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newstfionline · 8 months

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Friday, October 6, 2023

September sizzled (AP) After a summer of record-smashing heat, warming somehow got even worse in September as Earth set a new mark for how far above normal temperatures were, the European climate agency reported Thursday. Last month’s average temperature was 0.93 degrees Celsius (1.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1991-2020 average for September. That’s the warmest margin above average for a month in 83 years of records kept by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. “It’s just mind-blowing really,” said Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo. “Never seen anything like that in any month in our records.”

US democracy in disarray (NYT) Imagine if you were a foreign leader surveying the political chaos in the United States: For the first time in history, a party has just fired its own speaker of the House in the middle of a term. In the Senate, one of the two party leaders, who’s 81 years old, has twice recently frozen in public, unable to speak. A likely nominee in the upcoming presidential election is facing four criminal trials and regularly speaks in apocalyptic terms about the country’s future. That nominee is essentially tied in the polls with an 80-year-old president who many voters worry is too old to serve a second term. “To many watching at home and abroad, the American way no longer seems to offer a case study in effective representative democracy,” Peter Baker of The Times writes. “Instead, it has become an example of disarray and discord, one that rewards extremism, challenges norms and threatens to divide a polarized country even further.”

Elite pilots prepare for ‘camping out in the sky’ as they compete in prestigious gas balloon race (AP) It’s been 15 years since the world’s elite gas balloon pilots have gathered in the United States for a race with roots that stretch back more than a century. The pilots will be launching for this year’s Gordon Bennett competition during an international balloon fiesta that draws hundreds of thousands of spectators to the heart of New Mexico each fall. The race has been held in the United States only 13 times before, and this will be the fifth time the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta has played host. For the pilots, there are no stops to refuel or to pick up extra supplies. They will be aloft for days, carrying everything they need to survive at high altitude as they search for the right combination of wind currents to push their tiny baskets as far as they can go. Prevailing winds are expected to carry the competitors through the Midwest toward the northeastern U.S. and potentially into Canada. A Belgium team holds the record for traveling just over 2,112.9 miles (3,400 kilometers) in 2005. A German team was added to the record books for staying aloft the longest—more than 92 hours—during the 1995 competition.

Mexican reporters and hitmen (NYT Mag) The world has become an increasingly dangerous place for reporters, but—outside the war in Ukraine—no place is more deadly for them than Mexico. Since the central government began its brutal and chaotic war on drugs in 2006, at least 128 reporters have been killed there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 13 of them last year alone, a chilling record. Mexican journalists have faced phone hacks, death threats, beatings, torture and, in one case, grenade attacks on their newsroom. They face these perils in part because the authorities whose job it is to protect them have in many instances been infiltrated by the cartels.

England considers raising smoking age until cigarettes are banned entirely (Washington Post) British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak proposed raising the smoking age by a year, every year, so that children born after 2008 will not be allowed to legally purchase tobacco products even when they become adults. Sunak announced the idea in a speech Wednesday at the annual Conservative Party conference, saying he wanted to create Britain’s first modern “smoke-free” generation. Describing smoking as the “biggest cause of preventable death,” Sunak said the policy would mean “a 14-year-old today will never legally be sold a cigarette,” to applause from the audience. At present Britons over 18 can legally buy cigarettes. The proposal is part of a renewed global crackdown on tobacco and vaping. New Zealand last year passed a law, yet to take effect, prohibiting the sale of tobacco to those born after 2008. Australia unveiled plans to crack down on recreational vaping products, even those not containing nicotine. Hong Kong is considering imposing lifetime tobacco bans for future generations. Smoking causes 64,000 deaths in England per year, and costs the economy an estimated $20.7 billion annually via early deaths and costs to the public health system, according to the government.

France battles bedbugs (ABC News) In 2024, Paris will host the Summer Olympics. This year, though, it appears to be hosting the bedbug Olympics, with social media videos posted from the city showing bedbugs crawling around in hotels, on public transport, and even in Charles de Gaulle Airport. “Faced with the scourge of bedbugs, we must act!” Paris Deputy Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire said last Thursday. “This is a public health problem where all stakeholders must be brought to the table. It is up to owners and insurers to cover the costs of getting rid of these pests.” Though they’ve been historically associated with developing nations, bedbug infestations have become increasingly prevalent in wealthy countries like the U.S., U.K., and France. A recent study showed that about 1 in 10 French households experienced a bedbug infestation between 2017 and 2022. “The upsurge in bed-bug infestations in recent years has been due in particular to the rise in travel and the increasing resistance of bed bugs to insecticides,” said France’s health and safety agency.

Poland election turns Germany into punching bag (Reuters) Fighting to win an unprecedented third term in office, Poland's nationalist government has seized on a target close to home: Germany, its NATO ally and biggest trading partner. In a tight race ahead of Poland's Oct. 15 election, leaders of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party have accused Germany of trying to dictate Polish government policy from Berlin on anything from migration to gas. The feud has frayed Europe's broadly united front supporting Ukraine against Russia's invasion, shredding a plan for a joint Polish-German tank repair plant for Kyiv's benefit. The populist PiS has tapped into a mistrust towards Germany that still runs high in part of the electorate, above all elderly conservatives who remember the devastation of World War Two.

Ukraine’s Ammunition Problem (CNN/Politico/NYT) The war in Ukraine continues with support from the West, but some of Kyiv’s closest allies are struggling to keep up with the demands of the conflict. This week, NATO officials declared that Western ammo stocks are now scraping “the bottom of the barrel,” while Washington ended up sending ammunition it seized from Iran to Kyiv to keep the troops topped up. Over a million 7.62-mm rounds were seized by the U.S. Navy from a ship moving the ammunition from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to the Houthis in Yemen. Meanwhile, NATO officials are drumming up support from their constituents to “keep Ukraine in the fight against Russian invaders” as support from the E.U. and U.S. are threatened by recent political developments. “The bottom of the barrel is now visible,” said Netherlands Admiral Rob Bauer, the chair of the NATO Military Committee. “We give away weapons systems to Ukraine, which is great, and ammunition, but not from full warehouses,” he added. Experts say that the West will need to produce more ammunition (and fast) to keep up with demand from Ukraine while keeping their own stockpiles.

Russia starts moving its fleet from Crimea (WSJ) Russia has withdrawn the bulk of its Black Sea Fleet from its main base in occupied Crimea, a potent acknowledgment of how Ukrainian missile and drone strikes are challenging Moscow’s hold on the peninsula. Russia has moved powerful vessels including three attack submarines and two frigates from Sevastopol to other ports in Russia and Crimea that offer better protection, according to Western officials and satellite images verified by naval experts. The port in Crimea was first claimed by Russia in 1783 under Catherine the Great.

Pakistan abruptly turns against Afghan refugees, calls for deportations (Washington Post) There hasn’t been a single day over the past two years when Mohammad Abed Andarabi felt at ease. A former prosecutor for the U.S.-backed Afghan government that was toppled by the Taliban, he says he has changed hideouts four times in recent months. Andarabi isn’t running from the Taliban, whose fighters he once helped to put behind bars, but from police in Pakistan—the country where he sought refuge almost two years ago. His visa has expired and, amid a widening crackdown on Afghan refugees in Pakistan, he fears that he, his wife and his five children will be jailed or even sent back to Kabul. After Pakistan’s caretaker government last week abruptly agreed to deport the 1.7 million Afghans who are estimated to live in the country illegally, the Interior Ministry on Tuesday announced a 28-day deadline for them to leave voluntarily, promising a “reward” to anyone who shares information on their whereabouts starting in November. The decision appeared to be primarily linked to growing Pakistani frustration with the Taliban and with the economic burden of hosting millions of Afghans.

China’s demographic deficit (Financial Times) More important than (China’s shrinking population) is the change in the age composition of the population. While the overall population is forecast to shrink by 113mn between 2020 and 2050, the number of people over 65 will rise, according to these projections, by 215 million, while the number of those below the age of 20 will shrink by 137 million and those between 20 and 64 will shrink by 191 million. As a result, those over 65 will jump from 13 to 30 per cent of the population. Those aged under 20 will shrink from 24 to 15 per cent and those aged 20 to 64 from 64 to 55 per cent. By 2100, suggests the UN, the share of the over-65s will be an astonishing 41 per cent of the population.

Typhoon Koinu injures 190 and brings record-breaking winds to Taiwan (AP) Typhoon Koinu swept southern Taiwan on Thursday, injuring 190 people but causing no deaths as it brought pounding rain and record-breaking winds to the island, leading to school and office closures. Koinu, which means “puppy” in Japanese, made landfall early Thursday in Cape Eluanbi, the southernmost tip of Taiwan, and is expected to weaken as it moves west toward Guangdong and Fujian provinces in southern China. The typhoon brought the fastest wind ever recorded in Taiwan. A weather monitoring station on the outlying Orchid Island measured a gust of 342.7 kph (212.9 mph), as well as sustained winds that reached 198.7 kph (123.5 kph). Both values set all-time highs since Taiwan began keeping records of wind speeds in 1897.

$106,619 (BBC) That is how much it now costs to purchase the right to buy a car in Singapore. While Singapore has an astonishingly high rate of millionaires for its relatively small size, the city-state’s average salary of roughly S$70,000 ($51,000) means that the ability to purchase a car and drive is well out of the reach of many Singaporians. Introduced as an anti-congestion measure, the government’s new 10-year certificate of entitlement (COE) system aims to promote the use of the city’s public transportation network, which ranks as one of the best systems in the world. With many standard cars costing more than six times the price as in the United States, Singapore is the most expensive city in the world to drive.

At least 80 killed in drone attack on Syrian military academy in Homs (Washington Post) A drone attack on a military academy in Homs, in central Syria, killed at least 80 people, authorities in Damascus said Thursday, one of the deadliest attacks on government-held territory in years. Syria retaliated with airstrikes pummeling the northwest of the country, which is home to various rebel forces and millions of civilians. Drones carrying explosives struck the Homs Military Academy during a graduation ceremony attended by families, according to the Syrian Foreign Ministry. Hussein al-Ghabash, the Minister of Health, said the preliminary death toll was 80, including six women and six children. He said that 240 people were wounded. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

#headlines #news

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brookstonalmanac · 2 months

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Events 3.31 (after 1930)

1930 – The Motion Picture Production Code is instituted, imposing strict guidelines on the treatment of sex, crime, religion and violence in film, in the U.S., for the next thirty-eight years. 1931 – An earthquake in Nicaragua destroys Managua; killing 2,000. 1931 – A Transcontinental & Western Air airliner crashes near Bazaar, Kansas, killing eight, including University of Notre Dame head football coach Knute Rockne. 1933 – The Civilian Conservation Corps is established with the mission of relieving rampant unemployment in the United States. 1939 – Events preceding World War II in Europe: Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain pledges British military support to the Second Polish Republic in the event of an invasion by Nazi Germany. 1942 – World War II: Japanese forces invade Christmas Island, then a British possession. 1945 – World War II: A defecting German pilot delivers a Messerschmitt Me 262A-1, the world's first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft, to the Americans, the first to fall into Allied hands. 1949 – The Dominion of Newfoundland joins the Canadian Confederation and becomes the 10th Province of Canada. 1951 – Remington Rand delivers the first UNIVAC I computer to the United States Census Bureau. 1957 – Elections to the Territorial Assembly of the French colony Upper Volta are held. After the elections PDU and MDV form a government. 1958 – In the Canadian federal election, the Progressive Conservatives, led by John Diefenbaker, win the largest percentage of seats in Canadian history, with 208 seats of 265. 1959 – The 14th Dalai Lama, crosses the border into India and is granted political asylum. 1964 – Brazilian General Olímpio Mourão Filho orders his troops to move towards Rio de Janeiro, beginning the coup d'état and 21 years of military dictatorship. 1966 – The Soviet Union launches Luna 10 which later becomes the first space probe to enter orbit around the Moon. 1966 – The Labour Party under Harold Wilson wins the 1966 United Kingdom general election. 1968 – American President Lyndon B. Johnson speaks to the nation of "Steps to Limit the War in Vietnam" in a television address. At the conclusion of his speech, he announces: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President." 1970 – Explorer 1 re-enters the Earth's atmosphere after 12 years in orbit. 1980 – The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad operates its final train after being ordered to liquidate its assets because of bankruptcy and debts owed to creditors. 1986 – Mexicana de Aviación Flight 940 crashes into the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range near the Mexican town of Maravatío, killing 167. 1990 – Approximately 200,000 protesters take to the streets of London to protest against the newly introduced Poll Tax. 1991 – Georgian independence referendum: Nearly 99 percent of the voters support the country's independence from the Soviet Union. 1991 – The Warsaw Pact formally disbands. 1992 – The USS Missouri, the last active United States Navy battleship, is decommissioned in Long Beach, California. 1992 – The Treaty of Federation is signed in Moscow. 1993 – The Macao Basic Law is adopted by the Eighth National People's Congress of China to take effect December 20, 1999. Resumption by China of the Exercise of Sovereignty over Macao 1995 – Selena is murdered by her fan club president Yolanda Saldívar at a Days Inn in Corpus Christi, Texas. 1995 – TAROM Flight 371, an Airbus A310-300, crashes near Balotesti, Romania, killing all 60 people on board. 1998 – Netscape releases Mozilla source code under an open source license. 2004 – Iraq War in Anbar Province: In Fallujah, Iraq, four American private military contractors working for Blackwater USA, are killed after being ambushed. 2016 – NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko return to Earth after a yearlong mission at the International Space Station. 2018 – Start of the 2018 Armenian revolution. 2023 – A historic tornado outbreak occurs in the Midwest and the northern South.

#Events

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cyarsk5230 · 10 months

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Latin hip hop

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Latin hip hop (also known as Latin rap) is hip hop music that is recorded by artists in the United States of Hispanic and Latino descent, along with Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean, North America, Central America, South America, and Spain.Latin hip hop

Stylistic originsHip hop

Cultural origins1970s, Bronx, New York City

Typical instrumentsTurntable, synthesizer, DAW, rapping, drum machine, sampler, drums, guitar, bass guitar, piano, beatboxing, vocals

Latino hip hop in the United StatesEdit

Latin rapEdit

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, most Latin rap came from New York and the West Coast of the United States. Due to the heaviest Puerto Rican migration to New York City in the '50s, during the 70s, the birth of hip hop involved Latinos from the Caribbean islands. DJ Kool Herc was from Jamaica. Puerto Rico loved Hip Hop from America. Among the first rappers from the island were TNT, Brewley MC and Vico C. Later generations saw talented MCs, DJs and groups emerge all over the island. And artists from this period include Daddy Yankee, Anuel AA,[1] Big Boy, Bad Bunny, MC Ceja, Noriel, Ozuna, Iann Dior, Ivy Queen, Mexicano, Chezina, Lito y Polaco, and Kool Bob Love.[2]

Mellow Man Ace was the first Latino artist to have a major bilingual single, the 1989 track "Mentirosa". This song went platinum, leading Mellow Man Ace to be described as the "Godfather of Latin rap" and inducted into the Hip Hop Hall of Fame inductee. In 1990, fellow West Coast artist Kid Frost further brought Latinos to the rap forefront with his hit song "La Raza (song)." In 1991, Kid Frost, Mellow Man, A.L.T. and several other Latin rappers formed the rap super group Latin Alliance and released a self-titled album which featured the hit "Lowrider (On the Boulevard)". A.L.T. also scored a hit later that year with his remake of the song Tequila. Cypress Hill, of which Mellow Man Ace was a member before going solo, would become the first Latino rap group to reach platinum status in 1991. The group has since continued to release other Gold and Platinum albums. Ecuadorian born rapper Gerardo received heavy rotation on video and radio for his single "Rico, Suave". While commercially watered-down, his album enjoyed a status of being one of the first mainstream Spanglish CDs on the market. Johnny J was a multi-platinum songwriter, music producer, and rapper who was perhaps best known for his production on Tupac Shakur's albums All Eyez on Me and Me Against the World.[3] He also produced the 1990 single Knockin' Boots for his classmate Candyman's album Ain't No Shame in My Game, which eventually went platinum thanks to the single.[4]

In the mid-1990s, the success of LA's Cypress Hill led to additional Latin hip-hop artists finding label support. Delinquent Habits were a horn-sampling trio that found MTV support for their breakout bilingual single "Tres Delinquentes" in 1996. By the early 2000's, two Mexico-born, United States-raised Latin hip hop acts found success on major labels. LA's Akwid fused banda with hip-hop on hits like "No Hay Manera" while Milwaukee's Kinto Sol told tales of Mexican immigrant life over more minimalist beats. The genre even spawned a bicultural novelty, the Brooklyn-based crew Hip Hop Hoodíos, who fused their dual Jewish and Latino cultures on songs like "Havana Nagila" and "Raza Hoodía."

Latin rap in the East Coast and MiamiEdit

DJ Charlie Chase fused hip-hop with salsa and other music genres. Chase was the DJ for the New York hip-hop group the Cold Crush Brothers, from 1978 and through the '80s. East Coast Latin artists such as the Beatnutsemerged in the early 1990s, with New Jersey native Chino XL earning recognition for his lyricism and equal controversy for his subject matter. In 1992, Mesanjarz of Funk, led by the Spanish/English flow of Mr. Pearl, became the first Spanish rap group signed to a major label (Atlantic Records). In 1994, Platinum Producer and DJ Frankie Cutlass used his own label, Hoody Records, to produce his single “Puerto Rico” which became a classic. In the late 1990s, Puerto Rican rapper Big Punisher became the first Latino solo artist to reach platinum sales for an LP with his debut album Capital Punishment, which included hit song "Still Not a Player".

Southwest and Chicano rapEdit

Latin rap (as well as its subgenre of Chicano rap) has thrived along the West Coast, Southwest and Midwestern states with little promotion due to the large Latino populations of those regions. Jonny Z is considered to be a pioneer of Latin hip-hop, due to him being one of the first Latinos combining Spanglish lyrics with freestyle, salsa, mambo, and regional Mexican banda. He scored four Billboard Hot Dance singles between 1993 and 1997, including one of the greatest Miami bass songs of all time, "Shake Shake (Shake That Culo)". Besides bass music, he also recorded the Chicano anthem "Orale". The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States Volume 2, Page 301 states: "A new style of Latina and Latino hip-hop was created in Miami and Texas by the bass rappers DJ Laz and Jonny Z, who mixed Latin styles with bass music".[5]

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vrgamertc · 4 years

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John Prine was an Army veteran walking a U.S. Postal Service beat in Chicago and writing songs on the side when Kris Kristofferson heard him and helped spread the word about Prine’s gifts. Pretty soon, he resigned as a letter carrier; his supervisor snickered, “You’ll be back.” Nearly 50 years later, this January, he was given a lifetime achievement Grammy for his contributions to songwriting. The singing mailman almost always had the last laugh.

Prine, who died on Tuesday from complications of the coronavirus, was legitimately unique. He took familiar blues themes — my baby left me — but filled them with whimsy and kindness. He liked a saucy lyric, and wrote movingly, in character, of the quiet lives and loneliness of humdrum people. He seemed like a Zen sage and offered an uncynical live-and-let-live morality in his songs, writing in a colloquial voice that revealed a love of the way Americans speak. He showed how much humor you could put in a song and still be taken seriously. He had less in common with any other songwriter than he did with Mark Twain.

He grew up in Maywood, a western suburb of Chicago, and was reared by working-class parents from Kentucky, where he often spent summers with relatives and fell in love with country music and bluegrass. By 13, he was performing in rural jamborees. When he debuted in 1971, in his mid-20s, he sounded like an old man already, so years later, when he got old and went through two cancer treatments, he still sounded like himself. From his first to his last, he wrote songs that were tender, hilarious, and wise, without grandstanding any of these traits. Here are 15 of the best.

‘Angel From Montgomery’ (1971)

“Angel From Montgomery,” his best-known song, begins with a little declarative startle: “I am an old woman, named after my mother.” It’s an incisive and terrifying look at the dissatisfactions of a bad marriage and a woman’s sense of being economically trapped in her misery. Bonnie Raitt recorded it three years later and uncovered some of the song’s dormant melodies.

‘Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore’ (1971)

Prine’s self-titled 1971 debut album is a playlist all its own; it has more great songs than a lot of respected songwriters have in their entire careers. The moral stance of this sprightly folk-rock ditty is a response to what he saw as sham patriotism during the Nixon years, and it remains relevant: “Jesus don’t like killing/No matter what the reason’s for.” Prine, a former altar boy, stopped playing it live for a number of years, but when George W. Bush became president, Prine said, “I thought I’d bring it back.”

‘Hello in There’ (1971)

Some fans and critics are put off by this song and its slightly lesser companion, “Sam Stone,” which they see as performative displays of sensitivity toward the vulnerable, or what we now call virtue signaling. Yet somehow, we don’t ever criticize singers for signaling vices and meanness. Prine sings in the voice of an old married man with a dead son, who spends his days in silence and loneliness, and who at the end of the song, asks people to be kind to the elderly.

‘The Frying Pan’ (1972)

For his second album, “Diamonds in the Rough,” Prine assembled a small, mostly acoustic band and pursued a front-porch, Appalachian simplicity. Like a lot of his songs, this one takes a lighthearted view of domestic complications: A man comes home and discovers his wife has run off with a traveling salesman. He cries miserably, recounts what he loved about her (“I miss the way she used to yell at me/The way she used to cuss and moan”), and full of pride, comes to the wrong conclusion: Never leave your wife at home.

‘Please Don’t Bury Me’ (1973)

For people who love Prine’s music, there’s some small solace in listening to his songs about death, which have the same sense of mischief and acceptance as the ones about broken marriages. (Try “Mexican Home” or “He Was in Heaven Before He Died.”) The narrator is dead, and as angels explain to him how it happened, they also recap his last wish: to not be dropped into a cold grave, but to be put to practical use, as an organ donor: “I’d druther have ’em cut me up/And pass me all around.” A kind of recycling anthem from his terrific third album, “Sweet Revenge.”

‘You Never Can Tell’ (1975)

Almost like an apology, Prine concludes “Sweet Revenge,” a grieving, downhearted album, with an exuberant Chuck Berry cover, one great writer nodding to another. The Memphis R&B guitarist Steve Cropper produced the record and put together a crack horn section, which pushes ahead of some barrelhouse piano. Prine wasn’t a rocker, but he could rock.

‘That’s the Way the World Goes Round’ (1978)

Prine seemed to have an unlimited ability to expand and vary songwriting structures and perspectives. This track, which has been covered by Miranda Lambert and Norah Jones, has two verses: In the first, the narrator describes a drunk who “beats his old lady with a rubber hose,” and in the second, the narrator gets stuck in a frozen bathtub (it’s hard to explain) and imagines the worst until a sudden sun thaws him out. Both verses illustrate the refrain: that’s the way the world goes round. Even when circumstances are bad in Prine songs, he favors optimism and acceptance.

‘Iron Ore Betty’ (1978)

A lot of Prine songs celebrate physical pleasure: food, dancing and sex, which he gallantly prefers to call “making love.” The working-class singer in this soulful, up-tempo shuffle feels unreserved delight at having a girlfriend (“We receive our mail in the same mailbox/And we watch the same TV”), and wants us to know he and Betty aren’t just friends (“I got rug burns on my elbows/She’s got ’em on her knees”). OK guy, we get it.

‘Just Wanna Be With You’ (1980)

A stomping number from “Storm Windows” in the style of Chuck Berry, with the Rolling Stones sideman Wayne Perkins on guitar. Prine’s lyrics don’t distinguish between reality and absurdity — they don’t clash, they mix — and here’s one more way to say you’re happy and in love: “I don’t even care what kind of gum I chew.” And another: “Lonely won’t be lonesome when we get through.”

‘Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian’ (1986)

Prine had a sideline in novelty songs, which give full voice to his comic absurdity, throwaways that are worth saving, including the 1973 semi-hit “Dear Abby,” and this now-problematic number from “German Afternoons” inspired by a paperback book called “Instant Hawaiian.” Prine and his co-writer Fred Koller began making up Hawaiian-sounding nonsense words full of sexual innuendo, and Lloyd Green added airport-Tiki-bar bar steel guitar for maximum faux authenticity. You can say Prine’s loving disposition makes the song OK, and you can also say it doesn’t.

‘All the Best’ (1991)

After five years away, Prine returned with “The Missing Years,” a Grammy-winning album produced by Howie Epstein, Tom Petty’s bass player. The singer in this gentle, masterly miniature claims to want good things for an ex-lover, but feelings aren’t simple: “I wish you don’t do like I do/And never fall in love with someone like you” twists the knife. Now recording for his own label, Oh Boy Records, Prine was about to hit a hot streak.

‘Lake Marie’ (1995)

Bob Dylan, who was a huge fan, called the haunted, mysterious “Lake Marie” his favorite Prine song, and who are we to disagree with Dylan on the topic of songwriting? Even though Epstein’s booming production draws too much attention to itself, “Lost Dogs + Mixed Blessings” is full of winners: the simple, loving ballad “Day is Done,” the rapid-fire doggerel of “We Are the Lonely” and the calm, ornery “Quit Hollerin’ at Me,” where Prine tells his wife that the neighbors “already think my name is ‘Where in the hell you been?’”

‘In Spite of Ourselves’ (1999)

Prine was diagnosed with cancer, and doctors removed a tumor from the right side of his neck, which took away his already-modest ability to project his voice. But incredibly, his stolid singing was now perfect for harmonies, and he cut a duets album called “In Spite of Ourselves” with female country and Americana singers. On its one original song, Prine and Iris DeMent trade backhanded compliments (“She thinks all my jokes are corny/Convict movies make her horny”) that read like a divorce complaint, but turn out to be only pillow talk.

‘Some Humans Ain’t Human’ (2005)

At seven minutes and three seconds, this track from “Fair and Square” is the longest song on any of his studio albums. A cloud of slide guitar keeps this soft waltz afloat and allows Prine to express his disapproval of, if not contempt for, so-called humans who lack empathy for others. There’s a couplet that is clearly about George W. Bush, and Prine noticed that some audience members were surprised by it. “I never tried to rub it in anybody’s face, but I thought it was pretty clear that I wasn’t a closet Republican,” he told the Houston Press.

‘When I Get to Heaven’ (2018)

In 2013, doctors removed the cancerous part of Prine’s left lung, which sidelined and weakened him. It’s hard now to listen to his final album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” which was nominated for three Grammys, and not think that Prine heard the clock ticking louder. There’s so much tenderness in “Knockin’ on Your Screen Door,” about a man whose family left him with only an 8-track tape of George Jones, and in the elegiac, reassuring parental entreaty “Summer’s End.” In the last song, “When I Get to Heaven,” Prine describes his ideal afterlife: a rock band, a cushy hotel, a girl, a cocktail (“vodka and ginger ale”) and “a cigarette that’s nine miles long.” He removes his watch, and asks, “What are you gonna do with time after you’ve bought the farm?”

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Trump Employs an Old Tactic: Using Race for Gain https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/us/politics/trump-race-record.html

Trump Employs an Old Tactic: Using Race for Gain

By Peter Baker, Michael M. Grynbaum, Maggie Haberman, Annie Karni and Russ Buettner | Published July 20, 2019 | New York Times | Posted July 20, 2019

For the fourth season of “The Apprentice,” Donald J. Trump searched for a gimmick to bolster ratings. His idea was simple if explosive — pit an all-white team against an all-black team.

“Do you like it?” he asked, previewing the concept on Howard Stern’s radio show in April 2005.

“Yes,” Mr. Stern said.

“Do you like it?” Mr. Trump asked Robin Quivers, the African-American co-host.

“Well,” she said, “I think you’re going to have a riot.”

That gave Mr. Trump no pause. “It would be the highest-rated show on television,” he exulted.

Long before he ignited a firestorm by telling four Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to their home countries, even though three were born in the United States and all are citizens, Mr. Trump sought to pit Americans against one another along racial lines.

Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly......

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Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump

· Jul 14, 2019

Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump

....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how....

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8:27 AM - Jul 14, 2019

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Over decades in business, entertainment and now politics, Mr. Trump has approached America’s racial, ethnic and religious divisions opportunistically, not as the nation’s wounds to be healed but as openings to achieve his goals, whether they be ratings, fame, money or power, without regard for adverse consequences.

He was accused by government investigators in the 1970s of refusing to rent apartments to black tenants (he denied it but settled the case) and made a name for himself in the 1980s by championing the return of the death penalty when five black and Hispanic teenagers were charged with raping a jogger. They were later exonerated. He threatened to sell his Mar-a-Lago estate to the Unification Church in 1991 and unleash “thousands of Moonies” if city officials in Palm Beach, Fla., did not allow him to carve up his property.

Taking on competitors of his Atlantic City casinos, he questioned whether rival owners were really Native Americans entitled to federal recognition — then later teamed up with another tribe when there was money to be made. With his eye on the White House, he opened a yearslong drive to convince Americans that President Barack Obama was really born in Africa.

His own campaign in 2016 was marked by slurs against Mexicans, a proposed Muslim ban and other furors. To deflect criticism, two campaign officials said they regularly positioned a supporter nicknamed “Michael the Black Man” so cameras would show him behind Mr. Trump at his rallies.

In the White House, Mr. Trump equated “both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., referred to African nations as “shithole countries” and said Nigerian visitors to the United States would never “go back to their huts.”

Mr. Trump has insisted he is the “least racist person you have ever met” and over the years he has made friends with prominent African-Americans, particularly sports and hip-hop stars. Just Friday, Mr. Trump spoke with the rapper Kanye West and promised to intervene in the case of his fellow artist ASAP Rocky, who is being held in Sweden on an assault charge, and followed up by calling the Swedish prime minister on Saturday.

Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump

Just spoke to @KanyeWest about his friend A$AP Rocky’s incarceration. I will be calling the very talented Prime Minister of Sweden to see what we can do about helping A$AP Rocky. So many people would like to see this quickly resolved!

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4:01 PM - Jul 19, 2019

256K people are talking about this

Some of Mr. Trump’s black friends defended him in recent days, saying his raw, politically incorrect approach was just bracing honesty about the reality of America, and not motivated by hate.

“I have an advantage of knowing the president very well, and he’s not a racist and his comments are not racist,” Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development and only black member of the cabinet, said on Fox News. “But he loves the country very much and, you know, he has a feeling that those who represent the country should love it as well.”

Lynne Patton, a Trump family event planner now working in the administration, rejected accusations of racism.

“Trump sees success and failure, not color not race, not gender not religion,” said Ms. Patton, who is African-American. “I’ve traveled the country with this family, I’ve had drinks with this family, I’ve been at their weddings, their baby showers, their bachelorette parties. I’ve never heard anyone say anything bigoted or racist in my life.”

And White House officials argue that actions speak louder than words. Unemployment among Hispanics and African-Americans has fallen to record lows on Mr. Trump’s watch, they say, and the president signed legislation overhauling a criminal justice system tilted against people of color.

But the longer Mr. Trump spends on the stage, the more friends and former employees, like Michael D. Cohen, Omarosa Manigault Newman and Anthony Scaramucci, have concluded that he is more racist than they had admitted.

“Let me be clear: Donald Trump is a disgusting, filthy, petty racist and he is trying to start a race war in this country and what we saw this week is just the beginning,” said Ms. Manigault Newman, a former “Apprentice” star fired after a stint in the White House.

Mr. Scaramucci, who briefly served as White House communications director, wrote on Twitter that Mr. Trump would never have told a white immigrant to go back to his country. “That’s why the comments were racist and unacceptable,” he said, remarks that got him disinvited from a Republican fund-raiser.

For some who defended Mr. Trump against charges of racism in the past, this was a turning point. “As much as I have denied it and averted my eyes from it, this latest incident made it impossible,” Geraldo Rivera, a roaming correspondent at large for Fox News and longtime friend, said in an interview.

“My friendship with the president has cost me friendships, it has cost me schisms in the family, my wife and I are constantly at odds about the president,” he added. “I do insist that he’s been treated unfairly. But the unmistakable words, the literal words he said, is an indication that the critics were much more right than I.”

‘The City Was a Caldron’

Mr. Trump is a product of his place and time, born and raised in the Queens of another era. As he sought to make his mark in Manhattan real estate in the 1980s and 1990s, New York was struggling with a string of racial episodes, including the Bernhard H. Goetz subway shooting, the Howard Beach racial killing, the Tawana Brawley rape hoax and the Crown Heights riots.

In a city rived by tribal politics, elections were about assembling coalitions — white ethnic groups in Queens and Brooklyn, Hispanics in the Bronx, African-Americans in Harlem and, later, central Brooklyn. Race was a part of every citywide campaign every four years. That shaped the outlook of many rising stars of the moment.

“It was a period of enormous tension and the city was a caldron for those kind of emotions and very strong passions and feelings, and they spilled over,” said Robert Abrams, the special prosecutor in the Brawley case. “And unfortunately, I think Donald Trump was helping to fan some of those flames.”

The Justice Department housing discrimination lawsuit against him and his father and the case of the Central Park Five accused of rape were early milemarkers on Mr. Trump’s path. But he was a Democrat then operating in a diverse city and he showed a different side to many he met.

Charles B. Rangel, then a powerful African-American Democratic congressman from New York, saw Mr. Trump regularly when the developer would drop off checks for the party. What defined him was his “giant ego,” Mr. Rangel said the other day, but he never heard him make a racial remark.

“I don’t remember any remarks he ever made that was not sharing with me how much he thought about himself,” he said. “It was always the same story.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader who has grown more publicly critical of Mr. Trump in recent years, likewise recalled nothing overt. “I’ve never heard him say anything racial,” he said. But, he added, “I always sensed he was not comfortable being around us. He reminded me what he was — a Queens guy. He saw us as entertainers or athletes that he had to do business with.”

When Mr. Trump opened Mar-a-Lago as a club in the 1990s, he welcomed African-American and Jewish members. Still, he did not mind turning societal divisions to his advantage, at one point claiming Palm Beach was anti-Semitic in a zoning dispute because his members would be Jewish.

‘Put People in These Boxes’

Some who worked for Mr. Trump said he showed his true colors after growing comfortable with people. Jack O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino and later wrote a scathing book about Mr. Trump, said the mogul would come into the casino and notice many African-Americans. “It’s a little dark tonight,” he would say.

According to Mr. O’Donnell, Mr. Trump said “laziness is a trait in blacks” and complained about an African-American accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

In an interview, Mr. O’Donnell said Mr. Trump trafficked in stereotypes. “He genuinely believes things like white people are smarter. And black people don’t want to live next to white, and white people don’t want to live next to black people,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “And he rationalizes that as, everybody thinks that, so it’s not racist.”

Mr. Trump has dismissed Mr. O’Donnell as “a loser” but at one point accepted the book’s description. “The stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true,” he told Playboy. Later he disputed Mr. O’Donnell’s account, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “he made up stuff.”

Mr. Trump’s assumptions about people are based on what his biographer, Michael D’Antonio, called his “racehorse theory of human development.” Mr. D’Antonio said Mr. Trump told him a person’s genetic traits at birth were more important than anything learned over life.

“He likes to put people in these boxes and deal with them accordingly,” Mr. D’Antonio said. “It’s not universal and you can work your way out of the box. But working your way out of it is always personal. So one by one, black people can gain his confidence, but he does have this mentality about people as members of a group.”

‘The Blacks Love Me’

That helped shape Mr. Trump’s time on “The Apprentice,” where he was accused of giving short shrift to an African-American contestant, Randal Pinkett, who won the fourth season. During the finale, Mr. Pinkett said he was stunned when Mr. Trump, upon declaring him the winner, suggested he share the honor with the white woman he had just beaten.

“I would describe it as racist,” Mr. Pinkett said in an interview. “Not even racist overtones — racist.”

“Donald,” he said, “has constructed a world around him that reflects his identity and reflects his values. People who agree with him, people who celebrate him, people who he would consider to be his peers — wealthy white men.”

Mr. Pinkett added: “He’s completely out of touch with the realities of people not like him. Whether that’s people of color, ethnic minorities, immigrants — I mean, take your pick.”

Over the years, Mr. Trump has deflected criticism by citing friendships with black celebrities. In the 1980s, he became a fixture ringside in Atlantic City, befriending the boxing legends Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson and the promoter Don King. He briefly owned a United States Football League team, leading to friendship with its star player, Herschel Walker.

As the hip-hop industry flourished in the 1990s and 2000s, rappers often used Mr. Trump’s name in lyrics as a symbol of wealth and flash. Along the way, he became friendly with Sean Combs, Snoop Dogg and Russell Simmons.

Mr. Trump boasted about the mention of his name in rap videos, asking one of the secretaries to find examples on YouTube and play them for guests. “The blacks love me,” he said proudly.

By 2015, now running for president, he stopped using “the” before describing ethnic groups. While some black celebrities stood by Mr. Trump, other relationships have soured because of his politics. Mr. Simmons, in an open letter that year, told his estranged friend to “stop fueling fires of hate.”

‘This Is Just Politics’

The foundation of Mr. Trump’s campaign was built on questioning the birth of the first African-American president. To Ms. Manigault Newman, a conversation she had with Mr. Trump about the “birther” campaign during a break in taping of “The Apprentice,” was the first time she saw him as overtly racial.

“He was bragging about it,” she said in an interview. “I asked him, ‘Why would you do this?’ He said, ‘This is just politics. This is what happens in politics, you do opposition research.’”

And yet like others in Mr. Trump’s orbit, Ms. Manigault Newman did not find it so objectionable that she broke with him at the time. She spoke out about what she considered Mr. Trump’s racism only after she followed him to the White House and was subsequently fired.

In a campaign filled with racial controversy, Mr. Trump’s team sought to prevent a backlash. An ally in their efforts was the one they called Michael the Black Man.

Michael is Maurice Symonette, a man from Florida who once belonged to a violent religious cult and was charged but acquitted of two murders in the 1990s. During the campaign, he traveled the country to appear at Mr. Trump’s rallies holding a sign saying, “Blacks for Trump.”

Campaign officials said they made sure to position him behind the candidate. In October 2016, Mr. Trump noticed his sign. “Blacks for Trump,” he said. “Those signs are great. Thank you.”

Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, two African-American sisters and internet stars better known as Diamond and Silk, came to Mr. Trump’s attention after one of their videos went viral attacking Megyn Kelly, then a Fox host, for her aggressive questioning during a debate. They met Mr. Trump in December 2015 when he brought them onstage at a rally in Raleigh.

“I turn on my television one night and I see these two on television,” he told the crowd. He called them an “internet sensation” and implored them to entertain the crowd. “Do a little routine; come on,” he said. From then on, they became a regular opening act at his rallies.

Mr. Trump’s presidency has been filled with so many racial conflicts that many in Washington have become numb. After he made his “shithole countries” remark to lawmakers, some just shook their heads. “It wasn’t too much of a surprise,” said former Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican and outspoken critic. “He had been consistently coming from this.”

By the time of Mr. Trump’s “go back” taunt and the “send her home” chants of a rally crowd a few days later, congressional Republicans were clearly discomfited but unwilling to publicly repudiate him.

“The president,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, “is not a racist.”

‘When the Riot Starts’

Mr. Trump’s vision of a black-against-white season of “The Apprentice” never came to pass. He pitched it to NBC executives, prompting a series of can-you-believe-this conversations inside the network, according to two executives involved. It was quickly rejected.

One former executive described his reaction as, “Uh, I don’t think so!”

The concept later came to fruition on a rival network, CBS, which aired a season of “Survivor” in 2006 in which contestants were initially grouped by ethnicity. The idea generated protests but was defended by the producer: Mark Burnett, who also created “The Apprentice.”

“He always told me that was Mark Burnett’s idea,” Ms. Manigault Newman recalled. “But Donald Trump was champing at the bit to do that.”

He sounded enthusiastic during his appearance on Mr. Stern’s show in 2005. Mr. Stern asked if there would be both light-skinned and dark-skinned contestants on the black team and Mr. Trump said it would be an “assortment.” As for the white team, Mr. Trump said it should include all blonds.

Even as he egged him on, Mr. Stern expressed more concern about the ramifications than Mr. Trump. “Wouldn’t that set off a racial war in this country?” he asked.

“See, actually, I don’t think it would,” Mr. Trump replied. “I think that it would be handled very beautifully by me. Because, as you know, I’m very diplomatic.”

Mr. Stern agreed. “I gotta tell you something, on some level it’s wrong,” he went on. “But I like it. I like it. I would watch.”

“You’d have to,” Ms. Quivers replied, “because you’d want to know when the riot starts.”

Even as he egged him on, Mr. Stern expressed more concern about the ramifications than Mr. Trump. “Wouldn’t that set off a racial war in this country?” he asked.

“See, actually, I don’t think it would,” Mr. Trump replied. “I think that it would be handled very beautifully by me. Because, as you know, I’m very diplomatic.”

Mr. Stern agreed. “I gotta tell you something, on some level it’s wrong,” he went on. “But I like it. I like it. I would watch.”

“You’d have to,” Ms. Quivers replied, “because you’d want to know when the riot starts.”

3 notes · View notes

the-shark-is-a-mammal · 6 years

Photo

Actresses who have played both Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera and Belle in Beauty and the Beast:

Sarah Pfisterer - US Tour (1991-1994)/Broadway (1999-2000) Christine and Boston (2006) Belle

Lolita Cortés - Mexico (1997-1998)/Mexican revival (2007) Belle and Mexico (1999-2001) Christine

Claudia Cota - Mexico (1999-2001)/Buenos Aires (2008) Christine and Mexican revival (2007) u/s Belle

Julia Möller - Madrid (2001-2002)/Spanish revival (2007-2008) Belle and and Madrid (2002-2004) alt. Christine

Kiara Sasso - São Paulo (2002-2003) Belle and São Paulo (2005-2007) alt. Christine

Jennifer Hope Wills - Broadway (2004) u/s Belle and US Tour/Broadway (2006-2010) Christine

Mia Karlsson - Copenhagen (2004-2005) Belle and Copenhagen (2009) Christine

Samantha Hill - Manitoba (2009) Belle and Broadway (2012-2013) Christine

Talía del Val - Spain Tour (2012-2013) Belle and Madrid concert (2015) Christine

Missing here:

Rachel Barrell - West End (2004-2006) Christine and Belle in unknown production/date)

Elizabeth Welch - US Tour/Broadway/Oberhausen (2009-?) Christine and Denver (unknown date) Belle

Honorable Mentions:

Joke de Kruijf (Hamburg/Vienna/Scheveningen (1990-1994) Christine) and Louise Fribo (Copenhagen (2012-2013) Christine (Love Never Dies)). Both of them provided the singing and speaking voice of Belle in their languages (Dutch and Danish, respectively) for the dub of the 1991 animated movie.

Jana Werner. Jana provided the German speaking and singing voices for Belle in the 1991 animated movie and for Christine in the 2004 movie.

Emmi Christensson (West End/Stockholm (2014-2017) Christine) and Giulia Nadruz (São Paulo revival (2018-present) alt. Christine). Both women provided the speaking and singing voices for Belle in the 2017 live-action movie in Swedish and Brazilian Portuguese, respectively.

If I am missing anyone else, let me know!

33 notes · View notes

cutsliceddiced · 5 years

Text

New top story from Time: The Price of Insulin Has Soared. These Biohackers Have a Plan to Fix It

In a hip Oakland, Calif., neighborhood, just blocks from cocktail bars and swanky Mexican restaurants, is an enormous warehouse, home to Counter Culture Labs, ground zero for an audacious challenge to the high cost of prescription drugs. In the entryway stands a 1½-story cardboard T. Rex, and inside it’s a bit as if Dr. Frankenstein shared his lab with a hoarder: cluttered shelves hold piles of drying mushrooms, Clorox wipes, wires, kitchen pots, motor oil, two books about Darwin, ropes, a broken alarm clock, a telescoping magnifying glass, a heat gun, a 3-D printer and several jars of clear liquid with tubes running between them. One shelf holds plastic bins labeled Lab Coats, Paint & Brushes and Ebola Suits.

A group of professional scientists and amateur tinkerers founded Counter Culture Labs in 2013 with the goal of bringing biotechnology to the masses. At any time, it hosts dozens of projects; when I visit in July, there’s one whose objective is to make “vegan cheese” using yeast.

The Open Insulin Project has bigger plans. The group wants to reverse engineer how the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies produce insulin and then turn over the instructions to the public. In theory, anyone with a bit of cash could then build a DIY lab in their garage and make open-source insulin.

Photo-composite, photographs by Greg Kahn for TIME

Currently three companies—Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi—control most of the world’s $27 billion insulin market, using a complicated web of regulations and patents to keep a hold on it. Open Insulin wants to rebuild it with no megacorporations and no profit. The project is probably months, if not years, away from actually making medical-grade insulin, but its objective is as much political as it is production-oriented: bringing a sharp focus to the stratospheric price of insulin and, more broadly, the predatory pricing of prescription drugs in the U.S.

Over the past 60 years, the list price of a vial of insulin has gone from about 75¢ to $250—an increase nearly 43 times the rate of the U.S. Consumer Price Index inflation. “High drug costs exist throughout the system, but insulin is the poster child of this broken marketplace,” says Representative Tom Reed (R., N.Y.), one of the chairs of the Congressional Diabetes Caucus. Some, in fact, think that the project is already working as a kind of provocation: a way to force the issue on what is really a policy problem. “If the price of insulin gets regulated, the project will just go away,” says Jean Peccoud, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Colorado State University.

For now, the project seems to be in a regulatory safe space, but that may change as it gets closer to making actual medicine. In an email, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) spokesperson acknowledged that the agency is aware of the Open Insulin Project, but noted, “We cannot comment on hypothetical situations or potential future states of regulation.”

Predatory pricing in the U.S. isn’t unique to insulin. A study of the world’s top 20 medications found that Americans pay an average of three times as much as patients in the U.K. do for a given drug. The science behind making insulin is old, which makes it a good first target for the disruption of the pharmaceutical industry.

Cayce Clifford for TIMEDi Franco, founder of the Open Insulin Project, works with yeast at Counter Culture Labs in Oakland, Calif.

Anthony Di Franco, one of the Open Insulin Project’s co-founders, has diabetes himself, and has watched as the price of managing his disease has gone up and up. He has a dual undergraduate degree in physics and math/computer science from Yale University and is currently on leave from pursuing his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Davis. He lives on contracting jobs, doing data science and researching machine learning and programming languages. Like many freelancers, he doesn’t have employer-sponsored insurance. But unlike most with the disease, he knew enough about science to start thinking there might be a better way—and so, in 2015, he launched the Open Insulin Project.

“The current system was built to exploit people with diseases,” Di Franco says. “Historians will look back and say, ‘How could they have done such a terrible job?’”

Diabetes is caused when the pancreas can no longer make enough or any insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar, or when a person’s body builds up a resistance to the hormone. Insulin, which helps the body use sugar for energy and lowers its levels in the blood, was first used to treat diabetes in the early 1920s. Physician Frederick Banting and medical student Charles Best were working with dogs, inducing diabetes by removing their pancreases and then trying to figure out a cure. The two eventually extracted a substance from cow pancreases; purified it with the help of biochemist James Collip; and proved it worked by injecting it themselves and noting that they got dizzy, a sign of low blood sugar. By 1922, doctors were using insulin from cow pancreases to treat diabetes patients.

People with severe diabetes need insulin injections to stay alive. Without it, your blood turns acidic, your body dehydrates, your vision blurs, you get weaker and start to vomit. Over days, you slowly—and painfully—die.

This fact, coupled with the inefficiencies of the American health system, as well as a manipulable patent framework, has enabled pharmaceutical companies to steadily increase the price of the lifesaving drug, even as it’s become easier and less costly to produce. Generally speaking, drugs are cheap to make. The costs are mostly to pay for the research and development required to discover them. For example, one 2016 study that looked at 106 recently approved drugs from 10 different companies found that the average R&D cost for each was $2.78 billion, compared with only about $19 million per drug in costs of actual clinical trials.

Much of the industrialized world has some form of single-payer health insurance and strict price controls on drugs, usually determined by a board of doctors and experts. In the U.S., the pull of the free market was supposed to keep prices down, but instead has led to a complex system of profit-driven corporations, from manufacturers to insurance companies, who add cost at every juncture.

It wasn’t meant to be this way, especially not with insulin. Banting, who shared a 1923 Nobel Prize for his work on insulin, demanded his name not be put on the patent, believing profiteering off a medicine was unethical. His co-discoverers agreed, transferring their patents to the University of Toronto for $1 each.

The pharmaceutical corporation Eli Lilly and Company of Indianapolis offered to help the university develop the medication, and the school eventually agreed to license the technology. Eli Lilly contracted with slaughterhouses to receive pig pancreases by railroad car in order to squeeze out the insulin. It was crude, but effective—and cheap. Ads from the 1960s show vials of insulin available for 84¢ in the U.S., just $7.36 in today’s dollars. And then came a real breakthrough.

In 1982, Eli Lilly introduced insulin made by genetically modified E. coli bacteria. The new insulin was less likely to cause allergies than the animal version, and it could be grown in vats. Novo Nordisk started making its own bioengineered insulin in 1991, and it looked like the drug was about to get really affordable, thanks to the competitive marketplace. Instead, prices went up. A congressional report written in 2018 found the list price of competing insulin formulations “appeared to rise in tandem,” doubling from 2012 to 2018. According to the report, that was most likely due to limited market competition, and to the fact that “each part of the insulin delivery chain is controlled by a small number of entities.” The marketplace never became competitive.

In theory, the U.S. patent system, which gives manufacturers sole rights to a drug formulation for 20 years, should eventually enable other drug producers to bring cheaper versions of the same medication to the market. But as Reed and the co-chair of the Congressional Diabetes Caucus, Diana DeGette (D., Colo.), note, companies skirt this by “evergreening” their drugs—tweaking drug formulas slightly, often making incremental improvements, to renew the patent and prevent generics from ever entering the market. Lantus, a long-acting insulin patented by Sanofi in 1994, was due to enter the public domain in 2015, but instead the company filed 74 patents for newer versions of the drug, which delayed that until 2031. Novo Nordisk has done something similar with one type of insulin by upgrading the mechanics of its injection pen. These insulins are touted as improvements, although there is evidence these are typically minimal.

“People with diabetes experience different issues and complexities that can’t be covered by one solution, which is why we continue to bring forth programs that will directly benefit even more patients and work toward much needed longer-term systemic reform,” said a Novo Nordisk spokesperson in an email.

An Eli Lilly spokesperson told TIME in an email that the company does not evergreen. “None of our insulins is patent-protected and our most commonly used insulin, Humalog 100, lost patent protection in 2014,” the spokesperson said. While the patent for Humalog 100 has expired, because of the complexities of entering the market, only one manufacturer jumped in to make a version of the drug: Sanofi, which already makes its own formulation. Sanofi’s “generic” version of Humalog sells for just 15% less than its original price. Eli Lilly is also manufacturing an “authorized generic” version, currently selling for 50% of the price.

A Sanofi spokesperson, meanwhile, writes that the company’s original patent on Lantus has expired and subsequent patents “are related to new and unique inventions.” They also point out that despite increases in the listed price for Lantus, the actual price customers pay is lower than it was in 2006, a result of other inefficiencies in the market. The spokesperson added that “we also support a robust and competitive marketplace, including efforts by other organizations to develop new technologies and medicines—including Open Insulin Project.”

For insured diabetics, the high costs of insulin are borne primarily by their insurers, and so remain more or less hidden. But for those without insurance or for people on high-deductible plans that require them to pay for their own care until they hit a predetermined amount, these prices take lives. Alec Smith, a 26-year-old restaurant manager, couldn’t afford the $1,300 a month it took to manage his diabetes. In 2018, Smith was three days from a paycheck when he died alone in his apartment; investigators later found an empty insulin-injection pen in Smith’s home. The case made headlines, but the human price of the high cost of insulin isn’t hard to find. Some 13.2% of the 2.9 million people who take insulin in the U.S. do not take it as prescribed, and 24.4% asked their doctor for a lower-cost medication, according to the CDC.

It’s not going to take a Nobel Prize to make DIY insulin, just persistence. The good news for the Open Insulin Project is that it has the accomplished 33-year-old French biochemist Yann Huon de Kermadec as its lead scientist. He’s in the U.S. right now because his wife Louise Lassalle is studying for a Ph.D. at Berkeley. Huon de Kermadec donates his time, showing up at the lab five to six times a week to work long hours designing a new form of life: a yeast cell genetically engineered to produce a form of insulin people could use.

Cayce Clifford for TIMEHuon de Kermadec, lead scientist of the Open Insulin Project, at Counter Culture Labs

On his side is the fact that biotech is getting cheap. The same pressures that brought down the cost of total gene sequencing from a taxpayer-funded $2.7 billion project to a $200 drugstore test in under two decades mean you don’t need millions of dollars to start a biotech project anymore. The Open Insulin Project is able to do what it does because equipment has become so cheap—especially in the Bay Area, where high turnover in the biotech industry leads to a glut of second-hand, lab-quality gear—and, like your home computer, more powerful. There are now several companies that market vast databases of genes, searchable by utility, all of which are economical. Huon de Kermadec picked two sequences of genes: one that produces a protein that can be cut to make insulin, and one that makes the yeast resistant to a specific antibiotic.

Using these genes, he and the team created a formula for a plasmid, a tiny circular piece of DNA. Then he hired a company to manufacture a small quantity of these plasmids, which they sent to Counter Culture Labs in a tiny plastic vial. Dozens of companies offer this sort of service in the U.S., at prices as low as a few hundred dollars. Next, the team jammed the plasmids into yeast cells, and added an antibiotic solution to the cell cultures. That’s where the antibiotic-resistance gene comes in handy—the ones that successfully adopt the plasmid into their own DNA will survive, and those that don’t will die out. The next step would be to grow the surviving cells, which should contain the genes to produce both antibiotic resistance and the precursor protein for insulin.

The team thinks they’ve gotten this far. They know the yeast produces a molecule the size of insulin—which is a pretty good sign it is, in fact, insulin. But they’re scientists, so they’re not popping the champagne yet. They want to confirm that the molecule is indeed insulin by using mass spectrometry, a precise technique that allows scientists to identify specific proteins, before they say for sure.

Then they will have to prove their insulin is pure enough to inject into a person. They’ll also have to demonstrate they can make medical-grade insulin every time with their process. Then, to get it to the people, they’ll need to standardize the equipment so other people can manufacture or buy it.

When asked if he thought his team would eventually create a yeast that could produce insulin, Huon de Kermadec responded confidently. “Yes, of course,” he says, “it isn’t rocket science.” But then there are the regulatory hurdles.

Di Franco has been reading up on the history of democracy in ancient Athens and is trying to craft his organization’s bylaws in the spirit of the world’s first democracy. He also wants its product to be democratically affordable: Di Franco thinks roughly $10,000 should be enough to get a group started with the equipment needed to produce enough insulin for 10,000 people. Each of these $10,000 setups would be somewhere between a middle-school science experiment and an industrial laboratory, requiring rooms of equipment; think something closer to a medical-grade brewery than to a countertop bread machine. The resulting product, he says, would cost someone with diabetes dozens of dollars a month instead of hundreds.

That’s noble, in theory, but there’s a reason why the FDA puts a lot of effort into certifying the labs that make our medicines: mistakes can be fatal. The U.S. drug-development system may be expensive, but it does guarantee quality.

The Open Insulin Project falls into a black hole outside of FDA regulation, according to Peccoud, the Colorado State professor. For one thing, the project may skirt some regulations by being a nonprofit. Also, the FDA allows individuals to largely do whatever they want to themselves. “If you want to inject yourself with home-brew beer, there’s no law to stop that,” says Peccoud.

If it does reach a production phase, Open Insulin would have to conform to Good Manufacturing Practice, the FDA rules for factories that make medicine, food, cosmetics and medical devices. And because the group plans to share its insulin-production framework online, crossing state lines, there may be other legal issues on the horizon. One solution might be to partner with other players in the health care system, like hospitals and pharmacies, which create custom versions of everything from acetaminophen to opioids in a process called compounding and navigate the demands of the U.S. system already. However, that’s likely to make the final product more expensive.

Ultimately, it’s not clear that the Open Insulin Project’s real goal is to facilitate insulin minilabs across the U.S. The group intends to put the plan for their designer insulin-producing yeast online as soon as it’s done, but only for “research purposes,” says Di Franco. And without brewing facilities or the ability to check and purify the hormone, the plans themselves are a long way—scientifically and legally—from the point where anyone will be injecting homegrown insulin. Di Franco has offered up his own body as a proving ground once the lawyers sign off: “I’d be thrilled to be the first person to take the insulin,” he says.

There’s ample evidence that insulin doesn’t need to be as expensive as it is in the U.S., even without DIY labs. For one thing, just across the border with Canada, a vial of insulin costs $30. In January 2020, Colorado will become the first U.S. state to put a $100 cap on the co-pays insured patients pay for insulin. Minnesota is considering a similar law.

“It’s an old drug,” says Peccoud. “It’s not hard to produce. It should not be more expensive than Tylenol. Insulin is just pure greed. And a failure of government.”

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

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kweseplay-blog · 5 years

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It’s All About Our Leading Ladies This Women’s Month

These women aren’t just leading ladies, they’re so much more. And Kwesé Play wants to give them a little praise. From producing, directing and writing, to singing and even teaching – they’ve dabbled, and succeeded in, numerous industries. So, who are they and where can you catch them?

Genevieve Nnaji

Starring in Netflix’s first Original film from Nigeria, Lionheart, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what this leading lady is capable of. Genevieve is also a producer, model and singer. She has starred in over 80 Nollywood films and, in 2011, was honoured as a Member of the Order of the Federal Republic by the Nigerian government for her contribution to the industry. Catch Genevieve in Lionheart on Netflix where she plays Adaeze, a level-headed executive in her father's transport company. The film, which our leading lady not only starred in but directed as well, tackles the everyday issue of sexism in the workplace making her the perfect women to highlight this International Women’s Month. Where to find it: ‘Home’ or ‘Movies & TV’.

Rebel Wilson

She’s Hollywood’s IT funny girl and we love her! Rebel Wilson shot to fame as Fat Amy in the blockbuster film Pitch Perfect for which she received several award nominations and wins, including the MTV Best Breakthrough Performance Award and a Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie Actress. Not only is she a successful actress but she produces and writes too. The comedy Guru’s latest hit is the Netflix Original film Isn’t It Romantic. Rebel stars as Natalie, who finds herself stuck in a romantic comedy after being knocked out. Every girls dream, her worst nightmare. Catch this Australian whirlwind in Isn’t It Romantic on Netflix now! Where to find it: ‘Home’ or ‘Movies & TV’.

Nice Githinji

Hailing from Kenya, Nice Githinji is an actress, producer, vocalist, karaoke hostess and TV show host. She shot to stardom as a result of her performance as the lead actress in the hit movie All Girls Together and has graced our TV screens for years in shows like Changing Times. She began her acting career on stage and still performs in various theatre productions. Although it’s clear that Nice belongs in the spotlight, as the CEO of her own film production business Nicebird Production Company, she has her head screwed on right! Catch this budding star in Kwesé iflix’s Original production, Nganya, that delves in to Nairobi’s bustling and booming matatu business. With season 2 coming soon, you’d better head over to the Kwesé iflix app to catch up! Where to find it: ‘Home’ or ‘Movies & TVs’.

Yalitza Aparacio

Now, this Hollywood star really did rise to fame overnight. Unlike most actresses and actors, Yalitza’s breakout role was her first role EVER. She was cast in Netflix’s Academy Award-winning film Roma as Cleo, a maid working in Mexico City. Before the spotlight, Yalitza worked as a school teacher with degrees in both pre-school education and early childhood education. At 25, not only has she starred in an Oscar-winning movie, she was nominated for Best Actress at the 2019 Academy Awards making her the second Mexican woman to receive a Best Actress Oscar nomination, following Salma Hayek for her role in 2002's Frida. Oh, and did we mention she learned to speak Mixtec for the role? She’s sort of awesome. But don’t take our word for it, watch her Oscar-nominated performance in Roma on the Netflix app now! Where to find it: ‘Home’ or ‘Movies & TV’.

Charlize Theron

Born and bred in Benoni, Johannesburg, Charlize Theron is a force to be reckoned with. She left the sunny shores of South Africa in 1991, moved to Milan to pursue a modelling career and the rest is history. In 2003 she received critical acclaim for what many would say is her most notable role as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster. Charlize took home the Oscar for Best Actress, becoming the first South African to ever win an Oscar in a major acting category. Haven’t seen it? Monster is available on the Fawesome.TV Movies app… for FREE. The actress is majorly involved in philanthropic efforts and, in 2007, created the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project (CTAOP) to support African youth fight HIV/AIDS. She was named UN Messenger of Peace the very next year. So, she’s definitely not just a pretty face. Where to find it: ‘Movies & TV’.

Yvonne Okoro

This Nollywood beauty has most certainly left her mark on the African film industry. Starring in over 150 films (WHAT?!), Yvonne Okoro is one of Nollywood’s biggest assets… and she’s smart too! Yvonne attained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Linguistics at the University of Ghana before jetting off to France to attend the Université de Nantes where she pursued an education in Press Civilization, Drama and Marketing. Catch her in the romantic drama Rebecca available on the Kwesé iflix* app where she plays a small town girl forced to marry someone she doesn’t love. With the Nigerian film industry growing every day, we have no doubt that a star like Yvonne will be rising along with it. Where to find it: ‘Home’ or ‘Movies & TV’.

What better reason to catch all these lovely leading ladies than in celebration of International Women’s Month. Visit kweseplay.tv now to purchase a device!

*The Kwesé iflix app on Kwesé Play is only available in Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Coming to other countries on the African continent soon!

#KwesePlay #InternationalWomensMonth #LeadingLadies #Netflix #Kweseiflix

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itsfinancethings · 5 years

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October 24, 2019 at 07:38AM

Cayce Clifford for TIMEDi Franco, founder of the Open Insulin Project, works with yeast at Counter Culture Labs in Oakland, Calif.

“The current system was built to exploit people with diseases,” Di Franco says. “Historians will look back and say, ‘How could they have done such a terrible job?’”

Cayce Clifford for TIMEHuon de Kermadec, lead scientist of the Open Insulin Project, at Counter Culture Labs

“It’s an old drug,” says Peccoud. “It’s not hard to produce. It should not be more expensive than Tylenol. Insulin is just pure greed. And a failure of government.”

#IFTTT #Blogger

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sportsgameqia-blog-blog · 5 years

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The Unlikely Preacher of Action Sports

New Post has been published on https://sportsguideto.com/trending/the-unlikely-preacher-of-action-sports/

The Unlikely Preacher of Action Sports

Sal Masekela steps off a helicopter onto the white sands of Tavarua Island Resort, a tiny speck in the Fiji archipelago, and walks into a gorgeous open-air restaurant that overlooks a world-famous reef break appropriately dubbed Restaurants. He greets the Fijian staff by name, hugging them, asking them about their lives since his last visit.

Masekela, you may recall, was the face and voice of ESPN’s X Games, hosting both the summer and winter events for more than a decade. With his iconic dreadlocks and smooth baritone, he was a fixture at the center of the action-sports universe, narrating nearly every history-making moment at the games, from Travis Pastrana’s double backflip on a motorcycle in 2006 to Shaun White’s perfect halfpipe run in 2012.

Today, six years since a breakup with ESPN, Masekela remains deeply entrenched in action sports. He is here, on the surf mecca of Tavarua, for a vacation with a group of friends comprised of athletes, movie stars, entrepreneurs, Instagram influencers, and their families. As he makes the rounds, a guest compares him to Ricardo Montalbán, the suave Mexican actor best known for playing Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island. Somehow, despite the fact that Masekela is a stocky black man, and recently bald, it’s a rather apt observation. It can be challenging to walk anywhere with Masekela, because everyone who sees him wants to stop and talk with him and he wants to talk to everybody. He is Larry David’s worst nightmare.

This is Masekela’s 16th trip to Tavarua but nonetheless a special one, because it’s his first visit since his father died from prostate cancer six months ago. Hugh Masekela was a trumpeter and is often credited as the father of South African jazz. He played and toured with everyone from Paul Simon to Dave Matthews and was nominated for three Grammys. During apartheid, Hugh left South Africa to study music in the United States, but he remained outspoken against the brutality of South African racial segregation. In 1986, he recorded “Bring Him Back Home,” a song demanding the release of Nelson Mandela that would eventually become a rallying cry for the anti-apartheid movement.

Tavarua is Masekela’s favorite place on earth, and he’d implored his father to travel there with him. They made plans for the fall of 2016 and even purchased tickets, but at the last minute, Hugh postponed. A year and a half later, he passed away. This trip, these waves, Masekela says, are for his dad.

Masekela hosting Lollapalooza in Chicago (Jeremy Deputat/Red Bull Content Pool)

The vacation also comes at a significant moment in Masekela’s career—a moment when he hopes to find a path back into the limelight. Since walking away from the X Games, he has continued to work in television, hosting a series for Red Bull Media House, reporting stories for NBC at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, and hosting a sports documentary series on Viceland, among other gigs. He’s had bit parts in movies. His band, Alekesam, which blends jazz, soul, and R&B, has been featured on HBO and Showtime and released its second album last summer. Still, Masekela has grander ambitions, though he struggles to define them.

Like many major figures from the heyday of action sports, Masekela is still coming to grips with the fact that his world has lost much of its cultural and commercial cachet. As recently as 2011, an average of more than a million viewers tuned in to watch the four-day-long Summer X Games on television. By 2017, that number dropped to 385,000. (ESPN says viewership is actually up when you account for streaming and social viewers, but declined to share year-over-year numbers.) The formerly rebel sports of snowboarding, BMX, and skateboarding have been adopted by the Olympics. The bad-boy stars of yesterday are now middle-aged dads.

Masekela has ridden the action-sports wave as far and well as he could’ve hoped, but no ride lasts forever.

That Masekela became the face of the X Games in the first place was wildly improbable. He was born in 1971 in Los Angeles, the first child of Hugh and Haitian immigrant Jessie Lapierre. By the time he turned four, his parents had moved to New York City and split up, and his mother was remarried to a Jehovah’s Witness, who raised Masekela in the church. But despite his stepdad’s best efforts, Hugh’s influence endured. Masekela split time between marijuana-clouded jazz clubs and going door to door spreading the Truth. “Growing up between those worlds gave me a strange set of skills,” he says. “For a long time they felt like a burden, like I was always working to fit in.”

His mom and stepdad moved around a lot, ultimately abandoning the East Coast for Carlsbad, California, at the start of Masekela’s senior year of high school. Relocating across the country was difficult for him. During the drive out, he spent rest-stop breaks at pay phones. “I was calling my girl back east and not saying anything,” he says. “Just weeping on the phone for like ten minutes, that high school heartbreak shit.”

But on his first morning in Carlsbad, he discovered that his new house sat on top of a steep hill with a view of the ocean, a feature that he credits with shaping the trajectory of his life. “Imagine, you walk out of this house onto this lawn, and you look and you’re like, Oh shit we’re right here.”

Masekela with his father, Hugh, in 2016 (Abby Ross)

Surfing became the focus of Masekela’s life. As a Jehovah’s Witness, he was discouraged from playing organized sports, but several of the members of his congregation surfed, and they loaned him a board and a wetsuit, which he put on backward the first time. He spent his downtime at school paging through back issues of Surfer, neglecting his schoolwork to study board sports. He refined the basic skateboarding skills he’d started developing back east, and he learned to snowboard. “Nothing else sounded as good,” he says. “I didn’t want to be around people who did it. I wanted to be around people who lived it.” He became a full-on disciple of what he would call the shred life.

The tension between his new passion and his commitment to the church began to mount. At 19, Masekela went to South Africa to meet up with his father, who had recently returned home for the first time in 30 years. It was 1991, and Mandela had just been released from prison. During the trip, Masekela explored life a bit too enthusiastically for the church’s standards. His sins were, in his words, “that I made out with a bunch of girls and smoked some pot.”

When he confessed, the elders chose to disfellowship him. “You have to keep going to church, to the meetings, but no one talks to you,” he explains. During his exile, Masekela remained close with his mother, but the social isolation was a brutal punishment. “It was without a doubt the most difficult time in my life,” he says. “I was severely depressed. I held a knife to my wrist in my kitchen many times.”

He moved to a new congregation in a nearby beach community called Leucadia. In 1993, while working at a restaurant, he crossed paths with several employees from TransWorld Media, which produces board-sports magazines and films, and he charmed his way into a job as a receptionist. In no time he worked up to sales jobs and small-scale announcing gigs for skateboarding competitions. His circle of friends expanded to include the pros he was interviewing at contests. By 1996, he was the team manager for Boks, the nascent action-sports division of Reebok, where he helped build the brand’s surf, skate, snowboard, and BMX teams.

The more entrenched he became in action sports, the further he drifted from the church, leaving religion behind for a new gospel.

Masekela’s big break came in the winter of 1997, at a snowboarding conference in Vail, Colorado. Boks had just folded, and his future was uncertain. He knew he had to do some networking.

The event took place in the wake of the first X Games, which was an embarrassment to everybody who cared about action sports. Purple skateboard ramps and clueless commentators left the community and industry furious at how their lifestyle and products had been represented.

Masekela in the studio with bandmate Sunny Levine (Abby Ross)

During a Q and A session that included executives from ESPN and MTV, Masekela decided to speak up. “At a certain point, I don’t even know what happened, but I was standing on top of my chair in the back. I said, ‘You know, I watch all these things—the X Games and what you guys are doing on MTV—and you don’t have any voices that represent our culture to tell people about what they’re seeing. Bill Bellamy doesn’t fucking snowboard. Here’s the deal: I’m young, I’m black, I surf and I snowboard, and I know that I could get in front of the camera and do that.’ ”

He got a standing ovation. “People were buying me beers all night like I had just given some weird ‘I Have a Dream’ shred speech.” At an after-party, an executive from MTV gave him a business card. The next year, Masekela was commentating the MTV Sports and Music Festival, offering the insider’s perspective he’d cultivated since landing in California years before.

By 1999, Masekela had landed a job as a reporter for the Winter X Games. The following summer, when Tony Hawk landed the first 900, Masekela was standing at the top of the ramp. From there it was pretty much game on. The action-sports wave was barreling into the mainstream, and Masekela was pitted as its chief evangelist.

Masekela’s presence on Tavarua is conspicuous for many reasons, but even if he was less gregarious, he would still stick out. Other than the Fijian staff members, he is the only black person on the entire island. By contrast, the kids on the trip are named Chili, Coast, Country, Fin, Hazel, Jet, Lyon, Oz, Rider, River, Roman, and Tashen. That list may not be exhaustive or spelled exactly right, but the point is: the only thing whiter than the sand here is the people.

Tavarua, like many tropical-island resorts, is a destination for people with money. There are spa treatments. There’s a yoga space. There’s an artificial-turf tennis court. Speaking of tennis, Masekela loves tennis. He also loves golf. When you grow up as a skateboarding Jehovah’s Witness, perhaps adding golfer to the list becomes easier.

But still, as a black man at the center of a nearly all-white industry, Masekela has encountered racism many times. In the early nineties, the owners of a surf shop where he was working let him go, telling him that business was slowing down and they needed to cut back on staff. But a friend who was still working there told him that the owners didn’t think Masekela matched the image of what a surf-shop employee should be—which is to say, white.

Masekela on Niue, in the South Pacific (Sal Masekela)

“Even though I had gone through all sorts of fucking racist shit as a result of starting surfing and snowboarding—people making fun of me and calling me a nigger and telling me that we don’t even swim—I still didn’t think something like that would happen,” he says. “It really, really fucked me up.”

When he got the job as the host of the X Games, the racism became more pernicious. People would assume he was a marketing choice made by network executives—that he had studied up on the difference between a heel flip and a pop shove-it after he got the job, when in reality he could do both of those tricks. “There were people who started to be like, ‘Wow, that’s really gutsy of ESPN to pick a black guy to do this. So smart. You don’t really do this stuff do you?’ ” The same authenticity that got him the job was suddenly being questioned because of his skin color.

“I didn’t have an agenda to be like, I’m the fucking Great Black Hope of action sports. I wanted to be the best commentator. I wanted to be seen as on par with the greats in broadcasting and entertainment.”

One warm summer afternoon on his couch in Venice Beach, Masekela was in a reflective mood. We were surrounded by boxes that he hadn’t unpacked since he moved to the house 12 months ago. The front door was open, and sunlight streamed in.

He told me about his split with ESPN, back in late 2012, saying that the network had wanted to renegotiate his contract. He said that a big reason he left was a feeling that ESPN had begun to devalue action sports in general. For Masekela, this was unacceptable; they were his life. A few weeks after quitting, he cut off his dreads.

“I was kind of wrestling for identity,” he said. “I cried while doing it. There were people who told me, ‘You just lit your career on fire.’ And I’d be like, ‘If you know me and consider me a friend, and you’re telling me that my hair is my calling card, then you’re telling me that you don’t hear what it is that I have to say.’ ”

Masekela near his home in Venice, California (Nikko LaMere)

As a host and announcer, one of the greatest strengths Masekela brought to action-sports events was his credibility. “We had a lot of these bro-type announcers who didn’t really capture what was going on,” says snowboarder Shaun White. “Sal knew us personally, so he could kind of talk about how a guy has been wanting to do this trick for so long and what it would mean if he did it during this run.”

Today, though, being respected by core board-sports athletes doesn’t do much for a guy’s résumé. Masekela is eager to begin a new chapter but admits he doesn’t know what that will look like yet. Which is why he’s trying a little bit of everything. He’s starting a podcast, tentatively called What Shapes Us, for which he’ll interview the deep well of exceptional friends he’s made over the years, and possibly broadcast conversations with his father posthumously. He’s touring with his band, he’s hosting more traditional adventure and travel stories for National Geographic, and he’s trying to do more acting. He says he’d like to host another TV show, but only if it feels right.

One impediment to Masekela’s career reboot is the fact that he’s not the most organized person. He doesn’t like budgets or spreadsheets. He has a tendency to lose things, forget stuff, and miss flights.

Case in point: he arrives on Tavarua a day later than planned, after a fundraising event for his charity, Stoked Mentoring, ran long and he didn’t catch his plane to Fiji. But after he finishes unpacking, he hops on the evening boat to Cloudbreak, an infamous wave that detonates two miles from the island on a barrier reef. Just about anywhere else, you’d call the conditions good to great, but by Cloudbreak standards things are looking somewhat pedestrian. The wind isn’t quite right, the lulls between sets are long, and the wave isn’t barreling like it should.

Then, just before dusk, the wind dies a bit, and the reef starts to grab the swell. All of a sudden, Masekela is on an absolute gem—green and gold, backlit by low-angle tropical sun. Miraculously, the inside section gets hollow, and he tucks into the barrel. You can hear him whooping with joy. Finally, just before the wave ends, he kicks out the back. He’s probably 100 yards or more down the reef, but he reels in his board and heads straight for the lineup.

The sun is setting, but Sal Masekela is paddling back out.

David Shultz (@dshultz14) is a freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California. This is his first feature for Outside.

Source

https://www.outsideonline.com/2380521/unlikely-preacher-action-sports-sal-masekela

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sophiayacoub-blog · 7 years

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Bodies, Property and Global Medical Power

Commenting on the history of medicalisation of the human population within society, Foucault stated that “there appeared in the nineteenth century –above all in England- a medicine that consisted mainly in a control of the health and the bodies of the needy classes, to make them more fit for labor and less dangerous for the wealthy classes”. (Foucault, 2002, p. 155) This is an understanding of medical practise as something social rather than individual, and more than anything, as something that is informed by, whilst simultaneously informing power. Through this type of medicalisation of society, science and technology become the tools for the wealthy and powerful to control the health of the poor. Foucault wrote about the construction of the nation-state and the subject-ruler relationship and how this relationship was co-constructive of technologies of science and power. Building on from this, Sheila Jasanoff states that “science and technology can be fruitfully studied as social practises geared to the establishment of varied kinds of structure and authority”(Jasanoff, 2006, p.16) It may be argued that the claim to knowledge about bodies through science and technology is a technology of power to control bodies and that the two are co-constructive. Science is politics by other means.

In this essay I will explore the ways in which medical technologies of power transcends the power of the nation-state in the global medical market, especially with the neo-liberalisation of research funding, in search for new bodies for medical subjects; but also how categories of race and nationhood is reified through a focus on diversity - however minor - of the genome, such as in the human genome diversity project. I will argue that there in sociology needs to be an understanding of the relationship between property and the human body as one informed by power struggle in the context of biomedicine, necessarily just because the practice of biomedicine is a type of production and accumulation of power and knowledge. The claim to ownership over ones’ individual body and the genetic and other material from the body is a practice of dissent to the biopower that industry, the state, and scientific experts practice, with the tools and knowledge’s that are developed with different types of technology. We see how this type of power has been exercised over marginalised groups, especially indigenous groups such as the Havasupai in America, who were deemed as having valuable genetic make-up for scientific search of unique genomes in the process of advancing biomedical mapping of the diversity of the human genome.

In this essay I wish to show how biopolitics and colonialism intersect (by drawing upon Schwartz-Marín, Restrepo and others) through the types of control over bodies that often is bound up with reified racialised and gendered categories of marginalisation such as in the case of the Havasupai, as well as of the black woman Henrietta Lacks for the first widely used cell line (the HeLa cell line) which is a cell line that has been invaluable for research throughout the biomedical practice since the 1950’s without any informed consent ever being procured for its obtaining. This is of course symptomatic of racialised power structures and categories that are produced and reproduced within medical science.

In their study of Mexican and Colombian struggle for genetic sovereignty, Restrepo and Schwartz-Marín explore the ways in which institutions have been set up in order to protect the genomes of populations within the Mexican and Colombian nation-states and how genetically reified constructions of race is produced through this. They perceive this as a new type of biocoloniality and use the example of how the Mexican and Colombian governments have set up institutions in order to claim power over indigenous and mestizo (‘mixed race’) genetic material that is deemed unique and valuable in the global medical market. They have done so in order to protect bodies from ‘external’ powers such as scientists and researchers who are funded by companies that most often are situated in Europe and North America. Here we see how biopower is dispersed throughout society and how it not only plays out between coloniser-colonised, or state-subject but rather that it is in constant fluctuation between individuals, nation-states, global medical companies and other stake holders. The body is a constant site for struggle for power; Instances such as the Mexican and Colombian genetic institutions, together with other cases such as that of Henrietta Lacks and The Havasupai tribe, demonstrate this. It is interesting to look at the genealogy of how the study of human diversity was carried out by former European colonial settler powers and how they were able to exercise authority over non-European subjects through science and medicine, to understand biocoloniality today:

According to Quijano, Cartesian thought established a strict dualist ontology that separated body/nature/object from reason/subject, allowing for a version of Eurocentrism in which some (non-European) races were seen as closer to nature, […] therefore suitable to become objects of knowledge and of domination and exploitation (Restrepo and Schwartz-Marín, 2006, p.994) Euro-centric claims to knowledge allow for the domination and exploitation of those who are deemed less civilized and racially inferior within the deterministic, reductionist, essentialist, system of racial categorisation and hierarchy invented through western medical practice (especially within the capitalist economic system today). The ‘Othering’ (Said, 2003) in this type of scientific production is what drives the research. Science in (settler) colonial times was a technology to ‘prove’ the inferiority of the colonized subjects; In the preface to the fifth edition of Franz Fanon’s ‘the wretched of the earth’, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that because the colonizers in the 19th century saw it as a moral trajectory to kill and enslave other human beings, they lay down the principle that the native were in fact not human. (Sartre, 2001) This dehumanization was justified through scientific claims about the biology of the colonized, this links back to how categorization, differentiation and a focus on ‘diversity’ is a technology of power. The human genome project (HGDP) is a project that is worth looking at when discussing the co production of science and power. The HGDP has been on-going since 1991 when it was first drafted, and has since then changed many times; its central purpose however, has been to map the diversity of the human genome, specifically looking to indigenous groups for their supposed uniqueness in genetic build up. (Reardon, 2001) This is a way in which biomedicine uses radicalized social categories (that has been dismissed by post-structuralist and sociologists thinkers (see Goffman, 1990, for an example)), to further biotechnology by trying to find meaning in these categories; although the diversity of the genome has been shown to be minimal, the search for differentiation carries on. Reardon (2001) argues that biology has always been invested in the study of diversity from 18th century taxonomy to today’s genetic studies. We can see how the object of differentiation is on going but that the technology has changed. With the help of the methods that for example the HeLa cell line contributed to biomedicine, the study of diversity has been revolutionised even when the aims of finding difference in human populations is the unchanged. This shows signs of lack of reflexivity within the biomedical community as a focus on ‘diversity’ within biology has had detrimental effects before in terms of slavery, colonialism and ethnic cleansings.

It is helpful to look at the case of Henrietta Lacks when trying to understand the power relationships that are produced between scientists and subjects in biomedicine because of how in this instance white, male scientists exercised power over the black female body of Lacks and the cell-lines of her blood in their claims to knowledge. Lacks was a black woman from the American south who despite knowing that she had a ‘knot’ on her cervix refrained from seeking medical help for a long time. This made her fall ill and eventually she died before being able to go through successful treatment. Rebecca Skloot (2010) notes in her book about the (immortal) life of Henrietta Lacks that Lacks husband had to drive her twenty miles to get to John Hopkins hospital to seek treatment but also that “For Henrietta, walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. She knew about harvesting tobacco and butchering a pig, but she’d never heard the words cervix or biopsy“ (skloot, 2010, p. 25) We see here an instance of health inequality in how Lacks social and economic situation prevented her from taking part of positive aspects of medicine even though her body has since revolutionized the medical technological practice in ways that were previously unthinkable. Lacks’ medical doctor took a sample of her tumorous cervix that was then sent (without her consent) to the laboratory of Dr. George Gey who was trying to grow cervical cancer cells in vitro (that is outside of the rest of the body). (Skloot, 2010) Gey succeeded in growing the cells outside of the body of Henrietta Lacks and then shared them with the rest of the scientific community for biomedical purposes; Henrietta Lacks’ body was shared among the white, male scientists in their search for accumulation of wealth and power and whilst her family is still poor, the scientific community has gained massively from her. The hierarchies here are evident. Hannah Landecker (1991) describes in her findings of studying the way Henrietta Lacks was personified through the HeLa cell line that at first she was seen as a virtuous, young, housewife; But as soon as it was discovered that the cell line had ‘contaminated’ cell lines obtained from other bodies, disrupting what had previously been seen as successful advances in biomedical science, she was described as a “promiscuous, malicious black woman” (Landecker, 1999, p.213). Henrietta Lacks becomes personified through the cell line of her body showing that knowledge really is power. The use of Henrietta Lacks’ cell line throughout biomedical research and the complete lack of compensation for her and her family is entagled with racial and gendered power relationships that are bound up with the same types of racialised and gendered constructions that are produced and practiced within biomedicine today in projects such as the HGDP.

In 2004 the Havasupai tribe who are indigenous to the Grand Canyon, filed a lawsuit against the Arizona State University (ASU) in order to claim back the rights to the blood samples that had been taken from members of the tribe by the ASU in order to conduct genetic research studies on diabetes type 2. The samples were initially collected for the supposed benefits of the community, but the Havasupai discovered that the genomes derived from the blood had been used for other purposes than that which they were informed about in the first place (such as the production of genome studies of schizophrenia) and therefore they took legal action against the university practises. Here we see how a struggle between the scientists at the ASU and the indigenous Havasupai community for the right to property over, and essentially for right to power, control, and, sovereignty over the body and the mind was played out (note that it can be problematic to assume any distinction between the body and the mind as demonstrated earlier with reference to settler colonialism.) (Garrison, 2012) Foucault stated in his paper on the birth of social medicine that in the 1800’s, English speaking “religious groups were combating medicalization, with asserting the right to life, the right to get sick, to care for oneself and to die in the manner one wished.“ (Foucault, 2000, p.155) similarly, the Havasupai were challenging scientists at the ASU who were asserting a right to the Havasupai tribes genetic history, and although the community might not be strictly a religious groups as in Foucaults example, but rather a community with a common culture and religion, (especially one that differs from the neo-liberal western hegemony) this is a good example of what he was trying to demonstrate. The tribe have knowledges and traditions that are very much different to those of a scientific community and have managed to live for a very long time in the Grand Canyon surely struggling against colonial settlers before. Building on from this, Anne Phillips (2011) states that The capacity to resist intrusions on the body, and determine for oneself what can or cannot be done to it, has been central to the struggle for human rights. It is sometimes formulated in what sound like ownership terms (Phillips, 2011, p.2) The struggle for the human right to autonomy over one’s body within biomedical practice becomes the point at which the body is considered property. The body isn’t in itself essentially property because the word ‘property’ only comes to be in the power relationship that makes its claim necessary. The samples of the Havasupai were returned to the community but no legal repercussions followed for the researchers, despite the fact that they had breached the initial consent forms. Through semi-structured interviews with “institutional review board (IRB) chairs and human genetics researchers at US research institutions” Nanibaa' A. Garrison (2012) has tried to gain an understanding of how institutions view the case and what the possible consequences for future research involving the genetic materials of the body could be. What she found was that the biomedical institutions did not see the case as something that could potentially have an impact on how their research should be carried out, or on any types of epistemological changed having to be sought out, but rather that there were understandings of the implications as to how to better obtain consent from subjects in order to avoid legal outcomes or ethical reprimands. For example one of the IRB chairs said that: We encourage people to describe the types of research that may use the sample in the future, if applicable. […] rather than being advocates of tiered consent, . . . we’d rather say, ‘‘Listen, you’re giving broad permission for use of this, and that broad permission might include some of these kinds of things and if you don’t want your cells used that way, then don’t participate in the research.’’ (IRB chair Int22) From this comment it is possible to draw some conclusions about how scientists are encouraged by the IRB to find more ways to thoroughly safe guard properties of subjected bodies once the materials have been obtained for research, in order to avoid individuals or communities to intervene in how their bodies are being used. The consent forms become technologies of power where science and politics is co-produced; instead of the power becoming more evenly distributed where scientists change some of their claims that they make about knowledge of the body of subjects, the methods and technologies of obtaining these knowledges change. This is an example of the power that science is co-constructive of as the scientists in this instance were not willing to look at their own positionality within research and therefore run the risk of advancing exploitation for their own claims to knowledge about the body.

In this essay I have tried to demonstrate how through the technology of biomedical science, the body becomes a constant site of struggle for rights and that the claim to property over one’s own body is a dissent to the biopower that biomedical actors exercise. I have demonstrated this by drawing upon work about Mexican and Colombian state institutions of within ‘biocoloniality’ and by trying to gain an understanding of what property of the body means in the contexts of the Havasupai tribe and of Henrietta Lacks. This work has its limitations in trying to show some of the different ways in which power is exercised but I hope that I have been able to demonstrate that biopower entangles technologies of science, the body as property and knowledge even where the contexts differ. I would propose (as many others have before me) that sociologists develop an understanding of the importance of the meaning of sovereignty over the body, and the right to property over the body and what this means in a time of technologization and scientific authority.

References Foucault, M. (2008). The history of sexuality. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2002). The essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984. London: Penguin. Edited by James D. Faubion. Garrison, N. (2012). Genomic Justice for Native Americans: Impact of the Havasupai Case on Genetic Research. Science, Technology & Human Values, 38(2), pp.201-223. Goffman, E. (1990). Stigma. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jasanoff, S. (2004). States of knowledge. London: Routledge. Landecker, H. (1999). Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in Law and Science. SIC, 12(01), p.203. Reardon, J. (2001). The Human Genome Diversity Project: A Case Study in Coproduction. Social Studies of Science, 31(3), pp.357-388. Said, E. (n.d.). Orientalism. Sartre, J. (2015). In: F. Fanon, ed., The Wretched of the Earth, 1st ed. London: Penguin, pp.7-26. Schwartz-Marin, E. and Restrepo, E. (2013). Biocoloniality, Governance, and the Protection of 'Genetic Identities' in Mexico and Colombia. Sociology, 47(5), pp.993-1010. Skloot, R. (2010). The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers.

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latriceduke · 7 years

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Scam or legit? Omnilife reviewed

Omnilife is a multilevel marketing company that started in Mexico but operates throughout North, Central, and South America, selling hydration and nutrition products to a primarily Spanish-speaking customer base.

In the Hispanic world, it’s a major corporate power; until recently, it sponsored the fourth largest stadium in Mexico, and the CEO of the company owns a major Mexican professional soccer team.

So have I been involved? This explains everything:

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The company has been around since 1991, and as a large, well-established company, it doesn’t look like it’s had any major swings in its popularity in the last decade or so, at least as measured by internet search engine traffic. Search volume has been essentially stable, albeit with a few sporadic and random ups and downs, for over ten years.

Depending on your perspective, this can be either a good thing or a bad thing for your business prospects.

On one hand, it means that the name brand is pretty well-established, so people are more likely to have heard of it. But on the other, it also means that the company isn’t really expanding much, so your odds of getting in on a big surge in popularity aren’t as good.

Products

Omnilife’s products fall, broadly speaking, into four categories: hydration, in-house supplement blends, weight loss supplements, and sports products.

The hydration products from Omnilife are all pre-mixed and bottled drinks. As far as MLM products go, they are pretty simple and straightforward.

Ego Life Pina, for example, contains only potassium and sodium salts (for electrolyte replenishment), sugar, and B-complex vitamins.

On the upside, there aren’t any strange extracts or herbs in the product, but it’s also hard to justify selling something that’s not substantively different from the kind of sports drink you could buy at any corner store.

Things get a little more interesting with the in-house supplement blends. These range from pretty basic stuff, like the C-Mas Citrus supplement, which is just vitamin C and citrus flavoring, to more complex blends, like their Kenyan drink, which contains a blend of choline, glycine, and B-complex vitamins.

This supplement drink is intended to help you focus better.

What’s the science behind it? The connection between choline and cognitive function is tenuous. One study, published in the journal Neuroscience and BioBehavioral Overviews, drew a connection between choline intake during pregnancy and cognitive function in offspring, but there haven’t been any studies showing a direct link between choline supplementation and better focus or thinking.

The link between glycine and brain functioning is essentially untested; it’s more likely that it’s included for taste and sweetness reasons than for any boost to cognitive functioning.

B vitamins, on the other hand, do seem to help cognitive function. According to a 2002 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, B vitamin levels could help account for up to 8% of the variation in cognitive function of elderly people: lower B vitamin levels mean worse cognitive function. So there is a plausible link between B vitamins and ability to focus.

In the weight loss department, Omnilife seems stuck in the ‘90s. Most of their popular weight loss supplements are spiffed up highly-caffeinated products, and the product names (Cafetino, Caffezino) make no effort to hide this. While this does work, it’s unimaginative and can be risky if you don’t know the total amount of caffeine you are taking in.

Caffeine does boost fat burning, due to its stimulant properties. A 2006 study in the scientific journal Obesity used some advanced statistical models on a large group of patients taking caffeine as part of their normal diet, and found that higher caffeine intake is associated with higher amounts of weight loss over the long-term, due to its metabolism-boosting effects.

Of course, the downside is that high caffeine consumption can cause jitters, irritability, and trigger withdrawal headaches when you stop using it.

As is too often the case with caffeinated MLM products, it’s not always easy to find out how much caffeine is in Omnilife’s weight loss products.

The sports performance products are similarly simplistic. There’s your usual protein powders (flavored and with added vitamins) and taurine-containing energy supplements, alongside Undu, a glucosamine supplement, but nothing creative or innovative.

Compensation plan

At $49, the membership kit you need to purchase to join Omnilife is pretty middle of the road in terms of cost. The compensation plan is unilevel, meaning you can build up your downline however you wish.

The minimum amount of product volume needed to quality for active status (and thus earn income) is 300 product volume per month, but this is a little misleading since Omnilife uses a much higher points to dollars ratio than most MLMs. It works out to about $110 per month in minimum sales to stay active, which is not too bad.

The retail discounts increase depending on how much sales you have; it starts at 20% and scales to 50% if you can exceed 4000 product volume per month.

To start earning downline commissions, you need one active distributor below you (duh). Once you’ve got this, though, you get 5% commissions on downline sales through your first level. To increase this rate and get deeper levels of commission, you need to up your monthly sales.

Recap

Omnilife is mediocre in pretty much every regard. When it comes to popularity, it isn’t great, but it isn’t terrible either.

Its products are fine; ranging from interesting to passable, and its compensation plan doesn’t raise any eyebrows, good or bad. In this kind of situation, it only makes sense to get into an MLM like this if you think you can tap into a potential market.

Given Omnilife’s appeal to Hispanics, that would be the obvious choice, but it also means your market is limited. It’d take a special kind of distributor to make this plan work.

Look, I’m definitely not an Omnilife hater, as I’ve shown throughout this review. But if you’re just doing it for the money, there are better ways to kill your day job.

You might like our coaching because it shows you the good life without peddling products to your family and friends.

http://bodynutrition.org/omnilife-review/ http://bodynutritionorg.blogspot.com/2017/06/scam-or-legit-omnilife-reviewed.html

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viralhottopics · 7 years

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Who is Derrick Watson, the Hawaii judge who blocked Trump’s latest travel ban?

He has made himself a lightning rod with his strongly worded ruling on the ban, but many have praised Watson as fair-minded and highly principled

The ink was barely dry on Judge Derrick Watsons order suspending Donald Trumps latest travel ban when the recriminations and conspiracy theories began.

One Fox News commentator called it judicial tyranny. President Trump himself called it unprecedented judicial overreach. On social media, amateur sleuths noted that Judge Watson had graduated from the same Harvard Law School class as Barack Obama (in 1991), and even noted that Obama had been in Hawaii on the day of the ruling, as though they had cooked it up together.

One thing is beyond doubt: Judge Derrick Kahala Watson, the only native Hawaiian currently serving as a US federal judge, has made himself a national lightning rod with a ruling that admirers and detractors alike have described as pointed and outspoken.

His 43-page document flatly describes the governments contentions in defense of the revised travel ban as untrue and says the administrations illogic is palpable. It is rare that judges are willing to stick their necks out so visibly. And Judge Watson hardly has a reputation as a hothead or a rabble-rouser. He is a product of Hawaiis prestigious private school system, attended Harvard as an undergraduate as well as a law student, and had a distinguished career as a federal prosecutor in northern California and Hawaii before being elevated to the federal bench. He has also served as a reserve captain in the US army.

Interviews with colleagues and friends by the Associated Press overnight suggested a man who was usually understated and fair-minded if also strict and highly principled. That was also the impression gleaned by the Senate when it voted unanimously to confirm Watson as a federal judge in 2013. At the time, President Obama praised him and five other judicial nominees for their talent, expertise, and fair-mindedness.

Certainly, Watson is not the first federal judge to take issue with the administrations attempts to impose a temporary ban on travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries. A similar restraining order was issued in early February by Judge James Robart in Seattle in response to the first draft of the administrations executive order, and Watsons ruling coincided with a similarly argued, though less broad, ruling from a federal judge in Maryland. All of them have argued that the travel ban looks a lot like an instrument of religious discrimination both because of what is in the executive orders themselves and because of what President Trump and his team have said about them on the campaign trail and in public appearances since the election.

There are indications, though, that Watsons viewpoint may have been further influenced by his Hawaiian heritage and his long record of advocacy for immigrant rights and civil rights. While with a San Francisco law firm in the early 2000s, he devoted hundreds of hours to pro bono cases defending the rights of Mexican restaurant workers being held in slave-like conditions and to landlord-tenant disputes.

The complaint filed by Hawaiis attorney general against the Trump travel ban contained an explicit reference to some of the most painful chapters in the islands history the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the imposition of martial law and internment of Japanese Americans following the bombing ofPearl Harbor. At the time, the US supreme court upheld the governments argument similar to Trumps that it had the executive authority to defend national security as it saw fit. But the courts ruling in Korematsu v United States has since been described as a stain on American jurisprudence and has been widely repudiated in federal court rulings if never explicitly overturned.

If you have an order taking us back half a century to a time when there was discrimination on the basis of national origin or religion, Hawaiis attorney general, Doug Chin, told reporters after Watsons ruling, thats something we have to speak up against.

Watsons suspension of the travel ban rested on the argument that the plaintiffs, including the head of the Muslim Association of Hawaii, had a strong likelihood of prevailing at a full trial. That conclusion, though, rests on a reading of case law that many more conservative jurists and commentators do not share particularly when it comes to considering comments by President Trump and administration officials as well as the text of the executive order itself.

Watsons imaginative reasoning in Hawaii v Trump asserts a new judicial power to disregard formal law if the presidents personal words create a basis for mistrusting his motives, conservative commentator David Frum wrote in a column worrying about the kind of precedent this could set for future administrations of either party persuasion. In the age of Trump, many will be sympathetic to this judicial power but it is crammed with dangers, too.