April 29, 2020 (medium.com)

Will Coronavirus Finish the Job of Killing the Struggling US Economy?

See that chart above? The line plunging into the abyss? That’s an economy having a heart attack and dying.

The line is GDP. It just fell to about -5%, from 2%. That’s a fall of seven percent in the first quarter of 2020. The first quarter of 2020 was of course just the very beginning of the crisis — to March or so, when lockdown weren’t even fully in place. So just the beginning of the crisis cratered GDP by seven percent. What about the second quarter — aka a whole nation paralyzed, at a standstill? How much more will GDP fall when the reckoning finally comes? 15%? 25%? 35%? Bang!

The answer is: nobody knows, but it’s not going to be pretty. Coronavirus is already blowing past the worst expectations for economic damage. What’s about to happen next, in my estimation, is going to be truly catastrophic.

There are two schools of thought on how history unfolds next. One — the one favored by pundits and American intellectuals says: the economy will bounce back magically, as soon as lockdown are lifted! There’s nothing to worry about! And besides — working, even if your health still at risk, is what matters most, not your life.

I couldn’t disagree more. I don’t think the economy is going to bounce back, I think that this crisis shows us just how fragile the economy really was, and I don’t think that putting people at risk by making them go back to work or get fired is a substitute for…a working economy.

We are now entering the Coronavirus Depression. The economy won’t bounce back, magically, once lockdowns are lifted. Why not? For many, many reasons. The most obvious is that waves of businesses are already closing. So many of the job losses America’s suffering now — a record 26 million have filed for unemployment — are going to be permanent.

There’s another way to to put that. Coronavirus is going to do the job of transforming the American economy. For decades now, it’s been an economy where mega-monopolies offering people low-wage, dead end jobs have been replacing small and medium sized businesses — or even yesterday’s industrial giants — offering people a secure, stable middle class living. By annihilating huge chunks of small and medium sized business, Coronavirus is offering mega-monopoly the economy on a platter. All those “distressed assets” — whether storefronts or, well, unemployed people? Mega-monopolies can now buy them up on the cheap.

Think of who’s really done well from Coronavirus: the answer is all mega-monopolies. Amazon. Facebook. Google. Netflix. And so forth. These businesses exist on a spectrum from predatory — Facebook and Amazon, who subsist by paying lower taxes than you — to merely benign, like Netflix. What they don’t do, though, is employ masses of people in stable, secure middle class jobs, which provide decent lives. Instead, they lay the groundwork for an economy of technofeudalism — people eke out a living by driving an Uber tonight, selling junk on Amazon tomorrow, maybe delivering Instacart groceries the day after. The transformation of America into an economy of titanic mega-monopolies is going to be accelerated by Coronavirus, massively.

As people compete harder for a much, much smaller pool of jobs, another dismal American trend is likely to harden: wage stagnation. Real average American incomes haven’t grown in fifty years. But what do mega-monopolies really offer? Half of Americans work in “low-wage service jobs” — and that was before Coronavirus. Think of it for a second: a full half of Americans effectively now form something like a class of servants to the upper ten percent or so, driving their cars, walking their dogs, cleaning their homes.

The lesson is: mega-monopolies don’t just use their power, they abuse it. America’s labour market, already beset by decades of underpaid wages and overworked lives, is going to harden along just those lines.

Think of your average owner of a small business — now wiped out by Coronavirus, since the stimulus and rescue packages were laughably small, offering just a week’s worth of support to households and businesses. There she is — once following her passion. Now she has to spend months, maybe years, winding down debt, paying off what she can, negotiating with creditors. How likely is she ever to try her hand at entrepreneurship again — after being scarred by it for a lifetime?

But the effect is not just on her. It’s on all those she might have employed — and tried to take care of, too. Maybe at her microbrewery or bakery, she tried to run it along ethical lines, paying people a decent wage, offering good healthcare and retirement, even childcare, so that everyone could really put their heart and soul into their work. Bang! There’s a hundred jobs like that — which would have been a thousand in five years — vanished. Just gone up in smoke. Multiply that by a million, and you begin to see the devastating effect of Coronavirus on the economy.

All those people she might have employed in decent jobs — what happens to them? Well, since the economy base has now shifted decisively to mega-monopoly, that’s what they have left to choose from. The pundits and economists who gush over that shift speak of “freedom” — but all these people know is that they’re eking out a living doing gig work. Driving an Uber today, delivering Amazon packages tomorrow, and so on. But this kind of labour rewinds centuries in time: like the stuff of Dickensian England, it’s piecework, which offers no benefits, no guarantees, not even a stable income or wage.

People are plunged into fresh poverty — another trend that’s been accelerating in America, which is now going to harden. The American middle class became a minority around 2011 or so, for the first time in economic history. The reason? Another gruesome trend — I call it invisible hyperinflation. Since the 1990s, the prices of basics in America have risen astronomically. Healthcare? Education? Food? Retirement? All these things now costs thousands of percent more than they did just a few decades ago. Americans tend to think hyperinflation is something that happens in poor countries — and they’re right. The part they miss is that they’re one, too, now.

So if your income hasn’t risen in fifty years — but feeding your kid, educating your kid, providing healthcare for your family, each now cost as much as a home…what the hell do you do?

You go into debt, of course. Which is why Americans now live and die in debt. But that, of course, is exactly what poverty is: being stuck perpetually trying to erase the burden of unpayable debts.

What Americans don’t seem to understand is that on the incomes they earn, the debts they owe can never be repaid. That is precisely why retirement and home ownership have become distant, impossible dreams, especially amongst young people, who speak of such things with irony, to distance themselves from the pain of living a life falling apart.

America was becoming a poor society long before Coronavirus — but Coronavirus is going to finish the job of driving the average American into deep, enduring, life-long poverty, from which there’s no real escape. Translation: bills are going to go up, up, up, and wages are going to fall, so real incomes are going to go down, sharply.

What happens to societies that grow poor? They find themselves in a vicious spiral. People can’t put food on their own table — so how are they to fund things like decent hospitals, schools, universities, parks, and libraries for everyone else? If you can’t make ends meet — how can you look for anyone else, let alone everyone else?

So as societies grow poorer, their tax bases begin to decline. You can already see that effect at work in America’s Red States. Deindustrialized, full of decrepit Rust Belt towns, they have to be subsidized by Blue States, which is where the work of technocapitalism goes on, from San Francisco to LA to Manhattan. But such states can’t even really afford to run school systems or transport networks on their own at this point — which is why, incidentally, the whole country’s are falling apart.

A country of people too poor to make ends meet can’t afford an expansive social contract of generous public goods, like in Canada or Europe — good healthcare, education, retirement, childcare, for everyone. Instead, it sinks into the even deeper poverty of having no real functioning social systems.

By making America a society of poor people, Coronavirus is going to seal in its fate: it’s already gone without European or Canadian social contract and public goods, and now things like public healthcare and retirement and childcare will simply become economic impossibilities.

Especially, when, remember, the Facebooks and Amazons of the world pay less tax than you do.

What’s the further political effect of that — sinking into a kind of irreversible decline, into deeper poverty — the poverty not just of one’s own short-term personal deprivation, but of having no functioning social contract or social systems to support you, either? What happens when a whole society suddenly grows too poor to really act like a society?

Red States give us a clue — though the answer’s already in the question. What happens as people get suddenly poorer — especially people who expected upwards mobility into stable, middle class lives — is that they turn ugly. Rage becomes hate. Frustration simmers over into vilification. They turn to authoritarians who tell them “they’ll be Great Again!”

How is it that Red States are subsidized by Blue States — but they’re also the ones who want less government and investment? What the? It makes perfect sense if you think about it this way: the poor Red Stater wants everything for themselves. They understand the economy is shrinking, and they are trying to claim what morsels are left for themselves. What they mean by “less government” is really “I can’t pay taxes on my tiny or nonexistent income — but I need as much support as I can get!”

Red States, in other words, have been decivilized. Life has been reduced to a brutal contest for self-preservation — even at everyone else’s expense. That is why the average Red Stater is a buffoon and a mystery to the entire rest of the world. What kind of person votes agains their own education, retirement, healthcare…over and over again? A person who can’t afford it, is the answer.

Being too poor to care about anyone else at all, though, is a terrible plight. That is the effect of poverty that American intellectuals and thinkers don’t understand yet: they’ve long thought of it as a necessary punishment, the handmaiden of virtue, doled out justly to the lazy and foolish. But they don’t get that deep poverty of the kind America’s fallen into decivilizes people, right back into superstition, rage, fear, authoritarianism, hate, and cruelty, as the desperate impulse for self-preservation overrides any — by now long-forgotten — sentiment of generosity, kindness, compassion, or sanity.

The world looks at Red State America and sees — bewildered, mystified, horrified — people who don’t care if their kids have to do “active shooter drills” or pay “lunch debt”, if they have to go into “medical bankruptcy”, who tote guns but don’t read books, and so forth. The caricature’s true, but in a sad, indecent way. They’ve been left too poor by decades of neoliberalism and predatory capitalism to do anything but try to survive, by whatever means necessary.

Let me summarize. Coronavirus is going to finish the job of killing off the American economy. It will complete the transformation of a once entrepreneurial economy which, even if it lacked public goods, still offered people some semblance of mobility, stability, middle class life — into a kind of caste economy of new poor and ultra rich, without much in the middle. At the top, a tiny numbers of owners of capital — Bezos, Zuck, today’s CEO of Goldman Sachs. Below them, a small 1% of their lieutenants. And then everyone else, trying to scrape together a living, whatever gig or low-wage service job comes their way today.

In such an economy, education doesn’t count much — see how today’s PhDs already face mass unemployment. Neither does hard work, because there’s nowhere to go, really. What counts is being a certain kind of person. Brutal, selfish, greedy, avaricious, thoughtless, ignorant, foolish. Like a member of the Trump family, essentially. Such people will rise. And they will do what they do best, which is the only thing know how to do. Abuse their power for their own benefit and gain — at everyone else’s expense, even if that “expense” is, like right about now, death on an unimaginable scale.

Welcome to the Coronavirus Depression. It’s going to be ugly. Brutal. Remorseless. And most of all, unnecessary — because the truth is that a stimulus response as big as the crisis would have stopped it dead in its tracks. But you already knew that, deep in your gut, didn’t you? Now you know why there wasn’t one, too. A cynic might even say: this is how historic catastrophes are exploited by fools, wise men, and preening monsters — and glittering dark ages are born.

Umair
April 2020

umair haque

The Department of Defense isn’t admitting that aliens exist. But apparently they don’t mind if you check out their sweet rides.

ON MONDAY, THE US Department of Defense officially released three videos depicting encounters between Navy pilots and unidentified aerial phenomena. These events occurred in 2004 and 2015, but the videos didn’t publicly surface until The New York Times included them with a front-page story about the Pentagon’s “mysterious UFO program” in 2017. The Navy previously acknowledged that the videos are authentic, but the Pentagon never authorized them for release. Now it has.

Each of the three videos contains footage captured by Navy pilots that show a strange-looking oval zipping through the air and over the ocean. In a video from 2015 called “Gimbal,” a flying object shaped like a Tic Tac whips through the clouds before it slows and begins to rotate. The pilot filming the encounter describes it over the radio as “a fucking drone, bro.” In another video from 2015, referred to as “Go Fast,” a small white speck is tracked by a jet’s infrared system as it flies low over the ocean. The oldest video, “FLIR1,” is also from a jet infrared system and shows an oval object rapidly accelerating.

The videos were originally published by The New York Times and To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, a company founded by former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge to research UFOs and other unexplained phenomena. When the videos were released in 2017, To the Stars staffers claimed that the footage had “been through the official declassification review process and has been approved for public release.”

“All videos were previously reviewed by the cognizant DOD authority under the 1910 process and were cleared for ‘unrestricted release’ by the Defense Office of Prepublication Security Review,” says Luis Elizondo, To the Stars’ director of government programs and services. Elizondo is a former Department of Defense employee who claims to have led its Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, the “mysterious UFO program” alluded to in the Times report. The “1910 process” refers to the Defense Department form 1910 used to request clearance to release DOD information to the public.

But in their statement this week, Pentagon officials describe the 2017 release as “unauthorized.” Three years later, the DOD is finally ready to authorize the videos … even though they’ve already been watched by millions of people. “After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena,” Department of Defense officials wrote in a press release published on Monday.

(As of press time, a spokesperson for the US Navy had not returned a request for comment.)

So does the official authorization of these videos mean the Pentagon has finally admitted that aliens exist? Nope. For starters, anything the military labels “unidentified” is not necessarily extraterrestrial. It’s just something in the sky that military officials can’t explain—civil and military pilots see unidentified aircraft all the time. Could they be piloted by little green men? Sure, if you have an active imagination. But usually they turn out to be something much more mundane—an atmospheric illusion, an undisclosed military drill, a satellite, or evidence of a tired pilot’s brain playing tricks on them.

In the case of the videos released this week by the Pentagon, it’s still unclear what’s in them. As a Department of Defense staffer notes in the press release, “the aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified.’” The flying objects in the video might be aircraft, but if they are, they don’t move like any aircraft we’re familiar with. Audio from the 2015 video suggests that even the pilots who filmed it couldn’t understand what they were seeing. “What the fuck is that thing?” one of the pilots asks over the radio.

If these were evidence of extraterrestrial activity, or even just advanced military aircraft built by another country, one would expect that the Pentagon would classify those videos faster than you can say “Freedom of Information Act.” But here’s the thing: The DOD described the videos released this week as unclassified, which is not the same thing as declassified. Unclassified means that the military never thought the information was sensitive enough to slap national security restrictions on it in the first place. A spokesperson for the Department of Defense told WIRED that “imagery from military aircraft are routinely treated as classified until they are reviewed” and that a copy of the FLIR video had been “erroneously marked as classified during the intelligence investigation process.” According to the press release, the reason the Pentagon decided to release the videos was “to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos.

“The investigation into unidentified incursions into military airspace involves various intelligence methods and agencies, which means these videos were part of classified investigations,” a spokesperson for the Department of Defense told WIRED in an email. “The videos themselves were eventually deemed unclassified, but we do not release information that is part of ongoing investigations.”

Ultimately, the release of these videos is nothing more than the Defense Department giving them an official stamp of approval. But that doesn’t mean the mystery is finished. “This historic acknowledgement will cause a seismic shift in the attitudes and stigma surrounding these events, allowing more reputable institutions to openly share reliable data for research,” says Elizondo. “It will be looked at for years to come as a fundamental step in gaining people’s trust.”

Unless, of course, you trust no one.

Updated 4-29-2020, 12:40 pm EDT: This story was updated with comment from the Department of Defense.

Daniel Oberhaus is a staff writer at WIRED, where he covers space exploration and the future of energy. He is the author of Extraterrestrial Languages (MIT Press, 2019) and was previously the news editor at Motherboard.

Issued on: 30/04/2020 – France24.com

Text by: Sébastian SEIBT

A vaccine against Covid-19 developed in Britain has shown very encouraging results on rhesus macaque monkeys, among the animals closest to humans. The scientists working on the vaccine estimate that if they can prove its effectiveness, it could be ready as soon as September.

Its name is a mouthful, but it’s the vaccine on everyone’s lips: The ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, currently being developed by Oxford University scientists, has in recent days shot ahead to become the most promising potential vaccine against the novel coronavirus.

On Thursday, the British drug maker AstraZeneca said it would help Oxford develop, produce and distribute the vaccine.

“Our hope is that, by joining forces, we can accelerate the globalisation of a vaccine to combat the virus and protect people from the deadliest pandemic in a generation,” AstraZeneca Chief Executive Pascal Soriot said.

The partnership hopes to produce 100 million doses by the end of the year and prioritise supply in the UK, Soriot told the Financial Times.

The first good news came last week from a laboratory in the US state of Montana, where six rhesus macaques, who received a dose of the British vaccine a month ago, did not contract Covid-19 after being exposed to it. Other monkeys who had not been vaccinated caught the virus and fell ill.

“The rhesus macaque is pretty much the closest thing we have to humans,” Vincent Munster, the scientist who conducted the experiment, told The New York Times.

Morgane Bomsel, a molecular biologist working on Covid-19 at the Cochin Institute in Paris, agrees. “It’s true that it’s better than if the tests had been carried out on mice,” she told FRANCE 24.

Bomsel considers the results encouraging, but warns against celebrating too soon, if only because details of the experiment conducted in Montana have not yet been published. “We don’t know yet, for example, what dose of the virus the macaques were exposed to, or how they were contaminated,” she said.

First tests on humans in Europe

Work on the ChAdOx1 nCov-19 vaccine is moving ahead quickly in Britain as well. On April 24, the Oxford vaccine was the first in Europe to enter the human trial stage, with 1,110 healthy volunteers recruited for the tests.

“The goal is to ensure that the vaccine is not toxic for the human body,” Bomsel said. In other words, before checking whether the ChAdOx1 nCov-19 protects from Covid-19, the researchers first need to guarantee that it is not dangerous.

The next step usually is to “take blood samples from the subjects to check for the presence of antibodies and the effectiveness of the vaccine against the coronavirus”, Bomsel explained.

If the trial produces positive results, millions of doses of ChAdOx1 nCov-19 could be available as early as September, Oxford researchers told the New York Times, months ahead of other known efforts.

“Usually, in fact, it takes about 18 months,” a member of the crisis cell of the French Society for Virology (SVF), a network of over 1,000 virologists from different laboratories, told FRANCE 24.

Modular vaccine

The Oxford scientists might be able to work at record speed “because in a sense, this vaccine isn’t new”, said the SVF virologist, who asked to remain anonymous because she did not want to involve her employer in the debate.

The researchers used a “technological platform with which they already have quite a lot of experience”, she said.

The core of the vaccine – ChAdOx1 – is an adenovirus: that is, it belongs to a family of viruses that have a mild effect on humans, and it is present in chimpanzees.

“It exists in humans as well, but researchers preferred to take it from monkeys to be certain that the human body has not already developed antibodies to protect against it,” she explained.

It is then combined with parts of another virus to make a vaccine. Researchers at Oxford have already used ChAdOx1 in the past to test vaccines against Ebola, Chikungunya, Rift Valley fever and, above all, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus, a coronavirus related to Covid-19 that was first reported in 2012. British scientists had very encouraging results in the latter case, especially with tests on rhesus macaques.

For the current coronavirus, they simply “added the surface protein of Covid-19 to ChAdOx1”, said Bomsel. That is the part of the virus that allows it to attach to the host cells and infect them. The purpose of the vaccine would therefore be to allow the human body to develop defenses against this mechanism of attaching to a human cell.

Since the technology is already in place and they have already tested humans for other vaccines using ChAdOx1, the Oxford scientists were quickly able to adapt it to the current pandemic and develop the clinical trial protocols.

Ring vaccination strategy

But even if the results of the clinical trial currently under way end up being promising, it will still be too early to celebrate.

The following step, Phase III of the vaccine’s development, will be to administer it to volunteers who will then be released back into their regular environments where they could be exposed naturally to the virus. The complete process of ensuring that these subjects are effectively immune to the disease can take up to three years.

So how can British scientists commit to providing doses of ChAdOx1 by September if the trials succeed? By following a specific procedure for cases where there is not enough time to complete testing: ring vaccination.

“The idea is to administer the vaccine to members of the first circle of contacts of people who fall ill with the virus, and then to observe whether the virus contaminates the second circle. That way, it’s possible both to vaccinate and to evaluate,” explained the French virologist.

This was done during the 2018 Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and could be replicated to fight against Covid-19.

While the experts interviewed by FRANCE 24 recognised that the work of the Oxford team was very promising, they said other possible vaccines – like those being developed by the American pharmaceutical companies Inovio and Moderna – might also be in advanced stages of research by the autumn.

Despite the encouraging news, there is no guarantee that the vaccines will work. But even if the efforts at Oxford University are unsuccessful, Bomsel said, “we will at least have learned a lot about how the body’s immune system fights this virus”. 

The FSV virologist was even more optimistic: “Even if the vaccine won’t successfully immunise the body against Covid-19, we can still hope that it will reduce the severity of the virus,” she said.

That alone would be preferable to watching, more or less helplessly, as the number of coronavirus victims grows every day.

Luisa Neubauer of Fridays for Future lays out protest posters for the alternative climate strike on the Reichstag meadow in Berlin, Germany on April 24, 2020. Because of the continuing spread of the corona virus, the climate strike is being digitally distributed online. PHOTO BY KAY NIETFELD / PICTURE ALLIANCE / GETTY IMAGES

Students across generations are flocking to online crash courses on movement building and the Green New Deal.

---

BY LEANNA FIRST-ARAI  APR 30, 2020 (yesmagazine.org)

On any given weekday before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Michelle Cohen could be found in her Los Angeles office advising students on how to apply for an apprenticeship, or which classes they need to take before earning a high school equivalency diploma. But when public schools in the district shifted to online learning in March, Cohen, who has been an educator for more than 20 years, decided to embrace a new role as a student, in a class led by two instructors who were decades younger than her.

Cohen, who is 53, felt a little uncomfortable at first. Some of the other students in the Zoom classroom were clad in matching pajama sets, sitting knee-to-knee on the floor with siblings, with twin beds and movie posters behind them. “Am I a weirdo?” she asked herself, thinking she could be her classmates’ mother, even grandmother. Eventually, in a breakout room, Cohen was relieved to find that plenty of other adults were in the class, some of whom were older than her.

Sunrise School, as it’s called, is an online training program the youth-led climate activist organization the Sunrise Movement pulled together as soon as it became clear that students would be stuck at home for the spring semester. The group has three levels of online learning experiences designed to train thousands of new leaders in how to push elected officials to pass a Green New Deal.

Cohen enrolled in “The Green New Deal & Coronavirus Crash Course,” an intro class, and showed up every day at 6 p.m. for the four sessions. Amid California’s shelter-in-place order, it felt good to see the same group of people every night, dialing in from across the U.S. and Canada. Her teachers, Genai Lewis and Simon Metcalf, both in their mid-20s, explained what the class would cover with a set of minimalist slides splashed with text and borders in the yellow, black, and white customary of the Sunrise Movement’s T-shirts and protest banners.

Students were asked to analyze a black-and-white photo of a bread line, and to list some of the programs that emerged from the Great Depression, such as Social Security and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Metcalf went on to highlight some of the parallels between the economic fallout of the 1930s and that unfolding in 2020, including unemployment rates between 25% and 30%. The Green New Deal has the potential to jumpstart the economy through green infrastructure projects that employ people on a similar scale as The New Deal, Metcalf explained, though it will take massive political pressure if it is to be an equitable suite of policies. “There was a lot of racism in the original New Deal,” he says, pointing to how the Federal Housing Authority pioneered redlining.

The class dove into the legislative process, too, Cohen recalls. “They taught me about what an ‘appetizer bill’ is,” she says, referring to how programs that rose out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office in 1933, known as the First New Deal, were far less progressive than those introduced as part of the Second New Deal in 1935 and 1936. “You can’t throw everything you want into the first bill,” Cohen sums up.

An Education in Activism Online

The Sunrise Movement isn’t the only youth-led climate group bringing lectures, homework, and pop quizzes to the screens and smartphones we’re all glued to. Fridays For Future, the youth climate action group founded by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, has hosted regular Friday digital strikes and webinars featuring the likes of activist and award-winning writer Naomi Klein. And the BIPOC-led youth activist group Zero Hour has put out podcasts focused on a new theme each week aiming to call attention to the root causes of the climate crisis.

The lessons these groups are creating appear to be in high demand. According to Aru Shiney-Ajay, the Sunrise Movement’s training director, the group expected about 600 students for the first session of the crash course Cohen completed in March. As it turned out, 3,500 people signed up. At the time of this writing, 10,000 people have completed a Sunrise School course.

Digital organizing has also served as an outlet for young activists who are antsy and anxious at home. Yolian Ogbu is a 20-year-old political science major and part of Zero Hour’s operations team. Amid the lockdown in Denton, Texas, Ogbu says, focusing on school has become nearly impossible. “I’m sitting here doing essays thinking about my parents that have to go to work every day, because they’re considered essential, and not get paid hardly anything to put their lives on the line,” she says. Her mother works as a nurse, and her father is a truck driver.

What Ogbu does have brain space and energy for, she says, is jumping on Slack or Zoom to connect with other organizers. As a result of collaborations with Zero Hour members across the country, the internet is exploding with webinars, Tik-Tok videos, Facebook Live events, Instagram infographics, and podcasts that tackle themes such as environmental racism and patriarchy. “We like to make content that is easily digestible,” she says. Making it entertaining helps, too. “As a Black, immigrant college student who is first generation, we look at our traumas through a lens of humor.”

On a recent Zero Hour webinar, for example, 20-year-old co-host Sam Arechiga took a question from an anonymous participant on how colonialism has contributed to the climate crisis. Arechiga boiled down her mini-lecture into one core concept: “Capitalism has tried to alienate us from nature and… anyone who disagrees can … fight me,” she said, laughing. The presentation Arechiga co-led broke down definitions of “missionary colonialism” versus “settler colonialism.” Co-host Ethan Wright, also 20, pointed out how the education system has been colonized too: English is the primary mode of instruction, for example, which has contributed to the loss of first languages for migrant and Indigenous students.

Much like Sunrise School, Zero Hour webinars have attracted a diverse audience. Thirty-five-year-old Rebecca Ersek dialed into the colonialism webinar from Delaware. Ersek is new to activism. She joined a climate strike in September, which was her first protest. Now that she’s stuck at home from her job at an industrial pump company, she’s logged into as many Zero Hour webinars as her schedule allows. “I never had any classes about climate change, let alone the various structures of oppression of the systems we live in and how it’s used to uphold the power of the elite few,” she said in a Facebook message. She thinks the format of the presentations has been effective, too: the sharp colors, the layout, and how much ground the young co-facilitators cover in the course of an hour. “I have so much more to learn, and making [the webinars] accessible to everyone the way Zero Hour does is sacred work,” she wrote.

Doing the Work While Staying Apart

Difficult conversations have taken place in these spaces, on topics that don’t traditionally arise in the halls of an algebra or AP biology class. During a Sunrise School session in April, younger participants mentioned the impression that older people don’t care about climate change because they won’t live to see the worst of it. This sparked a flurry of frustrated comments from older participants, some of whom implored younger people to stop with the stereotypes. “I really dislike the ‘OK boomer’ meme; I think it’s hurtful and misleading,” wrote one participant, prompting a conversation about the importance of building an intergenerational movement.

In the Zero Hour webinar on colonialism, one participant asked whether they were personally complicit in climate breakdown because they worked on Wall Street, a job they had worked hard to earn. Arechiga didn’t skip a beat. “Yes,” she said. Instead of seeing other people as obstacles that we need to “beat” to be successful, we need to shift our mentality, she explained. “We have to question the work that we put into this wealth.” She then gave participants a reading list on the topic, which included an article on the three pillars of white supremacy; Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth; and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

For Ersek, the budding activist, the political education she’s gotten from Zero Hour has shaken her up. “Seeing the work these young folks are doing is so inspiring that I cannot just keep on with business as usual,” she wrote. Within the year, she has plans to leave her job and move from Delaware to Minnesota, where she’ll join efforts to fight Line 3, an oil pipeline rerouted to transport oil from Alberta to the western tip of Lake Superior. Cohen, too, has gotten more involved with Sunrise; she now plans to organize climate-concerned teachers in her union to show up for direct actions aimed at pressuring lawmakers to pass a Green New Deal.

Since Ogbu has been stuck at home, in addition to her work with Zero Hour, she has helped organize a rent strike in her town, supported her mother in securing hazard pay, and rallied support for a general strike on May 1 to demand health care and economic security for everyone who lives in the U.S. “Organizing is intertwined with our survival as a people, and that can’t take a back seat,” she says. “I finally feel like that is being heard more across a bigger platform.”

---

LEANNA FIRST-ARAI is an educator and writer intent on bringing awareness to the connections between climate breakdown and economic & racial injustice.

Masked-and-gloved adult dancers? We’ve reached “Cyberpunk 2077” levels of neo-dystopia.

VICTOR TANGERMANN APRIL 30TH 2020 (futurism.com)

A strip club in Oregon called Lucky Devil Lounge has created a “drive-thru” strip club experience to keep its business going during the pandemic, Oregon Live reports.

Customers slowly drive through a tent that contains four dancers and a DJ. The first 50 cars get a free roll of toilet paper.

“You pull in and you get one or two songs with the gogos, then we bring your food out to you and then you go on your way,” explained Lucky Devil Lounge owner Shon Boulden in a video report uploaded by The Oregonian.

“We’re continuing to keep our kitchen guys working, all of our bartenders, all of our dancers,” he added.

The venture’s food delivery service was formerly named “Boober Eats,” until Uber sent them a cease-and-desist letter, according to Oregon Live.

The business appears to be taking precautions to ensure the dancers’ safety. Reuters images uploaded to Twitter (NSFW) show masked and gloved strippers pole-dancing while customers remain seated inside their vehicles.

The photos “confirm that we have reached the neon anime sci fi part of our future dystopia,” Sean Craig, reporter for The Capital in Victoria, Canada, wrote in the tweet.

Even the official Twitter account of the upcoming video game blockbuster “Cyberpunk 2077” chimed in, writing “please release more footage” in a Twitter reply. The game, slated for release in September, takes place in a dystopian “Blade Runner”-inspired world.

“Every small business is feeling this pain, the same hurt, and we’re just another small business,” Boulden told Oregon Live. “We’ve just been able to create this niche and it worked.”

A strip club in Las Vegas attempted to open its own drive-thru experience last month, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The venture, however, met a wall when Nevada mandated all nonessential businesses to close in mid-March.

Other businesses in the industry have chosen to go the virtual route. A New York City strip club decided to launch virtual reality lap dances, according to the New York Post.

“People need human connection and need to be entertained,” founder Kalin Moon told The New York Post. “VR is a great way to accomplish this from the safety of your own home.”

READ MORE: Drive-thru strip shows? ‘Food 2 Go-Go?’ Nude clubs try to survive coronavirus lockdown [Miami Herald]

More on the pandemic: NEW RESEARCH: ENDING LOCKDOWN WOULD HURT THE ECONOMY EVEN MORE

May 4, 2018 (theconversation.com)

Author

1. Nigel GibsonAssociate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College

Disclosure statement

Nigel Gibson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Thinking of the relevance of Karl Marx on the 200th anniversary of his birth on 5 May 1818, takes me back to a wonderful picture of him in Algeria. It was taken in his final year in 1882. Underneath the full white beard is that familiar glint in his eye. He is up to something.

Though seriously ill he took an active interest in local life penning a long letter to his daughter Laura. He wrote appreciatively:

For the Muslims there is no such thing as subordination; they are neither ‘subjects’ nor ‘administrés’ … something which Europeans have totally failed to understand. Nevertheless, they will go to rack and ruin without a revolutionary movement.

In his last years, after the Paris Commune of 1871 when working people rose up against the capitalist state, he became interested in alternative paths to socialism. In his Ethnological Notebooks compiled in 1881, he critically read ethnographers, praising the freedom that the Native American Iroquois women had compared to women in “civilized” societies.

It was live human beings and their reason that remained essential – not the mechanical materialism that Marxism is often reduced to. Marx was a revolutionary humanist, open to – and inspired by – the new passions and forces that spring up and open new avenues to a truly human society.

Capitalism’s relentless march

Marx spent most of his life analysing capitalism. No one would deny that today it is well-nigh impossible to escape capitalism as it rushes faster and faster down the path of what he called the general law of capitalist accumulation.

The accumulation of wealth on one side and the accumulation of misery on the other is reflected, for example, in the recent Oxfam report that eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity.

At the same time, what Marx called the increasing “absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour” and the absolute mass of the “surplus population”, is reflected in the size of the global workforce estimated at about 3.5 billion. The majority of them, of course, live in the global South.

Global wealth and global inequality are massive, and the pauperisation and precariousness of human existence is terribly real.

Marx’s critique of capital is based on a philosophic perspective that could be considered radically humanist. It’s not simply a critique of alienation but a critique based on the reality of human life eaten up by the fetish of capital accumulation. Capitalism’s bloody and violent “rosy dawn”, what Marx called “primitive accumulation”, is a process to which contemporary capitalism continuously returns.

Workers are free to sell their labour for wages because they are violently alienated from other means of survival. Capitalism becomes naturalised and takes on a fetish character as the subject of life. Alienation becomes the coin of all social relations. The idea that people fetishise commodities, spending their waking and dreaming time thinking about them is caused by the simple inversion that gives commodities subjectivity and reduces human labourers to objects.

Marx warned that, although unveiling the secret of the fetish was crucial, that alone wouldn’t free us from its blinding power. Rather, it was only human beings in struggle who could vanquish the fetish, capitalism.

We revolt because we have to. Resistance to capital is inevitable and takes new and unexpected forms inside and outside of production.

Capitalism, however, marches on in its endless search for free labour and free goods, ruthlessly exploiting human beings, animals and the environment. But, Marx argued, it is also resistance and capitalist crisis that forces it to innovate and defy spatial and temporal restrictions.

Commodifying everything, its ideological prizefighters dress up expropriation as the freedom to exploit oneself in casual and precarious labour. The “app” economy – described as the “economic activity surrounding mobile applications” – is just the latest manifestation of Marx’s prescience.

Theory of liberation

The founder of the philosophy of Marxist Humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya described Marxism as a theory of liberation – or nothing. Marx was not a lonely intellectual sitting in the British Museum. He was a philosopher and activist constantly involved with revolutionary movements.

To say that Marx was a genius is to recognise that his ideas were intimately connected with – and elucidated by – the logic and history of ongoing struggles.

It was the weavers in the Prussian province of Silesia in 1844 that taught him the importance of workers’ own self-conscious action. It was the Paris Commune that taught him the importance of self-activity in developing a new form of social organisation. It was the Fenian activity of the Irish workers opposing British imperialism that taught him the importance of the autonomy of the Irish struggle and the chauvinism of the British trade unions.

Marx viewed capitalism as a living hell that chewed up human life. It was the workers’ way of knowing, their self-organisation, that interested him as it spoke to the necessity of a dual movement: uprooting capitalism and developing a new society based on human needs. Thinking with Marx on his 200th birthday means recognising the importance of thought in this confrontation.

BETH DALEY

Editor and General Manager

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Judith with the head of Holofernes by Carlo Francesco Nuvolone, second half of 17th century

Tanakh (Judaism)
Torah  (Instruction)[show]Nevi’im  (Prophets)[show]Ketuvim  (Writings)[show]
Old Testament (Christianity)
Pentateuch[show]Historical[show]Wisdom[show]Prophetic[show]Deuterocanonical[hide]TobitJudithAdditions to Esther1 Maccabees2 MaccabeesWisdom of SolomonSirachBaruch / Letter of JeremiahAdditions to DanielOrthodox only1 Esdras2 EsdrasPrayer of ManassehPsalm 1513 Maccabees4 MaccabeesOdesOrthodox Tewahedo1 EnochJubilees1, 2, and 3 MeqabyanParalipomena of BaruchBroader canon
Bible portal
vte

Judith with the Head of Holophernes, by Cristofano Allori, 1613 (Royal Collection, London)

Judith with the Head of Holophernes, by Simon Vouet, (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)

Caravaggio‘s Judith Beheading Holofernes

Klimt‘s explicit 1901 version of Judith and the Head of Holofernes was shocking to viewers and is said to have targeted themes of female sexuality that had previously been more or less taboo.^[1]

The Book of Judith is a deuterocanonical book, included in the Septuagint and the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian Old Testament of the Bible, but excluded from the Hebrew canon and assigned by Protestants to the Apocrypha. The book contains numerous historical anachronisms, which is why some scholars now accept it as non-historical; it has been considered a parable, a theological novel or perhaps the first historical novel.^[2]

The name Judith (Hebrew: יְהוּדִית, Modern: Yehudit, Tiberian: Yəhûḏîṯ, “Praised” or “Jewess”) is the feminine form of Judah.

Historical context

Original language

It is not clear whether the Book of Judith was originally written in Hebrew or in Greek. The oldest existing version is the Septuagint and might either be a translation from Hebrew or composed in Greek. Details of vocabulary and phrasing point to a Greek text written in a language modeled on the Greek developed through translating the other books in the Septuagint.^[3]

The extant Hebrew language versions, whether identical to the Greek, or in the shorter Hebrew version, date to the Middle Ages. The Hebrew versions name important figures directly such as the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, thus placing the events in the Hellenistic period when the Maccabees battled the Seleucid monarchs. The Greek version uses deliberately cryptic and anachronistic references such as “Nebuchadnezzar“, a “King of Assyria“, who “reigns in Nineveh“, for the same king. The adoption of that name, though unhistorical, has been sometimes explained either as a copyist’s addition, or an arbitrary name assigned to the ruler of Babylon.^{[citation needed]}

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Judith

Jason Collins NOV 19 2014 (theplayerstribune.com)

Today, I am retiring from the NBA after 13 seasons. Most people reading this probably don’t know me from SportsCenter. Most people know me as “the gay basketball player.” I have been an openly gay man for approximately three percent of my life. I have been a professional basketball player for almost half of it.

In order to understand why I am so lucky to be sitting here today as a person who is finally comfortable in his own skin, you need to understand how basketball saved me. I needed to live the past few years as an openly gay basketball player in order to be at peace retiring today. Why? It starts on a bus and ends on a plane.

*

“Hey Jason … Jason! How come we never see you with any women? Are you gay?”

The team bus was uncomfortably silent. Everybody from the front of the bus to the back heard the question. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. In sports, guys bust each other’s balls all the time. I had been asked that question a few different times by teammates in my previous years in the league, but this time was different. Whenever guys would go out on the town on road trips, I always had a built-in excuse—a trip to a local casino or a visit to a family friend or a college buddy in that city who I had to go see. Sometimes those friends were real. Sometimes I made them up and would sit alone in the hotel watching TV while the guys went out to enjoy the nightlife.

It was a lonely experience, even when I was around other people. It was always mentally draining, because I always had to be on, 24/7. Whenever I went out to dinner with teammates, I became especially skilled at steering any conversation away from the personal and back to the realm of sports or entertainment. After a while, guys just know you as the vet who loves to talk basketball. When you go to a new team, you have to create that character all over again.

“I think you’re gay, dude.”

Every other time, I could find a way to laugh it off. This time was different. I was 30 and unmarried. No kids. No crazy road stories. For years, I had dated women—never men, even secretly—but now I was starting to be more honest with myself about my sexuality. I felt like maybe the guards I had put up were starting to wear down. This time, the question stung like it never had before. There’s a very particular feeling in the pit of your stomach when the question comes up. I call it the blush. You feel angry, yet also embarrassed.

It felt like everybody on that bus was looking at me and could see right through me. Part of me was tired of running. Part of me wanted to scream out the truth and just get it over with, but I couldn’t. In a split second, that familiar survival instinct kicked in and I thought, Okay, I have to prove to these guys that I’m straight.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I asked myself, What would a straight guy do in this situation? So I pulled the fake-heated mean-mug face. Like, no way am I gay. Me? Are you serious? I started talking about a girl who had conveniently come to visit me that week. Of course, this girl was just a friend, but the guys didn’t know that. So I just kept talking, hoping I sounded believable. I felt like I was sinking in quicksand. It was so silent you could hear a pin drop.

Finally, somebody yelled out from the back of the bus, “Hey, what are you talking about? I saw him out with that girl the other night. Come on, man. You crazy. He’s straight.”

My teammate vouched for me.

Maybe he really saw me out with her, but I think he was just throwing me a lifeline. Whatever the case, the awkward silence broke. Guys started talking again. I slid back down into my seat. I had avoided the question one more time, but I knew I couldn’t keep up the act. It was exhausting.

On one hand, I felt pressure to be “The Perfect Son” for my family, which had always been incredibly loving and supportive of me. I wanted to keep up the hope for my parents that someday, when basketball was over, they would have the big traditional wedding and the grandkids from me and my wife. I was afraid of being rejected by my family and friends, much more so than being run out of the NBA.

On the other hand, by trying to keep everyone around me happy, I was becoming increasingly lonely. No matter your religion or what your political views are, I think there’s one thing we can all agree on. Most human beings are not meant to be alone. I know I’m not.

Later on that year, we faced the Orlando Magic in the playoffs, and I was given the unenviable task of guarding Dwight Howard. By that point, my battles in the post with Shaquille O’Neal over the years were starting to catch up with me. I used to play this game with Cliff Robinson where we’d come up with names for the moves Shaq used to punish you. “There’s the ol’ meat cleaver! Aw no, there’s the spine tingler!”

Shaq is responsible for a whole bunch of seven-foot-tall middle-aged men hobbling around America right now.

So my back was getting creaky, and Dwight was a 25-year-old beast. My job was the same as it had been my entire career: Make his life as miserable as possible. Bump him. Foul him. Stick a hand in his face and pull out every single wiley vet move under the sun to keep him from dominating the game.

Of course, he had his moments. He’s Dwight. He averaged 27 points a game. I averaged 1.8. But, when it mattered most, we kept him from hurting us. We won the series in six. Coach Van Gundy said it was the best defense he had seen on Dwight all year. But, I was essentially invisible. I barely talked to a single reporter during the whole series.

What a crappy, thankless job, right? To me, it was perfect. When I came into the NBA from Stanford, I had already decided what type of player I would be. I wanted to be the best player and teammate I could be, but not attract too much attention or make too much noise. I didn’t want people to start asking questions about my personal life.

I realize that might sound like a very convenient excuse for spending my career as a defensive grunt, but it’s just another example of the constant strategizing you do when you’re closeted. Every single moment, you’re paranoid that your words or actions could undo the whole charade.

With Twitter and Facebook, these mental gymnastics become all the more complicated. During that 2011 offseason, as the debate around “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and DOMA was heating up on social media, I had to pull out every last ounce of self-control to keep myself from retweeting something in support of marriage equality. Watching people I admired come out in support of the issues that were so dear to my heart was helping me get closer and closer to revealing the truth. But I was still scared.

When the 2011 NBA lockout kept me away from my normal routine, I had way too much time on my hands to be by myself—my authentic self—and read about the fight for equal rights in the LGBTQ community. I would keep track of what was going on via OUTsports.com every day, making sure to clear my browser history and cover my tracks. With basketball distractions taken away, I finally had to confront the reality of my existence as a human being on this planet. What did I want my legacy to be? What did I want out of life?

I had days and days by myself during the lockout and the only one I was able to have a full unguarded conversation with was Shadow, my German Shepherd. Granted, it was a one-way conversation.

I’d had enough. I wanted to be free. A few months later, after 33 years of not telling a single soul, I came out of the closet. First to a friend in Los Angeles, then to my aunt Teri. She said she had always known, and she was fully supportive. With that initial burden lifted, I told my family and close friends next. Unlike Teri, my twin brother Jarron was stunned. To be honest, I was pretty surprised that I was able to fool him for three decades. This is the guy I spent more hours talking to than any other person in my life. For the first time, he saw the real me. He had absolutely no idea.

Within a few hours, after the surprise wore off, everything with Jarron was back to normal and today, we’re closer than ever. He is one of the best men I know.

Of course, life is not a Disney movie. Life is messy. There were some people in my family who made gay jokes and used inappropriate language while I was growing up. Coming out to some people was more challenging than others, but in the end, I was amazed by how much my sexuality didn’t matter.Advertisement

That’s the secret that every single closeted person reading this—athlete or otherwise—should know. In the end, the people who genuinely love you will always love you and support you, no matter what. It’s the secret I wish I had known for 33 years.

When I decided to come out publicly with my letter in Sports Illustrated in April 2013, I was fully prepared to never play in the NBA again. Being an older free agent, I was dreading the “D” word. He’s a Distraction. Why bother? But I was also bracing myself to hear a lot worse, whether it was from opposing fans or from players. I had been in sports locker rooms since my high school days in the mid-’90s. I knew how guys talked. Athletes can be very … colorful with their language.

I had no idea what to expect.

*

“… Wait, who is this?”

I was coming out of a boot-camp workout in LA a few days after the Sports Illustrated article published when I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. It was a 305 area code. I thought, who the hell is calling me from Miami?

“Hey, this is Tim Hardaway,” the voice said.

Tim was an old-school athlete who came up in the ’90s when homophobia was still commonplace, expected and accepted. When retired NBA player John Amaechi came out in 2007, Tim made some negative and unsupportive comments that made headlines. To Tim’s credit, he later apologized for his comments and has worked with several groups to educate himself on LGBTQ issues. Tim has since become an activist and straight ally for the LGBTQ community.

Still, when he called me, I was stunned.

He said, “I just want to tell you that I’m really proud of you, man. You have my support.”

Tim may never know just how much that meant to me. That was major. In that moment, I knew that it was possible for a person to change in their heart and mind. If Tim supported me, I knew there would be others that did as well.

Now that the burden of hiding was finally off of my shoulders, I was confident that if an NBA team came calling, I was capable of doing my job, maybe better than ever. I spent the rest of the summer torturing myself with workouts, running up and down the trails of Los Angeles in order to get in the best possible shape of my career. I lifted weights that would make a football player proud. You could see the veins in my biceps for the first time in over a decade.

I knew the easiest excuse for any NBA team to explain passing on me would be that I was out of shape. At 34, it’s not hard to get flabby. Despite interest from a couple of teams, the entire summer and fall came and went without an offer.

Then, in January, I was invited to Washington D.C. by the White House for the State of the Union address. I had the pleasure to join the First Lady in her viewing box during the speech. Afterward, there’s something called the receiving line, where all the invited guests of the First Lady wait in line to greet the President and take a picture with him. Usually this process is rather quick as you shake hands, say a few words, and move along for the next person. At least that’s how it works with normal people. Unfortunately, as my friends love to point out to me, I am the Black Larry David.

Awkwardness follows me.

So President Obama gets to me and without missing a beat he says, “Hey Jason, nice to see you. Have you been staying in shape?”

“Yes, Mr. President. I just ran five miles yesterday,” I said. “I’m ready.”

“That’s good,” he said, “Because you know, after the All-Star break is when all the free agents get picked up, so stay in shape.”

At this point, I should have smiled and said, “Thank you, Mr. President, I will.”

I did not do that.

“Oh yeah, Mr. President,” I said. “I’d show you my six pack, but I don’t think the Secret Service or your wife would want me to take my shirt off right now.”

I have rarely seen the President at a loss for words. He is always smooth. This time, it took him a second.

“Uh, well yeah, that’s a good idea,” he said. “You should probably keep your shirt on.”

He grinned, shook my hand and turned to the next person.

*

President Obama turned out to be absolutely right.

After the trade deadline in late February, I went to my brother’s house with my friends and family for board game night. We played Celebrity, a modified version of charades. It was so fitting because it was one of those nights that made me realize how lucky I was to finally be free and happy in front of the people I love.

The next morning, at 8 a.m., my phone blew up with text messages and voicemails. One of the first messages was from my old teammate, Jason Kidd, who was then the head coach of the Brooklyn Nets. Most of the money I made in the NBA I probably owe to J-Kidd. He was one of the smartest players I ever played with—one of those point guards who could make a big man look so much better than he really is, just by feeding him easy buckets.

For seven years, J-Kidd and I played together in New Jersey. Now, he and the entire organization were welcoming me back to the Nets on a 10-day contract.

After that, everything happened really fast. I’ve often been asked if I was nervous to face the team for the first time. Honestly, I barely had time to think about it. I was more worried about how I was supposed to pack for a road trip. There’s only so much you can fit in a few travel bags, and when you’re a seven-footer, you can’t just roll up to the mall and buy normal-size jeans. I remember packing thinking that my wardrobe rotation was going to be very limited if I end up staying with the team for the rest of the year.

Everybody wanted to know what it’s like to play in a game as an openly gay man in the NBA. From the moment I stepped onto the court to the moment the final buzzer sounded—it was the same as my previous 12 years.

I was locked in. Nothing was different. I did what I always do. Being gay certainly didn’t affect how I played. I tipped rebounds to teammates, tried to de-cleat opponents with my screens, and I did my best to make life miserable for the opposing big. When the ball tipped off, I realized something that I wish I could instill in every single coach, GM, and player reading this.

IT’S STILL JUST BASKETBALL.

The ironic thing about the dreaded D word is that I had never felt more comfortable playing basketball than I was as an openly gay man. You know what a real distraction is? Maintaining a lie 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for most of your career, for most of your life. The energy involved in hiding the stress, shame, and fear of being gay is a full-time job. With all that removed, I was like a new person.

In the locker room after the first few games, there were a lot more cameras in front of me than usual. (A big thank you to Gary Sussman and Aaron Harris in the Nets media department for acting like my guard dogs, yapping at any media members who stepped over the line.) After a couple weeks, the media coverage shifted off of me because there are only so many ways you can write a story about having a gay teammate. It went back to being about the team and how we were making a push for the playoffs.

In my first 10 games with the team, we won eight and lost two. So much for that distraction theory.

As all good teams do, we were able to come together and have fun, and poke fun at each other as usual. One day, Andray Blatche got fed up with my wardrobe and called me out.

“Bro, I swear if I see you wearing those black jeans one more time,” he laughed. “You gotta switch it up, man.”

I responded to him saying, “Is that a t-shirt? Or a blouse you’re wearing? Either way, Prince & The Revolution just called and they want their clothes back!”

Yep, it’s still just basketball. Still just two teammates cracking jokes on each other.

On the team plane after the third game, I was watching a movie when a future Hall of Famer tapped me on the arm.

I had known Kevin Garnett since high school. When I was 15, my brother and I played against him at a tournament in Las Vegas. As a young man I was good; but KG was on another level. He had 19 blocks against us, and he was talking trash even back then. It was one of those monumental moments in life when I was like, I needed that. I’m not as good as I thought I was.

That game is one of the reasons I ended up making it to the NBA. Because there were two ways I could’ve gone. I could’ve tucked my tail between my legs and taken up golf. Or I could’ve gone back to the gym with a vengeance.

I got back into the gym. Now, here we were, 20 years later, two old vets sitting across from one another on an NBA charter flight.

“Hey JC,” Kevin said. “I’m really glad you’re back playing, man. That you’re back playing in the league and you’re on our team. You know, this is going to be big for society.”

It is extremely meaningful to me that he would express those words of support. At that point, my head was spinning just trying to learn the plays. I wasn’t thinking about the historical significance of a gay player in the league. I just wanted to be one of the guys again. For Kevin to go out of his way to say he appreciated me as a teammate meant a lot to me as a basketball player.

 *

There are so many people I have to thank for helping me on my journey. My family, friends, and fans empower me each and every day. My teammates, coaches, and the Brooklyn Nets organization gave me an opportunity. The entire NBA family, where the leadership of David Stern and Adam Silver created an environment that made me feel safe to step forward. My agent, Arn Tellem, who is like the cool uncle everyone wishes they had. All the fans in New York who would see me walking on the street and say, “Hey Collins, good luck tonight!” or “We are proud of you!” To all the people who came out before me and helped clear the path for others to follow. And the many countless individuals who have fought and sacrificed for human and civil rights, period. Thank you.

Many people have asked, “What’s next?” I’ll continue to encourage others to live an authentic life. My hope is that everyone achieves that day when you step forward and reveal your truth on your own terms. Your life will be exponentially better when you celebrate all that makes you unique. Additionally, I hope to inspire others to create a world of acceptance and inclusion; not only by their words, but by their actions.

What would you have done if you were on that team bus with me?

It’s easy to say you would’ve done what my teammate did, or something else to alleviate the situation. But when you’re in that moment, it’s a lot easier to pretend that you didn’t hear what was happening, or to throw on your headphones, or perhaps easier still—to laugh along with others.

This scenario plays out every single day on buses, school cafeterias, and office buildings across the world. Maybe 10 closeted athletes will come out and be free over the next year. Or maybe not. People ask me all the time, “Don’t you think we need more athletes to come out?”

Yes, of course I do; that would be great. However, if we really want to make the world a better place, we also need more people like the teammate who saw me drowning and threw me a lifeline. You can be that person who speaks up.

Thanks for all the love.

Jason Collins

As the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls for China-style control of the Internet

Matt Taibbi

Apr 30, 2020

Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine – fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type – ran an in-depth article of the problems free speech pose to American society in the coronavirus era. The headline:

Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal

In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.

Authored by a pair of law professors from Harvard and the University of Arizona, Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, the piece argued that the American and Chinese approaches to monitoring the Internet were already not that dissimilar:

Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices… But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.

They went on to list all the reasons that, given that we’re already on an “inexorable” path to censorship, a Chinese-style system of speech control may not be such a bad thing. In fact, they argued, a benefit of the coronavirus was that it was waking us up to “how technical wizardry, data centralization, and private-public collaboration can do enormous public good.”

Perhaps, they posited, Americans could be moved to reconsider their “understanding” of the First and Fourth Amendments, as “the harms from digital speech” continue to grow, and “the social costs of a relatively open Internet multiply.”

This interesting take on the First Amendment was latest in a line of “Let’s rethink that whole democracy thing” that began sprouting up in earnest four years ago. Articles with headlines like “Democracies end when they become too democratic” and “Too much of a good thing: why we need less democracy” became common after two events in particular: Donald Trump’s victory in the the Republican primary race, and the decision by British voters to opt out of the EU, i.e. “Brexit.”

A consistent lament in these pieces was the widespread decline in respect for “experts” among the ignorant masses, better known as the people Trump was talking about when he gushed in February 2016, “I love the poorly educated!”

The Atlantic was at the forefront of the argument that The People is a Great Beast who cannot be trusted to play responsibly with the toys of freedom. A 2016 piece called “American politics has gone insane” pushed a return of the “smoke-filled room” to help save voters from themselves. Author Jonathan Rauch employed a metaphor that is striking in retrospect, describing America’s oft-vilified intellectual and political elite as society’s immune system:

Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.

The new piece by Goldsmith and Woods says we’re there, made literally sick by our refusal to accept the wisdom of experts. The time for asking the (again, literally) unwashed to listen harder to their betters is over. The Chinese system offers a way out. When it comes to speech, don’t ask: tell.

---

As the Atlantic lawyers were making their case, YouTube took down a widely-circulated video about coronavirus, citing a violation of “community guidelines.”

The offenders were Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massahi, co-owners of an “Urgent Care” clinic in Bakersfield, California. They’d held a presentation in which they argued that widespread lockdowns were perhaps not necessary, according to data they were collecting and analyzing.

“Millions of cases, small amounts of deaths,” said Erickson, a vigorous, cheery-looking Norwegian-American who argued the numbers showed Covid-19 was similar to flu in mortality rate.  “Does [that] necessitate shutdown, loss of jobs, destruction of oil companies, furloughing doctors…? I think the answer is going to be increasingly clear.”

The reaction of the medical community was severe. It was pointed out that the two men owned a clinic that was losing business thanks to the lockdown. The message boards of real E.R. doctors lit up with angry comments, scoffing at the doctors’ dubious (at best) data collection methods and even their somewhat dramatic choice to dress in scrubs for their video presentation.

The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) scrambled to issue a joint statement to “emphatically condemn” the two doctors, who “do not speak for medical society” and had released “biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests.”

As is now almost automatically the case in the media treatment of any controversy, the story was immediately packaged for “left” and “right” audiences by TV networks. Tucker Carlson on Fox backed up the doctors’ claims, saying “these are serious people who’ve done this for a living for decades” and YouTube and Google have “officially banned dissent.”

Meanwhile, over on Carlson’s opposite-number channel, MSNBC, anchor Chris Hayes of the All In program reacted with fury to Carlson’s monologue:

There’s a concerted effort on the part of influential people at the network that we at All In call Trump TV right now to peddle dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus… Call it coronavirus trutherism.

Hayes, an old acquaintance of mine, seethed at what he characterized as the gross indifference of Trump Republicans to the dangers of coronavirus. “At the beginning of this horrible period, the president, along with his lackeys, and propagandists, they all minimized what was coming,” he said, sneering. “They said it was just like a cold or the flu.”

He angrily demanded that if Fox acolytes like Carlson believed so strongly that society should be reopened, they should go work in a meat processing plant. “Get in there if you think it’s that bad. Go chop up some pork.”

The tone of the many media reactions to Erickson, Carlson, Trump, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, and others who’ve suggested lockdowns and strict shelter-in-place laws are either unnecessary or do more harm than good, fits with what writer Thomas Frank describes as a new “Utopia of Scolding”:

Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold. That’s their future, and it’s a satisfying one: a finger wagging in some vulgar proletarian’s face, forever.

In the Trump years the sector of society we used to describe as liberal America became a giant finger-wagging machine. The news media, academia, the Democratic Party, show-business celebrities and masses of blue-checked Twitter virtuosos became a kind of umbrella agreement society, united by loathing of Trump and fury toward anyone who dissented with their preoccupations.

Because Conventional Wisdom viewed itself as being solely concerned with the Only Important Thing, i.e. removing Trump, there was no longer any legitimate excuse for disagreeing with Conventional Wisdom’s takes on Russia, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Joe Rogan, the 25th amendment, Ukraine, the use of the word “treason,” the removal of Alex Jones, the movie Joker, or whatever else happened to be the #Resistance scolding fixation of the day.

When the Covid-19 crisis struck, the scolding utopia was no longer abstraction. The dream was reality! Pure communism had arrived! Failure to take scolding was no longer just a deplorable faux pas. Not heeding experts was now murder. It could not be tolerated. Media coverage quickly became a single, floridly-written tirade against “expertise-deniers.” For instance, the Atlantic headline on Kemp’s decision to end some shutdowns was, “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.”

At the outset of the crisis, America’s biggest internet platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit – took an unprecedented step to combat “fraud and misinformation” by promising extensive cooperation in elevating “authoritative” news over less reputable sources.

H.L. Mencken once said that in America, “the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.”

We have a lot of dumb people in this country. But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set injecting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is that the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. In other words, to combat “ignorance,” the scolders create a new and more virulent species of it: exclusive ignorance, forced ignorance, ignorance with staying power.

The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant. It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.

---

Journalists are professional test-crammers. Our job is to get an assignment on Monday morning and by Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning act like we’re authorities on intellectual piracy, the civil war in Yemen, Iowa caucus procedure, the coronavirus, whatever. We actually know jack: we speed-read, make a few phone calls, and in a snap people are inviting us on television to tell millions of people what to think about the complex issues of the world.

When we come to a subject cold, the job is about consulting as many people who really know their stuff as quickly as possible and sussing out – often based on nothing more than hunches or impressions of the personalities involved – which set of explanations is most believable. Sportswriters who covered the Deflategate football scandal had to do this in order to explain the Ideal Gas Law, I had to do it to cover the subprime mortgage scandal, and reporters this past January and February had to do it when assigned to assess the coming coronavirus threat.

It does not take that much work to go back and find that a significant portion of the medical and epidemiological establishment called this disaster wrong when they were polled by reporters back in the beginning of the year. Right-wingers are having a blast collecting the headlines, and they should, given the chest-pounding at places like MSNBC about others who “minimized the risk.” Here’s a brief sample:

Get a Grippe, America: The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now: Washington Post

Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier, more widespread : USA Today

Want to Protect Yourself From Coronavirus? Do the Same Things You Do Every Winter : Time

Here’s my personal favorite, from Wired on January 29:

We should de-escalate the war on coronavirus

There are dozens of these stories and they nearly all contain the same elements, including an inevitable quote or series of quotes from experts telling us to calm the hell down. This is from the Time piece:

“Good hand-washing helps. Staying healthy and eating healthy will also help,” says Dr. Sharon Nachman, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at New York’s Stony Brook Children’s Hospital. “The things we take for granted actually do work. It doesn’t matter what the virus is. The routine things work.”

There’s a reason why journalists should always keep their distance from priesthoods in any field. It’s particularly in the nature of insular communities of subject matter experts to coalesce around orthodoxies that blind the very people in the loop who should be the most knowledgeable.

“Experts” get things wrong for reasons that are innocent (they’ve all been taught the same incorrect thing in school) and less so (they have a financial or professional interest in denying the truth).

On the less nefarious side, the entire community of pollsters in 2016 denounced as infamous the idea that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination, let alone the general election. They believed that because they weren’t paying attention, but also because they’d never seen anything similar. In a more suspicious example, if you asked a hundred Wall Street analysts in September 2008 what caused the financial crisis, probably no more than a handful would have mentioned fraud or malfeasance.

Both of the above examples point out a central problem with trying to automate the fact-checking process the way the Internet platforms have of late, with their emphasis on “authoritative” opinions.

Authoritiesby their nature are often wrong. Sometimes they have an interest in denying truths, and sometimes they actually try to define truth as being whatever they say it is. “Elevating authoritative content” over independent or less well-known sources is an algorithmic take on the journalistic obsession with credentialing that has been destroying our business for decades.

The WMD fiasco happened because journalists listened to people with military ranks and titles instead of demanding evidence and listening to their own instincts. The same thing happened with Russiagate, a story fueled by intelligence “experts” with grand titles who are now proven to have been wrong to a spectacular degree, if not actually criminally liable in pushing a fraud.

We’ve become incapable of talking calmly about possible solutions because we’ve lost the ability to decouple scientific or policy discussions, or simple issues of fact, from a political argument. Reporting on the Covid-19 crisis has become the latest in a line of moral manias with Donald Trump in the middle.

Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous. Or we’re politicizing the framing of stories in a way that signals to readers what their take should be before they even digest the material. “Conservative Americans see coronavirus hope in Progressive Sweden,” reads a Politico headline, as if only conservatives should feel optimism in the possibility that a non-lockdown approach might have merit! Are we rooting for such an approach to not work?

From everything I’ve heard, talking to doctors and reading the background material, the Bakersfield doctors are probably not to be trusted. But the functional impact of removing their videos (in addition to giving them press they wouldn’t otherwise have had) is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy and the effects of other crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide, stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re confusing real harm with political harm.

Turning ourselves into China for any reason is the definition of a cure being worse than the disease. The scolders who are being seduced by such thinking have to wake up, before we end up adding another disaster on top of the terrible one we’re already facing.