#so the people who were emergency managers before the pandemic… planning for emergencies….
Text
.
#re: last tags…#I can hear my wife on a work call right now#nowadays she’s a consultant who designs business continuity and disaster recovery plans for client organizations#she is OUT of emergency management and ESPECIALLY out of incident response#fuck incident response. never again#this is what happened to SO MANY emergency-related professionals!!!#during normal times you prepare for emergencies and disasters#those things are OVERWHELMINGLY single events that need responding to#but a pandemic? that’s just…. constant. constant constant constant#so the people who were emergency managers before the pandemic… planning for emergencies….#became 24/7 incident response workers#that’s a HARSH CHANGE to happen overnight#anyway sometimes it’s nice to remember how much we hated our lives before she left eman 😂#BC/DR allows her to use her 8 years of experience without ruining the mental health of her entire family#i can hear in her voice how much she enjoys her work now 🥹
1 note
·
View note
Text
...The disillusionment is all the keener because Biden defied expectations early in his White House term, signing landmark legislation to alleviate poverty and tackle the climate crisis that thrilled his progressive wing. But with an election looming, critics say, he is gravitating back towards his comfort zone in the centre ground, and his refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza has caused particular fury.
“Progressives in the movement were pleasantly surprised to see President Biden push on a lot of domestic progressive priorities that we have been calling for,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director of the progressive group Justice Democrats. “But without question he has erased much of that progress with his continued support for a genocide that’s happening at the hands of a far-right Israeli government.”
Biden, 81, was long perceived as a middle-of-the-road moderate, representing Delaware for 36 years in the Senate before serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president. He came under scrutiny for a cosy relationship with the banking sector, his role in drawing up a 1994 crime bill that ushered in an era of mass incarceration and his failure to protect witness Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s supreme court confirmation hearing.
Yet once Biden reached the White House in 2021, he proved more ambitious than many expected. He appointed progressives to his administration, the most diverse in history, and the first Black woman – Ketanji Brown Jackson – to the supreme court, along with numerous judges of colour. He gained further credit on the anti-war left by pulling US troops out of Afghanistan after two decades.
The coronavirus pandemic invited him to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Biden delivered trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing, invest in infrastructure and combat the climate crisis. His lifelong support of trade unions came to the fore. A Wall Street Journal column, arguing that he would effectively run for a re-election in 2024 as a democratic socialist, offered the headline: “Joe Biden Is Bernie Sanders.”
But there were seeds of discontent. Some observers felt Biden could have used different tools to fulfill his promise of widespread student loan forgiveness, a plan ultimately struck down by the supreme court. There was disappointment that he did not use his bully pulpit more effectively to push Congress to pass police reform and voting rights legislation. Biden also received criticism for fist-bumping the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who approved the 2018 assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Even on climate, critics say, his record remains decidedly mixed. The Inflation Reduction Act directs $394bn to clean energy, the biggest such investment in history, and just last month the president ordered a pause on exports of liquefied natural gas, hailed as “a watershed moment” by activist and author Bill McKibben.
Yet Biden also approved the Willow oil-drilling project in a remote part of northern Alaska. Indeed, he has rubber stamped more oil and gas drilling permits on federal land than Donald Trump at the same stage of his presidency. US oil production reached an all-time high last year.
Stevie O’Hanlon, spokesperson for climate-focused youth group Sunrise Movement, said: “The way that Joe Biden is acting right now, if it continues for the next nine months, is a recipe for him losing millions of votes from young people and losing the election.
“So many young people have been frustrated with Biden for approving new fossil fuel projects. His administration has made some important shifts around Fema [Federal Emergency Management Agency] rules, for instance, around air pollution. But while he’s making these steps forward, he’s also taking these really loud steps back that honestly made many young people more disillusioned with him than less.”
Last month progressives condemned Biden’s decision to launch retaliatory strikes against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. They argued that he violated the constitution by not seeking congressional approval first and was breaking his promise to keep America out of intractable wars in the Middle East.
Meanwhile the president threw his weight behind a bipartisan Senate bill to tighten border security – and send military aid to Israel and Ukraine – which would severely curtail migration and limit asylum in a way that broke a campaign promise. Biden even adopted Republican language, saying he would “shut down the border” when he was given the authority to do so.
Andrabi of Justice Democrats said of the bill, which failed in the Senate: “We saw Biden work with mostly Republicans and Kyrsten Sinema, who has left the Democratic party, zero Hispanic caucus members, zero border state Democrats to craft a Trump-like Republican anti-immigration bill that Republicans were never going to vote for.
“To prove what? Maybe that he’s willing to treat migrant families like Trump did, as long as it comes with funding for war. That’s not sufficient. That is not progressive. That is not even core Democratic.”
But nothing has done more to drive a wedge between Biden and the left than the war in Gaza triggered by Hamas’s attacks in Israel on 7 October that left 1,200 people dead and more than 240 taken hostage. He championed Israel’s right to defend itself and only gradually voiced concerns about its rightwing government’s destructive military campaign that has killed more than 27,000 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory.
A recent NBC News poll found 15% of voters under 35 approve of Biden’s handling of the war while 70% disapprove. Protesters disrupted his speech at Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina as the president spoke out against racism, at a United Auto Workers gathering in Washington and at a political event in Columbia, South Carolina. It is a vivid schism as the president, already facing concerns over his age, gears up for a hard fought race for the White House.
Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org, said: “A lot of independents and Democrats are sickened in a gut punch sort of a way. Biden is so out of touch with the base that he absolutely will need this fall to be re-elected. Young people are more politicised and more energised than ever before and some of these Gaza demonstrations are propelled by young people turning out. They’re just disgusted with Biden and it didn’t have to be this way.”
The backlash threatens Biden’s chances of re-election, not because progressives will switch from him to likely opponent Trump in decisive numbers, but because a sliver might choose to sit out the election or turn to a third party candidate such as Cornel West – potentially enough to make all the difference in Michigan and other swing states in the electoral college.
Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the the New School for Social Research in New York, said: “Part of me thinks that Biden has basically given up on reassembling on the Obama coalition and decided that the number that they lose among progressives and the young they will make up with [Nikki] Haley Republicans, moderates and independents.
“Since there’s no meaningful primary, he doesn’t have to appeal to the base. All of that makes for a campaign where he’s going to run to the centre and progressives are going to feel very much in the wilderness.”
For the third election in a row, progressives are confronted with the argument that a vote for anyone but the Democratic nominee is effectively a vote for Trump, a man who has demonised immigrants, vowed to shut down the border immediately and resume construction of a border wall. There is no reason to believe that he would urge Israel to exercise restraint in Gaza.
A dulling of the early optimism about Biden’s progressivism may have been inevitable as the presidential election loomed. When Republicans won the House in the 2022 midterm elections, the window of opportunity for sweeping legislation slammed shut. The war in Ukraine has consumed huge time and resources. The cracks between Biden and a younger generation over Israel were always there but it took the Hamas attack to bring them to the surface.
Matt Bennett, an executive vice-president of the centrist thinktank Third Way, describes Biden as a moderate by disposition who believes in compromise. “He’s governed the way he promised he would when he ran for president, the way he has always portrayed himself, which is somebody who’s at the centre of the Democratic electorate,” he said.
“He’s not on the liberal fringe; he is not a conservative Democrat. He’s always navigated to about the middle point of where the party is. That’s why he got there before Obama did on marriage equality, famously, because he saw where the party was headed and that’s where he has steered quite successfully as president. No one’s going to be happy with him all the time but most Democrats should appreciate that he’s done an extraordinarily good job.”
But Andrabi of Justice Democrats is less sanguine. He warns that Biden is failing to follow the will of the voters who elected him – and could pay a price.
He said: “It’s imperative that the Biden administration and Democratic leadership listen to those voters who are screaming at the top of their lungs in rallies, in meetings, everywhere they go that the current state of the Biden administration’s policies in Gaza, on immigration, on climate change is insufficient for core bases of their voters that got President Biden elected, that got Democrats a majority in the Senate and that is going to be crucial to getting Democrats to flip the House.
“But they’re not listening and lip service is not going to convince anyone when what we are seeing on the other side is nearly 30,000 dead Palestinians, let alone the ongoing existential crisis of climate change or an immigration system that is broken and their solution is to criminalise more folks. None of these are what the core base of the Democratic voters support.”
4 notes
·
View notes
Note
Just saying man. If Covid was a plot to instill a facist regime across the world, why go with an accelerationist plan? The movement was going very well from 2016 to 2018; slow and steady. The pandemic brought on social unrest and a resistance movement. Sounds more like they were sabotaging themselves (whoever "they" are) by attempting to bring societal collapse.
No, I didn't say it was planned or a plot by the elite to subjugate the people, the release of the virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was completely accidental, the CCP's mismanagement of containing the spread most likely wasn't deliberate either.
Governments will use any crisis to gain power, and once they have this power they will never relinquish said power, we have seen this time and time again, from the 1980's when Pierre Trudeau created a crisis to enact emergency powers and install his previously rejected Charter of Rights and Freedoms, (which overwrote the Canadian constitution by adding a line which basically reads as "you have all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, unless the government says so") to 9/11.
Hell, both Canada and the US have had to suffer under 100 years of paying a "temporary" wartime tax, known as income tax, and before anyone cites leftist articles supporting the taxation let us go over history, in Canada at least, the original tax act of 1917 was to finance the war effort, all eleven pages of it. Finance Minister White said it would be a temporary tax and so insisted it be called a "war tax" so that once the war ended, it would be. Instead, in 1921 the government added a sales tax, and even more over the years since.
Governments do not relinquish power, unless they are made to.
We have no evidence that the Governments of the world had ever planned for the Coof outbreak, well, other than
Event 201 is a damning thing for those who remember it, it was held in 2019, it simulated an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually became efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it caused were modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.
The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic begins to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic continues at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90% of the global population had been exposed.
The Governments of the world reacted the way they did because they trained themselves to do so, this isn't even the first event of its kind, they run scenarios like this every year at Davos, from Nuclear engagements to viral epidemics.
But the truly terrifying thing aren't the world leaders, but those who have openly admitted to infiltrating governments around the world.
Lead by a man who decried the Great Reset as a conspiracy despite his own website having this and he himself having authored a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset.
A man, and an organization that wants you to own nothing and be happy by 2030, fucking German economists.
They're still moving forward with the WEF's plans for digital IDs, which work the same as China's social credit system.
Listen, my point is, they do want you under their thumb, they aren't the most competent or smartest people, but they are persistent, they will whittle away at your rights until you're not when sure you had them in the first place, hell, most Canadians don't even know that prior to Pierre we had a right to self defense with a weapon at that, now you can't even use pepper spray.
50 notes
·
View notes
Text
Posting this more to keep record since I'm starting to lose track of all the bullshit that's happened in the last few months. Starting with:
- My most recent ex (M) breaking up with me out of nowhere. More on that later.
- Getting threatened on the floor by my assistant manager
- Two weeks later of said assistant manager being a complete ass and bully I get fired because HR didn't want to actually deal with the problem after I reported him. Also because my manager was old friends with him and the only coworker who was a witness hated me.
- My grandmother died
- Unemployed and somehow catch COVID even though for the first time since the pandemic started im not interacting with hundreda of people regularly? Completely kicked my ass for about a week
- I completely cut off contact with my entire friend group including my best friend after a couple months of increased problematic behavior and now I'm alone with no one
- I start losing my vision in my left eye and when I get it checked at my usual doctor (because I had a history of this particular thing happening) I get told it's nothing serious
- another month or so later I'm down a third of my vision and get a second opinion. They immediately catch the problem (same as I had before) and I'm rushed to the hospital for emergency eye surgery. That's a loose term because I was stuck there for 3 days where no one told me anything and I couldn't eat and was essentially in a hallway.
- My most recent ex (M) tells me the reason we broke up was due to her accidentally getting pregnant and miscarrying within a few days and it messing everything up and caused her to lose it on me (understandably). We weren't ready for kids and it wouldn't have happened but still a fucked up thing to learn and confusing to think about.
- My most important ex (P), back from 2015 or so accidentally came back into my life briefly. We talked, it went poorly, as nice as it was to know they were alive they didn't mean to reveal they were checking up on me and everything went to shit. It ended with a fight and them blocking me. This is the same ex who cheated on me, had a kid with the guy less than a year later, then some time later used me for a few months before disappearing again, leading me to thinking they might be dead and them secretly checking up on me for who knows how long because they "care". I don't fucking know. I'm exhausted.
--- update 1 ---
- matched with a super attractive girl on a dating app. She was super into me. Everything seemed great.
- Then I get blocked out of nowhere. Accused of shit I never did. Freak out and explain and eventually fix things that I had no control over in the first place.
- Planned to meet. Talked the entire way to where we were meeting up. Maybe 5 minutes away she starts acting funny. Changes the meeting place further away. Posts weird statuses on Facebook. Stops replying. Blocks me again. Get threatened by her brother. I freak out again with no idea what's going on or if she's even okay.
- I write a long letter explaining how I'm not sure what happened but I'm extremely hurt and confused and would like to try again if she would just talk to me about what's going on.
- she eventually replies, apologizes. Blames her brother for sabotaging the meet. I explain I'm on my last chance with her. My emotional and mental health has been devastated and I can't take the stress anymore. We start talking again and make plans to meet the next day. I reply to one last message quickly while half awake as I pass out. But everything is fine.
- wake up the next day and I'm blocked. Again. She claims I'm a piece of shit. Selfish. Has a line of guys who want to be with her. Etc. After a mini panic attack I calm down and realize she has serious issues. She needs help and I need to walk away from this situation and wash my hands of it. Finally after a week of insanity and my mind being played with and fucked around I'm able to get back to good
--- update 2 ---
- been looking for a place to buy or rent for over a year and no luck. Every time I apply they say they're swamped and have like 80 applicants and it's just impossible to find a place unless I spend my entire income monthly. So I'm stuck where I am
- for a few months now it's been increasingly clear the business I work for is going down the drain. The owner is a joke, the people before the current staff signed shit contracts and combine that with the downturn in the industry everything's been going downhill and looking more and more like we're gonna go out of business. Ever since I started back in August every month at minimum 1 person has left and not been replaced and now we're bare bones and I just have no fucks left to give about this place which sucks because I fucking loved this job until a couple weeks ago.
- my boss, the one who I was the assistant to and literally was the only reason I got hired in the first place gave her notice a few days ago. It sucks. The job was already bullshit but I'm not willing to pick up her work on top of my own since they're not replacing her and just expecting things to be fine.
- the family cat, Grey, hurt his paw a couple weeks ago. Thankfully nothing major aside from some pain meds but still a bit of a worry. Then earlier this week he was acting funny and not looking good and he was rushed to the vet. Turns out he had a urinary blockage and even though it's fairly common they went over everything including worse case scenarios including euthanasia and I was devastated. I was barely able to hold myself together at work and not breakdown. Even though he's home now and doing much better I'm still depressed from it. When I visited him at the hospital there was a woman in the room next to us. In the middle of me and my dad talking I had to stop him because I heard her crying. She said she was sorry and sobbed and it was clear her pet was just put down and it killed me. I can't stop hearing that over and over.
- Probably to be continued cuz my life is a joke
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
The 20s are shaping up to be a big decade for me. Let me tell you why with my Worst and Best compilation.
2020 Worst: The pandemic. The goddamn pandemic. This could have been avoided, but it wasn't, was it?
2020 Best: Corporate Earth employers realizing that yes, you can let your employees work from home and your profits will actually increase because you're paying way less in utilities.
2020 Best Subverted: Corporate Earth still demanded that their employees come into the office because they come from a time when face to face conversations are the only ones that matter and for whom "old school" means "I want to work the way we did when I got my first full time job in 1982 because if it worked then it will work now." They enforce this by sending out the most cryptic and unhelpful texts and emails they can manage.
2021 Worst: My mother got unreasonably sick from a treatable illness that the self-proclaimed medical gods of UPMC could have prevented if she had gotten there sooner. She died from pneumonia because her body was too weak to fight it off because of the preventable illness. Fuck you very much, UPMC (but the doctor and nurses who cared for her in the ICU were absolute angels for me and my family). A month to the day, my dog suffered a herniated disc that compressed her spinal cord and rendered her back legs paralyzed. She was given a 50/50 chance of ever walking normally again after emergency surgery.
2021 Best: My dog had her injury in june. By July she was walking again. By August she was doing zoomies.
2021 Best Subverted: It wasn't a 100% recovery. Oh, the walking and zoomies went swimmingly. But during the 7-9 weeks that she had no control over her bowels because she was paralyzed, she completely forgot all of her house training, so everywhere is her potty these days. Every bit of retraining I've attempted has failed so far, because she's old and stubborn, so I have to just keep the floors as clean as I can. You're welcome, Bissell.
2022 Worst: Moving to a different department in the company and my old supervisor making it his purpose in life to get me fired like he was the workplace version of a domestic abuser who gets more dangerous after the victim escapes.
2022 Best: You failed, you cunt. I'm still here. My new supervisor put me on a performance improvement plan with the intention of actually helping me improve and training me instead of using it as excuse to fire someone like you did to the HSEQ manager's assistant two weeks before a quality audit and three weeks before Christmas. You may as well install a revolving door in your department because of all the people who up and quit on your ass because you're so toxic to work for, and don't think people who have more clout than your boss (who is as bad as you) aren't going to notice that.
2022 Best Subverted: For as much as my new supervisor can't stand that chode either, he's a "path of least resistance" kind of guy. I hope that he'll have my back from here on out, but until that hope becomes a fact, I have to do my job perfectly out of pure spite.
2023 Worst (so far): I wanted to install crown molding in the living room but can't. You know how the vent for the furnace/AC is usually on the wall near the floor? Not in this place. It's about 3/8" down from the ceiling. See, these places were built by Westinghouse and the US DOD to house the workers Westinghouse had to bring to pinch hit for the men who were shipped off to WWII or were needed to fulfill labor demands for the wartime contracts that W had, so they were considered temporary housing and kind of slapped together. Slapped together extremely well, mind you, because they're still standing 80 years later, but they put the duct work in weird places presumably because it easier and faster. The housing became privately owned in the 50s and became a co-op.
Anyway, if this is the worst thing that happens to me in 2023, it will be a banner year.
2023 Best (so far): I finally bit the bullet and started to gut this place and make it my own. My mom lived here with me until her death, and as you can tell from the Before and After pics I've posted, she didn't have the best taste in home decor or paint. I put up with it because if you knew her, you'd know that it was far less painful to live in ugly surroundings than to try to get that stubborn bitch to compromise on anything. I work full time and she was retired, so she was here a lot more than me, so I said fuck it, I don't want to argue. The living room is 98% finished, it looks fucking fantastic and Mom, you would absolutely hate it and there's nothing you can do about that. Next up is the kitchen.
2023 Best Subverted: there actually isn't a subversion. Even if I don't pull this off flawlessly, I will still have done it 100% myself and have picked up some great skills and interests during this journey. That makes me feel really fucking good about myself.
0 notes
Text
Dodgy Diet Signs/Best Lockdown Diet
Plan For Weight Loss After Covid19
Coronavirus and dodgy diet signs you need to be aware of if looking to lose weight and get back
in shape. It wasn't until lockdown when it was realised the world over just how serious the
coronavirus was. When that state of emergency of international concern was announced, it
proved we had a major health pande.mic on our hands.
custom made keto diet plan.
Sady a lot of lives were lost due to covid19, while, the number still remains high for people in
hospital fighting to survive this cruel virus. If it wasn't for people around the globe coming
together during this traumatic time---giving all NHS workers the support needed to save as
many lives possible while risking their own safety, where would be.
Even though covid19 is still lurking and being managed... what of them during lockdown who
changed their eating habits through boredom and banged on weight. Because of the
coronavirus we are now facing another pandemic of people feared to step on to the weighing
scales.
It can be daunting and overwhelming looking for a weight loss plan, nonetheless, don't act in
haste and get sucked in by diet companies gimmicks. Evaluate all diets before making a
decision. I can't emphasise enough the importance of getting a doctor involved, especially if
personal health issues are included. Your doctor has all present and past records on your
medical history, where the doctor can gather information and know whether to refer you to a
dietician.
custom made keto diet plan.If you've piled on the pounds during those quarantine days and looking to lose weight then
choose your diet carefully. A popular and trusted one that delivers on its promise of a positive
result is the
Note: There's no instant overnight fix for losing weight.
Note: Dramatic weight loss is unhealthy and dangerous, so diets offering speedy weight loss...
forget it. Look towards a slow and steady approach and the weight will drop off in no time.
Note: Dodgy diets are typically highly restrictive and low in calories. It's not up for debate that
weight can't be lost, but at the expense of the persons well being.
Bad diet signs that suggest you seek medical advice.
Severe hunger: This shouldn't be the case... period. Not feeling full after eating is reason for a
red light.
Hair loss: Defintely reason for alarm. Hair falling out is normally due to a shortage of vitamin B8
(Biotin). Shortage of this kind extends to greying hair, flaky red skin, cracking nails and muscular
pain.
Energy Loss: If the body is denied a healthy amount of vitamin C and B, metabolism has to do
double the work which can bring fatigue and drowsiness.
Flaky scalp: Another sign making a statement that not enough essential fatty acids like Omega
3 is consumed.
Mouth sores: Mouth sores that keep retuning is likely down to another type of deficiency, that
being vitamin B12.
Tingling/numbness in the limbs (hands and feet): Normally an indication the body isn't getting
ample vitamins of group B such as folate (B9). Extended too, B6 ââand B12 which are
related to issues in the peripheral nerves. Possible outcome from this are bouts of anxiety,
depressed moods and hormonal imbalances.
It's known that highly restrictive low-calorie diets link to malnourishment and deficits in both
vitamins and minerals.
Warning: Diets of this sort do more DAMAGE than GOOD. If you want to turn your life around
and lose weight safely then simply turn the above quote around and pick a diet that'll do more
GOOD than DAMAGE.
custom made keto diet plan.If you want to lose weight but scared of choosing the wrong diet, then look for a custom made
plan to suit your own personal needs. Find out more about one of the most popular ways of
getting overweight people back into shape. Check out the weight loss section at spotthepimple
Thanks.
Shimul Biswas<<<<>>>>>
0 notes
Text
SCOTUS Hears Student Debt Relief Case
By Lauren Barrouquere, University of Louisiana at Lafayette Class of 2024
March 14, 2023
On the last day of February, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan [1]. SCOTUS is currently hearing two challenges to Biden’s debt relief plan, one from six different U.S. states, and one from two students [1]. The states suing are Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina [1]. Initially, the states were dismissed in a lower court because they had not been materially or otherwise harmed in some way by the relief plan [1]. However, a panel of federal judges agreed to place a temporary injunction on the relief plan until the litigation ended [1]. The case then made its way to the Supreme Court [1].
In order to discuss the arguments brought before the Court, it is necessary to have some sort of working understanding of the student debt relief plan itself. According to the Department of Federal Student Aid itself, the plan is a three-part process to forgive up to $20,000 worth of student loans [5]. The first part is to extend the pause placed on student loan repayment due to pandemic difficulties [5]. The second part involves providing targeted debt relief to those in lower-income households, or those of lower socioeconomic status. This means people who make under $125,000 annually as a single individual, or $250,000 if married, would have had their loans partially or fully forgiven [5]. The final part included making student loan systems more manageable for current and future students [5]. Biden was able to implement this plan under a 2003 act known as the HEROES Act [2]. The HEROES Act essentially allows the secretary of education to modify any regulations governing student loans after the president declares a state of emergency [2].
The plan seems relatively innocuous, why are so many entities suing? Well, in Biden v. Nebraska (the case in which six states are suing) the states are arguing that the Biden administration has overstepped its bounds and used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to accomplish campaign promises. [4]. In Department of Education v. Brown, two students are suing because they did not qualify for the full benefits from the debt relief plan and are arguing that the government failed to follow appropriate protocol when implementing the program [4].
Why does this case matter so much? For one, this kind of sweeping grant of authority from Congress to the executive branch (specifically the Secretary of Education) does not often happen [2]. If the Supreme Court justices decide in favor of the states, debt relief for millions of people could be revoked, forcing them further into poverty [2]. On the other hand, if the Court rules against the states because they have not suffered concrete harm, it could be an end to the seemingly endless train of cases brought against the Biden administration to block various policies [2]. Many of those cases involve no actual harm and are solely brought before the Court as an attempt to obstruct the implementation of certain policies [2]. A ruling has yet to be handed down [1].
______________________________________________________________
Lauren Barrouquere is currently a second-year undergraduate at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette studying political science and specializing in pre-law studies. Lauren hopes to attend law school upon graduation to become a civil rights attorney.
______________________________________________________________
https://apnews.com/article/student-loan-forgiveness-supreme-court-case-explained-8c62622e87c4ebff995f971263d932fc
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/28/1159606491/student-loan-forgiveness-supreme-court
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/27/supreme-court-readies-to-hear-bidens-student-loan-forgiveness-case.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/student-loan-forgiveness-supreme-court-arguments-takeaways/index.html
https://studentaid.gov/debt-relief-announcement
0 notes
Text
At The Movies
Those who know me best, know that I have become increasingly enamored of historic movie theatres. I frequently post my finds on my socials (On FB and Insta I am @nickgerlich, since one of my students asked). These are the variety that were typically built between 1920 and 1950, during the golden age of cinema. Some are even older, and those early ones typically started as opera houses, and evolved to showing silent movies and then the “talkies.”
These theatres often had very showy marquees and neon signage, and were the pride of a town. In fact, many towns, even those as small as 3000 people, could support several theatres at one time. This, of course, at a time when there was no competition from TV, cable, satellite, VHS, DVD, or streaming. If you wanted a social activity and entertainment, this was it, and they would attract not just townspeople but also folks from the country.
Not ones to skimp on luxury, early theatres had massive screens, often with a stage, velvet curtains, plush seats, and even a cry room for those who brought along their irritable little ones. Tickets were as low as a quarter for adults, and a dime for kids.
But things started changing in the 1960s, when shopping malls were being built out across the nation. The multiplex emerged as a new form of competition for traditional single-screen downtown theatres. In fact, to try to be competitive, some of the older ones “twinned,” meaning they somehow managed to split their facility into two separate screens so that multiple films could be shown.
Those multiplexes became the sprawling complexes we see today, sometimes with as many as 20 screens. Meanwhile, amid all this competition, along with myriad other entertainment options, those old theatres started falling by the wayside to the point that very few have survived. In fact, of those still functioning as theatres or even as event venues, often there was a major non-profit rescue plan deployed to renovate.
Meanwhile, I am content to carefully script my weekend travels so that I can photo-document as many as possible. From OKC last weekend, to Dallas, southern New Mexico, and a tour of Texas Panhandle towns, my shutter has been clicking in 2023. A 3000-mile massive Tour of Texas right before Christmas was also a highlight.
Skip forward to the present, though, and for a variety of reasons ranging from the lingering effects of a pandemic, extreme competition from streaming, high prices, and few new films worth showing, the multiplexes we have are hurting. Last year Cineworld filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and just last week, in what some view as a misguided effort to salvage revenues, AMC announced it would launch a tiered seating pricing policy with varying prices based on how hard you have to strain to see.
Another result is that the remaining theatres are having to be creative in manufacturing a movie-watching experience that beats what we have come to know as normal: over-priced soft drinks and popcorn at the concession stand. Thus, there are efforts afoot to add more diverse foods and adult beverages, from flatbreads to cocktails.
Then there’s the sobering statistic that only 54% of Americans reported patronizing a theatre of any kind last year between April and October, which is normally a good time of year with summer blockbusters. I was not one of the 54%, not even to see Maverick (I more recently watched it on Peacock at home). In fact, I have not been to a theatre since before COVID. And it was not like I was a big customer prior to that, either. I had simply lost interest as well as desire, and I knew that with a little patience, anything I wanted to see would show up in my queue on Netflix or elsewhere.
More importantly, and to the multiplexes’ chagrin, streaming has become a way of life. To make matters even more difficult for Hollywood and theatres, we have bought into the notion of episodic content instead of movies. I am referring specifically to the big series that are original content on their respective providers (much of which is streaming), like Yellowstone, Outer Banks, Only Murders In The Building, The Righteous Gemstones, and more. At the moment, I am devouring Season 4 of You on Netflix, which has amazing writing and acting. Content of this quality is rare on broadcast TV.
I shudder to think that our streets and avenues may one day be littered with empty big box theatres just like the oft-shuttered center city oldies. Nostalgia is helping keep some of those afloat with a new lease on life, but I have serious doubts there will ever be any nostalgic yearnings to reopen the suburban multiplex. They are architecturally void of any creativity, and were more than likely “crafted” if you will with tilt-wall construction, meaning those walls arrived on trucks and then assembled. Can you say “Boring?”
As much as I love my streaming, I concede I would like to see anything—a new release or a classic—in some of the old theatres I have photographed. I have been to the Mulkey in Clarendon Texas, and it is a gem. These relics are class acts, and produce an experience you cannot create on streaming or out in the suburbs.
That’s the kind of blockbuster I want to see, and photograph.
Dr “Bring On The Food And Beverages“ Gerlich
Audio Blog
1 note
·
View note
Photo
Are "Preppers" Whack Jobs?
Zealots and extremists exist for every opinion in the world. Outsiders look at these and twirl their finger around their temple to gesture "CraaaZeee". In most cases, it's really a matter of perception, not fact. Animals store things, and humans get insurance, to prepare for hard times. In the volatile world in which we live, maybe the real Whack Jobs aren't those who plan but those who fail to plan. I don't consider myself an extreme prepper but some of my acquaintances consider some of what I do and say "gibberish".
Boy Scout Before Prepper:
I grew up in a very rural area. I was in the cub scouts and boy scouts; in fact, my entire family participated in scouting. The Boy Scout Motto is "Be Prepared" and I have taken that literally. Like most of you, I have experienced unexpected, unpleasant events. Life happens; dangers and joys. But, whatever happens, I prepare to survive the next occurrance with less surprise and panic. My usual post-event response is to prepare so that, if a similar event occurs, I will not be as affected by it the next time. I evaluate what happened, how it played out and what I could have done to deal with it better. Then I plan and acquire what's needed for that event. This process has served me well with power outages, food shortages, water contamination/loss and other, then-unexpected, events.
I really didn't consider the term "prepper" until a friend brought it up in a conversation we were having about solar panels/power. After that conversation, I started to envision, and plan/prep for, scenarios that I haven't yet experienced.
I believe that many who experience an emergency event focus of getting through it but never learn from it. A "prepper-type" person not only learns from the experience but takes action to deal with the "next emergency". I believe I have that prepper thought process because of my family, scouting and rural-life background; things were not readily available to me anytime I needed something. Many times, I needed to think on my feet and create solutions.
I don't consider my emergency preparation activities to be an obsession but a precaution; proactive vs. reactive. To save money and sanity, I try to temper my emergency preparations to things, I consider, a bit more realistic; things that I have witnessed and experienced (like major, long-term, power outages in extreme temperatures) and others that seem, to me, to indicate something is heading down a bad road that could get ugly (just listen/watch the news for any length of time). There have been near-pandemic outbreaks; active shooter situations are not that uncommon and there is always a war somewhere in the world. To think "that won't happen here", and not prepare, seems unrealistic and irresponsible. We have insurance, locks and alarm systems to protect against the obvious. But, those "obvious" threats are not the limits of our risks. People get blind sided all the time by things that weren't that obvious.
Quite honestly, I don't want to survive a major, cataclysmic, earth shattering event but if I have no choice, and I do manage to survive, to what extent will I be prepared? I'm thinking that there is just so much the average person can pack away in storage. After that, and if the emergency lingers, basic survival techniques need to kick in.
Beware of the [Violent] Marauding/Rogue Prepper: Close friends, I've tried to convince to prep, tell me they will just come to my house if something happens. I tell them, they better bring lots of supplies with them and be prepared to work. I know/heard of others that say they will just take from, even kill, others to get what they want. These are people I consider "Whack Jobs". If they are serious when they say this, they have already prepared (not in a nice way) to steal and/or take a life. They have no conscience, mo morals, no soul. Someone in your own "trusted group" could be one of them. That's why it's so important to keep quiet about your preps and to watch out for, and be ready to defend yourself against, anyone you really don't know because they could be this kind of person. One episode (The Marauders) of the "Doomsday Preppers" TV series features one group with such an agenda; to conduct home invasions to get supplies after a societal breakdown. While some of the comments, for this YouTube video, poo-poo this guy and may be entertaining, in a real/serious SHTF senerio, these kinds of people will exist. Be prepare for them in your mind and your defenses.
Related Resources:
Learn to Think Outside the Box
Brain Prepping for Your Worst Case Scenario
If preppers become marauders, then what?
Marauding to survive?
How to Deal With the Unprepared (Non-Preppers)
Prevent and Survive a Home Invasion
[Reference Link]
[14-Point Emergency Preps Checklist]
[11-Cs Basic Emergency Kit]
[Learn to be More Self-Sufficient]
[The Ultimate Preparation]
[5six7 Menu]
#prepper#prepping#shtf#diy#survival#offgrid#defense#self-defense#marauders#rogue preppers#whack jobs#home invasion#outside the box#think outside the box
0 notes
Text
Personal Finances- lessons learnt- what we could or shouldn’t do in the current financial climate
“Victory is always possible for the person who refuses to stop fighting.” ― Napoleon Hill
Personal finances are being pushed to breaking point because of the increased cost of living and inflation rate, which has increased throughout 2022. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, households saved a substantial amount, reaching a record level of 23.9%. The significant increase in household savings corresponded with the government enforcing limitations on social interactions and financial activities, which resulted in more savings.
In contrast, in 2022, the saving rate has decreased as people’s ability to save has been impacted by higher living costs. The UK is feeling the sting because of living cost increases for food, energy, and other essentials. The economy being halted during the pandemic through numerous periods in 2020 and 2021 has contributed to some of the financial constraints that are being faced.
Furthermore, the money debt advice service conducted research that found that a quarter of adults in the UK had savings with a value of less than £100, which puts them at increased exposure to rising cost vulnerabilities.
In 2021, the number of UK households struggling with substantial debts rose by a third, before the winter increase in energy prices and the removal of the additional £20 in universal credit payments, according to research.
The Jubilee Debt Campaign analysed research conducted by the Bank of England and found that nearly 10% of households revealed that loan and interest repayments were a substantial burden, a 35% rise compared to a year before.
Households also stated that their typical monthly repayments amounted to a record £373 in 2021, an increase of 22% compared to the previous year and the most significant figure for at least a decade.
What should you do in the current financial climate?
1. Set up a budget
The first step of managing your finances is a budget; although it can be a little time- consuming, it is a worthwhile investment of your time so that you can get a better picture of your finances.
Setting up a budget can decrease the likelihood of ending up in debt and increase the chances of being more prepared for unexpected expenses, improving the probability of a good credit score and being approved for a mortgage or loan. You will also be able to see where you can save money and be more likely to save for holidays and a mortgage on a home.
What will be needed?
Before starting a budget plan, you will need to calculate the amount you spend on household bills, other living costs, financial products such as insurance, bank charges or interest, and any money spent on family and friends such as lending money or purchase of gifts or travelling to events such as hen trips, forms of transport such as car expenses such as fuel tests, leisure, including gym membership, hobbies, cinema and other entertainment.
2. Set money aside for savings
Once you have set up your budget, make room for saving by setting up automatic direct transfers from your current account to your savings account every month. Even if you would like to save for a specific goal, it is still worth having an emergency saving pot, especially in the current financial climate where the cost of living is causing many people to be at their wit’s end.
3. Download a Savings app
Intellisaving is an innovative money-saving app that facilitates the integration of multiple savings and ISA accounts. The app is suitable for users’ journeys, such as starting a family, getting an education, and saving for a deposit on a property.
The app is also home to several features which can be part of any user’s journey, such as a personal portfolio, a dashboard that navigates users to the other screens on the app, for instance, a watchlist screen which allows savers to refer back to accounts which have piqued their interest.
4. Set up a free overdraft limit
In 2020 regulations on overdraft fees changed. Therefore, the majority of banks had to amend their overdraft fees. Although you will not be penalised if you enter an unarranged overdraft with your bank, you will see charges that could reach a 39.9% effective annual rate (EAR) if you are overdrawn. Fear not, though, because some bank accounts have free authorised overdrafts of a limited amount.
5. Cancel direct debits you don’t use
Check your bank statements to see if there are any direct debits that you could cancel that you are not currently being used. Doing this could help you save a few extra pounds. Log into your online account at least once a month to keep an eye out on what is coming out. Or go to your nearest branch and ask if they could provide you with your bank statements.
What not to do in the current financial climate?
Before becoming a co-signer, think about it carefully
If you want to become a co-signer, it is crucial to consider the risks as this is a risky responsibility to account for if the borrower cannot make the repayments on a loan such as a mortgage, as you may have to step in and make the payments yourself.
Furthermore, with the economy being so financially unstable, the risks are more significant as the borrower and the co-signer are more likely to have their finances strained. Co-signing will leave you liable throughout the duration of the loan.
However, you may decide to go ahead and co-sign despite the risks and the current state of the economy; therefore, having a savings pot may be ideal as a safety net.
Alternatively, other methods of helping family or friends could be considered, such as assisting with a down payment or making a personal payment.
Think twice before acquiring new debt
Acquiring new debt, such as a car loan or home equity line, in more stable financial conditions is acceptable; however, in more turbulent times, this can make a significant dent in financial pockets as you are more likely to lose a source of income or run out of money due to a more expensive cost of living.
If you lose your job, you might have to find multiple positions that may not pay you as much as your previous job. Therefore, if you want to increase your debt load, consider that this will burden you more if your finances diminish.
2.What if I embark on an Adjustable-Rate mortgage?
If you are buying a home, you might want to take out an adjustable-rate mortgage; if interest rates are low, the monthly instalments would also be low.
If the economy falls into recession, rates often decrease at the beginning of a recession and then increase when the economy shows signs of recovery.
If the economy is unstable like it is at present, it is a good idea to think twice before embarking on any mortgage, as mortgage repayments will be challenging to pay back if your income declines for reasons such as losing your primary source of income.
3. Avoid investing in risky investments
It is best to be cautious before making a risky investment during unstable economic times, as if you invest in something that falls through, you stand to lose more than you put in initially, which in turbulent financial times can put further strain on your finances.
The same goes for business owners hoping to make risky investments during early periods of a recession; it is not ideal for putting your neck on the line, but when the economy stabilises, considering investments becomes more feasible.
4. Splurging out on significant expenses or lots of little expenses
The temptation to overspend is something that remains even during unstable economic times; it can be tempting to spend on things that are not needed, especially if feeling stressed. But it is crucial to shift the focus elsewhere to other healthier habits, such as learning budget-friendly recipes or learning a new skill for free on YouTube.
The pandemic made many people realise how much they could save when they had no choice but to stop doing outdoor activities such as cinema and bowling due to the economy being paused during the peaks of the pandemic. However, as. mentioned earlier, the level of saving has fallen since the economy opened back up after the lockdowns, primarily due to the cost- of-living crisis.
However, saving is still possible even in the current financial climate as there are ways of saving money; for instance, the number of excursions such as cinema or bowling can be reduced, and alternative methods of enjoyment can be sought instead, such as indoor movie night in, or an indoor games night. Money can also be saved on food expenses by following budget-friendly recipes, which can be found on YouTube and other sites.
Fuel costs can also be reduced by making fewer car journeys and fitting as many activities into one car journey. The money acquired through making these changes and other alterations to everyday life could make it easier to deposit money monthly.
Moreover, Intellisaving has several articles with recommendations on how to save money on a budget or on energy costs, such as 'Higher energy costs and how they are outing a strain on lower-income households’ and How to manage household on a budget?
0 notes
Text
Hard to look away from a train wreck
In the months since, the state’s efforts to shelter homeless residents amid COVID-19 have played out in starkly contrasting storylines, bent and molded by local politics and resources. Now, with the declaration of a state and national emergency, it looked as if the Federal Emergency Management Agency might help pay to rent them temporarily. His plan wasn’t ready for prime time, but Newsom had been quietly pursuing an ambitious idea to buy up hotel and motel rooms to get people off the streets and into housing with supportive services. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that people sleeping outside should be left alone the encampments that pre-pandemic were routinely dismantled would be largely left in place, state officials decided.īut California still would need somewhere to house people considered most at risk: those who are older and have chronic health conditions. Instead, the very conditions lambasted as California’s shameful legacy of neglect - people subsisting in makeshift shanties and battered tents in parks and alleys and freeway underpasses - emerged as a safer alternative. The crowded shelters, in short supply and usually considered safe ground for homeless people, suddenly posed a risk of transmission and would have to be thinned out. “When you take the attack rate and apply it to more than 100,000 unsheltered people,” Elliott said, “you very quickly find out that tens of thousands of homeless people are potentially susceptible to dying of coronavirus.” More than 40% of homeless Californians are age 65 or older or have underlying health conditions such as heart disease, according to the state’s internal estimates - factors that put them at greater risk of infection and death from COVID-19. They pored over data showing how California’s homeless population had gotten larger, older and sicker in recent years. It was a complicated ask for the more than 150,000 Californians without a home.įor two weeks in March, Newsom’s top homelessness adviser, Jason Elliott, gathered with academics, service providers and county representatives at the emergency operations center just outside Sacramento to confront the menace that COVID-19 presented for tens of thousands of people living outside, often without access to clean water or basic hygiene. Exactly one month later, he would order a far-reaching statewide shutdown, asking every person in California not working in an essential industry to shelter at home in an effort to stave off COVID-19. “It’s a disgrace that the richest state in the richest nation - succeeding across so many sectors - is falling so far behind to properly house, heal and humanely treat so many of its own people,” he told the crowd.īut even as Newsom spoke, a different epidemic was advancing silently across the state. Past administrations had mostly ignored the problem, Newsom said, but he’d be different. California is home to one-quarter of the nation’s homeless population, a grim distinction painfully visible not only on city sidewalks, but also along the state’s freeways and farm levees, in its urban parks and suburban strip malls. Gavin Newsom stood before lawmakers in the state Capitol, and delivered an unprecedented State of the State address devoted entirely to the homelessness crisis. This was supposed to be the year that California finally did something about its epidemic of homelessness. A few weeks before, pressured by the organizers, the county started dropping off hand-washing stations right before the meal, only to whisk them away as soon as it was served. Every night at 7:30 p.m., volunteers assembled at the park to serve a hot meal to anyone in need. Standing outside a closed restroom in Calexico’s Border Friendship Park, looking out over the complex of metal bars and security equipment that marks the U.S.-Mexico border, he waited for dinner. But not having a place to rinse off or wash up, that was just a hazard. July highs were topping 110, and it was uncomfortable wearing a mask in the swelter. Calexico’s quiet downtown had emptied out. Months into the coronavirus shutdown, Gonzalez, 47, felt lonely. People like Gonzalez, homeless the past two years, were simply not a priority. In this sprawling Southern California desert, where summer brings blistering triple-digit heat, that lack of access could amount to a death sentence for people without shelter. The message wasn’t lost on Daniel Gonzalez.Įarly in the pandemic, one of the first things Imperial County did to ward off the virus was close the public bathrooms and, later, public cooling centers.
0 notes
Text
A reflection upon my time in support work
The rising costs of living, the energy deficit and the relentless blooming of inflation rates have created a volatile situation across the world as powers butt heads over a war nobody seems to have asked for in the wake of a pandemic, if this sounds familiar that is because we have been here before. History repeats itself, over and over yet we do not seem to learn from it but instead we continue to elect leaders which seek to isolate us from the wider world in favour of ‘caring for our own' without any regard for the impact upon our own or our relationships with the numerous cultures around the world who have a lot to offer us. The conservatives came into power in 2010 off the back of a coalition and we have continued to forgive crippling mistake after crippling mistake despite the obvious impact of privatisation and austerity upon the average person. Upon me, upon you and most certainly upon those even less fortunate. Homelessness has risen dramatically; drug related crimes continue to spike as the war on drugs continues behind closed doors and brash raids and the nation’s debt just keeps on climbing. Who is really benefitting?
Well, massive corporations and the wealthy men and women operating behind the smoke screen of providing services and convenience. This could easily become a manifesto for a better way of doing things but greater people than I have tried and failed to change the status quo, instead I wish to simply share my experiences working in the forensic support and homeless support industries over the last five years. Unfortunately, as I hope you will come to realise, these are industries hidden behind a veneer of charitability which often started as a genuine effort to help and has devolved through years of under funding into a desperate scramble to keep things the same.
So, let’s start with criminal and forensic care or support, people use different names for it but ultimately it is the step after prison for many offenders who have committed both minor and major offences for various reasons. After years in prison many convicted criminals simply cannot cope with the world they find, they grow used to the routines and rituals of prison life and so emerging into the wide world which has often changed quite drastically is shocking. To give you a quick but important example one client I key worked, meaning I was their main worker, went into prison before flip phones were popular and due to the type of sentence, he was given he emerged far later than originally planned into a world filled with touch screen phones packed with a wide variety of mind-boggling features and they were expected to adjust to this new digital era simply to comply with their release conditions. They needed constant support as they engaged with the job centre, who made their life difficult through constant inflexibility, and soon they became reliant upon the support of workers like me. At the end of this document, I will be adding some articles and documents worth reading to give some context but even as prisons attempt to adapt to the new world and teach their residents how to cope in the world outside they are taking their individuality and power from them, teaching them routines which simply cannot be sustained in the real world when nobody will offer you work and you have to turn to specialised facilities for support, facilities which are often incredibly expensive and will not accept a case without large pots of funding from local authorities who recognise the need to manage their population of offenders. For two years I worked in the forensic and criminal support/care industry and heard the same stories over and over, the rate of evictions and recalls spiked as more and more residents simply could not cope and more prisoners needed somewhere to go after their release.
The homeless emergency housing and relocation industry is startlingly and unfairly similar, individuals are placed within facilities which have only one support worker per ten clients often and expected to remain largely independent while relying on their support worker to help with benefits claims, housing issues and many other aspects of their lives. Many of the individuals who reside in places like this have spent years rotating through the system; for example there was on client I worked with who had severe mental health issues, suffered from delusions and required injections to help him maintain his grip on reality, this individual has been going through the system for over a decade and despite engaging with various services including but not limited to drug use prevention support and the National Probation service they are still moving between facilities. Some of these individuals will be given an apartment, inevitably, and just a few months after they have moved in they lose all support from their support workers because there is no money available to continue providing support. They might make it work and last, many do, but just as many seem to fail at the last hurdle because all of the safety nets are gone. They slip back into old habits, be they criminal enterprises or drug use, and find themselves evicted, tossed back onto the streets once more where the contract holder for homelessness prevention will pick them up, move them into a temporary accommodation setting who will hold them for up to 58 days and then eventually move them right back into one of the supports settings they left not that long ago.
That is not to say the homeless support industry, or the forensic/criminal support industry are complete failures, not by a long shot. Almost every support worker involved in both industries are passionate, diligent, caring, compassionate and they go above and beyond considering they are often paid less than for example a retail worker while often pulling far longer shifts, overtime without pay and even holding the hand of the dying sometimes. I have spent five years working within both industries and I have seen these people give their everything to individuals that the politicians tell us are the problem, that people often write off and I have seen these support workers help to bring the best out of them. I do not know how we can solve these problems but I do know that austerity simply is not working, our support services are stretched thin and the workers are deeply underappreciated, they need more funding so that they can be paid a fair wage for their work, have more colleagues so they can work less hours and they need public services like the NHS to be functioning at their best to continue to provide the additional services which many of these companies simply cannot provide for their residents. By punishing people for falling off the well-trodden path of societal expectations we are creating an infinite problem and our solution is simply to stuff them all in supported living settings where managers are often over paid and support workers are undervalued and underpaid?
Ultimately both industries are plagued by the same problems that society at large is plagued by, a lack of consistent funding available for support structures which enable the day to day life that we all take for granted. Individuals both inside the industrial care complex and outside are waiting months and months for even a consultation let alone actual mental health support and even addiction support. Unfortunately, many of the cases I wish I could discuss are protected by GDPR and I was not able to get permission to provide you with even a watered down or redacted version. All I can rightly say is that many on the outside of the industry have a very stigmatized view of those that have committed crimes or entered into a chaotic lifestyle fuelled by addiction, many who begin working with these people learn that individuals from all walks of life can stumble into a life on the fringes of society after even one event turns their life upside down. We are all products of our environment and underfunding that environment is not the answer.
Austerity does not work. It is making the most vulnerable people in our society even more vulnerable leading to exploitation by gangs and organisations while the legal and support structures punish these individuals as if they are the cause more often than not.
We need to take a long, hard look at the services being provided by government funding (or lack of) and re-evaluate the structural integrity of these services. Managers obviously play a vital role but support workers are often the ones on the ground directly interfacing with their clients or residents, they need more tools, training, pay and less hours to be able to work efficiently. I have worked 4 out of 5 Christmas holidays, giving up time I would otherwise spend with loved ones simply because it was the right thing to do to support these individuals who have in most cases very little to their name. So, while I cannot offer you a solution to the issue and the experiences of myself and many colleagues but perhaps if we all begin to question why things are the way they are we might be able to make a change worth talking about. I ask you to think about the things I have said and to read academic works on the subject as much as first hand accounts from the support workers and those they support wherever possible, my experiences and the stories I have chosen to highlight above are just the very tip of the iceberg.
Further reading;
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/03-06-20-advantage_magazine__summer/article-3/ an interesting commentary of policing in a time of governmental austerity and criminal behaviour.
https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/media/policing-in-austerity-one-year-on.pdf Justice inspectorate’s reports on the effects of austerity on policing early into the Conservatives terms.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jul/01/police-warn-of-cuts-to-funding-even-worse-than-in-austerity-years media coverage of austerity within policing, articles like this help establish context for the way things have changed within the various support services.
https://prisonerresource.com/prison-education-facts/prison-education-controversial-history/ an interesting piece of work regarding the educational history within American prison systems which do not directly relate to our own prison system but there are similarities within the correctional approaches.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/proven-reoffending-statistics-january-to-march-2020/proven-reoffending-statistics-january-to-march-2020#:~:text=Adult%20offenders%20had%20a%20proven%20reoffending%20rate%20of%2024.1%25.,between%2024.1%25%20and%2030.6%25. Official statistics of prisoner recidivism, or reoffence and incarceration rates, which help to provide context for the challenges both industries face.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2022/jun/21/cost-of-living-crisis-uk-households-charts-inflation An article about the cost of living crisis which is currently gripping the country, a crisis which will amplify the issues already present within the industry.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9428/ official parliamentary reports about the rising cost of living.
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/cost-living-crisis another official report on the cost of living crisis.
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/four-decades-counting-continued-failure-war-drugs an article about the war on drugs in the USA, a ‘war’ Britain has also been engaged in while attempting to prohibit and control substances.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlse-4pNCwQ An interesting view into the war on drugs, the moral panic around drugs and drug obsessive policing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9ylU2t-9Hs An interesting reflection upon the criminal enterprises and smuggling within the prison system from a prison officer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHXj82EIb7E An interview with an addict.
1 note
·
View note
Photo
Jim Conway started working in restaurants in 1982, making $2.13 an hour, plus tips.
And though the world has changed significantly in the nearly 40 years since then, his hourly wage has not. At the Olive Garden outside of Pittsburgh where he worked when the pandemic hit last year, he was making $2.83 an hour, the minimum wage for tipped workers in Pennsylvania, plus tips.
So after being furloughed for months last spring, Conway, 64, decided to retire.
Being paid the rough equivalent of a chocolate bar an hour from the chain was little incentive for him to stick it out longer in the industry after so many years, especially with tips no longer a reliable source of income and lingering health concerns about covid-19.
“The main issue for me was safety,” Conway said. “There are lots of people who don’t want to participate in the old ways.”
Conway is one of the millions of workers who left the restaurant industry during the pandemic and haven’t come back. The industry has 1.7 million fewer jobs filled than before the pandemic, despite posting almost a million job openings in March, along with hotels, and raising pay 3.6 percent, an average of 58 cents an hour, in the first three months of 2021.
Restaurant chains and industry groups say a shortage of workers like Conway is slowing their recovery, as the sector tries to get back on its feet amid sinking covid cases, falling restrictions and resurgent demand in many areas around the country.
The issue has quickly become political, with Republicans blaming the labor crunch on the Biden administration’s move to boost federal unemployment insurance supplement, which has been a central part of the government’s response to the pandemic for most of the past year. GOP leaders and business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce say the extra unemployment insurance is a disincentive for some workers to return to work.
In interviews with The Washington Post, 10 current and former workers expressed a wide range of reasons they are or were reluctant to return to work. Some, like Conway, have left the industry or changed careers, saying they felt like the industry was no longer worth the stress and volatility.
Others said jobs that didn’t pay enough for them to make ends meet no longer felt appropriate to them. Others left after disputes with managers — over issues around safety and pay — and other flash points that have emerged in the past year.
All described the pandemic as an awakening — realizing that long-held concerns about the industry were valid, and compounded by the new health concerns. And forced to stop working or look for other jobs early on in the pandemic, many realized they had other options.
“The staffing issue has actually a lot more to do with the conditions that the industry was in before covid and people not wanting to go back to that, knowing what they would be facing with a pandemic on top of it,” said Crystal Maher, 36, a restaurant worker in Austin, who’s become more active on the industry’s labor issues in the past year. “People are forgetting that restaurant workers have actually experienced decades of abuse and trauma. The pandemic is just the final straw.”
Tonya Breslow, the owner of Mis en Place, a restaurant staffing firm, said a huge number of restaurants she works with are dealing with shortages.
The firm recently surveyed 2,000 line cooks and back-of-the-house restaurant workers nationally and found just over a quarter, 26 percent, reported leaving the industry, while 41 percent of workers said they were still employed in the industry. That left about a third of respondents who had not gone back to work.
Of that group, most workers said they were not yet back, because they were either looking for the right opportunity, they had concerns about safety during the pandemic, or they did not plan to return to the industry.
As usual, the simplistic explanations pushed by conservatives don’t make any sense.
3K notes
·
View notes
Text
Thread by @wwxwashere on Twitter
⚠️ WHAT IS HAPPENING IN BRAZIL: a thread ⚠️
am i going insane or more of the world should care about a country generating covid variants that could spread internationally? right
spoiler alert: covid is killing us. badly. no, it's not this bad everywhere. yes, you should care.
our government is DELIBERATELY and CLEARLY trying to kill us, not only not doing anything but actually trying to stop any help from getting here, with censorship to go with it.
PLEASE, READ RHIS THREAD
it's NOT this bad everywhere:
"No other nation that experienced such a major outbreak is still grappling with record-setting death tolls and a health care system on the brink of collapse."
yes, you SHOULD care:
"Preliminary studies suggest that the variant that swept through the city of Manaus is not only more contagious, but it also appears able to infect some people who have already recovered from other versions of the virus."
you REALLY should care:
"And the variant has slipped Brazil’s borders, showing up in two dozen other countries and in small numbers in the United States."
1 in every 4 covid deaths WORLDWIDE is happening in brazil, INTERNATIONAL MEDIA ISN'T TALKING ABOUT THIS ENOUGH.
our president?
- calling it "a little flu"
- literally making trying to legally stop states from lockdown
- blocked any attempts to get vaccines here for months
- recommended meds with no scientific proof which caused SEVERAL other deaths for overuse of improper meds
he refuses to wear a mask in public but it's not just the things he isn't doing, it's the deliberate steps he takes to make sure ANYONE who tries to do ANYTHING to help (even the US!!!!!!!! OFFERING US VACCINES FOR MONTHS!!!!!!!!!!!!) is shut down.
we have no oxygen. no ICU beds. no proper masks. basic food is so expensive here the country is falling back to hunger, so whoever is not dying from covid is dying out of starvation or due to the complete and utter collapse of our healthcare system.
if you read the articles i post here you will know brazil has a RECORD of being GREAT in this type of scenario & getting vaccines to everyone fast as fuck.
this is a DELIBERATE ATTEMPT TO KILL US, i couldn't possibly stress that enough.
who is it killing? take a guess.
"The study also found that Black Brazilians were likelier to lose their jobs or face pay cuts than white people during the pandemic. The death rate in poorer cities has been substantially higher than in rich ones."
BY JANUARY OF THIS YEAR the ny times was reporting "The country has not yet approved any of the vaccines on the market."
NOT EVEN APPROVED. ANY. OF THE VACCINES.
this isn't a tragedy, this is our government's plan.
again, why are people not helping? i have no clue.
"On Friday, officials at the World Health Organization called the surge of cases in Brazil deeply troubling and warned that it could wreak havoc well beyond the country’s borders."
censorship? oh yeah, the president's son is trying to silence a guy who made a TWEET calling the president out. & that was only news not a shady unexplainable death bc the guy is famous and rich in the first place.
this is not the only threat he has made, btw. during his CAMPAIGN he said he'd kill people who opposed his government. that is how low we are.
10,3MI brazilians might starve to death and things are only getting worse:
have i proven my point? cuz honestly there is no lack of evidence, but i can go graphic if you need to hear what happens when a patient needs oxygen or an ambulance and our hospitals can't provide it.
no? yeah. better not.
"ok but what can we do"
TALK. ABOUT. THIS.
WHY IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS.
WHY IS THIS NOT EVERYWHERE.
WHY IS NOBODY HELPING.
i literally feel crazy, as if this is only happening in my head. every brazilian i know is desperate and nobody cares.
"ok but what else"
we need donations, badly. money for food, masks, literally all supplies. if you are a single person guess what THERE ARE NO ORGANISED WAY TO HELP YET you literally need to find a brazilian or learn portuguese to be able to get to local donations centres.
have i mentioned nobody cares? how is a country going through this massive of a crisis with a government trying to kill and silence us yet there people barely heard about this???? given IT IS CREATING DEADLY VARIANTS THAT ARE SPREADING BEYOND BORDERS
oh my god i feel insane
special call-out for portugal & also the US for fucking us up historically
https://t.co/JQ9LBkfSIV
per request i will make an english speaking video about brazil's covid situation to be posted @ youtube.com/c/AndressaBuss later this week
🌟DONATIONS LINKS🌟
update: if you want to place a donation to @CUFA_Brasil or @maesdafavela i will offer free portuguese-english translations to help with the process.
email me @ [email protected] (i can't keep up with DMs here)
You can also try to finda artists or writers or professionals in brazil and hire them! or tip them a kofi! Or simply search for "brazil" in the search and help out by sending one dollar or two in kofi or gofundmes that will also help brazilians staying safe
i will keep linking more as i find it. donation centre to get basic food to people who need it: https://t.co/gFZdskBE6G
Update: finally managed to get an extensive list of options for donations after over 24hrs trying, from jun last year so some campaigns have ended but there's still plenty to choose from
(again: im available for free translations & help in your donation process if you need it)
just assisted in a R$740 donation process to the above donation centre & i am working on putting together a list of various options for donations as well as brazilian artists who are making emergency commissions :)
im mostly trying to assist people place the donations themselves & when i have to place the donation i offer vast proof (of whatever kind you need) of each transaction
im not a random account with no face behind it, im a broke history teacher who has covid, im trying to help
Thread by @wwxwashere on Twitter
And before i forget:
BOLSONARO GENOCIDA!
#Brazil#Brasil#COVID-19#USA#Help#Donations#We Need to Talk About#Government#Black Lives Matter#Boost#Signal Boost#Very Important#Donations Links#We Need To Talk About Brazil#Bolsonaro Genocida#long post
3K notes
·
View notes
Text
NME: New Arctic Monkeys’ album is “pretty much” finished and coming in 2022, says Matt Helders
By Andrew Trendell, 12th November 2021
Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders has revealed that the band’s new album is “pretty much” finished and likely to arrive in 2022 ahead of a summer tour.
Fans have been eager for news on the anticipated follow-up to 2018’s acclaimed ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino‘, with numerous reports and rumours around its recording emerging over the last year.
Back in January, the Sheffield band’s manager revealed that the group had been “working on music” and had initially planned to record last summer, before Helders confirmed that they were in the “early stages” of the album while trying to overcome obstacles brought on by the pandemic. Then, back in August, it emerged that the band had been recording new material in Suffolk.
Now, as part of the BBC’s Drumathon, Helders joined 5 Live Breakfast this morning to give a drum lesson and talk to presenter Rick Edwards.
Asked if the new album was “ready to go”, Helders replied: “Yeah, pretty much, yeah. It was a bit disjointed how we had to do it, and there are bits to finish off, but yeah, it’s all in the works.”
He went to say that he believed the album would be out in 2022, adding: “I think by the time we get everything together it’ll be next year. Hopefully we can get out and tour next summer.”
The drummer also went on to tease the potential sound of the record.
“We tend to always move it on a little bit,” he said. “For us, because we’re so involved in it, it always makes sense. They always kind of pick up where the other one left off in a way. It makes sense when you think about it in the context of the last record. But we always do try and do something a bit different – it’s kind of hard to describe. You can tell it’s the same band.”
Edwards then asked the sticksman if he was “confident you’ll bring the fans with you when you know that you’re evolving the sound,” to which he replied: “No, and I think we got a bit of a wake-up call with that on the third album [‘Humbug’, 2009]. That was more of an intentional decision to do something different. That was one where we’d get weird back-handed compliments from the fans who stuck around for that one.
“They’d be like, ‘Oh, I actually like Humbug!’ Why? Did some people not?”
With a tour now likely in summer 2022, Arctic Monkeys fans will be eyeing up what festivals they could be due to appear at. Asked by NME if they’d be headlining Reading & Leeds next year, festival boss Melvin Benn replied: “Arctic Monkeys are a law unto themselves and when they decide next to play live is beyond me, if I’m honest.”
#nme#arctic monkeys#am7#matt helders#alex turner#jamie cook#nick o'malley#so matt confirmed that the album would be out next year!!
293 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Dawn of Everything
We’ve lost so much to the pandemic. Every day I wake up and think of all the lives snuffed out, all the plans smashed, all the stories never told. I think about poor David Graeber, whom I spoke with just a few weeks before his sudden and tragic death in September 2020.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rip-david-graeber
David was a superb writer and an insightful scholar and activist. He helped formulate Occupy’s rallying cry, “We are the 99%” and he wrote magisterial popular works of anthropology like “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” and the incredible “Bullshit Jobs.”
https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/20/david-graebers-bullshit-jobs-why-does-the-economy-sustain-jobs-that-no-one-values/
Last autumn, Macmillan published David’s final book, a collaboration with the equally brilliant archaeologist David Wengrow, which they worked on together for a decade and finished shortly before Graeber’s untimely death.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything
I’ve been reading the book since its publication, taking it slowly and digesting the wealth of beautifully presented evidence for its core argument: that the shape of societies — hierarchical or non, authoritarian or free — is not foreordained by our technology or living arrangements. That we are free to choose who we want to be: equal or unequal, coercive or free, warlike or peaceful.
The Davids begin their book with the Enlightenment and the two poles of its views on civilization. First, there’s the Hobbesian view that we once lived as violent “primitives” whose bestial natures were tamed by the emergence of the hierarchies that inevitably arise with agriculture and are needed to manage the complexity of cities. Then there’s Rousseau, who argued that our “primitive” past was a time of pastoral equality and freedom, but that could not survive the hierarchies that inevitably accompany agriculture and are a regrettable necessity of cities.
Both Rousseau and Hobbes make it clear that these views are thought-experiments, not based on any observation or evidence of these “pre-civilized” ways of being; in their work (and in the writings of other Englightenment thinkers), they make arguments that they claim originated with indigenous Americans.
The attribution of heterodox, egalatarian and anti-coercive ideas to indigenous people is a commonplace of the Enlightenment. From multi-volume, best-selling, widely translated Jesuit accounts of dialogs with American indigenous intellectuals to sold-out plays that ran in Paris for decades, the Enlightenment attributed its ideology of liberty, autonomy and egalatarianism to indigenous people of the “New World.”
And yet, today, these attributions are widely discounted. They are characterized as convenient fairy tales spun by European thinkers who feared violent retribution — expulsion or even death — from the establishment if they put these thoughts in their own mouths, so they put them in the mouths of hypothetical “savages” from across the ocean.
But the Davids make a very compelling case — citing First Nations historians and anthropologists as well as the primary documents of the residents of New France and other American outposts of European societies — that the Enlightenment began with indigenous intellectuals of the Americas. These thinkers hailed from societies where leaders had to rely on persuasion, rather than coercion, to get people to follow their plans. They lived in societies that valued oratory, logic and rhetoric, where the natural response to an objectionable proposition was a devastating counterargument.
These indigenous intellectuals were responsible for “the Indigenous Critique” — a series of dialogs that spanned generations, crisscrossing the Atlantic both in written form and in person, as indigenous intellectuals visited Europe and mercilessly shredded the pre-Enlightenment consensus, inspiring European thinkers to the Enlightenment.
These Europeans — and their intellectual descendants — have devoted much of the time since in trying to formulate a theory for how we ended up the way we are: hierarchical, unequal, coercive. Starting with Rousseau and Hobbes, they spun a theory of the inevitable evolution of society: bands that yield tribes (whether noble or savage), that create agriculture and surplus and kings, that lead to cities and bureaucracy and hierarchy to manage complexity.
But — the Davids argue — the very origins of the Enlightenment disprove this hypothesis. The woodland people of the American northeast — source of the Indigenous Critique — lived in many ways. Some had agriculture but not hierarchy; some had hierarchy and not agriculture. The Americas had vast cities that were self-managed by local councils, and loose confederacies that were highly bureaucratized.
This is the jumping off point for a dizzying, thorough, beautifully told series of histories of ancient civilizations, many of which have only come into focus thanks to recent advances in archaeological technology. They show that every conceivable variation on centralization, coercion, hierarchy, violence, agriculture and urbanism has existed, in multiple places, for hundreds or thousands of years at a time.
More importantly, they reveal how thin the evolutionary theory of human civilization has worn. To maintain the neat picture of societies inevitable “progressing” through “stages,” we need to deploy increasingly unconvincing tricks, like calling 5,000 year periods of cultural stability “intermediate” or “early” or “late.”
But, the Davids say, something has happened. We’ve gotten stuck, here in the “modern” era. Civilizations through human history have all enjoyed some mix of three key freedoms:
I. The freedom to go somewhere else and expect to be welcomed thanks to duties of hospitality;
II. The freedom to disobey orders;
III. The freedom to imagine a different social arrangement.
These three freedoms are so thoroughly expunged from most of our modern world that we can barely imagine them. Indeed, much of the Davids’ work in this books is showing how the people who enjoyed these freedoms led complex, introspective, imaginative lives, rather than existing in a near-animal state.
They suggest that the most important of these freedoms is the third one — the freedom to imagine something else. Though they don’t invoke “capitalist realism” by name here, it’s highly relevant. When Margaret Thatcher declared “there is no alternative” (to unfettered, unequal, destructive unregulated market capitalism), she wanted it to be “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Jameson).
The attack in imagination itself is the source of our immobilization, our incapacity to disobey orders, our helpless, fatalistic hurtling towards nuclear armageddon and climate collapse.
Seen in this light, Dawn of Everything is a crucial intervention, fuel for a new imagination of a world governed by a radically different theory of human nature. We can organize ourselves without hierarchy, without inequality, without coercion. Our ancestors built stable societies with radically different social arrangements, no matter whether they were complex or simple, urban or agricultural or nomadic.
The just-so story that says we must live this way is well past its sell-by date and I think we know it. Between the pandemic and the wars raging around the world, there is an urgent appetite for change. So much of that urgency has been channeled into authoritarianism, xenophobia and hate, because we’ve lost our ability to imagine solidarity. Lost it? It was stolen from us, but ideological “science” that cherry-picked the evidence to claim that our world was inevitable, not contingent.
David Graeber was one of the most hopeful people I knew, someone who could dream of other ways of being together, whose dreams were informed by his deep scholarship. Most of all, he was able to convey that vision to others.
He and Wengrow produced an important, world-changing book. Read it, and you will never be the same again.
Image:
Macmillan
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything
31 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
xkdw
😂😂😂😂
savzzuk
For the Savvy Shopper
cautivadiito
violentado
mypinakothek
My Pinakothek
itsvs-moved
MOVED