Category Archives: Politically Incorrect

Im Michael Rivera. Im an American citizen.

When it comes to how much to value my political opinion, thats all you need to know about me. If you want to call me Latino or Hispanic, go ahead. Im OK with that. I call myself American.

I suppose Im a minority, but everyone is a minority of some sort. I am not a Person of Color. I dont know what that means, and I think its a term that divides us instead of bringing us together. There is way too much Us versus Them, too much identity apartheid, in todays political rhetoric.

I did one of those DNA tests, and my ethnicity estimate is 37 percent from Spain and 23 percent from Indigenous Americas for starters. Then theres the 17 percent from Ireland and Scotland, 6 percent Basque, 5 percent from France, and 3 percent European Jewish. Finish (no, not Finnish) it off with a smattering of 1 percent traces, including Northern Africa, Mali, the Andes and the Middle East.

Now I know that these tests are not definitive. They measure the appearance of genetic markers in current populations in various places and make assumptions that those markers have been there for a few centuries.

My Native American ancestors were here for thousands of years, but before that their ancestors were living in Asia, so its interesting, but maybe it doesnt matter.

And thats my point it doesnt matter.

I dont want any additional rights because my formerly European family has been here since the 1600s or because my Native American family has been here long before that. I dont expect more privileges or fewer privileges because of my ethnic pedigree or melanin content.

As an American citizen, Im entitled to one vote, just as is the American citizen who was naturalized yesterday. I want my one vote, and I dont want anyone else to have more than one vote.

America is always a work in progress, but its a wonderful country, and thats why so many people want to come here.

I dont blame people for wanting to come here, but the rule of law is one of the reasons this is a great nation, and if we dont control our borders, we have no rule of law and, eventually, will have no country. I think my Mexican cousins and my Irish cousins both have to play by the rules.

Since many immigrants come from Latin America and Asia, and since most illegal immigrants come from south of the border, anyone who thinks we should enforce our laws against illegal immigration or reduce legal immigration is called a racist.

Why? Because its easier to dismiss someone with an epithet than it is to engage in a discussion about an appropriate immigration policy.

We should be proud that we have built a country so attractive to others across the world. But there are almost 8 billion people on the planet, and they cant all live in the United States. We have an obligation to look after our neighbors and fellow citizens first.

I think we can do a better job of that, and protecting our environment, and rebuilding our infrastructure, if we reduce immigration. So you can call me a racist for that, too, although it turns out that a couple of national commissions have studied the issue and agreed with me.

E pluribus unum Out of many, one. Its a motto that has built this nation. You can agree or disagree with me on a proper immigration policy, but we can discuss our differences without the ugly name-calling that is so common to these debates.

Call me politically incorrect for supporting immigration cuts. Im OK with that. Look at my DNA results again. Im the United Nations of political incorrectness ... and proud to be an American.

Paso Robles resident Michael Rivera is a board member of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Californians for Population Stabilization. He has served on numerous governmental and private boards and commissions in Central California. The opinions expressed are his own.

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Michael Rivera: Im the United Nations of Political Incorrectness, and a Proud American - Noozhawk

WA and OR have used ballot by mail for many years, ballots are sent out by county auditors, filled out, then either mailed back or dropped off at official drop boxes (at least in Benton and Franklin County).

However, especially this year, the issue of voter ballot security has become a hot button topic. With numerous stories of allegedly lost, thrown away or otherwise mistreated ballots, people are concerned; and with online registration as well.

And now, perhaps online tampering? The Epoch Times ran an article over the weekend indicating that in Washington and Oregon, it appears that what they call "lax" security or safety requirements could allow persons to "cancel" other people's votes.

It's not cancelling as in wiping away completely, rather, has to do with requesting a new ballot online. The system is designed especially for first time voters, but others who may not have received an official ballot. If you have created a profile at vote.wa.gov, you can request a ballot, but if one has already been sent, that one will be cancelled--replaced by the new one requested.

The Times says people's birthdays are readily available online, especially via social media profiles. We looked at voter.votewa.gov, and your name and birthday are all that's required to register to vote, and view your vote/ballot status.

The Times raises the question that it would be easy for someone to obtain a person's birthday to go with their name, log into their voter profile and request a new ballot, thereby cancelling one they may have or have already filled out and sent in. This would greatly increase the chances of issues arising and their vote potentially not being counted. It would also cause greater backlog and confusion and delays in results.

The Times says it contacted a WA voter, who walked through the process with them, and confirmed this is possible. Here is what the screen looks like at vote.wa.gov, the page in question. It just requires name, and yes, birthday:

What led to this investigation is a report The Epoch Times saw on a website4chan.org and a discussion panel called "Politically Incorrect."

The panel showed screenshot examples of how some Oregonians were able to log in as Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, Oregon Secretary of State Bev. Clarno, and some other officials. The Times says it's not clear if they were able to print overseas, disabled or military ballots under the names of these officials. But it underscores how the lack of security requirements leaves these system ripe for potential misuse.

To read more about this story, click on the button below.

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Could Lack of Security Cause WA, OR Votes to Be Tampered With? - newstalk870.am

The Great Barrington Declaration might instead be called the Great Barrington Manifesto. That tweak would give it a more shall we say? proletarian ring.

The manifesto, to stick with that term, is named after the town in Massachusetts where it was unveiled earlier this month by three scientists with distinguished academic appointments who advocate a Focused Protection strategy for controlling COVID-19. The idea is to focus still more on protecting the most vulnerable while letting others live normally even if the result is that the virus will spread among the less vulnerable until, in a sense, it begins to burn out.

Hardly mainstream. But wrong?

The crux is this: Dont wait for a vaccine waiting still longer will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.

The manifesto thus weighs in more on the side of the jobless, the hard up and the impoverished than on the side of the perennially comfortable. It recognizes that he who can wait for a vaccine is the retired executive toasting friends during Zoom cocktails, not the restaurateur looking for work after the business in which he invested years of his life went puff. She who cannot wait is the maid shown the door to the street by a struggling hotel chain, not the six-figure-income lawyer who finds doing conference calls from her home is a nice break from doing them from the office.

You will recall that the pandemic and the lockdowns following it have cost tens of millions of jobs in the United States alone, and you have to ask how far the federal treasury can be stretched to provide continuing relief.

The manifesto advocates a gamble, and as Floridians understand, it is a gamble that Gov. Ron DeSantis is already making as he lifts COVID-19 occupancy limits on restaurants and prohibits local governments from fining people who violate their face mask orders. Indeed, he has taken advice from the manifestos authors, which flies in the teeth of the COVID-19 orthodoxy holding that we must continue to hunker down, albeit differently from state to state until, someday, vaccine makers bring us deliverance.

The authors of the manifesto are Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya, all epidemiologists, their university affiliations being, respectively, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford. They remain dissidents among their peers, to be sure. National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins calls their strategy fringe and dangerous. The chief of the World Health Organization predicts unnecessary infections, suffering, and death.

The authors of the manifesto see it differently. I should say at this point that, hardly expert but also desiring a new way forward, so do I.

The manifesto slants not toward a libertarian line of protest but rather a communitarian. Who suffers most from lower vaccination rates resulting from lockdowns, from fewer cancer screenings, from depression? The manifesto answers: the working class and younger members of society.

As for the young, it goes on: Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice. And who are the young who have the fewest out-of-school education options? We all know.

The manifesto does not, cannot, shy from the term herd immunity, an epidemiological concept now all but deemed politically incorrect. Though complex in its mathematical expression, the concept essentially refers to the natural immunity that builds across a population as a virus passes through it. Herd immunity, though assisted by a vaccine, can be attained safely enough ahead of a vaccine that is the manifestos hotly contested proposition.

Heres the argument, then: The most compassionate approach that balances risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection while better protecting those who are at highest risk.

Better protecting those at highest risk, especially the frail elderly, will be a big test of the gamble now under way in Florida, never among the states to lock down soon and hard. To date, of the roughly 16,000 COVID-19 deaths in Florida, about four in 10 have occurred in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. There is nothing but misery in those numbers, even if the nursing-home figure roughly accords with the national average despite the special challenges in a state with a large retirement population.

Every approach to COVID-19 is a gamble weighing risk versus benefit, an effort to be the least bad option. In the weeks since the manifesto was issued, it has been signed by more than 400,000 people betting it is a gamble worth taking.

Richard Koenig, a retired pharmaceutical-company executive and former reporter at the St. Petersburg Times, the predecessor of the Tampa Bay Times, is the author of the Kindle Single No Place To Go, an account of efforts to provide toilets amid a cholera outbreak in Ghana.

Originally posted here:
Taking a gamble with the pandemic | Column - Tampa Bay Times

ThursdayOct15,2020at12:45PM

Are you suffering from "TFS"?

Maybe you voted for Trump in 2016 because you were tired of business as usual. You loved it when Trump would say or do things that were so politically incorrect. You thought he would become more "presidential." But all the name-calling, juvenile tweets and drama have become too much. After almost four years, youre suffering from "Trump Fatigue Syndrome."

You may have started to have second thoughts when you heard thousands of young children were being separated from their parents at the border. His refusal to criticize white nationalists carrying torches and shouting racial obscenities in Charlottesville made you uneasy.

You liked the idea that Trump was a wealthy businessman, so you were surprised and a little angry that he only paid a total of $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.

You were shocked to learn that he knew how dangerous the coronavirus was back in February, but chose to play it down. Even now, he shows little sympathy for the 215,000 who have died.

When Trump got it due to his own reckless behavior, his first instinct was to suggest he got it from the Gold Star families who attended a reception at the White House. You grimaced when he put his own Secret Service at risk, forcing them to drive him around Walter Reed hospital in a cheap publicity stunt.

If youre suffering from "TFS," the cure is simple: Cast your vote for Joe Biden, and youll feel better in the morning. So will the nation.

Jim Van Slyke, Topeka

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Letter to the editor: Prescription for 'Trump Fatigue Syndrome' - The Topeka Capital-Journal

Adam Sandler's lucrative deal with Netflix continues with the recent Hubie Halloween, so it's time to rank each of his movies from worst to best.

Adam Sandler has now released seven Netflix exclusive movies but which are the best and the worst?Thanks to his charming and energetic personality,as well as his accessiblestyle that mixes crass humor and over-the-top slapstick, Adam Sandler's comedies have been massively popular with audiences for a quarter of a century. The same unfortunately can't be said about the critical reception of most of these films, as most of Sandler's films are labelled as bad. Critics more often than not correctly labeling them as lazy humor that caters to the lowest common denominator and this is especially true when it comes to output that's produced by his own studio, Happy Madison.

Just like any artist with a body of work as extensive as Sandler's, not every Happy Madison production that stars him is equal in quality, or lack thereof. This metric also applies to the films that were released exclusively by Netflix as part of their $400 million deal with Happy Madison.The seven Adam Sandler comedies released by Netflix so far contain the kinds of juvenile gags and jokes we expect from his Happy Madison output. However, each filmvaries enough in tone, sub-genre, and narrative drive to stand out on their own.

Related:The Adam Sandler Multiverse Theory Explained

As much asSandlersticks to his guns when it comes to specific tropes that are expected from his work, there's a refreshing amount of variety as well.But which ones are on par with his worst, like Jack and Jill, which ones are genuinely inspired, like You Don't Mess With The Zohan, and which ones are in between?

There's a solid, TV-MA-rated, 80-minute western parody that wears its envelope-pushing, politically incorrect absurdity on its sleeve, hiding within The Ridiculous Six's bloated two-hour runtime. Sadly, it's padded with repetitive gags that are designed to make you gag for no other reason than easy shock value, though the TV-14 rating keeps Sandler from going overboard. There are bright spots of absurdist slapstick, like a character shooting his own head aftergetting decapitated, but it's all too rare. Otherwise, The Ridiculous Six's go-to humor is divided into several cringe-inducing categories, from any excuse to mixing all kinds of bodily fluids in the grossest permutations possible to lazy and kind-of-racist puns likegiving Native American characters names like No Bra and Beaver Breath. The Ridiculous Six is not only the worst of Sandler's Netflix outings but is one of the worst films in his career.

Sandler's latest Netflix outing purports to be a lighthearted, family-friendly comedy-horror that takes place in Salem, Massachusetts -the Halloween capital of the US-, like Hocus Pocus, the other Salem-based season's favorite. Director Steven Brill manages a playful tone that finds the right line between real scares and comic relief, and Hubie Halloween's contrast-heavy cinematography is the most attractive out of Happy Madison's Netflix outings. The problem is Sandler himself, whogoes full Little Nicky and The Waterboy by creating yet another mumbling and abrasive cartoon character while expecting the audience to take him seriously whenhe switches gears into the obligatory tear-jerking territory. In many ways, Sandler's titular character, a Halloween super-fan who gets bullied by his neighbors, sticks out even more than Nicky and Bobby Boucher, since Hubie Halloween sports amore-or-less grounded list of supporting characters.Hubie Halloween carries an anti-bullying message, but it's delivered in an after school special way that practically breaks the fourth wall to make sure that the audience learned their lesson.

The Week Of, about one rich (Chris Rock) and one working-class (Sandler) father butting heads with each other about who will pay for their children's upcoming wedding, could have turned into an insightful and organically humorous study on modern class differences in the US. Co-writer/director Robert Smigel, who created Triumph The Insult Comic Dog, is certainly not a stranger to such biting satire, but the film is too toothless and languidly paced to work neither as satire nor as a madcap Adam Sandler comedy. Smigel also returns to the same well of one-note gags too often. Sandler's icky 1990s exploitation of people with disabilities to score cheap laughs gets an unwelcome reunion in the form of his character's amputee uncle (Jim Barone) freaking everyone out at the wedding party simply because of his condition. The plot gets lost in a series of 1980s sit-com-style conflicts that can easily be resolved with a single line of exposition. The Week Of doesn't rank as low as The Ridiculous Six and Hubie Halloween mainly thanks toRock's introspective performance as a broken man who gradually realizes that his entitled behavior resulted in the dissolution of his family.

Related:Theory: Adam Sandler Made Hubie Halloween To Punish Us For Uncut Gems

Most of the time, Adam Sandler's comedies try to cater to the family market with PG-13 material that contains crass humor but doesn't become too edgy. But every once in a while, he'll let loose with a comedy album that firmly earns its "Parental Advisory" sticker, or a hard-R-rating. The Do-Over is a fairly competent comedy-action that wears its TV-MA rating on its sleeve. Fromsimulated double-fellatio that becomes funnier as it uncomfortably drags on to a gag about hairy testicles, Sandler successfully translates the naughty man-child energy from his comedy albums to The Do-Over. There certainly isn't much depth to any of the gross-out gags, but at least this time Sandler swings for the fences. TheMacGuffinthat the odd couple protagonists are after a tablet that has the cure for cancer hidden inside it results in a plot that becomes too labyrinthine for the film's more simplistic tone, but Sandler and David Spade's commitment to the script's politically incorrect humorkeeps the pace chugging along.

For Murder Mystery, Happy Madison wentAgatha Christie bydropping two working-class New Yorkers (Sandler and Jennifer Aniston) in the middle of a whodunit full of intrigue, suspense, and the prerequisite rich and smugcharacterswho sometimes literally stab each other in the back for the sake of power and money. Ever since the first season of Friends, Aniston has perfected playing characters who are adorably uncomfortable in settings they don't think they belong in, so she's a natural fit for this material. Sandler, on the other hand, is a bit too charged and abrasive to fully sell the "fish out of water" quality of his character. Murder Mystery's glitzy style and halfway clever murder plot full of surprising twists and turns make it an engaging experience that runs a brisk 97 minutes. It's not the best Sandler comedy, nor is it the best Christie send-up, but together they result in a fairly entertaining romp.

In Sandy Wexler, Sandler pays loving tribute to his real-life manager Sandy Wernick, with this charming dramedy that sees Happy Madison and Netflix adopt a Woody Allen-esque freestyle character study mixed with the studio's trademark affinity for potty humor and broad slapstick. It's certainly an odd mix and Sandler almost blows his performance by using yet another silly voice, but the title character'slove forhis craft and dedication to his Z-list celebrity clients disarms the initial skepticism. The central romance of the story, between Wexler and his rising star singer client Courtney (Jennifer Hudson), works thanks to the natural chemistry between Sandler and Hudson. And the story's hilarious Greek Chorus, made up of the most celebrity cameos in a Sandler film to date,is the film's cherry on top. The plot goes on too many tangents and the final edit could have used a trimming by about half an hour, but Sandy Wexler earns its credit as one of Happy Madison's most compassionate outings.

This comedy special, in which Adam Sandler employs a gamut of his trademark songs laced with adult humor, edgy stand-up bits, and honest tidbits about his personal life, captures why he's endured as a beloved pop culture figure in as much of a vulnerable and unfiltered manner as possible. 100% Fresh is pieced together using footage from various venues where Sandler performed in, from a cozy comedy club to a theater full of thousands of adoring fans. Yet no matter the size of the audience, Sandler exudes his unique warmth and charisma, always making it seem like he's merely shooting the breeze with some close friends. This lack of ego in his approach turns 100% Fresh into one of his most engaging efforts as a comedian. In between the howling laughter, it's also hard not to shed a couple of tears at a touching tribute to Adam Sandler's deceased friend and SNL alum Chris Farley.

Next: Adam Sandler's Career is Underrated

Marvel Wasted The Opportunity To Tell The Avengers Coulson Is Alive

Oktay Ege Kozak is a screenwriter, script coach and film/TV critic. He lives near Portland, Oregon, with his wife, daughter, two King Charles Spaniels, and a Golden Retriever.

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Every Adam Sandler Netflix Movie Ranked Worst To Best - Screen Rant

A friend of mine, a research scientist in a Cambridge lab, told me about a pre-Covid encounter he had in his faculty building earlier this year. He saw two female colleagues coming out of the loo, and greeted them: Hello, ladies.

But, before he could go on his merry way, looks of thunder were fired at him and he was told off for having called them ladies, and as is so often the way now slapped with a lecture about his presumptuousness, patriarchy and offensiveness.

My friend is no dunderhead when it comes to politically incorrect bloopers, so the mistake baffled him. Being a gentleman, he apologised but was left shocked, deflated and uneasy.

Welcome to the brave no-longer-so-new world created by the people now controlling what can and cannot be said, written or thought. Its mean-spirited, dreary and frightening.

But theres something especially intolerable about their regime now. It was bad enough before Covid. At least we could ignore them and go to the pub with friends (remember those people from other households whose company we like?) and bitch about them.

But now we are being constantly bludgeoned by the PC police, who instead of worrying about more important things, like peoples livelihoods, or China are busy enforcing lunatic rules that change by the day.

People are battling isolation like never before in this crisis and, on top of that, the woke brigade is causing a deep sense of alienation. Our culture and language are fast becoming unrecognisable.

I was particularly struck last week by the strangeness of the new things added to the verboten list. In what might have been a ray of light in the gloom for her many millions of fans, it was announced that Gal Gadot, the beautiful Israeli star of Wonder Woman, had been cast as Cleopatra in a forthcoming film about the Egyptian queen.

But the cultural bullies lost no time in crying racism and Israeli imperialism. Twitter poured forth responses like this one from Sameera Khan, a broadcast journalist and former Miss New Jersey who has 65,000 followers: Which Hollywood dumb--- thought it would be a good idea to cast an Israeli actress as Cleopatra (a very bland looking one) instead of a stunning Arab actress like Nadine Njeim? And shame on you, Gal Gadot. Your country steals Arab land & yourestealing their movie roles smh. (Which, if you were wondering, stands for shake my head.)

It was quickly pointed out that Cleopatra was not Arab; she was Greek with Persian heritage and therefore Gadot was entitled to the role (the anti-Semitic jibe about Gadot being Israeli was left aside as just business as usual).

What got lost, of course, was the fact that whatever Gadots ethnicity, she should be able to play Cleopatra if she is the best woman for the part. Roles in art dont belong to certain ethnicities, with the possible exception of Othello. But who has the energy to point that out?

In another ludicrous little tantrum by the PC police, it was made clear that the term sexual preference is now offensive. In Tuesdays confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett used it in reference to a legal case concerning same-sex marriage.

Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono wrote a lengthy admonishment, which has since been applauded by thousands.

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Never mind Covid, the woke brigade is turning this into a very dark world - Telegraph.co.uk

Police officers stationed in schools, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy told a conference at the University of Connecticut last week, are why there is a "school-to-prison pipeline" that targets Black and Hispanic students. So he has introduced legislation to forbid federal funds from paying for such police.

"All across our country," Murphy said, "kids are being arrested, sent into the school-to-prison pipeline for ordinary misbehaviors often connected to their disabilities or childhood traumas, and that one negative interaction, which ends up with an arrestable offense, often leads kids down a path from which they can never return.

In Connecticut, a pretty progressive state, if you are a Black student in a school with a school resource officer, you are three times more likely to be arrested than if you're in a school that doesn't have a school resource officer. For Latino students in our state, for some reason, the number is actually six times.

So are school administrators and teachers a bunch of racist bums as Murphy suggests, or as the social science suggests, are crime, misbehavior and failure in school, and child neglect and abuse racially and ethnically disproportionate because poverty is?

To illustrate his point, the senator told the story of a student in a Connecticut city school system who at the start of 10th grade began walking out of class, "wandering the hallways until he bumped into another teacher, administrator, or school security officer who would bring him to the principal's office. He ended up getting suspended for a few days and sent home to his grandmother, with whom he lived."

Eventually in one of his wanderings the student got into an argument with a vice principal that was loud enough to prompt the school resource officer to arrest him for disorderly conduct. As it turned out, Murphy explained, "This kid didn't know how to read. He was years behind his peers. He had a learning disability and was mortally embarrassed to sit in this class when he couldn't understand anything the teacher was talking about. Luckily he had access to a good legal aid attorney who kept him out of the court system."

But the senator's example doesn't sound at all like a case of racism, overbearing pedantry, or the "school-to-prison pipeline." Instead it sounds like a case of chronic disruption by a student, of the disorderly conduct eventually charged to him -- probably because it was necessary to lay hands on him to end the confrontation with the vice principal -- and a routine diversion from the criminal-justice system.

It also sounds like a case of child abuse or neglect at home and grotesque social promotion at school. How do you get into 10th grade without being able to read? It's easy in Connecticut.

Indeed, Murphy's anecdote makes him seem unaware of just how hard it is for anyone to work his way into prison in Connecticut these days. For the prison population is steadily declining even as the state has more incorrigible offenders remaining free after their 10th, 20th, and even 30th arrest.

Police officers in school aren't the problem. At worst they are a symptom. Nor is the solution what the senator advocates, "wraparound social services." Whatever the solution is, it begins with asking: Where are all the messed-up kids are coming from?

But with Murphy and most elected officials, that is a most politically incorrect and prohibited question.

* * *

BARRETT THE LIBERAL: Restoring the civil rights of felons after they have completed their sentences is properly part of the liberal political agenda. For permanently alienating people from society just invites more trouble.

But Connecticut's U.S. senators, Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, both liberals, are making an exception in the hope of obstructing appointment to the Supreme Court of the federal appeals court judge nominated by President Trump, Amy Coney Barrett. In a dissenting opinion last year Barrett wrote that the constitutional right to bear arms can be revoked only for someone who has shown a proclivity for violence or threat to public safety. The case before her involved a man who had committed Medicare fraud.

Barrett's opinion in that case, Connecticut's senators say, makes her a dangerous extremist. Actually that opinion puts her in the liberal mainstream, which the senators have betrayed so they can defeat her.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer.

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Why are kids so messed up? Murphy thinks cops in school do it - Journal Inquirer

The two worst things that happened to me during the March COVID lockdown were:

In all honesty, it was the eyebrow thing that caused me the most grief. But given that everyone suffered some sort of corona-related DIY body hair disaster (hello, pandemic bangs), I'll focus on the accidental institutionalisation.

I've always been certifiably crazy (I know that's a politically incorrect term but I feel strongly about having the right to use it about myself). Some of my earliest memories as a child involved existential dread and serious contemplation of ... well ... not being alive, to put it bluntly.

Mental illness stalks several members of my family so at least some of my madness is probably genetic. But multiple episodes of abuse from the past has also hardwired my central nervous system into near constant fight, flight or freeze mode.

People who've suffered trauma know the deal. We'll be gaily going about our business in 2020 and suddenly we teleport back in time and it feels like The Terrible Things are happening all over again live.

Unsurprisingly, there have been many times in my life when I've barely held it together.

One of those occasions was my late teens when, after dropping out of high-school and running away from home, I barely survived a year of eating disorders, cutting and industrial-grade risk taking.

Then there was the time I was a new mother with a six-month-old baby who'd yet to sleep more than a few hours in a row. I woke one Sunday morning quite convinced she would be better off without me.

Checking myself into the postnatal depression (PND) unit of a nearby psychiatric hospital worked like a charm.

It wasn't because the treatment I received was particularly useful for an anti-social weirdo like myself. (While most of the staff were delightful, one especially Nurse Ratchet-y individual who talked to me as if I was my daughter's age had a habit of wandering into my room after lights out, shining a fishing torch into my face and shouting "HAVE YOU DONE YOUR MENTALLY CALMING, GETTING-READY-TO-SLEEP RELAXATION EXERCISES?" as I was trying to do my mentally calming, getting-ready-to-sleep relaxation exercises.)

What actually helped was the realisation that I was developing way more insight into the way my brain worked (and didn't work) than many paid professionals.

Indeed, my designated psychiatrist in the PND ward urged me to leave only five nights into my six-week stay because he decided that in my case institutionalisation was contraindicated for sanity. That said, I'd still re-admit myself in a hot minute if I thought I needed it.

These days, I'm extremely skilled at living as the DSM-5 personified.

When I get those "time to die" thoughts, I tune into the sliver of myself that still speaks sense. Instead of panicking about the blackness and bleakness of my thinking or buying into their "logic", I use them as diagnostic. "Wow," is what I think to myself. "Check out the blackness and bleakness of THOSE thoughts. Time to outsource for some assistance."

This is how things went down during my COVID crisis. For months, it had been just me and my teenaged daughter living under what felt like house arrest. I am immunocompromised as a result of having had cancer, which meant we had to remain hermetically sealed from the world way longer than everyone else.

I kept up an excellent impersonation of a sane-ish lady until the weekend my daughter went to stay at her dad's for a few weeks.

In the absence of any exogenous reasons to give meaningful shapes to the days, I spiralled. It's difficult to find the words to describe the visceral and malignant misery I felt though David Foster Wallace has a good stab at it in Infinite Jest:

"The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square ...The person [whose] invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise ... Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window ... The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors ... You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

Foster, tragically, didn't make it. In 2008, he committed what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called "self-murder".

I, on the other hand, have become a complete cockroach when it comes to doing the Bee Gee's thing of stayin' alive. When I started feeling that terror way beyond falling earlier this year, for instance, I did as I have done for many decades now and sought help.

I started by ringing my preferred crisis line and as per usual given my mega weirdness ended up in an oddly meta conversation with the anonymous counsellor.

The ABC gains unprecedented access to join social worker Anne-Marie Skegg and psychiatric nurse Chris Ward on the job, as they respond to acute mental health emergencies.

"I feel like you're reading from a script," I said.

"What I'm hearing you say is that you feel like I'm reading from a script," he replied.

"Now I feel like you're doing Active Listening with a capital 'A' and a capital 'L'," I said.

"What I'm hearing you say is that you feel like I'm doing active listening with a"

Long silence.

"Oh," he said finally. "I see what you mean."

And then as has happened so frequently in our house this year the line dropped out.

At the time, I didn't think much of it. I was feeling slightly better and figured the actively listening phone dude would call me back if he was concerned. I did, however, take the additional precaution of ringing my closest friend and asking her to come watch over me for a while.

Five minutes after she arrived, there was a firm knock on the front door.

On the NSW North Coast everyone knows each other. And everyone seems to know someone. Someone who has lost a loved one to suicide; someone who has become acquainted with the black dog.

Standing on my front porch were three burly police officers and two paramedics. Police vehicles and an ambulance blocked the street and neighbours were gathering in small, complex formations.

"You made a phone call earlier today," the largest of the police officers said by way of introduction.

"That is correct," I replied, launching matter-of-factly into a blow-by-blow account of the entire crisis conversation in a typically neuro-atypical manner.

I explained about the call drop-out. I explained I was feeling a lot better. I pointed out my friend. But the vibe was rapidly unravelling.

The three facemask-free officers insisted that I unlock the front door and show them every medication in the house. I said I was concerned about COVID.

"If you don't open the door immediately, we'll have you sectioned," the biggest one said.

Whether you want to know more about how depression actually manifests, different treatment approaches or go deep on specific experiences, from the light-hearted and humorous to the confronting and challenging, we've got the book for you.

My friend got antsy. "You're making things so much worse for her," she said, pulling out her phone to start filming.

The volume of everyone's voices rose rapidly. By the time I unlocked the front door, the police had changed tack.

"If you don't get in the ambulance immediately and get professionally assessed in hospital, we'll have you sectioned," was their new line.

At which point, I decided the sanest move was simply to succumb to asylum-isation.

During the ride to hospital, I apologised to the cute paramedics saying I really was OK and felt bad for wasting their time when so many other folk must be in greater need of their help.

"You're not wasting our time," one of these two women said. "A lot of the times we attend these sorts of calls, we don't find a person, we find a body."

For every death by suicide, as many as 30 others attempt to end their life. Australia has a suicide problem it seems we can all agree on that but when it comes to solutions, the verdict isn't so clear.

I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Not because I personally needed police and paramedic protection right in that moment, but because I live in a place where mental health is taken so seriously entire, emergency squads arrive at the domiciles of civilians regarded as psychiatrically imperilled.

Once we reached the hospital, the police decided for reasons I still can't fathom to section me anyway. The woman at the front desk of the psych ward took all my stuff and patted me down.

She then sent me in to talk to the (exceedingly delightful) triage nurse who agreed the whole sectioning exercise was bizarre, though he did gently explain that the crisis line I'd called had a duty of care to contact emergency services if its phone folk believed that life was in immediate danger.

His view was that I should simply be permitted to go home but because of the circumstances of my admission I had to be assessed by a psychiatrist first.

For three hours I waited in a room lit only with a reptilian green bulb or fluorescent tube. It did not soothe me so much as space-shuttle the whole scene into peak surrealism. During this increasingly weird wait, a call from my 13-year-old daughter came through via my smart watch.

I did my very best impression of a normal person (though this always makes me feel like I'm wearing drag) and hoped she wouldn't use the tracking app we both have on our phones and notice I was not at home but trapped in what was becoming an increasingly boring B-grade psych ward movie (though, just FYI, I did fill her in on the latter later).

Finding the right psychologist is a bit like app dating. You hope it'll be a good match, but sometimes you're left disappointed.

Finally, the psychiatric registrar (also delightful) arrived, sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, chatted for a while, and said, "you're free to go".

I walked out feeling decidedly chipper. I'm a maestro in a crisis and having to wrangle my fiercely protective friend and the three pushy police officers had been fantastically distracting. Plus, I've a total sucker for urban thrill-seeking.

"So, this is what it's like to be sectioned in a psych ward," I'd kept thinking to myself. "Now that's something to tick off the bucket list!"

Then, inevitably, the adrenalin wore off. The slow, painstaking details of psychiatric rebuilds aren't nearly as exciting as a crisis: gradual experiments with new meds, a period of more frequent therapy, endless mindfulness meditation, annoying exercise, dosed bursts of sunlight.

It's a yawn-fest but, for me at least, it works.

I find the annual "mental health chat" with my GP incredibly uncomfortable, but there are ways to make it less of a drag, Graham Panther writes.

What also works is telling people. When other humans ask how I am, I answer honestly.

"Experiencing a bit of suicidal ideation, now that you ask."

"Amused that the cops who sectioned me on the weekend chastised me for not changing out of my pyjamas before boarding the ambulance."

"Entirely mortified by the Groucho Marx eyebrows."

I blurt these things out partly because one of my multiple diagnoses is autism spectrum disorder and as the comedian Hannah Gadsby puts it about her own autism:

"[T]hat's how we roll. Pretty much, it's like, 'I have a piece of information you seem to be missing. You may or may not be ready to hear this information, but I'll tell you, because knowledge is power, ignorance is a cage and feelings can be dealt with. I bid you good day'."

The other reason I talk is that silence around mental health is toxic sometimes fatally so.

David Foster Wallace is my favourite writer ever but his burning building analogy is flawed. It's true that choosing to stay alive with an unquiet mind can burn so badly it feels excruciating, unbearable even. But, unlike the flames of a real inferno, it's possible to sit this type of scorching out and eventually walk away mostly unscathed.

In that other place, however, there are no takebacks.

Emma Jane is a freelance writer and an associate professor in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW.

Here is the original post:
How I was accidentally sectioned into a psych ward during the coronavirus lockdown - ABC News

PHOENIX They packed into the room to cheer their heroes.

The crowd of more than 100 hollered enthusiastically at Henry Cejudo, a local hero and Olympic gold medalist, the son of undocumented immigrants from Mexico who had gone on to become a mixed martial arts superstar.

But they were really there to celebrate President Trump.

Wearing red Make America Great Again hats, several men held giant American flags and stood in front of several campaign signs: Latinos for Trump, Cops for Trump and another imploring them to text WOKE to get the latest information on the campaign.

In the words of Eric Trump, the presidents son and the headliner of the event, the battle is simple. Its right versus wrong, he said, to a loud round of cheers.

They are trying to cancel our voice, guys.

Men are the core of President Trumps base. In polling, gender gaps exist in nearly every demographic: among white voters, among senior citizens, among voters without a college degree, men are far more likely than women to support his re-election. And little of that support has shifted in the days since Mr. Trump announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Polls suggest that this presidential election could result in the largest gender gap since the passage of the 19th Amendment a century ago.

Then there is one of the most enduring questions of the Trump appeal: Who are the nearly 30 percent of Hispanic voters who say they support him, despite his anti-immigration rhetoric and policies?

There is no one simple answer. Mr. Trump has strong backing from Cuban and Venezuelan exiles in South Florida, who like his stance against communism. And his campaign has heavily courted evangelical Latinos throughout the country. But no other group worries Democrats more than American-born Hispanic men, particularly those under the age 45, who polls show are highly skeptical of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Yet what has alienated so many older, female and suburban voters is a key part of Mr. Trumps appeal to these men, interviews with dozens of Mexican-American men supporting Mr. Trump shows: To them, the macho allure of Mr. Trump is undeniable. He is forceful, wealthy and, most important, unapologetic. In a world where at any moment someone might be attacked for saying the wrong thing, he says the wrong thing all the time and does not bother with self-flagellation.

I feel so powerful, the president declared at a rally in Florida on Monday, standing in front of Air Force One. Lest anyone miss the message, the rally ended with Macho Man by the Village People blasting on the speakers.

Paul Ollarsaba Jr., a 41-year-old Marine veteran, voted for a Republican for the first time in 2016, won over by what he saw as Mr. Trumps commitment to the military.

I am Mexican, Mr. Ollarsaba said, adding that for years he thought that meant he had to vote for Democrats. When he began supporting Mr. Trump in 2016, his family ostracized him. My parents say: Why are you supporting a racist? Youre Mexican, you have to vote this way, he said. No, its my country. Its fear, people are afraid of saying they support the president.

Keep up with Election 2020

Mr. Cejudo clearly had no such fear. When President Trump hosted large rallies in Nevada last month, Mr. Cejudo joined several other M.M.A. fighters who backed his campaign.

Ive been the biggest fan of him, said Mr. Cejudo, 33, recalling watching The Apprentice in a high school class. We need a businessman, we need somebody like this to run our country.

Other attendees at the event with Mr. Cejudo and Eric Trump spoke of watching Mr. Trump on The Apprentice, saying they liked his strong style, his apparent confidence in his own opinions. In interviews, they said they viewed his actions as president much in the same way: Even those they do not wholeheartedly agree with, they see as further evidence of his strength.

They said they saw his defiance of widely accepted medical guidance in the face of his own illness not as a sign of poor leadership, but one of a man who does his own research to reach his own conclusion. They see his disdain for masks as an example of his toughness, his incessant interruptions during the debate with Mr. Biden as an effective use of his power.

We saw him being a boss, said Edwin Gonzales, 31, who held a large American flag outside the Trump campaign office. And for him to go down the escalator is basically the same thing its like, Dang, the boss has stepped down and hes putting himself out there to be the president. Thats whats exciting.

Mr. Gonzales added that for him, and many other Trump supporters, the president represented the best of capitalism, adding, Hes a boss and they wanted to be him, they idolize him.

At the event, voters said they admired President Trump and also criticized Mr. Biden, whom many of these supporters described as weak and deserving of the derogatory label coined by the Trump campaign: Basement Biden.

Indeed, many of these men dismiss the need for masks themselves. After being screened with temperature checks at the event with Eric Trump and Mr. Cejudo, almost none of the audience members wore a mask, nor did any of the speakers.

Mr. Biden has mocked President Trumps reluctance over masks. What is this macho thing, Im not going to wear a mask? he said during one town hall event this month. The comment prompted a commentator on Fox to retort that Mr. Biden might as well carry a purse with that mask.

Were at a turning point in this country where we can either be afraid or move forward, said Ricco Rossi, 40. I think what they have done in the last few months, they have damaged their party more. They try to scare us.

Oct. 20, 2020, 6:07 p.m. ET

Though Hispanic women overwhelmingly support Mr. Biden, Hispanic men appear to have a persistent discomfort, with polls showing him struggling to maintain more than 60 percent of the group, far below his average among nonwhite voters. (Polls show him still well ahead of Mr. Trumps roughly 30 percent support from Hispanic voters.) Mr. Biden has not done enough to directly reach out to these young Latino men, Republican and Democratic strategists say.

You have these U.S.-born Hispanic males under 40 who are pretty Trumpy, the question is why? said Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant involved with the Lincoln Project, which is working to get Mr. Trump out of the White House.

Both parties have often focused their outreach efforts on white, working-class voters, though many Hispanic men share the same basic priorities. Theyre English dominant, they are facing very similar economic situations, listening to the same media, Mr. Madrid said.

After facing months of persistent criticism that it was not doing enough to reach out to Latino voters, the Biden campaign has released several Spanish language advertisements in the last few weeks, including one featuring Bad Bunny, a pop star known for his gender-fluid style. Other advertisements focus heavily on the way Trump administration has targeted Latinos, a message that simply does not resonate among men who do not want to see themselves pitied.

Some Democrats argue that the support for Mr. Trump is an example of machismo culture, venerating traditional gender roles and a kind of hyper-masculinity. But the enthusiasm hints at some of the underlying trends among U.S.-born Latinos. More Hispanic women than men attend and graduate from college, while Hispanic men tend to be overrepresented in law enforcement institutions, including the military, the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Yet the admiration of Mr. Trump reveals something deeper as well. Democratic pollsters who have closely tracked Hispanic men say they are more likely to prioritize jobs and the economy and less likely to be concerned about immigration and racism. Many Hispanic men are singularly focused on earning a living, gaining an economic edge that they can pass on to their children. There is a deep belief in an up-by-your-bootstraps mentality and that Mr. Trump did no such thing seems utterly beside the point.

Joshua Tapia, a 35-year-old cashier, said that before the pandemic, he believed he was much better off economically, because he started investing in the stock market. And now?

A lot of jobs are suffering right now, and I dont blame Trump, I just blame circumstances, unfortunately, he said. Nobody could have seen how this played out.

Even devoted Democrats have criticized Mr. Biden for offering a somewhat fuzzy economic message, at a time when the pandemic has left more than 10 percent of Latinos unemployed and many more with a reduction in wages.

In the Latino community, you are defined by your ability to provide, said Toms Robles Jr., an executive director of Lucha, a progressive group that is campaigning for Mr. Biden and other Democrats in Arizona. Folks who live in a perpetual state of economic insecurity want to look around and at least believe that you can do great in this economy. Biden needs to have a message that they matter, that he is going to create an economic reality they have the ability to make it.

In interviews with scores of Hispanic Trump supporters at events in Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona over the last year, nearly everyone said their politics angered some friends and family, and rejected any suggestion that their support was based on anti-immigrant attitudes.

And it is not quite assimilation either: These men are proud to be Latino, children and grandchildren of Mexican immigrants specifically, and many have made an effort to continue speaking Spanish.

Many say there is some appeal in being a political curiosity and voting differently than the vast majority of Latinos.

Even Mr. Cejudo, the M.M.A. star, told the enthusiastic crowd in South Phoenix that he had been shunned for his views, which had made him only more outspoken.

Getting backlash as a Latino, you know what that tells me, he said. That theres a lot of ignorance in this game.

He told the group supporters of a president whose first campaign was largely built on opposing illegal immigration that his own mother came from Mexico in a politically incorrect way. He said his father was later deported, while his mother helped him nurture his dreams of becoming an Olympian.

Then he posed for pictures with a flashy bicep flex.

Go here to read the rest:
Why Latinos and Hispanic Men Are a Part of Trump's Base - The New York Times

I do not remember exactly when various supporters of the Center-Left started referring to part of the Likud leadership especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a group of his henchmen from among the Likud ministers and senior MKs as a crime organization. Use of this term by former soccer player and current TV presenter Eyal Berkovic opened a whole Pandoras box of politically incorrect and legally problematic statements.I must admit that I am not happy with the use of crime organization in this context. A crime organization may be defined as a centralized, hierarchical enterprises run by criminals to engage in illegal activity, most commonly for profit. Even though I feel that Netanyahus conduct in recent years, which appears to be dictated primarily by his approaching trial on criminal charges, and the blind support he receives from his staunchest supporter are highly irregular, at times even bordering on breaches of the law, I do not believe they qualify to be defined as a crime organization.A WEEK and a half ago, on the Friday evening talk show on Channel 12 Ofira and Berko, presented by Ofira Asayag and Eyal Berkovic, Transportation Minister Miri Regev attacked Berkovic for having allegedly referred to the Likud as a whole as a crime organization, and to its 1.5 million voters as supporters of a crime organization, in an interview the previous week with Coalition Chairman Miki Zohar.In the interview with Zohar, Berkovic had complained that the government totally ignored the policy proposals of Coronavirus Project Coordinator Prof. Ronni Gamzu. You are behaving like a crime organization. You are doing whatever you please. You dont give a damn about [Alternate Prime Minister Benny] Gantz.To return to Regev, she proceeded to demand that Berkovic apologize immediately to the 1.5 million Likudniks or else she would do everything in her power to ensure that he will not be chosen as the next head coach of Israels national football team a position that Berkovic covets.But that was not all, Regev started hurling personal insults at Berkovic, inter alia called him a steak, claiming that he keeps turning over like a steak on a grill, claiming that in the past he had worshiped Blue and White leader Gantz (for whom he had voted), and now worships Yamina leader Naftali Bennett. That was our transportation minister talking (or, rather, shrieking).I must admit that I view Berkovic as a sort of Israeli Archie Bunker, even though until 15 years ago he was one of Israels greatest soccer players, albeit one with a tempestuous temper. To say the least, pearls of wisdom do not pour out of his mouth. cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b' }).render('4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6'); });However, that does not justify what Regev did, which was to publicly blackmail him live on television, blackmail being a criminal offense, no matter how, where and against whom performed.Not only that. Even when Regev was culture and sport minister, the appointment of the official head coach of the national soccer team was not within the frame of reference of her job, and even if it had been, the official position of FIFA (the International Federation of Association Football) has always been to try not always successfully to ensure that soccer and politics remain separated. In other words, Regev played foul, no matter how one looks at the event.It is interesting to note that Zohars reaction to his confrontation with Berkowitz the previous week was simply to declare that he would never again appear on Ofira and Berko. However, within days he, too, was caught online in an act of blackmail. The event he became involved in was much more serious than the one in which Regev had been involved. This time the person on the receiving end was not a big-mouthed ex-soccer player, but Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit.Mandelblit, whose aspiration is to be appointed to the Supreme Court after he completes his term as attorney-general, carries with him an affair from his past as the military advocate-general (the Harpaz Affair from 2010, connected to the appointment of the 20th IDF chief of staff) from which he was never entirely cleared, even though he had never been officially charged with anything, and which could prevent his appointment to the Supreme Court. On October 13, the content of a telephone conversation Mandelblit had held in 2017 with former head of the Israel Bar Association Efi Nave (who is about to stand trial on criminal charges on a personal matter), in which he bad-mouthed the former state attorney Shai Nitzan for having failed to clear him of wrongdoing in the Harpaz Affair, was reported on Channel 12.Due to both Nitzans and Mandelblits roles in Netanyahus indictments, and despite the fact that the Harpaz Affair had nothing whatsoever to do with Netanyahu or the charges against him, Zohar demanded on October 14, during an interview on radio station 103FM, that Mandelblit resign immediately and close all of the cases against Netanyahu, or else additional embarrassing recordings from Efi Naves mobile phone would be revealed. When asked, during the interview, whether this was a threat, Zohar answered no, it is a promise.In fact, once again we are facing a case of blackmail, live on the media, involving a senior Likud member. However, unlike the case of Regev and Berkovic, on this occasion Zohar was admonished by Netanyahu, who expressed his reservations about what Zohar had said, apparently because he had been warned by his attorneys that Zohars words could legally harm him.Zohar then issued a statement that he had been misunderstood, which is his usual reaction when he makes a hasty statement of which Netanyahu disapproves. This is also what happened at the end of July, when he threatened MK Yifat Shasha-Biton of the Likud, who chairs the Knesset Corona Committee, that she would be fired because her committee had refused to approve some measures that Netanyahu sought to get its approval for, before being provided with data justifying the measures.AN INTERESTING question is whether Regev and Zohar represent todays Likud in their conduct, or only a fanatic group that blindly supports Netanyahus approach regarding the law enforcement institutions and agencies as being involved in an anti-Bibi conspiracy, and the anti-Bibi demonstrators as being extreme left-wing anarchists whose sole goal is to cause the spread of the coronavirus in order to create chaos.When former Jerusalem mayor and current Likud MK Nir Barkat appeared last Friday on the Ofira and Berko show, there were those (including myself) who expected to hear a different Likud voice from him, especially since he has an ax to grind with Netanyahu. But, alas, all he spoke of was the unity of approach within the Likud, with no clear criticism of Regev and Zohar.But perhaps this was to be expected, given that Barkat was one of the senior mask-clad Likudniks who surrounded Netanyahu on the day his trial opened on May 24, as he gave his scandalous speech against the law enforcement agencies inside the courthouse and just before entering the courtroom, to hear the charges against him being read.

Originally posted here:
MKs Regev and Zohar caught acting as blackmailers -opinion - The Jerusalem Post