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By KEVIN FREKING | Associated Press – Tue, May 8, 2012
WASHINGTON (AP) — Members of Congress expressed doubts Tuesday on plans by the Department of Veterans Affairs' to hire 1,900 additional workers to improve access to mental health care.
Rep. Jeff Miller, chairman of the House committee with jurisdiction over veterans' issues, said the VA's plans to beef up staffing looked like a knee-jerk reaction to a critical inspector general's investigationthat was in the works.
That investigation released two weeks ago found that nearly half of the veterans seeking mental health care for the first time waited about 50 days before getting a full evaluation. The VA had been reporting that the vast majority of evaluations were being conducted within 14 days.
Miller said the investigation also showed that the VA did not have reliable data to measure staffing needs.
"If VA doesn't even have a complete picture of the problem, how confident can we be that access will be increased and care enhanced by the VA's knee-jerk reaction," Miller said during an oversight hearing. "This is not the first time we have been here."
VA officials insisted that the plans to hire more workers had been in the works for months. Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki said that the department's hiring proposal was based mostly upon an increase in patients that has occurred in recent years, in part, because the department had made it easier for veterans to submit disability claims for post-traumatic stress disorder.
VA officials said that while they agreed with the inspector general's recommendations, they did not necessarily agree that only half of the veterans seeking mental health care were seen within the recommended 14 days. Nevertheless, Shinseki said that improving access to mental health care would be his highest priority.
"Our efforts will not cease with the announcement of the 1,900 additional personnel," Shinseki said. "Future adjustments may be likely."
Miller pointed out the VA already has 1,500 job openings. He said he did not think anybody on the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs actually believed the department would be able to fill those openings quickly.
"How in the world are you going to accomplish that in a timely fashion in order to provide mental health care to the veterans who need it today?" Miller said.
VA officials said it will get most of the additional hiring completed in the next six months, but added that some specialties are difficult to fill and that hiring may carry over to early 2013. Officials said they would particularly enhance the salary of psychiatrists in hopes of hiring about 60 more in the coming months.
"We're beginning to hone in on this most difficult recruiting challenge," Shinseki said.
Officials also told lawmakers that they were beginning an advertising campaign focused on recruiting mental health professionals. They also have nearly two dozen recruiters in place who will be reaching out to health care workers.


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This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Masha Gessen, is a Russian-American journalist who reported in late January and February from Ukraine, then went to Moscow after the invasion. On the night Putin shut down the last remaining independent source of TV news, Gessen was at that studio. Gessen's dispatches are being published in The New Yorker, where Gessen is a staff writer. Gessen left Moscow on Thursday and is speaking to us from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia.
For 20 years, Gessen was a journalist in Moscow and had been the chief correspondent for Russia's leading news magazine until it became impossible to report the real news. After that, Gessen moved to a popular science magazine. In 2013, when it became too dangerous to remain in Russia because of Putin's anti-gay laws, Gessen moved to New York with their partner and their adopted son and their two other children. Gessen uses the pronouns they/them. They have written extensively about Putin, including in their book "The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin." Gessen warned about Trump's authoritarian style of leadership and its parallels to Putin in the book "Surviving Autocracy." We recorded our interview yesterday.
Masha Gessen, welcome to FRESH AIR. I'm glad that you're safe. You're in Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia now. Why is that where you are now?
MASHA GESSEN: So I was in Moscow until last Thursday. And all of that week following the full-scale invasion that began at 5 in the morning the previous Thursday, people that I know in Moscow started to feel panicked and, like, really panicked, not just about the state of the country and obviously the war, but also about needing to leave the country because there was a distinct sense that the borders were likely to close, that the country was just spiraling into some kind of North Korean scenario.
And so there's been a huge exodus from Russia in the last week and a half. It's that - recent estimates range at this point from 100,000 to 200,000 people who have left. And according to the Georgian authorities, between 20,000 and 25,000 of those people have arrived here in Tbilisi. So I actually followed some people who were leaving out of Moscow to Istanbul, which is one of the few places that you can still fly to from Moscow. And then I came here to Tbilisi to continue reporting on this exodus now.
GROSS: What are you hearing from people who have fled to Tbilisi?
GESSEN: People are - you know, I mean, it's an awful story to report. And it's very close to my heart because the people that I'm reporting on - actually, right now, like, all the interviews that I was doing today were with people I know quite well. And so I can see how their lives and their sense of themselves in the world have changed just in the last 10 days. And, in fact, when I say that their sense of themselves in the world has changed, the biggest thing I think that has happened for them is that their sense of themselves in the world has just disappeared. It's a kind of sudden and drastic descent into a sense of having no country, no place and no sense of a future.
And on top of that, there's a distinct sense that you don't even have the right to feel horrible about all the things that you have lost almost overnight because you've lost them because you're a citizen of a country that is waging horrible, murderous, aggressive war against another country where people are losing their lives and also losing their sense of themselves, their homes overnight in a much more brutal way. So I've been talking to people who are, you know, who are disoriented, who have gone from being wealthy Muscovites to being poor emigres who are not particularly welcome here right now, but who also feel like they don't even have the right to feel bad about it.
GROSS: Are most of the people who fled Moscow journalists that you know?
GESSEN: No. I do know a lot of journalists who've fled Moscow and the journalists who've left under, you know, a particular set of circumstances, which is that on Friday, the Russian Parliament passed and President Vladimir Putin signed a new law which makes it a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison to spread what they call false information about the special operation in Ukraine. Now, what they have classified as false information is any statement that calls it a war or an act of aggression or an invasion. So I know of at least 80 journalists who have fled Russia in the last week precisely because there was a real risk that they would be prosecuted under this new law.
GROSS: So in order words, if you tell the truth, you're going to be put in prison for 15 years.
GESSEN: If you tell the truth, you can face up to 15 years in prison for the crime of spreading false information. Yeah. But, you know, the people, I mean, like, the people I was talking to today are a sociologist, a popular science educator, an Orthodox priest, a podcaster and editor. So these are not journalists. These are people who, on the one hand, feel that they personally may be in danger because they have been arrested at protests in the past. And at this point, that raises a very real risk of actually going to prison.
But more than that, they're running from the fear of ending up behind the Iron Curtain as the Iron Curtain gets restored very rapidly. But also, they don't want to be a part of an invading country. They don't see themselves living in that country anymore. They don't see themselves as belonging to it in any way. So some of their reasons are not as clearly spelled out as I may be going to prison for 15 years. It's just I can't be here anymore.
GROSS: My impression from your writing is that there's a big division now in Russia between people who have managed to find sources of the truth about the war Russia really is waging against Ukraine and those people who believe the propaganda that Russia - that the Russian government is putting out and think, like, nothing's wrong here.
GESSEN: Yes. It should probably be noted that the people I'm describing, even if the estimates of 200,000 people leaving Russia are correct, that's still a tiny, tiny minority of Russians. And even if we add all the people inside Russia who are getting their information from Western media or more likely from the remaining independent media, all of which have been blocked in Russia, but if people are using VPNs, if they're using anonymizing browsers, if they're using telegram channels that are still at this point accessible - probably not for much longer - then they're getting factual information about the war in Ukraine. But there's still a tiny, tiny minority in a country that even as its economy has gone into a tailspin and you would think they would notice that, if nothing else, even so, they seem to continue to believe that that things are basically kind of normal, except they have to tighten their belts because Russia is under attack by the West, which is imposing unwarranted, unfair economic sanctions against it.
GROSS: One of the things I always wonder about in situations like this is when do you know it's time to leave? And you watch people make that decision first in Ukraine and then in Moscow. So let's go to Ukraine for a second. For a while, people thought, oh, Russia is just scaring Ukraine. They're not really - you know, they're trying to teach Ukraine a lesson. They're not really going to invade. And then not only did Russia invade, I mean, it's just been absolutely brutal. It's been a war on the whole country and on its citizens. What kind of anguish would the people going through who you knew and who you were talking to about whether they should leave or not before the invasion actually started?
GESSEN: So I was in Kyiv and in Kharkiv during the last week of January talking to people about precisely that, about the talk of war, about what their ideas were about what they would do if the invasion actually happened. And even though we know enough about Putin and we knew enough about Putin before his February 21 speech and before the invasion began on the 24, we knew enough to be able to predict precisely the worst-case scenario, according to which this war has been unfolding so far. It is impossible to believe. Some things are just too awful to contemplate. When you're sitting in a - you know, in a nice cafe in this incredibly vibrant city of Kyiv, which had a rich cultural life, that had a kind of - you know, so many places that had a kind of spirit of celebration, including a sort of ongoing celebration of Ukrainian independence - right? - of the - in the eight years that have followed the Revolution of Dignity, there's been a heightened awareness of Ukraine having figured out a way to create a kind of democracy and a really cohesive society in the rubble of the Soviet Union, unlike so many of us former fellow members of the Soviet Union.
And so to sit there and imagine that you may be subjected to an invasion, to sit there and imagine that bombs may fall on your beautiful city is too much, right? And a lot of the people that I talked to were quite aware of that - of the double think that they were engaging in. On the one hand, they had stocked up on unnecessary supplies. And on the other hand, they were saying, this is impossible. I don't believe it.
GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Russian American journalist Masha Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Russian American journalist Masha Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Gessen reported from Ukraine just before the invasion, then went to Moscow, where Gessen remained until last Thursday. Gessen is speaking to us from Tbilisi in the country of Georgia.
You were at TV Rain, Russia's last independent TV channel, on the night it was shut down. A couple of nights before that, you were interviewed on that channel. And then you heard that it was being shut down, so you went right over there. What was said on the air that appeared to be, like, the last straw for the Russian government?
GESSEN: TV Rain started running a round-the-clock live broadcast covering the war in Ukraine and calling it a war. From the moment the invasion began. And the thing is that you would think that that's what a normal television station would do, right? Part of what the the Russian state television does to disguise the fact that the country is waging war is not only not calling it a war but also not changing its broadcast schedule or tone in any way. So formally, I think it was TV Rain using the word war, using the word aggression, using the word invasion when they were describing what was going on there. But considering that the Russian government has blocked every single source of independent information in the last week, those things were just pretexts. It's that the state is in the process of establishing final total monopoly over information.
GROSS: When you got there, when you got to the station, what was going on at the station?
GESSEN: When I got to TV Rain, they were still broadcasting. Their website had already been blocked, but they were still streaming to YouTube, which is still accessible in Russia. The two anchors who were in the studio had gotten the news that the website was blocked while they were on air, had read it on air and continued to broadcast. And then after the broadcast, people - some people had come especially because they had heard that the site had been blocked. People sort of milled around, waiting to figure out what they were going to do next. And as the editor in chief, who is a 34-year-old journalist named Tikhon Dzyadko - as he was speaking to the staff, someone ran in and said, we're about to be raided. And so the night actually ended with all of us who were in that space running out through a back staircase, trying to protect ourselves from the raid. The raid didn't happen. It was a credible threat. It was not some kind of anonymous phone call. But it was clearly intended to basically tell people to get out and not come back to the office and, as the editor in chief interpreted it, to tell them to get out of the country if they didn't want to be subjected to prosecution and at least police violence.
And so by the following morning - right? This happened - I think we left the studio - maybe it was 11:30 at night. By the following morning, a majority of the staff were on planes to leave the country, some of them not even having gone home to pack, some of them, you know, with a backpack with two pairs of underwear in it.
GROSS: Is that when you decided you were going to leave Moscow?
GESSEN: I was going to stay a bit longer. I actually wanted to stay as long as I could while it was still safe for me to leave. But there were a couple of things going on. One was that I - I mean, I left a day later than most of the TV Rain staff. One thing that was going on was that there were fewer and fewer flights because Europe closed its airspace and because Russian - as sanctions kicked in, Russian companies realized that they couldn't fly their leased airplanes out of the country because they might get seized. So you would just kind of see the list of flights available from Moscow dwindle to a few destinations and just very few flights, right? So there was a possible shortage of flights and tickets with more and more people wanting to leave.
And the other was that there was a kind of panic, and there was rumor that on Friday, March 5, the Parliament was going to declare martial law and close the borders. That hasn't happened yet. I suspected at the time that that might be a Kremlin-generated rumor precisely aimed at getting people in the opposition to leave the country. I think it was quite effective at that. I think it may have been a Kremlin-generated rumor. But it's the sort of thing you don't really take chances with. So I ended up leaving a little bit earlier than I would have wanted to.
GROSS: And you were able to get a flight, obviously.
GESSEN: And I was able to get a flight to Istanbul.
GROSS: And then from Istanbul, you went to Tbilisi.
GESSEN: Right. And I went to Tbilisi because so many Russians have landed here, and it's such sort of a weird and sad and volatile cultural and political situation with this tiny country that also is partially occupied by Russian troops being afraid that it's going to be next again, right? And this influx of Russians makes Georgians even more nervous about that possibility.
GROSS: And I guess Putin wants his opposition to leave the country so he has more control in the country. Is it easier to get people to leave than to put them in prison?
GESSEN: It's always cheaper to get people to leave than to put them in prison. And I think he is irrationally afraid of any kind of street protest. Putin's regime has never been under any credible threat from street protests or even from the kind of organizing that has been - that people have been able to carry out, considering how repressive this regime has been for how long. But they're terrified. They're terrified of their own people. They're terrified of protests. And I think they're terrified that they may not be able to imprison everybody who's opposed to the regime. So it is much more economical for them to get as many people as possible to leave and then to imprison those who remain.
GROSS: Well, let's take another break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Russian American journalist Masha Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker. We'll talk more about their reporting from Russia after we take a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Russian American journalist Masha Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Masha Gessen goes by the pronouns they/their/them. They reported from Ukraine just before the invasion, then went to Moscow, where they remained until last week. For 20 years, Gessen was a journalist in Moscow and had been the chief correspondent for Russia's leading news magazine until it became impossible to report the real news. After that, Gessen moved to a popular science magazine. In 2013, when it became too dangerous to remain in Russia because of Putin's anti-gay laws, Gessen moved to New York with Gessen's partner and their adopted son and their two other children. Gessen has written extensively about Putin, including in their book "The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin." Gessen warned about Trump's authoritarian style of leadership and its parallels to Putin in the book "Surviving Autocracy."
Russia has passed several new laws. You mentioned the law pertaining to journalists and what you're not allowed to say. One of the new laws - and I think this passed the full parliament - one of the new laws is that mass graves are legal during wars and state of - states of emergency now. What are the implications of that? When I think of mass graves, I don't think of good things.
GESSEN: So that - the law on mass graves, or sort of regulating mass graves during states of emergency in military operations, actually went into effect on February 1. And it's one of the signs that we have that this particular military operation was in the works for a very long time. Things were put in place to make this possible over the course of at least a year.
Something else that happened late last year was that they banned the use of smartphones and personal cellphones by active duty military personnel. So they're - both of those things, the mass grave legislation and the ban on cellphone use, are clearly intended to avoid information getting out about where troops are, what they're doing and how many people are dying. In a country where the media are totally controlled by the state, that's - those are really effective moves. Because until you have so many soldiers dying that their families can actually talk to one another across, you know, this vast country - this vast and very atomized country - until that happens, and that requires a kind of critical mass and probably a critical amount of time, they can very effectively suppress information about what's happening there and how many people are dying there. And they've been doing that.
They've - for the first several days of the war, they were not admitting to any casualties. Then they finally said that 498 military personnel have died. But estimates from the Ukrainian side, and also from Western analysts, range from a couple of thousand to several thousand. That's a huge difference, and that's the kind of difference, the kind of misinformation, that you can maintain if you shut people up and control the media.
GROSS: Who do you think the mass graves are for? Are they for soldiers?
GESSEN: Yes. I think the legislation is to enable the military to bury soldiers in the field. I don't think they're at all concerned about casualties on the other side.
GROSS: Another new law - it's a crime to provide financial material, consultative or other assistance to foreign or international organizations, punishable by 12 to 20 years in prison. What are the implications of that in Russia?
GESSEN: So that's actually a really interesting one. It's not a new law. This is a law that was passed in 2012. And I remember - you know, I wrote about it then. I was still living in Moscow. And I saw that, and I thought, oh, my God, this is a Stalin-era law. And I actually went back and checked. And sure enough, it was almost the precise wording of the law on espionage that was used in the 1930s to imprison hundreds of thousands of people and execute tens of thousands of people summarily on manufactured charges of espionage. I think it's an intentional and transparent reference. I think it was putting in place the framework for real political terror, like Stalinist scale - Stalinist-style political terror.
The law was put on the books and wasn't used for 10 years. But the reason that you think that it's a new law is that right after the war started, or this part of the war started, the prosecutor general announced that they were going to start enforcing this particular part of the law, basically sending out the message that anyone could be picked up and accused of espionage in favor of any country.
GROSS: Wow. So many opportunities to be put in prison right now in Russia.
GESSEN: I mean, it - it'll - it makes you wonder why they need laws at all, which is something - I mean, it's a personal obsession of mine. Why do they formalize this stuff when it's just terror? Like, why even pretend that there's a legal system that makes it all work? But they still do. And I think part of it is a nagging sense of the illegitimacy of the regime and the need to prove that they're right, the need to constantly ramp up the story that drives the propaganda, which creates this crazy feedback loop where they're watching their own TV and trying to speak the same things even louder than the TV does. And then eventually, they come to believe more and more of it.
GROSS: That's such an interesting question you raised. Why bother with the pretense of the law when you're basically just rounding up people who you see as opposition? Do you think it makes Putin feel better about himself, that he can still convince himself that he's - you know, he's following the law, the laws that he created?
GESSEN: Yes, I think it does have a lot to do with the way he perceives himself, that he enforces laws, their rules, and it's always the victim's fault for violating the laws that are so clearly stated. If only they hadn't done it. I mean, you know, the phrase that they use so often is, we had no choice - right? - when they talk about the invasion of Ukraine. And Putin himself used this phrase several times in his big speech sort of setting out the framework for the war. And then, his announcement of starting the military operation, he keeps saying, we had no other options. We had no choice, right? And I think that that's - it's a kind of - it's a weird rhetorical crutch that he seems to require, right? He seems to need to tell himself that he had no other option.
GROSS: Let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Russian American journalist Masha Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker. We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Russian American journalist Masha Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Gessen reported from Ukraine just before the invasion, then went to Moscow, where Gessen remained until last Thursday.
We've been talking about how Putin has been making it virtually impossible for a lot of people to find out the truth about the war in Ukraine. It's just a special operation in Putin's propaganda. And there's very little information about this, quote, "special operation." There's also disinformation that is now required in Russian schools. Can you tell us about that? This is directives from the ministry of education about how the war should be taught in school.
GESSEN: So on March 1, all Russian schools had to conduct special social sciences lessons to explain to children how they should think and talk about the so-called special operation in Ukraine. And they were taught to talk about it in terms of genocide and in terms of de-Nazification. This is how Putin and the entire Russian propaganda machine frames this war. They accuse Ukrainians of perpetrating genocide of ethnic Russians, an allegation for which there's zero factual basis. And then they also - they refer to Ukrainians on TV constantly as Ukronazis (ph). They claim that this country, which is led by an elected Jewish president, is run by Nazis and that Russia has to come in and engineer a change of regime and conduct de-Nazification of Ukraine.
GROSS: So children are being taught lies at a very young age now?
GESSEN: (Laughter) Well, children are being taught lies, and this very particular kind of lie that calls to - I mean it references World War II in this really twisted way. But it also just dehumanizes the enemy, and the enemy being the Ukrainian people, people who have linguistic, cultural, religious, ethnic affinities with Russians. And people where - you know, it's very difficult to find a Russian family that has no connection to Ukraine either through relatives or friends that they went to school with. Or, you know, in more recent years, for middle-class people, a lot of domestic help have been Ukrainians, who come to Russia - or who used to come to Russia, which is a much wealthier country to work as domestic help. But these are tight family connections that - and now people are being told, and children are being taught in particular, that these are - this is the enemy. And they're Nazis.
GROSS: In your March 4 dispatch for The New Yorker, you wrote about a poll that asked who's responsible for mounting tensions in Ukraine. Three percent blamed Russia. And this was a poll in Russia. So 3% blamed Russia, 14% blamed Ukraine. And here's the shocker. Sixty percent - 6-0 percent - blamed the U.S. What is behind that?
GESSEN: So the larger historical narrative that the Kremlin has been pushing very, very effectively - and I think it's so effective because this is actually the part that I think Putin firmly believes himself - that the United States is an expansionist power that is interested in taking over the world and, certainly, the entire post-Soviet space - and that Ukraine has a government that is a U.S. puppet and that the U.S. is using Ukraine to surround Russia, to place NATO military bases and weapons close to the Russian border. Although, there are no military NATO bases or weapons in Ukraine - or there weren't any weapons until the invasion because Ukraine is not a member of NATO. But I think the sense that Russia is a fortress under siege and that the United States is surrounding it with military - and now they're also talking about by biomedical or bioweapon threat. I think there's a genuine element of fear and a sort of sense of having been diminished by the United States to that legend. And that's part of what makes it so effective.
GROSS: One of the most terrifying things that I read in your dispatches for The New Yorker is that one Russian analyst, who you think is a really good analyst, said that Putin might feel so kind of pushed into a corner that he lashes out by using a nuclear weapon at what he thinks of as the capital of the world, which would be New York. Tell us more about what this analyst said to you and what you make of that really terrifying comment.
GESSEN: So this analyst is Grigory Yudin, who I think is very insightful. And I think that he is attentive, right? Good analysts are - they largely earned their stripes by just really paying close attention to what is being said and done. And Putin has been threatening to use nuclear weapons for a long, long time. This is another strain of thought and action that we have observed over the years. Russia has changed its military doctrine to make it easier to use nuclear weapons. And this happened many years ago. Putin has repeatedly reminded the world, and in particular the United States, that Russia is a nuclear power.
And, you know, I don't know that I agree with Yudin that the first target would be the United States and, in particular, New York City. I think that Putin is much more likely and has given indications on this and also seeing indications of this in the way that the Russian state television narrative is working - I think it's much more likely that they would use a tactical nuclear weapon to target, say, a military airport in Poland.
GROSS: In Poland?
GESSEN: In Poland - well, yeah. So the reason - Poland is a country that borders both Russia and Ukraine. It's just to the west of Ukraine. And military aid to Ukraine that is coming from Western countries is coming through military airports in Poland. Poland also used to be a part of the Soviet military bloc. In fact, the Soviet equivalent of NATO - the Soviet-dominated equivalent of NATO used to be called the Warsaw bloc. So the use of Polish military airports to supply arms to Ukraine is almost a personal affront to Putin, who views himself as an agent of restoration, who wants to bring back the former glory that Russia had in a bipolar world. And so the fact that they're using not just a former Warsaw Pact country's airports, but Poland's - right? - the country where the capital is Warsaw, is like adding insult to injury. And so there has been a lot of nuclear saber-rattling in that general direction - or actually in that specific direction.
GROSS: The sanctions against Russia - the economic sanctions against Russia are, you know, killing the Russian economy. The ruble is in freefall. The stock market has been closed. So Russians are really suffering. They can't even get access to their money. A lot of the credit card companies have shut off access to Russia. So Russian citizens are suffering. What are the chances they blame the U.S. and not Putin for that - you know, that they just think the U.S. is the enemy, as opposed to thinking Putin has created this war, which is causing us to suffer?
GESSEN: What they're hearing on television constantly is anti-Russian sanctions, and it's all talk about these unwarranted, unmotivated, unprovoked sanctions imposed by the West that has conspired against Russia. But they're also hearing something else. They're hearing that these sanctions, especially today - I actually spent a little bit of time watching Russian television today just to see if the tenor had changed. The tenor hasn't changed, but the message has shifted a little bit. And it's shifted to looking at how detrimental the sanctions are for Western economies, how now that President Biden has said that he's imposed sanctions on Russian oil, gas and coal, Russian television is talking about how oil and gas prices are skyrocketing in Western Europe and the United States, how ordinary Americans and Europeans are being affected by it, which I think serves a dual purpose that it sort of communicates to Russians that the whole world is experiencing some sort of economic hardship, but it also just paints Western powers as completely crazy, right? They're, like, doing these awful things to their own people and to the Russian people for no particular reason. And, yeah, Putin and his war are nowhere in that narrative.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you again here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Russian American journalist Masha Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker. We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Russian American journalist Masha Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker. They reported from Ukraine just before the invasion, then went to Moscow, where they remained until last week. Masha Gessen is speaking to us now from Tbilisi in the country of Georgia. And Masha Gessen goes by the pronoun they/them.
What do your Russian journalist friends and your Russian analyst friends think Putin will do after Ukraine if he militarily wins in Ukraine?
GESSEN: I think Putin has made it very clear that he doesn't see Ukraine as the end goal. His speech on February 21, three days before the invasion began, was absolutely terrifying because he laid out his vision of history, and, you know, totalitarian rulers appoint themselves enforcers of the laws of history. And so he was talking about history as he sees it, and he sees the Russian empire as kind of the last legitimate incarnation of this country. He cancels out the entire Soviet framework, which on paper gave constituent republics the rights of statehood. And so he has signaled that he sees any country that once belonged to the Russian empire as fair game. That includes the entire Soviet territory, plus Finland and Poland, and, you know, that includes the Baltic states, which are NATO members and EU members. And if he carries out anything in Ukraine that he can frame as a victory, more such operations will follow and more such victories will follow. He is intent on violently redrawing the map of Europe, and that process will continue as long as he is alive and in charge in Russia.
GROSS: But it also sounds like Putin is the kind of leader who won't allow himself to be perceived as a loser. In a scenario where your analyst friend talked about the possibility of Putin using a nuclear weapon in New York, the context of that was, you know, Putin won't let himself be seen as a loser, so if he's really up against a wall, that's what he could conceivably do. So it just seems like an impossible situation. If you have somebody who's irrational, who's totally lacking in humanity and empathy and is willing to do anything to be perceived as the winner and not the loser, like, what sane options are there?
GESSEN: So I wouldn't actually call him irrational. I think that he is consistent and rational inside his own mental system, and he does give us access to his mental system. He does tell us how he views the world. It's absolutely terrifying. I mean, I think you're - the question I hear you asking is, wait, is there any way to think about this that is just not a total nightmare and the end of the world as we know it? And I can't find it. I mean, the absolute best-case scenario would be some kind of partial victory in Ukraine that would make him declare victory and at least pause for a little bit, and then maybe he will die eventually before blowing up the world, right? That's the best-case scenario.
GROSS: Well, Masha Gessen, thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you for your reporting and for all the risks you've been taking to do that reporting. Really, really appreciate it.
GESSEN: Thank you, Terry. It's great to talk to you.
GROSS: My interview with Masha Gessen was recorded yesterday. They spoke to us from Tbilisi in the country Georgia. Gessen is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed - like this week's interviews with The New Yorker cartoonist David Sipress or journalist Elizabeth Williamson, whose new book is about the parents whose children were murdered in the Sandy Hook school shooting and their efforts to refute the claims of conspiracy theorists that the massacre was a phony event staged by the government - check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews.
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(SOUNDBITE OF KRONOS QUARTET PERFORMANCE OF VLADIMIR MARTYNOV'S "THE BEATITUDES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

subset: commoncrawl


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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
Don't look now, but conditions are deteriorating in the western Pacific. Things are turning ugly, with consequences that could prove deadly and spell catastrophe for the global economy.
In Washington, it is widely assumed that a showdown with Iran over its nuclear ambitions will be the first major crisis to engulf the next secretary of defense—whether it be former Senator Chuck Hagel, as President Obama desires, or someone else if he fails to win Senate confirmation. With few signs of an imminent breakthrough in talks aimed at peacefully resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, many analysts believe that military action—if not by Israel, than by the United States—could be on this year's agenda.
Lurking just behind the Iranian imbroglio, however, is a potential crisis of far greater magnitude, and potentially far more imminent than most of us imagine. China's determination to assert control over disputed islands in the potentially energy-rich waters of the East and South China Seas, in the face of stiffening resistance from Japan and the Philippines along with greater regional assertiveness by the United States, spells trouble not just regionally, but potentially globally.
Islands, Islands, Everywhere
The possibility of an Iranian crisis remains in the spotlight because of the obvious risk of disorder in the Greater Middle East and its threat to global oil production and shipping. A crisis in the East or South China Seas (essentially, western extensions of the Pacific Ocean) would, however, pose a greater peril because of the possibility of a US-China military confrontation and the threat to Asian economic stability.
The United States is bound by treaty to come to the assistance of Japan or the Philippines if either country is attacked by a third party, so any armed clash between Chinese and Japanese or Filipino forces could trigger American military intervention. With so much of the world's trade focused on Asia, and the American, Chinese, and Japanese economies tied so closely together in ways too essential to ignore, a clash of almost any sort in these vital waterways might paralyze international commerce and trigger a global recession (or worse).
All of this should be painfully obvious and so rule out such a possibility—and yet the likelihood of such a clash occurring has been on the rise in recent months, as China and its neighbors continue to ratchet up the bellicosity of their statements and bolster their military forces in the contested areas. Washington's continuing statements about its ongoing plans for a "pivot" to, or "rebalancing" of, its forces in the Pacific have only fueled Chinese intransigence and intensified a rising sense of crisis in the region. Leaders on all sides continue to affirm their country's inviolable rights to the contested islands and vow to use any means necessary to resist encroachment by rival claimants. In the meantime, China has increased the frequency and scale of its naval maneuvers in waters claimed by Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, further enflaming tensions in the region.
Ostensibly, these disputes revolve around the question of who owns a constellation of largely uninhabited atolls and islets claimed by a variety of nations. In the East China Sea, the islands in contention are called the Diaoyus by China and the Senkakus by Japan. At present, they are administered by Japan, but both countries claim sovereignty over them. In the South China Sea, several island groups are in contention, including the Spratly chain and the Paracel Islands (known in China as the Nansha and Xisha Islands, respectively). ;China claims all of these islets, while Vietnam claims some of the Spratlys and Paracels. Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines also claim some of the Spratlys.
Far more is, of course, at stake than just the ownership of a few uninhabited islets. The seabeds surrounding them are believed to sit atop vast reserves of oil and natural gas. Ownership of the islands would naturally confer ownership of the reserves—something all of these countries desperately desire. Powerful forces of nationalism are also at work: with rising popular fervor, the Chinese believe that the islands are part of their national territory and any other claims represent a direct assault on China's sovereign rights; the fact that Japan—China's brutal invader and occupier during World War II—is a rival claimant to some of them only adds a powerful tinge of victimhood to Chinese nationalism and intransigence on the issue. By the same token, the Japanese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos, already feeling threatened by China's growing wealth and power, believe no less firmly that not bending on the island disputes is an essential expression of their nationhood.
Long ongoing, these disputes have escalated recently. In May 2011, for instance, the Vietnamese reported that Chinese warships were harassing oil-exploration vessels operated by the state-owned energy company PetroVietnam in the South China Sea. In two instances, Vietnamese authorities claimed, cables attached to underwater survey equipment were purposely slashed. In April 2012, armed Chinese marine surveillance ships blocked efforts by Filipino vessels to inspect Chinese boats suspected of illegally fishing off Scarborough Shoal, an islet in the South China Sea claimed by both countries.
The East China Sea has similarly witnessed tense encounters of late. Last September, for example, Japanese authorities arrested 14 Chinese citizens who had attempted to land on one of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands to press their country's claims, provoking widespread anti-Japanese protests across China and a series of naval show-of-force operations by both sides in the disputed waters.
Regional diplomacy, that classic way of settling disputes in a peaceful manner, has been under growing strain recently thanks to these maritime disputes and the accompanying military encounters. In July 2012, at the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asian leaders were unable to agree on a final communiqué, no matter how anodyne—the first time that had happened in the organization's 46-year history. Reportedly, consensus on a final document was thwarted when Cambodia, a close ally of China's, refused to endorse compromise language on a proposed "code of conduct" for resolving disputes in the South China Sea. Two months later, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Beijing in an attempt to promote negotiations on the disputes, she was reviled in the Chinese press, while officials there refused to cede any ground at all.
As 2012 ended and the New Year began, the situation only deteriorated. On December 1st, officials in Hainan Province, which administers the Chinese-claimed islands in the South China Sea, announced a new policy for 2013: Chinese warships would now be empowered to stop, search, or simply repel foreign ships that entered the claimed waters and were suspected of conducting illegal activities ranging, assumedly, from fishing to oil drilling. This move coincided with an increase in the size and frequency of Chinese naval deployments in the disputed areas.
On December 13th, the Japanese military scrambled F-15 fighter jets when a Chinese marine surveillance plane flew into airspace near the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. ;Another worrisome incident occurred on January 8th, when four Chinese surveillance ships entered Japanese-controlled waters around those islands for 13 hours. Two days later, Japanese fighter jets were again scrambled when a Chinese surveillance plane returned to the islands. Chinese fighters then came in pursuit, the first time supersonic jets from both sides flew over the disputed area. The Chinese clearly have little intention of backing down, having indicated that they will increase their air and naval deployments in the area, just as the Japanese are doing.
Powder Keg in the Pacific
While war clouds gather in the Pacific sky, the question remains: Why, pray tell, is this happening now?
Several factors seem to be conspiring to heighten the risk of confrontation, including leadership changes in China and Japan, and a geopolitical reassessment by the United States.
* In China, a new leadership team is placing renewed emphasis on military strength and on what might be called national assertiveness. At the 18th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held last November in Beijing, Xi Jinping was named both party head and chairman of the Central Military Commission, making him, in effect, the nation's foremost civilian and military official. Since then, Xi has made several heavily publicized visits to assorted Chinese military units, all clearly intended to demonstrate the Communist Party's determination, under his leadership, to boost the capabilities and prestige of the country's army, navy, and air force. He has already linked this drive to his belief that his country should play a more vigorous and assertive role in the region and the world.
In a speech to soldiers in the city of Huizhou, for example, Xi spoke of his "dream" of national rejuvenation: "This dream can be said to be a dream of a strong nation; and for the military, it is the dream of a strong military." Significantly, he used the trip to visit the Haikou, a destroyer assigned to the fleet responsible for patrolling the disputed waters of the South China Sea. As he spoke, a Chinese surveillance plane entered disputed air space over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, prompting Japan to scramble those F-15 fighter jets.
* In Japan, too, a new leadership team is placing renewed emphasis on military strength and national assertiveness. On December 16th, arch-nationalist Shinzo Abe returned to power as the nation's prime minister. Although he campaigned largely on economic issues, promising to revive the country's lagging economy, Abe has made no secret of his intent to bolster the Japanese military and assume a tougher stance on the East China Sea dispute.
In his first few weeks in office, Abe has already announced plans to increase military spending and review an official apology made by a former government official to women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. These steps are sure to please Japan's rightists, but certain to inflame anti-Japanese sentiment in China, Korea, and other countries it once occupied.
Equally worrisome, Abe promptly negotiated an agreement with the Philippines for greater cooperation on enhanced "maritime security" in the western Pacific, a move intended to counter growing Chinese assertiveness in the region. Inevitably, this will spark a harsh Chinese response—and because the United States has mutual defense treaties with both countries, it will also increase the risk of US involvement in future engagements at sea.
* In the United States, senior officials are debating implementation of the "Pacific pivot" announced by President Obama in a speech before the Australian Parliament a little over a year ago. In it, he promised that additional US forces would be deployed in the region, even if that meant cutbacks elsewhere. "My guidance is clear," he declared. "As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region." While Obama never quite said that his approach was intended to constrain the rise of China, few observers doubt that a policy of "containment" has returned to the Pacific.
Indeed, the US military has taken the first steps in this direction, announcing, for example, that by 2017 all three US stealth planes, the F-22, F-35, and B-2, would be deployed to bases relatively near China and that by 2020 60% of US naval forces will be stationed in the Pacific (compared to 50% today). However, the nation's budget woes have led many analysts to question whether the Pentagon is actually capable of fully implementing the military part of any Asian pivot strategy in a meaningful way. A study conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at the behest of Congress, released last summer, concluded that the Department of Defense "has not adequately articulated the strategy behind its force posture planning [in the Asia-Pacific] nor aligned the strategy with resources in a way that reflects current budget realities."
This, in turn, has fueled a drive by military hawks to press the administration to spend more on Pacific-oriented forces and to play a more vigorous role in countering China's "bullying" behavior in the East and South China Seas. "[America's Asian allies] are waiting to see whether America will live up to its uncomfortable but necessary role as the true guarantor of stability in East Asia, or whether the region will again be dominated by belligerence and intimidation," former Secretary of the Navy and former Senator James Webb wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Although the administration has responded to such taunts by reaffirming its pledge to bolster its forces in the Pacific, this has failed to halt the calls for an even tougher posture by Washington. Obama has already been chided for failing to provide sufficient backing to Israel in its struggle with Iran over nuclear weapons, and it is safe to assume that he will face even greater pressure to assist America's allies in Asia were they to be threatened by Chinese forces.
Add these three developments together, and you have the makings of a powder keg—potentially at least as explosive and dangerous to the global economy as any confrontation with Iran. Right now, given the rising tensions, the first close encounter of the worst kind, in which, say, shots were unexpectedly fired and lives lost, or a ship or plane went down, might be the equivalent of lighting a fuse in a crowded, over-armed room. Such an incident could occur almost any time. The Japanese press has reported that government officials there are ready to authorize fighter pilots to fire warning shots if Chinese aircraft penetrate the airspace over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. A Chinese general has said that such an act would count as the start of "actual combat." That the irrationality of such an event will be apparent to anyone who considers the deeply tangled economic relations among all these powers may prove no impediment to the situation—as at the beginning of World War I—simply spinning out of everyone's control.
Can such a crisis be averted? Yes, if the leaders of China, Japan, and the United States, the key countries involved, take steps to defuse the belligerent and ultra-nationalistic pronouncements now holding sway and begin talking with one another about practical steps to resolve the disputes. Similarly, an emotional and unexpected gesture—Prime Minister Abe, for instance, pulling a Nixon and paying a surprise goodwill visit to China—might carry the day and change the atmosphere. Should these minor disputes in the Pacific get out of hand, however, not just those directly involved but the whole planet will look with sadness and horror on the failure of everyone involved.
Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of The Race for What's Left, just published in paperback. A documentary movie based on his book Blood and Oil can be previewed and ordered at www.bloodandoilmovie.com. You can follow Klare on Facebook by clicking here.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse' The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.


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Chrome Music Lab is a website that makes learning music more accessible through fun, hands-on experiments.
Many teachers have been using Chrome Music Lab as a tool in their classrooms to explore music and its connections to science, math, art, and more. They've been combining it with dance and live instruments. Here's a collection of some uses we've found on Twitter.
Yes. Check out the Song Maker experiment, which lets you make and share your own songs.
Nope. Just open any experiment and start playing.
All our experiments are all built with freely accessible web technology such as Web Audio API, WebMIDI, Tone.js, and more. These tools make it easier for coders to build new interactive music experiences. You can get the open-source code to lots of these experiments here on Github.
You can play with these experiments across devices – phones, tablets, laptops – just by opening the site on a web browser such as Chrome.
We always get inspired by new, unexpected ways that people use these experiments. If you'd like to share something with us, post it with #chromemusiclab or drop us a line.


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The House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to proceed with President Biden's $3.5 trillion budget resolution, along with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Build Back Better agenda contains many of the labor movement's priorities, including growing Medicare, expanding sick leave and child care, increasing investments in education and combating climate change. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act will expand voting rights across the country. President Shuler praised the House's actions as an important step forward:
"By passing the $3.5 trillion budget resolution and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the House has taken a critical step forward for working families. Passage of this resolution puts America one step closer to providing major new funding for good jobs and our care infrastructure—including the first ever federal paid family and medical leave benefit, affordable health care, education and enhanced enforcement of our labor laws. President Biden's Build Back Better agenda already has made an impact on the lives of so many across this country and today represents yet another victory for America's working families. With discriminatory voting laws also proliferating across the country, passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act could not come at a more critical time. Thanks to the tireless efforts of House leadership, our country is on its way to building back better and stronger and protecting our democracy; and we look forward to the final passage of these bills and the bipartisan infrastructure legislation as soon as possible."


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- 05/06/2018
- All Day
- Sacred Heart Catholic Church
655 C Ave
Coronado, CA 92118
Casa de los Pobres Food Drive is this weekend!
We are in need of canned goods [pop-top cans are very helpful] such as soups (chicken, beef, and vegetable), beans, vegetables, pastas (ravioli or spaghetti), tuna, meat and chicken, and fruit and cups of ramen noodles, ready to eat items like crackers (cheese, peanut butter, etc.) and small size items for those without refrigeration are very helpful. As well as, dry beans and rice, cereal, dry-milk, pasta and sauce. Please check for expiration dates on items you wish to donate to be sure they are not expired.
These items may be included in your monetary donation the first weekend of the month, dropped off before or after Mass on the first weekend of the month or at the Ministry Center during office hours.
Thank you for your donations!


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Viddle Interact Review ⚠ Features-Price-Discount And More
Disclaimer: If you are looking for Viddle Interact Review (App by Neil Napier), you landed on the right page. As always, we accurately represent all the products and services reviewed on this website and their potential results/income. This post may contain affiliate links, meaning we may receive a commission at no cost if you purchase … Read more


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BASIC WALKING ON LEVEL GROUNDCore posture is important: keep your head and trunk erect so your ribs can expand for easier breathing; by stretching-up to walk-tall you'll flow over the ground with less effort. When walking on level ground or on slopes - always aim to keep the span between shoulder tip to shoulder tip as wide as possible i.e. not rounded forward or arched back. Your upper arm and elbow are behind a vertical line dropped from the shoulder, and the shafts remain at an angle behind. As you walk don't lift a pole to place it in front – instead almost drag it along so it just skims over the ground behind each time your elbow bends (the important swing comes from the elbow/forearm thrusting down-and-back from a firm shoulder girdle above).
If you grip hard it's the equivalent of lacing-up your boots too tight - which disrupts the flow of movement over the joints so they can't function as they should. As the body pivots over the shaft tip, loading is being controlled and directed through the hand/handle's contours as a dynamic action. Relax the fingers - just pressure between thumb and index finger is usually all that is needed to retain the pole. Gripping the handle tightly wastes energy, and can cause sweat (as can suncream / insect repellent on the hands). plus jamming the sides of the fingers together skin-to-skin can also cause sweat. By allowing air to circulate as the hand/palm peels away from the handle at the end of each stride, allows the skin to 'breathe' (see hand images on the Product page/What is a Pacerpole). For the 'swing / lift phase' of the stride, your elbow / forearm bends automatically after the thrust; this minimal action alone is enough to lift the shaft tip a few centimetres so it can just skim over the ground behind (no shoulder swing is necessary). The tip is now positioned ready to be dropped again behind you. Note: as the elbow bends relax the fingers so they curl into a hook for the handle's central core to rest on, away from the palm; remember just slight pressure between the thumb and index finger is usually enough to secure the pole before the tip drops to the ground again; this is the important 'ground contact phase', where you gain the benefits of improved stability / support / propulsion - and rhythm. Try to maintain an even stride, with heel/toe alignment pointing forward (and not at an angle). If you are aware that you have a weaker leg, consider starting with this leg and then match its stride length with the other (otherwise your stronger leg would set the length which may be difficult to match, resulting in unequal strides and poor posture). The body looks for equality Left and Right to perform at its best.
N.B. The arm's functional walking-stride leverage is to lift the trunk upwards to instigate the stride and thrust it forward, just like the legs leverage underneath - which is why the Pacerpole action can promote better posture and enhance our walking gait so effectively. |


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Senator Al Franken.
Senator. Al. Franken.
If that doesn't grate or demonstrate just how badly the GOP screwed up during the Bush Administration then I don't know what else in politics does. But, thankfully, after just four years, voters have apparently seen just how bad a miscalculation it was to put all the levers of power in Democratic hands, and the GOP looks set to be given another chance to live up to its principles.
Here is where I digress to remind us all;
We've won nothing yet. Harry Reid is still the Senate Majority Leader, Nancy Pelosi is still the Speaker of the House. Whether or not they would remain in those offices after January is entirely still dependent on you.
Vote. Vote and get all your family, friends, neighbors, work colleagues to vote, and make sure they all vote GOP from the US Senate to local school board.
Digression over.
Looking over to the sidebar, one notices that the NRSC has chosen to remind Republicans how important it is to turn out by reminding us that Al Franken is sitting in the Senate, i.e. No More Frankens – it's not enough to just win, we have to win BIG – or, as Hugh Hewitt would put it; If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat.
I have no problem with the sentiment – if enough of us turn out to vote, then the entire point of this diary is moot.
But let's be clear here … Al Franken being a Senator today is not the fault of MN Republicans who didn't turn out to vote for Norm Coleman, because Norm Coleman was actually the winner on Election Night and the subsequent recounts even as Obama made mincemeat of McCain in the state. No, Al Franken sits in the Senate today wholly due to one of the most blatant and shameless acts of election theft, done in the open and in broad daylight with the active leadership and participation of a corrupt bought and paid for Secretary of State.
Of course, if more of them had come out to vote, Coleman would still be a Senator, but at the end of the day, MN Republicans held up their end of the deal. It was Coleman, followed by the MNGOP, the NRSC and the RNC who failed to hold up their end by allowing the Democrats to steal it.
I have no beef with Al Franken or Mark Ritchie for this – might as well be mad with a toad for being ugly. It can't help its own nature. Al Franken is not a man known for his sense of fair play or decency and Mark Ritchie was a product of George Soros' Secretary of State Project. What else were they going to do?
Norm Coleman, on the other hand, I've got major beef with. He played the "moderate" "bipartisan" even as he was being cheated in broad daylight. He stood by spewing useless "reach across the aisle" pabulum, watching impotently as Mark Ritchie and the rest of his Soros-sponsored crew stole his victory away from him.
Even after FoxNews noted the amazing contortions and twists of logic that guided decisions by Mark Ritchie like this …
A vote for Franken | Not a vote for Coleman |
… the Coleman campaign decided to remain silent. This is not to mention the ballots found in Democrat operatives' car trunks and closets after Election Day that somehow made it into the final tally. Please read John Lott's FoxNews article – written as it was happening; it's enough to make you want to walk up to Norm Coleman and sock him in the face.
Up until Franken vaulted into the lead and the MN press cheerleading for Franken started calling on him to concede, Norm Coleman was preoccupied with thinking of all the "bipartisanship" he'll get to do in the Senate instead of calling down a rain of fire and brimstone and running a scorched earth campaign against Ritchie.
In other words, Coleman failed to protect and defend his own victory, perhaps failed to even notice it was under attack until it was too late, and ended up losing it to Al Franken. Al. Franken. Worse, even though Coleman (at the time) would have made the difference between having 41 Senators, where Arlen Specter would be the most powerful Republican in the Senate and 42, the NRSC did nothing.
Neither did the RNC or the Party's leaders in MN.
That's why I'm not mad at Franken, Ritchie or anyone involved in stealing the election in MN. It was obvious they were going to do it from the first. They didn't hide that they were doing it. They stole it fair and square, and the GOP let them
So, in response to the NRSC, we accept your "No More Frankens" challenge to make sure it is not close – where some corrupted product of Secretary of State Project can steal it for the other side. We will endeavor to ensure that the results on election are outside the margin of Soros.
But here's our challenge, and its not just with regard to Senate races; if, despite our efforts, it is close but we're on top, then you'd better be there to ensure that it does not get stolen. Run ads in broadcast and print, call press conferences, call for rallies and marches. Unleash hell.
In other words, No More Colemans.


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Is KOKS the best restaurant in the world?
KOKS, web site, Í Geilini 13, Tórshavn 175, Faroe Islands [Fodors | TripAdvisor] I am told KOKS is a Faroese word for "adding something excellent," though there are varying accounts of the translation. In any case, in terms of originality, … Continue reading
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Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.
For obvious reasons, mermaids prefer thin, delicate fabrics for their undersea fashion statements. These are usually just in single layers, possibly two or three extremely light layers for special occasions or if your situation in life is such that you don't have to move around too much; anything beyond that registers less as sumptuous and more as vulgar and ridiculous, if not simply dangerous. There is a mermaid fable, in the Aesop vein, about a particularly vain young thing with a pearly pink tail and a fondness for adornment. Despite the warnings of her more practical sisters, she kept adding layer after layer of richly embroidered skirts and tops and sleeves, as well as bangles and necklaces and hair ornaments; in the end her outfit becomes just too heavy and billowy to swim properly in, and she gets eaten by a shark. But then, there is also a mermaid fairy tale about a vain young thing with a pearly blue tail, who starts out with too many layers and sheds them, one by one, to give to others in need; in proper fairy tale fashion, the recipients repay her kindness later on. (From the mermaid point of view, neither story is a caution against vanity per se: the latter is about generosity, the former merely about self-preservation.)
This sleek, light aesthetic often carries over to what mermaids might wear on land. As a matter of fact, most mermaids mentally class humans with other mammals such as dolphins, so it's only natural to them to consider themselves superior in every way. Because of this perspective, mermaids tend to consider their own style to be obviously better than the fuller, often gaudier fashions popular among human women. Still, sometimes even for a mermaid it's fun to pile on the fabric. This bride wanted most elements of mermaid wedding gown design for her own dress: the traditional red, the romantic tatters, the bare midriff that would shock most human brides. Indeed the top is such a common design for mermaid wedding outfits that it's rather cliché. But now that she doesn't have to worry about sharks, she wanted a skirt with something like ten layers of fabric. The resulting creation looks odd to both human and mermaid eyes alike: the mermaids criticize the mismatch of tatters and heavy skirt, while the humans scorn just about every other part of it. But the bride and her partner adore it, and they've never quite been known for paying undue attention to the opinions of others.
The tatters are a long-standing symbol of enduring, patient love among mermaids (and someday, remind me, I'll tell you the story that most mermaids know a version of that started the trend). Of course, to humans, it just looks ragged and ridiculous. The tailor of this particular outfit took one last look at her beautifully balanced layers of fabric, then actually curled up in a corner of a different room and cried while her apprentice "distressed" the edges.


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Nitric oxide can increase heart rate by stimulating the hyperpolarization-activated inward current, if.
Musialek P., Lei M., Brown HF., Paterson DJ., Casadei B.
Background: Nitric oxide (NO) can modulate myocardial contractility and relaxation but it is not clear whether its effects on heart rate result from a direct action on the activity of the cardiac pacemaker or from a reflex response to the concurrent changes in arterial blood pressure. Methods and Results: In guinea pig isolated spontaneously beating atria we investigated the chronotropic effect of increasing concentrations of two NO donors (NOd): sodium nitroprusside (SNP, n=8) and 3-morpholino-sydnonimine (SIN-1, n=6). We found that exogenous NO modulates the beating rate in a concentration-dependent biphasic fashion, with a gradual increase in beating rate for low concentrations of NOd (nano- to micromolar) and a decrease in beating rate for high concentrations (millimolar). The positive chronotropic effect of 10 μmol/L SNP (n=28) or 50 μmol/L SIN-1 (n=16) was unaffected by ICaL antagonism with nifedipine (0.2 μmol/L) but was abolished after blockade of the hyperpolarization-activated inward current, If, by Cs+ (2 mmol/L) or ZD7288 (1 μmol/L). The involvement of If in the positive chronotropic response of exogenous NO was also tested in rabbit isolated patch-clamped SAN cells (n=17) where 5 μmol/L SNP caused a reversible, Cs+-sensitive, increase in this current (+ 130% at -70 mV and + 250% at -100 mV). Conclusions: Exogenous NO can directly affect pacemaker activity in a concentration-dependent biphasic fashion. The increase in beating rate with low doses of NOd is unaffected by ICaL antagonism but is abolished in the presence of If blockade. Direct recordings of If in SAN cells confirmed that this current is markedly increased by NOd. Our results suggest that stimulation of If by NO might play a part in the sinus tachycardia which accompanies pathological conditions associated with an increase in myocardial production of NO (e.g. heart failure and septic shock).


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App Startup Part of Android Jetpack.
The App Startup library provides a straightforward, performant way to initialize components at application startup. Both library developers and app developers can use App Startup to streamline startup sequences and explicitly set the order of initialization.
Instead of defining separate content providers for each component you need to initialize, App Startup allows you to define component initializers that share a single content provider. This can significantly improve app startup time.
To use Jetpack Startup in your library or app, add the following to your Gradle file:
dependencies { implementation "androidx.startup:startup-runtime:1.1.1" }
dependencies { implementation("androidx.startup:startup-runtime:1.1.1") }
Initialize components at app startup
Apps and libraries often rely on having components initialized right away when the app starts up. You can meet this need by using content providers to initialize each dependency, but content providers are expensive to instantiate and can slow down the startup sequence unnecessarily. Additionally, Android initializes content providers in an undetermined order. App Startup provides a more performant way to initialize components at app startup and explicitly define their dependencies.
To use App Startup to initialize components automatically at startup, you must define a component initializer for each component that the app needs to initialize.
Implement component initializers
You define each component initializer by creating a class that implements the
This interface defines two important methods:
- The
method, which contains all of the necessary operations to initialize the component and returns an instance ofT
. - The
method, which returns a list of the otherInitializer<T>
objects that the initializer depends on. You can use this method to control the order in which the app runs the initializers at startup.
For example, suppose that your app depends on
and needs to
initialize it at startup. Define a WorkManagerInitializer
class that
implements Initializer<WorkManager>
// Initializes WorkManager. class WorkManagerInitializer : Initializer<WorkManager> { override fun create(context: Context): WorkManager { val configuration = Configuration.Builder().build() WorkManager.initialize(context, configuration) return WorkManager.getInstance(context) } override fun dependencies(): List<Class<out Initializer<*>>> { // No dependencies on other libraries. return emptyList() } }
// Initializes WorkManager. class WorkManagerInitializer implements Initializer<WorkManager> { @Override public WorkManager create(Context context) { Configuration configuration = Configuration.Builder().build(); WorkManager.initialize(context, configuration); return WorkManager.getInstance(context); } @Override public List<Class<Initializer<?>>> dependencies() { // No dependencies on other libraries. return emptyList(); } }
The dependencies()
method returns an empty list because WorkManager
does not
depend on any other libraries.
Suppose that your app also depends on a library called ExampleLogger
, which in
turn depends on WorkManager
. This dependency means that you need to make sure
that App Startup initializes WorkManager
first. Define an
class that implements Initializer<ExampleLogger>
// Initializes ExampleLogger. class ExampleLoggerInitializer : Initializer<ExampleLogger> { override fun create(context: Context): ExampleLogger { // WorkManager.getInstance() is non-null only after // WorkManager is initialized. return ExampleLogger(WorkManager.getInstance(context)) } override fun dependencies(): List<Class<out Initializer<*>>> { // Defines a dependency on WorkManagerInitializer so it can be // initialized after WorkManager is initialized. return listOf(WorkManagerInitializer::class.java) } }
// Initializes ExampleLogger. class ExampleLoggerInitializer implements Initializer<ExampleLogger> { @Override public ExampleLogger create(Context context) { // WorkManager.getInstance() is non-null only after // WorkManager is initialized. return ExampleLogger(WorkManager.getInstance(context)); } @Override public List<Class<Initializer<?>>> dependencies() { // Defines a dependency on WorkManagerInitializer so it can be // initialized after WorkManager is initialized. return Arrays.asList(WorkManagerInitializer.class); } }
Because you include WorkManagerInitializer
in the dependencies()
method, App
Startup initializes WorkManager
before ExampleLogger
Set up manifest entries
App Startup includes a special content provider called InitializationProvider
that it uses to discover and call your component initializers. App Startup
discovers component initializers by first checking for a <meta-data>
under the InitializationProvider
manifest entry. Then, App Startup calls the
methods for any initializers that it has already discovered.
This means that in order for a component initializer to be discoverable by App Startup, one of the following conditions must be met:
- The component initializer has a corresponding
entry under theInitializationProvider
manifest entry. - The component initializer is listed in the
method from an initializer that is already discoverable.
Consider again the example with WorkManagerInitializer
. To make sure App Startup can discover these
initializers, add the following to the manifest file:
<!-- This entry makes ExampleLoggerInitializer discoverable. -->
<meta-data android:name="com.example.ExampleLoggerInitializer"
android:value="androidx.startup" />
You don't need to add a <meta-data>
entry for WorkManagerInitializer
because WorkManagerInitializer
is a dependency of ExampleLoggerInitializer
This means that if ExampleLoggerInitializer
is discoverable, then so is
The tools:node="merge"
attribute ensures that the manifest merger
tool properly resolves any conflicting entries.
Run lint checks
The App Startup library includes a set of lint rules that you can use to check
whether you've defined your component initializers correctly. You can perform
these lint checks by running ./gradlew :app:lintDebug
from the command line.
Manually initialize components
Ordinarily when you use App Startup, the InitializationProvider
object uses an
entity called
automatically discover and run component initializers at application startup.
However, you can also use AppInitializer
directly in order to manually
initialize components that your app doesn't need at startup. This is called
lazy initialization, and it can help minimize startup costs.
You must first disable automatic initialization for any components that you want to initialize manually.
Disable automatic initialization for an individual component
To disable automatic initialization for a single component, remove the
entry for that component's initializer from the manifest.
For example, adding the following to the manifest file disables automatic
initialization for ExampleLogger
<meta-data android:name="com.example.ExampleLoggerInitializer"
tools:node="remove" />
You use tools:node="remove"
in the entry instead of simply removing the entry
in order to make sure that the merger tool also removes the entry from all other
merged manifest files.
Disable automatic initialization for all components
To disable all automatic initialization, remove the entire entry for
from the manifest:
tools:node="remove" />
Manually call component initializers
If automatic initialization is disabled for a component, you can use
to manually initialize that component and its dependencies.
For example, the following code calls AppInitializer
and manually initializes
AppInitializer.getInstance(context) .initializeComponent(ExampleLoggerInitializer::class.java)
AppInitializer.getInstance(context) .initializeComponent(ExampleLoggerInitializer.class);
As a result, App Startup also initializes WorkManager
because WorkManager
a dependency of ExampleLogger
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View all posts by: Patty Greer
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text:
Section Branding
Header Content
Colombia goes into elections Sunday with a leftist looking to make history
Primary Content
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — At his final campaign rally before Colombia's first-round presidential election on Sunday, Gustavo Petro gleefully noted that the powers that be are cringing at the thought that he could win.
"Of course they are scared," Petro, a former left-wing-guerrilla-turned-politician, told thousands of supporters in Bogotá, the capital. "They're scared because we're going to kick them out of power."
Polls place Petro as the clear front-runner and, if elected, he has pledged to bring major changes to Colombia that have upset the business class. But if none of the candidates garners more than half of the ballots on Sunday, as the polls are also predicting, the two top vote-getters will meet in a runoff on June 19.
Competition is rising toward a second round
The other main candidates are Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative former Medellín mayor, Rodolfo Hernández, a populist businessman and former mayor of the city of Bucaramanga, and Sergio Fajardo, a centrist former Medellín mayor and former governor of Antioquia department.
Polls predict that in a second round, Petro would beat Gutiérrez or Fajardo. But some surveys place Petro in a statistical dead heat with Hernández, who has avoided debates and in-person campaign events in favor of social media videos. Still, he has moved up in recent polls and has connected to many Colombians with his pledges to eliminate corruption.
"I'm going to go after all the politicians who are thieves," Hernández, 77, said Wednesday in an interview on Colombian TV. "They are not all thieves, but nearly all of them are."
However, in the runup to the election it's Petro who has made most of the headlines and has caused the most consternation among business leaders, the military and conservative voters in a nation that has never before elected a left-wing president.
He went from rebel fighter to presidential candidate
Petro once tried to fight his way to power as a member of the M-19 guerrilla group. The rebels signed a peace treaty in 1990 and since then, Petro has served in Congress and as mayor of Bogotá.
Now on his third run for the presidency, Petro, 62, hopes to join a growing number of leftists now governing much of Latin America, including Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Peru, Chile and Argentina.
Petro promises to hike taxes on the rich to pay for anti-poverty programs. He wants to renegotiate trade agreements, including with the United States, he says, to better protect Colombia's industries and agriculture. To forge a greener economy, he wants to phase out the production of oil, the country's biggest export, and replace that income with tourism.
A business owner threatened employees who vote for Petro
But all this could provoke capital flight, business closures and massive unemployment, according to many business leaders, who are urging Colombians to reject Petro at the ballot box on Sunday.
"Without a doubt Colombia has problems. But that's no reason to leap into the void or to risk radical change," Miguel Cortés, one of Colombia's most influential businessmen, said in a video message to voters.
Another business owner, Sergio Araujo, recently tweeted that he would fire any of his employees that voted for Petro. In an interview with the Colombian newsmagazine Semana, Araujo called Petro a "destroyer of businesses who has spent five decades fighting against free enterprise in Colombia."
Some middle-class Colombians are also worried.
Roxanne Restrepo, who works in banking and finance in Bogotá, is nervous about Petro's plan to borrow from private pension funds in order to expand retirement benefits for poor Colombians. And she's not waiting for the election to take action.
"I've been sending some of my savings offshore and we've been searching to see if we can get Portuguese citizenship to see if we need to leave the country," Restrepo says.
Petro has also picked fights with the Colombian army, suggesting last month that some of its top officers are working in cahoots with drug traffickers. That prompted a furious anti-Petro tirade on Twitter from army commander Gen. Eduardo Zapateiro, even though under Colombia's constitution the military is supposed to stay out of politics.
Former army Col. John Marulanda, who fought against Petro during the guerrilla war and now heads a national association of retired military officers, put it bluntly in an interview with NPR: "We don't want an ex-guerrilla, a retired guerrilla being the president of Colombia. And if it happens, we declare ourselves in opposition."
He could realign the country away from the U.S.
Marulanda and others also question Petro's commitment to democracy.
For one thing, Petro intends to forge closer ties to the authoritarian regime in neighboring Venezuela. That poses a significant shift for Colombia, long closely aligned with the U.S. and a staunch critic of the government in Caracas. Because his Historic Pact political coalition would lack a majority in Congress, Petro has talked of passing economic laws by decree.
Not only "is he now proposing a radical change in the economy, but he's actually pressing the nuclear button on what he could potentially do to democracy," says Sergio Guzmán, director of the consulting firm Colombia Risk Analysis.
Petro and his many supporters want change
Petro claims such criticisms are unfair and has pointed out that President Iván Duque, who isn't allowed to run for a second consecutive term, also passed economic laws by decree during the pandemic.
Frustrated over accusations from opposition candidates that he plans to seize private property if he wins the presidency, Petro held a news conference at a notary public where he signed a document pledging not to expropriate farms and businesses.
And in an interview with NPR last month, Petro denied that he had a radical agenda. He pointed out that the United Nations is urging countries to transition away from hydrocarbons and that raising taxes on the rich to help the poor is common sense in the wake of a pandemic that drove Colombia's poverty rate from 35.7% to 42.5% in 2020.
"These are normal things," Petro said, speaking on Zoom. But in Colombia "they are seen as leftist and revolutionary."
Many frustrated Colombians agree with Petro.
They include Sara Gallego, 34, an athletic trainer who attended Petro's closing campaign rally. She checked off a long list of the country's woes — from unemployment to malnutrition — that she says have been ignored by President Duque and previous governments.
That's why, she says, the traditional ruling elite has only itself to blame for Petro's popularity.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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It reminds me of a case where after a blow up in the convertible bonds space around 2006, the firm decided to wind the fund down. They told employees there would be no bonuses, just wind down, and leave. So one guy sold his portfolio at bargain basement prices to his favorite brokers. He then had lots of credit in the favor bank, and was able to land a great job at a new firm, which since then has done very well.
Another fun story is when Niederhoffer blew up in 1997. As the fund was being liquidated, the agent for the liquidation with no skin in the game went to the pit to close out a large amount of eurodollar positions. Everyone knew he was going one way, and when he asked a price, they all stopped and looked at each other, silent. Eventually he sold his positions at such a low price, it was the best day ever for at least one firm there. The liquidator did not act in the investor's best interest, but he was not incented to.
When someone is in charge of a lot money, if you take away direct incentives, they will game the system indirectly. It's foolish to think people in charge liquidating hundreds of millions of dollars will do this without simply giving away stuff to people that can (and will!) be helpful to them later. Navigating the favor bank is part of life, and people act in the self interest.


text:
All kinds of posts are welcome--recipes, crafts, funny stories, home decor, etc.; but please do not link to Etsy shops, businesses, items for sale, etc. (I have a Sponsors section, if you'd like to Advertise with me.)
Here are a few of my faves from this week:
~DIY Ribbon Christmas Tree Topper
~Christmas Twig Vase
~A wonderful series on A Season of Giving (Acts of Kindness Advent Calendar!)
~And Me? This week featured:
- Little Doodahs GIVEAWAY! (Win a $30 Gift Certificate to the Shop)
- Framed Glitter Christmas Tree
- New series here! A Season of Serenity (Now) at Home
- Metal Tin Advent Calendar Craft (from Random Thoughts of a SUPERMOM
Time to link up your best post of the week. Please remember that this party is dedicated to showcasing your best post of the week--we've had some issues with people linking up 10 or more posts each week, and some of them for multiple weeks in a row.
- Please link back to me within your post. I will not feature your link if you don't link back to me.
- No items for sale, shops, etc. and please don't link up the same post week after week.
- Please visit some of the other links--that's how a good blog party works--participation!
Here's the button code if you'd prefer to use that rather than a text link-back:
Party is open until 10 pm (ET) on Sunday night.
What are you up to this weekend? Natalie turns 6 YEARS OLD (??!) next week, so we're hosting her birthday party at a local ballet studio tomorrow. So excited!
I hope to be back tomorrow with some highlights from Weekend Bloggy Reading!
(This Code is for blogs featured today!):


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After repeated delays, the trial of a Bangladeshi Muslim editor arrested for advocating ties with Israel began in Dhaka on Wednesday.
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, editor of the Weekly Blitz, an English-language newspaper published in the Bangladeshi capital, is facing a series of charges that include sedition.
If convicted, he could be sentenced to death.
In November 2003, Choudhury was arrested at Dhaka's international airport just prior to boarding a flight on his way to Israel, where he was scheduled to deliver an address on promoting understanding between Muslims and Jews. His visit to Israel would have been the first by a Bangladeshi journalist.
Bangladesh does not recognize Israel's existence.
Since his arrest, Choudhury has been subjected to various forms of intimidation and harassment. Two years ago, the offices of his newspaper were the target of an attempted bombing by unknown assailants.
In the first day of testimony this week, the prosecution called Abdul Hanif, the officer in charge at the airport when Choudhury was detained.
Hanif accused Choudhury of being anti-Islamic, and said that he had "praised Jews and Christians" and defamed Bangladesh. The hearings were then adjourned.
Contacted by The Jerusalem Post, a spokeswoman for the Bangladeshi Mission to the United Nations declined to comment on the case, saying she was not familiar with the details.
Dr. Richard Benkin, an American Jewish activist who has been leading the fight on Choudhury's behalf, told the Post that while he was clearly concerned about the trial, he nonetheless remains cautiously optimistic.
"The judge conducted himself in a judicially correct and professional manner today, something we never experienced under the previous government which initiated these charges," Benkin said.
In a message sent to his supporters abroad after the conclusion of the first day of hearings, Choudhury remained upbeat, declaring: "Now my luck hangs in the balance of being either acquitted from the charges by the court or accorded capital punishment."
"But let us remain strong. Pray for me, for God is with us and we shall win," he said.