The Grift

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We have spent the better part of the last decade debating about Trump and his coterie of Grifters that define both his business, Trump Enterprises (whatever those were) that included Real Estate, Casinos, Clothing Lines, Wine, Classes/Seminars, Steak, and other labeled brands that extended to other members of the Family that shared the name of Trump. From the seat in the White House he managed to further extend that brand to the point it drew attention from the State of New York which prosecuted members of his corporation, his personal Attorney and finally Trump himself for acts of duplicity and fraud regarding his real estate “empire.” That led to a massive penalty which he will not or will pay and this will go on perhaps for years more. There are other debts, trials and tribulations that seem to never have an end game in sight and that is what falls into that classification of the “Long Con.” A long con is one that takes place over a much longer time frame, I feel the story on John Oliver’s show regarding Pig Butchering is a great example of one of the current crops of long con. Bitcoin is a fabulous example of how that also plays into this story. A great long con if ever there was one, with the nefarious invisible “Banksy” who created all this but no one really knows who he is, where he is and what is this about? But even Kara Swisher in her new Memoir writes of another in Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg, who may be perhaps the best at this new type of Grift. Social Media is one long con.

This article in the New York Times discusses the growth of the Grift. And where I found this definition which I have paraphrased and added my own comments.

The difference between a Grifter and “Grafter” are often tied together. “Grift” evokes not so much specific criminal acts as a broad, opportunistic racket, executed with a bit of cunning and panache; Grafters are stolid and conventional, lining their pockets and then quietly retreating to one of their several homes. A Grifters has both flair and ambition, who seem to delight in the con itself — the cleverness of the scheme, the smooth ease with which the marks were gulled. So while Trump is a classic grifter take a look at many who attach themselves to his varying schemes and plans. Many worked for him during his Administration quickly extricating themselves post January 6th but would happily Vote and/or work for him again if the opportunity arose. A Grifter loves a Grafter as they give them legitimacy. I prefer the term “Enablers” which is another way of allowing or permitting if not encouraging the behavior, a person usually associated with Addiction and there is no greater addiction than money. All of Venture Capitalists are some type of Enabler. Without them or the banks would Sam Bankerman Fried or Bernie Madoff made as far and in his case as long without them?

Now we are all being grifted or are grafters at some point. We take an opportunity and we work it to our advantage. I like to think of Real Estate Agents as the lowest on the professional totem pole who play the role of Counselor, Financial Advisor and Best Friend as you try to buy or sell a home. They dip their wick in both pots often coming out well ahead of the game when you are working with one and this adds to the price of housing and why many cannot afford to as they work in tangent with another Grafter, the Mortgage Broker/Agent. Banks are not the only one who writes these loans and they too have a massive interest in making money, yours. The process of this led to a massive financial crisis in 2008 and yet not one saw a trial or a penalty in the process for this and many banks were bailed out and rescued from their misdeeds. But without the Agents and these secondary lenders, few would have made it to sign the papers and make the sales of a product they could not afford. Used Car Salesman get a bad rap, add Real Estate Agents to the list. There are many many more stories about Real Estate Agents and their acts of fraud and duplicity, and by far more costly. Just Google “Real Estate Fraud” to see the list of crimes they have committed.

This week a neighbor and her husband moved out of my building. He is a Surgeon and she is a “Model”/ Real Estate Agent. I did not like nor dislike them I simply lived down the hall from them and kept it at that. Upon their final move out our Refuse room was full of their rejects, disgusting broken furniture, filthy smelling couch cushions, and largely junky items that seemed to be from a college dorm than an adult professionals home. Their move out was done in a small order Uhaul truck with two hired hands who packed what they took with them to relocate to Pittsburgh. To say crap in both quality and design is to be polite. I had to remind myself that this Man was a fucking Surgeon and this filthy shit is his? His wife the model did not adorn herself with the quality of designer goods but they did have three vehicles, two Porches and Volvo. Well priorities. And while living in a building that is largely filled with Asian families and Students who live very cheaply I did laugh as it explains why the fascination with my decorated digs is a source of discussion. And for the record many many folks who rent now are taking it upon themselves to decorate and design living spaces that reflect their taste. And yes folks what comes up can come down and if you are responsible you restore, replace all what you did back to the shit the building gave you. Or you can be like the Doctor and his wife, leave it there and pay for that via forfeit of the damage deposit. Clearly he has the cash. But man would I want that Man operating on me? NO! Again, this is a choice and it takes a weekly wander outside any apartment building at end of month to see the treasures and trash left behind.

And that too is another kind of Grift, the tip. There is now an industry tied to the Tipping Economy. The complaints about the added “service fee” and the mandatory tip on screens when at the Bakery or Butcher even have made one wonder what is appropriate and how much also has become an insidious way of doing business. Living in already overpriced multi family housing means Tips at the Holiday time are mandated if not expected. For many the strain of tipping a building with often dozens of staff, many invisible can be an expensive proposition. To give you an idea, we have in our Building we have Six Front Desk Staff, some whom work Graveyard and often have limited Tenant contact but no less an important job in which to provide security and maintain package inventory and distribution for those who do collect them at odd times. The cleaning and maintenance staff are (often at times) 10 in number and do most of the heavy lifting; Add to that the Superintendent who oversees that crew and lastly the Manager and when we have one, an Assistant. (And for the record the Manager has massive problems holding staff so the turnover is high and often overtly dramatic adding to buildings toxic demeanor) So, at one point we have over 18 people we have to pay at some point, and how much and do all of them get it? I mean the fat fuck who is the Gossip troll deserves the most as that way you won’t be gossiped about right? He should get the most too as he is fat, old, barely walks and is a troll right? Over the young girl who works her ass off. But how about the former Lead who used her position as “helping people” by enabling those with Dogs and Kids to be largely ignored when the kids were running wild in the gym unsupervised or the Dogs shit everywhere or the ones that killed a dog and another attacking a woman, but they were “good” Tenants as they tipped more and more often. So that is hierarchy in Apartment living, who tips, how often and how much matters. And there are a lot of holidays and dates of import. Valentines Day, Lunar New Year, Holi, their birthdays, your birthday all are on the calendar and have cards ready in which to shove in that obligatory payment.

We think of Grift as something associated with Politicians and there is no greater profession guilty of it, but it is everywhere. It is the way we assert our control and and influence even in the most benign of situations. And with that we are not exempt from the fraud, the duplicity and the guilt associated with our role as Grifter or Grafter. The recent story about the New York Times Reporter who handed over 50K in cash to a recent scam, but the Bank who willingly handed over 50K in cash is the same banker who is supposed to notify the IRS if you have deposited more than 10K in your account to notify them as earnings. Or the payment apps if you have transfers exceeding 300 dollars. The Police who will take any amount a cash during a traffic stop legally as a it too is suspect under the guise of Civil Forfeiture. So that Estate Sale, Car Sale, or some transaction is all watched or monitored or taken as it is all seen as gotten gains. But taking it out and in cash to pay an extortion not a problem in the least.

Grift or Graft, the Con, the Long Con and we are all players or victims in the game. This article from Psychology Today explain who is more likely to be a victim, but in reality we all are at some point players in this game. It is just how much you lose what matters. We are all pigs waiting to be butchered.

The Art of the Con and Why People Fall for It

How the con is pulled off, why fraudsters are successful, and how to spot them.

Posted September 26, 2019 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

By definition, a con artist is a manipulator who cheats, or tricks, others through persuading them to believe something that is not true. Through deception, they fool people into believing they can make easy money when, in fact, it is the con artist who ends up taking the victim’s money. The criminal and legal consequences of such indiscretions can be insignificant or great, depending on the circumstances and the laws of the land. In the course of co-authoring The Crime Book, which covered more than 100 crimes, I researched and wrote a chapter about con artists. Their crimes are varied, as are their behaviors. But the one thing they each have in common is the power of persuasion to take advantage of unsuspecting people.

Name of the Game

The confidence game, as scam artistry is called, is one of the oldest tricks in the trade. It exploits people’s trust. Human nature is on the side of these masters of fraud when it comes to defrauding their marks, or victims, and contributes to the con’s enduring success. Perpetrators have been referred to everything from flimflam operators, hustlers, grifters, and tricksters. The victims have been called marks, suckers, and gulls. And while media publicity has further romanticized cons and put their crimes in the public eye, their actions are anything but glamorous.

Even further, the cost of the capers to victims may run anywhere from a couple hundred to a few million dollars, with some victims learning the hard way, using their own free will, that when an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission reported that people lost $1.48 billion to fraud in 2018, an increase of 38 percent in 2017.

It Can Happen to You

How do unsuspecting people get duped to begin with? After all, even the most rational people have proven susceptible to crimes of trickery. That’s because con artists often prey on people’s trust and their propensity for believing what they wish was true—especially with get-rich-quick schemes and individual’s desire for a quick buck. They let their guard down and buy into what con artists feed them—all in the belief of the scammer and a high rate of return in exchange for a small investment, albeit a shady deal. But the convincing scammer skews the victim into thinking the payoff will come true and the scheme is legitimate.

Some famous con artists were at the top of their game—until they ultimately got caught. With impersonator Frank Abagnale and international career jewel thief Doris Payne, they are the epitome of the swindling game. By their own rights, they became experts at the art of the con and successfully evaded law enforcement for years. Two centuries earlier, Jeanne de la Motte, a cunning Frenchwoman, orchestrated a diamond necklace affair, which was one of several scandals that led to the French Revolution and helped destroy a monarchy.

Other significant confidence criminals, from forged artwork to fake manuscripts—Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian-born forger of Picassos and Matisses, who sold more than a thousand pieces to art galleries worldwide, and novelist Clifford Irving, who wrote a fabricated autobiography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. These stories break down how grifters pass off their own works as those of masters and literary greats—but eventually they too were caught.

A con artist can execute remarkable expertise in their trickery, as with Czechoslovakian Victor Lustig, who in an underhanded plot sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal—not once, but twice.

Psychology of the Con

Each of these con artists have one thing in common: the power of persuasion to swindle their victims. The successful ones exhibit three similar characteristics—psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism—which have been referred to by psychologists as “dark” personality traits.

Those characteristics allow con artists to swindle people out of their money without feeling any remorse or guilt. Another thing most chiselers have in common are their egos. These extortion sales people boost the psyche of the perpetrators and make them feel even more confident, thus the description of the con has been termed as a confidence game.

Because cons often change their identities as part of their game, it can be pesky for law enforcement to catch them. Also, police may not even go after them when the crime has to do with bilking property and even money from their marks. That’s because the law can consider the loss a civil issue and not a legal one, unless it’s a corporate white-collar crime, such as those committed by Bernie Madoff, a former stockbroker, financier, and operator of a massive pyramid scheme that perpetrated the largest financial fraud in recent US history. Going after grifters is often of low status, more difficult to prove, and less likely to be prosecuted, with violent crimes and terrorist acts of higher priority.

That happenstance leads to a message for everyday people: Buyer beware.

Joy of Rage

I feel we are at a place where being enraged makes us feel alive. We take pleasure in another’s pain and we find joy in unanimity of taking the “other” down. It comes in the form of “own the Libs” or mocking the Trump-tards, the taking of another group or individual down a peg in the intellectual battlefield of online social media has become a National pastime, but instead of with bats to beat a ball into a field we do it with our keyboard and with words.

The only place I post is on the Washington Post or New York Times comment pages and even though both are homes to well received journals and you must subscribe in which to do so it is not a pleasant place to exchange opinion. The Moderation on WaPo is lacking and only done if a post is flagged. Posts on the Times are delayed prior to being put up, and with that it appears that it is the only moderation; however, that they do close comments early on and it appears WaPo is doing the same, especially concerning the more clickbait articles that are clearly written by an increasingly larger retinue of Freelance writers. I suspect editing and some composition will soon become the provenance of Chatbot AI soon enough, if not already.

I get that people post pandemic are still somewhat isolated and with that they are not quite ready to live and let live. It comes in the form of book bannings, stopping “wokeness” and other gestures in which to show you are with it, belong and are engaged. It is exhausting to give one flying fuck about anyone else when trying to live ones own life, and with that there is the problem, no one is living their own life they are living in the shadows of another. We want so desperately to have attention, be liked and be heard that we will write one inane comment after another, barely giving the last one the attention it deserves and move on to the next. Quantity over quantity seems to be the pretext if not the motivation. And with each post more rage, more recriminations and more joy as you “got them.” I simply flag anyone who posts or responds to my comments with “Thanks for playing” or tag as offensive to have it removed. I am not arguing with anyone, anywhere be it in life or online, it serves no purpose.

And then I read this opinion piece by the New York Times new Religion commentator. I do not find him as annoying as many and given he lives in Tennessee right outside of Nashville I was surprised myself how many times I find myself agreeing with him on his perspective. And while I don’t share his views or beliefs I can respect his opinion as one that comes from a place of intent and to further understanding. We all want dignity and that is very easy to model and provide, respect on the other hand must be earned through both thought and action and few make it on that scale. And when I read this take on the MAGA folk I had to agree, it is just that – a party – not just a political one.

I have thought much of MAGA a cult as I do Organized Religion. There is a dogma behind some of it – largely GOP bullshit. There is a loose sense of beliefs and a hierarchy of order that establishes a sort of chain of command and protocol in which to follow. And when I look to another more liberal organization I see how disjointed and confusing it can be when a grassroots group begins there are always growing pains, conflicts over power and money and with that Black Lives Matter has its own struggles; however, it is by far more authentic and well documented with regards to what their origin story defines. But do not tell that to a MAGA male as they too see themselves as victims of social injustice. Talk about a fucked up bookend. But MAGA is not a coordinated foundation, it is like the Evangelical Churches that often house many of its members, it is very piecemeal and very chaotic, there is no order to the disorder and they lack a cohesive organization and a leader. If that is Trump he is, well, not much of one. But with that it allows for those to flow in and out and attend without guilt or recrimination. Miss that rally? No one cares and no one is taking attendance and forcing one to Tithe. This is a party and you BYO. And that can be guns, booze, or rage. Party Down and party on. But with that the underlying message is a hateful one and to overlook that is a major mistake as January 6th reminds us. Even the faithful are finding themselves targets in the quest to find blame and distract from the truth that all of it was based on a lie. But is that not the foundation of all cults? For underneath the layer of joy is rage. Anger fuels and empowers, joy sedates and calms us. Pick one or the other. You cannot have both.

The Rage and Joy of MAGA America

July 6, 2023 By David French

Opinion Columnist The New York Times .

I’ve shared this fact with readers before: I live in Tennessee outside Nashville, a very deep-red part of America. According to a New York Times tool that calculates the political composition of a community, only 15 percent of my neighbors are Democrats. I’ve been living here in the heart of MAGA country since Donald Trump came down the escalator. This is the world of my friends, my neighbors and many members of my family. That is perhaps why, when I’m asked what things are like now, eight years into the Trump era, I have a ready answer: Everything is normal until, suddenly, it’s not. And unless we can understand what’s normal and what’s not, we can’t truly understand why Trumpism endures.

It’s hard to encapsulate a culture in 22 seconds, but this July 4 video tweet from Representative Andy Ogles accomplishes the nearly impossible. For those who don’t want to click through, the tweet features Ogles, a cheerful freshman Republican from Tennessee, wishing his followers a happy Fourth of July. The text of the greeting is remarkable only if you don’t live in MAGAland:

Hey guys, Congressman Andy Ogles here, wishing you a happy and blessed Fourth of July. Hey, remember our Founding Fathers. It’s we the people that are in charge of this country, not a leftist minority. Look, the left is trying to destroy our country and our family, and they’re coming after you. Have a blessed Fourth of July. Be safe. Have fun. God bless America.

Can something be cheerful and dark at the same time? Can a holiday message be both normal and so very strange? If so, then Ogles pulled it off. This is a man smiling in a field as a dog sniffs happily behind him. The left may be “coming after you,” as he warns, but the vibe isn’t catastrophic or even worried, rather a kind of friendly, generic patriotism. They’re coming for your family! Have a great day!

It’s not just Ogles. It’s no coincidence that one of the most enduring cultural symbols of Trump’s 2020 campaign was the boat parade. To form battle lines behind Trump, the one man they believe can save America from total destruction, thousands of supporters in several states got in their MasterCrafts and had giant open-air water parties.

Or take the Trump rally, the signature event of this political era. If you follow the rallies via Twitter or mainstream newscasts, you see the anger, but you miss the fun. When I was writing for The Dispatch, one of the best pieces we published was a report by Andrew Egger in 2020 about the “Front Row Joes,” the Trump superfans who follow Trump from rally to rally the way some people used to follow the Grateful Dead. Egger described the Trump rally perfectly: “For enthusiasts, Trump rallies aren’t just a way to see a favorite politician up close. They are major life events: festive opportunities to get together with like-minded folks and just go crazy about America and all the winning the Trump administration’s doing.”

Or go to a Southeastern Conference football game. The “Let’s Go Brandon” (or sometimes, just “[expletive] Joe Biden”) chant that arises from the student section isn’t delivered with clenched fists and furious anger, but rather through smiles and laughs. The frat bros are having a great time. The consistent message from Trumpland of all ages is something like this: “They’re the worst, and we’re awesome. Let’s party, and let’s fight.”

Why do none of your arguments against Trump penetrate this mind-set? The Trumpists have an easy answer: You’re horrible, and no one should listen to horrible people. Why were Trumpists so vulnerable to insane stolen-election theories? Because they know that you’re horrible and that horrible people are capable of anything, including stealing an election.

At the same time, their own joy and camaraderie insulate them against external critiques that focus on their anger and cruelty. Such charges ring hollow to Trump supporters, who can see firsthand the internal friendliness and good cheer that they experience when they get together with one another. They don’t feel angry — at least not most of the time. They are good, likable people who’ve just been provoked by a distant and alien “left” that many of them have never meaningfully encountered firsthand.

Indeed, while countless gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the MAGA movement’s rage, far too little has been spilled discussing its joy.

Once you understand both dynamics, however, so much about the present moment makes clearer sense, including the dynamics of the Republican primary. Ron DeSantis, for example, channels all the rage of Trumpism and none of the joy. With relentless, grim determination he fights the left with every tool of government at his disposal. But can he lead stadiums full of people in an awkward dance to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People? Will he be the subject of countless over-the-top memes and posters celebrating him as some kind of godlike, muscular superhero?

Trump’s opponents miss the joy because they experience only the rage. I’m a member of a multiethnic church in Nashville. It’s a refuge from the MAGA Christianity that’s all too present where I live, just south of the city, in Franklin. This past Sunday, Walter Simmons, a Franklin-based Black pastor who founded the Franklin Justice and Equity Coalition, spoke to our church, and he referred to a common experience for those who dissent publicly in MAGA America. “If you ain’t ready for death threats, don’t live in Franklin,” he said.

He was referring to the experience of racial justice activists in deep-red spaces. They feel the rage of the MAGA mob. If you’re deemed to be one of those people who is trying to “destroy our country and our family,” then you don’t see joy, only fury.

Trump’s fans, by contrast, don’t understand the effects of that fury because they mainly experience the joy. For them, the MAGA community is kind and welcoming. For them, supporting Trump is fun. Moreover, the MAGA movement is heavily clustered in the South, and Southerners see themselves as the nicest people in America. It feels false to them to be called “mean” or “cruel.” Cruel? No chance. In their minds, they’re the same people they’ve always been — it’s just that they finally understand how bad you are. And by “you,” again, they often mean the caricatures of people they’ve never met.

In fact, they often don’t even know about the excesses of the Trump movement. Many of them will never know that their progressive neighbors have faced threats and intimidation. And even when they do see the movement at its worst, they can’t quite believe it. So Jan. 6 was a false flag. Or it was a “fedsurrection.” It couldn’t have really been a violent attempt to overthrow the elected government, because they know these people, or people like them, and they’re mostly good folks. It had to be a mistake, or an exaggeration, or a trick or a few bad apples. The real crime was the stolen election.

It’s the combination of anger and joy that makes the MAGA enthusiasm so hard to break but also limits its breadth. If you’re part of the movement’s ever-widening circle of enemies, Trump holds no appeal for you. You experience his movement as an attack on your life, your choices, your home and even your identity. If you’re part of the core MAGA community, however, not even the ruthlessly efficient DeSantis can come close to replicating the true Trump experience. Again, the boat parade is a perfect example. It’s one part Battle for the Future of Civilization and one part booze cruise.

The battle and the booze cruise both give MAGA devotees a sense of belonging. They see a country that’s changing around them and they are uncertain about their place in it. But they know they have a place at a Trump rally, surrounded by others — overwhelmingly white, many evangelical — who feel the same way they do.

Evangelicals are a particularly illustrative case. About half of self-identified evangelicals now attend church monthly or less often. They have religious zeal, but they lack religious community. So they find their band of brothers and sisters in the Trump movement. Even among actual churchgoing evangelicals, political alignment is often so important that it’s hard to feel a true sense of belonging unless you’re ideologically united with the people in the pews around you.

During the Trump years, I’ve received countless email messages from distraught readers that echo a similar theme: My father (or mother or uncle or cousin) is lost to MAGA. They can seem normal, but they’re not, at least not any longer. It’s hard for me to know what to say in response, but one thing is clear: You can’t replace something with nothing. And until we fully understand what that “something” is — and that it includes not only passionate anger but also very real joy and a deep sense of belonging — then our efforts to persuade are doomed to fail.

You’re Fired

So goes the catch phrase of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice and with that it enabled him to further create a myth of a successful and rich white businessman who made it up on his own bootstraps, a career maker, deal breaker and all around walking verification of the Horatio Alger myth of meritocracy. None of that was or is true but it did hand him the Presidency on the back of a massive media campaign that he exploited for his benefit at our detriment. There is no doubt the roll of mass media and conventional cable did its part to elevate a man in search of press his entire life and acceptance in high culture and society. It did that but with an entire cohort of people that Trump in the normal days of his life would likely eschew and mock, the Evangelicals and the Working class. This is a man who never heard of a lawsuit he did not lock in when it came to suing Contractors and others who he felt ripped him off. These are not the Ivy League Class that came to work for him in the White House, these are Plumbers, Builders and others whose work he needed then stiffed for payment due. His fixer, Michael Cohen, hardly had the credentials of those later who would do his bidding, the Bill Barr’s, the Clarence Thomases, and the many others who have represented him throughout varying Impeachments, suits, investigations ongoing or in process that are racking up six figure bills that will likely follow him on the impending campaign trail. Trump may love the uneducated but he prefers those who are.

With that many were equally ill suited and educated and were largely responsible for some other myth making that ended the careers of another angry white man – Tucker Carlson – of Fox News. There is no doubt that the never ending clown car of Attorney’s and others who defended the Big Lie were less credentialed but no less impassioned about a future position in the Big House, be that the White one or the one often noted as Prison. The last few years are a revolving door of crazy is and crazy does and it has no end date in site. No folks the 2024 election will only continue this until they either die off or find a new shiny key.

This week saw not only Carlson’s exit but that of Don Lemon at CNN as it it attempts to remake itself after years of being the unofficial PR machine that gave us Trump. The exit of the last executive there was a former NBC Producer who was behind the Trump Machine, Jeff Zucker. His was due to a relationship he had with a staff member, that despite it being consensual was still a subordinate or not, who cares but it was obvious that his work at CNN had turned a cable news network into an endless parade of hacks and pundits determined to provide less news and more opinion all the time. Chris Cuomo was let go for his role in aiding his Brother, another angry white man who lost his job thanks to his numerous inappropriate comments, behavior and just all around stuff during the pandemic that had at one point him winning an Emmy for his daily news talks. Seriously they were not that great but it was a counter point to Trump’s rambling ones. See all things circle back to Trump at some point.

Don Lemon had allowed ego and perhaps a belief that being a “star” meant you were infallible to criticism or comment. With that he is gone but not forgotten and will undoubtedly show up somewhere else. Don will be fine and so will Tucker Carlson. Two Coins that have very different heads and tails but they have always turned up like the bad penny’s they are. Sorry folks I used to love Don Lemon but the ego took over and the id is now short for idiot. Women past their prime remark duly noted.

And with that another Executive at NBC was given his walking papers for his inappropriate comments to subordinates. The same goes for a McDonald executive a couple of years ago. And of course more Epstein revelations continue to rise from his grave with regards to his reach and abuse of those whose lives may never recover. It really does go to say, Ask E Jean Carroll about that as well.

There have been many casualties of the angry white men who on the surface were not, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer and with the roar of women on the horizon they too had to be let go into a sea of discontent or malcontent, pick a contention and they are there. It was decades before R. Kelly felt the sting of cuffs and the same goes for Harvey Weinstein. There is a movie and song there – Cell Mates meets Big Brother reality show for those two. But in all reality that will never happen to Trump and we have to get over that as the election nears. We have two very similar men running in regards to age and race and with that the same family dynamics and scandals that all of us have, just some pack that in designer bags versus plastic ones. I deeply respect Joe Biden and with that I was shocked to realize how much I would given his history in politics. I took little notice in his role of VP and with that I wish I could do the same with regards to Ms. Harris. This is history in reverse and with that Biden is the LBJ and the reality is may not live through his second term and that said do we want a Camelot and is Harris the one to bring it. If remakes are a sign, the new Camelot at Lincoln Center is not good despite the pedigree which often means something old cannot be made new again. I do worry and I am not alone.

After living in Nashville for three years I saw first hand the power of the pulpit both in doctrine and bully. The story behind the Nashville 3 says more than one needs to know on how it plays there. It is a State like many where the Minority rule the Majority and that with that we are finding more fabulists, idiots and out right dilettantes elected to public office. We have a Supreme Court with serious ethical lapses in judgements let alone decisions and again a role of religion that cannot be overlooked when it comes to said decisions. We are moving more towards Authoritarianism and a type of Autocracy that cannot be denied. Rare is the head that rules in calm. Fearing diversity of opinion or of life is not a place that Democracy can thrive. It took 40 years of under funding Education to finally allow true idiocy to thrive in jobs that once were the provenance of the educated and the elite. And while I do believe we need to break doors down and hear all voices there is something lacking when heckling a President during a formal speech, verbally abusing and threatening colleagues in which decorum is expected then in turn expelling those who seem to follow that belief but in a way that threatens your own belief seems to show hypocrisy at its finest. The Montana rep now forced to do business in the hall for expressing her own concerns about Transgender rights again shows how fear is seeping into all halls of justice. And yet even Arizona found themselves for once doing the right thing when something is in fact wrong.

If we fire everyone who is left to do the job? I have often said the reason people do not want to return to the office is because they loathe their co-workers. The level of tolerance and acceptance as we have come to learn be it forced or through natural corporate benefit has finally hit the wall and people found out that people are not the luckiest when they need other people. I again point to the school I have been substituting at for the past few months. The SPED department is in chaos and the most neediest of children are getting ignored thanks to the politics of Adults. Due Process for the Adults in question has been denied as is the education and support of the children. Why is this? Laziness, financial obligations or sheer lack of ability may be why. But this solves nothing and with that putting me and many other subs through those doors puts us all at risk. I am happy to be cut from the list and again proves my point that people do no good for me nor I them. I cannot stand being in the same room with two of the women and there is little I can say or do that will not bite me in the ass, so take a hit and move on. As I read about the asshole who was behind the Truth Social network of Trump and his blowing of the whistle on that operation and he is now a Barista at Starbucks, I thought of the song by Bob Marley, Redemption Song, and once again it takes a Black man to remind us all of the mistakes we make and the ability to forgive and move on.

Been fired from a job? I have. More than one. Do I care now? No. Did it teach me anything? Yeah to quit sooner. Other than that no. Sometimes you need to fire yourself and there is nothing wrong with admitting defeat and moving on. We all could use that lesson.

Sex, Power and All that Jazz

In tribute to the late Bob Fosse whose Dancin has returned the Great White Way it is a reminder why some things need to not and some things even when they have no substance have a history and resonance with many it really never leaves. Sex and Power are the two of the three and the third should be Money. It is the Jazz that never misses a beat in that trifecta.

Succession starts its final season and the Roy family aka the Murdoch’s are coming to terms with the end of an era in who comes out on top of a family that has never had to worry about their wealth or ability to have sex but their power on the other hand has always been tenuous. The family is of course tied to the Patriarch and that Logan Roy is a mercurial leader whose ability to fuck with the heads of his children may be more interesting and exciting to him than actually running the family business. And that is the business – the family. I love the show as the Actors are incredibly interesting and bring such life to what could be one note, – the prodigal son, the dutiful daughter and the wayward one. Then the extended family that includes son in laws, ex wives, current ones, future lovers, past lovers and all those Employees who have served to the hand of the Master. It is a long game and we have seen it here in life and in our own State of House, the White House when Trump was President. I don’t recall in my lifetime, the Kennedy’s included, where Nepotism mattered least and most all at the same time. The parallels to the Trumps I believe is more accurate than the Murdoch’s, although similarity breeds contempt clearly.

I have on my shelf a book about Sumner Redstone, the now very dead Patriarch of his clan that ran Viacom/CBS for what seems a lifetime. In that same time frame the same family dynamics have played out in real time the way it does on Succession but over years that has the Dynasty be more theatrical and bizarre than any TV show could provide. Insatiable in lust and greed, the Redstone family have perhaps chosen wisely in their profession as it will make an amazing Movie in ad of itself. But who will be the Stars? Succession wisely cast largely British Actors who play characters larger than life and of life but we know more about the Murdoch’s now we than had in the past and with that we can distinguish among them or can we? And with that I will never see anyone stranger than Cousin Greg or the weird Tom Wambaguah as odd Brothers from other Mothers. So in that fiction may be more interesting than reality. But the Redstone’s who are they and how did they got that way is a story of its own. I hope they do make this into a series as it is a hell of a story.

With that I have reprinted a story in the Guardian that will fascinate, infuriate and amuse those who like to follow the money. And there is plenty of that, sex too and well all that other jazz that dominates families of power and wealth.

Sex, power, money: how the real-life Succession stars make TV show look tame

The hit series satirising a billionaire media family is toned-down compared with the true stories of the Murdochs and Redstones

Andrew Anthony Sat 25 Mar 2023

• The Guardian UK The Observer

As HBO’s acclaimed satire Succession begins its fourth and final season this week, fans will be asking: “How will it all end?” The story of the machiavellian media mogul Logan Roy, played so menacingly by Brian Cox, and his power-hungry children has been must-see viewing for anyone interested in the machinations of high-profile billionaires and their damaged families.

Said to be inspired by the dramas of media dynasties like the Murdochs and the Redstones, Succession has been justly lionised for its biting wit and savage characterisations. But what has been more overlooked is that the show’s creators, led by Briton Jesse Armstrong, have envisioned a credible world of superrich movers and shakers by scaling down the action from the operatic behaviour of real-world counterparts.

In satire the usual rule is to exaggerate reality, but looking at the narrative lines of the Murdochs and Redstone families over the years, dramatic amplification was not really a viable option.

In Succession Logan Roy is a King Lear-like figure who sets his offspring against each other for the prize of taking over Waystar Royco, the family multimedia business. He is ruthless, cunning, full of intrigue and prepared to lie at any moment to protect his assets. In other words, a standard personality for a billionaire businessman. But he has only been married three times, once to a cold-bloodied aristocrat and most recently to an understated Lebanese woman in middle age.

Last week Rupert Murdoch announced that his fifth marriage was to be with 66-year-old Ann Lesley Smith, a former model, Christian minister for a police department and widow of a country and western singer. They are, said 92-year-old Murdoch, “both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together”. It’s not clear if he was joking or is the beneficiary of an undisclosed cryogenic procedure.

The announcement comes less than 18 months after his divorce from Jerry Hall, also a former model, albeit a slightly more renowned one, and one-time wife of the consummate rock star, Mick Jagger. That marriage followed his divorce from Wendi Deng (38 years his junior), who was believed by some around the Murdoch family to be a Chinese intelligence asset, after he suspected her of conducting an affair with former British prime minister Tony Blair.

Try pitching that last sentence in a writer’s room meeting and see if anyone would swallow it.

Yet Murdoch has been a Trappist monk by comparison with the late Sumner Redstone, who until his death in 2020 controlled the multibillion-dollar media conglomerate Viacom and CBS. Redstone was only married twice but he was obsessed with sex deep into his 90s, lavishing money on a succession of much younger women.

According to a court testament from one of them, although the old man was hooked up to a feeding tube and a catheter, she performed sex acts on him under the careful direction of his male nurse.

Now it’s beyond question that Succession has featured some weird scenes. Who can forget, for example, Roy’s son-in-law Tom Wambsgans’s own unusual sex act at his dissolute bachelor party? And the honking spectacle of the Boar on the Floor game was as bizarre as it was disturbing. Still, neither come close to rivalling the geriatric debauchery that took place with medical staff in attendance at Redstone’s Beverly Park mansion.

For some time it looked as though Redstone was going to leave all his money to the two much younger women with whom he lived at the mansion – Sydney Holland and Manuela Herzer. Of Argentinian descent, the multilingual Herzer was introduced to Redstone by the late legendary film producer Robert Evans. Holland met Redstone through Patti Stanger, the host of a dating show called Millionaire Matchmaker, after Holland’s previous lover died from “cocaine toxicity” while, according to a new book about Redstone, they were having sex.

Try to imagine the feverish inspiration required for a scriptwriter to come up with that extraordinary scenario, and the inevitable verdict of the showrunner that the audience would not be able to suspend disbelief. That is the unfair advantage that billionaire lifestyles have over even the smartest attempts to satirise them.

For several years Redstone was determined to leave his billions to Holland and Herzer rather than to his two children – in particular his ambitious daughter Shari. Instead Redstone discovered that Holland was conducting a secret affair with a loquacious ex-con and former actor called George Pilgrim whom she had installed in a house she bought with Redstone’s money in Arizona. She flew back and forth to her lover on a private jet, always making sure she was with Redstone each night in time for bed.

The equally blindsided Pilgrim only found out that his wealthy girlfriend was also Redstone’s girlfriend when he read about it in a Vanity Fair article. The resulting fall-out, and Holland’s failure to secure Pilgrim’s silence, led to her expulsion from Redstone’s life and will. In the end, Holland and Herzer had to struggle on with only the $140m they had been given by Redstone before they fell from grace. Again Succession’s scriptwriters would have to reject such material as too melodramatic for the show’s mordant intentions.

Even the scandal that rocks Waystar Royco in Succession is arguably less shocking than those that have afflicted some well-known billionaires. In the fictional version, the company’s cruise liner division, led by Lester McClintock (known as “Mo” Lester) is caught covering up a series of sexual assaults and even, potentially, murder.

Inevitably, the still-reverberating crimes and abuses committed by Jeffrey Epstein come to mind, but both Murdoch and Redstone also had to reckon with foul skeletons hidden in their corporate cupboards. In 2011 Murdoch was forced to close the News of the World newspaper after extensive phone-hacking allegations culminated in the revelation that a private investigator working for the paper had intercepted the voicemail of murdered teenager Milly Dowler. Andy Coulson, the paper’s former editor, who had gone on to be prime minister David Cameron’s director of communications, was sent to jail for authorising phone hacking, and Coulson’s ex-lover Rebekah Brooks, something of a surrogate daughter to Murdoch who he had made head of News International, was found not guilty of the same charges.

The bad publicity scuppered Murdoch’s plans to have Ofcom disbanded – the quid pro quo, it is alleged, for getting the Sun newspaper to back David Cameron in the 2010 election – so he could take full control of Sky TV. Similarly the cruise-ship allegations in Succession put paid to Roy’s attempts to expand his business.

Five years later the Murdochs were preparing for another attempted buyout of Sky when allegations of sexual harassment were made against Roger Ailes, the chief executive of Fox News.

As the accusations mounted, Ailes was forced to resign. But any sense that Murdoch had acted swiftly was undermined the following year when it emerged that Fox had paid out millions of dollars to silence complaints of sexual harassment against the network’s star presenter, Bill O’Reilly. Although the Murdochs hastily ousted O’Reilly, the Sky bid was once again profoundly damaged.

In 2018 Redstone’s right-hand man Leslie Moonves also resigned as chief executive of CBS after allegations of sexual assault and abuse. And the same year the Competition and Markets Authority not only ruled against the Murdoch bid for Sky but also prohibited any member of the Murdoch family from serving at the company again. Ironically, perhaps, Succession is broadcast in the UK on Sky.

In a sense, all of these scandals are mere historical footnotes when set against arguably Murdoch’s most egregiously reckless act – the creation of Donald Trump. Without first the Murdoch-owned New York Post and then later Fox News, Trump might still just be a narcissistic property developer from Queens with a bad haircut.

But it was Murdoch’s media might that helped turn the man he is alleged to have referred to as a “fucking idiot” into arguably the most dysfunctional president in United States history, and reshape the American political landscape into one of culturally entrenched hostilities. That is a legacy of which Murdoch’s second son, James, is said to be ashamed, and within which his eldest son, Lachlan, appears to thrive.

As its title suggests, Succession is most obviously concerned with the fight to take over from the ruthless patriarch. It’s essentially a three-way battle, with Kendall, Shiv and Roman seeking to thwart and humiliate each other as they individually attempt to take control.

With the Murdochs, despite occasional interest from Elisabeth, the main struggle has been waged between James and Lachlan. Initially Lachlan, the oldest son, and said to be more right-wing than his father, was the chosen heir. But hot-tempered and disinclined to compromise, he fell out with key executives and quit the family business with a £100m payoff.

James, a moderniser, relatively liberal and a moderating voice, was then in the ascendant, looking like Kendall in the first season as if he was being groomed to take over. But Lachlan, who as a young man culled kangaroos with a shotgun, appeared to remain his father’s favourite, and he returned to the fold in 2015.

Just as Logan tried to use his son Kendall as the fall guy for the cruise-ship scandal, so was James saddled with responsibility for the failed bid for Sky, not least by Lachlan, who Murdoch effectively made his brother’s boss. The de facto demotion prompted James to walk out of a lunch and fly to Indonesia, in the way you do when money is absolutely no object.

Like Kendall, he believed that he’d given years of his life to supporting his father’s interests while Lachlan was simply spearfishing and making bad deals in Australia. And, like Kendall, he has a point, although the far more glaring injustice is the belief that the most fitting leader of a multibillion-dollar business is going to come from the minuscule gene pool of its owner.

Perhaps Murdoch, who has never seemed a great supporter of the hereditary principle elsewhere, came to realise the folly of his ways. In any case, he sold his shares in Sky, along with his controlling interests in 20th Century Fox, in a deal in which he pocketed $4bn, taking his net worth to $18bn, and each of his six children picked up $2bn.

So, along with the Times, he and his heirs are left with Fox News and the Sun, the two institutions that have done most to spread Murdoch’s illiberal vision, and more money than any of them can ever spend. That’s unlikely to be the denouement that waits in store for the Roys. They can take solace in the fact that for once they will almost certainly reach a more dramatic climax than the real-life competition.

Rent: Too Damned High

Yesterday in the Washington Post was an article about a company called Starwood that has been buying up Multi family dwellings in Florida and raising rents that has led the company to earn profits out of literally forcing people to pay rents that have increased up to 50% (and higher) over their current rent. With that it forces more into poverty, debt and/or having to relocate with few options given Florida’s own issue with regards to affordable housing. And we are seeing this play throughout America, especially in Cities that are designated “it” and have intense in-migration from nearby States/Cities of individuals looking for work or in turn looking for better taxes and less regulation. Or just because an article declared it as such as the New York Times has done with regards to Nashville, Jersey City and Weehawken. Or when the New Yorker declares your city the Most Livable that pretty much kills the place. But Americans are always in search of somewhere better aka a place that will make them “richer” Places like Florida and Texas and Tennessee promise to with low wages and low costs and even less regulation. In real estate they are referred to as “migration boomtowns.” And in exchange, they generate revenue through a “regressive tax system” that harms the working class and frankly does not fill the coffers sufficiently. Which leads to endless ways to garner revenue you will certainly vote on new ways to tax property or supplement the budget, in order to improve schools, fund arts or create parks. Jersey City has done that of late and it shows how expensive it is to fund it all from the few who have little as a high rise that pays little to no taxes rises above them.

This from Investopedia explains how this tax structure works. This is also how much development across many cities build. Nashville has their Tax-Increment Financing, or TIF which is another boondoggle to taxpayers. How? By rising property values it means you have to pay more what? Property Taxes. And that used to be great when you are rich as you could deduct those, that is no longer so. Thanks to the GOP and the Trump Administration (which ironically contributed to some of his own tax issues), a Federal tax reform enacted in 2018, it limited deductions for state and local taxes and in turn supercharging the movement of more affluent Americans from the Northeast, Illinois and California toward zero-income tax states such as Florida, Texas and Nevada. Nashville was quite proud of its kills in that but TN does not quite have that “ennui” of the other States, but hey they are trying real hard. But the steady movement toward warmer, more affordable areas was well underway before the tax incentive and will persist even if it’s repealed. But also what contributed to this was the declaration of Opportunity Zones or Investment Areas. Funny I live in one or what used to be. These are the biggest bullshit of all the ways Developers use failures by Cities to build affordable housing. So you will see a brand new luxury building next to a shiny new Storage building; Convenient as you will need it as you cannot fit all you belongings into your overpriced but small unit or be homeless and keep your belongings in them as many do. And my recent trip to Detroit confirmed how that works for rich developers by buying off properties, keeping them dilapidated and then using fed funds to finally update and improve them. ProPublica did such a story on that same issue, leading the family to immediately write press releases dismissing the story as what? Fake News. Yeah right, welcome to City Living!

I live now in New Jersey with immense taxes, in 2021 I paid more in State Taxes than I did in Federal, go figure. And it taxes that push the migration, not politics. So when you go about red vs blue I suggest you realize that money is more a factor than whom you vote for. And our voting records show that. I lived in a Blue State went to a Red on and now back to Blue. Which only a few years ago was not. And with that I live in an “It” city that is undergoing immense gentrification with little to actually show for it but numerous luxury apartment buildings and some overpriced Condos (although few of those as Jersey City has the least available single family dwellings in the State and Condos are not money makers today at all but they have a few). With that we have also been listed as one of the most expensive rents in the country and are consistently in the top 10 with regards to rents and housing costs. And we have again little to show for it. The few green spaces are few and far between, the infrastructure is collapsing and they are in the middle of trying to replace all water and sewer lines. The flood that hit Jersey after Sandy has not been fully addressed and parts of Jersey City and Hoboken still flood when there are weather issues. I look out at a Development by a company called Bozzutto which built two units, one completed during the pandemic that sit directly on a FEMA floodplain. Yes folks this is city living.

A conversation with a neighbor about Jersey and the City led to some similar complaints, the lack of interesting places to socialize, inadequate library system, amenities in the building and of course rent. We also discussed the “character” or “type” of Jersey resident, either English as a Second Language group who rarely mix outside their own and she is Asian and the lack of sophistication and education. I agree that after my incident with the Cunt Family of 946 that there are problems, but I had not witnessed what she had in the building gym when a Young Man verbally berated and abused another over weights not returned, leading him to leave the gym and the Man followed this other man out, still screaming and ranting over the weights. She said she was terrified as she recognized both men, commented on the one young man’s good looks as well as the other and he often worked out with his girlfriend, so she knew them on sight. Yet, no complaints were filed with the building as this is another issue that defines White Privilege. White people here are abusive and unkind to other white people and believe that that is an implicit contract between you that you will keep it in house, handle it and accept it. I realized that when I filed my complaint over the Karen in 946, and her husband’s subsequent threat to me about “airing out our dirty laundry”. I kept on believing he had a type of Hoover file on me about some bullshit that he had “found out” from a former employee but I actually believe that is the again the invisible agreement, contract or script that we as White people have and tacitly agree to. These include such things that many Karen’s have been busted for when accosting POC about their behaviors. That is the first rule, don’t go public. Okay. So when I did mention this to the Front Desk one asked me “What Race where they?” He is White and often is a combative type, the stereotype Jersey person. Again, the implicit contract is in that response. I wonder if I had said Asian or Indian as we have few Black residents and to my knowledge no Latin ones or if there are they are really in hiding, what his response would have been.

The Racial divide is one of both Class and Money. Poverty is the level-izer that crosses all three. I saw that in Tennessee and in my travels in the South. There is little in migration in states like Alabama, Louisiana, and Missouri. The reason being that while they are not highly taxed they are highly populated by people of color and incomes and work are largely confined to small businesses. Larger industries and business have not established outposts the same way they have in Georgia, Texas, Florida and Tennessee. The courting and fawning over industry can only spread so far like the butter that melts on the table during the relentless hot muggy summers. And so while many do relocate there and have established homes, moving is not something you can do as frequently as I. You have children, you have family and you build roots. And with that you do not move unless a Job is in the offering and guaranteed. Despite all the hybrid work, I find it interesting the few chose to move to less populated states and areas, hell many moved to NYC or Boston or LA as this was their chance to take advantage of that cheap rent and availability thanks to those leaving in the same amount for safer pastures. My favorite of all of this are all the City Slickers who bought homes in the Country and found themselves now saddled with lemons and the costs to restore them now beyond the reach, so as Mortgages climb, the ability to dump it back on the market also declines. Watch for Foreclosures and more Venture Capitalists to buy those homes to rent back to the former occupants at a much higher cost. Regrets, I have a few.

That is the circle of ownership today. We have more businesses buying residences, both single and multi family units and moving them like checker pieces on a board. Add to that the growth of AirBnB. But cities are starting to realize how that affects home availability but that again does not exempt that home from being purchased by an investor and using it as a short term rental with minimal lease requirements, or a pied a terre which allows the unit to be vacant. There are those too that are an issue with regards to housing. But the reality is that most developers are seeing money in rentals. With now home purchases on decline, and more smaller landlords worried about rising interests and other costs they are looking to sell so, the building run by one slumlord today will be purchased and run by another tomorrow. I want to point out that again both Kushner and Trump were sons of fathers who began their career as slumlords.

But they have like all rich folks divested themselves of those properties and again the checkerboard keeps moving those pieces. Today in JC, there are the Cast Iron Lofts, once run by the most infamous of Slumlord Billionaires, Sam Zell, and Equity Residential now taken over by Bozzutto that has raised rents, amenity fees and reduced maintenance and oversight. They are notorious throughout the area as the numerous complaints from Yelp, Google and Apartments.com note. Equity, along with other property management firms are part of a class action lawsuit for price fixing thanks to the algorithms they use to inflate rent and discriminate. Yes folks the rent you pay may not be the same rent your neighbor pays. And they can blame the computer for that. You know like they do in law enforcement for facial recognition and other junk science.

And here again is Pro Publica, which did a recent investigation into this practice and the software used RealPage that supposedly enables leasing agents to get more bang for the buck. In other words gauge the tenant. It also allows for greater vacancy rate as they in turn can balance the books on the backs of the current residents to raise their rents to offset the loss. If you realize that most of these buildings are also required to have leased businesses be they local or educational as in day care, Boys and Girls Clubs etc to offset the tax incentives that the city provides. So when those big spaces are empty someone has to pay. Well that are those that live above. Write off? No. Many co-ops in Manhattan are struggling with that issue and have been working to find ways to fill spaces once held by Physicians, Bodegas, Cleaners and other commercial enterprises that supplemented the buildings bottom line. And with that, there will be many a unit with new costs to their annual assessments coming soon! But they too are equally discriminatory and have even more restrictions and requirements in in which to live. This is city living folks.

Home ownership is not just taxes, it is upkeep and the same with Condos only you have neighbors that are literally on top and below you. Think an Apartment with more costs and even less security. Just ask the Board of the Condo in Toronto that had a mass shooting over “noise” the standard complaint in almost all community living. Same problems different solutions. And what applies to those applies to the multi family “luxury” builds. Same problems, no solutions. And yes as the Year ended, regrets there are a few. And they are not alone as many did find themselves out of work as we are starting to see the effects of the recession and the white collar layoffs, and with that owning a home they cannot sell but cannot afford; hey folks the reality is that the grass is not always greener. And it is these same communities under the NIMBY rules that often again cause more problems than create solutions.

So we have a problem that ties into the construction of affordable housing across the county, homes that are too big to both maintain and in turn sell, homes bought by venture capitalists and put back on the market as rentals that are again overpriced, the “flipper” mentality also contributing to this; Multi family dwellings being built but as “luxury” with few to none affordable units and exempt from rent controls, if in fact there are such laws or restrictions in place (Seattle is not allowed to have them thanks to the State Constitution). Then there Opportunity Zones and Investment tax laws that enable developers (often with former Governors fronting them as one had always washes the other) to skirt further taxes: As people who invest their capital gains in qualifying real-estate projects (usually REIT) within these tracts can defer their tax bill. And if they hold the investment for at least 10 years, they won’t have to pay capital-gains taxes on any profit from an eventual sale of the property. The states make the pick and one area can always outdo the other in the bid. As Camden in NJ found out the hard way.

And what these do is decimate revenue from communities in the ways of schools, roads, public transportation and other infrastructure needs that when population increases demand does as well. The Investopedia link above shows how that affects the overall community and their liveablity factor. I can personally point to the schools in both Nashville and Jersey City as being absolute dumpsters in ways that Seattle only comes close but have active citizens who seem intent at at least staving some of that, but that too from what I can tell is coming perilously close thanks to the pandemic and a loss of enrollment. And without decent schools cities do suffer folks and that migration to the suburbs the place you left is the place you end up returning to, if you can afford to. But can you afford not? But then again the roads and public transportation options leave few and that gas tax again in many of these same places that you once left never to return is necessary to fund the State. It either/or neither/nor folks. You cannot have it all ways. Take for example the lack of buses and public transportation, let alone sidewalks that contribute to numerous pedestrian deaths in Nashville every year. The rise in bicycle deaths another. You have to live in a city and work in a city or you commute, so how does that work when you have a car but you cannot afford to fill the tank, or the drive is literally a competitive one?

So why is the rent too damn high? Yes corporate greed and the need to feed Wall Street. Then we have personal wealth and familial wealth that dictates another level of reasoning. We have varying State, City and Federal incentives and programs that enable tax dodging and in turn find new ways to redline via gentrification and rental increases all under the guise of providing growth. The pandemic enabled many to stop rent and evictions but those moratoriums are over and in turn inflation has brought even the most tolerant of Landlords to the brink and are now selling properties as refinancing has become a challenge due to rising interest rates. And lastly we have simply not built enough homes period. The issues of regulations, of financing and of construction has made it seemingly impossible and yet some is done and others have failed. Major corporations are now looking into loaning or offsetting those costs, Microsoft and Amazon have established such funds. But the idea of Workforce Housing is also fraught with issues and again the private versus public sector seems to have always been a dance with the issue of who leads a problem. Answers, I have none, ideas I have a plenty but there are few who listen and ever fewer willing to try. We are ruled by money, and in turn by race and gender. That is the reality of our America. We refuse to listen. I read the comments on the pages and there are valid ones and some just equally so; however, just in the way they advocate their position puts them further on the side of the “others” and we rarely see or listen to the “other” so in “other” words, compromise is near to impossible. Coming to a City near you.

Daddy’s Got This

I have said repeatedly that to many of the insane freaks who descended upon the Capital on January 6th saw Trump as their Father Figure. Now naturally many of the men are too old to be the actual progeny of the 75 year old moron but it is not lost on me that Trump often played the gayest group of my lifetime, the Village People, as a call to arms, literally. The added irony that again many of the older crowd were likely the participants in another debacle of Disco hate that dominated the late 70s as it was seen as integration through music. “The” Blacks, “The”Gays and “The” Women were living large and free dancing to the Bee Gees and equality seemed no longer an illusion but a possibility. And then game the haters of the players and the game gave way to the Disco Sucks Movement. Here is a story behind that rage that led to a near riot at a baseball game. Yes folks the precursor to January 6th has a history of Bigotry by the AWM.

And for many who are White and Aggrieved be they male or female, “The” Donald spoke to them in the same way their Father did, abusively, dismissively and full of mockery about “the” others. All Families have this Patriarch, the Father, Grandfather or a Drunk Uncle who uses family gatherings as opportunity to unleash is loathing of what is wrong with the world – The Pill, Abortion, Blacks, Gays, Women, Jews, Mexicans, Video Games, Heavy Metal, Hippies, Democrats, etc….. They are the reason the world is falling apart and then it is of course preceded by the comment, “Back in my day.” Yes those were the better days and in turn “The”Donald echoed that same belief when he coined the phrase, Make America Great Again.

It does resemble a cult, the fanatical leader who is enigmatic, both charming and yet elusive, the surrounding oneself with family and those whom reflect his vision of the self, and of course isolation that enables the pursuit of ignorance and dismissal of anyone who challenges their beliefs or “their truths.” The cult leader thrives on submission and fealty and anyone who challenges them or is not willing to comply of course is dismissed and degraded. You see this in Scientology as a most classic example of what defines group think. And MAGA is much like that. A grandiose paranoia veils the movement and of course FEAR is the prime motivating factor.

I urge you to read this article in the NY Times about how these devotees see themselves in relation to the world and with that the belief that Trump is going to be their “savior” from “the” others who are going to take what they have. They are the ones who will take Social Security, Health Care, get free education and in turn take their Bibles and Guns leaving them without any safety net or tool in which to protect themselves. Many are less educated, live in dying rural areas and are lowly paid, often ill and heavily religious. That last thing makes one predisposed to lies and untruths more than most as well what do you think religion is? Truth or Myth? They are afraid and alone without anyone actually speaking to them in the language they understand and that is a large failing by Liberals as they speak in multiple syllables and use a tone that is both scolding and patronizing as one does to a child. I see and experience this here watching Liberal New Yorkers act like entitled brats over nothing. They are often the most arrogant motherfuckers I have met, Southerners and Seattle not withstanding are passive aggressive but New Yorkers skip the passive part and hit for the jugular. You see that with Trump and here are the same folks horrified by that behavior yet embracing it. New Yorkers recognize it but on that note they too love it as he is a smokescreen for their most basest of beliefs and fears that they too have, they just cover it better than most. And yes folks there are plenty of Manhattan residents who are MAGA members, they are wealthy, white and very aggrieved.

The In Cell

I am writing this blog post without comment. I have printed two articles below about the rise of Incel’s and the danger they pose to society, including sexual assault, child rape, domestic violence and of course mass shootings. The next article is about a Police Officer in a small town in a vacation region that has had a long history of sexual misconduct and assault due to the “party” atmosphere and isolated location.

And this week two more victims of famous or infamous perpetrators, Mario Batali and Donald Trump have decided to pursue their assault charges with the reality that the system is stacked against them.

I feel that these stories need time to be read and processed. We all come to each with our own system of beliefs and experiences and with that many of us live in a bubble and the adage, “until it happens to you” is applicable in many situations. We truly go out of our way to remain in such, we read, socialize and keep to our own. And when all else fails the Ostrich head under ground works. Many intelligent people refuse to read anything other than work related materials or stick with few books and even fewer newspapers, journals and the like that are well reported and researched. The idea of what we know is a matter of willful ignorance and which we choose to inform ourselves with that the confirms and supports our beliefs and experiences. I get it. I really do. But with that I cannot stress enough the danger this is to young women and young men as they too will find themselves victims as we hear more about varying schools and Frats that under the guise of hazing do great harm and often end in death. This is what men do. I wonder why? Because it was done to you? Even if it wasn’t why would you tolerate, excuse or even partake in discussions where doing harm to others is acceptable. Do these young men have no Mothers, no Sisters or other Women in their lives that if it happened to them they would feel pain? And yes many do not have male figures in their lives but there are many Men whose paths they cross and with that have not had the sex talk in a frank and honest manner? Why not.

I feel for young women as they are facing a serious problem ahead in their lives with regards to this and recently I read in New York Magazine a young woman’s long history with Tinder. An app designed to get as many fucks as possible as that basically was her experience and with that her consent. It was tragic. Grim. Pathetic. And no, not the least bit sex positive. Imagine an Incel reading that one?

Again, below are the two articles – one alarming and one conventional when it comes to prosecuting men for crimes abusing women. I often think of Mario Batali genial host and Chef getting women falling down drunk, raping them and leaving them there passed out in the filth as a sexual repository in a basement and going home to his family. What the fuck? No, really what the fuck? But his story is one of many others who did the same. What the fuck?

The online incel movement is getting more violent and extreme, report says

The Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed more than 1 million posts showing a rise in advocacy of rape, mass killings

By Taylor Lorenz |Published September 22, 2022| The Washington Post

The most prominent forum for men who consider themselves involuntarily celibate or “incels” has become significantly more radicalized over the past year and a half and is seeking to normalize child rape, a new report says.

The report, by the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s new Quant Lab, is the culmination of an investigation that analyzed more than 1 million posts on the site. It found a marked spike in conversations about mass murder and growing approval of sexually assaulting prepubescent girls.

The report also says that platforms including YouTube and Google, as well as internet infrastructure companies like Cloudflare are facilitating the growth of the forum, which the report said is visited by 2.6 million people every month. “These businesses should make a principled decision to withdraw their services from sites causing such significant harm,” the report says.

“This is a novel, new violent extremist movement born in the internet age, which defies the usual characteristics of violent extremist movements that law enforcement and the intelligence community are usually used to,” said Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of CCDH, a US-based nonprofit. “Our study shows that it is organized, has a cogent ideology and has clearly concluded that raping women, killing women, and raping children is a clear part of the practice of their ideology.”

Incels blame women for their failings in life. The term originated decades ago, and while the first incel forum was founded by a woman in the mid 1990s, incel communities have since become almost exclusively male. Incel ideology has been linked to dozens of murders and assaults over the past decade, the most prominent one involving Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old self-described incel who murdered six people in a stabbing and shooting rampage in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2014. Before killing himself, he posted a long manifesto and YouTube videos promoting incel ideology.

In March, the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center released a report warning that anti-woman violence was a growing terrorism threat.

According to the CCDH analysis, members of the forum post about rape every 29 minutes, and more than 89 percent of posters support rape and say it’s acceptable. The CCDH analysis also found that posters on the forum are seeking to normalize child rape. More than a quarter of members of the forum have posted pedophilia keywords, the analysis found, and more than half of the members of the forum support pedophilia.

The forum also changed its rules this year to accommodate what appears to be a trend toward normalizing rape of younger victims, according to the report. The forum previously implored users not to “sexualize minors in any way, shape or form,” but in March changed that language to “do not sexualize prepubescent minors in any way, shape, or form.”

The report also cited content that reflected the trend toward pedophilia, noting that a majority of commenters voiced support for a post that read, “As an incel, there is literally no reason to be against pedophilia.” Another thread started by a regular user who had posted more than 7,000 times to the forum contained an image of a 12-year-old child with the comment “who in their right mind would prefer a 22 year old [woman] to this?”

“Analysis of their discourse shows this core group poses a clear and present danger to women, other young men, and reveals an emerging threat to our children,” the report says.

CCDH said its analysis also had found a rising interest in mass murder on the site. Posts mentioning incel mass murders increased 59 percent between 2021 and 2022, the study said, and praise was common for Elliot Rodger. The word “kill” was mentioned 1,181 times on the forum in just one month, equivalent to once every 37 minutes. “Shoot” and “murder” are also popular words on the forum.

“We are in no doubt after conducting this study that this community of angry, belligerent and unapologetic men are dangerous to each other, with malignant social dynamics whereby they encourage each other to worse and worse extremes,” the report said. “Unchecked, incel communities have the potential to radicalize further.”

The CCDH said it is making its full database of the forum available to law enforcement and has briefed counterterrorism officials in the U.S. and the U.K. about the report’s findings.

The forum was founded in 2017 by Diego Joaquín Galante, known online as “Sergeant Incel” and Lamarcus Small as a response to Reddit banning the subreddit /r/incels. It offers an invitation-only Discord server for its members who have posted more than 400 times to the site, and an active channel on the chat app Telegram. Moderators of the forum also maintain a Twitter account that promotes incel ideology and attacks perceived critics.

Galante and Small declined to comment. Cloudflare did not respond to a request for comment.

Only self-declared heterosexual men are permitted to post on the forum; women and members of the LGBTQ community are prohibited from weighing in.

The report says the forum has gained a mass audience largely through social media, singling out YouTube in particular, where, it said, videos promoting incel ideology have been viewed a total of 24.2 million times. “YouTube is a key part of incel education,” Ahmed said.

Forum members, the report said, often share content from misogynist YouTube channels and channels like Incel TV, which promotes incel ideology. Another popular YouTube channel mentioned on the forum, the report said, is SlutHate Creeps, where users post covertly recorded images of women.

“We remove content that targets or threatens individuals or groups based on protected attributes. Upon review, we removed and age-restricted several videos surfaced by CCDH for violating our Community Guidelines,” said YouTube spokesman Jack Malon in a statement.

YouTube isn’t the only inroad, the analysis found. Galante and Small have created a network of seemingly more mainstream websites that funnel people to the incel forum. Google searches for body image or unemployment frequently return links to these “incelosphere” sites, the CCDH found.

Teenage boys are among the forum’s most active and extreme users, according to the CCDH. In one instance, a boy who said he was 17 was recorded as being on the forum for an average of 10 hours per day during the period of the report, posting an average of 40 times per day, the report said. Another, who claimed to be 15, spent an average of five hours per day on the site, posting repeatedly about his desire to commit a mass shooting.

The forum enables their participation, the analysis said, by encouraging users to hide the site from prying parents or teachers by using a feature that disguises it as a banana marketing website.

The report criticizes Cloudflare, an internet services company that provides services to the forum and to other Galante and Small sites. Cloudflare recently dropped Kiwi Farms, a forum where users coordinated harassment campaigns against women and members of the LGBTQ community, after a protest launched targeting its mainstream clients. “Cloudflare is profiting from its role as an infrastructure provider to all four incelosphere forums and has been praised by the incel forum’s official Twitter account,” the report says.

The CCDH urged government regulators also to find ways to combat incel ideology and restrict the site. “This should not be left to the goodwill of Big Tech, who profit from the creation and spread of this content and are not properly incentivized or required to be proactively transparent on the key metrics or to invest in the desired safety outcomes,” the report says.

“This forum is a violent ideological manifesto, but for the 21st century,” Ahmed said. “Instead of being a book, it’s essentially a wiki that is continuously being evolved by the readers themselves. Left alone, this community has been radicalized further and their ideology is becoming more dangerous by the day.”

The Victim Who Became the Accused

After a Black female police officer reported that a white male colleague had taken advantage of her sexually, she found herself on trial.

By Rachel Aviv The New Yorker September 5, 2022

Put-in-Bay, a village on an island off the northern coast of Ohio, is sometimes called the Key West of the Midwest. In the winter, the population is roughly three hundred, nearly all white. In the summer, hundreds of thousands of tourists arrive by ferry or private plane to drink at the island’s fifty-two bars. Men celebrating bachelor parties go around in golf carts, carrying inflatable naked women. The police chief told me that he’s known as “the guy who pulls people over and deflates the blow-up dolls.”

In July, 2020, Arica Waters, the only Black female cop on the island, was invited to a pool party. She was twenty-seven and had been hired five weeks before, as a seasonal employee without benefits. She was ebullient and quick to make friends. “Some people say, ‘Oh, Waters is a flirt,’ ” she told me, “but that’s just my personality. I’m a friendly person. I give out compliments. I like to hype people up.” Meri LeBlanc, a bouncer on the island, said that Waters was open about her sexual desires, freely expressing her attraction to women and men. “She wasn’t plain,” she said. “She wasn’t the square cut of what they thought a police officer should be.”

The party was hosted by Jeremy Berman, a detective in the department, who had a house on a private road overlooking Lake Erie. Berman’s wife and young son were there, but he seemed to be paying extra attention to Waters, who wore a long yellow sundress. In a text message to a friend, Waters wrote, “The rich ass dude definitely has a thing for me lolol.”

As they were sitting by the pool, Waters told Berman, who was close with members of the village’s government, that she was hoping to get a full-time job in the department. Berman offered to put in a good word. “I think she would be fantastic for a full-time position,” he texted the mayor from the party. “She’s got the perfect disposition.” (The mayor responded, “Noted. Little interaction I’ve had with her it makes sense.”)

Berman’s house was next to the island’s airport, a small runway in a field near the water. When Waters and another guest said that they had never been in a private plane, Berman called a friend who runs an aviation business. Within fifteen minutes, a helicopter had landed near the pool. Berman handed Waters three hundred-dollar bills to give to the pilot.

“I’m in a helicopter holy crap,” Waters texted her mother from the air. She told her mom that the trip—a lap around the island—had been arranged by “the rich cop.”

“I don’t get it,” her mom, who lived in Cleveland, responded.

“He also just texted the mayor and told her to hire me full time,” Waters wrote. “He just said he has noticed my abilities.”

When the ride was over, Berman and Waters sat in his neighbor’s hot tub, drinking. She had several mixed drinks and then took off her bikini top. At dusk, the party migrated to a bar. Waters rode with Berman in his golf cart, but, instead of going to the bar, they stopped at an empty apartment owned by one of Berman’s friends. They quickly had sex, and then Berman drove home to his family and Waters went to the bar alone.

The captain of the police department, Matthew Mariano, was at the bar, and he observed that Waters was so intoxicated that “she could barely talk.” He had learned to be cautious with what he and others called “Berman drinks”: they were so strong that, at the pool party, he had secretly poured two of them out.

That night, lying in bed drinking Gatorade, Waters texted her friends that she had just had sex with the “richest person on this island.” She wrote, “He will give me whatever I want.”

“Do he need an assistant?? lol,” her friend responded. “Is he a sugar daddy???”

“Girl yes,” Waters responded.

The next morning, a little before eight o’clock, Berman texted Waters, “If it’s in the equation, I would love to have a round two.”

Waters said that she was hung over and needed to sleep. An hour later, Berman texted that he was driving by the bunkhouse where she and other employees lived.

“I honestly still don’t feel good,” she told him.

Twenty minutes later, he wrote, “I don’t have a long time but let me pick you up.”

Waters said that she had her period, but offered, “I can service you though!”

He drove her back to his friend’s apartment, and they had sex again. Twenty minutes later, she was back at the bunkhouse. She called her friend Monifah Lamar and said that she felt exploited. “She was really torn up and wanted to know, ‘Did I put myself in this situation?’ ” Lamar said.

She tried to process what had just happened through dozens of texts to her friends. Their interpretation of the encounter led her to modify her original assessment. She realized how beholden to Berman she had felt, given what she perceived as his power on the island. In a text to a friend, she described it as “sexual assault due to job title.” She felt like she’d been groomed. “Bottomline I need to get out of this department and go home,” she wrote.

Waters had made three allegations of sexual assault as an adult; two of them had involved situations in which she had consented to some degree of intimacy but, when the sexual encounter escalated, she had felt violated. No charges were brought in any of the cases. When a friend suggested that she report the incident with Berman, she wrote that she would just “live with it.” She knew that she had drunk too much. “I’m not going through that process again,” she wrote. “Who is going to believe me.”

The next day, however, Waters spoke with a friend who was an emergency medic on the island, and he, too, encouraged her to report what had happened. He mentioned that the island had a history of sexual assaults that the police department had not properly investigated. An article in the Cleveland Scene, from 2014, about the problem was titled “Roofie Island: A Summer of Reported Druggings and Rapes.” Waters didn’t necessarily think that she had been drugged, but she no longer felt comfortable at work, and she was motivated by the thought of other women who had felt disregarded. She had been adopted and brought up by a single mother—after being removed from her biological mother’s custody by the state—and, as a preteen, she was the object of sexual advances by adult men whom she had met on chat-line services advertised on TV. “I understood what I was looking for—affection,” she said. “But I didn’t understand why these guys were answering what I was looking for.” It wasn’t until she described these sexual encounters to her mental-health counsellor that she was told that what had happened was a crime. Her counsellor accompanied her to the police to report the incidents, but charges were never brought; one man was mentally disabled, and another was untraceable.

She believed that she had been abused as a preteen in part because she had gone through puberty too early. “I was a five-foot-two, bra-wearing fourth grader with a deep voice,” she told me. “I didn’t look like a child, and there were men who saw me and didn’t fully acknowledge that I was a child, or didn’t care.” Monifah Lamar, who went through puberty early, too, said, “Sometimes, when people see you in that sexualized way, you kind of mold yourself into that.” Waters was bullied throughout school: for her deep voice, for coming out as bisexual, for being “fast,” as she put it. She wanted to help troubled kids in her work as an officer, but Lamar wondered if the job also appealed to her because “it was the symbolism that stuck with her—no one is going to mess with a cop.”

The emergency medic gave Waters the number for a female sergeant, Amy Gloor, who often handled sexual assaults for the sheriff’s office in Ottawa County, which includes Put-in-Bay. Waters recognized that, in the eyes of law enforcement, she was not a “good victim.” But she felt harmed, and she wanted to tell someone. Perhaps on some level she was also seeking a remedy for wrongs that hadn’t been acknowledged when she was a child. “I really don’t know what to do, but it’s also, like, I need to do something,” she told Gloor on the phone. She explained that she felt as if Berman “holds my job in his hands.” She went on, “This isn’t O.K. You outrank me. Something happened, you know, and I don’t remember all of it.”

Although Waters did not use the word “rape”—she said that she felt “completely taken advantage of”—Gloor took her to get a rape exam on the mainland. Then Waters signed a form granting Ottawa County permission to search her cell-phone records.

The next day, Gloor tried to interview Berman, but he declined to answer her questions. Not long afterward, he put himself on administrative leave. “I was taking time away from the situation, to allow it to work out properly,” he later said.

That week, a private investigator, Robert Slattery, left a message on Gloor’s voice mail. “I have been retained by Mr. Jeremy Berman to gather some information,” he said, in a recording obtained through public-records requests. “I would like to actually pass some information on to you.”

Slattery sent Gloor footage from Berman’s neighbor’s surveillance cameras, one of which had been pointed toward the hot tub and showed Waters topless. He also told Gloor about an episode of the MTV reality show “Catfish” on which Waters had appeared. When she was fourteen, she had dated an eighteen-year-old, and, after her mother forced her to break it off, she secretly stayed in touch with him by creating a fake Myspace profile, using the face and name of another girl. Years later, when Waters was in college, she saw an ad seeking participants for “Catfish,” and she contacted the show to tell her story. She had just gone through a period of depression, and, she said, “I had this idea that I needed to acknowledge what I had done by showing the world that I could own up to it and have an open conversation. And honestly I shouldn’t have. But at the time I felt like this was a way to close a chapter and move on, because a lot of the bullying when I was young was on the Internet, so it all felt connected.”

On the show, Waters apologized to the person whom she had pretended to be, a white woman from Utah, explaining that when she’d used the profile she’d been despondent and lost. “I’m not expecting anyone to feel bad,” she said. “I’m just explaining to you what it is, and, in a sense, what judgments you make from there you have that right.” (Some of Waters’s friends had used the profile, too, to check if their boyfriends were being unfaithful.) Waters said that she had already deactivated the profile, but the show dramatized and distorted the events, making her ruse look more consequential. In her notes, Gloor wrote that she’d been informed that Waters “took the identity of a white female for years.”

Gloor reviewed messages that Waters had sent to Berman, and to family and friends. A few of the messages contained nude selfies. The sheriff of Ottawa County, Stephen Levorchick, said that at one point, as he was walking by Gloor’s desk, she asked him to look at her computer. On the screen was a naked picture of Waters that showed her vagina. Levorchick said that Gloor told him, “Look at this. You’ve got to see this. This is disgusting.” (Citing pending litigation, Gloor declined to comment.)

In October, shortly after Waters had finished working the summer season in Put-in-Bay, Gloor invited her to a second meeting. It had been three months since their last interview, and Gloor had talked with other guests at Berman’s party who said that Waters seemed happy to have his attention. Gloor said that she was struggling to understand why, given Waters’s texts, particularly the one about whether Berman was a sugar daddy, she had reported the incident. “I guess this is where, literally—I’m not sure where we take this,” Gloor said.

Waters said that the subject of sugar daddies came up because her friend had tried that kind of arrangement. “That’s her thing,” she said. “I don’t knock her for it.” She acknowledged that the texts were confusing, but she said that she had still been drunk and in shock: “It was me trying to cope with the whole situation.”

“I mean, you’re a police officer,” Gloor said. “How do you put that together? How do you make that look like something different?”

“I mean, as you know, every rape case is hard,” Waters responded. “Any sexual-assault case is hard.” She told Gloor, “I’ve been through other traumatic experiences, honestly, worse than this.” But, she asked, “I guess where I’m confused is, where does someone’s impairment come in? So are people saying I wasn’t impaired?”

“People are saying that you were not as impaired as you said that you were,” Gloor responded.

“I don’t understand how people were saying that I wasn’t as impaired as I was when I damn near fell out of the hot tub”—a moment that the surveillance camera had captured. “I know I slipped.”

“You did slip,” Gloor said. “But you caught yourself.”

Two days later, a Put-in-Bay officer texted Waters to ask if she was O.K. and then sent her a screenshot from the docket of the Ottawa County Court of Common Pleas. Waters read it repeatedly, confused. She had been indicted for the felony of “making false alarms”—for reporting an offense despite “knowing that such offense did not occur.” She faced up to eighteen months in prison. The charge had been brought by the office of Dave Yost, the attorney general of Ohio.

Waters was booked into the Ottawa County jail, where her department took many suspects. Her right to carry a firearm was immediately suspended. She was released that day under bond conditions that forbade her to leave the state, go to a bar, stay out past 10 p.m., or have contact with her victim. Next to the word “victim,” the court magistrate had written Jeremy Berman’s name by hand.

Waters was terminated from the police department. She had put herself through the police academy by working as an Uber driver, but, because of her felony indictment, Uber no longer let her drive. Without a steady income, she moved into public housing. The attorney general’s office told her that if she pleaded guilty and gave up her police certification she would not serve any jail time, but she refused. (The attorney general declined to comment.) Jessica Dress, the mayor of Put-in-Bay, said that she was shocked by the turn of events. “To go after her like that—that was unbelievable,” she told me. She sensed that Berman “had been pushing his agenda.”

Berman had an unusual arrangement in the department: he was said to be paid a dollar a year, and he worked mostly on the weekends. He told Gloor that he was the liaison between the island community and the police. He used his own golf cart when he was on duty—he had put the department logo on the vehicle and equipped it with a siren. In 2018, his first year on the force, he had hosted a ceremony at his house where he won Officer of the Year. During the week, he lived in Findlay, Ohio, where he co-owned a prosthetics business and worked as a prosthetist, fitting artificial limbs.

In a text to a member of the village council, Berman explained that he was “targeted & accused of something that I did not do,” but that he had been “officially cleared.” He sent a screenshot of the indictment. “So happy with this outcome,” the council member responded. “Thank you for your service to the island.”

Levorchick, the Ottawa County sheriff, told me that he had welcomed the investigation into whether Berman had been unjustly accused. “In law enforcement, you better have integrity—otherwise you shouldn’t be in this job,” he told me. “The minute I heard that she lied, I’m no longer thinking of her as a victim. My initial thought was anger at her.”

The offense of making a false report—punishable by law in most states—was originally applied to people who had wasted public resources by reporting nonexistent fires or catastrophes. But beginning in the seventies, when the women’s movement was advocating for a broader understanding of sexual assault, these statutes began to be adapted to allegations of rape. According to Joanna Bourke, a British historian of rape, “a large group of feminists were turning to the carceral state to prosecute abusers, but abusers were also turning to it: to prosecute women making these claims.” In “The Word of a Woman?,” from 2004, the cultural historian Jan Jordan described how “a new breed of rape ‘victim’ has been championed: the falsely accused man.”

There are no data, either at the state level or nationally, about the number of people who have been prosecuted for falsely accusing someone of sexual assault. Lisa Avalos, a law professor at Louisiana State University who studies false-rape prosecutions, told me, “It absolutely happens regularly throughout the country, but it’s an ad-hoc system.” With the help of a researcher, Cleuci de Oliveira, I filed public-records requests in every county in Ohio and found that, in the past fifteen years, at least twenty-five people have been prosecuted for the crime, including one who was thirteen years old. Nearly all of them pleaded guilty. The only false-alarms rape case in Ohio known to reach an appeals court involved a woman who had been convicted of the crime, in 1997, after she reported that a man she had met at a bar had followed her home and forced her to have sex. She and her alleged rapist agreed on most facts of their encounter except whether the sex was consensual. The appeals court overturned the woman’s conviction and questioned the “wisdom and fairness” of charging someone with making false alarms when the crucial question—whether an encounter was rape—“depends on whose version of the event is believed.” (The court wrote that the police “believed from the outset that [the woman] was lying and proceeded to investigate a claim against her rather than the reported rape.”)

False-allegation prosecutions offer a response to the imperative, popularized by the #MeToo movement, to believe women. News of the cases often circulates on men’s-rights Web sites, providing a counternarrative: women are vindictive and desperate for attention, and believing them is a waste of public resources. Nancy Grigsby, who has worked for forty years in organizations that address violence against women, said she has observed that, in the wake of #MeToo, “the eye rolls are bigger now, like ‘Here they come with their liberation stuff.’ ” Last year, in the county where Grigsby lives, in Ohio, a woman reported to the police that her ex-boyfriend had raped her and then forced her to go to stores to return gifts that he had given her. But when video footage at a mall showed that the woman did not appear the way the police imagined a rape victim to look, the police dropped their investigation against the ex-boyfriend. Instead, the woman was charged with filing a false report. Grigsby told me, “It is a rural county, and it doesn’t take very long for people to hear that story and decide, I’m not calling the police if I get raped.”

The legal system generally puts sexual intercourse into two categories—rape or not rape—a binary that is at odds with the way these things often unfold: two drunk people with unequal power who find themselves sexually involved for reasons that are complex and unstated. Such encounters are rarely not confusing. It may be impossible to locate an objective truth about each participant’s state of mind. And yet the spectre of the lying, manipulative woman is sufficiently pervasive that reports of assault that lack evidence can get wrongly classified as acts of willful mischief or revenge. The most comprehensive analysis of sexual-assault reports, published by the Home Office in the U.K. in 2005, found that, in a sample collected during a fifteen-year period, the police had labelled about eight per cent of rape complaints “false,” but often for shaky reasons, such as the complainant being inconsistent or mentally ill. Jordan, the author of “The Word of a Woman?,” told me that even when a complaint is false the circumstances that give rise to the report rarely indicate malice. She said, “Women with past abuse histories may conflate past trauma with present experiences, so the falseness comes from a place of genuine confusion and signals high vulnerability, not vindictiveness.” We expect victims to have unblemished histories, in part because sexual violence is addressed at the individual level, where, for good reason, the burden of proof is high; less attention is paid to the social and structural reasons that people become victims—the imbalances of power that shape identities over a lifetime.

In some cases, women are accused of lying about rape if they are thought to be promiscuous—an assumption that overlooks how this reputation can contribute to a social context in which their protests may be ignored. In 2016, in Connecticut, an eighteen-year-old named Nikki Yovino had just started college when she reported that she’d been raped by two football players. She had met them at a party, and ten minutes later they all went into the bathroom and had sex. One of the men recorded a video of the encounter without her knowledge. Two months after she made her report, a pair of detectives came to her house and interviewed her alone in the basement using interrogation techniques designed to elicit confessions from criminal suspects. They lied to her, telling her they had other video footage from that night which didn’t actually exist. “I want you to really tell me the truth, because I have this on video,” a detective named Walberto Cotto said. “I saw what I saw.” He told her, “People don’t get this opportunity.”

“I know,” she said.

“We’re talking about people’s lives,” he said. “And we’re talking about yours as well.”

When she explained that she’d been scared in the bathroom, he told her, “Come on. I’m not—you can’t trick me.” He said, “In the bathroom, you pulled your pants down. You said yes.”

“Uh-huh,” she said quietly.

“And it’s not that far-fetched. It’s actually common.” He went on, “If you think you’re the only college girl that went with athletes . . . let’s nip what got out of control now.” He asked, “Were you forced to have sex?”

“No, but I would consider it—I would consider it peer-pressured into it.”

“So what? I mean, so what? I mean, come on. We’re eighteen years old.” He told her, “So let’s stop the peer-pressure nonsense, because they didn’t force you.”

“No, but I wasn’t comfortable with it—”

“There’s a big difference between being comfortable—” the other detective said.

“Being comfortable and being forced,” Cotto continued. “And if you want to say that you’re comfortable because you don’t want people to think you’re less than, you know, less than a wholesome girl or whatever.” He asked her, “You went in there to have sex?”

“Yes, that’s what I assumed at that point,” she responded.

“You’re the one who did it,” he said. “Not a third person. Not a person outside of you who is Nikki.”

She agreed, but said the situation was so upsetting that she cried when it was over.

“I’m going to tell you when you started crying,” he said, “because I know this for a fact.” The real reason she cried, he said, was that she thought a male friend would judge her for what she had done.

“No,” she said. “I was upset at the situation.”

“That you created?”

“What happened,” she said.

“That you created?”

“Yeah.”

“Upset over your embarrassment,” the other detective said.

She was charged with making a false report, a misdemeanor, and with “tampering with or fabricating physical evidence,” a felony—for requesting a rape exam that, the state said, she didn’t actually need. She pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor, and the prosecution agreed to drop the felony charge. Nevertheless, she was punished with half a year in prison and three years of probation. Her lawyer, Ryan O’Neill, told me, “When you’re a young lady who has made a report to a trusted authority figure and he didn’t believe you, why would you—regardless of your own feelings about guilt or innocence—face the risk of going in front of another group of strangers and ask them to believe you?” O’Neill sensed that law enforcement in Connecticut had wanted to send a message that women can’t get away with lying about rape, but he didn’t understand why Yovino’s case had become the vehicle. “It’s like, Is this really the best you can come up with?” he said. “A scenario where there is a genuine perception from both sides that may lead to opposite results?”

In June, 2021, Sharon Tovar, a white forty-seven-year-old home-health aide, called the sheriff’s office in Hancock County, about seventy miles from Put-in-Bay, and reported that she believed she had been the victim of a crime, thirteen years earlier. Tovar had been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. “I was very naïve—the type of loner nerd who stayed at home writing poetry and sending letters to sick people in the congregation,” she told me. In 2008, a year after leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, she went to a networking event, at a bar and grill in Findlay called the Landing Pad, for people in the assisted-living industry. She had had one or two drinks when a man who she assumed was a bartender handed her one more. Suddenly, she felt more drunk than she’d ever been in her life. She didn’t know the man’s full name, but he guided her out of the bar and drove her to his office, which had a large bed in a finished basement where they quickly had sex. Then he returned her to the bar. She remembered little from the encounter except that when they had left the bar he had told her, “I want to hurry and get you back here before anyone notices you’re missing.” She said, “Those words kept ringing in my ears, and the more I repeated them the more I realized what happened was very calculated.”

A few months later, Tovar took her father to get his foot fitted for a prosthetic limb. When the prosthetist entered the exam room in a white lab coat, she said, she recognized his face: he was the man from the bar. It seemed to her that he was avoiding eye contact. “It was as though he were looking through me, like I didn’t exist,” she said. The prosthetist was Jeremy Berman.

At the time, Tovar, who was recently separated, was raising four children on her own. “I didn’t have time to sit around and dwell on something that I only remembered the half of,” she told me. As her children grew older, she became active on Facebook groups for former Jehovah’s Witnesses who were struggling with depression and with experiences of childhood sexual abuse. Through letters and petitions to lawmakers, she advocated for bills to extend the statute of limitations for reporting sexual assaults. In 2021, after years of encouraging other women to go to the police, Tovar decided that she should do so, too.

Tovar told her story to a Hancock County detective, but after a while she became anxious that she wasn’t hearing any updates about her complaint. As she waited for news, she searched online to see what had become of Berman. At that point, there had been only one article that mentioned Arica Waters, a brief summary of her indictment, seven months earlier, and Berman’s name was not included. But Tovar did find an article in the Sandusky Register noting that Berman had won “detective of the year.” The article also described the problem of unsolved roofie rapes in Put-in-Bay. “My mind was reeling,” she told me. “I was, like, What the hell? He’s a doctor during the week and a detective on roofie island on the weekends?” She called the editor of the paper, Matt Westerhold, to ask for more information. She said, “I wasn’t planning on telling him, but the next thing you know I was, like, ‘This is what he did to me.’ ”

Westerhold had always been curious about Berman’s arrangement with the Put-in-Bay police department. “I had never heard of such a thing,” he told me. “It didn’t sit well with me.” He wanted to read Tovar’s complaint, so he called Levorchick, the sheriff of Ottawa County, mistakenly thinking that the incident had happened there. Levorchick assumed that Westerhold was asking about Waters, and he explained that her rape complaint wasn’t credible and that she had been charged.

Westerhold called Tovar to share the news that she wasn’t the only woman who had complained about Berman’s sexual behavior. Tovar told me, “I don’t even know if a God really exists, but the fact that I came forward when they were about to try Arica Waters—and no one knew about it, because they had all kept it quiet—makes me think maybe there is.”

Several weeks later, a Hancock County sergeant named Jason Seem went to Berman’s prosthetics office to ask about Tovar’s complaint. “She thinks that you spiked one of her drinks and brought her back here and sexually assaulted her,” he said, according to a recording of their interview. (Tovar wasn’t sure that her drink was spiked, but she remarked that she didn’t understand how a few drinks had made her feel “that out of it.”)

Berman groaned softly. “Never happened,” he said.

Berman did confirm that he had a bedroom in his office basement and that he’d once co-owned the Landing Pad. But he didn’t know who Tovar was. “Doesn’t ring a bell at all,” he said. “I’ve never spiked anyone’s drink. I haven’t done anything of that sort.”

Berman told Seem, “There’s also ramifications for false allegations, too. I hope you’re looking at that.” He warned, “Moving forward, unfortunately, this is a serious felony accusation.”

After the meeting, Slattery, the private investigator, sent an e-mail to Seem proposing that Tovar and Waters were conspiring. The two women had been in California at roughly the same time—evidence, he said, that they may have been planning their allegations in concert. “They both seem to be professional victims that use and abuse people and strain the justice system with these false complaints,” Slattery wrote. The areas of California that the women had visited were more than three hundred miles apart, but Seem took the allegations seriously enough to request that the Hancock County prosecutor issue a subpoena for Tovar’s phone records. The subpoena was granted, but the records revealed no communication between the two women.

Not long afterward, Seem sent his assault report to the county prosecutor, who determined that Berman should not be charged, because of insufficient evidence, and Seem closed the case. When Tovar received a copy of her closed-case report, she saw a reference to a “second investigation from 2008” that had “some similarities to this one.” She called Westerhold and said that it appeared as if a third woman had accused Berman of sexual assault. Westerhold was skeptical. “It was almost like ‘I don’t want to know,’ ” he said. “This is a rabbit hole. It just goes deeper and deeper.”

Westerhold sometimes consults a woman named Tracy Thom, who is known in the area as a kind of volunteer victims’ advocate—she began the work after struggling to get a restraining order against an ex-boyfriend. Although Thom likes to refer to herself as a “dumb blonde with an iPad,” she is a rigorous investigator, who, having seen how hard it is to navigate the legal system alone, tries to help others in her free time. She read through Tovar’s records, concluded that there was indeed a third woman, uncovered the woman’s name and number, and then called her. They talked for more than an hour. Then she e-mailed Waters’s attorney to say that she had spoken with two other alleged victims of Berman. She wrote, “Their stories are similar and validate each other’s claims.”

The third woman, whom I’ll call Bridget, had gone to the police and got a rape exam in 2008, but several days later she decided that she did not want to “pursue this matter any further,” Levorchick, the sheriff, wrote. “She told me she believed that she had too much alcoholic beverage to drink on the date of the incident and that she believed that she could have been an active participant in the sexual behavior, although it is quite unlike her. Especially since she has had no sexual activity for over one year.” She asked Levorchick to tell her the results of her urine test, because she was concerned that a drug had been put in her drink, but it’s unclear if the test was ever completed. Seven months after Bridget’s report, the urine analyst called Levorchick to ask what he should do with her sample. The analyst wrote in his notes, “He told me not to proceed with analysis of evidence since she doesn’t want to prosecute.”

Bridget signed a form stating, “Of my own free will, and after careful consideration, [I] choose to no longer pursue the case.” But a statement that she had written by hand contradicted the description of her as an “active participant.” She wrote that she had been at a bar on an island near Put-in-Bay when she began talking with Berman, who offered her a job and then invited her to his condominium on the mainland, where he gave her a drink. “The next thing she remembers is ‘coming to’ while in the hot tub,” Levorchick’s report said. She was naked. A friend of Berman’s was having sex with her, and Berman was touching her sexually. “I broke down I began to cry really hard I was telling Jeremy that this is not me,” she wrote. “I would never do this.”

Berman declined to be interviewed, though he did say that all three allegations are false. Bridget also chose not to speak with me, saying that the idea caused her distress. James VanEerten, Ottawa County’s prosecutor, said that he recently discussed the case with Bridget and that she did not want it reëxamined. He said, “She told me, ‘I was sexually assaulted. I know I was sexually assaulted. But I made a conscious decision not to pursue the case. I still stand by that.’ ” VanEerten was made uneasy, however, by evidence suggesting that the sheriff’s department had mishandled her allegation, and, after he asked the court to consider appointing a special prosecutor, an investigation was launched into possible irregularities in her case. (Levorchick denies that Berman received special treatment.)

Tovar created a petition on Change.org to demand that Yost, Ohio’s attorney general, stand on the “right side of sexual assault.” She wrote, “Three women who do NOT know each other, who live in different cities, who have never talked to each other, but all 3 women have accused the same man.” She posted a glamorous photograph of herself—she was wearing makeup and her hair was windswept—next to Waters’s mug shot. “I had a big old grin on my face,” she said. “And Arica Waters had a forlorn look and she was in an orange jumpsuit.” Tovar didn’t think that her case had been handled well, but, “when I saw the two pictures, it really hit me—this is how a white woman is treated, and this is how a Black woman is treated,” she said.

In an e-mail to the prosecutor, Berman complained that he was being treated worse than a rape victim. “They don’t let rape victims be slandered and dragged through the mud on all their past sexual history,” he said. Referring to Tovar, he wrote, “She is 100% lying to support the sexual assault narrative.”

Although the phone records did not uphold the theory that Tovar and Waters had planned their complaints together, Slattery, the private investigator, argued that there may have been another channel of communication: he suggested that Waters’s defense attorney, Sarah Anjum, had been a kind of mastermind, coördinating the reports against Berman. He told Seem about the episode of “Catfish” that featured Waters. “The entire history of Arica Waters makes it very believable that she could and would attempt to help her criminal defense,” Slattery wrote.

Anjum had never spoken with Tovar. She was alarmed by the allegation and the possibility of a private investigator delving into her life. She had taken on Waters’s case, pro bono, because she, too, had once been accused of filing a false report. “I wanted to be there for Arica in the ways that no one had been there for me,” she told me.

In 2017, when Anjum was thirty-two, she had gone to the Toledo Police Department to report that a prominent local defense attorney had repeatedly groped her. She told the police that she did not want to press charges—she just wanted to acknowledge what had happened and to create an internal record, in case the behavior escalated or other women came forward. The report was not public, but, four days later, the defense attorney received a phone call informing him that he was the subject of a complaint. He called a friend, a retired homicide detective, and asked him to look into the report; after learning the details, the defense attorney called the chief of the Special Units Division in the Lucas County prosecutor’s office and requested an investigation into whether Anjum had lied. In an interview with two investigators, the defense attorney said, “I’m not telling you guys how to do your job at all or what the conclusion should be, but there needs to be a consequence for what she’s doing to me and my family, and I don’t know what it is. I’m hopeful that you guys can figure out some way to show that she’s lying.” He also said, “She is either a liar, crazy, or both.”

Anjum was called in for an interview with the investigators, but she was never charged. Still, to avoid encounters with the attorney, she stopped working on cases in her own county and went a year with barely any income. In an anonymous article on Medium, she wrote that, after she was groped the first time, “I did the sane thing—absolutely nothing. I knew that he was the more powerful player, and reporting meant additional harm to myself.” But, even after calculating the risks and benefits of reporting, she had never expected to be put in the category of potential criminal suspect. “I’m really not asking for much,” she wrote. “I would like my friends and colleagues to have backbones. I would like to matter. I would like to be able to work again.”

Now she worried that Slattery would dig into her own history, she said, and “use it, because one way to hurt Arica’s case is to take out her legal team.” She considered removing herself from the case. “I didn’t understand how Slattery could call in with these ridiculous allegations that I was somehow the ringleader of these women and that it was enough to get an investigation going,” she said. But she also felt that she had a duty to see the trial through. “I just kept thinking, It ought not to be me defending Arica, because I understand this feeling of trying to deal with your own trauma while trying to protect your own reputation and ability to work,” she said. “I felt like it couldn’t be me—but also, having walked this path, it had to be me.”

Anjum filed a motion asking that Tovar and Bridget be permitted to testify at the trial, as evidence that Berman had a “modus operandi of assaulting intoxicated women.” In response, the state’s attorney, Drew Wood, wrote, “There is a time and a place for JB”—Berman’s initials—“to be held accountable for sexual assaults he may have committed in 2008. But it is not the Defendant’s trial for Making False Alarms.” The request was rejected.

In a pleading, the state explained that the question before the court had little to do with Berman’s own behavior. “The primary issue,” Wood wrote, “will be Defendant’s knowledge—did she know that she had not been raped?”

Waters waived her right to a jury, and a bench trial was held in December, 2021. Tovar and Thom, the victims’ advocate, sat in the courtroom, to show their support for Waters, though they had never spoken to her. “I felt so bad that she had to sit there all prim and proper with her hair just so—pulled back, straightened,” Tovar told me. “She couldn’t just be herself without being judged.”

The state argued that the government had wasted $14,340.58 investigating Waters’s allegation and that Berman had incurred more than twenty-five thousand dollars in fees for his lawyer and private investigator. (In an e-mail to Wood, Berman said that the total was actually higher, because he hadn’t included the costs of “private aviation to handle the allegation.”) Wood told the judge, “The defendant knew she had not been raped. She knew it in the moment. She knew it afterwards, and she never forgot it.” He said her texts showed that she was after Berman’s money—“whether by becoming a sugar baby or perhaps through some future civil liability for quid-pro-quo sexual harassment.”

On the first day of the trial, Berman, who has short brown hair and a bulky chest and neck, testified. After his administrative leave in the summer of 2020, he had tried to return to his job, but the chief of the Put-in-Bay police decided to stop holding his commission, a requirement to maintain active status as a police officer. Berman had since found a different department in Ohio to hold his commission.

Recalling the encounter with Waters, Berman said that he hadn’t made her any drinks, and that she wasn’t drunk at all. “She was clear, concise, articulate,” he said. “She knew exactly what she was doing.” Once they were in the apartment, he said, Waters had unbuckled his shorts and performed oral sex on him.

A lawyer named Laura Dunn had joined Waters’s defense team a few weeks before the trial, on a pro-bono basis, and she asked Berman why he had picked up Waters at her bunkhouse for “round two.” She said, “She actually did not want to meet you, did she?”

“I did not get that tone or that feeling,” Berman said.

“So she didn’t say, ‘I’m not feeling well. I need to sleep before work’?”

“She did say that.”

“So she was declining,” Dunn said.

“You call it declining—I didn’t take it that way,” he said. He added that, after having sex, he told Waters he’d had a vasectomy. “On her face, you could see just the disappointment,” he said. “I felt she had ulterior—”

“We’re not here for feelings,” the judge, Janet Burnside, interrupted.

Two former Put-in-Bay officers who had been at Berman’s party testified: one described Waters as having been blacked out, and the other said that she was only moderately drunk. Amy Gloor, who had raised the possibility of bringing charges for false-rape accusations in at least two previous cases, acknowledged that Waters had not used the term “rape.” “She felt coerced,” Gloor said, explaining that Waters had felt intimidated by “Jeremy Berman’s power, money, and what he had over the department.”

Burnside deliberated for thirty minutes. When she returned, she said, “I was floored yesterday when I heard that the defendant did not accuse Jeremy Berman using the word ‘rape.’ ” She went on, “I’m not sure she was altogether clear what exactly had happened, but certainly by the time she doesn’t want to go with him for round two—and yet says ‘I can service you though’—she was getting a fair indication of what this was all about.” She said, “Look at this interesting way that she’s providing the bottom line, ‘I can let you use my body for your sexual pleasure.’ ” The sentence expressed “no joy, no materialism, no attraction,” she said. “There’s just obligation.”

She acquitted Waters, saying that it appeared as if Berman had been “grooming her to do what he wants.” She added that Berman’s account of events had been shaped by a “built-in bias because . . . well, let’s put it this way: Mr. Berman can only tell one story, because the other story makes him a person who could be charged with a serious first-degree felony.”

Wood texted Berman, who was not in the courtroom: “Not guilty.”

“Fuck,” Berman responded.

“Remember, when you weren’t charged with rape, you won your battle,” Wood encouraged him. “This was something different.”

Waters has never met the other two women who made accusations against Berman, but she feels a sense of camaraderie. “I think we are all kind of doing the same thing—waiting for each other to make that step,” she told me. Tovar is still trying to get her case reopened, though she is unlikely to succeed. Westerhold, of the Sandusky Register, said, “I keep telling her, ‘You’ve done your job—none of this would have happened without you. They thought they could run Arica Waters out of town.’ ”

Waters has applied to about a dozen police departments throughout Ohio. When Lamar, her friend, learned that she planned to return to law enforcement, “I was, like, Girl, what the hell?” But she also told her, “I get it. That’s what you went to school for—that’s your dream, your life plan, your sense of self.”

With an indictment on her record, Waters has struggled to secure a new job. She feels cautious asking for references, knowing that the names of people she admires could somehow be sullied by association. “I need to be honest and say, ‘This is what your name will be attached to,’ ” she said. She is reminded of the way she felt in her early twenties when, after years of being bullied, it finally stopped. She tries to reassure herself with the thought that, when a department finally hires her, it will be a sign that “this time you’re going to have my back.” ♦

A Weak Review

Actually I am feeling quite fine. I am not sleeping great and got up at 5 am to move scarves and winter clothes around, a compulsion that I think stems from my need to have all my home perfect at all times. That was one thing that Covid does to one, the need to rest while also being fanatically clean. Trips to storage to get winter blankets and other accessories and the need to redecorate after being trapped again in quarantine reminded me of those early days where fussing about was never enough, and in this case I bought an expensive Miele Coffee/Espresso Machine to replace the three different coffee makers/grinders I have. I am sure that this will end as I am on day two of negative tests and dropping temp, but I want to avoid the bounce back Covid so I am on varying Chinese herbs to cleanse and cool the liver heat that generates from illness. But isolation aside I have found it quite amusing to wander about full on mask and yell, “Don’t come in this elevator or stand close, put on a mask, I have Covid!” There is great pleasure in watching people get confused, some comply and everyone is relieved and thanks me. We have come a long way from Typhoid Covid days.

I also made the decision to return to work on the 29th and 30th of the Month as my entry back into Substitute Teaching here in Jersey City. The schools a distinct counter to the high rises and money that the city espouses to have and explains the insane rents as the migration from the even more expensive city across the Hudson has done more to push people to move than any Governor of Texas or Florida ever could. And with that I would love a free trip to Martha’s Vineyard. Call me Carmen, I am from Columbia……. Tennessee but HOLA! That act of bizarre human trafficking, funded by a State using Covid relief funds, chartering two planes and landing in two different air bases and then finally arriving in Massachusetts without a word of advanced notice takes hubris and arrogance to new heights. The buses to NYC, DC and to the VP home have been equally an odd strange trip to be on when you have literally risked your life to come to a country that is in supposed need of workers. Well not those ones I guess.

The interesting aspect is that both Governors aspire to be President of the United States. Really? Are we that fucked up a country that we would elect either of them. Abbot alone with his handling of Uvalde, the energy and weather crisis of Texas alone should disqualify him. As for DeSantis the man is disturbing to say the least in both behavior and policy. He is the Prince Charles of the Aggrieved White Males in the U.S.

Which brings me to the death of the Queen, long live the King. And with that Charles who has been in training and in waiting all of his life finally assumes the throne. And assume he has. First up was the fussy videos of him signing documents, demanding that the varying items on the desk be removed and another with the pen leaking, the date wrong and the wandering up to reprimand the Secretary’s for this always happening. I loved those as apparently the Prince/King has a habit of asking aides to get items accidentally tossed in the bin to retrieve and is so known for writing notes in spider like penmanship that they are called Black Spider notes. God save the King! Diana was lucky to end it and perhaps die as none of these family members seem to age well. And with the Monarchy rumbling along the idea of how the Commonwealth will continue is the real age old question and with America at the cusp of losing Democracy I wonder if we can get a redo on that Independence thing? Call me Daddy Charles!

And with Europe on the cusp of many countries examining Populism/Fascism we are sure to ask ourselves if the Great World War is perhaps veering for a third series. We are asking ourselves if we are the brink of a new Civil War so this too must be a matter of import given what we are seeing in the Ukraine at present. And that is now like the many wars and conflicts we have watched from afar that seem to have no end but this time I am not sure if we can just sideline ourselves in a way that permits this to continue. But Iraq and Afghanistan are fresh in our memories and again we have shown repeatedly that we cannot pass on nor share Democratic ideals with any other country despite our efforts be they diplomatic or militaristic, so perhaps that explains the Trump doctrine.

And yet the American Dream persists and the migrants journey’s continue to affirm that reality and yet we are doing what we do best, kick the can or in this case the person, down the road to the next with no real solutions in site. Not the first nor the last time we have used people as human pawns with regards to political jockeying. We have a massive housing crisis in this country, the irony that the Vineyard, vacation home of the Obama’s, is a town that cannot afford to even offer housing to Physicians they have recruited to work in their hospitals. And this exists in all the wealthy playgrounds, from the Hampton’s to Aspen, workers and others who are not among the uber wealthy cannot afford to live there. How these rich folks get food is beyond me but they seem to manage. Perhaps they bring their own. Not food, staff.

Again the housing crisis is not just workers it is for the many transient individuals plagued with mental illness and other acute disorders that prevent or limit them from fully integrating into society. Numerous cities are trying numerous measures to house these individuals, Seattle has had mixed results with tiny house encampments as has Los Angeles but the idea is solid, but frankly I do not think these should be for these individuals that are in a mental health crisis; however, a they are well suited to single dwellers, workers and others who may find this arrangement conducive if well managed and operated. And in some cases other cities are modeling this and are moving forward with the concept so it is better than nothing. But we are at a housing crisis with regards to rentals as well in many cities as work from home and again foreign investment push more and more ordinary workers into the streets. And when Trailer parks are now big investment opportunities, so what does that tell you? And the problems continue with global warming as despite it all we want to seemingly live in Fire Zones or Flood Zones and with that the damages and costs will continue to rise along with the temps.

And with that we move into the last of my reviews, reality TV which shows us the best of us, okay a little bit as Drag Race and Amazing Race do have moments that are memorable in a good way when team work and positivity show how you can do well, but in the best of times it is also the worst of us. I cannot think of a show that does this better than Big Brother or any of the Housewives franchises. The social experiment that CBS does every summer putting a group of young people in a shitty fake home and fucks with them by subjecting them to grueling competitions and bizarre challenges is one that I have never understood after the first season, I checked in on occasion but largely out as the discussions and posturing is something that is beyond idiotic. The constant refrain, “have blood on my hands” and “put on the resume” are to say the least the most idiotic of phrases that endless “super fans” seem to repeat ad infinitum as a mantra. The other is the discussion of the 750K they will earn after they are declared a winner by a Jury of their former housemates. That is again largely laughable as with taxes they will see 37% removed immediately and depending on where they live another percent for income tax. So here in New Jersey I would see an additional 10% or so added to that, meaning I would earn about 353K. That would be a down payment on a house. Seriously. But to the aspirants they are sure they can buy a home, pay off student loans and travel. Start with a math class or find an accountant would be my suggestion.

Then we have the housewives who seem to have tastes that end with 10K handbags and 500 dollar hats. What the flying fuck? And yet one wife, the infamous Erika Girardi has 750K in earrings that were paid for from a victim fund and she refuses to either acknowledge the victims nor acknowledge wrongdoing at all. You are divorcing the man so call him a liar and crook and a cheater, the LA Times sure does. Getting a publicist and a therapist and off that show would be three things I would do to add to my resume and not have blood on my hands.

The last one I find still deeply infused with some form of religious torture and abuse is Survivor. There is something wrong with Mark Burnett to literally think this is Robinson Crusoe meets Cast Away which are works of fiction and should remain that way. The insanity over again 1M dollars which will be taxed has demonstrated a desperation and duplicity that rarely ends well for the supposed sole Survivor. I know my Doorman loves all these shows, a man hitting the over 200 lb scale, uses a walker and has a marginal intellectual capacity tells me all I need to know. The reality of this is the only real millionaire is Mark Burnett and frankly he is a religious crackpot who gave us Trump who actually believed his own show about him. Another false idol there which is not lost on anyone who watches that bullshit show. And a review of where are they now shows that many returned to their jobs or endlessly competing on version after another which makes one think that is their reality, a quick infusion of cash that you can blow or save, but life changing, no.

And as I move into the weekend I don’t think much about the endless Trump trials and sagas. Some more amusing than others, the Lindell claim about the FBI seizing his phone at a Hardee’s drive thru which is not only bizarre but likely missing a truth in the same way he is missing a screw. That and the endless Attorneys who seem to be in the business of hiring more Attorneys as they hitched their wagon to Trump. Which tells me that getting a law license is a lot easier than one thinks and proves that most Attorney’s are raving assholes and morons.

As for inflation and the economy, the reality is that we don’t have any measure of comparison nor way to get the big picture or the little one straight. One day Dow down, next up. The Feds raise the rates but spending goes on. The need for workers belies a recession but the reality is that the cuts and lay offs are happening just in the white collar world and mid-managment in the business that were once the darlings of Wall Street. The Pelotons, the Netflix and Chill and of course the Crytpo currencies. Start ups are starting down and staring down at a balance sheet which they have never had to do and it reminds me of 2000 when the dot coms bombed. This is much more parallel to that then 2008 that hit a wider swath of individuals. The rich that are on paper and received margin loans to buy those Aspen homes are getting called and with that see that too change sooner versus later. I do think Americans are in denial and always have been about housing and education, they truly believe they are valuable assets. We have finally seen that truth exposed and the other is coming as well. See a lot more Ivy League Degrees competing on Survivor and Big Brother.

As I am fortunate and privileged and just fucking lucky I do think about the world outside my window a great deal. I get checked at the door when I walk into the public schools and from them I realize how fucked up we are. I am not sure we are going to find the great saviors in the next generation, we have been saying that for many a generation now and so now you tell me, really? I see what I have always seen, some bright shining lights and many many more dim ones. The need to be heard, to be seen dominates the landscape. There is not a post on the comment pages of WaPo, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook or Instagram that are irrelevant and unnecessary, mine included. But we are desperate for connection to anything outside that window and with that we tap into our most darkest of impulses and rages. I buy expensive clothes and return most of them. I buy expensive household goods and keep them. I rarely talk to anyone without it being me being in full on Teacher mode or in automat where I nod and try to extricate myself as it is a waste of time and energy, and with that validating my no compromise promise I frankly feel no need to try. Have I given up? No I have just stopped caring and I give only what I need to when I need to. Energy is a source and I am conserving mine.

Below is an op-ed, and this sums up what I think we do and what we need to do. And we will do all of the wrong things and do nothing we need. That is America.

Opinion How to counter today’s tribalism and build ‘a more perfect union’

By Bernice B. Donald and Don R. Willett The Washington Post September 16, 2022

Bernice B. Donald is a judge on the U.S Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. Don R. Willett is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

Federal judges rarely write newspaper op-eds. Rarer still: a joint op-ed by two assumed foes. In this era of poisonous tribalism, what could these two judges agree on?

After all, one is an African American female Obama appointee, the other a White male Trump appointee.

For starters, we’re friends. More, we respect each other as judicial siblings committed to a shared oath; our robes are black, not red or blue. In this coarse and graceless age, believing that our similarities eclipse our differences might be derided as Pollyannish. So be it.

Saturday is Constitution Day. But let’s begin with the Declaration of Independence, which in 2026 will mark its semiquincentennial — 250 years.

The Declaration is aspirational, debuting a uniquely American theory: that government exists to secure people’s inborn, individual, inalienable rights. The Constitution is architectural, erecting a structure to achieve those ideals. But the union was very far from perfect at the founding: One-third of the Declaration’s signers were enslavers.

Still, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was right in 1963 when he called the nation’s founding documents “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” While he recognized that America had “defaulted” on that note in failing to recognize equality for African Americans, he also knew that those founding documents made possible a government that could correct itself over time. He was echoing Frederick Douglass, who a century earlier declared that the Declaration’s promises of liberty and equality are eternal, even if America betrayed those promises.

King implored Americans not to tear down the nation’s heritage but to live up to it. Doing so might seem difficult these days, when entrenched tribalism threatens to swamp citizens’ shared attachment to the nation. But that makes trying all the more important. This Constitution Day, here are five suggestions to help form a “more perfect union.”

Log off. In today’s hot-take culture stoked by social media, the art of disagreeing agreeably seems quaint. The snarling, sneering and sniping are on full display in a realm we know well: modern law schools. Online incivility seems to fuel real-life boorishness. Earlier this year, a panel at Yale Law School brought together lawyers from the left and right to tout the importance of free speech. Chaos ensued. That is what happens when views held by the “other side” are deemed no longer debatable but disreputable. Better to reject venomous online voices — and promote civility in the physical world.

Learn up. The civics IQ of “We the People” is not exactly Mensa-level. According to the 2022 Annenberg Civics Survey, most American adults cannot name all three branches of government, and 25 percent cannot name a single one. The judicial branch is likely the least understood — especially by those who depict the judiciary as hijacked by craven politics. Facts are hostile witnesses. The Supreme Court’s rate of dissent today is no higher than it was in 1945, when eight of nine justices had been appointed by the same president. Besides, fixating on the Supreme Court is distorting: Ninety-nine percent of federal cases go no higher than regional circuit courts. That’s where we serve, and we can attest, as research has shown, that roughly 98 percent of circuit-court decisions are unanimous — hardly a sign of ideologically driven judging.

Reach out. Genuine across-the-aisle friendships are rare today. According to an NBC News-Generation Lab poll last month, about half of college sophomores say they wouldn’t date, or even choose as a roommate, someone who didn’t vote as they did in the 2020 presidential election. Americans too often hunker down in like-minded echo chambers, marinating in confirmation bias, rarely encountering, much less befriending, anyone who sees the world differently. Cross-party friendships are no easy feat. But if Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg could do it, so can we — and so can you.

Pull back. Many Americans view everything through a political prism. Entire identities get distilled to partisan labels. The places where attachments were found — such as civic and religious institutions — have thinned out, and politics has rushed into the vacuum. Political strife is nothing new, but things have radically intensified. Regrettably, some judges contribute to the noxiousness, penning acidic opinions that fuel a perception of judges as ideological combatants rather than evenhanded arbiters. But the toxicity is culture-wide. Fact: There is more to life than politics.

Plug in. President Jimmy Carter put it powerfully during his 1981 farewell address when he said he would be taking up “the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of citizen.” American citizenship is not a spectator sport. Be engaged citizens, not enfeebled (or enraged) bystanders. Self-government is not self-perpetuating. This raucous republic belongs to us all, and the secret sauce is a sleeves-rolled-up citizenry.

This Constitution Day, if any identity should define us as Americans, let it be one that transcends ideological and demographic differences: Our common identity as heirs to a rich civic inheritance.

Dates wrapped in bacon

Not a treat I like. I like dates and bacon but the sweet savory aspect of that does not work for me despite that I also love a good sweet savory. With that I don’t do dates, either the dried fruit or the human kind. I have written why I have quit the process and with that I read endlessly about sexual assaults and the failures of Police to either believe victims let alone investigate crimes against those who have been harmed in this manner as they simply have no incentive nor actual training in how to do so. As John Oliver so succinctly put it this Sunday, many Police rely on Law & Order SUV to assist them in doing so; as do victims who assume that the protocol they follow is one done in real life only to find out differently when they come forward. Shocking!! I know, not really.

Currently the Feds are investigating the NYPD with regards to their failures in that department and of course like all other “investigations” little will be done and the status quo will remain just that. Sigh. Defund Police is something they should ask for themselves as there is little to nothing they get right so why not fold up the tent and start anew? It could not be worse. Or then again it could it as the article cites:

The Special Victims Division was created in 2003 to investigate sex offenses and child abuse as well as monitor sex offenders. But its staffing has stagnated for years.

Victims described how their cases were assigned to officers who did not seem to know how to investigate them or did not care to make the effort, if they had time at all. Some investigators failed to return to crime scenes, collect surveillance video or speak to witnesses. Victims said investigators pressured them to sign forms that prematurely closed cases. Some victims even footed the bill for forensic testing and medical procedures.

Errors by investigators ruined cases, the victims said, an assertion supported by an evaluation conducted last year at the Police Department’s request. Researchers from the firm RTI International found that more than half of sexual assault cases were closed for lack of evidence, despite suspects having been identified in more than 80 percent of reports.

What is more insulting? Oh wait it gets worse as illustrated by this case:

Instead, Special Victims detectives insisted that Meghan call the perpetrator to see if he would incriminate himself.

The technique, known as a controlled phone call, can be a crucial tool in cases of acquaintance rape, the most common kind, where the central question is not whether sex occurred, but if it was consensual. In practice, however, investigators often do not have experience or time to properly prepare the victim.

Meghan refused the call, and the police closed her case.

A month later, investigators reopened it after a DNA test on the underwear she wore when she was raped. When they contacted her in January, she was 11 weeks pregnant by her rapist and had decided to get an abortion. Moments before her operation, the police asked her to postpone so that they could collect the fetus’s DNA. She reasoned that it would not prove she was raped, and went through with the abortion.

The case was closed again. The police described her in the file as “uncooperative.”

Alright this is our law enforcement at their finest which is well as low as it goes so that bar is just sitting on the ground.

With this I do not regret one fucking minute of running and moving and changing my name, not once. I feel safe for what that is worth and the rest of it falls entirely upon me in which to remain that way. Meaning no one in my home, no dating, no going to anyone’s home or place of business, anywhere that I could be harmed. I am 62 at this point it is a decision that really does not bother me but it saddens me and then I read the story below and think: Well there goes that!

And with that I again feel validated when I listen to the Aggrieved White Male Cohort lament the state of white men and how their state of mind and well being has been harmed by things such as Online Dating Apps, Working from Home and of course Porn which has made men confused, alienated and angry. Really, how did you know? The mass shootings a bit of a giveaway there no?

This comes from my personal favorite Prince of the AWM and their Lord, Scott Galloway and Bill Maher lamenting the future of society if men don’t get out, work hard and get laid. The third party there, Matt Walsh, was busy doing false equivalency remarks that were both Racist and Misogynist about Stacy Adams and her election rejection in GA a few years ago, making connection to the idea that both Liberals and Conservatives reject Democracy and that it started the whole Trump nonsense. That was so insane to compare her calling out how Governments/Legislators are circumventing voting rights and Trump and his blowing the horn to draw the MAGA boys in from the trailer parks and into the Capital in a type of bat signal. What.ever. What is it with white fucking men? Was Jordan Peterson not available?

Women are disproportionately affected negatively by the reliance on dating apps, the growth of online dating, the ability to create a false personal history and in turn manipulate women have contributed to abuse, assault and murder. I am just one victim, but the story is of another survivor. Yes we survived but many are not as fortunate. Men go out and work hard ON YOURSELVES. Scott Galloway needed to add that part.

She posted an ad on a dating site. An alleged serial killer answered.

By Justin Jouvenal The Washington Post September 11, 2022

Monica White had gone through a painful divorce, but at 53 she was ready to begin dating again in the fall of 2020. She created profiles on dating sites and soon got a message from a potential suitor — a man authorities would allege was a serial killer a year later.

Anthony Robinson, 36, who police have dubbed the “Shopping Cart Killer,” allegedly met women on dating sites and lured them to hotels, before killing them and loading their bodies into shopping carts to dump in vacant lots. He has been charged in two killings and been linked publicly by policeto three others.

“Hi beautiful,” White recalls Robinson writing in his first message. “I’d like to get to know you better.”

The whirlwind romance that followed was by turns intense, bizarre and menacing. White’s account provides the richest picture yet of a man who has largely remained a mystery since authorities labeled him a serial killer at a news conference that garnered national attention in December.

Police have said little about Robinson, other than that the D.C. man moved frequently and held a range of jobs. His family has never given media interviews. Louis Nagy, an attorney for Robinson, declined to comment for this story.

Robinson is slated for a preliminary hearing on two counts of murder Monday in Harrisonburg, Va., where he is accused of killing 54-year-old Allene Redmon, of Harrisonburg, and 39-year-old Tonita Lorice Smith, of Charlottesville, last fall.

The Washington Post has also learned police are re-examining the 2018 death of a Maryland woman who Robinson was engaged to marry in light of the allegations against him.

White said her brush with an alleged serial killer has left her shaken. She said she has not been able to go on dates since.

“It really rocked my world,” White said. “I went into a depression.”

White, who lives outside Harrisburg, Pa., said her relationship with Robinson proceeded quickly after that first message. White said Robinson was flattering, telling her what he found attractive about her profile. She said he liked that she was into art and had been a preschool teacher.

White said she told him she was looking for a serious relationship, and he confided in her that he preferred older women because they were more mature.

The messages soon progressed to video chats. White said Robinson would call her from the Metro as he commuted to or from his job in D.C., where White said he was working removing snow and cleaning streets for the city. At the time, Robinson was living in a friend’s apartment in the District and occasionally stayed with his mother in Maryland.

Robinson told White he had never been married, but he did have a son who died when the child was around 2 years old and a daughter who was around 5 or 6 at the time. White said she never learned much about the children’s mother, but sensed Robinson had a difficult childhood himself.

White and Robinson grew closer.

“He seemed to have an attachment to me, so he would call me every day,” White said.

By late 2020, Robinson scheduled his first visit to Pennsylvania. White said she and Robinson spent a weekend together, hanging out, watching movies and eating Chinese food. White introduced Robinson to her adult son.

The relationship continued, and White said Robinson said he hoped they could be a couple and move his daughter to Pennsylvania to live with her. Robinson returned to the Harrisburg area for White’s birthday in February 2021.

White said Robinson’s visit held a surprise: He bought a one-way bus ticket.

“When he got here, he said I’m going to have to get a job or something in order to get back home cause I don’t have my ticket money,” White said.

White said Robinson got a job at a warehouse for an online pet supply store and stayed with her for three weeks while he raised money for his return trip.

White said Robinson never discussed killing or hurting women, but he did have darker moments.

At one point, White said he pulled up his shirt to show her a scar and said he had been stabbed. White said Robinson never explained how the stabbing occurred, but promised he would kill anyone that came at him with a knife again. When they were intimate, White said Robinson sometimes choked her briefly, leaving her gasping for breath.

Robinson mentioned he had been engaged to a woman who died.

The woman was 30-year-old Skye Allen, who passed away on Valentine’s Day in 2018. Robinson had met Allen online in 2016, and the pair were planning a wedding, her family said. The couple were living with Allen’s mother in Glenarden, Md.

Stacey Allen, Skye’s mother, said she found her daughter barely breathing and with a light pulse in her bed on the morning of Feb. 14, 2018. Skye Allen had spent the night with Robinson in the room the pair shared, Stacey Allen said. Skye Allen was rushed to the hospital, where she died a short time later.

Skye Allen’s death was found to be caused by “fatal cardiac arrhythmia,” according to a copy of her death certificate obtained by The Post. Prince George’s County police said they are taking a fresh look at the case.

“The Prince George’s County Police Department did not open an investigation into Ms. Allen’s death in 2018,” the department said in a statement. “Our agency was not notified of her passing, which occurred at a hospital, and therefore had no involvement in documenting any aspect of her death. She was cremated following her death. In January of 2022, a PGPD Homicide supervisor did speak to Ms. Allen’s relatives. Based on those conversations, the PGPD’s Cold Case Unit is reviewing the facts surrounding her death.”

At White’s house, her relationship with Robinson came to a tumultuous end. White held a birthday party for herself in mid-February 2021. At the party, White said Robinson drank heavily and made sexually suggestive comments toward her son and the teenage son of a friend, which were confirmed by a cousin of White’s who attended.

White said she confronted Robinson about the comments the next day. White said she told Robinson the comments were inappropriate and asked if he had an interest in men. White said Robinson told her he did.

White said she felt blindsided because Robinson had not been forthcoming about that side of himself and said she couldn’t trust him any longer. “He could be anything,” White said.

A fight ensued, during which Robinson called police before he finally left, White said. Local police confirmed they responded to a call involving White and Robinson. White thought it would be the last she would see of Robinson, but it wasn’t.

Weeks later, White said Robinson messaged her on Facebook and said he was living at a hotel in Harrisburg. Robinson asked her to come to the hotel, saying “I will give you whatever you want.” White said he was also interested in buying “spice,” or synthetic marijuana. White declined to meet him.

About a month later, White was driving in Harrisburg and saw Robinson walking down the street. White said she was shocked by his appearance. Robinson had always been clean-cut and neatly groomed, but now he had an untidy beard and a knotty Afro. White never saw him again.

Roughly eight months later, in October 2021, police said Robinson killed Redmon in Harrisonburg, about 130 miles south of D.C., after going there for work. Police said Robinson killed Smith in November.

Robinson was arrested on Nov. 23 after both women’s bodies were found in an open lot in a commercial district in Harrisonburg. Police said surveillance video and cellphone records connected Robinson to both victims.

Fairfax County police announced in December they were investigating Robinson in connection with the slaying of two women whose bodies were found in a trash can in a vacant lot in the Route 1 corridor. Robinson has not been charged in the slayings of Cheyenne Brown, 29, of D.C., and Stephanie Harrison, 48, of Redding, Calif.

Fairfax County police have interviewed White as part of their investigation, a spokesman said.

D.C. police are also investigating Robinson in connection with the killing of Sonya Champ, 40, of D.C., whose body was found in a shopping cart near Union Station in September 2021.

White said she was stunned when a relative forwarded her a story about Robinson being called a serial killer by police in December. She was supposed to be with her niece, who was giving birth, but she couldn’t leave her home. She thought of the women who had been killed and her own experience with Robinson.

“It was all kinds of emotion flooding my head,” White said.

Damn, it’s hot.

Today we are having a respite from the relenting heat and humidity but as all things go into fall I am sure that it will be like the seasons that have preceded it, not traditional in any way. Yes folks Global Warming is worse and with the passage of one of the largest bills in which to address this issue, it my friends is not enough. We are in a global crisis that extends well beyond our borders.

As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago with regards to the Newport Jazz Festival and other outdoor concerts I attended at Saratoga Springs and Bridgeport, the evening was marred by the heat and the discomfort it lent to enjoying the music. The closeness of bodies, the movement of them and the lack of either air circulation or some type of coolness makes the body distressed. And with that even last night I was going to Pier 17 to see Franz Ferdinand and decided not. I simply had not enough energy to expend to stand for two to three hours fueled on bottled water, as I pass on liquor although I might have stopped for a cocktail beforehand, I just could not do it. I put the ticket on resale on Ticketmaster for 60 bucks, just a few dollars less than I paid and I knew it would sell. Overall a 20 buck loss was not as it offset the costs of going frankly and with that I felt it was a win, and I missed nothing. I can dance to them anytime I want in the comfort of my own home. Besides the night before I went to see a Cabaret performance by the Designer and commentator, Issac Mizrahi at Below 54. And frankly that would be a hard evening to top, from a gorgeous club, great professional servers, to a great White Burgandy all while listening to a man who has a surprisingly great voice, who is also highly entertaining and backed by stellar musicians, I figured why press my luck.

Instead I watched on Apple TV, Five Days at Memorial. This is about Memorial Hospital during Katrina that had to evacuate and with that made the call to end lives of terminal patients that could not be safely moved. 45 bodies were found and a Doctor and Nurse were tried for murder but not indicted as those were trying days and trying times. I had read the definitive book Katrina: After the Flood by Gary Rivilin and don’t recall this issue but I chose to not revisit that as after going to NOLA for a Christmas or two and talking to the returnees, they have very different recollections and emotions tied to the event; With that I chose to hear this narrative as it came from a ProPublica story and its own book on the subject. And again this is where we are people with regards to Global Warming, a book on every possible scenario with the actual disaster part missing. Watch the story or read the book and it will all become clear. We may have to make decisions in the same way those medical providers had to that week and none of them will be easy.

And with that the New York Times did a cover story on how the weather is affecting varying arts throughout the country. They focused on the outdoor Shakespeare and other Theater Festivals, but Tanglewood is also mentioned as their classical music festival is another larger one that attracts an older more attuned crowd whose idea of roughing it is a long bathroom line at the Metropolitan Opera. But even in Europe they too are seeing the danger of global warming, as Pearl Jam cancelled concerts in France as a result of weather. This is not the time to be swinging a jam frankly outdoors and the reality is that we are not dealing with it the same way Memorial did during those five days. Expect more health crisis from skin cancer to mental health breakdowns. It may explain the rising violence in cities to the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie or just that religion poisons all it touches, like Global Warming it is a danger in and of itself.

And within these last five days can you name a place not affected by bizarre weather fronts, from Death Valley to St Louis, rains have caused immense damages and dangers for the residents and travelers in the region. Heat across the country and Europe also leave a trail of tears akin to floods as the too are feeling the burn and with it a drought that will affect us for years if not decades into the future. Bringing with it more catastrophic fires and damage. And the irony of the rainfall and floods that result from this crisis will not solve it.

As we move into the hysteria over the FBI seizure of Trump documents and what that will do as we move into the elections I urge everyone to get a copy of the New Yorker for this week and read Jane Mayer’s piece on what it means to be a majority ruled by a minority: State Legislatures are Torching Democracy. Again all politics are local and few understand how the national ones became so divisive, well it did not start there it will however end there if we move forward with electing more of these extreme idiots on either side of the aisle. And for the record Ihlan Omar only one by 1,500 votes in Minnesota over her moderate Democratic opponent, Don Samuels. It shows that in November this may be a race to watch. And no I don’t like her for many reasons, being Muslim, being Black or being a Woman are not the reasons (and in that order) I find her annoying. She is the MTG of the left who says outrageous things, does little but shit stir and how is that helping? But we see little when we see only the color of our politics and not how to bond and connect on those issues that do not divide us and the article explains much of this and how it is playing out in Ohio.

We are in a crisis. So when I read this article about a raging idiot, Steven Pinker, my only thought, “Well at least he is optimistic. Bonkers, yes, but an optimistic one.” I will let you read it to form your own conclusions.

Despite climate, war and Covid, is everything actually … getting better?

The psychologist Steven Pinker has long believed we should be more optimistic – and even current crises do not dissuade him

David Robson The UK Guardian Sun 14 Aug 2022

Reading and watching the media over the past year, you might be forgiven for thinking that we are facing the collapse of civilisation. We have a shrinking economy, a fuel crisis that may bring on energy rationing and forced blackouts, extreme weather events, the increased chance of nuclear war, and risk of the growth of a new pandemic riding on the back of the last. The Doomsday Clock – a symbol created by scientists to represent the likelihood of a human-made catastrophe – places us at just 100 seconds before midnight, the closest we’ve been to Armageddon in the project’s 75-year history.

In the face of these threats, it may be hard to maintain a rose-tinted view of the future – unless, that is, you are the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. In 2018, his book Enlightenment Now argued that our interpretations of news events make us far too gloomy. There has never been a better time to be alive, he said, thanks to the social, economic, political, technological, and medical advances of the past 300 years.

At the time of its publication, Pinker’s book attracted as much scorn as praise. One common criticism was that he had oversimplified complex subjects and neglected any phenomena that might suggest a lack of progress. Pinker has, however, attempted to address many of the criticisms, and the recent challenges facing the world do not appear to have changed his opinion.

On Radio 4’s Today programme last week, he revisited the arguments of Enlightenment Now to explain why he believes there are still reasons to remain optimistic in 2022. “We have to remember that there’s no law of nature that spaces bad things apart,” he said. “Bad things happen, and they will appear to come in clusters – but it doesn’t mean that we’re being punished for our collective sins or that we’re in a uniquely dangerous moment.” He maintains humanity has the tools to deal with the challenges we face.

There is certainly something comforting about seeing cause for hope in crises. But do we really have good grounds for optimism? To find out, the Observer examines four indices of progress and the ways they have been affected by recent events.

Health in the time of Covid

The Covid-19 pandemic is the obvious place to start. According to the World Health Organization, more than 6.4 million have so far died of the infection, since the virus emerged. In a sample of 37 countries, the British Medical Journal found all but six had experienced a reduction in life expectancy as a result. That’s not to mention the burden of long Covid, which is thought to affect around two million people in the UK alone.

This is certainly a step backwards for global health. But it is worth noting that Pinker has never claimed that we will see continuous progress without any setbacks. His argument is more concerned with the ways we cope with problems and find potential solutions. Did we deal with the threat better than we would have been able to in years gone by?

The jury is still out on the UK government’s initial response to the crisis. But the rapid development of Covid vaccines is undoubtedly a triumph of scientific progress. According to a recent study from Imperial College’s Centre for Global InfectiouDisease Analysis, the vaccination programme saved at least 14 million people – and potentially as many as 19.8 million – in its first year.

This simply wouldn’t have been possible in years gone by; all previous vaccines had taken at least five years to develop, and at the start of the pandemic many scientists believed the possibility of creating a new one from scratch was naively optimistic. That may be some cause of optimism for our ability to deal with future health threats.

Wealth and happiness

One of Enlightenment Now’s core arguments is that people today are far wealthier than people in previous decades – and that this has resulted in higher life satisfaction, through greater comfort, more free time and better education. Pinker dismisses the idea that inequality is a driver of unrest – it is each person’s absolute wealth that matters, he says, which means we do not need to worry too much if much of a country’s gains in GDP go disproportionately to the richest echelons of society.

The evidence for this is not quite as clearcut as Pinker would claim, however. Recent research by veteran economist Richard Easterlin found that China’s and India’s recent economic growth have done very little for the population’s overall happiness. More comprehensively, a study by Małgorzata Mikucka at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium analysed life satisfaction in 46 countries from 1981 to 2012. It found that an increase in GDP only brought about greater happiness if it was accompanied by reduced inequality and increased social capital.

None of this bodes well for our lives over the next few months and years. The Office for National Statistics has just reported that the UK’s GDP has shrunk in the second quarter of 2022, suggesting that we are on the brink of a recession, while the average salary is set to fall behind inflation by 8% this year – the biggest drop in real wages in over 100 years. And according to the International Monetary Fund, the cost of living crisis is likely to widen inequality by hitting the poorest homes hardest.

It’s worth remembering that, by the start of this year, real wages had not fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis – suggesting that this is more than a momentary blip in our living standards.

War and peace

One of Pinker’s most controversial claims concerns our propensity to kill each other. He first made the case that human violence is at an all-time low inThe Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, and then revisited the idea seven years later in Enlightenment Now.

Much of Pinker’s argument concerns warfare. Using data concerning the sheer number of conflicts, their length, the proportion of lives lost, and the level of military investment, Pinker notes a downward trend across the centuries. Clearly, there are exceptions – the huge numbers of lives lost in both world wars, for one; you can only reach his conclusion by looking at average numbers across the globe over large time periods.

Pinker argues that various forces – such as the increasing importance of international trade, the rise of democracy, and the actions of institutions such as the UN – have made war much less desirable for most leaders, pushing us into the period known by some historians as the “long peace”.

But many other scholars have questioned these conclusions. One analysis by Aaron Clauset at the University of Colorado in Boulder, for example, concluded that the “long peace” may just be a statistical fluke. It is possible for any probabilistic events to cluster in certain periods and to disappear in others. For an analogy, consider how many times you can throw a coin and it lands on tails, despite the probability being 50:50. You might conclude that the coin is biased – but with more throws the overall frequencies will tend to balance out. According to Clauset’s paper, the “long peace” may be similarly ephemeral.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and growing tensions over Taiwan, have of course placed the thought of global war at the front of everyone’s minds. We can hope that diplomacy will prevent disaster, but optimistic historical analyses provide cold comfort when our fate can depend on the erratic decisions of dictators such as Vladimir Putin.

The environment

With the record-breaking heatwaves this year, and the threat of wildfires sweeping across the UK, it feels like we are already witnessing the start of the climate emergency – and unless we take drastic action, it is only set to worsen.

Pinker certainly doesn’t deny climate change, which he acknowledges is a “gargantuan problem”, but he has criticised “eco-pessimism” and the prevalence of what he considers to be alarmist green messaging. In Enlightenment Now, he describes many environmental successes, such as the reduction of water pollution, the elimination of acid rain and a recent deceleration in deforestation. He points to data showing that many countries’ CO₂ emissions are now plateauing. For an escape route from disaster, he points to ideas such as carbon taxing, combined with a reliance on nuclear power and technologies such as carbon capture, which involves scrubbing CO₂ from power stations before it is released and locking it underground.

Needless to say, the “eco-pessimists” are unimpressed. Technologies such as carbon capture do offer some promise, but their efficacy is unproven. And we will also require strong political will, which has been far from obvious in the years since Pinker’s book was published. A UN report from 2021 found most governments were “nowhere close to the level of ambition needed to limit climate change to 1.5C and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement”, though it is possible that a drive to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas could galvanise efforts to switch to renewables.

Pinker’s optimism relies on the fact that we – and our governments – will act rationally, according to the Enlightenment principles of reason, science and humanism. Our combined brainpower may certainly have the capacity to solve the climate crisis, but to believe that our politicians will take action in time – that may require a leap of faith.