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Insults to Black History

by Walter E. Williams

 

Many whites are ashamed, saddened and feel guilty about our history of slavery, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. Many black people remain angry over the injustices of the past and what they see as injustices of the present. Both blacks and whites can benefit from a better appreciation of black history.

Often overlooked or ignored is the fact that, as a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles, and in a shorter span of time than any other racial group in history.

For example, if one totaled up the earnings and spending of black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, we would rank well within the top 20 richest nations. A black American, Gen. Colin Powell, once headed the world’s mightiest military.

Black Americans are among the world’s most famous personalities, and a few black Americans are among the world’s richest people such as investor Robert F. Smith, IT service provider David Steward, Oprah Winfrey, and basketball star Michael Jordan. Plus, there was a black U.S. president.

The significance of these achievements cannot be overstated. When the Civil War ended, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed such progress would be possible in less than a century and a half — if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people. Just as important, it speaks to the greatness of a nation in which such gains were possible. Nowhere else on earth could such progress have been achieved except in the United States of America.

The issue that confronts us is how these gains can be extended to about one-quarter of the black population for whom they have proven elusive. The first step is to acknowledge that the civil rights struggle is over and won. At one time, black Americans did not enjoy the constitutional guarantees as everyone else. Now we do. While no one can deny the existence of residual racial discrimination, racial discrimination is not the major problem confronting a large segment of the black community.

A major problem is that some public and private policies reward dependency and irresponsibility. Chief among these policies is the welfare state that has fostered a 75 percent rate of out of wedlock births and decimated the black family that had survived Jim Crow and racism. Keep in mind that in 1940 the black illegitimacy rate was 11 percent and most black children were raised in two-parent families. Most poverty, about 25 percent, is found in female-headed households. The poverty rate among husband-and-wife black families has been in the single digits for more than two decades.

Black people can be thankful that double standards and public and private policies rewarding inferiority and irresponsibility were not a part of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. If there were, then there would not have been the kind of intellectual excellence and spiritual courage that created the world’s most successful civil rights movement.

From the late 1800s to 1950, some black schools were models of academic achievement. Black students at Washington’s Dunbar High School often outscored white students as early as 1899. Schools such as Frederick Douglass (Baltimore), Booker T. Washington (Atlanta), P.S. 91 (Brooklyn), McDonogh 35 (New Orleans) and others operated at a similar level of excellence.

Self-destructive behavior that has become acceptable, particularly that in predominantly black schools, is nothing less than a gross betrayal of a struggle, paid with blood, sweat and tears by previous generations, to make possible today’s educational opportunities that are being routinely squandered. I guarantee that blacks who lived through that struggle and are no longer with us would not have believed such a betrayal possible.

Government should do its job of protecting constitutional rights.

After that, black people should be simply left alone as opposed to being smothered by the paternalism inspired by white guilt. On that note, I just cannot resist the temptation to refer readers to my “Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon,” which grants Americans of European ancestry amnesty and pardon for their own grievances and those of their forebears against my people so that they stop feeling guilty and stop acting like fools in their relationship with Americans of African ancestry.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Millions in the world have lost a source of life from remittances

Remittances, farmers markets, migration flows collapse – developing world reels from pandemic fallout

 

by Sunita Sohrabji

EMS Contributing editor

 

SAN FRANCISCO — More than 265 million around the world currently face food insecurity in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, and several million have lost their life-line of remittances, according to experts speaking at an ethnic media conference May 8 on the pandemic’s impact on the developing world.

“COVID-19 is expected to double the number of people facing food insecurity. The world has never seen a pandemic like this,” said Dulce Gamboa, associate for Latino relations at Bread for the World.

Remittances — money sent from people working abroad to their families back home — have taken a huge hit, said Demetrios Papademetriou, who co-founded the Migration Policy Institute and is currently a Distinguished Transatlantic Fellow at the Washington DC-based think tank. The World Bank has estimated that $142 billion has been lost in remittances, as foreign workers lose their jobs to the coronavirus crisis.

“Remittances are an essential lifeline for people who receive that money. They will be thinner and more precarious,” said Papademetriou.

He equated the COVID-19 crisis to the decade-long Great Depression in the U.S. in the 1930s, and characterized it as an “economic abyss.”

Daniel Nepstad, President and Founder of Earth Innovation Institute, discussed the impact of the pandemic on the Amazon rainforest, the largest tropical rainforest in the world. The summer months are typically burning season in the forest, as villagers burn patches to use for agricultural purposes.

In a normal year, thousands of people would get respiratory illnesses as forests burn. This year, however, Nepstad predicted an increased number of deaths as the COVID-19 virus attacks people whose immune systems are already compromised.

In Manaus, Brazil, deep in the Amazon rainforest, Nepstad reported that mass graves have been erected for those succumbing to the virus. In Loreto, Peru, a lack of oxygen bottles has contributed to a high mortality rate from COVID.

The biggest threat to the rain forest comes from people fleeing there as a last resort, Nepstad said. Farmers can no longer bring their products to markets, which have shuttered in the wake of the pandemic. More than 200,000 migrants have left Lima, Peru by foot, walking through deserts and up into the highlands and from there to the rainforest for some measure of food security.

Nepstad urged the global community to support farmers in the Amazon — providing them with seed capital to grow tree crops which have a longer life-span — and also advocated for the formalizing of supply chains and for fair price support.

“Now is the time for solidarity, listening to local leaders and understanding what they need,” said Nepstad. “We tend to demonize the people that are clearing forests, but I think it’s important to have more nuance there.”

“Lots of people are extracting food by clearing the rain forests. We eat that food around the world.”

Even if there is no surge in food prices, the global hunger pandemic will continue, said Gamboa, noting that the situation will deteriorate most rapidly in countries where a large percentage of the labor force works in the informal economy.

Yemen currently faces the worst food insecurity crisis, said Gamboa, with 53 percent of its population — almost 16 million people — facing starvation.

Sudan and Nigeria are likely to be hit by famines, she said. Zimbabwe, South Africa, the Congo, and the Horn of Africa are also facing massive food insecurity issues due to high inflation, poor harvests and drought.

“Malnourished people have less effective immune systems,” said Gamboa, adding that a child who is malnourished during his first 1,000 days of life will face a lifetime of stunted growth, both physically and intellectually.

“People are saying ‘we’re going to die of hunger before we die of coronavirus.’”

“The U.S. needs to have strong leadership to help millions of people around the world, including women and children,” stated Gamboa.

Global migration has ground to a halt as countries close their borders and restrict incoming travel, said Papademetriou. However, there has been a significant amount of labor migration as people in developing countries return home, he said.

“There has been an elite consensus that has allowed migration to continue to be large and to thrive because of the demography of many of the rich countries,” said Papademetriou. “We will have to see if that elite consensus continues to hold as this pandemic continues,” he said, adding that countries will have to reassess afresh the number of immigrant workers they need, especially in the agricultural sector.

Papademetriou said it was too early to assess whether the U.S. would grant legal status to undocumented immigrants, many of whom are now considered essential workers.

“I have spent 14 years of attempting to come up with compromises that legislators on both sides were able to support. We have failed every single time.”

“The last time we failed big was in 2013 under President Obama. So it’s difficult for me to be optimistic,” said Papademetriou.­

Supreme Court: Nearly half of Oklahoma is Indian reservation

1.8 million people now live in “Indian Country”

 

by ZeroHedge

 

July 9, 2020 – The decision, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, holds the United States to an 1866 treaty that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation signed with the United States after the Civil War over land which was home to the “Five Civilized Tribes”; the Creek, Cherokee Nation, the Seminole, the Chickasaw Nation, and the Choctaw Nation, according to The New Republic.

“Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law,” wrote Gorsuch, a Trump appointee. “Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.”

Joining Gorsuch in the majority were Justices Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, while Justices Alito, Kavanaugh, Roberts and Clarence Thomas argued in the minority – siding with the state of Oklahoma.

“A century of practice confirms that the Five Tribes’ prior domains were extinguished,” wrote Roberts. “The State has maintained unquestioned jurisdiction for more than 100 years. Tribe members make up less than 10%–15% of the population of their former domain, and until a few years ago the Creek Nation itself acknowledged that it no longer possessed the reservation the Court discovers today.”

Roberts added that “The State’s ability to prosecute serious crimes will be hobbled and decades of past convictions could well be thrown out,” and that “The decision today creates significant uncertainty for the State’s continuing authority over any area that touches Indian affairs, ranging from zoning and taxation to family and environmental law.”

The original case (via the New York Times):

The case concerned Jimcy McGirt, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation who was convicted of sex crimes against a child by state authorities in the Nation’s historical boundaries. He said that only federal authorities were entitled to prosecute him.

Mr. McGirt argued that Congress had never clearly destroyed the sovereignty of the Creek Nation over the area, covering about half the state. The solicitor general of Oklahoma took the opposite view, saying the area had never been reservation land.

McGirt v. Oklahoma, No. 18-9526, an appeal from a state court’s decision, was the Supreme Court’s second attempt to resolve the status of eastern Oklahoma.

In November 2018, the justices heard arguments in Sharp v. Murphy, No. 17-1107, which arose from the prosecution in state court of Patrick Murphy, a Creek Indian, for murdering George Jacobs in rural McIntosh County, east of Oklahoma City.

After he was sentenced to death, it emerged that the murder had taken place on what had once been Indian land. Mr. Murphy argued that only the federal government could prosecute him and that a federal law barred the imposition of the death penalty because he was an Indian.

Mr. Murphy convinced the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver. But when the case was argued before an eight-member Supreme Court, the justices seemed divided and troubled. (Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who had served on the 10th Circuit when it ruled on the case, recused himself.)

Instead of issuing a decision before the term ended in June 2019, the court announced it would hear another set of arguments in its current term, which started in October. That was a sign the court had deadlocked, 4 to 4.

But there was no new argument in the Murphy case, probably because it was not clear another hearing would break the deadlock. Instead, the court heard Mr. McGirt’s case, allowing the overarching issue to be settled by a nine-member court.

Muscogee tribal leaders cheered the ruling, vowing to work with state and federal law-enforcement authorities to ensure public safety within the reservation, according to the Times.

“This is a historic day,” said Principal Chief David Hill. “This is amazing. It’s never too late to make things right.”

Thousands of immigrant kids are detained, far from their parents from COVID-19, too

An immigrant child looks out from a U.S. Border Patrol bus leaving as protesters block the street outside the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center Saturday, June 23, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. Additional law enforcement officials were called in to help control the crowd and allow the bus to move. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

They need protection from covid-19, too

 

by Katie Peeler

 

– As a pediatric intensive care physician, I like to think I have an unusually strong stomach for heart-wrenching scenarios. While they impact me deeply, I am not easily rattled.

But COVID-19 has rattled me. Everyone I run into is experiencing extreme anxiety over the uncertainty of what lies ahead. How many people will get sick? Will our local hospital run out of ventilators? Will my parents die? Will I die?

Imagine these questions not between adults, but between two school-aged siblings. Perhaps their parents overhear them and can quell some of their anxieties. My own son, only 5-years-old, could not fall asleep last night because at school last week he heard that “billions of people were going to die.”

Now imagine these questions, as asked by immigrant children detained in crowded shelters thousands of miles away from their parents. They are terrified, and the people they worry about most — and who they most need to love and comfort them — aren’t there.

While we are all justifiably concerned for our own children in these fraught times, we must not forget this particularly vulnerable group of children in the United States. They are just as deserving of protection during this pandemic.

Children younger than 18, who arrive at the U.S. border without a parent or guardian, are first held in border cells run by the Department of Homeland Security. Federal law requires that they be transferred within 72 hours to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is under the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The number of such children arriving annually is growing — almost 70,000 in 2019. Some ORR facilities are foster homes, which may offer better care, but others are group homes or large shelters that may house more than 1,000 children at a time.

The vast majority of these children come from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — countries notorious for rampant gang violence and governments unable or unwilling to intervene. After often long and extremely dangerous journeys, they arrive at the Mexico-U.S. border already severely mentally and physically traumatized — a fact I can testify to as a medical expert with Physicians for Human Rights.

The devastating impact of COVID-19 globally has made starkly clear how critical it is to take preventative action. The current system of detaining children in ever larger groups, and for longer periods of time, increases their severe health risks and the likelihood of human rights violations.

In crowded settings, how is ORR able to follow the CDC’s guidance about social distancing and appropriate personal hygiene? Have they reviewed these guidelines with their staff or with the children? Attorneys with Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to children in ORR custody, visited a shelter within the last week. There, they found diluted soap in the bathrooms, large groups of children crowded in a room for their legal screenings and no evidence of sanitizing the room before or after.

We’re in the middle of a global pandemic — none of this is acceptable.

We all want to protect our children and those we love. We cannot forget about the ones we cannot see.

New data from more than 2,000 pediatric cases in China indicates that young children are vulnerable to COVID-19, with severe and critical cases of children particularly noted in infants. While this is lower than adult rates, it still may represent a significant number of vulnerable and sick children. Unfortunately, there has been a history of delayed recognition of both underlying medical disorders and acute illness in detained children. ORR must take every precaution and implement creative solutions to shield children and staff from unnecessary harm.

Also of paramount importance to these children’s well-being is protecting their caregivers.

Reports from China and Italy indicate that many otherwise well children who contract this new virus are frequently asymptomatic or present with symptoms of the common cold. In the context of a crowded shelter or detention center, it is not uncommon for children to have minor colds. Without ready access to testing, it is impossible to know which virus a child has. Spread of COVID-19 will be quick. Caregivers in the shelters could also fall ill. What is the back-up plan for caring for these children if the shelter workforce is quickly depleted?

Policy change is slow, but pandemics wait for no one.

Migrant children also have significant mental health needs, given the trauma they endured at home, during their journeys, and in becoming a ward of our government. Their lives are already filled with anxiety and uncertainty.

A recent report from the Office of the Inspector General showed that despite specific guidelines that dictate the type and frequency of mental health services required for each child to receive, the actual mental health resources available in ORR shelters is far below the requirement. This need will increase exponentially in these children as their anxiety heightens with the pandemic.

Policy change is slow, but pandemics wait for no one.

DHHS must step-up high-level screening for safe sponsors of children immediately upon arrival to the border. They must expeditiously place children with such sponsors, thereby avoiding feeding into an already overcrowded shelter system.

Further, ORR must ensure all staff and children understand the CDC guidance surrounding social distancing and personal hygiene and robustly stock their shelters with soap, hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies and food. Medical triage guidelines must be clear and practiced, and mental health support should be provided for all.

Immigration court proceedings for detained children should be halted for now, and flexibility should be given to legal services organizations so they can utilize videoconferencing or individual meetings when possible.

The ORR facilities are spread out across the U.S., and there may be one or more in your state. You can encourage your local, state or national representatives to exercise oversight of ORR to ensure they are acting in the best interest of children, as well as their families and caregivers.

We all want to protect our children and those we love. We cannot forget about the ones we cannot see.

Listening to the coronavirus “experts” has led to death and despair

by Ron Paul

 

On April 21st the Washington Post savaged Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s decision to begin opening his state after locking down for weeks. “Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination,” sneered the headline.

The author, liberal pundit Dana Milbank, actually found the possibility of Georgians dying to be hilarious, suggesting that, “as a promotion, Georgia could offer ventilators to the first 100 hotel guests to register.”

Milbank, who is obviously still getting paid while millions are out of work, sees his job as pushing the mainstream narrative that we must remain in fear and never question what “experts” like Dr. Fauci tell us.

Well, it’s been three weeks since Milbank’s attack on Georgia and its governor, predicting widespread death which he found humorous. His predictions are about as worthless as his character. Not only has Georgia not seen “coronavirus … burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman,” as Milbank laughed, but Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have seen a steep decline since the governor began opening the state.

Maybe getting out in the fresh air and sunshine should not have been prohibited in the first place!

In fact, as we now have much more data, it is becoming increasingly clear that the US states and the countries that locked down the tightest also suffered the highest death rates. Ultra locked-down Italy suffered 495 Covid deaths per million while relatively non-locked down South Korea suffered only five deaths per million. The same is true in the US, where non lockdown states like South Dakota were relatively untouched by the virus while authoritarian-led Michigan, New York, and California have been hardest hit.

In those hardest hit states, we are now seeing that most of the deaths occurred in senior care facilities — after the governors ordered patients sick with Covid to leave the hospitals and return to their facilities. There, they infected their fellow residents who were most likely to have the multiple co-morbidities and advanced age that turned the virus into a death sentence. Will these governors be made to answer for this callous disregard for life?

Yesterday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar admitted the obvious: “We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases.” So why not open everything? Because these petty tyrants cannot stand the idea of losing the ability to push people around.

Shutting down the entire United States over a virus that looks to be less deadly than an average flu virus — particularly among those under 80 who are not already sick — has resulted in mass unemployment and economic destruction. More Americans may die from the wrong-headed efforts to fight the virus than from the virus itself.

Americans should pause and reflect on the lies they are being sold. Masks are just a form of psychological manipulation. Many reputable physicians and scientists have said they are worthless and potentially harmful. Lockdowns are meant to condition people to obey without question. A nation of people who just do what they are told by the “experts” without question is a nation ripe for a descent into total tyranny. This is no empty warning — it’s backed up by history. Time to stand up to all the petty tyrants from our hometowns to Washington DC. It is time to reclaim our freedom.

(Ron Paul is a former U.S. congressman from Texas. This article originally appeared at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity).

Will depression II dictate Trump’s fate?  

by Patrick J. Buchanan

 

As of April 30, the coronavirus pandemic has killed 61,500 Americans in two months and induced the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

And if history is our guide, the economic crisis, which has produced 30 million unemployed Americans in six weeks, may prove more enduring, ruinous and historic than the still-rising and tragic death toll.

The Spanish flu of 1918-1919, the deadliest pandemic in modern history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide, a third of the planet’s population, and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including 675,000 Americans.

“Adjusting for the difference in the size of the American population then and now,” writes Chronicles columnist Roger McGrath, “that number will be equivalent to two million deaths today.”

Yet, the Spanish flu did not shut America down.

As the Spanish flu hit and spread in 1918, the U.S. raised, trained and equipped an army of 4 million men, sent 2 million soldiers to France, broke Gen. Erich Ludendorff’s army, and turned the tide in favor of the Allies.

By December 1918, Doughboys were arriving in New York harbor — having sailed home from Europe’s battlefields on flu-infested transports.

As the scourge continued to take its toll, Woodrow Wilson sailed to Europe, participated for months in the Paris Peace Conference, returned, went on a national train tour to sell his Paris treaty and League of Nations, and suffered a stroke.

In September 1919, Gen. Pershing led his victorious troops in victory parades in New York City and Washington. This writer’s father, a teenager then, was in the D.C. crowd.

In the history books of the 1950s, World War I, Wilson and the Senate battle over the treaty he brought home and U.S. membership in the League of Nations loomed far larger than the Spanish flu that had killed as many U.S. soldiers as the Kaiser’s armies.

But the Great Depression, to which our current crash is now being compared, did not last for just a year like the Spanish flu. The Depression lasted from the stock market crash in October 1929 to the eve of World War II.

Economically, it was devastating. Unemployment during the 1930s never fell below 14 percent. In 1937, it was back up to 17 percent.

At the bottom of the Depression, the stock market had lost 90 percent of its value, and the GDP had fallen 50 percent. Not until the end of FDR’s second term, in 1940, when the U.S. began to gear up for the war, did America really begin to pull out of it.

FDR’s New Deal, however, while it did not cure the Depression, was a historic political triumph for both the president and his party.

From 1930 through 1946, Democrats controlled both houses of the Congress every year, elected and reelected FDR four times and gave him a 46-state landslide in 1936, losing only Maine and Vermont.

What this suggests is that the economic devastation we have brought upon ourselves to battle the pandemic may prove more lasting and historic in its impact than the terrible losses of human life to COVID-19.

Politically, the Depression worked for the Democratic Party like no other event in history. After the Crash of 1929 under Herbert Hoover, the GOP held the House and Senate for only four of the next 50 years.

From 1932 to 1968, the GOP lost the presidency in seven of nine elections. Only Dwight Eisenhower’s two terms in the 1950s interrupted a 36-year reign of the Democratic Party in the White House.

Richard Nixon broke the Democratic dominance and took back the White House for the Republicans in 1968. But it would still take another dozen years before the GOP won control of either house of Congress.

President Trump predicts a V-shaped recovery, the greatest boom in U.S. history. But it is well to recall what happened to the GOP when it failed to deliver in the last Depression.

Just as the Civil War was the defining event of the 19th century, giving us 13 Republican presidents from Lincoln to Hoover and only two Democrats — Grover Cleveland and Wilson — how and when we emerge from this new Depression may tell us which party not only wins 2020 but also dominates the new era.

And as one sees the growing divisions along political lines, with conservatives and populists calling for the country to be opened up, and liberals and Democrats calling for continued sheltering in place, both seem to realize the stakes.

Democrats may proclaim that they are eager to see the pandemic come to a swift and early end and the economy to return quickly to the robust state it was in last February.

But the cold political interests of the Democratic Party today are what they were in Hoover’s time, to pray that the president fails, and fails badly, so that they inherit the estate

(Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever).

Nick Cordero, nominated for Tony as tap-dancing tough guy, dies at 41

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 27: Amanda Kloots and Nick Cordero attend the Beyond Yoga x Amanda Kloots Collaboration Launch Event on August 27, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Beyond Yoga)

by Michael Paulson

Shared from the New York Times

 

The Broadway actor’s battle with the coronavirus was followed closely by many as his wife chronicled his experience on social media.

Nick Cordero, a musical theater actor whose intimidating height and effortless charm brought him a series of tough-guy roles on Broadway, died on Sunday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 41.

His death was announced on Instagram by his wife, Amanda Kloots. The couple, who moved from New York to Los Angeles last year, have a 1-year-old son, Elvis.

“My darling husband passed away this morning,” she wrote. “He was surrounded in love by his family, singing and praying as he gently left this earth.”

She did not cite a cause, but he had been hospitalized for three months after contracting the coronavirus.

Mr. Cordero’s experience with the virus, which included weeks in a medically induced coma and the amputation of his right leg, was chronicled by Ms. Kloots on Instagram.

Mr. Cordero’s big break came in 2014, when he played Cheech, a gangster with a fondness for theater and a talent for tap who was the highlight of a musical adaptation of “Bullets Over Broadway.” The role won him a Tony nomination.

“Mr. Cordero never pushes for effect, even when he’s leading a homicidal dance number to ‘’Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness if I Do,’” the critic Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review. “And somehow, this dopey, mass-murdering thug and the actor playing him stand out as being far more endearingly earnest than anybody else.”

He went on to play the abusive husband of the title character in “Waitress” and a mentoring mobster in “A Bronx Tale.”

“The terrific Mr. Cordero radiates a cool charisma that mixes a surface geniality with shrugging ruthlessness,” the critic Charles Isherwood wrote of “A Bronx Tale” in The Times.

Mr. Cordero fell ill on March 20 with what was initially diagnosed as pneumonia and later as Covid-19, Ms. Kloots said in a series of Instagram posts.

For weeks, he was kept alive with extensive treatment, including the use of a ventilator, dialysis and a specialized heart-lung bypass machine; he endured brief heart stoppage, minor heart attacks and sepsis, Ms. Kloots said, as well as the leg amputation and a tracheotomy.

As he remained unresponsive, she began daily playing a song that he had written, “Live Your Life,” and encouraging others to do so as well.

Many people joined in online, sharing videos of themselves singing and dancing as they tried to encourage his recovery with the hashtag #WakeUpNick. Alumni of musicals including “Waitress,” “Good Vibrations” and “Rock of Ages” recorded online performances for him, as did a group of musicians led by Constantine Maroulis and Steven Van Zandt.

“We sang it to him today, holding his hands,” Ms. Kloots said in her Instagram post announcing his death. She said that as she sang the words “They’ll give you hell but don’t you let them kill your light/Not without a fight” from the song’s final verse, “I smiled because he definitely put up a fight. I will love you forever and always my sweet man.”

The actor Zach Braff, in whose guesthouse Ms. Kloots has been living with her family while Mr. Cordero was hospitalized, said on Twitter: “I have never met a kinder human being. Don’t believe that Covid only claims the elderly and infirm.” Mr. Braff, Mr. Cordero’s co-star in “Bullets Over Broadway,” added, “I am so grateful for the time we had.”

Ms. Kloots’s frequent updates on Instagram, interspersed with short video clips from well-wishers, periodically had encouraging news; on April 24, Ms. Kloots said that Mr. Cordero had two negative Covid-19 tests.

“We think the virus is out of his system, and now we’re just dealing with recovery and getting his body back from all the repercussions of the virus,” she said. And on May 12, she said he had woken up after the lengthy medically induced coma.

But he continued to battle a lung infection, and by May 20 she told her followers that “unfortunately things are going a little downhill at the moment” and asked for prayers.

In recent weeks, he had been able to respond to some communication with his eyes but remained immobile, according to his wife.

Nicholas Eduardo Alberto Cordero was born on Sept. 17, 1978, in Hamilton, Ontario. His parents were both teachers — his father, Eduardo, was originally from Costa Rica, and his mother, Lesley, from Ontario.

A drama kid who performed frequently as an adolescent in shows at school and local theaters, he attended Ryerson University in Toronto to study acting but dropped out to join a band called Love Method.

His professional acting career began with “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding” in Toronto, followed by a two-year stint working on cruise ships.

In 2007 he moved to New York, and by 2008 the 6-foot-5 performer was starring in a small musical called “The Toxic Avenger,” first in New Jersey, and then Off Broadway.

“Mr. Cordero morphs convincingly from supernerd to slime-dripping hulk, retaining traces of geekery that glimmer appealingly from under the neon-green gunk,” Mr. Isherwood wrote.

After a period of unemployment, he was cast in the national tour of “Rock of Ages,” and then in 2012 he joined the Broadway cast of that long-running show; another stretch of joblessness prompted him to consider a career in real estate.

But then he landed his breakout role in “Bullets Over Broadway.” It was also there that he met Ms. Kloots, who was a dancer in the ensemble.

In Los Angeles this year, he returned to a familiar show reconceived for a new setting, appearing in a bar-based version of “Rock of Ages,” staged in a nightclub.

In a 2014 interview, he reflected on the challenge of finding his way into the roles coming his way.

“The producer kept telling me, ‘Get tough. Get mean. Get angry,’ ” he said. “But I’m a nice guy. I’m Canadian.”

How we learned to love Big Brother

EDITOR’S NOTE

 

Dear Readers,

 

How many of us in the communities where we live understand or know how much freedom we have and how many we lack; and how much are we controlled and spied on? The following investigative journalism article, by James Corbett, sheds light on the subject very deeply, and I am sure you will enjoy it. – Marvin Ramírez

 

by James Corbett

corbettreport.com


May 16, 2020 – “He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
― George Orwell, 1984

When I started The Corbett Report in 2007, the idea that governments were watching and listening to everything we do was still wild-eyed conspiracy theory. Oh, sure, the fact that the NSA had been secretly and illegally wiretapping Americans since at least 9/11 was, by that point, mainstream news. But those “revelations” (which themselves were old news to conspiracy realists) were not enough to convince the dyed-in-the-wool coincidence theorists that the government was actively engaged in the electronic surveillance of everyone.

We conspiracy realists could (and did) talk till we were blue in the face about the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act and Stellar Wind and Room 641A. “The NSA is splitting off the internet trunk lines and running them into locked off server rooms, for crying out loud!” we shouted. “What more do you need to know?”

We talked to NSA whistleblowers like William Binney and Russ Tice. We learned about ThinThread and Trailblazer, and how mass collection of everything was ready and waiting to go before 9/11. We learned how the NSA was spying on high-ranking officials within the US government itself, including senior congressional leaders, high-ranking military generals, the entire Supreme Court, and even then-US Senator from Illinois and future President, Barack Obama.

We made note of the mainstream media’s own casual admissions of the power of the deep state’s spying tools. We observed how our phones are listening to us even when they’re “off.” How smart appliances will be used to spy on us in our own homes. How the FBI can go back and listen to a recording of any phone conversation you’ve had at any point in the past, even if you weren’t under surveillance.

“Big Brother is already here!” we warned. “1984 is today!”

And we were laughed at.

Fast forward to 2020, and now no one is laughing. Instead, everyone’s shrugging their shoulders: “Yeah, of course the government is tracking us. They have to! It’s for our own good!”

So what happened?

The turnaround started in 2013. That’s when the public was given another of its phony heroes: Edward Snowden. Finally, here was a real, honest-to-gosh whistleblower spilling the beans and sharing the documents that proved that the NSA was . . . collecting metadata?

Yes, our wise and crusading Hero For Truth Snowden shined a light on the real problem with Big Brother: He isn’t filling out the right paperwork, or using the right legal mumbo jumbo to justify his spying. And so this “whistleblower” (who washed out of special forces training and worked for the CIA before becoming a super-duper computer god with access to the NSA’s internal network while he was in his 20s, somehow) just wanted to bring this spying to light so we could have a “conversation” about it!

(Oh, and don’t worry, guys: Snowden says there’s nothing to any of that silly 9/11 conspiracy stuff or to chemtrails or aliens or any other crazy theory, so you don’t have to bother thinking about them anymore, OK?)

Hearing his reassurances was actually something of a relief, even for the people who barked about how Snowden’s irresponsible actions had endangered American lives blah blah blah. Because, you see, now we could stop doing all that doublethink about government spying. Of course, the government is spying on us! . . . But maybe that’s a good thing. At any rate, it’s a debate we should be having. How much spying is too much? I mean, there is a terror threat, after all, and we want to get the bad guys, right? And you don’t have anything to hide, do you?

And so we admitted there is a Big Brother.

But that wasn’t enough for Big Brother. Oh no, you can’t just be aware of what Big Brother is doing. You can’t just tolerate Big Brother’s actions. You also must learn to love Big Brother.

Then China caught a cold. And so did Europe. And New York City. And—sure, why not—the rest of the world did, too. Maybe not in that order. Or maybe not at all. Don’t fret about the details. The important thing is that (say it with me) nothing will ever be the same again.

You will never again be able to leave your house without thinking about the mortal danger that each and every physical interaction with every human being on earth poses.

What? Get within six feet of someone? . . . Without a mask on? Are you nuts?

Oh, if only someone could save us from this dreaded scourge!

But wait . . . Whatever happened to that Big Brother guy? Can’t he find out everywhere we’ve been? And everyone we’ve been in contact with? And if someone gets sick, can’t he just go back and force everyone in that chain of connection into quarantine? Hey, it worked in Korea! Problem solved, right?

And so it was that “contact tracing” was born. And it spread to Canada and Australia and India and the UK and (you guessed it) everywhere else, too.

What? The contact tracing apps don’t actually work unless a “critical mass” adopts them? Well, then, just make them mandatory! After all, what kind of weirdo doesn’t walk around with a phone surgically attached at all times, anyway?

I want professional health care providers (and professional contact tracers and government employees and big tech companies and their subcontractors and app developers and extortionware makers and hackers and everyone else in the world) to know where I’ve been, who I’ve been talking to, what I’ve been buying and doing, and when I’ve been buying it and doing it!

I want to be spied on, dammit! It’s for my own good!

And that, my friends, is how we won the victory over ourselves. We love Big Brother now.

Now is the time to shine a light on police brutality in Mexico

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:

 

After the death of George Floyd in the hands of the police, a push to defund the police has been filling up the headlines of the mainstream media while encouraging violent demonstrations around the country.

I would say defund the (municipal) police, and fund the (county or parish) Sheriff instead.

If you didn’t know, the Sheriff is the only constitutional, and the higher law enforcement agency in the counties – even with more power than the feds.

The Sheriff is elected by the people, by popular vote. Every Chief of Police is appointed by a municipal Mayor, as are the federal directors of the FBI, ATF and CIA – a political appointment, and serves to the interests of the banking elite and not the people.

 

— “Justices Rule Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone” — is a US Supreme Court 1985 case.

In the following article written by Jack Gooderidge, he examines the dynamics that is causing uproar over the police violence that has been part of our communities for many years. – Marvin Ramírez.

 

Following police brutality in the US, Mexicans are being empowered to speak out against prolonged and widespread brutality

 

by Jack Gooderidge

 

The intersection of police brutality and racial prejudice is currently at a critical mass in the United States.

With the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the subsequent reminders of countless racist killings by police throughout the years, the table has been set for the most widespread civil rights movement in the history of mankind; across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, millions are demanding systemic change.

From witnessing historic demonstrations for justice, we know that in addition to effective change being achievable and maintainable through protest, offshoots of the original cause often find the confidence to raise their voices. In the case of the George Floyd protests, Mexicans are being empowered to speak out against prolonged and widespread brutality by the police in their communities.

In leaked footage depicting the arrest of Giovanni López, he can be seen being detained by officers holding rifles before he is hustled into the back of a police pickup truck and taken to the local station. The morning after the footage was shot, López was pronounced dead at hospital from blunt force trauma to the head, but had also sustained a gunshot wound to the foot. He had originally been arrested for walking in public without a face mask.

Since initially losing traction in the media and in the public consciousness, the wave of protests sweeping the world seems to have empowered and energized the outrage over Giovanni López’s death. Tensions forged in the bloody history of police brutality in Mexico have long sought an outlet, but global outrage has finally lent the outburst the legitimacy it needs to stand a chance of affecting change.

This is a legitimacy it is going to need going forward, as the change being demanded is far from simply a reduction of violent police activity, but a revolution of a culture that places the police force beyond reproach. The López case seems to have shown the people of Jalisco that not only are the police resorting to violence in their line of work, they are seeking it out.

Robert Coogan, an American prison chaplain, summarized this perception when commenting on the strict regulations regarding face masks in public, saying that “corrupt police are taking advantage of this. It’s giving police one more opportunity to detain people (and) steal from them.”

López’s neighbors went even further when discussing the killing with the press, explaining that the police had been routinely arresting those without face masks and “roughing them up.” From some of the stories from residents around the area that López was arrested, it becomes clearer that the anger has been approaching a tipping point for some time.

But the problem stretches far wider than Jalisco and its policing of personal protective equipment; abuse, torture, and extra-judicial killings have been ubiquitous in Mexico for decades. Human rights groups regularly identify Mexico as one of the countries with the most corrupt and unmonitored police forces in the world, pointing time and time again to cases of beatings, waterboarding, electrocutions, and rape in police custody.

A UN report from 2015 implicated “all levels of the Mexican security apparatus in the context of the government’s efforts to combat crime.” It went on to state that “torture and ill treatment during detention are generalized in Mexico, and occur in a context of impunity,” a phenomenon that five years on still seems to persist with the same absence of accountability.

A strong and ultimately undeniable line of correlation links the ever-escalating cases of police brutality and the country’s continuation of the “war on drugs.” Between the years before the commitment to the drug wars and 2012 (when the conflict was at its peak), the number of cases of torture rose from 320 a year to an almost unfathomable 2,100, a number so high that the robotic denial of opportunistic violence in the police force by the government almost feels laughable.

Despite a modest reduction in cases since then, the UN report still cites the same causes for the cases that still occur — a cultural “tolerance, indifference, or complicity” among the authorities. This devil-may-care approach by the government, judiciary, and anti-corruption departments, in tandem with the continual militarization of police forces nationwide, has landed Mexico with authorities unaccountable to the people, and to themselves.

While this may all seem almost entirely detached from the protest movement in the United States, the bare bones of the conflict remain the same. There are long and ugly histories of police brutality in both countries, and it is especially useful to remember that many police forces in Mexico have received U.S. training.

Understanding this can help us begin to identify the tensions in Mexico as possessing the same DNA as those that sparked the protests in the U.S., and while the realities on the ground differ between the two countries, both are resisting persecution from a system that systematically devalues their lives.

Feeling able to ideologically ally these causes, focusing not on the differences but instead noticing the power struggles at play in both, may be what ultimately allows each one to be taken seriously by those they stand against.

For now, though, it remains to be seen whether the demonstrations in Mexico will have a longlasting legacy, but looking at the U.S. and the progress it is making with each day of the movement should give cause for hope. After all, it’s the same fight.

Jack Gooderidge writes from Campeche.

When you lose weight, your fat cells don’t just let go of fat

Belly flab is like a storage unit for the rest of your body

 

by Sara Chodosh

 

If cells were personified, each fat cell would be an overbearing grandparent who hoards. They’re constantly trying to make you eat another serving of potatoes, and have cabinets stacked with vitamins they never take.

Like that grandparent, your fat cells are always trying to store stuff. Fats? Of course. Vitamins? Heck yeah. Hormones? You bet. Random pollutants and toxins? Sure. Adipose tissue will soak all that up like an oily little sponge and keep it safe until you need it again. That’s the whole point of body fat—to store energy for you. When you lose weight, your fat cells start shrinking, releasing lipids and other fats into your bloodstream. These get broken down, and eventually the smaller molecules exit via your urine or breath.

But adipose cells release all the other molecules they’ve hoarded, too. That includes key hormones like estrogen, along with fat-soluble vitamins and any organic pollutants that found their way into your bloodstream as you gained weight.

Adipose tissue’s tendency to store things is an unfortunate side-effect, because often we need those things to be circulating, not sitting around. Take hormones, for instance. Female body fat actually produces some of its own estrogen in addition to storing it, and the more adipose tissue a person has, the more estrogen they’re exposed to. This is why being overweight puts you at an increased risk of getting breast cancer. Many types of breast cancer are caused by malfunctions in estrogen receptors, which are more likely to go haywire when more estrogen is around to stimulate them.

Vitamins pose the opposite problem. Adipose sucks up available fat-soluble vitamins (those stashed in adipose tissue instead of being excreted in your outgoing urine)—A, D, E, and K—and often doesn’t leave enough for the rest of your body. Studies suggest that obese people tend to suffer from vitamin D deficiencies because it’s all lurking in their adipose tissue. These vitamins can come back out as you lose weight, and as you decrease your body fat, you also allow more of your new vitamin D to stay in your bloodstream. Water-soluble compounds can just be peed out if you take too much of them, but because the vitamins stored in your adipose tissue can continue to build up you can eventually overdose on them. It’s rare, but it does happen.

Fat is also a (temporarily) safe space to store pollutants and other organic chemicals that might otherwise pose a threat. Organochlorine pesticides build up in fat, as do the polychlorinated biphenyls in coolant fluids and other chemicals from the “dirty dozen” of environmental contaminants. These banned chemicals can get into your food supply in small quantities and are stored in your fat, possibly because your body wants to sequester them away from your organs. Bodies don’t seem to store enough of these to become toxic, but the constant build-up leaves you vulnerable to exposure. And they do start to re-emerge when you lose weight.

Since you’re not eliminating all of your body fat at once, this doesn’t seem to pose a problem for most people. You’re dumping toxins into your bloodstream, but you’re also eliminating them through your pee. There’s some evidence that certain pollutants—so-called “persistent organic pollutants”—can stick around in your body fat for years, but so far it seems that natural toxin-elimination methods (also known as peeing) work well enough to get rid of them.

Safe or not, it’s best not to give your body a spot to stash all the hormones and vitamins it can hoard. Our bodies aren’t designed to hold onto excess body fat and stay healthy—that’s why obesity is a risk factor for so many diseases. Getting rid of fat storage is just another reason to try and cut down on your own adiposity this year. Letting someone shame you into thinking you don’t look the way you should is not a wise reason to lose weight, but doing it to be healthier usually is.

Just think: every time you lose a pound of fat, you’ve also literally detoxed yourself without ever having to do one of those terrible juice cleanses (which, by the way, do not work). You’ve used the power of your own body’s filtration systems to get rid of them—and it will thank you for it.

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