The animating mission here is less to combat injustice than to efficiently manage discontent: to take the temperature of the popular mood, strain it of radical aspiration, then serve it back wrapped in the most aesthetically pleasing package liberalism’s practitioners can assemble, and pray like hell nobody notices when the gold paint loses its luster at the first sign of a market hiccup, budget deficit, foreign intervention, or genuine challenge from the left.
I was busily absorbed in adjusting to whiteness and being the spokesperson about China, in addition to living with my mother for the first time since I was four, and crying at my stepdad whenever my mother and I started to engage in our routine warfares. No thanks, I’ve got enough things to worry about other than making art.
Maybe all of the busyness with survival are just excuses for believing in myself. I just recently realized that I would rarely use the word “believe” in a sentence with “myself,” except for when it’s a question.
I don’t think I have memory of not questioning myself. After years of doing different personality tests and investing in self-improvement methodologies, I have come to acknowledge the fact that I am very sensitive and the exact opposite of thick-skinned, which means it takes a very long time to trust people and to just feel safe enough.
Policymakers have less time to respond than they thought. Governments need to invest even more urgently in schemes that protect homes from floods and fires and help people to manage heat stress (especially older individuals and those living in poverty). Nations need to make their forests and farms more resilient to droughts, and prepare coasts for inundation. Rapid warming will create a greater need for emissions policies that yield the quickest changes in climate, such as controls on soot, methane and hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) gases. There might even be a case for solar geoengineering — cooling the planet by, for instance, seeding reflective particles in the stratosphere to act as a sunshade.
So there’s these computer programs called artificial neural networks that are good at imitating things. By seeing examples of what humans did, they can learn to translate languages, predict product sales, and even categorize text and images as innocuous or explicit (it has a lot of trouble with this last task, as it turns out).
One neural network I use, called textgenrnn, tries its best to imitate any kind of text you give it. I’ve given them paint colors, bandnames, and even guinea pig names and in each case their results are somewhat… mixed. (Paint colors called Stanky Bean, Stargoon, and Turdly, for example) The problem is that it doesn’t know what any of these words mean - it’s just picking letter combinations that seem likely to it.
This is what happened when I gave it all the cookies from a list of American recipes. This is what human cookies sound like to a neural network.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go whip up a batch of Fluffin Coffee Drops.
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It’s an inhumane attempt to deny immigrants access to health care, housing, and food.
In October, the Trump-Pence administration issued a proposed regulation known as the “public charge” rule. The rule would jeopardize immigrants’ ability to stay in the U.S. if they’d used public benefits they’re legally allowed to access. Simply having accessed health care coverage, nutrition assistance, or public housing could mean they’d be denied visas, green cards, and entry into the country.
This policy is cruel and inhumane.
By linking people’s immigration status to whether they’ve used public benefits, the “public charge” rule would cause extreme harm to immigrants across the country — including documented and undocumented families alike.
What Would the “Public Charge” Rule Do?
Trump’s proposed rule would make a number of changes to U.S. immigration law. The rule would expand the government’s power to look at whether someone who’s applying for a visa, green card, or entry into the country has accessed public benefits — so that this information could be used against them.
Someone could be penalized for having used:
Medicaid in order to meet their health care needs;
Food assistance programs like SNAP to feed their families;
Public housing benefits to ensure their families are safe.
The public charge rule would also penalize anyone who meets criteria that the government considers would make them LIKELY to use public benefits. That includes someone with a poor credit history, limited education, or a medical condition that requires extensive medical care or could interfere with their ability to go to work or school. Even a person’s limited English proficiency would count as evidence against them under the rule.
Ultimately, the rule would empower the government to prioritize wealthy immigrant families over families with low incomes who have waited years to be reunited.
How Would the “Public Charge” Rule Affect the Health of Immigrant Families?
If the “public charge” rule goes into effect, its harms would be serious and wide-ranging. It would directly affect nearly a million immigrants in the U.S. — in addition to millions more people living overseas who are trying to gain legal status in the country. Most of the immigrants that would be forced to pass the new “public charge” test have family members that are U.S. citizens, so the rule would add yet another obstacle to keeping families together.
Already, the “public charge” rule has caused widespread fear and confusion for all immigrants — including the 23 million noncitizens living in the U.S., which includes U.S.-born children of immigrant parents. Even before the rule was announced, immigrant communities had been avoiding essential public services, such as nutrition and health programs, out of fear of drawing scrutiny from the government.
The proposed “public charge” rule would make this problem much worse. It would force immigrant families to choose between permanent legal status and their ability to access basic needs like health care.
The combined effect would be incredibly harmful to the health and well-being of immigrants, their families, and the communities they live in. We’re likely to see large declines in Medicaid enrollment, a program that provides access to care and financial security for families with low incomes. This will mean worse health outcomes and less financial stability for millions of immigrant families, which would be worsened by losing access to affordable housing and food.
The indisputable fact is that, just as accepting money or other tangible benefits in exchange for a future pardon would amount to impeachable bribery on the part of the president, so too is accepting the even more valuable (if intangible) benefit of a back-channel source of manifestly sensitive and closely guarded information on an investigation into the president himself. Ever since Manafort pretended to flip in order to worm his way into the otherwise air-tight Mueller operation, from which he has leaked to Giuliani valuable information the president and his lawyers have employed in fighting the Mueller effort, Trump has enjoyed the quid. And Manafort has received the quo: a basis to hope that his only exposure, after another couple years in prison, will be to state prosecutions.
As a monopoly supplier of U.S. currency with full financial sovereignty, the federal government is not like a household or even a business. When Congress authorizes spending, it sets off a sequence of actions. Federal agencies, such as the Department of Defense or Department of Energy, enter into contracts and begin spending. As the checks go out, the government’s bank ― the Federal Reserve ― clears the payments by crediting the seller’s bank account with digital dollars. In other words, Congress can pass any budget it chooses, and our government already pays for everything by creating new money.
This is precisely how we paid for the first New Deal. The government didn’t go out and collect money ― by taxing and borrowing ― because the economy had collapsed and no one had any money (except the oligarchs). The government hired millions of people across various New Deal programs and paid them with a massive infusion of new spending that Congress authorized in the budget. FDR didn’t need to “find the money,” he needed to find the votes. We can do the same for a Green New Deal.
“About 95 percent of the spices consumed in the U.S. are imported and often grown in countries polluted by leaded gasoline, smelters, battery-manufacturing plants and mines. In addition, the spices also may be deliberately adulterated with lead to enhance color or increase weight. Regulation is complicated by internet sales and importation through consumer travel.”
