Page 4 of 44 FirstFirst 123456714 ... LastLast
Results 46 to 60 of 648

Thread: All Down The Line

  1. #46
    Retired Member United States
    Join Date
    8th November 2015
    Posts
    1,264
    Thanks
    1,691
    Thanked 7,661 Times in 1,264 Posts
    Quote Originally posted by giovonni View Post
    A worthy look back during these political and economic uncertain times ...

    “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.”
    -- Yip Harburg



    A Tribute to Blacklisted Lyricist Yip Harburg: The Man Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz

    "His name might not be familiar to many, but his songs are sung by millions around the world. Today, we take a journey through the life and work of Yip Harburg, the Broadway lyricist who wrote such hits as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and who put the music into The Wizard of Oz.

    Born into poverty on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Harburg always included a strong social and political component to his work, fighting racism and poverty. A lifelong socialist, Harburg was blacklisted and hounded throughout much of his life. We speak with Harburg’s son, Ernie Harburg, about the music and politics of his father. Then we take an in-depth look at The Wizard of Oz, and hear a medley of Harburg’s Broadway songs and the politics of the times in which they were created."

    Democracy Now!
    Published on Dec 25, 2018

    58:01 minutes

    Best viewed in full screen


    Bumping this in case missed because Yip Harburg is now one of my heros.


    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3phiNL2bZ0

  2. The Following 7 Users Say Thank You to Maggie For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (9th January 2019), Aragorn (9th January 2019), Dreamtimer (9th January 2019), Elen (9th January 2019), Emil El Zapato (12th January 2019), Gio (9th January 2019), Kathy (9th January 2019)

  3. #47
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
    Join Date
    26th September 2016
    Posts
    7,330
    Thanks
    7,958
    Thanked 37,150 Times in 7,345 Posts
    By the time we got to ...

    Bethel, New York



    Woodstock

    "The dairy farm in upstate New York where nearly half a million people
    gathered for three days of peace and music in 1969."

    Joni Mitchell



    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXQmt6O9y5s



    The latest ...

    Three-Day Woodstock Festival From Original Organizer Coming This Summer

    “Woodstock ’99 was just a musical experience with no social significance,” Michael Lang says of Woodstock 50. “With this one, we’re going back to our roots and our original intent”

    After months of rumors, Woodstock co-creator Michael Lang has confirmed to Rolling Stone that a three-day festival honoring the 50th anniversary of the original event is coming to Watkins Glen, New York on August 16th, 17th and 18th. Organizers won’t be announcing specific acts until tickets go on sale in February, but Lang says that over 40 performers have been booked already across three stages, including some big-name headliners. “It’ll be an eclectic bill,” Lang says. “It’ll be hip-hop and rock and some pop and some of the legacy bands from the original festival.”

    He wouldn’t delve into specifics, but Lang did say that some “newer bands” will stage “celebrations of artists from the original Woodstock” that will likely include tribute performances to Janis Joplin, the Band, Jefferson Airplane and Joe Cocker, among others. “Having contemporary artists interpret that music would be a really interesting and exciting idea,” he says. “We’re also looking for unique collaborations, maybe some reunions and a lot of new and up-and-coming talent.”

    Unlike most festivals that exclusively target a young audience, Lang hopes to bring in people of all ages. “I want it to be multi-generational,” he says. “Woodstock ’94 was a nice mix of young and old and that’s kind of what we’re going for here.”

    That may be a challenge given Watkins Glen’s far distance from hotels, but Lang promises attendees will have options far superior to the original festival’s famously muddy field. “There will be ‘glamping’ tents and stuff like that,” he says. “There will be those types of experiences in various forms where there’s a real bed, and there’s a chair to sit in and a light bulb. There will also easier access to portable toilets.”

    Filthy, overflowing portable toilets were major problems at previous Woodstocks, but Lang swears that he’s found a solution for that too. “There’s a new dimension in portable toilets now,” he says. “They are clean and airy and sizeable. They also don’t get pumped during the event, so you don’t have these wagons running around smelling everywhere. And then the end product is fertilizer.”

    Sanitation was just one of many major problems at Woodstock ’99, a disastrous event held on a former Air Force Base in Rome, New York that culminated in fires and riots. It was held on a brutally hot weekend with few places to find shade. Water was sold at $4 a bottle. There was also a death resulting from a drug overdose and reports of sexual assaults in the mosh pits. Promoters dealt with a wave of lawsuits in the aftermath and for a while, it seemed like there would never be another Woodstock. (Lang’s original Woodstock co-promoter John Scher absorbed some of the blame for the fiasco. He is not involved with Woodstock 50.)

    Twenty years later, Lang is able to look back at Woodstock ’99 and see where things went wrong. “I shouldn’t have left the booking to others,” he says, noting that he’s booking many of the acts himself this time. “And the water situation was ridiculous. As soon as I saw that, I tried to get everyone to lower the prices and I couldn’t. I did order tractor trailers of water and put them out for free. I do think a lot of people had a good time, but the fires at the end became the imagery of it. It was just about 200 kids who went on a rampage. They exploded some of the cooling systems in the tractor trailers and just wreaked havoc.”


    Woodstock 50 organizer Michael Lang.

    "Lang goes on to dismiss Woodstock ’99 as an “MTV event” and says that Woodstock 50 will be its antithesis. “Woodstock ’99 was just a musical experience with no social significance,” he says. “It was just a big party. With this one, we’re going back to our roots and our original intent. And this time around, we’ll have control of everything.”

    They aren’t, however, going back to the site of the original Woodstock in Bethel, New York. The former farm was transformed into a 15,000-seat concert venue in 2006. That venue will host its own Woodstock 50th celebration there this summer, though bringing the actual event back there just wasn’t an option. “They’re good stewards of the original site and they built a beautiful performing arts pavilion,” says Lang. “But it’s a 15,000-seat shed. That’s not a Woodstock.”

    Finding a place that did fit their needs became a huge challenge. “I was desperate to keep it in New York,” he says. “I looked everywhere because I needed 1,000 acres of clear land with access and infrastructure. Frankly, we weren’t finding it. We had talked about Watkins Glen over the years and I decided on a whim to look at it since having it at a racetrack didn’t appeal to me. But when I looked, I knew it was the perfect facility for what we had in mind. It was reminiscent to me of finding Max [Yasgur]’s field.”

    The festival site is no stranger to enormous concerts. In 1973, a reported crowd of 600,000 people flocked there to see a one-day event featuring the Allman Brothers Band, the Grateful Dead and the Band. The exact headcount has been disputed over the years, but it was almost certainly larger than even the original Woodstock four years earlier.

    Phish held their Superball IX at Watkins Glen in 2011, but they were forced to cancel their Curveball Festival last August because the water supply had been contaminated. According to Lang, that sort of catastrophe will be impossible at Woodstock 50. “At Woodstock ’94 [in Saugerties, New York] we had a different sort of water issue since the town didn’t have a big enough reservoir,” says Lang. “We had to put up two 1 million gallon temporary tanks and filled them over the time. That’s the solution we’re going to use this time to make sure the water is potable.”

    Lang and the other organizers are still mapping out the site and haven’t settled on an exact capacity yet, but he says it’ll likely be in the six figures. Bringing in that many people may seem like a big challenge, especially since this is the first Woodstock since Bonnaroo, Coachella and nearly every other major festival landed on the scene, but Lang hopes this one will stand out. “We are looking for unique performances,” he says. “A lot of festivals these days are kind of cookie-cutter. Very few of them have any sort of social impact [and] that’s a wasted opportunity.

    “Woodstock, in its original incarnation, was really about social change and activism,” he adds. “And that’s a model that we’re bringing back to this festival. It’s a gathering for fun and for excitement and for experiences and to create community, but it’s also about instilling kind of an energy back into young people to make their voices heard, make their votes heard.”

    But for now, most people simply want to know who’s playing. And although Lang is talking about “reunions” and “bands from the original Woodstock,” he clamps up when pressed for details. Is there even a slight chance, say, that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young would put aside their differences for a single night? “I’ve talked to them all individually,” he says. “And it’s a mess.”

    What he can say is that they’re going to livestream the event online, bring in clowns and jugglers to roam the grounds, play movies on an enormous screen and, most important to Lang, bring in various NGOs to tell attendees how to get involved in various political causes. “Things on the planet are critical at this point, especially when it comes to global warming,” says Lang. “Everyone has a stake and ignoring it is ridiculous. I really want people to explore how they can get involved. That’s one of my main motivations for doing this.”"

    Source:RollingStone

  4. The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to Gio For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (10th January 2019), Aragorn (10th January 2019), Dreamtimer (10th January 2019), Elen (10th January 2019), Emil El Zapato (12th January 2019), Kathy (10th January 2019)

  5. #48
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
    Join Date
    26th September 2016
    Posts
    7,330
    Thanks
    7,958
    Thanked 37,150 Times in 7,345 Posts

    Thinking

    Very interesting ...

    Brexit debate: What young people really think

    Channel 4 News

    "These people were just too young to vote in the referendum –
    so how do they think Brexit is going"?


    Published on Jan 10, 2019

    22:01 minutes


  6. The Following 7 Users Say Thank You to Gio For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (12th January 2019), Aragorn (11th January 2019), Chris (11th January 2019), Dreamtimer (11th January 2019), Elen (11th January 2019), Emil El Zapato (12th January 2019), Kathy (11th January 2019)

  7. #49
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
    Join Date
    26th September 2016
    Posts
    7,330
    Thanks
    7,958
    Thanked 37,150 Times in 7,345 Posts

    Question

    Contradicting modern times ...

    Is this the world's most dangerous commute?

    BBC News

    "One way to travel in the Philippine capital, Manila, is by trolley. Passengers choose this unofficial transport service because it's quicker and cheaper than other options. For the homeless community that runs the illegal service, it puts food on the table. But it's also incredibly dangerous."


    Published on Jan 12, 2019

    4:39 minutes


  8. The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to Gio For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (12th January 2019), Aragorn (12th January 2019), Dreamtimer (12th January 2019), Elen (12th January 2019), Emil El Zapato (12th January 2019), Kathy (19th January 2019)

  9. #50
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
    Join Date
    26th September 2016
    Posts
    7,330
    Thanks
    7,958
    Thanked 37,150 Times in 7,345 Posts

    Question

    #Payingheed ...



    India Just Staged The Biggest Strike In History
    As 200 Million Workers Took To The Streets


    "In what may be the largest worker strike in history, last week India came to a halt for two days when at least 200 million workers - about 16% of India's 1.25 billion population - in the country's public, services, communications and agriculture sectors staged a strike across the country organized by ten labor unions against what they called the anti-national and anti-worker policies of the BJP-led government, and against a new labor law that would undermine the rights of workers and unions.

    The strike is a protest against new legislation that passed on 2 January, and is a de facto verdict on Prime Minister Narendra Modi providing an opportunity for millions of workers to protest against high prices and high levels of unemployment, something we touched upon in "The Indian Railway System Announced 63,000 Job Openings... 19 Million People Applied."

    John Dayal, general secretary of the All India Christian Council, told AsiaNews that the event was exceptional, "one of the largest ever organised in the country, planned in advance in every detail." In his view, the most important thing is that it "is taking place on the eve of general elections that will mark the fate of the prime minister".

    While the massive strike took place in an overall context of calm, there were numerous incidents confirming that social anger in the world's second most populous nation is also approaching a breaking point: protesters blocked several cities, clashes broke out and damage were reported; a 57-year-old woman died in in Mundagod, a city in northern Karnataka, during a local protest. In Maharashtra more than 5,000 workers blocked the Mumbai-Baroda-Jaipur-Delhi highway. In Puducherry (Pondicherry), on the east coast, protesters hurled stones at a Tamil Nadu state bus. Transport services closed and rail services were disrupted in Kerala. In Odisha (Orissa), shops, schools, offices and markets shut down for 48 hours. In West Bengal, protesters burnt effigies of Prime Minister Modi.

    The national strike was an initiative of the Central Trade Unions (CTU), which is an India-wide labor federation. Unions are opposed to the Trade Unions (Amendment) Bill of 2018 which modified the Trade Union Act of 1926.

    Under the law, trade union recognition is mandatory at both at national and state level. However, workers believe that the new law grants the government discretionary power in recognizing labor organizations, effectively eliminating the current bargaining process involving employees, employers and the government.

    Unions demanded the enactment of the Social Security Act to protect workers and a minimum wage of 24,000 rupees (more than US$ 340) for the unorganised transport sector."



    "Workers in banking, insurance, healthcare, education, transport, electricity and coal mining also joined the strike. Student groups also protested as did farmers’ associations that have threatened to call a gramin hartal, a rural strike. Farmers have been protesting for months over the harsh conditions in the countryside, burdened by debt and an wave of suicides.

    Tapan Sen, secretary general of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), one of the striking labor organisations, criticized Prime Minister Modi's government for killing the work culture in the country's public sectors by favoring private players in major manufacturing contracts.

    Unions also alleged the government had failed to create jobs and grossly ignored unions' 12-point charter of demands besides aggressively pushing for fixed-term employment and amendment to the Trade Union Act, all of which is against the interest of the workers, according to the Economic Times.

    Addressing the media after the 2-day strike, Amarjeet Kaur of AITUC said around eight states witnessed a complete shutdown, largely in the northeast, Kerala, Bihar and Goa. There were over 20 crore workers who had joined the strike.

    The massive strike comes at an critical inflection point for India, which is one of the world's fastest growing economies, yet isn’t generating enough jobs for its educated young populace.

    A recent Washington Post article estimated that the number of people in India between age of 15 and 34 is expected to hit 480 million by the year 2021. They have higher literacy levels and are staying in school longer than any other previous generation. The surge of youths could be an immense opportunity for the country, if it can find a way to put them to work. But the employment trends in the country remain gloomy.

    An analysis performed by Azim Premji University shows that unemployment between 2011 and 2016 in nearly all Indian states was rising. The jobless rates for younger people and those with higher education also increased sharply. For instance, for college graduates, it grew from 4.1% to 8.4%."



    "Ajit Ghose, an economist at the Institute for Human Development in Delhi, said that the country needs to generate jobs not just for the 6 million to 8 million new workforce entrants annually, but also for people like women who are working less than they would be if they could get jobs at a decent wage. The same economist notes that India has about 104 million "surplus" workers.

    Expanding the labor market that much is a tall task for any government, not just India. Modi's track record of job creation also remains somewhat of a mystery, as the country hasn’t offered nationwide employment data since 2016. The ministries of labor and statistics have conducted surveys of Indian households, but the results have not been made public.

    Amit Basole, an economist at Azim Premji University, said: “It’s anybody’s guess whether we’ll see any employment statistics come out before the 2019 elections.”



    *"What happens after this unprecedented show of force by India's workers? Probably more of the same: unions threatened to follow last week's strike with an indefinite strike if government does not heed to their demands. The general secretary for one of the labor unions, HMS, said the unions collectively decided to go on indefinite strike if the government does not respond to the “historic” strike this time.

    If that happens, India's record as one of the world's fastest growing economies will soon be tarnished. As for the bigger picture, one where general popular - and populist - discontent around the globe is rapidly spreading and affecting not only developed nations (Trump, Brexit, most of Europe), but also the developing world.

    Whether the unions will get what they want is unclear, but one thing is certain: India's even more populous neighbor, China, is very closely following these restive worker developments and doing everything in its power to stop its own population from getting similar thoughts."

    Source: Zeroghedge.com

  10. The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to Gio For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (20th January 2019), Aragorn (15th January 2019), Dreamtimer (20th January 2019), Elen (15th January 2019), Kathy (19th January 2019)

  11. #51
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
    Join Date
    26th September 2016
    Posts
    7,330
    Thanks
    7,958
    Thanked 37,150 Times in 7,345 Posts

    Question

    Taking it like a man ...




    Gillette's Ad Proves the Definition of a Good Man Has Changed


    Once again, the country seems divided. This time, it’s not a border wall or a health care proposal driving the animus, but an online ad for a men’s razor, because, of course. But underneath the controversy lies something much more important: signs of real change.

    On January 13, Gillette released a new ad that takes the company’s 30-year-old slogan, “The Best a Man Can Get,” and turns it into an introspective reflection on toxic masculinity very much of this cultural moment. Titled “We Believe,” the nearly two-minute video features a diverse cast of boys getting bullied, of teens watching media representatives of macho guys objectifying women, and of men looking into the mirror while news reports of #MeToo and toxic masculinity play in the background. A voiceover asks “Is this the best a man can get?” The answer is no, and the film shows how men can do better by actively pointing out toxic behavior, intervening when other men catcall or sexually harass, and helping protect their children from bullies. The ad blew up; as of Wednesday afternoon it has more than 12 million views on YouTube, and #GilletteAd has trended on Twitter nationwide. Parents across Facebook shared the YouTube link in droves, many mentioning how the ad brought them to tears."


    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0


    "And then, with perfect internet timing, the backlash came. The ad played differently with men’s rights activists, Fox News, and the Piers Morgans of the world. People shared videos and photos throwing disposable razors into the toilet (not a good idea—they aren’t exactly flushable). Men argued that the ad was anti-male, that it lumped all men in together as sexists, and that it denigrated traditional masculine qualities. But whatever noise has surrounded it, the fact that "We Believe" exists at all is an undeniable sign of progress.

    “Advertising reflects society,” says Henry Assael, professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business. They’ve also become yet another battleground in the country’s larger culture wars. Though some people have made hay on Twitter about never using Gillette again, Assael says buying habits, particularly with something as habitual as a razor, are hard to break. He estimates most people don’t really follow through with their threats to abandon a brand over controversies like this. Take Nike and its ads featuring Colin Kaepernick last year: While there were vocal calls for boycotting the company at the time, it wound up reporting stronger than expected growth in its most recent earnings report.

    Gillette’s ad plays on the feeling that men right now want to be better, but don’t necessarily know how. When Gillette was researching market trends last year, in the wake of #MeToo and a national conversation about the behavior of some of the country’s most powerful men, the company asked men how to define being a great man, according to Pankaj Bhalla, North American brand director for Gillette. The company conducted focus groups with men and women across the country, in their homes, and in online surveys. What Bhalla says the team heard over and over again was men saying: “I know I'm not a bad guy. I’m not that person. I know that, but what I don't know is how can I be the best version of ourselves?”

    “And literally we asked ourselves the same question as a brand. How can we be a better version of ourselves?” Bhalla adds. The answer is this ad campaign, and a promise to donate $1 million a year for three years to nonprofits that support boys and men being positive role models.

    There's broader evidence as well that the mainstream concept of masculinity is evolving. Last summer, the American Psychological Association issued guidelines saying that “traditional masculinity ideology” can be harmful for boys and men. When the guidelines got media attention last week, they received a fair share of criticism from conservatives, who viewed them as an attack on long-standing male traits.

    Since the #MeToo era ramped up in 2017, the question has been: Will this change anything? Advertising can be a litmus test for where a culture is—an imperfect one at times, but a useful one. Companies run ads to make money, so they wouldn’t knowingly risk espousing beliefs that the majority abhor. Advertising is not so much about creating a new desire as it is about playing into what people already want.

    “Advertising is in the business of reading cultural trends, that's what they do,” says Lisa Jacobson, professor of history at the University of California Santa Barbara who focuses on the history of consumer culture. “They spend a lot of time reading culture, thinking about culture, focus-grouping cultural shifts, so they are attuned to it.”

    Gillette's Bhalla acknowledges that the company would not have made this ad a decade ago. “The insight that ‘I am not the bad guy but I don't know how to be a great guy,’ that insight wouldn’t have come 10 years ago, because this wasn’t in our ether. It wasn't in our society at the time,” he says.

    Even today, Bhalla and his team knew the ad would not please everyone. An ad addressing such overtly controversial ideas is inherently risky. It could backfire and appear craven, as Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner ad did when it seemed to trivialize Black Lives Matter, and it could alienate existing and future customers. “We Believe” has about 713,000 dislikes on YouTube.

    At the same time, thousands of people are talking about the ad online, and the campaign has prominent coverage in media outlets like this one. “It's a calculated gamble,” says Jacobson. Even if Gillette does lose a few MRA activists, it stands to gain more new customers than it will lose.

    Daniel Pope, a historian who has written extensively about advertising in America, says that although this ad is clearly speaking to certain anxieties and desires in the culture, it’s a classically segmented or targeted ad. “Given the hostility that it's brought forth from conservatives and anti-feminist circles, [it’s clear] they are not appealing to everybody here. They are looking to a particular demographic based on perhaps political beliefs, education levels, feelings of gender equality.”

    Jacobson also notes the tropes of the ad appear to make an explicit play for millennial and Generation Z men, who are the generations most embracing and driving the change in masculinity. It's similarly an appeal to the mothers who buy their sons their first razors. Going after women is a smart business move, since women often do a majority of the household shopping, and Pope notes women also make up a good percentage of Gillette’s customer base. (Bhalla told WIRED the gender breakdown of Gillette customers is roughly 60 percent to 70 percent male, but that doesn’t necessarily capture cases where women are buying products for the men in their lives.)

    Though Gillette didn’t say this outright, the ad also works as a sort of corporate prophylactic against allegations of sexism or insensitivity, which many corporations have faced lately. Gillette is a subsidiary of Procter & Gamble, which sells many family and women-focused products in its other brand lines. “I have a feeling it was very much a corporate decision,” says Assael.

    Gillette’s older ads showed clean-shaven men kissing women, sending the message that the right shave can win you the girl. In 2013, the company launched a campaign called “Kiss and Tell,” which asked couples to make out before and after the man had shaved and then report back.

    The company is not alone in abandoning ad campaigns based on this kind of “women as object and reward” messaging. In fact, it’s following in the footsteps of Axe Body Spray, which for years relied on the idea that if you sprayed the stuff on women would come running. In 2017, Axe parent company Unilever unveiled a new ad campaign called “It’s OK for Guys,” which fought the idea of toxic masculinity by making it clear that it's OK for men to have emotions, or be skinny, or not like sports. Like Procter & Gamble, Unilever has many family brands under its umbrella, and it was perhaps no longer appropriate to have Axe’s brand out there selling stereotypical machismo.

    It’s not only stereotypical gender roles that the Gillette ad attempts to dismantle; it also subverts harmful racial stereotypes. The ad opens with an African American man contemplating his face in the mirror, and it highlights Terry Crews’ congressional testimony in which he advocated for men to stand up and intervene in toxic culture. It goes on to show African American fathers supporting their daughters, educating other men about sexist behavior, and protecting women from catcalling.

    “I think this is a subconscious reason why this is getting under the skin of Piers Morgan and Fox and Friends," says Jacobson. "It's because this is inverting an old narrative in which white supremacists or just casual racists have attributed toxic masculinity to African American men.”

    She’s talking about the racist stereotypes that paint African American males as prone to criminal behavior like sexual assault, or as absentee fathers. By showing black men intervening to stop these behaviors—which the ad shows largely being undertaken by white men—it subtly rejects those harmful tropes.

    This careful treatment of race is not necessarily the norm in advertising. According to Assael, the industry was slow to adopt racial inclusiveness and diversity even after the civil rights movement. Gillette’s ad was handled with uncharacteristic thoughtfulness.

    Much of the reaction to Gillette’s ad has been positive. Across the board, media and ad experts WIRED spoke to agreed the commercial was clever and as emotionally moving as an ad can really ever hope to be. Though the backlash to it clearly shows that the cultural divisions in America persist, its very existence is proof that the old definitions are masculinity are changing."



    Source: Wired

  12. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to Gio For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (20th January 2019), Aragorn (17th January 2019), Dreamtimer (20th January 2019), Elen (17th January 2019)

  13. #52
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
    Join Date
    26th September 2016
    Posts
    7,330
    Thanks
    7,958
    Thanked 37,150 Times in 7,345 Posts
    Something i am totally for ...



    Death on demand: has euthanasia gone too far?


    Countries around the world are making it easier to choose the time and manner of your death ...
    But doctors in the world’s euthanasia capital are starting to worry about the consequences

    By Christopher de Bellaigue

    "Last year a Dutch doctor called Bert Keizer was summoned to the house of a man dying of lung cancer, in order to end his life. When Keizer and the nurse who was to assist him arrived, they found around 35 people gathered around the dying man’s bed. “They were drinking and guffawing and crying,” Keizer told me when I met him in Amsterdam recently. “It was boisterous. And I thought: ‘How am I going to cleave the waters?’ But the man knew exactly what to do. Suddenly he said, ‘OK, guys!’ and everyone understood. Everyone fell silent. The very small children were taken out of the room and I gave him his injection. I could have kissed him, because I wouldn’t have known how to break up the party.”

    Keizer is one of around 60 physicians on the books of the Levenseindekliniek, or End of Life Clinic, which matches doctors willing to perform euthanasia with patients seeking an end to their lives, and which was responsible for the euthanasia of some 750 people in 2017. For Keizer, who was a philosopher before studying medicine, the advent of widespread access to euthanasia represents a new era. “For the first time in history,” he told me, “we have developed a space where people move towards death while we are touching them and they are in our midst. That’s completely different from killing yourself when your wife’s out shopping and the kids are at school and you hang yourself in the library – which is the most horrible way of doing it, because the wound never heals. The fact that you are a person means that you are linked to other people. And we have found a bearable way of severing that link, not by a natural death, but by a self-willed ending. It’s a very special thing.”

    This “special thing” has in fact become normal. Everyone in the Netherlands seems to have known someone who has been euthanised, and the kind of choreographed farewell that Keizer describes is far from unusual. Certainly, the idea that we humans have a variety of deaths to choose from is more familiar in the Netherlands than anywhere else. But the long-term consequences of this idea are only just becoming discernible. Euthanasia has been legal in the Netherlands for long enough to show what can happen after the practice beds in. And as an end-of-life specialist in a nation that has for decades been the standard bearer of libertarian reform, Keizer may be a witness to the future that awaits us all.

    In 2002, the parliament in the Hague legalised euthanasia for patients experiencing “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement”. Since then, euthanasia and its close relation, assisted dying, in which one person facilitates the suicide of another, have been embraced by Belgium and Canada, while public opinion in many countries where it isn’t on the national statute, such as Britain, the US and New Zealand, has swung heavily in favour.

    The momentum of euthanasia appears unstoppable; after Colombia, in 2015, and the Australian state of Victoria, in 2017, Spain may be the next big jurisdiction to legalise physician-assisted death, while one in six Americans (the majority of them in California) live in states where it is legal. In Switzerland, which has the world’s oldest assisted dying laws, foreigners are also able to obtain euthanasia.

    If western society continues to follow the Dutch, Belgian and Canadian examples, there is every chance that in a few decades’ time euthanasia will be one widely available option from a menu of possible deaths, including an “end of life” poison pill available on demand to anyone who finds life unbearable. For many greying baby boomers – veterans of earlier struggles to legalise abortion and contraception – a civilised death at a time of their choosing is a right that the state should provide and regulate. As this generation enters its final years, the precept that life is precious irrespective of one’s medical condition is being called into question as never before.

    As the world’s pioneer, the Netherlands has also discovered that although legalising euthanasia might resolve one ethical conundrum, it opens a can of others – most importantly, where the limits of the practice should be drawn. In the past few years a small but influential group of academics and jurists have raised the alarm over what is generally referred to, a little archly, as the “slippery slope” – the idea that a measure introduced to provide relief to late-stage cancer patients has expanded to include people who might otherwise live for many years, from sufferers of muscle-wasting diseases such as multiple sclerosis to sexagenarians with dementia and even mentally ill young people.

    Perhaps the most prominent of these sceptics is Theo Boer, who teaches ethics at the Theological University of Kampen. Between 2005 and 2014, Boer was a member of one of the five regional boards that were set up to review every act of euthanasia and hand cases over to prosecutors if irregularities are detected. (Each review board is composed of a lawyer, a doctor and an ethicist.) Recent government figures suggest that doubts over the direction of Dutch euthanasia are having an effect on the willingness of doctors to perform the procedure. In November, the health ministry revealed that in the first nine months of 2018 the number of cases was down 9% compared to the same period in 2017, the first drop since 2006. In a related sign of a more hostile legal environment, shortly afterwards the judiciary announced the first prosecution of a doctor for malpractice while administering euthanasia.

    It is too early to say if euthanasia in the Netherlands has reached a high-water mark – and too early to say if the other countries that are currently making it easier to have an assisted death will also hesitate if the practice comes to be seen as too widespread. But it is significant that in addition to the passionate advocacy of Bert Keizer – who positively welcomes the “slippery slope” – Boer’s more critical views are being solicited by foreign parliamentarians and ethicists who are considering legal changes in their own countries. As Boer explained to me, “when I’m showing the statistics to people in Portugal or Iceland or wherever, I say: ‘Look closely at the Netherlands because this is where your country may be 20 years from now.’”

    “The process of bringing in euthanasia legislation began with a desire to deal with the most heartbreaking cases – really terrible forms of death,” Boer said. “But there have been important changes in the way the law is applied. We have put in motion something that we have now discovered has more consequences than we ever imagined.”

    Bert Keizer carried out his first euthanasia in 1984. Back then, when he was working as a doctor in a care home, ending the life of a desperately ill person at their request was illegal, even if prosecutions were rare. When a retired shoemaker called Antonius Albertus, who was dying of lung cancer, asked to be put out of his misery, Keizer found that two sides of himself – the law-abiding doctor and the altruist – were at odds.

    “Antonius wasn’t in pain,” Keizer told me, “but he had that particular exhaustion that every oncologist knows, a harrowing exhaustion, and I saw him dwindle before me.” In the event, Keizer, who as an 11-year-old watched his mother suffer an excruciating death from liver disease, went with the altruist. He injected 40mg of Valium into Antonius – enough to put him in a coma – then gave him the anti-respiratory drug that ended his life.

    Keizer was not investigated after reporting an unnatural death at his own hand, and his career did not suffer as he feared it might. But what, I asked him, had prompted him to break the law, and violate a principle – the preservation of life – that has defined medical ethics since Hippocrates? Keizer paused to brush away a spider that had crawled uninvited on to my shoulder. “It was something very selfish,” he replied. “If ever I was in his situation, asking for death, I would want people to listen to me, and not say, ‘It cannot be done because of the law or the Bible.’”

    Over the past few decades the Bible has been increasingly sidelined, and the law has vindicated the young doctor who put Antonius to sleep. As people got used to the new law, the number of Dutch people being euthanised began to rise sharply, from under 2,000 in 2007 to almost 6,600 in 2017. (Around the same number are estimated to have had their euthanasia request turned down as not conforming with the legal requirements.) Also in 2017, some 1,900 Dutch people killed themselves, while the number of people who died under palliative sedation – in theory, succumbing to their illness while cocooned from physical discomfort, but in practice often dying of dehydration while unconscious – hit an astonishing 32,000. Altogether, well over a quarter of all deaths in 2017 in the Netherlands were induced."

    "One of the reasons why euthanasia became more common after 2007 is that the range of conditions considered eligible expanded, while the definition of “unbearable suffering” that is central to the law was also loosened. At the same time, murmurs of apprehension began to be heard, which, even in the marvellously decorous chamber of Dutch public debate, have risen in volume. Concerns centre on two issues with strong relevance to euthanasia: dementia and autonomy.

    Many Dutch people write advance directives that stipulate that if their mental state later deteriorates beyond a certain point – if, say, they are unable to recognise family members – they are to be euthanised regardless of whether they dissent from their original wishes. But Last January a medical ethicist called Berna Van Baarsen caused a stir when she resigned from one of the review boards in protest at the growing frequency with which dementia sufferers are being euthanised on the basis of a written directive that they are unable to confirm after losing their faculties. “It is fundamentally impossible,” she told the newspaper Trouw, “to establish that the patient is suffering unbearably, because he can no longer explain it.”

    Van Baarsen’s scruples have crystallised in the country’s first euthanasia malpractice case, which prosecutors are now preparing. (Three further cases are currently under investigation.) It involves a dementia sufferer who had asked to be killed when the “time” was “right”, but when her doctor judged this to be the case, she resisted. The patient had to be drugged and restrained by her family before she finally submitted to the doctor’s fatal injection. The doctor who administered the dose – who has not been identified – has defended her actions by saying that she was fulfilling her patient’s request and that, since the patient was incompetent, her protests before her death were irrelevant. Whatever the legal merits of her argument, it hardly changes what must have been a scene of unutterable grimness.

    The underlying problem with the advance directives is that they imply the subordination of an irrational human being to their rational former self, essentially splitting a single person into two mutually opposed ones. Many doctors, having watched patients adapt to circumstances they had once expected to find intolerable, doubt whether anyone can accurately predict what they will want after their condition worsens.

    The second conflict that has crept in as euthanasia has been normalised is a societal one. It comes up when there is an opposition between the right of the individual and society’s obligation to protect lives. “The euthanasia requests that are the most problematic,” explains Agnes van der Heide, professor of medical care and end-of-life decision-making at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, “are those that are based on the patient’s autonomy, which leads them to tell the doctor: ‘You aren’t the one to judge whether I am to die.’” She doesn’t expect this impulse, already strong among baby boomers, to diminish among coming generations. “For our young people, the autonomy principle is at the forefront of their thinking.”

    The growing divisions over euthanasia are being reflected in the deliberations of the review boards. Consensus is rarer than it was when the only cases that came before them involved patients with late-stage terminal illnesses, who were of sound mind. Since her resignation, Berna Van Baarsen has complained that “legal arguments weigh more and more heavily” on the committees, “while the moral question of whether in certain cases good is done by killing, threatens to get snowed under”.

    In this new, more ambiguous environment, the recent dip in euthanasia numbers doesn’t seem surprising. Besides their fear of attracting prosecutors’ attention, some doctors have been irked by the growing public perception that they are no-questions-asked purveyors of dignified death, and are pushing back. For Dutch GPs, fielding demands for euthanasia from assertive patients who resent the slightest reluctance on the part of their physician has become one of the more disagreeable aspects of their job.

    “In the coldest weeks of last winter,” Theo Boer told me, “a doctor friend of mine was told by an elderly patient: ‘I demand to have euthanasia this week – you promised.’ The doctor replied: ‘It’s -15C outside. Take a bottle of whisky and sit in your garden and we will find you tomorrow, because I cannot accept that you make me responsible for your own suicide.’ The doctor in question, Boer said, used to perform euthanasia on around three people a year. He has now stopped altogether.

    Although he supported the 2002 euthanasia law at the time, Boer now regrets that it didn’t stipulate that the patient must be competent at the time of termination, and that if possible the patient should administer the fatal dose themselves. Boer is also concerned about the psychological effect on doctors of killing someone with a substantial life expectancy: “When you euthanise a final-stage cancer patient, you know that even if your decision is problematic, that person would have died anyway. But when that person might have lived decades, what is always in your mind is that they might have found a new balance in their life.”

    In November 2016, Monique and Bert de Gooijer, a couple from Tilburg, became minor celebrities when a regional paper, the Brabants Dagblad, devoted an entire issue to the euthanasia of their son, an obese, darkly humorous, profoundly disturbed 38-year-old called Eelco. His euthanasia was one of the first high-profile cases involving a young person suffering from mental illness. Of the hundreds of reactions the newspaper received, most of them supportive, the one that made the biggest impression on the de Gooijers came from a woman whose daughter had gone out one day, taking the empty bottles to the store, and walked in front of a train. “She envied us,” Monique told me as I sat with her and Bert in their front room, “because she didn’t know why her daughter had done it. She said: ‘You were able to ask Eelco every question you had. I have only questions.’”

    Privately, even surreptitiously undertaken, suicide leaves behind shattered lives. Even when it goes according to plan, someone finds a body. That openly discussed euthanasia can cushion or even obviate much of this hurt is something I hadn’t really considered before meeting the de Gooijers. Nor had I fully savoured the irony that suicide, with its high risk of failure and collateral damage, was illegal across Europe until a few decades ago, while euthanasia, with its apparently more benign – at least, more manageable – consequences, remains illegal in most countries.

    Whatever the act of killing a physically healthy young man tells us about Dutch views of human wellbeing, the demise of Eelco de Gooijer didn’t traumatise a train driver or a weekender fishing in a canal. Eelco was euthanised only after long thought and discussions with his family. He enjoyed a good laugh with the undertaker who had come to take his measurements for a super-size coffin. He was able to say farewell to everyone who loved him, and he died, as Monique and Bert assured me, at peace. There might be a word for this kind of suicide, the kind that is acceptable to all parties. Call it consensual.

    “You try to make your child happy,” Monique said in her matter-of-fact way, “but Eelco wasn’t happy in life. He wanted to stop suffering, and death was the only way.” Eelco came of age just as euthanasia was being legalised. After years of being examined by psychiatrists who made multiple diagnoses and prescribed a variety of ineffective remedies, he began pestering the doctors of Tilburg to end his life.

    Euthanasia is counted as a basic health service, covered by the monthly premium that every citizen pays to his or her insurance company. But doctors are within their rights not to carry it out. Unique among medical procedures, a successful euthanasia isn’t something you can assess with your patient after the event. A small minority of doctors refuse to perform it for this reason, and others because of religious qualms. Some simply cannot get their heads around the idea that they must kill people they came into medicine in order to save."

    Those who demur on principle are a small proportion of the profession, perhaps less than 8%, according to the end-of-life specialist Agnes van der Heide. The reason why there is no uniformity of response to requests for euthanasia is that the doctor’s personal views – on what constitutes “unbearable suffering”, for instance – often weigh decisively. As the most solemn and consequential intervention a Dutch physician can be asked to make, and this in a profession that aims to standardise responses to all eventualities, the decision to kill is oddly contingent on a single, mercurial human conscience.

    A category of euthanasia request that Dutch doctors commonly reject is that of a mentally ill person whose desire to die could be interpreted as a symptom of a treatable psychiatric disease – Eelco de Gooijer, in other words. Eelco was turned down by two doctors in Tilburg; one of them balked at doing the deed because she was pregnant. In desperation, Eelco turned to the Levenseindekliniek. With its ideological commitment to euthanasia and cadre of specialist doctors, it has done much to help widen the scope of the practice, and one of its teams ended Eelco’s misery on 23 November 2016. A second team from the same clinic killed another psychologically disturbed youngster, Aurelia Brouwers, early last year.

    Ideally euthanasia is a structure with three struts: patient, doctor and the patient’s loved ones. In the case of Eelco de Gooijer, the struts were sturdy and aligned. Eelco’s death was accomplished with compassion, circumspection and scrupulous regard for the feelings of all concerned. It’s little wonder that the Dutch Voluntary Euthanasia Society, or NVVE, vaunts it as an example of euthanasia at its best.

    After leaving the de Gooijers, I drove northwards, bisecting hectares of plant nurseries, skirting Tesla’s European factory, to a conference organised by the NVVE. Apart from being the parent organisation of the Levenseindekliek, the NVVE, with its membership of 170,000 (bigger than any Dutch political party) and rolling programme of public meetings, is one of the most powerful interest groups in the Netherlands. The conference that day was aimed at tackling psychiatrists’ well known opposition to euthanasia for psychiatric cases – in effect, trying to break down the considerable opposition that remains among psychiatrists to euthanising disturbed youngsters like Eelco and Aurelia.

    The conference centre on the outskirts of Driebergen stood amid tall conifers and beehives. I was offered a beaker of curried pumpkin soup while the session that was underway when I arrived – titled “Guidelines for terminating life on the request of a patient with a psychiatric disorder” – came to an orderly close in the lecture hall. Precisely three minutes behind schedule, the Dutch planned-death establishment debouched for refreshments.

    I had met my first NVVE member quite by chance in Amsterdam. After watching her mother die incontinent and addled, this woman of around 70 signed an advance directive requesting euthanasia should she get dementia or lose control of her bowels. These conditions currently dominate the euthanasia debate, because so many people in their 60s and 70s want an opt-out from suffering they have observed in their parents. When I mentioned to the woman in Amsterdam the reluctance of many doctors to euthanise someone who isn’t mentally competent, she replied, bristling: “No doctor has the right to decide when my life should end.”

    At any meeting organised by the NVVE, you will look in vain for poor people, pious Christians or members of the Netherlands’ sizeable Muslim minority. Borne along by the ultra-rational spirit of Dutch libertarianism (the spirit that made the Netherlands a pioneer in reforming laws on drugs, sex and pornography), the Dutch euthanasia scene also exudes a strong whiff of upper-middle class entitlement.

    Over coffee I was introduced to Steven Pleiter, the director of the Levenseindekliniek. We went outside and basked in the early October sun as he described the “shift in mindset” he is trying to achieve. Choosing his words with care, Pleiter said he hoped that in future doctors will feel more confident accommodating demands for “the most complex varieties of euthanasia, like psychiatric illnesses and dementia” – not through a change in the law, he added, but through a kind of “acceptance … that grows and grows over the years”. When I asked him if he understood the scruples of those doctors who refuse to perform euthanasia because they entered their profession in order to save lives, he replied: “If the situation is unbearable and there is no prospect of improvement, and euthanasia is an option, it would be almost unethical [of a doctor] not to help that person.”

    After the Levenseindekliniek was founded in 2012, Pleiter sat down with the insurance companies to work out what they would pay the clinic for each euthanasia procedure its doctors perform. The current figure is €3,000, payable to the clinic even if the applicant pulls out at the last minute. I suggested to Pleiter that the insurance companies must prefer to pay a one-off fee for euthanising someone to spending a vast sum in order to keep that person, needy and unproductive, alive in a nursing home.

    Pleiter’s pained expression suggested that I had introduced a note of cynicism into a discussion that should be conducted on a more elevated plane. “There’s not an atom in my body that is in sympathy with what you are describing,” he replied. “This isn’t about money … it’s about empathy, ethics, compassion.” And he restated the credo that animates right-to-die movements everywhere: ‘I strongly believe there is no need for suffering.’

    That not all planned deaths correspond to the experiences of Bert Keizer or the de Gooijer family is something one can easily forget amid the generally positive aura that surrounds euthanasia. The more I learned about it, the more it seemed that euthanasia, while assigning commendable value to the end of life, might simultaneously cheapen life itself. Another factor I hadn’t appreciated was the possibility of collateral damage. In an event as delicately contractual as euthanasia, there are different varieties of suffering.

    Back in the days when euthanasia was illegal but tolerated, the euthanising doctor was obliged to consult the relatives of the person who had asked to die. Due to qualms over personal autonomy and patient-doctor confidentiality – and an entirely proper concern to protect vulnerable people from unscrupulous relatives – this obligation didn’t make it into the 2002 law that legalised euthanasia.

    This legal nicety would become painfully significant to a middle-aged motorcycle salesman from Zwolle called Marc Veld. In the spring of last year, he began to suspect that his mother, Marijke, was planning to be euthanised, but he never got the opportunity to explain to her doctor why, in his view, her suffering was neither unbearable nor impossible to alleviate. On 9 June, the doctor phoned him and said: “I’m sorry, your mother passed away half an hour ago.”

    Marc showed me a picture he had taken of Marijke in her coffin, her white hair carefully brushed and her skin glowing with the smooth, even foundation of the mortuary beautician. Between her hands was a letter Marc had put there and would be buried with her – a letter detailing his unhappiness, resentment and guilt."

    "There is little doubt that Marijke spent much of her 76 years in torment, beginning with her infancy in a Japanese concentration camp after the invasion of the Dutch East Indies, in 1941, and recurring during her unhappy adulthood in the Netherlands. But Dutch doctors don’t euthanise people because of depression – even if the more extreme advocates of the right to die think they should. As a result, it isn’t uncommon for depressives or lonely people to emphasise a physical ailment in order to get their euthanasia request approved. During his time on the review board, Theo Boer came across several cases in which the “death wish preceded the physical illness … some patients are happy to be able to ask for euthanasia on the basis of a physical reason, while the real reason is deeper”.

    In Marijke’s case, the physical reason was a terminal lung disease, which, Marc told me, she both exacerbated and exaggerated. She did this by cancelling physiotherapy sessions that might have slowed its progress, bombarding her GP with complaints about shortness of breath and slumping “like a sack of potatoes” whenever he visited. “To be sure of being euthanised,” Marc said drily, “you need above all to take acting lessons.”

    What torments him today is that his mother died while there was hope that her illness could be slowed. “If she had cancer and was feeling pain and it was the last three months of her life, I would have been happy for her to have euthanasia. But she could have lived at least a few more years.”

    Defenders of personal autonomy would say that Marc had no business interfering in his mother’s death, but beneath his anger lies the inconsolable sadness of a son who blames himself for not doing more. Marijke’s euthanasia was carried out according to the law, and will raise no alarms in the review board. It was also carried out without regard to her relatedness to other human beings.

    For all the safeguards that have been put in place against the manipulation of applicants for euthanasia, in cases where patients do include relatives in their decision-making, it can never be entirely foreclosed, as I discovered in a GP’s surgery in Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium.

    The GP in question – we’ll call her Marie-Louise – is a self-confessed idealist who sees it as her mission to “care, care, care”. In 2017, one of her patients, a man in late middle-age, was diagnosed with dementia and signed a directive asking for euthanasia when his condition worsened. As his mind faltered, however, so did his resolve – which did not please his wife, who became an evangelist for her husband’s death. “He must have changed his mind 20 times,” Marie-Louise said. “I saw the pressure she was applying.”

    In order to illustrate one of the woman’s outbursts, Marie-Louise rose from her desk, walked over to the filing cabinet and, adopting the persona of the infuriated wife, slammed down her fist, exclaiming, “If only he had the courage! Coward!”

    Most medical ethicists would approve of Marie-Louise’s refusal to euthanise a patient who had been pressured. By the time she went away on holiday last summer, she believed she had won from her patient an undertaking not to press for euthanasia. But she had not reckoned with her own colleague in the practice, a doctor who takes a favourable line towards euthanasia, and when Marie-Louise returned from holidays she found out that this colleague had euthanised her patient.

    When I visited Marie-Louise several months after the event, she remained bewildered by what had happened. As with Marc, guilt was a factor; if she hadn’t gone away, would her patient still be alive? Now she was making plans to leave the practice, but hadn’t yet made an announcement for fear of unsettling her other patients. “How can I stay here?” she said. “I am a doctor and yet I can’t guarantee the safety of my most vulnerable patients.”

    While for many people whose loved ones have been euthanised, the procedure can be satisfactory and even inspiring, in others it has caused hurt and inner conflict. Bert Keizer rightly observes that suicide leaves scars on friends and family that may never heal. But suicide is an individual act, self-motivated and self-administered, and its force field is contained. Euthanasia, by contrast, is the product of society. When it goes wrong, it goes wrong for everyone.

    Even as law and culture make euthanasia seem more normal, it remains among the most unfamiliar acts a society can condone. It isn’t enough that the legal niceties be observed; there needs to be agreement among the interested parties on why it is taking place, and to what end. Without consensus on these basic motivations, euthanasia won’t be an occasion for empathy, ethics or compassion, but a bludgeon swinging through people’s lives, whose handiwork cannot be undone.

    Two years ago the Netherlands’ health and justice ministers issued a joint proposal for a “completed life” pill that would give anyone over 70 years of age the right to receive a lethal poison, cutting the doctor out of the equation completely. In the event, the fragmented nature of Dutch coalition politics stopped the proposal in its tracks, but doctors and end-of-life specialists I spoke to expect legislation to introduce such a completed-life bill to come before parliament in due course."

    Assuming it could be properly safeguarded (a big assumption), the completed-life pill would not necessarily displease many doctors I spoke to; it would allow them to get back to saving lives. But while some applicants for euthanasia are furious with doctors who turn them down, in practice people are unwilling to take their own lives. Rather than drink the poison or open the drip, 95% of applicants for active life termination in the Netherlands ask a doctor to kill them. In a society that vaunts its rejection of established figures of authority, when it comes to death, everyone asks for Mummy.

    Even those who have grave worries about the slippery slope concede that consensual euthanasia for terminal illness can be a beautiful thing, and that the principle of death at a time of one’s choosing can fit into a framework of care. The question for any country contemplating euthanasia legislation is whether the practice must inevitably expand – in which case, as Agnes van der Heide recognises, death will eventually “get a different meaning, be appreciated differently”. In the Netherlands many people would argue that – for all the current wobbles – that process is now irreversible."



    Source: theguardian.com

    Christopher de Bellaigue will chair a discussion on euthanasia at the Dutch Centre in London EC2 on 23 Wednesday Jan at 7pm. See dutchcentre.com. This article was supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting
    Last edited by Gio, 18th January 2019 at 21:55.

  14. The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to Gio For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (20th January 2019), Aragorn (18th January 2019), Dreamtimer (20th January 2019), Elen (19th January 2019), JRS (20th January 2019), Kathy (19th January 2019)

  15. #53
    Administrator Aragorn's Avatar
    Join Date
    17th March 2015
    Location
    Middle-Earth
    Posts
    20,240
    Thanks
    88,437
    Thanked 80,969 Times in 20,255 Posts
    A great article -- thanks, Gio. This is indeed an ethically very complicated issue. One of my close family members was euthanized, albeit that I had no knowledge of that until after it had come to pass. And when I then learned about it, all I could think was "I'm glad I didn't have to be involved in making that decision."
    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

  16. The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to Aragorn For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (20th January 2019), Dreamtimer (20th January 2019), Elen (19th January 2019), Gio (18th January 2019), Kathy (19th January 2019)

  17. #54
    Retired Member
    Join Date
    14th September 2013
    Posts
    1,477
    Thanks
    19,167
    Thanked 6,144 Times in 1,444 Posts
    Quote Originally posted by Aragorn View Post
    A great article -- thanks, Gio. This is indeed an ethically very complicated issue. One of my close family members was euthanized, albeit that I had no knowledge of that until after it had come to pass. And when I then learned about it, all I could think was "I'm glad I didn't have to be involved in making that decision."
    BUMP!!!!!!!!!!!

  18. The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to Kathy For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (20th January 2019), Aragorn (19th January 2019), Dreamtimer (20th January 2019), Elen (20th January 2019), Gio (20th January 2019)

  19. #55
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
    Join Date
    26th September 2016
    Posts
    7,330
    Thanks
    7,958
    Thanked 37,150 Times in 7,345 Posts

    Thumbs Up

    The latest ...

    FAMOUS GRAVE TOUR - Desert Memorial (Frank Sinatra, Sonny Bono, etc.)

    "Welcome to Hollywood Graveyard, where we set out to remember and celebrate the lives of those who lived to entertain us, by visiting their final resting places. Today we're heading to the Inland Empire, and Desert Memorial Park, where we'll find such stars as Frank Sinatra, Betty Hutton, Sonny Bono, and many more."



    Published on Jan 19, 2019

    23:40 minutes


  20. The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to Gio For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (20th January 2019), Aragorn (20th January 2019), Dreamtimer (20th January 2019), Elen (20th January 2019), Kathy (20th January 2019)

  21. #56
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
    Join Date
    26th September 2016
    Posts
    7,330
    Thanks
    7,958
    Thanked 37,150 Times in 7,345 Posts

    Lightbulb

    "For all the world to see" ...


    Violence against women around the world | DW Documentary

    (Human rights documentary)


    Violence against women is a violation of human rights, but it happens around the world. The documentary gives a voice to women from Asia, Africa and Europe. [Online until: 18.02.2019]

    We meet women in Benin, Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo who have been victims of horrific violence, yet fought their way free. Across the world, violence against women is commonplace. Women aged between 15 and 45 are far more likely to be beaten to death or crippled by their husbands than die from cancer or malaria, in a traffic accident or as a result of war. The United Nations estimates that in some countries of the world, up to 70 percent of all women are victims of physical or sexual violence at least once in their lifetime - mostly inflicted by their husbands or partners. Meanwhile, many men describe violence against women as a normal part of their daily lives. If the woman is beaten, she deserves it. They see a strong, confident woman as a threat. If a wife stands up to a husband, he can take her children away from her and throw her out - penniless. Violence against women is not restricted to specific parts of the world and has nothing to do with levels of education. It can happen in all cultures and all countries."


    Published on Jan 19, 2019

    42:25 minutes


  22. The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to Gio For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (20th January 2019), Aragorn (20th January 2019), Dreamtimer (20th January 2019), Elen (20th January 2019), Kathy (20th January 2019)

  23. #57
    Administrator Aragorn's Avatar
    Join Date
    17th March 2015
    Location
    Middle-Earth
    Posts
    20,240
    Thanks
    88,437
    Thanked 80,969 Times in 20,255 Posts
    Quote Originally posted by giovonni View Post
    "For all the world to see" ...


    Violence against women around the world | DW Documentary

    (Human rights documentary)


    Violence against women is a violation of human rights, but it happens around the world. The documentary gives a voice to women from Asia, Africa and Europe. [Online until: 18.02.2019]

    We meet women in Benin, Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo who have been victims of horrific violence, yet fought their way free. Across the world, violence against women is commonplace. Women aged between 15 and 45 are far more likely to be beaten to death or crippled by their husbands than die from cancer or malaria, in a traffic accident or as a result of war. The United Nations estimates that in some countries of the world, up to 70 percent of all women are victims of physical or sexual violence at least once in their lifetime - mostly inflicted by their husbands or partners. Meanwhile, many men describe violence against women as a normal part of their daily lives. If the woman is beaten, she deserves it. They see a strong, confident woman as a threat. If a wife stands up to a husband, he can take her children away from her and throw her out - penniless. Violence against women is not restricted to specific parts of the world and has nothing to do with levels of education. It can happen in all cultures and all countries."


    [...]

    As a tribute to all women everywhere on Earth...


    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

  24. The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to Aragorn For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (22nd January 2019), Dreamtimer (21st January 2019), Elen (21st January 2019), Gio (20th January 2019), Kathy (20th January 2019)

  25. #58
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
    Join Date
    26th September 2016
    Posts
    7,330
    Thanks
    7,958
    Thanked 37,150 Times in 7,345 Posts
    Withdrawal ...
    A growing worldwide social phenomenon ...


    Rent-a-sister: Coaxing Japan’s hikikomori men out of their bedrooms

    BBC News

    "At least half a million young men in Japan are thought to have withdrawn from society, and refuse to leave their bedrooms. They’re known as hikikomori.

    Their families often don’t know what to do, but one organisation is offering ‘sisters for hire’ to help coax these young men out of their isolation.

    A film by Amelia Martyn-Hemphill for BBC World Hacks."


    Published on Jan 20, 2019

    12:55 minutes


  26. The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to Gio For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (22nd January 2019), Aragorn (20th January 2019), Dreamtimer (21st January 2019), Elen (21st January 2019), Kathy (20th January 2019)

  27. #59
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
    Join Date
    26th September 2016
    Posts
    7,330
    Thanks
    7,958
    Thanked 37,150 Times in 7,345 Posts
    Great idea/announcement ...
    And looking forward to its fruition ...


    Hollywood Graveyard/ Your Video Here:


    "Do you live near a famous grave or cemetery?
    To celebrate two years of Hollywood Graveyard, we're creating a "Viewers Special," consisting entirely of footage submitted by you, the Hollywood Graveyard community from around the world."


    Published on Jan 21, 2019

    3:38 minutes


    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P02j676TKJE


    Click the link below, read our submission guidelines, and fill out the form to submit your videos. https://www.hollywoodgraveyard.com/community ... I can't wait to see where you take us. Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. The deadline is (extended to) March 30th (for those in snowy areas).

    FAQ: Will you still be adding narration and music? - Yes, this will look and sound just like a regular HG video. No need to narrate when you film, I'll still be doing that. Just send the raw footage. And don't worry about noise, I will be removing the audio from your clips. Do I need to edit the video in any way? - No. Send me the video unedited (no filters, or anything fancy added, unless you're a pro editor and want to create something unique for artistic b-roll), I'll be editing the clips as I do all my videos. What Cemeteries do you already have in the pipeline? -

    After finishing the Inland Empire (Forest Lawn Cathedral City, Coachella Valley, Sunsest Hills), we also have Evergreen, and a re-visit to Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills already in development. So if you submit footage we already have, it won't be used. We also have other "themed" editions in the works with various people already filmed. Email if you want to ask about anyone specifically.

  28. The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to Gio For This Useful Post:

    Aianawa (22nd January 2019), Aragorn (22nd January 2019), Dreamtimer (22nd January 2019), Elen (27th January 2019), Kathy (26th January 2019)

  29. #60
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
    Join Date
    26th September 2016
    Posts
    7,330
    Thanks
    7,958
    Thanked 37,150 Times in 7,345 Posts

    Question

    Now that this mess-hap is temporary settled ...

    Published January 20, 2019




    People line up to get a free lunch at a pop-up eatery for furloughed government
    employees and their families, on January 16, 2019, in Washington, DC.


    Shutdown Exposes How Many Americans Live Paycheck to Paycheck

    "Today marks the two-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, and we have learned some hard lessons in the interval. The ongoing, historically unprecedented shutdown of the federal government has exposed Trump as one of the worst deal-makers ever to stand up in two shoes.

    It has further exposed the Republican Party’s bottomless disdain for marginalized people through its craven refusal to contain the man who has unleashed all this misery. It has exposed deep fissures in Trump’s once-unbreakable base as more and more of his supporters — battered by tariffs and now the shutdown — come to correctly believe they’ve been played for chumps.

    The shutdown has exposed something else far more personal and uncomfortable, something most folks don’t like to talk about because it is too frightening to contemplate, something they can’t see an easy way to fix. It is this simple, terrible truth: A great many people in the US are one missed paycheck away from complete financial calamity.

    This has proven true for many of the federal workers and contractors furloughed by the shutdown. The end of the month is less than two weeks away, and those furloughed workers will collectively owe more than $400 million in mortgage and rent payments, to say nothing of utility bills and child care expenses. Throw in food and gasoline, and the math becomes grim in a big hurry.

    This crisis is not limited to furloughed federal workers, however. According to a report by Forbes Magazine, a full 78 percent of all US workers are living paycheck to paycheck. One quarter of workers are financially unable to set aside any money for savings after each pay cycle. Three quarters of workers are in debt, and half of those believe they always will be. Most minimum wage workers are required to work multiple jobs to make ends meet.

    “What do professors, real estate agents, farmers, business executives, computer programmers and store clerks have in common? They’re not immune to the harsh reality of living paycheck to paycheck,” reports Danielle Paquette for The Washington Post. “They’re millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers. They work in big cities and rural towns. They’ve tried to save — but rent, child care, student loans and medical bills get in the way.”

    The situation becomes more concerning when considering the average worker’s inability to financially cope with an injury, emergency or turn of bad luck. “Can you cover an unexpected $400 expense?” asks Anna Bahney of CNN. “Four in ten Americans can’t, according to a new report from the Federal Reserve Board. Those who don’t have the cash on hand say they’d have to cover it by borrowing or selling something.”

    And it’s all a great big secret, a problem most people struggle with but seldom discuss, because we have been trained to be embarrassed about such things. This is the greatest country in the world! With the greatest economy! Rugged individuals and bootstraps! If we are failing to amass a personal fortune, it’s because of our own inherent laziness or lack of incentive. Shame on us, right?

    Wrong.

    This situation has been created by decades of Reagan-born trickle-down capitalism and the moral cowardice of bought politicians of every stripe. These unbalanced economic policies favor the wealthy and shun the rest with deprecating propaganda that parks the fault for financial struggle squarely on the shoulders of the very workers who have been taken advantage of for generations.

    Many millions of people in the US spend their lives sprinting to stand still, financially speaking, desperate to squeeze every ounce of value from a dollar whose purchasing power seems to diminish with each passing year. It’s a damned expensive country to live in, especially if you reside with most of the population on the coasts. We don’t seem to get very much for the money we spend or the hard work we do, and our social safety net is weakening more each day.

    It’s a feeling and an experience the Donald Trumps of the world have never known. There you lay, the clock yelling 3 a.m. and you know your alarm is going off in two hours, but you haven’t slept because you have $46 in the bank, no savings to speak of, a fistful of maxed-out credit cards, bills coming every day. You need to eat, need to commute, need medicine and clothes and shoes, and the rent or mortgage is due next week. After paying for all that, you’ll be lucky to still have that $46 left over. Your stomach is a crater inside you, and you lie there, waiting to work another day and maybe break even so long as absolutely nothing goes wrong.

    The shutdown has shoved this stark reality in our faces, and it is high time we talked about it instead of pretending it isn’t there or being embarrassed by it. Those furloughed federal workers telling their stories of struggle on the nightly news are part of a huge majority in this country, the kind of super-duper majority that can bring wholesale change virtually overnight if we look each other in the eye and remember that this is not our fault. We are not the ones who have stolen the dream of upward mobility and replaced it with a treadmill, all the while preaching austerity so those who do fall behind have nowhere to turn for help.

    We did not create this situation. We are the grist in someone else’s mill. This is what happens when unions are broken, when “right to work” laws are allowed to stand, when the social safety net is stripped, when the minimum wage is stuck in the past and the only important people are the ones who are already flush and can afford to buy some pet politicians to lock down the status quo.

    Because it has been this way does not mean it always has to be this way. We did not do this. This was done to us, and we are legion. It is time we remembered that, and acted accordingly."


    By William Rivers Pitt
    Source: truthout.org

  30. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to Gio For This Useful Post:

    Aragorn (26th January 2019), Dreamtimer (26th January 2019), Elen (27th January 2019), Kathy (26th January 2019)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •