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Irina (left) and Lori (1976)
Lori Lippitz: 56, married, 1 child, founder of The Maxwell Street Klezmer Band and The Klezmer Music Foundation
Best friend of 3 years: Irina Geinisman, died ... murdered during a robbery in 1978 at age 16
"In America, and in our culture, female platonic friendships are underrated, grossly, massively underrated. My friend Irina taught me a profound truth that I had not known, especially as a teenager, when she said, 'Your boyfriends will come and go, but your girlfriends will be there for you forever.' "
How did you meet?
The entire story of my friendship with Irina is tainted by the tragedy associated with it, but it is not the sum of the friendship—a brief friendship that defined who I am more than any other.
Irina and I met on November 22, 1974 when I was a junior at Evanston Township High School. I was 15 and she was a very emotionally mature 13. She and her parents had immigrated to the United States the day before. My Russian teacher introduced her to our class. She was a shy, gray-eyed girl with brown-blonde hair. I was a solid C student with poor Russian grammar, so I was surprised when our teacher asked me if I would socialize with Irina out of class. Did she sense, despite my struggles with the language, that Irina and I would click?
When we met, Irina smiled shyly, and I was won over right away. I spoke my few words of Russian and we made a date to tour town. I never concentrated so hard in my life listening to her. I felt as if giant waves of Russian were crashing over my head. I would catch a word or phrase and then try to figure out the rest from context. What I couldn't understand from her words, I understood from her eyes, which were flashing and intense. She had been separated from her home, her school, and her friends, so she was relieved and happy to have a girlfriend to share her feelings with, and to about her new, strange home. Irina started to pick up English almost right away. Soon, we were speaking an amalgam of Russian and English. She accepted and looked up to me, and I adored and admired her.
What was the friendship like?
In Russian, people go by diminutives. Hers was Ira (pronounced "EE-ra"). After school or in the summer, I would walk the four blocks to her house. Her mother, Tamara (who she called by her pet name, "Musya"), would cook and the house would be drenched in the aroma of fried potatoes, mushrooms and onions. Musya would feed us, and then we'd go into Ira's room to sit on the rug and talk. I can still hear her laughter, which was light and musical. Sometimes, she would pick up a book of Russian poetry and read aloud. Ira came out of the Soviet system in which you memorize poems by heart, and she had volumes of poems at the tip of her tongue —romantic verse by classic poets like Pushkin and modern poets like Ahmatova—that she would read with passion and expression. Without understanding every word, I could get the sense of it all through her. Sometimes we'd go walking. The Russians are huge walkers. I'd traveled to the USSR, and seen how the streets are alive at night with whole families walking and talking. One day we started walking — Irina telling me about her life in Russia and we were completely absorbed. We ended up at Broadway and Peterson in Chicago, about 13 miles from her home in Evanston!
I didn't have many friends in High School. I was one of those kids who doodled and daydreamed. I just recently saw the musical Hairspray, and in it there's a song with the chorus, "She's got cooties!" Well, in grade school, I was the Cootie Girl. On the playground, the other kids would yell, "She's got cooties!" and everyone would run in the opposite direction screaming. I was a very serious young person, thoughtful and sad and chronically sleep deprived because my hearing is sensitive and my dad would watch TV until the wee hours. When I was in 4th grade, my parents sent me to a special class that was supposed to be for helping kids who weren't connecting socially. That class turned out to have a mix of autistic and sociopathic kids in it, and the experience was terrifying. When I got to high school, I became friends with the political leftists, the hippies and the stoners. I was not popular, but Irina didn't get the memo. As far as she was concerned, I was a like spirit who was emotionally attuned to her, who listened, shared, and tried to help her acclimate to a new country and culture. In her I found a soulmate who genuinely loved and respected me.
Lori's daughter Kayla with Irina's mom Musya
In America, female platonic friendships are grossly, massively underrated. Irina taught me a profound truth that I had not known, especially as a teenager, when she said, "Your boyfriends will come and go, but your girlfriends will be there for you forever." That lesson has stayed with me all my life, like so much of her prescient wisdom. Maybe marriages wouldn't be so overburdened, with the spouse needing to be all things to the other spouse (the supporter, romantic interest, listener, partner, helpmate, etc.), if female friendships were more respected and appreciated. Many women marry and give up their friendships, and then expect their husband to jump into that breach. I married late. I was 38 when I got married and had my daughter, Kayla Renee, when I was just shy of 40. The name Renee is for Irina, because it means rebirth.
Describe how the friendship ended.
On April 28, 1978, my parents came to see me at the University of Michigan. I was a sophomore and it was about three-and-a-half years after Irina and I met. They told me that the day before Irina had been waiting for the El-train at the Dempster Street station. A couple of kids had been trolling around, looking to snatch purses. She struggled, they stabbed her to death and left her there on the platform. She had about $3 in her purse.
What is her legacy? That's the hard part of dying at 16. I'm sure that her legacy has got to be this bubbling passion of love she had for life, an infectious joie de vivre with which she touched so many of the people she knew and the friends she made here in America. It's as if she knew that she was on borrowed time, and she just went out and did everything she could to live a full life. There are ripples of awfulness that her death caused to wash over the lives of many, many people, and it's something that always stays in my mind whenever I hear about anyone's tragedy — how the news will move on, but that sorrow will last a lifetime. But she was this brilliant, beautiful girl who fate conspired to make my friend and change my life. She was a deep, poetic, graceful young woman with an infectious laugh and soulful eyes. Her life was far more than the news stories. I have dedicated myself to organizing a concert series in Irina's memory — a concert featuring young Russian-American kids like her, talented and special young people who will hear her name and think of the girl they never knew. And when people google her, they will see something other than the horrible news stories.
How did you cope with her loss?
After Irina died, a lot of my coping was done through art. I drew a charcoal portrait. I sculpted a weeping woman out of a red wax candle and painted it black. But the one that stays in my mind is two clay figurines: a young, beautiful woman lays at rest, and over her, an old woman is bent over in mourning. I realized that if I lived a full span of years, my friend would always be young while I became old. Eventually an old woman would stoop over the grave of a young girl that had once been her contemporary.
Coping with Irina's loss is a process that continues. No one was treating kids with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in those days. Her death still haunts my life. It has burdened my relationship with my own child because I can be overwrought with anxiety. Once, when we were in Whole Foods and she wandered away from me, I panicked and made them do an Adam alert (a lockdown). But I think watching Irina's mother rise up from the black depths of depression to a kind of a normal has helped me to realize that, as a teacher once told me, "You go on—limping, but you go on."
Irina's stepfather and mother divorced, so Musya has been alone all these years. She has no family here, but she has put her life together, and except for aches and pains, she would say she has a good life. I am her power of attorney, and I take care of her when she has medical emergencies and I have helped her with getting services from social service agencies so that she can live independently.
A positive lesson that came from this loss is that as busy as you get — and I tend to work obsessively — you always have to make time for your friends. Make time for friends, make time for family, make time for things that can't be checked off a list or monetized, because they won't be there forever, and these relationships are what really count. If I want to test that theory, sometimes I'll say, "What if, God forbid, I had a heart attack or a stroke right now — how would I feel about the way I left things?" Would I be satisfied with the quality time I'd spent with friends and family, or would I regret the solitary time I'd obsessed over work, and feel sorry for leaving so many boxes of papers and things to sort out?
One of the things that's caused me guilt is Irina's last visit to see me. She came to visit me at school, and although I spent time with her, I also said, "Hey I've got these exams and this homework," and left her for hours at a time. On the last evening we were together, I let a potential boyfriend come over. I didn't just send him away, and I could see that this hurt her. I wish I could rewrite that visit with the wisdom I have now.
I've had very important friendships in my life since then, and I haven't been a loner. In fact, my place in the community here is very visible. I'm a bandleader and singer and the head of a not-for-profit that I founded. I've learned to value people more and to cherish friends. Even though we only had three-and-a-half years together, she was the first person in my life that gave me unconditional love. That can't be underestimated — it can save a life. I gave it back to her, too, but for me it was the oxygen I needed, and it probably helped me orient myself on an upward path despite the many bumps along the way.
I was not one to believe in things like ESP before I met Irina. Not believing her and her experience is another terrible regret. Early on, Irina told me was that she was psychic. I discovered that, especially with her, I have some of these moments, too. When she came here, she told me that in the Soviet Union she had been in the hospital with hepatitis in a large shared room. There was another family there, and one of them was a gypsy from Romania. The gypsy read her palm and told her, "You are going to die when you're 16. Your life line stops there and it stops abruptly." So from that point on, she knew, and she shared this secret with me. She would talk about it, and I would dismiss it. When she was 16 and came to visit me in Michigan, I didn't know that, for her, it was her goodbye visit. She told me that she had dreams that she was lying on a wooden platform, and her eyes were so sad. I said, "Stop with this mishegas!" [Yiddish for craziness]. Really, I could not bear hearing it.
Rewind to when I was 13. One night, while staying over at my grandmother's house, I had an horrifying nightmare in which a young African native wielding a knife kills me in slow motion. That dream was of a different caliber than any dream I had had or have had since, so vivid that even though I had it at the age of 13, I can still remember it in every detail.
Fast-forward to a few weeks after Irina visited me in Michigan. It was five days before she died, during the Passover holiday. I was staying overnight at a friend's house after the first seder when I woke up from a horrible nightmare. I'd dreamed of a very beautiful girl with long blonde hair, which I was combing lovingly. The girl left and went into a garden, and I heard a scream. Someone told me she was dead, and I thought, "I've killed her." Then, I am standing in a vast room with stars in the vaulted ceiling. I am staring at these stars and knowing that she is gone.
I wrote the dream down at the time, and once again, it was of a different quality and emotional intensity than other dreams. I tried to tell everyone I saw that I'd had this dream, but no one seemed to understand how it had affected me. I didn't know what it was, but I just knew that it was the most painful thing I'd ever dreamt.
When I was at Irina's funeral, I looked up at the ceiling of the Northwestern University chapel, and there were all those stars. I said, "I've seen this, I've seen all of this, I've felt all of this." The dream came rushing back to me. I went to talk to my father and showed him the diary entry and told him about the dream. I asked him, how can this be? And my father, who was an extremely wise, rational, scientifically-minded person, just said, "You know, being rational doesn't mean you understand everything. There are just things we don't understand."
One of the greatest effects this has had on me is I understand that there are things I don't comprehend, there are people whose experiences I can't fathom, there are truths that are incomprehensible. There are meanings to life that I cannot see more than a corner of, and there are many, many times that I completely misconstrue reality because I don't stand above the world looking down. This realization has been very revealing and humbling to me.
Is there anything else that you'd like to add about your friendship?
Here is a song I wrote in 1981. Although I'm a professional singer, I've never sung my own songs in public. It describes what I learned from loss. It is also dedicated to Irina because, on her last visit, she asked me to sing her a certain Hebrew song (Eli Eli), but I wasn't in the mood. It was a song that expressed her desire to believe in eternity no matter what happens to life itself. Here is the song I wrote in 1981 after becoming a better listener:
by Lori Lippitz
What if you lived without glory or fame,
The whole world went by without learning your name?
Would you still come over?
We could just walk together–
I'll always have the time for you.
What if my plans all fall through?
None of my sure intuitions come true?
Will you still come over,
Childhood friend, you know all my dreams,
Pack them away with your old, dusty things,
And then please come over,
We could just talk together–
Yet, on we go, hopeful–we can't say why–
Nobody knows how he'll live or he'll die…
Before Friendship Dialogues was a gleam in founder Ellen Pearlman's eyes, a group of over two dozen women answered her online plea for women who had lost a female best friend. Ellen is eternally grateful to all the women, including Lori, for opening their hearts to her and sharing their personal stories of love and loss. It was through this process that the seeds for Friendship Dialogues were planted. Thank you!
Genealogy Mentor


A yuri (GxG) romance visual novel about girls overcoming tragic pasts as they discover love.
Help a werewolf find a dance date at her girl's school!
Short demo of a diverse dating sim.
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A fantasy yuri (girl love) visual novel.
Demo version of Painted in White made for Yuri Game Jam 2016. A short, sweet slice of life visual novel.
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A fantasy adventure RPG for #yurijam!


They've started tearing down the house next to the one that was built last year, two doors down. Today it's mostly hammering and banging and a lot of shouting. It's already bad, but it's just going to get worse. And after that's done, comes the construction of the new house.


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Home >> RISING TEMPLE : THEFTS IN ODISHA
RISING TEMPLE : THEFTS IN ODISHA
By Anil Dhir
udayindia Updated: September 2, 2021 2:20 pm
Over the past few decades Odisha has endured several temple thefts in each of the districts. In total, the number of idols lost is estimated to be close to a staggering 10,000. Antique dealers have for decades targeted Odishan temples and smuggled such items out of the country to rake in big bucks by selling them to museums or auctioning them at international auction houses. There is hardly a day when idol thefts are not reported in the media. Odisha has become a major hub for stolen idol export. The thriving industry of stone sculptures in the state gives easy access to export stolen idols along with the newly carved ones.
In January this year, five old metallic idols from the Sri Gopinathdev Temple at Kakudia near Pipili were stolen. In April, thieves broke into the Mausi Maa temple, just 500 metres away from the Jagannath temple at Puri. Last year, miscreants barged into the sanctum sanctorum of the 800-year-old Daksha Prajapati temple in Banpur town of Khurda and took away 22 Ashtadhatu idols. They melted six of them, only ingots were recovered along with five other idols. Last year, the STF recovered two brass idols from the Jadupur on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar. I had gone to see the idols at the STF office, the Sp told me that they had deployed a decoy, who was asked to pay a crore for them. Last year, Burglars broke into a Shiva temple in Malikeswarpur village in Kendrapada and decamped with an idol of Goddess Laxmi from the outer wall of the shrine. The idol, made from black chlorite was three feet high and weighed around one quintal. The theft of an 11-century-old idol from the Marichi temple at Ayodhya in Nilgiri December 26 2019 was solved with the arrest of Suresh Yadav from of Etah district in Uttar Pradesh.
In March 2017, an Ashtadhatu idol of Lord Krishna valued at around a crore was stolen from the 300-year-old Dadhibabanjew temple in Choudkulat village. The miscreants also stole brass idols of Lord Hanuman and Goddess Durga. In 2015, six rare antique idols were stolen from the Varahanath temple in Jajpur. Three 13th century antique stone idols were stolen from the famous Chandrasekhar Jew temple at Kapilash in the same year. In 2014, the chlorite Jain idol of Adinatha Deb was stolen from the Grameswar temple at Nivarana village under Niali Police Station. It was regarded as one of the rarest Jain statues of Odisha. The 2.5 feet height black-stone statue was later recovered, but the thieves had pruned it considerably and it was half its size when recovered.
While working on the Prachi Valley project, in the course of two years, I came to know of nearly 50 temple thefts in the jurisdiction of four police stations. Idols which were photographed and documented by scholars in the last three decades have vanished. Both the locals and the police themselves admitted that many more thefts have been unreported. Surprisingly, only one single recovery has been made, the rest of the precious idols have been lost forever. There were 20 cases of idol theft in the last decade in Bhadrak, but not a single recovery has been made.
Intach had repeatedly expressed its concern over rising cases of temple thefts in Odisha and illegal exports of idols. It has urged the government for framing a holistic policy and taking legal measures to deal with the menace. The prevailing laws intended to prevent idol thefts and burglary are inherently ineffective and a holistic national heritage protection policy and system should be put in place. There is no objective database of antiques – both stone and metallic idols — in the approximately 22,000 ancient places of worship in Odisha. Inconsequential and weak legislations like the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act and the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act, 1904 are ineffective to curb these crimes. There is an absolute lack of awareness and gross apathy regarding the intrinsic value of antique idols that represent the rich cultural heritage of the state.
More than 95 per cent of the antique idols in the State remain legally unregistered as the National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities remains incomplete. New legislation and amendments are a need of the hour and the police should have a separate wing to deal with such crimes. The state Archeology and the ASI should adopt methods as per international norms. Metal idols should have laser markings and the stone ones should have metallic engravings as evidence of ownership. There have been many instances where recovered stolen idols could not be traced back to their original places, and are lying in different police stations malkhanas and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) godowns. These idols should be returned back to the temples from where they were stolen. They are not objects of art, they are deities which were worshipped.
The practice of collecting Indian ancient statues can be dated back to the British Raj, when our colonizers took back with them several artifacts of historical importance. China too has been a notable victim of this, particularly when the Europeans stole from its famed Summer Palace during the siege of Peking in 1860. However, in its typical fashion, China resorted to a quick solution to bring back its lost heritage, they reportedly hired professional agents and thieves to bring back many of their stolen antiques from museums across Europe. The KODE Museum in Norway, The Swedish Royal Palace, museums in Durham and Cambridge and the Chateau de Fontainebleau have all been burgled in recent years, allegedly by Chinese operatives who have broken in and taken only items of Chinese heritage. Such has been the brashness of the Chinese in these matters that the government has even publicly displayed some of the relics that were stolen from the European museums.
India on the other hand, has taken a far softer route of using diplomacy to request for the return of our stolen ancient wonders. During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's initial tenure, the nation saw several such diplomatic repatriations, with the US vowing to return 200 statues, Tony Abbott's return of the Nataraj, the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's gift of several smaller figures and German Chancellor Angela Merkel's return of a stone carving of Goddess Durga. The Durga carving, which Merkel returned to India, was traced back to a small temple in Pulwama, Kashmir, giving rise to the question as to how did it get smuggled out the country and land up in Germany.
The British museums are nothing more than chor bazaars. The only official body responsible for bringing back all our ancient idols is the ASI, but they have not been able to accomplish much of what is expected of them. We need to first come up with a central database. We do not even have photos or dimensions of the statues because they're considered sacred, and measuring them was seen as unholy. There should be a state-wise anti-smuggling wing that specialises in ancient heritage.
Countries like the US and China have enacted heritage protection laws so have not-so-prosperous countries like Jordan and Mexico. Its saddening when a culture rich country like India, chooses not to. Ironically, there are some lobbyists within our country, who have invested heavily in our national treasure and want to amend the Antiquities Laws. It leaves one wondering if we as people truly want to support the cause of protecting our millenniums-old ancient heritage.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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What Does Amanda Tapping Think Her Chances Are For Returning To SG-1?
Posted July 29th, 2015 by Stuart Conover
With Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin rebooting their original 'Stargate' film into a new trilogy, one has to wonder what involvement fan favorites such as Amanda Tapping ('Stargate SG-1′,'Sanctuary') may have. Well, Tapping recently sat down for an interview and was asked if there was any interest in her returning to the series where she played Samantha Carter for over a decade. I'm going to warn you right now folks, this isn't casting news you should get your hopes up for.
So would she be interested in returning?
"Interest? Yes. Involvement? No. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich have taken the property back. I don't think they disliked the television series so much. But it wasn't their vision. The rights had gone to MGM. Brad Wright and Jon Glassner got a hold of it and ran with it, successfully. I mean: 17 seasons of television. But I think Emmerich and Devlin are probably happy to have it back. Certainly no one has been calling any of the Stargate actors, saying, 'Hey. I've got a part for you.' It would be nice, but no."
Sadly I don't think Devlin or Emmerich are the kind of guys who would have interest in bringing any of these faces back as a cameo or Easter Egg. Honestly, I don't think this would really be surprising to anyone as they are taking a fresh shot at the concept which they initially created. While I can understand the view of trying to not make reference ot the series as to not throw any confusion into the mix, it would still be fun for fans to get a last look at some of the actors and actresses even if they were in throwaway roles.
Would you love to see Tapping return even if it was just as a cameo? What do you think are the chances that it could actually happen? Share your thoughts below!
Source: Blastr
Stuart Conover
Stuart Conover is a father, husband, blogger, published author, geek, entrepreneur, editor of Horror Tree, horror fanatic, science fiction junkie, lives in a world of comics, and a casual gamer (all of this when his wife lets him of course.) He fell in love with science fiction and horror at the same time while watching the movie Alien at probably far too young of an age while still being extremely impressionable and has been happily obsessed with both since! Around the same time, he had also developed an unhealthy addiction to comic books that continues to this day!Want to talk about anything geeky? Reach out on Twitter - @StuartConover
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Online Casino / News / Your guide to progressive Slots
Your guide to progressive Slots
Slots are increasingly becoming popular because of the dynamic and quality software development. Also, the Return to Player of slots is very favorable, with some hitting an impressive 99%. There are different types of slots right now. The best of them all is progressive slot, also known as progressive jackpot.
What is a Progressive Slot?
As the name suggests, this is a slot machine with a jackpot that increases gradually, unlike the other slots which have a fixed jackpot. A percentage of money wagered is added to the main jackpot. It's very hard to strike a fortune in progressive slots, just like the lottery.
Types of Progressive Slots
There are different kinds of progressive slots as listed below:
1. Standalone Progressive Slots These are popular in land-based casinos and are not connected to any other slot machine; hence the jackpot is not as big. But it increases by a small percentage for every coin played.
2. In-House Progressive Slots Also known as local or proprietary slots, these are just standalone progressive slots linked to a network of slots within the same casino. In some cases, the slots can be linked together with others in different casinos, maybe because it's the same line of casino or the casinos share the same game suppliers.
3. Wide-Area Progressive Slots These are the most popular slots and the most rewarding. As the name suggests, the slot machines are connected over a wide network. That means there are more players, and consequently, the jackpot is big. These slots require massive infrastructure, and that drastically lowers the Return to Player.
4. Random Progressive Slots Also known as mysterious progressive slots, these interlinked multi-tiered slots are common in land casinos than the online scene. Random progressive slots have two or more jackpots categorized as minor progressive and the major progressive slots. These jackpots are dealt out randomly. Their advantage is that players can win small, frequently.
The above are the most popular progressive slots. Now, there are hundreds of different progressive slots. As usual, there are some worthy games to try out while others are a complete joke. Some of the worthy progressive slots to try out include Megabucks, Wheel of Fortune, Mega Moolah, and Elvis.
Progressive slots may be hard to strike, but if it's the lucky day, winners get a handsome cheque. Obviously, the wide-area progressive slots are the ones with big wins, though they come rarely. For players who want the big money, go for WAPs. But to stay afloat, it's better to play random progressive slots.
A Beginner's Guide to the Best Progressive Slots for 2020 In this beginner's guide to progressive slots, find out what is a progressive slot, the different types available, and some of the best games to try out.


The design of the Bomber Jointed Wake Minnow creates an eye-catching V-wake that will entice fish all over the world to blow up and bite.
The design makes it easy to fish and cast. Keeping the rod tip up with a medium retrieve will allow the bait to dance and move just beneath the water's surface. A faster retrieve with the rod tip down will make the bait swim a few inches below the water's surface.
The Jointed Wake Minnow can be used to fish for a multitude of fresh and saltwater fish. It comes in ten different colour options and the 3D high definition patterns give the bait a realistic look. This new high-energy bait comes equipped with heavy-duty hardware and black nickel hooks making it tough enough to handle big fish and durable enough to withstand saltwater.


Due to the uncertainty from Hurricane Michael, the Raise a Racquet tournament and Kid's Rally have been postponed until Friday, October 19. We hope to see you then!
Because 100% of the proceeds from Raise a Racquet benefit UNC Children's Hospital, we cannot offer any refunds. Thank you for your understanding and for supporting this important cause.


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Forrest "Fog" Clyde Hamilton (Saint Clair, Missouri, June 16, 1930 – October 7, 2021) is an American former basketball player who was a star player for the University of Missouri in its back-to-back national championship appearances in 1952 and 1953, also serving as an alternate for the United States at the 1952 Summer Olympics, and on the gold medal-winning 1954 FIBA World Championship tournament team. He was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 1990. He was chosen in the sixth round of the 1953 NBA draft by the New York Knicks. He later played in the Amateur Athletic Union with the Peoria Caterpillars.

Forrest later became a sales professional for the Chase Bag Company in St. Louis, Missouri. He married Betty Von Hoffmann, with whom he had two children. After this marriage ended, he married Joan Francine Merlo, with whom he moved to Louisville, Kentucky, for his employer, and had another son. The family later moved to Beaverton, Oregon, again for Hamilton's employer. He died there at the age of 91.

References

American men's basketball players
1931 births
Living people
People from Franklin County, Missouri
University of Missouri alumni
FIBA World Championship-winning players
1954 FIBA World Championship players
United States men's national basketball team players

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The Newtown Bee will host a forum on Tuesday, October 23, in the auditorium of Edmond Town Hall, 45 Main Street, featuring 106th District State Representative Mitch Bolinsky and challenger Rebekah Harriman-Stites and 2nd District State Representative Will Duff and challenger Raghib Allie-Brennan.
Senator Tony Hwang and challenger Dr Michelle Lapine McCabe have been invited to take part, as has 112th District State Representative J.P. Sredzinski, who is unchallenged in this election. These candidates will be granted time to briefly introduce themselves and their platforms.
A meet and greet of candidates, with refreshments, will take place at 6:30 pm, followed by the forum from 7 to 8:30 pm.
Candidates will respond to questions solicited from the public and vetted by The Newtown Bee prior to the forum. Candidates will not have seen the questions beforehand.
Newtown residents are asked to submit questions for the state representative candidates to editor@thebee.com, subject line "Bee Forum Question," no later than Tuesday, October 16, at noon. Questions should address town/state issues that are relevant to the office of the state representatives.


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The Worst Throwback Thursday Ever
As some members in Congress are rushing to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, they are failing to address the real-world impact repeal will have on real people. So what are the facts that they want us to ignore? What would ACA repeal actually mean?
For women, we know what the world was like without the ACA—and repeal will throw us back to that time—a time where insurance companies wrote their own rules, indiscriminately charging women more than men for health coverage, denying women coverage of critical services, and imposing high costs that effectively deterred women from accessing care.
This blog is the first in a series of "Worst Throwback Thursdays (TBTs) Ever" that will break-down the real-world effects that repeal of the ACA will have on women's health and economic security.
We are starting this #WorstTBTEver blog series by talking about Medicaid expansion because it's an often overlooked part of the ACA. Many think the ACA is just about improving private insurance, but through Medicaid expansion, it made a major improvement in public insurance too. Medicaid expansion and the progress it's made for women's health and economic security don't get the love and attention they deserve. So let's give it some.
What is Medicaid expansion?
Before the ACA, a population of lower-income individuals who did not qualify for Medicaid but could not afford private coverage was in dire need of affordable health coverage in order to access the care they needed to get and stay healthy. An important provision of the ACA allowed states to expand their Medicaid program to cover these people.
The technical details: states can expand Medicaid coverage to individuals who don't qualify for traditional Medicaid but have incomes low enough that they can't afford private insurance, like families of four who earn $33,465 or less per year. Although the ACA envisioned this happening in every state, a 2012 Supreme Court decision allowed states to decide whether or not to expand Medicaid in their state. So far, 32 states including DC have expanded Medicaid.
What is the impact of Medicaid expansion?
Medicaid expansion has been huge for women, who rely more heavily on Medicaid coverage than men. Seventeen percent of adult women ages 18 to 64 are currently enrolled in Medicaid. And states expanding Medicaid have seen large increases in Medicaid enrollment – between 2013 and 2015, over 3 million women in Medicaid expansion states gained health insurance coverage either through traditional Medicaid or through the expansion. In non-expansion states, fewer than 400,000 women have gained Medicaid coverage during that same period.
These women who now have Medicaid coverage are getting a comprehensive range of services that address major health needs throughout their lives, including birth control, maternity care, prescription drugs, hospitalizations, and long-term care. A growing body of research has demonstrated how important Medicaid coverage is to enrollees' access to care, overall health, and mortality rates.
At the same time, Medicaid has played a critically important role in advancing women's economic security. It keeps women and their families from medical debt and bankruptcy. By providing health coverage to women and their families that is not tied to employment, Medicaid allows women to seek positions that may offer higher wages or better opportunities, and it also has improved the economic security of future generations. Medicaid's coverage of birth control allows women to determine whether and when to start a family, expanding their educational and career opportunities. And Medicaid payments to health care providers directly support women's jobs.
Because of all these benefits, Medicaid expansion is a bipartisan issue— with Medicaid expansion happening in states like Ohio (where over 200,000 women have gained Medicaid coverage between 2013 and 2015), Pennsylvania (over 113,000 women), and Nevada (nearly 75,000 women).
What will happen if the ACA is repealed?
Repealing Medicaid expansion will throw people back to 2010. Those who have gained health insurance coverage through the Medicaid expansion will lose it and without it, their health and economic security will be put at risk. Lower-income uninsured women are more likely to go without care because of cost, are less likely to have a regular source of care, and utilize preventive services at lower rates than low-income women with health insurance.
But repealing Medicaid expansion doesn't just threaten the individuals who are enrolled in Medicaid. If Medicaid expansion is repealed, it would lead to the loss of an estimated 1.5 million jobs in 2019. This includes jobs in the health care industry, where women comprise a disproportionate share of workers. For example, women comprise nearly 77 percent of hospital employees. Loss of Medicaid expansion will also hurt states' economies. The job loss and damage to the economy would happen even in the states that chose not to expand Medicaid.
Repeal of Medicaid expansion would hurt all of us.
Medicaid Expansion has been an important part of promoting health and economic security for more women and families. Repealing the Medicaid expansion would make this Worst Throwback Thursday Ever a reality. And we can't have that. Women need health insurance. Women need jobs. Women need Medicaid expansion. Women need the ACA.
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Home » Film Festival Highlighting Technology Set to Debut in Southern California
Film Festival Highlighting Technology Set to Debut in Southern California
A new film festival highlighting creative content made by aerial filmmakers is set to debut in in Southern California this March. The inaugural Southern California Drone Film Festival is set for March 6, 2021 and marks the only event of its kind in California. The one-day virtual event will include panels on drone technology, cinematography, and video production, and will culminate with the awards ceremony highlighting shorts from creative storytellers.
The festival is the brainchild of Southern California native Jay Seidel. A Fullerton College professor and head of the Fullerton Drone Lab. "There is so much great visual content being created with drones," Seidel said. "I wanted to find a way to showcase it all here in Southern California, so people could enjoy it and we can recognize the efforts from these innovative filmmakers."
As with most public events, the festival is being held remotely in a virtual environment. In addition to showcasing the finalists and announcing the winners of the 14 categories, the festival will provide videos of interviews with filmmakers, photographers, journalists, drone professionals and many more. There will also be some training videos, as well as an exclusive screening of a new documentary on the first-person view (FPV) drone craze. As a professor, Seidel said the festival looks to encourage education as well as expanding creativity.
Tickets are only $25 for a month access to the content. The Southern California Drone Film Festival showcases the best and most creative content captured by drones by aspiring and professional filmmakers from around the world. More information can be found at the festival website or the virtual event site.
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Fractured Globalization & Dissolving Ethics, with Nikolas Gvosdev
Belfast, Northern Ireland, March 24, 2020. CREDIT: Gerry Lynch (CC)
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Good afternoon, and welcome to our first Carnegie Council lunchtime webinar. Like many of you, we're working remotely these days, so we're using this time to reach out to our Senior Fellows, friends, and constituents to talk about the important issues of ethics in public life that are at the heart of the Council's work. Thank you all for joining us wherever you are.
Our Senior Fellow Nick Gvosdev is in his office in Newport, Rhode Island. Nick is professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport. He is also a Carnegie Council Senior Fellow in our U.S. Global Engagement program.
The U.S. Global Engagement program is animated by three goals: first, to reshape discussions of American foreign policy to address the causes and consequences of U.S. disengagement; second, to move ethical considerations to the center of thinking about international relations; and third, to examine the narrative shifts taking place as America redefines its role in the world.
Nick's talk today goes right to the heart of his work and to the Engagement project itself. Great title: "Fractured Globalization and Dissolving Ethics," which I think is perfect for this moment.
Before turning it over to Nick, just a word about the format. Nick is going to talk for about 15 minutes. After that, he and I will chat for about 15 minutes. The second half of the hour will be interactive. You can use your chat function to pose your question.
With that, let me turn it over to you, Nick.
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: Thanks, Joel. Thank you all for joining in. I'm looking forward to a fascinating discussion.
When I tell people that I'm affiliated with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, particularly when it's people who are at the Naval War College or who are part of the national security establishment, the assessment starts out being that the strategic course of action and the ethical course of action are somehow in opposition to each other, that you can be ethical or you can be strategic, but that these streams do not easily cross. Yet what we're seeing with the pandemic crisis and what's happening in the international system is, in this case, a convergence of the strategic and ethical considerations, that they're actually coming together.
What I would like to do in this opening part is not speak about the ethical question and the strategic question in the completely global framework of looking at humanity on a single planet but bringing it to a more grounded and defined area, which is to look at how strategic and ethical considerations are overlapping and impacting the health and durability of what we usually refer to as the Euro-Atlantic community.
Let me back up for a minute and lay out the strategic picture. For the last 70 years or so it has been an article of faith in the U.S. national security community that America's own security, prosperity, and position in the world are enhanced if we can first promote integration and unity among our European allies so that they will work together and then to promote a tie across the Atlantic between Europe and the United States, where Europe and America together can set a global agenda and can maximize their economic, political, military, and cultural power to engage in other regions of the world, to spread zones of peace and security, and to expand liberal democratic and free market institutions.
For this to work you need both a Europe that sees itself as integrated and then to see Europe and America as forming this Euro-Atlantic community, where the countries and populations believe that there is a tie that binds them that is more than just simple cosmopolitanism, more than just simply saying: "We're all human beings. We all inhabit a single world, and therefore, we have obligations to others as human beings." The idea of the Euro-Atlantic community is that the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Austria, and Greece should somehow feel that there is a greater degree of connectivity between them than they share with countries that are not part of the Euro-Atlantic community.
Generally, we measure membership in the Euro-Atlantic community through its two core institutions: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union. Not all countries that are members of the EU are members of NATO—Britain, the United States, and Canada are not members of the European Union but are key members of NATO. Beyond those two formal institutions, there is a whole dense network of ties that connects these countries together—shared economic ties, technological ties, and so on. That's the strategic picture.
Where the ethical piece comes in is both NATO and the European Union are solidly grounded in the ethic of solidarity. That is, both of these institutions take as their starting point that the institution exists to promote solidarity among its members. The European Union does this through Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union; NATO does this certainly most famously through Article 5 and to a lesser extent through Articles 4 and 3.
The idea is that: "When you're part of this institution, your problems are my problems. If something impacts you, it impacts me. If you are attacked or you are facing difficulty, I am obligated to render aid and assistance to you as if it was something that was impacting me." The way you hold these organizations together has always been the promise of solidarity. The ethical component of it is, "Your problems are my problems." Certainly during the Cold War you had an existential military and ideological threat to the West where it was easy to forge those bonds of solidarity.
I teach History of the Cold War for Harvard Extension. I had a class last night, and we were talking a bit about this question of solidarity, the idea that sooner or later in the 1950s or 1960s there was a sense that the Soviet Union wouldn't simply stop at one or two countries. Ultimately for it to achieve its objectives it would have to take control of Europe as a whole and then be able to strike the United States. That enabled countries and their populations to understand this sense of solidarity, that Germany's problem is Spain's problem is Italy's problem is Britain's problem is Canada's problem is the United States' problem.
We sometimes forget today that it was the United States which helped to get what is now the European Union started, again by promoting this idea of solidarity, that West Europeans were faced with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union could outclass any single European country by far. The only way for Western Europe to consolidate itself would be to promote integration, and part of the way of promoting integration was promoting this sense of solidarity.
We have seen this all the way through to the current period: Why do taxpayers in Germany or Sweden contribute more? Why do other countries in Europe benefit more from EU stabilization and development funds? You might have a taxpayer in Sweden saying, "Why am I paying for roads in Portugal or Greece?"
The sense is that: "Well, you're paying for development there, and in turn they will be doing things for you. They will be buying your goods and services. As their economies grow they will contribute," and so on. This ethical obligation of solidarity is written into these two organizations. Of course, it has been something that political leaders will always bandy about: "We are together, we are united," and so on.
The pandemic response in 2020 has damaged that ethic of solidarity. As the pandemic first arrived in Italy and Spain, as it began to spread to other European countries, and as it then arrived in the United States, the idea that what affects you should affect me and I should be giving you aid and assistance based upon this ethic of solidarity, based upon this strategic logic of solidarity, eroded very quickly. The initial response as different countries within the Euro-Atlantic sphere were impacted by coronavirus was to put borders back up, was to institute export controls, and was to say: "You need equipment, but we may need it, and so we're not going to allow it to be exported to you."
What you had, at least in those first critical weeks in February and March, was countries within the Euro-Atlantic world not only simply not rendering aid—the first ethic of solidarity should be: "You're in trouble. I have something. I can help you, so I will give you masks, ventilators, spare capacity. We will deploy people to help you"—you had countries beginning to take steps that actively injured other members of the community, which is: "We're not simply not going to give you aid, but we will take steps in our own country that are going to actively cause the citizens of your country greater harm or greater tragedy."
When you have the countervailing ethic of sovereignty—and it's a natural reaction—on the one hand, you have the ethic of solidarity—what affects you affects me—and then you have the ethic of sovereignty, which says the price of sovereignty, the price of self-determination is that you take responsibility for yourself and for your own, and therefore you don't have a right to make claims on others or those claims lessen against the claims of my own citizens.
So you saw borders going up, checkpoints going up, restrictions, and then in the financial area, countries in the European Union harder hit by the pandemic asking for the floating of what they were calling "corona bonds" and more fiscally conservative countries in the Union being less likely to do it. We had then across the Atlantic competition for resources, competition to acquire patents and assets, saying: "Well, if I acquire this asset or I acquire this company that's working on something, then they're going to do it for me and not for you."
All of this creates damage to this ethic of solidarity, and this is why I'm concerned as we move forward that you already have people saying: "Well, this pandemic is a problem and it's a crisis, but then it'll pass, and somehow we're going to go back to the way things were pre-2020."
My sense is that when you damage the ethic of solidarity it's not that you can't reconcile, but you have opened up the possibility for countries and populations to say: "The last time we had a problem others did not have our backs. Therefore, we should be more concerned and reticent to so quickly offer aid in the future, or maybe that aid isn't dependable, so we shouldn't prepare or expect our partners to be able to do that," and you begin to erode those bonds. It's like termites working their way through the frame of a house. They begin to undermine it, and then perhaps that house isn't as stable for the future.
Looking at what's happening with the fracturing of the Euro-Atlantic community; those fractures are there. They have opened up. This doesn't mean that they're irreparable, that they can't be patched over, that you can't go in and put in some sealant and try to put the structure back together again, but the cracks have opened up. They have weakened that tie of solidarity.
Certainly in the case of Italy in those first critical weeks when it was Chinese and Russian efforts—even if they were modest, even if they were largely symbolic—that had an impact, and then to turn around later on and say: "Well, Italy you must now do certain things vis-à-vis Russia because your partners in Poland and Romania would like to see certain things happen vis-à-vis Russia, and European solidarity," you may find that the Italians say, "Solidarity only goes so far, and we're going to do things that benefit us." The trans-Atlantic relationship, even if there is a change of administration this November, the idea that you can just magically pretend that these things haven't happened and you reset to an earlier stage, I don't think that happens either.
Just to wrap up here, this is a case where the ethical and strategic questions really merge together around this question of solidarity. As the ethical basis of solidarity has been damaged within the Euro-Atlantic community there will be strategic consequences.
With that, I think I have covered the first 15 minutes, and, Joel, I will turn it back over to you.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Thank you, Nick. That was perfect, right on time, and right on topic. Thank you for that.
I wanted to pick up where you left off, about how the strategic and the ethical come together. As I look at the pandemic—and I have been saying this to anybody who will listen—if ever there was a realist case for global cooperation, this would be it. You have a global-scale challenge that affects everyone. What you have described is that the reaction has been zero-sum thinking. Everybody is doubling down on zero-sum, where it would seem, again from a realist perspective, from a practical perspective, from a problem-solving perspective, you would want some non-zero thinking, that it's going to take a cooperative endeavor to make progress for my people, if you will.
How do you respond to that? How would we even think about trying to change the frame, flip the switch, or introduce that idea, particularly against the background of the president of the United States right now going in the opposite direction? Any of these non-zero solutions, whether it's international cooperation around an organization like the World Health Organization (WHO), he's going the other way. Any thoughts about that?
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: That's a great way to frame it. As you know, Amitai Etzioni, a good friend of the Council for many years, America's leading tribune of communitarianism, has talked about this for a number of years also in international politics from a backdoor realist question. He has always been a little skeptical of the idea that countries work together out of a sense of the goodness of their hearts and that they believe in peace and brotherhood. He has always maintained that this idea of "communitarian realism," when countries are faced with a challenge that they by their own resources cannot adequately address, a realist consideration—that is, a consideration with the survival of the state, survival of the country, and maintenance of its position—will impel them to work together in order to fend off the challenge.
That's different from a zero-sum approach because one can argue that the zero-sum approach is what we saw as the response to the Great Depression after 1929, which is that countries said, "Well, I have to protect myself against this economic contagion," and they took measures that made it worse for everyone. Everyone was hurt by them.
So, yes, you could see an argument being made that international cooperation, in this case of fighting the pandemic, is not a case of pie-in-the-sky cosmopolitanism, of "we have no countries" and "we're all one human family," but making a Morgenthau-based power argument, which is that the ability of your state to come out of this pandemic reasonably intact with hopefully most of your population recovering and with your economic potential being retained I think is the kind of way forward.
We have already seen this, by the way, over the last month in the deal that has been brokered on energy. For a month we had a number of energy producers—Russia and Saudi Arabia in particular—deciding: "We're going to break with collective action because we want to maximize what we think are benefits for ourselves. If we increase our production of oil, then somehow we'll benefit and others will lose." What everyone was discovering, even the United States, was that you were starting to have a race to the bottom where everyone was losing and not cooperating; the zero-sum mentality was not producing effects.
The current administration notwithstanding, I think one of the things you are going to see is the scientific and medical establishments in a number of countries saying: "Look, this pandemic threatens everyone. No group in the world has a natural immunity to it. No human group is somehow exempt from it, except than perhaps children and teenagers, who seem to contract it but don't seem to develop symptoms largely." But the idea that "my country doesn't need to worry about it because somehow something in the genetic makeup of the majority of our population gives us an immunity," that's not the case.
We're also discovering—and this is where the fractured globalization comes in—that we can fracture globalization, but nobody right now is prepared to go back to autarchy, to say, "Look, we're going to keep the moat and pull up our drawbridges and just hunker down," because the costs of doing that are so astronomical. This I think will force countries, even if they have to do so kicking and screaming, to some degree of cooperative action, again not out of a sense of "this is the right thing to do" in an ethical sense, but "this is a strategic thing to do for the sake of maintaining power and prosperity."
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Right. So it's a necessity argument.
Just to follow that thread one more step. Gordon Brown has come out with a statement saying that we need to create some kind of new global coordinating mechanism to deal with the pandemic. My sense is that the model he has in mind was the response to the financial crisis of 2008–2009. The idea, I guess, is levels of formality or informality in terms of how the great powers but also middle powers and others can coordinate their response in some way.
My sense is there are some models to look at. I suppose there is the financial crisis. To switch over to the health area, there is also the Ebola crisis. My question to you is: Are there some models we can look at to think about how to get to the collective action problem-solving aspects of it?
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: I think we have to deal with certain political realities. Not just in the United States but most of the major great powers and middle powers right now have governments in place—whether it's China, India, Russia, the United States, Britain, Italy, Saudi Arabia—that instinctively are not interested in creating another formal level of international organization. So I think those who are saying that we need a new broad-based multilateral organization with rules and a secretariat and structure, or who hope that this crisis will be an opportunity to push for greater global integration, politically we're not there.
I think then we have to look at the more ad hoc arrangements, through the G20 perhaps, or what the United States set up in the early 2000s with the Proliferation Security Initiative, which is you have a set of principles, you create working groups, you have clusters of countries that come together to share capabilities and missions, but without creating that overarching bureaucratic structure, the same thing that we saw with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries+ (OPEC+) arrangements, where there is no secretariat, there is no organization—OPEC is an organization—but then drawing in all of these other producers. Politically I think that is what the traffic will bear right now, this more ad hoc arrangement, and of course, at differing levels, where you have certain degrees of trust and relationships built up.
Again, this is where the Euro-Atlantic community has enormous, if untapped and somewhat damaged and frayed, connections but connections nonetheless. We have already seen it with some of the early companies and groups that are working on vaccines, which are these multinational—there's a lab in Canada that works with a lab in the United States that has ties to Europeans, and they're sharing data, and then they connect to someone in Israel with the biotech industry there.
I think we also have to expect that there are going to be differing speeds. You're going to have an ad hoc response, and there are going to be differing levels of integration and of cooperation within it.
But then that does beg the question of leadership, which is that someone will have to coordinate. What we saw with OPEC+ is that Russia and Saudi Arabia stepped up to co-coordinate that, then they had their falling out, and now they're maybe back to coordinating again. But there were two clear energy ministers who set the agenda.
Right now with this pandemic we don't have a clear sense of who the coordinators are. Is it going to be the United States? Of course, now that the Trump administration has decided to pick a fight with the World Health Organization, that raises the question: If WHO was expected to play this coordinating role, then you already have one of the major stakeholders questioning whether or not it wants to support it.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: This brings me perfectly to the next question, going back to our theme of fractured and dissolving solidarity. Is China taking advantage of this moment? Is Russia taking advantage of this moment? My own view is that China is perhaps and maybe will make a bid for leadership. I would be interested in your view on that. Russia is different. Russia may be perhaps playing more of a spoiler, which is just that the dissolving solidarity may be in their interest.
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: I would be interested, of course, for those who follow China much more closely than I do to weigh in on this. But what I have seen is that obviously China does see an opportunity as it made its bid in Davos in 2017 after the inauguration of the Trump administration, to say, "We can be the guarantor of international rules," and so on.
I think China is making a bid. It is undercut a bit by China's lack of transparency about certain aspects of how this crisis started. The luster of China's aid has diminished as Italians, Dutch, and others discover that some of the things they have been receiving are defective or shoddy. Notwithstanding that, yes, China is making the case that in the diminished role of the United States, some major entity has to step forward.
The European Union is still, I think, struggling. It is beginning now to take some steps in the right direction after a very problematic start in February and March, but whether Europe will also step forward to do it remains to be seen.
But it does raise this question. Ian Bremmer coined the term several years ago, G-Zero concept. What happens when you have a world order where there is no clear—you don't have a G20 that works; you don't have a G7 that works; the G2 or G3 concept of United States and China or United States, Europe, and China doesn't take? What happens if you end up G-Zero? Right now we are living in a G-Zero response. Ian's thesis is being tested in real time with this.
The Russians have always wanted not to eliminate American leadership in the world because they don't seek to supplant it, but certainly they would want to limit it. They would want to cut it down to size, and they have been very effective both in the aid they have provided and also in their information operations to strike at this question of Euro-Atlantic solidarity, which is to tell different European states: "Why should you be damaging your relationship with Russia? Italy, Germany, Serbia, Hungary, why should you damage your relationship with Russia because other European countries want you to do it because they have a problem with Russia? What are you getting out of it? Where is the solidarity in your time of need, so why should you do that in return?"
I think you're seeing, as you said, the spoiler aspect of Russia using this to—instead of facing a Euro-Atlantic community of 800 million people with a $20-plus trillion gross domestic product—begin to fracture that community so they can deal with pieces of it on a more equal basis now. Putin channels his own internal Rahm Emanuel—"Don't let a crisis go to waste"—and he is definitely taking advantage of it for geopolitical consideration. A great piece just came out by Eugene Rumer from the Carnegie Endowment precisely on that point, that Putin and the Russian leadership are looking for geostrategic advantage that they can extract from this crisis.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: I have one last question from my section of this, and then we'll turn it over to questions from the group, but I can't resist—and this is a big-picture challenge to you, a bit of a provocation.
Sitting there in Newport as professor of national security strategy at the Naval War College, I'm thinking about your profession itself. When I think about what the challenges are to national security now, we've gotten a lesson. We could say that the biggest challenges may be sort of invisible—cyber, artificial intelligence (AI), health issues, viruses and things like this, and climate. Do you think that one result from this crisis could be a rethinking of how we think about national security, away from the usual ways of thinking about warfare and capacities in that way and thinking in a more innovative and creative way?
I'm going to be really ambitious with this question and tie it back to this question of solidarity—which is the values and interests that will be coming together to address issues of cyber, AI, health, and climate—and whether there is an opportunity to rethink and rebuild our way of thinking about national security around the values and interests of these new threats?
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: What I can tell you is that there has been an ongoing debate about national security—what is it, what are the principal threats? My colleague here in Newport, Derek Reveron, has been one of the thought leaders pushing this concept of "human security," which is that you have to think of national security in terms of the security of the human beings under your care.
Going back to your earlier question about Russia taking advantage of this, one of the elements of the Russian information push has been to tell Europeans: "Are you really worried about Russian tanks and green men, or are you worried about viruses and disease?"
And people say: "A hypothetical clash over a disputed piece of territory in East Europe is less relevant to me than people dying and hospitals that are overstretched."
I think what you're seeing is that for the last several years, the U.S. national security community really gravitated to this idea of great power competition and we're back to traditional hard power, ship-on-ship, tank-on-tank, plane-on-plane clashes between great powers, and we're really thinking about that. The pandemic is pushing the national security community, but more importantly it's pushing voters back to reconsidering what national security is.
There is some great work that is being done as we speak as people are looking at defense budgets and they're looking at people's responses to it and people saying: "I want more hospital ships. We need to have a more robust defense community that can respond to these types of outbreaks, not off contesting with Russia and China over oilfields in Eastern Syria, but dropping in people so that when we're hit by a virus we have an immediate response." I think you're going to see in the national security community—and it'll be interesting to see if politicians in the United States and in other countries begin to sound national security and defense spending that is more inward-looking on this.
Not to toot my own horn too much, I did a report on this two weeks ago for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, looking at the impact of the pandemic on NATO, and one of the things we're already seeing is people saying: "I'm part of an alliance, and defense spending is knowing that when there's a problem there is rapid response, and the military has medical units that can be dropped in and that's less about external projection of power and more about internal protection and internal security." So I think we're going to see this really pick up.
It may not be that much of a front-and-center issue in our own presidential election this time around—it could pop up as the core question—but I think this is going to be bubbling, particularly because as people say: "This pandemic is not going to simply be solved come summer; we may have more flare-ups"—the Harvard study suggests that social distancing may be something that we will have to continue doing in varying degrees, not necessarily lockdown, through 2022. That is going to cause people to question what they think of as national security and how they want their defense dollars spent.
To the second question that you laid out, I think it's something that we are really going to have to grapple with, about interconnected networks—cyber, health, AI, and dealing with climate change—and whether or not this is going to lead to a certain degree of retrenchment. Instead of us thinking about "the world," we're going to see the United States and other countries begin thinking about more geographically contained areas, where we say, "Look, we're going to concentrate on smaller but more resilient networks within a smaller group of countries."
Some of it may be dealing with climate change as well: "We need to ensure that certain areas are protected. We want certain supply lines." One of the things that may come out of this is the idea of the 10,000-mile long supply chain that may run through politically unstable, climate-challenged, and health-challenged regions of the world. You may have companies saying, "I'd like a supply chain that really only spans three or four countries," and maybe spans less geographic distance. Will this lead to countries beginning to think more in terms of pulling back and creating more compact networks within and, maybe not necessarily completely severing their ties or their linkages, but diminishing them?
We're already seeing this, by the way, with the Internet. We talk about the Internet as a single global space, but the major authoritarian powers have already been creating alternative Internets that they can then try to disconnect or lessen the connection to the larger Internet. But at some point will we have a Western network that, yes, it's connected to a larger global network, but where we really make it dense and compact within? I don't know if that's going to happen, but I think it's going to be on the table.
It may align with a narrative as we've started to see in the 2016 and in the 2020 campaigns—we don't know the extent to which Joe Biden will or will not embrace this, but certainly a number of his Democratic competitors for the nomination were talking about retrenching, pulling back, and creating a more digestible international grouping of countries that wasn't 194 countries of the world all coming together—if we're going to see that kind of pressure in the years ahead and whether or not this decoupling or partial decoupling with China becomes a point of bipartisan agreement. The Josh Rogin piece that we cited in Ethics & International Affairs last week—if that becomes a bipartisan point in the United States that we are going to decouple a bit with China, not disconnect but decouple a bit, then that leads to your point that more dense networks with a smaller set of countries and parts of the world that we are less connected to.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Great answer. Thank you, Nick.
BILLY PICKETT: If Joe Biden becomes the nominee, can we return to a pre-2016 focus on international cooperation similar to that of the Obama administration? Will other nations still trust that the United States will be a reliable leader in global cooperation?
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: Another good friend of the Carnegie Council, Tom Nichols, has made the point that even if Biden wins—or anyone else, a successor administration—that once the United States demonstrated that it was willing or able to turn its back and rupture some of these arrangements it does become hard for other countries to ever fully re-trust the United States again. Even if Joe Biden wins the election and comes in and says, "I want to reset to 2016," I'm sure other countries in Europe will be very welcoming of that, but they're going to be a bit more cautious because it's going to be a case of, "You did it once before." It also shows that there is a segment of the American electorate and also of the American political elite that was willing to disconnect in that way. So I think from this point onward, European states in particular will want to recreate and reconnect but they're going to hedge their bets more.
The other thing, of course, which is a fascinating thing to speculate about, is that between now and November how much does Joe Biden decide that he can reset or is prepared to do that? You had President Obama's endorsement of his former vice president essentially saying that you can't completely reset, you can't just go back to the policies of my administration, that things have changed. So the question is, what direction does Biden evolve in? Does he take on some of the policy prescriptions and advice from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and then take the Democratic establishment in that direction?
Of course, one of the things that I always point out when I teach these things to students is that personnel is policy: Who will staff a Joe Biden administration? If you take that Thomas Friedman column where he wrote, "We need a kind of grand unity cabinet," and he had all these different proposals for people who should be serving in a Biden administration, you look at that and that becomes, "Well, some of it would be trying to reset." Then there would be people saying, "No, we want to take things in a different direction. How hands-on of a president does he plan to be if he's elected? Who is his vice president?" We don't know. How much will he follow the pattern of his own vice presidency and that of the Bush and Clinton administrations with a much more involved and dynamic vice president who in some ways becomes not quite a co-president but very much a junior figure in the administration? These are all things we don't know yet.
I think that if Biden in his own heart of hearts would say, "Look, if I could magically reset the country and the international system back to where we were in 2016, of course I would. Can I?"
That's the other question. He may decide, just as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, that certain strategic initiatives that they both supported in the Obama administration, for political reasons they will not support, just in the same way that Hillary Clinton was for the Trans-Pacific Partnership until suddenly she discovered she was against it when she discovered that an important chunk of her electorate was lukewarm about it.
That's a great question. I think there's a lot in the air, and what we'll start to see over the next months is who the vice presidential pick is going to be, what happens at the convention—even if it's a virtual convention—who become the spokespeople, what become the themes, and of course, if Joe Biden is elected, what happens between November and January with who controls the transition?
BRETT BUCHNESS: I agree that pushing against China is becoming a more bipartisan stance. However, I do question the economic viability of it. The exploding middle-class demographic in China represents a massive economic opportunity. Economic leaders in the United States are keenly aware of this. For all of Trump's tough talk, to what extent is he willing to injure the economy on principle? For example, he has backed off of some tariffs and postured to back off of more. Are supply chains too deeply integrated to truly pull back without causing global recession?"
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: That's a great point, which is that politicians can talk, but economics walks, in the sense that, what is the business community doing? What are companies doing?
This point about the embedded supply chains I think is a critical one. It's a lot of easy talk until consumers and producers begin looking at the costs of disconnecting those supply chains, disrupting them, and then trying to create new ones. Right now everyone is saying it's terrible to be connected to China. That doesn't mean that in a year's time when we're through at least the first waves of the pandemic and people are back to work and back to spending that they're going to say, "I'm going to pay double for a television" or "I'm going to pay three times the price for sneakers, but then I'll know that I'm doing my part to disconnect our supply chains from China." I think that's the critical thing.
My initial forays—not scientific, not polling, but the people I know in the business community—say that right now no one is making any definitive reorientations of their supply chains. They are considering it, and they're aware of it, but no one has yet made the plunge to say: "I am now prepared to disconnect from a supply chain in China, disconnect from the Chinese market"—the other point that Brett raised—"and take my chances with a different supply chain." I think it will be interesting for us to observe this stimulus package that Prime Minister Abe got through the National Diet in Japan, which has money for Japanese firms to try to repatriate certain things back to Japan away from China. It will be an interesting gamble to see what happens.
In our context, Brett, I think one of the things we need to look at over the next year is what the Pentagon does in terms of supply chain management and stockpiling because if the Pentagon says, "Well, just-in-time supply chains" and so on "aren't working and we're willing to put money back into this and Congress is willing to appropriate that money . . ."
Just as a side note, the naval station at Newport has a lot of empty warehouses now because we don't stockpile anymore. What used to be full depots of equipment and other things that were just sitting and waiting for the balloon to go up are not really used anymore because we have adapted to this global supply chain.
We might say just-in-time supply chains are a risk, so we might say, "Okay, not so just-in-time, but we're not going to radically reorient." I think that's a good point. It's easy for think-tankers especially to talk about reorienting supply chains. The question is, are the green-eyeshade accountants looking at the bottom line of a company so sanguine to do the same just because a pundit opines that we should disconnect?
I think what we're going to see is people are going to look at what happens in Japan. If this Japanese effort is successful, you might see some effort to emulate it, but if it's not and it's just a boondoggle and once the crisis is over it's back to supply chains as usual, then I think we'll have our answer.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Nick, I have been trying to dwell on the more positive sides, but I do want to take a moment on the dark side. Going back to the main theme of fractured globalization and dissolving ethics, one of the leading areas—people that I look at to see where are we going with this thing is what's happening in Hungary with Viktor Orbán—"never waste a crisis." He is reacting in a certain way to consolidate his power. This is a country within NATO. He is, in my view, really taking it to the limit.
We can have our own conversation about what's happening in our country and so on, but I'm just curious—this is a taking-the-temperature question—what your level of concern is about this wave of populists at various levels? This is a global trend. What are you seeing, and what is your level of concern about populist leaders who are taking advantage of this moment to consolidate power and dissolve that ethic a little bit further of solidarity that we might deal with?
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: This connects back to your earlier comment about values, because NATO and the European Union as well now has to deal with the reality that two of its members—Turkey and Hungary—are now considered to be in the "partially free" or "partially not-free" category if you use the Freedom House characteristics, and that several other NATO members are teetering on concerns about the viability of their democracy.
For NATO this becomes a question of, is NATO a group of democracies or is NATO reverting back to an earlier conception of: "We are a group of countries that face a geopolitical, geostrategic threat from a large, perhaps unnamed country to the east. We don't necessarily need to share values; we just need to know who we're against"?
That raises the solidarity question because now in parts of Europe you have people who would say: "You may have a problem with Russia. We don't. If you don't share our values, we don't see a reason therefore to necessarily want to protect you. Take your chances."
After 1991, for two decades, NATO had a position where every country in NATO was adjudged to be a full democracy, and now we have a situation which reverts to a Cold War period in NATO where NATO had non-democracies or had authoritarian or illiberal democracies, or whatever terms you want to use to say you're not really at the full liberal democratic level; you've had some backsliding on that. What does that do to an alliance, which then says, "Do we have common values as a basis of solidarity?"
The question too which you have raised—which hopefully in more of these Carnegie discussions that we are going do, because there are other people who are part of the Carnegie family who have done some good work and thinking on this—combining technology gives you tools now to monitor people in a pandemic that, when the pandemic is over, governments may not return those powers or those tools.
If you now have an app which essentially allows you to say: "If I have my phone on and it's tracking me and then someone enters data that says you are symptomatic for the pandemic and it sends out an alert that says, 'Stay away from Nick if he's on the street,' or it says, 'Nick has COVID-19 and his phone has detected that he is now out of his home property and is in the store, so he needs to be detained as a public health menace,' and you say, 'Well, this is just for the duration of this emergency.'"
But when the emergency is over, are these tools that governments are going to necessarily give up or say, "Well, now that the emergency is over we're going to return your privacy to you, and we're going to delete those apps, and we're not going to take the app which tracks you for your health status"? Then say—what we used to have in authoritarian states, in particular when people would be not necessarily arrested but confined to a certain area—you were not allowed to leave the city; you were not allowed to leave the village.
Now you have the ability to say: "Well, you have left a zone. First it was for pandemic health reasons, but now we think your ideas are just as dangerous as germs you may be carrying, and so we're going to use those same tools." I think that's something to be concerned about, the erosion of checks and balances.
I know you said we're talking about Hungary, but even in this country, when you have: "I'm going to take a very expansive definition of the Article Two powers of the presidency to say that in a time of crisis I can pretty much do anything." When you breach those guardrails in a democracy, it's hard to put the guardrails back up. This was Senator Moynihan's classic observation back in his days as an academic, that once you have claimed power for something, it's rare that that power goes back or is clawed back. We saw that in national security with what people called "security theater," when we vastly increased surveillance and other things in the wake of 9/11, and the pandemic has the opportunity to do the same.
In the case of the Hungarians, because of the supermajority that Viktor Orbán enjoys in the Parliament, right now the check for Hungary is Viktor Orbán himself: How does he choose to use these powers that he has been granted? If he misuses them, what's the check against them other than saying, "Well, the next election?"
But as we have seen even in countries that are formal democracies, once you have those types of emergency powers you can begin to find ways to get around checks and balances. So, yes, I think this is something we need to be paying attention to and maybe having one of the friends of the Carnegie Council who really looks at the intersection of technology and politics to speak more on this because this is not an issue that's going away.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Your powers of perception are uncanny. Our talk next week will be on "Health Data, Privacy, and Surveillance."
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: Perfect.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: You've set us up perfectly. We're going to work with Jeff Kahn from Johns Hopkins University, who is the director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics there to lead us in this conversation, so it's an almost seamless transition to next week. Thank you for that setup, by the way.
We're coming to the end of the hour, so I'm going to adjourn the meeting. Nick, thank you very much for phoning us.
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: Thank you. This was a great conversation to have.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: You have given us a lot to pick up on as we move forward with these conversations. We'll try to do them weekly or perhaps even more frequently, so I hope people will be alert to the announcements for these programs.
We're going to post the recordings on the Carnegie Council YouTube channel, and then you'll also see reference to them, and the transcripts will be available eventually on the Carnegie Council website.
Thank you for kicking us off.
NIKOLAS GVOSDEV: Thank you very much.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Great. We'll be in touch with you directly, Nick, but thanks to everybody who has been listening in.
Joel H. Rosenthal President, Carnegie CouncilView Bio
Full Event Video: Fractured Globalization & Dissolving Ethics
YouTube: Nikolas K. Gvosdev on EU & NATO, Solidarity, & the Pandemic
YouTube: Nikolas K. Gvosdev on Cooperation or a Zero-Sum Response to the Pandemic?
YouTube: Nikolas K. Gvosdev on China, Russia, & COVID-19 in Europe
U.S. Global Engagement (USGE)Health World Economy Ethics Global Governance Global Public Health Globalization International Relations International Trade U.S. Foreign Policy Europe China Hungary Italy Russia United Kingdom United States
COVID-19: Eroding the Ethics of Solidarity?Nikolas K. Gvosdev
The Coronavirus Pandemic & International Relations, with Nikolas GvosdevNikolas K. Gvosdev, Alex Woodson
Hungary and the Values TestNikolas K. Gvosdev
Narratives, Priorities, and Defense SpendingNikolas K. Gvosdev
Does COVID-19 Change International Relations?Nikolas K. Gvosdev
Peace By Poison: How the Coronavirus Could Fix Globalization ProblemsNikolas K. Gvosdev
The Search for a New Narrative: Recasting American Involvement in the International SystemNikolas K. Gvosdev


Thanks to Brandbacker, I got to try OZ Naturals SPF 30 Tinted Sunscreen Moisturizer (free, in exchange for an honest review). The company's description says it protects against both UVA and UVB rays. That it can be worn alone or with makeup. And that the medium tint "blends well with most skin shades and evens-out skin tone, in addition to protecting skin from the sun's harmful rays."
Unfortunately, I'm just too pale for the medium tint (even with the bit of colour I've gotten in spite of sunblock this summer...call me Morticia! lol.). And at this time, it seems they ONLY have the medium tint (I checked on their site to be sure). But they DO have an Age Defying Moisturizing Sunscreen which I might check out eventually.
In the past, I would apply concealer and (if needed) a light layer of foundation, then spray with sunblock, then powder to make it less shiny. This left my skin feeling sticky. Conversely, if I applied liquid sunblock and then tried to put makeup over it, it would ball up (leaving me worried about protection) AND would feel very greasy.
So how does OZ Naturals SPF 30 Tinted Sunscreen Moisturizer fair? Well, it goes on smoothly and without streaks or balls. It absorbs quickly. It evens out the skin enough that I could skip foundation (though not concealer....those darn circles, lol). And it doesn't feel greasy or sticky at all. It doesn't really have a scent either (which is something I've always disliked about most sunblocks, they usually reek [often of coconut]).
I haven't yet tried putting foundation over it, to see if maybe that would help it blend more. But based on how well it absorbed without leaving a heavy layer, I'd think it would work well.
And it washes off easily with just a bit of cleanser (or even soap or a makeup removing wipe).
I'd say it's a great product. And I love the idea of having ONE product to moisturize, protect, and even out skin tone. Hopefully they'll come out with more shades soon.


Taste test: This bar had an unusual shape, as the sections were not actually rectangles, but instead were curved on all sides, with a curvy divider in between sections, a big departure from the typical rectilinear geometry seen in most multisection candy bars. The top of a each section had just a small stylized "G" from the Galaxy logo. The chocolate on the top and sides had a smooth appearance, but on the flat bottom of the bar, I could see bits of honeycomb showing through.
I bit in with an eye on that strange section divider, eager to see whether it would break cleanly along that curvy line. It did not. The chocolate taste was good, and the honeycomb added a nice crunch. I couldn't taste that much honeycomb amid all of that chocolate — it was a far cry from the all-honeycomb-interior Crunchie, but the chocolate was pretty good, though kind of on the sweet side.
Smell test: Very, very mild chocolate smell.


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Hey I am looking at building either 21' or 30' pool 54" deep saltwater sand filter. Can I have you recommend pump, filter, salt clorinator, and liner and anything else I am missing?
Hello Justin - We'd be glad to assist you. Are you building an above ground pool?
If you go to our above ground pool page, we have product suggestions for each size. Click on the links below. On the 21' sizes, click "customize" next to the pool you're interested in.
Click here for 21' pools.
Click here for the 30' pool.
I see the different options but I am not looking for the pool frame just liner and other mentioned equipment.
That will take you to a page that has equipment and liners for a 21' x 54" pool. Click on the blue links under the item to see the full description of the product. You can buy the items independently from the complete pool.