#and this caricature appeared in one of the far right newspapers. If it had been from a newspaper on the left or a journalist/ whoever publ

[route22ny]

Sky

Perhaps this will be hard to read. Laments often are. It may bring you comfort, or it may make you angry. It may make you think more of me, or less. It may offend you. Rest assured, it offends me. So be it. 

Once upon a time, there was a man who spoke of torture as a good in and of itself, to be pursued whether it was effective or not. Who promised to use the power of the state to enact violence upon scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities. Who insisted upon framing our struggle against Mideast terror groups in the same religious terms the terrorists themselves insist upon. Who praised himself for nursing petty grudges, for treating revenge as justice. Who threatened the free press with retaliation for reporting certain truths about him. Who bragged about sexual assault. Who mocked people more brave than himself and called their bravery weakness. Who lied seemingly without strategy, as if lies were good to tell only for the telling, who showed a shocking indifference to the very concept of truth. Who praised brutal dictators for their brutal methods. Who seemed (and seems) to be receiving shadowy support from a brutal dictator. Who claimed dictatorial power for himself.

This is fine.

He appeared entirely confused about the basic facts of geopolitical reality, or of how our government works, or even of the function within our government of the role he proposed to take on. He had a clear and obvious history of fraud and hucksterism, of enriching himself at the benefit of others with less leverage, and was even engaged throughout his campaign in a lawsuit for defrauding college students, since settled for $25 million dollars. He speculated with frightening casualness about destabilizing actions: proliferation and even use of nuclear weapons, defaulting on our debts and our treaties, backing out of our most long-standing alliances. He publicly called upon the intelligence apparatuses of foreign governments to intercede in our election on his behalf, and it seems increasingly likely they may have obliged. He whipped his crowds into frenzies, then directed their ire toward journalists reporting the event, many of whom he threatened to prosecute once in power. He offered to imprison his political adversary, to the delight of his chanting crowds, who wore t-shirts decorated with the flag celebrating the war to preserve American slavery, decorated with vulgar slogans of violence and rage. He promised to steer us directly into the deadly heart of the oncoming climate catastrophe; having claimed the work of men more intelligent and knowledgeable than he was nothing but a Chinese hoax, he sneered at the very idea of new energy sources.

This is fine.

That’s a short list. It’s a hell of a short list. But wait, listen: The people went for it.

Tens of millions of people voted to make him the most powerful man in the world. He will soon have the ability to blast the planet to an irradiated cinder, if he sees fit. He will continue to run his business, which appears to involve sitting in a golden throne and putting his names on things. He's given every indication, despite some laughably thin feints toward divestment, he will run that business from the Oval Office. Maybe he’ll even put his name on new things, like laws. Laws: a whole new product line for Trump International, and a potentially lucrative one. He owes the banks of foreign powers millions and millions of dollars. One wonders what laws they’ll want passed. Word is, his first foreign trip will be to visit Vladimir Putin. Heigh-ho. 

His party is in control, too. They don't seem bothered by any of this. They're a bit more focused on providing checks and balances upon ethics watchdogs who have pointed out their party leader's multifarious and historically unprecedented infractions. They'd rather ignore those, so they can immediately—immediately—get down to the serious business of divesting millions and millions of the most vulnerable people in our society from the only chance they have at affordable health coverage. They plan to replace this program with something...someday. Their speculation so far indicates they will be replacing it with the opportunity to save up hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for medical bills if you need them someday, or, if you don't have hundreds of thousands of spare dollars, to maybe go screw yourself. So, a lot of people are going to die in coming years, that would otherwise have lived, and they're rushing to make it happen. My, look at them laugh. 

Republican lawmakers sign legislation to repeal ACA and defund women's health care access through Planned Parenthood, January 2016

Meanwhile, they're ignoring as peccadilloes the caricatured infractions of a man who intends to keep his own private security detail around him, who expounds upon provable lies, and then when exposed simply doubles down on the lie, who is considering throwing the press out of the White House, and other maneuvers straight out of the dictator handbook. It's really something to see. It's a new order, trumping the old. Isn't it great again?

Laura Ingraham, speaker at the Republican National Convention, 2016.

It’s hard to understand what people hoped for from him other than this. It’s hard not to assume they were responding to the shockingly frank bigotry, his promises to return to an earlier time, the knowing use of slogans used byracists and fascists of days past. These are certainly what seemed to generate all the most popular applause lines. But I don’t want to think that of my country or my fellow citizens. I really want it to be something else. Let us consider other possibilities. Many seem to think that a great thing about him was his frankness. They liked that he “tells it the way it is.” Then again, those same people seemed most likely to think that he didn’t really mean his more shocking proposals. It’s a bit confusing, then, parsing what is meant by ‘telling it like it is,' as it appears to rely on selective trust in insincerity. Many voters, excited by promises to “drain the swamp,” but now disappointed by the recent appointment of a Goldman Sachs foreclosure kingpin to Treasury, of a Putin-connected oil executive to State, and by other signals the new president has given about his eagerness to rob us all blind, have been admonished by a key advisor for taking his words so literally. The 'alt-right' Neo Nazis and the KKK are very excited, for what it’s worth, about the more shocking proposals, and they remain confident our new leader meant every word.

You're really going to want to go to video on this one.

Some people thought he would be less likely to make them pay more in taxes, I suppose. So perhaps at last now we know the answer to the old hypothetical about whether we’d be willing to travel through time and sacrifice our lives to prevent the rise of a self-professing tyrant. Answer: We wouldn’t even suffer a hypothetical increase in our income taxes. I'm told folks voted for Trump because they were tired of being called racist. I imagine that was hard for them—who wants to be considered racist? If this complaint is yours, I imagine reading this (if you're still reading) is also hard. I sympathize; it's not particularly easy to write. But then again, the response seems an odd retort to the complaint. If your persistent problem is people keep telling you there is spinach in your teeth, you might consider getting a mirror and taking a look, rather than voting for the Jolly Green Giant running on a platform of outlawing all floss. And, perhaps, if it is painful to be considered racist, consider this: it may be all the more painful to live under racist oppression.

KKK Newspaper, The Crusader, endorses Trump. 

Many seem to have mainly enjoyed that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton, and it’s certainly true to say many concerns and criticisms could be levied against her. But the man they voted for as an alternative already stood actualized as the cartoon parody of any potential danger she may have hypothetically posed. Bad judgment? Corruption? Fraud? A proclivity to violent retaliation? A worry about temperament? Untrustworthiness? Lack of transparency? It’s hard to believe this all had much to do with Hillary Clinton and her faults. Hard to believe this list of concerns would yours, but your acceptable alternative would be Donald Trump.

Or maybe they believed the more lurid stories, the debunked, the ridiculous. Hillary’s murdered 80 people close to her. She invented cancer and put it in your cell phone battery. She is secretly seven tiny demons all stacked up in a pantsuit and glued together with the blood of aborted fetuses. She controls the Yosemite supervolcano, along with a cabal comprised of George Soros and 17 other Jewish industrialists. I don’t know what all. I know there are people like this, who have seceded from objective reality into a dystopian alternate dimension, where they can perhaps supplement the powerlessness they feel in their lives with the comfort of false control, of being one of the few with the secret knowledge unavailable to the masses. I don’t know what to do with them, because they live in an alternate dimension. And, it must be said, I don’t think there are 63 million of them.

So here we are. In grave moral and physical danger. All of us. And for what? I’ve heard the same line again and again since the election: “America isn’t a different country today than it was before the election.” Jon Stewart trotted it out. I think I heard it from President Obama.

I fear I agree with the statement. I’m puzzled, though, because I think it is meant to be reassuring, to think we’ve always been the country capable of such a choice.

The statement doesn’t imply that we’re still great. It implies that we were never good.

It has to be admitted, people responded to Trump for what he is. Which means we are left with the statements and proposals by which he distinguished himself. And millions of us—tens of millions—preferred him specifically for his points of difference. Excited by his promises to return us to a time when our system existed only for certain people, and the preferences and needs of all others were beneath consideration, or at least willing to overlook that, in favor of some material or policy advantage somewhere. And ultimately, the reason is immaterial. A man ran for president promising to use the power of the state to bring violence to scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities, to make America torture again, to make it easier for an already-militarized police force to employ violence, who praised dictators, who bragged about sexual assault, who praised vengeance as good, who promoted as fact debunked conspiracy, who stated his determination to ignore as conspiracy what the data overwhelmingly indicates is an oncoming extinction-level event. There was some other reason to vote for him, that allowed you to overlook these facts? Save it, please. It really doesn't matter. It was a bad reason. We have seen this movie before. Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore. They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding? What am I saying here? Am I saying we are Nazis? The answer, I suppose, has to be 'no.' Only Nazis are Nazis. We are Americans. But what that will mean in decades to come—'American'—has been thrown into hazard. We used to be the sort of place that doesn't allow Donald Trumps to happen. That's gone now, along with that specific sort of trust the world once had in us. In any case, what we seem to now be trying to redefine 'American' to mean seems like a rough beast, and omnivorous. Democracy reveals us by our choices and our actions, not our intentions. We are what we are. And Donald Trump will be president.

As a result, I’m bereft. Bereft of the country I thought I was living in. Bereft of the people I thought I lived among. Bereft of what I believed was a shared direction despite divergent opinions. Bereft of a belief in the possibility of a common dialogue or even a common reality. Bereft in confidence in basic decency and intelligence. Bereft of the spiritual heritage I was born into, because of course Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters were white Christians. Christians voting for a new Herod with the power of a Caesar is a pretty good joke for the universe to tell, I suppose. He’s even promised to go after the (anchor) babies.

My translation of the Bible is full of all this toff about loving your enemy, about how love of money is the root of evil, about showing hospitality to the widow and orphan and the immigrant, and admonishments against drawing the sword lest you die on it. My reading of the Bible doesn't ask "but who's going to pay for that?" My reading of the Bible suggests to me that if you wish to pretend to care about babies unborn, maybe you shouldn’t be so hostile to the idea of making sure they’re cared for once they are born and inconveniently and expensively needy, and perhaps you shouldn’t make so many of their mothers into the welfare-queen boogie-men of your whole realpolitik, and perhaps you shouldn't make weaponry a right more important than health and food. Maybe healing and wholeness and liberty is something that should be available to even the pagan. Maybe the door is open for the tax collector and the prostitute and the Samaritan. Maybe, unencumbered by the overweening need to be perceived as correct in every moral posture, they've even entered that door ahead of us as we do our best to hold it shut against unworthy access.

Maybe I got a trash translation. Maybe the other ones are all about the joys of using political power for your own aggrandizement instead of the call to self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, about the dangers of anchor babies and welfare mothers, about how paying tax money toward a shared life is tyranny, about how with terrorists you have to kill the families, folks, believe me, kill the women and children, you’ve got to go after the families, and we’re gonna torture again, folks, we’re gonna torture, believe me…

You know what? I believe him.

WWJD Check: White Evangelicals are the group most likely favor use of torture by a military superpower. 

* * * You wake up and the sky is gone. At times that’s how it seems. You wonder at it: how could there not be a sky? What will become of us now, in this world without a sky? Was it ever there, or did we just imagine it there, as an exercise of collective will?

And then you talk to other people who insist the sky is there. They say: It’s not gone, it’s just red now. Don’t be a sore loser, just because you didn’t want it red. Accept that we did want it red. It’ll be fine if it’s red. And anyway, the banks seem to like it red. Move on with your life. Suck it up. Hope that the red sky will be as good as the blue one. But the sky isn’t red. It’s not anything. It’s just … not. It is a not-ness. An un-sky. A nothing.

And then you start talking to people who laugh, not without compassion, that you ever fell for the idea there was a sky. They say: That big vast emptiness? Oh, yes. That’s always been there for us. Is it there for you now? How… interesting. We can tell you a thing or two about that emptiness, if you’d listen. We’ve been watching it an awful long time.

American Nazi Rally, Madison Square Garden, 1939 

Future Georgia Representative and Civil Rights pioneer John Lewis, beaten by a state trooper on "Bloody Sunday" in 1965.

Oh. Will he. Will he do that.

The sky is the future. Or it was the future. That’s how it seems, at times. How odd, to speak of the future in the past tense.

But the past tense presents us with further troubles. It seems the past is gone, too.

In 1965, everybody thought King was great, and nobody tried to dismiss him by tying him to violence.

Growing up, we were taught that we were a kind and good and just nation. The story we were given was of a nation born of a righteous cause, not quite made perfect by the godlike men who forged it, but honed to apotheosis over the decades that followed. The destruction of the native nations and their people, ah, tsk, a shame, we’d change it if we could, but unfortunately in the past and unrecoverable. Slavery, a dark stain, but by now expunged entirely. Jim Crow, its shameful cousin, absorbed by a saint named King, who led a boycott (a pleasant and polite and non-disruptive one, it seems, in our memories), then stood on some stairs to give a universally-admired speech about his dream of inclusion, and then, his work seemingly accomplished, having seemingly changed minds forever, ascended harmlessly into the clouds.

Somehow we are never culpable. It was always a long time ago. Mistakes were made, but we’d never make them ourselves. It was always somebody else holding the gun, the whip. We arrived here after that, you see, born blameless, without any afterbirth or shock, into the Greatest Country in the World. Our holocausts we absolved ourselves of, because they served to illustrate not the evil we’d done, but how far we’d come from it. We stood on the prow of the ship, looking forward as we cut new water, not aft looking back at whatever may have been churned up in the wake. Not big on the rear-view mirror, us, not fans of the over-the-shoulder glance. We’d tell ourselves stories of what lay behind. We’d imagine ourselves into those stories of darker times, making ourselves the protagonists. We would have been the ones to build false walls in our home to hide slaves. We would have marched with King. We would have spoken out against the Japanese camps. We would have stood at Stonewall.

Our moral arc bends ever toward justice; an inevitable thing. That was the story.

America was great, because it was good. All the old hits.

People still alive can remember this sort of thing very well. 

This kid is probably still alive. As are most of his classmates. As are the children with whom he refused to attend school. 

This also happened within living memory. 

It's amazing what people consider communism. I mean back then, of course.

Sometimes you’d hear stories about a random injustice or brutality. A policeman who had become a little too enthusiastic. A bad apple, and surely justice was served. If not, it’d have been in the papers You’d hear about it in the papers if it hadn’t been. A gay teen beaten to death in a cornfield. A car with the banner of the struggle to preserve human slavery on the bumper sticker. The KKK marching again, how quaint. Ah, you’d think, if you were like me. We still have some work to do. Cleanup on aisle seven.

Technology has changed that. We see with new eyes now, unless we choose not to. We see videos, dozens and dozens of them now, new ones each week it seems, of police shooting unarmed black people. Again and again and again and again. Can you remember all the names? I can't anymore. And I ask myself: why can't I?

We see the speed with which so many seem willing to seek and find the nearest handy reason the victim deserved his or her fate. We see the news organizations find a Sunday School photo for the shooter and a mugshot to represent the victim. We see acquittal and acquittal and acquittal. We see failure to prosecute.

And, perhaps, we begin to wonder.

We see the people protesting, unarmed, asking only that their lives be thought to matter as much as another’s, and we see the stormtroopers with their massive guns and their tanks, arrayed against a civilian population almost reflexively, like defenses in an organism’s bloodstream mustering against a disease. And we wondered, perhaps: why do they look so much—so exactly, if we’re honest—like an occupying force? 

We saw the white ranchers seize government land, pointing their guns directly at law enforcement officials, speaking openly of armed insurrection against the government, of revolution, of war. We saw them, later, seizing a government building. They weren’t protesting after centuries seeing their children and brothers and sisters killed without consequence by authority. Rather, they didn’t want to have to pay a grazing fee. Was it with surprise that we saw it: law enforcement seemed less frightened of these white men and their guns than they had an unarmed black woman in a sundress, or a 12 year old boy playing in a park? Were we surprised to see they seemed so level-headed in this situation, so much less likely to respond with immediate lethal force?

Why, those fellows with their arsenal didn’t even get convicted. They were less threatening to the system, apparently, than a man, arms up, lying on the ground next to his autistic ward begging not to be shot. (He was shot.) We might contrast to the treatment of the protesters at Standing Rock, and wonder…is the Holocaust against native people relegated only to the past? Would we change it, if we could?

We wonder: Are we seeing the system breaking down, unable to cope with new challenges? Or are we seeing a system working exactly as it’s always intended? Do we as a collective of 'white' people secretly want the police to control brown people by force? Are we secretly hoping that force will prove lethal, only occasionally enough to soothe our consciences, but frequently enough to promote an order less immediately costly, than the pain of culpability, than the justice of restitution?

If not, why are prosecutions so rare, and convictions even less so?

If not, why aren’t we protesting these killings? Why aren’t we in the streets?

Do all lives matter? If so, why wouldn’t we act like it?

White Christian America reveres Dr. King, it should be noted. You remember him—the peaceful guy who gave the speech that ended racism. If Facebook and newspaper op eds are any measure, we white Christians can’t stop bringing him up, almost as a cudgel, an admonishment to those today who would dare ask for their own human dignity, for not doing it as antiseptically as we remember it being done by him. And perhaps people begin to wonder: Why was King enshrined as 'the peaceful one' only once he was peacefully dead? Is King’s being safely dead our favorite thing about him? These days, we white Christians can claim to have brought his dream to reality (the white guy is usually the hero of the story in the movie), and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will not protest—and we white Christians don’t like protest. Heavens, no—it’s so divisive. Dr. King, he wouldn’t approve of this protest, nor that one, and certainly not that one. His protests were so polite! Why, nobody had any problem with them at all! Dr. King agrees with all of us in white Christian America so much, these days. Oh my, he never stops agreeing with us. Just ask us; we’ll tell you. Yes, and what ever happened to Dr. King, anyway, after he gave that speech that ended all inequality forever?

But no matter, I told myself. That’s a dying strain, it's not who we are these days. That’s just a few bad apples. We’ve made so much progress. They’ll exhaust themselves in a final futile sputter. We’re just about to turn the corner. Sure there are racists, bigots, white supremacists, lost-causers, and they're loud, but they're dying out, and they know it. They'll eventually run somebody on an overtly racist platform, and they'll lose huge—I disagree with Republicans, but most of them won't stand for stark white supremacy, surely, and obviously Christians won't be able to align themselves with it — and we’ll show them it’s no use, and they’ll retreat, retrench to even positions even more compromised, less fortified, further back, smaller, diminished. We’re a better country than that.

But then Donald Trump, a half-rate and transparently obvious bullshit artist, a greasy reality TV star most skilled at demonstrating his manifest ignorance, promising mostly the goodness of violence and the strength of vengeance, offering to return America to an earlier time, railing against the inconvenience of practicing sensitivity toward the perspectives of others (he called it 'political correctness'), received 63 million geographically-convenient votes to become the most powerful person in the world. Perhaps, if you’re like me, you took a moment then to ponder that statement about bad apples and what they do to the whole barrel. The meaning of it. And, perhaps, another saying, about recognizing a tree by its fruit. And, it must be said, though we refuse to face it: In America, our trees have long borne a strange fruit.

  Here’s what we’ve lost, or at least what I’ve lost: The assumption of goodness’s inevitability. The assumption of goodness of those around me. The assumption of good intent in their hearts. The assumption that the future is still there. The assumption that most of us will die of old age. Here's what I've lost, the one favor Donald Trump may ever do for me: The wool from my eyes. An illusion, particularly a pretty and a convincing one, can be a painful thing to lose.

I’ve gained a vision of tens of millions of people desperate to bend history’s arc back toward an injustice that favored them, and willing to fight for that regression, willing even to risk species-wide extinction rather than suffer the pain of facing the consequences of their own mountainous indifference.

The moral arc of the universe may bend toward justice, but the gears of history grind the weak. There are people now who are giddy, almost with the air of a teenager behind the wheel of a sweet-sixteen hot rod, to test out their perceived new warrant to deliver retributive and violent indifference to the people they deem unlovely. A headscarf yanked off here. A slur shouted in public there. A swastika scrawled on a wall here. A Neo Nazi propagandist advising the President of the United States in the corridors of power there. A crowd of seig heils in a government building, in praise of our new leader here. A few million children stripped of health insurance with no serious attempt at a replacement there.

They think this is allowed now. Sixty-three million people, complacently or enthusiastically or ignorantly aligned with white supremacy, gave them the idea it is. It’s going to be our job to show them otherwise. We must show them otherwise. And. Even if you voted for Trump—especially if you voted for Trump—the door is wide open for you to join in that struggle. You show them otherwise, too. All you have to do to join...is join. Your intentions were good? Excellent. I believe you. I've badly misunderstood you? Excellent. I believe you. Now, show it. Show your good intention by your good actions. You, like all of us, possess tremendous moral authority. Don't lend it any longer to those who have promised to squander it on atrocity. They seem intent on doing as they say. If you wait too long, they will leave you with none left to withdraw. Use it to protect those different than you. Use it against your own advantage, for the advantage of those who have none. And. If you, like me, did not vote for Trump, there is the great danger of complicity. You will be offered, if you, like me are white and straight and employed and well-off and cis-gendered and able-bodied and healthy and property-owning, the opportunity to be indifferent. Resist that current.

If the universe bends toward justice, the engine it has chosen for this good work is the hard and sacrificial struggle of good people willing to acknowledge the basic humanity of all other people. People who don’t think profitability is the foundational metric of goodness. People who don't think life holds a value that begins at conception but ends the moment it enters poverty. People bold and willing to become peaceful pebbles in the gears. To give time and money. To link arms with a married gay couple. To take sides in a cafeteria skirmish with a transgendered teen. To take a truncheon in the head for a Muslim. To paraphrase Jesus (another favorite who those of us in white Christian America appear by our words and deeds to consider as safely dead as Dr. King): to live, first you must die.

Or, as another poet says, love’s the only engine of survival.

So, what’s next?

First, we lament. We acknowledge the un-sky, the void. We listen to those who’ve been staring at it far longer than us. We name the challenge with clear eyes. That, I suppose, is what this has been.

And then we get to work. Let us hope our leaders will prove other than than they say they will. Let us not be so naive to think it likely. Let us oppose in a fierce and broken love. Let us meet with friends, we eat good meals with them. Let us consider people before money, and notice where our society fails to do so. Let us make art, and we try to make it well. Let us refuse to allow a comfortable silence to enfold a hateful or ignorant statement. Let us stand up against hate, bodily if necessary. Let us learn our system, and work within it. Let us call our leaders, and advocate for those who suffer. Let us practice generosity without care for the merit of the beneficiary, but only for their need. Let us investigate before we publish. Let us loudly proclaim the humanity others try to diminish. Let loudly proclaim the humanity of those who do not share our values, even as we oppose. Let us never celebrate the suffering of those who oppose us, for they suffer, too. Let us seek to divest ourselves of unearned cultural advantage. Let us enter spaces where our voices are not primary, and listen without thinking to speak. Let us create space to speak, in places where our voices are primary, for those who have had no voice. Let us reject optimism and blind belief. Let us embrace hope. Let us work. Let us work. Let us work. We are a people who have dreamed of the sky. I’d like to see if we can make it real.

source: http://www.armoxon.com/2017/01/sky.html (January 16, 2017)

VOTE

#a.r. moxon #racism in america #american dystopia #VOTE #RESIST #long reads

[janaikam]

Enemies to Lovers Trope

Before you say anything, yes I know not the best title. Second HAPPY BIRTHDAY LESSSSSSSSS( @lesslinette )!!!!!!

This is for you!!!!

Thank you @macaronsforchat for beta reading this!

Summary:  Alya has some suspicions about Paris' heroes and Nino's just hoping that everything doesn't blow up in his face.

AO3

“Good morning, Alya,” Nino greeted, kissing Alya on the head. She mumbled a good morning in response.

Alya was currently in their shared office space furiously typing out what seemed to be a new article for work. She was using both of their monitors. One screen had the Ladyblog up with videos of the most recent battle, and the other had a long list of notes Alya had been writing up.

Nino glanced at the document title, Hero Compatibility.

“Whatcha working on?” Nino asked, pulling up the other office chair.

It was hard to tell if she was just updating the Ladyblog or actually doing work stuff. Her latest job at the Paris Daily had her on the heroes section of their paper, so she was always doing something related to hero work.

Although Alya tended to keep the more serious topics for the newspaper, she was always changing it up so readers would still be interested.

“It’s something for the Ladyblog. I’ve been going through the recent attacks and analyzing how the heroes interact with each other and measuring their success against an akuma.” Alya turned towards him and he noticed the journalistic excitement in her eyes that he just loved.

“I mean every battle is successful, but some are harder than others and last way longer cause the hero dynamic isn’t the best or it takes time for Ladybug to get help. Take for example you and Chat Noir. You two work perfectly in sync to distract akumas and help Ladybug put her plan into motion.”

Nino nodded and motioned for Alya to continue. He knew she had so much more to say because when she got the chance to share a project, she shared everything. At least with Nino. Perhaps Marinette too.

“In all honesty, all of the heroes work fairly well together. The only battles that aren’t as smooth are the ones with Multimouse and Aspik. And I think I know why.” Alya paused for a dramatic effect. “Ladybug doesn’t like Aspik, and Chat Noir doesn’t like Multimouse.”

Nino blinked. That didn’t make a whole lot of sense to him. Why would Ladybug keep choosing holders that she and Chat didn’t like?

He opened his mouth to voice his thoughts, but Alya raised her hand to stop him.

“I know what you’re thinking. Why are they still being used as users? I think it’s the same reason why Ladybug and Chat Noir eventually give in to using the other holders. They need the miraculous’ power, and Multimouse and Aspik already know how to use that power effectively.”

Alya pulled up a video on the Ladyblog, Caricature. Nino remembered that battle. It was a particularly tough battle, and both him and Alya had been called in as back up, but even that wasn’t enough. If he remembered correctly, they needed Aspik for that battle.

Alya clicked ahead to about halfway through the fight. He noticed that though there was an ongoing battle, Ladybug and Chat Noir were off to the sides, and it appeared that the two were arguing about something. Of course, the video didn’t catch what was being said, but it was clear that both were upset when it became clear that the situation was dire, and Ladybug swung off somewhere. Likely to get Aspik.

Alya paused the video, but something nagged at Nino. He was pretty sure that both Ladybug and Chat Noir had disappeared at some point during that fight, but he couldn’t think of why Chat would have disappeared.

Clearly, it didn’t bug Alya as she continued with her proof.

“I can’t make out what they’re saying, but Ladybug disappeared and came back with Aspik not too long after, still upset. And the exact same thing happens whenever Chat goes after Multimouse. Remember Queen Silver?”

Nino remembered pretty well. Nino had been needed for that one, and he clearly remembered being alone for a good 10 minutes before Chat and Multimouse had shown up. He had thought it weird that Ladybug wasn’t with them. And then when the akuma had been released, Multimouse disappeared.

He shook his head. It just had to be some weird coincidence that one of them disappeared when the other appeared.

“I guess it makes sense, but why wouldn’t Ladybug like someone she herself chose?” Nino countered.

“I’m not exactly sure why they don’t like each other yet, but I have a plan to figure it out!”

Alya got up and from her chair and walked over to where her phone was charging on the other desk.

“Alya, as much as I admire your determination to figure things out, I think you should leave this alone. LB and Chat get the job done even if there are hiccups along the way. I mean what if we accidentally figure out Aspik or Multimouse’s identities? What then?”

Nino was starting to suspect that the two heroes’ identities were almost as important as Ladybug and Chat Noir’s identities.

“I won’t figure it out.” Alya waved off. “Besides this is important. If they can get past these differences then they’d be much more successful and faster at defeating akumas.”

Alya clicked on something on her phone and walked out of the office.

Nino sighed, hoping that Alya was right and that this wouldn’t blow up in her face.

--

“Nino, where’s the camera?”

Nino was just walking out of the kitchen when he came across Alya rummaging through the hallway closet.

“Uh, I think it’s still in my bag from my trip to Nice,” Nino replied.

He watched as she bolted up and ran towards the bedroom where their stuff was.

“Why are you in such a hurry?” he asked, watching Alya toss everything from his suitcase onto their bed.

“I have an interview with Ladybug, Chat Noir, Multimouse, and Aspik today and I’m late!” Alya explained quickly.

Nino moved to where his backpack was on the floor and proceeded to go through it.

“I got distracted by this article for work and lost track of time. I hope Ladybug isn’t too upset.” Alya paused from her search and took a deep breath. “Where is this dang camera!?”

“Here,” Nino said, handing it out to her.

“Thank you!” Alya gave him a quick peck on his cheek and ran out the door.

Nino glanced at her purse that was still sitting at the edge of the bed. He sighed. So much for him not getting involved.

--

Thankfully, Alya didn’t protest much when Nino said he was driving her to the interview. She was already pretty frazzled and to mix that with driving was not a good idea.

Ladybug had arranged the meeting to be held at city hall, which under normal circumstances should have taken them 10 minutes to get to city hall. Unfortunately, traffic was a mess, and it took them 30 minutes.

Nino was relieved when there was an open spot right at the front of city hall. Once the car was in park, Alya jumped out and started grabbing her equipment from the back. Nino hopped out to help, but somehow it turned against him as he ended up carrying all of Alya’s equipment.

Quickly entering the building, Alya showed her journalism badge and led Nino to a room not too far from the entrance. He figured Ladybug chose this room since it would be easy to hear if there was an akuma or something going on outside.

Alya knocked once and then opened the door. However, instead of four superheroes on the other side of the door, Ladybug and Aspik were there. Kissing. Quite passionately in Nino’s opinion.

To say Nino was shocked was an understatement. Of all the things he would have expected this was definitely not it.

“Uh…”

At the sound of Alya’s voice, the two heroes broke apart, realizing they weren’t alone anymore. Both of them were blushing furiously, not saying anything, which made the whole situation feel really awkward in Nino’s opinion.

“I think it’s safe to say they’re not enemies. Perhaps lovers?”

#nino #alya #my fic #enemies to lovers trope #lesslinette #ladybug #chat noir #multimouse #aspik #as less says ass pick #but in emojis #my writing #crack

[vavuska]

Three days ago Copenhagen woke up to find the iconic statue of the Little Mermaid vandalized with the black writing "racist fish".

A lot of newspapers that reported the news have attribuited the gesture to a protest for a frame of the Disney classic "The Little Marmaid" in which a fish with black caricatured features appears - a fish that at the time had already created controversy in the circles of the black movements -, an attribution that has never been claimed and which is nothing but one of the least accredited theory.

The statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen has nothing to share with Disney: it was built in 1913 in memory of Hans Christian Andersen and one of his most popular children-tales.

The statue has often been the victim of vandalism for the most generic reasons, as a symbol of the Danish people in general, similar in this sense to the Statue of Liberty for the Americans or to our Colosseum. The last vandalism that he suffered before the one under consideration dates back to January of this year, with the writing Free Hong Kong in solidarity with the protests that exploded in this regard at the beginning of the year.

The other two episodes in the photos, both belong to 2017 and were both accompanied by writings on the floor. In the blue case, the writing was "Befri Abdulle" (transl. Free Abdulle) and referred to a Somali refugee detained in Denmark in a controversial case, and in the red case "Danmark defend the whales of the Faroe Island" as a protest to the hunt to whales in the Faroe Islands, which are a protectorate of Denmark

The most accredited version on the matrix of the gesture, cited by local newspapers, goes to look for an episode that occurred in Denmark on the island of Bornholm against Phillip Mbuji Johansen, a Danish of Tanzanian origin who was on the island visiting to find his mother, who was found dead, with signs of torture and a split skull, on the island on July 1st of this year, a few days before the message on the statue.

The two main suspects in the murder admitted that they attacked and tortured the man but deny killing him. The two also deny the racial matrix of the crime, they claim to have acted out of degeneration of anger following a personal relationship that has deteriorated over time. Despite the reasons given by the two in this regard, the fact that one of the two is openly sympathetic to reactionary right-wing parties, the fact that the other has the tattoo of a swastika, and the fact that the body has also been found with lesions on the comparable to those of George Floyd, it makes investigators think that it was an episode of racial hatred of an emulative type.

Considering that the frame of the classic has created moderate controversy for decades and it would make no sense to refer to that episode right now and considering that the vandalism occurred in conjunction with the Phillip episode, it is quite unlikely that the reasons behind this protest action is related to the first hypothesis, it is instead reasonable to think that they refer to the second.

In any case, the gesture has not been claimed by any association, and above all it is far from being an isolated case that causes a sensation, being only the last of a long list of similar episodes affecting the statue.

The use of international press to link the character of the film to the vandalization of the statue is at best dictated by the naivety and the unprofessional skill of fishing the news from the internet without searching for sources and at worst a deliberate attempt to discredit the Black Live Matters movement by attributing to them actions they never claimed for reasons that have nothing to do with the events.

Now, I'm not here to tell you whether or not it is right to vandalize a statue for a cause.

I simply want to point out that the typical reactions from "this politically correct dictatorship" are exactly what the media want to trigger in order to shift attention from the main topic to one that is, in fact, non-existent.

#Disney #disney's little mermaid #littlemermaid #little mermaid #hans christian andersen #denmark #racism #vandalism #performative activism #Little marmaid statue #statue #the little mermaid #copenhagen #don't blame them #politics in denmark #politics #international #newspaper #black lives are important #black live matter #black lives are human lives #black lives fucking matter #blacklivesmatter #danish #Danish politics #Vavuskapakage

[bigskydreaming]

I'm kinda afraid to ask, but what was the panel that made you hate Ennis so much?

Ugh. So, dunno how long you’ve been following me, but three things that you probably know about me because I am the least subtle person that ever lived and also once I find a point to harp on about I hammer that point over and over until that point is dead and extinct and then I go to necromancy school, learn how to resurrect that point and do it all over again.

Hey, I’m a work in progress, ok?

But yeah. 1) Kyle Rayner is one of my three favorite superheroes and I identify with him and project on him way more than is probably healthy because what is moderation even. 2) I have absolutely zero chill when it comes to how rape is treated and handled by media and entertainment, and the quickest way to get me to hate your guts is making a joke of it or not treat it seriously. 3) Number two, repeated, but with emphasis. 

Mix that together, with some additional rage because racist stereotypes and also DC’s track record with rape in their comics in general, and I have super strong feelings on the otherwise forgettable miniseries that was the JLA/Hitman crossover.

So first off, Ennis created this parody character. For lack of a better word. No idea who or what he’s meant to be a parody of or what the hell Ennis was aiming for in general (if he was aiming for anything at all, I mean, his brand is basically being offensive is fun, yay). I mean, I guess you could call him a joke character, maybe, except there’s nothing remotely funny about him…look, idk. He’s disgusting, everything about this character is disgusting.

His name’s Bueno Excellente and here’s the summary of his character they have on comicvine, copied and pasted word for word. Its completely accurate based on what I remember of his appearances. I give this character summary alone trigger warnings for anti-latine racism, fatphobia, sexual assault and rape. Which says a lot right there.

And I’m not even slightly joking about these trigger warnings. Take them seriously in regards to whether or not you even want to know.

“Bueno Excellente is a pervert and more than likely a dangerous sadist who just so happens to be a member of a superhero team in the DC Universe, Section 8.  The team consists of a bunch of delusional superhero wannabes and Bueno, who is just sort of there.Bueno Excellente fights evil with the powers of perversion.  How exactly this works in a non-Vertigo/DC property is never exactly made clear.  The audience gets glimpses and their minds must do the rest.Bueno is an overweight, constantly sweating hispanic male who only ever says “Excellente!” or “Bueno”, which is usually preceeded with a chuckle.  At one team meeting, one of his fellow teammates yells at him to stop poking him under the table, while Bueno’s hands are both clearly shown to be folded neatly above the table; which just makes one wonder what exactly is happening and feel dirty.In combat, Bueno is typically shown just appearing behind an enemy when they aren’t paying attention.  He says one or the other of his words and the “camera” cuts away with a scream sound effect.  After one such instance, we later see the headline of a Gotham City newspaper that the person Bueno had snuck up behind had essentially been fatally sodomized, in the craftiest, most family friendly terms they could get this message across in within a non-Vertigo/ DC publication.”

Yeah. So that’s a character that actually exists, thanks to Ennis. I mean, I’d hate him on that alone (and I do), but then you’ve got JLA/Hitman #1, where he takes it one step further, with this throwaway panel.

And this is the crossover where Ennis uses his awesome little caricature character, so this is 100% a deliberate reference to an encounter with Bueno Excellente, by the creator of said character.

So yeah, thanks to a story that will never be referenced again but still very much exists, there’s canon of Kyle being a rape survivor by virtue of being drugged and assaulted by a character whose sole reason for existing is to…rape people. Because, why not, apparently.

Its absolutely a throwaway ‘joke’ that isn’t meant to be treated seriously, but that doesn’t make it better IMO, it makes it worse. There’s absolutely no reason any of this needed to exist, I have no clue WHAT the fuck it exists for, beyond Ennis thinking it was funny I guess? Because again…why? Who fucking knows.

But yeah, everything about it is gross, and it really doesn’t even have anything to do with it being Kyle in specific, I’d hate it just as much no matter what character was used there. But because he is a favorite character and I’ve read pretty much everything he’s in, this particular little goody springs to mind far more often than it probably would if it had been a character I don’t have strong associations for in my head, with it at least potentially being able to slip out of sight, out of mind for me over time. But because its one of my all time faves and I do have good recall for stuff involving characters I really like and emotionally invest in, there’s no avoiding this ‘joke’ even though it always pisses me off all over again to remember it happened. 

Not to mention the fact that BECAUSE it was such a stupid random crossover that nobody ever bothered acknowledging after the fact, there’s the additional awareness of the fact that this thing that just…exists, will never again be referenced and thus never given the proper attention and serious scrutiny I strongly feel any instance of writing a character as having been raped actually deserves. And that bothers me. A LOT. Like this nagging itch that’ll never be scratched.

Like, I don’t want to fucking read about characters being raped just because. If you do that to a character, it DAMN well better be because you’re focused on writing the aftermath, the recovery, the part where it isn’t just a thing that happened, its a thing that the person it happened to has to live with, and always will. If that’s not why you’re writing it, I just really fucking wish you wouldn’t.

And it reeeeeally doesn’t help that thanks to this one little fucking panel, ALL THREE of my all time favorite superheroes, the heroes I identify with more than any other and have been emotionally invested in since I was a kid, more than just about any other fictional characters period…..thanks to this panel, ALL THREE of those heroes, Kyle Rayner, Dick Grayson and Bobby Drake, have all been raped in canon stories. With the further commonality between ALL THREE being that not a single one of those instances has ever actually been acknowledged for what they are, by anyone in canon. 

And thus all three will never see any followup, aftermath, or any actual STORY about what this having happened to each of these characters actually means, how did it affect them, how did they deal. Those events are just things that happened and then on with the rest of the story as if nothing had just happened, nothing worth mentioning anyway, no need for anyone either in story or out of story to acknowledge what those events actually were and actually like….do something about that.

And that really, REALLY pisses me off and always will.

Just one more reason why I feel so strongly about creator responsibility.

This shit MATTERS. It may not matter to you, the writer, but that doesn’t mean its not gonna matter to your readers, and if you’re gonna be the one to decide hey, this story needs this to happen for whatever reason, this is something that readers need to read happening and be impacted by in whatever ways they end up impacted…then you damn well better be the one to treat that thing you wrote with the gravitas it deserves.

You don’t get to decide it matters enough to be worth MAKING IT HAPPEN only to then turn around and decide it just doesn’t matter enough for there to be a reason why you felt it needed to.

#rape cw #Anonymous #anti-latine racism cw #fatphobia cw

[seeselfblack]

Former slave and leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass revealed to be the most-photographed American of the 19th century - ahead of Abraham Lincoln - as he fought to use the medium to change the view of black people… 

He is revered as an abolitionist, author and orator, and has been called the father of the civil rights movement. 

But it turns out that former slave Frederick Douglass was also the most photographed American of the 19th century, beating out George Custer, Walt Whitman and even Abraham Lincoln. 

A new book that canonizes Douglass through historic photography brings together 160 images - many that have never been published - starting around 1841 and finishing around 1895.

Douglass began posing for portraits in the early 1840s after he escaped enslavement in Maryland…

…Douglass first sat for his “likeness,” as daguerreotypes were often called, around 1841, at the beginning of his public career. By the end of the decade, following his extraordinary success as an orator and autobiographer, he was famous at the very time photography had become hugely popular. There were photographic studios in every city, county, and territory in the free states. Virtually every Northerner could afford to have his or her portrait taken. Engravings, cut from these photographs, circulated as illustrations in best-selling books, including Douglass’s, and in the press, enabling readers to receive the news visually for the first time.Douglass recognized the power of photography. He and many other Americans believed that Mathew Brady’s photograph of Lincoln, taken in February 1860, helped elect him. At the time, Lincoln’s candidacy was a long shot, as he was virtually unknown in the east. After Brady’s photograph circulated widely in newspapers and became ubiquitous during the campaign, Lincoln purportedly said that Brady’s portrait had elected him. Douglass said the same thing: “The portrait makes the president.”

Douglass associated photography with freedom, and the feeling was shared by many across the nation’s free states who embraced photography with a fervor that surpassed that of every other nation on earth. The more rural southern slave states, however, were slower to embrace the medium. Defensive about slavery, white Southerners seemed to tacitly agree that there was much about their society best left un-illustrated.

Douglass defined himself as a free man and citizen as much through his portraits as his words. He also believed in photography’s power to convey truth. Even more than truth-telling, the truthful image represented abolitionists’ greatest weapon, for it exposed slavery as a dehumanizing horror. Photographic portraits bore witness to blacks’ essential humanity, countering the racist caricatures evident in lithographs and engravings based on drawings.

Douglass’s portraits and words sent a message to the world that he had as much claim to citizenship, with the rights of equality before the law, as his white peers. This is why he always dressed up for the photographer, appearing “majestic in his wrath,” as one admirer said of a portrait from 1852, and why he labored to speak and write with such eloquence. Through his images and words, he sought to “out-citizen” white citizens, at a time when most whites did not believe that blacks could be worthy citizens.

The sheer number of Douglass portraits—160 separate poses, reproduced millions of times—conveys not only his faith in photography, but his understanding of the public identity he was crafting. Photographers sought Douglass out and loved working with him. One friend boasted that she “owned more than 20 pictures of him,” and described how “the photographers are running after him to sit for them.”

Douglass would have been a savvy social media devotee, as he continually updated his public persona, projecting a continually evolving self. By doing so, he was defying the static foundations of both slavery and racism, which are predicated on the idea that some people of a certain race are somehow immutably inferior to others. Douglass’s fluid conception of the self united art and politics. He went so far as to say that “the moral and social influence of pictures” was more important in shaping national culture than “the making of its laws.”

His portraits evolved over the years from revolutionary freedom fighter and steely visionary to wise prophet and elder statesman. The most noticeable visual marker of his continual evolution is his facial hair and hairstyles. While 19th-century men experimented with hirsute faces, few did so as frequently as Douglass. He tracked, and often led, the prevailing fashion.

Among the 160 distinct Douglass poses, two continuities stand out. First, he almost never showed a smile, with the notable exception of an 1894 cabinet card, a popular post-war format that resembled a large postcard, six months before he died in 1895. Almost to the end of history life, he refuted the racist caricatures of blacks as happy slaves and servants. Second, he presented himself, in dress, pose, and expression, as a dignified and respectable citizen. Douglass’s portrait gallery contributed to his persona as one of the nation’s preeminent “self-made men,” the title of one of his signature speeches.

Nowadays, his portraits serve as an important visual legacy. In the thousands of murals, sculptures, paintings, prints, drawings, postage stamps, and magazine covers based on Douglass’ photographs, his face and demeanor broadcast a protest against lynching and segregation. It has lobbied for civil rights and celebrated Black Power. It dignified the black body that white Americans, according to Ta-Nehisi Coates, have so often tried to destroy.

For more information, visit W.W. Norton Books.  

#Fredick Douglas #Black History #Photography #Black images #Photography history

[gibsongirlselections]

Trading Social Science for Social Intimidation

As Americans watch the nightly mayhem in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and other cities, their shock comes not just from watching a vicious segment of the population loot, destroy property, and even physically assault in the name of social justice. If history has taught us anything, it is that anarchist and criminal mentalities lie dormant in every country, just waiting for the opportunity to take control of legitimate protest—in today’s case, the peaceable demonstrations inspired by George Floyd’s tragic death.

What is far more distressing about the present chaos is the response of historically responsible liberals who now seem to condone not only street violence, but the aggressive “cancellation” of citizens with views well within the mainstream. Many institutions once at the vanguard of advancing free speech—including the ACLU, colleges and universities, newspapers like the New York Times, and several social media companies—now appear to be working overtime against it. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently chided the far left as “not interested in winning debates with better arguments [but preferring] to shut down debate altogether,” one could be forgiven for thinking he was referencing the entire Democratic Party.

To the extent that the right has an explanation for this anti-liberal liberalism, it is that the center-left is suffering from an advanced case of what many Republicans mockingly call “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS). In other words, with the election so close, the president’s opponents will countenance anything that stokes dissatisfaction with his administration.

We know there is some truth to this, if for no other reason than that those Democrats still uncomfortable with cancel culture have been warning others in their party against getting too carried away with their dislike of Trump. “[They] should forget President Trump for a second,” writes long-time party activist Ted Van Dyk in a July 26 Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Democrats are presenting a pro-chaos caricature of themselves, which will discredit them with the public if they maintain it.”

But to settle for TDS as the explanation for growing liberal intolerance is to miss a much deeper crisis on the left, one that has been building for decades and would exist even if President Trump had never been elected. To understand this crisis, we must remind ourselves of something so obvious that, like air, it is easily overlooked: namely, that the underlying rationale for any form of left-wing governance over the last two centuries has been the presumed ability of educated officials to use social science for the benefit of the larger society. From early 18th century Owenism and Saint-Simonianism to Soviet communism to today’s European social democracies, to be anywhere on the left has been to believe in some form of technocratic governance.

The American left is no exception. For more than a century, it has created or shaped a wide range of government programs based more on the wisdom of credentialed experts (or legislation shaped by experts) than on market forces. Sometimes referred to collectively as the administrative state, these include K-12 education, public universities, health and welfare bureaucracies, departments of urban planning, environmental agencies, and correctional facilities. The left has also promoted the interests of trial lawyers, industrial unions, and other groups whose activities, although outside of government, were still seen as compatible with technocratic governance.

The power of claiming to represent the wisdom of social science can be seen in the fact that whenever any liberal program or agenda has failed in some spectacular way, the left has always been able to fall back on comparisons to experimental research. In other words, just as well-intended mistakes are an unfortunate but necessary part of laboratory investigation, so technological governance will inevitably take unproductive detours from time to time. Even having to backtrack on its aggressive promotion of phrenology and blatantly segregationist policies in the early 20th century never fatally tarnished the left’s case for expert rule.

But as politically effective as assuming the mantle of social science has been for American liberals, three recent developments now threaten to end its usefulness.

The first is the growing evidence that much of the research used by the administrative state over the years has been intentionally falsified by its academic authors, either to advance their own ideological biases or to please their government funders. It has been well-documented since the mid-1990s that any academic study that contradicts left-wing beliefs has an especially difficult time getting the peer endorsements needed for publication. This is true even when the rejected paper appears just as comprehensively researched as the more liberal papers commonly accepted by prestigious journals.

But in 2005, Dr. John Ioannidis, co-director of Stanford University’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, went one step further. In a now-famous report, he showed that even the social science research that does get published is not nearly as rigorous as it has been made to appear. Much of what has been taught for decades as “settled science” is, he showed, the product of unreliable statistical testing, the misleading use of small sample sizes, unwarranted credence given to small effects, unshared experimental data, and other scientifically dubious methods.

Ever since Ioannidis’ paper, it has become painfully clear that even many of the most influential experiments in sociology, political science, social psychology, economics, climate science, anthropology, education, and medicine cannot meet the first requirement of science: replication of results upon retesting. Widely cited studies supposedly confirming the liberal assertion that discriminatory behavior stems from unconscious stereotyping, for example, cannot be duplicated.

In 2015, Science tried to replicate the findings of 100 articles published in three prominent psychological journals during 2008 and got significant results for only 36, compared to the significance claimed by 97 of the originals. A similar study one year later in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series of the Federal Reserve could not reproduce the outcomes of a majority of prominent economics articles.

Ioannidis himself now believes that up to half the discoveries ever published in peer-reviewed social science and medical journals are probably wrong, an opinion he shares with The Lancet’s respected editor-in-chief, Richard Charles Horton. National Association of Scholars (NAS) president Peter Wood has similarly argued that many of the regulations, laws, and social programs routinely passed by Congress on the basis of supposedly solid research have no real scientific justification.

Even in the area of environmental science—where investigations tend to involve more physics and chemistry than social science—much of the research still cannot be replicated. Studies related to nuclear power turn out to be especially iffy. The dangers of accidents like Fukushima (where all the deaths were caused by the tsunami, not radiation) are grossly exaggerated while hazards posed by renewables like hydroelectric power are simply ignored. Completely overlooked are the successful development of fast neutron reactors, which eliminate the problem of radioactive waste, and of small modular reactors, whose simplicity of design makes them exceptionally safe.

The second development to undermine people’s faith in technocratic governance is their own experience of it. In 1964, polls showed that three of every four Americans trusted the competence of public officials. Today, only one third of respondents feel the same way. Recent surveys reported by City Journal show that those states that boast the most comprehensive menu of public services rank lowest for the efficient delivery of any of them. Indeed, there is a direct connection between how much a state spends on programs to improve the quality of its citizen’s lives and the percentage of those same citizens eager to migrate elsewhere.

Especially striking is the declining status of what decades ago was one of America’s most admired institutions, public education. In the latest annual poll by Harvard’s Education Next magazine, 75 percent of respondents graded the performance of the nation’s schools with a C or less.

Republicans may not be precisely on target when they attribute the decline of America’s big cities to the failure of Democratic mayors. But they are close enough to what the public perceives as the real problem—that government has wasted hundreds of billions over the last half-century to “engineer” an urban revival. That accusation has become one of the GOP’s most effective talking points.

The third and most recent threat to public support for technocratic governance is the dawning awareness that there must soon be a radical restructuring of state and federal finances. Had politicians listened to the advice of knowledgeable commentators and used the economic recovery of the last decade to prudently build a financial cushion, the need might never have arisen. But from 2010 to 2020, the federal government averaged deficits of more than $1 trillion per year, more than doubling its liabilities to $22 trillion. During that same period, the net debt owed by many states ballooned as well: New Jersey to $199 billion, Illinois to $248 billion, and California to $288 billion.

Then came the coronavirus, which almost overnight added 5.9 trillion to the U.S. deficit while starving the states of sales tax revenue. Even before the recently aborted negotiation on a second stimulus, it was already clear that the country’s cumulative debt would soon be greater than its annual economic output (GDP), the point where any nation’s creditworthiness is automatically called into question.

As voters contemplate the mix of tax increases and spending cuts that will eventually be required to balance government books, they know that many public programs are going to have to be trimmed, combined, or even eliminated. So large is America’s sovereign debt, as International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists Fabien Gonguet and Klaus-Peter Hellwig make clear in their recent working paper on “Public Wealth in the United States,” that no state or federal department will be spared.

Taken together, these three developments—the discrediting of the research underpinning current social services, the mushrooming mistrust of institutional elites, and the looming need to significantly downsize government—have created a crisis for modern liberals that is far more personal than generally recognized. Once, perhaps as students, they admired the administrative state from a purely intellectual perspective, as outsiders. But today, as working adults, liberals are the administrative state.

Among public school teachers and administrators, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 87 to 13. Among social workers, it is 93 to 7; for those involved in environmental regulation, 91 to 9; and for public defenders it is 19 to 1. Among college professors and administrators—many of whom work at private institutions but still benefit from government grants and federal student loans—it is 17 to 2.

When it comes to federal employees, a good indicator of party affiliation is campaign contributions. In 2016, according to The Hill, 95 percent of the donations from workers in 14 agencies went to Clinton. At the Department of Justice, 99 percent of the money went to Clinton; at the State Department, it was also 99 percent. Of the political contributions from Internal Revenue Service workers, 94 percent went to Clinton.

What does the modern liberal do when the old appeal to credentialed expertise is no longer enough to protect his or her job from being restructured, downsized, made more accountable, subject to greater competition, or even abolished? They do what privileged bureaucrats have always done when the rationale for their status no longer holds sway: they find a purpose whose ideology combines “right thinking” with a puritanical intolerance of any criticism of that thinking.

The K-12 public schools that fail miserably in international comparisons, the universities increasingly blamed for selfishly putting so many American students into debt, the court systems and social agencies which have presided over the collapse of America’s inner cities – all resist the reform they fear by uniting behind a substitute for social science which leaves their institutions and authority intact. The goal, as Center of the American Experiment senior policy analyst Katherine Kersten recently observed, is to go from being “the expert” to being “the elect.”

That liberals would gravitate to wokeness is hardly a surprise. With its unrelenting racial interpretation of every social encounter, it preserves the left’s claim to represent all minority and disadvantaged groups while simultaneously inventing endless reasons for institutional remedy. Once more, any criticism is easily dismissed as the result of the critic’s own unconscious privilege—the same way psychoanalysts used to deflect any challenge to their professional opinion as “a psychological resistance.”

Wokeness also comes with an especially powerful language for social intimidation, honed over decades through its evolution from deconstructionism to political correctness to identity politics to today’s cancel culture. It’s so powerful, in fact, that it can now intimidate the heads of major corporations. Wokeness even appeals to many clergy who, having failed to stem the declining number of church-affiliated believers, seek relevance in a biblically forbidden compromise with those preaching earthly utopia.

What all this means is that liberal intolerance will be with us long after the election, no matter who wins. At a time when sociological support for its institutions is no longer a given, when average Americans are increasingly skeptical of governing elites, and when public debt is about to force some serious budget adjustments, the last thing anyone on the left wants is a friendly, rational conversation.

There is no better glimpse into the future than what happened last February, when the Oakland, California-based Independence Institute decided to sponsor a conference on improving the accuracy of social science research. Not only were the organizers labeled everything from misogynistic white supremacists to climate change deniers, but two graduate students set to speak at the gathering were forced to withdraw after threats of career sabotage. Even the event’s most commonsense recommendations—to do more replication studies, to prioritize grants to researchers who pre-register their protocols, and to require experimenters to make their data and research protocols publicly available—were viciously attacked on social media as right-wing propaganda.

Whatever far-left lunacy today’s liberals are willing to tolerate in the name of upending white male privilege is really a measure of what they are prepared to inflict to preserve their own.

Dr. Lewis Andrews was executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy at Trinity College from 1999 to 2009. He is author of the new book Living Spiritually in the Material World (Fidelis Books).

The post Trading Social Science for Social Intimidation appeared first on The American Conservative.

[mathematicianadda]

Historiography of Galileo’s relation to antiquity and middle ages

Our picture of Greek antiquity is distorted. Only a fraction of the masterpieces of antiquity have survived. Decisions on what to preserve were made by in ages of vastly inferior intellectual levels. Aristotelian philosophy is more accessible for mediocre minds than advanced mathematics and science. Hence this simpler part of Greek intellectual achievement was eagerly pursued, while technical works were neglected and perished. The alleged predominance of an Aristotelian worldview in antiquity is an illusion created by this distortion of sources. The “continuity thesis” that paints 17th-century science as building on medieval thought is doubly mistaken, as it misconstrues both ancient science and Galileo’s role in the scientific revolution.

Transcript

To praise Galileo is to criticise the Greeks. The contrast class of “Aristotelian” science is constantly invoked to explain Galileo’s alleged greatness, both in Galileo’s own works and in modern scholarship. But this narrative gets it all wrong, in my opinion. It is based on a caricature of Greek science that effectively ignores the Greek mathematical tradition.

Francis Bacon put it well: when “human learning suffered shipwreck” with the death of the classical world, “the systems of Aristotle and Plato, like planks of lighter and less solid material, floated on the waves of time and were preserved,” while treasure troves of much more mathematically advanced works were lost forever.

Aristotelian science is not the pinnacle of Greek scientific thought. Far from it. It is not the best part of Greek science, but the part of Greek science that was most accessible and appealing to the generations of mathematically ignorant people who populated the universities in medieval Europe for hundreds of years. And perhaps some generations who still do.

Mathematicians have always felt differently. “So many great findings of the Ancients lie with the roaches and worms,” said Fermat. They are lost, in other words, these mathematical masterpieces that once existed. That’s how Fermat put it, and all his mathematical colleagues agreed. And they were right.

In the 20th century a few such masterpieces were recovered. So these 17th-century mathematicians were proven right in their intuition that great works were forgotten and hidden away among “roaches and worms” indeed.

In 1906, a work of Archimedes that had been lost since antiquity was rediscovered in a dusty Constantinople library. The valuable parchment on which it was written had been scrubbed and reused for some religious text. But the original could still just about be made out underneath it. As one historian put it: “Our admiration of the genius of the greatest mathematician of antiquity must surely be increased, if that were possible,” by this “astounding” work, which draws creative inspiration from the mechanical law of the lever to solve advanced geometrical problems. If even this brilliant work by antiquity’s greatest geometer only survived by the skin of its teeth and dumb luck, just imagine how many more works are lost forever.

Also in the 20th century, divers chanced upon an ancient shipwreck, which turned out to contain a complex machine (the so-called Antikythera mechanism). Again historians were astonished: “From all we know of science and technology in the Hellenistic age we should have felt that such a device could not exist.” “This singular artifact is now identified as an astronomical or calendrical calculating device involving a very sophisticated arrangement of more than thirty gear-wheels. It transcends all that we had previously known from textual and literary sources and may involve a completely new appraisal of the scientific technology of the Hellenistic period.”

Another example. The Greeks appear to have been much further ahead than conventional sources would lead one to believe in a number of mathematical fields. One example is combinatorics. Of this entire mathematical field little more survives than one stray remark mentioned parenthetically in a non-mathematical work by Plutarch:

“Chrysippus said that the number of intertwinings obtainable from ten simple statements is over one million. Hipparchus contradicted him, showing that affirmatively there are 103,049 intertwinings.”

“This passage stumped commentators until 1994,” when a mathematician realised that it corresponds to the correct solution of a complex combinatorial problem worked out in modern Europe in 1870, thereby forcing “a reevaluation of our notions of what was known about combinatorics in Antiquity.” It is undeniable from this evidence that this entire field of mathematics must have reached an advanced stage, yet not one single treatise on it survives.

These are just a few striking examples illustrating an indisputable point: the Hellenistic age was extremely sophisticated mathematically and scientifically, and we don’t even know the half of it.

Scores of key treatises are lost, and we are forced to rely on later commentators and compilers for accounts of the works of Hellenistic authors. It’s like trying to understand modern science and mathematics from popularisations in the Sunday newspaper. It’s vastly oversimplified and dumbed-down. It reduces complex science to one or two simplistic ideas while conveying nothing whatsoever of the often massive technical groundwork that it is based on. That’s the state of our sources for much Greek science: all that has come down to use are some clickbait headlines and blurbs by people who are themselves not scientists and wouldn’t understand the first thing about the technical details of the works they are trying to summarise.

Actually this is a misleading analogy. The situation is even worse than this. Here is how one historian puts it:

“Nearly all that we know on observations and experiments among the Greeks comes from compilations and manuals composed centuries later, by men who were not themselves interested in science, and for readers who were even less so. Even worse, these works were to a great extent inspired by the desire to discredit science by emphasizing the way in which men of science contradicted each other, and the paradoxical character of the conclusions at which they arrived. This being the object, it was obviously useless, and even out of place, to say much about the methods employed in arriving at the conclusions. It suited Epicurean and Sceptic, as also Christian, writers to represent them as arbitrary dogmas. We can get a slight idea of the situation by imagining, some centuries hence, contemporary science as represented by elementary manuals, second- and third-hand compilations, drawn up in a spirit hostile to science and scientific methods. Such being the nature of the evidence with which we have to deal, it is obvious that all the actual examples of the use of sound scientific methods that we can discover will carry much more weight than would otherwise be the case. If we can point to indubitable examples of the use of experiment and observation, we are justified in supposing that there were others of which we know nothing because they did not happen to interest the compilers on whom we are dependent. As a matter of fact, there are a fair number of such examples.”

In previous episodes we have discussed the many ways in which Greek sources already showed full awareness of many things often attributed to Galileo. Taking this context of filtering and lost sources into account means that we should give all the more weight to those arguments.

Sadly, however, the lack of appreciation for science among these ignorant commentators continues among scholars today. I collected some quotes on this by some very respectable classicists of today.

“The state of editions and translations of ancient scientific works as a whole remains scandalous by comparison with the torrent of modern works on anything unscientific — about 100 papers per year on Homer, for example. An embarrassingly large number of classicists are ignorant of Greek scientific works.”

“Classicists include many who have chosen Latin and Greek precisely to escape from science at the very early stage of specialisation that our schools’ curricula permit: and often a very successful escape it is, to judge from the depth of ignorance of science ancient and modern that it often secures.”

It is remarkable how strongly these authors make this point. The first quote is from Lloyd, the Cambridge professor. It takes a lot for people like that to almost condemn their colleagues to their face. They wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t serious.

Little wonder then that Greek science is systematically misunderstood and undervalued, and that simplistic ideas of philosophical authors and commentators are substituted for the real thing.

Galileo’s relation to the preceding philosophical tradition has been systematically misunderstood because of this.

How did modern science grow out of mathematical and philosophical tradition? The humanistic perspective is that science needed both: it was born through the unification of the technical but insular know-how of the mathematicians with the conceptual depth and holistic vision of the philosophers. The mathematical perspective is that science is what the mathematicians were doing all along. Science did not need philosophy to be its eye-opener and better half; it merely needed the philosophers to step out of the way and let the mathematicians do their thing. So which is it?

Many historians have tried to stress commonalities between Galileo and the Aristotelian philosophers who preceded him. That is to say, they argue for the “continuity thesis” which says that the so-called “Scientific Revolution” was not a radical or revolutionary break with previous thought. Here is what they say:

“Galileo essentially pursued a progressive Aristotelianism [during the first half of his life—the period of] positive growth that laid the foundation for the new sciences.”

“A particular school of Renaissance Aristotelians, located at the University of Padua, constructed a very sophisticated methodology for experimental science; … Galileo knew this school of thought and built upon its results; this goes a long way toward explaining the birth of early modern science.”

“The mechanical and physical science of which the present day is so proud comes to us through an uninterrupted sequence of almost imperceptible refinements from the doctrines professed within the Schools of the Middle Ages.”

“Galileo was clearly the heir of the medieval kinematicists.”

I agree with these authors that “those great truths for which Galileo received credit” are not his. But the notion that they were first conceived in Aristotelian schools of philosophy is wrongheaded.

The argument of these historians is based on a simple logic. First they show that various concepts of “Galilean” science are prefigured in earlier sources. Then they want to infer from this that these sources marked the true beginning of the scientific revolution. But in order to draw this inference they need two assumptions: first, that Galileo was the father of modern science; and second, that the Greeks were nowhere near the same accomplishments. These two assumptions are simply taken for granted by these authors, as a matter of common knowledge. But in reality both assumptions are dead wrong, and therefore the inference to the significance of the Aristotelian sources is unwarranted.

It is interesting that the continuity thesis on the one hand devalues the contributions of Galileo, yet at the same time desperately needs to reassert the traditional view that “Galileo has a clear and undisputed title as the ‘father of modern science’,” as one of these historians puts it. They need to say this because this is what gives them the one point of connection they are able to establish between medieval and modern science. The entire argument stands and falls with this false premiss. Therefore, if one proves, as I have done before, that Galileo was a mediocre scientists of negligible importance to the mathematically competent people who actually achieved the scientific revolution, then the continuity thesis collapses like a house of cards.

The defenders of the continuity thesis are equally ineffectual in establishing the second false premiss of their argument, namely the alleged absence of these “new” ideas in Greek thought. In fact, even continuity thesis advocates make no secret of the fact that the medieval tradition was built on “remnants of Alexandrian science.” For example, “although we are left with few monuments from the profound research of the Ancients into the laws of equilibrium, those few are worthy of eternal admiration.” Obviously, “masterpieces of Greek science [such as the works of] Pappus, and especially Archimedes, are proof that the deductive method can be applied with as much rigor to the field of mechanics as to the demonstrations of geometry.” All of that are quotes form Pierre Duhem, a passionate advocate of the continuity thesis.

How can people like Duhem acknowledge these “masterpieces” “worthy of eternal admiration” from antiquity, yet at the same time attribute the scientific revolution to medieval or renaissance philosophers? Here’s how. By writing off those ancient works as minor technical footnotes to an otherwise thoroughly Aristotelian paradigm. Only if this picture is accepted can any kind of greatness be ascribed to the pre-Galileans, as is evident from passages such as these:

“Some philosophers in medieval universities were teaching ideas about motion and mechanics that were totally non-Aristotelian [and] were consciously based on criticisms of Aristotle’s own pronouncements.”

“Admittedly, most of these significant medieval mechanical doctrines were formed within the Aristotelian framework of mechanics. But these medieval doctrines contained within them the seeds of a critical refutation of that mechanics.”

“The medieval mechanics occupied an important middle position between Aristotelian and Newtonian mechanics. [Hence it was] an important link in man’s efforts to represent the laws that concern bodies at rest and in movement.”

“The impressive set of departures from Aristotelianism achieved by medieval science nevertheless failed to produce genuine efforts to reconstruct, or replace, the Aristotelian world picture.”

If Aristotle is taken as the baseline, this looks quite impressive indeed. But why should Aristotle be accepted as the default opinion? Aristotle was one particular philosopher who was a nobody in mathematics and lived well before the golden age of Greek science. Medieval and renaissance thinkers indeed mustered up the courage to challenge isolated claims of his teachings almost two thousand years later, while mostly retaining his overall outlook. This does not constitute great open-mindedness and progress. Rather it is a sign of small-mindedness that these people paid so much attention to Aristotle at all in the first place. In my view, it is not so much impressive that they deviated a bit from Aristotle as it is deplorable that they framed so much of what they did relative to Aristotle, even when they disagreed with him. This is very different from post-Aristotelian thought in Greek times, where there is no evidence that any mathematician paid any attention to Aristotle’s mechanics.

In any case, “extravagant claims for the modernity of medieval concepts” suffer from “serious defects.” One historian has summarised it well:

“There was no such thing as a fourteenth-century science of mechanics in the sense of a general theory of local motion applicable throughout nature, and based on a few unified principles. By searching the literature of late medieval physics for just those ideas and those pieces of quantitative analysis that turned out, three centuries later, to be important in seventeenth-century mechanics, one can find them; and one can construct a “medieval science of mechanics” that appears to form a coherent whole and to be built on new foundations replacing those of Aristotle’s physics. But this is an illusion, and an anachronistic fiction, which we are able to construct only because Galileo and Newton gave us the pattern by which to select the right pieces and put them together.”

The main piece of such precursorism is the so-called “mean speed theorem.” This is a completely trivial result. You can visualise it in terms of a graph with time on the x-axis and velocity on the y-axis. Suppose you plot the graph of a uniformly accelerated motion, such as a freely falling object. It makes a straight line going from the bottom left to the to right. It starts from no velocity and goes to a certain final velocity. How far did the thing travel? Distance travelled is the area under the graph. So it’s the area of a triangle. Base times height over 2. That is to say, the time of fall, times half the final velocity. Or another way of putting it is that half the final velocity is the same thing as the average velocity. The triangle has the same area as a rectangle with the same base and half the height. The “mean speed theorem” is just this. In terms of distance covered, a uniformly accelerated motion is equivalent to a constant-speed motion with the same average speed. A very simple thing to see.

Some people praise this as an “impressive” achievement of the middle ages—”probably the most outstanding single medieval contribution to the history of physics,” derived by “admirable and ingenious” reasoning, according to one historian. Even though these medieval authors did absolutely nothing with this trivial theorem and only deduced it to illustrate the notion of uniform change abstractly within Aristotelian philosophy. Later the theorem became central in “Galilean” mechanics since free fall is uniformly accelerated. But it “was, in fact, never applied to motion in fall from rest during the 14th, or even in the 15th century” (only in the mid-16th century there is a passing remark to this effect within the Aristotelian tradition, “without any accompanying evidence”).

Let us not radically inflate our esteem for the Middle Ages by anachronistically praising them for pointing out a trivial thing that centuries later took on a significance of which they had no inkling. Let us instead recognise the theorem for the trifle that it is. Then we shall also not have any need to be surprised when it turns out that Babylonian astronomers assumed it without fanfare thousands of years earlier still. The utterly trivial “mean speed theorem” was implicitly taken for granted in Babylonian astronomy. They were too good mathematicians to make a big fuss about something so evident, unlike the medieval philosophers who sat around a proved this at length. They were so bad at mathematics that this trivial thing was the cutting edge to them, in their ignorance.

Galileo owes other debts to previous philosophical tradition as well, according to many historians. For example, we are told that there are “unmistakeable Jesuit influences in Galileo’s work”: “Above all Galileo was intent in following out Clavius’s program of applying mathematics to the study of nature and to generating a mathematical physics.” That’s a quote from Wallace. The preposterous notion that this was “Clavius’s” program can only enter one’s mind if one only reads philosophy. It was obviously Archimedes’s program, except, unlike Clavius, he proved his point by actually carrying it out instead of sermonising about what one ought to do in philosophical prose. Philosophers (ancient and modern alike) have a tendency to place disproportionate value on explaining something conceptually as opposed to actually doing it. After all, that is virtually the definition of philosophy. Hence they praise certain Aristotelians for explaining some supposedly profound principles of scientific method even when “it is quite clear that [none of them] ever applied his advocated methods to actual scientific problems.”

Descartes—a mathematically creative person—knew better: “we ought not to believe an alchemist who boasts he has the technique of making gold, unless he is extremely wealthy; and by the same token we should not believe the learned writer who promises new sciences, unless he demonstrates that he has discovered many things that have been unknown up till now.” Unfortunately, such basic common sense is often lacking among historians and philosophers assigning credit for basic principles of the scientific method.

There is a contradiction in the way modern historians try to trace many aspects of the scientific revolution to roots in the middle ages. On the one hand these historians like to claim that the traditional view of the scientific revolution is ahistorical and based on an anachronistic mindset, whereas their own account that sees continuity with the middle ages is more sensitive to how people actually thought at the time itself. Ironically, however, their view, which is supposed to be more true to the historical actors’ way of thinking, is actually all the more blatantly at odds with how virtually all leaders of the scientific revolution thought of the middle ages. One historian summarises it accurately: “The scientific achievement of the Middle Ages was held in unanimous contempt from Galileo’s time onward by those who adhered to the new science. Leibniz’ scathing verdict ‘barbaric physics’ neatly encapsulates the reigning sentiment.” This was not for nothing. Leibniz was an erudite scholar well versed in the philosophy of the schools. But he was also an excellent mathematician. The latter enabled him to pass a sound judgement on the “barbaric” science of the middle ages.

from Intellectual Mathematics from Blogger https://ift.tt/2OKtmmK

#Blogger

[barinacraft]

Ward 8 Cocktail - A Sweet and Whiskey Sour Political Drink

Ward 8 Cocktail Sours Election Night

The winds of political change swept the Ward Eight cocktail into the hands of Democratic politician Martin Michael Lomasney in November 1898. The drink's recipe is said to have been created by Tom Hussion at Boston's esteemed Locke-Ober Cafe, located a few blocks below the southern tip of the then thumb tack shaped eighth ward, across Boston Common on Winter Place, where Mr. Lomasney had just won enough election votes to represent the notoriously corrupt Ward 8 district.*

Or was it? See below.

This sweet and (whiskey) sour cocktail is a fairly easy home bar recipe to make and the opposing flavors of the Ward Eight drink mimic the ideological struggles of the left and right (in spirit anyway). So even if you live in a side-winding, incomprehensible, Rorschach test looking, gerrymandered voting district drawn up to guarantee the winning outcome, the sweet taste of absolute political victory there is sure to be offset by sour election results elsewhere outside the lines. Cheers!

Especially popular where it originated, Bostonians over-indulging in same, find the crowded streets of their city beautifully adapted for going home.

~ Irvin S. Cobb 1934

Behind The Bar

Ward Eight Drink Recipe:

1 ½ oz rye whiskey

2 tsp fresh lemon juice

2 tsp fresh orange juice

1 tsp grenadine ( pomegranate syrup )

1 maraschino cherry (optional)

Fresh squeeze lemon and orange sections in a citrus juicer. Add both of the juices, the rye whiskey and the grenadine to a cocktail shaker with ice.† Shake vigorously and strain into a chilled V for victory glass. Garnish with maraschino cherry, if desired.

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A Local Will Demonstrate

Seems almost required to show a Ward Eight video made by Mr. Boston. Don't you think?

More old school. Simple syrup instead of OJ. No mineral water.‡

So Who Really Invented The Ward Eight Cocktail?

Who knows?

The story above is the most widely circulated and certainly the juiciest. After all, who doesn't like a juicy story?

Its a lot of fun to tell and that's probably why it gained traction. However, here are two others and some additional details for the first. You be the judge.

Mahatma Brandy

Or, whiskey in this case.

At least when referring to the drink. Its a word play on Mahatma Gandhi, with regards to Lomasney and the cocktail named after the political district he led.

Mr. L was seen as a God by the local people he cared for and influenced, so when Boston Post cartoonist Norman stopped calling him "the boss" and started using "the Mahatma of Ward 8," he was very happy.1 Not sure how he liked his caricature on the right though.

Its probably more of a reflection of the power hungry politician he was than a caregiver concerned with providing food, clothing, shelter and jobs to the large population of immigrants in his district.

Martin Lomasney is said to have run the Eighth without any subsidized corruption and attended Catholic masses outside of his Ward in an effort to separate church and state.2 He certainly pretended to go to great lengths to appear to be pure. However, there's just one thing.

He had the goods on everyone!

When a favor for a favor wasn't enough, that infamous safe he kept locked behind his desk at the Hendrick's Club was full of dirt on everybody who was anybody and all those who may be someday. You know that must have also included compromising details on his main rivals like James Michael Curley, John F. 'Honeyboy' Fitzgerald and Thomas W. Flood. Money may not have exchanged hands, but secrets were kept secure only as long as the votes were cast as he directed.

Can you say blackmail?

🍸 Cocktail-wise, as far as who made what & why—there's more to the story.

The most popular account, as mentioned above, was actually the third of the three main stories floating around to surface in print. Locke-Ober bartender Tom Hussion is cited in a 1951 Holiday Magazine article as the 1898 architect of the Ward 8 cocktail as a way to toast Martin's election victory that year.3

But, that may not be the case.

The part about Lomasney's election anyway. Although he did serve as an alderman, a state representative and a state senator; in 1898 he was a district chairman of the Democratic Party and pulled a dirty trick on his opponents that almost backfired.

In charge of organizing the nominating convention, he scheduled the assembly for 4:30 pm at the Maverick House hotel in East Boston, five miles across the harbor from the State House, where the candidate's name had to filed by a 5 o'clock deadline that same day. Lomasney's and Mayor Josiah Quincy's contingents both tried stalling each other with various tactics.

The Hendrick's Club crew even joined a funeral procession to avoid road blocks on the way. Once there, the tiny room reserved was too small (by design) for both groups so the North End crowd had to meet elsewhere, causing another delay.

Nominations took only minutes and the race was on.

Messengers for each faction first traveled by tugboat and ferry, respectively. Then both pedaled furiously up the hill on bicycles until Mayor Quincy's cyclist broke his chain and had to run the last mile causing him to lose.

Now there's a reason for the eighth precinct to celebrate!

What's funny though is Lomasney wasn't a drinker. Maybe that's why its called the Ward 8 cocktail and not a namesake drink in his honor.

As yet another side note, its rumored that Hussion didn't start working over at Locke-Ober until 1900 so that casts a little doubt for some as well. Unable to find any information that supports or disproves this though.

So, let's go on to the next claim.

Pub Crawl

Puritan Club bartender Charlie Carter wrote Ward 8 drink history as the first mix master said to have concocted this cocktail. At least according to his 1934 letter to G. Selmer Fougner's "Along the Wine Trail" in the New York Sun where he claimed the credit himself for inventing it to celebrate a 1903 Lomasney election victory. Whether it was an office seat or a ballot issue; his own initiative or another whose outcome he influenced is unknown. This date also causes some to wonder.

Apparently its a popular name for guys who paint the town red though, since actor Charlie Carter stars as painter brother Paul, years later, in the 2012 movie Pub Crawl about some friends in Edinburgh, Scotland who go on a bar tour after one of them wins a bet on the Grand National horse race. Go figure.

Kane Is Able

The second person given credit for creating the Ward Eight was a famous bartender at Locke-Ober's named Billy Kane.

Billy's dead and laid in grave, and all his bones are rotten, but his Ward Eight will pick you up when Billy's long forgotten.

Recognition was given years later in 1940.4

History Of The Ward Eight Drink Recipe

Timeline of Major Milestones

1906 - The Ward 8 cocktail is first mentioned as being on the menu at Boston's Winter Palace Hotel a.k.a. Frank Locke's using Sirop de Grenadine made from pomegranate juice.5

1907 - All the mouth watering ingredients were originally fully listed as French grenadine, lemon juice, powdered sugar, whiskey and soda garnished with lemons, oranges, pineapples and strawberries. No measurements or proportions though.6

1912 - 1st Ward Eight drink recipe was printed as the juice of one lemon, 1 tbs sugar, 1 tbs grenadine syrup, 1/2 glass rye and Apollinaris sparkling mineral water strained into a goblet with ice and garnished with fruit.7

1914 - The Santa Clara Company serves notice in the Boston Globe newspaper saying they own and control the brand "WARD 8." Price is $1.00 a bottle, $10.00 a case. Their trademark to the word and numeral asserts use since approximately November 1912 and is said to consist of compounds of whisky, grenadine, rock candy syrup and lime juice.8

1922 - Orange juice replaces sparkling water as an ingredient.9

1924 - Canadian whiskey in particular is specified.10

1933 - Initial use of bourbon in a written recipe.11

1934 - Several dashes each of orange bitters and creme de menthe are added to the mix. Directions call for substituting fresh mint sprigs instead of creme de menthe when available.12

1934 - Esquire Magazine lists the Ward 8 as one of the 10 Best Cocktails Of The Year along with the Champagne Cocktail, the Daiquiri, the Dry Martini, the Harvest Moon, the Old Fashioned, the Old Fashioned Dutch, Planter's Punch, the Vermouth Cassis and the Vodka Cocktail.

Ward 8 Hosts A Political Cocktail Party

Hope your candidate wins. Be prepared for a long night.

If you plan on having your home bar host a political cocktail party on election night to celebrate whatever outcome it is you'd like to be celebrating, then the Ward Eight drink recipe should probably be on the left side of the menu. Don't forget to offer some politically biased beer choices as well.

BTW: This does appear to be the city's only classic cocktail, so why wait every two to four years to partake. You've got the Bruins ice hockey, Celtics basketball, Patriots football, Red Sox basketball and Revolution soccer teams to celebrate on a professional sports level and too many collegiate programs in the area to even list. Not to mention everything else that's great in Olde Towne.

To the good times!

Drinks Similar To The Ward 8 Cocktail

Bermuda Bouquet - apricot brandy, gin and triple sec win enough votes to replace rye whiskey.

Bunny Mother - a sugar sweetened vodka Ward Eight Cocktail with a splash of orange liqueur as well.

California Lemonade - blended whiskey, lemon and lime juice, powdered sugar and grenadine topped with carbonated water.

Chapala Cocktail - a tequila Ward 8 drink with a rain drop of orange flower water.

Chimp In Orbit - a high proof Tortuga minus the lime juice.

Crow Cocktail - Scotch whisky, lemon juice and grenadine.

Double Standard Sour - rye whiskey, dry gin, lime juice, sugar and raspberry syrup with a squirt of seltzer on top.

Eureka / Pink Garter / Gin & Sin Drink - a gin Ward-8. The Texas Fizz adds Champagne or soda to these recipes.

Hoffman House Fizz - gin, lemon juice, OJ, sugar, maraschino liqueur, cream, and grenadine topped with soda.

Hotel Drake Vesuvius - a sweet gold and Jamaican rum Ward Eight recipe garnished with fruit in season and a mint sprig.

100% Cocktail - an Eighth Ward mixed with Swedish punch instead of rye or Canadian whiskey.

Knickerbocker Special / Pikaki - a pineapple spear gets muddled in the district's drink and rums up the election.

Lone Tree Cooler - gin, dry vermouth, fresh orange and lemon juice, sugar and grenadine filled with soda or ginger ale.

New York Sour - rye whiskey, lime juice, sugar and grenadine.

Rabbit's Foot Cocktail - light rum brandies about the voting district drink.

Robson Drink - rye not try some Jamaica rum instead?

Scottish Guards - follows a similar theme with Scotch whisky replacing the rye.

Show Boat Drink - egg white caps.

Tonga Punch - light rum, brandy, curacao, passion fruit liqueur, lemon juice, OJ and grenadine.

Tortuga Tiki Tipple - rum(s), Italian vermouth, curacao, crème de cacao, grenadine and juices of lemon, lime and orange.

Welcome Stranger Cocktail - brandy, gin and Swedish punch substitute for rye whiskey in the original.

Whiskey Daisey - rye or bourbon whiskey, lemon juice, sugar, grenadine and optional egg white.

Winberry Drink - let the spirit change to bourbon and Amer Picon.

More cocktails and drinks that start with W.

References

* - Social History - The Traditional past and Locke-Ober... still the Boston Brahmin dining retreat!

† - many interchange bourbon whiskey as one in the same, but the original recipe called for rye.

‡ - Old Mr. Boston was a local distillery located in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts from 1933 to 1986 which now houses a number of different city government agencies.

1 - Leslie G. Ainley, Boston Mahatma (Boston: Bruce Humphries, Inc. Publishers, 1949), 4. Print.

2 - A. D. Van Nostrand, "The Lomasney Legend." The New England Quarterly, December 1948: 435-458. Print.

3 - George Frazier, "There's More than Beans to Boston." Holiday, January 1951: 58. Print.

4 - Eleanor Early, A New England Sampler (Boston: Waverly House, 1940), 371. Print.

5 - Amy Lyman Phillips, A Bachelor's Cupboard - Crumbs Culled from the Cupboards of the Great Unwedded (Boston & London: John W. Luce & Company, 1906), 154. Print.

6 - 1907 Boston Herald via.

7 - Holtz & Freystedt Co. Importers (New York: Holtz & Freystedt, 1912), 19. Print.

8 - Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, Volume 211 (Washington: Government Printing Office, February 2, 1915), 277. Print.

9 - Robert Vermeire, Cocktails - How To Mix Them (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1922), 48. Print.

10 - Carlo Beltramo, Carlo's Cocktails and American Drinks (Geneva: 1924), 44. Print.

11 - A. E. P. Bird & William C. Turner, Cocktails: Their Kicks and Side-Kicks (New York: Read Printing Company, 1933), 28. Print.

12 - G. Selmer Fougner, Along The Wine Trail - An Anthology of Wines and Spirits (Boston: Stratford Company, 1935), 287. Print. Initially via letters to the New York Sun in 1934.

#Cocktails #Drinks #Grenadine #Party #Politics #Rye #Whiskey

[todaynewsstories]

Pakistanis protest Geert Wilders′ Prophet Mohammad cartoon contest | News | DW

Thousands of Pakistanis on Wednesday protested far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ plans to hold a Prophet Mohammad cartoon competition.

Some 10,000 protesters participated in the march, chanting “we will die to protect the honor of the Prophet,” and holding a large banner that said they were holding a “peaceful protest.”

The demonstration was organized by Islamist groups that made surprising advances in the July elections, and came one day after Dutch police arrested a 26-year-old man suspected of threatening to attack Wilders over the contest.

Read more: Opinion: Imran Khan’s dangerous victory

Images of Prophet Mohammed are traditionally forbidden in Islam as idolatrous, and caricatures are regarded by many Muslims as highly offensive.

Wilders is an outspoken critic of Islam, and has made controversial comments regarding the Prophet Mohammed in the past, including announcing plans to show cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad on Dutch television.

How artists have responded to terror

First sign of peace

The day after the November 2015 Paris attacks, which left over 130 people dead, the city was in mourning. When German pianist Davide Martello began playing John Lennon’s “Imagine” outside the Bataclan on a piano he had transported from Germany, a crowd quickly gathered. Martello later told The Guardian that “I wanted to be there to try and comfort, and offer a sign of hope.”

How artists have responded to terror

When words fail

After the chaos of a tragedy, a simple visual image can be a comfort. French graphic artist Jean Jullien posted a hand-painted peace sign incorporating an image of the Eiffel Tower on social media after the November 2015 attack in Paris. It quickly became an iconic symbol of sympathy with survivors.

How artists have responded to terror

The image as a weapon

Artists do not always play a peaceful role. The comic artist known as Charb was famous for publishing offensive caricatures of religions, including Islam. After Islamist gunmen shot him and his colleages to death in the offices of Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7, 2015, demonstrators used his images to defy the attackers and their supporters.

How artists have responded to terror

Music from the ashes

Artists are sometimes the targets of terrorist groups. Such was the fate of Syrian pianist Aeham Ahmad, who studied music in Damascus and Homs but spent much of his life in a refugee settlement. It was on a bombed-out street there that Ahmad gained international attention, playing piano in a YouTube video. After ISIS militants burned his instrument, he fled to Germany and now lives there.

How artists have responded to terror

Catharsis, the therapy of theater

Aristotle’s theory of catharsis – purging emotions through theater – lives on. Austrian Elfriede Jelinek crafted her play “Anger” (pictured above in a 2016 production at the Hamburger Thalia-Theater) while in shock from the 2015 attacks in Paris. The title points not only to the anger of the attackers, but also the hatefulness of some responses, as well as the agony of those caught in the middle.

How artists have responded to terror

“Not even scared”

On March 13, 2016, Al-Qaeda militants gunned down 19 people on the Ivory Coast’s sandy Grand Bassam beach. Ten days later, a number of the country’s pop stars released a music video to reclaim the space. “Meme pas peur” is the name of the song – “Not even scared” – and the defiant words ring true among performers as they dance on the sun-bleached sand, no blood in sight.

How artists have responded to terror

Just color and line

Not all artistic responses to violence are literal. The vivid colors and lively shapes of Guillaume Bottazzi’s abstract art speak for themselves as a reponse to tragedy. Since the end of October, he has been working on a mural in Brussels’s Place Jourdan as a permanent memorial to the victims of the March 22 attacks in the city.

How artists have responded to terror

A wealthy donor

American pop artist Jeff Koons unveiled his plan for “Bouquet of Tulips 2016” at a ceremony in Paris in November. The forthcoming sculpture, by one of the world’s wealthiest artists who hires workers to construct his designs, was donated in honor of the victims of the multiple Paris terrorist attacks of 2015.

How artists have responded to terror

Together Berlin!

On December 20, a day after an attack on a Berlin Christmas market claimed 12 lives, the Brandenburg Gate was lit with the colors of the German flag. On Friday, December 23, the city will hold a six-hour long memorial concert featuring several German musicians as a sign of Berlin’s resilience to the disruption of an otherwise festive public life in the week before Christmas.

Author: Amien Essif

Dutch police make arrest

The man arrested for allegedly threatening Wilders was taken into custody on Tuesday in The Hague, police spokesman Jan Rensen said, without identifying his nationality.

Read more: Charlie Hebdo and freedom of expression

He is believed to have posted a video on Facebook on Monday in which he said he was five minutes away from the parliament building and said he was targeting the anti-Islam politician.

“Only that blasphemer [Wilders] is my target,” the man said in the video, which was shown on national broadcaster NOS. “I believe that God will help me succeed … they’re making jokes about our Prophet.”

Read more: Mainstream outlets need to judge benefits of publication

In January, 2015, two armed gunmen stormed the offices of satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, where they killed 12 people and injured 11 others. The left-wing publication often publishes articles mocking various religions, including Islam.

law/kms (AP, Reuters)

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[investmart007]

ROME  | Populists' pick to be Italian premier scorns bureaucracy

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ROME  | Populists' pick to be Italian premier scorns bureaucracy

ROME  — Giuseppe Conte, a bureaucracy-allergic law professor, is hardly a household name in Italy. Yet the 53-year-old academic is the candidate two rival political leaders have chosen to head what they hope will be the country’s first populist government.

Say the name “Conte” and the one who comes to the mind of many ordinary Italians is Antonio Conte, the former coach of the Azzurri, Italy’s national soccer team. The front page of Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera carried an editorial cartoon Monday playing on the possible premier’s lack of a comparable profile.

“For sure, if he were the ex-trainer of the Azzurri, he’d also have some international experience,” the cartoon read along with a caricature of a puzzled-looking Italian President Sergio Mattarella,

Conte also has international experience, but it’s academic, not political. His resume lists brief periods of study or research at Yale, Cambridge and the Sorbonne, as well as teaching positions at public, private and Catholic universities in Italy.

Until 5-Star Movement leader Luigi Di Maio and League leader Matteo Salvini announced him as their pick to take the helm of Italy’s next government, the accomplishment of Conte’s most Italians might remember hearing about was a kind of “MeToo” achievement.

An expert in civil and commercial law, Conte has served on a government administrative justice council. In that role, he presided over a commission that ousted a public administration official who had demanded that female students in his law course for aspiring magistrates wear mini-skirts to class.

The professor’s background features aspects that could please both Di Maio’s 5-Star Movement’s base, which includes many disgruntled former supporters of the center-left Democrats, as well as Salvini’s right-wing constituency.

Dear to the hearts of both Salvini and Di Maio, who rail against the strangling effect of the often byzantine bureaucratic rules Italian businesses and citizens must follow, Conte has declared that given the opportunity, he would slash hundreds of such “useless laws.”

When, a few days before the election, the 5-Star Movement presented Conte as the ideal person to be minister for public administration, the professor said the laws needing elimination number “many more than the 400 ones indicated by Luigi Di Maio.”

Conte is “an expert of simplification, de-bureaucratization and streamlining the administrative machine, that’s what so many businesses want,” Salvini said Monday night.

Conte also has pushed for stronger safeguards against corruption, which often finds fertile ground among those trying to circumvent government bureaucracy.

What Salvini might have had to swallow for the price of putting his League in power is Conte’s past political affinity for the left.

“In the past, I voted for the left. Today, I think that the ideological schemes of the 20th century are no longer adequate,” Conte said earlier this year, when Di Maio was touting him for a Cabinet post. “I believe it’s more important to evaluate how a political force works, in terms of its positions on its respect for rights and fundamental liberties. And on its ability to elaborate programs useful for citizens.”

In a recent TV program, he put it more succinctly: “My heart has traditionally beat toward the left.”

Conte isn’t a member of Parliament, but that’s not a requirement to be premier. Matteo Renzi, a former Florence mayor, served nearly three years as premier as leader of the Democratic Party and without holding elected office.

Earlier in the haggling between Di Maio and Salvini to cobble together a governing coalition, each man boasted the right to be premier.

Di Maio heads Parliament’s largest party after the Movement captured some 32 percent of the votes cast in the March 4 parliamentary election.  Salvini’s League was the biggest vote-getter in a center-right coalition that together clinched 37 percent.

But after shedding his campaign coalition partners, which included former Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right party, Salvini alone commands far fewer seats in Parliament than rival Di Maio.

Each eventually agreed to “take a step aside” and quit demanding the premiership for himself. But with Di Maio aware he would lose his party’s base if he agreed to a deal that would put the 5-Stars in government for the first time but without a loyal cheerleader as premier, the choice of Conte made sense.

Born in Volturara Appula, a town of 467 residents near Foggia, in the region of Puglia, Conte is the son of a retired city hall office worker and an elementary school teacher.

His southern roots might please the electorate that helped propel the 5-Stars into power. The Movement’s popularity has soared in the south, where its campaign pledge for a guaranteed basic monthly income of 780 euros (then some $950) resonated in a region where youth unemployment tops 50 percent.

Despite his lack of name recognition, Conte has a reputation for being a dapper dresser. When he appeared with Di Maio before the election, Conte was turned out in a three-piece suit with his tie tucked under a button-down gilet and a handkerchief neatly poking out of a breast pocket.

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By FRANCES D’EMILIO,By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (A.S)

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#Italian premier #Populists'pick #Rome #scorns bureaucracy #TodayNews

[cfpercy]

THE OPTIMIST BY SOPHIE KIPNER

(Review originally published at The Wales Arts Review: http://www.walesartsreview.org/books-the-optimist-by-sophie-kipner/)

Do you think of yourself as a hopeless romantic? Do you consider yourself to be optimistic? Well, meet Tabitha Gray from Topanga California, who’s sure to have you beat in both categories hands down. Tabitha’s a woman on a mission: to find love. Not just any kind of love however, but the true, romantic, ever-lasting love she knows is just around the corner. But it’s not solely for herself that she’s embarked upon this mad quest; if she can find true love, she can prove to her disillusioned mother and sister that they shouldn’t give up hope.

Although, so far, she hasn’t been particularly successful. Aggressively optimistic and cheerful to the point of delusion, Tabitha’s intensity often just ends up terrifying the men she pursues. Will she succeed or will her optimism prove to be disastrously unfounded?

There’s, at once, a timeless yet old-timey feel to The Optimist: a melange of wine-soaked evenings, edges softened by cigarette smoke, filled with the sound of old records – a screwball comedy that’s slightly off-kilter. This is echoed – Kipner being a visual artist as well as an author – in her beautifully abstract ink and charcoal illustrations. Stylistically reminiscent of a cross between Picasso and newspaper caricature, they allow us to view the subject as if through the distortion of cracked glass. The core of the novel is simply this: is Tabitha delusional or is she right in that the “choice to believe in love is a necessary pre-condition to being able to love?” It’s an interesting question. Tabitha is obviously not as self-aware as she initially claims to be (of course, if she were, where would be the room for growth?); her obsession with romance and insistence on always looking on the bright side leads her into some eye-wateringly embarrassing situations – from appearing to Harrison Ford in her underwear in a hotel room, to deciding (aged nine) that she is wildly in love with Ernesto the gardener and hiding in his truck to follow him home – with complete disregard as to the consequences for both her and those around her. But despite this, Kipner is not setting up Tabitha for us to mock her. Yes, her exploits serve to satirise the pitfalls and absurdities of the lengths people will go to find love, but – as the success of films such as La La Land have shown us – positivity (even if misplaced) is uplifting in a world that seems to be shifting ever more towards cynicism.

Having been burned one too many times, Tabitha’s mother turns to Dorothy Parker, “the queen of emotional shrewdness”, imparting wisdom that “would stick to my insides like gum, the most glutinous being: “Be the one to love the less.” It might be good advice, if the search for love is robbing you of your self-worth & piece of mind, but Tabitha makes a very perceptive observation:

Dorothy Parker’s words were cutting at us, line by line, and I could see my mom couldn’t stomach the thought that they might be true. She lived by them, but like an atheist who begins to pray when everything is going downhill, she secretly clung to the possibility that Dorothy’s truths were fallible. I think deep down she’d just pretend to disbelieve in love, to be hard and aloof, because the way her eyes lit up with any new prospect.

I’m reminded, particularly, of one of the more repeated criticisms brought against The Austen Project (the project of – in celebration of Austen’s bicentenary – having well known authors write modern re-tellings of her novels): that, in transposing Austen’s storylines from the 18th century to the 21st, they would lose some of their narrative impact & significance because ‘marriage doesn’t have the same importance it used to.’ Well, whilst it’s true that marriage isn’t a woman’s only option any more, if it weren’t still important to them would the wedding industry be worth as much as it is? Would shows such as Don’t tell the Bride, Say Yes to the Dress and Bridezillas be as popular as they are? If men and women weren’t still looking for a connection with another person would TV be saturated with Reality dating shows? (I mean, even the 90s had Blind Date, and that’s back now as well.) Wanting to be loved by someone isn’t a uniquely female thing but a fundamentally human one, and even the most independent of us can occasionally feel lonely.

So, is Tabitha deluded? No more so than the rest of us. Like its protagonist, The Optimist is completely bonkers, but in the best way possible.

#my writing #book review #books #sophie kipner #the optimist #unbound

[junker-town]

There is no escape from politics

How NFL owners and Donald Trump put down a national protest.

I. “By the way, everyone wanted to be here today”

It is the day Donald Trump is meeting with the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins, and I am sitting in the basement of the White House with a group of black folks. The group is made up of journalists, cameramen — all here to watch the day unfold.

The mood is light; we talk; joke. But it’s hard not to recognize how surreal this scene is. Here we are on this October afternoon, black, in a house built by slaves — a house where the first black president used to dance with his black wife, laugh with his black kids, and enjoy the company of his black friends.

That was then. Now, upstairs lives a president who is there largely because he is not black, whose campaign was built upon thinly veiled promises to return power to the majority; to make things the way they were before a black man was president.

We eventually walk inside the East Room, listening to the president speak, his words twisting in the pretzel logic we’ve somehow gotten used to. I can’t help but think how weird this all is. Gone are the days of Obama dancing with Northsiders and Cubs on one of the last days of his administration. The White House felt warm, inviting, even loving under Obama for folks like me. This place feels cold, aggressive, and devoid of anything harboring black joy.

“By the way, everyone wanted to be here today,” Trump says, smiling. “And I know why.”

His smile is one I recognize. It’s one that doesn’t quite involve his eyes.

There is constant cheering. Trump calls the hockey players handsome. He says they are incredible patriots, embodying values all young Americans needed to see. It’s unclear if Trump realizes how many of these young men weren’t born in the U.S.

It’s also clear that these hockey stars aren’t being celebrated for what they have accomplished. Trump’s White House has not rushed to invite any other teams who have won championships, including the Golden State Warriors. It took Stephen Curry saying he wasn’t interested in going to the White House for Trump to say the invitation was rescinded — in truth, no invitation had ever been sent to the team. The only other team Trump has welcomed has been the Chicago Cubs, whose co-owner, Todd Ricketts, was a Trump supporter and had been considered for Deputy Secretary of Commerce.

The Penguins are welcomed with open arms as a display of how white athletes are meant to behave. The president can’t put aside his own agenda, even for a moment. Trump brought the team here to reinforce his attacks against the black people he deems dishonorable, the football players who have protested police brutality, and who Trump has made his latest adversaries in his never-ending culture war.

The white audience seems unaware or uncaring. The blackness in the room or watching on TV is being taunted. Trump is taking a victory lap with his chosen champions, gaslighting nonbelievers and smiling while they squirm.

These political gymnastics are exhausting. For the entirety of this charade, I have felt disoriented. How can no one address this?

In this moment, I remember where I’d seen that smile.

II. The Day of Reckoning

It was a few weeks before that day at the White House, Sept. 25, when Dallas and Washington faced off in a Monday Night Football game.

All weekend, NFL players had kneeled during the “Star Spangled Banner,” some in support of Colin Kaepernick and his original protest against the police killing of black people. Others were responding to Trump, who implored NFL owners to "get that son of a bitch off the field right now" if a player kneeled during the national anthem at a rally earlier that week.

While some NFL owners supported their players and were vocally against Trump’s vulgar tirade, reports had come out that the majority of NFL owners were scrambling to find a way to stop the protests, or at least quiet them down enough to make football the story again.

Ahead of Monday Night Football, there was little talk of what would happen in the game. It was all about what would happen before the kickoff, during the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner.” Sports fans, culture warriors, and America tuned in as Cowboys owner Jerry Jones walked out with his players. I’ll admit: I did not, in my wildest thoughts, think I’d see ol’Jerruh, practically a caricature of a rich white man, walk out with these men.

Then, before the “Star Spangled Banner” began, they all kneeled, arms locked, Jones right in the middle. Jones kept his head down while fans booed. He did not care. His plan was already in motion. He finally looked up. The cameras moved closer. He looked directly into the lens and there it was: the smile. That same, soulless smile.

Then, just before the song, Jones and the rest of the Cowboys stood. It was a protest without any teeth. His smile had been a clear signal to white America: Don’t worry. Jerry will take care of this. We’re going to put them in their place.

What was funny about all this was that Jones, certainly by accident, actually showed hypocrisy on the part of the white people he was trying to send a signal to. He exposed the lie that kneeling was about the “Star Spangled Banner” or patriotism or Trump. He knelt before the song played and was still booed.

If Jones’ demonstration was inartful, it was at least emphatic. Jones has made no mistake about his belief that players should stand for the national anthem, even threatening to lead a coup against commissioner Roger Goodell in part because Goodell wouldn’t place any mandate on players. Even within a group of 31 owners who had collectively donated millions to Trump’s campaign, Jones was a hardliner, and he was lock-step with Trump that Goodell should have nipped the protests in the bud. Via ESPN:

At first, some in the room admired Jones’ pure bravado, the mix of folksy politician and visionary salesman he has perfected. But he was angry. He said the owners had to take the business impact seriously, as the league was threatened by a polarizing issue it couldn’t contain or control. To some in the room, it was clear Jones was trying to build momentum for an anthem mandate resolution, and in the words of one owner, “he brought up a lot of fair points.”

Jones couldn’t get exactly what he wanted — what Trump had demanded — in part because the movement was too big. Watching black bodies defy power in primetime was unexpected. Players reacting so quickly and strongly was unexpected and beautiful, and the league was too overwhelmed to react. The weekend had a chance to be historic. Jones needed to usurp the cause somehow, and he found a way. That moment when Jones smiled, I felt that beauty slip away.

That smile haunts me. It was in that moment I understood that this movement would be taken over and killed. This was the white owner reasserting control.

Truthfully, football was never meant to serve the black body.

This was the co-opting of a black message. This was a smile equivalent to a death sentence, signaling the fate of Colin Kaepernick’s movement — the end of an international moment staked in black pride.

This is something we have seen time and time again in the history of American sport: the use of the black body for popular entertainment; black men and women using that popularity to speak out, then white gatekeepers (either owner, audience, or overseer) co-opting that message or striking it down, often violently.

Truthfully, football was never meant to serve the black body, which has been abused for generations. America watched as men they perceive as property begged for a voice and were muzzled. This is a cycle America has always known. It is no wonder these NFL players did not get far.

III. “Those wild and low sports”

Maybe it was destiny that led Tom Molineaux to Copthorne Common on a blustery December afternoon in 1810 to fight Tom Cribb.

Molineaux, a man newspapers called the “American Othello,” was a freed slave from a Virginia plantation whose family taught him to box. Cribb was the champion of England and white. Molineaux had sailed from America just six months prior to start a new life as a prize fighter.

Englishmen thought he was a lamb being led to slaughter. Though the English were sympathetic to abolitionism, a slave wasn't supposed to swing against his white master. By the ninth round, Cribb was being pummeled. After 30 minutes, fans rioted. They thought Molineaux was cheating. By some accounts, they even broke his fingers.

After 39 rounds, Molineaux conceded, finally succumbing to exhaustion. He appeared to knock out Cribb in the 28th round, but no one could hear the referee call "time!" to indicate that Molineaux had won in the chaos that ensued. Cribb recovered and the fight continued. It was a brilliant fight by all accounts, yet there wasn’t much to read about Molineaux’s exploits in America outside of a small clipping in a North Carolina newspaper.

Molineaux was a symbol of a possibility that was deadly to the white world back then. If black people could prove they are equal in one arena, who's to say they shouldn't be equal in every arena?

Sports were the thing that kept Molineaux enslaved and his tool for liberation. Sports were created on the plantation as diversions to help slavers control the revolutionary urges of slaves. Frederick Douglass, who fought off his owner and ran to freedom, was a critic of sports on the plantation. In Douglass’ autobiography, he said Southern plantation owners deployed “those wild and low sports” in an effort to keep black slaves “civilized.”

What Douglass wrote is, foolishly, why owners expect athletes to know their place. It is why no one expected a Day of Reckoning to begin with. What Douglass missed, and what black athletes discovered, was the expressionism sports allowed. As Molineaux demonstrated, sports create room for protest because they hold the minds of the white consumers hostage during play.

White people showed up to watch Cribb beat Molineaux, and instead were held captive as Molineaux upended their expectations. Similarly, they did not think, both owners and fans, that black football players were capable of revolt. And just as Molineaux helped establish a norm, NFL players have made protest commonplace. To restore the old order would require intervention, co-option — violence of a non-physical sort. That was the reason behind ol’Jerruh’s smile. If order was to be reinstated, pain of some kind would have to be established.

IV. “Coach, a Negro boy can’t play football with white fellers”

It took seven minutes for Oklahoma A&M — the university now named Oklahoma State — to try to kill Johnny Bright, Drake University's black Heisman candidate. It was 1951. Bright was knocked unconscious three times, often without the ball. The third was the most brutal. A large, white defensive end named Wilbanks Smith saw Bright, looking left, throwing a pass. Seconds later — some say as many as six — Banks leapt from his feet and cracked Bright’s jaw with a forceful elbow. Bright’s trainer and another player carried him to the bench. A penalty hadn’t been called all day.

Maury White, who wrote about the attack for the Des Moines Register, said, “You could feel the bones move.” Photos of Bright are kept in the Drake Heritage Collection. They show images of Bright pulling his mouth apart, wires keeping his jaw straight, the reason his college career was upended. The “Great Negro Flash” would never make it to the NFL.

Local accounts before the game had students saying Bright “would not be around at the end of the game.” Three students told the Register that A&M’s head coach was seen yelling ”get that nigger” when the scout team was running Bright’s plays. Bright told the paper in 1980: “There’s no way it couldn’t have been racially motivated.”

Smith, the white man who tried to kill Bright, said in 2012 he had “nothing to apologize for.” Within two days after the incident, Smith received hundreds of letters of support. Half of the messages begged him to run for office in Louisiana or lead local Klan startups.

“If it wasn’t Wilbanks Smith, it would have been someone else,” the A&M basketball player Dean Nims told the Register in 1980. “They were determined to stop Bright.”

Oklahoma State waited 22 years after Bright died to express sympathy.

Violence was the price of being black in these spaces. It is important to understanding the Day of Reckoning. Players are not simply millionaires asking for attention. They have received death threats, their parents have lost their jobs, their jerseys have been burned from New York to Oakland, their likelihoods are being used as tackling dummies before games, and their coaches are called “no-good niggers.”

A few years before Bright had his jaw demolished in front of the country, Levi Jackson, the first black football captain at Yale, was playing in a high school exhibition. His body had been thrashed for hours, and he was ready to quit. In this era, it was common for white players to attack black players between the whistles. Jackson, however, was fed up. Reading his words, I assume he knew what this sport could do to us. The message was there: White sympathy was not for us unless we were willing to get over race.

“Coach, a Negro boy can’t play football with white fellers,” he said, according to Sport Magazine in Nov. 1949. “You saw what they did to me today. I’m turning in my suit. It’s not sport.”

V. “Nothing more than a mere picnic”

After the Day of Reckoning, the NFL responded by promoting a message of "Unity." I have grown so tired of hearing about “unity” that I no longer believe it's real. What is unity? What are we unifying against? It doesn’t appear to be racism. It has never appeared to be racism. When the concept of unity was offered to these black athletes, it felt comedic.

Look at all these white men. They do not look afraid, as I have. They do not seem tired, as I am.

And the black athletes who felt the same way were often labeled as ungrateful millionaires. "Ungrateful is the new uppity," Jelani Cobb wrote in the wake of the president's attack on players.

For the current revolting black athlete, this certainly seems the case. By co-opting the message of the protests, NFL owners like Jones were able to make still-unsatisfied athletes seem bitter and greedy in a certain light. Thus, Jones' performative wokeness successfully play-actioned protests about police brutality into something lesser that many players felt obligated to accept or else be ostracized even more.

This sort of transformation of messaging angered Bill Russell, one of America’s great social agitators in sports. By the time the March on Washington came to the capital in 1963, Russell was disenchanted with the Civil Rights Movement. He was sick of compromises. He said the day became “nothing more than a mere picnic” because whites marched. The message changed, and the voice of the oppressed was not one with the oppressor at his shoulder.

“The March on Washington was brilliantly conceived and badly executed,” Russell recalled in Go Up For Glory in 1965. “The bigots will make something of this. But I concur with what Malcolm X said: ‘They merely marched from the feet of one dead president to the feet of another.’”

Acts of "Unity" have been the fodder making America’s heart swell. Hand-holding in the face of a president who believes people of color are inhuman plays into America’s often misguided ideals of egalitarianism. Our nation loves to see black hands holding white hands but has never stopped to gauge what it accomplishes. We are not post-racial by any means, and we will not get there soon by evading America’s insidious nature.

Co-option is a powerful tool. So is money. This year, Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins said he would stop protesting after NFL owners met with the Players Coalition — a group Jenkins co-founded — and agreed to give $89 million over seven years to charitable groups working toward criminal justice reform and better relationships between community and law enforcement. Several members of the Players Coalition, including 49ers safety Eric Reid, publicly announced their decision to leave the group when the announcement was made.

NFL owners didn't have to look far for a lesson in how to stifle a movement.

In 1961, the Baltimore Colts played the Pittsburgh Steelers in an exhibition game in Roanoke, Va. Virginia State Police were enforcing Jim Crow seating. Local NAACP chapters filed lawsuits. For days state courts didn’t hear the suit. Telegrams were sent to black players on both teams. Coaches asked them what they would do if the game proceeded, and many said they wouldn’t play if segregated seating was enforced. Roanoke officials gathered and said they would ignore the segregationist law to keep peace with players. Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, even sent out a press release.

Newspapers labeled the day a victory before it began. Then Lenny Moore, a star tailback for the Colts, walked inside the stadium and saw that the gatekeepers had lied. Jim Crow seating was enforced, just like any other day.

“I had to reach through the chain-link fence in order to shake their hands,” Moore said in his autobiography. “No image had ever made me realize, with such force, just what blacks have been up against all through American history: We have always been on the outside looking in.”

The lesson here is to be wary of white folks; to know that football is fun, but it is also work. You must maim your body for the happiness of your owner, fans, and America. Or you will be fired. You will be cast aside. And you will go back to being an unknown number in a country that does not love you.

VI. “What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”

As we leave the East Room back on that October afternoon, I think to myself that this did not happen by chance. The concerns of black constituents, black footballers calling for an end to police brutality, none of these is as mighty as the man attacking them to get praise from white Americans.

Only under Trump could the Day of Reckoning have happened. If Obama’s presidency was a result of a second era of Black Reconstruction, then Trump, as the journalist Adam Serwer and the author Ta-Nehisi Coates have noted, sparked a second wave of white redemption.

Trump’s white identity politics are stronger than concerns about his temperament, his sanity, or the people who inhabit his administration. They are stronger than the black athletes at odds with him. If white Americans of virtually every economic background were willing to elect a man like this, one whose political identity is tailored for white nationalism, then there is no place for black, protesting football players.

Trump will always attack black athletes because they pose a threat to this white power dynamic, and because it is the easiest way to signal to his base that that they are right to feel threatened. They are evidence that the gatekeeper’s control is slipping. To suppress that idea, Trump must dismiss them and dehumanize them. As an added bonus for Trump, this excites the base — the large swath of the country that created this moment.

“If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is,” the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe told James Baldwin in 1980. “What they are saying is not don’t introduce politics. What they are saying is don’t upset the system. They are just as political as any of us. It’s only that they are on the other side.”

I can understand why the gatekeepers claim these footballers unpatriotic, because they don’t see us as citizens of their states. This can be an argument about the flag if you don’t believe it represents folks like me.

Near the manicured lawn of the White House, Mike Sullivan, the Penguins coach, begins speaking to gathered press. Sullivan reinforces the lie of the afternoon: He says he felt no pressure accepting an invitation here because it wasn’t political. This was only a celebration, he said.

Jerry Jones provided the smile that killed football’s latest revolt. He is no ally. He is not smiling to me. He is smiling to them: the rest of America.

At this point in our history, it seems foolish that someone could offer this misconceived belief unless they are too nonchalant to care or very careful to preserve their position of power. Either feels like cowardice.

“Does it matter that, regardless of [what you’ve said], the president is using you and your team as a prop in this culture war against other black leagues?” I ask. “Because you can kind of say it as many times as you want, but the appearance is that you are complicit.”

“See, you're suggesting that that’s the case,” Sullivan says. “We don’t believe that.”

It was that moment when I knew, despite anything said, that my initial thought was correct. This shit was weird. Trump and whiteness had won the Day of Reckoning. To be passive in the face of the crime is as dangerous as the transparent attack. To be willfully ignorant about race perpetuates and enables racism in America. I can’t help but think that they are all too afraid, too scared to challenge white power, to do what is just, to show a shred of morality for the unprivileged.

And while it is weird, by this point Sullivan’s words are expected. Yes, all of this is still insulting. Yet since black people were kidnapped and dragged here, four violent centuries says all of this is the American normal.

Jerry Jones provided the smile that killed football’s latest revolt. He is no ally. He is not smiling to me. He is smiling to them: the rest of America. I’m sure they are at ease. His message to them is one that we have heard from white people in power for centuries: Don’t worry. The black men had their fun and are back, reset, ready for servitude, docile once more. How dastardly. How American. What a rush.

VII. “We gon’ be alright”

Talking to black people in this country about the last two years since Kaepernick ignited protest in football and elsewhere, it is easy to become despondent. Folks truly, honestly, wanted to believe something could be done, that we could be saved, and that progress, the same progress we have always clamored for, was possible.

Look around. There is no better. There is no hope. This movie ends in tragedy. The idea that white folks think black folks have reason to believe in change is deflating.

There is no reason for optimism when the first black president was followed by a man looking to destroy his legacy and belittle the achievements and advancements of people who he sees as less than. That includes the men in pads who look as I do.

How can I enjoy optimism while a country pays black people for entertainment, appropriates our culture, then spits in their faces when they say anything other than “thank you?”

Optimism is not for me, though, it is beautiful to dream. There is no hope for the black body in modern America. But neither am I despondent.

Black protesters turned football players should not be hopeful. They also should not compromise. They did not win. Whiteness won. It always wins. But there is space to be positive. Blackness has become indefatigable even if our existence here and on the football field fighting for equality is Sisyphean and disheartening.

Thinking of this often makes me think of Kendrick Lamar and his anthems about Black America. On his 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick examines the emotions we can have being American. In the past 15 months, I found myself doing this, going back to these affirmations, humming them during the “Star Spangled Banner.”

“Nigga, we gon’ be alright,” Kendrick promises.

These words, in repetition, are like a proverb. Black people were kidnapped and tortured on the way to this country, built its infrastructure, and became its greatest athletes and entertainers. We are the culture, the sound, its consciousness — the heartbeat of America and somehow also its biggest enemy. Kendrick’s ghetto lullaby reminds me of that. The toot of that saxophone, the ping of that high hat, the rasp of his Compton attitude: It’s all soothing.

Our culture, our beauty, allows us — throughout this tortured cycle of protest and destruction — to keep our pride. There is fire shut up in our bones. We have shown how mighty we are. Listen to the song. Kendrick keeps saying, “Nigga we gon’ be alright.”

Well.

Nigga, maybe you right. Maybe one day we actually will.

[lydiayocum87-blog]

Parenting Articles.

With Christmas not too far, little bit of concern your interest is beginning to look to obtaining the right availables for your family and friends. This birthday, your close friend will definitely come to be much more delighted as well as amazed on getting your remarkable present. Go the distance as well as do not desert your close friend after the first devotion to view a professional. If you make use of a wicker basket, use some pleasing X-mas tissue newspaper or even various other beautiful paper to product line this. Manage the products in the container so this would appear appealing and also wonderful. Your buddy could feel in much safer region heaping it on you rather than where that truly belongs, certainly not that any individual is worthy of abuse. In my viewpoint that had not been arrogance yet this was actually again love for a friend that made you accomplish this.

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[dwestfieldblog]

SUMERIANTIME BLUES

With a Red Indian Summer chant...Hitherehowareya, hitherehowareya...Hi there, how are ya? Not my joke but I love it. Please don't ask what film it comes from, not exactly highbrow film noir, more low dirty primary colour cartoon. Anyway...let's pretend to be serious...arf.

Greetings from the Golden City/Anarcadia, all hail the black Madonna and the Rosy Cross...Sultry, feral and on heat...In the hollow of the temple, the vein that needs to burst. And at last, a storm to break the tension...release...a bolt of lightning smashed down about twenty metres from my window last night with an intensity of total sound I have never heard before. The ape man cowered in terror and the magician marvelled in thrill, which is how it should be...respect and wonder. Now, Morning song...At dawn there is an unknown bird which trills the first six notes of Stravinsky's The Firebird Suite'. Yes really. And, having checked, it is even the same notes. And the magpies sound like Varese. Meanwhile, back on the island...

Oh Britain... England my cowardly lion heart....I remember reading in 2008 that the UK has1percent of the world's population but 20percent of its CCTV cameras. Now, nine years later....'Rise and rise again till lambs become lions'? Pa! And HA! (Hiram Abif, the architect) From where does such passivity to irrevocable changes stem? GM Frankenfood? The oestrogen in the water supply? Chemtrails? Always seems a touch dubious to me when there are killing attacks made just before a general election and it is revealed that the 'lone wolf' characters were already known to the security services. If I were truly into conspiracy theories (and, despite all appearances, I am not), I might suggest that they were allowed to happen in order to have yet more restrictive laws passed by whichever party is in power. And of course, it is not the parties which hold the actual power. Are those muppet caricatures Boris and Gove going to blather and oil their way up the chain of slime again? At least we have the best sense of humour in the world...self deprecating sarcastic surrealism and a monopoly on fart jokes....

A Czech newspaper had the headline 'Britain Falls into Chaos.' Think that happened quite a long bastard while ago, but it could always be worse, says the realistic pessimist. My imminent 'holiday' in the UK will see me attempting to maintain my distance from the news but it will be hard not to be infected with the national mind set again. A hard discipline of emotional distance is required but I always love walking around the heart of London, the streets are ablaze and swarming with energies, stories and multicolour.  

I set a smart teenage student some homework last week about what she would do if she were World President. A moral and well balanced page of A4 writing was handed over where her main idea involved better, deeper education for the poor and the masses (as well as support for genuine refugees and limited time on the Net for young people). Good work. I would start in those countries which pretend to be democracies but appear have become run by and full of deeply soulless idiots such as (fill in the blank). Educatshun is the onlee way forward oar wee is domed. Funn wiv langwidge.  

Think about what the Mass believes and the fact that they are a Mass... the believed information used to be 'If the priest/teacher tells me, they must be right'...then that nonsense became 'If its in the papers it must be true'. Now it seems to have become 'If it's on the internet it must be real' Fake news and propaganda...Vested interests... oil and other businesses and Putin surpassing the former work of the CIA and stirring the shit up all over the world. What happens if I push these two groups together... then introduce a third party to cause a deepening chaos? Evil glee. Money to be made and power to be taken because Nature abhors the vacuum left after chaos...and psychic vampires adore the blood energy of fear.    

Oliver Stone's serial on Putin...hmmm...does the baldhead truly feel himself as no more than a helpless cog in wheel of history, grinding on events beyond his control? Poor fellow. Looked cute together with the golden shower kid this month.  

Heard that Michael Moore is to do a documentary on Duck Fart, sure it will be as righteously destructive as it needs to be...just sticking to the absolute facts and verbatim quotes in context should be enough to do it. Hoist him high on his own petard. Nice headline in the International Guardian about America becoming a rogue state due to the blonde egomaniac's decision to go against the climate change accord (and all his other genuinely insane ideas)...well his poor billionaire friends need all the support they can get eh? 'Evil' is un-evolved energy. So perhaps I should pretend to be a smiling Buddhist and feel sympathy for the sad little (ter)mites. But I don't. He and they of their ilk are ruining this planet and Mother is going to be very very angry. Earth First. Very decent of BP (British Petroleum) to have given Duck Fart 500,000 dollars for his election celebration. After 97 million dollars in corporate donations, you can be sure they expect him to be their whore bitch...or else.  

And as for all his posturing against American law itself...after having sworn 'To protect, defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States'...with his hand on the Bible...hmmm....you have to laugh at his infantile rage against a democracy which allowed him within quacking distance of the White House, let alone into the Oval Orifice...Whaddya mean I can't build a wall (between the land grab of Tex Ass and Mexico) and take total control of U.S media? The darkest is yet to come, just before a golden dawn. Illuminated Ones, it is time to get your finger out and SHINE a light

across this globe. Get with it, get this foul reptilian out. The tweeting duck needs spit roasting. But first glaze him with a golden shower eh?

And in other depressing news... one of Osama bin Liner's sons has vowed to continue 'holy' war in his father's name and install a global caliphate. Etc. Nice to have a hobby. Good to keep busy with purpose... Without such, the ennui, nausea and panic set in hard and thoughts turn to suicide rather than mass murder, and we wouldn't want that eh? And yet worse... Au Sang Su Ki...it is becoming apparent that she is following in the bloody footprints of the ones who kept her imprisoned. I truly hope not but the facts scream for themselves. And as for Iran, a country where a girl can be held criminally responsible at the lunar age of 9 (boys get off easier at 15) but cannot actually be executed until they are 18....Allah bless such a merciful state of foul patriarchs...But  to close that paragraph with a skateboarding duck story to send you to bed with a smile, good to hear the founding leader of daesh has gone to meet his harem of 72 virgins and their mothers in law, hope that isn't fake news.  

Facebook...the recent F8 (FATE) event...new updates to augment reality on your mobile screens and share the images...well this would almost sound like art, if not for the fact 'FACT' (copyright Duck Fart) that Mr Zuckerberg (and here the NSA can pick up on an actual name in these blogs which generally use pseudonyms) is thinking of running for office. Or an orifice, take your pick. My tube/your Facebook is designed to make money and manipulate the gullible and outsource/ in-source their users information while you thrill to the idea of an unreal connection to truth. Suckers. Why let yourself be used as fodder unless you are truly a deep masochist?  You had better be DAMN sure that you do not care whether or not you are a puppet. Psychic nudity is only for those who have truly chosen such. I stand by everything I have written in every blog. Networking keeps you in touch with a distorted and distracting version of reality, i-phone therefore I am...anti-social media... 'Every day of your life, you're sitting in a database, just ready to be looked at'. E.S.

Been wondering again about the prevalence of doctors who prescribe drugs just because they have been given free holidays or various enticements by the companies which make them. Not such a far fetched idea unfortunately. I have had recent talks with various chemists in Czech and the UK about this too to check the facts. Seems a real shame that so many healers work against their own Hippocratic Oath. A promise of hypocrisy perhaps. A special circle of Hell is reserved for them...

Apart from my five worsening health problems, I seem to be recording two double cds...33 songs now and another ten possibles on the peripheral third eye horizon. I plan to have only three more sessions in which to complete all. See how I love to count. Wonder which will stop me first, illness or lack of money? Already not looking forward to the non Zen emptiness of winter...so New Zealand here I come...

'I long so much to be where I was before I was me.'  (Screamin' Jay Hawkins.)

Occasionally my usual good natured self (ARF/fnord) is over-run by the blackest of humours...yesterday, walking down a long main street, I saw a small group of folk with banners and twisted expressions, and stopped to be given two leaflets which caused me to laugh out loud like Lucifer as I went on my way. Early next morning I checked their web site...; 'RAPTURE... HE WILL COME SOON, ARE YOU READY?'. That's how excited his followers make him feel. Open your orifices and let the load of the lord in. Impregnate thyselves with the holy seed...Sex and religion are always such an arousing mix.  

Once more, for the lossless Hi-Fi record, I have my own personal belief in what I call God and the Christ and all the others...what I dislike is those who interrupt without being asked and push their rant/laws/insanity on others. All rivers will flow in return to the ocean. Fundamentalist missionaries of ALL creeds are foul and lonely in desperation and use fear to persuade. No Love in any of them. Humans will find their way...or not. Some of us will, some won't. The energy generated by the few will be stronger than the lack of it from the mass. Phase transitions have been taking place for decades and will continue, sense it for yourself...taking some advice from guides you have manifested in your life by 'coincidence' is not the same as blindly following leaders.

I am fairly close to being a dictionary definition of the word stupid/stoopid, just smart enough to recognise this. I have a certain unbalanced logic but made my choices decades ago. To the bitter-sweet end and until I am screaming with pain for one reason or another, will regret nothing except not having been a father. Fuj to the liars and manipulators, their own poison will destroy them eventually. Not in my lifetime but quite possibly in theirs. Self educate yourself but check the source and when certain, flow with it. Blah blah blah...Trust yourself but only after you know who and what you are. I will be all right if you kiss me. So sayeth the Omega Male.

'Better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt'. Abraham Lincon said that, yes really. I should certainly shut up, but after all these pages, it must surely be clear just how deep a fool I am anyway. Anyway...

Next in the sequence of slogans and logos noticed these days, a girl with a bag upon which was written; 'Walk like you're a mediocre white man'. Easy enough to obey that command. I met an exceptionally cool black African guy last month who was applying for status here. He spoke excellent French, having lived there...I asked him why he wanted to live in Prague rather than France and he replied 'There's too many black people in France.' He was a true believer of Almighty Jah and one of his favourite songs was 'You'll Never Walk Alone' because of  'its righteous truth'. Effortlessly natural and down to Earth, with his soul in Heaven already. Surely even Nazis must realise on how many levels white folk suck? Perhaps that is one basis for their hatred...jealousy.  

Back in a room with golden light, curtains of smoke at 8pm, yes I am smoking again, surely the dumbest thing anyone can choose to do...And back to Dexedrine jazz 1958, still amazed how much I love this now, a broadening mature palette or a genuine sign of old age? Straight, no chaser.... Miles Davis and John Coltrane in wild abandoned synchronised improvising harmony...My liver is going the same way as Coltranes', shame I don't have an eighth of his talent. If I could play guitar the same way I whistle, I'd be a star. Or a black hole. Arf. Anyway...the next evening...

Wide open window...evening sky, sunlight on the cloud rims, the swallows circling, the dark green spaces between the leaves of the Horse Chestnut tree...even the houses look beautiful in glass and stone, a breeze through the window, breathing, every atom open in expectant silence. Beauty. Good to feel alive before you no longer inhabit flesh. A day is a wasted blasphemy without creating, working or truly taking it easy and watching the river. Wonders never cease...Love is Light...

See you later or not, meanwhile...you (yes, YOU) might like to have a look at this website and follow various links within the vast library. Knowledge of actual truths is always useful, so go and get Gnostic on yourself...  

www.halexandria.org/home.htm

Have fun, may ye be illuminated:-)

[viralhottopics]

Turkey in grip of fear as Erdoan steps up post-terror attack crackdown

Critics believe presidents intolerant approach to civil society may have fostered conditions in which atrocity was possible

Turkeys strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdoan, rarely goes on the defensive. Yet in his first public appearance since the New Years Eve massacre in an Istanbul nightclub, he felt obliged to publicly reject the notion that his governments intolerant approach to civil society could possibly have encouraged the attack claimed by Islamic State that left 39 people dead.

Erdoan was speaking before a regular gathering of elected community leaders, an opportunity he usually uses to glad-hand political support.

However, the shock of the attack has further rent an already divided country. While no one believes that the government is directly responsible, it is accused of creating an atmosphere in which a religious fanatic could get away with murder.

Nobody should be forced to share the same kind of lifestyle, said Erdoan, adding that if anyone had come under pressure to conform to an alien way of life it had been this brother meaning himself.

Erdoans rise from street urchin to inhabiting a palace that architects estimate to have cost more than 1bn has indeed been hardscrabble. In 1998 he was removed from office as mayor of Istanbul and briefly imprisoned for reciting a well-known nationalist poem which the prosecutor deemed an incitement to violence and religious hatred.

However, greater obstacles might lie ahead. The difficulties that are already facing Erdoans Turkey hardly need rehearsing. A civil war across the Syrian border has led to an influx of what may be as many as three million refugees. A once booming economy is now ailing. In 2015 in order to woo the nationalist vote the government shredded its attempt to secure an agreement with dissident Kurds. On top of this, there is the debilitating drip, drip of terrorist incidents.

On Thursday, a courthouse in the Aegean city of Izmir came under attack, leaving two people dead along with two assailants who were believed to be Kurdish militants. A rocket assault on a police station in the Kurdish south-east of the country, also on New Years Eve, was sufficiently commonplace to go unreported.

The killing spree in the Reina nightclub, by contrast, is not something that Turkish society is likely to forget. Whether by chance or by design, the gunman, who is still at large, managed to aggravate the us and them faultline in Turkish society. Despite the presidents assurances, many Turks feel that their lifestyle is under siege.

Are they going to carry on until we are all in little pieces? asked the owner of one fashionable restaurant who, like many people in the public eye, now prefers to remain anonymous.

Reina is located in the shadow of the first Bosphorus bridge, the pinch point of last Julys failed military coup. Since then, Turkey has been under emergency rule in an attempt to root out what politicians describe as terrorist infiltration into the state. The government blames the followers of Fethullah Glen, an Islamic preacher living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania.

While exact figures are hard to come by, there have been at least 120,000 dismissals of civil servants, and a third of these may now be under some form of detention including two constitutional court judges.

After the Reina shootings, many are beginning to suspect that the government has been chasing the wrong enemy, or at least wonder whether those in charge of the purges are themselves to be trusted. The point was driven home in December when an off-duty policeman working as a presidential guard shot dead the Russian ambassador to Turkey in what he said was revenge for the brutal reconquest of Aleppo.

Ordinary people, including many government supporters, took to the streets last summer to persuade those behind the coup to step down. Even government opponents were outraged that some still believed you could take control of a G20 nation and Nato member by occupying a radio station. Within hours of the putsch, Istanbuls Atatrk airport was open for commercial flights.

But if the country quickly returned to normal, it has been a new normal in which the president is much stronger but the country over which he rules has been weakened in ways that are still being played out. One consequence feared by many is that Erdoan now relies entirely on his core supporters and has given up all pretence of being a one nation leader.

Turkey no longer thinks in terms of left and right but secularist and Islamicist, says Aye nc, professor emeritus of sociology at Istanbuls Sabanci University.

The head of Turkeys state-funded Presidency of Religious Affairs took the lead from the pulpit in demonising the celebration of new year and social media buzzed with staged lynchings of Father New Year the Turkish equivalent of Santa Claus. When one German language school in Istanbul was forced to cancel its festivities, the daily Die Welt responded with a caricature of Erdoan on its front page as the Grinch who stole Christmas.

One of those injured in the nightclub attack in Istanbul is rushed to hospital. Photograph: AP

For a Turkish newspaper to do the same would have been a reckless act of bravery. Underlying secularists concerns is the governments eagerness to criminalise dissent. At least 140 journalists and writers are now behind bars amid a crackdown on the media since the coup. Prison conditions are dire and no evidence of involvement in the coup has been provided against those held in pre-trial detention, either publicly or in private, says Katie Morris, head of Europe and Central Asia for Article 19, the London-based freedom of expression advocates.

With little hope of redress in local courts, it is not surprising that victims are now applying to the European court of human rights, Morris says. One such applicant, the editor and novelist Ahmet Altan, has accused the government not of arresting people involved in the coup but those trying to investigate what really happened. He himself was arrested nearly four months ago but, according to his lawyers, so far there has been no indictment.

Whether European disapproval will have an impact is unclear. When the Justice and Development party (AKP) which Erdoan helped to found came to power in the early 2000s, it advertised itself as proof that Islamic politics could come in from the cold. Rather than lead Turkey away from the west, it would make the country more democratic, more European, and better able to exercise a moderate leadership role on the world stage.

Fifteen years later Turkey seems more isolated than ever. This is partly a result of vacillations over Syria. At first Turkey was at loggerheads with Russia over Moscows support for President Bashar al-Assad, even coming under an economic embargo when, in 2015, a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian jet. Now it argues with the US over a lack of air support in Syria as Turkish troops try to capture Islamic State strongholds before Syrian Kurdish fighters get there first. In a round of diplomatic sabre-rattling last week, it threatened to expel Nato forces from the key Mediterranean airbase in ncirlik.

An increasingly dire human rights record has weakened the countrys international standing and diluted the sympathy which the government might have expected as victim of an attempted coup. As its influence wanes, Turkey has become a breeding ground for conjecture and conspiracy theories where everyone else is to blame.

One pro-government newspaper morphed the mugshot of the man suspected of the nightclub assault into a photograph of Barack Obama.

Cold weather and bottlenecks in Turkeys supply of natural gas forced power cuts at the end of 2016, but many secular Turks chose to believe the explanation that a spiteful government was trying to sabotage new year celebrations. Yet on Friday the minister of energy (and the presidents son-in-law) announced that the electrical grid had come under cyber-attacks originating in America.

Unlike Russia, which Erdoan now courts, Turkey has no oil or natural resource which it can use to keep supporters loyal. Until now the AKP has relied on consumer confidence and building tunnels, bridges or a third Istanbul airport to keep its cronies happy and the economy well oiled. The shopping mall, as much as the mosque, has been the symbol of its era in power.

Now the streets are eerily empty. Even before the Reina massacre, the lira was under attack. The inflation rate is rising, growth is slowing and the markets are pushing up interest rates. These are times when investors look for a strong policy response, but the political environment means that this is proving hard to deliver, says Murat er, economist at consultancy Global Source Partners.

Ever since the coup attempt, Turkey has been under a form of emergency law where the government can rule by decree. The president is now pressing for constitutional changes that would make these powers permanent.

A democratic presidential system has checks and balances this would be one-man rule, says Ergun zbudun, a professor of constitutional law who was asked by Erdoan, then prime minister, to draw up a constitution in 2007.

However beleaguered Erdoan might be, few expect him to back down. You may dislike a thing while it is good for you, and you may love a thing while it is evil for you, he said in a New Year message to his people the implication being that, though they may view the new authoritarianism as a bitter pill, they will grow to love the taste.

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from Turkey in grip of fear as Erdoan steps up post-terror attack crackdown

#Turkey in grip of fear as Erdoan steps up post-terror attack crackdown