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itisbop · 2 months

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And now... the moment you've all been waiting for (or not, which is fine)! Let's talk Brawl Talk because OH BOY am I excited.

This is gonna be a pretty long post, so bear with me! I'll go over one section at a time and go over what I liked and disliked. Spoilers ahead! If you haven't watched the latest Brawl Talk, go do so! One more reminder, these are just my thoughts! You don't have to agree with me!

Without further to do... let's talk!

New Brawlers (Angelo and Melodie)

Now, when I first saw Angelo, I immediately went, "HE'S UGLY LMAO." After getting used to him, though, he's actually not that bad. His design is really good and is somewhat of an anti-cupid (perfect for a gal like Willow). Also, his voice actor did such a good job so much energy was put into him.

He doesn't seem like he's gonna be incredibly busted, but he is gonna be good in the right hands (while I'm at it pay your respects to Mortis Mains ya'll, they just took a major l with this guy). Sorry Larry and Lawrie, but you two are gonna have to step aside, I NEED this man as much as I need the next brawler.

I. LOVE. MELODIE!!! I did think she was a League of Legends character at first, lol.

Apparently, I've heard people say she is the first female assassin, which is very interesting! Out of the two, I feel she poses more of a threat. She might be broken, though her main attack is WEAK.

I've been through the Reddit and have seen so many people talk about how she looks like Janet, and I'd like to take the time to bring up a little theory... what if she was Janet and Bonnie's mom? I would go into this further, but we have to keep going!

Overall, I really like these two! Their designs are really good, and the character designers did a great job! Their pins and profile pictures show SO much personality! Expect some art of these two soon! However, if I may say something, I wish their skins were cooler. Why couldn't Angelo have a Sands of Time skin too? 😭

Speaking of Sands of Time...

Sands of Time and Ragnorok + Skins

Out of both seasons, I'm very hyped for Sands of Time. The "Sands of Time" is a very interesting concept that can be used very creatively. Can't wait to see what the animation brings! Though I think we all know why I'm hyped...

My best guest was that this skin was gonna be a Epic/Mythic skin, but a LEGENDARY?????? WHAT?????? Chuck fans we just fucking WON. I've seen the sneak peaks and heard his voice lines, Nicolai did an INCREDIBLE job as always. I'm am SO READY to go broke for this skin, but first, I must purchase some seasonal skins since they've been on my agenda for a while.

Loki Chester has to be the one I'm looking forward to getting the most for the Ragnorok seasons/skins. Plus, it's free! (If you have good luck).

Side note and honorable mention, Thor Bibi was just the icing on the cake for Bibi Mains this update. While I feel like a few more details could be added for this skin to make in truly "legendary," everything else about it great, including the voice acting! Poor Bull, he's the only one in his yet to get a Legendary Skin.

Ranked and The Report System

Okay, not related, but I love how they disses on the community a bit in this section, LOL. They know what, at least Reddit and Twitter are doing (and let's keep it that way, they don't need to know what's going on over here lol).

Anyways, while I'm excited (and scared) for Ranked with modifiers I wanna take this time to talk about a concern... the report system...

Now, I know there's a reason why we have 10 reports; but what's gonna stop so angry guy from reporting me if I didn't do anything? I feel like there's a chance this could backfire, that's all.

Hypercharges and Balance Changes

No Mortis or Poco hypercharge :(

Cordelius was definitely unexpected and very scary. Getting slowed in the shadow realm is a death sentence.

I wish Belle got a little more this update, but I'll take the hypercharge.

Move over Charlie, there's a new spider person in town, and he's a DINOSAUR.

Onto to balance changes. 84???? GOD DAMN. Adrien wasn't fucking around this update. Edgar is dead (and rightfully so FUCK HIM) and Doug might actually stand a chance in this Meta. I'll miss the days when Hypercharges were game breaking just for the community's rage, but it's probably for the greater good.

Whatever the Fuck the Random Skins Were

Now Primo Shark, I can take (though I'm definitely not gonna be able to take Baby Shark as a in game theme, I'm muting music for that entire time period). Pitcher Fang is a good skin too. Squeaky note is very... meh, but it's a rare skin so you can't expect much.

BUT POOP SPIKE.

POOP SPIKE.

What

the

FUCK?

It was tolerable until I saw the losing animation, and to that, I say EWWWWWWWWWW 🤮🤮🤮. WHYYYYY!?!?!? THAT'S SO NASTY!!!

I get that this is an April Fool's skin, but WHYYY THAT??? Thank GOD this skin is expensive. If I catch any of you with this skin, I'm gonna need to ask if you're okay. I don't wanna show a picture of this skin to you all, or else I'm pretty sure Tumblr would kick me to the curve. This is easily what I was least excited for for this update.

Overall Rating and Final Thoughts

Now, it's time to throw the final ratings on screen and say anything else that's on my mind.

New Brawlers - 9.5/10, definitely getting both! Let's hope they get some cool skins soon!

Sands of Time - 7/10, the concept and Chuck carry this season don't fight me on this. /j

Ragnorok - 6.5/10, I'm not as hyped, but I will grind for that Chester skin!

Ranked - 8/10, now I have a reason to actually play this mode. Hopefully, the report system is fair enough...

Hypercharges - 6.5/10, again not as hype, but I will be snatching that Belle Hypercharge since she's the only one out of the 6 I maxed out. She deserved more, though. :(

Balance Changes - 10/10, bye Edgar begone. F for the twins, however; I liked them.

Random Stuff - 3/10, not even Pitched Fang can save us from whatever the devs were on.

Overall Season 24/25 is...

8/10! (Poop Spike ruined it >:( )

And that's it. For those who have read to the end, thank you so much for heating me ramble it means so much. Expect some headcanons and more little theories soon (as in some time this week). Until then, ciao!

#brawl stars #speak no eve vil #see no eve vil #doodle #all brawlers

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sio-lokistiel · 7 months

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Hi!! So I'm a fairly strong chuck won believer (i have been given some Extremely convincing evidence and I think its interesting to think about so) but I saw a post you made about how that theory disregards cas and jacks arcs and I was just wondering if you could expand on that? I'm super open to interpretations lol and I'm really curious to hear the other side (i haven't seen too much anti chuck won stuff so I dont know the arguments)

Okay, oh boy. I guess part of it is what exactly you mean by “Chuck Won” because I understand it on a censorship level. Yes, Chuck was representing the network. Yes, the network meddled and cut Dean’s reciprocation and we ended up with that garbage finale with pages of [OMITTED] in the script. So, if that’s all you mean by “Chuck Won” then yeah, whatever I guess.

Idk, some people probably feel it’s a legitimate theory simply because Dean died. It seems a lot of the fandom thinks death = bad…and that’s just not the case now that Jack freed the souls. I mean, I can throw quotes from The Mummy and Lord of the Rings at you about how death is the next step in journey. So while I’m no longer upset about Dean dying in general, especially because it was foreshadowed, the way he died was so fucking dumb. That doesn’t mean I think it has anything to do with Chuck.

Cas’ arc was all about self-actualization. His speech in Gimme Shelter explains a good part of it with how he found purpose having a family and becoming a dad, BUT him also realizing that having himself is important, too. Then, oh goodness, we reach the culmination in Despair (The Truth) when he realizes happiness is in the saying, in accepting your truth, both the good and bad bits of yourself. The Empty comes and he reintegrates with his Shadow to become whole and saves Dean, the world, and himself in the process. Yes, that’s a whole bunch of Jungian psychology stuff and it’s a lot to process and I’m probably not doing the best job of explaining it. Most of the Chuck Won theory stuff I’ve seen ignores all that and seems to ignore the canon that Cas IS in heaven. I understand the disappointment of Cas and Dean not reuniting, YET. Corporate fuckery (and Covid) kept it from happening in the finale with the original Roadhouse ending that was planned and then scheduling conflicts and Jensen and Misha agreeing Cas needed more than a cameo kept him from being in The Winchesters.

And Jack. Jack was literally the whole goddamn point. The two big things are he’s possessed and sometimes dead because of this, or he is corrupted somehow. I have never seen a convincing damn argument for either of these things. There’s one post that tries to compare some his mannerisms to Chuck, but is filled with so much straw grasping and reaching I’m surprised the author didn’t need a doctor afterward. Another is that some people project on the poor boy so much and just they don’t like his arc, they want to think something is wrong. There is a lot more Pagan stuff about Jack and the number of mythologies where some god is brought down by being a power hungry dickhead and that comes back to bite them in the ass as a grandchild in Jack’s case removes them from power. There are better people to explain all the Pagan imagery surrounding Jack; my tag #jack is the orphic egg should get you to some really good stuff. I’m also not down to argue about how the last 3-5 seasons are meant to read with a Pagan lens. There was one group who predicted the end of the mothership months in advance and then all of The Winchesters and it wasn’t the people clinging to some white Christian reading.

Last thing, I just personally find the theory really lazy as well. I would legitimately be so disappointed in Jensen and whoever ends up writing the next chapter whether that’s Robbie or someone else if they went that route. Luckily, they are all smarter than that and I can see them seeming to lean into it, but then having the most fabulous rug pull! This is very long, oops.

#jack kline #castiel #spn #spnwin #fuck chuck won #anon ask #hermeticism #long post

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4x01 · 3 years

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when the jensen “anti-heaven endgame” ackles reboot proves the chuck won theory then you will Realize.

#txt

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seenthisepisode · 2 years

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the thing is, and i stared at a wall for the last 40 minutes dissociating about it, the thing is, that all of this is because we never got to properly say goodbye to cas. we knew spn was ending and in the finale we will have to say goodbye to sam and dean (no matter what actually happens in this ep) but we knew its the end and this is goodbye. we knew and we were prepared. Jack had his goodbye in 15x19 (i am putting aside the chuck won and jack was gone in 19 theories). but also we were ALL so sure cas was gonna be back in the finale one way or another and that's when we will say goodbye to him, and when i say we ALL i mean all, everyone, if someone, particularly if an anti, or a bibro tells you they knew he wasn't gonna be back they are LYING because they were gritting their teeth, scared that he will eventually be back (because. cas. always. comes. back) and the confession scene will be resolved somehow or at the very least addressed. lack of cas was such a surprise that no one, not a single person in the fandom was ready for and we just didn't prepare for it and we thought we were gonna be able to say goodbye to cas and then we just never got the chance. that's why it hurts, because we never got to say goodbye to him in a way that a normal show would allow us to. that's why no one here is normal and that's why we're stuck here because saying goodbye to cas is our unfinished business

#and the worst thing is dean didn't get to say goodbye either his voice was taken away from him and he never got to say anything #he couldn't even bury him like the last time because there was no body no coat nothing #n o t h i n g #yes i rewatched 15x18 today and i am very unwell #happy saileen wedding anniversary to all celebrating but i will stay in my corner rocking back and forth #destiel #cas #spngate

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princessnijireiki · 3 years

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I'm still stuck on this but the other thing I don't like abt Oxfordians is they say their evidence is none of Shakespeare's kids tried to claim royalties on his plays after he passed (1. did not know that was a thing at the time, 2. seems kind of antithetical to the way his plays were performed + were written to include a commoner working class audience, like... maybe his work being out in the world was satisfying enough? tf), and that there were no books written down in his will, and they say the "real Shakespeare" would have had to own over 200 books so they should be in the will to divide up between his estate

now... I am a broke individual who has also dabbled just a lil bit in academia & research papers & writing. and I promise you even digitally I do not own copies of all my research sources. I very specifically hate hauling books when I move, and that's in modern times when books are cheap. cannot tell you how many university press books & textbooks & stuff I've thrown or given away (thrown out only if they're damaged but tbh it was england in the 1600s with no, like, dehumidifiers or anti mold, anti bookworm stuff either... do you know how special a book has to be to me to keep it if it's water damaged from a flood or whatever while it's triggering my allergies? ok)

it's such a weird fucking detached-rich-person thing to use as "proof." if I won the lottery tomorrow & wrote up a will, my books wouldn't be in it. that doesn't mean I don't own books or didn't care about them, just that, like, will it matter when I'm dead? sell it, chuck it, fight over it, I don't care. once upon a time I would've said donate them to a library but most libraries can't just take any old book you drop off; they just become a middleman between the books being sold at the thrift store or pulped.

and also like... WHO is to say he didn't give his stuff away BEFORE dying? or that his kids hadn't already taken their pick rather than it NEEDING to be stipulated in writing? or that any books he had were even actually his? modern public libraries weren't a thing yet, but "borrowing or paying to lease a book from a guy you know" + "interviewing primary sources yourself if there isn't a book on what you wanna write about yet & just taking notes on scraps of paper you will DEFINITELY eventually lose" sure existed.

it's such weirdo energy that to me speaks to the person in question not knowing any worldly intelligent creative poor people who don't hoard evidence of their literacy like trophies because they also got a 9-5 and 3 kids to feed. like I live in a world where William Shakespeare is possible, and normal! and they live in a world where they've convinced themselves he couldn't possibly even exist... or at very least lack the imagination themselves to be able to fathom somebody being brilliant in the dust.

and both those mindsets are just too bad, yk? like it's genuinely disappointing to see folks would rather buy into a 17th century conspiracy theory than accept the fact that a poor person had the audacity to be talented & funny & MOVING in a way that's artistically stood the test of time, because it's impossible to them for this hick to have become a poet. it's ludicrous, but it persists either from bigotry or small mindedness, and it really is too bad that it's even given credence because that means people have been more married to their own snobbishness for 400+ years than they have been willing to engage with art or an artist who challenges their perception of the world & its limitations + its lack thereof.

#very shades of historical + modern racism in the arts & sciences too and i don't like that!#like at this point they're stupid but even if they weren't i don't care if i'm wrong bc THEY'RE coming from a gross place #so YES a shrimp DID fry this rice AND shakespeare wrote his own work & NONE of you can beat my ass!#long post //#shakespeare

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disillusioned41 · 3 years

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After Senate Republicans unanimously blocked debate on a far-reaching and popular voting rights bill, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont late Tuesday joined the chorus demanding an end to the 60-vote legislative filibuster and slammed the GOP for remaining "loyal to the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election."

"Now is the time for majority rule in the Senate. We must end the filibuster, pass sweeping voting rights legislation, and protect our democracy." —Sen. Bernie Sanders

"It is a disgrace that at a time when authoritarianism, conspiracy theories, and political violence are on the rise, not a single Republican in the United States Senate has the courage to even debate whether we should protect American democracy or not," Sanders said in a statement. "Meanwhile, in state houses and governor's mansions across the country, Republicans are shamefully working overtime to make it harder for poor people, people of color, young people, and people with disabilities to participate in the American democratic system."

Every member of the Senate Democratic caucus—including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the only Senate Democrat who has not co-sponsored the For the People Act—voted in favor of moving forward with debate on the bill Tuesday. But under current Senate rules, which Manchin and other conservative Democrats have refused to touch, a 60-vote supermajority is required to overcome a filibuster, effectively giving the Republican minority veto power.

Further spotlighting the undemocratic nature of the upper chamber, data shows that the 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus represent 43 million more people than the 50 Republicans in the Senate.

Following Tuesday's vote, Sanders said that "there's no issue in front of us right now that is more critical for the future of our country than protecting the fundamental right of every American to vote."

"If we are serious about calling ourselves a democracy we must make it easier for people to participate, not harder," the Vermont senator continued. "Now is the time for majority rule in the Senate. We must end the filibuster, pass sweeping voting rights legislation, and protect our democracy."

The outcome of Tuesday's vote was widely expected, and progressive activists are pledging to stage protests nationwide in the coming weeks to pressure Senate Democrats to end the 60-vote filibuster and pass legislation combating state Republicans' attacks on the franchise, which GOP lawmakers have justified by parroting Trump's false claims about widespread voter fraud.

But as progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers singled out the filibuster as a key obstacle standing in the way of voting rights legislation, neither President Joe Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris nor Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) mentioned in the 60-vote rule in their statements and remarks after Tuesday's vote.

Biden, who has faced criticism for failing to use his bully pulpit to build momentum for the For the People Act, vowed that "this fight is far from over" and that he will "have more to say on this next week."

Harris, for her part, said the White House will "lift up leaders in the states who are working to stop anti-voter legislation, and work with leaders in Congress to advance federal legislation that will strengthen voting rights."

Eliminating or weakening the filibuster would require the support of all 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus plus a tie-breaking vote from Harris, who has previously voiced support for scrapping the 60-vote threshold.

"[Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell led his caucus to embrace the legacy of Strom Thurmond and use Jim Crow-era tactics to block debate over desperately-needed reforms to protect voting rights and return power to the people," Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, said in a statement Tuesday, referring to the late segregationist senator from South Carolina who mounted a 24-hour talking filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

"The question now is whether congressional Democrats and President Biden join forces in order to repel the attacks on our democracy," Levin added. "Every elected official, including President Biden, must be all in to do what is needed to protect our democracy from Republican attack. Democracy is under threat. Fascism is rising. Time is running out. It's time for everyone to stop playing by Republican rules, or everyone will lose."

#Common Dreams #us politics #filibuster #bernie sanders

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theliterateape · 3 years

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A Quarter Flipped for Your Rational Thoughts

by Don Hall

The old man was faced with a dilemma. He needed to decide between two options and he was torn. He understood that most decisions in his life often boiled down to two choices: do the thing or not. Sometimes it was a choice of doing one thing or another. A crossroads. This was not that.

He had made a “pro’s” and “con’s” list on the doing or the not but was on the fence. Which way to go.

He pulled out a quarter. “Heads, I’ll do it. Tails, I won’t.” He flipped the coin. It landed on tails. He was immediately seized by the desire to flip it one more time. He realized that his hesitation to accept the chance odds was the answer he was looking for.

He decided to do it.

I once worked for a guy who would have an idea for the festival he produced. He'd formulate the idea. He'd be convinced that it was sound. He would then go and tell his idea to as many people as he could to gauge their reaction. If the overwhelming consensus was that it was a shit idea, he'd decide they were right. Even if they weren't.

It used to drive me nuts because I'm more of a try it out and see if it works type. The best advice I was ever given on the subject of indecision was to flip a coin. If you want to flip it again, you already know your choice.

How we make decisions tends to get complicated (certainly more complicated than the 50/50 odds of a coin toss). Most psychological studies indicate that we make them more with an emotional foundation than a rational process.

When we are calm, the slow rational thinking guides our decisions. The emotional system acts spontaneously without consideration for the broader consequences of the action.

The reflective system is clearly the grown-up in this pair, and its job is to monitor and correct the impulse of emotion. For example, our emotional mind wants to order dessert and smoke a cigarette, and our reflective brain knows we should resist the temptation and quit smoking. The final decision is determined by the relative strengths of these two systems.

SOURCE

This tracks with common sense and anecdotal experience. I’m more inclined to go along with theories about complex issues when the science and the personal go hand in hand. I’m less likely to buy into the lived experience thing if it is in contrast with data. Sort of like hedging my bets on deciding which information is misleading or credible.

For example, the guest at the casino who refuses to wear a mask because he doesn’t know anyone who has contracted COVID and his theory that it is overblown to solidify a left-leaning agenda in Congress loses out when his theory is in direct contrast with the mountains of scientific evidence that COVID is real and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

If your lived experience is not in concert with the facts at large, you are an exception rather than a rule.

The facts at large are that most of us make decisions with our emotions at the forefront and, while our emotions are valid, our decisions based strictly upon them can often be the wrong choices. For the most part, we know better but lead with that unreflective aspect out of nothing but instinct and entropy.

This is important. The quality of the information we use to make decisions on how to react is crucial in making smart and thoughtful decisions. With so much of our information being targeted to our emotional response, we need stop-gaps built in so we aren't each led by the nose to reactionary and destructive behaviors.

The conclusions reached by the Mueller investigation into Russian interference with our 2016 election were varied but the one that is most concrete is the hackers leveraged our social media platforms to increase our emotional divisions via incendiary posts about race, policing, perceptions of socialism, and a wholesale attack on the efficacy of our government. How terrifically Russian of them.

And we bought it all.

The conservative side of the yard bought the anti-government socialism skew; the liberal faction started wearing their postmodern Marxist t-shirts and the race was on. The Marxists lost in 2016 and won in 2020. The Good Old Boys are winning in the anti-union fights. The Marxists are winning in the universities. As we continue to battle it out with reactionary intent, the likelihood of a continued see-saw of ideology and passionate response is practically guaranteed.

In between the White Nationalists and Critical Race Theorists are the solid, mostly rational center trying to make good decisions based on hard fact and a hope for unity amidst the white noise of the internet.

You’ll find that none of the people who make you lose your temper has done anything that might affect your mind for the worse; and outside of the mind there’s nothing that is truly detrimental or harmful for you.

After all, you even had the resources, in the form of your ability to think rationally, to appreciate that he was likely to commit that fault, yet you forgot it and are now surprised that he did exactly that.

Marcus Aurelius

When I was a pup, I was taught to "count to ten" when I felt the stirring up of hot emotions. I was an angry Irish kid in the sticks of the MidWest and this advice was more insisted upon than suggested. So I did it. I counted to ten. I took that pause. It worked sometimes. When it didn't work I usually paid some sort of consequential price. I learned.

Much later, an older friend—one who had lived enough life to understand my impulsive nature as he was of the same ilk—suggested the coin flip.

"It takes a moment to assign your choices to one or the other side of the coin. It takes another moment to physically balance, flip, and catch the coin. These brief actions divert the gas on fire in your belly long enough to find a sense of rationality.

The discovery I've made is that I almost always already know the correct course of action and, if I really want to flip it a second time, the choice has been made."

Would Matt Gaetz be in the legal peril he's put himself in if he'd used a silver nickel rather than Venmo?

If Kim Potter had taken those brief moments before reaching for her taser and pulling out her pistol to flip a coin, perhaps Duane Wright would still be breathing and imprisoned for fleeing a police officer.

What if Derek Chauvin had, as a function of his training as a Minneapolis policeman, stopped as he decided to pin George Floyd to the ground with his knee on the man's neck and flipped a coin? Heads, knee to the neck for as long as it took. Tails, find a less aggressive approach to the situation.

As Chuck Palahniuk wrote "Every breath is a choice."

You can't play the odds for every breath but breathing isn't an emotional ride. I often say that he who is most certain is almost inevitably full of shit. This applies to True Believers (of anything), climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, anti-capitalists, anti-feminists, misandrists, and Cubs fans.

Flip a coin. Take the moment to cool the jets.

Make rational decisions.

#decision making #emotional vs rational #Marcus Aurelius

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blackkudos · 4 years

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Bobby Scott

Robert Cortez Scott (born April 30, 1947) is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Virginia's 3rd congressional district since 1993. A member of the Democratic Party, he is the dean of Virginia's congressional delegation. The district serves most of the majority-black precincts of Hampton Roads, including all of the independent cities of Franklin, Newport News (where he resides) and Portsmouth, parts of the independent cities of Chesapeake, Hampton, Norfolk and Suffolk and all of Isle of Wight County.

Early life, education and law career

Scott was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Newport News, Virginia. He is of African American and Filipino (maternal grandfather) descent. His father Dr. Charles Waldo Scott (1916–93) was a pioneering African American surgeon and in 1952 became the first African American appointed to the Newport News school board in the 20th century. Scott's mother Mae Hamlin-Scott (1918-2010), a graduate in chemistry from the University of Michigan, was an educator who taught science in the Newport News public schools.

Scott graduated from Groton School in 1965. He went on to receive his A.B. in government from Harvard College in (1969) and his Juris Doctor from Boston College Law School in 1973. He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Scott is a former member of the Massachusetts Army National Guard (1970-1973) and Army Reserve (1974-1976). He was a lawyer in private practice from 1973 to 1991.

Virginia legislature

Scott was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates as a Democrat in 1977 and he was elected to the Senate of Virginia in 1982, after a census-based reapportionment changed district numbers (thus, his nominal predecessors were in fact representatives from Northern Virginia). While in the Virginia legislature, Scott worked to allow the poor and children greater access to health care, as well as to increase the minimum wage, and increase job training. Scott also authored legislation providing tax credits to business that provide donations to serving local communities in preventing crime or improving social service delivery.

U.S. House of Representatives

Elections1986

Scott first ran for Congress in 1986 in the 1st district, which included his home in Newport News. He lost to Republican incumbent U.S. Congressman Herb Bateman 56%-44%.

1992

In 1992, the Department of Justice directed the Virginia legislature to draw a black-majority district after the 1990 census. The legislature responded by shifting most of the black residents of Hampton Roads and Richmond into a newly created 3rd District. Scott won a three-way Democratic primary with 67% of the vote, which was tantamount to election in this heavily Democratic district. In the general election, he defeated Republican Dan Jenkins 79%-21%.

1994-2008

During this time period, he won re-election every two years with at least 76% of the vote, except in 2004. That year, he was challenged by Republican Winsome Sears, a former State Delegate. He won with 69% of the vote, now the second lowest winning percentage of his career. In 1994, Scott won 79.44% of the vote, defeating Republican Thomas E. Ward. In 1996, he won 82.12% of the vote, defeating Republican Eisle G. Holland. in 1998, he won 75.97% of the vote, defeating Independent Robert S. Barnett. He ran unopposed in 2000, 2002, 2006, and 2008.

2010

Scott was challenged by Republican Chuck Smith, a former JAG. Scott defeated him 70%-27%,.

2012

After redistricting, Scott's district was made even safer; he picked up all of Portsmouth and Newport News, as well as Petersburg. In 2008, President Barack Obama had carried the district with 76% of the vote; he won the new district with 78%. Scott faced Air Force officer Dean Longo. He easily won an 11th term with 81.26% of the vote.

Scott joined President Obama in kicking off his campaign at Virginia Commonwealth University. The focus of the rally was largely on Obama's timeline for leaving the Middle East.

2016

The 3rd was reconfigured as a result of a court-ordered redistricting in 2015. It lost its territory in and around Richmond to the neighboring 4th District. However, the new 3rd was no less Democratic than its predecessor.

Scott was challenged by Republican Marty Williams. Scott defeated him 66%-33%, the lowest winning percentage of his career.

Tenure

Scott is the first African American Representative from Virginia since Reconstruction. Also, having a maternal grandfather of Filipino ancestry gives Scott the distinction of being the first American of Filipino descent to serve as a voting member of Congress. Scott's congressional district is the only one with a majority black population in Virginia. The district was created in 1992 and has remained the most Democratic district in Virginia.

Scott's annual Labor Day picnic, generally held at his mother's residence in Newport News, is a major campaign stop for statewide and federal candidates in Virginia.

On November 7, 2009, Scott voted for the Affordable Health Care for America Act (HR 3962).

Scott has voted progressively in the House of Representatives. He has supported increases in the minimum wage and has worked to eliminate anti-gay bias in the workplace. In 2010, Scott co-sponsored the "Lee-Scott bill" with Barbara Lee to make it easier on individuals who had been on unemployment for 99 weeks without finding work. In regards to the bill, Lee said that "it is important that we put in place a safety net for those still looking for work. We cannot and will not allow our fellow Americans to fall by the wayside. Congressman Scott and I plan to continue to push for passage of this legislation because it is simply the right thing to do."

Scott supports LGBT rights. In 2009, he voted in favor of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a bill that expanded the federal hate crime law to cover crimes biased by the victim's sexual orientation or gender identity. In 2010, he voted in favor of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act. In 2019, Scott voted in favor of the Equality Act, a bill that would expand the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and urged Congress members to support the legislation.

Scott was an outspoken opponent of the Bush administration. He opposed the Patriot Act explaining that officials may abuse the power by promoting anti-terrorist security and develop unfair "racial profiling". In 2002 Scott voted nay on the Iraq war resolution and did not support any of the Bush Doctrine in reference to the Iraq war.

Legislation sponsored

Scott introduced the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 (H.R. 1447; 113th Congress) on April 9, 2013. The bill would require the United States Department of Justice to collect data from U.S. states and territories about the deaths of prisoners in their custody. States and territories would face monetary penalties for noncompliance. The bill would also require federal agencies to report on the deaths of prionsers in their custody.

Committee assignments

Committee on Education and the Workforce (Chairman)

As Chairman of the full committee, Rep. Scott has the ability to serve on any subcommittee ex officio.

Caucuses

Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus

Congressional Black Caucus

Congressional Arts Caucus

Congressional Cement Caucus

Climate Solutions Caucus

U.S. Senate speculation

When then-presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton selected Tim Kaine, a U.S. Senator from Virginia, as her running mate in July 2016, speculation arouse about who would be nominated to replace Kaine in the Senate, should the ticket win. In August 2016, former Democratic Governor of Virginia Douglas Wilder stated that he would want Governor Terry McAuliffe to appoint Scott to the seat, stating that it "would be good for the commonwealth, good for the Democratic Party, of which Bobby has been most supportive, and great for our nation." On November 8, however, Clinton and Kaine lost the election and Kaine remained in his Senate seat.

Controversies2017 sexual harassment allegation

On December 15, 2017, Marsheri Everson (also known as M. Reese Everson), a former congressional fellow who had worked in Scott's office, alleged that Scott had sexually harassed her in 2013 which started by him touching her on the knee and back on separate occasions. Then later ended in a confrontation in his office where he propositioned Everson with an inappropriate relationship after asking "if you travel with me, are you going to be good?" Scott strongly denied Everson's claim. Everson was represented by two attorneys, one Jack Burkman, known for his involvement in the conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of Seth Rich as well as his alleged involvement in a scheme to pay women to lie about sexual harassment claims against special counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Everson's case against Scott is ongoing.

Knowledge of sexual assault allegations against Justin Fairfax

Scripps professor Vanessa C. Tyson alleged in 2019 that she was sexually assaulted by Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax in 2004 and had approached Scott, a long-time friend, about these allegations between the time of Fairfax's election in November 2017 and inauguration in January 2018; Scott was also contacted about the allegations by The Washington Post. In a 2019 statement, Scott said, "Allegations of sexual assault need to be taken seriously. I have known Professor Tyson for approximately a decade and she is a friend. She deserves the opportunity to have her story heard."

Electoral history

*Write-in and minor candidate notes: In 1986, write-ins received 9 votes.

#04/30

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dearyallfrommatt · 5 years

Link

So this young lady posted this on Twitter. If you need some help, it’s a fake $20 festooned with the Blind Idiot God’s picture and championing his re-election campaign for the 2020 election. Some rat bastard left this in lieu of a tip.

In her mentions, someone Venmo’ed her a $20 tip, which is nice and an example of people being decent in a world of buttholes. But this is just so typical of people in Trump’s cult and their behavior. This is especially true for people in the service industry, for whom conservatives hold in contempt already.

Honestly, of all the weird bullshit Trump cultists have done - including sending pipe bombs to media people, shooting up synagogues or massacring people trying to buy their weeklies at Wal-Mart - this might just be the most petty and small. “Being a butthole to minimum wage workers (at best) to own the libs” really isn’t a way to drum up votes.

If, that is, that’s what they want to do. Like I wrote about earlier concerning the Evangelicals, a lot of the humanoids ride with Trump because they’ve been waiting for a complete douchebag to strong arm the country and “prove” that might equals right. Even when it’s all smoke and mirrors, that’s what they want.

“Trump is a billionaire,” the say. Well, no, maybe he isn’t. We don’t know he’s actually a billionaire because he’s fighting like hell to keep his tax records from the public eye. In any event, he was born into money. His father, Fredrick “Fred” Christ Trump, took his father’s fortune, largely built on running a brothel, and turned it into a real estate empire. By the time Young Donald was 8, says The New York Times, he was already a millionaire largely based on a trust fund set up by dear old dad.

As an aside, it isn’t creepy as hell that a brothel owner named his son who later became known as a two-bit crooked racist landlord had the middle name “Christ”?

Anyhow, Young Donald claims he only borrowed a million from Pops to get the ball rolling, but investigations into it put the number at more like 60 million, which he largely failed to pay back before Fred kicked the bucket. So, Trump made his fortune in real estate... which his dad pretty much set up by the time the little shit was old enough to stiff his first contractor. It’s not like, say, Howard Schultz (the guy who started Starbucks) or even Bill Gates (who was able to turn his family connections and wealth to turn it around to form Microsoft); he did not do anything but be born.

I’ve read elsewhere that if Trump had never gotten into real estate and spent his life (and trust fund) learning guitar or weaving baskets and just rolled in the investments and what all, he’d be richer now than before his “business genius”. Anyhow, by the time the ‘70s was over, Trump had filed for bankruptcy at least once and perhaps twice. Lest we forget, filing for bankruptcy basically means you don’t have enough money to pay your debtors, so you can put it off, sometimes indefinitely.

I know this is Tumblr and all y’all are teenagers with blue hair, but when I was a young lad, Trump “wrote” a book called The Art Of The Deal. Before you knew it, this asshole was all over the place, on television and movies. In fact, it wasn’t until he screwed around on his first wife Ivana with the lady who’d become his second, Marla Maples, and blew all his good will, he was considered an icon of the American Dream.

Since then, it’s all been downhill. He went bankrupt four or five more times, put his name on everything from shrink-wrapped steaks and bottled water which all flopped, burned bridges in real estate and business for being known as someone who doesn’t pay his bills or employees, and got embroiled in feuds with Rosie O’Donnell and Spy Magazine. In fact, he spent 10 years arguing with the guy from Spy who initially made fun of his tiny hands.

Now, the reason he did all this was, after going bankrupt the first or second time, someone hipped him to the magic of public relations. Trump ceased being a real estate tycoon and became a brand, just something to put the name of “Trump” on it to make it seem classy.

And that’s how things were until Barrack Obama’s second term. Trump tried to get the Reform Party’s nomination for the 2000 election and got laughed out of the room. But when Twitter became a Thing, it was like Chuck Berry discovering guitar. He had found his medium and started building his cult.

During the 2008 election, some right-wing blog (remember those?) started spreading the rumor that Obama wasn’t actually born in the United States. As a part of what’s called “opposition research”, the Hilary Clinton campaign did some research into this claim and found it incredibly lacking. Of course, the wingnuts have taken this as gospel and still do to this day, despite Obama showing proof he’s a citizen and how silly the idea is that the entire GOP, U.S. bureaucracy, his opponents in the Democratic party, and media creature is in on the scam.

Now I don’t know if it would have stayed a wingnut fringe theory - the “Birthers” - had Trump not made it part of his Twitter persona, but here we are. He even claimed to have hired a private investigator who gathered irrefutable proof that Obama was born elsewhere. However, he never put up, just adding to the perception that he’s a proliferate liar.

At a White House Press Dinner, Obama poked fun at Trump for pulling this shit and if you go back to look at the footage, Trump looks like someone shit in his punch. He was pissed because he cannot handle someone mocking him. So, when 2016 rolled around, he decided to run for the Republican nomination for president.

If y’all remember, there was like 17 incredibly unlikable politicians running for the Republican nod. Seriously, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker, that’s who was running. Over on the Democratic side, Hilary Clinton edged out Bernie Sanders for the nod. We’re not going to argue anything about that, we’re just going to roll with reality.

So, it wound up Trump and Hillary, and we know how that all worked out. Again, we’re not going to argue the particulars on this. Trump won, by hook or by crook, he became the president. Now. What people want to say is that he and his actions and policies are the reason the rise in white nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, antisemitism, and general buttholery we’re seeing among the Right. Even Joe Biden thinks things will “get back to normal” with Trump gone.

He’s not the cause. He’s a symptom. The reason he was elected is because his campaign resonated with the absolute dregs of our culture. People who were pissed about people of color and women taking their due place in society. People who’re furious about LGBT just existing. People who cannot imagine an American not run by rich white guys.

And they are assholes, believe you me. They get off on pulling shit like the above nonsense - remember that; it takes a while but I get back to the topic at hand eventually - being mean to people who aren’t in the position to fight back. That’s how they see things as the “way it should be”. That’s what America is to them.

And that’s why they love Trump. They’ve been thirsting for a guy like this at least since Reagan. Bush Junior was supposed to be this guy, but I truly think his reportedly sincere Christian faith prevented it. For the movers and shakers, Trump is a useful tool. For the great unwashed, Trump is the strong-arm asshole of a leader they’ve been waiting on since Rush Limbaugh first told them how it was all the fault of liberals giving your hard-earned guns to the black lesbian intellectuals.

So. I’m tired of writing, but I think this pretty much makes the nut. What can we do? Vote. Vote in this upcoming election, vote in 2020 and keep voting. Not voting basically means you’re fine with the rich bastards running things. You’re not sending them a message that they suck; you’re sending them a message that you’re sheep. Stay informed, bug the hell out of your elected representatives and get as involved as you can on a local level.

Okay, I’m done except for one thing. Remember: nothing in the above is “fake news” even if it would hurt Trump’s feelings. Look it up on your own and deal with reality not being as cut-and-dried as we’d like. If you’re so inclined to try to argue me down for whatever reason, feel free to suck my farts, cry more and die mad, fanboy.

#the blind idiot god #the cult of 45 #people being assholes #2020 election

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sio-lokistiel · 7 months

Note

What sort of clowning do you expect to befall the fandom? I for one can't wait to see the bitters get bodied, or rather realize they already were by the original canon lol

Seeing bitters get absolutely owned will be delightful, same with the DeanCas antis. I’m personally waiting for the Chuck Won weirdos to get obliterated. That theory completely ignores and disrespects Cas and Jack’s arcs. If people don’t like those arcs that’s one thing, but I’m out of patience for those who are blatantly unwilling to learn. My time and crayons are precious so I’ll watch the revival run them down with glee.

#asks #fuck chuck won #i’m tired and petty #castiel #jack kline

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adz · 7 years

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i wrote a not very good essay a while ago about connections between William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom and Chuck Palahniuk’s Rant (specifically about the relationship between Faulkner’s alleged anti-Eurocentric style of retelling colonial histories versus the splintered time theory of Rant) and found it today and thought i’d throw it into the void, here goes~

A Man Who Wanted A Son: Faulknerian Techniques in Palahniuk’s Rant

Absalom, Absalom is widely considered one of William Faulkner’s most difficult novels to comprehend and enjoy. It is a dramatic and ambitious work, and its plot spans nearly a century. It is not unlikely that this novel and its companion, The Sound and the Fury, were primarily responsible for Faulkner’s Nobel Prize win in 1949. In Absalom, the story of one of Faulkner’s most enduring protagonists is told: Thomas Sutpen, the obsessed, incestuous, murderous patriarch of a doomed dynasty.

One of the vital characteristics that sets Absalom apart from most novels with clear main characters, and even from Faulkner’s other novels, is that Sutpen doesn’t do the telling: his past is relayed by a series of characters, most of whom heard their information secondhand. It’s a difficult and complex storytelling technique, and Faulkner certainly doesn’t make figuring it out easy for the reader, but knowing the absolute truth about the events in the novel isn’t really the point. As Richard P. Adams writes in Faulkner: Myth and Motion: “In the text, the question of ‘truth,’ in any sense of historical accuracy, is hardly relevant. The issue is not what is true about Sutpen but what it is like to live in the South.” (183)

Sutpen’s goal, and his eventual downfall, is his obsession with conceiving an heir who would live up to his own self-imagined legacy. During an interview at the University of Virginia in 1957, when Faulkner was asked by an unnamed audience member whether the central character in Absalom, Absalom was actually Thomas Sutpen, he responded: “The central character is Sutpen, yes. The story of a man who wanted a son and got too many, got so many that they destroyed him. It's incidentally the story of—of Quentin Compson's hatred of the—the bad qualities in the country he loves. But the central character is Sutpen, the story of a man who wanted sons.” (Faulkner at Virginia)

Comparing any author to Faulkner tends to elicit impassioned responses, which is fine, because Chuck Palahniuk and Faulkner don’t have very much in common anyway. Faulkner was an undisputed master of prose who won multiple Pulitzer Prizes, and is continually considered one of the greatest American novelists and essayists of all time, whereas Palahniuk is mostly known for his 1996 novel Fight Club, which features a scene in which a man steals human fat from a liposuction clinic dumpster in order to make soap. Despite occasional tastelessness, Fight Club is a widely-known and relatively respected novel—at least compared to Rant, which Palahniuk published 11 years later to significantly lesser acclaim.

Rant was kind of unprecedented, even to Palahniuk’s cult followers. The novel presents itself as an “oral biography:” a compilation of interviews with friends and acquaintances of Buster “Rant” Casey, our protagonist, concerning his childhood, activities as a young adult, and the events leading up to his suicide in a fiery crash. (Henceforth, he’ll be referred to as “Buster” to reduce confusion with the title of the novel.) The story takes place in two locations: Middleton, Buster’s fictional Southern hometown, and the unnamed city Buster moves to in order to realize his goal of becoming a sort of patient zero for rabies.

Rant takes place in a science-fictional America in which society has been crippled by a voyeuristic form of entertainment known as “boosting peaks,” which is best described as a sort of mental virtual-reality lens that allows users to jack into others’ experiences and view them firsthand, complete with all the sensory stimuli. Only someone with a surgically installed ports can boost, and a port can be deactivated by something like a traumatic injury or brain inflammation. Buster’s actual objective in spreading rabies throughout the populace is to disable as many people’s ports as possible, and free society to live in the physical realm, rather than basking in self-induced mental dissociation. Admittedly, it’s a bit of a heavy-handed metaphor.

Although the harmful detachment to the real world caused by the ubiquitousness of technology is the most obvious “message” of Rant, there’s an even more intricate subplot that is revealed late in the novel: it is discovered that by crashing a car just the right way, an individual with rabies can travel through time. Most of the narrators don’t fully understand how it works, but one character who calls himself Green Taylor Simms claims to have done it himself. As Buster’s father describes it, Simms visited Buster and explained that one could achieve immense power and even immortality by going back in time and impregnating their female ancestors. The purity of the bloodline would turn the traveler into some sort of superhuman, according to Simms.

Then, in a Fight Club-esque twist, Simms reveals that he’s actually Buster, and Buster’s father, etc., and that Buster is his (Simms’s) heir; an alternate timeline version of himself. Simms also explains that his process involves returning to the past and murdering his female ancestors once they’ve served their purpose. It’s supposed to then be Buster’s job to repeat the directions he’s been given by Simms and achieve immortality, except that Buster chooses to defy Simms’s plan and instead attempts to travel back in time to rescue his mother from Simms.

It’s unclear whether Buster succeeds in traveling through time and kills Simms, succeeds in traveling through time but arrives too late, or merely dies in a burning wreck, as most of the characters in the book assume. One of several interpretations posited by writer Marvin Sanchez has Buster trapped in an endless cycle of traveling back in time and arriving a minute too late to stop Simms, then living as his own father and raising himself as a son, over and over into infinity. Naturally, where time travel is concerned, the possibilities are literally endless.

Whether you love or hate Palahniuk, it’s a pretty ambitious plot. In many ways, Rant seeks to investigate some of the same sick visionary psyche that saturates the pages of Absalom, Absalom. Thomas Sutpen and Green Taylor Simms, the protagonists, if they are protagonists, each attempt to create the same thing by the same means: rape, violence, and incest. Sutpen’s immortality may be a good deal more figurative than that of Simms, but both believe that their pure bloodlines will produce perfect offspring and preserve some sort of lasting legacy. However, Sutpen’s children end up murdering one another, and his eventual heir is Jim Bond, a mentally handicapped mixed-race child: sort of an ultimate failure for the elitist, racist Sutpen. Buster similarly defies his father’s predetermined future for him, but in an even more direct manner: he travels through time to thwart Simms at the very beginning.

In Rant, we’re treated to a close look at the environment and upbringing from which Buster/Simms came: Middleton, an impoverished wasteland somewhere around the Bible Belt. Sutpen’s background is significantly hazier. It is described to us by narrators who heard it from people who heard it from other people. Since Sutpen’s intention is to leave his past behind and recreate himself as someone powerful and worthy of respect, it is reasonable that he would avoid spreading information about his time in Haiti, especially his miscegenous marriage and mixed-race son. “...A dispossessed and exiled Southerner, Sutpen marries into the Haitian plantation, gaining thus access to class and wealth, but he repudiates his wife and son on racial grounds. In exchange, he receives the slaves and the money that provide for his new beginning on the Mississippi frontier…” (Broncano 109)

It’s worth repeating here that despite Faulkner’s sentiment, Sutpen may not be the best candidate for protagonist in Absalom. There is an argument to be made for Quentin: “...the text, if I read it at all correctly, shows that the heart in conflict with itself is that of Quentin...” (Adams 181) and possibly for Jim Bond. Palahniuk’s book is no different: Buster is asserted to be the protagonist, but this presents problems with his relationship with Simms (since they’re in a sense the same person), not to mention the fact that the book all occurs in real-time after his alleged death. Sanchez argues that perhaps the actual protagonist is Echo Smith, Buster’s girlfriend and the only significant interviewee in Rant who doesn’t appear in the book’s “contributors” section. Additionally, by traveling back in time herself and aiding Buster’s efforts not just to eradicate Simms, but also the technology that would allow boosting—the root cause of the dystopian society in the novel—Echo could have changed the present in the novel to the one we currently live in: the world in which Rant is merely fiction.

In Sanchez’s words, “...Palahniuk wanted to present the novel as a real piece of history that had turned into fiction because the events that transpired [couldn’t] be proven anymore.” This description is particularly reminiscent of analyses of Absalom, Absalom. Quentin and Shreve have no way to confirm the veracity of any of the information they’ve accumulated, beyond what Quentin actually experienced. “There is an impenetrable pattern of relatedness and non-relatedness: those who were actually involved in the events were too involved to be objective; those who were capable of objectivity were too remote from the events” (Longley 210).

The narrative techniques in both novels necessitate wariness from the reader; we have no way of discerning who is misinformed, and who is deliberately misinforming. Although the following quote was written about Absalom, Absalom, it applies to both: “An act of imagination is needed if we are to get at lifelike, humanly meaningful, truth; but to gain the lifelikeness we sacrifice the certainty of the publicly demonstrable” (Waggoner 152). The story must lose the absolute certainty of capital-T Truth in order to be told in a way that does justice to the intensity of the events within. Many modern tabloids would agree.

In both Faulkner’s fictional world and Palahniuk’s “real” (but actually just barely fictional) one, there’s maybe some actual Truth beyond what’s filtered down to us by the narrators, but it’s as unattainable to us as it is to Quentin, Shreve, or to any of Buster’s acquaintances, except Simms and perhaps Echo Smith. It’s mostly accepted that Faulkner did this on purpose as some sort of statement on reality (or perceived truth) versus Truth, but there’s not an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest that Palahniuk had the same intention. As a result, the ambiguity at the end of Absalom, Absalom feels like a result of Faulkner’s decision to withhold information, whereas in Rant, it’s simply the outcome of Buster’s and Simms’s actions to empower themselves and to destroy one another. The “true” ending has been shrouded in mystery by those involved.

According to Hosam Aboul-Ela, much of Absalom, Absalom’s uniqueness comes from what he calls “the poetics of peripheralization,” which express a relationship between the way Faulkner constructed the novel, and his use of an anti-Eurocentric history of coloniality. “This relationship is manifested in the structure of the novel. The resulting narrative is fragmented, jumbling time by presenting counterintuitive beginnings and endings and multiple flashbacks, flashforwards, and jump cuts. It uses multiple perspectives to emphasize the multiplicity of histories and realities and eschews the unified subject in favor of split narrative foci” (Aboul-Ela 136).

Perhaps Faulkner would describe the colonial history in Absalom as anti-Eurocentric were he alive today, but it is just as likely that this interpretation, from 70 years in his future at the time he was writing Absalom, is merely applying a modern lens to a technique that Faulkner meant only to serve his trademark technique of delayed revelation. 40 years before Aboul-Ela’s analysis, Longley wrote: “The sheer magnitude of Sutpen’s grand design requires a matching magnitude of form and content: locale and time-span, geographical spread, and analysis of the meaning of history.” (209) Maybe Faulkner adopted this anti-Eurocentric historical method without realizing it in order to do justice to Sutpen’s sinister “design.” We can never know; we can only accept or deny each interpretation as we read them, same as Quentin.

Bibliography:

-Aboul-Ela, Hosam. Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh, 2007. Print.

-Adams, Richard P. Faulkner: Myth and Motion. Princeton: N.J., 1968. Print.

-Broncano, Manuel. "Reading Faulkner in Spain, Reading Spain in Faulkner." Ed. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie. Global Faulkner. Jackson: U Of Mississippi, 2012. N. pag. Print.

-Longley, John Lewis, Jr. The Tragic Mask: A Study of Faulkner's Heroes. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina, 1963. Print.

-Sanchez, Marvin. "Interpreting Palahniuk's ‘RANT:’ Splintered Time Theory." The Comfy Chair Massacre. N.p., 01 Feb. 2010. Web. 28 Nov. 2015. <https://moonwalkerwiz.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/a-long-long-rant-about-palahniuks-rant>.

-Waggoner, Hyatt H. William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World. Lexington: U of Kentucky, 1966. Print.

-"Faulkner at Virginia." Interview by Frederick Gwynn, Joseph Blotner, & Unidentified participants. Faulkner at Virginia. University of Virginia, 13 Apr. 1957. Web. 02 Dec. 2015. <http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/display/wfaudio06_1>.

#william faulkner #chuck palahniuk #absalom absalom #literary analysis #rant #essay

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courtneytincher · 5 years

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Trump’s Polarizing Pick for Spy Chief Has Tough Path in Senate

(Bloomberg) -- Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats won 85 Senate votes when he was confirmed early in Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump’s choice to replace Coats, Representative John Ratcliffe, probably will have to rely exclusively on Republican votes -- and even that could be a challenge.Republican senators have been unusually silent on Ratcliffe after Trump announced he intends to nominate him to replace Coats, a former Indiana senator who maintained close relationships with members of both parties and was known for contradicting the president’s stance on issues from North Korea’s willingness to disarm to Russia’s election interference.Ratcliffe, who tore into former Special Counsel Robert Mueller at a House hearing last week, has said he agrees with Trump’s characterization of the two-year probe into the 2016 election as a “witch hunt,” saying the discussion of Russian influence “was really a way to invalidate his election.”After Trump announced Coats’ departure and his choice for a replacement on Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell released a lengthy statement bemoaning the departure of his longtime Senate colleague. He lauded the intelligence chief’s work safeguarding elections against Russian meddling and emphasized the need for U.S. intelligence agencies to be free of political bias to “deliver unvarnished hard truths” to the nation’s leaders.Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, also praised Coats effusively, saying he did “a great deal to direct our attention toward growing aggression from Russia, Chin and Iran.” Burr said in a statement Monday that he called Ratcliffe to congratulate him, adding, “When the White House submits its official nomination to the Senate Intelligence Committee, we will work to move it swiftly through regular order.”Other senior Republican senators including Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Intelligence Committee, also praised Coats’ service without commenting on Ratcliffe, a Texas House member and former U.S. attorney with one of the most conservative voting records in Congress.Ratcliff did have one strong early backer, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham.“Congressman Ratcliffe will be a worthy successor and has my full support,” said Graham, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who has become one of Trump’s chief allies in Congress. “He understands the only way America can be safe is to be strong.”Spotlight on CollinsIf Trump sends Ratcliffe’s nomination to the Senate, one Republican in particular will be facing pressure from both sides: Susan Collins of Maine has fashioned herself as an independent-minded senator. But her votes in favor of Trump nominees has caused her poll ratings to plummet in her home state, and she faces a tough re-election fight next year.Collins sits on the Intelligence Committee, which has eight Republicans and seven Democrats. If the Democrats all stick together and a single Republican opposes Ratcliffe, McConnell would have to maneuver to discharge the nomination with a negative recommendation -- something unprecedented for the post.Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer indicated that Democrats will put up a fight.“It’s clear Rep. Ratcliffe was selected because he exhibited blind loyalty to @realDonaldTrump with his demagogic questioning of Mueller,” Schumer tweeted. “If Senate Republicans elevate such a partisan player to a position requiring intelligence expertise & non-partisanship, it’d be a big mistake.”Defeating the nomination on the floor would require four Republican senators to join every Democrat. Few Republicans these days are willing to cross Trump, however, given his strong standing among the party’s base.Political QuestionSecretary of State Michael Pompeo, who served with Ratcliffe in the House, dismissed concerns about Ratcliffe being a purely political pick by Trump.“I remember people said I’d be too political to be the CIA director,” Pompeo said in remarks Monday at the Economic Club of Washington. He said he felt confident that he dispelled such criticism.“He’s very smart,” Pompeo, who also was a staunchly conservative House member before Trump picked him to head the CIA and then the State Department, said of Ratcliffe. “I’m very confident he’d do a good job.”Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have called for investigating their contention that during the Obama administration anti-Trump forces in the FBI, Justice Department and the intelligence agencies worked with Democrats to concoct the theory that Trump’s 2016 campaign worked with Russia on election meddling aimed at helping him win.“That’s why the president gets so upset by that and why he uses the term ‘hoax’ or ‘witch hunt,” Ratcliffe said in an interview with Fox News after Mueller testified to two House panels. “He’s saying that the Russian interference didn’t have anything to do with him or influence his success in the 2016 election, and he’s right.”Ratcliffe, 53, has been a key member of a Republican-led House task force pursuing the theory that anti-Trump bias and support for Democrat Hillary Clinton tainted the Russia probe early on. He previously attacked then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein over the investigation.“If you set out to create an appearance of bias, or prejudice, or impropriety, or conflict of interest, the only way you could do a better job of doing it is pick this team and then have them wear their ‘I’m with her’ t-shirts to work every day,” Ratcliffe told Rosenstein during a Judiciary Committee hearing. Attorney General William Barr is conducting an investigation into what he’s called possible “spying” on the Trump campaign.Ratcliffe was mayor of Heath, Texas -- population 7,329 in 2010, according to the Census Bureau -- from 2004 to 2012. He was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas under President George W. Bush. He founded the Austin office of the Ashcroft Group, a collection of law firms headed by former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.Since 2015, Ratcliffe has been a member of the U.S. House, representing a sprawling district in the northeast corner of Texas that includes all or parts of 18 counties along the border with Oklahoma.(Updates with Intelligence panel’s chairman in fifth paragraph.)\--With assistance from Billy House and Laura Litvan.To contact the reporter on this story: Steven T. Dennis in Washington at [email protected] contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at [email protected], Larry LiebertFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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nebris · 5 years

Text

Trump Is Starting to Panic

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, Trump’s tantrums, the Times’ revelations about Facebook, and the First Lady’s campaign to get a West Wing staffer fired.

Since the Democrats made gains in last week’s election — and, in some places, may continue to make more still — Donald Trump has retreated into what the Los Angeles Times calls “a cocoon of bitterness and resentment,” canceling travel plans, lashing out at allies and adversaries, meddling in the remaining undecided races and, apparently, sitting for hours of meetings with his personal lawyers. Should we take his tantrums as an early indicator of additional bad news?

I will make the reckless prediction that “Donald Trump” and “good news” are not fated to appear in the same sentence unless the good news happens to be that his presidency is ending. Everything about his behavior since the midterms suggests that even he has figured this out. It has belatedly dawned on him that (a) he lost the election he thought he won; (b) the Robert Mueller investigation has moved faster than his efforts to thwart it; (c) any of his legislative fantasies, notably the funding of his border wall, are doomed; and (d) and his pouting in Paris elevated his international image as a buffoon to a whole new level of notoriety. Remember when Republicans attacked Barack Obama (falsely) for allegedly barring Winston Churchill’s bust from the White House? Now the GOP’s hero is a president whom Churchill’s own grandson, the Conservative member of Parliament Nicholas Soames, has labeled “pathetic,” “inadequate,” and “not fit to represent this great country” after Trump failed to show up at the French cemetery rites honoring the fallen of World War I.

That all this makes Trump panic at some gut level is visible not merely in his widely reported spells of rage and bitterness and in his increasingly empty official schedule. He is also stepping up his already impressive efforts to discredit and destroy those democratic institutions that might prevent him from escaping criminal jeopardy. And so he has returned to ridiculing the very lifeblood of America, the electoral process, by declaring elections that don’t go his way a fraud; he has escalated his assault on a free press by barring a CNN reporter and trying to frame him as a fellow misogynistic bully with a deceptively edited video; and, last but not least, he has appointed an acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, who has ridiculed the judicial system, been on the board of a fly-by-night company that practiced Trump University–style consumer frauds, and publicly attacked the Mueller probe in Trump’s own language.

This is bunker behavior. Only a desperate man would try to derail Mueller by installing this transparent reprobate at the Department of Justice. Even more revealing is how Trump has become more and more unhinged since making his Whitaker move. The growing fury, most manifest in his latest anti-Mueller tweetstorm this week, suggests that he already realizes that the ploy has backfired. It seems to be finally sinking in, perhaps under the frantic tutelage of his lawyers, that his fate and the fates of his son and son-in-law, among others in his immediate orbit, are tied to the fates of Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and all the other president’s men whose comprehensive narrative Mueller is bound to tell America no matter what Trump and his stooge at Justice do to try to foil or decapitate him.

According to the New York Times, Facebook knew about Russian election interference earlier (and in more detail) than Mark Zuckerberg has let on, but rather than sound an alarm the company went as far as enlisting a Republican opposition-research firm to cast protesters as puppets of George Soros. The revelations come among growing calls to regulate the social-media giant — is this the end of Facebook as we know it?

Facebook has managed to infuriate both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. Employee morale is crumbling along with its stock price. The company is now likely to be reshaped by both market forces and government regulation. But that’s not what interests me most about this extraordinary piece of Times investigative reporting. Equally important is the story the paper tells of how powerful liberal Democrats, one at the pinnacle of Facebook (Sheryl Sandberg) and another at the pinnacle of the Senate (Chuck Schumer), shielded the company from critics to preserve its fat bottom line. And in the process proved to be useful idiots for the Russians. Had Sandberg and Schumer not protected Facebook, it would have been harder for Russians to manipulate the 2016 election with impunity on its platform, and the presidential candidate Sandberg and Schumer supported, Hillary Clinton, conceivably might have averted narrow defeat.

It was Sandberg, who served under the Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in Bill Clinton’s administration and was a strong Hillary supporter, who hired the Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan, the key figure in covering up the extent of Russian meddling at Facebook for a full year. (Kaplan is most recently notorious for being caught on camera lending prominent support to Brett Kavanaugh as he denied Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee.) And it was Sandberg who looked the other way as other Republican operatives hired by Facebook targeted Soros, falsely portraying him as a prime mover in an anti-Facebook cabal. This Facebook-generated libel inexorably contributed to the proliferation of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Soros that would boil over in the final weeks of the 2018 campaign and arguably cost Democrats some votes in this year’s election as well. Sadly, it turns out that powerful Jewish executives like Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg offer no more protection against dark anti-Semitic corporate tactics at Facebook than Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump do against anti-Semitic political tactics at the White House.

As for Schumer, his water-carrying for Facebook, as documented by the Times, is mortifying: He even tried to shut down a fellow Democratic senator, Mark Warner, who dared question the company. (It will surprise no one that Facebook’s employees contribute more to Schumer, the Democrats’ Senate leader, than any other member of Congress.) It’s a cruel irony, I guess, that prominent Clinton supporters like Sandberg and Schumer in the end contributed to Trump’s victory by allowing Russian interference to play out unchecked at Facebook for much of 2016. But it is not a fresh irony. As I wrote in my New York piece on Trump and Roy Cohn this spring, “From the mid-1970s to the turn of the century, well before Trump debuted on The Apprentice or flirted more than glancingly with politics, he gained power and consolidated it with the help of allies among the elites of New York’s often nominally Democratic and liberal Establishment — some of them literally the same allies who boosted Cohn.” Those powerful Democrats’ priority, I posited, “was raw personal power that could be leveraged for their own enrichment, privilege, and celebrity.” And so the story of Sandberg, Schumer, Facebook, and Trump’s 2016 victory, as told by the Times, is yet another chapter in that same sordid narrative.

After Melania Trump publicly called for the ouster of Mira Ricardel, John Bolton’s deputy, earlier this week, Ricardel is gone from the White House. Was Melania justified in taking her case public?

It’s really hard to know whom to root for in this rollicking tale. For starters, it is utterly preposterous that a First Lady would have her press secretary release a statement announcing that a high national security official “no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House.” When Nancy Reagan put the shiv in Donald Regan, at least she had the good political sense to do so in the East Wing shadows rather than appear to wield power over a part of the government in which she has no official role or expertise. To quote David Rothkopf’s must-read tweet thread on this incident, Melania Trump is by contrast “just another member of the thug mob that has corrupted our White House.”

But this farce doesn’t end there. We’ve since learned that Melania Trump has never met the woman she banished. In the Washington Post’s account, Ricardel angered the First Lady with a bureaucratic gambit: She threatened to pull National Security Council policy advisers from the First Lady’s trip to Africa in retaliation for being denied a seat on her plane and having to travel on another flight instead. This much is clear: The last thing anyone involved in this episode was thinking about was Africa, the ostensible point of Trump’s trip.

The Post also reported that Ricardel is so widely despised that the White House couldn’t even find her a soft landing in the Commerce Department, presided over by Wilbur Ross, a world-class grifter even by the standards of a Trump Cabinet that now includes Whitaker. If there’s one bit of good news in this whole saga, it’s that John Bolton tried strenuously to save Ricardel’s job and failed. We can only hope that the First Lady will soon declare the malevolent Bolton unworthy of the “honor” of serving in her husband’s crime syndicate and send him back to Fox News.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/frank-rich-trump-is-starting-to-panic.html

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