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marireadshellblazer · 3 years

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Hellblazer Issue #10

This is, in my opinion, the first (but not the last) trippy issue in Hellblazer. I love these trippy issues. They remind me a lot of Swamp Thing (which was veeery trippy during Alan Moore’s run 10/10). I think for some people these trippy issues are confusing and maybe a bit off putting. After all, it goes from being very grounded in a relatively realistic reflection of the real world and addressing real world issues to…well…this.

Of course, in context, it does make sense that it would be trippy. Seeing as how it’s a crossover with Swamp Thing it needed to be at least somewhat trippy. Without context this issue may not even make sense to some readers. Here’s the cliff notes: Swamp Thing is basically a representative of The Green, which is basically all things green and leafy. He kinda dies and leaves Earth, meaning The Green makes a new representative. When Swamp Thing comes back, bad shit starts happening because there are two of them at the same time. Apparently, there can only be one at a time. Rather than killing the new rep, who they call The Sprout, he and his girlfriend decide the thing to do is give it a body to inhabit. That way it can live and won’t interfere with what Swamp Thing is doing. And how better to give it a body than to make one…the natural way. Thing is, Swamp Thing is a plant. Kinda hard to get your girlfriend pregnant if you can’t make that human sperm. So, due to reasons, they decide to use John as a donor. Now, John knew about what was gunna go down and was gunna volunteer. However, in a move that I can only chalk up to weirdly selfish dickishness, Swamp Thing tentacle rapes him, possesses his body, and basically actually rapes him via sleeping with Abby. John had pretty much no say in what was going on. Just woke up in the US naked. No memory of how he got there. No talk beforehand like “yeah I’m ok with this”. No talk about consent or anything. IDK seems like rape to me. So, this chapter fills in what happens to John while Swamp Thing has control over his body, which is pure nightmare fuel. All in all not a good time, but here we are.

Okay so as weird as the chapter is, you can’t argue with the quality of the art. It’s amazing. Don’t get me wrong, I love John Ridgway, but Richard Piers Rayner did a great job here. The sperm thing at the beginning is kinda…weird, but it works perfectly.

I love how they depict him moving through the astral plane here. It’s abstract, and not quite like being a ghost. He moves through things the way you’d think a ghost or spirit would, but he’s unhindered by the concept of time. This is the first time we see this sort of thing in the series, and it’s pretty cool.

Ahhh poor Zed. This is the aftermath. John is a cruel one, but it had to be done. Once again, I’m glad they are showing the regret and guilt John has over this. It would be so easy to have him be nonchalant or use the moral high ground to brush the whole thing off. I think a lot of people write John like that and it’s not accurate. John really is tormented by his own shitty behavior, justified or not. His humanity is such a big part of the story. It’s part of what redeems him in the eyes of the readers; he summons demons, runs headfirst into trouble, gets into fights for no reason, and is an asshole. Yet, he isn’t numb to it. And it’s this dichotomy that makes John a fun, complicated, and at times heartbreaking character.

Not gunna lie, the hell dogs bursting out of Nergal’s chest was…unexpected. In hindsight, considering the rest of this chapter’s contents, it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

I mean, where else would hell hounds come from?

WOOOOOOW. Rude. Not his fault. If anything, she should sicken him for basically assaulting him. But hell, that’s just me.

This memorable quote:

Now, the carnage that John comes home to is pretty horrifying. But it’s a lot worse if you read the Swamp Thing half of this part. When Swamp Thing possesses John, he sees that John really does feel relaxed and safe at his apartment, and rather likes his neighbors. Having this addressed right before all this happens is kind of heartbreaking. This place of safety has been violated by, as John finally realizes here, one of his greatest enemies. The demon who changed everything for him at Newcastle. And realizing he was behind it makes it all the more awful. Poor John. He has not had a good day.

And now, the moment we have all been waiting for! Up next: The Newcastle Incident!

Words I had to look up:

scupper- to sink deliberately

#Hellblazer #Issue 10 #reading #Thoughts

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pellicano-sanguino · 3 years

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A while ago I wrote that I was reading through an anthology of lesbian vampire stories to find a good one to read to White Rabbit, and that I was disappointment in the lack of lesbians and the amount of het sex and rape forced into the stories. I was especially disappointed because the authors of the anthology were women and they should know better.

Well, I have now finished the anthology and the rest of the stories.... kept disappointing in one way or the other.

One story told of a woman who gets lost in the Amazon rainforest and is hunted and seduced by a vampire that lives there. The concept is good, a fascinating and a rather unusual setting for a vampire story. But the writing is very confusing and kinda pretentious and the sort of realism that thinks in order to captivate the true reality one must focus on all the disgusting things and describe them in great detail. Like, I feel every other sentence is TMI fest of going into the condition of the blisters in the main character’s feet or of all the bugs scampering over her when she stumbles and falls. And when we finally do get into the vampire bit, it’s just vaguely described and kinda weird and surreal and... I don’t know, like from a completely different story. I suppose the change in writing style is supposed to symbolize the main character being under the vampire’s hypnosis or something?

The odd writing style makes this a very tedious read for someone whose native language isn’t English, because most of the I sure am reading words but fuck if they make any sense. For example, the author talks about a person as if she’s there and it took me a long time to realize this person is NOT there, but is... a ghost? A memory? A flashback into past or future? The main character’s imaginary friend/named sense of purity or some other symbolic shit? The author clearly intended this to be a story that you need to read several times to understand what happens and piece together the cryptic text. Hahaha nope. I am done with this pretentious fuckery.

Next story is... sigh... taking place in a gay club that is also into heavy BDSM. Because of fucking course that is how the hets see lesbians, to them homosexuality is a just a kink. Not only do we get descriptions of very brutal, bloody non-con sadism, we also have to read about men doing it (with women, of course. What, were you expecting gay men in this gay club? Or lesbians in your lesbian vampire anthology?). I know not all lesbians are actively grossed out by dicks but rather just completely disinterested in them, but still... why would you write a story about a lesbian vampire and force the reader to read three - three! - detailed descriptions of a mens’ erections.

Boy, are the writers of this anthology pissed that they did not write their lesbian masterpieces in our modern times when identity havers are vigorously attempting to redefine lesbianism as “non-men being attracted to non-men.” Today, the authors could write all the dick sucking, male orgasm centered het sex they want and still call it lesbian sex as long as the penis-bearer doesn’t identify as a man. They no longer need to try to sneak in the het sex and then write some half-assed plot about them disgusting gay women.

Though, to be fair, I don’t think it’s just the het sex these writers want to force in their lesbian stories. They specificly want to write about rape, questionable consent and painful sex. And I have a theory on why.

When analyzing why some people are hell bent on putting certain elements in their vampire story, one needs to figure out why they were originally drawn into writing a vampire story in the first place. What is it about the vampire as a creature that fascinates them? What sets the vampire apart from other supernatural creatures is their parasitic nature. You take away the blood drinking and you could replace the vampire character with something else and not have it affect the plot in any way. However, surprisingly many people who write vampire stories aren’t that interested in the blood drinking (much to my disappointment) and more into the power imbalance this diet creates between vampires and humans.

Relationships between a vampire and a human have a massive power imbalance, even when the vampire isn’t the kind that has super human strength and other special powers. If a vampire does not drink blood, they will perish. This simple fact forces them to be at best harmless parasites, at worst dangerous predators. Even with civilized vampires who get their blood from butchers, blood banks or who use synthetic blood substitutes, the special diet of a vampire cannot be ignored when they interact with humans. Imagine a civilized vampire like this stranded on an island with some humans - no one can blame them for stealing blood from the humans for survival in such a scenario. No matter how kind, how sworn to be friendly to humankind, the very nature of vampirism makes it so that humans and vampires can’t coexist together as if there is not a power imbalance in place.

Some writers are very into this power imbalance. The act of drinking someone’s blood, even from a willing donor, is an act of parasitism. The human is harmed, their skin is pierced, their blood is drawn and their body will suffer consequences for it, even if for some donors those are mild. The only one walking away from the act having benefited from it is the vampire. You can romanticize the act, you can give the vampire powers to make their bite painless, you can make the human the one who asks for it, but the act remains the same. A human is wounded and will suffer from minor blood loss, the vampire takes from them and gives nothing in return.

I admit, the blood drinking is what draws me to vampire stories. I am fascinated by the concept of a creature that is by its nature forced to become parasitic. But unlike creatures that eat actual human flesh, the vampire has the option to choose between becoming a predator or becoming a parasite. The ability to be civilized, or pretend to be civilized, with humankind creates interesting emotional bonds between a vampire and their victim/host/donor.

However, I am not interested in making blood drinking a metaphor for sex. It just does not work.

A vampire’s very survival is depending on them securing a bloody meal regularly. No one’s survival is depending on them getting laid regularly, no matter what rape culture advocating men crying about sex being a basic need and a human right want you to believe. No one has ever dropped dead because they didn’t have sex. And that’s why the blood drinking as metaphor for sex is flawed.

So, because the nature of vampirism demands that there must be blood drinking, that there must be harming of another living creature and stealing away a part of their body (blood is a liquid organ, consisting of living cells, drinking blood is an act of consuming living tissue), naturally people who are turned on by the idea of harming others or of being harmed and who are into non-con, would find the vampire as a concept fascinating. To them, a vampire attacking a human is equally arousing as fantasizing about rape, the idea of being bitten so deep that your blood is spilled as exciting as their other sadomasochistic kinks.

Bottom line: I get why people want to put so much sexual violence in their vampire stories. I hate it and wish they didn’t, but at least I see what motivates them to do so.

Ahem. Back to the anthology.

The only good thing about the gross BDSM story is that there is an actual lesbian sex scene in it and that it makes blood into a plot point. Too many vampire stories just ignore the blood drinking and do it off screen, or have it be completely meaningless to the characters and story. Admittedly, the way blood is used in this story isn’t anything new or super interesting but at least they remembered to put some actual real blood drinking lesbian vampires in their lesbian vampire story. * sarcastically side-eyes the other stories*

After this we get what I consider the strongest story in the anthology. It’s still not particularly good, but the bar is set low, so yeah. This is a rather long short story, a scifi one, about a vampire and a single human sharing a space ship for a long journey, during which they start having casual sex and the human eventually learns about the vampire’s real nature. The characters aren’t that interesting, but the concept of a vampire in space is a fascinating one. I was disappointed that the writer didn’t make the endless darkness of space a place for the vampire to be free from the fear of the sun and instead still makes her react badly to some kind of day to night cycle (it’s space! There is no sun in immediate vicinity! Why would you react badly to “oh well, back in Earth it’s sun time by now”?). Another fascinating part is that this vampire doesn’t steal blood from the human in the traditional method, but instead, um... performs certain sex act to her when she’s on her period. And this is the reason why she always insists on a female crew member.

Unfortunately not even this story is free from rape. The vampire tells her backstory, about how the man who turned her also raped her. Fortunately she does not describe it in detail but.... why must there be a rape in every single lesbian vampire story? Also, the sex scenes were a bit underwhelming, the vampire being very strictly stone butching the whole thing and not letting the human touch or pleasure her in any manner. Sigh. I know there are lesbians like this, but I can’t help but be reminded of the hets asking “so which one of you is the man?” Also, I wish I could read more lesbian romance, more flirting, more seducing and less of this no-emotional-bonds meaningless-fucking casual sex.

The last story is another pretentious one, this one even worse that the Amazon rainforest story. I... think it’s about a vampire... chatting with her parrot that has human-like intellect? I have no fucking idea what is going on. The writing is filled with snooty people talk and fancy words that no one uses in real life and it pisses me off.

“The parrot stuck its head on one side, began its swaying little dance shuffle, and gave a convincing rendition of “Viens poupoule.” It had nothing against lesbians and had been an admirer of Natalie Barney’s ever since a migrating cuckoo told it of the time Natalie, dressed only in a white nightgown, had herself delivered on Renée in a coffin full of enormous lilies. In its decadent period, when it has insisted on dyeing its feathers black and wearing World War Two dog tags round its neck, the parrot had even fancied itself Natalie’s ornithological opposite number, but John’s new slide rule, whom it was courting at the time, refused to attempt a Renée Vivien impersonation. That sour, unimaginative instrument had declared it had nothing whatever in common with the young, blond-haired poet, that anyone who could discern any points of comparison between any mathematical instrument and a blond-haired poet was certainly a surrealist, if not worse. The parrot had got a lot of satisfaction the day John came home from the university and declared, “With the mass production of the pocket calculator, the slide rule is dead.”

I’m gonna make a guess and say that the chances of an audience that enjoys this kind of pretentious fuckness aren’t going to be the target audience to look for their fancy-ass prose in a lesbian vampire story anthology. Just a guess.

I did find this bit funny, though:

“- - - Renée died in 1909, Natalie in 1972, but you have recently received messages from each. How is this possible?”

“Post took a long time,” suggested the parrot, ignored as usual.

You know, I could get behind the idea of a story where a lesbian vampire confides her adventures to a smartass parrot with a human intelligence. You know, if it was an actual story with actual plot and not this fake deep stream of consciousness word diarrhea “ask me what it means, ask me what it all means” garbage.

Well, if nothing else, reading the anthology through reminded me why I had forgotten most of these stories.

#vampire #lesbian

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ganymedesclock · 5 years

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do you think that Sari is somewhat Megatron's daughter? like her protoform was very different than the usual design and it all of a sudden appeared in Sumdac's lab right near Megatron's head, bit weird to be a coincidence. It would also be pretty neat of setting up an angle between the two of how Megatron was planning an heir or something like that but circumstance landed Sari in the care of autobots. maybe even show how Megatron may even "care in some way for his progeny if he found out.

To break your claim down into a couple of parts here, you’re suggesting:

1. Sari is biologically related to Megatron, and 2. this may awaken some parental sentiment in Megatron on her behalf.

Which I will say, I am deeply skeptical of both those claims.

Regarding the first: While Transformers Animated can be a bit inconsistent with what is and isn’t a cybertronian thing (see Bulkhead being confused what a girl is in Transform And Roll Out part 2 vs. Blackarachnia casually calling herself a female bot in Along Came A Spider) one thing that has not been challenged is the implications of Optimus asking about where baby humans come from in Home Is Where The Spark Is.

The fact that Optimus is first confused about babies and second, mortified at the implications of copulation would pretty clearly imply to us cybertronians are actively separate from their own process of biological reproduction. The implication here is that cybertronians are much like, say, bees or other hive/colony insects, where the majority of, if not all sapient cybertronians, are sexless- they do not reproduce and do not have organs for reproduction.

If anything, this is doubled down upon, once in Garbage In, Garbage Out when Ratchet, a medic, is very obviously wrongfooted in dealing with the pregnant woman- this is not a situation that cybertronians have any easy equivalent for.

Whatever the reproducing “queen” of the cybertronian “hive” is, whether there’s a single one or many, and if it reproduces with any consorts is an unknown- but fair to assume that queen or queens are very few and far between. As I noted, in Transwarped, while Ratchet has been calling Sari a “protoform” dismissively for most of the series, he, nor Optimus, Bulkhead, or Bumblebee seem to know what a protoform looks like. Again, this is another implication that for cybertronians, childbirth and child-rearing are not the everyday person’s job. And in Autoboot Camp, Bee excitedly talks to Wasp about being made from the same mold.

That would tell us childbirth isn’t just not handled by the public- it’s centralized and standardized. That’s not something biological structures like ours, where pairs of people with compatible biology are responsible for the child-rearing- could pull off without a LOT of artificial parameters on it.

In short, this would tell us that cybertronians don’t have biological parents at all. The closest they would come is interactions that seem culturally parental- the very protective and gruff, mentoring attitude Ratchet takes to the rest of the Bridge Crew is something that many viewers would point to as fatherly behavior.

Because cybertronians biologically do not have parents, this affects how they view rare situations where there is an obvious biological donor. Starscream’s clones are all physically derived from him- but none of them view him as a father and he obviously doesn’t view them as his children.

As a result, even if Megatron somehow was a physiological donor to Sari... first, this would be an abnormal situation. Second, he wouldn’t even have the cultural framework to suggest he should feel particularly parental about it.

Regarding the second point: one has to consider that Megatron has very actively given life to several entities throughout the course of Transformers Animated, and taken a guiding / leading position to several other young, new beings. This is, again, given the “there really isn’t the concept of parenthood on Cybertron”, the closest we’re gonna see to cybertronian parent-child relationships without some Earth influence (Sari, for example, does actively view Isaac as her father, but this is because she was raised in human culture which has these connections).

Megatron’s relationship with Soundwave, the Dinobots- even the Constructicons- is actively abusive in nature.

While he talks up the idea that he agrees with Soundwave, and similarly voices encouragements to Grimlock, Megatron in practice treats them as disposable experiments who he never even intended to be people, and once they do become people, he does not take responsibility for them.

With the Constructicons, Megatron lies to them, bribes them, orders them around, and, then, ultimately, indoctrinates them into the Decepticons with a process that involves physically branding them, causing them pain, and changing things about their bodies without their consent. He also doesn’t inform or warn them at all ahead of time.

We can broaden this out to look at pretty much every other onscreen relationship Megatron has, and it’s fair to say no matter how personally connected to someone he is, we have literally never seen Megatron actually engage with someone in a way that is not abusive and exploitative. If anything, the younger, more impressionable, or more personally connected to Megatron himself a particular individual is, the more Megatron’s inclined to try and manipulate them.

So Megatron is in effect kind of a father figure to a lot of his subordinates- specifically an abusive patriarch.

I think it’s also worth noting in Lost And Found, when the Allspark is trying to warn Sari off her path of sabotaging Omega’s body, what it conjures to scare her is a looming, nightmare silhouette of Megatron which Sari is noticeably completely terrified by. I say “noticeably” because Sari is rarely scared of opponents immediately- the closest she gets is being stressed out by the Constructicons in Sari, No One’s Home, but, even then, several times in that episode she stubbornly confronts them.

And, yet, the silhouette of Megatron has her cowering, running away, nearly throwing herself out into the ocean and needing to be rescued she’s so afraid.

If that’s an implication Sari has some faint, distant baby memories of Megatron... he’s a figure from her nightmares, not her dreams of warmth and safety. And Sari’s, again, someone pretty notably not scared of a lot of the giant robots in her setting before she has any idea she’s related to them- if she’s terrified of Megatron, there’s a reason for that, and not just because he’s big and has a gun on his arm.

Now, given Megatron’s very prone to experimentation and very prone to creating new beings- and also fascinated by the Allspark, which Sari is obviously connected to- I would say it is possible- but thus far, near-totally unforeshadowed- that Megatron had some hand in Sari’s creation. However, if that is the theory you’re going for... that as a theory would point more towards Megatron being abusive and exploitative towards Sari- or simply just writing her off as a tainted experiment and seeking to dispose of her.

#Transformers Animated #Sari Sumdac #Megatron #maccadam #readmore #conrad6136

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canchewread · 5 years

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Editor’s note: a few months ago on this blog, I wrote a short essay that used a quote from Matt Taibbi’s “Insane Clown President” as a vehicle to explore structural similarities between establishment power in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, as it pertained to the ability to hold off an internal insurgency during their respective nomination processes. Today, I’d like to return to that argument and discuss why there are even more structural reasons to believe Bernie Sanders will eventually emerge as the Democratic candidate in 2020; but first, let’s look at our quote.

-----

A Brief Look at Listen Liberal:

Today’s quoted passage comes from the 2017 updated paperback edition of Thomas Frank’s “Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People” - a book about which I have many complicated feelings and opinions.

First and foremost I should say that this book is quite frankly an excellent study of the how and why behind the US Democratic Party’s abandonment of the labor class and subsequent marriage to the far more affluent and influential professional class. As those of you who read my theory work are no doubt aware, this is a subject near and dear to my heart and as such I’m inclined to view Frank’s illuminating tome in a very favorable light.

As the author himself notes, “Listen, Liberal” is primarily an autopsy of the Democratic Party’s historic failure to reconnect with the labor class in the post Bush era, despite the existence of optimal conditions for success in doing so and the obvious tangible benefits that strategy would have presented. Frank also devotes multiple chapters to exposing how the idiosyncrasies, arrogant assumptions and open blind spots inherent to the rarely-discussed professional class - which now represents the “soul” of the Democratic Party (such as it is) - have acted as a driving force behind this failure. This identification and discussion of what Frank calls “the professional class” is to my knowledge, wholly unique in current mainstream literature and after reading “Listen, Liberal” I found it impossible to ignore the connections between the dominant beliefs of this professional class and the disastrous campaign run by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US election.

On both of these fronts, it is unreasonable to regard this book as anything less than a smashing success and within the confines of those two discussions, this is quite literally “must read” material. Indeed, if America had anything resembling a “free and democratic press“ Frank would probably be lauded as a brilliant soothsayer who effectively predicted Clinton’s 2016 election loss in March of that year - before she’d even sew up the Democratic Party nomination.

So, what’s the problem? Fundamentally, Thomas Frank is himself a professional class liberal; albeit a reformist - but certainly not a radical. While this naturally makes his analysis of what’s wrong with the liberal professional class more incisive and accurate, it has the downside of clouding his understanding of the very working/labor class people he’s arguing the Dem Party needs to return to representing.

In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that the author’s very conception of class is rendered at least somewhat inaccurate by the sheer number of comfortable mainstream “truths” he adopts without question in “Listen, Liberal” - things like the standard (and incorrect) North American conception of “the middle class” or his belief and insistence that the Democratic Party has a long history of supporting and representing this same “middle class.”

Truthfully, the so-called “New Dealers” that came to power in the post-war, anticommunist era after the death of FDR (who himself represented a desperate compromise by elite liberals to retain power in the face of a labor class revolt) were just as married to capital and the professional class as the corporate, center-right party Frank derides today. Even if you ignore the Democratic Party’s violent, authoritarian attempts to shatter labor on behalf of American capital from the end of the Civil War, all the way up to Woodrow Wilson’s “Red Scare” - there is almost no historical record of the Party as a whole supporting labor over capital, with the exception of FDR’s four term Presidency. Whereas Frank identifies the betrayal of the working class as something that largely begun under Bill Clinton, any history student worth their salt will tell you that Truman’s post-war, anti-Communist crusade effectively destroyed organized labor in America and eventually ushered in the modern neoliberal era the author correctly identifies as being toxic for the labor class.

In short, while Frank does a magnificent job of identifying what’s wrong with the Democratic Party today - his ideas about how to address those problems are fundamentally rooted in a reformist fantasy that at some point in the past, the Democratic Party ever stood with labor when the working class didn’t have a knife at their throat. This is simply not accurate, and as such it distorts some of Frank’s theories about where we go from here; after all, if you can’t even properly identify the “labor class” it’s hard to see how you’re going to restore political power to them. This problem isn’t big enough to seriously impact the value of “Listen, Liberal” for those looking to understand the professional class or why the modern Democratic Party is completely out of touch, but it also makes it impossible to recommend the work to readers without noting that Frank’s reformist tendencies and nostalgia for a party that probably never existed, occasionally cause him to get the wrong answer. In the final analysis this makes “Listen, Liberal” an unquestionably important, if imperfect addition to “the discourse.”

Bernie, Biden and the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination

So, if Frank is right and the Democratic Party has not only abandoned the labor class, but actually no longer even has any real contact with the roughly eighty-nine percent of the population who ultimately comprise the labor class - what does this mean for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest currently being waged across America? What does it mean if the Democratic Party establishment has lost touch with most of its base? Good things, if you’re a fan of Vermont’s democratic socialist Senator, Bernie Sanders.

In my February article, we examined the eerie similarities between the quietly shattered mainstream Republican leadership in the wake of losing the 2012 election, and their counterparts in the Democratic Party after their shameful elevation of, and eventually defeat to, a reality TV host, billionaire fascist. The crux of my argument then was that the leadership of both parties had expended all of their political capital to force through an unpopular (and ultimately unsuccessful) candidate against the wishes of growing insurgent forces within their own base. When these candidates then failed to deliver victory, the power structure behind these failures was left shattered, and wholly inadequate for the purposes of opposing those same insurgent forces during the next election cycle.

In the case of the Republicans, we already know how that story ends because Trump was indeed propelled to the nomination by a revanchist, reactionary base he easily pried away from mainstream GOP candidates, simply by being a better fascist than anyone else up on the stage. Whether or not that effect will be repeated on the Democratic side of the equation with a wholly different type of insurgency, is a question we won’t be able to answer until the end of the 2020 nomination contest - but as you can read, I’m betting that answer is “yes.”

Now that the nomination race has more fully shaken out, let’s take a look at the structural similarities between the nomination races themselves. How does the 2016 GOP contest that ultimately served up Donald Trump resemble the crowded 2020 Dem nomination race and what can that tell us about who will eventually emerge to run against the swine emperor?

The first and most obvious similarity between the two nomination contests is the sheer size of the field; the 2016 Republican nomination fight began as a seventeen candidate “clown car” battle while there are currently twenty-two officially declared candidates (Rolling Stone forgot to count Mike Gravel) for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination. Furthermore, although Biden’s supporters would undoubtedly deny it, there are a number of strong similarities between Palooka Joe and presumed 2016 Republican front-runner Jeb Bush - neither is a particularly strong campaigner, neither of them has met a banker or wealthy donor they didn’t love and both men advocate for policies and positions that are fundamentally out of step with their own party’s base. Finally of course, there’s the breakdown of the field into the various “lanes” that you would expect in each primary. In both cases, there is really only one viable insurgent candidate and very little tangible policy differences between the rest of the field - with apologies to Tulsi Gabbard (not viable) and Liz Warren (not insurgent enough.)

For perhaps the first time in his life, being left of and therefore outside of, the mainstream liberal orthodoxy is working in Bernie’s favor here - just as Trump’s open fascist tendencies worked to differentiate Herr Donald from the rest of the 2016 GOP field, and galvanize insurgent support around him for a revolt against the mainstream GOP leadership and their chosen candidate. More to the point however, the ace up Bernie’s sleeve is the fact that his policy platform and long-held public positions actually cleave far, far closer to those of the voting public than those of Joe Biden or the rest of the neoliberal passengers on the 2020 Dem Nomination fail-bus do.

Why does this matter? There’s a clue if you remember that when the 2016 GOP nomination began, the vast majority of the Republican establishment (and their candidates) were united in their opposition to Trump - mainstream “conservative media” in particular regarded him as a crude, hopeless outsider who would be dispatched quickly; even Fox News opposed Trump until it was clear he’d win the nomination for example. Of course, that’s not what happened is it? Why?

To put it simply, establishment Republicans either forgot about, or simply had no real connection anymore, to their own base. After a solid three decades of pushing the party further right, employing revanchist ideas to consolidate power and openly inviting extremist elements into the party, GOP leadership found itself facing down a voting base that agreed with and admired Trump’s open fascism, more than they agreed with anything Jeb Bush or the other fifteen candidates in the race had to offer. Republican primary voters wanted a crude, bigoted, anti-establishment candidate; they wanted to punish liberals and leftists, they did in fact like fascism, they did in fact like racism, etc. This in turn made Downmarket Mussolini largely unassailable because attacking the things that made Trump different from the rest of the field, also explicitly meant attacking the voting base and the ideas or values they shared with Trump!

Well, all of that took basically one primary contest for GOP mainstream candidates and their campaign advisors to figure out. Once they could no longer afford to attack Trump, the rest of the candidates predictably turned their attention on Jeb Bush (and each other) - resulting in a truly spectacular level of chaos, carnage and cannibalism. At various points the mainstream Republican leadership tried to rally the party around a single, “Trump-slayer” candidate (Bush, Rubio, Kasich and eventually Cruz) but because the party was no longer strong enough to force candidates out of the field, the result was always the same - the candidates who weren’t favored by the establishment at that moment would largely ignore Trump and tear down the presumed “unity” candidate, just to stay alive in the race.

Frankly, if you think about it from the perspective of the candidates, such behavior was perfectly rational - after all, attacking Trump not only brought the ire of the base, but also helped someone else get closer to the nomination; at that point you might as well just drop out unless you’re prepared to wrestle away the title of chosen unity candidate from whichever stiff the GOP establishment picked to rally behind at that time. The rest is as they say, “history.”

Turning our attention back to the 2020 Democratic Party nomination race, it’s impossible not to notice how similar the contest appears to the one that ultimately destroyed the RNC and surrendered control of the party to an insurgent candidate more in line with their own voting base; namely Donald Trump.

Although the issues that drive the democratic socialist movement behind Sanders are entirely different than the issues that drive Trump Nation, the dynamics of the struggle that propelled the swine emperor to victory are clearly being replicated on the Democratic side, with Bernie Sanders (and to a lesser degree, perhaps Elizabeth Warren.) Any policy or ideology based attack on Sanders, is effectively going to be an attack on the base - and in the meantime, every vote a candidate can snatch away from Sanders is going to help Joe Biden as much, or more, than any other candidate on the stage.

In light of all this, I believe there’s really only one more question you have to ask yourself - do you believe that the roughly nineteen other mainstream neoliberal candidates are in this race to make Creepy Uncle Joe Biden the President of the United States?

Before you answer I want you to think about who these people really are for a moment; Senators, members of Congress, government officials - many of whom have never lost an election in their entire lives. They each have their own donors, their own campaign war-chests, their own in-pocket media minions and supporters. These are people from the right families, and the right educational background who believe they have been overachieving their entire lives. They’re the success stories of capitalism, the best and the brightest; valedictorians, doctorate holders, egomaniacs who think they’re “the smartest people in the room” no matter what room they walk into.

Do you believe that these folks are going to lay down for the oldest, slowest, fattest antelope on the plains, in Palooka Joe - just because Tom f*cking Perez says so? If the Democratic Party establishment actually had the power and influence necessary to force them out of the race to prop-up an anti-Sanders coalition, don’t you think it would have happened already? The polls have pointed to a Biden versus Sanders race for months and months now, with no variation whatsoever on that front - shouldn’t neoliberals be dropping out and supporting Biden already if there is to be a united anti-Sanders resistance from the party?

When the rubber hits the road, do you sincerely think the other nineteen candidates are going to help the Democratic Party take out Bernie, even if it helps Joe Biden get further out in front of the rest of the pack?

Yeah, neither do I.

All of this is actually kind of ironic because the Democratic Party establishment has spent the past three years constantly attacking Bernie by saying he’s like Trump. This is of course balderdash; Sanders is nothing like Downmarket Mussolini and even ignoring the vast gap in their stated ideologies, their campaign styles aren’t even remotely similar either. But in the wake of their disastrous failure in the 2016 election, the Democratic Party establishment has found itself in absolutely the same position their Republican brethren faced in the wake of their 2012 loss with Mitt Romney. That is the real similarity, and in the end I believe that’s why Bernie Sanders will win the 2020 Democratic Party nomination.

That is, unless they shoot him.

- nina illingworth

#thomas frank #listen liberal #books #2020 Democratic Nominantion #Bernie Sanders #Joe Biden #Democrat Fail Bus #Downmarket Mussolini #DNC #RNC #Tom Perez #Politics #US politics #neoliberalism #Democratic Party #palooka joe #Donald Trump #2016 GOP Nomination

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-02/trump-s-impeachment-saga-stems-from-a-political-hit-job-gone-bad

Joshua Green's new @BW piece: Trump's impeachment saga stems from a right-wing hit job gone bad -- an anti-Biden project funded with Mercer family money that Trump and Giuliani hijacked, only to have it blow up on them: https://t.co/mw9TuUCr87

Trump’s Impeachment Saga Stems From a Political Hit Job Gone Bad

The president's obsession with finding dirt on Biden goes back to Steve Bannon and Clinton Cash.

By Joshua Green | Published October 2, 2019 | Bloomberg | Posted October 3, 2019 10:20 AM ET |

The irony of President Trump’s sudden impeachment peril is that it’s the unintended result of an effort to help him: a political hit job aimed at a likely opponent (Joe Biden) and funded by a major right-wing donor (Rebekah Mercer) that Trump and his lawyer (Rudy Giuliani) impatiently hijacked, with consequences that could turn out to be disastrous for them.

To understand how Trump wound up the target of a House impeachment inquiry, it’s first necessary to understand why he was so obsessed with finding dirt on Biden that he pressured Ukraine’s president in a July 25th phone call to “do us a favor” and investigate Biden and his son, Hunter. The notion that Hunter Biden and his father could be complicit in Ukrainian corruption was first aired in a 2018 book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, by conservative author Peter Schweizer. The book and its author had a purpose and a lineage.

Schweizer, an editor at Breitbart News, is the president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), a nonprofit group whose board chairwoman and major donor is Rebekah Mercer, a prominent Trump supporter and benefactor of right-wing causes.

In a book I wrote about Trump and Steve Bannon, I described how Schweizer and Bannon, GAI’s founding chairman, deployed a staff of lawyers, investigators, and forensic data scientists to scour public records, corporate filings, and the dark web to compile damning evidence that Hillary and Bill Clinton behaved unethically by associating with unsavory, favor-seeking foreign donors through their work with the Clinton Foundation. Bannon, the project’s mastermind, had a specific goal in mind. He wasn’t interested in firing up conservatives, who already despised the Clintons. He wanted GAI’s findings presented in non-partisan fashion to independents and Democrats who were considering supporting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. In May 2015, on the eve of her campaign launch, Schweizer published GAI’s findings in a book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. It instantly became a New York Times bestseller.

Because the book documented a series of ethically dubious actions—unreported foreign gifts, Bill’s dinner with Kazakhstan’s autocratic president on behalf of a donor seeking lucrative mining rights—the mainstream media took up and amplified its investigations into the Clintons. As Bannon had intended, the whiff of corruption attached itself to Hillary and became a major theme of the media’s coverage, poisoning her image. “They’ve enriched themselves while playing up the worst cast of characters in the world,” Bannon argued of the Clintons at the time. Material from GAI even showed up on the front page of the New York Times. “Looking at it from their point of view,” the liberal strategist David Brock told me of Schweizer and GAI, “the Times is the perfect host body for the virus.”

Clinton’s subsequent loss in the 2016 election was proof of concept: You could spot a Democratic frontrunner years out and tarnish that person badly enough to ruin their candidacy.

So Schweizer and GAI sought to repeat the trick. Looking ahead to 2020, it wasn’t hard to foresee that a moderate, two-term vice president like Joe Biden, popular across the party, was likely to run for president and be a good bet to win. Nor was it difficult for GAI to turn up examples of ethically questionable behavior by Biden’s family members and publish the information in Secret Empires.

In 2014, while his father was vice president, Hunter became a highly paid director of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company, despite lacking expertise in resource extraction, Eastern European energy concerns, or Ukrainian regulatory affairs. The year before, after flying to China with his father aboard Air Force Two, Hunter Biden joined the board of an investment fund, BHR Partners, co-founded by a Chinese private-equity investor trying to raise $1.5 billion. To all appearances, Hunter Biden was cashing in on the family name in way that’s common among political families in both parties. (In this 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek piece, for example, I explained how Jeb Bush leveraged his famous surname to fund private equity deals with Chinese investors.)

As with Clinton Cash, Schweizer didn’t allege in his book on the Bidens that any laws were broken. Instead, his reporting laid out a suggestive timeline that led readers to the inescapable conclusion that what had transpired reeked of influence-peddling and moral, if not legal, corruption—the sort of self-dealing voters despise. While Ukraine’s prosecutor general told Bloomberg News he found no evidence of wrongdoing, the facts surrounding Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings prompted the mainstream media, including the New York Times, to take notice.

But Secret Empires didn’t have anything like the effect on Biden that Schweizer’s last book had on Clinton—it pretty much came and went. When I spoke to Schweizer last week, he offered several reasons why the book kind of came and went: one, it didn’t focus solely on Biden, but included other politicians. “That probably affected the vectoring of the narrative,” he speculated. It also appeared well before Biden entered the race, he noted, depriving it of “the urgency of the campaign” to drive it into the news cycle. Another factor, which he didn’t mention, is that the primary bad actor in Schweizer’s tale isn’t Joe Biden, but his son, who isn’t running for president.

Rather than the wall-to-wall cable news coverage his Clinton book produced, the impact of Secret Empires landed almost exclusively in conservative media, much to the frustration of Bannon, who griped about it at the time.

This is important for two reasons. First, the political effectiveness of projects like Clinton Cash and Secret Empires rests on their ability to enter the public’s consciousness as something other than “conservative attacks.” The information needs to be legitimized—or “weaponized,” to use Bannon’s term—through the mainstream press. This requires patience, restraint, and enough sophistication to understand why a damaging story published on the front page of the New York Times has infinitely more political utility for conservative partisans than the same story appearing on Breitbart.com. As a GAI staffer explained to me in 2015, “We don’t look at the mainstream media as enemies because we don’t want our work to be trapped in the conservative ecosystem.”

By this past spring, it was clear the Biden attack was stuck in the conservative ecosystem. And here’s where Trump enters the story—and inadvertently kicks off the whole impeachment saga: Trump may be the single most devoted consumer of conservative media, absorbing hours of it each day. He was mainlining the Biden coverage as part of his daily media diet.

We know from his Twitter feed and frequent outbursts that Trump isn’t patient, doesn’t restrain himself from trying to dictate press coverage, and repeats—and often exaggerates—what he hears in right-wing media. (Helpfully, he also name-checks his sources, including Schweizer.) His former Homeland Security adviser Thomas Bossert confessed over the weekend to being “deeply disturbed” that Trump couldn’t distinguish truth from fiction, choosing to believe a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election.

What differentiates Trump from other power-consumers of conservative media is that he’s the president and was willing to use his governmental powers to attack a political rival. Impatient to advance a story he believed would damage Biden, Trump tapped Giuliani, who told the New York Times in May that he was going to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, to push the new government to investigate the Bidens. “That information will be very, very helpful to my client,” he said. (He later canceled the trip.) He told CNN that “a well-regarded investigator” had brought Hunter Biden’s story to his attention.

Schweizer says it wasn’t him. “I don’t know Rudy and I’ve had no contact with Trump or the White House,” he told me. “I know there was a lot swirling around Ukraine, but I was as surprised as everyone” to learn that Trump delayed military aid to Ukraine and called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy about Biden.

Last week, the White House released a rough transcript of the call, along with a whistleblower’s report, confirming that Trump pressured a foreign government to help him discredit his rival. On the same day the transcript became public—even as Republicans began to recognize the danger it poses to his presidency—Trump was still trying to force the Biden story into the news by misconstruing and exaggerating one of Schweizer’s central claims in Secret Empires. Trump told reporters: “When Biden’s son walks out of China with $1.5 billion in a fund and the biggest funds in the world can’t get money out of China and he’s there with one quick meeting and he flies in on Air Force Two, I think that’s a horrible thing.” (In a statement, a lawyer for Biden called this a “gross misrepresentation” and said “Mr. Biden has not received any return or compensation on account of this investment or his position on the board of directors.”)

The collective effort to impugn Biden doesn’t appear to have sent him into a tailspin, at least not yet. A new Politico/Morning Consult poll this morning finds that 40% of likely Democratic voters think Biden has the best shot of beating Trump, up one point from the last poll.

But there’s no question the anti-Biden effort has boomeranged on Trump, who is suddenly under siege from the Democrats’ fast-moving impeachment inquiry. Giuliani has been subpoenaed by House investigators. So has Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who admitted this morning he was on Trump’s call with Zelenskiy. Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine who quit on Friday, will testify in the House impeachment inquiry on Thursday, while Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who was abruptly ousted in May, will sit for a joint House deposition next week.

At this point, no one can say what effect all this will have on the 2020 election. But it looks increasingly like it won’t be the one that Biden’s antagonists, from Trump to Schweizer, were aiming for.

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type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

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Chatting with Novelist + Diabetes Auction Queen Brenda Novak

New Post has been published on https://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/chatting-with-novelist-diabetes-auction-queen-brenda-novak/

Chatting with Novelist + Diabetes Auction Queen Brenda Novak

Brenda Novak is best known to the world as a New York Times best-selling author of historical and contemporary romance novels. But to the diabetes community, she's famous for being the founder of Brenda Novak's Annual Auction for the Cure of Diabetes, which has raised more than $1 million for diabetes research. It's not just a one-shot (pardon the pun!) deal. The auction takes place over not just one evening, or even one day — but the entire month of May! The proceeds of the auction benefit the Diabetes Research Institute (DRI) in Miami.

Brenda's motivation for organizing her enormous online auction (featuring more than 2,000 items) is her son, Thad, now 15, who was diagnosed ten years ago with type 1 diabetes.

Brenda lives with her family in Sacramento, CA, where she is actually a mom of five! Busy lady! She took some time out of her schedule to chat with us about how she got started and her advice to moms of other teens with diabetes (plus, find out where diabetes makes an appearance in her collection of books!).

DM) Brenda, can you start by sharing what exactly inspired you to start an online auction for diabetes?

BN) I wanted to do something for my son who was diagnosed at age 5. Diabetes is something that we're so anesthetized to because of the media and because so many people have it. It's become so commonplace in a way. People think they know a lot about it, but they don't know much. People just think that those with diabetes live normal lives everyday. I had that attitude. It wasn't a focal point for me until my son was diagnosed and I learned how hard it is and the tragic side effects. I was a young mom, just starting my career. I didn't have a lot of resources and I wasn't sure what to do. My husband said, 'There will be a time and a place for this later in life.' But I couldn't let it rest. Every day, I was just agitated about what I could do with so few resources.

I went to an elementary school silent auction, but it didn't get the turnout that they wanted. I remember thinking that this was hard, trying to get hundreds of people at one location, under one roof, for a limited time. There was a chance they'd have plans or couldn't participate. By that time, I'd built enough of my readership that I felt I could do something online.

So you decided to build your own online platform?

eBay was starting to get hot, but the 'mommy generation' hadn't really embraced it, so it was kind of a new concept. I thought maybe I should do it on eBay, but I'm glad I went my own way. I can keep the community and shoppers coming back every year. I tried doing it on my website and enlisted help from people I know in the publishing industry, and readers and writers to came together in a community effort to raise some money.

You started raising huge amounts of money right away. Did you have some big-name donors?

The online auction is not your usual fundraiser, like JDRF galas where you sell tables to huge corporations. We don't have huge donors. We have authors and readers, and cumulatively it turns out to be a big event. I'm really grateful to all the people who have joined with me.

The first year, we raised $35,000 and at the time that sounded huge. I kept growing it and trying to get it bigger and bigger. The next year we almost doubled, and the next year we almost doubled that. Then the recession hit, so we haven't grown quite as exponentially lately, but we've continued to grow at a time when other fundraisers aren't growing or are even shrinking by 30 or 40 percent.

Why did you choose to give the proceeds to the DRI?

I love JDRF and I like the ADA as well, but they're big and they've been around for a long time. I felt they had grown complacent. For me, it isn't about educating, it's about solving the problems so we don't have to educate. The people at the DRI are so passionate and focused. I just got so much more of a sense that at the DRI, they are as hungry for a cure as I am.

I felt so encouraged about the work they are doing and how close they seemed to be. It seemed the best choice for me. I wanted to be sure that I was very responsible for those dollars and know that the dollars are going directly toward a cure.

How much of the money goes to DRI?

All the proceeds. The overhead is quite low. I don't get paid, and we only have the one part-time assistant. Most of the promotion work is donated. The magazines all donate ads, so we don't pay for that. The overhead is very small.

How do you get donors involved?

It's easier now that we have a donor base to go back to, which is something we have worked on growing. But we also target new people each year. We send a solicitation letter, and the recipients figure out who you are and that you're worthwhile. I want to make sure donors understand that this is a reliable event, that it will grow, and that we will do what we say we're going do with the money.

You build credibility and you work with the same people year after year, and that makes it easier for them to contribute the next year.

Do you run the auction all on your own?

This is the first year that I have one part-time assistant. Before, I was not a big believer in volunteers. Self-interest motivates people, and you can't always rely on people you're not paying. However, I've had two volunteers come on to help me and they have selflessly given hours of their time. I almost didn't do the auction this year because I was overwhelmed with work, but they said, 'We can do it, we can do it! We'll help!' So that's what we're doing.

What are some of your favorite items in the auction this time around?

There are a lot of things! I'm a big fan of The Voice, so the CeeLo Green tickets in Vegas look great. My agent reps him so that's how we got the tickets. There's a Celine Dion meet-and-greet, too. I think she's classy and one of the best singers on the planet. Also, some of the volunteers like an attorney who's donated the time for building a Living Will.

There are almost 2,000 items, and they're so varied -- everything from homemade items to trips and stays. My son Thad has been putting a business plan together for a pen business, so he's been showing me samples, and he donated one of the pens to the auction. My sister donated a homemade witch and my daughter Alexa does pottery.

If you're a writer, there are lots of publishing-related auction items that you won't find anywhere else, like the chance to get in front of the decision-makers at publishing companies for a response within 24 hours, rather than the usual time of a year or more it can take to hear back!

Of course, I don't participate because I don't want people to think that I'm talking up my own auction and then walking away with the prizes!

Is your son involved with running the auction?

He's still in school so he doesn't do a ton of work. He comes home everyday and hears our daily totals. He does a lot of the shipping. Most donors ship direct, which makes the job much easier. But there are still several days of shipping work. He helps package everything up.

Why did you choose to do the auction every year in May?

It was for Mother's Day, and it was the month that he was diagnosed. It just felt natural. If it were in December, I might have thought twice because we would've been competing with Christmas. I think Spring is a good time for fundraising. So practically and sentimentally-speaking, this is a good month!

You're also author of quite a few best-selling books. Have you ever written a book with a diabetic character?

I did! It's called Every Waking Moment, about a woman who is living with an abusive man. She has a 5-year old boy with diabetes and she has to get his meds, and that makes it easier to track her. This book was written shortly after Thad was diagnosed, and so it reflects the anxiety that a mother feels in dealing with a child with diabetes. I got a lot of reader feedback. Lots of people have no idea about managing diabetes, and tend to blame type 1 on lifestyle being out of whack. Or they know only about type 2 diabetes.

Speaking of raising a child with diabetes, what advice do you have for other D-moms?

I think that's a tough question. I get asked that a lot. I feel bad because doing fundraising doesn't make me an expert with management. I think that I took too much of the diabetes management on myself. Now that Thad's older and I can't do that as much, getting him to take care of himself the way I could is a struggle. I think the hand-off is going smoother now, but it could definitely be better.

What I needed to do was engage him and make him responsible, but instead I added it to my list and managed his blood sugar for him. I did that for years. I just felt I had to take it on myself. And as a mother, you're so protective of your child, so if you can do something for your child, you think it makes it easier. But I think that was a mistake. I needed to make him more responsible for himself sooner.

Thad's never been hospitalized, but he sees the worry in my eyes. It's important to stay more positive, and when your child tests and sees higher BGs, to say something like, 'At least you know' or 'Now you can adjust.' Don't be negative, don't drill them. A mother's naturally critical because of the worry, but I don't necessarily think it's the smartest way.

Thank you for that perspective, Brenda, and a very happy belated Mother's Day to you! Thanks also for all the hard work you've done on behalf of PWDs everywhere. And to our Readers: don't forget to participate in the auction, which is open until May 31!

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

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