#and one of those publicized murders was even gambit related!

[punkrogue]

People: rogue is too morally dark rn i dont like it

Me: you do remember she was raised as a terrorist by mystique and destiny, stalked dazzler with the intent to kill her AGAINST her parents wishes, was present for the moorlock massacre in 616, was stripped molested and enslaved on genosha in 616 and survived a GENOCIDE in this, once lead a xmen shock team that was 50% villains and killed TWO men on international television right?

[naesoonghonors]

First review, Perfect Blue

Double bind: a situation where one cannot manage a dilemma, they are unable to resolve or even escape such events.

Perfect Blue is not a simple movie to understand. Its not meant to be because it is a psychological thriller. Perfect Blue is a story of a pop idol facing a big career change from singing to acting. Mima feels smothered and unable to grow artistically in her role as a pop idol. Her persona that she displays to fans is not who she really is. It is a fake personality that she uses to pander to her fans. This persona is one of a squeaky clean and innocent idol. She sings feminine pop love songs and tells men to ‘be more aggressive because you will have the chance’. Like many real-life idols, she must maintain this perfect image if she wishes to remain relevant as her male fans will reject her if she seems unpleasant or undedicated to them. Her managerial team pretends they know what is best for her. Rumi, outwardly rejecting the will of the young woman in favor of projecting her own ideas. Mima is pushed into a submissive role even while trying to escape the suffocation of the idol world. Even worse she is pushed into these things by other women. This movie explores the ownership of young women and the control of perception/idolship. There is the interesting real-life case of Sulli and Choiza. When it came to be known they were dating they both received criticism. However Sulli was accused of ‘not caring what her fans thought’. Choiza was able to move on from this with much more ease then his female counter part. This feeling of owning a woman is not a new concept but simply evolved in new ways to suit this new medium. In the opening of the movie the stalker Me-Mania views himself as literally holding the performing Mima in his hand. He does not know the real human Mima, in fact only talking to a fake Mima through emails. This parasocial relationship is toxic to both sides. She is an icon, an idol, a commodity. So deviation from that perfect persona upsets those who believe they know the real Mima or believe they are Mima.

Rumi, who comes to believe she herself is the true Mima rejects the new actress direction Mima is pursuing. Women are not often allowed to evolve or change without backlash from executives and fans alike. Mima was known as a pop idol so she ‘must’ remain it. This is the problem Rumi herself faces. Rumi used to be a pop idol back in the day but it now old, fat, and with distinctly ugly/ unusual features. So as Mima chooses to announce her retirement from her pop group CHAM Rumi tries to protect what she believes the true Mima would want. She discourages Mima but none the less continues to be her manager and devoted stalker.

One of the most chilling parts of the movie are scenes related to “Mimas Room” a mysterious website posting about Mimas day and her thoughts going through it. Oddly this blog is not run by Mima. There is a disgusting element to the entitlement of people, more specifically devoted men, and how they feel about the lives of these pop stars. They are often not allowed boyfriends, nor to drink. This hysterical fan makes the mistake of blending the Persona and the Person. As the pop idol persona is pushed on to her she rejects it and tries to get away. This is when the Mima in the mirror manifests. These men and Rumi have pushed their ideas on her so hard its causing stress related delusions. This is not a farfetched fantasy, women in the public eye are often pushed to such extremes by media. Usually manifesting as afflictions like eating disorders, but possibly in these delusions and hallucinations. Some would say this is what happened to Brittany Spears.

Mima feels the need to cater to and make others happy. This is perhaps why she burned out on the idol business. But as a woman in the industry she is in an inherently not safe place. She is a vulnerable newbie actress; and predatory men take advantage of that. She is sent to a photographer known for talking women out of their clothes, her first real acting role is a rape scene. Even with a female manager she is sent to these situations and must live with the trauma as a steppingstone to her acting career. This is something very unique to women. Rape is often trivialized by media, made a plot point, and worst of all made a reason for a male character’s growth to be seen as her savior. This is almost parodied in the murders of all these men done by Me-Mania. He is there to protect the purity of someone who does not want his help and is in fact in more danger with him around. At the point in the movies of the rape scene it is too early in Mimas arch for her to have come into her true new fully realized Mima. She instead does these scenes for the sake of others.

This movie also sees Mima run the gambit with the Virgin Whore dichotomy. As soon as Mima does a single risqué scene her fan base seems to turn completely. They think she’s gross, or that she likes pretending to be raped. This would not happen to a male actor. People do not make assumptions about actors when they play certain roles; people do not think Leonardo Decaprio is at all like the role he plays in Wolf of Wallstreet. This strange double standard is an excuse to put down those who displease the masses and justify their hatred.

Mimas only source of support is from the drama she is acting in. The character is in a very similar situation. She is told by another actress, scratch that, a well respected actress that she admires, that it is foolish to believe each person is made up of one persona. The actress’s character claims people change from second to second. In the language of film it shows pretty immediately after that this is what pushes Mima to get herself back together. She begins to gain strength against the her of the past that keeps harassing her from her mirror. Acting is hard but it is what Mima wants to do. She is a hard working woman, who thrives when she does think for the sake of herself and her ambitions.

The movie ends with Mima fighting ‘her past self’/ Rumi. Rumi chases her through the street with a screwdriver and attempts to kill Mima. Mima manages to evade her and take Rumis wig. This reminds Rumi who she really is. Rumi runs in front of a truck attempting to commit suicide but Mima sees her past self and not Rumi in that moment. She runs and pushes her past self out of the way. Managing to defeat and overcome her past she is now able to reconcile with it. Mima learned a lot from her time as an idol, and while she is ready to move on to bigger and better things this past self is still a part of her, so she saves it. There is a time skip where you see Mima visiting Rumi at a psychiatric home. And Mima thanks Rumi for helping her become the Mima she is today. She reflects on being able to be her real self as she drives off under the ‘Perfect Blue’ Sky.

[theculturedmarxist]

The New York Times is literally a propaganda outlet and Timothy Egan is a deceitful chode. His every word drips with the anxious desperation of the Democrats who know their goose is cooked.

Watching “Succession,” the HBO show about the most despicable plutocrats to seize the public imagination since the Trumps were forced on us, made me want to tax the ultrarich into a homeless shelter. And it almost made a Bernie Bro of me.

That’s the thing about class loathing: It feels good, a moral high with its own endorphins, but is ultimately self-defeating. A Bernie Sanders rally is a hit from the same pipe: Screw those greedy billionaire bastards!

Sanders has passion going for him. He has authenticity. He certainly has consistency: His bumper-sticker sloganeering hasn’t changed for half a century. He was, “even as a young man, an old man,” as Time magazine said.

But he cannot beat Donald Trump, for the same reason people do not translate their hatred of the odious rich into pitchfork brigades against walled estates.

Because powerful oligarchs that own their government murder them with impunity when they do.

>March 7 was a bitterly cold day in Detroit, and a crowd estimated at between 3,000 and 5,000 gathered near the Dearborn city limits, about a mile from the Ford plant. The Detroit Times called it "one of the coldest days of the winter, with a frigid gale whooping out of the northwest". Marchers carried banners reading "Give Us Work, "We Want Bread Not Crumbs", and "Tax the Rich and Feed the Poor". Albert Goetz gave a speech, asking that the marchers avoid violence. The march proceeded peacefully along the streets of Detroit until it reached the Dearborn city limits.

>There, the Dearborn police attempted to stop the march by firing tear gas into the crowd and began hitting marchers with clubs. One officer fired a gun at the marchers. The unarmed crowd scattered into a field covered with stones, picked them up, and began throwing stones at the police. The angry marchers regrouped and advanced nearly a mile toward the plant. There, two fire engines began spraying cold water onto the marchers from an overpass. The police were joined by Ford security guards and began shooting into the crowd. Marchers Joe York, Coleman Leny and Joe DeBlasio were killed, and at least 22 others were wounded by gunfire.

>The leaders decided to call off the march at that point and began an orderly retreat. Harry Bennett, head of Ford security, drove up in a car, opened a window, and fired a pistol into the crowd. Immediately, the car was pelted with rocks, and Bennett was injured. He got out of the car and continued firing at the retreating marchers. Dearborn police and Ford security men opened fire with machine guns on the retreating marchers. Joe Bussell, 16 years old, was killed, and dozens more men were wounded. Bennett was hospitalized for his injury.

> All of the seriously wounded marchers were arrested, and the police chained many to their hospital beds after they were admitted for treatment. A nationwide search was conducted for William Z. Foster, but he was not arrested. No law enforcement or Ford security officer was arrested, although all reliable reports showed that they had engaged in all the gunfire, resulting in deaths, injuries and property damage. The New York Times reported that "Dearborn streets were stained with blood, streets were littered with broken glass and the wreckage of bullet-riddled automobiles, and nearly every window in the Ford plant's employment building had been broken".

The United States has never been a socialist country, even when it most likely should have been one, during the robber baron tyranny of the Gilded Age or the desperation of the Great Depression, and it never will be. Which isn’t to say that American capitalism is working; it needs Teddy Roosevelt-style trustbusting and restructuring. We’re coming for you, Facebook.

Yeah, just look how well that’s worked out, you fucking idiot.

The next month presents the last chance for serious scrutiny of Sanders, who is leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire. After that, Republicans will rip the bark off him. When they’re done, you will not recognize the aging, mouth-frothing, business-destroying commie from Ben and Jerry’s dystopian dairy. Demagogy is what Republicans do best. And Sanders is ripe for caricature. 

The same Republicans that got their breakfast ate by the dottering windbag cheetoman? The same Republicans that are unpopular with over half the fucking country? The same Republicans which have shown majority support for Sanders’s policies in the past? Those are the Republicans you’re talking about, right, Timothy, you fucking asshole?

I’m not worried about the Russian stuff — Bernie’s self-described “very strange honeymoon” to the totalitarian hell of the Soviet Union in 1988, and his kind words for similar regimes. Compared with a president who is a willing stooge for the Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, a little vodka-induced dancing with the red bear is peanuts.

Nor am I worried about the legitimate questions concerning the candidate’s wife, Jane Sanders, who ran a Vermont college into the ground. Again, Trump’s family of grifters — from Ivanka securing her patents from China while Daddy made other promises to Beijing, to Don Jr.’s using the White House to leverage the family brand — give Democrats more than enough ammunition to return the fire.

This is fun. Due to a complete lack of incriminating conduct, little Timmy has to invent wrongdoing to libel Jane Sanders. I suppose he’s relying on his readers being too stupid to read the article that he himself links, another NYT hitpiece that desperately tries to paint Ms Sanders as a shady character without anything in the way of tangible proof.

>Federal prosecutors have not spoken publicly about their investigation, though late last year, Ms. Sanders’s lead lawyer said he had been told it had been closed. And while doubts remain about the contribution pledges claimed by the college, the lawyer has said that neither Ms. Sanders nor her husband was even questioned by investigators, indicating a lack of significant evidence of a crime.

>After Ms. Sanders’s ouster, the college’s troubles worsened. It abandoned a promising effort she had undertaken to sell some of its new land to improve its finances, interviews show. A few years later, when it did begin selling, it was to a consortium that secretly included at least one member of its board, raising conflict-of-interest questions.

>There is little question that the college’s 2016 demise can be traced to Ms. Sanders’s decision to champion an aggressive — critics say reckless — plan to buy the land. But with potential students put off by the lack of a campus, and with many such colleges struggling at the time, her move was the academic equivalent of a Hail Mary. Her allies said she never had a chance to fulfill her vision.

>“Jane made an audacious gambit to save the college,” said Genevieve Jacobs, a former faculty member. “It seemed to be a moment of ‘change or die.’”

>In interviews and emails, Ms. Sanders expressed frustration at her dismissal and the college’s failure to continue her rescue plan.

>“They went a completely different direction in every way than what we had proposed and decided upon as a board — with the bank, with the diocese, the bonding agency,” she said. “They didn’t carry out any of the plan. It was very confusing and upsetting at the time.”

The TL;DR seems to be: Jane Sanders tried to save a struggling school with an audacious but risky plan that ended up being aborted when she was let go by by a board, some of the members of which may have had a stake in seeing it fail. At the very least, a much more complex situation than the aspersion of “running it into the ground.”

Trump bragged about sexual assault, paid off a porn star and ran a fraudulent university. He sucks up to dictators and tells a half-dozen lies before he puts his socks on in the morning. A weird column about a rape fantasy from 1972 is not going to sink Bernie when Trump has debased all public discourse.

No, what will get the Trump demagogue factory working at full throttle is the central message of the Sanders campaign: that the United States needs a political revolution. It may very well need one. But most people don’t think so, as Barack Obama has argued. And getting two million new progressive votes in the usual area codes is not going to change that.

“Ah jeez, ah fuck, he has no sexual indiscretions that I can dredge up and his Feminist polemic against pornography and the rape culture that it engenders is old news, and if I actually reported on it honestly people might actually read it and support his ideas. Oh, well, you see, despite the incredible groundswell of support for just such a thing, Barack Obama, the man that gave the banks trillions of dollars and then allowed the state apparatus to function as their gestapo-cum-storm troopers, says we don’t need one!”

Timothy Egan wants to dismiss “two million new progressive votes” after doing a little gaslighting. His Democrat masters don’t want people to remember that it was Obama’s promises of Hope and Change after 8 years of Republican tyranny that generated a record breaking voter turnout. They would also like you to forget that 2016 was a 20-year low in voter turnout. Do you think those things are related, Mr Egan? Do you think that there might be some connection between Obama taking advantage of the desperation of millions of people, betraying them, and then those people not fucking showing up next time, causing your party to lose to the dimwit that they themselves boosted to the position?

Give Sanders credit for moving public opinion along on a living wage, higher taxes on the rich and the need for immediate action to stem the immolation of the planet. Most great ideas start on the fringe and move to the middle.

But some of his other ideas are stillborn, or never get beyond the fringe. Socialism, despite its flavor-of-the-month appeal to young people, is not popular with the general public. Just 39 percent of Americans view socialism positively, a bare uptick from 2010, compared with 87 percent who have a positive view of free enterprise, Gallup found last fall.

“Just” 39 percent of Americans, up 4% from 2016. This is ignoring for the moment that due to Americans’ piss-poor education system they have no idea what “Socialism” means aside from “more government.” Looking at the breakdown of results, it seems as though they just asked people off the top of their head what they thought about X, no definition or elaboration given. Unsurprisingly, when you look at the actual numbers on specific issues, you can see exactly why Egan has to play this deceptive bullshit: of respondents 18-34, 52% have a favorable view of “Socialism,” as opposed to 47% supporting “Capitalism.” This is in sharp contrast to the 35-54 and 55+ cohorts. 65% of Democrats have a favorable view of “Socialism.” Those with a “Liberal” ideology are even more in favor at 74%, Timothy Egan, you massive shithead.

What’s more, American confidence in the economy is now at the highest level in nearly two decades. That’s hardly the best condition for overthrowing the system.

"The highest level in nearly two decades.” That’s faint fucking praise right there.

You can see the tremendous fucking crater caused by the crash in 2007/8, a reversal of a whopping -81 points from the previous year. With many economists forecasting recession beginning either this year or the next, we’ll see how long the confidence lasts. 

So-called Medicare for all, once people understand that it involves eliminating all private insurance, polls at barely above 40 percent in some surveys, versus the 70 percent who favor the option of Medicare for all who want it. Other polls show majority support. But cost is a huge concern. And even Sanders cannot give a price tag for nationalizing more than one-sixth of the economy.

A ban on fracking is a poison pill in a must-win state like Pennsylvania, which Democrats lost by just over 44,000 votes in 2016. Eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another Sanders plan, is hugely unpopular with the general public.

“Medicare for all is really unpopular, except when it isn’t.”

Hmm, you know? Hmmm.

As for fracking, from his own link:

>A November poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Cook Political Report found that only 39 percent of Pennsylvania swing voters saw a fracking ban as a good idea, even as nearly 7 in 10 of those same voters said they supported the idea of a “Green New Deal” for the environment.

Democrats are whinging on the jobs “lost” to a fracking ban as though it exists in isolation. 39% might support a fracking ban, but 70% support the GND, which could potentially offset the “job loss” with industry that has the potential not to leave their state as a fucking environmentally ruined horror show. I haven’t run the numbers on this, but not living in a cesspool of polluted air and water tends to be pretty popular, Timbo.

More shellgames from Mr Egan regarding abolishing ICE.

> Only 1 in 4 voters in the poll, 25 percent, believe the federal government should get rid of ICE. The majority, 54 percent, think the government should keep ICE. Twenty-one percent of voters are undecided. 

That sounds bad. Maybe it’s not such a good ide

>But a plurality of Democratic voters do support abolishing ICE, the poll shows. Among Democrats, 43 percent say the government should get rid of ICE, while only 34 percent say it should keep ICE.

Oh.

Sanders is a rigid man, and he projects grumpy-old-man rigidity, with his policy prescriptions frozen in failed Marxist pipe dreams. He’s unlikely to change. I sort of like that about his character, in the same way I like that he didn’t cave to the politically correct bullies who went after him for accepting the support of the influential podcaster Joe Rogan.

Democrats win with broad-vision optimists who still shake up the system — Franklin Roosevelt, of course, but also Obama. The D’s flipped 40 House seats in 2018 without using any of Sanders’s stringent medicine. If they stick to that elixir they’ll oust Trump, the goal of a majority of Americans.

Democrats lose with fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists. Three times, the party nominated William Jennings Bryan, the quirky progressive with great oratorical pipes, and three times they were trounced. Look him up, kids. Your grandchildren will do a similar search for Bernie Sanders when they wonder how Donald Trump won a second term.

“Failed Marxist pipe dreams.” Aaaaay lmao. You should also have an inkling something is wrong when you have to go all the way back to FDR to find someone that supports your point. Talk about “poison pills,” Obama proved himself to be as much of a snake as the rest, and the effects of that resonated in 2016 when the Dems ran on a platform of “that’s a nice country you have there, you wouldn’t want Trump to get elected, would you?” How did that work out? You ran one of the most unpopular politicians in the country—after very blatantly rigging the primaries against Sanders to do so—against one of the most unpopular capitalists in the country, and lost, dipshit!

Ironically, I think Timbob’s closing statement will prove true, though not in the way his clown ass intends. Shills like Egan are doing everything they can to try and poison public perception against Sanders and his policies, who only proves increasingly popular as time goes on, so much so in fact that the DNC is already biting its nails and muttering to itself about ways it can try and cheat his supporters again.

In conversations on the sidelines of a DNC executive committee meeting and in telephone calls and texts in recent days, about a half-dozen members have discussed the possibility of a policy reversal to ensure that so-called superdelegates can vote on the first ballot at the party’s national convention. Such a move would increase the influence of DNC members, members of Congress and other top party officials, who now must wait until the second ballot to have their say if the convention is contested.

They deny it in the article, claim that changing the rules would be “bad sportsmanship,” but one would be a fool to believe them. If anything, their ambivalence towards relying on Superdelegates would make me even more nervous at this stage. Politico wants it to seem like the DNC is bent on playing fair, but more likely than not they have no intention of changing the convention rules because they believe there’s no need. With Warren’s flagging support and the luke-warm response to Biden, I doubt they’re overcome with optimism of beating Sanders in an honest primary. With all the shenanigans from last time’s primaries in mind, it’s likely that the machinery to rig the results their way is already in place—the primary could already be over before it even begins.

[ibroughtthisonmyselfpixels]

Shall we try the Death Archives thing again?

I think I’ve left it for a sufficient time that we can do this.

Across all known MMBCs, including the abandoned ones, we have 179 contestants who are still alive and competing, 213 who are dead (including one migrating from the first category), 37 with-a-38th-coming who are pending for current projects (ditto the last brackets), and eleven, all mine, who are pending for possible, or probable, future MMBC entries.

The total of confirmed alive and dead is 392; including the current-pending, the total is 429; including the future-pending, it’s 440. Going from the last time I talked about this eight or nine months ago, this is a respective numbers increase of 69 alive and 63 dead, and a complete-total increase of 144.

(McNair contestants are still counted as all alive for this purpose.)

The number of floater deaths - which, for the uninitiated, are deaths of individuals involved in MMBCs that aren’t exactly contestants, such as cohosts or external murderers - has gone up to ten from six. The new ones are Eleanor Voss and Just of Von Aleshire, Seth Diamond of Francis, and Cheyenne Butler of Collins. Without their inclusion, the total dead would be 203.

Discounting the five floater deaths that overlap with this category through their own killings, the number of known murderers across all MMBCs is 23 - a stark leap from the twelve of last time. Of those from completed projects, I believe five of them are still alive: Alice Juster from Hart, Chadrick Waite from Francis, Christiano Verde from Knight, Raina Mukherjee from Von Aleshire, and Tangelo Teahouse from the concluded-but-not-completed Galactic.

There’s a sixth still alive that I explicitly know the identity of... however, that murderer is the one for SoS MM BC, so I’m obviously not gonna tell you who that one is. From now on, when the word “murderers” is used statistically, it will not include this person among them.

Na na na-na na.

Out of all completed MMBCs, Von Aleshire has the most contestant-based survivors, on account of being a double MMBC: Raina, Dominic Windham III, and Aisling Bellamy. (Being a triple, I suspect that Hathorne will either match or exceed this total, but I Could Be Wrong.) As before, Moon-Blackberry and Angelo are the only MMBCs with contestant survivors that are neither winners nor murderers*: indeed, Lyra Maurer remains the only contestant to be eliminated from such a project through the “under -20 relationship” clause.

I’ve honestly lost track of how many of these Sims are supposed to be in Valhalla, and frankly, I am running out of room for them. Ergo, I’ll probably suspend the inclusion of any more of the dead in the active Valhalla StoryProgression circle - with the exception of SoS deaths, of course, plus one or two besides - until Hopelessness and Paranormal are indeed lifted. They are still going to be in Valhalla, don’t get me wrong; they just won’t be interactable in a gameplay sense. I really need to focus on Amelia’s story and that of the existing Valhalla residents right now, so I can be better and improve and be better.

A bewildering SIXTY-FOUR Sims, dead or alive, have names beginning with C, an increase of twenty since last time. Accordingly, C has the highest ratio of murderers to a letter, with five / seven: Caesar Clamato of Camisade, Camille Mist Sparta of Heliotrope, Chadrick, Charlie Fuentes of Chambers, Christiano, and Cheyenne and Cupid Hawthorne as floaters. It also has three winners to it: Cecil Amity of Ferox, Chadrick, and Cordelia Chicory Veil of Collins (who has not yet become Rafferty).

Chadrick Waite is the only Sim currently in the archives to simultaneously straddle the Murderer and Winner categories.

Five of all of the C sims are mine - Carl, Casey-Mae, Castor, Cordelia, Cree.

The letter A ties with C as having the most winners, with three out of its thirty-eight: Aisling, Anemone Shell of Moon-Blackberry, and Annie Kayse of Chambers. It also contains the second most murderers, another three: Amelia Ruth Limerence, Alice, and Asha Malik of Collins.

The letters D, N, P and S each contain two winners; K, L, O, R and V contain one each. N and P also contain two murderers, alongside B and G; E, H, J, M, R, T and V contain one each with floaters.

The B column contains the most ‘pending’ Sims with five, including one of mine; C, E, M, S, and tentatively R have four each. (Tentatively, because one of the Rs, mine, is merely a placeholder name until the MMBC runner I send her to approves of a different one.)

The most common first names in MMBCs, outside of Katherine, are Daisy (Harlow, MacGregor, and Olson), Felicity (Dubose, Harrison and Rose), Poppy (Blaze, Citrus and Reaves), and Scarlet (Caramel Creme, Rancune, and Tides, plus Scarlett Carnelian). The most common surnames, outside of West, are Chanel (Charlotte, Holly, and Shelley), Eklund (Anissa Alea, Mollie, and Racheal), Ivy (Claudia, Esmeralda, and Junpei), and Rose (Baxtor, Candy, and Felicity again). There are of course several names that can be abbreviated into similar ones - five beginning with Alex, for instance - but the above are the most common with that exact spelling.

If we’re going to be technical, the most common surname on the list is a lack of one! Just, Lithodora, Pomona, and Sprite all appear on a solely-first-name basis.

First names that occur two times are Alex on its own, Annalise, Betsy, Callie, Cynthia, Helena, Iris, Joey, Julian, June, Lady, Laurel, Lily, Percy, Scott, Seth (del Bosque and Diamond), and Sylvia.

Last names that occur two times are Arsenic, Butler, del Bosque, Didit, Ebonywood, Flynn, Greenwood, Haynes, Jernigan, Kang, Lust, Maple, McCabe, Rain, Rancune, Romero, Rothschild, Sparks, Stevens, Westwood, Wilcox, Winston, and Zest. The Arsenics, Chanels, del Bosques, Didits, Ebonywoods, Eklunds, Jernigans, Lusts, Rancunes, and Rothschilds are all related to each other to some degree; the Butlers, Flynns, Greenwoods, Haynes, Ivys, Kangs, Maples, McCabes, Rains, Romeros, Roses, Sparks, Stevens, Westwoods, probably Wilcoxes, Winstons, and Zests are not. Confused yet?

The Sim called Independence is still alive.

Faux starvation (guns, cowplants or knives) remains the most frequent death, having appeared thirty-two times across sixteen unique MMBCs - thirty-four if you count Amelia and Laurel. Six are cowplant deaths, fifteen / sixteen are stabbings, one is a decapitation after a botched stabbing, eight involve guns, one is / two are a slit throat... and Edmond’s was Boot to the Head.

Fire appears twenty-four times, across nineteen unique MMBCs. Interestingly, only the Goth MMBC has the death not be caused by the fire directly, but rather specifies that Ladonna died of “smoke inhalation”.

The most common first cause of death in an MMBC is also fire, it having opened nine of them if we count Galactic’s opening double-death gambit as a single instance. The next most common is Blunt Force Trauma, at five times.

Of the known dead murderers, the most common way for them to die is by stabbing or gunshot (this still includes Hortense, despite the differing ghost look).

There have been fifteen double-deaths in MMBCs; only those of Dublin-and-Junior and Alex-and-Dalton have the causes of death differ between the two. Phantom had the most true double-deaths, with two in quick succession: While Hawthorne and Von Aleshire had an equal amount, Cupid and Eleanor Voss were involved in two of the respective double deaths, and they were not contestants, while all of Phantom’s involved contestants. There have still been only two triple deaths in MMBC history.

There are three Sims with unique death causes / ghost colors within the MMBC context: Charlie, Chokecherry, and Whisper. Reef lost his unique color, Mummy’s Curse, to Fae Bricks’ own poisoning.

Blunt Force Trauma and Jellybean now have eighteen deaths between them - though for the latter, Daisy Olson’s death is counted as that despite it either being a starvation or a stabbing. Weird. The next most common deaths are Drowning and Electrocution, at 17 each.

There are currently sixteen completed MMBCs, nine currently still happening as far as I know, three preparing to start, eleven discontinued, and ten that may be happening in the future that I know about / have names for. This is a total of forty-nine* MMBCs at this moment in time.

* = Fifty-one, if you count the two Sims 4-exclusive ones that may or may not still be happening, the one by yoongisims and the one by the one who originally ran Bucket. I don’t know if they’re still happening or will even start or what, so I’m hesitant to count them until there is actually proof of a beginning for either of them.

I’ve entered Sims into thirty of the thirty-nine MMBCs that are currently known about and ‘public’; ten of them are dead. I have three BFTs, two drowning ghosts, a jellybean ghost, two Buried Alive ghosts, a freezing ghost, and a stabbing ghost. I also have a BFT from Chambers, Dub, and a would-be-stabbing from Limerence, Amelia. I don’t know if any of my creations are going to die in SoS yet...

I also have three Sims alive by victory, gorgeous Lyra alive by conventional elimination, five by current circulation, three by their not having started yet, seven (plus Sera’s first iteration) by oblivion, and my eleven pending. That’s nineteen to thirty-one alive to ten dead, depending on how you look at it.

Sera was one of the four mooted Powers contestants to go on to other projects, and of those four, she is the only one to have died. Lichen Hara is still alive in the same project as Sera, Alice Juster was Hart’s killer, and Regina Largo is en route to Baines.

The MMBCs I missed out on entering are Steele, Francis, Mirage (Shipwrecked Passion), Heliotrope, Bucket (Sims 4), and Phantom. Of these six, only Steele and Francis are complete, and the last three all ended prematurely.

I have run two MMBCs in the past, and am in the process of running another one. I also have six projects slated for the future: Roach, Teufel, Jernigan, Pritchett / Celare, Last Chance, and [redacted]. Vidcund has completed four in the past, is running four at once now, and has at least two ‘named’ ones in my archives for the future, though I’m sure he has many more ideas that he hasn’t told you about, and even some she hasn’t even told me. Jack is quickly rising up the ranks of prolific, having run two and about to properly start a third. Eighteen of the known MMBCs - nineteen including Wormwood - have been ‘single attempts at the concept’ so far.

FROM IGNORANCE BLIND A'SPRANG A SONG OF DOOM / BETRAYER OF BLOOD A'HARKENS INTO THE GLOOM / O'RE STONE, O'RE BLOOD THE CHURCH WILL WEEP / AND WITNESS THE BRIDE IN ETERNAL SLEEP.

[ramajmedia]

The Godfather: True Stories That Inspired The Movie | Screen Rant

These true stories served as inspiration for cinematic masterpiece, The Godfather. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and released in 1972, The Godfather represents a landmark achievement both in filmmaking and storytelling, bringing together an iconic cast of actors led by Marlon Brando and a young Al Pacino. Diving headfirst into the murky world of Italian-American crime organizations, The Godfather centers around the Corleone family, presenting the group as people first and gangsters second.

While Coppola put his own spin on the story, The Godfather was adapted from the novel of the same name by Mario Puzo, who also wrote the movie's screenplay. Born in New York to Italian immigrants, Puzo had direct links to the communities explored in his writing and drew heavily on his background for a number of novels. With The Godfather, Puzo was desperately seeking his first literary hit and, at the suggestion of his publisher, decided to focus on the Mafia, fictionalizing real life tales of violence alongside crime stories Puzo had come across during his time as a journalist.

Related: Black Panther Embraces Both Elements Of James Bond And The Godfather

Many of The Godfather's true stories are reworked so as to not be immediately recognizable, but the real-world influence can certainly be felt. This sense of realism perhaps even aids in making both versions of the story feel grounded, visceral and foreboding at all the appropriate junctures. Here are the real-life events that inspired The Godfather.

The Godfather's central story chronicles an ongoing power struggle between the Corleone family and their New York rivals. The other four families - the Tattaglias, the Barzinis, the Cuneos and the Straccis - are seeking to move into the narcotics trade with the help of Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo, but the old-fashioned Don Corleone refuses to play ball. Since the whole operation falls down without Corleone influence, Sollozzo makes an attempt on Don Vito's life, hoping his successor will be more willing to cooperate but, eventually, the botched assassination leads to an all out war between the Five Families.

This setup directly mirrors the real life Five Families of New York that first emerged in the early 20th century and still exist today. Unlike the world of The Godfather, the names of these families have changed over time, but the current incarnations are: the Bonanno family, the Colombo family, the Gambino family, the Genovese family and the Lucchese family. Naturally, periods of hostility did erupt between these rival groups, and inner conflicts would also arise as individuals jostled to climb the ranks.

The real Five Families did also take differing stances over their drugs policy, although it could be said that this was more to do with the potential risks involved than the moral position taken by Vito Corleone.

The attitudes and beliefs at play in The Godfather's criminal dealings were somewhat based on truth. Events during the 1930s demonstrate some level of discord between older and younger generations, with the newcomers resenting the strict, antiquated ways of their predecessors, such as their refusal to work with criminals from different ethnic backgrounds. This isn't the motivation behind Vito's refusal of Sollozzo, but the story does play on genuine accounts from the period.

Marlon Brando's Vito Corleone is one of cinema's most celebrated figures, but the character took inspiration from several real-life criminals and perhaps the most prominent influence is Frank Costello, one-time head of the Genovese family. In preparing for his defining role as the Godfather, Brando listened to tapes of Costello's recorded testimony and there are a number of key parallels between Vito's story and that of Frank Costello.

The power of the Corleone family is founded upon its connections to authority - judges, police and politicians - and this is why Don Corleone's involvement is such as vital cog of Sollozzo's budding drug empire. Similarly, Costello's own power was rooted in deep connections to the U.S. legal system and government and, also like Vito, this allowed the Genovese family to operate in areas such as gambling, while deliberately avoiding dealing in narcotics. Costello's personal story follows a similar path to that of Don Corleone, with both men surviving an assassination attempt, retiring in order to maintain peace, and then getting revenge on their enemies from the shadows.

Related: 10 Movie Board Games We Can't Believe Exist (But Definitely Want To Play)

Some components of Marlon Brando's character can also be found in Carlo Gambino, head of the Gambino crime family. Like young Vito in The Godfather, Carlo traveled from Sicily to the U.S. alone as a boy and became widely known for possessing a calm temperament that belied an inner ruthlessness. Just as Vito Corleone and Carlo Gambino began their lives in a similar manner, both men lived to a relatively old age and died within the comfort of their own home - a fate not always afforded to the heads of crime families.

Although the singer himself was infamously irked by the connection, it's widely believed that the Corleones' close family friend, Johnny Fontane, was based on Frank Sinatra. Although his role in The Godfather's movie adaptation is diminished, Fontane is painted as a celebrity big band crooner at the height of his popularity, looking to branch out into acting in order to sustain his time in the limelight. The audience learns that Vito Corleone once managed to intimidate a band leader into releasing Fontane from a restrictive performance contract by making an offer he couldn't refuse, and this story mirrors a similar situation between Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey, who was allegedly "convinced" to cancel his agreement with Sinatra.

While plenty has been made of Frank Sinatra's ties and association with the criminal underworld, not all of the purported similarities to Johnny Fontane ring true. It has been suggested that the Corleone family's coercion of big-time movie producer, Jack Woltz, to cast Fontane in his upcoming film was inspired by Sinatra's casting in From Here To Eternity. Director, Fred Zinnemann, has dismissed this assertion, claiming that Sinatra was hired for his physical suitability to the role.

As the Corleones' associate in Las Vegas, Moe Greene is an exuberant and debauched personality who thinks of himself as a big-shot, however, this larger-than-life personality is modeled on real-life mobster, Bugsy Siegel. In addition to both men's Jewish heritage, Siegel was the polar opposite to the likes of Carlo Gambino, taking full advantage of his expensive lifestyle and celebrity status. This contrast is best represented in The Godfather during Greene's icy first meeting with Michael Corleone.

The similarities between Greene and Siegel continue, with both figures responsible for developing the casino business in Las Vegas during its construction. While Greene is touted as one of the men who built Vegas in The Godfather, Siegel took control of the famous Flamingo Hotel, although he struggled to make the investment an immediate success.

Related: Rupert Wyatt's Gambit Movie Would've Taken Cues From The Godfather

Moe Greene's death scene is a famous piece of cinema, with the gangster getting shot directly in the eye. Many claim that this execution was taken from the real-life assassination of Siegel and while Mario Puzo may have drawn inspiration from the murder, Siegel was actually shot multiple times, including in the head. These blasts damaged Siegel's eye socket, giving the impression that he had been shot in the eye, even though the eyeball itself was intact.

In one of The Godfather's most famous scenes, a still-innocent Michael Corleone sits down for dinner with Virgil Sollozzo and a corrupt police chief and, after a quick toilet break, guns both men down in cold blood. American crime history is littered with infamous examples of public executions, but this particular scene derives from an incident on Coney Island in 1931. Due to the aforementioned generational power struggle among New York City's gangs, Charlies "Lucky" Luciano sought to overthrow his boss at the time, Giuseppe Masseria. Working alongside a group of other "Young Turks" (not the YouTube news channel, obviously), Lucky arranged for Masseria to meet him at a restaurant, and would retreat to the bathroom while his colleagues gunned down the old-timer.

For the taboo sin of shooting a police officer, Michael is forced to flee to Sicily, where he meets his first wife. The tactic of seeking refuge back in the homeland was practiced in the real-life gangster world, with the likes of Vito Genovese and, indeed, Lucky Luciano forced to move abroad at various stages of their careers. In Luciano's case, however, his departure was the result of a deportation from which he never returned, but did still manage to remotely manipulate his criminal empire.

It's always the quiet ones. In The Godfather, a member of the Corleone organization is working with the rival New York families to get rid of Vito's son and the family's new leader, Michael. While the audience is naturally led to suspect the brash and outspoken Clemenza, the real culprit is revealed to be the mild-mannered Tessio. As explored above, instances of betrayal within the Mafia are not uncommon, but Tessio's story does bear a close resemblance to that of Gaspar DiGregorio.

Much like Tessio, DiGregorio was a high-ranking member of his family, the Bonannos, but was overlooked for the job of consigliere in favor of the Don's own son. DiGregorio responded by triggering what became known as the Banana War between 1964 and 1968, splitting the family into his own supporters and those loyal to Bonanno. Although jealousy and ambition weren't Tessio's prime motivations, he was guilty of doubting Michael's ability as a leader and, similar to how the character tried to arrange a supposedly peaceful summit at which Michael would be assassinated, DiGregorio attempted a similar meeting-disguised ambush with Joseph Bonanno.

Lenny Montana, the actor behind Luca Brasi, didn't have to try too hard to come across like a member of the Mafia. He'd already worked as muscle for the Colombo family by the time he was cast in The Godfather. Still, Puzo's creation was derived from the true story of Willie Moretti. Similar to how Brasi served as Vito Corleone's chief enforcer, Moretti was the muscle behind Vito's real-life counterpart, Frank Costello. Interestingly, it is Moretti who is said to have negotiated the dissolution of Frank Sinatra's unwanted contract - a job carried out by Brasi in The Godfather.

Unlike Brasi, Moretti was more of a humorous personality, as displayed in the 1950s Kefauver hearings, which pulled back the curtain somewhat on the Mafia's inner workings. This differs greatly to Brasi's more subdued nature and his fearful respect for the position he holds within the Corleone family.

More: 10 Crime Movies All Anti-Hero Lovers Should Watch

source https://screenrant.com/godfather-movie-true-story-real-people/

[entergamingxp]

Crusader Kings III Is a Worthy Heir to the Franchise’s Dynasty

May 14, 2020 12:57 PM EST

While Crusader Kings III may be in the same genre as other strategy games, its focus on dynasties and inter-personal relations sets it apart.

You are the ruler of a small country in Europe, and only 10 years old. Your parents are dead and your younger brother is under your charge, with both loyal and treacherous relatives surrounding you. As a child, you must navigate the complex and oft dangerous court in order to survive and emerge as a proper king of your land.

You’re a chieftain of a tiny territory in North Africa and the last of your antiquated rulership. You have a husband from the Middle East. Your current half-sister heir leads to a dead-end and your only son is just as closely tied to your husband’s court as your own, endangering your future family line.

You are a king destined for rulership filled with lost battles and failure, fated to die by the hand of someone close to you. You can either play into your tragic destiny or take the chance to change that and become a powerful king with a dynasty that will rule for centuries to come.

These are just a few scenarios players may find themselves in as they play through Crusader Kings III.

Crusader Kings III is the latest installment of a strategy role-playing series set in the Middle Ages. You take on the role of a noble or royal leader, either from the provided ones or from any leader in the world map, and try to enhance the reach and power of your dynasty through the centuries. You can use military power, diplomatic arrangements, royal marriages, and various schemes to increase the status of your royal house.

The main difference between other strategy titles, such as Civilization, is that in Crusader Kings, you don’t control a single city-state or nation as much as you are controlling the fate of a family. This is an incredibly important distinction because while your family line becomes intertwined with the fate of the lands it rules, sometimes circumstances can drastically change. You can lose control of your starting realm or even decide to build a completely different one more in line with your ambitions.

In terms of gameplay, you control a single character and all of their actions and decisions. This includes realm management during both war and peace, construction and development in your lands, alliances, religious development, various intrigues, romances, friendships, and rivalry. Each character accumulates a number of traits over the course of the game, and these will affect the nature and number of opportunities available to them.

If this sounds like a recipe for some deliciously deep and complex gameplay then you’re absolutely right. Because of the focus on people rather than a nation, there is a far more personal touch to all your decisions. You can see firsthand the effects of what your decisions have on your court, family, and subjects and in turn, see how those decisions affect you.

When you start a new game, you choose from several start dates between the late 800s and early 1000s AD. Then you choose from the pre-selected list of rulers or any ruler in the available regions during that time period. If you’re a beginner, it’s highly suggested that you start with the tutorial that has you play as a well-financed and connected Irish ruler. It’s the closest option in Crusader Kings III to an “easy mode.”

But if you’re a veteran of the franchise and are having trouble figuring out who to play as, you can enable observation mode from the title screen. This mode lets you watch the politics unfold in any region in the era of your choice. It’s a great way to scope out the political climate in an area of interest, as well as scout for a ruler to play as.

“Of course, schemes are just one part of the game. Stabilizing and eventually securing the future of your dynasty is what’s vital to the endgame.”

After you choose your starting character you’re immediately launched into the game. The tools are all available for you to take advantage of but there’s no hand-holding; you have complete control over how you play and what your eventual goals are. The UI is complex and takes a while to fully adjust to, even if you played the tutorial level, but you’re ultimately rewarded with a robust system that allows for a wide variety of gameplay styles.

One of the signature mechanics of Crusader Kings III is schemes (formerly known as plots in Crusader Kings II). These are long term plans that the player character may choose to enact against any other characters. This can range from personal schemes (befriending a character) to hostile schemes (murdering another character). You can either do it alone or rope in aid from agents. If you manage to complete a scheme through natural stats or succeeding during random event flags, the objective is fulfilled.

Naturally, this means that others can enact schemes against you as well, whether they try to court you through romance, gain your friendship, or outright murder you. Personal schemes have the option of being denied or accepted, but hostile schemes are only discovered by your Spymaster. Once a hostile scheme (whether it’s one by you or against you) is discovered, the chances of its success dip significantly. After that, the person behind said scheme can be discovered and action can be taken against them.

Of course, schemes are just one part of the game. Stabilizing and eventually securing the future of your dynasty is what’s vital to the endgame. Some of the biggest long-term goals of Crusader Kings III are to unlock Dynasty Legacies and Decisions. The former are specific features that carry over from heir to heir and help strengthen your dynasty. These range from strengthening the quality of your bloodline, becoming more fearsome in war, having better support systems, and more. Decisions meanwhile can run the gambit between changing your entire governing style, founding Holy Orders, uniting large swathes of territory, and much more

But Legacies and Decisions take significant time to accrue. One of the easiest and most viable ways to expand your realm and gain more titles, in the beginning, is to immediately exert your country’s military might and conquer nearby lands. You start with a certain amount of levies, or peasant troops, as well as your knights who lead them into battle. You can also invest in men-at-arms regiments (high-quality soldiers who strengthen your troops), obtain better weaponry, hire mercenaries to greatly bolster your numbers, or even create holy orders once your religious control is at a certain level.

Once a war is declared, you rally your troops at a chosen rally point and control where they march, what battles they fight, and which strongholds in a given territory they can siege and eventually occupy. Every victory adds to your war score until you reach 100 percent, which then allows you to push for your victory conditions. Conversely, taking too many losses means that the enemy can push their own conditions on you, which will cost you dearly. Planning out your strategies, making smart matchups, taking advantage of alliances to bolster troops, and paying close attention to your enemies’ troops are all vital to success.

Expanding territory isn’t the only way to ensure a realm’s success. Stability and public opinion are also vital to maintaining control in an area. If you expand too quickly, you’ll run the risk of losing your grip on the population in new territories, which is amplified by any cultural or religious differences. Losing control means that you’ll gain a penalty for tax collection and having a low popular opinion runs the risk of factions started against you by peasants or even courtiers.

Marriage also plays a huge role in your realm’s success as it determines the quality of your eventual heir to the throne, traits that can be inherited, and alliances to be forged. The player character’s spouse often helps rule as well and can either give passive bonuses to your stats or specialize in a certain field to bolster efforts there.

“What makes Crusader Kings III so phenomenal is the attention to detail. This is a game absolutely rich with culture and historical accuracy.”

Religion is closely intertwined with a country because it’s directly related to the culture of your people, gives you the right to conquer other lands without other proper declarations, affects who you can ally with through marriage, who can rule and hold titles, what character traits are considered sins or virtues, marriage doctrines, crime doctrines, and more. However, with enough power, you can reform your culture’s religion or even start a brand new one with tenants that better match your playstyle and morals.

Each character accumulates a number of traits over the course of the game, which affects the nature and number of opportunities available to them. For example, a character who is honest and better at diplomacy will have a disadvantage when it comes to hostile schemes. Traits can range from personality traits that develop naturally and from education, to hereditary traits that have positive or negative effects on stats and how others perceive you. While some event flags can influence certain traits, like becoming an alcoholic later in life, for the most part, they are simply things that must be factored into your decision making.

There are plenty of options to improve your player character as well. Lifestyles are a way to learn and customize various skillsets that aid your leadership. These are separated into the game’s stat categories: diplomacy, martial, stewardship, intrigue, and learning. Depending on your education you’ll receive a bonus in one of these, which tends to correspond with personality traits and overall shows what kind of ruler you’ll be.

Outside of yourself is the Council, a group of courtiers from your royal court who help govern your land. Ideally, you’ll want the best people for the job since higher competency leads to a better government. However, politics are messy and players need to contend with,lko;p vassals, powerful people within the court who often own land or titles of their own. No matter how untalented they are, they expect a seat on the council and will have a more negative opinion of you if you don’t. You can either give in to their demands or deal with them in more underhanded ways.

Once your character dies you’ll have control over their heir, assuming they are part of the same family line. This is extremely important to establish because if your family line has no title (county, duchy, kingdom, empire), it can be legally inherited, then your game is over. This can happen if your character dies with no children, descendants, or living siblings or if all of their titles are seized or usurped by rival rulers.

When rule passes to the heir, they become the next player character and you control them in the same way as the previous one. Depending on the succession laws (which can be changed once certain prerequisites are met), you can either inherit all your titles from the ruler before or they can be split amongst other family members with preference given to the heir. Thus the dynasty continues until you either fail or you reach the end of the game centuries later.

What makes Crusader Kings III so phenomenal is the attention to detail. This is a game absolutely rich with culture and historical accuracy. One of my biggest concerns was whether the variety of races, cultures, religions and ethnic groups would be represented with respect and accuracy. Those fears were immediately put to rest once I toured city-states and nations throughout North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and most of Asia. The amount of research and care that clearly went into this title is astounding and makes the experience that much more immersive.

“The possibilities are nearly endless in how you can approach each run and Crusader Kings III encourages it every step of the way.”

The 3D models for characters are an excellent metric for this attention to detail as well. Not only do their features properly reflect the demographics of their given region but also account for their age, overall physical condition, clothing that alters depending on rank, or any addictions or illnesses. While the models themselves may not be the prettiest to look at, they reflect the diversity of people so well.

Despite the depth of this preview, I’ve only scratched the surface of the features, mechanics, and how flexible each gameplay run can be. I am a novice to the series so I tend to play very strictly, carefully weighing my options to create the strongest dynasty and empire possible. I absolutely found that to be a rewarding approach on its own. There is an inherent thrill of satisfaction when you conquer new lands and overcome great challenges to further your kingdom.

For veterans of the franchise, the amount of ways to deviate from what’s considered proper is manifold. You can create entire new nations or religions, and even take over a continent and unite it completely under a near-invincible empire. You can play underhanded and stay close to a more powerful ruler, then steal their realm from right under them. You can even have fun and figure out the most entertaining ways to lose. You can be a calm and compassionate ruler, a greedy one obsessed with money and prestige, a battle-hungry and ruthless one, and more. The possibilities are nearly endless in how you can approach each run and Crusader Kings III encourages it every step of the way.

Playing through Crusader Kings III lets players truly experience the political intrigue revolving around being involved in the noble circles. At times it can be frustrating as a random event can cause disaster to strike on an otherwise flawless run. But mostly, it’s a logical cause and effect in which appointing competent leaders and making sound decisions leads to general prosperity and success. Conversely making a string of poor or selfish decisions will eventually lead to your downfall in some way, as those slighted will seek revenge and plot against you.

It’s an incredibly immersive experience in the purest form. There were times I sat down to play a session and suddenly three hours passed in the blink of an eye. Even during a peaceful point in your run, there’s always so much to plan for the future. My extensive time with this preview build has substantially whet my appetite and I eagerly await the main course when Crusader Kings III releases in September.

May 14, 2020 12:57 PM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/05/crusader-kings-iii-is-a-worthy-heir-to-the-franchises-dynasty/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=crusader-kings-iii-is-a-worthy-heir-to-the-franchises-dynasty

[global-news-station]

WASHINGTON: On the 19th day of a partial U.S. government shutdown, Democrats were set on Wednesday to test Republicans’ resolve in backing President Donald Trump’s drive to build a wall on the border with Mexico, which has sparked an impasse over agency funding.

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats, who took control of the chamber last week, plan to advance a bill to immediately reopen the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and several other agencies that have been partially shut down since Dec. 22.

Democrats are eager to force Republicans to choose between funding the Treasury’s Internal Revenue Service – at a time when it should be gearing up to issue tax refunds to millions of Americans – and voting to keep it partially shuttered.

In a countermove, the Trump administration said on Tuesday that even without a new shot of funding, the IRS would somehow make sure those refund checks get sent.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump was still considering a declaration of a national emergency to circumvent Congress and redirect government funds toward the wall.

The Republican president’s push for a massive barrier on the border has dominated the Washington debate and sparked a political blame game as both Trump and Democrats remain dug in.

In a nationally televised address on Tuesday night, Trump asked: “How much more American blood must be shed before Congress does its job?” referring to murders he said were committed by illegal immigrants.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell opened the Senate on Wednesday with an attack on Democrats for not supporting Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion for the wall.

But Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump’s speech was a rehash of spurious arguments and misleading statistics.

“The president continues to fearmonger and he makes up the facts,” Schumer said.

Democratic tactics

Later in the week, Pelosi plans to force votes that one-by-one provide the money to operate departments ranging from Homeland Security and Justice to State, Agriculture, Commerce and Labor.

By using a Democratic majority to ram those bills through the House, Pelosi is hoping enough Senate Republicans back her up and abandon Trump’s wall gambit.

The political maneuvering comes amid a rising public backlash over the suspension of some government activities that has resulted in the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers.

Other “essential” employees are being required to report to work, but without pay for the time being.

As House Democrats plow ahead, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence will go to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to attend a weekly closed lunch meeting of Senate Republicans.

They are expected to urge them to hold firm on his wall demands, even as some are publicly warning their patience is wearing thin.

Later in the day, Trump is scheduled to host bipartisan congressional leaders to see if they can break the deadlock. On Thursday, Trump travels to the border to highlight an immigration “crisis” that his base of conservative supporters wants him to address.

With tempers running high over Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion just for this year to fund wall construction, there are doubts Pelosi’s plan will succeed in forcing the Senate to act.

McConnell has not budged from his hard line of refusing to bring up any government funding bill that does not have Trump’s backing even as a few moderate members of his caucus have called for an end to the standoff.

The funding fight stems from Congress’ inability to complete work by a Sept. 30, 2018, deadline on funding all government agencies. It did, however, appropriate money for about 75 percent of the government by that deadline – mainly military and health-related programs.

The post House Democrats to test Republicans on Trump’s wall demand appeared first on ARYNEWS.

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[killingthebuddha]

“…the attendant phenomena of eclipses, solar and lunar, from immersion to emersion, abatement of wind, transit of shadow, taciturnity of winged creatures, emergence of nocturnal or crepuscular animals, persistence of internal light, obscurity of terrestrial waters, pallor of human beings.” –James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

“We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the Earth rolled down.” –Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse” (1982)

“Leonard Nimoy: A solar eclipse. The cosmic ballet goes on.

Fellow Passenger: Does anyone want to switch seats?”

—The Simpsons, “Marge vs. the Monorail” (1993)

Let’s begin with one of the most famous examples, March 1st 1504: that Genoan sailor, navigator, epistler, propagandist, colonizer, self-promoter, rapist, murderer and genius Christopher Columbus supposedly found himself in a difficult situation. Initially welcomed by the Taino of this Caribbean Eden called Jamaica, relations with the natives had soured as the Spaniards indulged their every desire upon the islanders, with no concern for either Christ or consent, thus setting the template for how this experiment called America would be marked from its earliest days. And so, the Taino Cacique rightly ordered his people to halt delivery of provisions to the Christians as punishment for the pillaging and rape which had marked Columbus’s tenure on the island. With tawny skin stretched tight across rib cages, and with sunken yellow eyes and yellow cheeks, the Spanish began to starve, here in this lush utopia that they transformed into a fetid prison ship.

But, if the accounts of the navigator’s son Ferdinand are to be believed, his father was nothing if not an ingenious man, and though he was a medieval-minded mystical visionary who imagined the world as a pear-shaped breast with paradise at the nipple, who searched for Indian gold to fund the crusaders’ war against the Saracens, and who parsed scripture for evidence of the apocalypse’s date, he was also a partisan of astrolabe and compass, and one mad enough to no longer hug the coast as he sailed to undiscovered kingdoms. And so in his time of desperation, he turned not to his beloved Revelation, which predicted wars between Gog and Magog, nor the matrices of kabbalah or the totalizing ardor of the alchemist, but rather to the German astronomer Regiomantus’ Ephemeris.

In that book of sober science he read that that very month, that veritable day, that immaculate hour the moon was to descend into the shadowy blackness of Earth’s umbra so that it would appear that the satellite itself was to disappear, after turning an inky blood red. And so, not in spite of the fact that he was girded with this empirical knowledge but because of it, Columbus, with great duplicity, affected the persona not of the learned mathematical scholar but of the prophetic magus (though both are privy to the luxuries of certainty). Embracing the new learning of the Renaissance, but masking it as magic, Columbus told the Cacique that–lest the natives reestablish their life-giving trade with the sailors–the Christian god would extinguish the moon and loose the blood-dimmed tide over this isle so full of noises. And like Prospero with his Caliban, these honey-sweetened threats were affective, for upon the lunar eclipse it was “with great howling and lamentation they came running from every direction to the ships, laden with provisions, praying the Admiral to intercede by all means with God on their behalf; that he might not visit his wrath upon them.”

It’s a hell of a story. One of the many mythic legends about the disgraced man who found some islands off the coast of Asia and lived to see another man give his name to them. Columbus with his disappeared moon belongs to the same genre that includes stories such as Cortez being welcomed as that eastern pale-face Quetzalcoatl by a humiliated Montezuma still resplendent in panther-skin robes and feathered headdress; or the account of some unscrupulous Dutch real estate traders inaugurating a venerable New York tradition of grifting when they tricked the Lenape into parting with Manhattan for $24 and some beads. That template–of simple, naïve, child-like (yet somehow bloodthirsty) natives tricked by the cagey and treacherous (yet somehow admirable) Europeans became our favored script of first contact. Never mind the specifics of whatever actually happened that half-millennium ago on that verdant island. For after all, Columbus was a man who at several points in his letters and diaries emphasized that Taino and Carib and Arawak spoke an incomprehensible babble of tongues, and yet he could somehow discern that amongst each other they communicated the convenient message of “Come and see the men who have come from the sky. Bring them victuals and drink.”

Washington Irving, who was as responsible as any for constructing the enduring legend of Columbus (including the fallacy that he was the first to demonstrate the sphericalness of the Earth), wrote that the Indians regarded Columbus “with awe and reverence, as a man in the peculiar favor and confidence of the Deity, since he knew upon earth what was passing in the heavens.” Sleight of hand and chicanery; confidence man, medicine man, bullshit artist: Americans have always loved these sort of stories about Columbus, for though he was a mystical-minded Catholic visionary, this Protestant country has seemingly never had much of an issue with its name being an Italian one which ends in a vowel (true whether it’s America or Columbia).

Mark Twain, in his own act of jingoistic trickery, converted Columbus into a sober and rational New England engineer, and the Indians into ancient Britons, in his 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. There, Henry Morgan of Hartford tricks Merlin, Arthur, and the rest of the assembled court by performed a trick identical to the one Columbus pulled on the Jamaicans. Twain writes that, “the eclipse had scared the British world almost to death; that while it lasted the whole country, from one end to the other, was in a pitiable state of panic, and the churches, hermitages, and monkeries overflowed with praying and weeping poor creatures,” and so Samuel Clemens performed that alchemy which transformed Arawak into Anglo-Saxon, a nice little bit of confidence trickery in its own right, even more fully conflating our first discovery with the United States’ independence from a barbaric Old World.

This Columbus, and his myth as constructed by Irving, or Twain, or New England epic poet Joel Barlow, or for that matter two centuries of American public education, casts the explorer not as the representative of those most sovereign Catholic royals Ferdinand and Isabella, but rather as a stolid advocate for republican values, where the eclipse legend is just one more example of Columbus’s Yankee ingenuity, before there were Yankees. But that Columbus, or Morgan, used an eclipse to befuddle the primitives who threatened them is not incidental. In both stories, whether truth or fiction, accurate or exaggerated, the eclipse is itself centrally important precisely because it is an eclipse. That is because within the eclipse’s shadow there is the uncomfortable union of science and superstition, reason and magic, the discord between what we intellectually understand and what we experientially know.

For the astronomer, little is more certain than an eclipse, a matter of mathematical regularity. And yet what could seem more terrifying in its apocalyptic imagery than the literal devouring of the sun, the extinguishment of light, the banishment of the day? That they are regular and (to us) a completely explicable phenomenon drains these events of none of their power and significance. Eclipses are themselves generally mundane, between two and seven a year, if rare over populated areas; they are explained through the almost heroically simple to understand movement of either the Earth or moon directly in front of the sun. And yet the eclipse itself becomes a potent occasion. For though the physics of the whole thing are basic enough to explain to an elementary school student with a basketball, a baseball, and a flashlight, there is strange prophetic majesty implicit in viewing the event itself, as when that old cynic Twain writes, “In the stillness and the darkness, realization soon began to supplement knowledge. The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it takes on color.” The tension in those old accounts is between the “mere knowledge” held by the superior intelligence of the interloper, when placed in contrast to “realization.”

What dwells in the shadow of the penumbra is predictability wed to the remarkable, for eclipses are remarkable not in spite of their predictability, but in part because of them. The narrative thrust of all such accounts as those I’ve mentioned is the disjunction between those who can predict and those who can’t – but the universal existential incongruity of a disappearing sun is that which makes the narrative possible. Facts are pale, experience has color, and if an almanac is a straightforward book it can sometimes take on the feeling of kabbalah. The navigator, or Connecticut engineer, can manipulate using their astronomy tables, but their success is predicated on the drama of the spectacle itself. Literal knowledge of when the eclipse is going to happen only takes Columbus so far, for the whole gambit to work is implicit in the undeniable drama of the thing itself. Mathematics can give us the pale fact of when and how an eclipse is to occur, but our own eyes imbue the event with that terrifying sense of the sacred, when in the sixth hour “there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent.”

One shouldn’t think, however, that tricking the locals with a light show that you yourself didn’t actually produce is limited only to Spanish colonists and Hartford time travellers. Implicit in those sorts of stories is the arrogance of modernity, the preposition that just a little bit of star-gazing knowledge makes someone capable of flummoxing the rubes with some conveniently timed astronomical phenomena. But these sorts of stories actually go back deep into history, for one shouldn’t forget that though the Chaldeans are synonymous with magic, they dotted the lush fields of Babylon with observatories as well. Say what you will about their errors in modeling the solar system, if the ancients were capable of anything it was predicting the motion of those celestial spheres with a surprising accuracy. Indeed, it is precisely because of a similar trick, if done for more noble reasons, that we’re able to know the earliest exact date in human history: May 28, 585 B.C.E.

On that particular Ionian spring day, an armistice was reached between the Medes and Lydians, who until that hour had been embroiled in furious conflict for five bloody years. Thales of Miletus, the first of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and, as that tribe was apt to be, remembered for his aphoristic pronouncements, which have the strange quality of being literally wrong while also somehow completely correct (in Thales’s case this was his contention: that all of reality was made of water) used those famed Babylonian star charts to predict the exact hour at which a solar eclipse was to occur. The Medes and Lydians ignored foolish aquaphilic Thales with his Chaldean charts, until on that predicted May 28,th when Herodotus recorded that “during the battle the day was suddenly turned to night. Thales of Miletus had foretold this loss of daylight to the Ionians,” and so the philosopher was celebrated as one who, through casting darkness, was able paradoxically to bring peace, as the sons of both Media and Lydia could once again live as brothers under the specter of a dark sun. But as miraculous as that blessed moment of peace may have been, what’s even more incredible is that Thales was forever able to mark this specific May 28th as the first day in our human calendar that we can know and identify with any exactitude. There is no range of dates on which the ceasefire could have occurred, it did not happen on the 27th, nor the 29th – the disappearing sun ensures that it only could have been on the day that Thales said it would be. Exact dates of any event before that Greek spring must be forever unknown, as for that matter must the majority of significant dates after that May 28th, at least until relatively recently. We can never know what the exact date was on which Ashurbanipal first oversaw the foundations of Nineveh, or when Siddhartha sat up from the Bodhi tree, or when young Alexander pressed stylus to wax at the side of Aristotle in the Lyceum, or for that matter when Christ screamed out his last moment of doubt (even if the Gospels tell us that the son’s darkness rose a darkened sun).

But because the spheres move in their orderly ellipticals, with epicycle within epicycle, and all retrograde motion carefully circumscribed by immutable and elegant physics from Copernicus, to Kepler, to Einstein, we know with exact certainty that date a half-millennia before Christ when those soldiers cast aside their swords. Laplace’s demon set that clock billions of years ago, and whether you’re an adherent of Calvin or Newton the result is the same: the sun had no choice but to disappear that May 28th, and because Thales knew that, we can forever remember that first date with as much certainty as one knows a birthday, or an anniversary, or the day a loved one died, or the day someone put down the bottle, or the day of a graduation, or a first kiss. Only the date of our individual death is forever unknown to us, but all eclipses are forever inscribed and certain, both those that have come before and those yet to occlude. Thales, by the measurement of eclipse, started human history by giving us certainty; through the myth of the swallowed sun he initiated the recording of fact. The date of that sacred armistice is as immutable and certain as April 15th, 1865, or December 7th 1941, or November 22nd, 1963, or September 11th, 2001. That exact hour from the Peloponnesian War was the first such moment that could be definite in the same way as those other dates; because Thales knew of that eclipse, and so we know of Thales.

But just as that first definite date merely preceded the multitude of the rest, that Greek eclipse was only one of many which so starkly intervened within human history (and not even the first). Eclipses’ shadows are cast across history, across myth, and across literature – as with all things human, these categories are much more permeable and interrelated than might be first assumed. There was an eclipse in 1302 BCE where a Chinese inscription painted on the back of a turtle shell records that “flames ate the sun,” a 763 BCE eclipse which coincided with an uprising in the Assyrian city of Ashur (with a tablet indicating that the two events were conflated); there was one which lasted a little under five minutes in 1133 and marked the death of Henry I of England and was experienced as “hideous darkness,” and the lunar eclipse of May 22, 1453, when the Ottomans were battering down the walls of Constantinople, a blood moon marking the final demise of the great Byzantium.

As if the collapse of the remainder of the eastern Roman empire and the routing of Orthodox Christianity by Mehmed II wasn’t dramatic enough, May 29th, 1919, saw an eclipse that demonstrated an even more radical reshuffling of reality. The Experimentum crucis of two observational teams deployed to both Brazil and an island off the coast of Africa used the shadow of the event to compare measurements of the deviation of light through the curvature of space, confirming Einstein’s General theory of Relativity. Constantinople becoming Istanbul may have been punctuated with that lunar eclipse of 1453, but the solar eclipse of 1919 transformed space into time (at least in our understanding of the universe), with the New York Times reporting “Light All Askew in the Heavens.” That eclipse provided the opportunity for astronomers like Arthur Eddington, making his observations on a colonial African cocoa plantation, to calculate the slight difference between where stars appeared to be in the heavens before and during the eclipse, and to thus observe the way in which light traversed through the portion of the space-time continuum more radically curved by the sun’s massive gravitational field. The Times of London’s headline was “Newtonian Ideas Overthrown,” and indeed Einstein’s was a strange theurgy, which defeated classical physics and forever-unified time and space into one unit, whose alteration was the origin of something as fundamental as gravity. Such an eclipse was the modern version of another one two millennia before, whose exact date we don’t know, but which supposedly marked the crucifixion of Christ. Like Einstein, he was a Jew who challenged a traditional order, and much as Einstein permanently combined our ideas of space and time, so the idea of Christ would unify matter and spirit (at least for those who adhere to the Nicene Creed).

Christ’s eclipse belongs as much to mythic time as it does historical, but the connection of his death upon the cross to the movements of the moon and sun demonstrates the pagan core to all faiths, which still endure even through the Abrahamic religions. Theology might be of the head, but faith must always be of the body, and the sublime wisdom of paganism–that the sun and moon, seasons and weather, animals and terrain indelibly mark how we experience both the profane and the sacred–can’t help but find a home within the great desert religions of the Axial Age. In Surah 75:7 of the Qur’an, the prophet Muhammad said of eclipses that, “These signs which Allah sends do not occur because of the life or death of somebody,” and yet tradition holds that an eclipse marked the birth of the Prophet, and some Muslims believe an eclipse will mark the arrival of the Mahdi. The rhythms of the heavens and the cycles of nature are a potent force, still providing the most majestic experience available to human sense, and we can condescend to the ancient Chinese fearing that the sun had been devoured by a dragon, or the Aztec’s Black Sun when feather-plumed Quetzalcoatl made his western exit in that passage set into the gloaming meadows of Dusk’s Kingdom, but the emotions that conflate an eclipse with the execution of God as man, or which mark the birth of the final prophet, remind us that we must be humble before our pagan ancestors as they were before the disappearing moon and sun.

I am not claiming that Christianity and Islam are as “irrational” as those archaic religions that preceded them, nor am I saying that they are all simply reducible to one another. I respect the majesty of the eclipse too much; if I observe a pagan element running through the great monotheisms as clearly as the moon runs between the Earth and sun, it’s not to denigrate Abraham’s progeny, but to note that all of us are the progeny of Adam, and he was firstly one who dwelled within the temple of nature. And as day first needed to be made distinct from night, as both the greater and lesser nights had to be distinguished from one another, the eclipse briefly confuses and comingles them, providing us a few minutes of knowing what it was like when creation had yet to be fully created.

And not just creation, but millennium as well. Creation is simply apocalypse played in reverse, and both raveling and unraveling are intimately connected as times where the order of things is upended, the world turned upside down (or more appropriately the sun extinguished). Whether Christian or Cannibal, Puritan or pagan, the disordering of nature marks both genesis and revelation, and if an eclipse gives us a view of that first day when the crystalline spheres were initially put into motion, then it also affords us a glimpse of when those planets will run off their tracks, crash into each other, and all shall be final. Supreme Protestant though he may have been, the poet John Milton understood that nature and nature’s God are more synonymous than not, and the deep-time wisdom of paganism is threaded through his verse. Indeed astronomy, though defined by objective, empirical measurement, and practiced with calculation and observation, is in some sense the most “pagan” of sciences; for like primordial religion, astronomy, perennially reminds us of the grandeur of the universe and of our own insignificance within it. Milton, perhaps because he met Galileo during his Italian tour, deeply understood that the universe’s and God’s grandeur are as equivalent, in both sublimity and terror. He was well versed in Ptolemaism, Copernicanism, diurnal theory, and conjectures on the plurality of worlds, and furthermore in his Paradise Lost he has Adam discuss such issues with the archangel Raphael.

In the first book of that epic he equates the fall of the “dread commander” Lucifer, the “morning star,” with the disappearing sun. Cast into perdition, yet “his form had yet not lost/All her original brightness, nor appeared/Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess/Of glory obscured.” Milton compares the towering fallen angel to “when the sun new-risen/Looks through the horizontal misty air/Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon/In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds/On half the nations.” An eclipse, like the archangels exile from heaven, may be foreknown to the omniscient God; and Lucifer caste from paradise, like an eclipse, is also a terrifying vision. The eclipse signifies the union of both the regularized almanac predictability of the calendar with the terrifying spectacle of the very sun itself seeming to go extinct (if for a few minutes). Darkness falls out of light, like Lucifer cast from heaven, and for but a few minutes we experience apocalypse, even if intellectually we know it’s but the moon passing before the sun.

Twilight might shed on half the nations, but eventually she shall shed on all of them. This month it sheds on only one nation. Excitement mounts for August 21st, 2017’s Great American Eclipse, which will first be seen in Salem, Oregon at 10:15 in the morning, for close to two minutes. From the rainy green-leafed Cascades of the northwest, the path of totality will burn eastward across the badlands of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, the prairies of Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, the expanses of Missouri, the hills of southern Illinois and the ancient Appalachians of Kentucky, and through the crucible of the Confederacy in Tennessee, Georgia, the pines and cedars of North Carolina, and finally the low country of South Carolina. It marks the first time a complete eclipse has been visible in a path of totality across the entire continent-sized empire of America since June 8th, 1918, when European trenches still convulsed with the wretched dying, the Bolsheviks consolidated power in Petrograd, and army infirmaries started to fill with patients stricken with the early dull ache of the Spanish influenza, when confirmation of Einstein’s alchemy of space and time through another eclipse still lay a year off. The Great American Eclipse’s path of totality will take exactly one hour, thirty-three minutes, and sixteen-point-eight seconds to diagonally burn eastward across the continent from the Pacific to the Atlantic, entering and exiting the continent like a bullet cutting through flesh.

That a total eclipse is visible in any given specific, geographic location is rare. Though a huge swath of the continental United States will be privy to August’s eclipse, most of us will only be able to view a partial one. Take, as only one example, the city of Los Angeles. Since the United States of America became a nation, the city of Los Angeles has never once been witness to a total solar eclipse. During the colonial era, the area were Los Angeles would one day spread outward was only privy to a complete solar eclipse five time; in 1557, 1623, 1632, 1679, and for the last time in 1724. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo staked a claim for Southern California by the Kingdom of Spain in 1542 (memories of Columbus’s trick perhaps still fresh in conquistador minds), but no Europeans reached that coastal basin hemmed in by those snow-capped peaks until 1769, and a permanent mission wasn’t established until 1771. That means that absolutely nobody of European, Asian, or African descent has ever seen a complete solar eclipse within what would be L.A. The city has seen colonization by the Spanish, Mexican independence, the California Republic, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the discovery of oil, the construction of the aqueduct that made the arid desert fertile, the Olympics, and the rise of Hollywood. From the eighteenth-century when the settlement was populated by some forty odd Pobladores, to the almost four million inhabitants who live in the city today, Los Angeles is a consummately American place; city as metonymy for the country’s history from squabbling colonial outposts to massive, diverse, complex, and contradictory nation. But the last time a total eclipse was viewable within the valley it was the home to only Tongva and Chumash.

If you want to see a total solar eclipse within Los Angeles city limits, you’ll have to wait until after the year 3000, as NASA’s calculator records no total eclipses for the rest of the third millennium within L.A. However, citizens should be pleased to learn they may be able to see a partial annular eclipse within the city in 2121, 2711, or 2876, at which point it’s hard to know whether there still will be a Los Angeles within which to view an eclipse (though perhaps the city will sprawl far enough out in the meantime that it will encompass regions where the phenomenon may be observable, and Angelinos will be lucky enough to see an eclipse before those predicted dates). The point remains the same however: Los Angeles (or anywhere) can be as a memento mori when placed in contrast to the long planning of the heavens, for the cosmos cares not about Spanish colonization, Mexican independence, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, oil, aqueducts, the Olympics or Hollywood – an eclipse’s schedule works on a different scale, whether we’re there to witness it or not. It’s very possible, as the vagaries of history go, that Los Angeles may have been born and pass entirely within the time frame of there being no visible total eclipses within the region it currently occupies. My hometown of Pittsburgh has never had a total eclipse in the entire history of European settlement, it will only have her first on September 12th, 2444, at which point I’ll assume that I’ll be too infirm to enjoy it. Vanity of vanities, veil of shadows, and all the rest. An eclipse hurries for no man.

Where then is our theory of the eclipse? Not the mechanism, but the grappling with the significance, not the science, but the poetry? We still fear that dragon swallowing the sun; it is primal and adrenal. Not of the mind but the endocrine gland, not of contemplation, but fear. Beautiful, majestic, and terrifying, for Apollo seems to still his axle. A reminder not that the universe can die, but that she can hide her face from us and be none the worse for wear. We can watch with our goggles and cards with pins punched in them, but an eclipse in its authenticity, and its explicable magic and its inexplicable regularized prosaicness haunts us still, with evocations of the sublime. When standing out in whatever field, or hill, or skyscraper you choose to spend your few minutes looking at the sun be devoured on the 21st, remember that from the beginning until the end, eclipses continue on and on whether we’re there to witness them or not, and that may be their most important lesson.

In what is possibly both the dawn and the dusk of the short Anthropocene, the eclipse is like a skull in a Dutch Old Master’s painting, a reminder that nature still wins, even if we can predict what nature does. We may be destroying our own “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan called the Earth, but we’re thankfully still small in contrast to the cosmos. All of our technology can’t prevent an eclipse, even if we’ve found ways to alter the very weather, to raise the sea levels and burst the banks of our rivers, even if we find it possible to erase Columbus’ Jamaica, or our Los Angeles, or any of our other places from the map. In the past, eclipses terrified because they were unpredictable, and they still terrify for they are the nature that we cannot touch, reminding us that even in the Anthropocene we are defenseless against the turning gyers of heaven. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid’s Apollo asks Phaeton: “Suppose the chariot of the sun were given you, what would you do?” Suppose indeed, thankfully it’s a question we can never answer; better to consider Nietzsche’s interrogative “What will we do as the Earth is set loose from the sun?” for we ultimately never have any real say in what heavenly bodies move in front of other heavenly bodies. A type of scientific wisdom crucial for keeping us small, a strange consolation in a world where we’ve been able to alter the very weather: there are some things of this world that we cannot alter. Leave Dyson spheres for the aliens circling around KIC 846 2852, even with our hubris and our arrogance we cannot smash the crystalline spheres, and thankfully the Anthropocene ends at the border of our atmosphere (minus some trash on the moon passing in front of the sun).

The Arawak were terrified of the eclipse because they couldn’t predict it and Columbus could; as descendants of Columbus we should be terrified precisely because of the eclipse’s predictability, because the lesson it conveys is that in our own insignificance the eclipse goes on, whether we’re here to view it or not. No magicians are controlling the eclipse, least of all ourselves, and in the scope of deep time our ability to predict the calendar of eclipses between now and the billions of years hence when the Earth is engulfed in the supernovae of that sometimes bashful sun only serves to remind us of how very small we are. The final lesson indeed is that the that eclipse was destined to happen on February 29th, 1504, whether Columbus was there to see it or not, as indeed the Los Angeles eclipses of 2121, or 2711, or 2876 are to happen, regardless of us. The final trick is that we realize the heavens turn without our intervention, and that we must be wise masters of predicting our own obsolescence.

We are not so different, the Taino and us, both penitents in a world not of our own making, whose script was written long before we were born and will continue to be acted long after we are dead; a script in which we are less than bit players, though our roles must still be ever important to us. Ultimately we must learn that simply because we can predict an eclipse we have no power before it, because in front of the incomparable majesty of the very universe we are but all standing on our Jamaican beach, mere fact no balm before the infinite sublimity of the everything which is not us.

[newstfionline]

Has Seymour Hersh Debunked ‘Russia-gate’?

By Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, August 04, 2017

Journalist Seymour Hersh has given us good reason to believe what many have long suspected: that the “hacking” of the Democratic National Committee, which supposedly delivered the White House to Donald Trump, was an inside job. In a recorded phone conversation with Ed Butowsky, a Republican operative who has been financing an investigation of the Seth Rich affair, Hersh told Butowsky that Seth Rich, who worked for the DNC and was murdered on July 10, 2016, was in contact with WikiLeaks, and wanted money for access to the DNC emails.

Hersh doesn’t buy the conspiracy theory surrounding Rich’s death: he sees it as a random event, one that wasn’t too unusual given the neighborhood Rich lived in--and yet this haphazard tragedy may have led to the unraveling of the mystery that is, today, at the core of our politics: the controversy over who delivered the DNC/Podesta emails to WikiLeaks.

The Democrats, the media, and the War Party contend that the Russians hacked into the DNC, and fooled John Podesta into handing the keys to his emails over to them: a full-fledged federal investigation, complete with a special counsel, is now busy trying to find evidence of the Trump campaign’s collusion with this nefarious plot. On the other hand, the case for Russian “hacking” has been fragile from the start, and has only gotten less tenable as time goes on. Now another blow has been delivered to the “Putin did it” conspiracy theory, one that may indeed prove fatal.

Hersh contends that, upon Rich’s death, the District of Colombia police went into his apartment--with a warrant--and examined his computer, but they couldn’t get into it. So they called in the DC cyber unit, which didn’t do much better, and so they called in the FBI’s Washington field office, the cyber unit, and they got in. “What I know came off an FBI report,” says Hersh. “Don’t ask me how. You can figure it out.” Well, yes, we can indeed. He goes on to say:

“And so what the report says is that sometime in late spring, we’re talking June you know summers in June 21st, late spring would be after, I presume, I don’t know, I’d just say late spring, early summer and he makes contact with WikiLeaks. That’s in his computer and he makes contact.”

Hersh notes that the last DNC/Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks are from late May 2016, or “early summer,” a timeline that fits in with the sequence of events: his contact with WikiLeaks followed by his death in what appears to be a random shooting. Hersh continues:

“So, they found what he’d done. He had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some juicy emails from the DNC, and you know, by the way all this s--t about the DNC, um, you know, whether it was hacked or wasn’t hacked, whatever happened, the democrats themselves wrote this s--t, you know what I mean? All I know is that he [Seth] offered a sample, an extensive sample, you know I’m sure dozens of emails and said ‘I want money.’”

This note of realism--“I want money”--for the first time provides us with something that has previously been missing from the arguments of those who have claimed that the “hacks” were an inside job, and not a case of Russian cyber-warfare: motive. After all, why would Rich, supposedly a loyal employee of the DNC and a committed Democrat, hand over embarrassing emails that would hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign? Well, now here we have it. If true, this not only explains why Rich would do such a thing, but also why the Rich family is furiously denying that their son was in any way connected with the DNC/Podesta email revelations.

Hersh goes on to detail what is in the FBI report:

“Then later WikiLeaks did get the password, he had a Dropbox, a protected Dropbox, which isn’t hard to do, I mean you don’t have to be a wizard IT, you know, he was certainly not a dumb kid. They got access to the Dropbox.”

And so, according to Hersh, WikiLeaks must have reached a deal with Rich, and the rest is history. It’s not clear to me what “They got access to the Dropbox” means: is Hersh talking about WikiLeaks, or the FBI? In any case, Rich apparently took precautions to cover his a--, as Hersh relates:

“He also, and this is also in the FBI report, he also let people know, with whom he was dealing, and I don’t know how he dealt, I’ll tell you about WikiLeaks in a second. I don’t know how he dealt with the WikiLeaks and the mechanism but he also, the word was passed according to the NSA report, ‘I’ve also shared this box with a couple of friends so if anything happens to me it’s not going to solve your problem.’ Ok. I don’t know what that means.”

Well, something did happen to him, but we’ll pass over that and note that Hersh mentions “the NSA report.” So the FBI, in investigating this case, turned to the National Security Agency, which has access to everyone’s online communications, and came up with evidence confirming that Rich was in contact with WikiLeaks, that he had a secure Dropbox, and that he was concerned that he might be in danger. Hersh says “the word was passed”--but to whom? There are more mysteries here than we can uncover with just these bits of information.

According to Hersh, a warrant exists for the DC police entry into Rich’s residence. There’s also a report from the FBI, which Hersh has not seen, as far as I can tell, but which has perhaps been read to him. As Hersh puts it:

“I have somebody on the inside, you know I’ve been around a long time, and I write a lot of stuff. I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful, he’s a very high-level guy and he’ll do a favor. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

Hersh’s record speaks for itself: from exposing the My Lai massacre to ripping the lid off the false flag Syrian “chemical attack,” he’s made a career out of unmasking the lies and machinations of the War Party. I’ll take his word over the word of some anonymous spook leaking to the Washington Post any day of the week. And perhaps this is the time to point out that there’s just as much evidence for what Hersh is telling us as there is for the tall tales of “collusion” with Moscow that have been retailed by the “mainstream” media for a solid year.

The “Russia-gate” conspiracy theory never had any real evidence to support it aside from the arbitrary assertions of three US intelligence agencies: the “proof” they submitted to the public was laughable, as Jeffrey Carr and other cyber-warfare experts have pointed out. Yet we don’t have the actual evidence to support Hersh’s contentions, although if he’s right there is indeed a paper trail: the warrant, the FBI and NSA reports, and probably more.

However, it is an exercise in elementary logic to take the simplest explanation for how the DNC/Podesta materials got out--an insider with access did it for money--rather than assume it was an elaborate Russian conspiracy involving teams of hackers, the Russian intelligence agencies, and Vladmir Putin himself. Apparently our brainless media, not to mention our not-very-intelligent “intelligence community,” have never heard of Occam’s Razor.

Hersh, who has been around the block several times, and is intimately familiar with how the intelligence community operates--as well as being personally familiar with the individuals involved--is onto the game that’s being play here. In his words:

“I have a narrative of how that whole thing began, it’s a Brennan operation, it was an American disinformation and f--g the President, at one point when they, they even started telling the press, they were back briefing the press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, Rogers was telling the press that we even know who in the GRU, the Russian Military Intelligence Service, who leaked it. I mean [it’s] all b--t…. Trump’s not wrong to think they all f--g lie about him.”

It’s all BS: Russia-gate, the “collusion” gambit, and the whole avalanche of fake “news” that purports to describe a Russian conspiracy to “undermine our democracy.” It’s a lie, pure and simple. More than that: it’s an exact inversion of the truth. Because what’s happening is that a vast intelligence-gathering apparatus is being utilized to undermine an elected President and undertake what is in effect a “legal” coup d’etat. But then again, projection has always been an essential element of the War Party’s methodology.

I’m not surprised that Hersh’s revelations have been studiously ignored, even by some “alternative” news sites.

Whatever is going on here, Hersh’s contentions are now public. The truth, whatever it may be, is going to come out.

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Cruz Goes From ‘Lucifer’ to Dealmaker in Health Care Overhaul

Sen. Ted Cruz (Photo: Cruz)

(Bloomberg) — Ted Cruz is trying a radically new role: dealmaker.

The first-term senator from Texas is seeking to unite warring wings of the Republican Party around an effort to kill the Affordable Care Act and is showing a new willingness to compromise with colleagues to devise a replacement plan.

(Related: Cruz Pushes ACA Repeal Gambit That Could Roil U.S. Senate)

It’s a significant departure for the formerly obstructionist Cruz, who lost the Republican presidential contest to Donald Trump and has long had icy relations with other lawmakers. Cruz once called Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor, and former Republican House Speaker John Boehner once called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh” and the most “miserable son of a bitch” he had ever worked with. His most notable legislative accomplishment so far has been to help force a shutdown of the government for 16 days in 2013 in an unsuccessful effort to strip funding from the Affordable Care Act.

Cruz, 46, said Trump’s election and Republican control of the government prompted him to change his approach. These days, he’s negotiating regularly with McConnell and other senators. “The entire world changed on election day,” Cruz said in one of several recent interviews. “My focus today is on delivering results and not wasting this historic opportunity.”

Cruz’s engagement underscores how difficult it has been for Republicans to follow through on one of the party’s top priorities. While the majority of GOP lawmakers have long championed getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, there are deep divisions among Republicans about what should replace it. While the House narrowly passed a health care plan, Senate Republicans have been mired in discussions about how to craft legislation that could attract enough votes to pass.

‘Constructive’ Behavior

Fellow Republicans say they’re pleased with Cruz’s current approach.

Sen. John Cornyn, the Republican whip and fellow Texas senator, called his health care efforts “constructive.”

“I like the way Senator Cruz has been conducting himself,” Cornyn said.

Whether he’ll be able to help bridge the Republican divide, given that his previous behavior left a strong distaste with a number of lawmakers, remains to be seen. McConnell has said Republicans are nearing the introduction of their health care plan. But some GOP senators have said they’re skeptical about whether their party can pass a bill.

Cruz has been working to pass a health care bill for several months. He set up a working group of conservatives and moderates, starting with Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, which later expanded to include party leaders. They met once a week for two months in Cruz’s conference room without the press catching wind of it — a point of pride for Cruz.

“The week after the election I brought my staff together,” he said, and told them they had a new mission. For the past four years, he told them, they had been fighting “a president with a radical agenda” and had focused on stopping bad things from happening as the loyal opposition.

Support Needed

Republicans can’t afford to lose the support of Cruz, making him crucial not only to passing a health care bill in the Senate but also to potentially selling such a compromise to House conservatives and outside groups.

Cruz already played a behind-the-scenes role in the May House vote to approve that chamber’s version of an Affordable Care Act change bill, H.R. 1628.

After an earlier attempt to pass H.R. 1628, the American Health Care Act bill, collapsed because of opposition from the Freedom Caucus, Cruz was among those insisting the party not give up.

Rep. Mark Meadows (Photo: Meadows)

“I have long said, when it comes to repealing Obamacare, failure is not an option. This was the central promise Republicans have made for seven years,” he said. But he also criticized an early version of the bill for not doing enough to repeal Affordable Care Act regulations and to bring down premiums.

Op-ed Writer

Cruz worked with House conservatives, including Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows of North Carolina. He penned an op-ed in Politico arguing that language gutting the Affordable Care Act insurance regulations should be included in the bill and could pass procedural muster in the Senate.

Meadows said he’s met with Cruz many times on health care, often “without any fanfare or any knowledge of his involvement.”

“I don’t know that it’s a different Ted Cruz, because I’ve seen this Ted Cruz before,” Meadows said. “The only one that got reported for a long time was the other Ted Cruz.”

“I’m very optimistic that his involvement this time will actually produce results,” Meadows said. “He knows the real pressure points and what becomes real obstacles for us.”

An amendment giving states the option to nix insurance regulations ultimately brought on members of the Freedom Caucus and the votes for the bill. But Cruz’s task in the Senate is harder. While Ryan could lose more than 20 Republican votes and still pass the bill, McConnell can only lose two.

New and Improved

It’s a fact Cruz cites repeatedly when asked about his new approach. The new Cruz makes clear his preferences but isn’t drawing red lines in public that could blow up the bill.

Take the issue of taxes. A central dispute among Republicans is whether any Affordable Care Act repeal must eliminate all of its taxes, including those on the wealthy.

Moderates like Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are focused more on cutting premiums while not leaving tens of millions more people without insurance as the Congressional Budget Office says the House bill would do.

“We should repeal all of the Obamacare taxes,” Cruz said. “But I’m sure that and many other issues will continue to be subjects of discussion within the conference, and to reach a bill that can pass, we have to arrive upon a proposal that will command the support of 50 senators.”

Cruz is in a vastly different place than he was a year ago. Back then, the Cruz who excoriated his colleagues was running for president.

Graham’s Cracks

His tactics and demeanor rubbed so many colleagues the wrong way that Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina joked to reporters that senators wouldn’t convict his murderer. Another time, he said a choice between Trump and Cruz for the party’s nomination was like choosing to get shot or getting poisoned.

Cruz is now running for re-election and in need of rehabbing relationships with his colleagues. Legislative wins might help, too. He said he is optimistic that a health care deal will come together, even as several colleagues have predicted failure.

“For several months now, I have been spending day and night, meeting with House members, meeting with senators, meeting with the administration, to bring people together to actually deliver on our promise to repeal Obamacare and critically to lower premiums to make health care more affordable,” he said.

He added: “You need senators who represent different parts of the conference, are in different spots on the ideological spectrum and are willing to work together in good faith and productively to reach a solution.”

— Read Freedom Caucus Keeps Heat on Would-Be ACA Changers on ThinkAdvisor.

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X-POSITION: Marc Guggenheim Gets Back To Basics With X-Men Gold

ResurrXion is upon us, and readers have now experienced the debut issues of the X-Men line’s new flagship titles. With its release last week, “X-Men Gold” #1 featured a return to form for Marvel’s mutants as the new lineup, led by Kitty Pryde, took on Terrax and proved to the world that the X-Men are still in the business of saving the day. Thanks to the book’s twice-a-month shipping schedule, readers will get to see where Marc Guggenheim takes the team next in a fast fashion.

RELATED: X-Men Gold: The New Brotherhood X-Plained

This week in X-POSITION, “X-Men Gold” writer Marc Guggenheim returns and answers all of your questions about the new team, the potential for an Excalibur reunion and more. This interview was also conducted prior to the recent controversy surrounding “X-Men Gold” artist Ardian Syaf.

CBR News: Welcome back to X-POSITION, Marc! Let’s start with a big picture question from Anduinel.

On a project like this, where the theme is explicitly “back to basics,” how do you judge which elements of the franchise should be considered classic enough to bring back to the forefront intact, which ones to update, and which ones perhaps haven’t aged so well over the decades?

Terrific question. For me, the most important element of the franchise to bring back is the notion that the X-Men are heroes working to protect a world that hates and fears them. That conceit is my north star and it drives all the other creative choices. Admittedly, some of those creative choices are driven by my own sense of what’s “classic,” my own sense of nostalgia. The team lineup is probably the best example of that. The first issue of “X-Men” that I ever read was “Uncanny” #139. With the exception of Rachel (and, if one wants to quibble, Old Man Logan), the lineup I chose for “Gold” is drawn from what, for me, was a seminal read.

That said, I think there’s a reason why a lot of elements of the franchise have endured and even thrived for decades. I see my job mainly as presenting those elements as best I can, in the most interesting ways I can. That’s the other piece of the “back to the basics approach” — reducing the X-Men back down to their core conceits — returning to “first principles,” as it were — then building up from there.

There’s another classic team that your lineup resembles, and Askanipsion has a question about it.

Thank you for having Kitty, Kurt and Rachel on the team. Any chance we will get a reunion with Brian Braddock & Meggan?

Totally a possibility. I love “Excalibur.” I thought it was such an interesting premise for an X-book. And I’d love the opportunity to revisit the history that Kitty, Kurt and Rachel have with Brian and Meggan.

It’s a real testament to the strength of the X-Men franchise that there are so many beloved characters. I feel like I could write the book for as long as Chris Claremont did and never get to them all.

With the X-Men now acting as public heroes, Valamist has a question about the role “X-Men Gold” plays in the Marvel Universe.

Given how a part of Kitty’s plan as leader seems to be making the X-Men into more recognizable heroes to the world, is there any plans to see the “Gold” team interact with the wider MU? Such as the Avengers, Defenders etc?

Absolutely. Kitty moved the X-Men to Central Park so they wouldn’t be segregated off from the rest of society, and that includes the various other heroes of the Marvel Universe. The first example of this will be in Issue #6.

Next up, Maestroneto wants to know more about one of the book’s potential romantic subplots.

How are we supposed to feel about Colossus’ feelings over Kitty? He’s moved into her room when she left to get married and now he’s hanging around her. Is this supposed to be romantic or creepy?

Oh, boy.

Thanks to my work on “Arrow,” I’ve got a little familiarity with how everyone’s mileage varies when it comes to romantic subplots. For some fans — not all, but some — relationship storylines are these Rorschach tests where people see what they want to see in the story. I can absolutely see where some people might find Peter’s behavior creepy, while others find him extremely romantic. And I’m sure that there are other people who would place his behavior somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. I will say that my intention isn’t to turn Peter into “creepy stalker guy.” Make of that what you will — so long as my Twitter isn’t full of “Guggenheim thinks creepy behavior is romantic” mentions…

Don’t “@” him! Moving on, we have a question from Purplevit about a certain Ragin’ Cajun.

Will Gambit join the Gold team or just appear as guest star? Did you like to write him?

For the moment, he’s just a guest star — albeit a pivotal one — in our second arc. But I love Gambit and he’s enormously fun to write. He’s got buckets of charisma and a devil-may-care attitude that defies you not to like him.

“X-Men: Gold” #4 cover by Ardian Syaf

Since “X-Men Gold” is set at the school, ţh€ €жţяą-๏яďɨɲąя¥ Tycon wants to know if we’ll see one student in particular.

Considering some of the X-Men graduated, most of them seem to be heading out with other teams or ending up back at the school. One glaring problem is the missing members of the New X-Men — especially Dust, who we haven’t seen have an important role since “Schism.” I know you loved using Dust in “Young X-Men,” so is there a chance we may see her soon in “X-Men Gold”?

You’re right, I love Dust. And I think given the current political climate, it’s more important than ever to include a Muslim in the X-Men’s ranks. My hope is to get her into the book for our “Secret Empire” tie-in.

Here’s a question from Steroid about a character you did use in “X-Men Gold” #1 — although not in the way people expected.

Loved the first issue. My question is what made you go with the decision to create a new Pyro instead of resurrecting the classic old one?

First, thank you. Glad you enjoyed the first issue.

Second, great question. The answer lies in the fact that Daniel Ketchum and I share a great affection for Pyro and Avalanche. Both of us wanted to see them represented in some way on the roster of the New Brotherhood of Evil Mutants? (Or is that New New New Brotherhood of Evil Mutants? It’s hard to keep track.) But Pyro and Avalanche both being dead presented something of a problem, as you might imagine. It made more sense to me to create new iterations of them rather than have dual resurrections. Also, when the truth comes out about the New Brotherhood, I think you’ll see why it made more sense to have new iterations of Pyro and Avalanche.

Our next question comes from Scott. (EDITOR’S NOTE: This X-POSITION interview was conducted before recent news broke about “X-Men Gold” artist Ardian Syaf.)

You’ve got an aggressive release schedule for “X-Men Gold,” coming out every two weeks. How are the art duties being split up? Will Ardian Syaf be just churning out a book a fortnight? Seems unlikely. Rotating artists? One arc each? I know it’s a little “inside baseball” but I haven’t seen anything about any other artists being involved.

Well, lemme tell ya! We have a murderer’s row of rotating artists. RB Silva is drawing our second arc and Ken Lashley is drawing our third arc.

“X-Men Gold” #7 cover by Ken Lashley

Here’s a question from Kamose1234 about the franchise’s central metaphor.

In issue #1 we saw the Gold team express some anger over the renewed racism against them, but will they have to deal with it more forcefully given Ms. Nance’s organization? As a person of color, I’ve always appreciated the X-Men’s fight against intolerance and I feel we need to see more of this given today’s real world condition.

I absolutely agree with you. I think the X-Men franchise is at its best when it holds a mirror up to real world events. That’s absolutely what I’m trying to do with “Gold,” albeit without turning the book into a polemic. You guys will tell me if I’ve struck the right balance.

As to your question, I think what makes the X-Men so heroic is that they don’t get angry in the face of prejudice and bigotry. Rather, they respond with greater resolve. You’ll see a confrontation between the X-Men and Lydia Nance sooner than you might expect. It might be my favorite moment of my run thus far.

And we’ll close out this week with a question from Chad about one character fans want to see more of.

Will Magik be making an appearance? During the “Prime” issue, Kitty tells her she has a job for her to do….was it to bring the X-Mansion back? Will she still serve with the team? I need you to say “yes”!

The “job” was certainly to move the X-Mansion from Limbo to Central Park, but that doesn’t mean we’ve seen the last of Illyana. At the moment, I have her in the script I’m writing presently. We have so many great characters to play with, things can and do change as this stage of the writing, but I promise you haven’t seen the last of Magik.

Special thanks to Marc Guggenheim for taking on this week’s questions!

Keep checking CBR for information about the next X-POSITION!

The post X-POSITION: Marc Guggenheim Gets Back To Basics With X-Men Gold appeared first on CBR.

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