#and the cheapness of death seems to underpin a lot of it

[trans-cuchulainn]

one thing i have been finding with books recently (especially fantasy, and especially YA fantasy, i think) is that so many of them treat life so cheaply. characters die and others immediately move on, skim past it, even if they were responsible or even if they cared about the person. the depth of grief isn't there, and because death is not given the weight it feels like it should have, all of the other emotions also seem... hollowed out, shallow somehow. like, if life is not precious and if these characters are not grievable, why does any of it matter?

and i guess. not every book has to be About Grief™. but books that treat death casually run the risk of making me not care about anything, because the lives of the characters are not valued, are not seen as worth grieving, and so therefore they are not worth my emotional investment, either. it's like they've told me i don't need to care if these people live or die, because none of the other characters will

on the flip side, it means when books DO dig deep into grief and death and the absolute profound awfulness of irreversible endings, i get a lot MORE emotionally affected than i would otherwise because i've got so used to skimming over the surface of characters and never being dragged down into caring, so it catches me out a bit more

[tentakrool]

i'm putting all of my thoughts about ofmd s2e8 and the season in general here, so if you don't want to see it, please don't click. thank you.

so narratively, i really do think this season was rushed, but of course it was. i think the ending was rushed, as well. i think that while the general moves of the story made sense, the way it was presented glossed so much that it was hard to see the underpinnings of what was going on. which is why i feel like izzy's death felt cheap to a lot of people, and why the ending feels weird, and why so many characters seemed to disappear.

there's a lot to critique there. that said, there's a lot of good shit going on in this season, too. i enjoyed pretty much the whole thing.

with regard to izzy, i'm fine with letting people have their feelings about it. i was sad, but i don't personally feel like it betrayed anyone to have his character die. i think a lot of people are making a looooot of assumptions -- again, because the narrative was rushed so much! it's not their fault that assumptions are being made. i do truly think a big part of this is because of the narrative problems.

i will need to watch the whole thing all together to really get the feeling for how it all works together, but for the moment, it just feels... kinda choppy. i was left wanting a lot more, which is a double-edged sword for a fandom person. on the one hand, i want more. on the other hand, TONS of opportunities for fan creations.

that's all i got rn, xoxo take care of yourselves everyone.

[dower]

Coal saved our forests

And oil saved the whale, or so goes the energy transition tale. But thats not the whole story, not by a long shot.

Without the UK driving the adoption of coal in the late 1600s, we’d run the risk of de-foresting the whole of the land. Probably. Long before the industrial revolution, we needed heat to make glass. And heat traditionally meant charcoal, made from lots of trees.

But, we were running out of trees, and much of the landed gentry wanted to keep forests for themselves. They loved to hunt. So, the glass makers turned to using bituminous coal to create heat. Thereby saving the trees, and hunting. And coal was glorious..

Coal went on to give us indirect locomotion via heat (steam) providing the energy layer that underpinned the industrial revolution; steam trains, cross-ocean shipping, and portable motive power that liberated farming, mining, construction, and transport. Steam engines replaced huge, unscalable static powerplants such as water wheels and windmills with smaller, cheaper and more controllable power.

Coal was controllable power on a scale never seen before, but came at a price. Smoggy cities, respiratory diseases, filth, and death plus the cost to miners and communities from its extraction. For 200 years we dug and burned the stuff to fuel growth, imperialism, wars, ambition and the egos of the nouveau riche.

Atmospheric CO2 was clearly not a thing 300 hundred years ago, but if it was, the meter would have shown 280ppm in 1700. By the time oil usurped coal’s crown in the early 20th century it had barely moved the needle, showing under 300ppm. A 7% rise, or 20ppm, in 200 years seemed fuck all.

Yes, it had turned the facades of our great institutions black with soot. It might have turned London and other industrial cities into health death traps and created the horror that is the commuter belt. But, we had an empire to run, locals to subjugate, foreign lands to pillage, remote corners of the world to own.

The world was ours, driven by British bureaucracy, imperial coffers, and that damn coal. We were coal-powered apex predators.

Oil eh? Well, come the 20th century and we get super-efficient at converting heat into motion - by directly burning it under pressure in a confined volume; the dawn of the internal combustion engine. We also set alight to its lighter fractions to produce light, which was useful as we’d been burning dead whales for way too long.

Oil also produced other useful stuff such as fertiliser, pharmaceuticals, plastics, waxes, lubricants, detergents, and paints. This wonder substance would go on the dominate world growth, geopolitics, war, fame, and power for over a century.

Britain would lose its imperial crown, first, to oil-fired USA, then to … erm, lots of others. Some weren’t even real countries when the combustion engine was invented.

Unlimited cheap oil corrupted us all, kept on killing people and now increasingly wildlife. But energy this cheap and (even today) plentiful might have saved us from a coal-smog death and also allow whales to edge back from extinction. The ppms kept going up; by 30ppm to 330ppm in the first 75 years of the 20th century, more than the whole of the preceding 200 years.

We still burned coal, of course, and now also oil, mostly to provide our ravenous need for electricity. And now here comes gas, natural gas, clean burning, cheap gas. From the 1960s on, the UK pivoted to using gas for heat and electricity and oil (kerosene, petrol, and diesel) for transportation.

In the final 25 years of the 20th century, atmospheric CO2 climbed a whopping 40ppm. It took 200 years of burning coal to get a rise of 20ppm. Worse still, in the first 20 years of this century, CO2 rates have climbed a further 40ppm. Despite wind turbines, nuclear, carbon capture, rooftop solar, plant oils, led lightbulbs, single-ply toilet paper, hybrid engine technology and sophisticated combined cycle gas-turbine power stations.

We still burn coal, hunt and extract oil, we compress gas into massive ships and we send it round the world. Some luddites still burn charcoal and wood - more than you think and certainly more in the UK than use heat-pumps. At least we don’t frack, for now.

So what saves us next? After 300 years we need to stop burning stuff. We still need oil; for plastics, fertiliser, food stuffs, pharmaceuticals etc the list goes on. We don’t need gas - that’s you fucked, Qatar - or coal. But, oil still has a place in the world, we just need to decarbonise it.

To continue to grow on Planet Earth, we need to make much more electricity, more cheaply, more locally, at zero or negative carbon cost and we need to do it now. Our lungs will thank us, as will our great grandchildren who’ll be able to hug us and inherit our 20th century homes. The whales will probably say thanks, too.

Your turn

Look into getting an EV. Consider a heat pump to replace your aging home boiler. Look into solar, and wind. Understand YOUR CO2 footprint and try to tread a little lighter. It’s not just the whales that will benefit - it’s mankind itself. And the ability to look directly into your great grandchildren’s eyes and tell ‘em what you did to save the planet, what you sacrificed, that they may live.

[realtylong]

Young go whole vibe lyrics

#Young go whole vibe lyrics full#

I could live without the Orson Welles narration in Dark Avenger but if you put that and some questionable 'rape and killing' lyrics aside you've got a nice slab of Sabbath/Priest influenced heaviness. The autobiographical Manowar is nicely paced. Side two veers into the power metal that would become Manowar's trademark. I've always regarded these three excellent tracks as the 'engine room' of Battle Hymns. A slightly sinister sounding riff underpins the 'nam casualty tale of Shell Shock. There are shades of '70s Judas Priest as there are elsewhere. Sure, it's corny as hell but that's the nature of the beast with this type of punch-the-air metal 'anthem' and it hits the mark with Eric Adams' high - range, over the top vocals and some nicely dirty guitar from Ross 'The Boss'.įast Taker rocks hard and is aptly named as it's the fastest track here and my personal favourite. No, Battle Hymns should have kicked off with Metal Daze. Death Tone is suitably heavy in nature but it's a bit of a plodder & lyrically it's slightly risible, even by Manowar standards. My first criticism is the choice of opening track. Side One is straight-up, metel-edged hard rock. I lost patience with them after the first two or three albums but the occasional dip into their work down the years would reveal the odd gem in among all the cheese and pretentiousness.įor me though, they never bettered their debut.īattle Hymns is very much a game of two halves. Whatever, there was a fine band in there somewhere. I've also never quite figured out whether that's because they took themselves and their shtick way too seriously or not seriously enough. I've always found it difficult to think of them as anything other than a band who's career descended, quite quickly, into self-parody. OK, so it's easy to take cheap shots at Manowar but, let's be honest, they tend to invite a lot of it on themselves. This is manly metal for manly men doing manly things. No, that wasn't a comment on the music, it's just that I think I used too much starch on my loin cloth which isn't very pleasant, particularly since I've spent the past week in the company of the mighty Manowar, purveyors of prime power metal. This may well be attributed to the fact that Manowar still were a rather young band trying to find their niche, but as Joey DeMaio's bass solo William's Tale will attest the band members themselves were anything but modest." ( Metal Storm (opens in new tab)) It is also Manowar's humblest album in terms of posturing, feel and attitude. " Battle Hymns is the début album by the four piece Conanic metal band from New York.

#Young go whole vibe lyrics full#

"The lyrics " Raping the daughters and wives/in blood I take my payment in full with their lives" characterise Manowar's attitude to song-writing, but outside of the pillaging and invasion-based penmanship, there's some very forceful and energetic guitar-work with a profusion of impressive drumming." ( Sputnik Music (opens in new tab)) Production wise, this album might seem like it suffers from usual first album inexperience, but at least you can easily distinguish what's a guitar and what's a bass on this album, unlike the next two records." ( Encyclopaedia Metallum (opens in new tab)) "Aside from that song and Dark Avenger (structurally resembling the song Black Sabbath slow doom before erupting into a frenzy), the rest of Battle Hymns are standard early 80s slabs of metal. With Orson Wells gone, actor Sir Christopher Lee was hired to voice the Dark Avenger narration. In 2010 the band re-recorded them album as Battle Hymns MMXI, with a stated aim to make it "make it as loud as we possibly can". The crusading title track and Dark Avenger established a tradition for grandiose fantasy epics, Manowar set out their warrior code, and William’s Tale was a ritualistic show of strength. The first four tracks have a raw, streetwise vibe embodied by the abrasive riffs and Vietnam-referencing lyrics in Death Tone and Shell Shock. – the only man with a voice big enough for Manowar – on Dark Avenger, and a keynote message in Metal Daze: ‘ Only one thing really sets me free/Heavy metal, loud as it can be!’ Pure heavy metal thunder, built to a blockbuster scale, it featured narration from Hollywood legend Orson Welles Manowar’s debut album, 1982’s Battle Hymns (with full-time drummer Donnie Hamzik) set the tone for their entire career. Vowing to create what DeMaio called “the hottest rock group in the world”, the pair reconvened in the US to launch Manowar, with singer Eric Adams and Rods drummer Carl Canedy, who also produced their first demo. Sippin' on that Henny or D'usse not no Gin and Juice Yeah oj's wanna fuck with me 'cause I been that dude Baby you the one, been the one, never been a two I ain't never felt no bitch how I'm feeling you You know this.

[thefamoustownofyeadon]

I will keep on writing this stuff until someone stops me Hillbrow- Berea border Johannesburg. December 1986

During 1985 my family and I were living and working at a  residential farm school at Glen Austin midway between Johannesburg and Pretoria in South Africa. The school was operated by a charity founded on the educational and social principles of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner and operated as a fairly closed community. 

The director of the school had a moderate and tolerant approach. She became unwell and others, who were stricter on the dogma, took over. In short, when the original director was in charge the place was fun and people were happy. When the blue meanies got the upper hand it became oppressive. I decided it was time to move on. There was no problem with my work, it was a matter of a lack of commitment to some of the very odd ideas which underpinned the running of the place (See Anthroposophy, if you are interested). 

The place gave me a distaste for fanatics. We left  with only a very small amount of money 

I had a British nursing qualification and phoned up the head of nursing at a state psychiatric hospital in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. She gave me an interview the next week. After a year of doing hard manual work with only a monthly pocket money allowance, all I had in the way of clothes was baggy jeans, trainers and T-shirts. My hair was home cut. I could not imagine anyone would employ me looking like that. I was also late for the interview. I had to hitchhike into the city and then find my way across the northern edge to the hospital which was tucked away in a residential area. The first words out my mouth was an apology for how I looked and for being so late. The lady who interviewed me, did not seem phased by any of that and I got the job.

 I was to work there for about eight years and count it as the best place I have ever worked. Incredible opportunities were provided for me. The hospital was linked up to a top-class university (Wits) and the learner culture was rich. I count that interview as one of the luckiest half an hours of my life. A friend at Cresset helped us move our stuff, which only amounted to a few suitcases, to our new home in a district of high rise flats on the edge of Hillbrow in Johannesburg. We were in the Helderberg Building. Twenty storeys high with a view out over the city. We had no furniture at all. I bought two cheap mattresses for the kids and that was our new home... but we did have a swimming pool. Near Christmas, a Jewish charity came collecting door to door. I was not home but they saw how we were living through the open door and rather than asking for money they gave us a generous amount to get us over Christmas and up to my first pay packet from the hospital that I was working at. We somehow survived that first month and then things got a lot better. Six months later we had had a fridge, tables and chairs and everything! 

After rural Glen Austin, Hillbrow was like an overdose of adrenaline. It had been the place where immigrants to the country had been arriving, in waves, for a hundred years. Southern Europeans, Brits, Jews escaping oppression under the Russian empire, lots of Irish and a sprinkling of Czech, Poles. Hungarians. It was an area of the city which was starting to 'go grey', which was a term to describe relaxation of the Group Areas Act which had controlled where people of different races were allowed to live. It was urban, noisy busy and exploding with street energy. A very tall African man in high heels, wearing a kilt and full Scots regalia would promenade up and down one of the main streets playing the bagpipes all day long, trying to entice people into underground arcades. I remember lines of Hari Krishna boys, as we called them, dancing in a long conga line wearing Saffron robes. I would sit out at a continental i.e. Mediterranean style café's and watch all this craziness going by. 

 When a country is in crisis all kinds of odd people turn up… drawn in by the political fever. An Australian Doctor arrived proclaiming the end of the world on a certain date. Thousands assembled on a hillside, waiting for the end which did not come. Every trickster, scam merchant snake oil entrepreneur headed in to set up shop one minute and disappear the next. Hillbrow felt like it was having the equivalent of a manic episode. It operated twenty-four hours of the day. I was shocked when the police turned up and hurled tear gas at revellers on New Year’s Eve, but this was the regular deal that happened every year to clear the streets. It felt so extreme. The dark side of this was the levels of criminal violence in the city. I was common to see blood on the pavements as I ran across town to catch the bus to work. Piles of glue-sniffing street children slept in shop doorways every night, and street hold-ups were a constant hazard. One incident sticks in my mind though. 

The Helderberg Building, where we were staying, was surrounded by a low wall and a paved area. On one side of that area was a swimming pool, and the remainder was spotted with palm trees and benches. I regularly got up at 4am to sit, drink coffee and read. One night I heard a commotion out in the streets and went to the window. A black man was running down the street being pursued by white men in a car. There was a lot of screeching of tyres and shouting going on. I watched as the black man ran into the paved area below my window, but seven floors down. He hid behind one of the palms furthest from the gate. Three or four men, armed with handguns, got out of the car and began conducting a search. I could see both sides. The man hiding and the other men searching. As they got closer I could see the man was going to run, which he did. What happened next was really odd and I have never understood it. He ran but then stopped by the wall of the building. The chasers stood in a line and opened fire at the man who then collapsed to the ground. They then walked over and stood him up. He walked away with them in a fairly normal way. They then pushed him into the back seat of the car and drove off. Lots of lights had come on in the buildings surround a park in front of our flats. They then all went off within a minute or so, I guess because the observers had judged the incident over.

I have no idea if this was an incident related to crime or politics, or if the men in the car were police or not. They were not in uniform. What struck me was how suddenly things happened and were over. 

In later years I learnt that a government sponsored death squad was based at the Johannesburg Fort detention centre less than a mile away.

To be continued. Travelling around Lesotho with the aid of a bin bag.

Photos: 1980s Hillbrow and neighbouring areas

[nellie-elizabeth]

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The Sign/New Life (6x12/13)

Yikes! Some stuff occurred! I have a lot to say, and it's kind of mixed, but I will say that over-all I really enjoyed watching this episode and I'm excited for the final season next year.

Cons:

All season, I have been saying that Sarge was interesting, but that ultimately it still felt somewhat cheap to bring Clark Gregg back after Coulson's emotional send-off in Season Five. In this finale, Sarge is defeated, after being maybe kind of redeemed, and then flipping on that redemption, and at the last minute we see an LMD of Coulson who is there to help with the next big bad (the Chronicoms). So now we have not one, but two different contrivances to bring Clark Gregg back as a Coulson-adjacent character on the show. I get it. They killed him off, then got two more seasons that they didn't know they were going to have. But as much as I love Coulson, as much as I would love to watch these characters navigate their feelings of loss and hurt, it's kind of strange to have him there all the time. They did a good job with Sarge, and I hope they do a good job with the LMD as well. But on principle, I still have my issues with it.

And speaking of contrivances that get repeated over and over again, it appears going in to next season, that Fitzsimmons have been separated. There's time travel shenanigans going on, and I'm super excited to see that, but come on. If we spend next season with Fitz and Simmons in separate story-lines, and then watch them reunite at the midpoint or something, I'm going to be annoyed. They were a duo at the beginning, and then once they fell in love, it seemed like the only trick the writers had left was to separate them again and again for the sake of drama. Before this show ends, I want to watch this great couple actually interact with each other, and be a unit once again! Please!

Pros:

But as I said, this two-part finale was really enjoyable. Lots of drama and action and tension and pain and joy. There are so many elements I want to discuss, but I'm going to try and be pretty succinct about it.

Let's start with Deke. I wavered on my support of this character a little bit, when it seemed like we were leaning heavily in to the comic relief. But here, all of that comedy is underpinned but legitimate emotion, and I adored it. We see Fitz is getting along well with Deke, but they start fighting when Fitz realizes Deke's scheme of stealing S.H.I.E.LD. tech and marketing it as his own. Things get pretty rough between them, and then Deke bursts out and says he built his company because nobody likes him. He's alone, a fish out of water in a world and time that he can never fully belong to. This is an effective and interesting character arc for him. He desperately loves his grandparents, and he's so earnest about it, and to have that love become conditional so easily is ridiculously painful. And so he does something risky and reckless, to prove his worth. Sure, things go wrong for him very quickly, but it's also important to note - he saves Mack, Yo-Yo, and Flint. He does that. And there's that moment where Mack refers to him as an agent, and it feels like the perfect way of giving him his due, after his journey of acceptance in this season.

A few little moments with Deke that I loved: him telling his employees that Fitz and Simmons "identify as my grandparents." That was so funny. I also loved it when Deke yelled at Simmons, telling her that he could have helped her carry some of the pain when Fitz was dead. Deke is really forgiving of Fitz and Simmons for the most part, craving their approval. But he's got opinions, and he's been through some shit, and I appreciate him for standing up for himself in this way.

Obviously May broke my heart in this episode. I don't think I was all that worried that she'd be permanently dead, but even that assurance didn't stop the moment from feeling heartbreaking. I want so bad to believe in Coulson. And May learning to let herself have love was such an important journey for her character. So in that moment, when she trusts in Sarge's feelings of love, and his stabbed because of them, it's such a betrayal in every conceivable way. The acting was superb. Everything underpinning this moment was just so achingly perfect. And the fact that it was on camera, so a bunch of other characters had to witness it? Ouch! So much ouch!

Another enormously emotional aspect to this episode was when Yo-Yo was in danger of becoming a Shrike. I find it super annoying that defeating Izel managed to defeat all of her zombie minions (what is this, Game of Thrones? Or The Avengers? Sheesh). But setting that aside, the moment when Mack realized that Yo-Yo was in danger, was just so heartbreaking. It's like finding out a loved one has terminal cancer. It's not instant death, with all the shock and grief that comes with that. But it's the acknowledgment of the inevitable, the feeling of helplessness that overtakes you when you know what's about to happen and you can't do anything to stop it. It was really scary, and even if the way it happened was contrived, I'm terribly relieved that Yo-Yo is going to be okay!

Flint being here raises a lot of questions, but I think they're interesting questions that might get explored in future. Is he real? If he's only a manifestation of Yo-Yo and Mack's minds, is he the same as evil Dr. Fitz, or anything else that came from the mind/fear monolith? Now that we've got Chronicoms becoming the central threat, and an LMD Coulson, and Flint who may or may not be a real person... it seems like next season will be a chance to really dive in to the various forms of life and personhood that we've been introduced to over the seasons. I hope that we get an interesting exploration of this idea!

I was a latecomer to the Enoch appreciation club, but now that I'm totally in love with his character, I'm thrilled with the concept of more focus on the Chronicoms next season. They're fascinating to me, and when you couple them with the time travel element, I'm thinking we're in for a special treat. It looks like we might be back in the early days of S.H.I.E.L.D. Do I want Agent Carter to show up and work with the team? Yes. Yes I do. Do I think it's likely? Eh. Maybe not, but whatever. This is still going to be so cool!

As I said, it's annoying to me that Fitz and Simmons are being separated at this point, because I think it would be more interesting to spend the final season with them as an actual partnership. But, I loved that glimpse we had of Simmons, totally cold and efficient, putting May in that cryogenic chamber and accepting coordinates to get the team to safety. There's a lot of story to back-fill here, but clearly Simmons, and by extension Fitz, have been through something involving time travel. I liked the way the acting and the script writing made it so clear right away that Simmons had been away from the team for a while, doing her own things separate from them. The timelines don't match up, and that's interesting!

I'm ready to say goodbye to this show, if I'm being honest, but not because I don't love it dearly. I just think we're about at that point where it's time to wrap things up, complete some character arcs, and contemplate what the future will look like for these people, after everything they've been through. Fingers crossed that the final season will be able to achieve that!

8/10

[foreverlogical]

The election season of 2015 and 2016 was defined by chaos, infighting and a pool of deep resentment that came boiling over when votes were cast. But this election was barely noticed. It happened on February 17, 2016, in a rundown labor union hall in Portland, Oregon. Union members were voting on a new contract with their employer, Koch Industries. The union members felt powerless, cornered, and betrayed by their own leaders. The things that enraged them were probably recognizable to anyone who earns a paycheck in America today. Their jobs making wood and paper products for a division called Georgia Pacific had become downright dangerous, with spikes in injuries and even deaths. They were being paid less, after adjusting for inflation, than they were paid in the 1980s. Maybe most enraging, they had no leverage to bargain for a better deal. Steve Hammond, one of the labor union’s top negotiators, had fought for years to get higher pay and better working conditions. And for years, he was outgunned and beaten down by Koch’s negotiators. So even as the presidential election was dominating public attention in late 2015, Hammond was presenting the union members with a dispiriting contract defined by surrender on virtually everything the union had been fighting for. He knew the union members were furious with his efforts. When he stood on stage to present the contract terms, he lost control and berated them. “This is it guys!” his colleagues recall him yelling. “This is your best offer. You’re not going to strike anyway.”

I thought of the free-floating anger in that union hall often as I travelled the country over the last eight years, reporting for a book about Koch Industries. The anger seemed to infect every corner of American economic life. We are supposedly living in the best economy the United States has seen in modern memory, with a decade of solid growth behind us and the unemployment rate at its lowest level since the 1960s. Why, then, does everything feel so wrong? In April, a Washington-Post/ABC Poll found that 60% of political independents feel that America’s economic system is essentially rigged against them, to the advantage to those already in power. Roughly 33% of Republicans feel that way; 80% of Democrats feel the same.

What reporting the Koch story taught me is that these voters are right— the economy truly is rigged against them. But it isn’t rigged in the way most people seem to think. There isn’t some cabal of conservative or liberal politicians who are controlling the system for the benefit of one side or the other. The economy is rigged because the American political system is dysfunctional and paralyzed—with no consensus on what the government ought to do when it comes to the economy. As a result, we live under a system that’s broken, propelled forward by inertia alone. In this environment, there is only one clear winner: the big, entrenched players who can master the dysfunction and profit from it. In America, that’s the largest of the large corporations. Roughly a century after the biggest ones were broken up or more tightly regulated, they are back, stronger than ever.

I saw this reality clearly when I went to Wichita, Kansas to visit Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, a company with annual revenue larger than that of Facebook, Goldman Sachs and U.S. Steel combined. Charles Koch isn’t just the CEO of America’s biggest private company. He also inhabits one extreme end of the political debate about our nation’s economy. A close examination of his writing and speeches over the last 40 years reveals the thinking of someone who believes that government programs, no matter how well-intended, almost always do more harm than good. In this view, most government regulations simply distort the market and create big costs down the road. Taxing the wealthy only shifts money from productive uses to mostly wasteful programs. Charles Koch has been on a mission, for at least 40 years, to reshape the American political system into one where government intervention into markets does not exist.

But for all the free-market purity of Charles Koch’s ideology, there is not much of a free market in the corporate reality he inhabits. Koch Industries specializes in the kinds of businesses that underpin modern civilization but that most consumers never see—oil refining, nitrogen fertilizer production, commodities trading, the industrial production of building materials, and almost everything we touch, from paper towels and Lycra to the sensors hidden inside our cellphones. This is the paradox of Charles Koch’s word – he is a high-minded, anti-government free-marketeer whose fortune is made almost exclusively from industries that face virtually no real competition. Koch Industries is built, in fact, on a series of near-monopolies. And it is these kinds of companies that do best in our modern dysfunctional political environment. They know how to manipulate the rules when no one is looking.

Consider the oil refining business, which has been a cash cow for Koch Industries since 1969, just two years after Charles Koch took over the family company following his father’s death. Charles Koch was just in his early 30s at the time, but he made a brilliant and bold move, purchasing an oil refinery outside Saint Paul, Minnesota. The refinery was super-profitable thanks to a bottleneck in the U.S. energy system: the refinery used crude oil from the tar sands of Canada to be refined into gasoline later sold to the upper Midwest. The crude oil was extraordinarily cheap because it contained a lot of sulfur and not many refineries could process it. But Koch sold its refined gas into markets where gasoline supplies were very tight and prices were high.

Why didn’t some competitor open up a refinery next to Koch’s to seize this opportunity? It turns out that no one has built a new oil refinery anywhere in the United States since 1977. The reason is surprising: the Clean Air Act regulations. When the law was drastically expanded in 1970, it imposed pollution standards on new refineries. But it “grandfathered” in the existing refineries with the idea that they would eventually break down and be replaced with new facilities. That never happened. The legacy oil refiners, including Koch, exploited arcane sections of the law that allowed them to expand their old facilities while avoiding the newer clean-air standards. This gave them an insurmountable advantage over any potential new competitor. The absence of new refineries to stoke competition and drive down prices meant that Americans paid higher prices for gasoline. Today the industry is dominated by entrenched players who run aged facilities at near-full capacity, reaping profits that are among the highest in the world. In this industry and others, the big gains go to companies that can hire lawyers and lobbyists to help game the rules, and then hire even more lawyers when the government tries to punish them for breaking the law (as happened to Koch and other refiners in the late 1990s when it became clear they were manipulating Clean Air regulations).

The oil refining business is just one example of how Koch has benefited from complex regulatory dysfunction while public attention was turned elsewhere. In the 1990s, for example, a Koch-funded public policy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) pressured states to deregulate their electricity systems. California was a pioneer in this effort, and the results were disastrous. Lawmakers in Sacramento created a sprawling, hyper-complicated system that surgically grafted a free-market trading exchange onto an aged electricity grid. Virtually no one paid attention to the 1,000-page law as it was being written. Almost immediately after the markets went online in the early 2000s, electricity traders at Koch Industries and Enron began gaming the system. They earned millions of dollars doing so, even as prices skyrocketed and the state’s grid collapsed in rolling blackouts. Lawmakers were blamed when the lights went out, and then Governor Gray Davis was recalled. The role that traders played in the crisis was hard to understand and hidden from view. Federal regulators filed a case against Koch for manipulating markets in California, but the legal proceedings dragged on for more than a decade. Koch ended up settling the charges and paying a fine of $4.1 million, long after the damage was done.

To take another example: In 2017, Koch helped kill part of the Republican tax reform plan to impose a “border adjusted” income tax that almost certainly would have hurt Koch’s oil refining business. The plan was being pushed by none other than Paul Ryan, a onetime Koch ally who was then Speaker of the House. Ryan wanted to include the border adjustment in President Trump’s tax overhaul because it would have benefited domestic manufacturing and would have allowed the government to cut corporate taxes without exploding the deficit. But former Koch oil traders told me that the border adjustment tax would have hurt profits at the Kochs’ Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota. Koch played a vital role in killing the border adjustment tax before a vigorous public debate about it could even begin (A Koch Industries spokesman insisted that the Koch political network opposed the border-adjustment measure only on ideological grounds, because it was basically a tax, and not to protect profits at Koch’s oil refineries) . By the time most people started paying attention, Paul Ryan admitted defeat and jettisoned the border adjustment.

Charles Koch doesn’t talk about issues like this when he talks about free markets. When I met him, Charles Koch was giving interviews for his new book that described his highly detailed business philosophy, called Market-Based Management. I had heard a lot about this philosophy, but what surprised me most when I interviewed the people who worked with him, some for decades, is how much they admire him. They said he was brilliant, but also unpretentious. He was uncompromising, but fair. I felt this way too, the minute I met the billionaire. I remember him telling me something along the lines of: “Hello, Chris! You didn’t need to put on a tie just to see me,” when I walked in the door (my audio recorder wasn’t even running yet, so the quote might be inexact).

Charles Koch’s avuncular, aw-shucks persona masks his true nature. I think of him instead as an uncompromising warrior. He has been fighting since he was a young man. He fought his own brothers, Bill and Freddie, for control of the family company (and won). He fought a militant labor union at the Pine Bend refinery (and won). Most of all, he fought against the idea that the federal government has an important role to play in making the economy function properly—even while taking advantage of government laws to maintain his company’s advantages.

When Charles Koch became CEO in 1967, the U.S. economy operated under a political system that is almost unimaginable today. The government intervened dramatically in almost every corner of the economy, and it did so to the explicit benefit of middle-class workers. This happened under a broad set of laws called the New Deal, which was put in place in the late 1930s. The New Deal broke up monopolies, kept banks on a tight regulatory leash, and even controlled energy prices, down to the penny in some cases. It greatly empowered labor unions and boosted wages and bargaining power for workers. Charles Koch dislikes every element of the New Deal. He has formed think tanks to attack the ideas behind it, donated money to politicians who sought to dismantle it, and built a company that was hostile to it.

As it turned out, the American public joined Charles Koch, to a certain extent, during the 1970s. Vietnam, Watergate, rampant inflation and multiple recessions shattered Americans’ confidence in the government’s ability to solve problems for ordinary people. Passage of the Civil Rights Act shattered the political coalition behind the New Deal, which had relied on Southern segregationists for support. Ronald Reagan rode the tide of antigovernment sentiment to the White House. But even Reagan wasn’t able to repeal the New Deal. He failed miserably when he tried to repeal Social Security, for example. He cut taxes, but never could restrain spending. What emerged during the 1980s and 1990s was an incoherent governing system, one that is deregulated in some key areas, like banking and derivatives trading, but hyper-regulated in others like the small business sector.

If the American political system is confused, Charles Koch is not. He rules over his company with undisputed authority, and he uses that authority to spread his Market-Based Management doctrine. This philosophy inspires the rank-and-file employees at Koch Industries—the company cafeteria is full of young, entrepreneurial workers who thrive in a system that heaps promotions and bonuses on top performers, while unsentimentally weeding out employees considered weak. But the unbending nature of Market-Based Management, and how it applies to the factory floor, played a big role in building the rage that swept through that union hall in Oregon.

When Steve Hammond, the union boss, tried to bargain with Koch, he found himself fighting over ideology, not benefits. In one case, the Koch negotiators wanted to strip down workers’ health care benefits, requiring employees to pay more money out of pocket for their benefits. The Koch team framed their request not as a way to make more money for Koch, but to create a system that better reflected the ideals of Market-Based Management. “It’s a matter of principle,” recalled union negotiator Gary Bucknum. “The principle is that an employee should be paying something toward their healthcare, or otherwise they’ll abuse their health care.” It was hard to bargain against principle. And the unions didn’t have the leverage to fight. The policies that once supported labor unions have been steadily undermined since the 1970s, dragging union participation in the private sector down from about 33% of the workforce to less than 10%. The union took the cut in health care benefits.

The current American political debate is focused on the shiny objects, the high-profile contests between Team Red and Team Blue. But companies like Koch Industries have the capacity to focus on the much deeper system, the highly complicated plumbing that makes the American economy work. This is where Charles Koch’s attention has been patiently trained for decades, as administrations have come and gone in Washington.

Thanks to this focus, Koch wins every time.

VISIT WEBSITE

[kuipernebula]

the-evil-pizza replied to your post “the-evil-pizza replied to your post: ...”

This all soundsright up my ally and so good? Where can I find it? It is expensive or cheap? I can'tafford it right now but I'll save the link to buy it because NNGH VAMPIRES

God Exalted is a whole thing and the new Abyssals book won’t be out for a while

The short version is Exalted is a tabletop game made originally by White Wolf, now Onyx Path, made to emulate a host of different types of stories, but largely Epic Fantasy through the lens of Anime and Tragedy. Which is a huge over-simplifaction but

It has a really intricate setting that I, personally, am a huge fan of. The 1st and 2nd editions of the game were hit-or-miss - some cool ideas but often things that were just poorly thought out or adjusted, or rushed out to meet a deadline. This latest edition, 3rd, has a lot of cool ideas, including a combat system directly inspired by Final Fantasy Dissidia, and is by far the most mechanically consistent of the whole system.

The core book for the game is available in pdf form for like $30? But as with all things tabletop, you can also just find the pdf online. (Or I can send you my legal copy somehow if you don’t trust rando downloads) The core includes the basic underpining lore of the game’s setting, the basic mechanics of the game, and the rules and structures to play Solar Exalted - the most powerful, but also the most basic, of the Exalted types. (Of note: Abyssals used to be Solars, but their magic was corrupted by death, turning them into, well, Super Magic Vampires.)

Every Exalt Type other than Solars - Abyssals included - traditionally gets their own book, detailing the exalt type, their history, any locales important to them not in the core book (so the Underworld for Abyssals), the magics unique to them, and any artifacts or other items for players to use for their exalts. So far, only 2 types have gotten theirs - the book for Dragon-Blooded/Terrestrials (elemental heroes, powered by their bloodline) is still in pre-order for some reason, while the Lunars book has only just left the kickstarter phase. (Thankfully, Lunars’ basic text was finished by the time they opened the kickstarter, and they seem to be picking up speed soon)

After Lunars, we’re going to see a book for Exigents (exalted of individual/smaller gods, making them each a unique hero) which will be the first book for a new concept. After that, we’ll see either Sidereals (heaven’s secret agents, with fate powers) or Abyssals next - genuinely it’s hard to tell which we’ll see first, since both are of equal importance to the setting. (Unfortunately for you, Sidereals have enough history to the setting compared to Abyssals that they have the advantage)

All of that said, if you’re just in it for the cool Vampire Lore, you can check out the Abyssals books for 1e (Exalted: The Abyssals) or 2e (Manual of Exalted Power: Abyssals) 

[luckylq28-blog]

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[bonniejstarks]

The Pink Jumpsuit: An essay about the bubbles we live in

‘It seems like someone else’s dream of my past.’ For Emma Neale, the painting ‘Wanderlust’ by Dunedin artist Sharon Singer stirs memories of her childhood, and new understandings of guilt and forgiveness.

There were gifts from my father when he came home from overseas trips. Love offerings; a bit like those a cat might bring home after night revels. Placations. Mixed messages. Guilt trips. Gilt traps. 

Top 40 albums and band memorabilia for my younger sister. Leather pants for me, the anxious girly swot he called ‘Stude’ to rhyme with ‘dude’, to make praising my studiousness — and maybe that studiousness itself — seem cool. 

After unwrapping the leather trousers, I went to a school social with my bottom half dressed like a biker chick; the top half in a turquoise T-shirt borrowed from my mother, which sported a black panther and swirls of gold glitter. The ensemble was a look I wasn’t sure how to carry, though I still drew a lot of attention from the senior boys. “Are you really a junior?” “Whoa, hot pants.” “Hey, Olivia Neutron-Bomb!”

My svelteness was wasted on me, at that age. I couldn’t see it: I just felt awkward, uncoordinated. Even if I had seen it, I was probably still too sensible and bookish to flaunt it, cash in on it, or let it give me confidence. The attention was just unsettling. I got the same feeling in my throat as when I’d seen an aggressive male pigeon treading a female — the flutter and scramble of it, the poor hen hard-scrabbling to get away. There had been no preamble dance of bobbing beak-link, glossy necks shimmering at each other, like panels of sequins. It was all panic, claw, shake, the female’s coos like bottled sobs.

Sharon Singer ‘Wanderlust’, acrylic on canvas, 2019

From the pod of my teenage awkwardness, however I could see that my mother absolutely knew how to cut a figure; elegance was, if not a weapon, a kind of armour. When Mum unwrapped her own gift from Dad that year, my sister and I thought it was hilarious — and dizzyingly bold. He had given her a slim-fit boiler-suit in a light denim fabric, its colour the pink of smoker’s candies. It had fake gold ventilation grommets, a long front zip; and I think it had stitching in a batwing bust. Usually Mum wore deep plums, aubergines, black, russet-red. They were the shades of polished piano wood, tooled leather hardback book covers, candlelight, the heavy, hushed velvet of theatres: colours with body and weight The colours of thought, and of night. The suit was racy, playful, youthful, almost saucy — and she looked stunning in it: dark and sultry like Anni-Frid Lyngstad, from ABBA, with a shiver of haughtiness.

We crowed at Mum when she tried on the new outfit. “You look great! It’s fabulous!”

Silence.

“Are you brave enough to go out in it? Don’t you like it?”

Her quiet reply: “I’m not sure about it yet.”

“Do you think it’s too tight-fitting?” 

We knew she and our father often worried about their weight. Weren’t the ‘80s a decade of extreme food weirdness? Hadn’t they tried the bread diet, the grapefruit diet, the cottage cheese diet, the Jane Fonda workout, skipped meals, taken up running, talked about the Lebanese Army Food Diet (which I think involved eating only eggs or chicken)? 

Dad sometimes made dark jabs at Mum about her figure. “If only your [x or y] was smaller, you’d be perfect.” His nickname for me was Lumpy. If he found me and my sister eating, he often said with acerbic, Basil Fawlty-esque disdain: “Having a little snack, are we?” 

I became anorexic when I was 17. As a schoolboy at Nelson College, Dad had been harassed for his own weight, so his attitude had a backwards logic, even for a man who could be deeply empathetic. He was a close listener, and loving enough that, if I think too hard about his sudden death at age 48 (from a heart attack while he was out jogging), it feels as if a trench is being excavated in my stomach. He repeated what he knew, I guess. He criticised us to pass on the urgent and venomous message he had received from that all-boys’ boarding school culture: fat means failure, slender is status, beauty is, yes, narrowly defined. 

‘Wanderlust’ by Sharon Singer, 2019 (detail)

Mum stood side-on to the mirror, hand swiping quickly over her stomach, as she pulled it in: as if women’s bellies should at least sit level with the hip-bones, the way lager should sit level with the rim of the glass, Mum’s swipe a bartender’s beer comb trimming the foam head. She turned this way, that way, a whether vane in the mirror: should she wear it, should she not?

“You look lovely, Mum!” We wanted her to be wedding-day glad at Dad’s return from his travels; we wanted the normal routine to have landed with him. We wanted that ordinary rhythm to mean we were safe: safe to be as selfish as kids need to be, to get on with the job of growing up and eventually, wanting to leave… which makes no sense, it makes no sense, but what does, when…

“I’m just not sure how your father really sees me,” Mum said.

I don’t know if I put two and two together then — the candy-pink overalls and the other time I’d seen her taken aback by a gift. I think it was about five years earlier, when we lived in America, but memory shuffles together events and settings from different packs to come up with a stacked deck. Dad’s not here to contest the dealer’s version.

One Christmas, he gave her some jade and silver jewellery. She loved nephrite; we kids were far too ‘70s-expat-Pākehā-Kiwi to know the word pounamu then. We were busy learning to hide our accents and swap ‘cookie’ for ‘biscuit’, ‘bug’ for ‘beetle’, say ‘jerk’ and ‘turkey’, ‘Get off the grass’, ‘No duh’, ‘Catch my drift’, ‘Mondo bizarro’… And maybe because my dad was a nephrologist, the word nephrite drew the family language to it. The words share a relationship: the root links them through the Spanish piedra de (la) ijada or yjada (1560s), where ijada means loins or kidneys. Jade was thought to have healing properties, for kidney and lumbar complaints. Even the thought of pressing a cool, polished jade amulet over an ache seems soothing.

I suppose if this scene did happen in America, the jade was unlikely to be from Te Wai Pounamu anyway, given jade is also found in California, where we lived at the time. Either way, when Mum opened the gift there was confusion and collapse in her face, which she fought against. 

There was something going on here that we hadn’t seen before. I only recall seeing her cry one other time, and that was when she was in pain, from a minute shard flicking into her eye as she clipped my baby sister’s toenails. I had never seen her look so stricken. American TV in the build-up to Christmas hadn’t revealed this kind of reaction in all the seductive ads for toys, toys, toys … Presents were meant to be opened in great communal teeth-baring, group hugs, a festival of cleanliness, perfect skin, efficiency, friendship-joy and great hair. We were all in our dressing-gowns, three of us no doubt with bed-hair, Mum probably the only one who’d brushed hers for the occasion. I can remember looking at the Christmas wrapping to try to figure out what had gone wrong. 

Something was very awry. The jewellery was already broken? The jewellery had something missing? It seemed elegant, queenly to me — but the sadness in Mum’s face made me think, are the necklace and bracelet really so ugly? How do I find the ugliness? How do I understand it? 

I thought the gifts would look enchanting on her. My mother has very green eyes: she really does. She tells me that green eyes are more common in fiction than in real life. I wonder if that might have subliminally helped to make her a writer? 

When she found her image in novels, saw her statistically exceptional eyes and her difference reflected, was that unconsciously affirming?

Mum hid her face in her chestnut brown hair. In the Californian sun, her hair bleached ginger on the tips, which she hated, though she loved candied ginger, and my sister had a giant teddy called Ginger Bill, and ‘gingerly’ was a beautiful word, but what was wrong with the present?

Perhaps I didn’t truly begin to understand until I was 16, when a boyfriend brought me gifts after he’d been away overseas: gold fan earrings, gold fan charm on a necklace, a tropical flower perfume: frangipani or hibiscus, the name lost, now along with its thin sugary fragrance. When I received them, I was confused about what to feel; the offerings weren’t at all to my personal taste, but the gesture seemed wildly generous, and it gave off a thin buzzing edge of a new experience, even though it was also conventionally, stiflingly romantic. Yet as soon as I’d unwrapped the gifts, the boyfriend went at me with a force and insistence that seemed to say I owed him something. He was extracting payment; pushing me down on the bed, so that I felt like the poor flustered female pigeons I’d seen, pecked and trampled and somehow, at the same time, bizarrely, completely ignored by the grinding bull of a bird. 

I must have understood it, then, as now it feels as if the two events are filed in the same memory compartment: terrible, terrible presents. 

Mum’s jewellery was a kind of hush money. Or an apology. Or a bribe? They weren’t a gift of  time. They weren’t companionship. They weren’t home when he said he would be; home at the weekend. 

The gift was also a celebration of her beauty, of course: which is fine, and human — don’t even babies spend longer looking at symmetrical features? But that isn’t enough to underpin and make-good the architecture of love. 

I also seem to remember that part of the shock was the expense; the gift can’t have really been within our means. The sense of disproportion was all part of the strange scene. If it had been books, or notebooks, pens, typewriter, foolscap, or even a cheap T-shirt with a favourite author’s portrait and some bad but forgivably literary pun printed on it, the gift would have said more about Dad listening to Mum, really knowing her. 

I think I remember my father’s devastated expression, too, from that day, and him hugging her as she cried. I’m in the child’s position of feeling for them both; a bad place to be when there are irreconcilable differences. He just wanted to show that he loved her. He thought she would be happy. He thought the receipts for the jewellery were like  … billets doux, a love letter. 

What can anyone outside a marriage really understand about what goes on inside it? When I said as much to my paternal grandfather once, when he was in his early 90s, he answered, ‘Sometimes even the people inside the marriage don’t have a clue what is happening, either,’ and he told me an extraordinary tale of a house call he had made once, as a GP in Wellington in the 1950s or 60s. When he arrived at the house, the woman patient reported severe abdominal pain. Gramps examined her and told her that she was quite far advanced in labour. She insisted — with real vehemence — that he must be wrong. The husband fully backed her up. He told my grandfather, privately, that it was impossible as there “hadn’t been marital relations for some considerable amount of time”. Gramps was confused; he doubted himself. As he prepared to re-enter the bedroom, to examine the woman again a ‘poor little frightened probationer nurse’, as he called her who had accompanied him that day, called out, “Doctor, I can see a tiny hand!” My grandfather helped the mother deliver a live, healthy baby. He said to me, “I’ve always wondered what on earth became of that poor couple. I’ve thought about them, all down the years.” And, shaking his head, “Not every child is a gift, though it should be.”

‘Wanderlust’ Sharon Singer (detail)

Every Christmas and birthday my own husband says the best gift I can give him is nothing. I think about that, too when I see Sharon Singer’s painting, ‘Wanderlust’, and its arid, red-planet setting. I feel dread at my own covetous impulse to have the painting, partly because I’m not sure I can explain the impact of the strange sideways slipping trail into memory it’s leading me along. 

The image itself touches on everything from a scorched earth, to climate refugees, perhaps even to the avoidance of infection. (Sharon Singer has other creepily premonitory paintings of people socialising with face masks in outdoor settings.) It also suggests space exploration; a sense of adventure; threat and fragility; the ludicrousness and the tenacity of so much human aspiration. Yet it also seems like someone else’s dream of my past.  

The child in the painting could be my dark-haired little sister, her sweetly rounded limbs when she was under five. She could be in a child’s androgynous, asexual version of the strange gift overalls from the 1980s: a little like a child dressing up as a superhero. The image brings back memories of our guinea pigs: we sometimes carried them in the kind of pet transport cage seen in the painting, and of course, they tried to escape us. It brings back the time well before them, when I tried to run away, with a small, brown, ginger-nut textured zip-up school-case. (I sat happily on a street corner, telling the adults in a car that stopped to ask if I was all right, that I had left home forever. I had a book, a warm jersey, a toy rabbit and maybe an apple so I was going to be fine.) 

The small child astronaut in the image, with her long, untied shoelace (such a loving, funny, apt detail) trails its own clouds of meaning: vulnerability, inattention, slap-dash, innocence, the tiny hazards that persist amidst the colossal breaks from the norm and the known.

Those shoes and the carry-case also make me think of my sons, their pet rabbits, my boys’ laces trailing like mouse-tails, the constant reminder, you’ll trip up! (I would still be saying it on the moon, on Mars, on the moons of Mars … ). 

None of this has anything to do with a husband in the 1980s imagining his wife in tight-fitting, distinctly non-utilitarian coveralls. My sister points out that the gift was telling Mum she was gorgeous. Was that so out of the norm by then that it unsettled her? It seemed to set off detonations of silence, anxiety, disapproval, contraction, retreat, mystery and the unspoken  — which, of course, is different from the silence. 

But what if our real life is lived in the silences? The thoughts, and the in-between-the-thoughts, not what we manage to put into words? What we intuit, intimate. (The visual arts and music can both exquisitely, expertly, seep into and explore these interstices, I think.) 

The people close to us can never truly know us, and we can never truly know them. Maybe real love is when you feel you do understand the silences — when it’s in what you don’t say that you agree to meet. What if the person you share that with isn’t someone you live with? Or, to complicate things, what if the main way you fight in a family is actually the silent treatment, when it seems as if you are all wearing opaque glass masks, air-locked in the head-gear of your own hurt and anger?

It doesn’t make sense that this dumpy little cosmonaut with her luggage, her pet travel crate, her heedlessly undone basketball boot, brings back memories of my tall, slender mother standing in front of a full-length mirror, looking intent and also a little crushed, trying to smooth her stomach and hips away as she strokes the fabric over the planes and curves of her body. 

But what does, what does, when your father buys your mother a parachute suit, a flight suit, a jumpsuit, and then reels with shock, when finally, she makes the leap, she bails, she decides to leave?

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[republicstandard]

Harvey Weinstein and the Death of 'Liberal' America

Weinstein is a goner. Everyone knows it. It would be a great surprise if the man stands trial. The weird thing is, we all knew about Hollywood. Hell, the exact behavior of Weinstein and people like him is a trope so well engrained in our culture that porn movies that riff on the behavior rack up millions of views.

Editor's Note: This piece was originally published on my now permanently banned Medium.com account on October 13, 2017. It was read over 100,000 times on that site. It is still accurate in my opinion, so I have republished it here. Strange how yet again we hear of an FBI investigation beginning, but never ending. ~A.S

As ever, hypocrisy underpins everything. Berated from the podium of award ceremonies, we, the plebs, the cattle, the consumers, we are instructed. Don’t be sexist. Don’t be racist. Black lives matter. The liberal elites are better than you. Much better. We are rich, you are not. We know what is best, and if you disagree with our agenda, who cares. We are gods.

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They look down on our petty behavior and sneer, and turn their eyes aside when their friends behave in ways that truly are deplorable.

That is the attitude that allowed Weinstein to bugger his way through busloads of wannabe starlets. The glitterati Cosa Nostra has a vow of silence that protects them all. I’ll keep your secrets, you keep mine, and the gravy train keeps running. The cattle buy their tickets to see the movies we make, and who cares about a few broken women along the way.

As Actress Sophie Dix said:

“I was very, very vocal about it at the time. I didn’t want to own it. I wanted people to take it away from me. But I was met with a wall of silence. People who were involved in the film were great, my friends and my family were amazing and very compassionate, but people in the industry didn’t want to know about it, they didn’t want to hear.”

They didn’t want to hear. Rose McGowan was right to call out Ben Affleck. Oh, well done Ben; you told Weinstein to stop. Guess what? You weren’t convincing, and then it turns out that, at best, you’re a sleaze yourself. He said he’s saddened and angry about Harvey. Yeah, Ben. Us too.

Now that the FBI is involved, who else is in line to be toppled by the sizable domino of Weinstein?

Meryl Streep

Meryl is a national treasure, a confidant of Harvey Weinstein, and outspoken figurehead of the industry. If there’s a progressive cause, she’s there to lend a voice. Such a darling, she will happily slather on orange facepaint and a suit to impersonate Donald Trump and sing, at the top of her lungs:

“Problem now with society, we’re all hung up on propriety … She can sample my Measure for Measure.”

Wow, sure seems like she knows exactly what she’s talking about here. Donald Trump must be a bad guy, after all, this is Meryl Streep. She would know.

“I didn’t know about these other offenses: I did not know about his financial settlements with actresses and colleagues; I did not know about his having meetings in his hotel room, his bathroom, or other inappropriate, coercive acts,” she said. “And If everybody knew, I don’t believe that all the investigative reporters in the entertainment and the hard news media would have neglected for decades to write about it.”

Isn’t that precious. The mainstream media, who have chased conservative scandals with the perspicacity of a coke-crazed Glenn Close character, would surely have reported on such widespread abuse.

So Meryl is off the hook. No one would believe that someone whose career rose in parallel with Weinstein’s could possibly have heard what literally everyone else knew to be true.

Ben & Matt & George & Quentin & Brad & Leonardo &….

Ugh. White supremacy hand signals too.

Here’s what is confusing me, Mr Affleck; I wonder if you could help me out. So, when Brad tells Harvey to back off Gwyneth, and when Ben tells Harvey to knock it off, but it keeps going for decades- what’s up with that? Was it just because Harvey and his peccadillos kept you rolling in cash? Is that why you prostituted your morals?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you convinced yourselves at the time that you tried. The feminists claim that they don’t need no man, and you guys are of course ready to back up anything so long as you don’t have to actually act. Act, as in, take action. Not the act that you snakes have been putting on for 20 years or more, pretending that your industry isn’t riddled with criminals.

Here’s the thing. Any man in the real world, we see some guy assaulting women- he’s toast. Or at least he should be. Imagine this- ten men know about a sex offender living on their street. They watch as he creeps on the local girls. They don’t report it, they don’t kick his teeth in; a couple of them say, hey- that’s not cool please stop.

The sex offender pays them off and carries on.

What would you think of these men? Are they heroes? Great actors, philanthropists and role models? No.They are spineless worms. It’s not PC to say anymore but one of the roles of man in human society has always been to protect women from danger, which mostly comes from other men. Have we just decided to say f-ck it? Is that the price of equality?

Would you stand by while women are abused? Would someone being rich and powerful prevent you from beating the hell out of them if they assaulted your daughter? I would like to think not. I think any man worth a damn would drag Harvey Weinstein through hell for half of that.

So, why is Hollywood so divorced from reality that men stand by as girls young enough to be their daughters are abused by men old enough to be grandfathers? It boggles the mind. How corrupt. The hypocrisy stinks.

Let us all remind ourselves never to give another cent to Hollywood. These movie stars are either cowards, complicit or literally the dumbest people on Earth.

That’s a lot of movie stars scrambling to overturn American democracy to prevent the will of the people being recognized. I do hope none of them knew about Harvey. That would be unfortunate.

The Clintons & The Obamas

This should be open and shut. Hillary says she was sick and appalled when she found out. I’m sure she was, but I don’t think that Hillary found out with the rest of us about her donor Harvey Weinstein.

Are we to believe that a former President and a former Secretary of State not once was told about Weinstein? Do these people not vet their supporters before reciprocating the support?

Of course they do.

A man comes up to you and gives you a cheque for $100,000. He says he believes in your cause. He asks for nothing, but you thank him in public and say he is great. You later discover that man is a criminal, and not just a petty thief, his crimes are an open secret.

Yeah, I don’t think so either.

Barack Obama was ready to send his daughter to intern for Weinstein this year. Are we to believe that the Secret Service conducted no vetting prior? This is the daughter of a president.

But that, of course, is the problem. These girls that Weinstein abused were not presidents daughters. They were just girls who wanted to be famous. So, Barack, Hillary, Bill, Michelle. In my view, you all took money from Weinstein. You all had access to the most powerful information gathering network on the planet.

But, you knew nothing, of course. Sickening. Saddened. Someone else’s problem. Someone else’s daughter.

Good luck, FBI.

Maybe it is a vain hope that the FBI is going to do a serious job on Hollyweird.I don’t see how just picking at the threads of this case and applying some rudimentary common sense can result in anything but the utter destruction of the industry as we know it.

But, of course, money talks and bullshit walks. With so much filthy lucre paving the streets, Hollywood elites will remain so.

Plausible deniability, omerta, I never knew, it was a rumor and I hoped it was wrong, by the way, I’m a feminist, #TheResistance.

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The liberal elite is utterly hypocritical. We’re all hypocrites. It is human nature to be hypocritical. What makes us feel sick though, is when hypocrites monetize their hypocrisy. From an ivory tower, we are told about how bigoted we are for not being progressives. The cloistered demi-gods spit on you for being working class and voting in your own interests. Donald Trump is a sex criminal, they cry. No evidence is ever provided, but you are a bad person for supporting him.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, they know. They all know about Harvey.

The hand-wringing will be long and drawn out, as Hollywood and CNN examine all of us for their crimes. It must be toxic masculinity, or whiteness, or some such. The Oscars will dedicate 2018 to female directors and producers, ideally, Womyn-of-Color and the fireworks will be bright.

Ben and Matt and Leo and Brad will be there, and they will applaud. So will Hillary and Bill and Barack and Michelle. And here we are, the plebians, told that we are morally inferior. Ethically compromised. The deplorables.

We should always remember that those who make character judgments about their opponents based on nothing are usually guilty of that flaw themselves. The liberal elite has accused Donald Trump of being the worst kind of sex offender for over a year. Now we see that the snake pit is not at Trump Tower at all. It never was. The whole charade played out on sound stages on the Miramax Studio lot.

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