#i even took the liberty to include susan

[eternallyfatedjadedspaded]

i actually just snorted. fuckin hell. thank you. love it

what they could’ve had but instead alex wanted to be a dramatic bitch

the original meme and the drawing with a white bg

[inkandpen22]

Fate in Narnia

Pairing: Prince Caspian x Female!Reader

Warnings: none 

Word Count: 1.7k

Summary: A year after the Narnian Revolution, Y/N, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie are sent back to Narnia. This means the three have a chance to be King and Queens, but most importantly, it means Y/N and Caspian can see each other again. 

Masterlist

I return home from my classes at the university with groceries for dinner. After a long day like today, I’m reminded that it’s just me left to take care of Edmund and Lucy. Peter and Susan joined Mother and Father in America six months ago. They write to us often, promising they’ll send for us too when it’s safer. Honestly, I’m not sure how much longer I can balance classes, work, and picking up the slack for Aunt Beatrice. Her son Eustace and her husband don’t do anything to help around the house. Sometimes it feels like I’m taking care of five people. 

“Edmund! Lucy!” I holler up the stairs after I set the groceries down in the kitchen. 

When I don’t hear a response, I jog up the steps. They should be back from school by now, it’s nearly time for dinner. I hear a commotion coming from my and Lucy’s room. If it’s Edmund and Eustace going at it again I might just scream and I’m supposed to be the more patient older sibling! 

I swing open the door to find Eustace and Edmund fighting. However, my attention is stolen by Lucy standing in front of a picture frame spewing water. 

“What have you three done?!” I rush into the room. 

“It wasn’t us!” Lucy explains, grinning brightly. 

I glance between my sister and the ocean painting frantically. “You mean-” 

Narnia. Caspian. 

Eustace and Edmund finally notice the water swallowing up the room. Edmund hurries over to us. Based on his grin, he’s thinking what we are too. Eustace screams and goes to rip the frame off the wall. 

“I’m just going to smash it!” He threatens. 

“No!” My siblings and I struggle with our cousin for the frame. 

The ice-cold water fills the room in a matter of seconds. We each struggle to kick ourselves to the surface as the furniture of the room starts to float. I close my eyes, afraid of what may happen. I keep kicking to the surface, in the need of air. When I finally reach the top after what feels like an eternity, I take in a deep breath. 

“Swim!” Lucy shouts. “Eustace swim!” 

I snap open my eyes and a massive wooden ship is sailing toward us. I scream and Edmund grabs my arm to get me to start swimming. My brother and I swim like Olympians to get away from the path of the ship. 

“It’s Caspian!” Lucy yells enthused. “Guys, It’s Caspian!” 

Edmund and I halt immediately. Two men swim up and take each of us safely. 

“Caspian,” I repeat breathlessly, searching the surface for him. 

“You’re alright now,” the sailor assures me as he starts guiding me toward the ship. 

“Are we in Narnia?” Edmund asks one of the sailors helping us. 

“Yes, you’re in Narnia,” the man chuckles happily. 

After Edmund and I are brought up on the side of the ship, one of the sailors offers me his hand to help me on. I step onto the deck and immediately start scanning the many faces for the one I want to see most. 

“Y/N!” 

I spin around on my heels and am met with the raven-haired prince I’ve been longing to see. A bright smile appears across my lips as I run across the short distance. He opens his arms to me and I leap into them. He laughs deeply, twirling me around playfully. His embrace is warm and strong, just as I remember. Oh, how I’ve missed him. He lowers me to the deck, but his hands remain on my waist. 

“How long has it been for you?” He checks instantly. 

“A year and you?!”

I can’t hide my worry that it’s been forever. Granted, he looks far too good for it to have been too long. He looks practically the same except for the facial hair. 

“Three years,” he smiles and relief rushes over me. 

“Thank heavens it wasn’t over a thousand again,” I sigh, laughing lightly. 

“You still are older though...” he sucks in air sharply between his teeth. 

“Oh stop it!” I swat his arm playfully. 

“Beautiful as ever I might add,” he compliments and leans in to plant a kiss on my forehead. 

“Caspian!” Ed interrupts joyfully. 

“Edmund!” 

Caspian and Edmund embrace and Lucy comes to join us. Our attention is stolen when Eustace lands on deck failing. 

“Get this rat off of me!” He screams. 

A mouse comes leaping off Eustace and bouncing over to us. 

“Reepicheep!” Lucy gleams. 

“Good to see you again, Rep,” Ed greets. 

The mouse bows to the three of us. “Your Majesties, always a pleasure.” 

Caspian comes up behind me and drapes a blanket over my shoulders. I thank him quietly and wrap the fabric around myself. His hands remain on my shoulders as we watch my cousin go mad. 

“Where in the blazes am I?!” Eustace fusses. 

“You’re on the Dawn Treader! The greatest ship in all of Narnia!” A minotaur announces to Eustace. 

The boy faints instantly, making everyone on the crew laugh, including Caspian and Edmund. Lucy ridicules them. 

“Was it something I said?” The minotaur asks us. 

“No, don’t take it personally. He’s just never been to Narnia,” I explain kindly. “In our world, there aren’t any minotaur.” 

“Oh, interesting,” the creature replies with a shrug. 

Caspian slips his arm around my waist and appears at my side. “See to him will you?” He asks of the sailor. 

“Right away, Your Majesty,” the minotaur bows. 

Caspian then jogs off to the stairs leading up to the helm of the ship. 

“Gentlemen!” Caspian gathers everyone’s attention. “Behold our castaways! Edmund the Just, Lucy the Valiant, and Y/N the Gracious! High King and Queens of Narnia!” 

Each of the sailors gets down on one knee and bow their heads. My brother, sister, and I can’t help but smile. 

Caspian hurries back down and takes my hand to guide all of us inside. “Come! Let’s get you changed and I can show around!” _________________________________________ As the sun starts to set on the horizon, I watch over the side of the ship as the waves hit against the wood. Dolphins play in them, dancing along with the white foam. It reminds me of when I would watch them at sunrise when we lived in Cair Paravel. 

A pair of arms snake around my torso and bring me into their chest. I rest my head back against Caspian and slip my arms over his. He plants a kiss to my temple gently. For a year I’ve missed this. The last time we were in Narnia, Caspian and I hardly had any time after the revolution to settle. It came as a shock when Peter announced we would be returning home. I wasn’t ready to go and Caspian wasn’t ready to say goodbye. It took every ounce of willpower to leave. 

“I have a surprise for you,” Caspian whispers in my ear. 

“Oh do you?” I snicker. 

“Close your eyes,” he instructs with a nod.

Reluctantly, I close my eyes and hold out my hands. I feel a familiar leather sheath and strap brush against my palm as Caspian lowers the object into my hands slowly. 

“Okay, open!” Caspian gleams. 

My eyes flicker open and sure enough, it’s my old weapon gear. “My dual-swords!” 

“I’ve kept them safe since you’ve been gone!” Caspian tells me. 

Over the moon, I spin on my heels and pull him into a hug. I can’t believe he’s kept them with him after all this time and even took the liberty of taking them on the voyage. His arms linger around me and I ponder the feeling. 

“I’ve missed you,” he whispers against my shoulder. 

“Me too,” I mutter solely, resting my cheek against his chest. 

Caspian tightens his embrace upon hearing my words. Three years have gone by for him. A year was long enough to feel like a lifetime to me. 

“So Caspian-” Edmund voices, making Caspian and I part. I place my weapons down on a barrel and lean against the rail behind me. Edmund doesn’t notice my glaring at him for interrupting. “-have you managed to find yourself a queen in the three years we’ve been away?” Edmund asks, amused. 

“Oh uh...” Caspian stammers nervously. 

My lips part as I stare at my brother dumbfounded. “Ed-” 

“No, none to compare to your sister,” Caspian answers to my surprise. 

“Ew,” Edmund grimaces in disgust and cowers off somewhere. 

I turn to Caspian in awe. “Do you really mean that?”

“Every word,” he whispers, reaching up and caressing my cheek. 

I lean into his touch as my eyes fall shut with immense peace. A sense of peace I haven’t felt in over a year. 

“I’ve counted the days, waiting for your return. I knew there was a chance it may never happen, but I couldn’t give up hope. I still love you, Y/N,” he confesses and I open my eyes. “If not more than I did when you left.” 

I step forward, leaning into my press my lips to his softly. The sensation is exactly as I remember, if not better than before. I part from him for a second, resting my forehead against his. Our eyes meet, my Y/E/C ones, and his jet black ones that I adore so much. The eyes I’ve dreamt about each night for the past year. 

“I love you too, Caspian,” I whisper. 

He smiles, releasing a breathless laugh of joy and takes a step back. His hands take both of mine and he rubs them with his thumbs softly. “I... I know you’ve never had a choice and I know I’m asking a lot of you but... will you stay here in Narnia... with me?” 

My eyes search his face at a rapid rate. Is he truly asking me this? I take a moment to consider what he’s really asking me. I would be leaving behind my world forever. I may never see my family again. After all, this could be the last time we ever come back to Narnia. 

“And I know that would mean asking you another question,” he continues. “I have something else for you.” He steps back and lowers himself to one knee. 

My lips part as I start to comprehend what’s happening. The crew takes notices and starts to gather, along with Edmund and Lucy. 

Caspian reaches into his pocket and a reveals a gold floral engraved ring in his palm. “It was my mother’s. I’ve kept it with me, waiting for you to return. I don’t wish to bombard you. I know I’m asking you to make an impossible decision and-”  

“Yes,” I answer. 

“Yes?!” He repeats, rising from his position. 

I laugh, “Yes! Yes, Caspian I will marry you!” 

He wraps his arms around me and lifts me off the deck. “Oh, I love you so much, Y/N!” Above him, I lower my head and bring my lips to his. 

Instantly in my heart, I can feel that my fate was always meant to be forever with Caspian in Narnia.

Masterlist

[distant-rose]

Hey so, care to share any of the mood boards and /or playlists that I'm 99% sure you have your your next gen marvel universe?

Okay, I know you sent this like yesterday morning, but you’re asking for me to share a piece of a universe that @justanotherwannabeclassic​ and I have been developing since…July? Which is insane but I made my first post about our Earth-6828 universe on the 26th July 2019. We have an estimated ninety-three characters for this universe that categorized as a next generation or involved in the next generation narrative. Ninety-three characters. Nine. Three. It’s insane. WE’RE INSANE. We created an entire universe over the course of a half year.

Anyway, with that many characters, I don’t think it’s possible to share everything on the internet involving them. So, I’m gonna focus on the OG team - the Daughters of Liberty. They’re the catalyst for Earth-6828 universe and they’re eleven women from different backgrounds and skill sets. We deliberately made a all-female team that’s diverse and we really have fun playing with them. So I’ll share some mood boards and playlists that I made for them.

NOTE: Please note that when I make playlists, I’m a weirdo with very specific rules. I make playlists made of songs sung by the genre of music I think the character would listen to, in the gender they identify with and I only do one song per artist. So, a character like Bekka who likes old school country and jazz, she’s a big fan of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis and Wendy Nguyen who is folksy really likes the Lumineers and the Mountain Goats but neither of those artists are featured on those lists because both characters are female and I like to think of the songs as being from their perspective. It’s really weird but I feel the need to make the disclosure.

I’m gonna put this under the cut because this is gonna be LOOOOONG. Also, if you’re interested in other characters and nuances of the universe, you’re also welcome to hit up not just me but also Shea because she’s done some amazing work too.

Valeria “Val” Richards

Val Richards is an Earth-616 canon character and the daughter of Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) and Susan Storm (Invisible Woman). She’s the smartest woman in the world and holds more degrees than she knows what to do with. She’s constantly working on a new degree and really hates the amount of condescension she gets sometimes from people who don’t believe how smart she is and underestimate her. It’s half the reason she’s involved with the team - she wanted to show that she and the women she works with shouldn’t be underestimated. She’s the team coordinator and is the most tech savvy. She’s known for drinking her weight in coffee, listening to Led Zeppelin on full blast and always having her hands in one project or another. She has a habit of never going to bed because she’s constantly involving herself in a project and because she’s constantly blasting music, her hearing isn’t always the best. She constantly has people repeat things since she often can’t hear them. Though she’s not involved with the family business, she’s got a great relationship with her parents and especially her brother, Franklin, who is without a doubt her hero. She’s a part of the LONGEST slowburn I’ve ever written and it took SIX YEARS for her and the team empath Wendy to get together. 

Val’s Playlist: Classic and Hard Rock, this is the type of music that Val generally listens to when she’s in the lab. It features Lita Ford, Pat Benator, Joan Jett and The Pretty Reckless. I think shows a lot of her attitude and some of her anger.

Eleanor “El” Rogers

El Rogers is an Earth-85826 canon character and the daughter of Steve Rogers (Captain America) and Sharon Carter (Agent 13). She is a professionally trained spy and is a specialist in various forms of combat. Though she offered the mantle of Captain America to Dani Cage, she is very proud of her father’s legacy and sometimes nags Dani on how she should handle things, which sometimes leads to some contention between the two. Prior to the starting the Daughters of Liberty with Val Richards, she was a SHIELD agent and often known as “Espionage Barbie.” Growing up in the spotlight, she’s a gifted and knowledgeable public relations specialist and has more than a few headaches trying to manage this team and the array of personalities she deals with. Despite her PR skills, she’s naturally more introverted and prefers to spend her time with her close friends and working on her art. Though she’s more like her mother, she did inherit Steve’s sense of justice and morals while also keeping questionable company seeing that she often finds herself in some morally grey company, namely a couple of rebellious Southern mutants and three SHIELD trained professional killers. Most people often see El as perfect but she is riddled with anxiety and constantly beats herself up for not living up to people’s expectations. Before her father’s death, she was seen as very upbeat and friendly, but has been much more subdued and even more argumentative. She’s incredibly stubborn, which often gets her into epic fights with Dani and Meredith, as well as the leaders of the Avengers (Sonny Stark) and X-Men (Olivier LeBeau).

El’s Playlist: El is very much a pop music kinda girl, but her playlist comes with a bit of a twist of her anxieties, depression and desires to live up to that expectations that have been put on her. It features Taylor Swift, Elle King, Demi Lovato and Ruelle.

Danielle “Dani” Cage

Dani Cage is an Earth-616 canon character and the daughter of Luke Cage (Power Man) and Jessica Jones (Jewel). She’s the current Captain America and it’s a job she’s very ambivalent about because as much as she is honored by being bestowed the title, it comes with a lot of pressure and criticism which Dani is not great with. Due to her super strength and invulnerability, she rarely uses the iconic Captain America shield which is one of the many things she gets criticized for by El. Like her parents, Dani is tough as nails, a little rough around the edges and swears like it was its her job. Despite her short fuse, Dani has the biggest heart of them all and tends to come from a place of compassion rather than a place of judgment. This doesn’t stop her from being one of the sassiest members of the Daughters of Liberty however. When she’s not shouldering her duties as Captain America, Dani is working out her frustrations in the gym through boxing and acting as a volunteer for the Harlem Boys and Girls’ Club. Dani is a creature of habit. She goes to the same gym that she’s gone to since she was a little girl despite having a gym in HQ, she eats the same thing for breakfast and orders the same thing whenever she goes out for dinner. Her teammates often make fun of her because of this habit, but with all the stress in her life, she clings to these habits as a source of comfort and normalcy. Dani is best friends and incredibly close to Lucy Rand, who is about 85% of her impulse control. Sometimes the only thing keeping Dani from punching out her teammates and the occasional reporter is Lucy.

Dani’s Playlist: Her playlist is the perfect workout playlist because it’s intense and high energy R&B, Hip-Hop and Rap songs. It’s an ode to black excellence and being unapologetically awesome. It features Beyonce, Cardi B, Lizzo and Salt-N-Pepa.

Lucy Rand

Lucy Rand is an Earth-21722 canon character and the daughter of Danny Rand (Iron Fist) and Misty Knight. She’s a highly skilled martial artist and gifted detective. While Val might be the most intelligent person in the world, Lucy is skilled at picking up social and culture nuances quickly and reading people despite not having empathy and psychic abilities. Despite having great tragedy in her life and losing her parents at a young age, she’s a very positive person who tends to do her best to make any difficult situation manageable. Lucy’s anger rarely comes out but when it does, it usually is when people disregard the sacrifice her parents made. Though privately, she’s very upset with them for not being there for the major events in her life and though Luke Cage and Jessica Jones had a big hand in raising her, they are not her parents. She has a permanent job at handling Dani’s short fuse but she wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Like Dani, Lucy is very involved the community, but she has a lot of other outlets including knitting hats and managing the Instagram of her favorite little gremlin - her hairless cat Dobby. Lucy is the type of person who tends to put the focus on everyone but herself, something that the team does their best to curb. Very rarely is Lucy in any photos, mainly because she’s normally the one taking them. While she’s not field commander like Dani and El, she’s certainly the team negotiator when it comes to arguments. Needless to say with the amount of big personalities on the team, there is a fair share of fights she needs to break up and while Dani might be her best friend, Lucy’s most trusted companion is her jumbo sized bottle of migraine reliever pills. 

Lucy’s Playlist: Like Dani’s playlist, Lucy’s playlist features a lot of black excellence, but completely genre. Like Lucy herself, it’s a playlist with a lot of Soul and with a focus on fluidity rather than high energy. It features Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Whitney Houston and Ari Lennox.

Rebecca “Bekka” LeBeau

Bekka LeBeau is an Earth-41001 canon character and the daughter of Remy LeBeau (Gambit) and Anna-Marie LeBeau (Rogue). She inherited her father’s kinetic manipulation and her mother’s enhanced durability and flight. A complete Daddy’s Girl, she’s an incredibly gifted thief and has a penchant for using her abilities to blow shit up. However, instead of using playing cards, Bekka’s weapon of choice is…random objects from the dollar store? Don’t be surprised to see this chick throws weaponized plastic army men or marbles at your face. Despite her charisma, revolving door of men and natural extroversion, Bekka rarely opens up to people nor does she let people get close to her. This is a result of a very traumatic event in her childhood that completely changed both of her and older brother’s lives and caused her mutation to develop early at the age of eight. Due to this, she often suffers from nightmares and can be seen putting her absurdly gifted baking skills to work in the middle of the night. She’s the unofficial chef of the team and has introduced the team to a lot of Cajun cuisine. She’s a proud New Orleans girl and prepared to stomp your Southern stereotypes out of you. A running gag with Bekka is that despite being a very observant person, she is a penchant for refusing to see what’s right in front of her if she doesn’t want to see it such as her brother and best friend hooking up or that a certain ginger SHIELD agent is madly in love with her.

Bekka’s Playlist: Like Bekka herself, her playlist is a mixture of old school, new old and a little bit of subtle darkness. It has a mixture of Old School jazz, Classic Country and Southern Rock. It features Billie Holiday, Delta Rae, Dolly Parton and Gin Wigmore.

May “Mayday” Parker

Mayday Parker is an Earth-982 canon character and the daughter of Peter Parker (Spider-Man) and Mary Jane Watson. She inherited Peter’s enhanced physiology and wall-crawling abilities. While Mayday has her father’s intelligence, smart mouth and penchant for science, she’s more of an athlete than a nerd. She’s an avid lover of basketball and even played two years of Division Three basketball at Empire State University. She is a very frustrated New York Knicks and New York Mets fan and is often antagonized by Dani Cage, who has a tendency to be a very obnoxious Yankees fan. Though Mayday has a spot on the Daughters of Liberty team and often works outside the team as a research chemist, she has struggled with her identity since she stopped playing basketball. While she is currently Spider-Girl, she always views it more as her continuing her father’s work rather it being her own thing. Despite being incredibly bright and formidable fighter, Mayday also struggles with a lack of confidence and anxiety. She is often makes sarcastic jokes and often at her own expense. Mayday is loyal friend and often agonizes over the fact her superhero duties sometimes make her break her promises to her friends and family. However, she’s found a good support system in her girlfriend Nancy Lu, a telekinetic member of the X-Men and in her mentor, Val Richards. Though she is seven years older, Mayday often mothers her younger sister Annie, whom she sees as reckless and impulsive.

Mayday’s Playlist: This playlist is a mixture of Alternative and Rock music. It has a lot of songs that deal with self-esteem and discovering who are you is enough. It features Paramore, Avril Lavigne, Halsey and P!nk.

Anne “Annie” Parker 

Annie Parker is Earth-18119 canon character and the daughter of Peter Parker (Spider-Man) and Mary Jane Watson. Like her sister, she inherited her father’s enhanced physiology and wall-crawling abilities but that’s where their similarities end. Like her mother, Annie is an incredibly outgoing personality. With her love for pink, glitter and partying, most people look at Annie and think of her nothing more than an empty-headed party girl who does stupid shit and has nothing to add to the conversation. Wrong! Annie has one of the world’s highest IQs and is usually the smartest person in the room. She’s gifted in both sciences and mathematics. At the start of the story, she’s a student at Empire State University and is pursuing two degrees in Mathematics and Physics. She’s got an endemic memory which helps her manage her schoolwork, hero work and social life. Annie wasn’t initially invited to be a part of the team, but Mayday convinced Val and El to bring her on in hopes of curbing Annie’s partying. She’s a bit of hedonist and often does things to an excess. Since she was a child, Annie has been known for her bubbly attitude and infectiously positive attitude. This was developed at a young age as she rarely saw her older sister happy (not understanding that her sister suffered from depression and anxiety) and she made it her personal mission to make Mayday smile. Annie is a fearless girl with a big heart who doesn’t often think before putting herself in harm’s way, which unknowing stresses out her older sister more.

Annie’s Playlist: This playlist features a lot of Pop, Hip-Hop and Dance music. It’s high energy, upbeat and makes you just want to have a good time. Honestly, a good chunk of these songs have featured on RuPaul’s Drag Race as Lip Sync for your life songs. (Annie is a massive RuPaul fan). It features Arianna Grande, Britney Spears, Rihanna and Tove Lo.

Meredith “Mere” Pryde

Meredith Pryde is an Earth-41001 canon character and the daughter of Piotr Rasputin (Colossus) and Kitty Pryde (Shadow Cat). She inherited her mother’s phasing power, tech skills and ability to make epic callouts. She inherited almost nothing from her father, whom she doesn’t really remember since he died when she was young. She was raised mainly by her mother and her aunt Illyana Rasputin. Meredith joined the Daughters of Liberty so she didn’t have to deal with her brother Cameron second-guessing all of her choices and telling her to calm down. When Meredith sees injustice, she does her best to correct the situation and she doesn’t care who she has to call out. When she’s not doing work for the Daughters of Liberty, Meredith is active activist who is involved in various projects but especially on mutants’ rights. She attends and supports every march she can and her instagram is full of all her favorite protest and march signs that she sees. Aside from being involved in activism, Meredith’s second favorite activity is trolling her teammates, especially those who tend to be nonplussed about things. She’s notorious for her pranks and for playfully flirting with her teammates’ siblings to make them uncomfortable, namely Bekka. While she’s a notorious flirt, she has no interest in relationships and will punch you in the face if you ask her if she has a boyfriend or girlfriend. Though she is involved with the Daughters of Liberty and various movements, Meredith often suffers from loneliness because she doesn’t have a lot of time for herself and fostering her friendships. She’s every girl’s friend, but no one’s best friend. 

Meredith’s Playlist: This playlist highlights Meredith’s confidence and unapologetic nature. She is who she is, and you can take it or leave it. It’s an eclectic list which has mixture of Pop Rock, Pop, Alternative and R&B music. It features Superchick, Billie Eilish, Lily Allen and Icona Pop.

Wendy Nguyen

Wendy Nguyen is a character Shea and I made up, she is not related to anyone. Shocker. She’s a licensed therapist who often treats other superheroes and was actually assigned to El Rogers after the death of her father. She is an empath who is capable of sensing people’s emotions and when she touches them, she gets not only your emotions but your thoughts and even your memories. Her senses are incredibly strong and she often cannot be in the same room when someone is feeling things a bit too strongly, particularly her teammate Maya Ayala during the team’s first year together. Because she feels people’s emotions so strongly, Wendy is often confused whose emotions she is feeling - hers or someone else’s. This is one of the reasons it took her so long for her to admit her feelings for Val. Wendy is often seen as a quiet and thoughtful person who does her best to make her teammates confront their feelings for both her sake and theirs. She has an affinity for tea and has the world’s most absurd tea cabinet which is filled with tea from all over the world from her many travels. She also as an affinity for butterflies, which she views as being similar to human emotions - intense, sometimes beautiful but fleeting and fragile. Wendy often wears gloves to keep herself from accidentally touching others and taking their thoughts and memories without their permission. The ethics of her ability sometimes is a struggle for her since while they allow her to be good at job, however she feels them without control or consent from others. She rarely goes out with her friends in public areas mainly because being around so many people who are feeling a variety emotions is too much for her and causes her to have splitting headaches.

Wendy’s Playlist: Best described as folksy and acoustic. Wendy prefers most chilled out music because feeling others’ emotions can be very overwhelming. However, there’s a range of emotion here because she feels a lot. It features Of Monsters and Men, Regina Spektor, Jolie Holland and Hannah Connelly.

Yasmin “Yas” Khan

Yasmin Khan is a character Shea and I made up, she’s the niece of Kamala Khan (Miss Marvel). Like her aunt, Yasmin has Inhuman heritage alongside holding Pakistani and African heritages from her parents, Aamir and Tyesha. She was exposed to the Terrigen Mists and gained abilities similar to her father in which she can create psychic force fields, however she also has telekinesis and touch-telepathy. Yasmin is a practicing Muslim and while most of the women don’t wear hijabs nor expect her to wear one, she often feels to try and normalize Muslim practices in a society that is suspicious and often hateful towards her culture. She likes to joke that it covers up her bad hair days. Yasmin loves fashion and color, and though she is often the most modest wearing person in the room, she is definitely the most colorful and enjoys outrageous patterns. She is a big lover of pop culture and can often be seen playing Pokemon Go and watching shows on Crunchy Roll on her phone. She has a massive sweet tooth and can be seen in the kitchens watching Bekka bake in hopes of being allowed to have a bite. Though she doesn’t drink, she is best friends with Annie and often accompanies her on nights out and makes sure her friend doesn’t get into any trouble. Yasmin is one of the few people who isn’t out with her personal identity and this is mainly due to her fear of people hurting her family due to the rampant Muslim prejudice in the United States. As one of the youngest members of the team, her teammates are incredibly protective of her and have actually a designated plan ready to cheer her up if they ever see Yasmin is upset, which is called Operation: Yas Smiles. 

Yas’s Playlist: Like Meredith, Yap’s playlist is very colorful and has a diverse range of generics from R&B to Soul and Rap. It has a range of emotions since while Yas is a very cheerful person and absolute sweetheart, there’s some anger there at how she and other Muslims are treated. It features Mona Haydar, SassyBlack, Daya and Azealia Banks.

Maya Ayala

Maya Ayala is a character Shea and I made up, she’s the daughter of Hector Ayala (White Tiger) and the niece of Ava Ayala (White Tiger). Nothing happy ever happens to the Ayala family and unfortunately that saga continues with Maya, who witnessed her entire family and boyfriend being murdered in front of her during a shoot out in the Bronx. She took up the mantle of White Tiger and has been on a search to find their murderer. Before becoming the current incarnation of the White Tiger, Maya was a former competitive gymnast who was almost on the United States Olympic team and was working as a gymnastics coach. However, since the incident, she’s put all of her energy into getting revenge for her family and joined the Daughters of Liberty to honor her aunt and to use her resources to get justice. While her focus is on revenge, her greatest desire is to see her family and her boyfriend again. At the beginning, she kept herself from her teammates because she didn’t want to get attached, but after awhile, she became very close with Wendy, Val, Dani and Lucy. Maya has a secret love for telenovelas which she tries to keep quiet because she’s afraid of being seen as stereotypical. Despite this, she’s very proud Latina and gets pissed off when people write her off as “Mexican” or “foreign,” especially since her family hails from Puerto Rico and she’s just as American as anyone else. However, occasionally she does share her culture with the others, and occasionally makes arroz con gandules and pollo guisado with Bekka for the team. 

Maya’s Playlist: This is list is a mixture of Latin Pop, Alternative and R&B. It holds a mixture of Maya before the loss of her family and after. A lot of the latin pop are from gymnastic routines she would create. However, there’s also a lot of anger and sadness here, which is understandable. It features Audri Nix, Ciara, Lana Del Rey and Skylar Grey.

[newagesispage]

                                                                            JUNE    2020

PAGE RIB

FX and Ryan Murphy will bring us season 10 of American Horror Story next year. The cast includes Mac Culkin, Kathy Bates, Sarah Paulson, Evan peters, Billie Lourd, Lily Rabe and Finn Wittrock. There will also be a spinoff called, wait for it, American Horror Stories. Woo Hoo!!

*****

Reno 911 is back

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I happen to have a clementine in my butt. –Jimmy Kimmel

*****

NASA got their dragon launch. It is unfortunate that they had to compete with the current cycle.

*****

Sam Springsteen (son of Patti and Bruce) has been sworn in as a Jersey City firefighter.

*****

Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood is great. I don’t know how to feel about the fast and the loose and the nice made up endings like Once upon a time in Hollywood.  Will this be a trend??** Another great one on Netflix is, Have a good trip.

*****

Are there biopics in the works for Michael and Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, the Bee Gees and Bowie?? That is the word.

*****

Days alert: Look for Lani to become pregnant. Eli and Justin are both thinking marriage. Claire is back which will bring Shawn and Belle back. Gabi may be kidnapped. Word is that July will have a wedding every week that will lead to a funeral.  Allie Horton is all grown up and heading back with a secret. Will she be like Mom, Sami?? Brady thinks that ruining Titan will get back at Victor. Sonny and Will may get a chance at another child. Eve may be back later in the summer. And, C’mon Xander, do something wonderful to get your woman back. Lucas may be on the way back and Orpheus is leaving. ** Judi Evans (Adrienne) had a serious horseback riding accident on May 16. She had broken ribs, a collapsed lung and 2 chipped vertebrae. The good news was in the hospital they discovered a blood clot so the whole thing saved her life.

*****

Morton Buildings is being sued by 2 women for harassment and discrimination. One incident claims an employee said, “God created women by lining up all the men and castrating the stupid ones.” Another lawsuit was filed in 2009.**Thanks for the tip, Di.

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If you expect elementary school children to endure the trauma of active shooter drills for your freedoms, you can wear a mask to Costco. –Sara Elizabeth Dill

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House republicans have sued Pelosi to block proxy voting.

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Seth Rogan, Steve Carell and Ben Schwartz are donating funds to bailout Minneapolis protestors after the death of George Floyd.** The country has been turned upside down as another cop kills another black man. No need to rehash, we have all seen it. I wonder if those four horrible cops are proud of what they have done to their city. Could we finally have a tipping point in this time when racism is spotlighted with our racist President? After many incidents in just the past couple of weeks and everyone on edge with coronavirus, it has boiled over. Scary Clown threatens to start shooting as Minneapolis burns down. Burn down a police station, get a cop arrested (finally)? Seems worth it to me. The way the killer looked into the camera as if he was just so proud is gonna stick with us as it should.  ** A CNN crew were arrested live on the air but released later after Jeff Zucker spoke to Gov. Walz.**  Liberate Minnesota was the Trump tweet, well, they are working on it.** I am hearing people saying in all sincerity lately that it is time for the humans to go, we are ruining each other and the planet.

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If you have not seen the Killer Mike speech from Atlanta, you need to check it out.** Netflix, Hulu and Paramount are taking a stand and showing support for the Black lives matter movement.

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John Cusack put out video of police coming at him with batons and pepper sprayed him as he protested in Chicago. More than 1000 were arrested and it continues.** In Flint, Sheriff Chris Swanson and other police put down helmets and joined the protestors. Police in Schenectady took a knee and joined the march. The behavior is spreading and look what a difference it makes, could they be starting to get it?

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Never thought I’d say this but in light of everything that is happening, the DNC made a big mistake in not backing Berne Sanders. –Pete Buttigieg ** Ok, first, of course he is right but you helped set this all in motion. It is a bit late for that …or is it? Biden is not the OFFICIAL nom, the deal is not done yet. Will Bernie jump back in the race?? Perhaps we will soon see BERNE FOR PRESIDENT again.

*****

American carnage was a self -fulfilling prophecy, alas. –Susan Glasser

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Scary Clown 45 has designated Antifa a terrorist organization. ** There is no legal authority for designating a domestic group, any such designation would raise significant concerns. –ACLU

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In any season, police violence is an injustice, but its harm is elevated amidst the remarkable stress people are facing amidst covid-19. Even now, there is evidence of excessive police initiated force and unwarranted shootings of civilians, some of which have been fatal. –American Medical Association.

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Washington Week had a great discussion about how all the ills in US history have played out in 2020. Impeachment, pandemic, depression and civil unrest are all here at once.

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Word is that Trevor Noah has been proven much more popular than the other late night hosts since they have been at home.

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I predict the picture of the upside down flag with the backdrop of the burning liquor store will be the lasting image of the Trump Presidency.

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This is the Presidency George Wallace never had. –Max Boot

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Spanish flu, Polio, Aids, Covid-19: Why don’t people get any smarter? The masses (and sometimes those in charge) can get it wrong over and over again. From Dr.? Phil and Dr Oz and their cavalier attitude toward death to Rosie wanting her son to take a leave of absence from the grocery store, we just do not learn. Even before that, I can’t forget the woman who wanted to change her vote after she found out Buttigieg was married to a man. Is she even a dem? Do your research people! Respect others, people!! Have compassion, stop being so selfish and use your brains!!** Puerto Rico was a pre curser to the pandemic response.

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Amy Cooper Chris Cooper? WTF? Another liberal who is not really liberal.

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Crime in general is down and police shootings are up. And yes, now the opportunists are out of control and anger is boiling over but protests against police brutality causing police brutality is WRONG!

*****

Check out the book, What makes a marriage last, from Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue.

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Ben Taub, Barry Blitt and Colson Whitehead have won the Pulitzer Prize.

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Word is that Nick Cage will play Joe Exotic of Tiger King fame. Of course he will.

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I refuse to wear a mask because God did not have us born with one.- Nino Vitali** How many people have you heard say, “The President isn’t wearing a mask, so I don’t have to.”

*****

It looks like Apple will partner with Paramount for Scorsese’s adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon.

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Oh my: Scary Clown is having a twitter feud with twitter!  He has to, of course, lash out and now signs an executive order targeting social media. He is going on about section 230 which gives immunity to social media companies against being sued over content.  It could curb liability protection. Experts say it will only encourage lawsuits because he does not want to be edited.

*****

If Native American tribes were counted as states, the five most infected states in the US would all be native tribes. –Nicholas Kristof

*****

Did ya see that Jeff Epstein doc from James Patterson. It is lays blame in all directions. Why does it seem like all these old guys on there with all that money have such yellow teeth?

*****

Lindsey Graham is urging Federal judges in their mid to late 60’s to step down so they can fill the spots with republicans.

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Richard McGuire tried to live at Disney World in a zoological park that was closed down.

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Caterpillar, Levi, Black and Decker and others have cut jobs but gave millions to shareholders.

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Axl Rose and Steve Mnuchin had a twitter feud.

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China announced plans to introduce a National Security law in Hong Kong. The law enables mainland Chinese National security agencies to operate in the city for the first time. Using a rarely used constitutional method, they bypassed Hong Kong legislature. Since the former British colony became a semi-autonomous region of China more than 20 years ago, they have manages its own affairs. The law will affect media, education, politics and international business. Many acts will now be criminalized. Hong Kong is party to international treaties guaranteeing civil liberties that China is not. The U.S. is urging Bejing to reconsider. Pro- democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong were tear gassed as they yelled, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.”

*****

The Michael Flynn charges were dropped.

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Holyoke soldier’s home in Massachusetts lost 70 souls to Coronavirus. AP photographer David Goldman got a projector and cast big pictures the vets onto the homes of loved ones. Each one had a story including one vet who was sent to Nuremberg to guard Nazis. He claimed to have filled Hermann Goring’s glass with toilet water.

*****

The swimming Dinosaur, Spinosaurus has been getting a lot of attention.  The Sahara desert which was once massive rivers kept the first intact aquatic dinosaur.  With a snout, teeth and jaw like a croc, it is so far the only known kind of dinosaur that lived in the water.  The 50 foot long bizarre fin-like tail is like a giant paddle.  Paleontologists encourage others to have a look at other fossils to see if there are more.

*****

Octavia Spencer is said to have been telling everyone she is a year younger than she is. She is turning 50.

*****

The $69 million ventilator scam. Really? The White House heard from a guy who told them he could supply the product so the WH told NY to order them and stood behind the guy but it was a scam. Scary Clown sure loves his shady people, intentional or not.** A Florida woman, Rebecca Jones claims that she was asked to fudge the numbers to make reopening look better. ** Georgia moved their dates around on a graph to make their cases seem flattened. ** For 17 months, Florida investigated voter fraud for Trump and Gov. Scott. They found NOTHING!!

*****

Amazon stock price is up 25% yet they have become notorious for the terrible way they treat their workers. Bezos is set to become a trillionaire.

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We have to remember that order comes from chaos. True enhancements can come from large scale crisis. What will we learn from this one? This is a warning!!** Universal health care? No more buffets? ** Prices will probably go up everywhere what with the closings and all the extra cleaning. I hope this means that hotel bedspreads will be cleaned after every stay.  It looks like there may be no cocktails or food on planes.

*****

Take a virtual tour of the statue of liberty. All the fun without all the swaying.

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Local PBS stations are making it easier to learn. Students will be able to put on a channel for lessons that does not need cable or internet. Woo Hoo!!

*****

Insiders say that Trump threatened to sue his campaign manager because he did not agree with his assessment and the poll numbers in a 2 day rant.** Just one more example of Scary Clown double talk. Then: Less testing, less positives. Now: So much testing is a badge of honor.**Doctors without Borders are now here, not the third world countries that they usually help, it is US.

*****

Haven’t we had enough of powerful men being accused? A female Dem candidate would have been nice and Bernie did not seem to have any baggage that way either.

*****

Will the Senate see fit to ok some more stimulus $? 4 trillion to prop up Wall Street seems per the usual. Enough for them, let’s take care of those small businesses and those really in need.

*****

Thao and the get down stay down is one of the best in this internet entertainment era.

*****

Check out Stars in the House with Tony Shalhoub and others.

*****

The Detectorists on Acorn TV is a great little show!!

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Happy Day! There is a new season of At Home with Amy Sedaris!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*****

It looks like Pier 1 will permanently close as well as JC Penney, J Crew, Sears and Neiman Marcus.

*****

Check out the wonderful, This is about Humanity!!

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Have U seen the trailer for The King of Staten Island?? OMG Pete Davidson, Steve Buschemi and Marisa Tomei , just to name a few!! I can’t fucking wait!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*****

Bill Maher looked really high on his 5-22-20 show. This working from home makes him much more mellow!!

*****

3 Russian doctors treating coronavirus have fallen out of windows in about a weeks time.** Russia boasts that it has more ventilators per capita than the U.S. After they made fun of us, on May 22, the first shipment of U.S. ventilators headed to Russia. They are a gift from Trump and the U.S. taxpayers. –Julia Davis

*****

State Department Inspector General Steve Linick is out.  Was he investigating Pompeo?  Trump never knows anything about any of it. Why are all the protectors of the rule of law thrown out?  ** Was Pompeo throwing lavish foreign policy dinners with Reba, Dale Jr. and the owners of that horrid chicken sandwich place? ** The clean water rule has been suspended which cuts protections for most of the country’s wetlands.

*****

The market facilitation program has been helping small farmers over the last few years in a $28 billion bailout. Trump’s sanctions brought this on and the corona virus has made it worse.  Mostly the money has helped bankers and bigger farms. Much like the stimulus $ that was earmarked for small business, there are loopholes that screw up the ‘rules.’ The cap is not being followed like they may say because the $ is going to “investors” in the farm and often not the actual farmer who works on a smaller scale. A small farm run by family members may not get the bailout. It seems to be more important to get a good lawyer who can manipulate the paperwork.  Sad that taxpayer $ is used this way.

*****

Just in time, the Space Force flag and plans for the super duper missile have been unveiled. WTF??

*****

Paula Poundstone is a woman I knew I liked. She was recently talking about not liking couches. I thought I was the only one, People are always telling me how much they love their couches and I don’t get it.

*****

Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore are upset after Youtube pulled their doc, Planet of the Humans. After 8.3 million views, there was a copyright claim by Toby Smith of about 4 seconds of footage.  Now , this is not the first time that Moore has had problems with content in one of his movies.  Many have claimed there is a lot of fiction in this latest venture. I think I would just remove the possible copyright infringement and move on. It can now be seen on Vimeo.

A Florida law that restricts felon voting is found unconstitutional by a federal judge.** The RNC filed a lawsuit against California to stop mailing ballots to registered voters.

*****

R.I.P. Little Richard, Roy Horn, Jerry Stiller, Sam Lloyd, Ann Sullivan, Mike Cogswell, Michael Keenan, Shirley Knight, Irrfan Khan, Hana Kimura, Forrest Compton, Jimmy Cobb, George Floyd, Ken Osmomd, all the corona victims, Lynn Shelton, Richard Herd, Larry Kramer, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Anthony James, Fred Willard and Carolyn Busch.

[maswartz]

IN THE PROGRESSIVE COLLEGE TOWN where I live, one sees a lot of “Bernie” bumper stickers on a lot of Subarus. Probably these are remnants of 2016, when the Independent from Vermont masqueraded as a Democrat, dividing the party and hobbling Hillary Clinton’s campaign just enough to fuck up the final tally. Although I held with HRC then as now, I don’t begrudge anyone who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries four years ago, when we first became acquainted with the ugly font and awful shade of blue on his campaign merch. But to support him today, after Trump, after Mueller, is akin to insisting, on Christmas 2019, that despite ample evidence to the contrary, Michael Jackson is innocent, because you really dig Off the Wall.

“Don’t they know?” I scream when I see these Bernie stickers. “Don’t they realize who he really is?” Apparently not. But then, to them, and to most on what Sean Hannity might call the “radical left,” Bernie is not a person as much as an ideal: A sort of liberal Santa Claus who will come down our collective chimney to deliver free healthcare and free college, and, with the aid of his ineffable North Pole magic, break up the banks, slay the patriarchy, eliminate racism, end income inequality, and tax corporations into insolvency—all while raising the minimum wage for his workshop elves. How he plans to actually accomplish any of this he only hints at—Bernie rarely deigns to answer process questions and usually gets grouchy when pressed for details—but it all sounds so wonderful we want to believe, just as we every year insist that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, the flesh-and-blood Bernie Sanders, if elected, would not have the requisite power to fulfill his lofty promises—any more than the tipsy Macy’s Santa will leave the mall on a sleigh driven by flying reindeer. Bernie is a real person, and he is deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. He would be a horrible candidate in the general election—like, McGovern-in-’72-level bad—and, more urgently, his nomination would ensure that, whoever won, the White House remained in Russian hands.

The Bernie extolled by the bros is a myth, just like the Trump that MAGA adores—just like Neverland, and just like Santa Claus. We need to face some cold, hard truths, before Sanders scolds and finger-wags his way to a second term for Donald Trump. We cannot permit this egomaniacal fraud to spoil yet another election.

Bernie is a socialist—but of the Union of Soviet Socialists variety.

Hey, there’s a reason Santa Claus wears red!

Bernie is a self-styled “socialist” who has bought, hook line and sinker, the Stalinist propaganda about Marxism and the glories of the Soviet Union. This was understandable if you were Dalton Trumbo in 1947. After all, the governing philosophy of communism is “let’s share everything so there is no want,” which is kind of appealing, especially next to the “fuck you, pay me” mantra of unvarnished Trump-variety capitalism. Seven-plus decades later, alas, the naïveté borders on delusional.

From the Young Peoples Socialist League to his membership in the Liberty Union Party, which sought to nationalize (and not just “break up”) the banks, to his time at the Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, which extolled Stalin—who slaughtered more people than Hitler—as “Sun of the Nations,” to his hanging a Soviet flag in his Burlington mayoral office, Soviet boosterism is the thruline of Bernie's career.

Bernie took his wife to the Soviet Union for their honeymoon, as one does. For years, he extolled the virtues of the USSR. Rather than grok that it’s all KGB-fed propaganda and lies, he’s been a staunch Bolshevik apologist for his entire adult life.

I mean, the guy has a dacha, ffs.

Look, our healthcare system is flawed. I’d love some sort of universal coverage like they have in every other developed country. But the best person to promote the de facto nationalization of the healthcare system is not a Soviet apologist who once wanted to nationalize the banks, too.

Bernie is unpopular with Black voters.

To be fair, Sanders (likely) really does want equality and all those nice things he talks about. Good for him. The problem is that his vision of “socialist” utopia is absolutist and focuses too much on the (white, male) working class that he, like his beloved Marx, idolizes and idealizes.

Despite some high-profile Black supporters, Bernie remains unpopular with Black voters, particularly Black women. This, and not “the rigged DNC,” is why HRC kicked his ass in the primaries. Could it be that Black voters have made Bernie as a BS artist? Those are his initials, after all.

The failure of the United States to properly examine and make amends for slavery contributes mightily to the country’s enduring racism, on which MAGA feeds. Not to even discuss reparations is madness. Unsurprisingly, Bernie does not understand this:

Marcus H. Johnson@marcushjohnson

Bernie Sanders thinks reparations is "just writing a check" instead of a redress for state sanctioned terrorism, violence, and being shut out of the economic, political, and legal systems for 250+ years. How is reparations "just writing a check," and free college not?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar

Bernie Sanders on reparations on The View: "I think that right now our job is to address the crises facing the American people in our communities, and I think there are better ways to do that than just writing out a check." https://t.co/FXso34iSbs

March 1st 2019

470 Retweets1,065 Likes

To win the resounding victory necessary to defeat Trump and the Russian hackers threatening to sabotage yet another election, overwhelming African-American voter turnout is essential. Black voters are more likely to turn out in big numbers for Joe Biden—especially if he runs with Kamala Harris, as we K-Hivers hope—than yet another elderly New Yorker who makes pie-in-the-sky promises he can’t possibly keep.

Bernie is lazy.

Sanders spent the early part of his career flitting between low-paying odd jobs:

He bounced around for a few years, working stints in New York as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.

Then as now, he was more given to talking the talk than walking the walk. In 1970, the 30-year-old Liberty Union Party socialist was kicked out of a Vermont commune for not doing his share of the work. His days there were instead spent in “endless political discussion.”

Sanders’ idle chatter did not endear him with some of the commune’s residents, who did the backbreaking labor of running the place. [Kate] Daloz writes [in her history of the commune] that one resident, Craig, “resented feeling like he had to pull others out of Bernie’s orbit if any work was going to get accomplished that day.” Sanders was eventually asked to leave. 

Eventually, Bernie found a career that would allow him to talk a big game but accomplish precious little: politics. For the decades he’s been in Congress, his record is pretty scant. Seven bills in 28 years, including two that name post offices, is nothing to write home about (unless you’re writing home to one of those post offices)—although Sanders has been a quiet champion of gun rights for most of his Congressional career, as well as a dependable “nay” vote on Russian sanctions, so I guess there’s that.

But hey, I’m sure a guy who has avoided labor as assiduously as possible for 78 years will magically turn into a workaholic as an octogenarian. That heart attack no doubt jump-started his engines. Speaking of which…

Bernie is old, and he just had a heart attack.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t actually a heart attack. Maybe it was just a life-threatening cardiac issue that required emergency surgery. We don’t know, because Sanders has not yet released his medical report. But he has promised to do so, just as he promised to release his taxes and then waited a million years to make good. Will he bring the receipts before next week, as he said he would?

The Speaker's Basilisk⚖️@PelosiLegatus

Why hasn’t @BernieSanders released his medical records yet? He just has a heart attack three months ago, which he lied about. What is he hiding from the American people? Why is the press so afraid to dig into his dishonesty?

December 23rd 2019

173 Retweets444 Likes

Even if his medical report checks out, I mean…there’s ageism, and then there are actuarial tables. A President Sanders would turn eighty in 2021, his first year in office. That would make him the oldest first-term president by a significant margin. He can’t live forever; in that way, he’s not like Santa Claus.

Bernie is a misogynist.

That Bernie Sanders is some sort of radical feminist, a paradigm for how men should be in the post-Third-Wave world, is almost as ridiculous as his stubborn refusal to comb his hair.

Before he launched his political career, he was a deadbeat dad. Remember, Bernie was a graduate of the prestigious University of Chicago, in an era when college degrees were relatively rare. Instead of putting food on the table, he was running quixotic political campaigns as the standard-bearer of a barely functional party. As Spandan Chakrabarti writes:

In 1971, Vermont was debating a tenant’s rights bill. One of the testimonials to Vermont’s State Senate Judiciary Committee came from one Susan Mott of Burlington, who said the legislation did not go far enough in prohibiting discrimination against single mothers and recipients of welfare benefits. Mott had one child and was on welfare. That one child…was Levi Sanders, Bernie Sanders’ son. Which begs the question, why did Bernie Sanders’ (former?) girlfriend and his son have to be on welfare? Where was the University of Chicago graduate’s considerable marketable skills? What was 5-year-old Levi’s father doing that he couldn't afford to support his own child? It turns out he was too busy coming in third with single digit votes.

To be fair, Bernie did bring home a little bit of bacon writing stuff like this:

A man goes home and masturbates [to] his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.

A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes [about] being raped by 3 men simultaneously.

Even if those lines were intended as a provocative rhetorical flourish to be shot down later in the essay, I mean…what feminist ally would write something like that?

And then there’s the more recent sexual harassment issues that seem to be pervasive in his campaign offices. He missed one of the Russian sanction votes because he was busy dealing with it:

The only one to miss the vote was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. He was meeting with women who had accused his 2016 presidential campaign of sexual misconduct, his spokesman, Josh Miller-Lewis, told CNBC.

As if to confirm his misogynist bona fides, Sanders this month endorsed the candidacy of Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, no feminist ally—before the bad optics forced him to reverse course:

“As I said yesterday, Cenk has been a longtime fighter against the corrupt forces in our politics and he’s inspired people all across the country,” the Vermont senator said. “However, our movement is bigger than any one person. I hear my grassroots supporters who were frustrated and understand their concerns. Cenk today said he is rejecting all endorsements for his campaign, and I retract my endorsement.”

That Cenk is running for the California seat vacated by rising star Katie Hill, a victim of criminal revenge porn who was shamed into stepping down, makes the gaffe even worse.

Bernie is not a Democrat.

Of all the idiotic narratives spewed by the “Bernie bros” about 2016, the most asinine was that the process had to be rigged because the DNC clearly preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders. Um…why would it not? Just as a New York Yankees fan club would want its leader to be a ride-or-die Yankee fan rather than a waffler who rooted for either the Bronx Bombers or the Red Sox depending on which was doing better that year, so the Democratic National Committee wants an actual Democrat to be its nominee. Duh.

And this was not any nominee. HRC was practically funding the operation herself, to help with the down-ballot races Bernie could give a shit about. Anyone can scold the country about big banks and wage inequality, but to actually, you know, govern requires working well with other people, a skill that seems to have eluded Sanders for the last 30 years.

Alas, the incorrigible Senator has learned nothing from 2016. He’s still playing the hackneyed “rabble-rousing outsider” card:

The Hill@thehill

Sen. @BernieSanders: "We are going to take on the Democratic establishment."

December 22nd 2019

426 Retweets1,930 Likes

The election of 2020 is, or should be, a referendum on Trump. It’s not about taking on the Democrats. That sort of internecine divisiveness is exactly what Putin wants. Which makes perfect sense when we consider that…

Bernie is (at a minimum) a Useful Idiot for Putin.

The bots go on the offensive whenever I tweet that Bernie is a Useful Idiot for Russia. But he is Useful, in that he operates as a divisive force in the Democratic Party, which aids Putin. And he’s certainly an Idiot, in that he doesn't realize the damage he’s done. But does he really not know?

The Mueller Report makes it clear that Russian IC was helping the Sanders campaign. Either Bernie didn’t realize this, and is an idiot, or he did realize it and played along, and is a traitor. Either way, the guy who hired former Paul Manafort chum Tad Devine to run his campaign cannot be trusted with standing up to Putin and the powerful forces of transnational organized crime, no matter how passionate his anti-Wall Street screeds.

(Sidenote: Tad Devine is now peddling his Kremlin-y wares for Andrew Yang, which perhaps explains Yang’s recent remark that he is open to granting Donald Trump a pardon. This, needless to say, is disqualifying).

Put it this way: Are we sure that a Nominee Sanders—an almost-eighty-year-old who just had a heart attack—would not pick the Russophile cult member Tulsi Gabbard as his running mate? The “anti-anti-Trump Left,” as Jonathan Chait calls it, is alive and well, sharing, “in addition to enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, [a] deep skepticism of the Democratic Party’s mobilization against the president.” So: traitors, basically. Would not Sanders, if given the chance, throw meat to this rabid fan base, if only to generate more adulation? Do we really trust the judgment of the guy who can’t ensure that his own campaign headquarters is not a hostile work environment?

Bernie still, years after the fact, cannot understand that he contributed to HRC’s defeat—just as he can’t see that his ideas about the Soviet Union and communism have been debunked. He doesn’t have it in him to realize, much less admit, he was wrong. And why should he? As long as well-meaning people—especially young people; especially young women; especially pretty young women—keep “feeling the Bern,” he will continue to happily soak up the attention, like the insufferable narcissist he is. Why Millennials support the guy instead of OK-Boomering him to oblivion is a head-scratcher. Maybe it’s because he was born two months before Pearl Harbor and is therefore older than the Boomers?

Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. Repeat: Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. He’s an egomaniac who believes his own hype, like Trump. And like Trump, Bernie is selling snake oil; we just happen to like his brand of snake oil. He’s a bad mall Santa, promising everyone a pony, when all he can deliver is a lump of coal. And make no mistake: far from assuring a worker’s paradise, his nomination would bring about the end of the republic.

It’s not a “revolution.” It’s a con job. And it’s got the full support of the Russians.

[famous-aces]

Simone Weil

Who: Simone Adolphine Weil

What: Philosopher, Mystic, and Political Activist

Where: French-Jewish (active largely in France, Spain, and UK) 

When: February 3, 1909 - August 24, 1943

(Image Description: a black and white photo of Weil in the 1940s on the street in Marseilles. She is a pale woman with an oval face and big round glasses. Her hair is short and dark and fluffy. She is wearing a beret and a cap.  She is in her early thirties but I would have thought she was older. Behind her are buses, sidewalk [with trees] and curb. There are some other people on the street behind her. End ID)

There isn't much about Simone Weil that isn't odd and often contradictory. A pacifist who went to war, a Christian mystic who refused baptism, a writer whose most important works were not published until after her death, a religious humanist, intelligent but perpetually naïve, an ethnically Jewish woman utterly disconnected from her heritage, despite embracing the questioning and intellectualism that characterize much of the Jewish faith.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls her "a philosopher of margins and paradoxes" and André Gide called her “the patron saint of all outsiders.". Today she an important left-leaning philosopher, but her real influence did not come until after her death. But between 1995 and 2012, more than half a century after her death, over 2,500 newly scholarly articles about her were published.  She inspired the likes of Albert Camus, Jean-Luc Godard, Pankaj Mishra, Flannery O'Connor, and Pope Paul VI. Camus said she was "the only great spirit of our times." But her legacy is extremely mixed (with good reason) and some claim she was insane or unbalanced. Even people who greatly admired her say she was a bit odd.  Susan Sontag calls her "one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit." Which may be an accurate description. She was strange, often contrary, sadly comedic, and, indeed, sometimes deeply troubling. Which is odd, considering that her heart was almost certainly in the right place; regardless of her naïveté and occasional hypocrisy her goal was truth and justice. And as mixed as her legacy was there is a lot to admire in Weil's steadfastness and dedication to others. Indeed her uniqueness of character almost makes her worthy of study even without her influence.

Weil's heart was in the right place (she had a darker side that I will get to).  She was extremely dedicated to the workers, the poor, and the otherwise less fortunate, and was critical of both capitalism and communism. Eventually this dedication extended to God, not necessarily religion, but an Abrahamic God.

She wrote extensively on a number of subjects including labor, management, politics, war, peace, religion and spirituality, among other subjects throughout her life. She was an activist who threw herself into the fray, mind, soul, and body. This last despite being in quite poor physical health for all her life, including suffering from tuberculosis. Her intellectualism and dedication to others began in early childhood. She was always reading and forming opinions. At age five Weil refused to eat sugar to be in solidarity with French soldiers in World War I (then raging).  Her activism often got her in trouble at school, something that didn't change when she went from student to teacher. She was always something of an outsider among her peers.

She was extremely political, altruistic, self-sacrificing, and warm hearted throughout her life. As an adult she worked largely as a writer and teacher, inturupted to spend time incognito working in an automobile factory to get first hand experience/accounts of the plight of workers and the psychological damages caused by industrialization. She was involved in the 1933 general strike in France. Ultimately she was booted from several teaching gigs because of her politics, activism, and contributions to leftist journals. 

She briefly fought against the Fascists in Spain (1936) but was very clumsy and a poor shot due to her terrible eyesight. No one really knew what to do with her, but she was dedicated. Weil ultimately ended up injuring herself with hot oil and her parents came and took her away.

Around this time she became very interested in Catholicism. She was never baptized, however, because her religious interests were far broader than one faith, extending to numerous religious traditions of the East and West, and she disagreed with some of the more brutal moments in the Bible. She had sort of her own conception of God and faith, she called it fundamentally Christian, but it was really her own philosophy with a grounding in the Abrahamic concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and above all omnibenevolent God.

It is important to note that despite being ethnically Jewish Weil was in no way religiously Jewish and has been criticized as downright antisemetic. Having barely read anything of hers beyond a little for this project I cannot say without a doubt if she was, but what I have heard described certainly worrisome. This is obviously not exhaustive and she may have said far worse but she was critical of the Torah (without realizing a lot of the things she loved about Christianity actually came from it), critical of the cruelty of the "Old Testament"/Talmudic God (as if Christianity didn't embrace those actions perhaps more than the Jewish faith), claimed that Hitler was no worse than any other colonizer, while comparing Judaism/Jewish people to the Roman Empire/Romans (she hated the Roman Empire). So be aware of that, especially given the era -- both the one Weil was writing in and our own. Her family was secular, she never interacted with Judaism on any real level, so it is possible -- given the political climate at the time and France's history of antisemitism -- Weil was misled, but given the fact that her political views changed throughout her life (starting as a communist and ultimately abandoning it) and the fact that she was so open hearted elsewhere is saddening and negates the ignorance argument.  It does seem she failed to understand the weight and reality of what she was saying/critiquing. She was vehemently against racism in other forms, but never seemed to make the connection. According to some sources she was always shocked to be called out on hypocrisy (which she was, more than once). So maybe there is something to be said for her just not getting it. This is not an excuse for hatred, but ignorance might be a huge part of the problem.

After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Weil and her parents fled and began a life in exile, first in the US, then in England.  In England Weil wrote her best known work, L'Enracinement, prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l'être humain (The Need for Roots: Prelude Towards a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind) (written 1943, but it wasn't published until 1949). During this time she worked for the French Resistance, although exactly in what capacity seems to be unknown. But her punishing work against the Nazis and penchant for self-denial ultimately ended up costing her her life at age 34 of either heart failure from malnutrition or tuberculosis. 

(Image Description: the cover of one of Weil's many notebooks. On it she has written "3 (1941)" in the top left corner. She has covered the rest of it in writing in a bunch of different languages including Greek and Sanskrit [maybe?]. All of it is written in squares/rectangles with one rectangle in the middle with shapes/writing in it. End ID)

Like The Need for Roots most of her work was printed posthumously. Her ouevre has been translated into other languages, including English, Arabic, and German as she reached international acclaim.  During her life only a few of her works were published of the 20-some volumes that survive today. Her most important works include (French / English) L'Iliade ou le poème de la force / The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1940), La Pesanteur et la grâce / Gravity and Grace (1947), Attente de Dieu / Waiting for God (1950), Lettre à un religieux / Letter to a Priest (1951), Oppression et Liberté / Oppression and Liberty (1955) among others, including a lot of eccentric, esoteric, and diverse notebooks kept throughout her life, like the one above.

Probable Orientation: Aroace

As is probably obvious I do not quite know what to make of Weil, but one thing I can tell you is she was definitely asexual.

Weil's sexlessness (and by extension asexuality) has long been part of the narrative oddness of her life. The fact that she shunned physical and romantic relationships is often thought of as part of the pathetic humor as her personality. Clumsy, naïve, downright weird, sexless has become part of that persona, that cloak of oddity. 

People love to claim political reasons for others chastity and Weil is no exception. There has to be some reason beyond natural disinterest. The alternative is too foreign or strange for allos to fathom. All of these suppositions are equally aphobic. The idea that asexuality must be a conscious choice rather than a natural part of a person is extremely damaging as is the idea that not feeling sexual/romantic attraction/desiring sex/romance is unnatural.  There have been people who try to explain away Weil's lack of sexual desire as well: some Christian writers say she was devoting herself to God years before she found the church (Weil herself says the idea of pursuing what she calls "purity" struck her at 16, she would not find Catholicism for more than a decade), to certain subgroups of feminists her sexlessness a conscious choice to escape the patriarchy. But really it seems much more to be her sexual orientation than a political statement. Weil was a woman who made a lot of political statements, constantly, but the avoidance of sexual contact seemed natural rather than put on. 

For one thing she spurned physical contact, but only that with sexual intent. She didn't spurn friendly contact and she would kiss her friends in a platonic way more common in her era. Weil wasn't prudish nor offended by the idea of sex. When she was asked if she was seeing anyone she laughed, but was unbothered, it was more like she thought the idea of her dating was ridiculous rather than looking down on the idea. She had many friends both male and female. 

 In her teen years Weil started dressing oddly so that no one would find her physically attractive. She had a reputation from youth as being a weirdo in part due to her asexuality, but an attractive one. Although it seems that people, especially boys, had a mixed response to her attempts to mask her beauty. Some of them said it was a shame, others said she was never attractive in the first place.

Many of her critics in the modern day claim her odd traits and behaviors can be explained away by extreme sexual repression, once again giving into that belief that sex makes us normal and whole.

Also like many aroaces it seems that Weil put her love and attention into someone or something other than a significant other/partner. For many of them it is a specific friend or family member, for others it is a passion or cause. These are the historical figures dubbed to be "married to their work". This includes the likes of Erdős, Rankin, Franklin, Santos-Dumont, Nightingale, Wang, Woodson, and Tesla. This is not to say they were friendless, indeed some of them have extremely close relationships but overall these are people who dedicate themselves utterly and completely to their passion and their work. People with more than drive. People who are happiest not in a romantic/sexual relationship, but when doing what they love. I think Weil is part of that category. Her love was not for one person but for nearly the whole of the world. 

(Image Description: a photo of Weil as a young woman/teenager. She is a pretty and pale woman with fluffy dark hair, dark eyes, and full lips. She is not yet wearing her glasses.  She is shown from the neck up. End ID)

Quotes:

"The idea of purity, with all that this word can imply for a Christian [so, virginity], took possession of me at the age of sixteen, after a period of several months during which I had been going through the emotional unrest natural in adolescence. This idea came upon me while I was contemplating a mountain landscape and little by little it was imposed upon me in an irresistible manner." 

-Simone Weil, letter sent to a priest friend on May 15, 1942. (Years after the fact Weil attributed her lack of interest in sex to an inclination to Christianity, but it sounds as if she herself is trying to explain away her lack of sexual attraction or interest. This is something a lot of baby aspecs still do, try to explain away why they aren't interested in sex or romance. I know I did.)

"The Red Virgin" 

-The taunting nickname given to Weil by her classmates due to her chasteness and lack of romantic interest.  She was also referred to as "the Martian" for being "inhuman" and was widely mocked for being aspec. 

"As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.”

-Sir Richard Reeds (due to the fact that, despite being chronically ill with a fatal disease she continued to work for the French Resistance while also not eating anything above the French ration to show her solidarity.)

(Image Description: a colorized photo of Weil from 1936 when she was fighting in Spain. She is wearing a dark military uniform with a dark bandana around her neck. Her dark hair is even darker than usual. She has a rifle on her back. There are some men behind her on a fairly quiet street. End ID) 

[arabfanon]

Over more than a decade, the rise of the left in Latin American governance has led to remarkable advances in poverty alleviation, regional integration, and a reassertion of sovereignty and independence. The United States has been antagonistic toward the new left governments, and has concurrently pursued a bellicose foreign policy, in many cases blithely dismissive of international law.

2390

Jose M. Vivanco at Senate hearing in 2004. Photo by Jeremy Bigwood.So why has Human Rights Watch (HRW)—despite proclaiming itself “one of the world’s leading independent organizations” on human rights—so consistently paralleled U.S. positions and policies? This affinity for the U.S. government agenda is not limited to Latin America. In the summer of 2013, for example, when the prospect of a unilateral U.S. missile strike on Syria—a clear violation of the UN Charter—loomed large, HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth speculated as to whether a simply “symbolic” bombing would be sufficient. “If Obama decides to strike Syria, will he settle for symbolism or do something that will help protect civilians?” he asked on Twitter. Executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies John Tirman swiftly denounced the tweet as “possibly the most ignorant and irresponsible statement ever by a major human-rights advocate.”

1

HRW’s accommodation to U.S. policy has also extended to renditions—the illegal practice of kidnapping and transporting suspects around the planet to be interrogated and often tortured in allied countries. In early 2009, when it was reported that the newly elected Obama administration was leaving this program intact, HRW’s then Washington advocacy director Tom Malinowski argued that “under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place” for renditions, and encouraged patience: “they want to design a system that doesn’t result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured,” he said, “but designing that system is going to take some time.”2

Similar consideration was not extended to de-facto U.S. enemy Venezuela, when, in 2012, HRW’s Americas director José Miguel Vivanco and global advocacy director Peggy Hicks wrote a letter to President Hugo Chávez arguing that his country was unfit to serve on the UN’s Human Rights Council. Councilmembers must uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights, they maintained, but unfortunately, “Venezuela currently falls far short of acceptable standards.”3 Given HRW’s silence regarding U.S. membership in the same council, one wonders precisely what HRW’s acceptable standards are.

One underlying factor for HRW’s general conformity with U.S. policy was clarified on July 8, 2013, when Roth took to Twitter to congratulate his colleague Malinowski on his nomination to be Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL). Malinowski was poised to further human rights as a senior-level foreign-policy official for an administration that convenes weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings. In these meetings, Obama and his staffers deliberate the meting out of extrajudicial drone assassinations around the planet, reportedly working from a secret “kill list” that has included several U.S. citizens and a 17-year-old girl.4

Malinowski’s entry into government was actually a re-entry. Prior to HRW, he had served as a speechwriter for Secretary of State Madeline Albright and for the White House’s National Security Council. He was also once a special assistant to President Bill Clinton—all of which he proudly listed in his HRW biography. During his Senate confirmation hearing on September 24, Malinowski promised to “deepen the bipartisan consensus for America’s defense of liberty around the world,” and assured the Foreign Relations Committee that no matter where the U.S. debate on Syria led, “the mere fact that we are having it marks our nation as exceptional.”5

That very day, Obama stood before the UN General Assembly and declared, “some may disagree, but I believe that America is exceptional.” Assuming that by “exceptional” Obama meant exceptionally benevolent, one of those who disagreed was Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, who had opened the proceedings at the same podium by excoriating Obama’s “global network of electronic espionage,” which she considered a “disrespect to national sovereignty” and a “grave violation of human rights and of civil liberties.” Rousseff contrasted Washington’s rogue behavior with her characterization of Brazil as a country that has “lived in peace with our neighbors for more than 140 years.” Brazil and its neighbors, she argued, were “democratic, pacific and respectful of international law.”6 Rousseff’s speech crystallized Latin America’s broad opposition to U.S. exceptionalism, and therefore shed light on the left’s mutually antagonistic relationship with HRW.

*

Malinowski’s background is but one example of a larger scenario. HRW’s institutional culture is shaped by its leadership’s intimate links to various arms of the U.S. government. In her HRW biography, the vice chair of HRW’s board of directors, Susan Manilow, describes herself as “a longtime friend to Bill Clinton,” and helped manage his campaign finances. (HRW once signed a letter to Clinton advocating the prosecution of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes; HRW made no case for holding Clinton accountable for NATO’s civilian-killing bombings despite concluding that they constituted “violations of international humanitarian law.”)7 Bruce Rabb, also on Human Rights Watch’s Board of Directors, advertises in his biography that he “served as staff assistant to President Richard Nixon” from 1969-70—the period in which that administration secretly and illegally carpet bombed Cambodia and Laos.8

The advisory committee for HRW’s Americas Division has even boasted the presence of a former Central Intelligence Agency official, Miguel Díaz. According to his State Department biography, Díaz served as a CIA analyst and also provided “oversight of U.S. intelligence activities in Latin America” for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.9 As of 2012, Díaz focused, as he once did for the CIA, on Central America for the State Department’s DRL—the same bureau now to be supervised by Malinowski.

Other HRW associates have similarly questionable backgrounds: Myles Frechette, currently an advisory committee member for the Americas Division, served as Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean from 1990-93, and then became U.S. Ambassador to Colombia from 1994-97. Frechette subsequently worked as the executive director of a “nonprofit” group called the North American-Peruvian Business Council, and championed the interests of his funders in front of Congress. His organization received financing from companies such as Newmont Mining, Barrick Gold, Caterpillar, Continental Airlines, J.P. Morgan, ExxonMobil, Patton Boggs, and Texaco.10

Michael Shifter, who also currently serves on HRW’s Americas advisory committee, directed the Latin America and Caribbean program for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-governmental entity whose former acting president Allen Weinstein told The Washington Post in 1991 that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”11 Shifter, as current president of a policy center called the Inter-American Dialogue, oversees $4 million a year in programming, financed in part through donations from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the embassies of Canada, Germany, Guatemala, Mexico and Spain, and corporations such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Boeing, and Western Union.

To be sure, not all of the organization’s leadership has been so involved in dubious political activities. Many HRW board members are simply investment bankers, like board co-chairs Joel Motley of Public Capital Advisors, LLC, and Hassan Elmasry, of Independent Franchise Partners, LLP. HRW Vice Chair John Studzinski is a senior managing director at The Blackstone Group, a private equity firm founded by Peter G. Peterson, the billionaire who has passionately sought to eviscerate Social Security and Medicare. And although Julien J. Studley, the Vice Chair of the Americas advisory committee, once served in the U.S. Army’s psychological warfare unit, he is now just another wealthy real-estate tycoon in New York.

That HRW’s advocacy reflects its institutional makeup is unremarkable. Indeed, an examination of its positions on Latin America demonstrates the group’s predictable, general conformity with U.S. interests. Consider, for example, HRW’s reaction to the death of Hugo Chávez. Within hours of his passing on March 5, 2013, HRW published an overview—“Venezuela: Chávez’s Authoritarian Legacy”—to enormous online response. In accordance with its headline’s misleading terminology, HRW never once mentioned Chávez’s democratic bona fides: Since 1998, he had triumphed in 14 of 15 elections or referenda, all of which were deemed free and fair by international monitors. Chávez’s most recent reelection boasted an 81% participation rate; former president Jimmy Carter described the voting process as “the best in the world.”12 The article neglected to cite a single positive aspect of Chávez’s tenure, under which poverty was slashed by half and infant mortality by a third.

In contrast, HRW’s August 21, 2012 statement regarding the death of Ethiopian leader Meles Zenawi was decidedly more muted: “Ethiopia: Transition Should Support Human Rights Reform,” read the headline. Leslie Lefkow, HRW’s deputy Africa director, urged the country’s new leadership to “reassure Ethiopians by building on Meles’s positive legacy while reversing his government’s most pernicious policies.” Regarding a leader whose two-decade rule had none of Chávez’s democratic legitimacy (HRW itself documented Ethiopia’s repressive and unfair elections in both 2005 and 2010), the organization argued only that “Meles leaves a mixed legacy on human rights.”13 Whereas HRW omitted all mention of Chávez-era social improvements, it wrote, “Under [Meles’s] leadership the country has experienced significant, albeit uneven, economic development and progress.”

The explanation for this discrepancy is obvious: as a New York Times obituary reported, Meles was “one of the United States government’s closest African allies.” Although “widely considered one of Africa’s most repressive governments,” wrote the Times, Ethiopia “continues to receive more than $800 million in American aid each year. American officials have said that the Ethiopian military and security services are among the Central Intelligence Agency’s favorite partners.”14

*

HRW has taken its double standard to cartoonish heights throughout Latin America. At a 2009 NED Democracy Award Roundtable, José Miguel Vivanco described Cuba, not the United States, as “one of our countries in the hemisphere that is perhaps the one that has today the worst human-rights record in the region.” As evidence, he listed Cuba’s “long- and short-term detentions with no due process, physical abuse [and] surveillance”—as though these were not commonplace U.S. practices, even (ironically) at Guantánamo Bay.15 Vivanco was also quoted in late 2013, claiming at an Inter-American Dialogue event that the “gravest setbacks to freedom of association and expression in Latin America have taken place in Ecuador”—not in Colombia, the world’s most dangerous country for trade union leaders, or in Honduras, the region’s deadliest country for journalists (both, incidentally, U.S. allies).16

Latin America scholars are sounding the alarm: New York University history professor Greg Grandin recently described HRW as “Washington’s adjunct” in The Nation magazine.17 And when Vivanco publicly stated that “we did [our 2008] report because we wanted to show the world that Venezuela is not a model for anyone,” over 100 academics wrote to the HRW’s directors, lamenting the “great loss to civil society when we can no longer trust a source such as Human Rights Watch to conduct an impartial investigation and draw conclusions based on verifiable facts.”18

HRW’s deep ties to U.S. corporate and state sectors should disqualify the institution from any public pretense of independence. Such a claim is indeed untenable given the U.S.-headquartered organization’s status as a revolving door for high-level governmental bureaucrats. Stripping itself of the “independent” label would allow HRW’s findings and advocacy to be more accurately evaluated, and its biases more clearly recognized.

In Latin America, there is a widespread awareness of Washington’s ability to deflect any outside attempts to constrain its prerogative to use violence and violate international law. The past three decades alone have seen U.S. military invasions of Grenada and Panama, a campaign of international terrorism against Nicaragua, and support for coup governments in countries such as Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, and Guatemala. If HRW is to retain credibility in the region, it must begin to extricate itself from elite spheres of U.S. decision-making and abandon its institutional internalization of U.S. exceptionalism. Implementing a clear prohibition to retaining staff and advisers who have crafted or executed U.S. foreign policy would be an important first step. At the very least, HRW can institute lengthy “cooling-off” periods—say, five years in duration—before and after its associates move between the organization and the government.

After all, HRW’s Malinowski will be directly subordinate to Secretary of State John Kerry, who conveyed the U.S. attitude toward Latin America in a way that only an administrator of a superpower could. In an April 17, 2013 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, a member of Congress asked Kerry whether the United States should prioritize “the entire region as opposed to just focusing on one country, since they seem to be trying to work together closer than ever before.” Kerry reassured him of the administration’s global vision. “Look,” he said. “The Western Hemisphere is our backyard. It is critical to us.”19

[patriotsnet]

Which Of These Individuals Were Radical Republicans

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Which Of These Individuals Were Radical Republicans

The End Of The Movement

January 6th Hearings Were Absolutely Terrible For Republicans

The Radical movement was coming to an end, its agenda superseded by concerns about the economy, which had been hit by recession in 1873.

In the Congressional elections of 1874, the Democrats took control. Southern State legislatures gradually reverted to the Democrats as well, and the reforms of the Radical Republicans began to be rolled back.

In the highly controversial 1876 presidential election, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes managed to win power despite losing the popular vote, when he promised Southern States that all federal troops would be withdrawn.

After this, civil rights were no longer enforced in the South, and the former Confederate states brought in the so-called Jim Crow laws.

These laws allowed the segregation of white and black people, and although they did not explicitly state that black people could not vote, the conditions that had to be met in order to vote were disproportionately unfavourable to African-Americans. The inequality imposed by the Jim Crow laws persisted for almost a century.

Image sources:

What Did The Radical Republicans Stand For

Radical RepublicansRepublican

The Radical Republicans believed blacks were entitled to the same political rights and opportunities as whites. They also believed that the Confederate leaders should be punished for their roles in the Civil War.

Additionally, what were three policies that the Radical Republicans proposed for reconstruction? On the political front, the Republicans wanted to maintain their wartime agenda, which included support for:

Protective tariffs.

Liberal land policies for settlers.

Federal aid for railroad development.

Thereof, what was the Radical Republicans plan?

The Radical Republicans reconstruction offered all kinds of new opportunities to African Americans, including the vote , property ownership, education, legal rights, and even the possibility of holding political office. By the beginning of 1868, about 700,000 African Americans were registered voters.

Did the radical Republicans favored emancipation?

Radical Republican. Radical Republican, during and after the American Civil War, a member of the Republican Party committed to emancipation of the slaves and later to the equal treatment and enfranchisement of the freed blacks.

Johnson’s Bold Reconstruction Stance

After the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, Vice PresidentAndrew Johnson , a former U.S. senator from Tennessee, was thrust unexpectedly into the highest office in the nation. Instead of waiting for Congress to convenean event scheduled for December 1865Johnson abruptly put into effect his own plan for readmitting the Southern states into the Union and reorganizing their state governments.

Expected to deal harshly with those who had rebelled against the Union, Johnson surprised everyone by treating them leniently. Owing to Johnson’s liberal signing of presidential pardons, many Confederate military and civil leaders were able to regain power in the South. The governments they formed then went about trying to recreate the conditions of slavery, using laws called Black Codes to limit the economic options and civil rights of the former slaves.

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An African American Institution Of Higher Learningwilberforce University

A group of Ohioans, including four African American men, established Wilberforce University near Xenia, Ohio, in 1856, and named it after the famous British abolitionist, William Wilberforce. When the school failed to meet its financial obligations, leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church purchased it in 1863.

The articles of association of Wilberforce University, dated July 10, 1863, state that its purpose was to promote education, religion and morality amongst the colored race. Even though the university was established by and for people of color, the articles stipulated that no one should be excluded from the benefits of said institution as officers, faculty, or pupils on account of merely race or color.

1 of 2

Constitution Of The National Woman Suffrage Association

Despite the Fifteenth Amendments failure to guarantee female suffrage, women did gain the right to vote in western territories, with the Wyoming Territory leading the way in 1869. One reason for this was a belief that giving women the right to vote would provide a moral compass to the otherwise lawless western frontier. Extending the right to vote in western territories also provided an incentive for white women to emigrate to the West, where they were scarce. However, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others believed that immediate action on the national front was required, leading to the organization of the NWSA and its resulting constitution.

How was the NWSA organized? How would the fact that it operated at the national level, rather than at the state or local level, help it to achieve its goals?

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The Reconstruction Acts Of 1867

By the beginning of 1867, only one former Confederate state, Tennessee, had been readmitted to the Union. The other ten states were still undergoing reconstruction. In early March, Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act. This act divided the South into five military districts and established martial law. It also listed the requirements a state must meet to be readmitted into the Union. Each state had to include universal male voting rights in its constitution; receive approval of its constitution from the majority of its voters; and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to ”all persons born or naturalized in the United States” and declared that states could not deny any person ”life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”

To give the First Reconstruction Act sharper teeth, Congress passed the Second Reconstruction Act later in March. This act put the military in charge of protecting voter registration efforts to make sure that no one, especially the African American, was refused his right to vote.

What Were The Goals Of Reconstruction For Radical Republicans

They wanted to prevent the leaders of the confederacy from returning to power after the war, they wanted the republican party to become a powerful institution in the south, and they wanted the federal government to help african americans achieve political equality by guaranteeing their rights to vote in the south.

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Andrew Johnson: Domestic Affairs

On April 15, six weeks after Andrew Johnson was sworn in as vice president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Had the assassin’s plot gone as planned, Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Secretary of State William Seward would have also been killed. As it turned out, co-conspirator George Atzerodt had stalked the vice president but lost his nerve at the last minute. Johnson, who was staying at the Kirkwood House hotel, rushed to Lincoln’s bedside when he was told of the attack. A few hours after Lincoln’s death, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase swore Johnson in as President of the United States. Republicans were relieved that Johnson had not been killed and could provide continuity; they thought that he would be putty in their hands and would follow the dictates of Republican congressional leaders.

The Question of Black Suffrage

Phase I: Presidential Reconstruction

Phase II: Congressional Reconstruction

Off-Year Election Showdown

Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

What Was The Radical Plan Of Reconstruction

These Republican Con Artists Weren’t Ready For Cenk Uygur

After the election of November 6, 1866, Congress imposes its own Reconstruction policies, referred to by historians as Radical Reconstruction. This re-empowers the Freedmans Bureau and sets reform efforts in motion that will lead to the 14th and 15th Amendments, which, respectively, grant citizenship to all

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Iv Reconstruction And Women

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton maintained a strong and productive relationship for nearly half a century as they sought to secure political rights for women. While the fight for womens rights stalled during the war, it sprung back to life as Anthony, Stanton, and others formed the American Equal Rights Association. , between 1880 and 1902.;Library of Congress.

for all

The AERA was split over whether Black male suffrage should take precedence over universal suffrage, given the political climate of the South. Some worried that political support for freedmen would be undermined by the pursuit of womens suffrage. For example, AERA member Frederick Douglass insisted that the ballot was literally a question of life and death for southern Black men, but not for women.23 Some African American women challenged white suffragists in other ways. Frances Harper, for example, a freeborn Black woman living in Ohio, urged them to consider their own privilege as white and middle class. Universal suffrage, she argued, would not so clearly address the complex difficulties posed by racial, economic, and gender inequality.24

Republicans Sweep The 1866 Elections

During the campaign of 1866, most support for Johnson came from the Democratic Party, whose members tried to play on white fears about expanding rights for blacks. They claimed, for example, that the Republicans wanted to give black workers an advantage over white workers. Meanwhile, the Republicans also campaigned hard and used dramatic language and images to discredit Johnson. As recounted in The Era of Reconstruction: 18651877, Indiana governor Oliver P. Morton called the Democratic Party a “common sewer and loathsome receptacle, into which is emptied every element of treason North and South, every element of inhumanity and barbarism which has dishonored the age.”

When the election results came in, the widespread lack of support for Johnson was evident. The Republicans had won by a huge margin. They were now solidly in control of every Northern state legislature and government; in addition, they had more than the two-thirds majority needed to pass bills in both houses of the U.S. Congress. As the second session of the Thirty-ninth Congress met in December 1866, the Radicals were at their most powerful.

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Two Different Plans For Reconstruction

During the months following the April 1865 conclusion of the Civil War, the U.S. Congress was the stage for another kind of battle. A group of senators and representatives known as the Radical Republicans opposed the Reconstruction program put forth by President Andrew Johnson . Having gained that office unexpectedly when Abraham Lincoln was assassinatedonly days after the wars endby an enraged Southerner, Johnson had surprised everyone with a plan that allowed white Southerners to virtually recreate the days of slavery. The Republicans had managed to win public support for their own vision of a reconstructed South, which they saw as a place where free labor and industry would thrive and where, most importantly, access to equal civil and political rights would allow African Americans to become full, responsible U.S. citizens.

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Battles Over Reconstruction Policy

During fall 1865, as a response to the Black Codes and worrisome signs of Southern recalcitrance, the Radical Republicans blocked the readmission of the former rebellious states to the Congress. Johnson, however, was content with allowing former Confederate states into the Union as long as their state governments adopted the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. By December 6, 1865, the amendment was ratified, and Johnson considered Reconstruction over. Radical Republicans in Congress disagreed. They rejected Johnson’s moderate Reconstruction efforts, and organized the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, a 15-member panel to devise more stringent Reconstruction requirements for the Southern states to be restored to the Union.

In January 1866, Congress renewed the Freedmen’s Bureau, which Johnson vetoed in February. Although Johnson sympathized with the plights of the freedmen, he was against federal assistance. An attempt to override the veto failed on February 20, 1866. This veto shocked the congressional Radicals. In response, both the Senate and House passed a joint resolution not to allow any senator or representative seat admittance until Congress decided when Reconstruction was finished.

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Freed Persons Receive Wages From Former Owner

Some emancipated slaves quickly fled from the neighborhood of their owners, while others became wage laborers for former owners. Most importantly, African Americans could make choices for themselves about where they labored and the type of work they performed. This account book shows that former slaves who became free workers after the Civil War received pay for their work on Hampton Plantation in South Carolina.

Hampton Plantation Account Book, 18661868. South Carolina. Handwritten manuscript. Page 68 Page 69. Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/reconstruction.html#obj6

The End Of Radical Reconstruction

The end of Reconstruction was a staggered process, and the period of Republican control ended at different times in different states. With the Compromise of 1877, army intervention in the South ceased and Republican control collapsed in the last three state governments in the South. This was followed by a period that white Southerners labeled “Redemption,” during which white-dominated state legislatures enacted Jim Crow laws and, beginning in 1890, disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites through a combination of constitutional amendments and electoral laws. The white Democrat Southerners’ memory of Reconstruction played a major role in imposing the system of white supremacy and second-class citizenship for blacks, known as “The Age of Jim Crow.”

Many of the ambitions of the Radical Republicans were, in the end, undermined and unfulfilled. Early Supreme Court rulings around the turn of the century upheld many of these new Southern constitutions and laws, and most blacks were prevented from voting in the South until the 1960s. Full federal enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not occur until passage of legislation in the mid-1960s as a result of the African-American Civil Rights Movement .

Also Check: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

Grant Is Elected President

The 1868 presidential election would be the first in which African Americans would participate, and they would play an important role in the election of the next president, Ulysses S. Grant . A career army officer and a hero of the Civil War, during which he had helped carry out such presidential orders as the Emancipation Proclamation, Grant had shown no previous interest in politics. His stance as a moderate made him an attractive candidate for the Republican Party, which wanted to put forth an individual who would represent stability during a troubled period in the nations history. To oppose Grant, the Democrats nominated a rather colorless figure, former New York governor Horatio Seymour . Their campaign centered on the theme of maintaining white supremacy at a time when, racists maintained, blacks were threatening to take over the country.

The sight of black people voting in the 1867 elections to choose convention delegates had been difficult for many

Impeachment Of Andrew Johnson

Republican Leader Could Be Prosecuted For Threatening Telecom Companies

Impeachment of Andrew Johnson by the Senate 1866

In 1866 the Radical Republican Congress sought to remove President Andrew Johnson from office. This was part of the power struggle between Johnson who sought highly lenient policies towards the former Confederate states and the Radical Republicans who wanted a harsher version of Reconstruction as well as more forceful protection of the rights of the newly freed southern black population. Ultimately the impeachment, which was not popular or supported by the general public, failed by one vote.

Also Check: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

Freedmen Navigate Legislative Shoals

In order to regulate the activities of newly freed African Americans, national, state, and local governments developed a body of laws relating to them. Some laws were for their protection, particularly those relating to labor contracts, but others circumscribed their citizenship rights. This volume, compiled by the staff of General Oliver O. Howard, the director of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Landsusually called the Freedmens Bureauprovides a digest of these laws in ten of the former Confederate states up to 1867.

Laws in Relation to Freedmen, U.S. Sen. 39th Congress, 2nd Sess. Senate Executive Doc. No. 6. Washington: War Department, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1866-67. Pamphlet. Law Library, Library of Congress

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/reconstruction.html#obj13

The Freedmen’s Bureau Bill

One of the first actions Congress had taken after refusing to recognize the Southern legislators was to create a Joint Committee on Reconstruction to investigate and report on conditions in the South. Already reports were arriving that documented the mistreatment of blacks in the South. Perhaps the most revealing report was compiled by ex-Union general Carl Schurz . As the new year began, it was clear that the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency established in March 1865 to assist the former slaves in their transition to freedom, needed more power to punish those who denied blacks their rights or physically assaulted them. To that end, Senator Trumbull introduced a bill to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and broaden the power of its agents to protect blacks.

It came as a surprise to almost everyone when President Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau bill. He claimed that it was not necessary and too expensive to extend the Bureau’s life and even asserted, as noted in A Short History of Reconstruction, that giving blacks assistance was unfair to “our own people” . Even Johnson’s supporters had urged him to sign the bill, as it would help to keep the moderate Republicans on his side. Congress immediately overrode the bill, and it became law.

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Senator Revels On Segregated Schools In Washington Dc

Hiram R. Revels became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate in 1870. In 1871, he gave the following speech about Washingtons segregated schools before Congress.

According to Senator Revelss speech, what is social equality and why is it important to the issue of desegregated schools? Does Revels favor social equality or social segregation? Did social equality exist in the United States in 1871?

Though the fact of their presence was dramatic and important, as the New York Times description above demonstrates, the few African American representatives and senators who served in Congress during Reconstruction represented only a tiny fraction of the many hundreds, possibly thousands, of blacks who served in a great number of capacities at the local and state levels. The South during the early 1870s brimmed with freed slaves and freeborn blacks serving as school board commissioners, county commissioners, clerks of court, board of education and city council members, justices of the peace, constables, coroners, magistrates, sheriffs, auditors, and registrars. This wave of local African American political activity contributed to and was accompanied by a new concern for the poor and disadvantaged in the South. The southern Republican leadership did away with the hated black codes, undid the work of white supremacists, and worked to reduce obstacles confronting freed people.

[cinema-tv-etc]

  ∧ Top 10 Things Bombshell Got Factually Righ WRITTEN BY: Nick Spake As disturbing as it sounds, there are a lot of things Bombshell got factually right.  Transcript

What exactly goes on behind the scenes of this controversial news corporation? Welcome to MsMojo and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the Top 10 Things Bombshell Got Factually Right. For this list, we’re taking a look at accurate plot points and details from this drama about the Fox News misconduct scandal. In case you haven’t seen the film yet, this list contains spoilers, not to mention bombshells.   #10: More Than 20 Women Accused Roger Ailes In 2016, Megyn Kelly reportedly informed investigators that she had been sexually harassed by Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. When Kelly goes on the record in “Bombshell,” the investigators label her with the letter “W,” meaning that she’s the 23rd woman who has accused Ailes. According to Gretchen Carlson’s lawyers, more than 20 women accused Ailes of inappropriate behavior, both publicly and privately. Many of the women who spoke out against Ailes were former Fox News employees, including Rudi Bakhtiar, Laurie Luhn, and Andrea Tantaros. The film does take a few creative liberties with Ailes’ accusers. Most notably, Kayla Pospisil, a Fox News journalist played by Margot Robbie, is a composite character. Just because Kayla is fictitious, though, doesn’t mean her story is without truth. #9: Megyn Kelly’s White Santa Debate During a brief news segment in the film, Kelly scoffs at the possibility that Santa is any color other than white. This is based on an actual Fox News story in which Kelly slammed a Slate article entitled “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore.” Addressing all the “kids watching at home,” Kelly firmly insisted that “Santa just is white.” She’d go on to say that “Jesus was a white man too.” Kelly revisited the “White Christmas” debate in a later segment, claiming that an “offhand jest” she made snowballed out of control and Fox News was being unfairly targeted. Aisha Harris, the Slate piece’s writer, interpreted Kelly’s comment as more than just a joke and accused Fox of playing the victim. #8: Elizabeth Ailes Stood by Her Husband Connie Britton portrayals Elizabeth Tilson Ailes, Roger’s third wife. Working as a programming executive, Tilson met Ailes at CNBC and they were married in 1998. Just as there’s a significant age difference between Britton and John Lithgow, Tilson was 37 while Ailes was 58 when they wedded. “Bombshell” depicts Tilson as a “good wife” archetype who supports her husband, even as he faces a harassment lawsuit with accusations piling up. In response to the allegations, Tilson reportedly stated, “This is not about money. This is about his legacy.” Despite defending her husband, there were reports that Tilson took the accusations “especially hard” and considered divorcing Ailes. Nevertheless, the couple remained together until Ailes passed in 2017, less than a year after the scandal hit. #7: Gretchen Carlson’s Real Stories Although she was given her own afternoon show after leaving “Fox & Friends,” Gretchen Carlson didn’t always fit the network’s mold. Leading up to her termination, Carlson took a few stances that challenged the Fox News brand. As seen in “Bombshell,” Carlson did an exposé on how makeup is used to sexualize girls in culture. Carlson emphasized her point by not wearing any makeup for the segment, claiming this was a first for cable news. Carlson also advocated an assault weapons ban in a 2016 segment. 89% of viewers disagreed with Carlson, to which she replied on the air, “That’s fine. That’s what makes America great.” Only a few days after Carlson showed support for stricter gun laws, her contract with Fox News officially expired. #6: Roger Ailes Threw Doughnuts Actual reports indicate that Ailes was every bit as paranoid as “Bombshell” suggests. Ailes reportedly had around-the-clock security at his home and was even accused of spying on reporters. One of the most bizarre details that the film gets down is how Ailes used donuts. In multiple scenes, we see Ailes stocking up on these fried desserts. It’s said that Ailes orders donuts just so he can throw them at people during his emotional moments. This behavior is backed up in the biographical book, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” which reads, “Aisles could turn donuts into projectiles.” Although Ailes didn’t always eat the donuts, both the book and this film point out his poor diet, claiming he’d order entire pages off room service menus. #5: Gretchen Carlson Recorded Conversations Instead of going after Fox News, Carlson filed a lawsuit directly against Ailes, who continually denied the allegations aimed at him. In the film, Ailes is finally backed into a corner when his lawyer, Susan Estrich, tells him that Carlson recorded their conversations. In 2014, about two years before the scandal broke out, Carlson started using her iPhone to secretly tape her meetings with Ailes. Carlson dedicated an entire year to recording the inappropriate comments of Ailes and other Fox News employees. Ailes reportedly asked Carlson to “turn around so he could view her posterior,” which we see him do on multiple occasions in “Bombshell.” The tapes also caught Ailes telling Carlson, “you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago.” #4: Megyn Kelly Faced Backlash from Trump Supporters Fox News’ audience is known for being conservative, but that didn’t stop Kelly from calling out Donald Trump’s treatment towards women during the first Republican presidential debate. This ignited an ongoing feud between the two with Trump posting numerous tweets that painted Kelly as “crazy.” Kelly thus became the story, as well as a target. As the film shows us, Kelly was heavily criticized and even threatened by Trump supporters. In an interview, Kelly stated, “The vast majority of Donald Trump supporters are not at all this way,” but added, “The worst part is the security threats that I’ve had to face and, as much as I try to avoid some of that online vitriol, I get lots of it and I really hate it.” #3: Roger Ailes’ Meeting with Rupert Murdoch The final act of “Bombshell” is mostly faithful to Ailes’ downfall as he’s barred from the news empire he helped build. On July 21, 2016, Ailes and Susan Estrich reported to the apartment of Rupert Murdoch, played here by Malcolm McDowell. In the film, Murdoch’s two sons, Lachlan and James, are also present at the meeting. This is slightly off, as James was not present, although Lachlan did attend. Peter Johnson and Gerson Zweifach are also notably absent from this scene. Nevertheless, Rupert did inform Ailes that he’d temporarily be taking over Fox News. He also denied Ailes’ request to walk into the Fox News headquarters with him and announce his departure. Ailes ultimately agreed to go quietly, receiving a severance package of $40 million. #2: The Black Room Speaking to a former Fox News journalist played by Jennifer Morrison, Megyn Kelly learns about the infamous “Black Room,” as various insiders called it. Established in 2011 on the 14th floor of the News Corporation building, the Black Room is where Ailes supposedly managed public relations and surveillance campaigns against his foes in secrecy. Among the people Ailes targeted was reporter Gabriel Sherman, who’d go on to write “The Loudest Voice in the Room.” According to Sherman, the “Black Room” consisted of “consultants, political operatives, and private detectives who reported only to [Ailes].” The Fox News CEO reportedly used company money to fund these sketchy operations, although Susan Estrich claimed on Ailes’ behalf, “These allegations are totally false.” #1: Fox News Dresses Throughout “Bombshell,” Ailes is seen ordering the network’s female talent to wear dresses, sit at see-through desks, and show off their legs. According to “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” Ailes once called during a segment taping, saying, “Move that damn laptop, I can’t see her legs!” While Fox News denied accusations that there was a “miniskirt dress code,” Ailes didn’t make it easy for female employees to cover up their legs. Under Ailes’ management, Jedediah Bila claims that the wardrobe department was full of dresses, but no pants were available. Bila was also reportedly told that she couldn’t wear orange because Ailes wasn’t a fan of the color. After Ailes’ departure, women were permitted to start wearing pants and jumpsuits on the air.                                                                                                                                                                  

https://watchmojo.com/video/id/30955

[madisonacampbell]

Via the ACLU: The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

No one expected their words to be enlightening or their tone harmonious. Hatred rarely comes in such flavors. It spills out as an ugly, incoherent mess infused with the rotten odor of willful ignorance. And so it was with the Nazi wannabes — self-styled white supremacists determined to make their mark on the world, committed to convincing anyone who might listen that their superiority was both evident and inevitable. The setting was downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017. Their mission was unity — of like-minded hate mongers. Their leader, Jason Kessler, was a 33-year-old who lived with his parents and had once supported Barack Obama. He had learned that many demographers thought whites would eventually become a minority race in the United States. That news was so unsettling that Kessler remade himself into a white-rights activist. He styled himself as “a civil and human rights advocate, focused on the Caucasian demographic” in the mode of “Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi.” His “Unite the Right” rally, observed the Christian Science Monitor, “was supposed to be the movement’s coming out party, an emergence from the shadows of internet chat rooms into the national spotlight.” Kessler was inspired in part by fellow University of Virginia graduate and white supremacist Richard Spencer who, in May 2017, led a band of racists in Charlottesville chanting “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi-inspired slogan. Why they were enamored of Russia is anyone’s guess; I presume it had something to do with President Trump. The reason for the Nazi chant was evident; they thought it allowed them to channel the spirit of General Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned the U.S. Army in a doomed quest to preserve race-based slavery in the South. Charlottesville’s leaders recently had voted to remove Lee’s statue from the downtown park that no longer carried his name. Spencer and his crew opposed that effort and everything they thought it implied, including hostility to the legacy of whiteness. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were similarly motivated by the perceived threat to American whiteness. Its members — 50 strong — converged on Charlottesville that July to march around and shout “white power” as hundreds of counter protesters responded with “racists go home.” How did the mad ravings of a bunch of intellectually confused, racially paranoid misfits end up spurring a national debate over the limits of free speech, the meaning of the First Amendment, and the moral obligation of the president of the United States? One reason is that — despite Kessler’s efforts to cast himself as the Martin Luther King Jr. of white rights — the rally engendered fears of made-for-TV-scale violence. As news of the event spread, and some sense of its size became clear, several local businesses announced they would temporarily close out of concern for the safety of their customers and employees. The University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville, asked students to stay away. Many rally participants showed up armed with rifles and other deadly weapons (thanks to Virginia’s open carry laws). Indeed, even before the rally’s scheduled noon start time, Kessler’s congregation had ignited so much hostility and ugliness that local authorities labeled the gathering an “illegal assembly” and ordered participants to leave. In the end, the racist, anti-Semitic hate-fest caused three deaths. Two of the dead were state troopers. Berke Bates and H. Jay Cullen, assigned to monitor the gathering from the sky, died when their helicopter crashed. The third victim was Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Adolf Hitler fanatic from Ohio, killed Heyer by intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of counter protesters — injuring some 19 people in addition to Heyer, who died from blunt-force injury to her chest. Following the tragedy, Donald Trump famously condemned the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” His words provoked a controversy that went on for months as Trump proved incapable of criticizing the racist mob without also condemning those who opposed it. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, was so sickened by the president’s words that she refused to take his condolence call. “I’m sorry. After what he said about my child,” Bro told CNN, and added, incredulously, “I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the [counter] protesters … with the KKK and the white supremacists.” James Fields’ lawyers sought mitigation by stressing his history of mental illness. A psychologist testified that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 6 and later with schizoid personality disorder. His lawyers also delved into his childhood traumas, which included coping with the murder of his grandmother by his grandfather, who had subsequently killed himself. “James’s mental illness causes him to lose emotional and behavioral control in stressful situations,” said his attorneys, who claimed he had taken himself off his meds when he was 18, meaning he was medically untethered when he murdered Heyer. After pleading guilty, Fields received two life sentences — one in state court and the other in federal court. Even with Fields confined to prison, questions raised by Heyer’s murder — and the rally that caused it — reverberated. Trump’s troubling insistence on calling bullying bigots “very fine people” was perhaps inevitable given his need to placate a base that contains more than its share of people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who promoted the rally as an effort to “take our country back” and who, after Heyer’s murder, thanked Trump via tweet for his “honesty & courage.” Duke also tweeted, “This is why WE LOVE TRUMP and WHY the FAKE NEWS MEDIA HATES TRUMP. He brings to light what the lying, Fake News Media Won’t. The truth is the media covers up horrific numbers of racist hate crimes against White people!” But putting the president and his behavior aside for the moment, what about the free speech community — the civil libertarians who successfully fought in court for Kessler’s right to hold his rally in downtown Charlottesville? The city had wanted to move Kessler’s parade of bigotry to another park, one farther from the heart of town that officials claimed would be easier to police. But Kessler had said no; and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with a local outfit called the Rutherford Institute, had sued the city on Kessler’s behalf. Following the event, the ACLU was heavily criticized — and also lauded — for standing up for the racist rabble-rousers. Glenn Greenwald, best known for reporting on U.S. surveillance programs brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcefully defended the ACLU. Civil liberties advocates, he argued, “defend the rights of those with views we hate in order to strengthen our defense of the rights of those who are most marginalized and vulnerable in society.” Others were not so sure. The Guardian reported on an erosion in “the belief that the KKK and other white supremacist organizations are operating within the bounds of acceptable political discourse — rather than as, say, terrorist organizations — and therefore have a moral right to be heard.” Jessica Clarke, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, pointed to studies showing that bigots routinely hid behind free speech arguments as a cover for racism. Highly prejudiced people, she noted, “were less likely to voice First Amendment objections when the threatened speech was race-neutral, suggesting their free speech concerns were more about the freedom to express racist prejudice than free speech in general.” Legal scholar Laura Weinrib noted that the ACLU had never blindly supported free speech but had done so in the fight for a better society; and she wondered whether “a dogged commitment to free speech” was still the best strategy for an organization pursuing social justice: “The balances have shifted dramatically since the 1930s. In recent years, nearly half of First Amendment victories have gone to corporations and trade groups challenging government regulation. Free speech has served to secure the political influence of wealthy donors. Labor’s strength has plummeted, and the Supreme Court is poised to recognize a First Amendment right of public sector employees to refuse to contribute to union expenses. Long-settled principles of American democracy are newly vulnerable, and hate has found fertile terrain.” Even Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, questioned whether old assumptions about free speech still applied: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims — the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out — still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” Leslie Mehta, the young black attorney who was legal director of the ACLU of Virginia when it took the Kessler case, seemed confident, when I interviewed her in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, that she had made the right decision. “There were certainly lots of conversations between myself and the executive director. There were a lot of revisions back and forth with briefs and having discussions about potential implications, but nobody has a crystal ball and no one [knew] exactly what [would] ultimately happen. I do think that the First Amendment has to mean something. And at the time, it was my understanding … that there was no evidence that there would be violence.” Mehta, a native of Woodland, North Carolina, is intimately familiar with the South and with the United States’ legacy of brutal racial oppression. She went to historically black Howard University School of Law because of its reputation for creating lawyers devoted to “social activism and social justice.” But she also is adamantly committed to the idea of free speech. “I think one of the reasons why free speech is so important to me is because … it exposes what you disagree with. And for me, I think it’s important to hear things like our president saying … ‘Well, there are good people on both sides.’” Mehta also thought it was important to consult with her mother and her 92-year-old grandmother as she proceeded with the Kessler case. Her grandmother, she confided, “never said that she fully agreed or disagreed [with Mehta taking the case], but she did not think that I was wrong.” As anyone trying to understand the Charlottesville fiasco quickly discovers, the issue of speech — particularly in a society polluted by racism and largely defined by economic inequality — is endlessly complex. So let me begin this journey with a brief exploration of how the U.S. came to embrace such a broad notion of free speech, and let’s look at some decisions made in its name. ••• We tend to think our current conception of free speech has been around essentially since the beginning of the republic. In truth, our firm and collective embrace of the First Amendment is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Constitution was drafted at a time when the Founders had rejected foreign tyranny. They were wary of the potential power of a centralized state. So the Bill of Rights was a balancing act, weighing not only the rights of individuals versus government in general but also the rights of states versus the federal government. Indeed, at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment did not apply to the states. As legal scholar David Yassky has pointed out, the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech was “quite weak — at least to contemporary eyes. A citizen in 1800 had no absolute right to free speech; if the speech-restricting law was a state law, the Constitution was silent.” Eventually that changed, and that had a lot to do with the Civil War, the end of slavery, the 14th Amendment, and assorted court decisions. But even after the Reconstruction era, free speech, as we understand it today, was nothing but an aspiration, which is one reason that Southern states could effectively outlaw agitation for abolition. Free speech is very much an invention of the 20th century. And that concept of speech is very idealistic, inextricably linked to the notion that in the competition of ideas, good ideas generally crowd out bad. That argument received its most famous articulation in a 1927 case: Whitney v. California. At its center was Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy California blueblood convicted of joining the Communist Party. She argued that her prosecution violated the Constitution. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. But even in disagreeing with her position, Louis Brandeis (joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) produced a brilliant and eloquent exegesis on the potential of free speech to enact social change: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine.” As Brandeis saw it, free speech was virtually a sacred right and an awesomely powerful force that would expose “falsehood and fallacies” and “avert … evil by the processes of education.” Hence, the remedy to bad speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” That piece of writing has been deemed one of the most important commentaries ever crafted on the First Amendment. But Brandeis assumed something that has not been borne out by facts, which is that the better argument would generally win. He also assumed that relevant people on all sides of a question were equally capable of being heard and that skeptics were interested in listening. That fallacy continues to inform the thinking of those who see speech as inherently self-correcting. Much as many of us admire Louis Brandeis’s mind and spirit, the society he envisioned has never existed. Instead, we have created a society in which lying is both endemic and purposeful. We have brought the worst values of advertising into the political sphere and wedded that to long-established tactics of political propaganda, even as our political class has learned to use social media to spread disinformation that propagates at a breathtaking rate. The very idea that political speech would expose and therefore vanquish “falsehood and fallacies” now seems incredibly naïve. Free speech always had limits. But because of our new technological reality, because of the unexpected weaponization of speech, we are having to consider those limits in a new light. We live in a world where it is far from clear that the answer to bad speech is more speech; and where a foreign power, thanks to our freedom of expression, may well be responsible for the election of a U.S. president. We live in a time when a frightened white minority within the larger white majority fights to maintain control of our country; and when large corporations and cynical functionaries — eager to exploit fear — have a bigger megaphone (including their own television news networks) than anyone speaking for the powerless and dispossessed. We live in an era when the U.S. awarded its presidency to a man who lost the election by roughly 3 million votes, and who, with the cooperation of a submissive Senate, has appointed judges determined to thwart the will of the public; has proposed policies, supported largely by lies, designed to further divide an already polarized nation; and caters to an irrational mob whose most fanatical elements want to refight the Civil War. All of this raises a host of difficult questions: If the Brandeisian view of speech is fatally flawed, what is a better, or at least a more realistic, view? Is it possible to reverse these trends that are destroying our democracy? How do we balance an array of important societal values that compete with the value of free speech? How, in short, do we enable a relatively enlightened majority to rescue our country from an embittered, backward-looking minority? And what happens to speech — which has never been totally free — in the process?

Excerpt adapted from The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose. Published by Amistad. Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins.

Published September 21, 2020 at 01:40PM via ACLU (https://ift.tt/3iRPsAm) via ACLU

[nancydhooper]

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

No one expected their words to be enlightening or their tone harmonious. Hatred rarely comes in such flavors. It spills out as an ugly, incoherent mess infused with the rotten odor of willful ignorance. And so it was with the Nazi wannabes — self-styled white supremacists determined to make their mark on the world, committed to convincing anyone who might listen that their superiority was both evident and inevitable. The setting was downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017. Their mission was unity — of like-minded hate mongers. Their leader, Jason Kessler, was a 33-year-old who lived with his parents and had once supported Barack Obama. He had learned that many demographers thought whites would eventually become a minority race in the United States. That news was so unsettling that Kessler remade himself into a white-rights activist. He styled himself as “a civil and human rights advocate, focused on the Caucasian demographic” in the mode of “Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi.” His “Unite the Right” rally, observed the Christian Science Monitor, “was supposed to be the movement’s coming out party, an emergence from the shadows of internet chat rooms into the national spotlight.” Kessler was inspired in part by fellow University of Virginia graduate and white supremacist Richard Spencer who, in May 2017, led a band of racists in Charlottesville chanting “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi-inspired slogan. Why they were enamored of Russia is anyone’s guess; I presume it had something to do with President Trump. The reason for the Nazi chant was evident; they thought it allowed them to channel the spirit of General Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned the U.S. Army in a doomed quest to preserve race-based slavery in the South. Charlottesville’s leaders recently had voted to remove Lee’s statue from the downtown park that no longer carried his name. Spencer and his crew opposed that effort and everything they thought it implied, including hostility to the legacy of whiteness. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were similarly motivated by the perceived threat to American whiteness. Its members — 50 strong — converged on Charlottesville that July to march around and shout “white power” as hundreds of counter protesters responded with “racists go home.” How did the mad ravings of a bunch of intellectually confused, racially paranoid misfits end up spurring a national debate over the limits of free speech, the meaning of the First Amendment, and the moral obligation of the president of the United States? One reason is that — despite Kessler’s efforts to cast himself as the Martin Luther King Jr. of white rights — the rally engendered fears of made-for-TV-scale violence. As news of the event spread, and some sense of its size became clear, several local businesses announced they would temporarily close out of concern for the safety of their customers and employees. The University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville, asked students to stay away. Many rally participants showed up armed with rifles and other deadly weapons (thanks to Virginia’s open carry laws). Indeed, even before the rally’s scheduled noon start time, Kessler’s congregation had ignited so much hostility and ugliness that local authorities labeled the gathering an “illegal assembly” and ordered participants to leave. In the end, the racist, anti-Semitic hate-fest caused three deaths. Two of the dead were state troopers. Berke Bates and H. Jay Cullen, assigned to monitor the gathering from the sky, died when their helicopter crashed. The third victim was Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Adolf Hitler fanatic from Ohio, killed Heyer by intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of counter protesters — injuring some 19 people in addition to Heyer, who died from blunt-force injury to her chest. Following the tragedy, Donald Trump famously condemned the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” His words provoked a controversy that went on for months as Trump proved incapable of criticizing the racist mob without also condemning those who opposed it. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, was so sickened by the president’s words that she refused to take his condolence call. “I’m sorry. After what he said about my child,” Bro told CNN, and added, incredulously, “I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the [counter] protesters … with the KKK and the white supremacists.” James Fields’ lawyers sought mitigation by stressing his history of mental illness. A psychologist testified that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 6 and later with schizoid personality disorder. His lawyers also delved into his childhood traumas, which included coping with the murder of his grandmother by his grandfather, who had subsequently killed himself. “James’s mental illness causes him to lose emotional and behavioral control in stressful situations,” said his attorneys, who claimed he had taken himself off his meds when he was 18, meaning he was medically untethered when he murdered Heyer. After pleading guilty, Fields received two life sentences — one in state court and the other in federal court. Even with Fields confined to prison, questions raised by Heyer’s murder — and the rally that caused it — reverberated. Trump’s troubling insistence on calling bullying bigots “very fine people” was perhaps inevitable given his need to placate a base that contains more than its share of people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who promoted the rally as an effort to “take our country back” and who, after Heyer’s murder, thanked Trump via tweet for his “honesty & courage.” Duke also tweeted, “This is why WE LOVE TRUMP and WHY the FAKE NEWS MEDIA HATES TRUMP. He brings to light what the lying, Fake News Media Won’t. The truth is the media covers up horrific numbers of racist hate crimes against White people!” But putting the president and his behavior aside for the moment, what about the free speech community — the civil libertarians who successfully fought in court for Kessler’s right to hold his rally in downtown Charlottesville? The city had wanted to move Kessler’s parade of bigotry to another park, one farther from the heart of town that officials claimed would be easier to police. But Kessler had said no; and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with a local outfit called the Rutherford Institute, had sued the city on Kessler’s behalf. Following the event, the ACLU was heavily criticized — and also lauded — for standing up for the racist rabble-rousers. Glenn Greenwald, best known for reporting on U.S. surveillance programs brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcefully defended the ACLU. Civil liberties advocates, he argued, “defend the rights of those with views we hate in order to strengthen our defense of the rights of those who are most marginalized and vulnerable in society.” Others were not so sure. The Guardian reported on an erosion in “the belief that the KKK and other white supremacist organizations are operating within the bounds of acceptable political discourse — rather than as, say, terrorist organizations — and therefore have a moral right to be heard.” Jessica Clarke, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, pointed to studies showing that bigots routinely hid behind free speech arguments as a cover for racism. Highly prejudiced people, she noted, “were less likely to voice First Amendment objections when the threatened speech was race-neutral, suggesting their free speech concerns were more about the freedom to express racist prejudice than free speech in general.” Legal scholar Laura Weinrib noted that the ACLU had never blindly supported free speech but had done so in the fight for a better society; and she wondered whether “a dogged commitment to free speech” was still the best strategy for an organization pursuing social justice: “The balances have shifted dramatically since the 1930s. In recent years, nearly half of First Amendment victories have gone to corporations and trade groups challenging government regulation. Free speech has served to secure the political influence of wealthy donors. Labor’s strength has plummeted, and the Supreme Court is poised to recognize a First Amendment right of public sector employees to refuse to contribute to union expenses. Long-settled principles of American democracy are newly vulnerable, and hate has found fertile terrain.” Even Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, questioned whether old assumptions about free speech still applied: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims — the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out — still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” Leslie Mehta, the young black attorney who was legal director of the ACLU of Virginia when it took the Kessler case, seemed confident, when I interviewed her in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, that she had made the right decision. “There were certainly lots of conversations between myself and the executive director. There were a lot of revisions back and forth with briefs and having discussions about potential implications, but nobody has a crystal ball and no one [knew] exactly what [would] ultimately happen. I do think that the First Amendment has to mean something. And at the time, it was my understanding … that there was no evidence that there would be violence.” Mehta, a native of Woodland, North Carolina, is intimately familiar with the South and with the United States’ legacy of brutal racial oppression. She went to historically black Howard University School of Law because of its reputation for creating lawyers devoted to “social activism and social justice.” But she also is adamantly committed to the idea of free speech. “I think one of the reasons why free speech is so important to me is because … it exposes what you disagree with. And for me, I think it’s important to hear things like our president saying … ‘Well, there are good people on both sides.’” Mehta also thought it was important to consult with her mother and her 92-year-old grandmother as she proceeded with the Kessler case. Her grandmother, she confided, “never said that she fully agreed or disagreed [with Mehta taking the case], but she did not think that I was wrong.” As anyone trying to understand the Charlottesville fiasco quickly discovers, the issue of speech — particularly in a society polluted by racism and largely defined by economic inequality — is endlessly complex. So let me begin this journey with a brief exploration of how the U.S. came to embrace such a broad notion of free speech, and let’s look at some decisions made in its name. ••• We tend to think our current conception of free speech has been around essentially since the beginning of the republic. In truth, our firm and collective embrace of the First Amendment is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Constitution was drafted at a time when the Founders had rejected foreign tyranny. They were wary of the potential power of a centralized state. So the Bill of Rights was a balancing act, weighing not only the rights of individuals versus government in general but also the rights of states versus the federal government. Indeed, at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment did not apply to the states. As legal scholar David Yassky has pointed out, the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech was “quite weak — at least to contemporary eyes. A citizen in 1800 had no absolute right to free speech; if the speech-restricting law was a state law, the Constitution was silent.” Eventually that changed, and that had a lot to do with the Civil War, the end of slavery, the 14th Amendment, and assorted court decisions. But even after the Reconstruction era, free speech, as we understand it today, was nothing but an aspiration, which is one reason that Southern states could effectively outlaw agitation for abolition. Free speech is very much an invention of the 20th century. And that concept of speech is very idealistic, inextricably linked to the notion that in the competition of ideas, good ideas generally crowd out bad. That argument received its most famous articulation in a 1927 case: Whitney v. California. At its center was Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy California blueblood convicted of joining the Communist Party. She argued that her prosecution violated the Constitution. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. But even in disagreeing with her position, Louis Brandeis (joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) produced a brilliant and eloquent exegesis on the potential of free speech to enact social change: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine.” As Brandeis saw it, free speech was virtually a sacred right and an awesomely powerful force that would expose “falsehood and fallacies” and “avert … evil by the processes of education.” Hence, the remedy to bad speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” That piece of writing has been deemed one of the most important commentaries ever crafted on the First Amendment. But Brandeis assumed something that has not been borne out by facts, which is that the better argument would generally win. He also assumed that relevant people on all sides of a question were equally capable of being heard and that skeptics were interested in listening. That fallacy continues to inform the thinking of those who see speech as inherently self-correcting. Much as many of us admire Louis Brandeis’s mind and spirit, the society he envisioned has never existed. Instead, we have created a society in which lying is both endemic and purposeful. We have brought the worst values of advertising into the political sphere and wedded that to long-established tactics of political propaganda, even as our political class has learned to use social media to spread disinformation that propagates at a breathtaking rate. The very idea that political speech would expose and therefore vanquish “falsehood and fallacies” now seems incredibly naïve. Free speech always had limits. But because of our new technological reality, because of the unexpected weaponization of speech, we are having to consider those limits in a new light. We live in a world where it is far from clear that the answer to bad speech is more speech; and where a foreign power, thanks to our freedom of expression, may well be responsible for the election of a U.S. president. We live in a time when a frightened white minority within the larger white majority fights to maintain control of our country; and when large corporations and cynical functionaries — eager to exploit fear — have a bigger megaphone (including their own television news networks) than anyone speaking for the powerless and dispossessed. We live in an era when the U.S. awarded its presidency to a man who lost the election by roughly 3 million votes, and who, with the cooperation of a submissive Senate, has appointed judges determined to thwart the will of the public; has proposed policies, supported largely by lies, designed to further divide an already polarized nation; and caters to an irrational mob whose most fanatical elements want to refight the Civil War. All of this raises a host of difficult questions: If the Brandeisian view of speech is fatally flawed, what is a better, or at least a more realistic, view? Is it possible to reverse these trends that are destroying our democracy? How do we balance an array of important societal values that compete with the value of free speech? How, in short, do we enable a relatively enlightened majority to rescue our country from an embittered, backward-looking minority? And what happens to speech — which has never been totally free — in the process?

Excerpt adapted from The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose. Published by Amistad. Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/the-short-life-and-curious-death-of-free-speech-in-america via http://www.rssmix.com/

[gdelgiproducer]

If anyone wants to know one specific view of how I would have staged my team’s “Tanz”...

...you can go here. I updated my proposal, as I stated in an earlier entry, to reflect new ideas I’ve had since I wrote (as part of a renovation effort on my side-blog). 

But it is important to bear this in mind: my staging plans are pure fan wish fulfillment. The vicissitudes of production would no doubt lead to different approaches to many of these ideas if the show actually reaches the stage, and I’m literally one of the last in the pecking order who would probably be allowed an opinion on the subject. My ideas would carry weight with Richard, Ashton (to a lesser extent, though he has always been positive and enthusiastic about my thoughts), and that’s about where the list ends.

For those who are curious as to why, and don’t already know, I shall explain.

A lot of shows are subject, both in their first-run production history and occasionally in their licensing, to replica productions. In the interest of clarity, for those who don’t know, a replica production is one that retains the original staging, and sometimes even costumes and choreography, and all of that comes as part of the license, with a varying degree of restrictions over what can be used and how. Think of it as the original version “frozen” in time or something like that.

Major “frozen” shows include some of the greats, like:

Jerome Robbins. Professional productions of Fiddler on the Roof, Gypsy, and West Side Story, for example, must use his choreography, and occasionally when people have tried to do quite different takes – of Fiddler or Gypsy in particular – they have then been forced to work around the mandated choreography and somehow make it not feel shoe-horned into their new concept.

A Chorus Line

Some of the largest Cameron Mackintosh productions (Les Misérables, Phantom, etc.)

Susan Stroman’s original production of The Producers. In its early years of widespread licensing, productions were essentially all stamped “replica,” going as far as making sure the leads performed their roles the same way other leads did, and even bringing in show veterans to keep it running like clockwork, same as it ever was, in touring, regional, and Hollywood Bowl productions.

The obvious advantage to this for the audience is that one can see glimpses of what made the original production so thrilling, and in terms of advantages to the creative team, they can ensure that the show they toiled over will always basically look and sound the same when someone sees it. The downside is that it can grow samey over the years, or worse, be cast with performers not up to the original standards. For me, the jury is still out when it comes to replica vs. new stagings: for some shows, I would like to see a newly-interpreted production (I mean, why write a side-blog devoted to new directorial concepts otherwise?), but for others, I’m very much in the “show me a replica of a brilliant production” camp.

After a famously awful example of a non-replica (in the strongest sense of the word) production in New York, the rights holders for Tanz der Vampire have been very careful about allowing even the most minor changes to the show. By which I mean, they generally don’t allow them (after NY, who could blame them?). The show has mostly been presented in one of two replica packages, which I have dubbed – for lack of a better distinction – the “Stage Entertainment” (basically resembling the original Vienna and Stuttgart productions, with Dudley/Blane/Vanstone designs) and “Kentaur” (self-explanatory, used in a few territories since the Hungarian production where the designs premiered) packages.

It’s been my understanding for some time that they are largely only interested in licensing Tanz for professional production when coupled with one of these two packages. A few non-replica productions (Estonia, Finland, Japan, Slovakia, and now the Czech Republic) have been allowed to go forward, but only with minor differences (i.e., a white dress instead of red for Sarah in Prague) that don’t materially alter the way the story is told, and they all have the same text and music.

Well, a non-replica production that did something rather different indeed finally came along. After some initial speculation and outcry that appears to have been based on lost-in-translation shenanigans that construed “sanitarium” as meaning “a lunatic asylum” and only that, it emerged that the St. Gallen production had been re-set in a Bryan Fuller/Gotham-ish retro-present at a remote health resort run by the Chagal family (perhaps on behalf of Krolock, I’m still not 100% sure on that detail). And to say it has been divisive in the fandom is a massive understatement. Purists cried “if you can’t do the show right, don’t do the fucking show” and compared it sight unseen to the changes wrought in New York, while Tanz fans who had been thirsting for something – anything – different urged all comers to give it a chance.

After initial skepticism and misgivings, mainly related to the fear (stemming from the mistaken impression it would be set in the Transylvanian equivalent of Arkham) that we were going to be dealing with a whole lot of stylized insanity bullshit tropes, I found myself in the latter camp. While I didn’t see the particular point of modernizing it, and thought some of it looked silly, I was decidedly less worried about this approach than what I thought it was: it sounded novel (once I figured out what it was), it still arrived at what was basically a modern equivalent instead of being what many feared (namely, a radical thematic reinterpretation that clashes with the text), it looked fun, and, if successful, it could have a positive impact on non-replica productions of the show in the future. For anyone who has read my ideas, you’ll note that such success would benefit me – immensely – if it leads to allowing that level of flexibility.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand the purists’ objections. As a Jesus Christ Superstar fan, I have been tired of seeing essentially the same show for almost 50 years (well, okay, I wasn’t around for all of it, but you know what I mean), so when I finally got my hands on the score for a short-lived “gospel” adaptation that took huge liberties with the music, I was excited, because at last it was something different. But, as I discovered when sharing it with other fans who criticized its radical departures, different is not always an improvement, and “different for the sake of being different” is bogus. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” On the flip-side of that coin, however… Jesus Christ Superstar GOSPEL was rooted in the specific idea of looking at the show and its score from a new perspective. Because a) gospel music is traditionally identified with the story told in the show, and b) the specific way the story is explored in JCS has never been done in the gospel tradition before, not only was it worth exploring on an artistic level, but the concept (if not necessarily the execution) could be defended intellectually. It shone a new light on the material, it was rooted in textual analysis, and it brought forth things about the show that no one had considered before. In my opinion, that was exactly what the St. Gallen production did, and what my ideas do. It’s interesting, and valid, to play with different ideas sometimes.

While seeing the outcry from purist Tanz fans did cause some second thoughts (if they can’t handle the St. Gallen Tanz, how are they going to handle my stripped-down concert-like version with a smaller cast [using revamped characterizations], reduced orchestration, and nightclub aesthetic?), I’m not ashamed of my ideas; I feel like part of doing Tanz one’s own way is to go big or go home. But, given the currently established precedent, Tanz purists can rest easy; it is highly unlikely my ideas will ever be used.

[ao3feed-janeausten]

Sanditon continued - a novella

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2SlTiHm

by thesispyre2007

This is an experiment. In writing this I have created a pastiche of Jane Austen's and Andrew Davies's world. I started with AD's version of Sanditon and tried to imagine what sort of story JA might have written after that cliffhanger ending, loosely following the outline that I wrote for series 2. I have tried to do the impossible by imitating her (inimitable) voice and moralizing tone, and as a result many of the scenes and conversations have been adapted and/or lifted from JA's works (including details from her Sanditon fragment). It was fiendishly difficult to write male conversations in what I imagine to be JA's voice since I had no examples to base it on. In such cases I turned to George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and even to Tolstoy to get a sense of a male world or a male sensibility - for that reason you will find many scenes/conversations that are also adapted from North and South, Wives and Daughters, Middlemarch and Anna Karenin. I had a lot of fun writing this but took many liberties with JA and shamelessly lifted from other beloved 19th-century books - so be warned!

Words: 40527, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Sanditon (TV 2019), Sanditon - Jane Austen

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: F/M

Characters: Charlotte Heywood, Sidney Parker, Tom Parker (Sanditon), Mary Parker (Sanditon), Georgiana Lambe, Otis Molyneux, Lord Babington (Sanditon), Esther Denham, Lady Susan Worcester, Arthur Parker

Relationships: Charlotte Heywood/Sidney Parker, Charlotte Heywood & Sidney Parker

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2SlTiHm

[marauderhead55]

A Piece of Me... Cassandra x Caspian.

Cassandra strolled through the magnificent gardens of Cair Paravel. Taking a long walk was the only way she found helpful whenever she felt the need to clear her head. She thought about England, and how she had initially assumed she was going to be homesick for things like the radio or even the simple waft of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies flitting through the mundane kitchens. However, choosing to remain in Narnia with Caspian was one of the best decisions she had ever made. Today, was her wedding anniversary. The day marked her second year of wedded union with her beloved Caspian. 

The brown-eyed female took in her surroundings, the gardens were beautiful indeed. There were trees and plants of all sorts growing in there. Colourful tulips, purple orchids dancing in the breeze, apple trees that looked as if they held the sweetest of apples. She stopped and sat under one of the pergolas, with a book in her hand. The only memory of her times in England. She had carried that book with her when she first arrived in Narnia. Oh, good old Narnia. If anyone told her back when she was a grumpy teenager that one day she would be living in a magical land and that she would be betrothed to a prince, she would have laughed at them. Cassandra still couldn’t believe how her life had played out. She flipped through the pages of ‘Through the Looking Glass’ but paid little attention to the words on the page. Instead her mind drifted off as she thought about her best friends, the Pevensie children. Whom by now, she was sure, were adults and teenagers. She was best friends with Susan at school, and had discovered Narnia when she was sucked into the land by a supernatural (as she had phrased it back then) force. She fought in the battle against the Telmarine army, and in fact, that was where she met her husband, Caspian. Her cheeks turned a light shade of pink as she thought about him. She was rendered speechless the first time she laid eyes on the man. But to say that their relationship was love at first sight would be a downright lie. Initially, Cassandra and Caspian had disagreed on so many levels. They had different opinions and views on most things and that included battle strategies. However, through all that they established a friendship like no other. Soon enough the duo had crossed the friend-zone and became a couple. They were a power-couple, in fact. They embarked on the iconic Voyage of the Dawn Treader together, and fought many battles alongside each other. Eventually Caspian proposed and made her his Queen. 

Fate worked in funny ways sometimes. 

“Lady Cassandra? I hope I’m not interrupting anything,”  spoke a voice from behind her. The chocolate-haired female turned around to see her lady-in-waiting and best friend, Andromeda, standing there. Cassandra shook her head and gestured for the pretty lady to join her. The two ladies chatted with one another. Cassandra even took the liberty of reading Andromeda a passage from her beloved book. The afternoon seemed to pass quickly with a friend there. 

------------------------

Caspian frantically tried to occupy Cassandra that evening. Cassandra found it unnerving that he was acting so strangely. Caspian never fretted about anything. All Cassandra wanted was to have a romantic evening with Caspian, not be away from him. 

“Love? Is there something wrong?” questioned the chestnut-haired female. Caspian turned to her, with wide eyes.

“Nope, nothing is amiss. Why do you ask?” 

“Come off it Caspian, I can tell when something is wrong with you,” chided Cassandra. Caspian sighed, massaging the bridge of his nose. After some hesitation, the brown-haired male gave in. 

“Look, Cassandra, I wanted to surprise you. Since its our anniversary, I thought maybe we could do something special. Just the two of us and I had this whole dinner planned and what not,” trailed off Caspian. Cassandra beamed. Caspian, who saw no point in delaying what he had planned for that evening, led her to the palace library. 

Cassandra was surprised. Why the library? Caspian noticed the puzzled expression she sported. 

“Not to worry, love, we’re not going to be reading all night,” assured Caspian. Cassandra chuckled. 

“That’s too bad, reading would have been a splendid idea,” 

Caspian feigned hurt and pretended to wipe away a tear. Earning himself another hearty laugh from his Queen. The brown-eyed male pushed an enormous shelf aside, as if he were opening a large sliding door. Caspian did a ladies-first sweep, motioning for Cassandra to enter the hidden room. To say that Cassandra was stunned would be an understatement. 

The room was grandly decorated, yet in all of its royal splendour, it had an air of simplicity about it. Something that Cassandra appreciated. There was a small table in the middle of the room, which was laden with Narnian delicacies that the duo enjoyed. The room itself was glamoured with small candles, which reminded Cassandra of the little fairies she had come across on one of her adventures. On closer inspection, the doe-eyed female noticed that one of the delicacies wasn’t Narnian at all. It was a tray of chocolate chip cookies! She laughed in awe. 

“Caspian, how did you get these?” She asked, hoping she didn’t sound like a blazing idiot. Caspian chortled.

“I had some help,” came his reply. Cassandra nodded and sat down on the chair Caspian pulled out for her. 

“This is beautiful, I didn’t think you’d remember, but thank you so much,” said the chestnut-haired girl. Caspian waved her off.

“Come on, how could I forget?” 

Cassandra had a a cheeky glint in her dark brown eyes. She brought up the time when Caspian was too petrified to ask her out on a date. Caspian laughed at the memory, and claimed that he wasn’t in fact petrified, but thought that she would be instead. However, Cassandra knew that he only said that in his defence. 

Caspian gazed at his wife. She hadn’t lost any of her grit, wit or determination. She was still the strong, intelligent and charismatic woman he fell for. The fact that she was beautiful didn’t hurt too. Her eyes were a hickory as rich as the Earth’s soil; stained with the colour of hot chocolate on a winter’s night, that engulfs you in it’s warmth making you feel right at home. Her long, brown hair that seemed to flow like a waterfall around her whenever she walked or danced, captivated him like no one else had before. Cassandra blushed, she felt weak under his gaze. She felt as if she could melt into a puddle right there and then. Caspian stood up.

“May I have this dance?” 

“You may,” She said, or squealed. She couldn’t tell. The couple danced effortlessly. There was no music; they didn’t need any. Caspian looked in awe at the woman in his arms. He couldn’t believe how lucky he had gotten. Her enticing eyes, adorable freckles, carefree smile as they continued to promenade over the glossy floors, without a hitch. He could never get enough of her. Cassandra enjoyed being in Caspian’s arms. She let his familiar peppermint-y scent mixed with a dash of vanilla intoxicate her. His youthful, mahogany eyes reminded her of the seasons, ever changing, but nonetheless; dazzling. Caspian leaned closer toward Cassandra, their lips brushed against one another until Cassandra seized him in a kiss. His soft lips collided against hers. Cassandra’s hands entangled themselves in Caspian’s hair. His lips tasted sweet from the cookies and slightly bitter from the spiced wine they had been consuming. Cassandra’s lips tasted like overly-sweetened tea, as is always did, mixed with the taste of spiced wine. They lost themselves in the kiss. Their tongues battled for dominance. It was a beautiful moment. No interruptions, no hesitations and no limitations. Cassandra pulled away, breathlessly. 

“I think we should take this party somewhere else,” She remarked, suggestively. Caspian smirked.

“I assume the bedroom would be a better place?”  

Cassandra nodded, grabbing Caspian’s hand as they sauntered to the bedroom. 

Let’s just say they had a wonderful night. 

[themastercylinder]

  SUMMARY

In the film’s prologue, two geological researchers for the American multinational corporation NTI encounter an ancient alien laboratory on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. In the lab is an egg-like container which is keeping an alien creature alive. The creature emerges and kills the researchers. Two months later, the geologists’ spaceship crashes into the space station Concorde in orbit around Earth’s moon, its pilot having died in his seat.

CREATURE, 1985

NTI dispatches a new ship, the Shenandoah, to Titan. Its crew, consisting of Captain Mike Davison (Stan Ivar), Susan Delambre (Marie Laurin), Jon Fennel (Robert Jaffe), Dr. Wendy H. Oliver (Annette McCarthy), David Perkins (Lyman Ward) and Beth Sladen (Wendy Schaal), is accompanied by the taciturn security officer Melanie Bryce (Diane Salinger). While in orbit, the crew locate a signal coming from the moon—the distress call of a ship from the rival German multinational Richter Dynamics. Their own landing turns disastrous when the ground collapses beneath their landing site, dropping the ship into a cavern and wrecking it. When radio communication fails, a search party is sent out to contact the Germans.

In the German ship, they find one of the containers from the prologue breached, as well as the dead bodies of the crew. The creature appears and kills Delambre when she lags behind the escaping group. Fennel enters a state of shock at the sight and Bryce sedates him. When they return to their own ship, the Americans find that one of the Germans, Hans Rudy Hofner (Klaus Kinski), has snuck aboard. He tells them how his crew was slain by the creature, which was buried with other organisms as part of a galactic menagerie. He proposes returning to his ship to get explosives, but the crew are unwilling to risk it.

It becomes apparent that the creature’s undead victims are controlled by the creature through parasites. Unsupervised in the medbay, Fennel sees the undead Delambre through a porthole and follows her outside. She strips naked, and he stands transfixed while she removes his helmet. He asphyxiates, and then she attaches an alien parasite to his head. Now under alien control, Fennel sends a transmission to his crew mates, inviting them over to the German ship. Hofner and Bryce are sent to get some air tanks for the Shenandoah and stand guard over it, while the rest of the crew go over to the Richter ship.

Hofner and Bryce stop over at the menagerie on their way, and are attacked by Delambre, who has had a parasite attached earlier. The rest of the crew go over to the Richter ship, and find Fennel with a bandage on his head to conceal his parasite. Davison insists that medical officer Oliver examine his head, so Fennel has her accompany him to the engineering quarters to feed her to the creature. Davison and Perkins notice Fennel doesn’t sweat and go check on them. They are too late to rescue Oliver, who is decapitated by the creature, but Perkins blows up Fennel’s head with his pistol.

Soon afterwards, Sladen runs into an infected Hofner. She escapes the ship, and in her haste, only puts on her helmet after exiting. Perkins spots her outside and opens the airlock. Now unconscious, Sladen is carried in by Hofner to lure the others. They fight, and Davison manages to defeat Hofner by ripping off his parasite. The three survivors formulate a plan to electrocute the creature with the ship’s fusion modules, which can only be accessed by going through the engineering quarters.

Alarms suddenly sound as a creature makes its way through the ship, committing sabotage. Sladen and Davison go through engineering to construct an electrocution trap, while Perkins goes to the computer room to monitor the creature. Sladen finishes rigging the trap just in time for the creature’s arrival, and they apparently electrocute it to death. However, when Davison leaves, it captures Sladen.

CREATURE, Robert Jaffe, Klaus Kinski, 1985

Davison and Perkins follow her screaming and find her locked inside engineering. Studying the ship’s blueprints, they find another entrance to engineering and sends Perkins to lure away the creature while Davison retrieves Sladen. On the way, Perkins locates one of the bombs Hofner had mentioned, just before the creature jumps him. Dying, Perkins manages to attach the bomb to the creature and set off the countdown so Davison can jettison it through the airlock.

It climbs back aboard, however, so Davison tackles it, throwing himself out the airlock in the process. When the bomb fails to explode, Bryce appears and shoots it, which sets it off and kills the creature. She recovers Davison and dresses his wounds, then they reunite with Sladen and finally launch the ship.

  Director William Malone

BEHIND THE SCENES/ PRODUCTION

Even though in space, nobody can hear you scream Bill Malone still wants you to try. The 37 year old director of SCARED TO DEATH is getting ready to try and scare audiences again with his second feature, THE TITAN FIND. The $4.2 million production is set to open this spring, and Malone is cautiously optimistic about its chances.

The film is set in the near future, when the commercialization of space is well under way. On the surface of Titan, a research ship has discovered the remains of an ancient alien laboratory and its collection of specimens. One specimen, however, turns out to be much livelier than originally thought, and kills all but one of the crew. The survivor lives long enough to make it back to Earth, setting off a race between two competing multinational firms for whatever is there, both unaware of just how deadly the alien is.

Despite its small budget, the film boasts good production values, with set design by Robert Skotak and effects by the L.A. Effects Group, and stars international weirdo Klaus Kinski as a German space commander.

Malone, a baby-faced man who resembles DREAMSCAPE’s villain David Patrick Kelley, explained the roundabout way THE TITAN FIND got off the ground. “After I did SCARED TO DEATH, I was trying to get another project going.” said Malone. “One of the people my producer Bill Dunn and I went to see said they’d really like to make a picture like SCARED TO DEATH. They signed us up to do one of our projects, MURDER IN THE 21ST CENTURY, a detective story. After we did the screenplay, they didn’t think it had enough exploitation value. ‘What else do you have,’ they asked, and can you have it to us by tomorrow morning?’ This was in January, 1984.

“On that short a notice, all I could do was go through my files and see what I had kicking around. I found a two page story synopsis of THE TITAN FIND which I had written six or seven years earlier, and I took that in to them. It was basically just the beginning of the picture as it is now. I read it to them with some background tapes of classical music and they loved it. I said to myself, ‘Great…, now how do I make a film out of this?”

Not only was how a problem, but where as well. With a tight budget and little lead time given the company, it would have been nearly impossible to get studio space to shoot the film. The production’s answer was to create its own studio, setting up shop in an abandoned industrial plant in Burbank. The small warehouse became a tight maze of different bits of spaceship interiors and planet exteriors, with Malone’s crew shooting on one set, while another was torn down behind them and another built just ahead of them. Filming began June 25th.

Construction of the bridge of the NTI spaceship ‘Shenandoah

“We’ve been on it now for 8′ weeks, and I’m tired,” said Malone. “This has been a particularly tough picture because everything’s got smoke and dust and lava rock, which not only creates a lot of noise when you step on it, but makes this gritty dust and gets into everything. We’re forever wearing filter masks. Initially it sounded like a good idea doing everything in one location where you wouldn’t have to be moving people around, but after a while, all you want to do is go outside and see some sun.”

Malone is taking a lot of liberties with the Titan setting. “Well, I figure it will be a long time before anybody gets there to find out what it is actually like,” he said. “Everything’s got this sort of Dante’s Inferno look to it. There are these tremendous lightning storms going on all the time. The picture almost winds up looking like gothic horror. In fact, when we designed the miniatures, that was the instruction, make them look like Dracula’s castle. From the dailies, someone said they thought it looked like a Mario Bava picture, which I take as a compliment.”

To get the most out of the sets and special effects, Malone decided to shoot in widescreen Panavision. “A space picture practically demands that kind of format,” said Malone. “I had to do some fast talking because most of the people involved didn’t want to go anamorphic. Initially it’s a pain in the ass to deal with the Panavision company. If you’re not a major company, they tend to want all their money up front, and that’s very hard to deal with, but once we had set the deal with them, they were easier to get along with. Using Panavision really paid off in the long run, because it gives the picture a bigger look. With Panavision, you gain about 40 percent in image area, and it tremendously improves the image and clarity. This is only my first Panavision picture, but after working with it, you get kind of spoiled.”

Robert Skotak on the set of the Richter Dynamics spaceship from ‘Titan Find

One group that found it a little harder to work up enthusiasm for the widescreen format were the people involved in physically producing the special effects for the film, the year old L.A. Effects Group headed by Larry Benson. The company includes Alan Markowitz, director of animation and optical effects, and Corman effects graduates Robert and Dennis Skotak. Robert serves as director of visual effects while brother Dennis is director of photography.

“The single biggest problem we had was the anamorphic format,” said Dennis Skotak. “Bill Malone likes widescreen, and I like widescreen, but for a limited budget, it’s a problem. It’s real hard to force depth of-field because you have to have a great deal of light to close the camera aperture down.

“Because the budget was so low on this picture, we had a limit on how much time could be spent building the models. The ships are not large enough for a lot of the things that are necessary. One of the producers wanted a shot of the Shenandoah much closer than what we had planned it to be. I had to pull out the bag of tricks to get it done. We had to have the ship so close to the camera that it was grazing the film magazine.”

“I storyboarded the film, designed all of the miniatures (except for the American ship, The Shenandoah, which Bill Malone designed himself), and worked closely with Bill on the planning and staging of each shot,” Skotak explains. “He pretty much left me with a free hand to design the look and layout of each scene. His input was heavily along the lines of what the mood and coloration of something should be, the things that were important to convey a building feeling of suspense. For example, when the ships are approaching Titan, they’re not zooming by. They’re moving very slowly, almost serenely. Then as they enter Titan’s atmosphere, there is all of this lightning going on around them and huge dust storms everywhere. “In the same way, we wanted the interior of the Richter Dynamics ship, where a lot of the action takes place, to look very German Gray, functional, much like a battleship. We wanted it to look like a weird place without getting ludicrous. I made it a little expressionistic, gave it buttresses and bulkheads to shoot from behind. There is also a geographic quality to the bridge; the area is broken up into planes by several different shapes.”

An Early Concept

Robert Skotak’s Creature Design

Skotak also designed the look of the alien, which Malone finally approved after choosing elements from dozens of different sketches that Bob drew. Mike McCracken and Don Pennington were among several people who contributed molds and mechanics to the snakish suit, but it was Doug Beswick, who was called upon, under a heavy deadline, to pull the whole suit together.

“I was real skeptical about it being finished on time,” Beswick recalls. “Bill could only push the shooting schedule back 13 days. The neck and jaw had to be rebuilt to give the creature a larger bite radius, the fingers had to be extended and given long claws, legs and arms had to be built, we had to get a truly vicious look into the face.

This is the small scale maquette, which estabilished the look for the Monster — which would have only minor modifications. It was built by Michael McCracken’s team.

“We would have liked to have done more, but it was a very limited schedule. Considering that, I’m very happy with the way the thing turned out. I haven’t seen many dailies, but what I’ve seen looks good. They are shooting it right, taking their time to light it correctly. I hesitated at first to take on this job, because of the time limit, but I was able to do it and I’ve learned quite a lot, so now I’m glad that I took it on.”

Beswick also built a mock up version and a one-third scale gelatin replica of the rubber suit, both of which will be used in surprise special effect scenes. But monsters from other planets aren’t all you’ll be cringing at. Besides your basic assortment of gouged necks, chewed limbs and decapitated skulls, Titan Find will grace screens with the spectacle of ripped faces, exploding heads and flying cow bellies.

Special effects makeup was originally designed by Bruce Zahlava, who left the production due to creative differences halfway through the shooting. Jill Rockow, a makeup veteran of The Howling, Frightmare, Deadly Eyes, Conan the Destroyer and Friday the 13th-The Final Chapter, among numerous others, is responsible for the daily applications. One of her primary tasks was to destroy parasite victims Robert Jaffe and Klaus Kinski from the inside out.

“Robert Jaffe has the most makeup of anybody.” Rockow explains. “He attacks people and spits blood at them. His face deteriorates and pulls off. In fact, it’s my hand that rips his face off! The actress he’s fighting with in the scene had to go home, and the actual ripping was done with a fake head. I just reached into the frame and pulled off a section of it to expose the underneath, which was a duplicate of the makeup Robert had on.

Jill Rockow Applies Prosthetics

“His face peels off more later on, to reveal this whole bloody and slimy underface. Eventually, his head explodes completely. That was done with another fake head and pyrotechnics. The head was filled with cow bellies, cow brains; it was a real party there. It was made out of gelatin and we planted pieces of primacord inside it. Primacord’s an explosive that is so powerful that a piece of it wrapped around your neck will shoot your head right off. It cuts things off clean. People who do blasts for oil wells use it.

“Robert Jaffe really gets destroyed in this. He’s a producer as well as actor; he produced Motel Hell and Demon Seed. He was wonderful to work with, very cooperative. We went through five hours of makeup application every day and two hours of taking it off. He never moaned once.”

Three overlapping appliances are used to create Klaus Kinski’s makeup. The chin goes on first, then the nose, and the forehead and cheek pieces last. As his character starts to deteriorate, plugs on his cheeks and chin are pulled out to uncover the monstrous mutation going on underneath. Rockow and her crew, which included Jerry Quist and Paul Rinehard, have their work cut out for them with these designs; because of the limited budget (estimated at $4 million), Kinski does not appear in all of his scenes, and two doubles, neither of whom resemble the Polish actor, or each other for that matter, have to stand in for him in a number of action scenes. Luckily, Rockow’s foam rubber appliances cover the entire face, so the differences in actors is impossible to detect.

“The alien itself and all the parasites were covered in K-Y,” Rockow explains, “and everyone’s face was K-Y’d too. We tinted it a yellowish-brown for all of the decomposing human stuff. The neat thing about K-Y is that it dries about an hour or so after you apply it, to a point where it’s not slippery. A lot of makeup people use Methocel for creating slime, but that dries hard and you’ve got to peel it off before you can put a new batch on. This stuff just keeps dripping until it dries.

“About the gore, I tend to sort of pull back in that area,” says Malone. “There are some dramatic scenes that have some gore in them, but I think that if you do it all the way through, then it loses its punch. My basic approach is that I really like suspense more than gore, but the problem is that you have to remember that we also have to try and sell the movie overseas. There are countries that won’t buy your picture without a certain amount of gore in it. Look at the Italian zombie movies, and Japanese kid shows, they have people getting hacked to pieces and arrows that go through eyes … that sort of stuff, so you have to have some pretty heavyweight material in your picture for them to be interested in it.”

Regarding Klaus Kinski

Surprises and difficulties were in store for the live action crew as well. No sooner had Malone worked out the story line for the film and started work on the script when his backers threw him a curve. To help give the film a stronger selling point, his investors had gotten a “name” actor, Klaus Kinski. The problem was that they only had Kinski for a week, and there wasn’t a part in the film that would suit him.

“Previously, we had clues in the original story as to what happened in the German ship, and the audience was supposed to draw its own conclusions,” Malone said. “But once we had Klaus, it seemed the best thing to do was make him the commander of the German ship and work from there. I think he enjoyed working on the film, but it was very hard to tell. He’s got an unusual personality. He worked with me on his part in the script, and actually, I think he would make a very good story editor. He was very helpful with suggestions and with working with the other actors.

I think it helped everyone else too because they really seemed to be working harder because they were working with him.

“Klaus was crazier off camera than the part I wrote for him, and I wrote him as a total looney. The first day of shooting he shows up, and the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘I raped my 12-year-old daughter, you know.’ I thought, oh great, this is going to be fun. “Halfway through the first day of shooting, the crew came up to me en masse and said, ‘Billy, we want you to know we’re all going to take Klaus out back and beat the shit out of him.’ I said, ‘Look guys, you have to wait until the end of the week, and then you can do everything you want.’ He was a madman, really, but I will say this, when he’s on screen, he just lights up the screen. He’s definitely one of the best things in the picture. He really added a lot to it. When we write a script, a lot of times the actors don’t give you what you heard in your head. Klaus was one of the few people who gave me exactly what I was writing, the intonation and delivery that I heard for this stuff.”

A running gag on the set occurred after Kinski tried to make a pass at the female makeup artist who was applying his makeup by sticking his knee between her legs and telling her, “That is not my knee, that is my cock.” From then on, whenever anyone on the set bumped into someone else, it became de rigueur to say, “That is not my knee, that is my cock,” regardless of the circumstances.

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ALIEN rip off?

 “You have to understand that this movie has turned out to be a lot bigger picture than we set out to make. We started out small, but after the second week of shooting, the investors looked at the footage and said they loved it and wanted us to make it bigger and better, so they kept throwing money at us, which is really a filmmaker’s dream. We’re using a Dolby stereo soundtrack, which isn’t something we were originally designed for. When we put together a rough cut of the movie, we decided it would add a lot to the film, even though it was going to cost another $80,000.”

Aside from the technical aspects of the film, Malone knows he’s going to run into objections about the film: is it an ALIEN rip off?

“I don’t know what to say about the ALIEN question,” Malone continued. “I guess it depends on whether you consider ALIEN an original story. I don’t look at that many films as real originals. I know ALIEN had elements of several films in it that I could name, but beyond that, most genre films are pretty derivative. I think that THE TITAN FIND has got some unusual and interesting things in it. Certainly the film is going to be compared to other films, but I don’t think you can help that. I actually think there’s a lot more of 1950’s science fiction in it than anything else, and that it resembles ALIEN because Dan O’Bannon and myself were probably inspired by the same pictures. I like Spielberg’s JAWS also. I think it’s probably one of the best monster movies ever made; when I was writing Klaus Kinski’s part, I wanted to try and capture more of the feel of Robert Shaw’s part in that, than ALIEN.”

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Cast

Stan Ivar as Captain Mike Davison

Wendy Schaal as Beth Sladen

Lyman Ward as David Perkins

Robert Jaffe as Jon Fennel

Diane Salinger as Melanie Bryce

Annette McCarthy as Dr. Wendy H. Oliver

Marie Laurin as Susan Delambre

Klaus Kinski as Hans Rudy Hofner

  Directed by   William Malone

Produced by William G. Dunn

Screenplay by William Malone Alan Reed

  Produced by

Moshe Diamant       …       executive producer

William G. Dunn      …       producer (as William G. Dunn Jr.)

Ronnie Hadar          …       executive producer

William Malone        …       producer

Don Stern     …       associate producer

    Art Direction by Michael Novotny

  Stephen Glassman  …       scenic artist

  Special Effects by

Wayne Beauchamp …       pyrotechnician

Doug Beswick         …       creature coordinator / miniature construction

John Eggett  …       pyrotechnician

Michael McCracken …       creator: “Titan Find” creature

Gerald Quist …       special effects makeup assistant

Paul Rinehard         …       special effects makeup assistant

Jill Rockow    …       special effects makeup assistant

Robert Short …       weapons creator

Bruce Zahlava         …       special effects makeup supervisor

  Visual Effects by

Larry Benson          …       visual effects executive producer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Suzanne M. Benson          …       visual effects production associate: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Bob Burns     …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Steve Caldwell        …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

George D. Dodge    …       effects cinematographer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. (as George Dodge)

Judith Evans …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Alec Gillis      …       special thanks: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Sanford Kennedy    …       model maker: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

John Lambert          …       optical consultant: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Alan G. Markowitz   …       animation supervisor: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. (as Alan Markowitz) / director optical effects: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. (as Alan Markowitz)

Pat McClung …       special thanks: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Jake Monroy …       mechanical engineer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Jay Roth       …       model maker: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Dennis Skotak         …       director of photography: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. / stage supervisor: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Robert Skotak         …       special designer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. / visual effects director: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Kathleen Spurney    …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

George Turner        …       effects animator: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Steve Benson         …       visual effects supervisor (uncredited)

    REFERENCES and SOURCES

Cinefantastique v 15 n02

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      Creature (1985) Retrospective SUMMARY In the film's prologue, two geological researchers for the American multinational corporation NTI encounter an ancient alien laboratory on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

[libertariantaoist]

It’s the Boomerang Effect – an investigation that exposes the investigators.  That’s what we’re witnessing as the “Russia-gate” probe reveals that the real  evildoers at the heart of this ginned-up brouhaha are those who accused President  Trump of “treason.”

Now we know the real treason — to the Constitution — is that committed by  members of the Obama administration, starting with former National Security  Advisor Susan Rice, who, as the Daily Caller reports:

“[O]rdered U.S. spy agencies to produce ‘detailed spreadsheets’ of legal  phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president,  according to former US Attorney Joseph diGenova.

“’What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms.  Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump  associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals… The overheard  conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates,  or anyone they were speaking with,’ diGenova said. ‘In short, the only apparent  illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.’”

The Susan Rice connection was first reported  by Trump supporter Mike  Cernovich, but his article received little notice. However, when Bloomberg  reporter Eli Lake wrote  about it, Fox  News followed up and the story began to break all over the media map. Lake  reported that:

“White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security  adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of US persons in raw intelligence  reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and  campaign, according to US officials familiar with the matter.”

Monitored conversations had nothing to do with Trump’s alleged ties to Russian  officials, but instead, according to numerous reports, involved detailed information  about the Trump campaign. As Lake put it:

“The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations – primarily  between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some  cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign  officials. One US official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable  political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was  meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for  the incoming administration.”

When monitored  conversations involve a US person, the protocol is supposed to mandate the “minimization”  of that person’s identity. There are, however, ways to get around this, and  the Obama administration apparently relaxed the rules to enable not only the  “unmasking” of the US persons involved in these conversations but also to make  it possible for the information to be disseminated to top administration officials,  including not only Ms. Rice but also, according  to Fox, “to all those at the National Security Council, some at the  Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and  then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including  former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.”

This went on for “up  to a year.”

So here is what we now know: The Obama administration was spying  on “Trump, his team, and his family,” as the report cited above puts it, for  a year before he took office, and feeding the information to the media. This  goes far beyond the legendary Watergate scandal, which merely involved a single  bungled break-in at Democratic party headquarters: this is Watergate times one-hundred.

And here’s the real kicker: as Lake points out, “The standard for senior officials  to learn the names of US persons incidentally collected is that it must have  some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything.  This suggests Rice’s unmasking requests were likely within the law.”

Lake trenchantly skewers this nonsense about how a “foreign connection” is  required to legalize the unmasking of Americans’ communications, including their  Internet activities, as did this  2013 incident. James Risen and Laura Poitras made this same point in a New  York Times op  ed piece back in 2013:

“Since 2010, the National Security Agency  has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs  of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their  locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information,  according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.

“The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs  in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign  intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice,  according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

“The policy shift was intended to help the agency ‘discover and track’ connections  between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according  to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct  ‘large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without  having to check foreignness’ of every e-mail address, phone number or other  identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy  of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been  permitted only for foreigners.”

Something quite similar to this “graphical analysis” is apparently what Rice  asked for and received, and it was all perfectly “legal.”

As  I wrote at the time that Snowden revealed the nature and extent of NSA surveillance:

“They can map out your whole life: your friends, your family, your finances, your enemies, your politics, your love affairs, your consultations with a doctor or a psychiatrist, and your location at any given time. They don’t need a warrant: they don’t  need a judge: they just need to establish a ‘foreign connection’ – and, as we  have seen, that’s real easy.”

It was inevitable that these capabilities would be used for  political espionage. That it is the “liberals” who are now defending these practices  in the service of blatantly partisan ends comes as no surprise. The irony is  that this is part of an assault on a conservative administration that came into  office vowing to increase these capabilities – little knowing that, even  as Donald  Trump was defending and calling for the expansion of the NSA’s ability to  snoop on Americans’ phone conversations, our spooks were spying on the President-to-be.

As “Russia-gate” turns into “Spy-gate,” one wonders: will  the Trump administration learn the lesson of this incident and do an about-face  on the issue of government surveillance? I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, but  it’s possible. More importantly, it looks like conservatives and some Republicans  are now becoming the  biggest defenders of civil liberties – and that’s a big turnaround.