#if people are interested then ill sketch out a pose/scene to make

[chip-and-the-bastards]

ok this might be a crazy idea, but I really wanna try and make a jrwi riptide comic based on the Improbably Compatibility comic (this one, I'll also put this panels under a read more), but with as many riptide aus as i can fit in!

if i do this i'd more be organising/hosting it, so people can submit their aus and draw the art for it! if we stick to the comic exactly then we can fit 759 aus in there (though only 30ish are really visible), so it'll probably be smaller/i'll just fill in whatever spares with random stuff

anyway here's the comic

[catleha]

     random asks that make me cry ft. @daintycure​

   ‹  'TWAS A QUESTION SHE COULD NOT ANSWER LIGHTLY; to drift back to a time where the arcane had not been the sole purpose of a flawed existence. To ponder about scenes associated to her very childhood. Oh, this posed to be a challenge, why she had been too young to show any true interest in anything but fireflies on a glade, creatures roaming close by, the softest whisper of wind frolicking akin to a summer breeze. How oft had she ran away from tents & ever busy folk only to elope into the wilderness armed with naught but twelve given curiosity? To watch, to follow, to simply linger where not even hunters wagered to remain. There had always been a fascination with life & its mysteries, the elementals that shaped all that the bare eye could see. Aye, those were images forever kept dear; to replace what fooleries & missteps had taken. To think back to those very days could be seen as nothing but sentimental nonsense & yet ...

        Magic affinity observed in a being that young had never been called pleasant, not when surrounded by too much that could tip the balance between beast & men. Oh, recall mutters & muffled outcries speaking of yet another witch in their midst, of tainted aether, an ill omen. ‘twas an ill omen indeed, some form of curse that their tribe arrival in this new found land had perhaps triggered. Could she blame those not accustomed to such grand outbursts of magic? Ever afraid of sudden assaults of frenzied beasts, of blackened earth? Oh, remember, remember the man they brought ; a remedy. Towering, an Elezen mage performing a single wave of the hand to conjure a gust of wind, a slab of stone, coercing it into a shape of his liking. How old have you been? Six, not older than seven, no doubt. Ah, recall the name of the man who ever so willingly had traveled across the cliffs all the way from Sharlayan’s research colony, the one that gently promised to lend her the guiding hand she needed. Louisoux; other mentions of his name had always been spat & ridiculed. Aye, dear Matoya had never been too fond of him, no?

    Cue prolonging silence; she thought long & hard with a single finger set against her chin & brows lowered in tense contemplation. It had been more an order than a choice, more a necessity than persuasion. -- using the word ‘compelled’ seemed wrong; still, she could not blame the other for assuming. Why, someone who had easily dedicated all her life to naught but study MUST have felt some higher calling able to compel her to do so, nay? Reason demanded that much. Alas, father’s words still rang in ears & heart alike; to minimize the danger for their people. Why, they could only foster so many mages.

      ❛ natural curiosity. ❜ taciturn as her respond might be, it was neither a lie nor the truth. For but a moment, she felt inclined to leave it at that. Secrets were supposed to remain just that & yet she could not bring herself to simply walk away. Hands drop ere performing a petite wave / a gesture meant to symbolize that there was more to come.  ❛ Given my young age, there was little much else I could have fawned over. Why, ‘twas perhaps my sister’s books that rouse some fascination in me. Not that I understood the slightest fraction but in my nativity the colorful depictions and sketches inside were enough to mesmerize me. Naturally, I took it upon myself to venture into the wilds and find out what exactly it was that had me spellbound.  ❜ -- to my own dismay.

      There, another pause scorched glance wandering elsewhere. To be reminiscent of a time that far into the past / to be that genuine suited her ill. ‘twas a foretime oft considered merry, a chapter seen as the calm before the storm. -- for what followed were difficult years of trying to reach old master’s impossible standards, nights spent crying / asking for a mother that no longer roamed the earth, for a sister that was mayhap miles away & attempts to endure & endure, fueled by spite & stubbornness. To persist, to prove, to never forget the very wonders hands could evoke if she could only master what young eyes had witnessed. -- 'till one day, matters changed for the better.

    Crossing arms ever so firmly, she but rolled stiff shoulders, sudden wash of melancholy lingering whilst she finished.  ❛ obstinacy did the rest, or so they say. ❜

[jatamansi-arc]

so, the second time i watched annihilation, i have a lot of feelings about it. like a lot lot. and i’m not sure if anyone else will agree with me, but i’m gonna fucking dump all my notes here so i can come back to them here and see how i feel about them in subsequent viewings.

i really love the movie, though. i liked it the first time, but i loved it this time. so much. definitely one of my favorite movies ever. maybe actually up there with everything is illuminated with being my actual favorite.

spoilers, y’all.

the first time you watch this movie, you walk away blown away, going AAAAaaaaAAaaAHGFJ about it. the second time you watch it? they aren’t kidding when they say everything has double meanings. literally everything does. i think that’s half the reason that makes it so much fun to slowly dissect.

annihilation isn’t a story about depression, though i can see how it’d be read that way very easily. there are tons of elements that would lead you to that conclusion. rather, i’ve come to the conclusion that it’s one about the competition between our tendency for self-destruction and our capacity to forgive. it’s a love story.

the most important thing that annihilation repeatedly touches on, is really playing with philosophical and allegorical extremes and dismantling them. the question of whether something is a scientific proof or a sign of faith is posed to lena several times in the film, and the question is never answered but carefully balanced. and it’s shown time and time and time again, in sweeping scale and in minute details. for example: ventress, the pinnacle of the rational and higher thought, has a name that draws its source from a term meant to show someone’s ability to take brazen risks. she takes her notes when talking to lena with artist grade sketching pencils. ventress’ mask is good, but she is desperate dreamer who wants to see what lies beyond the shimmer before her body takes the chance from her.

all of the main characters’ names, however, were picked very specifically. 

lena: short for helena, which can be taken to mean ‘torch.’ there’s the whole thing about helen of troy eloping and causing the trojan war to bring her home, too. but more importantly, i firmly believe it’s also a play on the hela cell line.

anya: ties to anna, a prophetess of the bible, who preached of redemption and experienced deep loss early in her life.

cass: short for cassandra, another prophetess, but one who was cursed so that her words wouldn’t be heeded until it was too late. she was also connected to troy.

josie: josephine is the feminine form of joseph, and the father of jesus is the patron saint of contentful death, and is almost always displayed surrounded in his field by flowers meant to represent purity and resurrection.

kane: from o catháin, which means war like or battle. 

everyone in kane’s group had a surname that has been shared among three kinds of famous people in every instance: a scientist, a religious scholar, and an author. it was weird enough to note.

area x is in an area that’s remote and has alligators, but the thing that makes it interesting, is that bears and alligators don’t have much overlapping territory. this means if it wasn’t already a giant red fucking flag to begin with, our furry friend is a composite from the shimmer.

the shimmer may be alien or it may be biblical; the reality of it doesn’t much matter. what it does, is take the cells of the dead and dying and recycle them. when ventress talks about how a shark and alligator are clearly intermingling genetically and lena dismisses it, lena isn’t wrong, but lena’s error is that she’s not thinking broadly enough.

cass is the first one to drop the hint, right after we get lena talking about the bruise that she gets with the fight with the alligator. it’s where the tattoo would eventually be later on -- except there is a hitch. cass is also clearly skeptical of this, and it reads easily on her face, before she talks about her daughter dying of leukemia and how she died, emotionally, with her. it’s a hint that lena’s cells immediately begin to mutate once this happened. whatever the shimmer is, it takes hox genes, which are what hold the entirety of our genomes, and is trying to manipulate and recode what it can with what’s available. this isn’t evolution, but a sort of intelligent design with very limited resources and a finite understanding of what it’s doing. it’s creating immortal cell lines, though, and the hints are dropped about five thousand times over.

the man that kane and his crew kill likely had cancer. look at how prolifically his cells were mutating before he died, and his complete lack of reaction while being otherwise vivisected. what’s even more interesting is that ventress, who otherwise never gives a fucking shit about anyone, is visibly shaken for the only time in the movie. she was the one who was in charge of area x. she knew about everyone going in there. it’s much more likely she’d have an investment in knowing what happened to someone else who was ‘self-destructing’ for a similar reason to her.

once she has her answer, it’s straight back to business.

the reason the bear is tragic -- and ultimately horrific -- is because it was spliced together from bits and pieces of dna by a being that has never seen a fucking bear besides the hyperstylized one that was on kane’s chest. it wanted to build what it saw. it was curious. it looks like his tattoo; look at it closer when you get a chance.

it’s furthermore meant to represent kane’s fear. absorbing cass’ voice as its call is only meant to really drive the metaphor home, and to make josie’s decision in the next arc all the more poignant.

the symbolism behind the bear, by the by, is a lot of things. most important is the duality of the male and female. it’s one of the rare animals that represents both sexes. bears also represent a desire for answers and, again, resurrection. 

and when looking for cass, lena sees two deer, who are again another rare animal who represent both sexes and are oftentimes portents of death and a hope for a return to life after that death.

anya’s role in these scenes is important because they’re allegorical. the implication that lena’s and kane’s addiction to their careers is what kept them apart is certainly clear, and it’s not just casual happenstance that anya self-destructs in a house that’s a carbon copy of kane’s and lena’s home. anya’s death is meant to represent breaking the cycle of addiction (even if you’re terrified) and the beginning of the resurrection of kane and lena’s relationship. she was the paramedic, after all.

she’s also meant to stand in for kane here, because her words are meant to be accusatory towards lena, as if it were kane saying them about her cheating. 

“ you don’t get to ask that question, you lying bitch! you get to answer it!”

“what we know now -- what we know, is that lena is a liar.”

^ that one is really fucking important okay

who delivers the death blows against the bear is important. it’s josie. young, doe-eyed and fresh faced josie who is full of life and has dedicated her life to studying the science understanding the interactions between matter. who eventually gives her life over to the entire process, but not before saying something really important to lena:

‘imagine dying in fear. i wouldn’t like that at all.”

THAT’S GONNA BE RELEVANT HERE SHORTLY HANG ON.

by the by: lena finds out her humanity is slowly leaving her at the same table where we see kane time and time again. kane’s self-destruction is external while lena’s is internal, at least at the time. 

josie, anya and lena are not impacted in the same way that kane, vertress and other clearly sick people who have gone into the shimmer are. or, at least, not at the same pace. it makes me have the theory that lena thought kane learned that she was cheating, but kane was perhaps hiding something much worse. there could be a lot said about what guilt does to people, on both sides. they may have both been hiding things. it really twists the whole plot to an interesting angle if the reason kane was sitting, so melancholic and distant, was not because he knew about lena and daniel, but because he was angry and upset at himself for not being able to tell his wife that he may have been seriously ill. it may also be why the clone of him suddenly crashed once it’d been outside, in the real world, as well?

it further tells an interesting tale if you read that dying in the shimmer causes a far faster progression of mutation and, in a sense, almost a sort of dementia. kane may have lost himself entirely over the course of what felt like 10-12 days, knowing very little in the end other than he truly loved lena.

regardless of my theories on it, the shimmer is still literally kane’s feelings of adoration towards lena on display. if you debate me on this point i will fucking fight you.

coming back to allegory: kane’s self-immolation was meant to represent genesis and the big bang. lena’s fight with clone!lena is a battle with what’s meant to be the perils of knowledge (and forgiveness/grief, I think, honestly) and her eventual departure from what’s clearly meant to be a garden of eden metaphor. the phosphorus grenade, the second time around, is meant to be the fruit of knowledge.

it was clone!lena that survived imho, because original!lena didn’t have the tattoo by that point. clone!lena did the instant she was made. and the instant whatever lena did survive made it outside, she pulled down her sleeves.

when she’s being asked questions at the end, she literally mimics clone!kane to perfection. she even drinks the water, with the hint in the glass that two become one via the pooling on the side of the glass. it’s, furthermore, a throwback and lead-in to the next scene, serving as a reminder to the very beginning of the movie when lena talks about how cells reproduce. one becoming two, two becoming four, etc. but as one of my friends said, sometimes two need to become one first. GOOD POINT IT WAS A GOOD POINT.

in the end, it really didn’t matter which lena survived, because lena’s an unreliable narrator and ultimately lying to get exactly what she wants. if they knew the reality, they’d never let them be in a room together. the book talks about biological imperatives a lot and the movie deviates pretty strongly from it, but this was an instance where you definitely get exactly that vibe. this is adam and eve on a whole new, cosmic scale.

when she asks kane if he’s himself and he says no, he returns the favor. lena doesn’t answer the question. kane’s facial expressions are very telling, but i’m not going to tell you what they are if you didn’t see them. then we get the shimmer eyes and it makes me very happy okay.

the amount of fucking times the immortal life of henrietta lacks is referenced in this movie DRIVES ME BATTY but in a good way??

[whopooh]

Undercover or under the covers? The June trope MFMM challenge

Undercover, but rather uncovered.

June was the month for undercover, and this trope opens up for a broad range of possibilities – all the way from creating a whole case to sketching a teasing undercover attempt mostly to make Phryne and Jack get together in a specific way. Often, the two layers of the roles and themselves comment on each other in meaningful ways, and within this, the undercover scenarios – worlds to immerse in, roles to play – are more or less limitless, and also really tickles the imagination.

Compared to the other months, this month’s fics ran away and got rather long, and also published late in the month -- so what first looked like an ‘easy’ month for me to write an overview for instead in the end became really fic heavy. This is also a trope that has already been extensively (under)covered in earlier fics – also there not seldom long ones. To just name a few, we have lovely longfics like @wah-pah’s “Undercover at the Elvsworth Club", @phrynesboudoir/sassasam’s: “The Model Murders”; PlayfulMay/ @mollidraws’s "Undercover Escort”; @firesign23‘s "The Uses of Adversity”; @missingmissfisher‘s series “Double o Phrack”; and two lovely and rather different undercover fics with a cycling theme: Miss_Lilian’s “Death at the Warrny” and hotelf’s “Murder at the Cycling Club” -- just to name some of the longer ones. Undercover truly is a popular trope.

But this post is about the trope challenge, so we’ll concentrate on the fics from June. In most stories, it’s either Phryne, Jack, or both of them going undercover, and the focus is on their relationship and the case. A few fics are broadening that focus, which is really lovely. I will start with them, to then go on to the lighthearted fics, the smuttier fics, and finally end with the longer cases.

In @flashofthefuse, “The Red Flame”, there are two different undercover operations that unbeknownst to each other are set in the same place, a club/brothel. When Jack is in need for a woman to go undercover and pose as a criminal, the title’s red flame, he asks Mac – although it takes a little while for the reader to realise this, and it’s deliciously done. At the same time, Phryne has a case and makes her undercover work with Bert.

The repartee between Mac and Jack is glorious, like here:

“... you definitely look the part, but just looking like her won’t be enough, you know. Are you as confident in her character? I hope you took the time to read the material I sent.”

“Are you always this condescending?”

“Probably,” he admitted, earning him a small smile. “May I come in? I’d like to fill you in on what we’ve learned this afternoon.”

The story isn’t finished yet, but it’s lovely in more than one way to see the interactions both within and between these two pairings – having their own very difficult mission, but also worrying about the other’s. We often say that we want more interaction between Mac and Jack, and here that is given in a brilliant way, with sincere care and respect as well as banter – and also with a Mac that is a genius in playing a tough, nonchalant role undercover, using her experience of being a woman in a man’s world in a way that helps the case enormously.

@rubycaspar’s “And after all the obstacles” gives us a fic all from Rosie’s point-of-view. Even if it is Phryne and Jack that are undercover, the person we follow here is Rosie, being at a garden party and suddenly encountering Jack, who turns out to be undercover together with Phryne. We see all the action and scenes from her point of view, and the case part of the fic is thus brilliantly shortened. @rubycaspar gives us Rosie’s view and her observations and conclusions of what she sees – conclusions she constantly needs to revise, as more and more is revealed to her about Phryne and Jack. This also gives her the chance to work through her feelings about her ex-husband. It is set almost a year after “Unnatural habits”, and gives a strong and determined Rosie – “Rosie thought about avoiding him, but she wasn't one to back down. If he didn't want to see her, he could leave. With that in mind, she straightened her shoulders and made her way over” – and a Rosie ready to change her preconceptions. It’s a very hopeful story.

In @longlineoftvdetectives‘s “Incognito”, finally, Jack is the one going “undercover”, but his undercover interplay is with Aunt Prudence. Aunt P is ill and needs to travel to England, and it turns out that she needs Jack to accompany her, thus forcing him to pretend to be her niece’s husband. With small gestures, the fic teases out many emotions, details and characterisations, in snippets covering many issues and building up a story about Phryne and Jack, about Phryne in relation to her family in England, and also about not hiding who you are (a second take on the theme ‘undercover’). Like this discussion about Oscar Wilde:

“Dragged out of his room by the police and sentenced to hard labor.”

“For…, um…” Jack stammered, unsure what euphemism was appropriate for the dining room of the establishment in question.

“For refusing to live his entire life undercover,” Phryne responded, her voice now clear and defiant. “For loving who he wanted to love. For not hiding or apologizing for who he was.”

Jack smiled and held her gaze. He loved her like this. He would have kissed her, soundly, if they weren’t in public.

“So the Wilde play, then,” he said matter-of-factly, after a long beat.

These undercover prospects are intriguing.

After these alternative perspectives, I’ll turn to the rather large section of fics that are fun and light hearted and sometimes also have a… shall we say more liberal view of what ”undercover” can mean.

The perfect transition between these two sections are of course @ollyjayonline‘s “The Inspector”, a fic that focuses on Isabella, the rather scandalous wife of Phryne’s cousin Guy, and has a delightful touch on the subject of both her and the theme of ‘undercover’. The two spouses have a conversation worthy of British toffs, discussing a news item about Phryne getting married, while simultaneously devoting themselves to both rather ‘dirty’ and casual carnal pleasures.

Isabella’s logic turns the tables on the “propriety issue” we often consider with respect to Phryne and her life style in contrast to Jack: “Really, it is quite wrong of your cousin. A divorced policeman? Why can’t she just keep sleeping with him? I mean, what will people say?"’ It’s a brilliant turnarounf. Reassured that this won’t affect her, she instead turns to daydream about the handsome and dour Inspector, something Guy doesn’t mind helping her out with through some roleplaying.

Isabella’s and Guy’s way of seeing everything as a game, of indulging in fantasies, and of having other people in bed with them – both physically and in role play – is all very in character, and an interesting contrast to Phryne.

The next lighthearted fic is @loopyhoopyfrood’s sweet modern AU “Love At First Swipe?”, where Jack Robinson is being set up for a date on an app as part of a case. He needs to find out how burglaries seem to have been conducted in relation to dates set up via this app; his only problem is that when he meets his date, it is not a suspicious stranger but a lady detective working on the same case.

Maybe it was her profile, as full as lies as every other user, but missing that hint of authenticity. Or maybe it was just Jack’s spidey senses tingling. Either way, something about Fern Roberts had him groaning in resignation and swiping right.

20 minutes later he had a date.

He tried not to think about how it was his first date since his divorce.

As a chapter 11 in her longer fic collection, “The Friday Phrack Series, @rositalg writes an intimate and atmospheric scene from Phryne and Jack in an established relationship. Phryne comes home to a Jack that sits and reads, and she simultaneously talks about her case and is seduced by him.

Her eyes closed blissfully, relishing in the attention.

“Perhaps you could help me.” She suggested, her thighs parting ever so subtly. “You’ve always been one to...dive deep into a case.”

He met her eyes, both of them knowing he was going to have her right here on this couch before the evening was done.

“Miss Fisher, are you asking me for assistance?”

In @omgimsarahtoo‘s “Under Cover of Darkness”, both the ‘undercover’ and the ‘under the cover’ theme is at play. Phryne and Jack has spent the evening undercover in a club, and the fic starts after this is over. Everything goes black, and when Phryne wakes up, he is in a strange room. After the first moments of fear, she deduces that she is not kidnapped but rather at Jack’s house, with a Detective Inspector sleeping in the chair next to her. The fic then turns to her instead indulging in pleasures under the covers with her crime solving partner, and it’s combined with really lovely banter:

“You, Jack Robinson,” she breathed, around sweeps of her tongue across his cheeks, “have a very talented mouth.”

“It’s entirely the subject, Miss Fisher,” he responded, his smile a smug tilt of the lips.

And in the end:

Catching her hand, he leaned up to kiss her, his smile tender. “You are an excellent partner, Miss Fisher. I enjoy working with you, undercover or not.”

“That’s because I’m exceptional.” Phryne grinned as she said it.

“And so modest, too!” Jack affected surprise. “A prize among women.”

Equally of the fun and teasing persuasion is @firesign23′s “Subterfuge at the Savoy” that establishes a gorgeous scene of Phryne in bed in a hotel in England – just to suddenly have her mother barge in without warning (of course Phryne Fisher’s mother is resourseful...). In the heat of the moment, Phryne decides to keep Jack hidden under the covers, but he is in a devilish mood and starts touching her and making her behave exceedingly oddly towards her mother.

“You aren’t still pouting over that policeman your father mentioned, are you? He said you told the poor man to come after you, which is utterly foolish.”

The policeman in question was drifting dangerously high up her thigh with his tongue, and Phryne really had no idea how much longer she could keep this charade up.

Among all the fun, there is also a partly serious question from Jack, after Phryne’s mother has left: ‘“Why was it, Miss Fisher, that we are two consenting, independent adults and I still found myself hiding from your mother?” he asked, eyes dancing. “You’re not ashamed of me, are you?”’

But Phryne has an answer to that question, too.

A last lighthearted undercover fic is leavephryneforme's “Undercover At The Great Australian Baking Show” – a fun romp told in small snippets about a modern Jack being undercover on a baking show. He decides to keep this a secret to Phryne, who starts wondering why he suddenly has so many cookbooks, and the fic addresses his far too alluring features – which the female judges appreciate – when baking.

Preparing Jack for undercover crossdressing. Art by @kidnthehall.

From lighthearted, we’ll turn to two fics that focus on putting Jack in costume.

@whopooh's “The Importance of Being at the Wilde Cats Club”, is a case fic where the focus is not so much on the case, but more on the characters. In order to help Phryne’s old friend Eleanore, who is also a transwoman, Jack, Hugh, Bert and Cec need to go undercover at a club as men impersonating women. The fic focuses on the transformation of them – how they will need to dress, and move, and wear make-up – and also in Phryne’s complete delight in dressing up and putting make-up on Jack, and the shenanigans that follow from this, where Jack uses his newly painted lips to tease Phryne. There is both trust and teasing all through, and a slight continuation of the role reversal theme of April. It all came from two things: the comment “We need more mfmm men in lingerie”, and the desire to have a transgender person who would not need to die in order to be important in a case story. This turned into seduction via lipstick:

She pressed her lips together and motioned how he should do the same and he followed her lead, pushing his lips together. She smiled, and he followed her lead in that too.

“Oh, hang on,” she said, and procured a piece of paper. “Bite the excess colour off on this one, like this.”

But instead of doing that, Jack captures her and kisses her deeply, smudging the lipstick: 

When they resurfaced, she looked at him and couldn’t stop a smile from spreading over her face. He looked ridiculous, with the lipstick smudged and forming a mad pattern around his mouth. 

“Well, you should see yourself,” was all he said as he gave her a small smile.

Also in @scruggzi's “Merciful Powers”, there is a focus on Jack in costume – this time in a luscious costume for going undercover as an understudy in a Macbeth production. Phryne takes great pleasure in the fact that he is dressed in tights, and that he also can be extricated from said tights, and there is a wonderful use of Shakespeare quotes as seduction throughout the fic. As the whole undercover trope shows, it is very fulfilling to put Jack in other clothes than his normal ones, while still keeping his restrained character, and here it is combined by a delicious push-and-pull between them: ‘“Mmm,” she purred, “much as I applaud your theatrical talent, Jack, that was definitely better than Shakespeare.”/ “Sacrilege!” he protested in mock horror, eyes twinkling at her.’

And heading into smut, there is a lovely self-awareness of the literary, and the way it comments on the two of them:

“Macbeth always knew he couldn’t resist temptation forever. All he really needed was an excuse.”

Phryne was fairly sure that analysis had very little to do with Shakespeare, but Jack’s hands had moved around to palm her breasts, and his lips had found the spot just under her ear that made her knees weak. Literary criticism could definitely wait.

The undercover work, and its implications of dressing differently than normal, and of perhaps partly trying out being someone else, is driving the sensual pleasure here.

A similar thing can be said about @phrynesboudoir /Sassasam’s, “The Captain’s In”. Here Phryne and jack are both working undercover on the same case, or rather, Jack is working undercover and a stubborn Phryne stumbles into his case. As they're thrown together, Phryne having to pretend to be a prostitute, the undercover turns into rather rough sexual roleplay (‘"Get below and get naked," he ordered. / Phryne realised with a rush of aroused surprise, that he meant it and she must obey in order to maintain their cover’), and also here there is the idea of heightening an experience through unfamiliar roles and costumes – in this case more ‘dirty’, and added to it a rather sinister on-looker.

Fancy meeting you in the US, Lin!

Over to the long, more elaborate case fics. First, @longlineoftvdetectives, “Welcome to San Francisco”, as the title gives away, set in the US where Phryne and Jack have taken a detour on their way home to Australia. In San Francisco they happen upon Lin Chung, who’s in need of their help. The stakes are high – Lin is threatened to his life – and it turns out that Jack will have to pretend to be Baron Fisher, while Phryne poses as Lin’s wife. In a lovely and similar way as the show, the storyline shows some of Phryne’s and Jack’s emotional journeys, but without settling anything too much, still leaving many questions unanswered. Their relation and the case is woven together, and there is a lovely relation between Jack and a young lad he takes in under his tutelage;, an interesting triangle between Phryne, Jack and Lin; an outsider view disapproving of the Chinese man that they handle brilliantly; and a very competent pair of detectives.

There are many poignant points, often made through dialogue, like here:

“Are you and Inspector Robinson in San Francisco on a case?” Lin asked.

“Not exactly,” Phryne replied. “You might say our relationship is no longer strictly business.”

“I see,” Lin answered. “Are you happy?”

“Very much so,” Phryne replied without hesitation.

“Should I still refer to you as Miss Fisher?”

“Yes.”

“Then there must be more to Inspector Robinson than I had originally perceived,” he concluded.

A fic that teases out an emotional side of Phryne and Jack’s partnership, and of Phryne’s backstory, is @omgimsarahtoo‘s ”Ungentle Reminders”. The undercover stint in this story awakens memories of René in Phryne, and it also higlights misogyny and abuse. Phryne is unsettled by the happenings, where she has to pretend to be a subdued woman among other subdued women, and after the women unexpectedly has made a bloody rebellion, she states:  

“I’ll be a character witness for them,” Phryne said, her eyes on his face as he swept the cloth gently across her skin, wiping up the residue he’d left behind. His eyes flashed up to hers, surprised.

“You only knew them for a couple of days,” he said.

“Maybe,” she agreed, “but Jack, I was them, once upon a time.”

And Jack agrees about the woman who’s now going to be charged for murder: “She made her own freedom.”

In @zannadubs23 /Inzannatea’s “Things Said”  (her first mfmm fic – welcome!) the theme is also rather sinister: Jack is, on his way to London and Phryne, kidnapped in Egypt and taken by slave traders. The theme is serious and the case is given plenty of focus, building up the world where Phryne can be in place to save him – but there is also plenty of focus on more carnal pleasures, once Jack is finally released and still in her tent, as well as luscious details, like here, before Jack has realised who is his saviour: 'The room had an amber glow to it. Jack couldn’t really tell where the lights were coming from, but the room decidedly glowed. The floor was covered with stacks of ornate rugs and large pillows in shades of orange and red and purple. “She would love this,” his traitorous brain informed him instead of working on an escape plan.' The fic grew out of the line "Shave him and bring him to my tent" -- and from that start an elaborate story was built.

A casefic that has both dinosaurs, archaeological sites, a friend of Phryne with interesting parallels to her and the inspired idea to let Phryne and Jack pose undercover as siblings, is @firesign23 “Poetry of Earth”. 

Phryne and Jack arrive at the scene of an archaeological dig on Isle of Wight, where a clever female archaeologist, Lucy, that is a friend of Phryne’s works. There seems to be sabotage and ill will, and Lucy is particularly putting her neck out as a female archaeologist. There is a young girl that tries to flirt with the handsome brother in the newly arrived sibling pair, and there is a lot of tension and fun scenes as Phryne and Jack must take care not to seem to close for siblings. 

“Hence travelling as Frances and John Sutherland, amateur Australian archaeologists without the financial resources to make a name for themselves,” Jack concluded. “How fortunate then that I’ve decided to bone up on my childhood interests while here.”

Phryne looked at him, noting the small hints of a smug smile on his face.

“You know, Jack, one would almost think the pun was deliberate.”

“Thankfully you know my tastes are far too refined for puns,” he replied and she laughed at the glint in his eyes.

And there is a wonderful passage that comments on their earlier case at the observatorium, and that reflects on Phryne being rather alike her friend Lucy, who once almost got stuck in a flood because she was so focused on her work:

“That was careless of Lucy.”

Jack quirked a small smile. “She was distracted by a nearly complete skeleton they were uncovering. I cannot imagine what it would be like, working with someone so easily deterred by bones or luminescent objects.”

“If this is about the plutonium vial, I stand by my choices.”

He didn’t reply, merely smirked at a point well made; she glanced down the empty beach and then leant up to kiss his cheek.

At the same time as Phryne is standing by her choices, she is also all the time noticing how close she’s come to Jack, and contemplating on that sense of familiarity, all while not allowed to show any feelings for him openly.

In one last finished casefic, @ollyjayonline & @solitarycyclistadventures have ganged up on a case fic with plenty of tension between Phryne and Jack, “Death Under the Arch”. 

Here, Jack is going to Sydney for an undercover stint and leaves City South to a very handsome and eligible Inspector – Phryne, however, decides to join him in Sydney. The story is set after Murder and Mozzarella, right after they have said they’ll “make do” with each other, but before they have figured out what that actually means, which opens up for insecurities and misinterpretations on both sides. The mystery is set around the bridge that is being built in Sydney, and Phryne decides to play Jack’s ex-lover as a way to be able to keep watching him:

She leaned towards him, face alight with mischief, “I was thinking it could be fun if we were old friends.”

Jack almost laughed, how typical, only he would manage to go from strictly business to old friend without any of the fun in-between.

There is also a very perceptive young woman who tries to figure the two of them out, which adds to the mix of tensions and uncertainties, and a murder mystery that turns rather sad.

Finally, the section of “To be continued”: two fics that are not finished so I’ll only write shortly about them. In @missingmissfisher​’s “Hold out your hand” Jack has come after Phryne to England and meets her mother that instinctively dislikes him. It seems Margaret wants to stop her daughter from repeating her own mistakes by marrying an unsuitable man, and Margaret is something of Phryne’s kryptonite, so much annoying her that Phryne has troubles thinking straight. Added to the mix are snobbish and boring neighbours and a small mystery that turns into a much bigger and more serious one -- and how that will unfold we’ll see rather soon. @221aubrina started “The Case of the Missing Moll”, which promises to cover both the tropes undercover and bodyswap, and has just taken its beginning – so far, we only now that Jack has been drugged and taken away somewhere… 

That’s all for June from me. I am very much looking forward to the July fics, on the trope “Through time and space”!

[latestnews2018-blog]

Bob Mackie on dressing Cher, Tina Turner and Elton John as Donald Duck

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/bob-mackie-on-dressing-cher-tina-turner-and-elton-john-as-donald-duck/

Bob Mackie on dressing Cher, Tina Turner and Elton John as Donald Duck

The fashion designer reminisces about sequins, surprises — and why he’ll never retire

Fashion and Costume Designer Bob Mackie poses with two of his iconic designs, a scarlet red satin gown worn by Cher in 1975, right, and a marigold jersey jumpsuit worn by Cher between 1971-1976, left, in London, Thursday, Aug. 16, 2018. The gowns are estimated at 3,000-5,000 US Dollars ( 2,363-3,938 UK Pounds) each will be auctioned in the ‘Property from the Collection of Bob Mackie’ sale by Julien’s Auctions in Los Angeles on Nov. 17. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

You could dine out for a lifetime on Bob Mackie’s stories. After 60 years of designing sequin-encrusted stage costumes for Cher, Bette Midler and Diana Ross, to name a few, the 79-year-old has anecdotes to spare. He sprinkles them into conversation like glitter.

He once dressed Elton John as Donald Duck, complete with tail and webbed feet, making it very difficult for the Rocket Man to play the piano. He worked with Tina Turner during her post-Ike transformation, when “she wanted to look like a sexy cave woman”. Barbra Streisand, he says, “was always questioning everything. ‘Does this really look good? Can we try on three or four, then decide?’ With that kind of sensibility, you work harder, believe me.”

He was friends with Marlene Dietrich, an uber-perfectionist whose gowns would be worn out by multiple minute alterations before they had even left the fitting room. She would also root around “in our community refrigerator, and throw out old food if she found it. And if someone was sick, there was always something in her purse that would work. She was like a grandmother.”

And then there is Cher, his closest collaborator, with whom, in the 70s, he developed a design philosophy best described as “more razzle-dazzle, less fabric”. Without him, Cher has said: “I would have been a peacock without feathers.”

Mackie was scheduled to board a cruise ship from Southampton to New York City with more than 100 of his sketches and gowns, for a seaborne exhibition to promote a sale at Julien’s Auctions, in Los Angeles and online, on November 17.

Why sell the frocks now? “When you have been in a business as long as I have,” he says, “you end up with a lot of interesting things. I certainly don’t need to keep the lot of them. I still have a lot of memories left.”

Mackie is neatly dressed in a gold-buttoned navy blazer with a cobalt-blue, silk pocket handkerchief. His hair is the colour of weak tea and he has a wide, boyish face. He looks like the treasurer of a local Rotary Club, or a daytime gameshow host, rather than a purveyor of showgirl chic.

FASHION ICON

Some of Mackie’s most vivid memories are of Cher. When they met, he says, her look was totally new: “She was the first hippy, really; the bellbottoms, the fur vests, the long straight hair. She created a whole fashion turnaround.” Together, they built her next visual incarnation, which often centred on her naked abs. “The doctor,” he says, “said she had some kind of strange malady of tight stomach muscles.” (Mackie refers frequently to the lithe proportions of his most famous canvas; he has been known to point out that her armpits were the best in the business.)

Their fashion hits included the sequin-studded, feathered “nude” dress she wore to the 1974 Met Gala, which created “a lot of hullaballoo”. Afterwards, “I got a lot of calls from performers wanting something ‘like Cher wears’ because it got a lot of attention.”

More eyeballs were drawn by Cher’s 1986 Oscars ensemble, a sort of “Big Bird goes for a night out with Maleficent in Las Vegas” number, with a perilously low-rise skirt. The outfit was conceived as a dig at the Academy, which, Cher felt, had snubbed her that year. “I wasn’t sure if it was the proper, polite thing to do,” says Mackie, noting that he was “apprehensive” about it (he is always apprehensive, he explains; a wardrobe malfunction is often just a millimetre of tape away). “Some people were horrified but it was in every newspaper,” he says. Cher loved it, of course. He says, with a knowing smile: “Halloween’s her favourite holiday.”

It was often Cher pushing Mackie to create more revealing and outlandish outfits, not the other way around. For example, she came up with the mesh bodysuit worn to mount a cannon in the video for If I Could Turn Back Time. He thought it was “vulgar and horrid. I told her: please, I don’t want any credit for this.”

EARLY YEARS

Mackie grew up in a more reserved time. His childhood sounds pretty dour: between the ages of six and 14 he lived with his British grandmother, who “believed children should be seen and not heard”. His escape was the cinema. He recalls the “religious experience” of seeing the ballet scene from An American in Paris for the first time. He built mini movie sets, complete with stars dressed in paper outfits, on top of his dresser.

In 1960, he married LuLu Porter, a singer, actor and acting teacher. They had a son, Robin, and divorced after three years. That year, when he was 23, he started working on The Judy Garland Show, assisting costume designer Ray Aghayan, who became his partner, in life and business, until his death in 2011.

Garland was, he says, “a phenomenally talented individual, but she had been so mistreated in the beginning, as a child, that she was very troubled”. The show was disastrous, with a high turnover of personnel, but the situation proved unexpectedly useful for Mackie, as he quickly met almost everyone who was anyone in the industry. It sounds tougher for Aghayan who, in the past, Mackie has said, received phone calls from Garland in the middle of the night, asking him to take her to hospital. Clearly, the dark side of Hollywood is never hidden for long, no matter how thick the crust of glitter.

Mackie is also from a time before debates about cultural appropriation in design were commonplace. Cher herself has recently been criticised for the 1973 song Half-Breed — even that title might make a contemporary audience wince — and for the Mackie-designed Native American war bonnets she wore when singing it.

Mackie doesn’t understand the fuss. “People are becoming much too sensitive about their cultures; we’re losing the humour, and that is very sad. She wore that for 40-odd years. Now, all of a sudden, you have a couple of hard-nosed people saying: ‘Oh no, she can’t.’ Well, you’re a little late honey.”

That said, he confirms that Cher won’t be wearing a war bonnet for her forthcoming tour, even though he has faithfully remade a lot of the other costumes. “I just ended up doing a whole new costume, with a different twist to it.” (The claim that Cher can sing this song because her mother has some Cherokee heritage seems to hold less water these days. Mackie says: “I don’t know how much Native American blood Cher has in her, I don’t think very much. I think she gets her dark good looks from her Armenian father.”)

Mackie’s life is still monopolised by work; he is working on the costumes for a huge Cher-themed Broadway musical. “I think I’m the oldest living designer in Hollywood,” he says. Will he ever retire? “I hope not.”

Work has been a balm in difficult times. The year 1993 was unbearable. His son died, at 33, from an Aids-related illness, and Mackie was forced to close the New York fashion business he had launched in order to move beyond pure costume design. Rather than lying low to grieve, he went straight back to work, with Midler, on the TV movie Gypsy, a project that, he has said, saved him.

Has Mackie created icons — by swathing them in sequins — or have existing icons approached him because they like his aesthetic? “It works both ways,” he says. They are also, often, women who pile on the shimmer to shine at dark times, who must always project otherworldly charisma and talent. That is quite a challenge, says Mackie, “because your public always expects to see it. They want to be delighted — ‘Oh, she’s so beautiful did you see what she wore?’ — but very often these actresses are just homebodies with kids at home and a husband. It’s when they go out and make the bucks they have to change the whole thing.”

[foursproutwealth-blog]

What Would An "America First!" Security Policy Look Like?

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/wealth/what-would-an-america-first-security-policy-look-like/

What Would An "America First!" Security Policy Look Like?

Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Republicans love to caricature Democrats as big spenders whose only approach to any problem is to throw money at it. As with most caricatures, it is made easy by the fact that it is mostly true. At least when it comes to domestic entitlement programs, nobody can top the party of FDR and JFK when it comes to doling out goodies to favored constituencies paid for by picking someone else’s pocket.

However, Republicans are hardly the zealous guardians of the public purse they would have us believe. While quick to trash their partisan opponents for making free with taxpayers’ money, they are no less happy to do the same – at least when it’s called “national defense.”

Over the next five years, the Trump administration will spend $3.6 trillion on the military. The GOP-controlled Congress’s approved, with Republicans voting overwhelmingly in the affirmative, the “Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018” (HR 1892) and the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018” (HR 2810). With respect to the former, the watchdog National Taxpayers Union urged a No vote:

‘An initial estimate of approximately $300 billion in new spending above the law’s caps barely scratches the surface in terms of total spending. The two-year deal also includes $155 billion in defense and non-defense Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) spending, $5 billion in emergency spending for defense, and more than $80 billion in disaster funding. $100 billion in proposed offsets are comprised of the same budget gimmicks taxpayers have seen used as pay-fors over and over and are unlikely to generate much of a down-payment on this new spending.’  

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) poses the question that few in Washington – and certainly few Republicans – are willing to ask: “Is our military budget too small, or is our mission too large?” He notes:

‘Since 2001, the U.S. military budget has more than doubled in nominal terms and grown over 37% accounting for inflation. The U.S. spends more than the next eight countries combined.

It’s really hard to argue that our military is underfunded, so perhaps our mission has grown too large. That mission includes being currently involved in combat operations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Niger, Libya, and Yemen. We have troops in over 50 of 54 African countries. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost over a trillion dollars and lasted for over 15 years.’

Defense spending is about survival, right? If you need to spend it, you spend it. But realistically, how does one assess whether spending is too much or too little without looking at the strategy the military is tasked with carrying out, and whether it makes any sense?

Proponents of increased – always increased – spending, like Defense Secretary James Mattis, point to real problems with increased accident rates due to poor training or equipment maintenance or the fact that most army brigades and navy planes are not ready for combat. But is that a symptom of too little money or of a force stretched beyond its limits by conducting operations anywhere and everywhere with little regard for actual U.S. interests?

That doesn’t matter politically, though. The message is, if you don’t support giving more money, you are guilty of neglecting the nation’s security and of killing service personnel. No wonder only a brave handful of Republican legislators consistently are willing to say No, like Senator Paul and a few House members: Justin Amash (Michigan), John Duncan (Tennessee), Walter Jones (North Carolina), Raul Labrador (Idaho), and Thomas Massie (Kentucky).

Here’s a crazy idea. What if instead of taking for granted a national security policy that seeks to maintain U.S. supremacy over every square inch of the globe we figure out what our real defense needs are – protecting our own country, not mucking about in the rest of the world – and then structure and fund the forces we need? What would that look like?

To start with, we know what it doesn’t look like: the policies followed by Presidents and Congresses of both parties for the past three decades since the Berlin Wall came down.  While the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) takes a commendable but befuddled nod toward genuine American interests – Pillar I (defense of American borders and tightening immigration controls to keep dangerous people out) and Pillar II (ending unfair trade practices and restoring America’s industrial base) – the real meat and potatoes is in Pillar III (“Preserve Peace Through Strength”), which could have been drafted by any gaggle of George W. Bush retreads – and no doubt was – or for that matter by Obama holdovers.

The NSS’s Pillar III is little more than a rehash of the usual litany of “threats” from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc. It’s symptomatic that these are clustered under “Strategy in a Regional Context” as Indo-Pacific (a perfectly ridiculous concept that could best be summed up as “China – bad!”), Europe (“Russia – bad!”), Middle East (“Iran – bad!”), and South and Central Asia.  Next comes the region that should be our first concern, but isn’t: the Western Hemisphere (“Cuba and Venezuela – bad!”).  Last comes Africa (well, at least we can agree on something), but we still need a dedicated Africa Command (which for some reason is located not in Africa but in Stuttgart, Germany).

Still, just suppose that by some wild unpredictable accident we ended up with a strategy that in some way resembled the “America First!” prioritization Donald Trump promised us? Here’s a possible broad sketch:

1. Western Hemisphere comes first, not last. As they say in New England, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Presumably good walls make even better neighbors. Whatever happened to controlling our own border with Mexico, which was the cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s campaign? That remains hostage to political horse-trading and a budgetary game of chicken in the Washington Swamp. As far as the political class is concerned, the Wall can wait until mañana.

At the same time, the U.S. is all too happy to meddle in our neighbors’ internal affairs under the justification of “democracy promotion.” Recently Secretary of State Rex Tillerson claimed such meddling was an expression of the Monroe Doctrine, which he said “clearly has been a success, because… what binds us together in this hemisphere are shared democratic values.” Really? That would have been big news to President James Monroe, who promulgated the Doctrine back in 1823 when no other country in the Americas could be described as a democracy and when even most of the U.S. Founding Fathers would have disputed that label for the Republic they sought to create. Monroe’s declaration had nothing to do with democracy. Rather, its core was a warning to other powers not to establish colonies in our hemisphere, an exclusion which we have considered essential to our security for almost two centuries. Even as a relative infant on the international scene, long before our young nation had emerged as a power on a par with those of Europe, the United States considered it reasonable to ask other powers not to step on our toes in our own neighborhood.

2. Respecting the “Monroe Doctrines” of other powers: The regional deference the United States has demanded in our own area for nearly 200 years is precisely the one we today refuse to accord to other respectable powers, namely China and Russia, by conceding the primacy of their security interests in, respectively, the former Soviet space and in the western Pacific. Instead – as under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush – the Trump administration still rejects the principle of “spheres of influence,” which in practice means not only asserting mastery in the Western Hemisphere but over every square inch of the globe. Today not a single sparrow falls to the ground anywhere but that a divinely omniscient and omnipotent Washington must have the last word about it – generously lubricated with rhetoric about democracy, human rights, rule of law, and other invocations of “universal principles.”

Despite suggestions from the foreign policy establishment, neither China nor anyone else is threatening the sea lanes in the South China Sea. Even America’s closest regional partners do not want to be pushed into a military confrontation with China to suit the agenda of “indispensables” in Washington. American concerns about North Korea can only be solved with Beijing’s security respected – and without the presence on the peninsula of almost 30,000 American “tripwire” troops and tens of thousands more in Japan.

In Europe, NATO forces should stand back from Russia’s borders and territorial waters.  NATO expansion should be ended – even after the Trump administrations ill-advised decision to induct tiny and corrupt Montenegro – while a new security architecture in Europe takes shape. The Alliance’s 2008 pledge to bring in Georgia and Ukraine should be withdrawn. Better yet, get us out of NATO entirely! We and our European friends should be finding a way to cooperate with Russia on pulling Ukraine out of its political and economic crisis as a united, neutral state, not pumping in lethal weapons so touch off renewed large-scale fighting.

An American accord with Russia and China is the stable tripod of any rational global peace, and no one else really matters at the moment. Russia boasts the world’s greatest landmass and natural resources unrivalled by any other country. She also has the only nuclear arsenal comparable to America’s. China is the most populous country in the world, with an economy achieving a par with ours and a burgeoning military sector. If American policy had been designed to alienate both of these giants and drive them to cooperate against us – and maybe it was designed to do that – it could not have been more successful.

3. Get the hell out of the Middle East and Central Asia. The NSS risibly refers to the undesirability of America’s earlier “disengagement” from the region, evidently a reference to the Obama administration’s not being quite as bellicose as its authors might prefer (for example, only supporting terrorists in Syria, not invading the place outright), Of dubious value even in its time, President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 declaration that the Persian Gulf region lies within thevital interests of the United States is only a dangerous absurdity now.  The entire region designated under the goofy moniker “Greater Middle East” is a welter of ethnic and religious antagonisms and unstable states that for America have only two things in common: (1) they ain’t us, and (2) they ain’t nowhere near us. It’s not America’s job to sort the place out, via such fool’s errands as nation-wrecking in Libya and Syria, nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq (after wrecking them), and “mediating” to “solve the problem” of the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The sole interest the U.S. and the American people have in the region is to ensure that jihad terrorism doesn’t achieve a sufficient foothold as to present a threat to us here. However, our regional efforts have instead served to increase and import that threat, not diminish it. American policy toward the region should rest on two pillars: (1) limiting our contact with it, above all drastically cutting down immigration from the area and, hence, the prospect of importing more terrorists; and (2) instead of favoring terrorism-supporting regimes like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, defer to countries with more direct interests in the region but who also have a fundamentally anti-jihad outlook, principally Russia, China, and India. Let them babysit Afghanistan.

Other than that – include us out.

Granted, this is only an outline, but it’s a start.

Back to the matter of Republicans’ penchant for overspending on the military, the force needed for this concept of “America First!” – one that focuses first of all on defending our territory and people – could only be a fraction of what we spend now.

Wouldn’t it be great to finally get that “Peace Dividend” we were promised until George H.W. Bush decided he’d rather build a New World Order starting in Kuwait?

[foursprout-blog]

What Would An "America First!" Security Policy Look Like?

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/wealth/what-would-an-america-first-security-policy-look-like/

What Would An "America First!" Security Policy Look Like?

Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Republicans love to caricature Democrats as big spenders whose only approach to any problem is to throw money at it. As with most caricatures, it is made easy by the fact that it is mostly true. At least when it comes to domestic entitlement programs, nobody can top the party of FDR and JFK when it comes to doling out goodies to favored constituencies paid for by picking someone else’s pocket.

However, Republicans are hardly the zealous guardians of the public purse they would have us believe. While quick to trash their partisan opponents for making free with taxpayers’ money, they are no less happy to do the same – at least when it’s called “national defense.”

Over the next five years, the Trump administration will spend $3.6 trillion on the military. The GOP-controlled Congress’s approved, with Republicans voting overwhelmingly in the affirmative, the “Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018” (HR 1892) and the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018” (HR 2810). With respect to the former, the watchdog National Taxpayers Union urged a No vote:

‘An initial estimate of approximately $300 billion in new spending above the law’s caps barely scratches the surface in terms of total spending. The two-year deal also includes $155 billion in defense and non-defense Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) spending, $5 billion in emergency spending for defense, and more than $80 billion in disaster funding. $100 billion in proposed offsets are comprised of the same budget gimmicks taxpayers have seen used as pay-fors over and over and are unlikely to generate much of a down-payment on this new spending.’  

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) poses the question that few in Washington – and certainly few Republicans – are willing to ask: “Is our military budget too small, or is our mission too large?” He notes:

‘Since 2001, the U.S. military budget has more than doubled in nominal terms and grown over 37% accounting for inflation. The U.S. spends more than the next eight countries combined.

It’s really hard to argue that our military is underfunded, so perhaps our mission has grown too large. That mission includes being currently involved in combat operations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Niger, Libya, and Yemen. We have troops in over 50 of 54 African countries. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost over a trillion dollars and lasted for over 15 years.’

Defense spending is about survival, right? If you need to spend it, you spend it. But realistically, how does one assess whether spending is too much or too little without looking at the strategy the military is tasked with carrying out, and whether it makes any sense?

Proponents of increased – always increased – spending, like Defense Secretary James Mattis, point to real problems with increased accident rates due to poor training or equipment maintenance or the fact that most army brigades and navy planes are not ready for combat. But is that a symptom of too little money or of a force stretched beyond its limits by conducting operations anywhere and everywhere with little regard for actual U.S. interests?

That doesn’t matter politically, though. The message is, if you don’t support giving more money, you are guilty of neglecting the nation’s security and of killing service personnel. No wonder only a brave handful of Republican legislators consistently are willing to say No, like Senator Paul and a few House members: Justin Amash (Michigan), John Duncan (Tennessee), Walter Jones (North Carolina), Raul Labrador (Idaho), and Thomas Massie (Kentucky).

Here’s a crazy idea. What if instead of taking for granted a national security policy that seeks to maintain U.S. supremacy over every square inch of the globe we figure out what our real defense needs are – protecting our own country, not mucking about in the rest of the world – and then structure and fund the forces we need? What would that look like?

To start with, we know what it doesn’t look like: the policies followed by Presidents and Congresses of both parties for the past three decades since the Berlin Wall came down.  While the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) takes a commendable but befuddled nod toward genuine American interests – Pillar I (defense of American borders and tightening immigration controls to keep dangerous people out) and Pillar II (ending unfair trade practices and restoring America’s industrial base) – the real meat and potatoes is in Pillar III (“Preserve Peace Through Strength”), which could have been drafted by any gaggle of George W. Bush retreads – and no doubt was – or for that matter by Obama holdovers.

The NSS’s Pillar III is little more than a rehash of the usual litany of “threats” from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc. It’s symptomatic that these are clustered under “Strategy in a Regional Context” as Indo-Pacific (a perfectly ridiculous concept that could best be summed up as “China – bad!”), Europe (“Russia – bad!”), Middle East (“Iran – bad!”), and South and Central Asia.  Next comes the region that should be our first concern, but isn’t: the Western Hemisphere (“Cuba and Venezuela – bad!”).  Last comes Africa (well, at least we can agree on something), but we still need a dedicated Africa Command (which for some reason is located not in Africa but in Stuttgart, Germany).

Still, just suppose that by some wild unpredictable accident we ended up with a strategy that in some way resembled the “America First!” prioritization Donald Trump promised us? Here’s a possible broad sketch:

1. Western Hemisphere comes first, not last. As they say in New England, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Presumably good walls make even better neighbors. Whatever happened to controlling our own border with Mexico, which was the cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s campaign? That remains hostage to political horse-trading and a budgetary game of chicken in the Washington Swamp. As far as the political class is concerned, the Wall can wait until mañana.

At the same time, the U.S. is all too happy to meddle in our neighbors’ internal affairs under the justification of “democracy promotion.” Recently Secretary of State Rex Tillerson claimed such meddling was an expression of the Monroe Doctrine, which he said “clearly has been a success, because… what binds us together in this hemisphere are shared democratic values.” Really? That would have been big news to President James Monroe, who promulgated the Doctrine back in 1823 when no other country in the Americas could be described as a democracy and when even most of the U.S. Founding Fathers would have disputed that label for the Republic they sought to create. Monroe’s declaration had nothing to do with democracy. Rather, its core was a warning to other powers not to establish colonies in our hemisphere, an exclusion which we have considered essential to our security for almost two centuries. Even as a relative infant on the international scene, long before our young nation had emerged as a power on a par with those of Europe, the United States considered it reasonable to ask other powers not to step on our toes in our own neighborhood.

2. Respecting the “Monroe Doctrines” of other powers: The regional deference the United States has demanded in our own area for nearly 200 years is precisely the one we today refuse to accord to other respectable powers, namely China and Russia, by conceding the primacy of their security interests in, respectively, the former Soviet space and in the western Pacific. Instead – as under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush – the Trump administration still rejects the principle of “spheres of influence,” which in practice means not only asserting mastery in the Western Hemisphere but over every square inch of the globe. Today not a single sparrow falls to the ground anywhere but that a divinely omniscient and omnipotent Washington must have the last word about it – generously lubricated with rhetoric about democracy, human rights, rule of law, and other invocations of “universal principles.”

Despite suggestions from the foreign policy establishment, neither China nor anyone else is threatening the sea lanes in the South China Sea. Even America’s closest regional partners do not want to be pushed into a military confrontation with China to suit the agenda of “indispensables” in Washington. American concerns about North Korea can only be solved with Beijing’s security respected – and without the presence on the peninsula of almost 30,000 American “tripwire” troops and tens of thousands more in Japan.

In Europe, NATO forces should stand back from Russia’s borders and territorial waters.  NATO expansion should be ended – even after the Trump administrations ill-advised decision to induct tiny and corrupt Montenegro – while a new security architecture in Europe takes shape. The Alliance’s 2008 pledge to bring in Georgia and Ukraine should be withdrawn. Better yet, get us out of NATO entirely! We and our European friends should be finding a way to cooperate with Russia on pulling Ukraine out of its political and economic crisis as a united, neutral state, not pumping in lethal weapons so touch off renewed large-scale fighting.

An American accord with Russia and China is the stable tripod of any rational global peace, and no one else really matters at the moment. Russia boasts the world’s greatest landmass and natural resources unrivalled by any other country. She also has the only nuclear arsenal comparable to America’s. China is the most populous country in the world, with an economy achieving a par with ours and a burgeoning military sector. If American policy had been designed to alienate both of these giants and drive them to cooperate against us – and maybe it was designed to do that – it could not have been more successful.

3. Get the hell out of the Middle East and Central Asia. The NSS risibly refers to the undesirability of America’s earlier “disengagement” from the region, evidently a reference to the Obama administration’s not being quite as bellicose as its authors might prefer (for example, only supporting terrorists in Syria, not invading the place outright), Of dubious value even in its time, President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 declaration that the Persian Gulf region lies within thevital interests of the United States is only a dangerous absurdity now.  The entire region designated under the goofy moniker “Greater Middle East” is a welter of ethnic and religious antagonisms and unstable states that for America have only two things in common: (1) they ain’t us, and (2) they ain’t nowhere near us. It’s not America’s job to sort the place out, via such fool’s errands as nation-wrecking in Libya and Syria, nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq (after wrecking them), and “mediating” to “solve the problem” of the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The sole interest the U.S. and the American people have in the region is to ensure that jihad terrorism doesn’t achieve a sufficient foothold as to present a threat to us here. However, our regional efforts have instead served to increase and import that threat, not diminish it. American policy toward the region should rest on two pillars: (1) limiting our contact with it, above all drastically cutting down immigration from the area and, hence, the prospect of importing more terrorists; and (2) instead of favoring terrorism-supporting regimes like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, defer to countries with more direct interests in the region but who also have a fundamentally anti-jihad outlook, principally Russia, China, and India. Let them babysit Afghanistan.

Other than that – include us out.

Granted, this is only an outline, but it’s a start.

Back to the matter of Republicans’ penchant for overspending on the military, the force needed for this concept of “America First!” – one that focuses first of all on defending our territory and people – could only be a fraction of what we spend now.

Wouldn’t it be great to finally get that “Peace Dividend” we were promised until George H.W. Bush decided he’d rather build a New World Order starting in Kuwait?