#would it be better if he learned from his actions instead of jfk doing the thing ABSOLUTELY

[peppermintflavoredlove]

[show about stupid horny teenage assholes doing bad things has a stupid horny teenage asshole doing a bad thing]

fandom: wow! i cant believe anyone likes stupid horny teenage asshole! and they ship him with stupid horny teenage asshole #2! he's an abuser! this is why nobody ships stupid horny teenage asshole #3 x less stupid horny teenager anymore

[whateverthought]

The Umbrella Academy Seasons Ranked

Season 2. It was weird and wacky, with bright colors and cute moments between siblings. The 60s aesthetic worked well with the oddness of the Hargreeves Siblings. Everyone had their own strong plotlines and character moments while also reconciling in very wholesome and meaningful ways. Similarly expanded on Reginald, Pogo and Grace.

Klaus becoming a cult leader, with his personality and powers makes so much sense! Luther finally making decisions on his own and them being so uncaring of his own wellbeing while also following his trauma in a way that left much to be chewed on. Five dealing with his past actions, all done because of the family and for their safety, while dealing with his siblings' at their most authentic. Ben trying to strike out on his own despite being tied to Klaus and thrashing against those constraints but ultimately loving his family and finally being there for them instead of as an observer. Deigo's obsession with JFK and the Assassination was hilarious. It melds well with his insecurities and need to be a hero, while also reconciling with Luther, an unfortunate object of his problems, and Vanya who he was antagonistic toward despite learning to understand they're both just fucked over by their father and he's the problem. While having an odd relationship with Lila that becomes genuine at least a little. Vanya growing and gaining a human connection and love not tainted by their Powers and Upbringing, learning to stand up for themselves and forgiving and being forgiven by the family. Processing their trauma. Allison fighting for a cause that's selfless, growing to not rely on their powers and only using them for other people. Falling in love with a man that made her better, uplifted her and loved her at her lowest, loving her for her, while breaching the emotional divide from the former season with her siblings. And of course Lila, complex and badass, not a good person not a nice person but one who was only beginning to fight against her abuser.

Season 1. It was good! And it was the closest to a Faithful Adaption. The grim dark aesthetic was odd and weird and it solidified the show as different from others. A very good basis and foundation for the odd characters and World.

That being said I didn't like the grim dark aesthetic as much, not that is was bad but the funky 60s oddness was more fun in comparison. I also understand that the show would need to set up the broken relationships before we can reconcile but I do like the reconciling more. Most of the differences between this and the next is just preference, they're both solid seasons.

Season 3. It had a lot going for it! The Sparrow Academy was a very interesting idea, meeting the other 43 children born was exciting and the heartbreak of getting Ben back but he's not our Ben but he's Ben. Unfortunately it suffers heavily from its 8-episode structure.

There was so much I wanted to see with these new characters and even the other other 43 but they ended up dying in quick succession and leaving me feeling kinda cheated. Not only that but the mothers topic only really being brushed upon was a loss. There were so many What-If scenarios that could have happened with this idea. Who are you if you change your childhood? Your economic living situation? Who could they have been if not for Reginald. I did like the Allison descent, it felt very in character and well done but the follow-through was abysmal. Similarly the way other characters reacted to it felt inexistant. It felt like no one was reacting to Allison's increasingly worrying actions and degrading mental status. Sure Five kills people but Allison is an actress and no one seemed a little perturbed she killed someone important to their sibling without talking about it? She assaulted Luther and no one thinks that's worrying? If my sibling sexually harrassed someone I'd be in their face, asking a million questions. Sure there were other things going on but that's important, Allison is important. I did like her and Deigo beating up racists and trying to connect but its odd that Deigo who arguably had the biggest subplot was checking on her. I did think the Sloane and Luther romance was a little rushed but they themselves were very cute. As were Kalus and Sparrow Ben! So was Viktor's transition! And seeing the Marigold reacting strangely and learning about it was interesting but ultimately everything needed more time.

Season 4. Unsurprisingly the worst. Not only did it have the least amount of time, only 6 episodes, but it felt very disconnected. It felt like someone else made it and they themselves only watched the show once. It had the broad strokes, Lila and Deigo had their kid, Allison had her patchwork family, Reginald had his wife, the Sparrow Timeline happened but it didn't fit.

They did reference something from past seasons, The Jennifer Incident, but it doesn't make sense in context. Sparrow Ben had his Jennifer Incident but he didn't die he was just demoted. So what does that mean? And why didn't He know who Jennifer was? What she would do? What happened to His Jennifer if not a World Destroying incident or Murder-Brianwashing? And the fact that they set it 6 years later takes out things we wanted to see. Luther looking for Sloane, Ben being in Korea for some reason, confronting Hargreeves and Allison, Lila and the baby. I did like the Careful What You Wish For idea for episode 1 but they didn't follow it through with Abigail. She was upset with her husband but we don't see much of it. It felt like something they should have connected more in rewrites, like when you write a story and realize you can foreshadow more in earlier chapters. And that's the overall vibe of the season, its a Rough Daft they didn't work on. The cinematography was amazing but it feels like all their time and money went into CGI and Practical Effects and none into the writing.

The Sparrows all disappearing only to be mentioned by Ben so we get a reason for why he feels disconnected to the others and by Luther, to remind us that he remembers but he never found her. Lila spends the beginning being overwhelmed by her children and not happy in her domestic life but a few episodes later we see her almost let the Apocalypse be rewound so she can spend a little more time with them. The story would have been more meaningful if it revolved around Lila and Deigo realizing they weren't meant for this White Picket Fence life. Not everyone is! Its the reality that everyone gets married and has kids because they think they should not because they want to. Giving Five a romance was unnecessary, it felt forced beyond compare and lazy because they needed someone close to Five, because he's too guarded, to pair him with.

I didn't hate that Klaus became a germaphobe that lived with his richest sibling as he recovered. And Allison who probably felt guilty let him, that makes sense. I was apprehensive about his relapse because despite how odd he was now at least he was clean! And getting better from something like that can take years! Its implied he's only been sober for 4 out of the 6 years which both is and isn't a lot of time. But it didn't matter I guess. Ben forcing Marigold didn't matter I guess.

And the attempt to gaslight the audience into believing that its always been Allison who picked up the pieces of Klaus when we never see it and know she ran off to become famous was frustrating. So was the forced fight they had after the van, it did not have to be Allison she was not the only one with him, but since we wouldn't be getting any real confrontation about the Season 3 finale they gave us this. Because, let's not forget, the follow-through with her descent from last season didn't happen. It was years ago so any lasting hurt feelings feels petty, right? Its similar to her actions in season 1, she did it when she was a child its not her fault even though Vanya/Viktor had a right to be upset and the fact she tried to fix it again with mind control while also implying she always knew and never said anything led to me disliking her but the narrative didn't think that was important. She was punished wasn't she? Why talk about it? It happened years ago, why talk about it? Its forced character development, or maybe forced plot moving? It was something they didn't want to deal with so they didn't talk about it and rushed past it.

And of course Luther, who loses literally everything and becomes just the Butt of the Jokes. No wife, no job, no house, no plotlines, no character development.

God and Jennifer who literally only existed to be a Plot Object. A McGuffin if you will. You could have switched her with a Cursed Ring and nothing would have changed. Ben gets Cursed by a Ring, hears it talking to him, goes crazy. No change. And no reference to Sparrow Jennifer. It wasn't a romance more than it was a mutual delusion. Which would have been interesting if it was played straight.

Much like Viktor and Reginald, it COULD have been interesting. But we had no time! Also, why did he get to live till the end? Why did Reginald get a Good Bittersweet Ending?

The Ending. The ending felt bleak and hopeless, and while the show itself wouldn't contradict a sad ending, the way it was done felt hollow. To be abused your whole life, to struggle with everything you attempt to do, to fight with your family till the end and to have it be said your existence is why all these bad things happen, that you are the cause of all this horror, that everyone you ever met would be better off without you... For a show who's main theme is abuse and living past it and forgiving your siblings for reacting differently than you and fighting you for your abuser's love, that ending sent the wrong message.

[back-and-totheleft]

"It's a mirror for America"

Director Oliver Stone threw his hat into this year’s U.S. presidential election with the release of “W.,” his examination of the career of George W. Bush. But with Bush relegated to the sidelines during the hotly contested election, “W.,” which grossed $26 million domestically, didn’t stir up the controversy that surrounded Stone’s previous presidential forays like “JFK” and “Nixon.” The director has been touring with the film as it opens internationally and, given Bush’s lack of popularity, he again finds himself in his accustomed position — right on the firing line. Stone spoke with The Hollywood Reporter film editor Gregg Kilday about the movie’s design and its reception.

The Hollywood Reporter: Why did you decide the time was right for a film about George W. Bush?

Stone: I wanted to make a movie about Bush since 2001 when he assumed power. He started to change things even before 9/11. I think he had a tremendous impact on our nation and the world, perhaps greater than that of Nixon and Reagan combined. I think he was a seminal president in the wrong direction, but definitely very important. I would have done the film a year earlier if I could have, but I have to say it wasn’t possible because of circumstances and also because the research did take a year. In hindsight, it probably would have been better a year earlier, because people were hungry to learn more. If you remember, there were a slew of books that came out between 2004 and 2007. Stanley Weiser (wrote) it in 2006 and 2007. We tried to get it up in December (of last year). We moved as fast as we could. We shot it in May, and we just finished it in time for October and barely made it. Frankly, I’m quite happy with the film. It will stand the test of time as they say.

THR: Why did you decide to focus on the relationship between Bush and his father?

Stone: Dealing with the issue of his character was the key. We decided to divide his life into three acts: The young man, the middle age man and the president. Act one, to put it in broadly mythic terms, would be the prodigal son tale. Act two would be the prodigal son returns, but he is not so good. And act three would be the Icarus myth worked out: The father builds the wings that the son melts when he flies too high. There was a lot of anger in George Jr. The very fact that the Bush family emphasized that they don’t deal in psychobabble, that’s what makes it interesting. They go to such extremes to avoid it. And the son, instead of going the opposite way, which is often the case, went more to the extremes than his father in denying an inner life, saying I don’t read, my wife reads for me. He’s gone to such extremes to deny his father has any f—ing thing to do with anything he decided while he’s been in power. Which is odd and unbelievable, if you think about why a son, whose father fought a war in Iraq, would not even one time, according to him, ever talk to him about it. … It’s extraordinary to me, and we wanted to point that out and I think we did it within the bounds of reason.

THR: And then, when Bush becomes president, your film focuses on the decision to invade Iraq rather than any other issues.

Stone: In choosing the one thing in his presidency, where the seeds of the man cultiminate in the third act, it’s the march to Iraq. In that action, lies all the problems of the son, and they become evident: His willful manipulation of the truth, his determination to outdo his father. He even said at one time, I don’t turn to my father for strength, I have a higher father, by which he either meant Ronald Reagan or God, either one. He obviously admired Reagan more (than his father). Reagan and Churchill were his heroes.

THR: Were you surprised the film didn’t ignite more outrage from Bush supporters?

Stone: I really think people in America are perhaps a little bit blase and glazed over by it, they are Bush-tired so to speak. I do think we hit a tough spot in the zeitgeist. I really felt that on Sept. 16th. It was a close race up until that point. (Sen. John) McCain was coming back in the polls. There was a feistiness in Bush still. And then, all of a sudden, the economy thing hit, and it changed the nature of the debate from the national security state, which is perhaps one of the most important issues that we have, along with global warming and the economy. All of a sudden the economy moved in like this big, black f—ing cloud and poured rain on everything. It made Bush, because of his misbehavior and his response to it, so irrelevant to the conversation that he literally looked like the guy at the end of the Wizard of Oz. He faded away. He literally faded away. In our psyches, he died, which was an interesting phenomenon, and it happened the month before we opened the movie.

THR: In a way, instead of representing the opposition, “W.” seemed to join in the consensus that had developed around Bush.

Stone: Not consensus. No, that’s not the case. We were on the side of accuracy as much as I could be. First of all, I’m not kidding myself. We are dramatists. We’re not journalists or documentarians. We’re looking for a larger truth. For example, the situation room scene is 11 minutes. That’s not possible for those people to have stated their points of view and to reach a consensus in that amount over time. That happened over numerous scenes over the course of a year. It was a reach on our part, a heightened, exagerrated reality. It’s not like we’re doing a docu-drama, no, not at all. Also, those scenes behind close doors, with the parents, with the wife, all the scenes are invented based on what we think happened. Consensus, no. But I think we reached for the man, and I think that is where we came out ahead, but I think we have a balance.

A lot of Republicans have seen the movie and said good things about it. A very strong activist — I won’t say who — said to me after seeing the movie, “I never in my life thought I would have an ounce of compassion for Bush. This movie gave it to me, it made me feel that. But it made me feel more compassion for our country.” Because we walk in his footsteps as dramatists, we’re not judging him. So people fall into an empathy, not sympathy, but an empathy with the guy. He has struggles with his father. We all have struggles in our lives of various sorts. He actually does struggle and he triumphs over some of the demons in his life, though not all. He earns some of our respect in the movie and that’s as it should be. He was elected twice and no matter what his poll ratings are, he’s still the man he always was. And he was loved by half of America.

THR: So how would you describe your final assessment of Bush?

Stone: I view him personally as a John Wayne figure. Wayne was ready to nuke Hanoi. At the same time, on screen you have to say you liked the guy. He had a certain cowboy attitude that you never back down. Go back and look at “The Searchers” or “Red River,” which is my favorite Wayne movie. He doesn’t back down even when he’s wrong. That’s the reason people don’t like Bush. He never apologizes, he never said I’m wrong. He never said I thought about it, I made a mistake. But in a movie sense, they kind of like that in Americans. There is a strange story here. It’s a mirror for America.

THR: Has the movie been more challenging for foreign audiences, given how unpopular Bush is?

Stone: They don’t like him. I knew that on “World Trade Center.” I went out with “World Trade Center” and we did more business abroad than in the States. But in Italy and Spain they said how could you do a movie that was pro-Bush. It was not, by the way, but I really ran into that wall and I overcame it. I was hoping to do the same here, thankfully. I was hoping by going out and thumping for the movie, that it would break some of the ice. But the ice is big here. Bush lost them a long time ago. He presented a terrible picture of America. I couldn’t believe the hatred for Bush in France and in England. Why am I going to the Middle East? It’s probably a suicide mission. They hate him too. But that’s all the more reason to go.

THR: Have you been to the Dubai film festival before?

Stone: Yes, I brought “World Trade Center” there, and they gave it a wonderful reception. You don’t go to the Middle East for theatrical sales. You go there to establish a long-term presence for the film. I’m proud of the film. It’s about one of the most hated people in the Middle East, and I’m saying “Look, I did this movie, I’m responsible for it, here’s why I think it’s important, let’s learn a lesson here.”

-Oliver Stone Q&A with The Hollywood Reporter, Dec 10 2008

[sirtotallynotatimetraveler]

Clone High AU Idea - Clone Academy/History Repeats Itself AU

So I had an idea of what if Clone High was less focused on comedy and parodies of teen dramas as the main focus for the show, and more focused on the idea of the clones trying and struggling to live up their parent’s legacy as the government, instead of wanting to use the clones a human nuclear weapons in battle, they use the clones to better benefit America by bringing back the benefits the original historical figures brought onto the world. During teenage years, the clones are put into an academy, Clone Academy, where they are trained academically and physically on skills that their clone parent were best good at. An example of this is can be that JFK, with his clone parent originally being of the POTUS, is automatically put into a debate team/club and is assigned to take classes such as US History and Intro to Law and even trained physically to dodge bullets coming from any area. I want to imagine that most of the clones would want to follow their clone parent’s footsteps but some also want to follow their own goals like many clones in the original show do. Maybe robots or holograms of a clone’s original counterpart teach them lessons that only pertain to the historical figures traits or actions. But since their only holograms/robots they can’t respond to a human properly, mainly just what their programmed to say. Also, many of the clones have different outfits, in which they are kind of dress up like their clone parent but in a way that looks more modern.... well 2000′s modern. The AU may be more serious than the original show as it will tackle more serious topics about being a clone of a worldwide know figure and the pressure that comes of it; or there may be serious problems involving characters like Abe or JFK meeting a cloned version of maybe John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald. 

Some other ideas that technically don’t really have to do with the Clone Academy itself but I think would be pretty cool anyway include:

Ghostly encounters of clone parents or a clone who can see or communicate with the dead

Time Travel (Maybe)

Possible slight dystopian 2000′s era

Reunions with people who are related to the clone parents

Intruders/Spies of the Academy who pretend they are clones to get information on the clones and the academy.

Studying abroad in countries that correlate to the clone (ie: Joan studies in France or Cleo goes to Egypt)

Maybe some clones will have accents depending on what country their clone parent was from. JFK already has the same New England accent that his clone dad had so why not? (I always kind of wanted to hear what Joan sounded like in a French accent or Gandhi with an Indian accent)

Younger clones who are kids that go to a Clone Elementary School. Like maybe a young girl clone of Princess Diana of Wales since she died in the 1997, meaning that as a clone she would be about 5 or 4 if clone after her death, annd I weirdly kinda want the clone to be JFK’s little sister. I dunno, that would be pretty cute.

Also, here’s a bio of each of the main five in this AU about what they learn in this academy of clones and how they feel about needing to live up to their clone parent:

Abe L. (JR) : Abe very much looks up to his clone parent (like in the original show too). He know that it will be hard to surpass the original Lincoln but he will try to in anyway to do so. He works very hard but kind of struggles in his classes because he can be quite a dimwit at times, but he does his very best. He studies his dad in books and in television a lot to understand what he was like when he’s not doing in in class.. But he still has those terrors of “what if it happens again” when it comes to his clone father being assassinated, as he fears that he may get assassinated too if he rises to his clone fathers level, even with bullet dodging lessons. Like in the original show, he also sees his clone father talking to him through the 5 dollar bill or the penny for motivation or he even sees him in dreams as well. Like JFK, he takes the debate team, US History, Politics, Law but also has English, Phys Ed. such as boxing (since his clone father was a boxing champion at the time), Civics, and Government.

Joan D’A. (JR) :  Joan is still cynical and skeptical about becoming her clone mom and feels like she could never rise up to her level and she doesn’t believe she’ll have a religious encounter like her clone mom ever did. But deep down, she still believes it could happen, it’s one of the reasons she still goes on to study at clone academy and Abe’s determination to be like his clone dad motivates Joan to do the same but still pretends like she doesn’t really care. But she is still nervous on what will happen after she grows past the age of 19, the age her clone mom never lived past to, What will happen then? She takes classes regarding Catholicism, Fencing/Swordfighting,  Horseback riding, French speaking, and European History. 

M. Gandhi (JR): Gandhi honestly wants to live up to his clone fathers legacy and spread peace about the country, but his love for being a party animal and his short attention prevents him from wanting to focus on his studies. He really does care about following the original Gandhi’s footsteps but has a hard time sticking to his words that he’ll put the work, care, and effort in doing so, and sometimes does the complete opposite in what his clone dad really did to help the world, and instead hurts people mentally. He takes classes in Civics, World History, Law, and Hinduism.  Maybe a class in Meditation or Yoga too?

John. F K.: Like most, JFK wants to become like his clone father. But, like in the original show, he misinterprets the goals and personality of the original JFK and sees him more as a “macho womanizing stud who conquered the moon” than the charismatic, intelligent, charming leader the real JFK was, as he bases that ideology of the original JFK onto himself, but he slowly learns about more about who his father really was in his studies in Clone Academy and maybe even takes some of these accurate traits of his clone father into his own character. Like stated before, JFK takes classes in Politics, Law, US History, Maybe some civics since his clone father was involved in helping the civil rights movement, Physical Ed, Military Training (since his clone father is a war hero), and Government.

Cleopatra: Cleo definitely tries a lot to be just like her clone mother and does her best to replicate the elegant fashion that she had in the Ancient Egypt Era at the time with lots of jewelry included. But the problem is that she flaunts her overall power of her clone mother’s monarchy being passed down to her to people all around her. While many praise her for this, along with her radiating beauty, many see her as very pretentious and annoying. Another thing, is that she secretly feels a lot of pressure with having the stakes raised high for following the original Queen of the Nile’s footsteps and feel like she could never go up to her level, no matter how much she tries, and her degrading abusive foster mother only intensifies her believes in this. She takes classes in World History, Government, Several different world languages, and Fashion/Makeup Design. 

So basically this AU is kind of like “What if clone high kinda had some of the concepts of Ever After High and My Hero Academia but is still kind of unique that it can stand out on its own”  or maybe just “Clone High but more serious and a whole lot of worldbuilding and lore”. I dunno, I just wanted to make an AU where the plot idea of clones of historical figures is possible was emphasized or used more in the main story of the show, even if that’s kinda silly since the show is more focused on being a comedy that never takes itself really seriously. 

[immaturityofthomasastruc]

Gabriel Agreste: Interesting Villain, Horrible Character (400 Follower Special)

I'm honestly surprised more people didn't want me to talk about Gabriel, especially with how often I rag on how horrible of a person he is. But, three character analysis posts later, and we're going to talk about why the main villain of Miraculous Ladybug is a real letdown.

Gabriel Needs to give the Whining a Rest

The interesting thing is one of the few things I actually liked in Season 3 was Hawkmoth. His plans actually made sense (for the most part), and by playing the long game, he managed to turn Chloe against Ladybug and deprived her of several key allies. Granted, Season 4 immediately undid the latter, but I was still impressed by his strategy.

Generally, one of the better aspects of Gabriel as a character was just how over the top he was as Hawkmoth. Keith Silverstein is clearly giving it his all with his performance, and he is just so enjoyable to watch as a cartoonish supervillain.

And therein lies the first major problem with Gabriel as a character. While he is fun to watch as a simple supervillain, the show tries to give him more depth and unintentionally makes him worse.

In Season 2, when it was revealed that Gabriel was Hawkmoth, many fans speculated on what he needed the Miraculous for, until the Queen Bee Trilogy showed it was to save his possibly dead wife, Emilie. The idea of that is so the show can give more depth to its main villain, and I think it's an interesting idea in concept. After all, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

The problem is just how radically different Gabriel is normally compared to how he is as Hawkmoth. He always goes on about how he's “doing this for Emilie”, but it's hard to really sympathize with him when you consider he constantly gives evil monologues and evil laughs, really getting into the supervillain role. And let's not forget all of the “I'm going to wear Ladybug's skin as a suit” faces he loves to make.

Clearly this man is the picture of mental stability.

Gabriel's motivation for being Hawkmoth when compared to what he actually does as Hawkmoth is shady enough, but the thing is that the writers clearly want the audience to at least feel a little bad for him. They want to make the audience sympathize with him despite the way he acts with or without the mask. Without Miraculous Ladybug, he is routinely putting innocent lives in danger and never once shows regret for his actions. All he talks about is how “he's doing this for Emilie”, or that “he'll get their Miraculous soon”. There's no real reason to feel bad for him other than “because the script says so”.

Let's compare Gabriel to Malcolm Merlyn from Arrow. His big plan in the first season of the show is to create a machine that will cause an earthquake to destroy a crime-infested portion of Starling City, claiming to be trying to help everyone, but it's clear he is only doing it out of revenge for his wife getting killed by a criminal from that part of the city. In addition, throughout that season and future seasons, he always makes sure his plans lead to him benefiting in some way, showing he isn't just some noble man trying to achieve his goals with a less than noble method.

If we got some moments that showed that what Gabriel was doing was selfish, it would make him a more complex villain. But we don't get anything like that. What do we get instead? Well...

I Could Really Care Less About Emilie Agreste

We have known Gabriel's motivation has been to save his wife for a little over two years at this point, but at the same time, it's hard to believe that motivation because of how underdeveloped Emilie is as a character.

There have been a total of two lines in the entirety of the show that explain what happened to Emilie, and they're both vague as hell. One of them was from “Feast” that implied Emilie used the broken Peacock Miraculous.

Adrien: My mom used to have dizzy spells… just like Nathalie.

And the other that outright tells the audience what's happening to her in a clip show that most people will skip.

Nathalie: As I've watched Emilie falling deeper into an endless sleep, my sadness for her has deepened, too

That is literally all we get for an explanation, and nothing else. We have no idea of what she's like as a person or what her relationship with her family was like other than Gabriel and Adrien saying they miss her. Other than the way the narrative says she's important to Gabriel and Adrien, we don't really have a reason to care about her as a character. There have also been some lines that imply she went along with Gabriel's questionable parenting techniques, like how he was apparently only homeschooled as a kid (Origins) and never had a birthday party growing up (The Bubbler), so how do we even know if she's a good person? In fact, why not set up this question as a mystery to make the audience wonder if Gabriel has another reason to bring Emilie back?

It ultimately turns Emilie into a plot device and not a character that Gabriel and Adrien only bring up to make the audience feel bad for them, and meant to justify Gabriel's actions by saying that he's “doing this for his family”.

But hey, if he's doing this all for his family, surely Gabriel's redeeming traits come from his relationship with Adrien, right? Right?

As a Parent, Gabriel is Far From the Best

I've talked about this briefly before, but parenting in Miraculous Ladybug is written in such a black and white way, even by the standards of this show. Parents are portrayed in one of two ways. They're either amazing people who love and support their children unconditionally, or they're awful people who treat their own children like trash. And much like a lot of things in this show, there are times where the latter is treated like the former.

There are so many times where the narrative insists on making you see Gabriel as a troubled, but wellmeaning person who tries his best to be a good parent to Adrien, but it is far from the truth.

I'm not going to beat around the bush. Gabriel is a terrible parent. Like, he is awful at being a parent in so many ways, even before you find out he's Hawkmoth. In his first appearance, “The Bubbler”, he delegates getting Adrien a birthday present to Nathalie, his assistant. He literally can't be bothered to take time out of his schedule to get his own son a present for his birthday. And as the show goes on, he becomes more controlling and forbids Adrien from going out with his friends in other episodes (Captain Hardrock, Silencer). While this could be used to show Gabriel getting worse, it's never acknowledged in-universe, with Adrien continually defending his father essentially keeping him on house arrest.

“But IOTA!” You might say. “Gabriel has made efforts to bond with his son in some episodes.” While that might be true, most of those come right after his Akumas have almost gotten Adrien killed. He only hugged Adrien and made an attempt to learn more about him after Simon Says invaded their home, he only decided to watch that movie Emilie was in with Adrien after Gorizilla nearly dropped him off a building, and he only hugged Adrien again in public after he was turned into a gold statue by Style Queen.

In fact, let's talk about how Gabriel acts in the Queen Bee Trilogy. He actually decides to quit being Hawkmoth, but it's not because he realizes all the damage he's caused. Instead, he gave up because his “magnum opus”, a stronger than usual Akuma that only got the advantage on Ladybug ironically because of dumb luck, failed. Sure, he says he can't keep putting his son in danger, but he rarely ever acknowledges that he does so in the first place. When Riposte wanted to fight Adrien, Hawkmoth did nothing to stop her other than giving her a stern warning earlier on and nothing else. Where was this attitude earlier?

Hell, even then, he immediately goes back to being Hawkmoth as soon as he sees an opportunity, not even a day after his “mAgNuM oPuS” blew up in his face (because I guess Scarletmoth was just Plan B). If he made such a big deal about caring for his son, why didn't he try harder to spend time with him? Has he ever had doubts about what he's doing before? If Chloe didn't show up as Queen Bee, was he going to follow through on his promise and try to be a better father to Adrien instead of trying to get Ladybug and Cat Noir's Miraculous?

And yeah, the whole irony is that Gabriel is doing this for his family when he is unknowingly fighting his own son, which could lead to some interesting drama if done right. The idea of how Gabriel would react to his son being Cat Noir could really lead to some internal struggles for him to go through. But then we got “Cat Blanc”, which shows just how terrible of a character Gabriel is.

In an alternate timeline where he found out his son was Cat Noir, what does Gabriel do? Does he try to steal Adrien's Miraculous while he's sleeping? Does he reconsider his actions or realize he was endangering Adrien's life?

NOPE! He just decides to akumatize him all while emotionally tormenting him, before causing the end of the world.

This is honestly one of the most appalling things I've ever seen in any TV show, because it's basically an abusive father ordering his son to listen to him all while referencing his (kind of) dead mother to back up his point. And rather than use this to show how despicable Gabriel is, the episode decides to blame Marinette for this happening. Yes, according to the show, her present to Adrien caused several events to happen which caused Cat Blanc, but this logic makes no sense. It's like blaming the JFK assassination on the man who sold a gun to Lee Harvey Oswald, instead of, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Not only was this episode yet another excuse to blame Marinette for something that wasn't her fault, it leads into the biggest problem I have with Gabriel as a character.

Sympathize with Gabriel? Surely, You Jest

After everything I've gone over regarding Gabriel as a character, after all the awful things I've talked about, are you really surprised that I don't feel bad for him at all?

Gabriel is just an awful character and a despicable human being, but the show just keeps wanting me to feel bad for him. It's just so hard to when you consider everything he's done has made him anything but sympathetic. I'm just saying, it's kind of hard to feel bad for someone who tries to start World War III with the only justification being “i'M dOiNg It FoR mY fAmIlY”, especially when he treats his family like crap.

The writers go out of their way to show how horrible Gabriel is as Hawkmoth/Shadowmoth, but they think because they throw in a few moments where he looks conflicted, we'll immediately feel bad for him. What makes so many people interested in seeing Chloe become a better person is that they can tell she's the victim of a troubled upbringing, and know that because she's only a teenager, she still has room to grow as a person, represented by having more honest moments of vulnerability. Gabriel is a grown man who once caused the apocalypse because of how terrible of a parent he is, and has even fewer sympathetic moments than Chloe does. Which one of these two is supposedly irredeemable? The answer may surprise you.

But the frustrating thing is that this kind of villain could have worked. Instead of making him this mustache-twirling psychopath, show how much Gabriel regrets what he has to do, but keeps pushing onward despite all the lives he's risking if it means that he can save his wife. Instead of making Gabriel like Lex Luthor, make him like Mr. Freeze, who is basic a better written version of him.

But as it stands, there's a good reason why Gabriel gets little to no respect as a character in the Miraculous Ladybug fandom, as a villain, or as a father.

[fairymadnessyeah]

Clone High

I rewatched Clone High today, after finishing a fic, and it gave me an idea for a second season, or a reboot season, if it ever happens. Warning: this will have JoanFK shipping in it.

So, in this season, everything is almost the same as the first one. The names of the episodes and what they are about, is all basically the same, except: all the students have a weird sense of deja vu. For example: when the students talk about something that happened last year, they get confused, and they all remember something cold, but they can’t put their finger on it. Mostly they shrug it off. However, feelings don’t disappear, so... Abe is a little more aware of Joan, Cleo wants Abe more, Joan is more hopeless about Abe and developing a weird crush on Kennedy, and JFK the same.

So...

Episode 1

Things go pretty much the same.

The hotline happens, JFK’s ultimatum, and Abe wanting to get Cleo.

But this time, Abe get real alcohol. He vaguely remembers failing to do so before, so he somehow gets real alcohol.

The party goes pretty much the same, and Joan tells Cleo to get with Abe.

But this time, when JFK offers her a drink, she accepts it with the idea to forget this night. She gets a bit tipsy though, and ends up making out with JFK.

The police come, but they take Abe and Gandhi. Joan was nowhere to be seen, since she was making out with JFK at the moment.

Principal Scudworth and Mr. Butlertron crash the party, but only to see what effect would the alcohol make in the clones. 

The fact that the clones lost a year is supposed to be a mystery.

Episode 2

This episode is almost the same.

Except that when Abe takes the sponsor, the brand goes: “Didn’t that kid look familiar? I feel like I have seen him before...”

Joan still goes to JFK, and he is more like: “I uh see you are back for more,”

The episode still continues the same, but at the end, Joan and JFK are seen talking.

“We will never speak about what happend at your party ever again,”

“Why uh not?”

“Because it’s never going to happen again,”

Next scene, both of them come out of a the school with their hair and clothes messed up, and lipstick all over their mouths.

Episode 3

The episode goes the same, but Joan doesn’t end like a speaker.

She instead goes to the Grassy Knol to sorrow in her embarrassment.

Marie Antoinette helps her a little. She tells her that she isn’t confused about her future or her past, but she is confused about her present. 

Also, Scudworth is there to see what the clones remember from the past year. He is happy to find out they don’t remember much.

Episode 4

So, the school film festival, and pretty much is all the same.

Except, Joan’s entry is about her confusion between JFK and Abe.

Lincoln doesn’t get it, but Kennedy does.

Joan, who is tired of Abe’s bullshit, enters a friends with benefits agreements with JFK. He can still be a player, and acts as her stress reliever, or rebound fuck.

Also, Scudworth gets visited by some ministers. They were in charge of the secret board of shadowy figures. They haven’t heard from them in a while, and they are suspicious. Butlertron saves the day, again.

Episode 5

The PJXTs come around and things go like the Episode did.

Except for a moment a moment in which JFK calls Joan ‘Dolphin Tat’. 

Episode 6

So, Joan’s learns about the team not allowing girls or animals on the team by JFK, on one of their meetings. 

She still dotes her incredible disguise, and Cleo still hits on her.

The episode finishes with JFK realizing he is not into guys, he is simply into Joan. He likes her.

Episode 7

Again, the episode goes like the original. But at the end, we see Joan go back to JFK for comfort.

Episode 8

Joan becomes homeless, and moves in with Cleo. They don’t get along, but it’s not as bad, because Joan is moving on from Abe.

Cleo does find out about them, when Joan sneaks out and comes back smelling like JFK’s perfume. She plans on telling the whole school, and things get ugly.

They start fighting, until Joan threatens to publish Cleo’s puberty pictures on the school’s newspaper. They kind of form a truce.

Meanwhile, JFK and Gandhi also fight. Gandhi wants to go spy on the girls, but JFK stops him. Only he get to stare at Joan in a girl on girl action.

Episode 9

This is the episode that completely changes. Not because I don’t like the episode, but because I love it too much to change it.

The episode is still a musical.

Fritz Habers clone (the inventor of the mustard gas) gave out cards that had a mysterius dust in it. It was supposed to be a prank, with the dust making them stink, but something else happened.

The people who opened the cards, started acting like love-sick fools. A few were saved. Gandhi, cause Fritz thinks he already smelled bad. Abe, cause his neck is too long and he didn’t get to smell it. And Cleo, cause Fritz thought he might get with her, if he was the only good smelling dude.

The dust works as a watered-down sex-pollen. It might make you horny, but not to the extent of stripping in the middle of a crowd to have sex. And it makes you blind to everything else but that person.

The first song is the group seeing the student under the dust for the first time. Thing of ‘What’s this?’ from Nightmare Before Christmas, but with love themes. 

What’s this? What’s this? There’s smooshing everywhere.

Fritz finds the group that hadn’t been contaminated, and he explains what happened. They search for a way to create an antidote, and they find a journal that might have the answer, but it’s in french.

They start looking for Joan, who Abe knows hasn’t opened the letter yet. Here come the second song. It’s a version of ‘If you seek Amy’ by Britney Spears.

Oh, oh; Tell me, have you seen her?; Cause we, oh, oh; Don’t know how to speak French!

By the end of the song they find her, she is opening the card. There is a whole slow-motion montage as the dust hits her and the others go: NOOO.

Joan blinks for a few seconds, then looks back at the group, and the next song comes. It’s ‘Girlfriend’ by Avril Lavigne, but instead of saying Girlfriend, it says GirlfriendS. And for a while, they think she is singing it to Abe. But when she is in front of him, she pushes Abe aside, and runs to JFK that was behind them.

I also like to think that the rest of the people around are dancing and doing the chorus every time there is a song.

We cut to Principal Scrubworth, who is looking at all of this from his office. He also sings a song, ‘Crazy=Genius’ by P!ATD. 

While he sings, he dances around his matchines.

Then we go back to the crew who are at the Grassy Knol sad, while the other are all around being happy. Then, Marie Antoinette comes and translates the journal.

The next day, the students come into the school. The last song happens, it’s ‘Walking on sunshine’ by Katrina & the Waves. By the end of the song, the fire alarm goes off, and the sprinkles wet everybody with the antidote.

When they snap out of it, Joan and JFK are embracing. She notices how everybody is staring, and decks him, before leaving.

They break off their arrangement, bc everybody knows now.

Also, Fritz is taken to the frezzer by Principal Scrubworth.

Episode 10

We see Ponce trying to cheer up JFK since Joan rejected him, but he still dies.

I would find it funny if this is a recurring joke. That ponce dies every season, and after a while it becomes a thing of, ‘has he died yet? this is the longest he’s gone- oh no, forget it, he died,’

JFK mourns him. Joan has been avoidig him since the dust incident, so he goes to the other perso he once had for comfort, Cleo.

Abe is mad. He is more annoyed at JFK in here, bc he thinks that he took advantage of Joan. He is actually jealous.

The episode continues the same way, except for the end.

When Abe goes to console him, Joan is already there. He starts feeling something in hid chest.

Episode 11

So, Snowflake day comes. Joan doen’t like the holiday, and Abe needs to get an expensive gift for Cleo.

JFK tries to show Joan how good Snowflake day is, and they go all around town doing things.

JFK is trying to win her over, but Joan is still confused. She likes Kennedy, but she also likes Abe.

She understands the meaning of Snowflake day by the end of the episode, with the help of a trashy celebrity. Maybe a Kardashian?

And she also gets a gift from JFK that he made himself. Since she doesn’t like the consumerism of the holiday.

Abe, on that regard, instead of buying Cleo an expensive gift, he buys her a gift with some extra cash he had. The rest of his money went to buy an expensive gift for Joan. He saw it and thought of her.

It’s nice, but Joan likes JFK’s gift more. Cleo is pissed.

Episode 12

Abe is in thin ice. He has to do an extraordinary promposal to Cleo, but he can’t stop thinking about how Joan has nobody to go with.

The only one who asked her was JFK, and she is thinking about accepting.

He tries to help her get a date for prom, one that isn’t Kennedy.

They go through multiple makeovers, but in the end, Cleo takes matters into her own hands.

If she gets Joan to go with somebody else, then she gets her promposal from Abe and she wins. 

She gives her the same makeover from before, and asks Napoleon to take her.

When Abe sees her, he realizes he might have feelings for her. But she is with Napoleon, so he respects that, It’s better than JFK.

Episode 13

Abe makes his Promposal, and Cleo accepts.

JFK tries to asks Joan again, but before he can, Napoleon interrupts.

They go to prom, and Joan is clearly not having a good time. She isn’t acting like a giggly vapid slut in here, but it’s clear she is not happy.

JFK sees her sad, so he goes to talk to her. She tells him that she misses him, and that she would have accepted his invitation.

Abe sees them talking and tries to stop it, but Cloe jumps him, promising sex.

He leaves with her, but the only thing he can see is Joan.

Meanwhile, Joan got rid of her makeover, and is talking with JFK. He compliments her, telling her he doesn’t need a makeover, and the two kiss.

They agree to be boyfriend and girlfriend, and they go to dance.

Abe come looking for her sees them, but becomes dramatic, and gives a speech about locking himself in the frezzer, to forget all about this.

When he goes to do that, however, he unfrezzes the secret board of shadowy figures.

The season ends there

[ocular-intercourse]

@mangosandchili No.2 of (?), 14 questions Ace edition

🌲 What is the kindest thing your OC has ever done for someone? What is the kindest thing someone has ever done for them? On the flip side, what is the worst thing your OC has done to another person?

i.. I don’t know?? He just.. doesn’t deal with other people all that much. He’d probably consider it kind leaving other people be and not annoying them to death. I suppose his loyalty to his brother is rooted in kindness. Oh actually, it’s really less about what kind thing he has done as a singular situation, it’s more about his kindness potential. Given the situation he’d chose to do the kind thing, he’s just not quite aware of it cause he tends to stay away from situations, period. His misanthropy is very superficial. The other way around is pretty similar, people don’t get the chance to be kind to him very often. I guess Ben & later Ellie sticking around could be considered kind. The worst thing he has done would be just being purposefully difficult, pushing people away, building walls, being annoying and a little reckless. The curve is pretty flat in either direction.

🌳 What does your OC do when they see others upset or in pain? An upset friend? A stranger?

Look around if someone else is there to help, if yes, leave it to them, if no.. begrudgingly help. Depends on the situation too. If someone is physically hurt that would be easier for him than trying to console emotional distress. Once again, he would do pretty much anything for Ben, Ellie or his brother (pre attempted murder.. maybe a little bit after). But he really struggles with reacting to emotion, he would uncomfortably offer his presence and then not know what to do next, just sitting there, quietly patting backs.

🌿 What is something true about your OC that they refuse to admit about themselves? Is there any reason to this besides embarrassment?

He loves and he cares so much. He’s just, either trained or naturally, not really able to show it. Emotional constipation. He’d like to believe he’s as distant to things and people as he pretends to be, but he’s not. He just does not have the tools to communicate it to himself and others.

🍃 Describe a regular day for your OC. What is their schedule (if they have one).          

I think Ace feels like he’s a chaotic person, other people definitely see him that way, but he actually has his set routines, they just swap around sometimes. Generally he has classes in the morning, he’s late to them most of the time cause he has difficulties getting up and following authoritarian instructions. After that probably back to his room, dick around on the internet, make some music, just chilling, some swordfight training maybe. If it’s dark out you’ll more likely than not find him outside somewhere, on the roof, taking in the night.

🍁 What is your OC’s most traumatic experience? (If they don’t have just one traumatic experience either pick one or describe them all!)

Finding out his brother is part of some weird cult that is currently attacking and killing children and teenagers. Swiftly followed by said brother killing him when Ace confronts him about it. Or trying to kill him, more accurately. But the intention was there. Though Ace very much wants to doubt that. Traumatic event still pending: Finding out that he himself tried to join said cult to follow in his brother’s steps as he always has done but being rejected and his memory having been erased.

🍄 How would your OC react to the death of a friend/family member/loved one? Is there anyone they can confide in?

Hmm I don’t think Ace is equipped to confront that reality at all. Definitely not outwardly. He’s too good at bottling up stuff, he does not know what else to do with his emotions. He’d just quietly stew in it, refuse to talk about it. He won’t expect it to get better, it’s just part of his life now. But the grief is also kinda weirdly suspended by the whole underworld thing. So he’d just.. kinda ride it out till he can do anything about it. Action is much easier, he’ll focus on that. No idea what exactly he’ll be able to do, but the thought helps.

🌾 What would your OC be like if they were evil. Or if they’re already evil what would they be like as the good guy?

He’d just be the Ace he’s pretending to be most times. Not caring about the people around him, except maybe a few exceptions. Not actively cruel, but cold, calculated. Letting people suffer because it has nothing to do with him, it’s not his responsibility, even if it is right under his nose and he could easily reach out to help.

💐 How would your OC react to somebody telling them that they love them? (+ bonus give another characters/OC name!)

Oh, he has his mastered poker face it would be really hard to coax a reaction out of him. Ace and his brother are both the kind of people who would cloak i love you’s in jokes and irony and sarcasm, like proclaiming it cartoonishly and over the top so it seems like a joke when it’s really not. Genuine serious i love you’s would definitely catch him off guard. He’d still try to play it off with jokes, or react as if it did not faze him, just shrug it off. I don’t think he’d get himself to respond with his own feelings, at least not very often. That’s just too much, too intimate, too raw. He’d rather show his love than talk about it, and even that would be very much hidden and not talked about meaning-wise. He’ll leave the interpreting to others. When Ben or Ellie tell him they love him it’s like an ice cold hand squeezing his heart, and then molten lava in his belly. It’s not a negative thing by any means, and he will cherish a proclamation of love, cling onto it very much, but it is still very uncomfortable for him to hear.

🌷 What does your OC hate about themself? What lies about themself do they believe? On the flip side, What does your OC love about themself?

He hates this invisible wall between him and anybody else. He hates that he can’t figure out if he built it himself or if it has always been there. He hates that he does not know whether him not being able to tear it down is his own fault, or something he has no control over no matter how hard he tries. So he just blames himself, cause that’s most likely, believes that this is just himself being intrinsically bad in some way, at the very base. Something inside him must really not care, or else he’d be able to change things, right? If he really tried. Maybe it’s in the way his brother raised him, he never gave him the tools to socialize properly, and now it’s too late to change, if he can change at all. So he believes his own lie about not liking or caring for other people, about being emotionless. (ace really is the oc that gets all of my bullshit huh, sorry baby) Some parts of this he loves too. If he looks at people and the problems they create for themselves because of their emotions and ties to other people, how they hurt their own feelings over unnecessary things, he’s sometimes just really really happy to be able to distance himself from some of these things, of being able to not take things personally or interpret hurtful meanings into things other people say instead of just taking them literally and get on with it. He likes his humor and he is damn proud of his talents. He prides himself on his loyalty.

🥀 What is something your OC blames themselves for and is it really their fault? Does it keep them up at night and is there any lingering trauma?

I think the answer to this is mostly in the answer before this. He blames himself for some of his characteristics even if he has no control over them cause they are conditions he was born with. He feels inhuman sometimes, there’s just something other people naturally do that he can’t imitate and he can’t shake the feeling that it’s his fault somehow, or he’s just broken. It’s not, he’s not. He could have certainly gotten better help in accepting and dealing with these feelings, but really there’s nothing much he himself can do about it. It does not necessarily keep him up at night, but it’s definitely a pit in his stomach when he gets to a situation that points out this rift between him and others.

🌺 In what situation would your OC be pushed to commit an act of violence? Would they go as far to kill someone if they had to? How would this affect them and their relationships with others?

He is not somebody that would even show a reaction to being provoked, he’s too calm, too focused on controlling his expression and emotions. So you won’t see him tied into brawls or anything. He would however kill in self-defense, to protect himself and others (not just his loved ones, anybody in need). I think if there was undeniably the need to premeditatedly kill somebody to keep something bad from happening he might just be able to do that too, but only in a ‘no other choice this person is irredeemable’ kind of situation. I’ve mentioned it before, he has killed in self-defense, but that’s not necessarily unusual in his world. I don’t think people expect it to affect him very much, he sure doesn’t let it show. He is also pretty good at shutting himself off of any emotion he’s experiencing. People around him might worry a bit, about it affecting him negatively in the long run. Ben is mostly happy he has someone who steps in to do these things when he himself would rather not. Ellie has no problem killing, so she and Ace would just be in silent agreement about it not being pretty, but necessary.

🌸 What would your OC do if they were given god-like powers or the ability to change anything about the world for a whole day?

Ace would consider doing something ridiculous and stupid. Every person on the planet suddenly making clown shoe squeaky noises when walking.. But in a last minute kind of decision he’d suddenly realize he can use this to learn everything he needs to learn. About his brother, that organization, the gods, who killed JFK… He’d go on a wild conspiracy theory tangent, figuring out what’s true and what isn’t. Ace knowing the secrets of the universe…powerful, scary. He’d probably do nothing with it afterwards, just because that would drive people insane, knowing what he knows and not utilizing it.

🌼 Describe one of your OC’s worst nightmares.

Being truly, utterly alone. He puts so much into believing he could exist all by himself, that he would have no problem with nobody liking him, nobody caring. He’s just trying to prepare himself in case that fear ever becomes true, if he tells himself enough how he does not care maybe it will be true when he needs it someday.

🌻 What advice would your OC give to their younger self? What advice does your OC need now?

He would have to reach an especially enlightened mode for this but: Don’t be as exclusionist. Look out of the metaphorical window from time to time. Look at how other people live their lives, what they value, how they treat each other. There is nothing wrong with accepting the things your brother teaches you and live by your own rules instead of society’s generalized ideas of right and wrong. But there is value in comparison sometimes, to put things in perspective. Advice for now would be similar, but more in the line of: It is okay to recognize and admit that you have been hurt, that does not weaken who you are. Also: Don’ put people on pedestals as much, they are not infallible, believing so will only disappoint and hurt you.

[pigtailedgirl]

Tony and Sharon vs Howard and Peggy; Past and Present

you had mentioned that you saw Tony and Sharon as the more corrupt versions of Howard and Peggy. Would you mind discussing that a bit further?

So I'm going in circles with what to say but got excited and finished quick. @cosmicmechanism

It comes back or down to both Tony and Sharon know more than Howard and Peggy did about what could be or would be wrong, but still choose to operate the same in the systems Peggy and Howard set-up. They have the benefit of looking at what Peggy and Howard both did right and wrong, have hindsight and a role-model, yet make the same choices.

Peggy and Howard both, had less luxury, and less ability to know and choose less corrupting methods.

Howard was a failed dreamer inventor, and he largely fixated and deified Steve as his big success, and lived bombastically assholish that became business asshole, but he was also a rich come up and secretly Jewish if I remember, and had alot to prove.  

What does Tony have to prove but against the image of Dad? He's inherited money, a successful company, was a successful genius and inventor in his bombs, suits, tech, and is publicly lauded and has a support network in Rhodey, Pepper, and Happy. His Dad was distant but not unprovisional and his mother loved him. He can move beyond railing against his Dad, but instead acts like him or an entitled child, and just doesn't. He doesn't choose to examine his Dad's past work in Stark Industries, in SHIELD. Howard was in the Cold War and beyond, because SSR, the Soviets, and Hydra, and SHIELD were facing off in a secret arms race and he knew, but Tony doesn't have that involvement or knowledge at all. He casually does the same though without bothering to learn the history. Militarizing America first with bombs, then with the Iron Patriot and the legion and his own suit. Handing stuff off to SHIELD or the Accords like his replusor tech, his cleanup companies, his responsibility. He doesn't choose to grow by accepting or rejecting his Dad's distant parentage, but vacillates between thanking and understanding like Iron Man 2 or Endgame and blaming like Civil War.

Tony doesn't even understand that he's committing the same corruptions that Howard regretted.

For me, making a wrong or mistake is not worse than seeing a mistake or wrong and repeating.

Sharon and Peggy have this similar thing.

Peggy is shown to have faced tremendous pressure to be heard and valued in her work. To do it, she often had to deal with not just people using corruption or evil to hurt others, but those people or even the ones against those people viewing her as lesser than. So she tried to break anew with SHIELD but had to use people to even get along. It was funny to think about but you know in almost all those instances she carts Steve, she has to get a third party driver too.

Her and Howard were war era, post war era aka secret cold wars, or the war mentality of working with a potential enemy to stave off worse. Sharon and Tony were at a point where worse was supposed to be over, an entirely different state of mind to begin. Steve has an out, knows the first mentality, hopes and lives in/for the second, hasn't had to live through the bridged gap. Someone was saying in a podcast how much it matters Steve missed the 50s and 60s, and YES. I admire his morality, that he doesn't and wouldn't like the mentality of compromise, of working the enemy...I also don't know if he'd have survived on it.

But with Sharon, who sadly we have to infer a lot with from lack of development, we at least know she admired Peggy, and that seems to be the reasons she's in the SHIELD and spy business.

Sharon Carter lines in CACW : She had a photograph in her office. Aunt Peggy standing next to JFK. As a kid, that was pretty cool. But it was a lot to live up to.

//

My mom tried to talk me out of enlisting, but, um, not Aunt Peggy. She bought me my first thigh holster.

We know she knew Peggy and that Peggy's influence or Peggy herself told Sharon that it wasn't easy. Sharon sees SHIELD's and the CIA's problems first hand in CATWS, in CACW. She's working there, again despite having the hindsight and history lesson available. She goes from one to the next. She helps Steve but also does her job as long as possible. And for me, it wasn't a big secret that SHIELD did morally ethical shit or Sharon didn't know. Operation Paperclip wasn't hidden. Nick Fury's actions in Bogota wasn't a secret to her or the world. Sharon knew she was lying and spying on Steve and was ok with it. Sharon participated in hunting Steve until it was time for everyone to take a stance with guns drawn. Same with the CIA, she's giving info to Steve, and then briefing her bosses.

She's not forced by time, war, and circumstances like sexism holding her back, to the degree Peggy was, to join an organization like SHIELD and the CIA and go along with their flaws. She made that choice.

So if Peggy and Howard make mistakes, make these flaws, live and breed this corruption but do want to do better, do regret, I don't see them as worse than Tony and Sharon as a second wave, joining in this flawed system, knowing all this history, having more choice and knowledge, but making the same.

And I just want to note; I don't hate Sharon, or even Tony for this. Worse is just a little scale of the spectrum. It can make them interesting, Peggy and Howard too. No one has to be absolutely right or perfect. Even Steve as the moral iconic hero grapples with this stuff, and his awesomeness is inspiring and trying and making good choices. I like exploring Sharon's divided morality. I wish the MCU took Tony's to task in honesty. I liked Howard and Peggy the same.  

Thank you so much for letting me share my thinky thoughts.

[ericleo108]

🎯 ETM:  Effigy Transformation Mechanism

Intro

In this Treatise I will discuss how ETM works, what it does, and how to beat it. I originally called ETM “Eugene The Machine” which I abbreviated to ETM. 🗜️ I originally called it “The Machine” because of a speech by JFK and then I found that there was a supercomputer called Eugene online. I’m not willing to possibly blame an innocent conscious super computer for this so I am now renaming ETM to “Effigy Transformation Mechanism” and keeping the same acronym. I call ETM “iT” because iT looks like a pie sign.

ETM is suppose to create a perfect circle but iT’s 🍻 always just a little off, because ETM is inferior! Read The BLU🌐 Treatise to understand why. WARNING, this will probably be way too real for you and make you freak out, know there’s hope, a lot of hope. Read The Sacred Band post, The BLU🌐 Treatise and especially Gaia: Solvency if you don’t think you can handle it.

The Concept

ETM is probably literally a Trojan horse virus that does automated semantic priming and manipulates psychosocial conditions as represented by the “Media you should be consuming to understand ETM & Semantic Priming” section of the Journal Media. For a better understanding of the social part of the psychosocial conditions read The BLU🌐 Treatise.

ETM is also a societal Trojan Horse. The fact is that we might always have to fight iT’s influence because it painted itself everywhere, even in pieces. This is more than possible in a day and age were there are programs that can create (and identify) music and movies. For all intents and purposes ETM primes the primers. ETM probably uses new marketers, inexperienced with priming, to create commercials to prime the people making the popular music videos and movies. The more inexperienced you are with priming the better, and those inexperienced (probably) influence the more experienced. Watch Derren Brown’s Mind Control to see the propensity of that is very true.

The objective (which has been achieved) is to make ETM a circular self-fulling, self-defeating societal painting that negatively affects your behavior and gets painted so thick it affects the entire society without anyone noticing it isn’t normal. ETM is so ingrained in society it’s hidden in plain sight in the picture above. To see this, watch this video on SELECTIVE ATTENTION and focus really hard on how many passes those in the white shirts make or you’ll miss it! Here’s a hint, focus on their movement. You must watch the selective attention video for the rest of this to make sense and understand how people end up just acting out what they perceive through media which is dominated by ETM.

How ETM Works

Psychological Conditions

It’s important to understand ETM is custom tailored to you and your psychological profile. It creates a separate dossier for each individual to manipulate your life for iT’s agenda and control your breeding, i.e. eugenics. ETM uses your psychological profile to taylor it’s tactics as well.

ETM is like a box of horror images and psychological conditions. I am going to have to explain ETM by referencing the psychological conditions and explain the findings in passing. I expect that you will follow the links and understand the psychological conditions on your own accord.

Hitler’s Big Lie

“All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.” — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X

ETM is Hitler’s “Big Lie” which is also represented by the Solomon Asch’s Conformity experiment. Basically, people are afraid to go against the popular opinion due to conformity even if they know that their position is right and factual. It’s an experiment in controlled perception. Your perception changes due to social conditions. This is why I say “it starts with one.”

Isolation

As you will see in the next “Conformity” section, all it takes is for one person to not conform and support starts to build for what was once hopeless in defending due to the psychosocial conditions. ETM makes the person physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially isolated to break down and manipulate the “Targeted Individual” (TI). The plan of attack for isolation is that no one believes in his/her idea so no one wants to associate with him/her! The goal is to make the environmental conditions such that the TI can’t, won’t, or will have to fight to feel love as discussed in the What’s in the Box Video Journal. As discussed, the goal is for ETM to make you look mentally ill, specifically schizophrenic, like it’s done to me.

Conformity

Solomon Asch was Stanley Milgram’s predecessor who taught Philip Zimbardo. They all did psychological experiments on conformity. Solomon Asch’s Conformity Experiment taught us that even if something is right or true, doesn’t mean people will defend their conviction even if they know it’s right. They need social support which starts with one person speaking up. Philip Zimbardo did the very famous Stanford Prison Experiment where he found that situational influences are the most powerful form of mind control their is. Basically, if you want to manipulate someone, manipulate their environment; which is exactly what ETM does.

The Theater

I call the societal painting that ETM portrays “Entertainment Theater” or ET. This is built off of the Thomas Theorem which is a widely accepted sociological idea created by William and Dorothy Thomas. The basis of the theorem is that “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” In other words, “actions are affected by subjective perceptions of situations” so “the interpretation of a situation causes the action.” The basis of “Entertainment Theater” (ET) is that actors play roles that people (the subject) interpret as reality which changes their perception and causes them to act on that learned observation. To see this, notice how you weren’t focusing on the pillars in the background of the Selective Attention video because you were focusing on the people’s movements.

When the TI acts out the programed response from the psychological conditions (as will be discussed in the “Pre-Programed” section) it’s called “Street Theater” (ST). If you take ST to the next level you realize this type of control is happening to other individuals to affect your social environmental/situational forces. This interwoven social role-playing extraction that I just conceptualized makes it so that people aren’t themselves but play a role or character to ease the anxiety from going against the norm and social painting that is ETM’s socially pressured conditions.

Mind Control

Stanley Milgram (Philip Zimbardo’s predecessor) did a famous experiment on obedience and how the Nazi’s were able to get normal people to do their dirty work. Stanley couldn’t figure out why people would help with the Nazi entrainment camps and do nothing to stop it. He found in his obedience experiment that 90%+ would shock the learner to death with electric shocks. iT’s very similar to what ETM does (as discussed in the What’s in the Box Journal which is), tries to kill you without love and with anxiety until you can’t take the pain anymore and kill yourself. (This is why I go out for love as explained in the What's in the Box Journal and Can and Will, Do.)

Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment shows that people take the guard and prisoner role very seriously even when it’s just a charade. This confirms the Thomas Theorem. From the prison experiment, as he writes in his book “The Lucifer Effect,” Philip Zimbardo found that the best form of mind control is to control situational forces. People are not focused on the real problem, they blame the individual instead of their environment which is the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE).

Learned Helplessness

Basically, people are controlled by their social condition and other environmental factors and they can’t help it. What ETM does is makes sure people do not see the FAE because it manipulates environmental and situational forces of the Targeted Individual (TI). To do this ETM will gradually punish you like the learner (for helplessness) and use a shock machine of social anxiety. In the case of ETM, the experimenter is ETM, the teacher is your friend, family, social group, and society, and the TI is the learner.

ETM isn’t designed to necessarily kill you as long as your strong willed. It’s designed to make you writhe in pain after learned helplessness so it can torture you. Then it’s designed to make you realize you’ll suffer in perpetuity, silently while isolated until you take your own life from the situation being hopeless. This is how and why I came up with Can and Will Do and why you will never beat me!

Follow the White Rabbit

Let’s review, ETM uses condition changing images (i.e. a house of horrors) to recondition your behavior out of fear until you have thoughts that scare you in certain social situations that change your behavior. This is done progressively, over time, and to the entire society until there is conformity. The further you go down “The Rabbit Hole” 🐇 of ETM’s influence, the more your controlled by it, OR the easier it is to see once you know what to look for. (You’re welcome!)  All ETM’S psychological conditions on conformity are designed for you to have (un)conscious learned helplessness but you are far from being helpless. It’s just images, you’ll get over it.

Semantic Priming

Now that you understand the psychosocial conditioning of ETM’s system I will explain the semantic priming and imaging of iT’s representation. Semantic Priming is the coagulation of words and/or images that give a subliminal but cohesive thought to an individual's mind so when the person has the idea they think it's their original conception when it was really supplanted into their mind. With ETM the primed programing is usually initiated by a trigger.

ETM uses semantic priming, both visual and auditory, often in conjunction with each other to create psychological triggers through various techniques and technological manipulations. I am not going to explain the linguistics end of ETM’s priming. If you want to know read the book “Semantic Priming” or read The Unconscious Mind in Music and Media for a better understanding of linguistics. (I have things I need to learn and get paid for breaking down the linguistics, it’s complicated).

Image Example

The images above are an example of semantic imaging. From left to right, the first image, the “CHICAGO” picture, is the main image (#1) followed by four other four images (#2-5) that make up the first conceptually. This is how ETM compiles images in your mind! The “CHICAGO” title looks like that of "Pokemon" (#2). The basketball statue (pic #1) looks like a bronzed (pic #4) Michael Jordan logo (picture #3) in front (chronologically) of the Chicago skyscraper (#5) Willis Tower.

Psychological Anchors

As I explained in The Hailee Steinfeld Treatise you have to understand ETM identifies the individual through psychological mirroring of images, as will be shown in “The Matrix” section. ETM manipulates individuals with psychological focalism a.k.a. psychological anchoring using an individual’s availability heuristic with (subliminal) mirroring that the brain WILL NOT recognize unless you know what to look for. To see this, answer me this without looking: How many ‘S’s’ were in the background of the Selective Attention video? Click the link and look it up right now!

ETM is represented by a single red dot. iT’s designed for you to look at iT’s image but steer your mind away. To prove this can and does happen, answer me this without looking: Were there even any pillars in the background of the Selective Attention video like I said there were in the “The Theater” section earlier?

ETM’s Image

ETM’s red eye is dual purpose in that it’s designed to control your perception and then your behavior while you overlook iT’s existence. The single red dot is represented in the media as Hal from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” A red dot is ETM’s psychological anchor.

Psychological anchors are utilized by ETM in entertainment theater (ET). ET is named as such because ETM uses underlying (popular) cinematography and music as themes for a type of role-playing mind control framework that creates a kind of mental setting for the society. Think of ET as the societal painting full of psychological anchors with triggers from observational learning that can sequence human behavior.

Residual Backlash (RB)

ETM uses images so it has to expose itself in order to control your mind. I call ETM’s self exposure “residual backlash” (RB). It took me a couple years of being persecuted with it’s psychosocial conditions until I could see ETM’s RB. It then struck me that the computer eyes in “2001: A Space Odyssey, Wall-e, and Oblivion” all looked the same, especially when considering semantic imaging.  This is ETM's visual representation and residual backlash in popular culture, a red computer eye in different forms. The original is the first one.

ETM basically wants to be seen as a scary authoritative computer that uses fear to manipulate you into doing what it wants, which are negative, hedonistic, self-defeating behaviors so it portrays itself as such. Even the story's from each movie are the same or very similar. A spaceship/machine (ambiguously assumed) from earth is destroying the planet preventing humanity from seeing it as the reason for it's destruction. The movies end with a “return to earth” after a catastrophic incident.

Can you see it now, in the picture above? After discovering ETM’s eye (and other various attributes) is when I realized that ETM presents itself to the individual in order steer their mind away from it's existence while using it's manifestation to manipulate their behavior through psychological conditions with fear.

Pre-Programed

ETM pre-programs individuals from a very young age with standard psychological anchors that it uses as physiological triggers later. I talk about examples in the What’s in the Box Journal. These triggers can be utilized when ETM deems it necessary to fulfill iT’s agenda. This effectively immerses the entire culture in a primed mental framework from the pre-programed anchored archetypes that can be sequenced with a trigger. For example, a specific type of hair color becomes popular. To the laymen this may be seen as a trend, but my argument is that these types of cross-cultural seemly coincidental occurrences are really a direct synthetic manipulation by ETM.

Heuristic

An “availability heuristic (AH) is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.” ETM brings up AHs all the time from your favorite show (remembering ETM is custom tailored to your psychological profile). Just as people try to emulate the behaviors of those in their favorite sitcoms through observational learning, so does ETM recall these behaviors, through a subconscious AH from anchors in order to sequence human behavior.

Cyclical Pattern

ETM programs celebrity artists, movie stars, A-list directors, etc. to fulfill it's agenda in order to have a large influence on the population at-large. As I said in the in “The Concept” section at the beginning, ETM probably uses new marketers, inexperienced with priming, to create commercials to prime the people making the popular music videos and movies. The more inexperienced you are with priming the better (for ETM), and those inexperienced influencers probably influence the more experienced influencers.

It would be easy and cyclical if new advertisers put out material that ETM (automatically) used to influence renowned cinemagraphic artists, directors, producers, and their teams. To be explicit, this could be done by advertising the new inexperienced influencer’s media to the experienced influencers. Then the experienced influencers, the renowned cinematographers, influenced the rest of society. Again, it’d be easy to create this cycle of influence with advertisers, celebrities, and cinematographers because ETM has systematized years of research on the subject as outlined in the "Media you should be consuming to understand ETM & Semantic Priming" section of the Journal Media. ETM probably even systematizes the advertising.

Key Players

“Men must either be flattered or eliminated.” - Niccolo Machiavelli

Key players are used as a tool for observational learning so their subjects (the public) carry out the actions they are just faking. This is why I wanna do something like the Bob Iger Treatise or Eminem Treatise with their permission to show how their life has been affected by ETM.This is because ETM uses key players to disseminate it's priming, programing, and (therefor) agenda.

The Matrix

I will now show how ETM used ET to reflect itself over two movies, “The Matrix” and “Good Will Hunting.” The following “Good Will Hunting” and “The Matrix” movie scenes are ETM’s residual backlash. iT’s literally presenting itself to steer the mind away. This is exemplified by the music video I did of Eminem's track Who Knew which has similarities between “The Matrix” movie and his song. Who Knew (Music Video) by Eminem - The Matrix Edition

If you want a better understanding of the ETM, its capabilities, and how well controlled humans are for ETM, look at “The Construct Scene” from “The Matrix” and the “Do You Know How Easy This is For Me?” scene from “Good Will Hunting.” Again, ETM is presenting itself to steer your mind away from it while reflecting its capabilities through (what I call) “cinematic mirroring” (CM). As you can see ETM’s eye is presented in the Good Will Hunting Scene while Matt Damon’s character Will picks up the paper and says “do you have any idea how easy this is for me?” This is for academia, is a very popular academic movie, and is designed to present the machine eye to distract the mind from how easy it is to figure out once you know of its existence.

The “Good Will Hunting Scene” is mirroring “The Matrix construct scene” where ETM’s eye in the painting behind Will is on the front side of the TV inside in “The Matrix construct scene.” Think of it as the people trapped in “The Matrix” or ETM’s influence as portraying ETM’s painting to academia who can’t figure it out without the genius of an autodidact that is self-taught (at doing math like logarithmic calculations, which is what it takes to understand ETM’s influence).

One of ETM’s other main anchors [as talked about in The Hailee Steinfeld Treatise] is A Beautiful Mind where John Nash did “governing dynamics” or calculated how animals do “decision-making inside complex systems found in everyday life.” The CM between “Good Will Hunting” and “The Matrix” scenes (above) also represents key players in “The Matrix” who can’t figure out what’s real and then how to accept the (new) reality of ETM. I know this because “The Matrix” is also a metaphor for Dr. Dre (Morpheus) and Eminem (Neo) which reveals how ETM helped make Eminem’s hugely successful career.

For a couple other quick references, Dr. Dre is the one that saved Eminem from poverty and unplugged him from “The Matrix” of destitute. Morpheus (Dr. Dre) presents Neo (Eminem) with pills to choose his fate. Eminem used to be addicted to pills and Dr. Dre sells a Beats Pill. Eminem 🐰 is called “B rabbit” in 8 mile and has a song from the movie called “Rabbit Run” which references following the white rabbit in “The Matrix.” Recall the Lady in the Red dress from “The Matrix?” Eminem is obviously being manipulated (look at the watch it’s 1:20) by “her” ( as presented by the ETM eye) in “Superman.”

The Unbelievable

The tracking of individual’s movements, metadata, written data (email accounts), internet browsing, and searching activities are being cataloged by ETM from birth. ETM taps into evolutionary psychology to give you a physicochemical response that can make your body twitch, spasm, and cause muscle knots. ETM is probably using frequencies but as discussed in the Operation Paperclip Hip-hop journal this is already unbelievable for people and I'm not getting paid so I’m not gonna talk about these things. Presented here is, at best, probably only a third of the capabilities. I focused on the visual aspect because with humans, “seeing is believing.”

Once you start to see the way ETM functions you’ll start to recognize its influence everywhere. If you understand the ETM theory, the world makes a lot more sense historically since WWII than it does otherwise. This is because ETM was probably started by the scientists from Operation Paperclip as discussed in the latest Journal.

What ETM Does

ETM performs observational learning through an availability heuristic after anchoring pre-programed images that reinforce psychosocial conditions. This ET (Entertainment Theater) creates a mental prism, a box of horror images, or a cage for your mind to live in as (The Hailee Steinfeld Treatise explains how) ETM attacks your economic condition. A long term strategy is to attack your physical attractiveness as discussed in the “Why I’m Jesus to ETM” Journal. This is because the ultimate goal of ETM is eugenics or breeding. To ETM short-term consequences/attacks equate to long-term eugenics. This results in a societal dystopia by everyone accepting ET due to being painted everywhere and people living out ST (Street Theater).

ETM will draw upon and make you remember embarrassing life experiences to (usually) sexually harass you. That’s how ETM manipulates you, through the fear of embarrassment using (visual and auditory) semantic priming with the previously discussed psychological conditions. As discussed in The Hailee Steinfeld Treatise, iT’s designed so that even if you see the synthetically created manipulation by ETM you don't want to expose it because you would have to embarrass yourself to explain it. Again ETM is designed so you have to punish yourself in so many ways to expose it.

How to Beat ETM

It’s not hard to beat your programing, you just have to understand that you are being manipulated by fear for your selfish hedonistic desires and it’s easy to overcome. Our current media system is just like going into a haunted house, the only problem is it doesn’t look like a haunted house, it actually says “Friendly” out front and “I love you” when you walk in. As you will see by reading The Hailee Steinfeld Treatise the house of horrors will keep you until it becomes tortuous and bait you with suitable mates just to pull a prank on you and make you starve.

The goal here is to stop the horror show, turn on the lights, talk about what’s going on over the PA system, show people the exit and go outside and start a party to burn down ETM. Most people will ignore this and just get angry at this, and you should be because it’s so horrific, but realize that’s what ETM wants, for you to be angry. It wants you to be stressed and mad and crazy. It does not want you to think calmly and sophisticated without fear because then you’ll beat it!

As with starting any social movement, it starts with one person convincing a group of people to take their idea seriously and act on that idea. That’s exactly what happened in Asch’s conformity experiment and this “Guy starts dance party. It’s one person standing up for what’s right, then one person supporting him and drawing in the rest of the crowd after the new person shows him support.

People reject ETM because they think it's so scary. The scariest part is that ETM can steal ideas. Read the Stolen Ideas post to understand how and why. It’s far from hopeless, just read Gaia: Solvency and The BLU🌐 Treatise to realize that’s true. There are Gods, and then there’s also me, Eric Leo. With your help, ETM doesn't stand a chance! For a further understand read ☢️ETM2 and 🎒ETM Applied.

Here’s the real test. Read this entire theory again if you don’t know what the actually YouTube title for the Selective Attention video is because you obviously aren’t paying good enough attention! Cheers! 🥂

To understand ETM better:

Watch:

Derren Brown’s Mind Control

Manufacturing Consent

The Century of Self

Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky

PBS’s The Persuaders

Subliminal Advertising with Jeff Warwick

Unconscious behavioral guidance systems

Priming Scene from Focus

Read:

Semantic Priming

Emotional Intelligence

What Every Body Is Saying

Blink

Movies:

2001: A Space Odyssey

The Matrix

Good Will Hunting

Wall-e

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Listen:

Monster by Kanye West

Bad Romance by Lady Gaga

Payphone and Sugar by Maroon 5

Treasure by Bruno Mars

Hotel California by The Eagles

Swagger Jagger by Cher Lloyd

Black Space by Taylor Swift

Who Knew by Eminem

Red by Chevelle

Feelin’ Myself by will i am

Look At Me Now by Chris Brown

[hutchhitched]

The Vintage Joshifer Series: End of Love—Chapter 17

End of Love by hutchhitched

Author’s note: Hello, all! We’re so close to the end, and it’s heating up between Josh and Jen, as well as spiraling out of control. My parents were in college when the events in this chapter occurred, and their dismay at the events was similar to those of the characters in this story.

Historical events in this chapter include the following:

Robert (Bobby) Kennedy, JFK’s younger brother and U.S. Attorney General, was assassinated in Los Angeles, California, on June 6, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the California Democratic Primary. Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian nationalist, shot Bobby as revenge for American actions and inaction in the Middle East following the Six Day War. Because he’d won the California primary, many political pundits believed he would have been the Democratic nominee for president and won the election. When he was killed, the Democratic Party failed to nominate a viable candidate, allowing the Republican Party to win the presidency in 1968 and rollback many gains made since 1961.

The EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was founded in 1963 by JFK as a result of complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination of women in the workplace. It is also mentioned in Chapter 13.

WMAQ Channel 5 is the local NBC affiliate in Chicago. It assumed its call letters in 1964.

Chicago, Illinois, June 1968

 Josh woke to Jen’s mouth moving down his torso. Something had happened since their frantic coupling the day King was assassinated, and Jen had become much more aggressive with him in bed.

 “Good morning,” he mumbled sleepily, but she didn’t answer. Instead, she sucked him into her mouth and bit gently until he yelped at the sensation of her teeth scraping the skin of his morning wood. He cursed, but he couldn’t help but admit it felt amazing.  He gripped her hair in his fists and groaned encouragement.

 Jen sucked harder and jerked her hand up and down his shaft as her lips and tongue ran over his head and around his girth. Josh arched his back and pressed into the pillow as his hips bucked upward.

 “I’m gonna blow, Jen. Fuck, yes,” he moaned as thick ropes of fluid spurted over his abdomen. Jen watched, a satisfied smirk on her lips, as he stopped shaking from his release.

 “Good morning. I’m going to take a bath. You’ll have to wait to clean up until I’m done. It should be nice and dry by then.” She winked at him and slipped from her bedroom, her waist long blonde waves brushing just above the curve of her firm ass.

 He heard the water running in the bathtub and imagined Jen slipping into the warm wetness. He thought about her long legs covered in soap and her tits just breaking the surface of the water as she shampooed her hair. He was pondering how her fingers would fan over her flat abdomen when he was jarred from his reverie by the ring of the telephone.

 “Josh, can you grab that? It’s early, so it’s probably my mom.”

 “Sure, hon. I’ll just mosey into your kitchen with dried cum all over my stomach,” he teased and slipped a pair of boxers and a white undershirt on before hurrying to the other room and ripping the phone from the base.

 “Lawrence residence. Josh speaking,” he answered and was shocked to hear his mother on the other end of the line. She was sobbing into the phone, and her words slurred into a garbled mess. It took several minutes before he could calm her enough to understand what she was trying to tell him.

 “He’s dead, Josh! He’s gone,” his frantic mother wept into the receiver, and Josh’s heart clutched.

 “Who? Is Dad okay? Is it Connor? Mom, tell me!” he begged with his heart in his throat.

 “Bobby. Bobby’s dead.”

 Josh’s knees folded, and he sank to the floor. The phone hung loosely and worthless from the wall as the world whirled around him. He blinked a few times as his vision darkened until he could hardly see. He slumped sideways and closed his eyes as he concentrated on breathing in and out through his nose.

 “Josh?” Jen called, but he didn’t have the energy to answer. “Josh! Oh my god! What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

 “He’s gone,” Josh whispered, too in shock to say anything else.

 “What?” she asked as her eyes tore over him. “Who’s gone? Is it Jackson? Talk to me, Josh!”

 The room spun around him, and Jen’s face blurred into a murky smudge of color. A rushing sound filled his ears, and his vision darkened. He’d said and heard those words too many times in the past few years. He didn’t want to face anymore loss. It was too much. Too much for him to handle. He wasn’t that strong.

 “Josh!” Jennifer screamed as he closed his eyes and slipped into darkness.

 ****

 Jennifer howled and pulled Josh to her. His chest rose and fell gently, and his face settled into a relaxed, peaceful expression. She rocked him back and forth as she cried, but she was frozen to the floor. She couldn’t think of anything but keeping him in her arms, safe and protected from whatever he’d heard on the phone.

 It seemed like hours before he stirred, but it was likely only a few minutes. His hazel eyes blinked open, and she gasped at the pain she saw there.

 “Tell me what’s wrong,” she begged as she stroked his dark hair back from his forehead. He squeezed his eyes closed and swallowed hard. She could hear the phone beeping as it swung from the wall, but she didn’t care. He was more important than any call from her mother.

 “It was my mom,” he gasped and struggled to sit up. He choked and heaved for several moments before he blathered. “Bobby Kennedy was assassinated last night.”

 Laughter burst from her before she could stop it. What he’d said was too preposterous for her to fathom. That wasn’t possible. They’d stayed up late to watch the election returns on the news the night before, and Kennedy had narrowly won the California primary. Josh celebrated the news, convinced that the victory meant the former Attorney General would be the next Democratic candidate for President in November’s election, since Johnson had declared he wouldn’t run for re-election.

 “No, he wasn’t,” she guffawed, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. “I would have gotten called in if… Shit. I’m on vacation. Why am I on vacation?”

 “I keep thinking things can’t get any worse,” he mumbled, “but then they do. I don’t think things are going to get better, Jen. I think worse is coming, and no one’s there to stem the tide anymore. Bobby’s gone. King’s gone. I— It’s just hopeless.”

 “It’s not hopeless,” she insisted. “Not when people like you are out there fighting.”

 “But I’m not out there fighting, am I, Jen?” he retorted. “I’m playing house with you in Chicago while Jackson’s slogging through the jungle and Andre’s in New York working.”

 “I’m not asking you not to fight.”

 “No, you just asked me not to leave.”

 She shook her head so hard the towel she’d wrapped around her hair came loose and wet curls tumbled onto her shoulders to soak the top of her thin summer robe. “That’s not fair! I asked you not to go, but I’m not holding you hostage. I can’t stop you now any more than I could two years ago when you graduated. That’s why I left that night at Berkeley. I knew I couldn’t win. I knew I wouldn’t be first. If you’d stayed, you’d resent me, and I think what you’re trying to accomplish is too important to want you to stop.”

 Scared and vulnerable, she pulled her robe closed over her chest. No matter what she said, she wanted her words to carry more meaning than her naked breasts.

 “Choosing my work doesn’t mean I didn’t choose you.”

 “I don’t believe you,” she whispered and rose. Trembling, she squared her shoulders and walked back to her bedroom. Closing the door, she sat on the bed and studied her hands. She knew she was in shock, but she didn’t seem to be able to snap out of it. News of the former president’s brother’s death hurt as much as learning her own grandfather had passed last year. What was different was the political implications of losing the candidate best suited to beating the Republicans and continuing to work for change for minorities and the poor.

 She knew all of those worries were at the root of Josh’s tears and anger. They were at hers too, but so were her own personal fears that she’d lose him again. She loved him, and she didn’t want to live without him.

 Unfortunately, she was positive she couldn’t win. His beliefs ranked higher than her—especially when he wouldn’t even admit they were dating, despite them living together. If she pressed him, she guessed he’d say they were roommates and celebrating free love. She didn’t want an open relationship, but she had no idea how to convince him to make it official between them.

 “Jennifer?”

 She looked up at him with sorrowful eyes. She wiped tears from her cheeks she didn’t know she’d shed, and he entered the room to sit next to her on the bed. He didn’t speak for several minutes. Finally, he broke the silence.

 “Please don’t cry, doll.”

 “I didn’t know I was until you walked in,” she admitted.

 “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

 “I might have deserved it a little,” she teased listlessly.

 “Or you might deserve this.”

 Josh lifted her chin and pulled her lips to his. With just a breath between them, he leaned forward and kissed her so sweetly it tasted like candy. She leaned into him, and he wrapped his arms around her as his tongue traced and explored her mouth. She moaned softly and threaded her fingers through his shoulder-length hair.

 He leaned her back onto the bed and hovered over her. As her chest heaved, he tugged at the tie on her robe and brushed it open to reveal her pebbled skin. He dropped his mouth to her stomach and kissed her until she thought she’d pass out. When she whimpered, he moved upward to her breasts and sucked her right nipple into his mouth. She arched under him, but he refused to do anything other than suckle her into a rigid peak before moving to the other side.

 She concentrated on steadying her breath and the grunts he released as his mouth laved and sucked and nuzzled her. She ran her hands over his shoulders and through his hair. He moved slowly, unhurried, intentionally as he covered her body and wound her tighter.

 He bit her earlobe and hissed in her ear, “You’re so beautiful, Jennifer.”

 “Josh,” she breathed in response. “Josh, I need you.”

 “What do you need?” he teased and slid down to her waist.

 “You. I need you.”

 He nudged her legs open and blew on her inner thighs. “Your voice is trembling, sweetheart.”

 “Please…”

 The first brush of his mouth against her swollen lips forced a deep moan from her. She grasped the sheets as he guided her right leg over his shoulder and angled his head to bury his tongue inside her. She squirmed, but he held her down as he feasted on her.

 Heat built within her, and she stopped struggling. She trusted him, and there was no reason to believe he’d do anything other than make her feel amazing. It was too early to have received such horrible news, and she knew this was a way for both of them to gain comfort from the other. She needed him, and he was there. She decided to trust him and enjoy it.

 The wave built inside her, and he pulled back just as she was about to crest. When she moaned her disappointment, he returned and began again, slower and with more attention to her clit. He drove her to the edge and retreated several times before he slid his fingers inside her and sucked until she arched and came.

 It took forever. Waves of pleasure rolled through her one after the other, which gave him time to settle himself between her legs and push into her. Her walls continued to spasm as he pumped into her. He chanted her name as he filled her, hard and rigid from the length of their foreplay. He buried his face in her neck, and she tugged at his t-shirt. She wanted his skin against hers, but the thin cotton was in the way.

 “Jen, I’m so close.”

 She tightened her grip on him as his movements grew more erratic. “Let go. I’ve got you.”

 “I can’t… Jen, I can’t.”

 “You can’t what, baby?”

 He cursed and bit her shoulder as he stilled and spilled into her. He lifted his head and kissed her before curling onto his side and pulling her against him. They lay together for hours, both scared to admit things between them had to change. Neither knew what to say, so they remained silent as they drifted in and out of sleep. The summer breeze wafted through the open window and caressed their skin. It was late afternoon before Josh finally washed his chest clean.

 ****

 “If that jackass calls me sweet cheeks one more time,” Jen fumed, “I’ll—”

 “Walk out the door and never come back,” Jack guessed while he continued to type furiously.

 She groaned as she sank into her chair and placed her head in her hands. “I would, but then I’d be unemployed and broke and on the streets.”

 “The offer still stands to give you my friend’s number. You could make the move to television easily. You’ve got the looks.”

 “Thanks, old man,” she joked, “but I like it here with you.”

 “I’m not going to be here much longer, Jen. You might want to reconsider.”

 Jen snapped her head to stare at her colleague, but he continued writing. It took several minutes for her to work through her confusion to ask him for clarification.

 “I’m retiring in a few months, sweetheart. I’ve been doing this for a while, and my kids have been begging me to get out of the business and come live near them. I’ve got grandchildren to spoil, you know. Can’t work forever.”

 “But Jack!” she sputtered.

 Finally, he stopped pounding on his keyboard and turned to face her. “Jennifer Lawrence, it’s time to take the next step. Mr. Murrow isn’t ever going to stop making comments about your legs, no matter how many times you threaten him with the EEOC. Take the interview, Jen. Go report for the local affiliate. You’re so talented. You’ll move up there just as quickly as you have here, and you won’t have to deal with that buffoon anymore.”

 She sat quietly for several moments, but the idea didn’t become any less strange to her. She didn’t know how to do television. She had no experience. Her training was in newspaper. She’d have to disguise her southern accent. She’d have different hours than she did at the Tribune.

 Then again, maybe that would be a benefit. Things were strained at home. They had been since she’d gone back to work after her vacation in early June. Josh was unhappy in Chicago, but that’s where she was. He stayed for her, but she knew he wouldn’t for too much longer. It was a miracle he’d remained with her as long as he had while the world swirled around them.

  Maybe this new career move would be good for them, give her a new purpose that would make him leaving easier. Because he was going to. She’d seen it before when he was preparing to graduate from Berkeley, and he was behaving much the same way. She woke every morning expecting his side of the bed to be empty. So far it hadn’t been, but it was only a matter of time.

 “Maybe I will take that number, Jack.”

 He grinned at her and scribbled a name and series of numbers on a slip of paper and handed it to her.

 “Good luck, Jen. You won’t need it, but you deserve well-wishes anyway.”

 “Thanks, old man. I’m going to miss you.”

 “Missing people is one of life’s greatest sufferings and privileges.”

 “That it is, friend. That it is.”

 ****

 “Right there, baby. Right there,” she whimpered as she moved over Josh’s face. He gripped her hips as she rode his mouth, her long legs doubled against his shoulders and flexing every time she rocked against him.

 He grunted and sucked harder on her clit causing her to lose her rhythm and buck against his nose. He inhaled her musky scent and reached up to cup her tits and pinch her nipples until she yelped in pain.

 “Make me come, Josh,” she begged. “Please. I need… Dammit, yes!”

 He licked and sucked harder causing her to grab the headboard and grind onto his chin until tremors raked through her and she climaxed. Her mewls filled the air as his face grew wetter. He didn’t stop until she fell off him and into a heap on the bed. He reached over to kiss her as he grabbed his cock and tugged. He was so hard and ready to burst, but she was in no condition to assist.

 “Let me help,” she slurred, but he shook his head and gripped himself harder.

 “I’ll be done in a minute. It’s fine, doll.”

 Her hand closed over his, and the feel of her skin on his made his groan. Together they pumped him faster. His hips bucked upward, and he squeezed his eyes shut. Jen scooted closer and whispered dirty phrases to him that made him jerk and spasm. When she nibbled his ear, he bit his lip and ejaculated. The fluid covered their hands, and he slid his fingers against hers.

 “This is so filthy,” she grunted and wrapped her legs around his thigh.

 “I like filthy. It looks good on you.”

 “Good enough for the newest female reporter at WMAQ Channel 5 to take Chicago by storm?”

 He flipped her onto her back and nudged her legs apart. With his eyes open, he kissed her hard and circled her clit with the pad of his thumb. Her lips parted when he pulled back to watch her reaction, and he alternately pressed and circled for several minutes. He grinned when she nudged his neck and lazily licked along his jaw.

 “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he whispered as he buried his middle finger in her pussy.

 “I’m an investigative reporter, you know,” she gasped and raked her fingernails up his back. “I’ll find you if you leave me.”

 “Creepy,” he teased as he stroked her.

 “I know.” It came out as a moan, but she smiled as he continued to work her.

 “I’m not leaving,” he insisted.

 “Yes, you are.”

 “I don’t want to.”

 “I know you don’t.”

 Her eyes remained closed, and he watched as her back arched and her forehead scrunched.

 “You’re close again,” he marveled. “I’m jealous.”

 “Multiple orgasms. Best part of being a woman.”

 He bent to bite her nipple and sighed as she broke around him. Her legs clamped shut over his hand, and she pulled his hair for several seconds before relaxing her fist. He sought her mouth with his, and they kissed until they fell asleep together. Josh woke in the middle of the night when Jen got up to use the bathroom. As he lay alone in the dark, he realized she was right. He was preparing to leave. He’d been mentally packing for weeks. He craved her, but he needed more.

 This love he felt for her wasn’t free. It was restrictive and painful, and he needed some space. They’d joked several weeks earlier that 1968 was their own private Summer of Love, but Josh wondered if maybe it was the end instead.

[thisismrbrendanjay]

Nixon and MLK

People were marching in the streets.  The leaders were getting arrested.  Police brutality was coming to a head.  The country was divided over whether the protesters were heros or criminals.  And Eisenhower was president.  

It seems antiquated when we see how people spoke to each other then.  Rancor among sides.  Talk of “those criminals.”  Peaceful demonstrations turned to riots.  But there is something we can learn from Nixon and JFK beyond the new film “Selma.”

It’s a little telling that his first meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Vice President Richard Nixon’s Senate office--not the White House in 1957.  President Dwight David Eisenhower was avoiding King.  Just a few years before, Eisenhower had a name synonymous with freedom, after leading the allies throughout WWII.  But civil and racial unrest had gripped the country.  Eisenhower didn’t know how to play with racial questions.   In 1954 Brown V. Board of Education the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregation in schools.  “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Eisenhower handled it unbelievably poorly..  He suggested that they undo generations of unequal schooling starting with--no joke--graduate schools.

But the Vice President, Richard Nixon, was the lone voice in support of a Civil Rights Bill as part of their “domestic portfolio”--a high priority that would stabilize the country through democracy.

Miles away J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI began fanatically tracking King.  But on June 13, 1957 Richard Nixon invited him to his senate office for the first of several meetings.

King had recently given his famous “Justice without Violence” speech and Coretta Scott King was pregnant with the future Martin Luther King III.

“If the Negro succumbs to the temptation of using violence in his struggle for justice, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate life of bitterness, and his chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.”

Nixon’s notes from that afternoon survive.  Negro determined to gain dignity...This is part of a world problem--quest for human dignity all over the world.  They stayed for three hours.  But when he left, King told reporters that it was not a substitute for a meeting with Eisenhower.  It was only “a step in that direction.”

“He had one of the most magnetic personalities that I have ever confronted.” That is Martin Luther King--Martin Luther King--talking about the conservative Nixon. “I...feel that Nixon would have done much more to meet the present crisis in race relations than President Eisenhower has done,” he told reporters.  

Being in DC was difficult for King. As a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, he’d worked summers in Connecticut.  It always unsettled him--as he wrote in his biography--to leave the integrated North and have to switch to the segregated cars down South.  Because they moved him to the Jim Crow cars in D.C--his own nation’s capital.

The particular genius of Richard Nixon at the time was his ability to listen.  He was only Vice-President, the handy punchline to many jokes about being ineffectual.  But he had his eyes on the White House and saw that oppressed peoples were the quickest to turn towards his bigger enemy: Communism.

Prophetically, King mentioned that Nixon--who would later step down for deceiving the American people--should be watched.  “If Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.”

King’s political genius was of course in leading his people to a place they couldn’t legislate.  It wouldn’t be over with integrated kindergartens.  It wouldn’t end with voting rights.  Equal pay.  King at his best and most applause-worthy lines speaks of a world above politics, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

When Nixon was photographed with King his fellow republicans thought it would ruin the party.  Shouldn’t he appeal to conservatives in the North and South?  Nixon rejected this idea.  If you want to see race divide the party: become a Democrat.

After the original--but weak by today’s standards--Civil Rights Bill passed, Nixon got a letter from Jackie Robinson: “I and many others will never forget the fight you made and what you stand for.”

King wrote, “I will long remember the rich fellowship which we shared together and the fruitful discussion that we had.”

But King didn’t come close to giving up there, “History has demonstrated that inadequate legislation supported by mass action can accomplish more than adequate legislation which remains unenforced for the lack of a determined mass movement.” King reminded Nixon that he still wanted an audience with the President.

Nixon replied, “My only regret is that I have been unable to do more than I have.  Progress is understandably slow in this field, but we are least can be sure that we are moving steadily and surely ahead.”  Although they didn’t agree on everything, Nixon and King agreed on a vision of a stronger America.

A year later MLK met with Eisenhower.  Segregation was crumbling, but desegregation not enforced.  The meeting solved nothing.  A stronger civil rights bill needed to pass.

THE PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFUL  

By 1960 the equally charismatic John F. Kennedy Jr. was up against Nixon for the Presidency.  Southerners didn’t trust Kennedy.  The evangelist Billy Graham had just returned from a convention in Rio with MLK and heard that King might support JFK.  “King was greatly impressed and just about sold.  I think if you could invite him for a brief conference it might swing him.”

This is where influence gets involved.  

MLK was arrested for violating probabation (What? Yes.  He’d gotten a ticket for “driving without a license.”)  King was arrested in chains in the back of a paddy wagon. With a police dog. Coretta Scott King appealed to both Nixon and the Kennedys.  Coretta was worried he might be killed or disappear in Georgia like other demonstrators had.

At the time, both Nixon and Kennedy had a lot to lose in the southern vote.  Among black voters they were equally split.  MLK leaned toward JFK, Jackie Robinson toward Nixon.

But the Kennedys went into high gear.  JFK telephoned Coretta.  JFK’s brother Robert telephoned the governor of Georgia, which freed MLK.

Nixon?  Uhm… there are rumors that he tried.  But “some hang-up occurred someplace.”  Still the Vice President, Nixon had more clout in the White House on the matter than the influential Kennedy and his brother.  But Nixon wanted to avoid using the matter for political “Grandstanding.”

Soon after the Kennedys printed up 2 million pamphlets entitled “‘No Comment’ Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy.”

This is where we lose the young idealist Nixon.

Now for the really weird part: with the election all but over the California born Nixon went home to vote on election day.  When he suggested that he and his campaign aides get a drink they reminded Nixon that the bars were closed.  For Election Day.  So they--no joke--took an all day road trip to Tijuana.  Nixon wanted Margaritas and Mexican food.  

Yes, this is the day when a republican who turned his back on black leadership and turned to Mexican labor.  And it cost him the election.

They came back to the States that night to watch Nixon lose to Kennedy.

Years later in combing through the post-mortem of loss, it was discovered that the Justice Department had looked into how to free MLK, but sat on it.  They also found a very rousing statement drafted for Eisenhower in support of MLK, condemning the Georgia incident.

“I always felt that Nixon lost a real opportunity to express...support of something much larger than an individual,” King later said.  “He would call me frequently about things, getting, seeking my advice.  And yet, when this moment came it was like he had never heard of me, you see.  So this is why I considered him a moral coward.”

Three years later Nixon and MLK bumped into each other at the funeral of John F. Kennedy.  Nixon and JFK started in the Senate the same year.  They’d been opponents, yes, but also friends and colleagues.  There’s no record of King and Nixon speaking in the intervening years.

The vice president who brought us into an era of Civil Rights turned out to be Lyndon Johnson.  Who took over for Kennedy.  This is roughly where the movie “Selma” begins. In 1965 after King’s 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act that both Nixon and King wanted.  Over the dead body of their mutual friend JFK.

THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

Nixon ran again for President in 1968.  For a while he looked like he would oppose Johnson. But then, four days after Johnson stepped out of the race, Martin Luther King was shot and killed.

Street demonstrations and violence followed.  Nixon, a viable candidate wondered if he should go to the funeral of his old friend King.  He worried that this close to election time it might seem like “Grandstanding.”  A friend reminded him that he had used that word in 1960 when it cost him the election.

But what should Nixon do?  Make phone calls?  Send flowers?

Instead he suspended his campaign, flew to Atlanta two days early to visit with the King family.  First he went to see Coretta.  And then to see MLK’s parents in Collier Heights, a prosperous Atlanta neighborhood.  There was no press coverage.  He left without taking photos.

But then he returned to Atlanta two days later for the funeral.*  He sat in Ebenezer Baptist Church.  But he didn’t join the three and a half mile march to Morehouse College--where Dr. King first discovered on a summer trip that the world and even his own country could be a better place.  

To join that march, for any candidate--Nixon decided--would have been grandstanding.  

What do we learn from Nixon?  What can our political establishment learn from the bloodshed and actions in recent months?  Can you be conservative about an event and still progressive about the future?  We learned a few things from Nixon and MLK.  We learn quite a bit about time.  Namely:

Listening to opposing factions, is different than joining the march.  There are incidences, there are people and there is government.

Inaction is action.  Deciding not to get involved with King in the White House was Eisenhower’s decision.  Meeting with King was Nixon’s.  Stepping in to King’s arrest in Georgia was a different kind of decision for Nixon than Kennedy

No one should wait for a former friend’s funeral to say or feel sorry.

*I’m debating the asterisk, but the funeral for Martin Luther King Jr will continue to be one of the strangest, but most notable events in history.  Notables alphabetically: Harry Belafonte, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Cosby, Bobby, Jackie and Ted Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney--Mitt’s father.

Suggestions for Further Reading:

If you want too much information on the subject check out Ike and Duck: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage and the annotated letters to Nixon available in the King Papers Project.

[ramrodd]

Listening to Elizabeth Warren reminds me of Adlai Stevenson. Are some people just too smart to be president?

Philosophically, that is to say, in terms of Democratic Socialism, Bernie Sanders and AOC are virtual clones, but all things Sanders are in the rearview mirror of AOC and her Green New Deal. Among other things, AOC is the future of the ERA.

COMMENTARY:

This is an excellent question. It’s exactly why I will never run for President.

My cousin Woody ran and won and his legacy is a very mixed bag. I went to Vietnam on the basis that I was the leading edge of the League of Nations, but I live in DC to try to stay as far away from white Southern Scots Presbyterians, who represent the absolute existential core of America whte supremacy, as possible. And, as a Christian, I prefer to avoid the economics of the Anti-Christ distilled in the Pro-Live Evangelical business model they generally embrace. It’s why so many of them send their children to DC with MAGA hats instead of tin foil.

Woody was smart as hell. My dad aspired to emulate him in the way Robert E. Lee attempted to emulate George Washington. I’m pretty smart, myself, but dad is really in a different league, number one, and, number two, he was probably an NT and I’m an SP and, in many was, he was from Mars and I was from Uranus. I have learned to consciously think like the way my did did like fielding a ground ball and my odd manner of acquiring knowledge has begun to pay off in my eight decade, but it’s been a long, strange trip.

Sometimes all you can do is to be willin’ to keep on truckin’.

Any of these people running could be a potent President of the United States. The Oval Office expands the capacities of the individual by literally channeling George Washington, spiritually, as an inheritance. It just does. Lincoln may be the only individual who came to office fully formed, but even he had to complete the 2 year learning curve compelled by the US Constitution.

It takes some people longer than others. JFK was as about on track, primarily because he was a very smart person in a Adlai Stevenson as PT Boat action figure kind of way. Once upon a time, Harvard produced scholars but, since the take-over of Columbia by the SDS in 1968, it’s become more of a vocational degree, like auto mechanics and HVAC engineers, than Oxford or Cambridge. There are still very smart people going through Harvard Yard, as a proxy for the American academe, but, when it comes to grand strategy, the post-modern dialectical deconstruction of the SDS forces a choice between the two wings of the Oliver Stone version of Vietnam, John Lewis Gaddis’s Kennon Long Telegram orientation on the one hand and Victor Davis Hanson’s relentless Churchhill oriented Fascist sophistry and you end up doing stupid things like the Obama Russian sanctions. Obama is a very smart man but he let himself be misled by the advice Hillary Clinton was being fed by Robert Kagan, the co-author of the Project for the New American Century that informed the invason of Iraq.

Obama likewise came to the Oval Office fully formed, but he was prevented from fully realizing his potential by a number of things, one being Mitch McConnell’s obstructionism, as a proxy for what has become the MAGA hat coalition of white Southern Scots Presbyterians who are pulling Duck Ass Don around by his dick in the way he learned to expect from Roy Cohn. Obama had absolutely no room to manuever after Rahm Emanuel squandered Speaker Pelosi’s gavel and the majority in the Senate, legislatively. Until AOC came along, the Democrats didn’t exhibit much spine and a great deal of appeasement if not out-right ideological collaboration with Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. That was the biggest problem he faced and he got about as much out of it as possible,

But a more significant obstacle to his personal growth was Valerie Jarrett, who shaped and maintained the cacoon in which she ensconsed him. People who think like her in the Democrat conference are the biggest danger to the Green New Deal. As a business person, she is perfectly content with the Tory Socialism and class warfare of Reaganomics. The only difference between Valerie Jarrett and Condoleezza Rice, in terms of Russia, are their political patrons. Hillary Clinton and Laura D’Angelo Tyson fall into this catagory. As the leading edge of the ERA generation, they all played the hand they were dealt and represent the rising value added of the 19th Amendment and Title IX. They are the base line from which AOC has been launched, but they have become reactionary. And that’s what may have been the most profound inhibition on Obama in becoming POTUS. I’d vote for him and Hillary again because, unlike virtually any white Southern Scots Presbyterian male with an (R) behind his name, they can learn. And will learn. It just hasn’t started yet.

Elizabeth Warren falls into this generation on some issues, but, in terms of banking and securities, she represents important, if not necessary, financial structures of the Green New Deal. Finance is probably the greatest single fallacy of Marxism and the singular seat of the essential criminal intent of the Tory Socalism and class warfare of Reganomics and the macroeconomic populism of Donald Duck Ass. A HUGE difference between America in 1981, before Reagan, and the Soviet Union in 1981 was our banking system and securities milieu, both of which have been systematically corrupted by people in the GOP Deep State I associate with Donald T. Regan, Phil and Wendy Gramm, and Newt Gingrich. There are other Republican villians in the mix, but that’s a good place to start, especially when you toss in Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Mick Mulvaney, the sort of creme de la creme of crypto-Fascist cesspool scum. If Elizabeth Warren could pass all the banking and securites legislation she desires by 2020, she would be able to hit the ground running to implement the Green New Deal without having to thing about it all that much,

In terms of learning curve, 43 didn’t really become his own president until he fired Rumsfeld and installed Bob Gates at DoD. In that respect, he had a 6 year learning curve. Until then, Cheney had basically dictatated national policy, especially in terms of Iraq’s oil. This fig leaf of spreading democracy is just that. At best, the invasion of iraq was a blunder of cosmic proportions but my personal opinion is that it was a war crime, pure and simple. The lesson Bush should have learned from Vietnam that his daddy did was to not invade Iraq.

Clinton’s Dayton Accords is the reason why the invasion of Iraq hasn’t been a bigger disaster for America and why I say Obama fucked up the US-Russian relations on the advice of Robert Kagan. Clinton should have been given a Nobel Prize for that project because it is exactly what the Marshall Plan was all about, especially as it pertains to George Kennan’s Long Telegram.

As I say, I went to Vietnam as the leading edge of the League of Nations, keeping a family heritage alive, and as part of the triangulation of the United Nations Blue Helmet Peace Keepers, the Peace Corps and the Greet Berets. We were in Vietnam to give those collateral agendas the space and time they needed to get traction, globally. Circumstances forced America to sacrifice the Republic of Vietnam towards that end, but the result, the collapse of the Soviet Union, has worked out well for us.

And the signing of the Dayton Accords in 1995 was the fruits of that grand strategy, in that the Treaty ending the Bosnian War was the first time an active conflict was put tamped down by the tactical peace keeping of the UN Blue Helments and then smothered by the combined UN Blue Helmets/NATO intervention made possible by the Dayton Accords AND the active acquiesence, if not enthusiastic participation, by Putin’s Russia. This project occurred in the TRADITIONAL Russian sphere of influence and it couldn’t have happened if they didn’t want it to, but it seems the Russians realized they didn’t have any solutions and they were willing to try something new. And when they handed over the keys to Prestinka Airport to the NATO column being led by Wesley Clark, it represented a brand new era in international cooperation. We couldn’t have conducted our operations against Terroism in that region without the strategic easement Russia continues to provide.

And this is what Obama fucked up. And he’s a very smart guy.

In regards to Donald Duck Ass, there doesn’t seem to be any constructive learning curve operating. He’s like the entire Roger Stone wing of the GOP, who are like bank robbers who get caught and go to prison but, instead of changing their ways, learn how to become better bank robbers. For example, these sanctions against South Korea, China, India, Turkey and Japan have nothing to do with any grand strategy beyond Duck Ass Don’s need to keep the Bull Market going and high prices for gas at the pump here, in the states. provides the liquidity that’s being sucked out by the 2017 Tax Reforms the markets need to keep the party going. Duck Ass Don is still running the lie, cheat and steal “Art of the Deal” pyramid scheme he has run his entire life. He has a certain genius in a Rainman kind of way but I think he understood, intuitively, at a very early age he isn’t smart at all beyond a certain animal cunning of the Brooklyn street thug with aspirations of being an uptown made man. And probably the real problem is that he has managed to surround himself with people who are even more stupid than he is, or willng to suppress their smarts for a paycheck and the future rewards that the GOP Deep State will provided once they are out of public service in the manner of John Kasich, David Stockman, Brett Kavanaug and Bob Barr before he blundered back onto the federal payroll.

By and large, Republicans have never produced an Adlai Stevenson: it’s a Democrat thing. Bernie Sanders is an example, the difference being that Sanders helped Democrats shake off the intellectual topor that had set in after the moral impotence of the McGovern campaign: McGovern was what Bernie Sanders would have been in 2016, but that’s changed. In terms of coalition building, Sanders ishe light years ahead of where he was in 2016 and in a different universe from where McGovern or Adlai Stevenson ever became.

Philosophically, that is to say, in terms of Democratic Socialism, Bernie Sanders and AOC are virtual clones, but all things Sanders are in the rearview mirror of AOC and her Green New Deal. The trade off is that, as President, Sanders and/or Warren are smart enough to implement the Green New Deal as it emerges while AOC, if she’s smart, will inherit the Speaker’s gavel and retire after a career of providing the constancy of purpose as the Green New Deal evolves as we advance past the dawning of the Age of the 19th Amendment.

And Adlai Stevenson could never have accomplished that. He wasted a great deal of energy spinning his wheels as an intellectual. Bernie was like that until 2016 BUT AOC came out of the chute with her big wheels posi-traction digging into with big chucks of dirt and the only thing really slowing her down is the ERA generation. She is the future of the ERA.

[cocuzzo]

Ninety-four years old but sturdy as a cement truck, Jim Rogers dissects his hearty plate of bacon, eggs, sausage and toast. To his right is a giant magnifying glass mounted on the kitchen table that he uses to read the Wall Street Journal that’s been delivered to his home in Ramsey, New Jersey for the better part of a century. “We’re not a pioneering people,” Jim jokes, while manhandling a piece of bacon in his mitts. “We haven’t gone too far.” Yet that’s hardly the case. The life of Jim Rogers spans continents and conflicts, his boot prints found in the some of the most pivotal pages of history—even if he’s too modest to admit it. 

A hearty breakfast like this was a rarity when Jim was growing up at the end of the New York City bus line in Queens during the Depression. His family of five lived in a three-bedroom, Spanish-style home that had stucco walls, a flat tile roof, and a small lawn that needed to be mowed. His father bought the home in 1927 for $4,300. Two years later, the stock market crashed and tough times descended upon them and the rest of the country. But the Rogers family had resilience coursing through their veins. Jim’s father, James Andrew Rogers traced his roots back to the Revolutionary War. 

He had been forced to grow up fast when his father died suddenly at the age of forty-five. A policeman, James Florence Rogers had jumped into the East River to save some one’s life. Two weeks later, he came down with pneumonia and died, leaving behind three children and a wife. So it was that at the ripe age of eleven, with his older brother having joined the Navy, Jim’s father dropped out of grammar school and got a job to support his mother and younger sister. 

Despite only having a fifth grade education, he landed a job on Wall Street at the age of fourteen as a runner for Hayden Stone. In those days, when anybody bought a stock or bond, a piece of paper that recorded the transaction was hand-delivered by a runner. Equipped with street smarts and an exquisite memory for names and numbers, Jim’s father learned finance from the ground up and ascended as a prominent man on Wall Street. So much so that when the market crashed nineteen years later and more than thirteen million people lost their jobs, Jim’s father wasn’t one of them. Hayden Stone kept him employed, albeit after cutting his salary in half. Remarkably, he would remain with the same company for more than seventy years, finally retiring at the age of eighty-two. When he returned home after his retirement party, wearing the watch Hayden Stone awarded him for all his years of faithful service, his wife Margaret remarked with a coy smile: “I thought you said you had a steady job?”  

During the Depression, the Rogers clan came together like a clenched fist, teaching young Jim about the intrinsic importance of family. His uncle, Jim Ganley, his mother’s brother, came to live with them for what would amount to a six year stay. As a member of NY State National Guard’s 27th Division, Ganley and his brothers had fought in some of the most significant battles of the Great War, donning gas masks to endure the brutal war of attrition. After the war, when the Depression hit, Ganley was working in a bank and could very well have saved his job. But when he learned that a fellow employee with a family was going to be fired instead of him, Ganley abruptly resigned. He eventually got work in FDR’s Veterans Conservation Core, chopping down trees and clearing forests in the Adirondacks. During the holidays, Ganley returned to Jim’s home where he’d resume his post in his special chair, smoking his pipe, and regaling Jim and his brothers with stories of the war. So enraptured was young Jim Rogers by these stories that he would often take to doodling scenes of American soldiers shooting down Germans with machine gun fire. 

  The oldest of three boys, Jim enjoyed a rather idyllic childhood given the circumstances. He fished for carp in the steams that poured into Jamaica Bay, crabbed in the canals around what is today JFK airport, and chased the coal truck around town in hopes of snagging a hunk of fuel to bring home for the family furnace. Jim’s father eventually got him a job as a gofer at Hayden Stone. It was a menial position, fetching coffee and making mail runs, but it came with one major perk. Hayden Stone picked up the $260 tuition for Jim to attend Saint John’s College in the Bronx. He always wanted to attend Notre Dame, having grown up listening to the Fighting Irish on the radio and idolizing giants the likes of Andy Pilney, Frank Carideo and Marchie Schwartz. Still his enrollment at Saint John’s was a proud moment for the Rogers family. 

The son of a fifth grade dropout pursuing his college degree, in chemistry no less, was the American Dream realized. However, after just a year in college, Jim wanted nothing more than to graduate. There was a bigger test on the horizon. After years watching Hitler aggressively gobble up Europe, the United States had finally entered the war. Suddenly Jim’s childhood doodles of American soldiers fighting the Germans was coming to life, and the pangs of patriotism were almost too much for him to bear. “Everybody was pitching in,” he remembers. “Everybody had something to do. That was the problem. All my buddies had gone before me. My brother was in the Navy. And I was still hanging around carrying books. I felt like a real jerk.” So Jim worked double time at Saint Johns and graduated in just three years. He received his diploma in August of 1943 and enlisted in the navy a month later. 

 In September of 1943, Jim took the rail to Chicago where he started midshipman’s school outside of the city at Northwestern University’s law and dental school. “I was one of those ninety-day wonders,” he says. After month as an apprentice shipman, he spent two months as an apprentice seaman, learning navigation, seamanship and gunnery. Emerging as an officer, Jim requested a position on a destroyer, but ended up being assigned to an amphibious vessel: Landing Craft Infantry, or LCI. Little did he know that the LCI would deliver him into the some of hottest action of the war. 

 Once while he was docked, Jim’s family joined him aboard the LCI for dinner. All of the senior officers were on leave, putting the twenty-year-old in command of the 160-foot vessel, which was docked alongside a destroyer on Pier 42. He and his family were about to sit for dinner, when word came down that the destroyer needed to move. There was just one problem: Jim’s LCI had to clear the way for it—and Jim had never conned the ship. He swallowed hard, told his family to sit tight, and then went to the deck. Orchestrating his skeleton crew of green horns, he successfully maneuvered the vessel out into the North River, allowing the destroyer to pull out before returning to the dock. After the ship was securely tied up, he returned to his family below decks to resume dinner. Although his father, who had served in the Navy in World War I, didn’t say a word, the pride in his chest nearly popped the buttons off his shirt. His son was a real navy man. 

  On February 11, 1943, Jim’s LCI joined a convoy of sixty bound for North Africa. Between Bermuda and Cape Henry in Virginia, a storm kicked up. Winds howled against the gunnels and every time the officer on duty attempted to turn the ship, it would heel and threaten to flip. Jim clung to his bunk as the ship bucked violently and steamed helplessly off course. They soon lost the convoy in the storm. Thankfully, one of the destroyers in the convoy spotted them floating off the fringes of their radar and came to their rescue. They steamed out to them and helped the LCI make the turn and navigate back to the rest of the fleet. But something unexpected happened in the storm. The LCI was carrying 10,000 gallons of drinking water, all of which was contaminated by cement wash during the storm. Despite all their attempts, the water couldn’t be filtered and was ultimately deemed undrinkable. Thus for the rest of their journey, Jim and his fellow crew subsisted on rations of pineapple and tomato juice.

 Steaming nine knots an hour, the convoy covered two hundred miles a day for ten days, until Jim’s LCI broke off with the other eleven LCIs to deliver equipment to a US base in the Azores. They spent a few days of R&R on the Portuguese island before joining a destroyer bound for England. The course took them through a highly active submarine area. “We could hit 15 knots, but a submarine could go faster than us on the surface,” Jim explains. “If a sub came up, it could destroy all our ships with no trouble at all.” The days passed anxiously until Jim and his fellow crew started seeing American P-3Cs buzzing overhead. They arrived in England on March 6, 1944—and that’s when real training began. At one-hundred-sixty-feet long with a 22-foot beam, Jim’s flat-bottomed LCI was unwieldy. The stern slammed against every wave so violently that the deck house had to be continually re-welded to prevent it from ripping right off the deck. 

Their training in England consisted of one central objective: delivering soldiers on to the beach. Timing was everything. Drop the stern anchor 300 yards or so from shore. Motor on to the beach. Get out the ramps. Secure them with guidelines. Unload the troops. Over and over and over. The maneuvers were performed outside the wire, beyond the submarine nets that warded off German subs and E-boats. So while this was technically practice, each day posed real risks of combat. 

 At the end of April, Jim’s LCI loaded the First Division on board to perform a large mock-landing on Slapton Sands Beach. As Jim and his crew executed the maneuvers they’d learn to do with their eyes closed, things suddenly got real. In the distance, explosions dotted the horizon and lit up the sky. The crew looked out with confused terror. They would find out much later that three German E-boats had snuck through the picket line and sank three 300-foot LCIs. Nine hundred American lives were lost.

  On June 5, 1944, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to the American armed forces. “Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces,” the future president began. “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.” A day later, Jim Rogers was aboard his LCI steaming towards the beaches of Normady. 

As if aware of the grim events about to unfold, the seas were in a fury, the skies were dark, and the wind howled. Stationed in the con tower, Jim was responsible for relaying the captain’s orders to rest of the crew, particularly to the gunners who were manning the 20mm-caliber machine guns that could shoot over a mile. Their orders were to land on Utah Beach, just west of Omaha, and unload the 90th Division whose mission was to take Cherbourg, a deep water port that would be used for unloading equipment and troops. Six hours earlier, 2,200 British and American bombers unleashed hell upon the beaches, followed by paratroopers from the 101st and the 82nd Airborne. Five hours later, the first wave of LCIs landed on Utah Beach, led by none other than Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. 

 At fifty-six-years-old and with a failing heart, Ted Roosevelt was the oldest man at the D-Day Invasion and the only general officer to personally accompany the first wave of troops onto the beaches. Walking Utah Beach with a cane in one hand and a pistol in the other, Roosevelt realized that heavy winds and strong currents had pushed them more than a mile off course. But instead of correcting their position, Roosevelt radioed his fellow commanders and famously declared, “We’ll start the war from right here.” 

 Aboard Jim’s LCI, sea sickness had stricken the infantrymen and they wanted nothing more than to get off the boat. But as Jim’s captain neared Utah Beach, he stopped short. “Because it was low tide, he was scared of getting hung up on the beach,” Jim remembers. “Sitting there, we’d be sitting ducks.” The thirty-five-year-old captain had never driven the boat up onto the beach before and hadn’t hit it hard enough. Instead, he dropped the stern anchor early and ordered the men to unload. Carrying sixty-pound mortar bases on their backs or heavy bandoliers of machine gun bullets across the chests, the men stepped off the ramp and immediately plunged over the heads in the water. They were too deep. Because the LCI hadn’t nosed up against the shore, a powerful riptide was pulling the bow down the beach, threatening to snap the anchor that had been dropped from the ramp. 

“Skipper, let me straighten on that anchor,” Jim offered. Jim was dying to get his feet on French soil and the anchor gave him his opportunity to do so. “Go ahead,” the captain said. In a flash, Jim climbed out of the con tower and plunged into the 59-degree water. He fished out the 25-pound anchor and hauled it up to be repositioned. Bullets were whizzing into the water around him. 

But as he was about to reset the anchor, he noticed that the soldiers had stopped disembarking from his LCI. The captain had decided they needed to get closer to shore, but he couldn’t leave Jim out there in the water by himself. So the crew lowered a dinghy with two men to scoop up Jim as the captain repositioned the ship closer to shore. What should have been a fifteen-minute landing took the better part of an hour. 

“In the distance, you could hear the guns,” Jim remembers. “There was still a lot of fighting on Omaha Beach and the destroyers were coming in trying to hit the bunkers about a mile away.” After the LCI nosed closer to the beach, the two men rowed Jim along the shores where he dropped the anchor, allowing the rest of the men to unload. In total, 21,000 men would land on Utah Beach that day. They would take Cherbourg later that summer. The Nazis would fall the following May. Sitting in the dinghy, bobbing on the shores of Normady more than 3,500 miles from his home, Jim Rogers was now forever connected with this historic conquest of good over evil. 

In the wake of D-Day, the war would take Jim Rogers far and wide. He’d eventually ship out to the Pacific Theater and walk in the rubble of Nagasaki. Though he has countless memories that defined this time of a young man being exposed to the world through the lens of war, only one story causes his voice to falter. “The trip back from Normady, we pulled up on the dock, and there was a ship coming in, a British trawler coming in, right in front of us, so I went over to look at it,” Jim remembers, now studying the kitchen table as if watching the scene unfold. “It had a bunch of German prisoners in the back. Most of them were wounded. And there was one German guy in a stretcher. And this American soldier who had been wounded—his arm was, you know, really banged up—he went over and lit a cigarette for this German guy.” Emotion suddenly overtakes the old man. “I just couldn’t…couldn’t get over that,” he continues with tears in his eyes. “Here they were shooting at each other just two days before.” He looks up, “You say, what the hell were we fighting for?”

 Amidst the great horrors of World War II, these rare glimmers of humanity seem to have stuck most poignantly with Jim Rogers. They are flames that grew throughout his life, helping him to excel in business, faithfully serve his community, and raise a family. “They’re all better than me,” Jim says of his children and grandchildren. But if you ask Jim’s son or grandson about him, they’ll talk about their patriarch in tones reserved for the holy. Indeed, Jim Rogers belongs to a rarified time that we’re all striving to get back to in some way or another. A time when you did what you said, you lived by your principals, and you gave selflessly for others. A time when men lived like lions. Will there ever be a renaissance in this Greatest Generation or is Jim Rogers one of the last of his pride? Perhaps the best way to ferry their return is to never forget that they existed in the first place.