#also for the record I do not actually work in export controls I would hate that lmao

[essektheylyss]

Once again raging about shitty research standards and the methodology and ethical decision-making of like, a significant majority of my peers. This is why I can never change my blog title, it's too accurate to my soul.

[maxwell-grant]

Your Top Five Pulp Heroes that you wish were better known? By Pulp Hero fans, I mean. Since pretty much all of them except Conan and Tarzan are fairly unknown.

It’s actually quite hard for me to narrow it down to just five, because I’m having to choose between characters that are my favorites that I wish were more well-known and appreciated (which is all of them), and characters that aren’t quite my favorites but I very much think should have achieved great popularity for a myriad of reasons. So instead I’m going to pick some of each. These are not necessarily ranked by their importance or my personal taste, just 5 characters I felt like highlighting in particular. 

Honorable mentions goes to characters I already talked about prior and don’t want to repeat myself on. These aren’t “lesser” picks, just ones that I already talked about: Imaro (who in particular definitely feels like he could, and should be, a pop culture superstar if he was only more well-known), Kapitan Mors (who’s got a lot in common with one of my favorite fictional characters, Captain Nemo, but also has a lot of interesting things going on for him as his own character). Sar Dubnotal (a character that appeals a lot to me and I think should be included much more often in pulp hero team-ups). The Golden Amazon (again, definitely a character that feels like it’s just begging to have a pop culture breakout, even comic books rarely if ever have female supervillains this ruthless and over-the-top), The Mexican Fantomas (who absolutely deserves a better name than what I’m calling him here, because he’s incredibly awesome and leagues ahead of just being a knock-off). And of course my homeboy, The Grey Claw, whom I would consider Number One of the list if it wasn’t for the fact that his obscurity has left him untouched by copyright and I got plans of my own for the character that wouldn’t be possible if he was more well-known, so I guess I’m ultimately glad he’s obscure (even if I’m still bothered by how little he’s known). 

Allright let’s go:

Number 5: Sheridan Doome

Sheridan Doome appeared in fifty-four stories and three novels from 1935 to 1943. As chief detective for U.S. Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Sheridan Doome’s job was a grim one. Whenever an extraordinary mystery or crime occurred in the fleet, on a naval base, or anywhere the navy worked to protect American interests, Doome was immediately dispatched to investigate it. Fear and dread would always precede Doome’s arrival in his special black airplane. For, in an explosion during WWI, he had been monstrously disfigured. 

He was six feet two inches tall; had a chalk-white face and head. It appeared as though it had once been seared or burned. For eyes, he had only black blotches; glittering optics, that looked like small chunks of coal. His nose was long, the end of it squared off rudely. He had no lips, just a slit that was his mouth. His neck was long, as white and as bony as his face…. Sheridan Doome looked more like a robot than a human being. He was tall and ghastly; his uniform fitted him in a loose manner. Long arms hung at his sides; his face was a perfect blank. He had no control of his facial muscles; consequently, his countenance was always without expression, chalky and bony.

But behind the ugliness was a brilliant mind. Sheridan Doome always got his man. Before Sheridan Doome became a staple in the pages of The Shadow magazine, two Doome hardcover mysteries were written in the mid-1930’s by acclaimed hard-boiled author Steve Fisher (I Wake Up Screaming) and edited by his wife Edythe Seims (Dime Detective, G-8 and His Battle Aces). Age of Aces now brings you both books in one huge double novel, presented in a retro “flip book” style. This book is currently Out of Print.

I sadly don’t have any more information on the character other than this. The book is unavailable for me to acquire in any capacity, and the text above is taken from the Age of Aces website as well as Jess Nevins’s personal profile for the character. I’m not even sure if any of those 54 stories even exist anymore, since although he was published as a backup in Shadow Magazine, there doesn’t seem to be reprints of them anywhere, at least as far as I can find, and the original Shadow magazines have largely turned to dust by now. 

A character who combines aspects of The Phantom of the Opera and The Shadow, whose adventures are set in a backdrop that can easily lead to ocean adventures? That’s like, what, three of my favorite things in the world combined. I really, really wish I could at least read the stories this character stars in, but as is, this description is all I can provide. Again, time really has been cruel to the pulp heroes. 

Number 4: Harlan Dyce

This is another character I’ve only been able to learn about through Jess Nevins’s archives and have not been able to attain any further information on, which is sadly the case with a lot of pulp heroes that nowadays only seem to exist as footnotes in his Encyclopedia or records in libraries. I don’t post more about these characters because I really would just be copying the stuff he wrote without much to justify me quoting him verbatim, and I hate the idea of doing that.

I especially hate that in Harlan Dyce’s case though. Here’s his description

“Dyce had brains, taste, money, ambition, and a total lack of physical or spiritual fear. But—

“Dyce was thirty-three inches tall and weighed sixty pounds.

“That was all the world could ever hold against him. That was what had made the world, most of it, in all the countries of the world, stare at Harlan Dyce, billed in the big show as “General Midge.””

Harlan Dyce is a misanthropic and venomous private detective. He has an “amazingly handsome face,” and the aforementioned brains. But all anyone sees is his stature, and he hates that and turns his cold eyes and acid tongue on them. 

The only person Dyce likes and gets along with (besides his dwarf wife, a former client) is his assistant, Nick Melchem, a six-foot tall former p.i.’s assistant with bleak eyes and a strong body. Melchem ignores Dyce’s stature and treats Dyce normally, which Dyce responds warmly to.

Dwarfs may be the single most maligned group of people depicted in pulp magazines, even more so than the Japanese in the war years or the Chinese during the peak of the Yellow Peril’s popularity. Evil dwarfs, murderous dwarfs, sexually depraved dwarfs, they are all loathsome, ugly cliches that are, sadly, the only instances you see of dwarf characters being represented at all, with the only ones who are awarded any measure of sympathy are doomed henchmen or tragic villains.  Even outside of the pulps, the only other examples of heroic, protagonist dwarfs I can think off the top of my head are Puck from Marvel Comics and Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones.

I’m not gonna say Harlan Dyce is great representation because I’m not a little person and can never make that kind of claim for a group I’m not a part of, but Harlan Dyce may be the first time I’ve ever seen a dwarf character in pulp fiction who was not a villain or a murderous goon or a victim, but an actual person and a heroic protagonist, and that definitely counts for something. I’m not sure how popular this character was or could be if someone picked up the concept and ran with it (and I’m pretty sure he’s public domain), but I definitely think this is a character that should exist and should be popular. 

Hell, this character has Peter Dinklage written all over it, give it to him. Maybe then he will get to play a smart, fearless, cynical, misanthropic but good-natured and heroic character in something where he actually gets to keep these traits until the show ends.

Number 3: Audaz, O Demolidor

Audaz is a Brazilian character who was created and published by Gazetinha, the same publishers of Grey Claw as well as properties exported from elsewhere like Superman and Popeye, and much like The Grey Claw, he is also completely unknown even here. I’ll get to Audaz more in-depth sometime but here I’m going to provide a quick summary: 

Audaz, The Demolisher is a gigantic crime-fighting robot controlled and piloted by the brilliant scientist Dr. Blum, his close friend Gregor and the child prodigy Jacques Ennes, who pilot the giant robot from a massive laboratory inside it's head rather than a cockpit. He takes on a variety of ordinary human criminals, mad scientists, supervillains and invading armies, towering over skyscrapers and grappling with jets.

Audaz was created in 1939 by illustrator Messias de Melo, a year before Quality Comics's Bozo the Iron Man and 5 years before Ryuichi Yokoyama's Kagaku Senshi, and decades before the debut of Mazinger Z. Although he is not the first giant robot of science fiction, he is the first heroic giant robot piloted by human pilots, and thus the first true example of "mecha" fiction.

Number 2: Emilia the Ragdoll

This is another Brazilian character, although nowhere near as obscure as Audaz as even a cursory Google search can show. Although Brazil did not have a “pulp era” in the same way the US had, we’ve long gotten past the point of sticking to it as a definitive rule, and I’m including Emilia as a pulp hero because she’s a 1920s fantasy literature character who was created under a publishing company that released pulp stories, because she doesn’t quite belong in the mold of fantasy literature characters she takes after, and because I like her and if I was putting a bunch of pulp heroes together in the same story, I would definitely include Emilia in it. It’s not like she really has anywhere else to go, now that she’s public domain and she’s outlasted her franchise.

As you can tell by the above image, Emilia’s had a lot of variations over the years and that’s because the work she was created for, Sítio do Picapau Amarelo (Yellow Woodpecker Ranch/Farm), has become a major bedrock of Brazilian fantasy literature, one of the only works created here that you can find substantial information about in English if you go looking for it. Here’s some descriptions of Emilia’s character:

Emília is a rag doll described as "clumsy" or "ugly", resembling a "witch" that was handmade by Aunt Nastácia, the ranch's cook, for the little girl Lúcia, out of an old skirt. After Lucia takes her on an adventure and the doll is given a dose of magic pills, Emília suddenly started talking, and would never stop henceforth.

Emilia has a rough, antagonistic personality, and an independent, free-spirited and anarchist behaviour. She is rogue, rebellious, stubborn, rough and intensely determined at anything she sets her mind on, eager to take off on just about any adventure. She is often immature and behaves like a curious and arrogant child, always wanting to be the center of attention.

She is extremely opinionated even when she constantly and confidently mispronounces words and expressions. Her attitude often gets her into trouble, and she very often has to fight against the villains who attack her home on the Yellow Woodpecker Farm and mistreat her friends.

In the stories, Emilia often takes the role of a heroine who travels through different realms and dimensions, as the books include not only figures from Brazilian and worldwide folklore, but also several characters both real and fictional, such as Hercules, King Arthur, Don Quixote, Thumbelina, Da Vinci, Shirley Temple, Captain Hook, Santos Dumont and Baron von Munchausen.

She's fought scorpions and martians and nymph hordes, her arch-enemy is an alligator witch, she rescued an angel from the Milky Way and tried to teach it how to become a human, and once shrunk the entire population of Earth to try and talk the president of the United States into ending war forever.

To little surprise, she has become the most popular character and the series’s mascot.

It’s a little strange to consider Emilia underrated considering she is one of the most famous original characters of Brazilian literature, but hardly anyone outside of Brazil even knows who she is, and regardless of the quality of the original stories (and Monteiro Lobato’s views on race that tar much of his reputation), Emilia definitely feels to me like a character that should be a lot more popular globally. 

She is the only character from Yellow Woodpecker Ranch that has transcended the original stories, since she was always the most popular character and there’s been a couple of stories written about her that usually separate her from the ranch and just set her out on the world by herself. The latest story about this character has been a series called The Return of Emilia, that’s about her stepping out of the books in 2050 and discovering a Brazil that’s been ruined by social and ecological devastation, and traveling back in time via a flying scooter in order to try and prevent this calamity. 

Now that she’s public domain, I definitely think there’s some great stories that can be told with the character that just about anyone could get to, and I definitely think she’s a character that deserves more appreciation. Anything goes in stories starring her and it’s that kind of free-for-all freedom that I think can benefit future takes on pulp heroes. I would be very happy to place Emilia among them.

Oh yeah, and there was one time she kicked Popeye's ass by tricking him with a can of mouldy cabbage instead of spinach, making him sick and then beating him, which possibly puts her as one of the all-time badasses of fiction, except she would be pissed at not being number one and likely embark on a quest to beat everyone else just to prove she could, because that’s how Emilia rolls.

Number 1: Luna Bartendale, from The Undying Monster (1922)

Not necessarily my favorite of the bunch, but one who sort of epitomizes what you asked, a character who is both incredibly obscure and incredibly underrated in every sense. Despite the book being somewhat known, mainly thanks to the movie, the character is so obscure that I don’t even have an illustration of her to display here, not even fan art, just one of the book’s covers that I think best conveys it. Luckily, the book is also available freely online, so you can all go check it out here. The movie adaptation does not feature the character of Luna Bartendale which makes it pointless to talk about.

To not spoil it too much, The Undying Monster is a very fascinating book, ahead of it’s time in quite a few ways. You expect it to just be a detective story centered around a werewolf cursed, except the subtitle of the book is “The Fifth Dimension” and then it goes to talk about dimensions of thought and post-WWI trauma and love and hypnotic regression that travels through time and ancient runes and Norse mythology. It’s not exactly an easy book to get through in one setting, but I’d recommend it much the same if only because it’s got supersensitive psychic sleuth Luna Bartendale, literature’s first female occult detective, and she’s an incredible character who absolutely feels like she should have become a literary icon. 

She lives in London but is world-renowned for her many good deeds. She is a small, pretty woman, with curly blonde hair, dark eyebrows and a high-bridged nose, and a slight build. She has a voice described as a light soprano that "does not make much noise but carries a long way". 

Petite, bedimpled and golden curled, Luna is completely in charge of events, dominating every scene that she appears in with her welcoming disposition and cleverness. 

Bartendale has various psychic powers, including mind reading. She is well-versed in psychic and occult lore, is a “supersensitive” psychic, and has a “Sixth Sense” which allows her to trace things and people through both the Fourth and the Fifth Dimension. (The Fifth Dimension is “the Dimension that surrounds and pervades the Fourth–known as the Supernatural”).

Her extensive knowledge of occult rites and practices puts John Silence, Carnacki and Miles Pennoyer to shame, and she beats them all with her "super-sensitive" gift of being able to psychically connect with troubled souls and hypnotize them.

She uses a divining rod for various tasks, including psychic detection and tracking, and distinguishing between benevolent and malevolent forces. She has various (undefined) powerful psychic defenses, can carry on seances, and can even cure a person of “wehrwolfism.” And she can always rely on her massive, intelligent dog Roska for help.

Luna sadly doesn’t show up in the book as often as I’d hoped, but everything about this character is so delightful. In a lot od ways she hardly feels like a pulp hero, at least the ones I usually talk about. She feels like a lost protagonist from an incredibly successful kid’s adventure series where a kind and eccentric detective witch and her giant dog go around solving occult mysteries and encountering all sorts of weird supernatural beings while counseling and helping people, like Ms Frizzle meets Hilda. Like this character is just waiting for Cartoon Saloon to make a film about her.

Its not so much “this character should/could be popular but it’s clear why that didn’t pan out”, it’s more me being confused as “why the hell isn’t she super popular? This character should have had a franchise ages ago, holy shit put her in everything””

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Everything you need to know about day one of Brexit

By Ian Dunt

Oh sweet Christ not Brexit again.

Yes, you will never escape. It will never be over. Decades from now, as your wrinkled fingers grasp the remote for your 3D holo-viewer, the main news item will still be about Brexit.

At least we got a break during the coronavirus emergency.

Yep, say what you like about pandemics, but at least they take trade talks off the front pages. Still, it's back now. We leave at the end of the year. And deal or no-deal, things at the border are going to be very different.

OK lay it out for me.

For decades we have had frictionless trade with Europe in the customs union and single market. The customs union got rid of tariffs, which are taxes on goods entering a territory, and the single market harmonised regulations, which means goods are made to the same standards. Once you're outside of them, you need checks at the border to make sure people are paying the right tax and complying with the regulations.

And that's what's about to happen?

Exactly. And this will apply regardless of whether there is a deal or not. I want to issue a word of warning before we go any further: It's a horror show. The level of tediousness here is off the scale. This is like someone came up with a super-powered serum for the concept of bureaucracy and then injected it directly into your bloodstream. But you didn't turn into Chris Evans in Captain America, you turned into Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. The worst things are the acronyms. Everything has an acronym. But you need to get your head around it in order to understand what's going to happen to us next month.

I don't care. I hate this. I want this conversation to stop.

You can't, it's too late. You are trapped here with me and the acronyms. OK so here's the basic problem, the one from which all others follow. Our customs system currently processes around 55 million declarations a year. In 2021, it will process around 270 million. It needs to massively ramp up capacity.

It's just as well the government has such a good track record of implementing complex IT projects at speed then.

Quite. To be fair, the government has put a lot of effort into this, albeit belatedly. More than 35 government departments and public bodies are involved, including HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), the Home Office (HO), the Department for Transport (DfT), the Border and Protocol Delivery Group (BPDG) and the Transition Task Force (TTF).

Sweet Jesus the acronyms.

Actually, most of those are abbreviations, but let's not get caught up on details. We've barely scratched the surface. There are three key areas where the government needs to build capacity: IT systems to process the customs declarations, physical infrastructure at or near ports, and staff in government and the private sector to keep the customs system going.

That's a lot to do.

It is. But the government made things easier in one crucial respect: it delayed its own import declarations system until July next year.

What does that mean?

It means that stuff coming into Britain from Europe basically gets waved through. There are still technically customs requirements, but they've been pushed back six months. This allowed them to make sure goods would still enter the country and let them focus on trying to get the exports right.

It's hardly taking back control, is it?

No it isn't, but they're undertaking a systems-level change at an eye-watering timetable, so it was a necessary sacrifice.

Couldn't they have extended transition to prepare for this?

Yes they could, but chose not to. That's cost them. Covid seriously delayed preparations, dominated attention in business and government, paused ministerial decision-making and put communication with traders into deep-freeze over the summer.

So what are the biggest risks now?

The IT systems. There are 10 critical IT systems which are needed at the GB–EU border. Then there are the European systems which UK exporters will need to use to get access to the continent. We're not going to go into all of them here - we're going to massively simplify.

Thank heavens.

Don't worry, it'll still make your brain dribble out of your ears. We're also going to simplify by taking goods going from Britain to Northern Ireland off the table. That's its own separate hellscape. And we're going to focus on the Dover-Calais crossing. There are many others going from England to France, but this is the main route. It serves 'accompanied goods' - when a driver in a lorry takes the goods onto a ferry and then drives it off on the other side of the Channel. This is called RoRo, for roll-on-roll-off.

Acronym. Drink.

If you keep that up you'll be smashed by the end of the article and won't have any idea what I'm talking about.

I already have no idea what you're talking about.

Fair enough, drink away. The trouble with customs IT systems is this: Everyone needs to be filling in the right thing, in the right place, at the right time. If they don't, things break down. That doesn't just apply to the UK and French governments. It applies to exporters and importers, ports, hauliers and others. Customs is all or nothing. If one section is wrong, it's all wrong. Lorries are often full of lots of different consignments of goods from different exporters. Plenty of them travel with 100 individual separate consignments on them. This is called 'groupage'. So if one input of one customs form in one of those consignments is wrong, the whole lorry is delayed. And if that lorry is delayed, all the lorries behind it are delayed. The potential for breakdown is therefore very significant.

This is already making me anxious. It's like Jenga but it reaches all the way into the sky and is composed entirely of knives.

You also need to make sure that third party software used by places like the ports integrates with the government systems. And that assumes that the government IT systems actually work and have staff with the proper experience and training to operate them. And this too is interrelated. If one of the systems breaks down, it has a knock-on effect on the other systems. You keep seeing this same problem crop up. It's not one of error, exactly. It's about the consequence of the error, the knock-on effects of it.

How robust are those IT systems looking right now?

Not great. Some have been delayed indefinitely, some for a set period, some are in trials and some are online. But even when they're finished, you really want to give all the people using them time to understand them, to get used to them, so that when we leave transition there are as few mistakes as possible. All four industry representative bodies, including the Road Haulage Association (RHA) and the British International Freight Association (Bifa), have raised concerns about the government's level of preparedness, saying that they don't believe the border will be fully functioning by next month.

That's two more acronyms by my count.

I'm glad to see you sticking to the important information here. The trouble is that lack of government preparedness doesn't just affect it - it affects trader preparedness as well. If they're not getting clear communication from the government about what is happening and how it is happening, they don't know what to do. And the government has a bad record here. It has marched traders up the hill on no-deal several times over recent years, only to march them down again. Now many simply ignore it. Government communications have, until recently, centred on the "opportunities" of Brexit, which does nothing to indicate the urgency with which people need to make expensive and time-consuming changes. Even in October, just 45% of high-value traders who trade exclusively with the EU had started to invest in readiness.

Oh dear.

There are some reasons to be more optimistic. The first is that government communication has belatedly started to improve.  A new campaign in October was much better, telling traders that "time is running out". There's also one really important thing to remember about all this: it's not a long term problem. Brexit has plenty of those and they are severe, but this is not one of them. This is a short, sharp, embarrassing shock. Eventually, the market will adjust. People will see what happens in January and find ways around it so they can get their goods to market. Some people think that will happen very quickly indeed - no more than a month. Some think it'll take the first quarter of next year or longer. But very few people think it will last the whole year. What we're looking at here is the most dramatic, but also ultimately the most superficial, of Brexit impacts.

Starting to feel a bit tipsy now.

Cool, then it might be a good time to start talking about the IT systems.

No. Stop.

What?

I don't want to hear it. I want to get out.

It's too late. You're trapped here in an imaginary world in which I am talking to myself and explaining customs procedures. And in fact your resistance to this conversation probably points to some kind of deep-seated psychological trauma which I'm working my way through.

Dog carcass in alley this morning. Tyre tread on burst stomach.

Very good, Rorschach. So look, there are really four forms you need to remember. First, the import/export declaration. Second, the safety and security documentation. Third, the sanitary and phytosanitary measures for agricultural goods. And fourth, the system that collects these data sets and connects them to the lorry which is transporting the good.

What's in the import/export declaration?

They basically state what the good is, its value and how much duty you have to pay on it. It's the tax bit. It's all very complex, laborious and crammed full of technical minutiae but that's the executive summary. It needs to be lodged before the good gets to the French border.

How do you lodge it?

You do it through a UK system called the Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight, or Chief.

Drink.

This is a really old system and before Brexit was even a twinkle in Boris Johnson's eye, the UK planned to turn it off and migrate all traders to a new system called the Customs Declarations Service, or CDS.

Drink.

CDS was meant to replace Chief from January 2019 and then switch off altogether by March 2021, but there were repeated delays. So instead they're keeping Chief for trade between Britain and the EU and using CDS for trade between Britain and Northern Ireland, because it has the capacity for dual tariff fields. CDS is then going to be scaled up until it can deal with all the declarations.

No acronyms there.

Actually trade between Britain and Europe is called GB-EU and trade between Britain and Northern Ireland is called GB-NI, but let's not worry about that. The government insists that Chief now has an increased capacity that can handle 400 million annual declarations - way higher than the 265 million which are expected. HMRC has paid Fujitsu £85 million to provide technical support. But others aren't convinced. They're not sure it can handle the load and nervous that there isn't enough support if something goes wrong.

Very reassuring.

Isn't it. Remember that the importer on the EU side also has to be doing all of this - at the right time, in the right place - on the European customs system.

OK so what about the safety and security thing?

It's a document outlining what the good is, so it can be assessed for potential risks. Again, it's a long complex thing with multiple data fields. Like import/export, it has to be done in advance of the goods reaching Calais. It's submitted to the UK government via a new system called S&S GB.

Drink.

It must also be submitted to the EU member state's Import Control System, which is called ICS.

Drink. OK tell me about the sanitary pad things.

Sanitary and phytosanitary measures, or SPS.

Drink.

These are there to protect people, animals and plants from disease or pests. They cover products of an animal origin, like cheese, or meat, or fish, as well as live animal exports, plants and plant products, and even the wooden crates used to transport other types of goods. It's painstaking stuff, but I think, given the pandemic we're all going through, we all understand why it's important.

Yeah, fair enough. You've sold me. I'm totally on board with this stuff.

These kinds of goods have to enter Europe through specific Border Control Posts, or BCPs.

Drink.

And there they undergo some, or all, of a variety of checks. There's a documentary check for the official certification which travels with the good. There are identity checks, which provide a visual confirmation that the consignment corresponds to the documentation. And there's a physical check to verify the goods are compliant with the rules, for instance temperature sampling, or laboratory testing. You know that whole chlorine-washed chicken thing?

Sure.

Well this is where they check whether it has been and stop it getting into Europe if it has. But it's actually the documentary check which is the hardest part in terms of UK preparedness. It includes something called an Export Health Certificate, or EHC.

Drink. Jesus Christ.

These are documents which confirm that the product meets the health requirements of the EU. So they might say that the animal was vaccinated, for instance. Some products, like a cut of lamb, will just have one EHC. But others, like a chicken pizza, will have more than one.

We've talked about this before. People shouldn't put chicken on pizza.

You are wrong, it's a perfectly legitimate pizza topping, and in fact you are so wrong that I have started using chicken pizza as my trade-good shorthand. Chicken pizza is the new widgets.

What even are widgets?

No-one knows, that's why economists love them. A chicken pizza, however, is a composite good for the purposes of SPS. The chicken and the cheese are different animal products, so they would need separate export health certificates. And all these certificates have to be verified by an official veterinarian, or OV.

You're just messing me about now.

No seriously, they use that acronym. This whole area of public life has been radicalised into extreme acronym use. Anyway, the OV goes through the details, queries the documents and signs them off. But there's assistance from a person pulling together all the paperwork. They're called a Certification Support Officer, or…

I can't believe this.

...CSO. These guys are mostly in private practices, usually farming practices. It's not a big part of their workload - maybe 20% of what they do. But if you don't have those vets, you can't send the export. That would be catastrophic for the farming, food and hospitality sectors. And that's where we have an issue. There are restrictions on getting that many OVs up and running. There's a tight labour market for vets and the UK is highly reliant on Europeans coming over to do the job, but the end of free movement makes that much more difficult and expensive, as does the covid pandemic.

So what has the government done?

It pumped £300,000 into providing free training for the role. Many vets took it up. The number of qualified vets has jumped from 600 in February 2019 to 1,200 today. But that still leaves a capacity gap of 200.

Well that doesn't sound so bad.

No it doesn't, but when you start to scratch away at the figures, they fall apart. The 200 figure is the number of 'full time equivalent' qualified vets required. And if vets only spend about 20% of their time doing this, it means we'll actually need an extra 1,000 vets training in the additional qualification.

Oh dear.

Yep. Groups representing the sector are seriously worried about this. And as with customs, the smooth functioning of the border will rely on the importer on the EU side doing all the bits they're required to do too, by creating a record in the Trade Control and Expert System, or Traces NT.

Drink. OK, what's the fourth bit of IT?

Transport. This involves wrapping all the other forms together and attaching them to a vehicle. In the UK, we'll be doing this through something called the Goods Vehicle Movement Service, or GVMS.

Drink.

It links export declaration references together into one single Goods Movement Reference, or GMR.

Drink. Bloody hell man these people are out of control.

The GMR should come out like a barcode, a one-stop shop for all the tied-together information we've been discussing. GVMS will be needed for certain movements in January, particularly for trade with Northern Ireland, but it won't be a requirement of all imports until July. It's currently being tested and there are dark murmurs about its functionality from those who have come into contact with it. Mercifully, exporters into Europe on January 1st will be using the French system, SI Brexit. This was operational a year ago and has been fully tested several times.

Those lazy French with their useless romantic dispositions.

It's almost like they're a nation that cares about shopkeepers.

Speaking of which, how're British businesses going to deal with all this additional paperwork?

Many companies will be OK. Very big corporations are well ahead and in many cases have set up a European entity so that they can sell directly from their UK entity to the EU one. Then they'll probably just reflect the customs costs in a subtly increased retail price. Smaller companies who are used to exporting to the rest of the world outside of Europe also have an advantage. They're used to these kinds of things. The people who are most at risk are the small-to-medium-sized enterprises who have traded exclusively with Europe.

Small-to-medium-sized… Oh no.

Yeah, that's right. SMEs. Which, by the way, comprise the vast majority of companies in the UK. If you send just two or three loads of your product a month to Europe, it probably won't be worth the cost in manpower and money preparing for all this stuff. They'll likely just accept a shrinkage in their business. For many of them, the whole thing is a bafflement. Honestly, you read the guidance on all these systems and it's like it's in an alien code - a garbled assault of acronyms and complex systems. Many small firms, already suffering from covid, just throw up their hands in despair.

Bleak. It's always the little guys that get it.

Yes, although paradoxically, that actually presents one of the few reasons for optimism. Well, not optimism exactly, but a hope for least-badism. Now that so many people feel January will be chaotic, they might just decide not to bother trying to send anything. Goods will get stuck at a warehouse instead of on a truck.

Seriously? That's your good news? Aren't you just displacing disruption from the ports to other parts of the supply network?

Yes precisely. But there really are no good outcomes here.

Because if that doesn't happen, the system seizes up?

Yeah exactly. Lorries head to Dover then get held up because they don't have the correct paperwork. Then lorries behind those lorries get caught up, pushing the queue out, dominating Kent, creating a huge singular blockage. The government's own Reasonable Worst Case Scenario, or RWCS…

Drink.

... estimates that between 40% and 70% of lorries may not be ready for border controls, leading to queues of up to 7,000 trucks.

But that would only be going out right? The stuff we bring in to the country would be unaffected because we're not putting in place controls.

Kind of. It's certainly true that most imports should have a clear run into the UK. You can keep those two lanes separate. But most hauliers are from Romania, Lithuania, Hungary and Poland. They pay a lease on their trucks, which means they have to keep them going if they're to make money. They can't afford to get stuck in a queue at the border. So there's a good chance they'll look at the log-jam in the UK and think: 'I'm not touching that with a barge pole'. This would mean Britain struggled to get its imports, including potentially fresh food and medicines.

Wow.

Yeah, it could be bad. But there are plans for that eventuality. The government has set up some emergency routes, for instance on the Newhaven-Dieppe crossing. There's additional ferry capacity at eight ports, with the Department for Transport acting as the referee on which vehicles get onto their crossing. But it's not a like-for-like replacement. Many of these crossings take much longer than the short gap between Dover and Calais, and they often operate for unaccompanied goods overnight. If the import is urgent, or fresh, or, like some covid vaccines, needs to be kept at a certain temperature, then you may have a problem.

What is the government doing to make sure this doesn't happen? How will they control the blockage?

There's three parts to that really. The first is controlling access to Kent, which the trucks head into to get to Dover. This project has no acronym, but instead adopted one of the least elegant names in the history of British policy-making: The Check an HGV is Ready to Cross the Border Service.

Wait but...

Yeah. HGV: Heavy Goods Vehicle.

I fully accept now that it was a mistake to adopt this drinking idea.

Before the lorry gets to Kent, the driver will fill out an online form with a bunch of information - the registration number, the destination, details of the consignments, confirmations that the import/export documents have been filled in, export health certificates, the whole lot basically. Those that are judged to have all the documentation are given a Kent Access Pass, or KAP.

Drink.

And that allows them to go into Kent. Police can hand out £300 fines to lorries found on the Kent roads without the permit.

But this is all done on trust right? It's a self-assessment form.

Yep. It'll rely on people filling it out right. It's not linked to EU customs systems. So there's no guarantee that documents they claim to have completed will be accepted by EU customs authorities. But on the plus side, the software was launched recently and most people think it'll work OK. It's better than nothing, basically.

Alright so what's next? Traffic management?

Exactly. It's uncanny how naturally your questions lead me onto the next thing I want to discuss.

That's because I am you.

Don't talk about that, it makes it weird. Alright so first up we have the traffic flow plans. The Department for Transport is taking an existing temporary system to create contraflow on the M20 and putting it on a permanent footing, allowing 2,000 lorries to be held on the motorway while traffic still flows in both directions on the London-bound side.

OK, what's next?

Well then there's the issue of actual sites. HMRC has identified seven locations outside the ports. There's prep work being done at a site in Sevington, Ashford, at a cost of £110 million, to act as a clearing house for another 2,000 lorries. Some 600 lorries can be held on the approach to Manston airport, with more at the airport itself. These two sites, along with the M20 contraflow, are for holding traffic. There are also plans for Ebbsfleet International Station, North Weald Airfield and Warrington to be used for bureaucratic checks away from the border. Other sites, potentially in the Thames Gateway and Birmingham areas, are also being considered. They insist that this should give them capacity for 9,700 lorries, which is above the 7,000 in their worst case scenario.

Assuming that scenario is correct.

Right. Covid and other unrelated events, like a fire breaking out for instance, could mean that even the worst case scenario is an underestimate. We just don't know. Plus that relies on all of this being up in time. The government has passed legislation to streamline planning processes, but the timetable is unbelievably tight. The same thing goes for staff.

These are the customs officials who check all the paperwork, right?

That's certainly part of it. They're split into two departments: HMRC and Border Force. HMRC needs 8,600 full-time equivalent staff in place for January 1st. They still need another 1,500 but seem confident they'll have them. Border Force recruited an additional 900 staff ahead of a possible no-deal last year and is trying to bring in 1,000 more. Ministers are confident they'll have enough people in place by January 1st, but trade experts are less convinced.

Recurring theme.

Indeed. It's easy to get fixated on numbers but it really matters how well you've trained people too. You can have someone helping with customs work after a day or two, but for them to have any real sense of what they're doing, you're going to want a year's training. And then there's the question of personality type. Customs is a very specific kind of work, full of extremely complex documentation which must be got right. For some people, that is unimaginably boring. For others, it's very satisfying. But you need the right ones. And that's not what typically happens when people get desperate on a recruitment drive.

What's the other part of the staffing problem?

The private sector. It's a job called 'customs broker'. They're basically people who come in and help companies with their customs forms. Like I said, this stuff is mind-meltingly complex. You really do need someone to come and help you do it. And that's what the government wants too of course, because the more people getting it right, the fewer delays at the border. But as of last September, just 53% of traders said they planned to use a customs broker, with 30% unsure and 18% saying they were going to do the work themselves. Those aren't good numbers.

Are there enough of them to meet demand?

No. This has been a long-running problem. Almost two-thirds of customs brokers do not have enough staff to handle the increased paperwork from leaving the EU. And actually capacity seems to have reduced over the year due to the covid pandemic. The UK needs thousands more.

What's the government doing about it?

It's invested £84 million since 2018 into training, recruitment and IT system development. But many customs brokers are still hesitant about taking on new salary costs to build a capacity that won't be fully required until next July and they're nervous about taking on unprepared customers.  Of the £84 million on offer, just £52 million had been taken up in mid-October.

Is that… is that it? Please say that's it. I'm wasted.

It is.

OK so give me the executive summary.

We're about to experience the sudden implementation of complex customs processes in a nation which forgot they existed. This involves the introduction of numerous interrelated IT systems which have been under-tested. It's not clear that either government or traders are fully prepared for what's about to happen. In order to minimise the disruption the government is introducing various traffic management projects and trying to bulk up staff capacity. But there's just too many variables to know how it'll pan out. Maybe the systems will hold out and many traders will anyway sit out January because of concerns about queues. Or maybe the systems will fail, traders won't fill in forms right and the whole thing will blow up in our face. The most likely outcome right now is somewhere between shambles and catastrophe. We have to hope it's a shambles.

Can you do it in acronym-speak?

Amid RHA and Bifa concerns about the lack of progress, HMRC, Defra, the HO, the Dft, the BPDG and the TTF are building up IT systems for post-Brexit GB-EU trade and particularly for RoRo at Dover-Calais which will involve exporters submitting import/export declarations to Chief and the CDS, S&S information to S&S GB and ICS, and collating their SPS documentation - including an EHC filled out by an CSO under the supervision of an OV sent via a BCP - with the importer logging it on Traces NT, while generating a GMR via GVMS and SI Brexit, and then HGVs getting a KAP, all to avoid the RWCS.

D… Drink?

Yes I think so. That seems very sensible.

[spookyshake]

*proceeds to do exactly everything but work on my pets* H-have some faeries and lore dump I had rotting in the cabinet

[Light Faerie - Justine] A stern light faerie who manages Faerieland's treasury. Rules and regulations are her creed, and she will not allow any misdeed under her watch.

Despite her uptight demeanor, she has a peculiar fondness for games of chance. She seems to have an unwavering confidence in the certainty of numbers- and the dice, once cast, are fair and absolute arbitrators in her eyes. Of course, it could just be that she's addicted to gambling. When there's no clear protocol for a situation, she opts to flip coins and leave it to luck and happenstance.

-Fwaku's life was saved by Justine, who had happened to be passing by the area. She decided to flip a coin to determine his fate- and as luck would have it, he would survive. -The townspeople that had found Fwaku suggested that Justine should give the draik a name. The exchange probably went something like this: Townspeople: Thank you great faerie!! Would you give the honor of naming this child you just saved????? Justine: (uh shit) Give me a moment. *furious dice rolling* Justine: I grant this child the name...F..W...Q...Fwaku. Townspeople: WOW!! WHAT AN HONOR!!

(What kind of name is Fwaku......)

-While Fwaku is generally irreverent and unlikable to most parties he comes across, he displays a great deal of respect towards Faeries because of his background. Justine, in her act of saving and naming Fwaku, also unwittingly left him with a strange blessing: he has extremely good luck to the point of absurdity, which has saved his skin from karmic retribution countless times in the past.

---

[Fire Faerie - Heliae] A go-getter fire faerie with a particularly strong affinity to her element. Still young for a faerie, she has trouble controlling her excessive energy and often bursts into flames when she's excited.

Fun-loving but a bit careless, she loves to attend concerts, festivals, and other events where crowds gather...a serious fire hazard waiting to happen. She doesn't seem to fully grasp the danger she poses to those around her, and was originally sequestered away in Faerieland before she decided to run away- as you do, when you're a young faerie whose had your freedom denied.

Very explosive. very explosive. very explosive.................................

---

[Earth Faerie - Lottie] A lax but cryptic earth faerie who appreciates tranquility. She wandered into Kiko Lake some long time ago, and has since stuck around trying to achieve what she calls 'perfect bliss.' Generally found quietly meditating and contemplating her surroundings- usually with sweets and a cup of borovan as accompaniment. Her perception of time seems to be a little out of sync with the world around her.

Though usually impassive and calm, she hates above else having her peace and quiet disturbed. She will, with a quiet but tremendous fury, catapult raucous intruders out the window. Her longest recorded throw was over a mile! So impressive is her throwing skill, that kiko children often dare one another to see who can get flung the farthest.

-Because the architecture around Kiko Lake are built with kikos in mind, it's not uncommon to see the faerie bump her head on the door frames and ceilings. Fortunately, there's also never a shortage of bandages in the vicinity.

[Dover] Brown Kiko. Ever since Lottie began living on their family land generations back, their crops have prospered- especially asparagus. Now, the family is in the Borovan business, exporting premium blends of chocolate and asparagus for which Kiko Lake is now famed.

Dover isn't the kiko's real name- that was the name of his great great grandfather, but Lottie doesn't seem to make a distinction. All of her little helper kikos are 'Dover' to her. His job is to run around fulfilling Lottie's errands, whether that be procuring snacks or chasing pesky kids out of her yard.

---

[Dark Faerie - Alluce] A vain dark faerie living near Neovia, known to kidnap Neopets to force into servitude. She periodically terrorizes the citizens of Neovia to spread her influence. She wants, above all, to be feared and revered! ...but her actual ambitions tend to be quite small and petty. Knowledgeable about mirrors and magic involving them.

Though she revels in garnering fear, she's rather full of fears and cares herself- the thought of the true horrors lurking within the depths of the Haunted Woods makes her quiver. All smoke and mirrors, no bite.

-Doesn't get along well with Clariote. Alluce can't maintain her high-and-mighty mistress of evil theatrics against Clari's general irreverence. ABSOLUTELY D I S R E S P E C T F U L

---

[Air Faerie - Nephele] A fickle air faerie scout with a light-hearted but arrogant demeanor. One of the faeries tasked by Justine to recover Faerieland's lost artifacts, which were scattered across the lands in the aftermath of the Faerie's Ruin. Holds a strong belief that Neopets are lesser beings, considering them to be incompetent without Faeries.

Rand (Faerie Tonu) and  Bell's (Faerie Tuskaninny) supervisor. She usually leaves the Neopets to do all the dirty work and takes credit for their efforts, usually under the justification that Neopets 'owe' the Faeries anyways.

---

[Social Media Faerie - Papilla] A young faerie, rare in her time (Einse’s Future). Big-time celebrity and social media influencer, she loves travelling Neopia and blogging about her adventures (and promoting sponsored products.) Has a great love towards Neopets and lives life at her fullest interacting with them, but holds feelings of isolation due to being perhaps the last known faerie in Neopia. She’s invested in discovering why Faeries have all but disappeared in her time, and spends some of her time flitting across Neopia looking into the matter. She has a terrible sense of humor, and she sometimes has strange fits where she floods her social media with incomprehensible jokes and memes- terrorizing her followers’ feeds. She does all this in earnest, thinking her jokes are hilarious, but her fans generally think she’s just trolling and get a kick out of it. This creates a strange cycle of positive reinforcement as Papilla continues to get many reactions from her bad jokes, reinforcing her confidence in her humor. SOMEONE STOP THIS FAERIE

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

[The dynamic between Faeries and Neopets] Neopets aid Faeries, Faeries grant blessings. The dynamic between Neopets and Faeries is mutually beneficial, for the most part.

-Power of belief is essential to grant power to a Faerie's magic. Neopets, by helping Faeries on the premise that they will receive a reward or be granted a blessing, creates a transaction of belief. This is the premise of Faerie quests, which plays a vital role in powering the barrier that protects Neopia from wraiths (among other things.)

-Faeries are perhaps better defined as 'memetic' as opposed to 'elemental'- their magic is framed on a concept or idea, which relies on the belief/understanding/recognition of the themes surrounding the idea in question. The more wide-spread and strongly understood the idea, the greater the manifestation of a faerie's magic. (Motes, though simpler entities, also work on the same logic)

The basic elements, for example, are widely and easily understood as a concept- which may be why the majority of the faerie population falls in this category. (Something like a singular 'Fire' Faerie, for example, would probably be TOO POWERFUL AN IDEA to contain as a single being, so instead there's just a lot of them.)

-Names are very important, because they give shape to a concept or idea. -When they're cut-off from belief, they lose strength (Bottled Faeries) -They can shrink! Probably to conserve magic. -A Faerie without wings is essentially unheard of (with the special exception of Water Faeries). Taking away their wings is one of the most heinous things you can do to a Faerie. -Faeries are born spontaneously? Most of them just appear one day out of the ether or whatever. -They're ageless and nigh immortal

they're......the OG gijinkas <-- hold on this is actually somewhat relevant but that's a story for another time

[Shenkuu - A curious case study of Kaia, the Shenkuu Faerie] Kaia the Shenkuu Faerie appeared spontaneously in a relatively recent timeframe- probably within an average Neopian lifetime. She's a young faerie, younger than most of her kind. She's in the same category as Jhuidah and Taelia- faeries with a strong conceptual connection to the land they watch over.

There are no other (known) faeries in Shenkuu, which implies that the faerie population in Shenkuu is very low or...non-existent? At the very least, it can be said that Faeries are novel in Shenkuu, given that Kaia mentions how everyone stares at her. If we go a step further, we could postulate that Faeries, as a concept, isn't a part of common knowledge in Shenkuu as a whole.

Almost as if the concept of 'Faeries' have never existed here...?

-Shenkuu was a land that had barred itself from the outside world for an undetermined amount of time. The land only recently opened their doors to the rest of Neopia (Cyodrake's Gaze) (*in my lore I'm pinning that down to like 10~15 yrs ago for character reasons but passage of time in Neopia is not very well defined so.... shrugs) -It can be assumed that there was still some exchange occurring with the outside at a smaller scale (Airship merchants, travellers who ended up in or out of Shenkuu by happenstance, Neopians living in areas close to but not quite in Shenkuu proper, etc) -Assumably, Shenkuu has a history perhaps dating back to the heyday of Altador and other 'ancient' civilizations (1000+ years) -This creates a situation where: a. There never were faeries to begin with in Shenkuu or b. There used to be faeries, but they disappeared from Shenkuu AND from common knowledge

-Kaia's manifestation may have been the direct result of the opening of Shenkuu to Neopia- with the arrival of outside trade and ideas, so too did the knowledge of Faeries. Once the faerie 'meme' took hold in Shenkuu, where there was a void of Faeries, it took form as the Shenkuu Faerie: Kaia. This is why she's so young as a faerie- she probably spawned sometime between Cyodrake's Gaze and the present day. (Alternatively, she might have existed in Shenkuu before the events of Cyodrake's Gaze but I think it still holds that she popped up in a pretty recent timeframe.) Kaia herself only seems to know Faeries through the knowledge she received from travelers.  

[hecktorr22]

THE AUDACITY OF THIS MAN TRUMP

By E. P. UNUM

December 13, 2020

I’m still trying to understand what 80 million voters disliked about President Trump so much that they decided to cast their votes for a man who served forty-seven years in government and has done absolutely nothing for the American people. And, I’m still flabbergasted that those same people would vote for a woman to serve as Vice President, a heartbeat away from the Presidency, with a rather checkered and not so moral past. I wondered why they despised and hated President Trump so much.

And so, I have many questions:

Did you dislike that Trump made cruelty to animals a felony?

Did you dislike he raised billions to stop the opioid crisis?

Perhaps you feel that he destroyed ISIS, killed terrorists, including the leader of ISIS and the Iranian General responsible for thousands of American deaths, all without going to war?

Did you dislike the fact that the media and democrats, Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Cuomo, and Jim Acosta said we’d be in World War III by now with North Korea, and their prophecies did not come to pass?

Did you dislike Trump because under his leadership we became energy-independent and an exporter rather than an importer of oil, no longer relying on the Middle East for our petroleum needs?

Did you dislike him because he wanted to build a wall to keep criminals and drugs from coming into our country?

Did you dislike him because he just slashed the price for medications in some cases by 50%, which is driving big Pharma nuts?

Perhaps you dislike that he signed a law ending the gag-order on pharmacists that prevented them from sharing money-saving options on prescriptions?

Is your dislike for President Trump based on the fact that he signed the Save Our Seas Act, which funds $10 million per year to clean tons of plastic and garbage from the ocean?

Did you dislike that he signed a bill for airports to provide breastfeeding stations for nursing moms?

How about the fact that he signed the biggest wilderness protection and conservation bill in a decade, designating 375,000 acres as protected land, was that why you dislike him?

Did you dislike that he loves America and puts Americans first?

Did you dislike that he made a gay man the ambassador to Germany and then asked him to clean up national security and un-classify as much of it as possible for transparency?

Did you dislike that he’s kept almost every campaign promise (with zero support from Congress who work against him daily!) plus 100 more promises because Washington was much more broken than he or any of us thought?

Do you dislike that he works for free, donating his entire $400,000 salary to different charities?

Did you feel that he did this for four years because he was “showboating?”

Do you dislike that he’s done more for the black community than every other President?

Do you dislike that he listened to senator Scott and passed Invest In Opportunity Zones to help minorities?

Do you dislike that he passed prison reform, which gives people a second chance and has made quite a huge difference for the black communities?

Do you dislike that he passed VA reforms to benefit the very people who served our country and defend our freedom?

Do you dislike that he’s winning and signing new trade deals that benefit Americans, instead of costing us more?

Did you dislike him because, unlike all of the presidents who came before him, he recognized Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel, relocated the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv there, and then proceeded to negotiate four peace accords between Israel and Arab Nations when many in the media were predicting there would be war? Was that why you disliked him?

Do you dislike that he loves his flag and his country?

Do you dislike that he calls out and has shown time and time again that the mainstream media in our country has become corrupt and incompetent, twisting the truth to control and mislead the people and he is trying to protect us from this?

Do you dislike that he has been a President totally committed to ending wars and bringing our troops home?

Perhaps you dislike the stern way he spoke, publically to NATO allies to step up and pay their commitments to defense rather than expecting America to do it for them, something we have done for over seventy-five years?

Do you dislike that he has made a commitment to end child-trafficking and crimes against humanity and has made 1000’s of arrests already?

Do you dislike he’s brought home over 40 Americans held captive, the last one from Iran?

Do you dislike that he’s proven he was right about the Deep State and he was indeed spied on before, during, and after he became President?

Do you dislike that he was a Billionaire before he ran for President and now is worth at least 1/3 less... because he loves America?

Do you dislike that he respects cops, veterans, ICE & First Responders?

Do you dislike that he does not sell out America to other countries, like the leaders prior to him have done?

Could it be possible that the ones who sell out America to line their pockets own the media and Hollywood and hate him so much for trying to expose them and hate him for putting the American people first that they try to manipulate our thinking and control the information we get to try to cultivate hatred for him? These people benefit when you hate the man trying to stop them... so they won’t have to give up the wealth they have gotten and continue to get thru mass taxation and control. Wouldn’t you at least want to research this possibility?

Could 75 million Americans already know the truth... that he has done more for blacks in the last 20 years than our last 5 presidents put together and is actually not a racist and never has been one… but you believe he is because it has been drilled into your head and yet you’ve never researched his accomplishments?

You can start by watching those daily briefings he did during the lockdown (all online) and then watching the coverage on the Main Stream Media and how they twisted it.

Do you actually believe the President encouraged America to inject bleach?

Did you research the effects of UV light which is used to disinfect school busses and medical equipment and is also being used as a treatment for bacteria and respiratory infections? They want you to believe he is stupid because if you figure out that he isn’t, they will lose billions of dollars and all their control.

I know... it is hard to let go of what you believed to be true for most of your life. You are not alone. But your blind hatred of this man who is literally trying to save us from the far left, radical Socialists is going to be detrimental to our country if you continue to support their hatred.

They are teaching hatred and separation...to our children and even to our families! You are not allowed to agree with “part” of their agenda and think for yourself; you must repeat their full belief system, or name-calling and insults ensue.

This is not an informed debate. It is not a reason. This is the very definition of a cult! All or nothing! They despise law and order. Just look around you. He supports law and order, not looting, rioting, and chaos, so we are safe and can live in a civilized society. He stands for unity and America first. Is that why you dislike him?

You will be amazed at how much more peace comes into your life when you turn off the fake news and tune into what America stands for, where we focus on what unites us, not what divides us. The media has despised him from day one. Impeachment was on the table before he even took the oath of office in January 2017. They said Impeach the “motherfuc#^*r”....but then they turn around and say his rhetoric is bad? He was never given a chance, yet he’s done more in 4 years than any president with zero help from the media or democrats. Results don’t lie.

The media and democrats consistently complain about Trump “mismanaging the Covid Crisis." Nothing could be further from the truth. The man has been a rock and his leadership has kept the nation from the abyss. He promised a vaccine before the end of 2020. They said it could not be done. He proved them wrong once again….doses of the vaccine are being delivered now in mid-December!

He built hospitals in NYC and California, sent retrofitted Navy Hospital Ships which went unused, initiated Operation Warp Speed that produced PPE and therapeutics in record time along with thousands of ventilators, far more than we needed, and which are now being sent all over the world. And the overall death rate from Covid stands at less than one percent!

How dare this man, the President of the United States, care so much about the American people and our Country. How dare he stand at attention and salute our Flag, support our troops, honor our veterans, put God back into our lives, protect the unborn, give people second chances and take seriously his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

How dare this man show up at 2:00 AM at Dover Air Force Base to welcome home hostages held in foreign lands and the remains of our fallen soldiers.

How dare this man develop and implement plans and programs to create the greatest most prosperous economy and standard of living in the history of mankind.

How dare he reduce unemployment to 3.4% and lower unemployment for Black, Asian and Hispanic communities in fifty years!

You would think this man was trying to actually do things rather than speak eloquently and act “Presidential” and “Cool” about such things.

How dare he!

One would think this President was trying to provide leadership.

How crass.

The audacity of this man.

You would think he is trying to be a leader or something.

[newagesispage]

                                                                    SEPTEMBER       2019  

PAGE   RIB

 July 2019 was the hottest month in human history.

*****

This Ordinary Life has sent the world their new EP, Sadderdays!! Give it a listen!

*****

Judd Apatow is putting out a book about Garry Shandling.

*****

Debbie Harry: Face it will be out on Oct. 1

*****

This year the Kennedy center will honor Big Bird, Linda Ronstadt, Earth, Wind and Fire, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Sally Field.

*****

Kentucky principal Phillip Wilson who banned books from his high school in 2009 for homosexual content has been arrested on possession and distribution of child porn.

*****

In Illinois, the capital bill is funded through a doubling of gas tax and an increase in license plate fees. The money is supposed to be for roads, public buildings and bridges. The state constitution tells us the state shall not pay for aid in any school, academy, seminary, college, university or other literary or scientific institution controlled by any church or sectarian denomination. Organizations that are now receiving some of the funding are, Catholic charities, The ARK of Sabina, Inner-city Muslim action network, Gifts from God ministry, Chicago center for Torah and Chesed, Hatzalah, Keshet, Jewish united fund, Lewis University, St. Ann Catholic school and Mt. Sinai hospital, among others.

*****

Gary Busey will appear in the off Broadway musical, Only Human where he will play God.

*****

Eastwood’s The Ballad of Richard Jewell is in production with Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde, Kathy Bates and Jon Hamm.

*****

For a look into Brian Jones death catch the doc ‘Who killed Christopher Robin?’

*****

Dale Jr. and family were in a plane crash but everybody seems to be ok.

*****

I hear that Porn hub is planting a tree for every 100 videos watched.

*****

Days alert: Rex is out. What about Chloe? Who will love her now? They still had the chemistry. Oh, never mind, Chloe is gone too!** Ted is out. Tripp is out. Jordan will be back briefly.** OMG How my heart fluttered when Tony and Anna saw each other again. Oh, the magic of a soap!! **At last Robin Strasser is on the way as Vivian. ** Greg Vaughan is dating Angie Harmon and they are a pretty adorable couple.**Why don’t they try to charge Kristen with Holly’s murder? She may want to tell them where they are then.  And I am so sick of Eric leaving sweet women to sniff after Nicole, enough. He used to be one of my favorite characters but it has gotten old. ** Please Please put Xander and Sarah together!!!!!

*****

Dolly Parton’s America: A podcast will begin this fall.

*****

The new owners of the LA sex club that was known as Snctm are taking apps and promising carnal bliss.

*****

Scary Clown told workers in a GM plant in Michigan not to sell their homes. He promised the plant would not shut down and guess what? Lie!** Trump owes El Paso 470 thousand for his MAGA rally. ** Perhaps we should all refer to him as he refers to himself, Ttump.** A Nazi rally in Germany handed out hats inspired by the Trump campaign that read: Make Germany Hate Again.** We have to hit him where it hurts..$.. This is all he understands.** The evangelicals finally got a little upset when Trump took the lords name in vain. ** Trump wanted to buy Greenland, they wouldn’t bite and he cancelled his trip to Denmark.** Now he is The King of Isreal? The chosen one? The second coming of God? ** Word is that half of Trumps twitter followers are fake. Also, the US Labor Dept. says America created 500,000 fewer jobs in 2018 and 2019 than previously reported. **Rural farmers are 50-50 on Trump like the rest of us. Why do we categorize people? Things like this show that our differences don’t usually have anything to do with our religion, the color of our skin,$, job or location. We are different at our cores in what we think and feel about others and the world around us.** Scary Clown has told some staff to get this wall started no matter the coast and to just, ”take the land” if necessary and he will pardon them later. He has taken FEMA money to get the ball rolling as a hurricane bears down on the U.S.

*****

Why do we vote in those that allow the drug, insurance and credit card, lender companies to make all the dough?? Let’s ALL enjoy America.

*****

A newly invented bag can be dissolved in water after use.

*****

Pardon Blagoevich?? What??

*****

The Black Jewel Coal Co. has filed for bankruptcy. The miner’s last paychecks bounced. Nobody will answer their questions about their 4o1k’s. Since they are not technically laid off yet, they can’t receive unemployment. The company got 5 mil in emergency funds from the bank and they owe 976 thousand in fines.

*****

Kelly Craft, a major Trump donor is the new UN ambassador.**US ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman is out.

*****

I have to say, I don’t get why people aren’t more excited about the democratic candidates. There are a few that could go away but there are some really fabulous ideas there. I hope they put their egos aside when the last is standing. The lot of them would compose a great cabinet. And how do you not get excited about the future of our country?? How can you be so inside your own head that you put our own day to day ahead of your country? We all have to pay our bills, work, care for others and enjoy our passions from time to time but this is crunch time people!!! Pay attention!!** Beto’s REAL reaction to the El Paso shootings did more for him than all his relaunches. He was himself and not what he thought he should be. Trump and Biden were giving sympathy to the wrong cities for goodness sake!  Trump couldn’t even show any true feelings as he gave the thumbs up beside an orphan and tweeted about how lousy Shep Smith as he flew to the next photo op of victims.** It’s hard to look away from the freak show.** The next Dem debate is Sept.12.

*****

With no notice, immigrants who are here for life saving treatments have been given 33 days to clear out of the country.** Scary Clown is fighting with Comey again. What an unhappy schmuck this President is.

*****

It seems to me that if 2 people had run for student council president and the winner cheated and abused his office, they would make him step down. Would they have another vote or let the opponent step in?? The President of the US post is a bit more important than student council President. ** Now Trump is thinking that nuking hurricanes might be a good idea.

*****

If elected, Bernie says he will tell us what is known about aliens from outer space.** Hickenlooper is out.** Seth Moulton is out.**Jay Inslee is out (oooh, that one hurts). I love ya Jay!! He is now running for reelection as Governor.** Gillibrand is out** Former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh and former Massachusetts  Governor Bill Weld are in for the Republican side.

*****

Some studies show that over 50% of inmates have dyslexia.

*****

Jim Gaffigan made some jokes about craft beers including how labels might have say a penguin wrestling a cactus. Well, a small brewery in NY has made it happen with their blend called Penguin and Cactus

*****

6000 people of Oklahoma are dead from opiods and Johnson and Johnson have been ordered to pay $572 mil per the court verdict.

*****

The International wildlife regulator has banned the capture and export of baby African elephants.

*****

Leslie Jones is out at SNL.

*****

“Under the Trump administration, the pledge ”the right to bear arms,”  has morphed into “Don’t just stand there, shoot somebody.” – Carl Reiner

*****

In the event I am killed, organize, mobilize and get the peace plan passed and put my body on the NRA’s doorstep in Fairfax, Va. – David Hogg

*****

The trailer for this Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix, Marc Maron and Robert DeNiro looks fucking amazing!! Hurry up Oct.4!!

*****

The NRA has 5 million members but one still has to wonder why the rights of gun owners supersede the rights of everybody else. Why don’t we hear more about their money scandals? Just when you hear that Trump is asking his people behind the scenes if the NRA still has power, he and LaPierre talk and the Pres backs off his tough gun talk. We know who is Wayne’s bitch. ** A group of surgeons have been showing X-Rays of what a gun can do as they protest gun violence.** The world now has bulletproof backpacks.**New schools are being designed to cut down the number of victims of a shooter. Hallways are curved and classrooms can lock.

*****

The Firearm dealer license certification act in Illinois requires those who hold a Federal firearm license to also obtain a state certificate of license and comply with state regulations. All dealers will be required to have security alarms where guns are stored in case of intrusion. Dealers will also have to keep electronic records of their inventory. Gun dealers and the Illinois state rifle association are challenging, of course before this all takes effect in 2020.

*****

“We don’t have an actual Presidency right now. We have a reality show whose ratings have begun to slide and whose fading star sees cancellation on the way.” – Eugene Robinson.

*****

The Bruce Lee philosophy , Be Water, is being used by the Hong Kong protesters. Be Strong like ice. Be fluid like water. Gather like Dew. Scatter like mist.

*****

As the crackdown on immigrants continues, word is that Trump still employs many undocumented workers. And why aren’t the employers arrested?** The administration wants to make it easy  for the wealthy and educated immigrants to come to this country. Again, only the rich have rights.** Trump has moved $150 mil from FEMA to the immigration courts as hurricane Dorian heads this way. ** He is telling his staff to just “take the land” and build the wall, disregard environmental rules and he will pardon them. A joke?? I wouldn’t be so sure.**

*****

Jews against Ice really let ‘em have it. They shut down Amazon as they marched against the internment of immigrants. The rally cry: We will not stay silent while tech companies profit off of cruelty.

*****

Jeff Epstein is dead and the conspiracy theories have begun. Many are glad that Epstein is dead and some wish he had lived to pay for his crimes. Would he have turned on his high end friends?  David Koch is also dead.** Word is that in 2008 Epstein bought female undies from the jail shop.

*****

A recent survey shows that 45% of people wear underwear for 2 days, 13% for a week. Tell me this can’t be true.

*****

Chris Christie and Anthony Scaramuchi are always everywhere and now Sean Spicer on Dancing with the Stars?? OMG.. Can we stop seeing these people?** Sarah Huckabee Sanders is joining Fox news.

*****

White Supremacy is officially the majority of domestic terrorism in the U.S. Now, let me see, who seems to want to be their leader?** Advertisers pulled out of Tucker Carlson’s show after he called white supremacy ,’not a thing.’

*****

Truckers have been really hurt by the tax cuts. Longer hours and less money have come since they can’t deduct expenses the way they used to. Regulations have been relaxed that limits hours on the road.

*****

The Department of labor is proposing a rule that would allow government contractors to fire workers who are unmarried and pregnant or LGBTQ.

*****

David Gilmour sold his guitars for 20 thou and used the money to fight climate change.

*****

Michael Cohen claims that Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife and a pool boy they met at a hotel became fast friends. Eventually Cohen had to intervene because of some lurid photos. He claims that the Falwell’s are quite kinky. The couple gave the pool boy over a mil to buy a resort that has become trendy with the LGBTQ community.  Apparently nobody else knows what is on those photos that Cohen brokered a deal for.

*****

Kathy Griffin: A Hell of a story won the Freedom of Speech award at the Traverse city film fest. She announced the release of the film by giving a heads up to hashtag emmyless Donald.

*****

California is trying to make those that run for President show us their tax returns. Illinois rejected that idea.

*****

Blaze it forward

*****

U.S. Fencer, Rick Imboden took a knee during the national anthem after taking gold at the Pan Am games.

*****

Stumptown looks like a good show but boy what a terrible name.

*****

Check out the new book, Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow.

*****

Ron Burgundy has been making the rounds.

*****

Yada Yada Yada politics has made its way into our thoughts with Marianne Williamson warning us of business as usual.

*****

Geena Davis is getting the humanitarian Oscar.

*****

In a joke that Seth Meyers told he said, ”Cleveland Browns win Super Bowl!”  So it may never happen but it was nice to hear.

*****

Chairman of the parent company of Equinox and Soul Cycle and owner of the Dolphins, Stephen Ross, caused a stir when he held a fundraiser for Trump.

*****

Liam and Miley broke up.

*****

Someone started a little joke about renaming the street in front of Trump tower. But people have started to take it seriously and NY is considering the name President Barack Obama Avenue.

*****

The administration is rolling back regs on the endangered species act. It has been a great success but Trump and the lobbyists think it just stands in the way of their profits.

*****

28% of delivery drivers have eaten some of your food.

*****

The Rolling Stones are trying to push a green agenda on the latest tour. At some venues fans can purchase a tones cup for $3, use it all night and then take it home or turn it in for your $3 back.** In 1964 the first Stones album came out and the Mariner 4 fly by satellite had its first look at Mars. In November last year the Insight lander thrusters disturbed a rock on Mars which has been dubbed Rolling Stones rock.

*****

Studies show that the most dangerous years of our lives are the year we are born and the year we retire. Depression spikes 40% after retirement. In Okinawa, Japan they don’t even have a word for retire. On the whole they eat a lot of fresh seafood and eat smaller portions. They seem to live the longest, healthiest lives.

*****

The green shirt guy was a thing for a few minutes.

*****

Wal Mart is really cracking down on security, one store at a time. Some people are asking the store to stop selling guns and donating to NRA backed lawmakers.

*****

The Black lady sketch show is Robin Thede’s new thing which is good but her last show was good too.

 R.I.P. Saoirse Kennedy Hill, Hal Prince, the El Paso and Dayton and Odessa/Midland shooting victims, D.A. Pennebaker, Toni Morrison, Jimmy Aldaoud, Valerie Harper and Peter Fonda.

[racingtoaredlight]

Opening Bell: April 6, 2018

First, the news…

After the markets closed yesterday, President Donald Trump announced an additional $100 billion in tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States. Chinese trade with the U.S. was over $500 billion last year, meaning these tariffs, if imposed, will attach to nearly 20% of the value of Chinese goods which come into this country. The goal, according to the president, is to protect American farmers, manufacturers, and businesses in the Midwest—a significant part of his electoral coalition in 2016—but reactionary moves by China on goods, including American pork, could hurt the American agricultural industry. The tariffs have left one of Trump’s economic advisors, Peter Navarro, crowing at their implementation, while his brand new chief economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, has claimed that the tariffs are meant to create leverage for China to come to the negotiating table for a grand bargain on trade and that the goal is for the tariffs to never actually go into effect. Whichever one of these positions reflects the president’s actual view, and trade is one of the few areas which Trump has been consistent, one hallmark of this administration is that the best crystal ball in the world will not help anyone forecast what will actually happen. While uncertainty can be a bargaining chip of its own, the problems is that financial markets hate uncertainty. And sure enough, the Dow futures were down 300 points in aftermarket trading last night, indicating that the markets will be in for a rough morning today.

After announcing earlier this week that he wanted to withdraw the U.S. military from Syria and deploy it on the border with Mexico, and keep it there until a border wall is constructed—and causing many talking heads to dust off the posse comitatus laws which prevent the military from being deployed as law enforcement on American soil—the message from the White House shifted later in the week and it was announced that 2,000-4,000 National Guardsmen would instead be deployed to various points along the border. The two preceding administrations also deployed the Guard to the border—approximately 1,500 by the Obama administration, 6,000 by the Bush administration—but it is less clear what Trump expects of these part-time soldiers once deployed. Previous missions involved supplementing the Border Patrol and providing enhanced surveillance assets of certain points on the border. But the language of this president has felt more aggressive, as if he expects these federalized state military units to dig in as if for invasion. It is worth remembering that, during an anti-narcotics operation on the Texas-Mexico border in 1997, a unit of active-duty U.S. Marines mistook a local high school student for a drug smuggler and shot and killed him. U.S.-Mexico relations were far better in 1997 than they are today and it is disquieting to wonder what might spring out of the repetition of such a horrible incident.

And now for some features...

 At its height in 2014-2015, ISIS—or, the Islamic State as it preferred to be called—controlled a sinuous web of territory from Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, the city of Fallujah on the approaches to the capital Baghdad, up to the Turkish border, and into the heart of Syria, to say nothing of publicly declared allies in Libya and Nigeria. This state persisted, despite its brutality and harsh application of extreme Islamism, because it embraced the local government departments and bureaucrats, so long as they were Sunni, and ordered them to return to work, just as they had done before ISIS fighters arrived. Gradually, ISIS bureaucrats altered the practices of these government departments to bring them more in line with the cultural, social, economic, and religious goals of the ISIS leadership in Raqqa. This included the development of forms for land sales and leases, driving permits, birth certificates, citations by the religious police, and contracts for land appropriations of non-Sunnis. While many government buildings used by ISIS have since been destroyed by air strikes or in fighting as anti-ISIS fighters have recaptured territory—ISIS now controls only 3% of the territory it once did—some of their government documents and forms survived. New York Times international correspondent Rukmini Callamachi, traveled to Iraq five times over 15 months, collected documents from wherever she could find them, often not far from the front line, wary of potential booby-traps left behind by retreating ISIS loyalists, and brought them back to the states. Here, they have been translated and analyzed by a panel of six experts and the same team at West Point that examined the documents captured by U.S. Navy SEALs during the raid which killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Callimachi’s story painstakingly maps out the bureaucratic structures which ISIS took over and then altered in order to put their governance into practical effect. Some of the documents themselves can be seen here. There is something surreal about looking at some of these documents and I recommend both links.

In a controversial move, last month Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that a question would be included in the 2020 Census Questionnaire which asks individuals about their citizenship status, the first time such a question has been included on the census since 1950. The Brookings Institution looks at all the problems this will likely create, including exacerbating the already extant problem of under-counting the actual amount of people living in each state and each congressional district. Such figures are not only used in redistricting of legislative seats, but also in turn helps determine the rate of federal funding a state, region, or municipality will receive. This report further breaks down the insidious reason for asking such a question, to act as a deterrent to people answering the census questionnaire for fear of being found, even though federal law prevents identities in census questionnaires from being used to locate criminals or those in the country illegally. The point of the census is not to root out the lawless from the law-abiding and it is not even to count the total number of U.S. citizens, it is to count the number of actual residents, no matter their status or criminal record, in order to determine how to appropriate funding and services around the country. To insert a question which will only lead to more people not taking part in the census is so short-sighted that it beggars belief.

When you board an airplane and fly anywhere in this country, you are constantly handed off from one flight control center to another until you reach your destination. After leaving the gate and taxiing to an assigned runway by a controller in the airport tower, you are then told when to takeoff by another controller who guides the plane for a few moments until handing it off to a controller in a regional TRACON center. Once the airplane reaches cruising altitude, it is handed off again to one of the network of 22 national centers strewn across the country. Upon nearing your destination airport, the aircraft you are on is handed off to a controller in the local TRACON center who lines the plane up with a series of others just arrived in the area and told what order to proceed towards their exit ramp from the freeway in the sky. As the plane descends it is handed off one last time to the tower controllers at the destination airport, who tell the pilot which runway to land at and when and then which gate to go to. Considering there are 60,000 people in the air above the United States at any given moment, all strapped into airplanes by the dozens or hundreds, carrying enough aviation fuel to incinerate everything, it is amazing to think that midair collisions almost never occur. This despite the fact that the working conditions—often six days a week—have worsened considerably, stress is endemic, and technology is horribly out of date, if it works at all. In 2009, a correspondent from GQ visited the then control tower at LaGuardia (the new tower, mentioned in the article was still under construction, but opened for operations in 2010, after the article came out) and found that despite difficult working conditions, antiquated operations systems, and terrible hours, the controllers in the tower loved their jobs. This was such a great read, even if only for the exchange about the red telephone that had a label marked “black telephone” on it.

In the chaotic climate of post-Soviet, post-Cold War Russia in the 1990s, organized crime took center stage as daring bosses gunned down rivals in the streets of major cities and took on wealth which their parents and grandparents could have hardly imagined. The rise to power of Vladimir Putin in 2000 has tampered down on overt violence associated with organized crime, but the Russian mob bosses still exist, only now they have learned how to go with the grain of the Kremlin; they are free to do as they wish so long as they do not offend Moscow, but if they do, there are ready reminders that the government of Putin is “the biggest gangster of them all.” The Guardian, even as it has been forced to downsize in some departments, continues to do longform, deep dive investigations and stories very well. Read this and maybe consider contributing a little, especially since The Guardian adamantly refuses to put up a paywall.

The current political culture we find ourselves in, is both a fascinating and a distressing one. Populists on the right have espoused ideas that seem completely unmoored by traditional pro-business, small-government conservatism, while hardcore progressives on the left demand ideological purity of their party and sneer at anyone who attempts to find middle ground; so-called “centrists” or, an even greater slur, “neo-liberals.” This essay by John Gray examines hyper-liberalism and its 19th century roots and finds a striking commonality between the farthest adherents of right and left; a strict and demanding streak of individualism which values personally held viewpoints over facts and evidence.

In 1814, Napoleon, defeated on the battlefield, was forced to abdicate as Emperor of France, and was sent into exile on the island of Elba, in the Mediterranean. In 1815, Napoleon slipped away from his captors and, with a small band of loyalists, crossed by boat to southern France. Within days he was back in Paris—the unpopular Bourbon government having fled at his approach—and he retook his throne as Emperor, quickly raising his army from hundreds of thousands of loyal veterans. 100 days later, Napoleon was defeated by an allied British, Dutch, and German army (assisted by late arriving Prussians who tipped the balance in the allies favor) on a grassy field that sloped upward to a ridge, outside the village of Waterloo. Napoleon was captured within days and sent into a much more distant exile; the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, so remote that thousands of miles of ocean surround it on all sides from the nearest continental landmass. Napoleon would spend the last six years of his life at St. Helena, well-fed and wined by his British jailers, but forbidden from reading all but a handful of outside newspapers. In order to overcome his isolation, Napoleon undertook to learn English in order to read the few English papers that did come into his hands. This story is about Napoleon’s first few months of learning the language of his enemy, how he developed an idiosyncratic approach to spelling and pronunciation—he was excellent at grammar, but terrible at vocabulary and simply anglicized French words instead when it pleased him. And yet his sentences are fairly coherent, which is remarkable for someone learning a language while in ill-health in his fifth decade of life.

Ending as I always do with politics. First, Leah Askarinam writes for Inside Elections about how the 2018 election, despite a record number of female candidates, could lead to the fewest amount of women in the U.S. Senate since the 1970s. Second, Geoffrey Skelley and Kyle Kondik have the latest round of race ratings for House, Senate, and Governors’ race for 2018, which underline how well positioned Democrats are for the 2018 election, but how they could also still fall short in the Senate—despite a current 51-49 GOP margin—and how much uncertainty continues to undergird House races.

So, we masthead folk have been talking, and we’re not sure at the moment what our commitment level is to RTARL. I still enjoy doing one post a week, even if it is a pain in the ass on Thursday nights. If you guys care about content and want us to carry on, say so. If not, if each post is just a new repository for your comments, regardless of what is written above them, well, we’ve got better things to do with our time going forward. Either way, let us know.

 Welcome to the Weekend.

[lydiahainesqut-journal-blog]

Online Journal Analysis

Seminar Week 4:

“EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT”

·       Contrast between historical building and contemporary, neon, capital letters (Old building- reassuring and authoritarian- the building has been around for a long time, and is reassuring the readers that everything is going to be alright)

·       Text is quite intrusive as it has been placed on the outside of a monumental building- subtracts the quality of the building.

·       Have measured the exact width of the building to fill the text of the entire width- taking into account the architecture of the building.

·       Public space, shown by the amount of people in the photograph.

·       The colour of the white text in combination with the sombre, grey atmosphere creates an overall solemn image.

o   The main presence of luminosity in the image.

·       The text is indicating that everything is not alright currently- something needs to change. An example of modern propaganda.

Week 5:

Lecture 4:

Type up written notes from class.

Week 8:

Premier Pro CC Workshop:

·       Exporting File

o   Select area that you wish to export (mark an outpoint so that your work goes from 0 seconds to the point you wish to include).

o   Make sure window is active with blue line.

o   File à Export à Media (Command M) à Change settings and place.

§  Click on file name and make sure you know where you’re saving it.

o   Format: H.264 (NOT blueray)

o   Preset: Vimeo 1080p HD (720 is fine also)

o   Click export audio and video.

o   Click queue- this will open up a list of things to export… then launches another programme called Adobe Media Encoda.

o   Once you have got your “list”, then click export.

·       Audio

o   Right click on audio à unlink, then delete the video instead of the sound.

o   Fade: selection tool, right click. Apply to fault transition.

Preparation for Assessment 2

Artist Talk- 2 minutes

This artwork MUST be new this semester, and NOT one of the 2 discussed in your Studio Report.

Form/Process:

Introduce and describe your work addressing its general information(e.g. medium, materials, scale, ‘gestalt’ impression, display method etc.) as well as specific formal qualities (e.g. texture, light, line, colour, evident methods etc.).

Content:

Discuss how these formal qualities can relate to and communicate certain ideas or experiences that you are interested in. Remember the adjectives you use to describethe work can contribute to the discussion of content. Your choice of words is important here to acknowledge your subjective position. Avoid overly didactic and ‘closed’ discussions of your work.

·       Paper Formations – organic flower forms, lined paper.

·       Are You Happy Now? – varied blue floor piece.

·       Art Annotations – Green plastic suspended piece.

·       Process Pronunciated – Fucia pink, plastic film.

Contextual Discussion- 3 minutes

Providing a very brief overview of a post-1960 contemporary artist who influences your work, choose 1 work of theirs to compare to your own. This artist MUST be a different artist to those you discussed in your Studio Report.

Form/Process: Describe the formal qualities of the work using adjectives to contribute to ideas of content. Content: What ideas, experiences, and emotions do you think the work communicates? Again, this is a subjective analysis of the work that should avoid exclusive claims and readings. It is expected thought that this analysis would be informed by further research.

Context: Now compare and contrast your work with your chosen influence. How do your formal choices of media and process relate or diverge? Why did you make these decisions? Why do you imagine they did? What overlaps and differences are there in your ideas, topics, emotions etc.? How does this manifest in the work? What else have you found out about this artist? Do you share any influences?

·       Marit Roland

·       Angela De La Cruz

Week 8

Lecture 5:

John Baldessari (1973)

·       He sits in front of some new technology for that time (video camera) making images that move- beyond cinema, beyond film. Was a very technically advanced and expensive activity making films but in the 1970’s video became more accessible for artists to make moving images.

·       Artists were playing with the idea of experience- what experience can they offer someone to take them on a journey? (early video works were documentations of performances)

o   35 Sentences on Conceptual Art- what Baldessari is singing/reading on the video performance.  

Dan Graham (1975) “Performer, Audience, Mirror”

·       This artist is purely narrating his actions in the performance (eg. I am moving my head to the right, to the left… etc.)

·       The large mirror allows each audience member to watch themselves watching the performance - become acutely aware of how they watch a performance.

Richard Serra (1973) “Television Delivers People”

·       Branding the use of television to show people how ‘useless’ television might be. Merely a source of branding/advertising for companies behind the scenes.

Gary Hill (1980) “Prosesual Video”

·       The monotone voice adopted when narrating creates a sombre atmosphere, enhanced with the use of a black background.

·       The powerful thing here is that we implicitly connect his narrative with the ever-changing image on the screen.

·       The very simple white line becomes everything it needs to be when it adapts to each different object narrated (eg. Horizon, ski slope, horizon etc.)

More works by Gary Hill- “Videograms” , “Happenstance”

·       Creates abstracted forms, moments of synchronicity between sound and image as well as discontinuity between image and language. A slippage becomes prominent between how we read text and how we see text.

General Idea “Shut the Fuck Up- Part III” (1984) – Artist Collective

·       Subtle reference to Eve’s Cline.

·       A multi-segmented video.

·       The artist collective’s cleverly deceit makes this video lightly comical.

Gillian Wearing (1997) “2 in 1”

·       An example of a very simple idea becoming very effective- mother and twin sons swap voices. The kids critique her parenting, and she explains how there is love and hate in all human relationships.

·       Simple creative choices that go together can create incredibly rich viewing situations.

·       This is quite a compelling video to watch in terms of time, as she critiques about how her children behave and they critique how the mum dresses.

Omer Fast (2002) “CNN Concatenated”

·       Again, this video is very compelling derived from the simple idea of creating a unique narrative using news reporters words in aid of this.

·       This very simple editing has incredible power to create a whole new narrative out of existing pieces.

·       Quite poetic- pauses, rhythm etc.

·       Post 9/11: in attempt to make sense of the world and what is currently happening. Utilizing the reports from this time to try and make sense of an incredibly complex and political landscape.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (2002) “Dakota”

·       Create flash-based artworks – early net art makers creating these online experiences of purely text and sound, however it is poetry aswell.

o   What happens when you try and make poetry that has sound attachced?

o   What happens when a reader has no control at the speed to read the poem? (Entirely at the mercy of the time and experience that the artists make for us).

·       Forms a ‘porous poem’: one of different entry points, unable to refer back as it is continuous. If one is unable to keep up with the speed, then they will have a different artistic experience to someone who can.

Candice Breitz (2005) “King (portrait of Michael Jackson)”

·       Video recording of selected people singing other celebrities songs. Very effective.

Grant Stevens (2005) “Like Two Ships”

·       Pairs a fast paced poem with different sound: creates slippages between what we hear and what we see.

Video art usually operates on different time-based experiences, so try and push yourself to see what your attention spam is capable of.

Ignas Krunglevicius (2009) “Interrogation”

·       Took advantage of what it means to create a conversation between two screens.

·       This work recreates an interrogation between a police officer and their as yet un-arrested interviewee.

·       Formally, the very simple composition and rhythm adopted here reflects actually a very complex, kinetic soundtrack that is synchronised with every line typed.

·       Bursts of colour or light at certain points might reflect the states of the interviewee.

·       The speed and tempo change depending on the nature of the conversation between the interviewer/interviewee.

[surly01]

This Week In Doom: What Muslim Ban?

Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on February 5, 2016

Hampton Roads Light Brigade at direct action January 31, 2017

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

–Pastor Martin Niemoller

Our foreign policy requires an externalized enemy, as our economy requires a state of permanent war. Were peace to break out across the world, the US economy would shudder to a halt within 60 days.

Ever since Reagan announced "Morning in America" we have been tempted with the promise of returning America to the golden postwar era when white male colossi like Patton, Marshall and MacArthur strode like heroes astride a grateful world. And the corresponding postwar boom in which American industry sold everything it could make to a prostrate world. Who paid for it with money we lent them.

Trump's call to "Make America Great Again," prints nicely on red ball caps but is short on specifics. One example put in practice is the recently announced Muslim Ban, giving color of law to demonization of the Muslim "other." [Note: On Friday night, U.S. District Judge James Robart blocked the entirety of trump’s de facto Muslim ban from taking effect. His ruling, which applies nationwide, froze all relevant provisions of trump's executive order.]

In a recent Harper's article, Lawrence Jackson ruminates about the leaders of the Atlantic-facing victors, usually known as "the West:"

The most arrogant inhabitants of these nations …understood themselves to be the ordained directors of human beings across the globe, across space and time. They were committed to civilization by the sword. Yet not even Reagan was mighty enough to reinstall the American militants who ached to battle the Russians and the Chinese. Reagan took to politics for what he couldn’t achieve in his original profession, acting. He stood in the shadow of John Wayne, a cultural hero who… declared that the problem was that the values of white rule weren’t being exported vigorously enough. Wayne’s films gave audiences a steady dose of what historian Richard Slotkin calls “regeneration through violence.” Both civilization and capitalist bonanza depend on violent encounters and imperial expansion. If the country is to be healthy, it needs some frontier populated by some brand of enemy.

After 9-11, to forestall a "peace dividend" breaking out, America's best minds concocted the Global War on Terror, a concept plastic enough to permit many interpretations, and unwinnable enough to guarantee the Permanent War Economy. Having recently defined that enemy as brown people planet-wide coming for our golfs and guns, now they have infiltrated our borders! Clear and present danger! Wearing hijab! Sharia Law in our streets! Can female genital mutilation for Barbie be far behind?

Enter trump. In our empathy-free times, we think little and care less about what such reckless decisions mean to individuals. Today I am going to challenge you to care.

Demonstrators march from a Department of Homeland Security office through the West Loop on Feb. 1, 2017 against President Donald Trump's ban on refugees and travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)

Several weeks ago, I listened to a Ted Talk by Deeyah Khan, raised in Norway by an Afghan mother and Pakistani father. Khan recounted the rejection and isolation felt by Muslim kids growing up in the West, and the way they get squeezed between two worlds. At a time when executive action careens towards an unconstitutional ban on immigrants fleeing the very countries we bomb, this talk opened my eyes—and ears.

Khan recounted the story of how she had to subsume her own dreams for her life and take on those given her by her father. To be famous, he said, “it's either got to be sports, or it's got to be music." So he threw away her toys and dolls at age seven, and was given a ratty Casio keyboard. She practiced music for hours each day.

Khan started singing and playing, and became good enough to perform before growing audiences. Let her tell it:

I became almost a kind of poster child for Norwegian multiculturalism. I felt very proud, of course. Because even the newspapers at this point were starting to write nice things about brown people, so I could feel that my superpower was growing.

Until one day, she was headed into a store for candy, and found her way blocked by a man intent on making sure she understood who really ran things in Norway.

There was this grown white guy in the doorway blocking my way. So I tried to walk around him, and as I did that, he stopped me and he was staring at me, and he spit in my face, and he said, "Get out of my way you little black bitch, you little Paki bitch, go back home where you came from." I was absolutely horrified. I was staring at him. I was too afraid to wipe the spit off my face, even as it was mixing with my tears. I remember looking around, hoping that any minute now, a grown-up is going to come and make this guy stop. But instead, people kept hurrying past me and pretended not to see me.

So she learned that when faced with persecution of brown people, white people tend to not want to get involved. But her fellow brown people would have her back, right? Not exactly.

Some men in my parent's community felt that it was unacceptable and dishonorable for a woman to be involved in music and to be so present in the media. So very quickly, I was starting to become attacked at my own concerts. I remember one of the concerts, I was onstage, I lean into the audience and the last thing I see is a young brown face and the next thing I know is some sort of chemical is thrown in my eyes and I remember I couldn't really see and my eyes were watering but I kept singing anyway. I was spit in the face in the streets of Oslo, this time by brown men.

The threats continued and the oppression, this time from her fellow Muslims, got worse. And it took the edge that we often hear that the Islamic world visits upon women:

The death threats were endless. I remember one older bearded guy stopped me in the street, and said, "The reason I hate you so much is because you make our daughters think they can do whatever they want." A younger guy warned me to watch my back. He said music is un-Islamic and the job of whores, and if you keep this up, you are going to be raped and your stomach will be cut out so that another whore like you will not be born.

Her family realized they could no longer keep her safe, so they sent her to London. She resumed her music career, but with similar results.

Different place, but unfortunately the same old story. I remember a message sent to me saying that I was going to be killed and that rivers of blood were going to flow and that I was going to be raped many times before I died. By this point, I have to say, I was actually getting used to messages like this, but what became different was that now they started threatening my family.

Eventually after transitioning to work as a maker of films, she moved again, this time to the US. She makes this point:

What most people don't understand is that there are so many of us growing up in Europe who are not free to be ourselves. We're not allowed to be who we are. We are not free to marry or to be in relationships with people that we choose. We can't even pick our own career. This is the norm in the Muslim heartlands of Europe. Even in the freest societies in the world, we're not free. Our lives, our dreams, our future does not belong to us, it belongs to our parents and their community.

So this lack of freedom to choose personal autonomy is what we decry in our conflict with Islam: "Islam is a death cult." "Look how it treats women." Yet compare and contrast with the policies announced and espoused by the current trump/pence regime.

Trump wants to completely ban abortion, with exceptions only for rape, incest, or when the life of the woman is in danger. He's backed this up by showing support for a ban on abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. He has also said there should be "some sort of punishment" for women who seek abortion if outlawed.

He has said of Planned Parenthood, which provides low-cost family-planning services, cancer screenings, and other health care to millions every year, "It is like an abortion factory, frankly."

Mike Pence said he wants to see Roe v. Wade on "the ash heap of history", and has a long record of attacking reproductive freedom in his state.

Also on the books are rollbacks of all 25 of the grant programs managed by the Office on Violence Against Women, housed in Justice. The grants, established by 1994’s Violence Against Women Act, go to organizations working to prevent domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, stalking, and elder abuse. Perhaps to be expected from an administration that features a principal with a history of domestic battery.

Denying women reproductive freedom has long been the Holy Grail of Christian Dominionists who have never gotten over The Pill. The Pill gave women the ability to control pregnancy, and with it far more autonomy over their lives. Couple these efforts with the assault on programs that combat violence agaist women, and you begin to trace the outlines of a program to re-chattelize women that sounds positively… Islamist.

Consider in the singular example of Deeyah Khan how Islamists treat women, and realize that this story is re-enacted across the world millions of times over. Then compare with announced trump/pence policies designed to deny women access to services won over decades of activism and legislation. It would appear that the difference is merely one of degree. Policies to repress the rights of women stem from the same shrunken root: an insecure manhood and a need for control. Women, beware short fingered vulgarians and the men who serve them.

Surly1 is an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere, and once quit barking and got off the porch long enough to be active in the Occupy movement. Where he met the woman who now shares his old Virginia home and who, like he, is grateful that he is not yet taking a dirt nap, and like he, will be disappointed to not be prominently featured on an enemies list compiled by the incoming administration.

[trystanevansfilmmaker-blog]

Software Analysis:

Across the past year I have employed many different programs along my journey. Bellow is a list of the programs I can use to a decent level. I shall talk about each of them in turn, highlight there strengths, weaknesses and also  key features.

AVID:

I first used Avid media composer in first year but found it extremely difficult to use, having to have the technicians help me every 2 minutes. Second year I avoided it really as Perry as editing, I was directing so I sat in on him editing but he I didn't pick up to much really until throughout the process. Third year came round, me and Liam realised that we were going to have to edit the film together, we were going to have to learn  along the way. I used to hate Avid, but now I love it! you have to know how to use it and then it can do wonders! Premier Pro was my favourite but now that I have got used to avid  I much prefer the interface, however in saying that I still do prefer Premier Pro's drag and drop method of importing. Avid Is a very advanced piece of equipment and I do understand why we have been encouraged to use it, however I do believe that we should have had the opportunity to learn more of Premier pro as it is also heavily used in the industry. But Avid is very good and some of my resentment for it is just due to misunderstanding. I like Premier because it is simple but I love Avid because it is a piece of technical wizardry, when you know how to unlock its full potential you can do anything an editor can dream of. Although its advised to mix sound on another piece of software Avid's sound levelling system is extremely nice to use. Avid is also helpful in that you can export AAF. files and put them straight into ProTools to do a proper mix down and re-import it seemingly as it was but yet, much improved. In future I would use avid but only if asked to or if it was standard practice where I work, I would never own Avid because to get licensing as a member of the public it is hundreds of pounds!

Photoshop:

I have use Photoshop heavily in the creating of the creative platforms work, Photoshop is something I am very familiar with and can use it to a decent level. I have use this year  to design my business card, DVD case, disk cover and CV and I am very happy with the outcome. I did start with importing my own drawings and trying to see what they would look like after digitising them and adding colour.  I did this and I was happy with the results, however they lacked an air of professionalism to them. Therefore from then on I only used free pictures I could source from the net, this made things a lot easier as things were ready for me to manipulate strait away. Photoshop lets you do a lot, however something's are hard to find, Robert Green, one of my peers told me something new which has benefited my work greatly.  When having a picture with a black design or black writing you select the darken option from the drop down menu located on the far right of the screen, it then removes the white from the image, making it much more manageable and easily integrated into your design. Trying to get the template so that my DVD disk was the right size was extremely difficult, I ended up having to get my peer Sophie Christ email me a template. I had found a YouTube video regarding building a template, I thought with my skill it should be fine but it proved extremely confusing. However I got my design on the template and I am extremely happy with the result. I feel  I will continue using Photoshop for a long time, it is unparalleled  in its ability and user interface and the more I use it the more I learn of its ability.

DaVinci Resolve 12:

I was only introduced to DaVinci Resolve 12 by James Bonner our second year colour coercionist from our gradate film It's All About The P. I did not use the program myself however, Liam and myself over watched James correct our film (which you will see featured in my showreel) giving him instruction, which he then followed out. The amount of freedom you get to is insane, you can change  any aspect of colour and light with the greatest of ease, DaVinci posses a mathematical application that preserves dynamic range throughout! We corrected our film expressionistically making the scenes more vibrant in our protagonists shop and his flat very drab to reflect where he feels most at home and where also hold the most prospects for him. As in DaVinci the 3 colour wheels are very insensitive which gives you so much more control when you need to make the slightest of adjustments.  You can use the program to simply edit, it has a wonderful multi-camera option which use the number key pad to live mix angles,(which I didn't use but James did show us a bit of its potential). We heavily used their 3D viewer for mapping people's faces for colour correction, you simply click an area and the program maps it across the whole clip, enabling you to not have to go through the footage frame by frame and drawing out the area. This program has a free download option of their website, this gives you a slightly restricted version of the program, but does still give you the majority of tools for colour correction. I would definitely use this programme again, however it is advanced and elements seem a tad confusing, therefore it would take me many hours of practice in order to become able to use it at a comfortable level.

Audacity:

I used audacity in the procuring of a few songs for our soundtrack in the film, we had followed the new set of steps to acquire tracks from audio network, by filling out a form and sending it to Neil Hunt. We were going to show early cuts to the second years to get some feedback, we had only an hour till we were suppose to show, an although we had emailed Neil the day before with all the correct information, we didn't have the tracks. We knew that we would receive the tracks very soon, just not in time, therefore Daniel O'neill advised me as to a way to use audacity to record the internal sound. Thus, anything that comes out the speakers will be recorded at high quality all internally. All we had to do was to change the input of the recording device to the internal sound card, then hit record hand play the songs off audio network. The quality was extremely high, almost as good as if we had downloaded them properly, we realised this was not allowed but technically we knew the licensing would come through very shortly.  Me and dan also took an audio sample of Barry singing from our film, we took the last line of his song and copy and pasted it a few times, thus creating echo. However it required a fade added to the end to sound normal and more importantly to achieve what I wanted to create with the moment in the film. It is quite a simple program however you can actually do quite a lot with it and it is extremely user friendly. I've been slowly learning to use it for a few years now and every now and then it surprises me with its potential.

VLC Media Player:

We used VLC media player regularly to review any video content, it offers a lot in the way of features and is extremely used friendly. You can affect the speed vary easily which proved handy when getting screen grabs for various different reasons. It also will run almost any format of video from AVI. to MP4., this is very useful as I often used several different forms of video.  It also is quick to start up which is not something I can say for quick time movie, which is the university recommended video reviewing platform. Something that helped me at home more than uni, as that VLC is a free download that is in the public domain, getting access and downloading it as extremely easy. I love the simplicity and the layout, VLC has been for years and will continue to be my elected media player.