#also re the 'sister-wife ideology'

[wishesofeternity]

"Antiochos’ and Stratonike’s activities in the eastern part of the [Seleukid] empire are largely shrouded in mystery, but, as Engels has argued, Antiochos was far from idle since he embarked on a large building programme and was active in securing the frontier. There is some evidence to suggest that his new bride accompanied him for much of this period. We can perhaps identify Stratonike’s presence with her new husband in the Upper Satrapies through the gold coinage minted in Susa and Baktria in c . 287. The two gold coin sets are of the same type, the obverse features the laureate head of Apollo facing right and the reverse features Artemis in an elephant biga facing left with the legend ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΣΕΛΕΥΚΟΥ in exergue.

Figure 1: Coin of Seleukos I from Baktria Depicting Apollo on the Obverse and Artemis with Elephant Biga on the Reverse (Houghton and Lorber 2002, SC I no. 163).

Figure 2: Coin of Seleukos I from Baktria Depicting Apollo on the Obverse and Artemis with Elephant Biga on the Reverse (Houghton and Lorber 2002, SC I no. 257).

The reverse image of Artemis in the elephant biga is within the same design type as a large range of other coinage issued by Seleukos I celebrating the success of his elephants and thus his eastern campaigns. The appearance of Artemis is however unique to these coin types. This suggests the emphasis on the close links between the twin gods, Artemis and Apollo, depicted on the obverse and reverse of this coinage . Since there appears to be as a close link between Apollo and Antiochos as there is between Zeus and Seleukos, the presence of Artemis could be seen as a symbol for Stratonike. This would create a series of parallels: Seleukos/Zeus, Antiochos/Apollo, and Stratonike/Artemis. The first two reflect what we see for these two kings at the list of priests of Seleukid kings in Seleukeia in Pieria . Additionally, it may be notable that the sister-wife ideology [...] appears to be evident later in the reign of Antiochos.

As all of the Apollo/Artemis cointypes were produced on high value gold coinage, this suggests that it was issued in order to commemorate a significant event. While the type was similar to other Seleukid coinage, the shift from Athena to Artemis was clearly discernible and unique. The arrival of the new joint-King and Queen in the region to take up residence would have been a suitable moment for the issuing of the new coin type. This advertisement of their new rule certainly falls in line with Seleukos’ wedding speech which confirmed their new roles."

-David Engels & Kyle Erickson, "Apama and Stratonike – Marriage and Legitimacy", "Seleukid Royal Women" (edited by Edited by Altay Coşkun and Alex McAuley). The pictures of the coins are screenshots from the book.

[amongaesthetics]

OK, so I’m re-watching Dexter (the TV series with the serial killer not the cartoon with the little kid scientist who wants to be evil). And I’ve got two really big thoughts that someone needs to hear.

The first is that the kind of started Dexter off as being sort of ace/aro. They went into a lot of things in the beginning about how he’s dating his current girlfriend (Rita) because she’s got issues with sex and he wanted to avoid sex in his relationship and how he could never be in love with her. And this gave me a little bit of mixed feelings in how I think about it, because whenever they assign these sorts of traits to bad people it’s supposed to be evidence of how fucked up they are. Like, “look at Dexter, he’s a fucked up serial killer who does not enjoy sex and can’t be in love with someone, he’s really-really messed up”.

I think it’s problematic because it’s making the ace/aro representation that we do have more of a representation of how people who fit within those categories are not truly human. But on the other hand, they cement this ideology even further through Dexter‘s character by eventually making it that he is in love with Rita, that he does enjoy sex with her. He marries her and has a child with her and starts to fit within this range of normal, except for the fact that he is still a serial killer and this is supposed to be exemplifying him becoming more of a “real person” while he does those things.

The other big critique I have as I’m re-watching is that, all of Dexter’s problems are caused by himself with exception to the first season. The first season, Dexter’s big bad brother Brian is back in town, killing people, reaching out to Dexter and causing him to question his foundations and his choices and Deal with a lot of trauma, while also trying to deal with the fact that his brother wants to have a relationship with him. That’s not really Dexter‘s fault. However, he consistently makes bad choices throughout the rest of the seasons where he’s like “maybe I don’t have to kill this guy. Maybe they can teach me something. Maybe I can learn from them. Maybe I’ll just get close to them and everything will be fine…”. For example, the serial killer that does kill his wife, like the guy who is sister eventually ended up seeing him kill, like those serial rapist murderers that he deals with in season 5 who set a trap for him, like him trying to make friends with that ADA serial killer, like his NA sponsor who tries to burn alive his step kids.

His issues aren’t that he is a serial killer, it’s that him being a serial killer defines the way he approaches every other relationship that he tries to enter into and causes him to enter into relationships with dysfunctional murderous people who want him dead.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

By Michelle Goldberg July 26, 2024

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2016 memoir that made JD Vance a celebrity, he described constantly remaking his childhood self to fit the rotating cast of father figures his unsound mother brought into their lives. “With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it, I pretended earrings were cool — so much so that he thought it appropriate to pierce my ear,” Vance wrote. “With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of ‘girlieness,’ I had thick skin and loved police cars. With Ken, an odd man who proposed to Mom three days into their relationship, I was a kind brother to his two children.”

Vance’s yearning for a father is a constant theme in the book, as is his willingness to rationalize the flaws of the men he looks up to. At one point, he is reunited with his biological father, who gave him up for adoption when he was in kindergarten. The women in Vance’s life — not just his mother, but also his beloved sister, grandmother and aunt — told him that his dad had been “mean” and abusive, but he doesn’t believe it, preferring to think that there had only been “a bit of pushing, some plate throwing, but nothing more.”

His father was a devoted Pentecostal, and for a time Vance gave up his Black Sabbath CDs and became one, too. “I’m not sure if I liked the structure or if I just wanted to share in something that was important to him — both, I suppose — but I became a devoted convert,” he wrote.

“Devoted convert” may be the role he inhabits most naturally. In 2016 Vance speculated that Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” Now he’s his running mate. A lot has been written trying to understand Vance’s ideological journey, but at least part of the story seems to be hiding in plain sight in his book. In attaching himself to the most bellicose patriarch he can find, he’s re-enacting a childhood pattern.

There is, of course, nothing inherently pathological about changing one’s political views. Vance, however, swapped out not just his beliefs but his entire public persona in just a few short years. “Hillbilly Elegy” contains an indictment of “conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics” who spread lies about Barack Obama’s religion and birthplace. And it laments the corrosive cynicism that led many in his white working-class community to embrace these falsehoods.

Vance presented their views as self-defeating: “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us,” he wrote, adding, “You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society.”

Now Vance promotes all these things. He’s argued that Alex Jones is more trustworthy than Rachel Maddow and that Joe Biden may be intentionally flooding the country with fentanyl to kill off MAGA voters. He gave a speech in 2021 titled, “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

Vance’s new worldview can be explained in part by opportunism: He was anti-Trump at a time when Trumpism seemed likely to fail. And he’s said he was “red-pilled” by the cultural upheavals of 2020, a common enough phenomenon, especially in the Silicon Valley circles he travels in. But there is something particularly extreme about Vance’s transformation, suggesting he hasn’t left behind the mutability that once served as a survival strategy.

As Gabriel Winant wrote in a perceptive essay in the journal N+1, “Hillbilly Elegy” is fundamentally a book about unresolved trauma. In one of the book’s final moments, Vance gains some insight into his own behavior by reading up on “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. Kids who endure violent and chaotic childhoods like his, he wrote, “become hard-wired for conflict. And that wiring remains, even when there’s no more conflict to be had.”

His upbringing had taught him that “disagreements were war, and you played to win the game.” Understanding this, he wrote, helped him navigate his relationship with his wife, Usha. But he seems to have stopped there, rather than reckon with how his pugilistic instincts shape his approach to the wider world.

In 2020, Vance wrote an essay detailing his journey from Pentecostalism through the new atheism of Christopher Hitchens and finally into Catholicism. He portrayed his young adult rejection of religion as essentially mimetic, something he absorbed from his university surroundings rather than decided on for himself. One of the things that brought him back to religion was meeting the right-wing venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who would eventually become a patron. Thiel “was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian,” Vance wrote. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019. By then, he’d become part of a new conservative elite in which many leading intellectual figures were also Catholic.

Now this person of unusual suggestibility has become second in command to a first-order demagogue, giving himself over to MAGA theology. As Mother Jones reported on Thursday, Vance recently endorsed a new book called “Unhumans,” co-written by the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, which demonizes progressives as nonpeople who must be crushed by extra-democratic means. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” the book’s co-writers say.

It is perhaps not surprising that Vance has ended up in this milieu. Authoritarian personalities, as the German social psychologist Erich Fromm argued, long to dominate, but they long just as much to submit.

[sayuricorner]

Ever After High x Twisted Wonderland AU  Headcanons part 6

Part 5.5

AU concept

MASTERLIST

Warning: English is not my first language so sorry if it’s confusing

So, after those few continuity headcanons parts let’s go back to more general headcanons! ^^

This part will focus on the EAH teachers who left the school and who were hired in NRC.

General:

-After most of the students were withdraw from the school, a good portion of the teachers got fed up with headmaster Grimm’s nonsense and decided to leave the school to be hired in others school.

-Some of those teachers got hired to teach at NRC.(Yes Crowley is a big opportunist! XD)

-The newly hired teachers do either the same job they were doing at EAH either a new one.

Professor Badwolf-Hood:

-After Cerise and Ramona were withdraw from EAH, him and his wife, Red riding Hood, moved from the White kingdom to a more welcoming town toward their family.

-After the girls got accepted into NRC and he got hired at the school, the whole family take back their whole family name,Badwolf-Hood,  not faring anymore to be punished and rejected.

-At NRC, professor Badwolf-Hood is a school supervisor/councelor, he monitoring the school with the duty to make sure there’s no unauthorized magic fighting or any kind of fights in the school grounds. He is also in charge of some detentions monitoring.

-He is also teaching as a sport teacher with Ashton Vargas and teach to the students more pakour like sports.

-Since he became a school supervisor, unauthorized fights became less frequents and the most troublemaking students like the Savanaclaw walked more in line.

-Most of the students are intimidated by him and many, like the Savanaclaw students, respect him.

Baba Yaga:

-Her being one of the teachers who left EAH was quite surprising, but let’s just say that after things go down hill at EAH she realized how ridiculous Milton Grimm’s ideology was and that he was way out of line regarding Raven Queen and left.

-After being hired at the NRC she become a school advisor in spells and potions.

-She even give private tutoring sessions to students who got difficulties or who want to deepen in a subject in potions or in spells lessons.

Evil step-librarians:

-After they left EAH the two sister got hired in the NRC as school librarians.(I headcanon the NRC to not having an official librarian since in TW there seem to not have one and it always others characters like Crowley who told to students to be quiet in the library.)

-They’re very strict and don’t hesitate to severly punish students who broke their library rules.

-Most students found them annoying and tend to call them the “crazy old hags”.

-Some students keep causing trouble in the library but after some detentions with the two sister in which the punished students were forced to re-catalog entire sections and claning the whole library, all students begined to respect the library’s rules. And they make sure to not call them the “crazy old hags” to their face.

-If they’re cranky to most students they’re nicer to students like Azul liking his gentleman attitude.

-Nobody is exempt from the library’s rules not even the teachers or the headmaster.

-”Headmaster Crowley! As the headmaster of this school we got respect for you but that not dispensing you from following this labrary’s rules so hush!”

Giles Grimm: 

-When students and teachers beging to left EAH an investigation was launched and Giles was found prisonnier underneath the school and under a curse of speaking Riddlis.

-The investigators forced Milton Grimm to free his brother and to undo the curse.

-The two brothers tried to talk but Milton’s stubborness about destiny make any form of discussion impossible.

-So Giles, sad and desipointed by his brother’s behavior, left EAH.

-Some times later he is hired at the Night Raven College as an general history teacher.

-To everyone’s surprise, it turn out that headmaster Crowley and Giles Grimm are old friends who knew each other long times ago even before EAH’s and NRC’s foundations during the times where the Ever After world and the Twisted Wonderland world were still connected before being separated by Milton Grimm’s spell.(I kinda headcanon Crowley to be way older than he look since his age is unknow.)

-Giles is also an acquaintance of Lilia Vanrouge, the Grimm brother met him when Lilia was way younger and since Lilia is apparently very old himself despites his childish appearence you can guess that their meeting goes back to very very long ago.

-He always make sure to use his great history knowledge to make his lessons interesting and his nice personnality make him well liked by the students.

Additional headcanons:

-Others EAH teachers are either in other schools either still at EAH but if you want a teacher who is not in this list to teach at NRC go ahead! 

TAG LIST :( a reblog will get you a place in the tag list! ^^)

@virgil-is-a-cutie

@zebrabaker

@icant-choosename-help

@twistedwonderlxnd

@cowardlybravette

@iwilldietomorrowyees

@balsae

@shinypainterkid

@biscuitbirdpeach

@feuilleszuyu

[moon-yean]

could u elaborate what was so bad about the barbarians? i saw the show and thought it was ok but i don't have enough knowledge to know what are the ideological implications of it? sorry, just really curious and wanna learn more

*takes a deep breath* oh boy, where to even begin? Thanks for your question as I might finally get this off my chest! Okay, fair’s fair, anyone who likes the show should look away now because I’m not going to mince words. And I want to reiterate that there were things about the show that I liked, mostly on a superficial aesthetical level. Generally you could tell from the get-go though that the writers are hacks who know nothing about history or good storytelling for that matter. I could’ve dealt with a show that was historically inaccurate if only the character drama had been written well. I might also have enjoyed the show more if the character drama had been mediocre but if there had been a sense of historical authenticity (not accuracy, mind; but still something tangibly more substantial than the patina they tried to throw onto their frankly embarrassingly lowbrow attempt by having parts of the dialogue translated into Latin by an expert and by hiring a good crew for the costume and props design - of the Romans at least... putting lipstick on a pig and all that, although pigs are great and the writing here is not).

Since you asked about the ideological implications specifically, I’ll start with that and work my way towards other criticisms (this is going to be LONG):

19th century nationalism: The story of Arminius and his merry band of brothers who defy the big bad Roman empire is a narrative that became especially popular in Germany in the 18th and 19th century, both with liberal patriotic movements that were advocating for the unification of the “German cultural nation” in a modern nation state (spurred by the Wars of Liberation against Napoléon Bonaparte and French occupation) and later with the völkisch movements where that nationalism segued into the pseudo-scientific racial ‘theories’ of a ‘superior German race’ which in turn was part of the ideological foundation of the genocides and atrocities committed by Germany in the 20th century (not only in WWII, see also the colonial genocide of the Herero in 1904). We cannot disentangle this predominantly racist reception history that re-invented Arminius (”Hermann der Cherusker” - “Hermann the Cheruscan” - or, indeed “Hermann the German” ha!) as the founding myth of a German people from the way this story has been depicted in media, entertainment and culture and, as evidenced by Barbarians, continues to be to this day.

Barbarians pays lip service to the fact that actually there was no German people at the time by having the tribes meet at the Ting in the first episode and have someone outright state it. These kinds of tidbits literally voiced by characters give off a strong whiff of the authors googling something, reading something on Wikipedia, and then putting it in there. I’m sorry (actually not sorry) to come down harsh on this but given what we’re talking about here, that’s just not good enough. It’s an embarrassing level of “writing”. The authors clearly have NO idea what they’re talking about or what they’re dealing with because despite their lip services, they actively reproduce the harmful narratives that were spun around this actual historical event and these actual historical figures in the 19th century. No effort was made to depict anything complex or realistic here. Case in point: Even though there’s a pretense that the tribes aren’t part of the same people, they don’t look much different from each other, they all speak the same kind of modern high German that sounds like they’re at a costume party in the year of our lord 2020 (and in the case of Folkwin, drugged out of their mind; he sounds like a guy who’d throw beer cans at passersby). They come across as basically just being separated by the few acres between their villages. And then when the big bad evil Roman empire wants to squash their resistance (Asterix did it better change my mind challenge), freedom fighter Arminius rallies them together with a heroic speech and they charge at the Romans RAAHWWHR! ... no, just no.

There would have been SO MANY ways to reframe and retell this story in a fresh, new, and exciting way that would have made for amazing character drama. The premise is so good. If we were to look at the basics of what is known, there are so many personal AND political complexities in there that just beg to be coloured in with a little imagination. I just... I don’t even know where to begin to fix the choices that the show did go with since most of them don’t make any sense, don’t contribute anything to the narrative and are just. there. Have y’all noticed that there is ZERO dramatic tension in any of the scenes? Like, what? How?? Culture clash, divided loyalties, identity issues, the way that a militaristic upbringing might warp the mind, feelings of home and belonging and displacement, the return of the lost son, the betrayal of a high-ranking officer, just, there are so many themes that the show could have focused on but it botches all of them, nothing of it feels real, earned, or logical. Characters behave in idiotic ways for the sake of the plot (I wanted to like Thusnelda, I really did, I’m always here for female characters but she was so painfully obviously written by 3 dudes who thought that feminism = praying to the good sisters of the forest and slashing your face aöldksfaökdjf plus the actress could not sell any of it, she sounded ridic).

I’m exhausted just thinking about the many ways in which the writing on the show sucked. Impaired character used as a symbol~ for other characters instead of being a character on his own? Check. Weird mystical shit? Check. Earthbound tribal people who are one with nature? Check. Death on the cross to get that Christian imagery in there? Check. Lack of female characters except feisty!badass!Thusnelda, scheming!conniving!pulling-the-strings!wife, weird!mystical!seer? Check. Varus doing a Herod by demanding first-borns to up the Christian persecuted ante? Check. (All he was missing was the mustache to twirl. Was he even a character? He looked vaguely concerned and sceptical. That was his character.)

Look, the actor Arminius was great but even he couldn’t make sense of any of it. The character work was so shoddy, it was shocking. One minute he’s still all-in with the Romans, ordering lashes for “German” mercenaries without being very conflicted about it, reminiscing with fellow Roman soldiers about the good old times in some fireside bonding, asking his foster father to go home to Rome, and then when bad!dad is like “lol no” (surely they would have had that convo before??? surely Arminius would have known how far his career could go???), Arminius turns around and goes “let’s kill 3 Roman legions!! I’M MAD!!” ... lmao dude, just...

Another favourite of mine: The romance between Thusnelda and Folkwin is supposed to be illicit and against her social status. Does anyone even notice? Does anybody even care? Why did the writers come up with Folkwin in the first place? (His name Folkwin Wolfspeer is a hoot and an embarassment in itself. I wonder whether they used some kind of Germanic name generator. They certainly did use a generic speech generator for the battle speech Arminius gives in the last episode lol)

Back to the topic of a lack of tension. Of course there can’t be any tension if the characters suck. But it’s also because of the design of the scenes and plot points. The cliffhangers are so telegraphed and artificially constructed, it’s almost hilarious. My “favourite” has got to be the one of the first episode: The “hi dad” one. Not only does Arminius go to the village with other Romans in tow who then disappear because nothing in this show makes sense but this kind of revelation also goes against everything we know about good storytelling. There’s a famous quote by Hitchcock and I’ll quote it in full because I think it absolutely applies here (and it is valid for character tension as much as it is for suspense):

There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

I hope you can see what I mean here. Barbarians continuously springs surprises on its audience but it has absolutely no tension/suspense in any of its scenes. The only time where the show even comes close to having any kind of genuinely dramatic moment is the conversation between Arminius and Varus where Arminius tries to hide his hurt and disappointment, and all the emotion in that scene is completely due to the actor since the dialogue is fairly idiotic for what is supposed to be the turning moment. Let’s go back to the basics and imagine what the show could have done differently, even allowing for the way in which the writers wanted to tell it (which, as I mentioned, is not appropriately sensitized to the misappropriation of the material in the past - but even if we go with THAT kind of freedom fighter / lost child narrative, it ought to be done well). And here now follows my actual essay of grievances:

The premise of the story, in as much as we know from history, is amazing: An officer of the Roman army, delivered to the Romans by his tribe as a child, returns to the "country" of his birth as part of the invading Roman army which oppresses the natives of the lands. He switches sides, unites different tribes and leads them to a decisive victory against the Roman army in a battle in a forest that lasted for several days and was cleverly planned by the "Germans" who end up outsmarting the Romans who are victims of ambush and the terrain, being split up and stumbling through the forest exhausted and without finding a way back to the other troops (love that the show as we have it managed to squeeze in the cliché "two armies standing on opposing sides decide to just start running towards each other, epic clash, chaos" (which is militarily so fucking stupid and nobody ever did that)).

Anyway, that premise is amazing. You could do so much with it. And if you wanted to make a miniseries about it, the biggest question would surely be: Why did Arminius switch sides? That’s the key plot point. And themes of otherness, oppression, exploitation, identity, and so on, would be a good fit. The first problem with the miniseries is that it has nothing to say about any of that. Arminius doesn’t even feel like the main character (aside from his actor being a cut above the rest). We don’t get to see much of his POV. We don’t get many meaningful conversations between him and Varus (actually just one after which he has a total character transplant). Instead, we get to spend lots of time with characters that don’t add anything in particular to the central plot nor to any of the central themes. Literally, why? 6 episodes is already pretty fucking short to make Arminius’ turn believable, so you’d better spend most of them on him. This is not material for an ensemble show (nevermind that the other characters suck and are not well-acted and written to behave stupidly... that’s just ON TOP of the fundamental issue of this show lacking a POV).

Like, you can turn this into a big Hollywood action movie about the battle or you make it a character drama where the battle is also told from a character perspective (i.e. focusing on the mounting fear and desperation of the soldiers as the battle drags on for days etc but more importantly focusing on why the battle takes place and why it’s important to both the Romans and the “Germans”). As it is, in the show, we don’t get any idea why the Romans are even there in the first place and pestering the people by demanding some tributes. And we don’t get any idea why the Germanic tribes are so opposed to this or why others of them might not be. We don’t get any of the broader political implications, we just get some eagle-stealing pranks (defiance!! cool, just agitate them in a completely stupid and arbitrary way, why don’t you) and a few people executed because the “Germans” were being stupid. That’s not the scale that’s needed here. And I don’t mean that we needed to see mass executions. In fact, I would have preferred if there had been no such hackneyed and emotionally manipulative device.

Arminius is basically absent for all the early encounters of the Romans with the “Germans”. So while we suspect that the mistreatment of the “Germans” at the hands of the Romans would be a strong motivational factor for him, we don’t actually see him witness any of few hints in that direction that we get, so it doesn’t actually matter for his character arc. I have so many issues with how his arc is written. In the first episodes, we don’t get any sense that he’s not a happy Roman. When a “Barbarian” mercenary ridicules Rome, he has him whipped and we don’t get much of a sense that he’s very conflicted about it. Even just moments before he ends up destroying his effigies of Roman gods, we see him trying to get Varus to send him back to Rome. Earlier in the same episode, he prays to those Roman gods. I’m sorry but wtf? How the turntables... If you want to make it believable that he would turn on Rome, why not start with him already being frustrated with the way that things in Rome work? With the way the army is run? And why not give him a careerist streak and make him frustrated that he can’t advance much further because of his lowly birth and background? And instead of Varus being an asshole to him about it (he’s supposed to be his foster father, surely Arminius would already know how Varus thinks about his people and surely he’d already know how far he can climb up the ranks), have Varus be sympathetic but basically like “sorry, there’s nothing I can do.”

Arminius betraying Rome shouldn’t be about Varus saying something mean~, if anything a personal connection of his with Varus should just make the betrayal harder and be something that he does despite the fact that there are Romans he cares about. If you start out the show with him already having significant doubts about his place in the Roman army and identity issues, you just need to add something to it that will finally breaks the camel’s back. Have him become increasingly agitated by the way the "Germans” are treated by the Romans. Start the show with him making to leave Rome, someone asking him whether he’s excited to return to his place of birth and him joking about it but obviously being conflicted and then overwhelmed when he actually gets there because it totally destroys his sense of self which he has built for himself (and for which we would have needed to see the contrast, even if just for one scene, of how he is treated in Rome – perhaps snobbed by others, not treated equally in some sort of social setting, could be something subtle – to show us and him that as much as he wishes, he is not and will never be accepted as a Roman).

And then when he gets to the provinces, we need to see that from his perspective. What’s his reaction to arriving there? To seeing the familiar landscapes? (Or maybe he was taken as a younger child and doesn’t actually have that many memories of it but feels a sense of belonging anyway.) There are so many scenes in this show that seem to hint at these things but they are completely random and unfocused and interspersed with the stupid village people shenanigans. Varus talks about burning down villages in retribution. Well, why don’t we see any of that? (Nevermind that it’s comic book villain level of evil, but I’m working with a fix here and not a total rewrite as would be better.) Surely it can’t be too expensive to burn down a few huts in the night. And having Arminius ride along / witness it but not say anything even though we can see these things having an effect on him. As mentioned: The worst offense is the scene when he rides to the village (with other Romans in tow!) and announces “hi dad!” just to have that cliffhanger. Wtf?

Characters doling out information that the viewer doesn’t have is the absolute worst way of telling a story and maintaining tension. It should be the other way around. How about instead you have him be part of a Roman delegation that rides into the village and demands [random, whatever, the fucking eagle if you must keep that shit] and when the Reik (whom the audience already knows to be Arminius’ father) doesn’t want to give it (because he’s not actually a weak fucking clown as almost everyone in the actual show is aside from feisty Thusnelda who’s a fierce~ fucking clown rmfe), the Romans begin beating the dad or whipping him or whatever, completely humiliating him and his people, and we see Arminius on his horse watching the show with growing unrest until the realization really hits him that this is his father (cue flashback to a very young Arminius being dragged away) and the tension keeps ratcheting until he shouts in German “that’s enough” before correcting himself to give the same command in Latin (maybe he still thinks in German, would be an interesting idea) and the Romans look at him with suspicion, like wtf was that, and the "Germans” are like, why tf does this Roman officer speak German, and it’s super awkward and shit and maybe Varus is also there and he looks at Arminius like, oh shit I need to protect my boy he’s actually all up in his feels about these wildlings let’s go back to the camp and have a talk, and so the Romans end up leaving and the “Germans” are like “wait, was that... could it have been.. remember lil Ari who you gave up... but it couldn’t be...” and meanwhile the beaten dad doesn’t want to hear any of that because he actually has never dared hope he would see his son again and also he kind of doesn’t want to see him again because he would be too ashamed to meet his eyes.

And then later we see Arminius pacing up and down in his tent because this won’t let him go, even after he had a talk with Varus, and after some agonizing he steals away in the night to go confront his father (if you want to keep that German mercenary noticing shit, have him notice that). And then we see the father in his hut and everything is quiet and we are waiting for Arminius to show up because we know he’s on his way. But we don’t know whether he wants to talk to his father or just kill him in revenge for the trauma he’s caused him. You’d show the dad and if it were a good actor, you could see so much in his unrest, maybe despite not wanting to think that that guy could be his son, he kind of knows in his heart that it must be and he’s unsettled and whatnot and then we hear someone outside the door and the door opens and there stands Arminius in a cloak and there’s none of that ridiculous music that wants to scream “epic” but falls way short. Have it be quiet. Have Arminius enter and pull back the hood and they just look at each other. And the dad looks like he wants to hug him but he doesn’t move. And Arminius looks like he wants to murder him but he actually moves to sit down, all the while they keep an eye on each other because who knows, they might actually end up murdering each other. That’s the kind of confrontation you need with a reunion like this jfc. And then they talk and it’s an important scene and I’m not going to write it all out but I hope y’all know what I mean.

I feel like you’d have to rewrite this whole show to actually give the character drama the weight that it needs and deserves because what’s happening in the show is dramatic af but you wouldn’t know because it’s so unbelievably stupidly written. I CANNOT believe that when Arminius is back in the village, he’s standing around with Thusnelda and Folkwin in a field as if they’re catching up at a high school reunion. “So, how’s it been?” “My name is now Arminius lol” “You’re kidding lol” ... uhm hello ??? Is this show a meme or...???

Actually as a last thought, I would have kept Arminius’ mother alive and killed his dad. His dad is irredeemable. He gave him away. But if we assume that he never had a substitute mother, then meeting his mother again (who was against giving him away) would make for much more interesting scenes and would also have a much stronger impact on Arminius. I’ll stop now but I just wanted to note how much I hate the writing on this show and everything it chooses to be. Thanks.

[sclfmastery]

Dude, Simm!master deserves all the love and joy in the world.

Well I super appreciate this and I know the muse does. At the same time, it’s good to contemplate this in (attempting) being a responsible blogger. A redemption arc should not be an apologia.  I need to be careful. 

 I think it’s important to acknowledge the things Simm Master did that were pretty dreadful, LOL.  What complicates matters, of course, which is kind of the thing this blog harps on about all the time, is that the Master is the Master (and at times, Missy), right? From one face to the other, the same entity.  What changes, arguably, is contingent upon who is at the writing helm at the time, more than “personality differences between faces/incarnations.” You may already know this, but it’s called the Watsonian vs. Doylist perspective.   The problem with most of the Simm Master hate, I think, is that people mistake the Doylist reasons for his behavior as Watsonian reasons.  Basically, one should acknowledge that  some of the explanations for in-universe behavior boil down to bad, tone-deaf writing.  They’re Doylist reasons. 

RTD, Moffat, and Chibnall are ALL guilty of writing the Master/Missy irresponsibly.  @modernwizard recently made a post about Chibnall’s racial and gender-based tone-deaf errors in writing Dhawan Master.  When it comes to Simm Master, RTD and Moffat are pretty bad, too, not in representing the Master HIMSELF (a white man), but in his relationships with the people he hurts. 

 It has been, for instance, pointed out that both times the Simm Master mistreated companions of the Doctor, they were black (the Jones family and Bill Potts--the Bill thing, with the Cybermen conversion, even borders on eugenics, which, given the most prominent Western example thereof in real life, bothers me as a person of Jewish heritage more than I can say).   This is incredibly and repeatedly insensitive to a POC audience. 

 Moreover, representations of gender: why would a canonically nonbinary character from a culture that “doesn’t do gender like you humans do” consciously and consistently be misogynistic? To his wife, whom he beat? To Martha’s sister, telling her to “just stand there and be pretty”? To Bill, “do as she says? Is the future going to be all girl?” This not only misrepresents the Master from a Watsonian perspective, distorting the essence of his character for shock value, it’s also an unnecessary way to make him a compelling, “love-to-hate-them” villain to an audience of women.  The showrunners are (perhaps) trying to condemn this kind of ass-backwards misogyny by rendering the ALIEN villain an exemplar of all the most debased qualities in a HUMAN villain, because that’s their Doylist agenda . . . but does it really work?

 I would argue that it doesn’t.  A villain’s flaws should be consistent with his background and his motives.  They should not just be arbitrarily superimposed onto the character “because bad guy.”  The person who actually writes about this the most eloquently in the case of Simm is @the-twohearted-dalek. 

I know these things mostly because of the great writers I’ve encountered here on Tumblr. Characters like River Song, who seem, in Moffat’s hands, to be mere titllating male fantasy extensions of the Doctor, are suddenly brought breathtakingly to life as compelling, sympathetic characters of their own by FAN writers.  Re Simm Master, someone who is great at this is @natalunasans, who makes a series of photoshoots of dolls they’ve designed (as well as fanfictions) portraying the Master as a chronically ill enby.  Again, the issue is a Doylist one. Get a good writer who loves and respects the characters, and gives them flaws that MAKE SENSE, and you’ve got half the battle fought. 

Writing him therefore presents the challenge of constantly disclaiming that one does not condone the outside-universe flaws that are shoved onto who he is by showrunners who are more interested in getting an emotional rise out of the audience than in disseminating media content responsibly and sensitively.  It’s a unique challenge, and worthwhile, but occasionally, I will admit it’s exhausting. 

Another example of this is people who write Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and have to contend with Joss Whedon the Glorified White Male “Feminist’s” giggly need to slip “cunt” into the Avengers Assemble script by having Loki call Black Widow a “mewling quim.”  Loki, who is genderfluid, and whose mother Frigga is his canonically hallowed role model.  Does that add up? Nope. 

However I agree in that it’s also good to acknowledge when someone is earnestly trying to learn from their terrible mistakes and grow. Otherwise there would be no hope for anyone, because everything sentient, literally, is on some level “problematic.”  We build ideologies from the knowledge our neural network acquires while bombarded with literally millions of information cues per second.  We develop mental “shortcuts” that categorize environments and other people. The problem with that is that sometimes those shortcuts lead to stereotypes, which lead to a resistance to continue learning and growing, because we have “those people” pegged.  And that’s, I think, the root of all evil.  Unlearning that ad being open to growth again, with new information, is a part of every good redemption arc. I hope that  for every Master, even this one. 

Thanks for passing on your sweet message to the evil gay tardigrade <3 

[thephilosopheroftheboudoir]

Grim History

Severino di Giovanni: Anarchist Bombs and Anti-fascism

      The time period between World War I and World War II saw the rise of anarchism and fascism, two of the modern era’s most dangerous political movements. Italy was one of Europe’s hotbeds for radical extremism and as migrants went abroad in search of work and to escape poverty, they brought these ideologies with them. Argentina became one place where the two philosophies clashed with the anarchist Severino di Giovanni on the advanced guard, instigating the violence.

    Born in Abruzzi to an impoverished family, Severino di Giovanni later claimed that the constant hunger pangs and fear of starvation would be the primary motivation for his interest in anarchist revolutionary politics. Anarchists of that time believed all people were naturally equal and blamed the mechanisms of government, economics, and private property for the social disequilibrium that resulted in some people having so much food they could never possibly ear it all while others were condemned to a life of scarcity, malnutrition, and the soul-destroying search for adequate means of survival. Therefore, a world without government would be a world of equality and peace. After growing up so poor, Giovanni emigrated to Buenos Aires, got involved in trade unionism, and embraced the convulsively liberating theory of anarchist violence.

    Fascism was also on the rise in Argentina and many Italian fascists had also emigrated to that Latin American country. Upon his arrival, di Giovanni immediately began attending meetings with anarchist groups who planned to fight against the fascists who believed in enslaving the masses of industrial workers for their own capitalistic gain. In 1925, the fascists of Argentina held a public celebration in honor of the Italian king Victor Emmanuel III’s accession to the throne. Many prominent politicians and public figures from both Argentina and Italy were present along with a cadre of Black Shirt thugs, present to maintain order in the crowd. When the orchestra began playing the Italian national anthem, Severino di Giovanni and his companions began throwing anti-fascist leaflets in the air and shouting “Assassins! Thieves!” The Black Shirts beat them up and sent them on their way.

    That same year, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti took place in America. The two factory-working anarchists were accused of detonating a bomb that killed several people. The prosecution’s case rested on the fact that the two men had been caught with Italian language anarchist newspapers. The lawyer also argued that their Italian ancestry proved their guilt since, in the eyes of many Americans at that time when anti-immigration sentiment was at fever pitch, Italians were fundamentally incapable of civilized behavior. The judge was also well-known for having extreme anti-immigrant views. The defense claimed that the newspapers were planted by the police but the judge refused to allow that claim to be admitted as evidence and abruptly ended the trial. The jury found Sacco and Vanzetti guilty and sentenced them to death. A mistrial was declared but the judge refused to reopen the case, citing his dislike of Italian people as the cause. Eventually, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. The case has since been seen as an example of American racism, xenophobia, and an unhealthy fear of immigrants. In the trade union and anarchist movement, it was seen as a rallying cry for revolution.

    Severino di Giovanni had started his own newspaper called Culmine. It was a left wing political paper dedicated to labor issues; he quickly took up the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti and furiously published a storm of articles denouncing the injustice of the trial. Many of those articles made their way to newspapers in America. Di Giovanni was deeply impressed with the Galleanist idea of “propaganda of the deed”, a term signifying the use of public political actions to serve as an example for inspiring further political action. Severino di Giovanni had decided to take action.

    The campaign started with a bombing of the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires; the front of the building was demolished. The Argentinian police sought help from the fascists in the Italian embassy who captured di Giovanni, imprisoned him for five days, then released hum after torturing him the entire time. Di Giovanni and two of his friends then blew up a statue of George Washington and, later in the same day, set off a bomb at the office of the Ford Motor Company. The next day they blew up the house belonging to the Buenos Aires chief of police; he just barely escaped being killed because, without any knowledge of the impending attack, he had left his home and walked down the street to buy a pack of cigarettes. No doubt, ling cancer must have later accomplished the task that the bomb had failed to do.

    Di Giovanni’s bombings continued into 1927 and 1928. The next targets were an American owned tobacco warehouse and branches of two American banks, Then di Giovanni and his two friends, the Scarfo brothers, killed a whole bunch of fascists when they bombed the Italian embassy; it was the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentinian history.

    Severino di Giovanni’s propaganda of the deed turned out to have a polarizing effect. Some anarchists and unionists began accusing him of making their movements look reckless and evil. Others fell in love with his campaign of terror. Fighting broke out between the two sides  until the publisher of an anarchist newspaper got assassinated. Some blamed di Giovanni for the murder but evidence seemed to point to other members of the anarchist community. Di Giovanni decided to end his bombings in order to make peace between the fighting workers.

    In 1930, a military coup overthrew the government of Argentina. Severino di Giovanni married and settled down but eventually left his wife for a fifteen year old Italian immigrant named Fina, the sister of his two best friends, the Scarfo brothers. The couple went into hiding and di Giovanni found employment at a printing press. The police found out where he was working and raided the shop. The attempted arrest resulted in a gunfight; one officer died and the other got injured. Di Giovanni escaped. On a later date when di Giovanni was with Fina, the Scarfo brothers, and several other friends, the police again showed up and a firefight broke out. Di Giovanni was captured and Fina was arrested then set free because of her age.

    Severino di Giovanni was executed by firing squad in 1931. He shouted “long live anarchy”, in Italian of course, before eight bullets pierced his body. His wife was shot a few hours later. The fascists eventually lost World War II. Both anarchism and fascism fizzled out and faded away as capitalism and communism took over. Those two sleeping dogs were not left to lie. Both anarchism and fascism began to re-emege as political ideologies starting in the 1960s. Without any chance of ever becoming a functioning political system, both still have an enormous potential to inspire destructive and murderous violence.

Vollman, William T., Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means. Ecco, 2003.

https://grimhistory.blogspot.com/

[pyreo]

Fixing Incredibles 2: stuff I would do

Hey wanna hear some thoughts on what I’d do to tune up a movie I found slightly disappointing? There’s three main aspects I want to deal with which are

1. badly utilised new supers 2. iffy villain motivation 3. third act was a mess

So here’s a few things I’d wanna do to rework some of that

So first off, that’s a lie, there’s really 5 things that bothered me. this should not have been an immediate sequel where no time had passed. they actually had to backtrack on the character development from the first movie to have them do the same character arcs again. Helen’s back on wanting her kids to stay away from dangerous heroics. Violet’s reward for learning to assert herself, a date with Tony, is erased and she has to win him all over again. Bob, in a weird 180 from his first portrayal where he adored spending time with Violet and Dash during his training montage... suddenly struggles with caring for them, though that’s mostly the fault of Jack-Jack’s powers manifesting. 

So firstly, I’d do what I always imagined the sequel would be and push it a few years forward. Allow it room to change. Have Violet be a college student with Tony as her longterm boyfriend. Have Dash be a teen who’s still eager to save the world, but needing to learn that no danger is better than stopping danger. And make Jack-Jack a child, still in need of supervision but not a total cartoonish liability who necessitates long sequences of adjustment to discovering his powers, again, a retread we already saw last time. Every character arc was a re-do and the constant burden of dealing with Jack-Jack really slowed stuff down. (this was my 5th thing) Fix this by skipping forward. (Also, Violet’s hero moment being... learning that she has to set personal glory aside and babysit Jack-Jack while everyone else does stuff? Are you kidding me?)

We now have a different angle on Helen’s worries - she’s not just concerned about putting her kids in danger. She acts like it, she tells them not to start jumping at the chance to get into heroism. She tells them to apply themselves in school and get normal lives too, in case it doesn’t pan out. But this feels familiar, because it’s what she said in the first movie, and it’s a front. She’s worried about her kids growing up, becoming adults - Violet basically is one - and how she can’t protect them if they move out. She pretends it’s about their powers to cover this. This also refocuses the movie’s main character arc onto Helen like it’s... supposed to be, instead of putting it on Bob’s learning to parent and accept his wife’s super- importance, because despite being framed as Elastigirl’s time to shine, it’s not her story when she doesn’t embody a change of character. It’s still Bob. 

So, those things established:

1. Better villain ideology

Revenge because supers failed to save your parents? Basic. Also not that believable, because the reason the heroes failed to answer Daddy Business’s call is that they’d been outlawed and given new lives as normal people. They could not have come to the rescue; it was illegal. And a superhero enthusiast would have known that. And, hey, ‘criminals shot our dad and then our mother died afterwards of a broken heart’? Are you kidding me? Just have them both get shot, fuck it. Stop this ‘women dying because their man tragically died’ shit. It’s getting melodramatic at that point. 

No criminals, no revenge stuff. Have the Deavor’s parents die when they were in early teens. The brother and sister had to support each other as they started to navigate adulthood. This instilled in them the philosophy that’s common to the type of silicon valley startup wizards they parody - that anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and be hugely successful if they try hard, having come from orphans near poverty to multimillionaires. 

I want both of them, brother and sister, to be the villains together. You don’t really need to twist that. They both come off as helpful fans who want to put their money to use helping supers get back in the game. After all the biggest complaint keeping supers illegal is the property damage and lawsuits, and what fixes that? Money. They also both believe, as is Evelyn’s motivation for real, that superheroes are actually causing the public to develop dependency on them. 

I would set up the siblings as advocates of Randian objectivism in how they work. They think everyone can go from nothing to having everything. They think it’s a personal imperitive to be hard working, to contribute and make yourself a success, without relying on others. They think needing a safety net - superheroes, as a metaphor for social facilities - is a weakness that stops people from taking responsibility for themselves. I want to downplay the ‘tech company who makes tiny cameras’ thing, because that was far too modern day to fit in the 60s, and make it more about sheer money generation and the ability for the siblings to pay off debts and influence public opinion; essentially, that money can get you anything, glossing over the corrupt nature of that by claiming it’s doing the right thing to help the heroes. 

Winston still had a childlike adoration for supers as a kid, but it was killed when he grew up without parents who couldn’t BE saved, followed by extremely hard work in the financial sector, dealing with stress, and realising that he worked just as hard, but got no media acclaim, as people who just happen to have been born with powers. Both siblings invest in personal security solutions, aiming to eventually reveal a plan to put superheroes out of business by outpacing them with technology. To use the free market to provide ways that normal people can protect themselves, without becoming complacent, relying on dubious, flawed heroes, without becoming blind to danger because they expect to be saved. Their evil motto is basically ‘don’t expect anyone to save you’, putting the burden of responsibility on the individual to take care of themselves and be solely in charge of their success or failure. 

The superheroes, of course, represent altruism, saving people just because they can, just because they were given an ability and can use it to help anyone and anyone they wish. Making no judgements between rich or poor, personal backgrounds, social class... everyone can be saved just the same. 

The villains intend to gain the trust of the three main heroes - Mr Incredible, Elastigirl and Frozone - and push them into good public opinion by funding everything they do or break. Destruction is paid for, claims are settled. Heroes shouldn’t have to worry about it, they say. What they actually intend is for the heroes to become dependent on their company for money, just as they see the public growing dependent on supers instead of taking steps to protect themselves. They will set up a huge, climactic battle in the most expensive part of the city, after the heroes have been encouraged to ignore the financial cost to their feats. Then they’ll withdraw support, burying the trio in horrific debt to a level they cannot recover from, while also pushing a new line of tech solutions to make money off people’s protection. Technically, they want to help people, but they need to make sure the legal battle for supers will finally crush them out of work so they can get the maximum profit from their products. 

2. More cohesive new super team

It’s not that they were bad, I just felt it was jarring after the profiles Syndrome kept on his targets - all supers were completely normal people who happened to have abilities. The new guys were okay, but felt like oddball ideas and out-of-place mutants (the whole point is that supers are being pushed into normal lives and hiding their innate abilities. I dunno how you do that as an owl-man). I would make all the new guys young adults and teenagers. 

One, to point out the reality of the situation with supers. The new blood is going to be young. After what Syndrome did, nearly all adult heroes have been killed. I want to point out that, in order to bring back the idea of superheroism, we have to acknowledge that the ones who are going to do that are a generation down. Elastigirl meets them (we’re keeping Voyd obviously, but they’re all nervous youngsters like her, 15-22 ish). Elastigirl get confronted by her protective instinct - legalising supers means all of these kids going into danger. But, through talking with them, she realises how much it means to them, not having to hide who they are. They’re all like Voyd is. They were all shunned, pushed away, and ultimately hid their powers while feeling like absolute shit for being abnormal. There is a very clear real life allegory here. Helen realises that legalising supers isn’t just about throwing yourself into danger. It’s about allowing people to be who they are, and not shame them for something out of their control. They’re unpractised, they’re ashamed of showing their powers to her, and Helen mentally adopts every single one of them instantly. 

Helen gets a montage of training her super team to understand their powers better. She sees them become more at home with themselves after an early life full of restriction and even self-hatred. It’s not just about being cool, it’s about your identity, and Helen gets that and stops having reservations about legalising supers again. It’s bigger than her family. And the Deavors arrange and fund this, because they want as many heroes implicated as possible, they want both generations of supers wiped out and to never be able to return. Dependency is a crutch they would say, and humanity needs to learn to survive without it. We can keep Screenslaver as the fake villain setting up the big final battle, and we can keep his monologue about dependency on screens as a metaphor, but devolving into a diatribe against the nature of neglecting your personal success by vicariously watching someone else’s. 

3. The third act didn’t fit 

We already don’t have the dead weight of baby JJ crashing the pace of the story. He’s a young child, and we’re going to have Edna watch him (she can love it like she does in the movie, Jack-Jack can find her research enriching too). This time it’s Frozone, Elastigirl and Mr Incredible who get taken by mind control. The siblings are going to stage a fight between all three, pretending that superheroes are unstable, liable to turn on each other at the cost of civilian lives. That should turn the public against them for good, while causing massive amounts of damage. They use the Screenslaver persona to set up a showdown in the city, only to capture the three supers and turn them on each other. 

Not mind controlled? Elastigirl’s recruits. They just barely manage to escape it. They go to get help from their mentor, only to find the supers gone, and Violet and Dash seeing the carnage on TV and getting suited up to find out what’s going on. The kids get an introduction and team up together, heading off to stop their teacher and parents, new blood vs old guard. 

That results in six or seven barely trained supers going up against three extremely experienced ones, while they also have to try to minimise loss of life and property damage. While dealing with the trauma, for Violet and Dash, of being attacked by their own parents and not knowing why. Also, they get backup from Honey. Frozone’s wife. SHE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE IN THIS MOVIE. She was designed and then cut and that’s a TRAVESTY. She’s already popular, she was a breakout hit, let her be in this. She steps forward, no powers, regular civilian clothes, and helps the kids out with advice from the ground, picking them up when they fall, and huge vocal encouragement. She kicks ass because that’s what she fucking does. She helps direct the crowds to safety, she tells these kids to look at their super suits and believe in what they’re capable of. And it’s her who snags Frozone after his powers get strategically rebuffed, she grabs him and grabs his goggles off and fixes it herself. 

With another adult on their side and better confidence the new supers manage to pull Elastigirl and Mr Incredible back to reality too, which concludes Helen’s anxiety about their capability and the passing of the torch. They did it, they were responsible - there’s no casualties and with all their powers combined, they managed to avert damage better than Helen and Bob ever did. The adults realise that the kids can be trusted to handle heroism and Helen is super proud of her trainees-slash-children. 

That leaves the actual capture of the villains, which comes down to running from the combined might of all the supers who gradually cut down their ability to escape, culminating in Winston stopping Evelyn from getting away, and having a personal realisation. A resurgence of the boyish glee he once had for heroes stopping the villains. He foils his sister and turns both of them in, willingly, in a weird way fulfilling his dream of saving the day like his idols did. 

To round off, thanks to the rehabilitated (and not sabotaged) hero image, and the display of capability the young supers put on, supers are legalised again. Helen and Bob now work as teachers to the kids as part of a new government program to make sure kids with powers learn how to responsibly control them, Helen of course continuing her role as mentor to her massive new family, and Bob finally able to work without restraining himself. The government agrees that encouraging kids to train properly and learn how to avoid risk and costly situations is worth endorsing. Dash befriends some of the other teens in the supergroup and has friends he can push his abilities with, without it being unfair. 

Finally, it’s time for Violet to move out, because things must move on. Helen, Bob and Frozone (who gets an updated suit because come on) are accepting that they’ll eventually they’ll have to let others take their place. Violet’s going to move in with Tony and get a normal job, because she still yearns for a normal lifestyle underneath it all, but she won’t be far away and can always answer the call to join the family in the field. They all bid her farewell (”Finally maybe I can get some peace without Dash bursting into my room-” “I can run to your apartment in one minute 28 seconds, I checked!!”) but Helen isn’t worried any more, because she has renewed faith in how well her children have grown up and is accepting they don’t need has as much any more. And besides, she has tons more children who need her too and it’s up to her to help them find their true potential. 

Thanks for reading this way too long exercise in figuring out what I wanted from the sequel to one of my favourite films in the world... the original Incredibles was centred around heroes also just being human, who make mistakes and have to grow up and change, and the villain’s fanboy mentality was the antithesis to that. I would’ve wanted a sequel that understood the message of its predecessor in that people have to develop and grow, one aspect of which is letting go, but what we actually got seemed too static and unwilling to move away from what we had already resolved in the first one.

[saved-to-be-sent]

The Image of Heaven

The image of Heaven is different for many: some imagine fluffy clouds, singing angels, pearly gates, and shining lights; others see countless realms of individualized paradises, complete with pets and buffet-style memory replay. The interpretations are almost as numerous as the interpreters. One of the most common aspects among believers, though, is the presence of loved ones, fellow communicants who passed on ahead of us and who are waiting with a congratulation and a harp. It is an almost universal belief in American congregations that our loved ones are looking down on this world, smiling and encouraging us. We cling to this idea, as it gives our lives a purpose: an afterlife we can think of in terms we understand, a verisimilitude that makes our existence seem worthwhile and meaningful. In this way, death becomes a graduation ceremony for believers wherein this mortal coil is shuffled off in exchange for a role as celestial supervisor, watching and waiting for those behind us to arrive and begin their own watches. It is a comforting thought, and nearly ubiquitous in Christian ideology. Scripture and theology, however, may point in a different direction.

My first inclination of a different image of Heaven comes from C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. He notes that there is nothing in the Bible that indicates we will actually be united with our loved ones or that our loved ones will even recognize us on the other side. Strong words coming from a man grieving the premature death of his wife with whom he spent significantly less time than he would have liked. In this assertion, Lewis is touching on a key element of Heaven—it is not the fulfillment-place of our earthly desires and attachments. Heaven is the wellspring of the soul and cannot be constricted to our needs for tearful reunions. The sole reunion of import—the soul reunion—is that occurring between ourselves and the Godhead. We rejoin our loved ones as brothers and sisters in salvation, yes, but our eyes are meant to be turned outward to the majesty of God the King, tripartite and singular, not inward to the fulfillment of mortal expectations.

The idea of mortal expectations (re: reunion) being fulfilled is somewhat, even fundamentally, against the core concept of Heaven as a paradise because it introduces the potential of decidedly non-paradisiacal elements, namely disappointment and sorrow. What good is a paradise where sorrow is prevalent and some denizens are constantly longing for more in the face of others who have all that they need? Families and friends are torn apart daily over matters of faith, but the common conception of Heaven forces the separated faithful to watch as complete families enjoy paradise together. Yet this is inherently included in the mortal reunion model of Heaven. Not every person we know and love is necessarily Heaven-bound; whether due to predestination (a thoroughly dangerous and poisonous concept) or free-will, some will not come to the Father’s table. This is, though sad, a central understanding of our faith. And why some of our fellow citizens won’t see Heaven is important: they refuse to fully accept and embrace their places as children of God and servants of Jesus Christ. The continuing praise of the Godhead is the one and only point of Heaven. For us to recognize and place undue value upon our mortal attachments would be for us to detract from paradise in two instances: first, our sorrow—for it would be sorrow; deep, unending sorrow such as we could never know on Earth, akin only to, yet still dwarfed by, God’s sorrow at our distance from and neglect of His love for us—at the absence of non-believing loved ones; second, our joy over the presence of the prior departed and desire to simply live in Heaven as we did on Earth. Both of these are completely antithetical to the idea of Heaven as laid out in the scriptures.

This is by no means a new idea. One of the greatest poets of the English language described Heaven as non-reunionist in “Pearl,” the poem by which the anonymous author is remembered. The poet’s dream narrative features a child, a mere infant at the time of her death, grown into a woman of grace and stature in Heaven. What’s more, the only attachment she seems to feel for her father (the dreamer) is one of religious affiliation, eschewing notions of corporeal family altogether. She notes, when her narrator-father tries to play on feelings of sentimentality, that her sole focus in the hereafter is her role as a bride of Christ, eternally praising Him. She has been given, quite literally, a new body which itself is free from familial attachment and sentimentality, furthering the idea of non-reunion. Herein is the idea that our reward in Heaven is one of simplicity—when the scales of mortality fall from our eyes, we see a singular, eternal purpose that far surpasses the joys and tethers of anything we experienced on Earth. Even the most rudimentary, base affections of family ties are nothing compared to the call of Heaven’s labor of love (for did Christ not say that to truly follow Him would require leaving one’s father and mother?). The trials of mortality make way for eternal praise. How then can we be solely devoted to the everlasting praise due to the Father of all if we are attending to the emotions connected with a reunion of loved ones? Christ told us through the gospels that He goes ahead to prepare a place for us—we are to join as members of His Father’s house. Becoming a member of a household, as the Bible routinely demonstrates, is taking on a specific function; ours is to praise, no more, no less.

For those surrounded solely by fellow believers, this may initially seem a bleak turn. We put great stock in the idea that we will see each other on the other side—that we will be able to laugh again with our siblings or meet the grandparents for whom we are named. None of this is to say that we will not. Though not centered on reunion of earthly mentalities, Heaven is also not a place of drudgery or mechanical routine: awake, praise, lunch, praise, sleep. That, too, would not be paradise and would diminish the power of the free-will granted by our existence as children of the Most High. It simply means that our earthly cares and connections will not be important, and this is an important facet of the image of Heaven, especially for those intimately connected with non-believers.

I recently had a conversation with an aunt that demonstrated the profound mental/spiritual strain placed on those Christians tied closely to non-believers. She said she would forgo Heaven in favor of being wherever her daughter was (a professed non-religious person). She, a lifelong, devout Catholic, would trade eternal paradise and peace for separation from God for a supposed proximity to her daughter—”wherever she is,” in her words. Glossing over the idea that the only other place for a post-death soul is Hell—and Hell is meant to be torture (more precisely, eternal separation from grace and protection of God, but theoretically extendable to other realms of depravity and deprivation), which means that she would never be reunited with her daughter (because why would there be any meaningful happiness in Hell?)—the idea that we can be sad or remorseful in Heaven is preposterous. This woman—and any other person separated from a loved one—will not, and I believe cannot (if the idea of Heaven as a paradise is to be believed), have the capacity to feel anything but supreme joy when Heaven is attained. Just as being reunited in a recognizable way with loved ones detracts and distracts from the eternal praise-work, so too would being eternally separated. Further, to allow this intense grief to exist as a natural part of paradise—set apart from the natural grief that is human existence—is to fundamentally change the nature of God, making Him ultimately cruel, uncaring, and out of touch.

The idea here lies in the base substitutive concept of Christian salvation. Christ, in His redemptive existence, took upon Himself the weight, the burden, of our iniquity and suffering. For us—in place of us, instead of us—did He die. This did not stop at the cross, but continued into Heaven as He reclaimed His throne. While we exist on Earth, God’s heart breaks for (after) us; He wants nothing more than for us to come home to His loving protection. In Heaven, His heart breaks for (instead of) us; He continues to bear the weight of souls lost to humanity’s mistakes. The loved ones from which we will be separated will not go unmourned; instead of us, Christ suffers. The Suffering Servant is not a one-time title; just as we are called to continually seek out the Heart of Love in Christ, that same Heart chooses to suffer for us. Without final separation, salvation means nothing, yet we do not serve a heartless God. He continually and permanently has our best interests at heart. He has promised to keep up close, to heal us, to protect us. We have no issue, most of the time, believing in the probability of this not looking the way we anticipate while we temporarily occupy Earth; why, then, do we not believe it possible when we get to our eternal Heaven?

[dialux]

Infinity War Reaction: so, like, spoilers through this whole post.

I think.............................. there’s a lot to be said for the acting. This cast is really good, and though a lot of people had like, three lines (cough SebStan cough) they made those three lines memorable. And the plot itself was so disjointed that the cast must have had a hell of a time weaving the storyline together into something coherent. 

I also went in ready for a mess and came out with a more positive impression than I entered, which is not what happened with cacw, the other ensemble cast film, so I’m pleasantly surprised about that. And the movie is... a culmination of the entire mcu, so I wasn’t expecting it to be very character-driven or deep (and imo this is where people are getting irritated with the movie, as well as the fact that marvel chose to dump the movie’s minimal exposition on its villain instead of any one hero)(but unpopular opinion: i’m glad they didn’t have strange ‘’’grow’’’ out of his moral ruthlessness, or wanda declare that she can’t turn her back on the fight, or tony sob about peter’s death- this was a movie about loss that is just... shoved onto you, the disappearance of billions of people in a matter of minutes- and idk I think people changing drastically over that length of time is unlikely, and once you’ve set that aside, imo, the movie didn’t feel as exhausting.)

I think I read two reaction posts right after exiting the theater  (@him-e‘s and @subjunctivemood‘s) and it’s kind of funny but I agree and disagree with them on a lot of points, despite each having relatively separate reactions themselves.

Funniest bit was that Clint/Ant-man just......... took a plea deal. I could not stop imagining the poor data entry person who had to process that nightmare of a thing, like, Clint goes “first active, then I brought in a Russian spy who might be brainwashed, then I got married and hid the family, then I retired, then I un-retired and became a fugitive, now I’m.... retired again bc my wife’s mad at me and I miss the kids???” this convo has no room not to be hilarious, I’m forever mad at marvel for cutting it lol

I liked the beginning.

ngl, it was heartbreaking. 

also though, the movie starts by someone pleading- “this isn’t a warship, don’t fire- please- don’t fire-” and we see Thanos ignoring that, we see Heimdall on the floor, we see Thor bleeding; there were a lot of ways to establish that Thanos was a villain but none so dramatic as this one

And this movie is if nothing else #iconique 

So not exactly a surprise, if you get my meaning

The total message behind the villain’s ideology was screwed up, but the hero’s answers to that? Reminds me of this meta in the asoiaf fandom, tbh: “we don’t trade lives” vs "’Everything,’ Davos said softly.”

It was powerful. I’m still in love with it. 

In fact, I’m in love with the entire idea of the movie- where everything hurts, and hurts, and hurts, and nothing you do is enough, where all you can do is keep pushing against the darkness and it’s winning all the damn time and you know you cannot win, you know it’s absolutely impossible- but you rise and you stand and you fight nevertheless.

Yeah, I don’t like Peter, I never have and never will

honestly I couldn’t get through any of the gotg movies 

I still haven’t watched either of them because he scrapes on my nerves like nothing else

That said, let me just say that I fucking loathe Peter Quill okay this is me hating him 

Pssh Nebula though is gorgeous. Nebula is just. W O W. I might watch specific clips of her and Gamora alone because I have been missing out on that relationship. (SISTERS??? RAISED TO HATE EACH OTHER??? NOW REPAIRING THAT RELATIONSHIP??? I LOVE)

Gamora didn’t deserve to die, but- I think.... I’d have liked it more if Thanos had killed her and realized that it wasn’t love, not in the end, so he gives up something else- I understand why that didn’t work out, because of screen time- but maybe another gem?? Or one of his best lieutenants? Idk that would’ve been a better route, imo.

Relationships what relationships. Who knows who? Who cares about who? What cacw baggage? The only thing the Russos know is that Tony isn’t talking to Steve, and even that isn’t resolved properly, jfc.

I’m glad they piggy-backed off of Ragnarok’s humor, though, using both Banner and Thor to deliver those lines- it was good, and both actors are really good at those punchlines, so.

Though CA’s “I am Steve Rogers” in response to Groot still has me in stitches, that’s one of the best lines in cinematic history

RED SKULL. RED SKULL. RED SKULL.

I’ve never known anything more legitimately weird or jarring.

Was that supposed??? To be a point??? For the next movie???

idk but it looked damn stupid in this one

(Though if the entire point is to bring Steve Rogers to Vormir as a sort of full circle cycle and then Steve jumps into that hole and then he finds out that Gamora isn’t actually dead........ I think I might forgive everything. But only if all of that happens. Not before.)

Re: Strange/Tony, I went in expecting to ship it from multiple friends, but I came out kind of.... lackluster? Idk, I don’t see the chemistry that much- it seems like... they’re both just snappy assholes and used to being the smartest in the room and build off of each other. The Pepper scene in the beginning made my day, lolol.

The deaths could have been better. Ngl, the only deaths that made me feel things were T’Challa and Spiderman. The rest just- happened too fast. 

Though Tony’s face (and Steve’s, and Rhodey’s)- oh, yeah, that was good. 

Anyone else realize that the majority of the people that are left are the original avengers? Avengers4 will be more similar to the first avengers than either Ultron or this one, mark my words, and hopefully better for it.

I really really hope they put in one thing in the next movie of Tony panicking on Titan because he’s faced the thing he’s been afraid of for years now, he’s faced his biggest fucking fear-

Yeah, they probably won’t have time, yada yada yada, but it’d be damn cool if they gave me another panic attack a la IM3. That was good shit right there.

So, overall- I liked the movie, and the best shot of the entire thing (the five minutes that summed it up) were where all the Avengers come to try to stop him, and it doesn’t work, they’re batted aside like little toy pieces, and they face their darkest fears, Wanda kills Vision-

And it isn’t enough.

Thanos has time, has reality, has everything on his side. Wanda isn’t enough. Vision isn’t enough. Strange and Tony and Spiderman and everyone- they aren’t enough.

14 million possibilities, and only one where they win. But that one is a chance, and they aren’t going to let go of hope while that chance exists. There’s almost no likelihood that they’ll succeed, but goddamn does that mean they’ll give up.

That’s a really good motif for the entire movie.

[newstfionline]

For God or party? China’s Christians face test of faith

AP, Aug. 6, 2018

NANYANG, China (AP)--The 62-year-old Chinese shopkeeper had waited nearly his entire adult life to see his dream of building a church come true--a brick house with a sunny courtyard and spacious hall with room for 200 believers.

But in March, about a dozen police officers and local officials suddenly showed up at the church on his property and made the frightened congregants disperse. They ordered that the cross, a painting of the Last Supper and Bible verse calligraphy be taken down. And they demanded that all services stop until each person, along with the church itself, was registered with the government, said the shopkeeper, Guo.

Without warning, Guo and his neighbors in China’s Christian heartland province of Henan had found themselves on the front lines of an ambitious new effort by the officially atheist ruling Communist Party to dictate--and in some cases displace--the practice of faith in the country.

“I’ve always prayed for our country’s leaders, for our country to get stronger,” said Guo, who gave only his last name out of fear of government retribution. “They were never this severe before, not since I started going to church in the 80’s. Why are they telling us to stop now?”

Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, believers are seeing their freedoms shrink dramatically even as the country undergoes a religious revival. Experts and activists say that as he consolidates his power, Xi is waging the most severe systematic suppression of Christianity in the country since religious freedom was written into the Chinese constitution in 1982.

The crackdown on Christianity is part of a broader push by Xi to “Sinicize” all the nation’s religions by infusing them with “Chinese characteristics” such as loyalty to the Communist Party. Islamic crescents and domes have been stripped from mosques, and a campaign launched to “re-educate” tens of thousands of Uighur Muslims. Tibetan children have been moved from Buddhist temples to schools and banned from religious activities during their summer holidays, state-run media report.

This spring, a five-year plan to “Sinicize” Christianity in particular was introduced, along with new rules on religious affairs. Over the last several months, local governments across the country have shut down hundreds of private Christian “house churches.” A statement last week from 47 in Beijing alone said they had faced “unprecedented” harassment since February.

Authorities have also seized Bibles, while major e-commerce retailers JD.com and Taobao pulled them off their sites. Children and party members are banned from churches in some areas, and at least one township has encouraged Christians to replace posters of Jesus with portraits of Xi. Some Christians have resorted to holding services in secret.

A dozen Chinese Protestants interviewed by the Associated Press described gatherings that were raided, interrogations and surveillance, and one pastor said hundreds of his congregants were questioned individually about their faith. Like Guo, the majority requested that their names be partly or fully withheld because they feared punishment from authorities. After reporters visited Henan in June, some interviewees said they were contacted by police or local officials who urged them not to discuss any new measures around Christianity.

The party has long been wary of Christianity because of its affiliation with Western political values. Several Chinese human rights lawyers jailed for their work, including Jiang Tianyong and Li Heping, are outspoken Christians. So too are many Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, not least among them 2014 protest leader Joshua Wong.

“Chinese leaders have always been suspicious of the political challenge or threat that Christianity poses to the Communist regime,” said Xi Lian, a scholar of Christianity in China at Duke University. “Under Xi, this fear of Western infiltration has intensified and gained a prominence that we haven’t seen for a long time.”

Guo, who keeps a small storefront selling ornate doors in a riverside district, once had eyesight so poor that he could not distinguish the sky from the earth. But after finding God at 27 years old, he made a seemingly miraculous recovery that he attributes to his faith.

For decades, he, like many Christians in China, shuttled from one unregistered house church to another, where folding chairs served as pews and coffee tables as lecterns. Two years ago, he and 10 other Christians pooled their money to erect a permanent church on his property.

They are part of what experts describe as a spiritual awakening in China.

The number of Chinese believers of all faiths has doubled in two decades to an estimated 200 million, by official count, as the hold of the Communist party has weakened. Among them are an estimated 67 million Christians, including Catholics--a number that is expected to swell to become the world’s largest Christian population in a matter of decades. This rapid growth has reinvigorated the party’s longtime mission to domesticate a religion traditionally aligned with the West.

Historians believe that Christianity was known to China as early as the seventh century, and was later propagated by Jesuit missionaries starting in the 1500s. In recent decades the religion has faced by turns heavy persecution and tacit acceptance.

During the Cultural Revolution, when Mao sought to eradicate all religions, Christians were jailed, tortured and publicly humiliated. But they survived by operating covertly and grew steadily in number after Mao’s death in 1976, when a populace disillusioned with the Communist Party began to seek moral guidance elsewhere.

Chinese Christians say the Bible gives them a sense of right versus wrong and the strength to endure in a country where power often trumps justice. While China’s rapid growth has brought prosperity to many, others despair at what they see as a deterioration of public morals. The deaths of children in scandals involving tainted infant formula and shoddily-built schools in recent years have led to the sense that modern China was in the midst of an ethical crisis.

“After the ‘collapse’ of communist ideology, no value system has been in place to fill the spiritual vacuum,” said writer Zhang Lijia. “China has witnessed a religious revival in recent decades precisely because of this vacuum and relaxed control.”

Officials once largely tolerated the unregistered Protestant house churches that sprang up independent of the official Christian Council, clamping down on some while allowing others to grow. But this year they have taken a tougher approach that relies partly on “thought reform”--a phrase for political indoctrination. Last November, Christian residents of a rural township in southeast Jiangxi province were persuaded to replace posters of the cross and Jesus Christ inside their homes with portraits of Xi, a local official said.

The poster campaign appears to symbolize what analysts see as the underlying force driving the change in the party’s approach to religion: the ascendance of Xi.

“Xi is a closet Maoist--he is very anxious about thought control,” said Willy Lam, a Chinese politics expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “He definitely does not want people to be faithful members of the church, because then people would profess their allegiance to the church rather than to the party, or more exactly, to Xi himself.”

Various state and local officials declined repeated requests to comment. But in 2016, Xi explicitly warned against the perceived foreign threats tied to faith, telling a religion conference: “We must resolutely guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means.” And in April, the religious affairs department published an article saying that churches must endorse the party’s leadership as part of “Sinicization.”

“Only Sinicized churches can obtain God’s love,” the article stated.

The state-backed Chinese Catholic church at recent conferences has also stressed the need to remain independent of the Vatican and to “Sinicize” itself.

The government is also cracking down on Christians more aggressively through legal means. In March, a prominent Chinese house church leader with U.S. permanent residency was sentenced to seven years in prison after he built Christian schools in Myanmar. And half a dozen Christians were sentenced last month to up to 13 years in jail for involvement in a “cult,” according to U.S.-based Christian non-profit ChinaAid.

The pressure has pushed several dozen pastors and their families to flee to the United States in recent years, ChinaAid says. The wife of one pastor under house arrest left for Midland, Texas about a year ago, after authorities warned that their children might have trouble getting an education in China. She said members of their church in China were barred from being baptized, and even a simple Christmas service was interrupted.

“The government says that we have religious freedom, but really there is no freedom at all,” said the pastor’s wife, who asked to remain anonymous for her husband’s safety. “Many of our Christian brothers and sisters are upset and fearful.”

Those who resist pay the price.

After Jin Mingri, a prominent pastor who leads Zion Church in Beijing, refused local authorities’ request to install surveillance cameras inside his house church, police individually questioned hundreds of members of the 1,500-person congregation, he said. The congregants faced veiled threats, Jin said, and many were asked to sign a pledge promising to leave Zion, which the government agents called illegal, politically incorrect and a cult. Some people lost their jobs or were evicted from rented apartments because police intimidated their bosses and landlords.

For 11 years, the church has been housed on one floor of an office building, but the property management informed Jin in May that they would have to move out at the end of the summer. Jin said the management admitted to being influenced by external “pressures.”

“A lot of our flock are terrified by the pressure that the government is putting on them,” he said. “It’s painful to think that in our own country’s capital, we must pay so dearly just to practice our faith.”

At the epicenter of the drive to control the Christian community in China is Henan, the cradle of Chinese civilization and the entry point for many of the earliest foreign missionaries. Today, the province is one of the most populous in the country and a key part of Xi’s fight against poverty, as proclaimed by red banners across acres of peanut farms and oil fields.

Around the time authorities ordered Guo’s church to stop congregating in March, his district announced a crackdown on private Christian meeting spots. On a single Sunday morning, the announcement said, 700 religious banners were removed, 200 religious texts seized and 31 illegal Christian gathering places shut down. Officials went door-to-door stripping decorative scrolls bearing the cross from home entrances.

In Zhengzhou, Henan’s capital, all that is left of one house church is shattered glass, tangled wires and torn hymnbooks, strewn among the rubble of a knocked-down wall. Pegged to another wall is a single wooden cross, still intact.

The church inside a commercial building had served about 100 believers for years. But in late January, nearly 60 officials from the local religion department and police station appeared without warning. Armed with electric saws, they demolished the church, confiscated Bibles and computers and held a handful of young worshippers--including a 14-year-old girl--at a police station for more than 10 hours, according to a church leader.

The authorities called the church illegal. The church leader said they had brought documentation to the religion department three or four times in an attempt to formally register it, but never received a response. Now, they have ceased to congregate.

Xu Shijuan, a 63-year-old Seventh-Day Adventist held house church gatherings in her living room for four years. She stopped in March, after a group of men led by a local official ordered her to disband the meeting of about two dozen elderly Christians.

“If you don’t heed our orders, the next group to come will be law enforcement,” he said, according to Xu. “They will use force to disband you.”

Xu readily complied. “The people have dispersed, but our faith has not,” she told the AP at her home in Zhengzhou. “God’s path cannot be blocked. The more you try to control it, the more it will grow.”

Inside Guo’s church, he has refused to remove the cross and other decorations, telling authorities they are within his private property.

Among them, pinned to a wall in the nave, is a bright blue poster that quotes China’s constitutional promise of religious freedom.

[whyspeakin]

All About Kalpana Chawla, Why She Is Best Astronaut

Kalpana Chawla Death Reason

Kalpana Chawla,  died on February 1, 2003, in an accident in the space shuttle Columbia somewhat over Texa, United Status, while approaching to earth, in an accident.

It is just after 9 a.m. at Cape Canaveral. At the Command Center in Houston, the first wave of panic takes over. Kalpana Chawla Husband - Jean Pierre-JP,  response to their last message from mission control had been aborted midway. All communication with Columbia got disconnected. However, it is a routine when a spaceship re-enters the earth's atmosphere. Jean Pierre-JP to those who know him—to is aware that this is commonplace. However, successive calls go unanswered. At about the two-minute mark, before touchdown, JP does not hear the expected double sonic booms of the shuttle overhead. As the minute pass, the silence becomes deafening. For the first time, the ground crew feels that something has gone wrong. On television screens across the world, the white streak has turned to a series of white spots in the sky. At this moment speculative ideas began to trade-in media about Kalpana Chawla death reason. The first fearful questions have begun doing the rounds; phones are ringing all over the world and what can be the Kalpana Chawla Death Reason. At the landing site, officials with cellphones glued to their ears are exiting the viewing area. The worst is feared. The world does not have to wait until the official word is out. Columbia has blown up, and its debris is raining down on the southern states of Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. It is darkness at noon. At the Kennedy Space Center, workers hunch over their terminals in complete shock, while at the same time, family members of the crew are being herded together at Cape Canaveral. Shuttle contingency is declared. In the Houston home of Kalpana, her family stares in disbelief at the television screen. Monty won't be coming home. And, in her hometown, the party for the schoolchildren is over. Instead, the stunned inmates of Tagore Bal Niketan join one billion countrymen in mourning their brightest star. An abrupt end to a space journey for six other brave astronauts too. But in her wake, forty-one-year-old Kalpana leaves behind many unanswered questions. What made it possible for this petite girl from Karnal to successfully undertake such an incredible journey that spanned not only continents but also cultures and finally ended in space? Unlike what many others would have done, Kalpana had chosen to come out of the comfortable cocoon of a well-to-do family, preferring instead to explore the world, taking the challenges as they came. Overcoming a host of prejudices, this five-foot-tall, slightly built girl, armed with only her radiant smile and fierce determination, had managed to realize her dream. Therein lies one of the most compelling stories of our times, one that begins in a house in downtown Karnal in 1961.

Kalpana Chawla Family Details

Father: Banarasi Lal Chawla Mother: Sanjyoti. In 1961, the household of Banarasi Lal Chawla, in Karnal, was expecting the arrival of a baby. By the persistent kicking in the stomach, Sanjyoti, going by midwife tales, felt that it was probably going to be a boy—she already had two daughters and a son. But lo and behold, the fourth member born to Banarasi Lal and Sanjyoti Chawla turned out to be a very energetic baby girl. It wouldn't be the last time that Kalpana would surprise her parents. The Chawla household had only recently moved to Karnal. Banarasi Lal, like thousands of others in the wake of the Partition riots, had trekked across from Pakistan, with precious little of his own. Only those with grit eventually made it and, more importantly, we're able to put the bloodshed behind them and move on with their lives. For Banarasi Lal, then a teenager, and his family, the first stop after leaving Gujranwala in Pakistan was Ludhiana. As refugees, they had to begin from scratch, and Chawla senior, along with other members of the family, started on a host of businesses, including selling wares as a street hawker. With each change in occupation, he started nudging up the social ladder. The progress was slow, till the extended family finally moved to Karnal. They took up a two-storeyed house in the middle of the town, close to the family business, which at that time was merchandise in clothes. A little later, the family took to the company of manufacturing tyres, which turned out to be very lucrative. Through all this, the Chawla household retained its spirituality. Banarasi Lal's parents had abdicated worldly existence and moved into a little house on the outskirts of Karnal town to spend their last years in spartan life. The religious attitude in the family was secular. While Banarasi Lal himself read the Guru Granth Sahib, his wife Sanjyoti followed to the preaching of Pune-based Swami Rajneesh. As far as food was concerned, the household was uniformly vegetarian, a habit Kalpana retained even years later when she went up in space as an astronaut. The years of struggle were not lost on Montu, as Kalpana came was popularly known affectionately known in family circles. Though by then the family business had begun to thrive, the basics-never let up in your effort-were never forgotten. From virtually nothing, her father had built up a lucrative business and had even received a laurel from the President of India for an indigenously designed machine to manufacture tyres. Just before the Columbia launch. Her easy-going nature and by then radiant smile masked the extent to which the child had absorbed her father's experience. It would be many years before the family would first realize how this slightly built, the dark-eyed girl had imbibed the family traits of grit and determination. Time and again, after that, the baby of the family would prove unflinching in her resolve-something that would come handy in surmounting the barriers that Montu faced growing up as a girl child in the state of Haryana. Speaking to friends who had dropped in to offer condolences at the Houston home of Kalpana, her mother said, 'Kalpana was born in our family, but she had a mind of her own.'

Kalpana Chawla Childhood in Karnal, Haryana.

Kalpana Chawla’s childhood was spent in the town of Karnal, Haryana, which lies on the Grand Trunk Road, halfway between New Delhi and Chandigarh. Located along the west bank of the river Yamuna, the town and its adjacent areas have a legendary history linked to it, dating back to the Mahabharata. Legend has it that neighboring Kurukshetra-also in Karnal district—was the battlefield that launched the famous war of Mahabharata between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Centuries later, the town's penchant to be associated with history has not changed. Growing up in the sleepy town of Karnal was quite an experience. For girls to be given the privilege of studying was rare, and not many families encouraged the idea. According to Kalpana's contemporaries from Karnal, a fifty-strong class would be hard-pressed to have even five percent girl students-a far cry from the average has seen today. In the Chawla household, however, there was an enormous premium on academic prowess. Elder sister Sunita was already a trailblazer, setting a benchmark as it were. By the time Kalpana came of age, money was no longer an issue in the family. At the same time, the family was not keen to send her to a school far from home. So they opted for Tagore Bal Niketan, which was located in the vicinity of the Chawla home. Captain D. Sharan, who grew up in an adjoining village and is now a pilot with Indian Airlines he was, in fact, piloting the aircraft that got hijacked to Kandahar-recalls that Tagore School was among the best that the town could offer. 'Women were never encouraged to study at that time, he recalled. 'In one class you would have only about three or four girls. For a girl in Karnal to get through (academically) was next to impossible. For that matter, even for a man, it was not easy.' He should know, having cycled every day to go to college and later to the local flying club for his first lessons in aviation.

Kalpana Chawla Education

Kalpana Chawla School: Tagore Bal Niketan Kalpana Chawla College: Dayal Singh College Tagore Bal Niketan was not the best school in town, yet it was unique in the way it was founded and run. At Tagore Bal Niketan, Kalpana's class had only fifteen students. Most classmates remember her as a shy individual. Though she never stood first in class, she stayed among the first five. Her energies were now increasingly towards raising the bar as it were. Her upbringing in a small town and her measured victories against tradition would be valuable lessons, as helpful as the support she drew from her female mentors, not the least from her mother. Given the family's conservative background, Kalpana skipped the better option in Dayal Singh College and opted instead for her pre-university from D.A.V. College in Karnal. It was only in the second year (equivalent to the twelfth grade) that Kalpana moved over to Dayal Singh College, that too because D.A.V. did not offer science beyond the first year of pre-university. As her teacher of English, Dr. Kamlesh Sharma, mentions, Kalpana was never traditional or conservative in her ideology, her thinking. By the time she finished her pre-university from Dayal Singh College, the petite girl with large black eyes, high-pitched voice, and luminous smile had set her sights on a graduation degree in engineering. It was not surprising, therefore, when news filtered home that Kalpana had to attend Punjab Engineering College (PEC) in Chandigarh. The Chawla household was initially reluctant to send her out of Karnal. Ultimately, however, they relented, and as a safeguard, ensured that Kalpana's friend Daisy too got admission in Chandigarh for a graduate degree. Recalling the moment, in the NASA interview, she said, 'I was lucky to get into aerospace engineering at Punjab Engineering College. And, in my case, the goal was, at that stage anyway, to be an aerospace engineer. The astronaut business is far-fetched for me to say, "Oh, at that time, I even had an inkling of it." The time had come for this small-town girl, who weighed ninety pounds with rocks in her pocket, to move on in her journey.  She could well have rested on her laurels and earned a more than comfortable livelihood as a civilian.

Kalpana Chawla Death Reason

The horrific turn of events after the space shuttle made its re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere on its home run are now history. For NASA and people all over the world, the end came as a tragic shock. A host of reasons have forth to explain Columbia's break-up on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. The most plausible reason out is that debris from the shuttle's external tank had struck Columbia's wing, just eighty-one seconds after launch on 16 January. The foam insulation purportedly fell and hit the shuttle's left flank on at least two, possibly three, locations. Titis believed, caused damage to the heat resistance tiles covering the wing and eventually proved fatal to the craft on re-entry. Retired Navy Admiral Harold Gehman, head of the independent investigation, is looking into this and other plausible causes. Progress has been painstakingly slow, which is understandable given that the debris from the shuttle is still being located and put together. Therefore, it may well be a long time before something gets is conclusively established. Meanwhile, the initial shock of losing Kalpana and her six colleagues in the unfortunate accident is now gradually wearing off. And the harsh realization has dawned that life has to go on without these magnificent seven among us. Comforting to many people--including her . own husband is the thought that Kalpana's death doing something that was most dear to her. Kalpana Chawla Death reason whatever maybe, 'The initial shock has worn off, aided by a constant stream of prepared meals, friends arriving from far-off places, and ever-present Astronaut Office contacts,' wrote JP on the Iweb log maintained by a Gillan of the rock group, Deep Purple. 'Intellectually, we all realize what has happened. Emotionally, none of us can yet connect the dots. We all take solace in that the crew was doing what they loved, with people they loved and respected. When the end came, it was instantaneous.' It is what makes her legacy enduring-an inspiration for generations to come. In many ways, the spirit of the seven astronauts, lost on that fateful morning on 1 February 2003, will always be with the world. Kalpana's journey from Karnal to space will forever remain a part of us. It did not end with the mishap or after her ashes were spread over Utah. It is not just because of her incredible achievements. It will be as much for her ability to achieve the impossible. Though being born into an upper-middle-class family helped, she struggled against very much the same odds as the rest of her countrymen. As a young girl born in the 1960s, she had no model to follow, no godfathers in the system. She did not use the prejudices and handicaps as an excuse for inaction. She sincerely believed that there was no alternative to hard work. And that if you believed in something genuinely, then it is yours. Her origins and life were, in a sense, very much commonplace. But her achievements were not. That is what makes her extra special--a role model to be emulated by generations after her. That, in many ways, is the central element of her legacy. In her last interview to India Today, she summed up the sine qua non of her incredible achievements thus: 'In one word-perseverance. There have been other factors too. Taking the time to follow other interests such as reading and exploring that have helped to widen the perspective and have enriched the journey.' Kalpana's strengths also flowed from the fact that she did no wanting for effort. She drew inspiration for this from ordinary individuals around her. People who gave it their all, no matter how commonplace their tasks might appear to be. For her, the commitment of her teachers—with their constant ability to devote attention daily to almost every student-was a cause for inspiration. So were the initial struggles of her parents to establish themselves again after being uprooted from their homes by the flames of Partition. The steadfastness and commitment that all of them displayed as they went about their daily lives inspired her in her journey. She looked for very much the same qualities--perseverance and courage-in the stories of explorers like Shackleton and Matthiessen. Another quality—which endeared her to those who knew her and will continue to inspire many, was her bold approach to life. Almost everyone who has been touched by Kalpana recalls the adventurous spirit that was so intrinsic a part of her. As her friend Acuff wrote on his web page after the accident: For Kalpana, the words she wrote on the photograph she gave to Amy (his wife) and I sum her up: In the spirit of adventure. She was always seeking new knowledge, new experience, and a unique wonder. She wrote to David (his son), 'Reach for the stars.' That is the message she would want all the children of the world to hear. Only by reaching beyond what we believe is possible can we achieve the impossible. Also striking was her desire to give back to the community and her commitment to preserving nature. It was this that motivated her to help not only young children from her old school in Karnal but also other deserving people from all over the world. It prompted her to painstakingly track down her alumni to share mementos from her first trip into space. To keep this legacy of generosity alive, her family has set up the Montsu Foundation (PO Box 58937, Houston, TX 77258, USA). As JP put it: 'The Foundation's first objective is to sponsor the university education of bright young men and women whose only obstacle is lack of funds, or means to acquire those funds. Sponsorship is open to anyone anywhere in the world ... The second objective is to acquire and preserve the natural environment, such as the purchase of land used by migratory birds during their stopovers.' Very appropriate for someone who drew inspiration from the words of the philosopher, Seneca: 'I was not born for one corner. The whole world is my native land. It was a connection that she sincerely believed in till the very end. Born Indian, yet died as an American, in space. Indeed a global citizen. As she said in her final interview to India Today, 'I have felt that connection and stewardship for Earth as long as I can remember. And not just for Earth, but the whole universe.'

Seconds before disaster Columbia Space Shuttle

A Timeline of Events in the Last Flight of Space Shuttle Columbia (All times EST) 16 January 2003 10.39 a.m.: Columbia rockets into orbit from Kennedy Space Center 1 February 2003 8.15 a.m.: Columbia fires braking rockets, streaks towards a touchdown. 8.53 a.m.: NASA loses temperature measurements for the shuttle's left hydraulic system. 8.58 a.m.: NASA loses measurements from three temperature sensors on the shuttle's left side. 8.59 a.m.: NASA loses eight more temperature measures and pressure measures for left inboard and outboard tyres. One of the measurements remains visible to crew on a display panel, which crew acknowledges. 8.59 a.m.: Final transmission. Mission Control radios: 'Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did not copy your last.' Columbia replies: 'Roger, uh. 9.00 a.m.: NASA loses all data and contact with Columbia at 207,135 feet. Residents of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana report hearing a big bang' and seeing flames in the sky. 9.16 a.m.: Columbia's scheduled landing time. 9.29 a.m.: NASA declares an emergency. 9.44 a.m.: NASA warns residents to stay away from possibly hazardous debris. 11.00 a.m.: Kennedy Space Center lowers the flag to half staff. 2.05 p.m.: President Bush announces: Columbia is lost; there are no survivors.' Read the full article

[rottenappleusach]

Psychoanalytic Dualism of Mrs. Dalloway´s characters

José Garrido Geraldine Lara Virginia Woolf’s ‘‘Mrs. Dalloway’’ portrays an interesting post World War I society in which characters are being constantly influenced by the consequences of this historical event. Not only are the changes imposed by governments shaping our characters’ minds and personalities, but also the development of their own internal world. How they metabolize the direct or indirect exposition to death of that period is going to be an important process to the self of the beings. As we have to deal with these factors of the conscious and unconscious of the mind, it results wise to psychoanalyze the characters’ behaviour in order to comprehend and illustrate more profoundly certain interpretations. Through Freud’s ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’’ we are going to understand the instinctive drives manifested in Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren, which represent a relationship of dualism that clarifies the Freudian notions of Thanatos and Eros....

Through years, different types of criticism has been created in order to analyse literature in an effective way, this is to say, avoiding fallacies. One important school is Psychoanalysis that maintains the main characteristics that Freud has studied. Psychoanalytic literary criticism is understood as a tool that helps us discover and understand the reflection of the author’s most hidden desires and anxieties that are repressed by the conscious mind, inside a particular text. Freud, at first, bonded all human behaviour to the sexual instinct (‘‘Eros’’), but he realised that there was also another human natural instinct as a counterpart of the previous: the death drive (‘‘Thanatos’’). This way, the dichotomy between self-preservation and self-destruction is proposed as a constant identity struggle that, in literature, commonly ends with one of the two sides triumphing.

Jacques Lacan also refers to this idea that postulated Freud, but he centres the idea of psychoanalysis in four different perspectives: The Drive, the Unconscious, Repetition Compulsion and Transference. For our essay, the different conceptions of drive are important, thus are necessary to clarify. The notion of drive differs from Freud’s, in that Lacan’s drive is not a mean to accomplish satisfaction but to circle round the object, creating a repetitive enjoyable movement. Furthermore, Lacan’s drive presents a dual bond between the symbolic and the imaginary and not in opposition, both belonging to the same type of drive. As to Lacan drive is excessive and repetitive, all drives are destructive, so part of the Thanatos.

The death drive (Thanatos) pursues the self returning to an inorganic state, and as Julia Kristeva implies in her work ‘‘Black Sun’’, ‘‘he [Freud] considers the death drive as an intrapsychic manifestation of a phylogenetic going back to inorganic matter. Nevertheless… it is possible to note… the strength of the disintegration of bonds within several psychic structures and manifestations. Furthermore, the presence of masochism, the presence of negative therapeutic reaction… prompt one to accept the idea of a death drive that, … would destroy movements and bonds’’ (Kristeva 16-17). Here we notice that this perception indicates that there are two different death drives, one in the psyche manifested to the outside as a violent instinct, and the other manifested to the inner self, self-destructive. This last one can result in an accumulation and cultivation of death drive, and Kristeva questions if this process could be erotized by the self, being implicitly part of the pleasure principle and leading to a constant change of the satisfaction object.

Freud’s concepts of Thanatos and Eros are present in the characters of ‘‘Mrs. Dalloway’’ since they behave according to inner forces that propel them to do so. In the case of Septimus Warren Smith, it is important to say that he is a veteran soldier that is shell-shocked by the impact of World War I because one friend of his, Evans, was killed there and Septimus saw it. Before the war, he was a normal person and he liked poetry. But after that he became a numb person. Moreover he is becoming mad and has different kinds of hallucinations. At the time of the story, Septimus and his wife Lucrezia are waiting for a doctor in an apartment, who is going to treat Septimus’ problems. They both pass through a very lovely moment but then Septimus throws himself out the window and dies.

First, Freud’s Thanatos is highly related to the death instinct and to the self-destruction of the person. This is explicitly clear at the end of the work with Septimus death. Second, this sudden personality change after war is related to the Unconscious mind, proposed by Lacan, in which the repressed feelings change the way in which a person behaves. Also this is shown in the form of automatic thoughts that are the ones that appear without any apparent cause, which are represented by the desire of death at the end of the story. Moreover, the Lacan’s Repetition Compulsion concept is also present since, as the name says, Septimus repeated in his mind several things that happened in the war that made him feel distressed to the point he turns mad and suffers hallucinations which are also an important behavioural characteristic of this kind of phenomenon. This character present an extreme case of cultivation of death drive, and Kristeva’s notion of erotization of it seems possible as Septimus is always looking for the pleasure and liberation of death, re-encountering with his dead friend.

In the case of Clarissa Dalloway, Freud’s Eros is dominant. She had a strong relation with the life instinct. It has to do with solidarity and true love. Also she tries to relate people with each other because it is a pleasure for her, and this can be seen in the fact that she is giving a party to a high number of people.

“Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that everyone was unreal in one way; much more real in another. It was, she thought, partly their clothes, partly being taken out of their ordinary ways, partly the background, it was possible to say things you couldn't say anyhow else, things that needed an effort; possible to go much deeper” (Virginia Woolf, 134).

However, Clarissa is also affected by the World War I since she saw her sister being killed, so two of the Four fundamental principles of Lacan are present: Transference and the Drive Theory. The first is related to the reproduction of emotions related to past events since she constantly sees the changes that the war brings to society, and more importantly, she every now and then thinks about her sister. The second one is related to a negative state of tension created when some psychological needs are not satisfied. This is shown in the work through the Clarissa’s pessimistic way of seeing things because she is mostly interested in her own social gratification.

To contrast the ideas of different literary analytic schools, we want to talk about the Marxist criticism. The relation between this with Psychoanalysis is that both look for information inside the text but the difference is that Marxism tries to see things that exist outside the text represented in it, whereas Psychoanalysis tries to look for inner things that happen inside individuals represented in the work. Then, “Mrs. Dalloway” can also be analysed from a Marxist point of view: Clarissa Dalloway is disinterested with the “Eros” conception, but she behave in that specific way because of the individuals’ roles inside the society in which she is immersed where she is somehow obligated to do certain things. On the other hand, Septimus is mentally different to the rest of the society and he cannot comply with the personal established roles inside it, so he cannot find a viable alternative for the curse of his life because he has been rejected by his peers.

These ideas can be exemplified in Eagleton’s chapter “Form and Content”. Special attention is put to the form, meaning, and style of the work where context is important since it determines the way in which the story is understood. It is important to notice the society in which this story takes place has an established ideology, defined as “forms of social consciousness” (Eagleton 3), about the social roles of people. As context determines form, which is understood as “a complex unity of at least three elements: . . . literary history of forms, . . . certain dominant ideological structures, and . . . relations between author and audience” (Eagleton 12); both characters can be analysed from this perspective. Clarissa is a woman that behaves according to the dominant ideology of the period of time in which she is living, that the reader will understand if he/she is aware of the context. Although she feels the oppression of society, she is still part of the world she constantly critiques. Besides, Septimus is obviously affected by the World War I and it triggered a behavioural change in him. When the reader knows that, he/she can understand why he behaves in the way he does, because it contradicts the dominant ideology of that time since he is labelled as a mad man.

To conclude, it is important to understand that Psychoanalysis covers different areas of the conscious and unconscious of the mind, taking always beings and their internal worlds as the main object of study. The human instinctive deciphers a major part of characters when we need to analyse them. When a narration does not present tangible characters, we have to notice that the interpretation will focus on the author, who, despite its unwillingness, would reflect its own drive and satisfaction. If the focus of the analysis is not centred in any being but rather epoch, community or social environment, Marxist perspective is always useful to comprehend the outside elements that influence a literary work. Despite we do not mention equilibrium between the Eros and Thanatos in this work, it is always possible. Indeed, a ‘‘normal’’ person would be someone that has reached the equilibrium between these two instinctive desires. In literature, flat (simple) characters are often found with one of both sides more dominant than the other, but it is important to understand that the real world does not work as if it was black or white, nor does round (complex) characters.

Works Cited

Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary criticism. London: Routledge, 2006.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,

1961.

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1989.

Lacan, Jacques. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. W.W. Norton, 1998

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. South Australia: University of Adelaide, 2015

[valoansdallastx]

Kenneth “Ken” Elbert Niles

Contents

Cities contents 05/14/2019 press

2 power 196 residents indicating counseling

Mission continues’: local veteran

Kenneth arthur schischka

Results. kenneth neil

Kenneth is survived by his wife, the former Valerie Limmer, whom he married May 26, 1992; a son, Matt Reison of Pittsburgh; two sisters, Audrey Fritz of Niles and Marlene (Pete) Hall of Corvallis, Ore.

The VA and the FDA are keeping veterans from a helpful treatment option, just because it’s marijuana Mortgage service for military opens Virginia Beach office Kentucky WWII Veteran to Receive French Legion of Honor Welcome home to this lovely well maintained all-brick ranch in Brighton on the Bay in the heart of Great Neck. The entire exterior has just been sanded and painted. The hardwood foyer opens to a spacious open floor plan with Great room, Dining room, well appointed Kitchen, 3 Bedrooms, huge FROG as the 4th Bedroom, and a 5th Bedroom/Bonus Room/Office/Study.Veterans Affairs is changing for the better.. The VA and the FDA are keeping veterans from a helpful treatment option, just because it’s marijuana.Vet behind ‘build the wall’ GoFundMe hits back at fund claims Rockford city ordinance mandates gravel driveways to be paved EUSA Pharma nabs new executives, including the recently ousted Abeona CEO New residence hall at Veterans Home in King under construction Realtor.com Says You Can Get an $1,000 Monthly Mortgage in These 5 southern cities contents 05/14/2019 press release. ostrum asset district 2 power 196 residents indicating counseling services.podimetrics completes $13.4 China remains unbowed "If you get a good lawyer, you can basically live mortgage-free for seven or eight years," he says. There are still a lot of homes in foreclosure, and that depresses the homes surrounding them.The Wisconsin Veterans Home at King (Home) serves the long term care needs of 721 aged and disabled veterans and their eligible dependents. The Home was established in 1887 by the Grand Army of the Republic. The Home has grown and developed over the past 127 years.eusa pharma (EUSA), a recently-established profitable specialty pharmaceutical company with global reach, today announced the appointment of Lee Morley as Chief Executive Officer, and Dr Gran.All properties with gravel driveways and/or gravel parking lots must be paved by November 1, 2019. This ordinance was passed two years ago.

Kenneth Niles is charged with two counts of first degree murder, two counts of felony murder and aggravated arson, among other charges.

The Make It Right Project cultivates community in the shadow of Confederate monuments The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply the Lost Cause, is an ideology that holds that the cause of the Confederacy during the American Civil War was a just and heroic one. The ideology endorses the supposed virtues of the antebellum South, viewing the war as a struggle primarily for the Southern way of life or "states’ rights" in the face of overwhelming "Northern aggression".

158 records for Kenneth Niles. Find Kenneth Niles’s phone, address, and email on Spokeo, the leading online directory

Ken Niles (December 9, 1906 or 1908, in Livingston, Montana – October 31, 1988) was an American radio announcer.He was married to Nadia Niles, and had two children, Kenneth Niles and Denise Niles. His brother, Wendell Niles, was also a radio announcer. Niles debuted in radio on KJR in Seattle, Washington, late in the 1920s. "

Springfield man who shot former brother-in-law in groin found guilty of home invasion After the profanity-laden video was shared, the Springfield NAACP demanded that it be investigated as a terroristic threat. ‘It should be taken seriously,’ Toni Robinson, president of the Springfield.

“Ken” was a past-president of Painter and Allied Trades, Local No. 476. He was a member, trustee, and past-president of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, Aerie No. 2172 in Girard, and a member of the.

Ken Intriligator. Physics Department 0319 University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093. Tel: (858) 822-1179.

Memorial Day ceremony preview Iconix Reports Financial Results For The First Quarter 2019 ‘The mission continues’: local veteran dedicates music career, album to America’s heroes Armories now available for events royal armouries Events | Eventbrite – The Royal Armouries is the UK’s national museum of arms and armour, with collections in Leeds, near Portsmouth at Fort Nelson, and in the White Tower at the Tower of London. This world-renowned collection contains over 75,000 objects, including arms and armour from the early medieval period to the present day and from Europe, Asia and the Americas. · With the help of Adult Swim’s Jason DeMarco, Paste presents the 100 Best Anime Movies of All Time.BATON ROUGE- 31 LSU cadets march under the oaks of the Memorial Oak Grove to represent the 31 LSU. changing the landscaping and holding this re-dedication ceremony on Veteran’s Day. Changes that.

Kenneth had one brother: Niles Richard Faulk. Ken Shelton is a professional development trainer, workshop facilitator, speaker, educator, and motivator based on the Los Angeles area. Ken currently holds an M.A. in Education with a specialization in Educational Technology as well as New Media Design and Production.

Kenneth J. Zucker, Ph.D., C.PSYCH. Clinical Psychologist Focus on Gender Dysphoria. I hold a Ph.D. in Psychology, am a Certified Psychologist with the College of Psychologists of Ontario (Reg. kzucker.phd@gmail.com ken.zucker@utoronto.ca (416) 986-4104.

Ken Kenneth. Quite the same Wikipedia. Just better. kenneth arthur schischka (11 June 1912 – 16 October 1994), better known by his ring name Ken Kenneth, was a New Zealand professional wrestler.

Kenneth C. Wilbur. Professor of Marketing Rady School of Management University of California, San Diego. 9500 Gilman Drive, Box 0553 San Diego, CA 92093 619-535-9536 kennethcwilburATgmail.

Also known as Ken Wilson, Kenneth Wilson Harris, Jr Kenneth G Wilson. See results. kenneth neil Wilson, 83.. Kenneth Elbert Wilson, 74. Tyler, TX. Lived In Irving TX, Longview TX, Niles MI. Related To Kelly Wilson, Deborah Wilson, Joyce Wilson, Kathy Wilson, Sandra Wilson. Also known as.

The post Kenneth “Ken” Elbert Niles appeared first on VA Loans Dallas TX.

https://ift.tt/30dHTxM

[investmart007]

NANYANG, China | 'We must pay so dearly': China's churches raided, silenced

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/D7btnQ

NANYANG, China | 'We must pay so dearly': China's churches raided, silenced

NANYANG, China — The 62-year-old Chinese shopkeeper had waited nearly his entire adult life to see his dream of building a church come true — a brick house with a sunny courtyard and spacious hall with room for 200 believers.

But in March, about a dozen police officers and local officials suddenly showed up at the church on his property and made the frightened congregants disperse. They ordered that the cross, a painting of the Last Supper and Bible verse calligraphy be taken down. And they demanded that all services stop until each person, along with the church itself, was registered with the government, said the shopkeeper, Guo.

Without warning, Guo and his neighbors in China’s Christian heartland province of Henan had found themselves on the front lines of an ambitious new effort by the officially atheist ruling Communist Party to dictate — and in some cases displace — the practice of faith in the country.

“I’ve always prayed for our country’s leaders, for our country to get stronger,” said Guo, who gave only his last name out of fear of government retribution. “They were never this severe before, not since I started going to church in the 80’s. Why are they telling us to stop now?”

Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, believers are seeing their freedoms shrink dramatically even as the country undergoes a religious revival. Experts and activists say that as he consolidates his power, Xi is waging the most severe systematic suppression of Christianity in the country since religious freedom was written into the Chinese constitution in 1982.

The crackdown on Christianity is part of a broader push by Xi to “Sinicize” all the nation’s religions by infusing them with “Chinese characteristics” such as loyalty to the Communist Party. Islamic crescents and domes have been stripped from mosques, and a campaign launched to “re-educate” tens of thousands of Uighur Muslims. Tibetan children have been moved from Buddhist temples to schools and banned from religious activities during their summer holidays, state-run media report.

This spring, a five-year plan to “Sinicize” Christianity in particular was introduced, along with new rules on religious affairs. Over the last several months, local governments across the country have shut down hundreds of private Christian “house churches.” A statement last week from 47 in Beijing alone said they had faced “unprecedented” harassment since February.

Authorities have also seized Bibles, while major e-commerce retailers JD.com and Taobao pulled them off their sites. Children and party members are banned from churches in some areas, and at least one township has encouraged Christians to replace posters of Jesus with portraits of Xi. Some Christians have resorted to holding services in secret.

A dozen Chinese Protestants interviewed by the Associated Press described gatherings that were raided, interrogations and surveillance, and one pastor said hundreds of his congregants were questioned individually about their faith. Like Guo, the majority requested that their names be partly or fully withheld because they feared punishment from authorities. After reporters visited Henan in June, some interviewees said they were contacted by police or local officials who urged them not to discuss any new measures around Christianity.

The party has long been wary of Christianity because of its affiliation with Western political values. Several Chinese human rights lawyers jailed for their work, including Jiang Tianyong and Li Heping, are outspoken Christians. So too are many Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, not least among them 2014 protest leader Joshua Wong.

“Chinese leaders have always been suspicious of the political challenge or threat that Christianity poses to the Communist regime,” said Xi Lian, a scholar of Christianity in China at Duke University. “Under Xi, this fear of Western infiltration has intensified and gained a prominence that we haven’t seen for a long time.” ___

Guo, who keeps a small storefront selling ornate doors in a riverside district, once had eyesight so poor that he could not distinguish the sky from the earth. But after finding God at 27 years old, he made a seemingly miraculous recovery that he attributes to his faith.

For decades, he, like many Christians in China, shuttled from one unregistered house church to another, where folding chairs served as pews and coffee tables as lecterns. Two years ago, he and 10 other Christians pooled their money to erect a permanent church on his property.

They are part of what experts describe as a spiritual awakening in China.

The number of Chinese believers of all faiths has doubled in two decades to an estimated 200 million, by official count, as the hold of the Communist party has weakened. Among them are an estimated 67 million Christians, including Catholics — a number that is expected to swell to become the world’s largest Christian population in a matter of decades. This rapid growth has reinvigorated the party’s longtime mission to domesticate a religion traditionally aligned with the West.

Historians believe that Christianity was known to China as early as the seventh century, and was later propagated by Jesuit missionaries starting in the 1500s. In recent decades the religion has faced by turns heavy persecution and tacit acceptance.

During the Cultural Revolution, when Mao sought to eradicate all religions, Christians were jailed, tortured and publicly humiliated.

But they survived by operating covertly and grew steadily in number after Mao’s death in 1976, when a populace disillusioned with the Communist Party began to seek moral guidance elsewhere.

Chinese Christians say the Bible gives them a sense of right versus wrong and the strength to endure in a country where power often trumps justice. While China’s rapid growth has brought prosperity to many, others despair at what they see as a deterioration of public morals. The deaths of children in scandals involving tainted infant formula and shoddily-built schools in recent years have led to the sense that modern China was in the midst of an ethical crisis.

“After the ‘collapse’ of communist ideology, no value system has been in place to fill the spiritual vacuum,” said writer Zhang Lijia. “China has witnessed a religious revival in recent decades precisely because of this vacuum and relaxed control.”

Officials once largely tolerated the unregistered Protestant house churches that sprang up independent of the official Christian Council, clamping down on some while allowing others to grow. But this year they have taken a tougher approach that relies partly on “thought reform” — a phrase for political indoctrination. Last November, Christian residents of a rural township in southeast Jiangxi province were persuaded to replace posters of the cross and Jesus Christ inside their homes with portraits of Xi, a local official said.

“Through our thought reform, they’ve voluntarily done it,” Qi Yan, a member of the township party committee, told the AP by phone. “The move is aimed at Christian families in poverty, and we educated them to believe in science and not in superstition, making them believe in the party.”

The poster campaign appears to symbolize what analysts see as the underlying force driving the change in the party’s approach to religion: the ascendance of Xi.

“Xi is a closet Maoist — he is very anxious about thought control,” said Willy Lam, a Chinese politics expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “He definitely does not want people to be faithful members of the church, because then people would profess their allegiance to the church rather than to the party, or more exactly, to Xi himself.”

Various state and local officials declined repeated requests to comment. But in 2016, Xi explicitly warned against the perceived foreign threats tied to faith, telling a religion conference: “We must resolutely guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means.”

And in April, the religious affairs department published an article saying that churches must endorse the party’s leadership as part of “Sinicization.”

“Only Sinicized churches can obtain God’s love,” the article stated. The government is even cracking down on Christians more aggressively through legal means. In March, a prominent Chinese house church leader with US permanent residency was sentenced to seven years in prison after he built Christian schools in Myanmar.

And half a dozen Christians were sentenced last month to up to 13 years in jail for involvement in a “cult,” according to U.S.-based Christian non-profit ChinaAid.

The pressure has pushed several dozen pastors and their families to flee to the United States in recent years, ChinaAid says. The wife of one pastor under house arrest left for Midland, Texas about a year ago, after authorities warned that their children might have trouble getting an education in China. She said members of their church in China were barred from being baptized, and even a simple Christmas service was interrupted.

“The government says that we have religious freedom, but really there is no freedom at all,” said the pastor’s wife, who asked to remain anonymous for her husband’s safety. “Many of our Christian brothers and sisters are upset and fearful.”

Those who resist pay the price.

After Jin Mingri, a prominent pastor who leads Zion Church in Beijing, refused local authorities’ request to install surveillance cameras inside his house church, police individually questioned hundreds of members of the 1,500-person congregation, he said. The congregants faced veiled threats, Jin said, and many were asked to sign a pledge promising to leave Zion, which the government agents called illegal, politically incorrect and a cult. Some people lost their jobs or were evicted from rented apartments because police intimidated their bosses and landlords.

For 11 years, the church has been housed on one floor of an office building, but the property management informed Jin in May that they would have to move out at the end of the summer. Jin said the management admitted to being influenced by external “pressures.” “A lot of our flock are terrified by the pressure that the government is putting on them,” he said. “It’s painful to think that in our own country’s capital, we must pay so dearly just to practice our faith.” __ At the epicenter of the drive to control the Christian community in China is Henan, the cradle of Chinese civilization and the entry point for many of the earliest foreign missionaries. Today, the province is one of the most populous in the country and a key part of Xi’s fight against poverty, as proclaimed by red banners across acres of peanut farms and oil fields.

Around the time authorities ordered Guo’s church to stop congregating in March, his district announced a crackdown on private Christian meeting spots. On a single Sunday morning, the announcement said, 700 religious banners were removed, 200 religious texts seized and 31 illegal Christian gathering places shut down. Officials went door-to-door stripping decorative scrolls bearing the cross from home entrances.

In Zhengzhou, Henan’s capital, all that is left of one house church is shattered glass, tangled wires and torn hymnbooks, strewn among the rubble of a knocked-down wall. Pegged to another wall is a single wooden cross, still intact.

The church inside a commercial building had served about 100 believers for years. But in late January, nearly 60 officials from the local religion department and police station appeared without warning. Armed with electric saws, they demolished the church, confiscated Bibles and computers and held a handful of young worshippers — including a 14-year-old girl — at a police station for more than 10 hours, according to a church leader.

The authorities called the church illegal. The church leader said they had brought documentation to the religion department three or four times in an attempt to formally register it, but never received a response. Now, they have ceased to congregate.

The church leader prays that the government will change its mind.

“We support President Xi,” he said. “All we ask for is a space for our faith.”

That space for Xu Shijuan, a 63-year-old Seventh-Day Adventist, was her living room, where she held house church gatherings for four years. She stopped in March, after a group of men led by a local official ordered her to disband the meeting of about two dozen elderly Christians.

“If you don’t heed our orders, the next group to come will be law enforcement,” he said, according to Xu. “They will use force to disband you.”

Xu readily complied. “The people have dispersed, but our faith has not,” she told the AP at her home in Zhengzhou. “God’s path cannot be blocked. The more you try to control it, the more it will grow.”

Even Protestant churches already registered with the state have not been spared greater restrictions. When reporters visited five such churches in Henan this June, all bore notices at their entrances stating that minors and party members were not allowed inside. A banner above one church door exhorted members to “implement the basic direction of the party’s religious work.” Another church erected a Chinese flag at the foot of its steps.

Some congregations now sing the national anthem during services, according to a house church pastor named Liu. Another pastor said his government-approved church shut down its Sunday school and cancelled all activities for children after receiving orders in February.

Across Henan, house churches that once hosted gatherings of hundreds have now sealed their doors and split into groups of no more than a handful. Services are announced last-minute and held in different locations each week, often under the cloak of darkness.

For a time, Guo’s church did the same. They avoided congregating on Sundays to escape authorities’ notice.

But the church members were scared, and the group dwindled to 30. Authorities appealed to Guo to help gather information on his fellow Christians. He was given a form, reviewed by the AP, which asked for churchgoers’ names, educational background and addresses, as well as the length of time they had been faithful and whether they were baptized.

The brick house was largely deserted this summer. Around the door frame, tattered red outlines remained of a scroll that once read “God’s love is as deep as the sea.”

Inside, Guo has refused to remove the cross and other decorations, telling authorities they are within his private property.

Among them, pinned to a wall in the nave, is a bright blue poster that quotes China’s constitutional promise of religious freedom.

By YANAN WANG ,  Associated Press

[imspardagus]

The Prodigal Father

A cry of inarticulate anguish for what we have done.

   In a land not far from our own, and in a time not so remote as to be forgotten, a young man went to his father. “Father,” he said, “On this, your farm, I was born and here I passed my childhood. But now I am nearly a man and it is time to take my place in the World.”

 The young man’s father barely raised his head from the paper he was reading, sprawled on the couch. “You have everything you need here. There is nothing but misery and squalor and evil, cutthroats and mad murderers in the rest of the World – see here, it says so.” And he tapped the sheet of newsprint in his hand. “Why would you want to be anywhere else?”

 “But, Father,” said the son, “I have friends on the neighbouring farms who are inviting me to go with them and learn about the World so that we can take our place and make our contribution.”

 “Our neighbours are not our friends,” said the father, “Because of them, I have to pay my farmhands and can no longer whip them when they complain. Because of them, I can no longer water the milk of my own cows before I sell it. Because of them I can no longer release the slurry into the river. Because of this, they grow rich selling their produce and I cannot sell mine.”

 “But, Father,” said the son, “If I go and learn their ways, and bring what I learn back to you, we can take our place in the market alongside them and make as much as they.”

 “You are a mere boy,” said the father with a sneer, “You think that profit comes from quality. Profit comes from bearing down on cost. And cost and quality are enemies. No, we are better off on our own. You shall not go to join your friends.”

 “Then, Father, teach me your ways that I may support you.”

 “Teach you? And how will you pay me for this teaching? All that I have learned has made me what I am. Do you think I should pass it on to you for nothing?”

 “But Father, if you do not teach me, how will I run the farm when you are too infirm to do it?”

 “You will not run the farm, for I have surrendered the title to a travelling salesman in fine wines.”

 “Then, Father, give me a share of the wines and I shall take it to the market and make our fortune.”

 “There is no wine. I have drunk it.”

 “Then, Father, if I have nothing to sell in the market, how shall I keep you in your old age?”

 “You will keep me by your labours, for have I not also sold you into bondage, as was my right and mandate? For you and your birthright were always mine to dispose of.”

 Seeing for the first time the enormity of his fate, the young man swooned and fell to the floor, cracking his head on the table. His father looked briefly and without compassion at the youth, prone and bleeding.

 “And do not think I have bandages to fix you up. I sold them for a box of cigars to the man who bought your sister.”

My sister was born in 1949. I followed in 1951. We were among the first beneficiaries of our parents’ generation’s determination that the legacy of two brutal world wars would be a new order of societal improvement and peace: that the World should be made a better place to live for all its people.

My sister took all the childish ailments of the time – chickenpox, measles, bronchitis, whooping cough – in her stride. I didn’t. Dr Murphy was a frequent attender at our house. Dr Murphy, our NHS GP, always there for us, at any hour. And free. Like the prescriptions, like the glasses that my spiralling myopia required to be changed every 6 months for 10 years. Like the free dentistry. Like the free inoculations. And free school milk and school dinners. And free school books. And free…

And our Nan, her ulcerated legs needing daily attention, she didn’t suffer the same fate as her husband, the grandfather we never knew except from photographs because he died of TB in 1936 when Dad was just 16, abruptly ending Dad’s education because, with no welfare support, his income was needed to keep the home. Just 12 short years further down the line, the probability is that Granddad would have survived and, even if he hadn’t, there would have been a safety net to catch the family.

Our parents had been a part of the humane revolution that started to build during the war and gathered an unstoppable momentum soon after. They had met in Blackpool in 1946, where each had been re-assigned after the war to work on the newly emerging Welfare State. My mother, eldest of eight children of a Sheffield railway porter and his wife, raised by a maiden aunt in Nottingham and given an enlightened education she could never have enjoyed in the hard, cold pre-war poverty of that cramped Sheffield home. My father, only child of an embittered widow, without a qualification to his name but risen through his own intelligence and efforts from trainee bank clerk to civil servant.

They were a part of a great civilising movement, though few in it would have thought to put it that way. These survivors of 30 years of hell didn’t stop to bicker over who was more left or right, didn’t huffily withdraw their co-operation from the task in hand because of ideological differences. They just worked together for a better life for all. And within a few short years they achieved it.

Through their efforts, my generation and the next and the next were blessed. It wasn’t just the NHS or the promise of cradle to grave financial support. All over the country, council housing started to replace slums, state education gave us all a chance to lift ourselves out of ignorance. Further education became a possibility for the many, not the pampered few.

Politicians across the board understood that poverty and ill-health, which so often run hand in hand, were a brake on economic success and that, in a landscape of increasing technological complexity, education was an essential investment if we were to hold our own as a modern trading country. It made sense. Reason and humanity, going hand in hand, as Adam Smith had said they should to forge the wealth of a nation.

Every town had a library, every person had easy access to health care. Schools, colleges, universities, hospitals and whole towns were built. Telecommunications were rolled out, roads laid out fit for heavy transport, railways and buses moved people around, gas, electricity and clean water were supplied as a basic necessity.

It wasn’t free, of course. It had to be paid for. But taxes spread the burden across the nation and most people thought that was fair, partly because politicians and the media talked responsibly about the national interest and serving the nation, partly because we were still so close to the harshness of the world that had gone before and we could see the improvement in our lives.

No, this is not “Golden Age” thinking. There was a lot of residual poverty, a lot of hardship still, a lot of sweat and strain: and there was a lot of ugly thinking that was still ingrained – widespread and easy racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-semitism. It would be absurd to think that all that was wrong could be transformed over night as if a fairy wand had been waved. But the direction of travel was, for a time, progressive, new ideas were taking hold and for a while the spirit of reconstruction held.

Yes, for a while it held. But success carried the seeds of its own destruction. What my parent’s generation had been through was traumatic. And in the aftermath, instead of a land flowing with milk and honey, they were asked to endure genuine austerity (not the fake, cynical austerity of the present day designed to make the rich richer and to keep the poor in poverty and discontent but the austerity needed to pay for the restoration of all that had been destroyed and for the building of a brighter future). But technology, enterprise and industrial modernisation had combined to produce more houses, more innovations and devices, more cars, washing machines, televisions. All this produce was worthless if it could not be sold. It needed a market. And a market needed customers, consumers, in ever-increasing numbers.

For centuries, for most of human history, ordinary people had owned very little. They could afford little but they had needed very little for their constrained lives. The manufacturers and investors of new Britain had to change all that or they would soon be broke. So people had to be taught that they needed what they had never had before, or what only the rich and privileged had enjoyed. They had to be taught avarice and dissatisfaction, on a massive scale. The message had to shift from “to each according to his needs” to “you are what you own and what you covet”. And to succeed in this endeavour, the new religion of Consumerism had to break down their seriousness.

My parents and their parents had slogged through their lives. They and most people like them survived, more than lived. If they were lucky, there would be moments of celebration, occasional rewards for which they were expected to be grateful. If they borrowed it was to stave off destitution, not to acquire fripperies. If they took time off it was to recuperate and to build their strength for the drudgery ahead. This, prudence, was how they had been taught life was to be led (how it still is for most of the people on this planet). Consumerism, to succeed, had to push prudence out of the limelight and move indulgence to centre stage.

Prime Minister Harold MacMillan warned them “You’ve never had it so good.” And yes it was a warning. But his message was misheard against the seductive dance music blaring from the Tannoys.

So, now, just beyond the edge of their half-constructed utopia, a fairground opened, big, bright and brash and extravagantly attired ring-masters, amid of a parade of tumblers and clowns, called to them through loudhailers “Put down your tools, tear off your overalls, be done with toil. Come and indulge yourselves. It is your right. You have a right to be happy. You have earned it.” And they went, and were dazzled and intoxicated by the lights and colours and the noise. Who wouldn’t be?

Everything was done to make people feel that this flimsy, gaudy world of cosmetic pleasure and damn tomorrow was sustainable. Remember, just don’t click the heels, and you’ll never need to go home. At the same time, everything was being done to denigrate and devalue those who clung to sobriety and reflection. Everything had to be “fun”. Hedonism became a philosophy: Sodom for Gomorrah we die.

And I believe it was then, around the early sixties that parents lost the grip on the hands of their children and with it the sense of what it was all supposed to be for. And we wandered off alone to be importuned with sweets from greasy strangers, drinking in the sleazy patter from the slick bunco booth artists as if it were gospel. It sounded good and without our parents’ warning words we knew no better.

In the fairground, fashion and the cosmetic ousted utility and substance. Worrying about the future was for losers. All was for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds (paradoxically a world continually shifting in order to remain the same). For those who wanted the intellectual version, issues and causes were now available in all sizes, to be put on and cast aside like miniskirts and loon pants. For our parents, erudition became a glossy large format photo-edition for the coffee table or five minutes of late night pretentious punditry from self-consciously groomed and preening presenters. And for us, the TV generation, learning and information was increasingly fed to us from plastic bowls via plastic spoons, served up with flashy images and music, bland and  mashed up and gently warmed through so that we did’t have to chew hard on the issues.

The producers of this diet of froth and flim-flam were making more money than they had dreamt of but there was a threat to it: satisfaction. If, even for a moment, people felt comfortable with what they had, continual consumption, needed to keep the tills ringing, would falter, and collapse would surely follow. Growth was the only game in town. Only two things could keep the game in play. Customers had to be made to feel insecure; and then they had to be told what it would require to reassure themselves. And this must be repeated over and over.

Luckily, the invention of mass media provided the perfect tool for the job. There had always been advertising but now it took on a viral, insidious and monstrous form. Every medium, newspapers, cinema, television, was co-opted to convince my parents, and my own generation that our lifestyle, as soon as we had bought it, was already past its sell-by date and could be salvaged and enhanced only by this or that new acquisition. And lest we might have time to pause and question this message, television, with its new ubiquity, harnessed celebrity and bombarded us with an infinite amount of vacuous content that held our attention for the briefest of moments before moving us on to the next advert break. 

We were flattered, like Pinocchio by the oily Thespian, like the magpie by the wily fox. Under the ceaseless deluge of stuff, ingratiating stuff, we became accepting of what was put before us, choosing, or thinking we were choosing, only the identity of our preferred purveyor of images and accepting without question his or her pre-packaged self-evident truths. And so we became what Consumerism required of us, malleable, persuadable, compliant consumers.  

It was then that, pressed and pressed into wanting more and newer things, borrowing money we could not afford to repay to add to our personal stores of status conferring possessions, we started to resent the burden of those who needed our support: and, encouraged by those who wanted our money for themselves, it was then that we started to see our taxes as an imposition, an oppressive interference with what was ours and should be ours to spend. And so the stage was set for the tragedy that became the killing of the post-war project.

This is the world we now inhabit. Duped daily by rogues and charlatans in the pay of the plutocrats whose fortunes we have made out of our own impoverishment, but, like heroin addicts, equally convinced that we are in control of our habit, we sell our present and our future for another fix of blissful distraction. Like all addicts, we make enemies of those who tell us we have got it wrong. How can we have? This feels right, doesn’t it. And if it doesn’t, isn’t it all someone else’s fault? The saboteurs, the naysayers, the doom-mongers, the bleeding’ heart liberals. It will all come right if only… if only… if only all those other people will stop making demands on us, stop reminding us of the need to be decent.

Our politicians have learned from Consumerism’s conjured success. Where once they sought to govern in what they perceived to be the interests of the nation, and accepted the burden of responsibility and the prospect of blame that came with it, now their product is pure image, soundbite, designed to bring them power, influence and fandom at no cost to their consciences, conflicted interests or careers. In hock and in thrall to the same plutocrat owners of the media, and now, in addition, to the new oligarchs of IT (TV’s heir) that invasively directs our lives, they no longer preach prudence except to the poorest among us, who have nothing else; they no longer care to attend to the national interest, preferring to claim illusory mandates to insult our intelligence while they hand sackfuls of our money out of the Treasury window to economic rapists not worthy of the term kleptocrat, more in the nature of artful dodgers. They have their tickets on the gravy train out of here, or think they have. All they will have to do is to say, as others have said before them, “We were only obeying orders”. Orders from us, the disordered, the misinformed, the manipulated.

And our children? So far from protecting them, as was our duty, we have sold their birthright over and over.

If only we could hear the message coming down from our own history, calling on our decency and self-respect, “Time to leave the fairground and get back to work. There is a nation to rebuild”.