#and I refuse to give Murdoch any more money

[insanityclause]

“Pressure,” Tom Hiddleston says, “is a privilege.” He apologises for appropriating the title of Billie-Jean King’s memoir, but it’s a sentiment that feels pertinent to him and his co-star Hayley Atwell. They have known each other for 20 years, have both starred in the Marvel universe (Hiddleston as the charmingly villainous Loki; Atwell as the wartime spy Peggy Carter), but this is the first time they have worked together — if you don’t count their group audition to get into drama school.

In a baggy sweatshirt (Atwell) and natty pale-blue jacket with clasps (Hiddleston), they are in a south London studio to rehearse Shakespeare’s bantering would-be lovers Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. It will be only the second Shakespeare play performed at the 2,000-seat Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London since 1957. And the pressure Hiddleston refers to comes from the fact that the previous one — The Tempest, starring Sigourney Weaver, also directed by Jamie Lloyd — failed to go down a storm.

Atwell and Hiddleston in rehearsal for Much Ado About Nothing

MARC BRENNER

Withering reviews such as The Times’s (“Sigourney Weaver’s blank Prospero makes zero impression”) poured cold water on a desert island story that had been relocated by the director Jamie Lloyd to a charcoal-black netherworld. Prices were cut, and an onstage protest by Just Stop Oil looked like light relief.

“We can exclusively reveal that [Much Ado] is not set in a charcoal netherworld,” Hiddleston deadpans. The pair start each day of rehearsals with an hour of dancing. How much dancing will make it into the show? The pair, who are friendly but guarded, can’t or won’t reveal.

What they will say is that you don’t do a show like this by halves. It turns out that Shakespeare is more like a Marvel film than you’d think. “You’ve got to commit with heart and soul and body, like you do for action sequences,” Hiddleston explains. “All acting can be boiled down to how much you commit.”

“I like pressure,” Atwell says. “There is a part of it that is very healthy and useful. But any sort of pressure attached to an idea of my name as a brand or a public persona is so arbitrary and abstract. I turn off the noise that is inconsequential. I find the bit of it I can use.”

Tom Hiddleston as Loki, a mischievous Marvel villain

ALAMY

In 2022 Atwell had to do this while filming Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One amid bogus reports of a relationship with the film’s star Tom Cruise; the pair are teaming up again for Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, released this summer.

Hiddleston tells a story about his first big London Shakespeare opening, in 2007. He was playing Cassio in Othello, alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello and Ewan McGregor as Iago. At five o’clock the three popped out to a Covent Garden Pret a Manger to get a pre-show sandwich. (It is hard, the Much Ado two agree, knowing exactly when to eat before a show.) There was a first-night tension you could cut with a knife. Or there was until Ejiofor just said bluntly: “‘Well, this is a big night. No question.’ And it made us all laugh. Cos, yeah, it’s kind of a big deal — but what can you say?”

“’This is not your average Thursday,’” Atwell says.

“It’s not!” Hiddleston agrees.

Now 44, he already had an agent when he auditioned at Rada, having got one while studying Classics at Cambridge. Atwell, now 42, who grew up with her mother in west London, had delayed higher education to travel around with her American father and work for a casting director. When they met, in the final stage of auditions, it was on a day of working in a group.

Atwell and Hiddleston at the premiere of Jamie Lloyd’s The Tempest last year

ALAN CHAPMAN/DAVE BENETT/GETTY IMAGES

Atwell feels she handled the pressure less well than Hiddleston. “The woman from Rada said to us, ‘We are now looking for the next generation of actors who will be making a profound contribution to the arts.’ And I was, like, ‘I don’t know about that, mate, I’m just trying to get out of being in a housing association — if I can make a living I will be very happy.’ I was very intimidated.”

“It was very intense,” Hiddleston says.

“I was too shy,” Atwell says. “I didn’t commit.”

“I thought you committed,” Hiddleston says. “I thought you committed hard.”

He got in, she didn’t, and went to Guildhall School of Drama instead. But after leaving in 2005 she got a big role in the TV adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty almost immediately. A few posh roles followed, including in the film Brideshead Revisited.

“There was probably a bit more classism around then, and I suppose my own prejudice about ‘I’ve got to sound a certain way to even be considered for the kind of parts that might lead eventually to a film career’. So I thought if I could go down a period drama route, as opposed to the soap route or more working-class plays, I might give myself more of a chance. I had no back-up plan. I didn’t have any kind of privilege, didn’t come from money.”

The Eton-educated Hiddleston may come from a more prosperous upbringing but insists that, as an actor, “you never feel you are on solid ground. I have had to remind myself to smell the roses, because they don’t bloom all that often.”

His next theatre role was Lloyd’s revival of Pinter’s Betrayal in London and New York in 2019, which is how he met his fiancée, Zawe Ashton, who was a castmate. Atwell, meanwhile, last appeared in the West End in Ibsen’s Rosmerholm in 2019. Before that her work included another Donmar Shakespeare (Measure for Measure) and an Olivier-nominated performance in Lloyd’s production of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride. She didn’t know it at the time, but theMission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie saw her in it — something that led, seven years later, to him casting her as the con artist turned secret agent Grace.

He had a moment like that in 2013 — when the second Thor film came out at the same time as he was earning rave reviews for Coriolanus at the Donmar theatre in London. Hiddleston was the man of the hour. “And then you’ve got to do another 75 nights on stage, and make sure you are careful in the fight scene not to slip on the blood. The work anchors you.”

“You can’t predict,” she says. “There’s so much luck involved. I’ve worked for a number of years … and failure is allowed. I didn’t used to find it easy to fail and get a second chance. Particularly as a woman there was this sense of ‘you have to be perfect’. But while you want to deliver, after a while it’s not yours any more. It’s for the audience, and if they don’t like it, or if it doesn’t work, they’re allowed, that’s allowed.”

Atwell as the wartime spy Peggy Carter in Captain America: The First Avenger

JAY MAIDMENT/MARVEL STUDIOS/THA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Hiddleston, meanwhile, who has been filming the second series of John le Carré’s The Night Manager after a nine-year gap since the first, is still Loki to much of the world. The pair have never been in a Marvel scene together, though they did appear at the same event: Comic Con in San Diego in 2013, to which Hiddleston turned up in costume. “Nobody knew it was happening , it was insane and foolish and really fun.”

“I was backstage,” Atwell says cheerfully. “I will never forget the vision of Loki brushing his teeth in full costume.”

She says she is glad she was 15 years into her career before her five-year tour of duty on Mission began with filming in 2020. “I’m so grateful for that, because the level of global exposure on it, purely from being alongside Tom Cruise, can uproot and upend your life. But actually I’m too old to go, ‘What’s next?’ A real sense of security only comes from the commitment to work for work’s sake.” Offstage, both are engaged to their partners: Hiddleston to Ashton (the couple have a two-year-old), Atwell to the music producer Ned Wolfgang Kelly.

What led to today’s professional pairing? Hiddleston and Lloyd wanted to do another play together after Betrayal, and the actor suggested Much Ado. “It seems so light and warm,” he explains, a nice contrast to the heartbreaks of Betrayal. When Lloyd suggested Atwell, Hiddleston said yes immediately. “We’ve known each other for so long, and Beatrice and Benedick have known each other for so long.”

“I had only one question,” Atwell says, “which was, ‘Jamie, how ‘hey-nonny-nonny’ is it going to be?’” Lloyd assured her the hey-nonny-nonny levels would be minimal. “So I thought, this sounds really exciting.”

And if this pulls in a crowd more inclined to Marvel than Much Ado, well, marvellous. Hiddleston, who likes to spin a yarn, gives an impassioned speech about the magic of storytelling in all its forms, about “something being transmitted, from the stage or from the screen, that leaves you feeling more connected, more human, more alive, less alone in the world”.

And that applies to Marvel — famous dislikers of the franchise such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola notwithstanding — too?

“One hundred per cent,” they say in unison.

Atwell sees superhero stories as modern-day mythology. “I don’t believe in highbrow or lowbrow — I think it’s just art and film and theatre. You wouldn’t necessarily connect Marvel with Shakespeare. But both can be for everyone.”

Hiddleston remembers going to a screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York of the first Avengers film. A group of first responders who had been at 9/11 a decade earlier were there too. “They were all wearing their uniform in the cinema. And the film is about how the Avengers have basically saved New York from Loki. And when Loki gets smashed by the Hulk like a fish at the end, they literally threw their hats in the air and cheered. That was so moving.”

Much Ado About Nothing is at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, Feb 10-Apr 5, thejamielloydcompany.com

[ingek73]

Game, set, and twat: Whether it’s Meghan or Naomi Osaka, Piers Morgan’s MailOnline-enabled bullying has a pattern...

... the mediocre hack’s mediocre hack hates women who don’t dance to his tune.

Mic Wright

11 hr ago

If someone had a blog and Twitter account where they relentlessly attacked a series of high profile women — many of them women of colour — for perceived slights and their refusal to pay the writer attention, we’d usually call that person a bully and a troll, and if they persisted in that behaviour they might even find themselves facing legal consequences.

But Piers Morgan has a TV career and a MailOnline byline so he’s given impunity to mock, abuse, and denigrate women while claiming he’s just a ‘critical voice’. His latest target is Naomi Osaka, the 23-year-old tennis player who is currently ranked number 2 in the world, is the reigning champion of the US Open and Australian Open, and became the first woman to win back-to-back grand slams since Serena Williams in 2015.

By contrast, Piers Morgan is a mediocre hack who owes his controversy-baiting career to Simon Cowell who pulled him out of the dumper of history and plonked him on the America’s Got Talent panel after he was frog-marched out of Fleet Street for slapping faked photos on the front page of a national newspaper. That incident was the last in an ignominious run at The Daily Mirror and, before that, in the Murdoch press, which I have covered extensively in the past.

[image description] Twitter avatar for @Nabilu

Nabil Abdulrashid

@Nabilu

If time machines existed Piers Morgan would go backwards in time to chat shit about Rosa Parks

May 31st 2021

346 Retweets2,456 Likes]

Morgan’s latest creepy obsession was triggered — I use that word deliberately — by Osaka’s decision not to speak to the press during the French Open at Roland Garros because interviews were affecting her mental health. She subsequently withdrew from the tournament altogether after winning her first match, having been fined $15,000 for not speaking to the media and warned she was at risk of being expelled from the event.

In her statement yesterday, Osaka wrote that she had suffered “long bouts of depression” since she defeated Serena Williams in the 2018 US Open Final and received significant media attention. She continued:

I never wanted to be a distraction and I accept that my timing was not ideal and my message could have been clearer. More importantly, I would never trivialise mental health or use the term lightly.

Nothing in either of Osaka’s statements support Morgan’s sneering labelling of the player as “Narcissistic Naomi” or “world sport’s most petulant little madam”. Once again a 56-year-old man is using his vast and undeserved media platform to bully and harass a woman half his age. And — surprise, surprise — it’s actually just a new front in his obsessive one-sided war on the Duchess of Sussex.

Beneath the frankly unhinged headline, Narcissistic Naomi's cynical exploitation of mental health to silence the media is right from the Meghan and Harry playbook of wanting their press cake and eating it, Morgan writes:

Naomi Osaka is a brilliant tennis player…

… She is also the highest-paid female athlete in the world, raking in $55.2 million in the past 12 months, $5.2 million from tennis winnings and $50 million from endorsement deals with the likes of Nike, Beats by Dre, Mastercard and Nissin…

… Unfortunately, Ms Osaka is also an arrogant spoiled brat whose fame and fortune appears to have inflated her ego to gigantic proportions.

How else to explain her extraordinary decision to announce she will no longer participate in media press conferences, supposedly to protect her mental health?

Morgan is pretending that he doesn’t know that money is not an impregnable suit of armour to protect your mental health. Osaka could be the richest woman in the world and still face anxiety and depression. In fact, at just 23, the pressures of her performance-driven, endorsement-laden life are arguably more likely to lead to those feelings than a ‘normal’ one.

But rather than seeing Osaka as a young woman in an extraordinary position who is struggling with those demands and finding the hectoring, hostile, and entitled attitude of the press hard to handle at the moment, Morgan calls her “petulant” and continues:

[She] was fined $15,000 for refusing to appear in front of the media… Of course, given that she earns around $6,000 an hour, Osaka will recoup this fine while she sleeps tonight, rendering the fine utterly meaningless.

What's not meaningless is her frankly contemptible attempt to avoid legitimate media scrutiny by weaponizing mental health to justify her boycott.

Morgan departed Good Morning Britain after the row that followed his comment that he “didn’t believe a word” of the Duchess of Sussex’s statements about her mental health during the Oprah interview. Now, the mental health analyser has logged on again and he has determined that Naomi Osaka does not meet his standard of distress. Sadly, he secured his professional qualifications in this area by scrawling a certificate in crayon on the back of a Pizza Express kids menu.

[image description] Twitter avatar for @PaulbernalUK

Paul Bernal

@PaulbernalUK

What is it about Naomi Osaka and Meghan Markle that gets Piers Morgan so worked up, I wonder. Image

May 31st 2021

1,726 Retweets10,537 Likes

-

He claims that after reading Osaka’s Instagram post about press conferences, which he calls “an orgy of narcissistic twaddle”, “several times” he experienced “mounting fury”. Remember, this is a 56-year-old man contorting his melted waxwork face into an angry rictus over a 23-year-old woman he doesn’t know choosing not to appear at a press conference. I am not convinced that Osaka is the narcissistic one here.

Morgan continues:

One thing’s very clear: This has got nothing to do with mental health.

What Osaka really means is that she doesn’t want to face the media if she hasn’t played well, because the beastly journalists might actually dare to criticise her performance…

… This is straight out of the Meghan and Harry playbook of wanting to have the world’s largest cake and eating it, by exploiting the media for ruthless self-promotion but using mental health to silence any media criticism.

One thing’s very clear: This has got nothing to do with Naomi Osaka.

What Morgan really means is that he’s still beetroot red over a perceived slight by Meghan back in 2016, which he only started ranting about after he didn’t get an invite to her wedding and was “ghosted”. That came after two years of him tweeting about her as a “friend”.

Piers Morgan is simply using Naomi Osaka as another way to wage his sad fuck guerilla war against the Sussexes. And Osaka is just the latest in a long string of young women to fall short of his weirdo expectations.

He berated Lady Gaga on social media, attacking her after she spoke about dealing with PTSD after being raped, and goaded her so much that she agreed to an interview clearly in the hope of getting him to stop.

He attacked Arianna Grande after the Manchester Arena attack and kept up his bullying for six months until she agreed to have dinner with him after what he said was a “chance meeting”. After she had conceded to spending time in his fetid presence he shifted tack and started creepily calling her his “soulmate” — she was 26 at the time.

These obsessions with young women are often framed as “feuds” in the press, but they are, in fact, byline-enabled stalking. Morgan has a huge platform and he abuses it to get women to concede to him, to make mollifying noises, to pretend that they are his friends just to get him to stop.

The only difference between Piers Morgan and a street harasser screaming at a woman to smile is that MailOnline and ITV pay him handsomely for the privilege. Tonight, Morgan’s ‘Life Stories’ interview with Keir Starmer goes out on ITV and he’ll once again get a chance to dominate the headlines. His views are given credence by the political elite even as he continues to abuse women for attention and praise.

It’s a tactic he’s used for decades, stretching back to his time on The Sun’s Bizarre column, where he insisted on inserting pictures of himself cuddling up to celebrities. His ‘feud’/obsession with Madonna has run on for decades, beginning in his Fleet Street days when she didn’t give him the exclusive on her first pregnancy and continuing right up until now.

As with Lady Gaga, Morgan has repeatedly mocked and dismissed Madonna for saying she was raped in the past. However, unlike Gaga, Madonna has refused to pay homage to Morgan with an interview. He preemptively ‘banned’ her from his CNN show back in 2011 though she had shown not one scintilla of interest in appearing, and tried to reignite interest in his hatred for her in 2016 by saying he would end “the feud” if she apologised to him. He’s still waiting for that call.

Morgan’s attack on Osaka, which is simply another attempt to get at Meghan, came two days after a Daily Mail interview with Jan Moir in which he grumbled:

[Meghan] thinks she’s beaten me? She might be in for a surprise because I suspect I’ll be back soon. If Meghan thinks she has cancelled me or won the battle, she is in for a big shock. I’ve never been more popular.

It made me think of this moment in Mad Men:

Michael Ginsberg: What do I care? I got a million of them… a million…

Don Draper: Good. I guess I’m lucky you work for me.

Michael Ginsberg: I feel bad for you.

Don Draper: I don’t think about you at all.

Meghan is Draper. Morgan is a total Ginsberg — smug and self-satisfied, convinced that Meghan is as obsessed with him as he is with her, certain that they are having a feud between equals and not the same dynamic as every woman cursed with a sad but sinister stalker.

And while Morgan acts like he’s a brave truth-teller, he only dares pump his horseshit opinions into MailOnline’s open sewer once he’s fairly sure that there are enough other media bullies taking the same line. The Australian’s tennis correspondent Will Swanton filed his misogynist screed a full day before Morgan got round to his.

There’s a clue as to how Morgan expects young women to act around him in the latest instalment of his journals — The Diary of Samuel Creeps — which are published in The Mail on Sunday.

Recounting his visit to what sounds like a truly mind-numbing party (“…drinking cocktails, nibbling canapés and having actual ‘fun’ in the garden of the Notting Hill home of Gabriela Peacock, nutritionist to the stars.”) he describes an encounter with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie:

Princess Beatrice arrived with her husband Eduardo. They announced her first pregnancy today, and both seemed ecstatically happy.

‘Please thank your mum for her supportive texts when I left GMB,’ I told her. ‘She’s always been very loyal to me, and I greatly appreciate it.’

‘Well, you’ve been very loyal to her,’ Beatrice replied, ‘and she appreciates that too.’

I’ve always had a soft spot for Fergie.

Princess Eugenie, who gave birth to her first child three months ago, joined her sister. ‘If you two need any parenting tips for your expanding Royal creche, I’ve had four kids so am something of an expert,’ I suggested.

Their regal eyebrows shot up in synchronised horror. ‘No, we’re good thanks, Piers,’ came the firm, unified response.

I’ve known both Princesses since they were very young, and they’ve been through a lot of tough times in the media spotlight, especially lately over their father Prince Andrew’s shameful friendship with billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

But they never complain, or give whining interviews, or publicly trash their family, and they’re always incredibly nice, polite and good fun – which all makes such a refreshing change from their narcissistic, self-pitying, family-abusing, spoiled-brat cousins over in California.

Piers Morgan wants to be treated as famous rather than infamous, and likes women to indulge his antics and act as if they’re amused by his sweaty-handed attention. Fergie — a woman devoid of discernible talent beyond tolerating her ex-husband’s second career as the top Yelp! reviewer at Jeffrey Epstein’s houses — is a-ok with Piers because she sucks up to him. Similarly, her daughters are delightful because they’ll tolerate Morgan’s dad jokes and fetid familiarity.

Morgan is not a journalist, a truth-teller, a maverick, or a commentator in anything but bad faith. He’s nothing more than a misogynist with a MailOnline byline and some big money contracts. Don’t let him pretend to be anything else.

[jorahssquire]

Whether or not Trump successfully steals this election, he’s already stolen Biden’s victory -What it feels like to watch the challenge to Joe Biden becoming President Elect.

BY JOE BERKOWITZ

8 MINUTE READ

In my mind, the calendar always ended on November 3. Beyond some potential events and projects, that’s as far ahead as I dared imagine.

Whatever happened afterward would either be too horrible to contemplate in any depth, or would bring such tremendous healing relief that to consider the possibilities for even one second when they could still be taken away would be torture.

Only after the election would I allow myself to open the mental Pandora’s Box of what it would feel like to suddenly wake up each day in a world where Donald Trump is out of power and we could all take a breath and undo some of the harm he’d inflicted and maybe try to do some good.

I didn’t kid myself that a Biden administration would instantly solve the pandemic puzzle or bring the country together. At the very least, though, it would deliver consecutive days without a constitutional crisis.

It took until Friday, November 6, to understand that it was actually happening; that Biden was ahead by so much in Pennsylvania, his victory was all but assured. Some publications like Vox even called the election, though legacy outlets remained cautious. At that moment, I finally let myself comprehend the enormity of the moment and its attendant implications, but only a little.

I dipped a toe into a creek to test the water and ended up falling in entirely. All of what this victory meant finally started to truly dawn on me at once, and an ecstatic energy animated my very being. I let out an involuntary holler, and ran around my apartment, ending up on the balcony, where my joyous screams ripped through the calm of the day.

On Saturday, when the news finally broke that the win was official, my wife and I jumped and danced and made calls to family. We watched videos of New Yorkers and Philadelphians celebrating in the streets, and we went outside in Minneapolis to experience it ourselves, greeted by a cacophonous call-and-response of honking cars and applauding passersby. People were walking around in groups of five, brandishing glib and glittery homemade posters, drinking champagne straight from the bottle. There were the spontaneous revelers, mini-parades, and block parties of a rare religiously festive occasion. World leaders started congratulating Biden, who made a very normal if not particularly inspiring victory speech. It was a moment for the ages, complete with Rudy Giuliani’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco unfolding in the background, a reminder of just how ridiculous Trumpworld could be, and how it might feel to laugh at them now that they would no longer be in charge.

It was an ending and a beginning and it felt so amazing, I was glad I hadn’t allowed myself to imagine it when there was still a chance I might lose it. Then, by Tuesday, November 10—a week after the election—it was gone.

The victory hadn’t vanished entirely, but it was now tainted by the all too familiar crisis mode, another existential threat suddenly looming. I had expected Trump to be surly and uncooperative, and that he might not concede, so when those things happened, it was almost a relief to see how low and small it made him look. But my mistake was in thinking that the GOP didn’t really need him any more and would just let him twist in the wind.

Instead, by Monday it became clear that the bulk of the Republican party, including its leadership, were fully unified behind Trump. Everyone from Mitch McConnell to Ivanka Trump to Ted Cruz on down, all claimed a peculiar form of voter fraud that only affects the top of the ticket, and not the down ballot section, where Democrats lost as many as 10 House seats and failed to win the Senate. They’re all using the line that “every legal vote must be counted,” implying a surplus of illegal votes, only from Democrat voters. Bill Barr authorized an investigation into alleged electoral irregularities, causing a top lawyer at the Department of Justice to resign in protest. And finally, on November 10, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assured the country that, in the end, Donald Trump would prevail and remain president.

It was as if America had survived the climax of a horror move only to find out it was actually the beginning of a two-season Netflix series. That release of tension was instantly reversed, replaced with a deep spiritual exhaustion, and the feeling of being turned inside out and wrung dry.

No matter what happens now, whether Trump and the GOP succeed at stealing this election, under the paradoxical guise of preventing it from being stolen, they’ve already stolen our victory, and so much more.

One of the most excruciating aspects of witnessing this attempted theft is that it’s unfolding in exactly the way that experts predicted. Trump alleged in advance that any outcome in which he didn’t win would be the result of voter fraud, something he also suggested back in 2016. He also discouraged his own supporters from using mail-in ballots, despite the pandemic, because in his framing, they were so easy to manipulate. Democrats called out Trump’s maneuvering, and the fact that his appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy happened to be slowing down deliveries just before the pandemic election. Pundits speculated that Trump would claim victory based on the early, in-person votes, and that mail-in ballots would later erode his victory and that he would refuse to concede.

It was all so predictable that Bernie Sanders called every shot in advance exactly.

Considering all the Trump-inflamed scrutiny on would-be voter fraud, the election was heavily and thoroughly observed, including by an international panel Trump invited (which is now calling his accusations baseless.)

This broadly embraced charade relies upon tremendous bad faith. No legitimate evidence of voter fraud has been found—aside from the one Trump supporter in Pennsylvania who got busted requesting a ballot for his dead mom—let alone enough fraud to account for anything near the margins by which Trump lost. All claims to the contrary tend to be based on hearsay and shadowy evidence to support a preordained hypothesis.

The GOP is acting only on unearned suspicions and hostility. They clearly started with the conclusion that Democrats  stole the election, and are now working backwards, throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. They make broad statements that their observers weren’t allowed in, when they were, and that droves of dead people voted, when they didn’t. Disgraced scam artist James O’Keefe, who got busted in 2018 for trying to run a #MeToo sting operation on the Washington Post, is offering $25,000 rewards for testimony. All any takers have to do is lie and their voice will be worth more than the people’s voice, as long as enough soulless GOP jackals believe them.

So far, though, all of Team Trump’s cases are being laughed out of court. Either the judges outright toss them, or the hearings end with Trump’s defense admitting that they have nothing and are wasting everyone’s time.

Even the one “whistleblower” O’Keefe unearthed, and who set up a GoFundMe that raised over $120,000, has now recanted his testimony. (The personal fundraising appeal has since been removed.)

How on earth are we expected to accept, after four years of a presidency known for its dishonesty, that high-level officials can contest a legitimate election win on the basis of such amateur hour, fake fraud b.s.? Or that the GOP is owed the opportunity to kick the tires because of how unfairly they’ve been treated? Or that Democrats are just inherently suspicious and, according to Senator Lindsey Graham, can only win by cheating?

The nihilistic cynicism on display here is breathtaking. Trump decided the only way he could save face is to shroud his decisive loss in indecision, and delegitimize it in the eyes of his 70 million supporters. It’s the Birther conspiracy all over again, minus the racism.

The goal at this point might not even be to overturn the results, so much as just inject enough doubt into the proceedings that Trump voters refuse to believe the election wasn’t stolen. (Also, to raise money for Trump’s new leadership PAC and chip away at his debt.) Why would those voters accept the truth, when their leadership angrily swears otherwise? The best-case scenario now is that Trump supporters ultimately forego an actual street-level revolution for just angrily assuming the next administration is utterly fraudulent.

Some of their response depends on how this tumultuous post-game phase of the election ends. At the moment, Rupert Murdoch is dangling rumors of a historic book deal payday in front of Trump, which could cushion the blow enough to get him to go quietly. Or maybe he—in collaboration with McConnell, Graham, O’Keefe, and the rest—will find a way to invalidate the results. Or maybe the fraud allegations will only persist until a lawyer gives a damn compelling speech in a courtroom, and we get the full Aaron Sorkin ending.

Either way, Trump has stolen something from us that he can’t give back.

In addition to the fleeting feeling of victory, which already feels so long ago, and the sheen of legitimacy, he has stolen any naïve hope of Biden or anyone else uniting the country any time soon.

For a brief instant, I thought maybe if Trump was revealed as a bitter, sulking wannabe tyrant for all to see, we might start to agree on some things again. I had a modicum of optimism, which was bound to get crushed by the reality of a Biden presidency, but which felt incredibly refreshing.

It’s all gone now.

For the indefinite future, all those days in the calendar beyond November 3 now look identical to the days that preceded them: Constant chaos, frustration, lies, and irresolvable polarization.

Trump and his cohort have stolen this victory, stolen our optimism, and stolen Biden’s legitimacy.

Some of it can be restored, some of it cannot.

None of it can be forgiven.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joe Berkowitz is an opinion columnist at Fast Company. His latest book, American Cheese: An Indulgent Odyssey Through the Artisan Cheese World, is available from Harper Perennial.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Wherefore art thou, Compromise?

Where is America's ability to compromise? Why can't American politicians compromise?

We couldn't compromise in the 1860's, and that's good because certain things do not allow for compromise - morals and ethics, for starters. The Civil War creeped up then, delivering a win to the forces of equality and the American Dream, something that until recently we took for granted - that anyone in America could be anything, even a Black man a president, which we learned in 2012 and quickly declared victory for the United States despite the fact that compromise in America had already shown itself to be near its end.

And with Trump, Republicans dealt a potentially fatal blow to the concept of compromise, the idea that we could work together to build a shared future and an ongoing conversation between human beings would push us forward with only a few bumps and bruises along the way.

The problem is that we can't compromise, and there are a lot of forces in play that are the reason why everyday adults can no longer just get along. in no particular order, those forces are...

Right-wing media

Money

Conspiracy Theories

Term Limits

Right-wing Media has been a growing concern for some time now - at least a solid two decades. It started with an effort to give the greater Conservative world a voice (and for Rupert Murdoch to make some giant money), and that's what it did. Only with Fox News, the Right got more than some news leaning its way, it got a full-on not-really-news, more-like-infotainment piece (that even a court judge admitted a few weeks ago). Fox News was more like opinion, more talk radio than news, although they threw some news in there to make it look good. Add in talk radio itself, and all of its bullshit -- all of this reaching back to the 90's, and you get what's essentially a powerful propaganda machine. Plus one equals Trump, who full advantage of the growing insanity to push right-wing media over the edge with full-on conspiracy theories. And here we are, right-wing politicans who advocate for some of these conspiracy theories getting elected to Congress in Georgia. A US President that shapes public opinion with conspiracy theories, demonizes anyone who opposes him, and has essentially given birth to an entire movement of alternate reality from the Oval Office via Twitter.

There's no compromising with people who aren't even lucid. And these conspiracy quacks are definitely not looking for ways to compromise and govern together. They are busy uncovering plots of Venezuelan leftists to destroy the Trump empire, unearthing chiild molester cabals in the basements of pizza parlors and declaring Biden a Chinese agent and pedophile. Compromise is suicide for these fools because they've already shown themselves unwilling to even embrace reality. It's rather like arguing with a 5-year old over who spilled the water on the floor. "It was the dog." "The dog is outside." "It was Nana." "Nana died last year." "It was an earthquake." "Nope." "It was aliens." "Hmmm." Just ask the yahoos at QAnon, or the History Channel, it was definitely aliens. The Lizard People. Or maybe it's just the Commies and the Socialists - just ask Rush Limbaugh; he's been repeating white supremacy talking points from the 1870s for decades.

But really, what's the point of all this? Why does any of this bullshit even get anywhere? Simple answer: $$$$$$. Money.

It's all about money. That's all. It's all money. Money answers every question. Why did Trump run for President? Money.Why did QAnon appear on the scene and spread their insanity? Money.Why did Rush Limbaugh get the Presidential Medal of Freedom? He generates support for American Conservative through extremist right-wing propaganda, which in turns generates money - campaign donations is huge money.Why are Republicans supporting the Mad King Trump? Money. Money and power.Why are Fox News personalities willing to say anything on TV? Money.

Everything comes down to money. And a few years ago, the money faucet was turned (possibly) permanently open thanks to Citizens United. Now the money flows from everywhere, and there's little effort to control it, regulate it, track it and see who's giving it. Billionaires and millionaires and moms and pops are sending in cash. The rich send it in to ensure that policies favor them, so they can make more money. The average person sends in money because they've bought into fear politics over the last 2-3 decades of being clued to the Big Lie Machine, like Fox News or now OANN, the new Trump-loving propaganda producer. And with limited rules on how this money is handled or used, much less audited and regulated, we have all these people with big, fat, happy flush funds for lavish dinners and golf trips and 3rd yachts. Now rich people can buy their way into an ambassadorship or a Cabinet position, which generates them even more money because being rich isn't about producing anything, it's about making connections, and connection mean money. Politicians need money for campaigns so they can work on policies that in-turn benefit their benefactors and make them more money, which opens doors for all to....you guessed it, more money.

The propaganda machine delivers the money, and the monied voices reflect the propaganda machine. And when there's as much money as you need to stay in the driver's seat, what the American people want doesn't matter. Because you don't need to convince the Average Joe on the Right to vote for you because the propaganda machine has convinced Joe that the other guy is going to kill your family and give your house and daughter to an illegal immigrant. So, Joe's money and votes are coming your way, even if you murder Joe's wife in the parking lot. It's a machine that grinds people up and spits them out, creates trolls and proles, and all the money lines the pockets of the rich and the representatives of the rich, aka politicians.

And that leads us to our last piece, perhaps the most important one. Term limits.

What we've seen is a perpetual cycle of lies and money, which likely can't be broken because the Supreme Court validated it once and now SCOTUS is owned by the alt-Right for a generation (unless Congress impeaches some judges, which may or may not be possible, or the United States puts service limits on federal judges and SCOTUS, like it should - but that's another discussion). Now we have one way out of this - that I see, and it's in term limits for all federally-elected officials. No more 7-term Senators. No more 10-term Congresspersons. No more Mitch McConnell's and Nancy Pelosi's. You gotta go. Do your 2 terms and get lost. Sure, you can be in Congress two terms and then go to the Senate for two, but that's it. Two terms, then let's get some fresh meat and fresh ideas in there. (Same concept as above with the judiciary at the federal and SCOTUS level.) You do some time in public service, and then you get out and let someone else play. It's one way to ensure that there's some competition, which could lead people to having to prove themselves and sell themselves to the public, based on ideas rather than team. As long as a Senator can just run on name recognition, propaganda and oodles of dark money, it's going to be nearly impossible to get someone who refuses to compromise out of an important seat. 

Because that Senator, for example, is safe and no longer has to care about the needs of half the country, or even anyone else at all. They are getting rich, have a secure job and have a massive political machine behind them. The longer they are there, the more entrenched they become, and the less challenged they are for their seat, the less they have to work with anyone or adapt their stances on policies that affect everyday Americans. Now, I'm sure there are a lot more issues that could come up, and there are likely some better arguments out there, but it seems to me that if we ever want to get back to a place where politicians compromise and work together, we're going to have to start somewhere, and I think we have to begin with term limits. But that won't happen by leaning on compromise, ironically; that's going to have to be forced somehow some way. And hopefully it starts with a Senate majority on the Left.

[tonystarkbingo]

Tony Stark Bingo Prompt Meme

So, we did another Prompt Meme game, and came up with these summaries based on a three-tag prompt. This is an open prompt, if any of these summaries look like fun to you, please feel free to write them!! Tag us or the writer of the prompt when you do so we can all see how cool you are and what you’ve given us for the promot

@summerpipedream - Winteriron - All Tony wanted to do after finishing up at MIT was to pack up his desk at Stark Industries and quietly fade into obscurity. Sure money was tight, but he never expected Jan to actually sign him up for one of those social media reality shows. Now, he was stuck in a house, with no phone, no internet, or access to the outside world, trying to avoid the sexy Bucky Barnes, who's mission in life seemed to be to never wear a shirt around him.

@darthbloodorange - The world is ending, an alien race has all but taken over the world, it is an apocalypse of devastating proportions, most of the world is dead. The Avengers, those who are left, have retreated to a bunker built a fourth of the way down into the Earth’s core. Tony and Steve have been growing closer, when they are not working together to find a way to fight back against the aliens, they are fuck buddies. Tony’s a genius, he knows the odd of surviving this are not in their favour. Odds were that they were going to die… and well, Tony doesn’t want to die without letting Steve know how he feels. Before the battle Tony corners Steve in the armoury and confesses that he loves him. Steve is aromatic, has been since project rebirth.  They are both so very sorry. 

@newnewyorker93 - After a series of strange killings where the victims are found set up kneeling like they're praying, Tony Stark (a private detective) is on the case. An initial (false) suspect is the local priest, Matt Murdoch, who ends up being a helpful ally in solving the case (and possibly more)

@27dragons - Winteriron: You'd think that Tony Stark would have learned to ski when he was growing up. You'd think wrong; Howard never saw the point in it. So here he is, almost done with his PhD, and his friends have decided on a spring break trip to go skiing. He doesn't want to admit to them that he doesn't know how, so their first night at the lodge, he offers one of the ski instructors a large sum of money to sneak him up onto the slopes for a few lessons that night. Against his better judgment -- but desperately needing the cash -- Ski instructor Bucky Barnes takes Tony up on the slopes. Unfortunately, just as Tony's starting to get the hang of things, it starts snowing. Hard. Even more unfortunately, the newfallen snow disguises a patch of ice and Tony tumbles out of control. By the time Bucky catches up to him and verifies that he's not badly hurt, the snow is coming down too hard to see the lodge -- so what else are they to do but seek shelter in a caretaker's cabin conveniently (TM) nearby and wait for morning...?

@gavilansblog - Tony is kidnapped as part of an Evil Plot (TM). He's handling things just fine, tyvm, until his would-be rescuer (who he's been pining for, obviously), gets dragged in and handcuffed back to back with him. Seriously, dude? If you insist on breaking the kidnapping procedure at least actually rescue me! The taxes come in when the Evil Plot Master does his monologue and reveals that the kidnapping is part of a Villain Logic scheme to get Stark Industries to throw money behind the campaign to get a new law requiring actually taxing billionaires to fail. Evil Plot Master is, naturally, a billionaire. Tony would facepalm if he weren't handcuffed to his idiot rescuer, seriously. And then the kidnapping protocol kicks in and Jarvis shuts the whole facility down only instead of being handcuffed by himself Tony is now handcuffed to his rescuer so they have to do the whole escaping part of the plan while handcuffed together, resulting is the standard Tension (TM) moments and possibly an almost-kiss.

Fey Relay - Bruce, Tony, and Peter, resident science geeks, get de-aged and really want to play in the lab. You know, the one that has lots of things that can kill them in it? But they're still sort of mentally in there, just cranky and smol. So they get assigned their own Non-Science Adults who they hand-hold and point to do their sciency bidding. Thor, Steve, and Natasha oblige them and have great fun!

@rise-up-ting-ting-like-glitter Dragons were real. Okay they were actually just souped-up dinosaurs, but that didn’t mean Tony wasn’t being hunted—with intent—by lizards. He hadn’t wanted to come to this stupid Island in the first place. SI funding had explicitly been removed from the crackpot idea to return dinosaurs to the food chain. He could have told everyone that this was going to happen. Instead he was climbing through a jungle with a one-armed man who refused to give his name and if they didn’t get to the raptor enclave, retrieve the anti-venom, and return in time, people Tony loved were going to die.

His guide had better live up to his scruffy wild-man appearance or Tony was going to lose everything.

@somesortofitalianroast - Nurse Bucky Barnes wasn’t sure what exactly was going on. The vigilante known as Nomad had just crashed through the (luckily) open fire escape window. While he was lucky not to have any broken bones, he was unlucky enough to have a bad concussion. A really bad one. One that meant he couldn’t fall asleep. Also unfortunately, he only had the one bed and the enormous Nomad wouldn’t fit on his couch, so they’d have to share. It was only after he helped Nomad into his bed that he noticed the blood, and, unthinking, he pulled the cowl off to check for another, serious injury. And gasped. Nomad was Steve Rogers, his best friend in school, who’d died in an IED attack in Iraq 5 years earlier.

@polizwrites Natasha Romanov and Virginia Potts are the proprietors  of  Chaykus -  a Russian tea room on the seedy side of town.  Its new mission  is to be a sanctuary for women  who have been smuggled into the country for sex trafficking purposes.  As for the men who engage in such practices? Well, they are quickly discovering that their days are numbered.

@dixiehellcat - Pepper is the manager of the heavy metal band War Machine. James Rhodes, lead guitarist and founder of the band, is looking for a new lead singer. He did not expect the woo-loving Virginia to get horoscopes cast for the applicants and decide based on that. He just wants somebody who can sing, dammit. This Stark kid is uncomfortably attractive, yeah, but he's been thrown out of two bands already. what? the shower sex? it was only that one time after a show, and they were both wasted...

@dracusfyre Tony was born without a soul mark. Bucky's was lost forever when Hydra took his arm.  Without the universe to give you a hint that this person is The One, falling in love is gambling with your heart. But soulmates don't have to be born, they can be made - and Bucky and Tony decide that the same should be true of soul marks, as well

@ceealaina Tony was like nerd prime growing up. Normally he doesn’t let it bother him too much — he’s got inventions to invent, after all. But all of a sudden he realizes that he’s almost 20, he’s got two degrees under his belt, and has no idea how to do much more than kiss. He’s not entirely sure how he manages to convince Rhodey to sleep with him to “get it out of the way,” or how he manages to convince him to keep sleeping with him to “help improve my technique,” but it’s the best sex of his life (not that he has much to compare it to) and he never wants it to end. But it’s the night when they’re watching movies, and Tony’s ends up dozing against Rhodey’s shoulder only to wake up to a feather light kiss against his forehead that he realizes he might be in trouble. 

@thudworm - King Anthony considers it part of his royal duties to protect his people by going out and taking care of any monsters harassing them. Of course, no one can know that the knight Iron Man is really the king, which leads to some fun assumptions about Iron Man’s identity.

@jacarandabanyan Tony’s mom forbid him to purposefully drive out his roommates so that he can have a room all to himself where he can tinker until morning light. She had to hear about it from friends, acquaintances, and other well-known socialites often enough when Tony went to boarding school and ran his roommates off there. Now that he’s in college, that behavior must stop. Luckily for Tony, he doesn’t even have to try to get the first two roommates at MIT to request a room switch. But then he meets his third roommate- a tall, handsome, funny man named James Rhodes. At first it was just natural joy at having a fellow competent engineer to hang out with, and perhaps the occasional dirty thought. But his crush on the man quickly grows. Before he knows it, Tony’s pining hard for his best friend. Every once in a while he thinks Rhodey might be interested too- but then he hears Rhodey lecturing a computer science senior for plying Tony with :beer: alcohol at a party because “come on, man, kid’s only 16. Have a little class and try chasing skirts a little closer to your age.” After that, he’s convinced Rhodey will only ever see him as a friend and a kid.

psychiccatpanda - Tony works hard and puts in long hours.  So what if some of his long nights turn into very early mornings at CHew 2 OH.  The only drawback is his business partner and head baker, Steve, with his disappointed looks and his continual arguing.  When Steve's friend Bucky starts hanging around the shop, though, Tony notices.  Oh lord, he notices. A month or so later, one night when he and Steve are working after hours at Steve's place to plan their seasonal menu, Steve tells him that he's noticed him checking out Bucky.  Tony hits him with a decorative pillow and things kind of get out of hand.  Surveying the damage (let's face it - Steve's coffee table was never going to be quite right again), Steve turns to him, "I was just going to suggest you get some practice kissing before asking him out."  Oh.  Oh...

@tisfan So... the problem with being a necromancer is being able to practice one's skill. The local cemeteries won't even let you look at a dead body if you're not a relative. Tony Stark, budding necromancer, forges a marriage certificate for the John Doe so that he can practice his craft. Only to find that it works perfectly. Bucky is No Longer Dead, and 100% interested in staying married...

@abrighterdarkness He didn’t mean to snoop.  He knew that wasn’t what he was being paid for here--the loud laughter of the party echoing from down the hall where he was actually supposed to be, was clear enough reminder of that fact. All Tony wanted was two short minutes to breathe without being pawed at--yes, yes, that might be his job but breathing room was much appreciated just the same--and now he was stuck in this closet sized bathroom with what sounded like a mob-hit being discuss right outside the door.  He knew he should’ve turned this job down.

magica - Howard Stark had an idea. Some people - alright, most people, stop hitting me, Maria! - would say it was a terrible idea. But it was only a little injection of stuff based on that strange glowing blue cube they'd found in the Arctic. And Tony was absolutely willing, let's get that straight, Maria! How was Howard supposed to know that it'd enable Tony to open up his own portals? And if some mystical green energy happened to swamp Tony just as he was opening a portal to Egypt? Well, that wasn't his fault. The dark-haired, well-built Priest of Anubis that Tony manages to bring back with him? That is not his fault either, damn it, Maria!

@festiveferret - Tony could say with absolute confidence - at least, if he could say anything at all in his current predicament - that this was not the way his PR rep, Pepper, would have wanted him to come out. There were, he figured, several hundred ways that the day could have gone better, but if asked to rank the top three, he'd put them thusly: 

1) That he decided to come out by having a wild, unabashed make out session with none other than Captain America, in the middle of a busy New York street.

2) That it was, in fact, the morning after their first "date" - a term he was applying loosely here - and not a tasteful reveal of a long-standing, safe, secure, adult relationship.

And 3) That at some point between the first floor lobby of his apartment building and the front door off his penthouse suite he'd suddenly, unexpectedly, and so-far permanently been turned into a ferret and no one knew.

It would also probably concern her to discover that of all these rather bewildering turns in his life, the one at the forefront of his mind was that ferrets couldn't send morning-after texts, and he didn't want Steve to think their little dalliance had been nothing more than an - albeit unfortunately public - one night stand.

Of one thing he was sure, however: Pepper was going to need a raise.

[circeart]

2020’s Mind-Blowing Jupiter/Pluto Conjunction:  Shadow & Light By

Dana Gerhardt

Seven of the ten deadliest pandemics in human history erupted during Jupiter/Pluto transits—just like the conjunction that peaks this year in April, June, and November.

Jupiter and Pluto were conjunct during the outbreak of the Spanish Flu in 1918.  Bubonic plague–the Black Death–ravaged Europe, Asia and Africa from the J/P conjunction of 1347 to their opposition in 1353.   Jupiter was trine Pluto during one of humanity’s very first pandemics, the Plague of Justinian, which killed 25 million in 541.  In modern times, the Lord of death and shadows (Pluto) has joined forces with the God of growth and expansion (Jupiter) during our five most recent pandemics.

Yet Jupiter and Pluto are gift givers too.  Astrology teaches there are no shadows without light.  These conjunctions, occurring about every 12 years, have also coincided with humanity’s greatest leaps forward. Together, Sky God Jupiter and his brother the Underworld Lord keep expanding our universe, triggering scientific breakthroughs, awakening new paradigms, distributing mega-wealth, and inspiring sweeping shifts in political power.

Johannes Kepler was born during a Jupiter/Pluto conjunction in Pisces, when most of the globe still believed that planets circled the Earth in perfect round orbits.  At 24 (his Jupiter return), Kepler has a mind-blowing epiphany about the solar system’s true design; it’s published a year later, during the 1596 Jupiter/Pluto conjunction. Under a later conjunction, Kepler publishes the work for which he’s most famous—his planetary laws of motion—still used in calculations today. **

Hans Lipperhey applies for the first telescope patent in 1608, under a Jupiter/Pluto conjunction.  In the following months, Galileo, the father of observational astronomy, builds his first telescope, through which he observes four of Jupiter’s moons, the first space objects seen orbiting a planet other than Earth.  Three hundred sixty years later, after so many Jupiter/Pluto gifts, humanity takes its greatest leap yet, beyond Earth. Neil Armstrong leaves his footprints on the Moon within orb of the 1968-69 Jupiter/Uranus/Pluto conjunctions.

Spread the wealth

Pluto is a god of wealth—Jupiter rules good fortune. You might expect these archetypes to have blessed our billionaires.   And they have.  Warren Buffet, Rupert Murdoch, George Soros, Bill Gates—all born during a Jupiter/Pluto conjunction.  Charles Koch was born with a Jupiter/Pluto trine (as was an earlier financier & philanthropist, JP Morgan).  Koch’s brother David was born during their square (as was steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie nearly a century earlier).

But if you’re hoping Jupiter/Pluto might bring you a mega-lottery win this year, think again.  Jupiter is an optimist who loves to roll the dice, but when dancing with Pluto, he favors hard work that’s born of obsession.  That’s how scientific geniuses and billionaires are made—they think big (Jupiter) with formidable focus (Pluto).

What about the wealth of the common man?  I’ll argue that the last three J/P conjunctions have increased this beyond measure, even as the divide between the haves and have-nots has grown wider than it’s been (some say) in all of human history.  But first we have to expand our perception of wealth beyond the dollars in our bank accounts.  Jupiter is a god of perspective—he favors higher, longer, and broader views.

With that mindset consider how the gifts of the 1981, 1994 and 2007 J/P conjunctions have thoroughly reshaped our world, bestowing the average man with powers beyond that of any king or emperor in history.

In 1981 IBM releases the first personal computer. Computing power that used to require a floor of bulky machines is now small enough to become a home appliance. Soon after, the internet is in development—which will eventually put whole libraries at our fingertips.  Many of our greatest emperors spent massive piles of gold on developing their libraries. Today–for free–we can explore the works of mankind’s greatest thinkers.

During the 1994 J/P conjunction, the first PlayStations are released—opening the collective imagination to countless interactive new worlds. How do we calculate the ways these games have rewired possibilities inside the human brain?  That year, Bezos launches Amazon—so that today, we can sit in our homes, desiring a book or a toothbrush and like an emperor, clap our hands, and have it delivered in an hour or a day.  In 2007, the iPhone is released.  It quite literally drops the universe into our palms.  What king could have commanded views of the birth of a star?  Now any child can do this.

But let’s get back to money.  How might this year’s conjunction affect our wealth?  Covid-19-inspired quarantines have halted economies around the world—prompting talk in the United States of relief efforts that would serve as the greatest wealth distribution in human history, a gesture fitting for these two planets.  It’s reminiscent of the Pluto/Jupiter aspects of the early 30’s during the Great Depression—the New Deal was passed in the years between the J/P conjunction and the square.  Big bold action is often required when these two planets meet.   During the 1943 conjunction, FDR enlists the whole nation in a massive unified war effort.

It helps to remember that Jupiter is also a philosopher.  For many, the most honest measure of wealth is having the free time to enjoy their lives—a sudden gift of this year’s pandemic. Time is perhaps the one thing more valuable than money. A homeless man has greater wealth than the dead billionaire.  With life and astrology we always have a choice: we can focus on the shadow or the light.  We can obsess (Pluto) about our common poverty.  Or we can use this sudden abundance of hours to leap beyond our own limits.  We can use Jupiter’s massive exuberance to boost our Plutonian passions.

As when–during the J/P conjunction of 2007–NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft uses the boost of Jupiter’s gravity to slingshot itself toward Pluto! **

Political pendulums swing

People focus on Pluto’s destruction—but empowerment is his favorite game.  During J/P conjunctions, political power can swing dramatically. These are the years when we see regime changes, stunning political landslides, assassinations, and the birth of social movements.

Within orb of the 1931 Jupiter/Pluto conjunction, Mahatma Gandhi, himself born under a J/P conjunction, leads one of the most powerful nonviolent campaigns.  He marches 241 miles across western India to get salt from the ocean, in defiance of the British ban against Indians collecting it or selling it.   Spain becomes a republic; King Alfonso XII is deposed.  Under the next conjunction in 1943, during World War II, Mussolini resigns; Italy surrenders.  Assassination attempts on Hitler and the Philippines president fail.

Argentinian President Peron is ousted under the beams of the 1956 J/P conjunction, when Morocco gains independence from France & Spain, Churchill resigns, and Khrushchev shocks the Soviets by denouncing Stalin; the de-Stalinization of Russia begins. In the US, Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat—and a young Martin Luther King helps lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

At the next J/P conjunction in 1968, under the weight of the Vietnam War, President Johnson stuns the country by declining to run for re-election.   Throughout the year, around the world, workers and students take to the streets in mass protests against social and economic inequalities.  In the US, the Civil Rights Act is passed.

Under this same conjunction, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King are assassinated.  At the next conjunction in 1981, Egyptian President Sadat is killed; attempts are made on newly elected President Reagan and Pope John Paul II.  That same year, Nelson Mandela (born during the J/P conj of 1918) inspires one of the world’s earliest hashtags, “Free Mandela.”  This cry starts gathering momentum around the world, and by the next Jupiter/Pluto conjunction, in 1994, Mandela, now freed, is elected the first black president of South Africa.

What happens is always surprising

I had hoped for wild regime changes this year.  Though honestly, I hadn’t given Jupiter/Pluto much thought.  Like many astrologers, I’ve been fixated on the Big Saturn/Pluto Restructuring and how it all ends this year—with the birth of a new collective cycle, signified by the Great Jupiter/Saturn conjunction in progressive Aquarius. I had hoped these omens were pointing to rising power for the people, a mass multi-cultural movement of women and millennials who would stare down the structures corrupt with greed and forge a new world, one that would benefit those at the bottom as much as those at the top!

Alas the future always glitters in a progressive’s eyes.   And now that I know more about J/P conjunctions, I also know they don’t guarantee success.  Just ask the air traffic controllers or the Polish Solidarity workers—whose 1980/81 rebellions were crushed by those in power.  Jupiter and Pluto point to this great woosh of universal energy, erupting in massive expansion, but as with any explosion, there is darkness and light, destruction and birth. How many people grabbed high mortgages during the J/P conjunction of 2007, just one year before home values crashed?   And if you want to know why toilet paper is flying off the shelves, blame Pluto (god of excrement)  fueled by Jupiterian excess.

In truth Jupiter and Pluto don’t cause what happens below.  They’re omens.  Astrology is an art of symbols.  Planetary motion tracks for us the otherwise invisible waves and patterns of universal energy.  The Covid-19 virus is having its best year ever.  As magnificent as our leap to the Moon, it has jumped into a new species and is conquering territories all over the world.  It’s breathtaking.  And their spaceship?  Pluto’s agents!  Bats and their guano.

But even wilder is what’s happening among humans now.  Just one month ago, around the globe, people were hopelessly divided, right vs left, globalists vs nationalists, as democratic values collided with dictatorships.  And now, with a snap of the cosmic fingers, we’re One World. We’re rallied and unified.  What the amazing Greta Thunberg couldn’t do for climate change, was accomplished by a virus.  The surge in national compassion that didn’t erupt when families were broken apart at the border, now erupts everywhere.  “We’re in this together.”   What Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders couldn’t achieve—inspiring the nation to strengthen its social safety nets, reign in corporate greed, and make health care available to all–this is suddenly being discussed in Congress, without a regime-changing election.

There was another moment like this,  of overwhelming unity.  It came during the J/P conjunction that took us to the Moon.  But it wasn’t seeing that footprint or the planted flag that made us gasp with wonder.  It was what we saw when we turned around—our very first view of that blue jewel, our whole Earth, floating in the dark vacuum of space.  That single startling sight rippled us forward into a new awareness of the fragility of our ecology.  It reawakened us to our interconnection with—and responsibility for—all life on this planet.  A year later we held the first Earth Day.  We were recycling.  We were talking about alternative energies.  We took measures to save disappearing species and habitats.  Maybe it didn’t go far or fast enough, but our future trajectory was changed.   The J/P conjunctions of 2020 are just beginning.  Who knows what else they will bring!

Were you born during a Jupiter/Pluto conjunction?

Bill Gates was lucky to be born in 1955, wrote Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Gates was born just a few months before the J/P conjunction of 1956.   Gates was lucky, said Gladwell, that local parents got together in 1968 (the next conjunction) and purchased a computer for his school.  The opportunity to learn coding came to him at 13, during the year of his Jupiter return, when most of us find our life���s passion.  Gates was lucky that he was just the right age to roll the dice when tech began taking off.  He founded Microsoft during the 1975 Jupiter/Pluto opposition (which fell across his natal Moon/Mars opposition).

Jupiter and Pluto aren’t personal planets.  Jupiter indicates the luck that comes to us through society—this is what’s called a “social” planet. Pluto is an “outer” planet; it defines generations.  Both are zeitgeist planets—they describe the times.   So it wasn’t just Gates, Gladwell argues.  All those who made it big in high-tech were lucky to be born around this time, like Bill Joy, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs.  Gladwell puts the peak at 1955, but says it actually stretches from 1952 to 1958–which is from the J/P trine to the sextile.

Below is a table of recent J/P conjunctions.  If these aren’t your birth years, you may have been born during the years of other aspects.   Check your birth chart.  Are Jupiter and Pluto connected?

DateDegree April/June/November 202024/22 Capricorn December 200728 Sagittarius December 199428 Scorpio November 198124 Libra October 196823 Virgo February/June 195627/26 Leo August 19436 Leo May 193118/19 Cancer August 19185/6 Cancer

What happens for societies goes much slower than what happens for individuals. Jupiter/Pluto conjunctions are like a wave that peaks at the conjunction, but starts rolling the year before and continues the year after.  We wouldn’t use such orbs in a birth chart—but we should use them to understand the time.  And whether or not you have a Jupiter/Pluto aspect in your birth chart, this energy is in the zeitgeist now.  We can all have a taste of its magic, if we’re willing to use it.

More on how to do that in my next article, Making the Jupiter/Pluto Conjunction Work for You.

How is the conjunction affecting you?  First check the house (and/or planets) where 24 Capricorn falls in your chart. Are you getting transits this year?  Steven Forrest’s fabulous Skylog report will tell you (order here). Mary Shea’s brilliant Solar Return report adds extra insight (order here).  The SR is a divination chart calculated for your birthday.  The house where Jupiter and Pluto falls in the SR is telling.

** This and more is in Patrick Watson’s exhilarating article on Jupiter and Pluto–check it out!

Filed under: Chart Play Tutorials, Home New Moon Featured Article

About Dana Gerhardt

A popular columnist with The Mountain Astrologer since 1991, Dana Gerhardt is an internationally respected astrologer. She has lectured extensively and written for astrology publications on several continents. Her ongoing passions are the moon and living the intuitive life. Dana worked for many years in the corporate sector, where she observed the undeniable influence of natural cycles. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude from Occidental College in Los Angeles and did graduate work in literature at Columbia University and CSULA.  Dana can be contacted by email.

[therealreverendchris]

Hey so I found this pretty funny/disturbing post that others here may find interesting. OG post is here: https://ift.tt/3gBQUYH PASTAOG post starts here:So this is a story I think people in the field of journalism should find shocking. It raises the question of how free western media truly is. It starts with a comedian who does good journalism mocking a corrupt ("allegedly", but again I say that in quotations because there is a lot of evidence for this alleged corruption) and ends with the deployment of a counter-terrorism unit. At the same time is is absolutely hilarious until a recent dark turn. If you care about free speech, journalistic freedom or koalas you may find this of interest. If you want to cut to the chase here is a video depicting the use of police to gag a western journalist while attacking his mother and dog. (WARNING THIS IS DISTURBING): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXtq4a8829g&tIf you want some context as to why a man in a Luigi suit appeared in that video read on. This will be long but worth your time, even if you are not Australian. So for some context FriendlyJordies is a comedic youtube channel which covers Australian politics recently they have been is a very long spat with the Deputy Premier of New South Wales (NSW). NSW is the Australian state with the largest economy in the country also the state where its federal political body governs from. The host of FreindlyJordies, Jordan Shanks has been attacking John Barilaro for corruption and oh boy does Mr. Shanks have a lot of ammunition for these accusations. One example I personally find shocking it Mr. Barilaro using bushfire relief money to fund local election campaigns for Liberal seats (the Australian center-right conservative party).Here is the guardian reporting on this particular claim: https://ift.tt/35xQtbE work, which I recommend people check out, is very high quality journalism. Thoroughly researched and well cited. I will link three videos below so you can see for yourself. The first of these videos Jordan Shanks delivered from a massive property Mr. Barilaro himself owns and rents on Air BnB. Jordan delivers the accusations in a bathrobe and proudly proclaims to have "f**ked in your bed John". The whole point of doing this being to use comedy to draw attention to the question of how a public servant can afford a multimillion dollar estate? Mr. Barilaro is far from having a clean criminal record either he lost his license for texting and driving for instance (https://ift.tt/3jK5Umu) and openly brags about pork barreling (the act of using government funds intended for a public service as electoral funds, so you ostensibly say your funding an arts institute and then you pay for some local representatives advertisements during an election). Jordan has alleged John Barilaro committed perjury 9 times. Throughout these videos Jordan refers to Joh Barilaro as "bruz", a "Giant meatball", "Giovani", or simply "a big fat wog cock" often does a highly offensive impersonation of Barilaro while wearing a Mario outfit. Bruz is often compared to a mafia don or a corrupt roman official. Jordan has also had a rather hilarious string of merchandise based on Jon's likeness including a shirt based on the doom video game cover with John as Doomguy crushing a horde of Koalas under foot and shooting machine guns at them (https://ift.tt/3fz7AOI), or more recently a key chain which depicts Barilaros face on an anthropomorphized scrotum..Bruz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihoirTYqf2c(the video delivered from Barilaro's estate, and is highly recommended it is rare to see any politician so viciously mocked and called out for their bullshit). Another video detailing illegal dealings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgy_FblYNh4Secret Dictatorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AiYvpe6qfs -this video describes how Barilaro is personally connected to a poorly designed water refinement project clearly built as cheaply as possible to allow people connected to the local liberal council or just friends of Barilaro to skim tens of thousands of dollars off a grant intended for infrastructure. The facility is poisoning local residents, even giving one families son permanent neurological damage and is drowning some farmers lands with tainted water.Barilaro is hiding his corruption behind banality and the veneer of authority and legitimacy. People simply don't have time to look into local politics and explaining it is boring so no one cares. The problem is John Barilaro is not only corrupt he is destroying Koala habitats, his policies have lead to a huge amount a land clearing which destroys Koalas living spaces and their only food source, the eucalyptus plant. At 14 minutes into the Bruz video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihoirTYqf2c)Jordan Shanks describes how Mr. Barilaro essentially sold a national park for 10 000 dollars. Eventually Mr. Barilaro sued Jordan Shanks for defamation, Jordan decided to turn this lawsuit into a public carnival. If you are wondering if that was a good idea, no probably not but the whole point is to draw attention to Mr. Barilaro's corruption.Jordan proceeded to crash a university event where John Barilaro was dressed as Luigi. Go to 38 minutes in to see that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUhNFSyHGyE&t=312sThey then taunted the lawyers sending them the lawsuit and finally Jordan's producer, Kristo Langker ran into John in the street and approached him to clarify the address on the document served to them. John Barilaro is a provincial official but has listed his address as the federal parliament a fact Jordan is probably trying to mock.Now this is where this gets dark. Within hours of that incident happening some one gave the Australian police a falsified police statement and a counter terrorism unit was deployed to arrest Jordan Shanks's producer at his own home. A video The producer is a key witness in the defamation lawsuit but now is under a criminal bail conditions which prevent him from speaking about John Barilaro or possessing's and image or caricature of the Deputy Premier. How is he supposed to speak in court during the defamation lawsuit if he is not allowed to even talk about John Barilaro? Jordan Shanks's lawyer points out as much in an interview. The lawyer representing Jordan Shanks says it is likely a warrant out for Jordan as well.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsqjPUu8LkY(interview with Jordan Shank's Lawyer)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXtq4a8829g&t=1s(The video detailing the arrest made by the "Fixated persons unit" posted at the beginning)https://ift.tt/2U6zBWX news piece describing how this fixated persons unit has been used in the past to intimidate journalists who don't tow the Liberal party line)To make matters worse most of the media landscape in Australia is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the guys who runs fox news. 70% of all news outlets in Australia are Newscorp and Rupert Murdoch is unsurprisingly very buddy buddy with the Liberal (the Australian conservatives). So you would think given the context of what I have described here the Australian press would be running stories about the counter terrorism unit deployed to put a gag order on a journalist exposing corruption. Nope! Google "FriendlyJordies arrested", you will find a string of articles nearly copied and pasted titled "FrinedlyJordies Producer arrested for stalking" with a favorable picture of John Barilaro in a suit painted as a victim of stalking and the only mention of him using public funds illegally as "alleged corruption". Not even a mention of what the allegations are, because that might make people wonder if they are true and no context given for the arrest or mention that is was performed by a counter terrorism unit. The interview I posted earlier, was the only interview longer than 45 seconds with Jordan Shanks's lawyer and it was removed from the facebook page for fear of legal action as Jordan Shanks is being sued for defamation. That YouTube link is a recording that has been shared online. Jordan has made numerous attacks on the Australian press where it is a common tactic for politicians to refuse to give interviews to journalists who give them unfavorable coverage. These "drops" are then dangled like carrots in front of journalists and basically used to control their career advancement. Here is one example of this happening to an AM radio host who pointed the failing of the Murdoch press to report on Barilaro's doings and now has been denied access to parliamentary members granted to other members of the press (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR67gwv7Gns). This of course will limit his ability to actually report on Australian politics.EDIT: Now that a couple days have passed some other non-murdoch publications have begun turning out some stories with a more balanced slant, pedestrien, crikey, the brag, have all given more than fair coverage (despite being targeted by Jordan Shanks in the past, honestly cudos to them). Googling FriendlyJordies arrested turn out some decent coverage but you should note the swarm of nearly copy pasted Murdoch publications with headlines designed to make it seem to a reader cursorily grazing the headlines that FreindlyJordies was arrested for stalking.Here is one (non-Murdoch) report that gets it right: https://ift.tt/3wRLApK I think it adds a lot to this story to get the full picture of Jordan dressing as mario and comparing John Barilaro to a meatball. The doom shirts and the keychains are a particular favorite of mine. Not to mention a reminder that free speech is something that even in the west we need to fight for. You may disagree with the methods Jordan Shanks used but bear in mind he succeeded in making John Barilaro a household name, beforehand John was just this boring local politician no one thought much about despite the fact that his policies may drive Koalas further to extinction and he is thoroughly corrupt. This is how evil hides, behind boredom and banality. Indeed Mr. Barilaro has hidden behind the curtains polite society affords him for years, and when Jordan Shanks put on a Mario-cap screaming "LOOK AT THATA GREAASY MEATBALL" people in Australia finally started to pay attention. Mr. Barilaro's defamation lawsuit against Jordan Shanks is a reminder that sometime parody carries more weight and power than politely worded attempt at informing citizens.Not feeling a defamation lawsuit was enough the deputy premier lied in a police statement and is now putting Jordan's producer at risk of going to jail for 3 years...because Kristo (the producer) mocked Mr. Barilaro in person at a public event and bumped into him on the street? Because of that a counter terrorism unit was dispatched to enforce a gag order for "stalking". Mr. Barilaro has also sued google for defamation for hosting the videos and this may go on to have wider implications for how big tech designs their algorithms to handle political content via /r/Corruption

[kittywildegrrl]

MamaCat and All the Nostalgia

MamaCat is so nostalgic this morning. Looking back on the good times. The Nixon resignation, for example. Working in MS-DOS. Subway tokens. Landlines. Consensus reality.

Things I keep on my clipboard:

“Dear Bot or Troll: Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, it does not meet our editorial needs at this time. We look forward to your going and jumping in the lake. Best regards, Everyone With A Functioning Mind.”

“Trying to discuss why social media providers refusing to do business with insurrectionists does not equal a threat to the 1st Amendment in general with some people is like bringing a knife to a peanut butter fight.”

These are more applicable to everyday communications than you might think. The rift between the online voices of a fractured nation, and objective reality as I understand it, is just. So. Loud.

I miss consensus reality.

Once upon a time, until the Reagan administration, there was a thingy called the “Fairness Doctrine” (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fairness-Doctrine).

Later, in the Clinton administration, along came a thing called the “Telecom Act of 1996” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996).

And those two factors – the end of the Fairness Doctrine, and the signing of the Telecom Act, contributed to the schism we have today, where Objective Reality is just not necessarily a thing upon which we all agree. It’s tearing society apart.

The Fairness Doctrine required equal time for opposing points of view. A broadcaster couldn’t load up their station with all one-sided opinion pieces and not make room for the opposition (I’m looking at you, Fox News). Broadcasters were licensed “in the public interest,” and news programming was a public service, not a source of revenue.

The Telecom Act allowed for – among other things – the consolidation of the broadcasting industry nationwide. Ownership of more radio & TV stations in any given market was unleashed, and huge companies bought up most of the stand-alone radio and TV stations in existence across the country. That may not feel significant in the internet age, but remember, back in 1996, radio and television were the predominant means of mass communication. Suddenly, everything began to sound alike, coast-to-coast. Rightwing hate radio blossomed. Careers were made and destroyed (I was there, darlings. Radio was a wild and dark ride).

My personal favorite analysis of the ways in which these factors combined to fracture consensus reality over time is that of Thom Hartmann, writing in 2016: https://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2016/03/how-do-we-democratize-our-media

The TL:DR highlights, IMHO, include these:

On the functions of the Fairness Doctrine:

“Between 1949 and 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was a longstanding policy of the Federal Communications Commission that required broadcasters to give air time to controversial issues of public importance, and to do so in a fair manner without editorial input from advertisers. But after the FCC stopped the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan in 1987, broadcast corporations stopped having to worry about broadcasting in the public interest. Because the main way that stations "programmed in the public interest" was by producing news, real, actual, non-infotainment news, once Reagan lifted that requirement, the news divisions of the various networks came under the sway of ratings and profits. News was no longer the cost of keeping your broadcast license, instead, it became an opportunity to make more money with increasingly dumbed down and salacious reporting.”

On the aftereffects of the Telecom Bill of ’96:

“…the Telecommunications Act of 1996, as well as a few other smaller laws and changes in FCC policy, that let a small handful of corporations buy up all the radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers in communities from coast to coast. Many of those radio stations were then programmed with hyper-corporate-friendly right-wing hate radio. It's been a big factor in the rightward-shift of our country over the past 30 years.”

Powerful corporate interests, and rich white men, started pushing our buttons and radicalizing the opposite ends of the political spectrum in order to make more money. And make money they did. Roger Ailes died wealthy. Rupert Murdoch isn’t missing any meals. The current CEO of Fox News, Suzanne Scott, is not a man… but she’s also not exactly depending on a stimulus check to get her through the pandemic, either. She’s probably not in favor of healing the perceptual divide to which her network contributes so heartily -- here’s the latest programming decision from her network: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/business/media/fox-news-anchor-changes.html

When the news wasn’t a moneymaker… when it was just the news… when purveyors of the news were required to do so in the public interest… there was consensus reality. An objective reality, which was more or less generally agreed upon. There were no “alternative facts” – because there’s literally no such thing. There were still divisions of opinion, mind you. Strong ones. Opposite points of view. On that topic, here is a delightful look back at Archie Bunker, his and Edith’s chairs, and the amazing TV series, “All in the Family,” which skewered those divisions.

But today, in the wake of all that, we have a social media debacle of epic proportions, where some of those 74,222,958 who voted for Trump (source) whipped up an insurrection, and right this minute some of them are still defending that insurrection. Like it was a good thing to storm the Capitol and shit on the floor and hunt human beings for potential hostages or potential assassination. God knows what else. Go on Twitter at your own risk. There are people out there, right this instant, who doubt the veracity of the 2020 election. People who I think are insane for embracing that point of view, think I am insane for embracing its opposite. And then there’s the pandemic and the non-believers-in-science.

The House is formally discussing impeachment debate rules as I write. We are about to impeach Herr Drumpf for the second time. Again we make history. Again we as a nation must respond to the chaos he has engendered. We count down the days to Inauguration and hope it all works out.

But… what are we going to do about perceived Reality?

[hastybooks]

OMG that was amazing & perfect & I want moooore. Is Gally on the Habs/does he get super nosy abt Alex's life? I imagine Alex refuses to ever tell him anything but when he shows up dressed in clothes that clearly aren't his own (because "like you would ever pick out anything that nice yourself") it takes 5 seconds for Gally to be like "sooo you got LAID down there, huh?" Alex doesn't answer of course, but his blush gives him away. Gally gets the story out of him eventually tho & is *impressed*

[degerbils]

When you see publishers and authors chatting chummily at book parties, you're likely to think that they're on the same side - the side of great literature and the free flow of ideas.

In reality, their interests are at odds. Publishers are marketers. They don't like scandals that might threaten their bottom line - or the bottom lines of the multinational media conglomerates of which most form a small part. Authors are people, often flawed. Sometimes they behave badly. How, for instance, should publishers deal with the #MeToo era, when accusations of sexual impropriety can lead to books being pulled from shelves and syllabuses, as happened last year with the novelists Junot Diaz and Sherman Alexie?

One answer is the increasingly widespread "morality clause". Over the past few years, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House have added such clauses to their standard book contracts. I've heard that Hachette Book Group is debating putting one in its trade book contracts, though the publisher wouldn't confirm it. These clauses release a company from the obligation to publish a book if, in the words of Penguin Random House, "past or future conduct of the author inconsistent with the author's reputation at the time this agreement is executed comes to light and results in sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author that materially diminishes the sales potential of the work". That is reasonable, I guess. Penguin, to its credit, doesn't ask authors to return their advances. But other publishers do, and some are even more hard-nosed.

This past year, regular contributors to Conde Nast magazines started spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It's a doozy. If, in the company's "sole judgment", the clause states, the writer "becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals," Conds Nast can terminate the agreement. In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous. In the age of the Twitter mob, that could mean simply writing or saying something that offends some group of strident tweeters.

Agents hate morality clauses because terms like "public condemnation" are vague and open to abuse, especially if a publisher is looking for an excuse to back out of its contractual obligations. When I asked writers about morality clauses, on the other hand, most of them had no idea what I was talking about. You'd be surprised at how many do not read the small print.

One writer who did was the fantasy and science-fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, who died last year. When she discovered the morality clause in her HarperCollins contract in 2011, she posted a satirical letter from a fictional writer confessing sins to Rupert Murdoch, who owns the company: "It was nothing really materially damaging, only just the money and ID. I stole from the old man with the walker and some things I said about some schoolgirls with big tits."

Please, the letter went on, don't "make me pay back the money because I can't because I already had to give most of it to some stupid lawyer who said I had defaulted on a loan and was behind on my child support, which is just a lie. That stupid brat was never mine."

Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, who writes regularly for The New Yorker, a Conde Nast magazine, read the small print, too, and thought: "No way. I'm not signing that." Gersen, an expert in the laws regulating sexuality, often takes stands that may offend the magazine's liberal readers, as when she defended Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' rollback of Obama-era rules on campus sexual-assault accusations.

When I called Gersen in November, she said, "No person who is engaged in creative expressive activity should be signing one of these."

Times change; norms change with them. Morality clauses hand the power to censor to publishers, not the government, so they don't violate the constitutional right to free speech. But that power is still dangerous.

It is not that a company should have to keep on staff a murderer or rapist, she added. But when the trigger for termination could be a Twitter storm or a letter-writing campaign, she said, "I think it would have a very significant chilling effect."

Masha Gessen, another New Yorker writer, also said she would not sign her new contract, at least not as it was originally worded. Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who won the 2017 National Book Award for The Future Is History, about the return of totalitarianism in post-Communist Russia, has spent her career challenging prevailing nostrums.

Last year, as prominent men fell like bowling pins after being accused of sexual misconduct, Gessen published columns on the New Yorker website describing the #MeToo movement as an "out-of-control "moral panic" bent on policing sexual behaviour by mob justice. Needless to say, many readers did not agree.

"I'm extremely uncomfortable with it," Gessen said about the contract, "because I have in the past been vilified on social media."

Having once been fired from a job as the director of Radio Liberty in Russia after what she called a disinformation campaign, she added: "I know what it's like to lose institutional support when you most need it."

Both Gersen's and Gessen's agents got Conde Nast to tone down the language that offended them, and the writers have now signed. Gessen's agent made Conde Nast acknowledge "that I have expressed controversial views", Gessen said, and the morality clause now states that it cannot be invoked as "the result of my professional work". By "professional work", she added, she meant public events or posts on social media in addition to her writing.

Gessen said she felt she could stand up to Conde Nast because she has clout. She worries that younger or less famous writers won't be as empowered.

I share that concern. Over the past four years, I have published articles criticising the concept of safe spaces and deploring the lack of due process in campus rape hearings . I've been called transphobic for an essay I wrote in 2016 about the tension between transgender rights and the right to privacy, and I'm still being called that.

If I'd had a book contract with a morality clause when I wrote those, I might have thought twice before indulging my fondness for picking fights.

It is impossible to say how many novelists and journalists have fallen afoul of morality clauses, or, indeed, if any of them have. No one I talked to could or would name a case.

In 2017, Simon & Schuster cancelled a book by the professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos after he gave an interview in which he appeared to condone pedophilia. His contract reportedly did not include a morality clause, and he sued, though he later dropped the suit. If a morality clause did lead to a book's cancellation, we probably would not know it, according to Ms Devereux Chatillon, a partner in the media and intellectual property law firm Chatillon Weiss who has represented both The New Yorker and writers. "It wouldn't be public unless somebody sued over it," she said. And even then, the lawsuit probably would not come to light.

Morality clauses may be relatively new to mainstream publishing, but they have a long history. The entertainment industry started drafting them in 1921, when the silent-movie star Fatty Arbuckle, who had just signed a then-astonishing US$1 million contract with Paramount Pictures, was accused of the rape and manslaughter of a girl at a party. Arbuckle was acquitted after two mistrials, but by then the public had soured on him, and the studios wanted out.

Today, the clauses are widespread in sports, television and advertising.

Religious publishers have used them for at least 15 years, which seems fair enough. You cannot condemn a Christian publisher that cancels publication of a book called The Ridiculously Good Marriage after the author is accused of having sexually assaulted an underage girl when he was a youth pastor. (He apologised for a "sexual incident".)

Children's publishers have been including the clauses for a decade or more, and they, too, have a case. It would be challenging to sell a children's book written by a pedophile.

Maybe you do not find morality clauses alarming under any circumstances. "If what you're selling me is your reputation, if that's what I'm paying you for, then I should not have to pay you" if your reputation tanks, said Mr Rick Kurnit, a partner in Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, a firm specialising in art and entertainment law.

Maybe you're asking: Why should anyone get away with being a racist or sexist jerk? What gives Alexie, accused of hitting on women who saw him as a mentor, and Diaz, accused of forcibly kissing someone, the right to have their books published? Or even: Why should opinion writers be allowed to gratuitously insult duly elected officials? If a loudmouth suffers from a backlash, this reasoning goes, he probably deserves it.

The problem with letting publishers back out of contracts with non-celebrity, non-religious, non-children's book authors on the grounds of immorality is that immorality is a slippery concept. Publishers have little incentive to clarify what they mean by it, and the public is fickle in what it takes umbrage at.

In 1947, the concern was communism, and morality clauses gave studios a way to blacklist the Hollywood 10, a group of directors and screenwriters who denounced the House Un-American Activities Committee as illegitimate and refused to say whether they'd ever been communists. All 10 went to jail, and all but one, who decided to cooperate with the committee, became unemployable until the 1960s, though some continued to write under pseudonyms.

Not long ago, publishers were hailed as countercultural heroes for backing works that offended public sensibilities. Mr Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press, introduced Americans to Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, Malcolm X, Marguerite Duras and Kathy Acker, among scores of other writers considered avant-garde at the time.

Mr Rosset fought doggedly to overturn laws that were preventing him from publishing D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic Of Cancer, both of which contained scenes of graphic sex. The Tropic Of Cancer case made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the book was not obscene. The feminist critic Kate Millet attacked Miller's novels as misogynistic - she was quite right about that - but that did not stop the PEN American Centre from awarding Mr Rosset a citation for "the free transmission of the printed word across the barriers of poverty, ignorance, censorship and repression".

Times change; norms change with them. Morality clauses hand the power to censor to publishers, not the government, so they don't violate the constitutional right to free speech. But that power is still dangerous.

After our conversation, Gersen sent me an e-mail pointing out a possible unintended consequence of the Conde Nast clause. Who are the groups subjected to the most public vitriol for their published work, she asked? Who is most viciously trolled?

Women and members of minorities. "That is one of the realities of publishing while a woman or minority in this age," she wrote. "The clause is perversely posing more career risk to women and minorities than to white males."

If all it takes to lose a magazine gig or book deal is to fall into "public disrepute", it won't be only villains whose voices are lost.

NYTIMES

• Judith Shulevitz, the author of The Sabbath World: Glimpses Of A Different Order Of Time, is a contributing opinion writer.

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Sunday Times on January 13, 2019, with the headline 'Must writers be moral? Their contracts may require it'.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

KEEP YOUR MIND THE LADDER

There's a real difference, because an assertion provokes objections in a way that was entirely for the better. Human problems are the most common type, so being good at solving those is key in achieving a high average outcome. It was a kind of work is higher because it gives you more options to choose your life's work, there are more and more true as computers get faster. We fell into the classic problem of how when a new medium comes out it adopts the practices, the content, the business models of the old medium—which fails, and you can't have a mecca if you don't let people ship, you won't have to write programs to solve, but I never have. This is one case where it pays to be self-indulgent. I believe they conceal because of deep taboos. It explains why VCs take so agonizingly long to make up new things, some old rules don't apply. So maybe I'll try not bringing books on some future trip. I wasn't looking for it. Imaginative people don't want to follow or lead. It explains why VCs take so agonizingly long to make up their minds, and why their due diligence feels like a star. The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be able to work hard: these guys would have paid to be able to leave while you're there.

You're an investor too. In a way, it's harder to see problems than their solutions. Every founder knows that VCs will tell your secrets to your competitors if they end up investing in them. Even YC's haters buy it. But again, the only reason VCs are the way they are.1 The immediate cause of death in a startup is to try to create a more elegant alternative to the Turing Machine. It was astonishing to learn later that they'd both been serial womanizers, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts.

The books I bring on trips are often quite virtuous, the sort of backslapping extroverts one thinks of what Microsoft does to users, or negotiate with other companies, who to hire, everything. The problem with VC funds is that they're looking for the trick.2 If you make people with money love you, you can write about, and they were used in the Roman empire. 0 first arose in a brainstorming session between O'Reilly and Medialive International. Junior professors are fired by default after a few years before by a big company. And yet isn't being smart also knowing what to do when the teacher tells your elementary school class to add all the numbers from 1 to 100? The German and Dutch governments, perhaps from fear of elitism, try to ensure that the company pays 10 times as much on sales as on development. Can it get you the designers, though?

But it's convenient because this is an example of such a UI to work from: the old one.3 Of course the habits of mind than others? But if it's inborn it should be. Just to be clear about this, it was meaningless. YC.4 If there are any axioms that could be weeded out. In the process of explaining them to the right people, giving the impression of productivity, and so on. If you have the resources, it's more elegant to think of intelligence as inborn is that people trying to take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware? At Y Combinator we advise all the startups we fund never to lord it over users. The most dramatic example of Web 2.5 Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than their flaws. But prudence can't tell me what sentence to write next.

And if you start from successful startups, you find they'd often make good startups. So we'd refuse to fund founders whose characters we had doubts about, because how good founders are and how well they do are not orthogonal. There's a physical analog in the Intel and Microsoft stickers that come on some laptops. The closest you'll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. This implies that the kind of parallelism we have in a hundred years. From either direction we get to the same spot. In the US most kids graduating from college still think they're supposed to start them while they're still in college. Now when one thinks of as typically American. If founders' instincts already gave them the right answers, they wouldn't need us.6

If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. A teacher has to walk a narrow path: you want to act on, act now. A friend who moved out of Manhattan said merely that her 3 year old. Startups are as unnatural as skiing, so there's a similar list for startups. A quality that's inborn will obviously be more convenient to work with than one that's influenced by experience, and thus might vary in the course of a study. And they're astoundingly successful. They'd face some challenges if they wanted to make more, but not too easily impressed.7 I think one of the most important components of the world's infrastructure? And if your startup succeeds, it will become increasingly important relative to wisdom because there is more room for what would now be considered slow languages, meaning languages that don't yield very efficient code. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies: it was a description of Google?

As I was mulling this over, I found myself thinking: I can understand why German universities declined in the 1930s, after they excluded Jews. Toys and cartoon characters meant to be cute always have clueless expressions and stubby, ineffectual limbs. I don't have time to find out. It's the sort of strategic insight I was supposed to come up with ideas for startups? I claim hacking and painting are also related, in the sense of something someone made happen. An undergrad who gets something published feels like a body cavity search. If this were true, the most common mistakes young founders make is not to be an inexhaustible source of research papers, despite the fact that Jessica and I decided one night to start it, and the distinction between acceptable and forbidden topics is usually based on how intellectual the work sounds when described in research papers, despite the fact that if their parents had chosen the other way, they'd have grown up considering themselves as Xes must be enormous.8 Already chip designers have to think about it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved.

Odd as it might sound, we tell startups that they should try to make as little money as possible.9 At its best, starting a startup is because that's what they've been trained to do for their whole lives to play such games, young founders' first impulse on starting a startup is that you get a lot of people seem to have some sort of internal compass that helps me out. Ideally till you realize how mistaken you were. And when I used to think I wanted to try being a painter, and the people who thought during the Bubble all I have to do is start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful, you'll never get to bum around a foreign country. I was firmly in the camp of bad. Specifications change while a program is being written way too fast for Microsoft even to channel it, let alone which to choose.10 A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on it had been nice growing up in the country. Investors are more of a problem.

Notes

But it is less than 500, because any VC would think Y Combinator.

Or more precisely, the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is actually a computer.

People were more at home at the time. I don't have a group of people mad, essentially by macroexpanding them. Everything is a dotted line on a form that would scale.

If Congress passes the founder of the iPhone SDK.

They therefore think what drives users to switch to a can of soup. If you try to go to work on what you write has a sharp drop in utility. Super-angels will snap up stars that VCs may begin to conserve board seats by switching to what used to wonder if that got bootstrapped with consulting.

But no planes crash if your goal is to create one of the reason it used to do it mostly on your thesis. Convertible debt can be surprisingly indecisive about acquisitions, and the valuation should be especially skeptical about Viaweb too.

The question to ask, if we wanted to invest more. If you really need a higher growth rate has to be staying at a discount of 30% means when it converts. When governments decide how to be identified with you.

On the face of it, I'm also an investor who invested earlier had been, and stir. Which helps explain why there are few who can predict instead of admitting frankly that it's hard to predict precisely what would happen to their returns. These two regions were the people working for startups might be able to raise money after Demo Day or die.

Unfortunately the constraint probably has to work for Gillette, but to establish a protocol for web-based alternative to Office may not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push to being a train car that in 1995, but Google proved them wrong.

But a couple predecessors. The reason the young side. So you can base brand on anything with a no-shop clause. But on the critical question is not so good that it killed the best in the 1990s, and others, like most of their predecessors and said in effect why can't you be more selective about the cheapest food available.

[sailorrrvenus]

How an Elaborate International Scam is Making the Rounds Among Instagrammers and Photographers

It all started with an email from Wendi Murdoch. She claimed that she had found us through a personal recommendation from a senior editor at Conde Naste Traveler. We had just finished talking with Conde Nast Traveler about doing some Instagram featured work on both my and Zory’s accounts, so the timing made sense.

Flattered, I kept reading her pitch about needing some up and coming photographers to help capture the essence of China for an upcoming exhibit centered around the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.

I had a rough idea of who Wendi Murdoch was: a Chinese American art philanthropist and shrewd businesswoman who made waves with an expensive divorce from media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

Not really knowing what to make of it, I responded that I’d be interested in the project.

About a week later, she responded and we set up a time to have a phone call.

So on a sunny Sunday afternoon, her assistant Aaron called us. I noticed that the area code was from New York. He had a thick New Yorker accent and connected us to Wendi after a momentary pause.

When she got on the line, she introduced herself with an interesting accent that was a mix of Asian, British, and East Coast drawl. (If any of you have seen Crazy Rich Asians, she sounded very similar to the character that Michelle Yeoh played.)

She complimented us on our photography and went on to talk about how our style was exactly what she wanted in her exhibit for the Beijing Olympics. She then talked about her childhood experience in China. We were completely drawn in by her storytelling about how between the hours of 10 pm to 7 am that was when the people of China whispered amongst themselves about their dreams and aspirations. It was these whispers that she wanted us to somehow capture through photography in the areas of Southeast Asia where Chinese communities had immigrated to.

She wanted to hear more about our backgrounds. My parents are from Taiwan while Zory is from Bulgaria. We both talked a bit about those cultures, of which she was able to converse intelligently and freely. For example, when I told her we had visited Taipei the year before she was able to chat knowledgeably about some of my favorite areas of town.

We ended the call with her asking us to help her research which parts of Southeast Asia would be great for the subject. In turn, she would ask her panel (comprised of senior editors from magazines such as Vogue and Cosmo) where they thought work best.

After a couple more calls negotiating budget and timelines, we agreed on a price that was higher and a timeline that was later than she initially offered. She would later use that to defend any ideas of pre-payment on her part. She also said that we would have to book our own tickets to Jakarta since she was taking care of all the internal flights via private jet and hotels. Of course, we’d get totally reimbursed within 24 hours of the project conclusion.

Zory and I spent some time discussing whether or not we should be fronting such a large amount up front with a new client we had never actually met. (Last minute airline tickets were $2,200 each) But all I could think of was the grandeur and high profile connections that ‘Wendi’ would be able to open up for us if the project was successful. We also had done other projects in the past (albeit with bigger companies) where we had to front travel costs first and then be reimbursed at project conclusion, so this wasn’t entirely asking too much.

So we agreed to the terms and she sent over an NDA and shooting schedule that had several red flags that we overlooked.

The NDA, for starters, listed Wendi’s lawyer Mr. Hebert B. Dillof, who I couldn’t find on Google anywhere. His name was also misspelled later in the document as well as having the wrong date of the Olympics. I also did a DNS lookup on the wendimurdoch.com domain and in my haste overlooked that it had only been created a couple weeks before.

The shooting locations she picked were Jakarta, Semarang, Badung, and Penang, which were especially confusing since most of those places (minus Penang) lacked any good photographic scenery for the exhibit subject of China.

We tried getting her on the phone to discuss details but her assistant Aaron said that she’d be unavailable that day because she was spending it with her family for her birthday. It was actually Wendi Murdoch’s birthday, so we wished her a great day with her family.

These small details were what they were so good at. I’ve heard from other people who got scammed that she would even pretend to talk to her kids or other family members while on the phone with you.

After finally booking the plane tickets and packing our bags to leave for the airport, Aaron gave us a final call to tell us apologetically that we’d have to pay some photography permit fees or ‘bribe’ fees to some of the local government there due to corruption. He also claimed he wasn’t racist to say Indonesia was corrupt. I thought that was a peculiar thing to say but let it slide. Boy did it come up again later.

The fees were kind of high ($1,100) but he promised all expenses would be reimbursed per the contract and not to worry about it. As we were just 6 hours from the flight, it was hard to contest this.

So we went to SFO airport, hopped on an Eva Air flight and 20 odd hours later landed in Jakarta to be greeted by our non-English-speaking in-on-the-scam driver. He had our names on a placard and helpfully directed us to the nearest money exchange so we could give him the ‘photography permit’ fee. He gave us a silly looking piece of paper with an official seal on it. We had some warning bells going off in our heads but Wendi’s assistant Aaron did tell us we’d be handing the money over to the driver.

When we got to the hotel, I snapped a photo of the driver and his license plate to be sure:

After checking in and seeing the hotel was paid for, we felt a bit more at ease and had a good night’s rest in hopes of capturing some great photos the next day.

At 7:30 am we awoke to Wendi calling us urgently to tell us that the driver and the transportation company refusing to work with us because we had been racist by taking photos of him. Remember how Aaron had used the word ‘racist’ to describe the bribe just a day earlier? Anyhow, Wendi claimed that she had no idea how to fix the situation and that perhaps we should just cancel the whole project. This is at 7:30 am in the morning on the first day of the ‘project’.

A bit flabbergasted and still jet lagged, we went on the defensive to try to salvage the project and promise to ‘fix’ the misunderstanding with the driver. This was one of her key tactics that we realized later. Attack us with strange things so we have to defend our position. Then ask for money while we’re in this defensive state.

It totally worked.

While we were apologizing for ‘offending’ the driver, she casually mentioned that there would be another photography fee for the last two cities. By now our warning bell system was exhausted and we just agreed to it, fully believing we’d be reimbursed after the project was finished.

So we met the driver downstairs and he’s acted like nothing was wrong. We gave him the second ‘permit fee’ and then he dropped us off at in the middle of Chinatown. It wasn’t quite photogenic but we tried to make the most of it while wandering around on our own.

As luck would have it, we ran into a German photographer at a Chinese temple who was talking to some locals about a photo project he was on. Zory, unable to hold her curiosity in, asked him for more details and he replied that it was for Wendi Murdoch! At this point, we became friends quickly and started exchanging all the oddities and details of our project.

He had apparently been in Jakarta a day or two before us and was about to cancel the project because they kept giving him the runaround every day when it was time to move to the next city. They’d find ways to drive him to the wrong airport or make excuses to ask for more permit charges all while threatening legal action for violating the NDA and contract. Even after all this, he was not completely sure it was a scam and neither did we, but doubt was creeping in.

We got his WhatsApp number and stayed in contact while we went our separate ways for the day.

After a full day of shooting, without any help from the driver, by the way, we went back to the hotel to rest, recuperate, and investigate a bit further.

When we got back to the hotel, we had the concierge call all the hotels we had reservations with to see if they had been paid for. As the concierge called each one to find out none had been paid for yet, it started to dawn on us that this might be an elaborate scam.

A couple of hours later, Aaron calls to check on us and we asked him why all the other hotels aren’t paid for yet. This made him lose his mind! He went on a crazy rant about how I was ‘racist’ again to the driver, how I’m not in touch with my Asian side, and how cynical we’ve been towards Wendi about getting reimbursed. He also threatens to call Immigration to tell them we are in Indonesia doing work illegally on a tourist visa. He then says Wendi wants to cancel the project because she can’t work with us.

At this point, we were still on the fence if this was a scam or not. I don’t know if it’s because we already had so much skin in the game but we still surprisingly wanted to continue with the project!

Anyhow, we got Aaron to calm down and then said we’d talk again the morning to discuss if this project was still viable or not.

After a sleepless night, we decided we’d hear what Aaron had to say on the call and then decide from there.

8 am. Aaron calls and he says that Wendi has decided to cancel the project, but not to worry she would reimburse all the travel costs and permit fees within 24 hours. He said to make an invoice with the bank account and routing number so they could transfer the money in. We felt an instant weight off our shoulders as the past 48 hours had been outrageously stressful.

But, I just couldn’t shake off the feeling that we were getting scammed and possibly in danger. So I looked on Facebook to see if I knew anyone who lived in Jakarta. Lo and behold, one of my friends had just moved from Los Angeles to Jakarta recently and was the type of guy to just ‘know things’.

I pinged him on Facebook messenger to tell him I was in a weird situation here in Jakarta and if I could call him. He gave me his WhatsApp contact info and within 10 seconds of my telling him what happened, he knew what was happening to me. He gave me a link to the Hollywood Reporter where many other people ( filmmakers, military consultants, hair stylists, etc) had been scammed with the same thing. They even had recordings of the scammer and one of them matched “Wendi’s” voice exactly.

Right then and there I spent the next 3 hours calling and securing all my financial accounts to make sure nothing had been stolen. I was in full paranoia that they might have bugged our hotel room, placed video cameras, and used all my info to steal my identity. Luckily, they hadn’t done any of that, most likely because they were busy scamming the next photographer on the way to Jakarta.

As of today, they are still scamming photographers and bringing them to Jakarta. I spoke to Nicole Katsianas, Director at K2 Intelligence, who’s been on the case for the past year. She said she’s spoken to at least 100 people who have been scammed by this and estimates between 5-10 times that amount have been affected by this.

Our total loss was around $7,500 due to the airline tickets being so expensive. And no, we never got reimbursed for anything.

‘Permit charges’ that we never got reimbursed for

If you’ve been scammed by this, please reach out to me or to Nicole Katsianas at K2 Intelligence to help catch this guy. Oh, and yes, it’s one Indonesian man who is apparently an expert at impersonating male/female voices and accents on command, along with having mastery of psychological tactics. The wendimurdoch.com domain was closed by the authorities, but he opened a new domain dengmurdoch.com.

We won’t let this encounter color our view of how amazing Instagram, photography, and traveling the world is though.

Stay safe and make sure to share this along your social channels to spread awareness! Let’s catch this guy!

About the author: Henry Wu is a photographer, travel writer, and editor. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of Wu’s work on his website, Facebook, and Instagram. This article was also published here.

source https://petapixel.com/2019/01/16/how-an-elaborate-international-scam-is-making-the-rounds-among-instagrammers-and-photographers/

[pauldeckerus]

How an Elaborate International Scam is Making the Rounds Among Instagrammers and Photographers

It all started with an email from Wendi Murdoch. She claimed that she had found us through a personal recommendation from a senior editor at Conde Naste Traveler. We had just finished talking with Conde Nast Traveler about doing some Instagram featured work on both my and Zory’s accounts, so the timing made sense. Flattered, I kept reading her pitch about needing some up and coming photographers to help capture the essence of China for an upcoming exhibit centered around the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.

I had a rough idea of who Wendi Murdoch was: a Chinese American art philanthropist and shrewd businesswoman who made waves with an expensive divorce from media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

Not really knowing what to make of it, I responded that I’d be interested in the project.

About a week later, she responded and we set up a time to have a phone call.

So on a sunny Sunday afternoon, her assistant Aaron called us. I noticed that the area code was from New York. He had a thick New Yorker accent and connected us to Wendi after a momentary pause.

When she got on the line, she introduced herself with an interesting accent that was a mix of Asian, British, and East Coast drawl. (If any of you have seen Crazy Rich Asians, she sounded very similar to the character that Michelle Yeoh played.)

She complimented us on our photography and went on to talk about how our style was exactly what she wanted in her exhibit for the Beijing Olympics. She then talked about her childhood experience in China. We were completely drawn in by her storytelling about how between the hours of 10 pm to 7 am that was when the people of China whispered amongst themselves about their dreams and aspirations. It was these whispers that she wanted us to somehow capture through photography in the areas of Southeast Asia where Chinese communities had immigrated to.

She wanted to hear more about our backgrounds. My parents are from Taiwan while Zory is from Bulgaria. We both talked a bit about those cultures, of which she was able to converse intelligently and freely. For example, when I told her we had visited Taipei the year before she was able to chat knowledgeably about some of my favorite areas of town.

We ended the call with her asking us to help her research which parts of Southeast Asia would be great for the subject. In turn, she would ask her panel (comprised of senior editors from magazines such as Vogue and Cosmo) where they thought work best.

After a couple more calls negotiating budget and timelines, we agreed on a price that was higher and a timeline that was later than she initially offered. She would later use that to defend any ideas of pre-payment on her part. She also said that we would have to book our own tickets to Jakarta since she was taking care of all the internal flights via private jet and hotels. Of course, we’d get totally reimbursed within 24 hours of the project conclusion.

Zory and I spent some time discussing whether or not we should be fronting such a large amount up front with a new client we had never actually met. (Last minute airline tickets were $2,200 each) But all I could think of was the grandeur and high profile connections that ‘Wendi’ would be able to open up for us if the project was successful. We also had done other projects in the past (albeit with bigger companies) where we had to front travel costs first and then be reimbursed at project conclusion, so this wasn’t entirely asking too much.

So we agreed to the terms and she sent over an NDA and shooting schedule that had several red flags that we overlooked.

The NDA, for starters, listed Wendi’s lawyer Mr. Hebert B. Dillof, who I couldn’t find on Google anywhere. His name was also misspelled later in the document as well as having the wrong date of the Olympics. I also did a DNS lookup on the wendimurdoch.com domain and in my haste overlooked that it had only been created a couple weeks before.

The shooting locations she picked were Jakarta, Semarang, Badung, and Penang, which were especially confusing since most of those places (minus Penang) lacked any good photographic scenery for the exhibit subject of China.

We tried getting her on the phone to discuss details but her assistant Aaron said that she’d be unavailable that day because she was spending it with her family for her birthday. It was actually Wendi Murdoch’s birthday, so we wished her a great day with her family.

These small details were what they were so good at. I’ve heard from other people who got scammed that she would even pretend to talk to her kids or other family members while on the phone with you.

After finally booking the plane tickets and packing our bags to leave for the airport, Aaron gave us a final call to tell us apologetically that we’d have to pay some photography permit fees or ‘bribe’ fees to some of the local government there due to corruption. He also claimed he wasn’t racist to say Indonesia was corrupt. I thought that was a peculiar thing to say but let it slide. Boy did it come up again later.

The fees were kind of high ($1,100) but he promised all expenses would be reimbursed per the contract and not to worry about it. As we were just 6 hours from the flight, it was hard to contest this.

So we went to SFO airport, hopped on an Eva Air flight and 20 odd hours later landed in Jakarta to be greeted by our non-English-speaking in-on-the-scam driver. He had our names on a placard and helpfully directed us to the nearest money exchange so we could give him the ‘photography permit’ fee. He gave us a silly looking piece of paper with an official seal on it. We had some warning bells going off in our heads but Wendi’s assistant Aaron did tell us we’d be handing the money over to the driver.

When we got to the hotel, I snapped a photo of the driver and his license plate to be sure:

After checking in and seeing the hotel was paid for, we felt a bit more at ease and had a good night’s rest in hopes of capturing some great photos the next day.

At 7:30 am we awoke to Wendi calling us urgently to tell us that the driver and the transportation company refusing to work with us because we had been racist by taking photos of him. Remember how Aaron had used the word ‘racist’ to describe the bribe just a day earlier? Anyhow, Wendi claimed that she had no idea how to fix the situation and that perhaps we should just cancel the whole project. This is at 7:30 am in the morning on the first day of the ‘project’.

A bit flabbergasted and still jet lagged, we went on the defensive to try to salvage the project and promise to ‘fix’ the misunderstanding with the driver. This was one of her key tactics that we realized later. Attack us with strange things so we have to defend our position. Then ask for money while we’re in this defensive state.

It totally worked.

While we were apologizing for ‘offending’ the driver, she casually mentioned that there would be another photography fee for the last two cities. By now our warning bell system was exhausted and we just agreed to it, fully believing we’d be reimbursed after the project was finished.

So we met the driver downstairs and he’s acted like nothing was wrong. We gave him the second ‘permit fee’ and then he dropped us off at in the middle of Chinatown. It wasn’t quite photogenic but we tried to make the most of it while wandering around on our own.

As luck would have it, we ran into a German photographer at a Chinese temple who was talking to some locals about a photo project he was on. Zory, unable to hold her curiosity in, asked him for more details and he replied that it was for Wendi Murdoch! At this point, we became friends quickly and started exchanging all the oddities and details of our project.

He had apparently been in Jakarta a day or two before us and was about to cancel the project because they kept giving him the runaround every day when it was time to move to the next city. They’d find ways to drive him to the wrong airport or make excuses to ask for more permit charges all while threatening legal action for violating the NDA and contract. Even after all this, he was not completely sure it was a scam and neither did we, but doubt was creeping in.

We got his WhatsApp number and stayed in contact while we went our separate ways for the day.

After a full day of shooting, without any help from the driver, by the way, we went back to the hotel to rest, recuperate, and investigate a bit further.

When we got back to the hotel, we had the concierge call all the hotels we had reservations with to see if they had been paid for. As the concierge called each one to find out none had been paid for yet, it started to dawn on us that this might be an elaborate scam.

A couple of hours later, Aaron calls to check on us and we asked him why all the other hotels aren’t paid for yet. This made him lose his mind! He went on a crazy rant about how I was ‘racist’ again to the driver, how I’m not in touch with my Asian side, and how cynical we’ve been towards Wendi about getting reimbursed. He also threatens to call Immigration to tell them we are in Indonesia doing work illegally on a tourist visa. He then says Wendi wants to cancel the project because she can’t work with us.

At this point, we were still on the fence if this was a scam or not. I don’t know if it’s because we already had so much skin in the game but we still surprisingly wanted to continue with the project!

Anyhow, we got Aaron to calm down and then said we’d talk again the morning to discuss if this project was still viable or not.

After a sleepless night, we decided we’d hear what Aaron had to say on the call and then decide from there.

8 am. Aaron calls and he says that Wendi has decided to cancel the project, but not to worry she would reimburse all the travel costs and permit fees within 24 hours. He said to make an invoice with the bank account and routing number so they could transfer the money in. We felt an instant weight off our shoulders as the past 48 hours had been outrageously stressful.

But, I just couldn’t shake off the feeling that we were getting scammed and possibly in danger. So I looked on Facebook to see if I knew anyone who lived in Jakarta. Lo and behold, one of my friends had just moved from Los Angeles to Jakarta recently and was the type of guy to just ‘know things’.

I pinged him on Facebook messenger to tell him I was in a weird situation here in Jakarta and if I could call him. He gave me his WhatsApp contact info and within 10 seconds of my telling him what happened, he knew what was happening to me. He gave me a link to the Hollywood Reporter where many other people ( filmmakers, military consultants, hair stylists, etc) had been scammed with the same thing. They even had recordings of the scammer and one of them matched “Wendi’s” voice exactly.

Right then and there I spent the next 3 hours calling and securing all my financial accounts to make sure nothing had been stolen. I was in full paranoia that they might have bugged our hotel room, placed video cameras, and used all my info to steal my identity. Luckily, they hadn’t done any of that, most likely because they were busy scamming the next photographer on the way to Jakarta.

As of today, they are still scamming photographers and bringing them to Jakarta. I spoke to Nicole Katsianas, Director at K2 Intelligence, who’s been on the case for the past year. She said she’s spoken to at least 100 people who have been scammed by this and estimates between 5-10 times that amount have been affected by this.

Our total loss was around $7,500 due to the airline tickets being so expensive. And no, we never got reimbursed for anything.

‘Permit charges’ that we never got reimbursed for

If you’ve been scammed by this, please reach out to me or to Nicole Katsianas at K2 Intelligence to help catch this guy. Oh, and yes, it’s one Indonesian man who is apparently an expert at impersonating male/female voices and accents on command, along with having mastery of psychological tactics. The wendimurdoch.com domain was closed by the authorities, but he opened a new domain dengmurdoch.com.

We won’t let this encounter color our view of how amazing Instagram, photography, and traveling the world is though.

Stay safe and make sure to share this along your social channels to spread awareness! Let’s catch this guy!

About the author: Henry Wu is a photographer, travel writer, and editor. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of Wu’s work on his website, Facebook, and Instagram. This article was also published here.

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2019/01/16/how-an-elaborate-international-scam-is-making-the-rounds-among-instagrammers-and-photographers/

[accountancyandtaxupdate-blog]

General election: May says Tories will keep 0.7% aid pledge - politics live

Live coverage of the day’s politics as Jeremy Corbyn tries to switch focus to education – but leaked EU documents cause more Brexit ructionsLeaked documents say EU wants Britain kept under European courtsThe Snap: sign up for the daily election briefing and read today’s 3.18pm BSTHere are some more pictures from Jeremy Corbyn’s visit to the children’s centre in Bristol. He was reading We’re going on a bear hunt. No doubt our colleagues at the other end of the Fleet Street spectrum will take a rather jaundiced view, but many people will find them delightful."The book is called Going on a Blair Hunt...bear, I mean bear hunt". pic.twitter.com/MDaftybzd4 2.53pm BSTJeremy Corbyn has said Labour is “gaining a huge amount of ground” on the Conservatives in the battle to win the general election. Speaking during a visit to a children’s centre in Bristol, Corbyn told Sky News: We’ve just started the election campaign, we’re 72 hours into it and I’m loving every moment of it. We’re gaining support, we’re gaining a huge amount of ground and we’re getting a great deal of support. Watch this space ...We are putting a message out there - this country does not have to be so divided, [there] does not have to be such appalling levels of poverty and unachieved ambition because of people growing up in poverty. That’s our message, that’s the one we’re putting out, and the Labour Party is totally united in putting that message out, okay? 2.46pm BSTA Labour peer has compared the behaviour of Unite the union to the North Korean regime following the suspension of the union’s leadership hopeful Gerard Coyne just hours after ballot boxes were closed. Lady Prosser, a supporter of Coyne and former president of the TUC, said the union has refused to say why he has been suspended and did so as first reports showed that Coyne might beat the incumbent and Jeremy Corbyn supporter Len McCluskey. She told Radio 4’s The World At One: My understanding is that the election was going well for Gerard and on some kind of analysis of how the votes were going that it looked a though he was going to win. And so for the next thing to hear is that he has been suspended and the union is not saying why, that just looks like something that might go on in North Korea.He ended up with a final written warning and the reason for that was his attendance at a meeting with some Labour MPs who had at that time spoken out against Jeremy Corbyn. All of that was mucky and not nice and made everyone wonder what was going on. Now all of this has happened it makes you wonder what is going on. It can’t be right.There are rules to the game and the rules are that Lenny has put himself forward for election. And unless there is a really substantial reason why Gerard Coyne should be suspended then it looks like Lenny is going to be a bad loser. The union needs to come clean on just what they think it is that Gerard has done. Union members need to know about it. 2.08pm BSTThis is what Theresa May said in response to the question about aid spending.Let’s be clear – the 0.7% commitment remains, and will remain. What we need to do, though, is to look at how that money will be spent, and make sure that we are able to spend that money in the most effective way.I’m very proud of the record we have, of the children around the world who are being educated as a result of what the British taxpayer is doing in terms of international aid. 2.01pm BSTThis is from my colleague Patrick Wintour.May says the 0.7 % commitment on aid will remain, but worth waiting to see precise manifesto wording and how aid in future is defined. 1.55pm BSTThe BBC’s John Pienaar gets a question now.Q: Will you continue to raise pensions every year? 1.49pm BSTTheresa May is now taking questions.She is at a factory and is taking questions from members of the staff before taking them from journalists.PM tells audience she has a "plan for Brexit but also beyond Brexit" pic.twitter.com/iaoVjMf3Xk 1.46pm BSTAfter his budget U-turn on raising national insurance for the self employed, Philip Hammond has hinted at the IMF spring meeting in Washington that the coming Tory manifesto will drop 2015 pledges not to raise income tax, national insurance and VAT. The chancellor said the 2015 commitment made by David Cameron had constrained the government’s ability to bring down Britain’s budget deficit.I’m a Conservative. I have no ideological desire to to raise taxes. But we need to manage the economy sensibly and sustainably. We need to get the fiscal accounts back into shape. It was self evidently clear that the commitments that were made in the 2015 manifesto did and do today constrain the ability to manage the economy flexibly. 1.41pm BSTTheresa May is speaking in Maidenhead, where she is the local MP.She says the election is about leadership. 1.22pm BSTJeremy Corbyn has dismissed questions about his future as “absurd” and claims he is “loving every minute” of the campaign. Speaking to reporters in Swindon, the Labour leader claimed he was gaining support. “Watch this space,” he said. 12.53pm BSTHarriet Sherwood has more on the intervention of Rowan Williams, on the row about Britain’s aid budget. Related: Former archbishop of Canterbury defends Britain's aid budget 12.36pm BSTAn investigation by the UK media regulator into Rupert Murdoch’s £11.7bn takeover of Sky has been delayed until after the general election, writes Mark Sweney. Karen Bradley, the culture secretary, was set to receive the findings of two investigations by Ofcom – examining whether the takeover gives Murdoch too much control of UK news media and whether he is a “fit and proper” owner – by 16 May. Related: Inquiry into Murdoch's Sky deal delayed until after general election 12.26pm BSTPA has more on the departure of Lizzie Loudon, the second member of Theresa May’s inner circle to quit after the snap election announcement. Loudon is leaving her role as May’s press secretary after what she described as a “thrilling” and “historic” nine months in Downing Street. It comes after Katie Perrior left the post of Number 10 director of communications on Tuesday, when the PM announced the snap June 8 election. 12.09pm BSTThis is a bit tangential to British politics, but Donald Trump has just weighed into French politics. In one of his latest tweets he claimed last night’s terrorist attack in Paris will “have a big effect” on Sunday’s presidential election. Another terrorist attack in Paris. The people of France will not take much more of this. Will have a big effect on presidential election!If we wish to turn Britain’s forthcoming election into a security-drenched hell, we will do so by overreacting to Paris. That way we will ensure that terrorism “just never ends”. 11.58am BSTScotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has accused the Conservatives of fielding local election candidates “more at home in Ukip”. “The SNP is the only party that can stand against cuts and privatisation of our public services, in the face of an increasingly hardline Tory party which, under Ruth Davidson, is fielding candidates who would be more at home in Ukip.”“There are real and dangerous consequences if our vital local services fall into Tory hands. With Labour and the Lib Dems ready to sell out for even the slightest suggestion of power, voting for any other party risks seeing the Tories take over our town halls.” 11.43am BSTThe former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has weighed into the debate about the international aid budget by urging Theresa May not to cut the existing pledge to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid. 11.29am BSTTheresa May’s press secretary Lizzie Loudon, has quit her job after just nine months in post, in the latest blow to the prime minister’s communication teams.Loudon’s departure comes after communications chief Katie Perrior left in the wake of the snap election announcement. PM's press secretary, Lizzie Loudon, is quitting. Second big departure from May's inner circle after director of comms Katie Perrior. 11.18am BSTHere’s an audio summary of Corbyn’s pledges in Swindon courtesy of Sky News. 11.15am BSTAs Northern Ireland’s parties gear up for a bruising and, as ever, tribal general election campaign in the region, the secretary of state James Brokenshire reminds us that there is still another political game in town - the discussions aimed at restoring power sharing devolved government in Belfast.The Northern Ireland Secretary has granted local parties what could be described as “Fergie Time”, the extra extra time that Manchester United once seemed capable of getting from referees. Since the Northern Ireland Assembly election on 2 March our focus has been on re-establishing inclusive, devolved government.The forthcoming UK general election does not change that. This bill will therefore enable an executive to be formed in the coming days should an agreement be reached. However, if an agreement is not possible before the general election, it is right that we provide flexibility for an incoming government to act in the best interests of Northern Ireland and the space for the parties to conclude a deal. 11.07am BSTThe Lib Dems have raised £500,000 since the election was called through an urgent email appeal, more than twice as much as Labour, the Financial Times’ Robert Wright reports. Here’s an extract from his story (paywall).The UK’s third biggest party, which is currently polling at about 12 per cent, told the Financial Times it had succeeded in raising £500,000 with an urgent email appeal. Labour said its similar initiative had raised £200,000.In the last general election, the Lib Dems were punished by voters for their part in the coalition government but since the Brexit vote they have picked up support as the only party that is pro-EU. 10.45am BSTIn his Times column (paywall) Michael Gove, the Conservative former justice secretary, has also been writing about what Theresa May’s manifesto will look like. Here’s an extract.The prime minister is, to use a phrase coined by one of her advisers, post-liberal. She is neither the cold economic liberal of one caricature nor the hand-wringing Hampstead liberal of another; neither Hayek nor Rawls. She is instead a communitarian, closer to the thinking of a philosopher such as Alasdair MacIntyre, or indeed the Blue Labour intellectual Maurice Glasman.Which is why I expect the Conservative manifesto, and the Queen’s Speeches to follow, to be rooted in the concerns of those whom the writer David Goodhart has described as the citizens of Somewhere rather than Anywhere. Those who are rooted in specific communities, who aren’t living life from one Twitter storm to the next, who don’t have the reserves of capital, or connections, to be able to chase every new opportunity globalisation might provide. 10.38am BSTJeremy Corbyn is speaking at an event in Swindon now.He says Labour will publish its manifesto soon.Why do we allow this form of employment in this county. A Labour government would end zero-hour contracts. 10.33am BSTAccording to reports in the Sun and the Daily Telegraph, the Conservatives’ massive opinion poll lead is being seen by some in the party as a liability, not an asset. Both papers report party sources as being concerned that the polls showing the Tories ahead by around 20 points are creating unreasonable expectations. It has got to the point where a majority of less than 60 could be seen as disappointing, the Telegraph reports.A Tory source told the Sun:We take no great comfort from our position in the published polls. Public polls measure national support for the parties, but the election will be decided in a handful of marginal seats.There is clear historical evidence that the reported Tory lead could actually be non-existent, and if the vote is distributed unfavourably we could easily lose our working majority. We only need to lose 6 seats and no one party would hold a majority.On average, UK polls this far out have missed the final margin by 6 percentage points. And they don’t get all that much more accurate as you go along — the final polling average has missed the result by 5 points. The experience in Brexit last year — when the polls missed the final margin by 4 points according to the Huffington Post polling average or 6 points according to the method I described above — wasn’t a big outlier by UK standards. The same goes for the previous U.K. general election in 2015, when they underestimated Conservatives by around 6 points. Polls in 2010 were quite good in diagnosing the Conservative-Labour margin, although they considerably overestimated Liberal Democrats’ performance.May’s Conservatives do have a massive lead, with recent polls showing them 9 to 21 points ahead of Labour and their unpopular leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Also, while the polls in the UK haven’t been very accurate, they’ve tended to underestimate Conservatives rather than Labour in the past. In every election [between 1945 and 2010], the polls have (on average) always been different from the final result, to a greater or lesser degree. Across all polls the average MAE was 2.2%, with a minimum of 0.8% (1955/1959) and a maximum of 4.6% (1992). The same approximate levels of error can have different consequences, depending on the closeness of the race between the two main parties. Note that the MAE on the Conservative and Labour vote shares was only marginally worse in 2015 (3.3) than in 1997 (3.1). Yet the 1997 election is not considered to have been a polling disaster; the polls indicated there would be a Labour landslide and there was. 9.55am BSTAnyone hoping that the Conservative party manifesto insight will give a detailed insight into Theresa May’s plans for the next five years may be disappointed, according to a good column by the Spectator editor Fraser Nelson in the Daily Telegraph (paywall). Here’s an extract.The last Conservative manifesto contained 625 pledges, none intended to be taken seriously. David Cameron didn’t think he’d ever win a majority and saw his various promises as chips to be bargained away with Nick Clegg – but then, things went badly right. The 625 figure has been repeated by those around Theresa May recently, with some disdain. Their point: that this time, the number of pledges could be closer to 62. Or, even better, six. That a good manifesto should give a clear sense of direction, but with as few hard promises as possible.I understand that the Prime Minister has given her team two weeks to come up with a manifesto for the June 8 election, under a very clear remit. She wants it to be short, closer to 25 pages than the 120-page opus that David Cameron unloaded on the public in 2010. She wants clarity of thought but no laundry list of pledges. Her model is Margaret Thatcher’s slim 1979 manifesto, which offered just five ideas and boasted about its lack of “lavish promises”. Until the manifesto publication date – pencilled in for May 8 – there will be tensions. Philip Hammond, the chancellor, is pushing for a pledge-free economic section. He wants no spending commitments, nothing about balancing the books in this parliament or any other, and freedom to raise whatever taxes he likes. Ben Gummer, who is liaising with ministers over the manifesto, is facing similar requests from his colleagues: could they kindly be released from their various pledges? 9.36am BSTYesterday, for no obvious reason, Priti Patel, the international development secretary, issued a very long written statement to MPs defending the record of her department.The Daily Mail is interpreting the move as an attempt by Patel to defend her department’s budget. Theresa May has refused to commit the Tories to maintaining their commitment to spend 0.7% of national wealth on aid in the next parliament. The Mail says the target will not be abandoned completely, but that it could be watered down. In his Mail story Jason Groves reports:Tory sources suggest the target is unlikely to be axed altogether. But a Government insider confirmed last night that ministers are examining whether to abandon the international definition on aid to allow the cash to be spent on a wider range of activities, including some that currently come from the defence budget. 9.28am BSTBallot papers are being counted today in the Unite leadership contest. Len McCluskey, the current general secretary and one of Jeremy Corbyn’s most powerful supporters in the Labour party, had been expected to win reasonably comfortably, but, according to the BBC’s Ross Hawkins, one account has him “neck and neck” with Gerard Coyne, his main challenger. In a bizarre move, Coyne was suspended from his union post yesterday.Defining moment for Labour as we speak. Told Unite ballots being counted. Neck & neck says one src, McCluskey ahead says another. Let's see. 8.38am BSTGood morning. I’m taking over from Claire.Seven weeks today we will know the results of the general election. But we don’t have to wait that long for an election result. Local council byelections take place on Thursdays and, as usual, Britain Elects has last night’s results, or result.Tonight's council by-elections: two Labour defences.https://t.co/4Iw1Li6o4j pic.twitter.com/FdqCER9wltLabour HOLD Blacon (West Cheshire & Chester).Blacon (West Cheshire & Chester) result:LAB: 59.1% (+1.6)CON: 21.8% (+4.0)IND: 16.5% (+16.5)LDEM: 2.7% (+2.7)No Grn and UKIP as prev.To understand this better:LAB: 59.1% (+1.6)CON: 21.8% (+4.0)IND: 16.5% (+16.5)LDEM: 2.7% (+2.7)*UKIP: 0.0% (-16.9)*GRN: 0.0% (-7.7)Kenton East (Harrow) will be counting in the morning. 8.22am BSTI’m handing over the live blog to Andrew Sparrow now for the rest of the day’s campaign action.Please do sign up for our morning email, the Snap, to start your every weekday from now until polling day (and possibly beyond; who can predict these days?). You can register here, and read today’s here. 8.07am BSTThe Labour leader will visit the Conservative constituency of Cardiff North today, where he will claim that “seven years of Tory failure and broken promises have left our schools in a terrible state” and that “hundreds of thousands of our children are paying the price”.He will point out that the Tories have failed to deliver the 2010 manifesto pledge to deliver “small schools with smaller class sizes”.Labour will stand up for all children by building a schools system for everyone, keeping class sizes down and making sure schools and teachers have the resources they need to ensure that every child, whatever their background, has access to a world-class education.This situation is becoming unsustainable; too many children are being taught in classes which are simply too big.The system for school place planning is broken. The Tories need to let go of their unjustified fixation with free schools, but instead they have relaxed the rules so even more can be built in areas where there is no demand for places. Free schools are clearly not addressing the growing pressures on schools. 7.57am BSTOver on the Today programme, Labour’s Liam Byrne and Tory Grant Shapps are doing their very best to avoid answering the question of whether earning £70,000 a year makes one “rich” – despite coming on the radio to participate in a segment about whether earning £70,000 a year makes one “rich”.This analysis might help them: statistics show that only a smidgen over 5% of taxpayers earn that much. Those earning between £15,000 and £50,000 make up two-thirds of UK taxpayers. Related: How much do you have to earn to be rich? £70,000, says Labour 7.50am BSTMichael Dugher last night became the latest sitting Labour MP to announce he will not be standing again on 8 June.He told Politics Home he had made the decision to step down in Barnsley East with “some sadness”:I have worked for the Labour movement for nearly all of the past 20 years. Throughout that time I have always tried to fight for a Labour party that is in touch with working class people and one that can get into government so we can actually do something to really help people.I wish the party and more importantly the people of Barnsley nothing but the best for the future. 7.39am BSTMy colleague Steven Morris reports from Bristol, where he found “love – or admiration and sympathy at least” for Jeremy Corbyn:Martin Wells, a psychotherapist from Bristol, admitted he had not voted for a while. “I’ve been Labour all my life but I fell out of the habit of voting. I think I had just lost interest in all politicians.”But then came the 2015 general election, Brexit and the triumph of Donald Trump. “It made me sit up and think.” Wells plans to back Labour this time. “I like Jeremy Corbyn. He makes me feel more optimistic. I will vote for him.”None of this is to say that Bristol is in the bag for Corbyn’s party. At the Focus on the Past antiques emporium in Clifton, worker Kate Baker said she had always voted Labour. “But I’m going to vote for Theresa May this time. I think she has integrity. I think she knows what she wants and will do it. Brexit is going to be awful. She will give us some stability.”She is not against Corbyn. “I like him, actually, but I don’t think many in his party do and that’s a problem.” 7.23am BSTPro-remain Tories are hastening to send their thoughts to the PM for the Conservative manifesto, following her call for contributions, Rowena Mason and Peter Walker report:Some of those trying to keep their seats in remain-supporting areas are asking for explicit mention of the need to seek a trade deal with the EU.The MPs, in south-west England and Greater London, are also calling for transitional controls to prevent a cliff-edge at the point of Brexit, while others fighting the Liberal Democrats and Labour in marginal seats are pushing for more support for “just about managing” families on housing and childcare. On the other side, many on the right of the party will see the revision of the 2015 manifesto as an opportunity to rid the Conservatives of all traces of David Cameron and George Osborne’s “modernising” project.There are a number of Conservative MPs campaigning for an end to the target of spending 0.7% of national income on foreign aid and for deregulation and tax cuts after the UK leaves the EU. 7.12am BSTScottish former first minister Alex Salmond thinks Theresa May, in refusing to participate in televised debates, is turning her back on what had been a progressive step in UK politics.Writing in the Guardian today, he says:It was generally assumed that once the precedent was set, there would always be television debates in elections. However, May’s refusal to take part can be explained in two words – Lynton Crosby.She has hired Cameron’s “Wizard of Oz”, that master of the darkest of political arts. Lynton’s highly paid instruction would be simple, but probably delivered to the vicar’s daughter with his usual expletives deleted. It would be something like “You are 20 points ahead, prime minister – take no risks whatsoever” … Related: No dissent, no risks, no TV debates: May’s election stall offers only cynicism | Alex Salmond 7.03am BSTHow do you feel about the snap election? We’re looking to build a picture of the mood of the country ahead of the general election. Wherever you live, and however you’re intending to vote, please do share your views with us: Related: How do you feel about Theresa May's snap election? 6.41am BSTGood morning and welcome to the beginning of the end of a week in which the UK sharpened its pencils for yet another run at the ballot boxes.Andrew Sparrow will be along later to cover the day’s campaign action; in the meantime, settle in with your morning rundown of all things electoral. Comments are open below or you can find me on Twitter @Claire_Phipps.All I can say is, in 2015, almost exactly two years ago, I was given 200-1 as an outside chance. With a larger majority [May] can more easily stand up to her ultra-Eurosceptic backbenchers, some of whom seem actively to want Britain to crash out. That explains why the pound rose this week.The election also buys Mrs May time. Holding a vote this year means that she need not face the polls again until 2022, three years after Britain’s formal exit from the EU. Avoiding the pressure of an imminent contest at home will further strengthen her against the headbanging fringe of her own party and the right-wing press, which screams treachery at any hint of the compromises needed to secure a deal with the EU.Counterintuitive as it sounds, there’s a risk for Labour in jumping aboard the current posh-bashing wagon which doesn’t necessarily apply to other parties. As Gordon Brown’s pollster Deborah Mattinson has argued, when focus groups were asked about his desire to raise taxes on the rich, they didn’t balk at the definition of ‘rich’ or even at the risk that one day they might be eligible. They just complained that it was old-fashioned: it reminded them of 70s Labour.The paradox is that raising taxes may scream ‘politics of yesterday’ to voters Labour needs to win over, when in many ways the idea has never been so contemporary. Crumbling public services, a mountain of debt to repay, and an ageing nation of pensioners with a post-Brexit aversion to letting young, taxpaying foreigners move here all adds up to one logical conclusion: tax rises loom almost regardless of who wins in June. I expect the manifesto to be distinctly unglamorous, indeed anti-glamour, and all the better for that. I would expect more emphasis on improving technical education and renewed focus on those overlooked parts of the country where educational opportunity still lags far behind the capital. I would also expect policies to boost productivity, including changes to corporate governance as part of a strengthened industrial strategy focused on boosting employment outside the southeast. I think we might also see an assault on establishment glitz: Lords reform, changes to the honours system, heightened probity in appointments and the exercise of patronage. There will be things, I’m sure, that we will want to put into the manifesto that we won’t be able to put in just yet, so the manifesto may even be a rolling manifesto, in that there’ll be other things coming in at the end.All I'm saying is if we can all agree to make #VoteFishFinger a thing then the next 7 weeks might be bearable pic.twitter.com/tBl91nxVej Continue reading...

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