#and sometimes the consequences will be irreversible. but its never too late to start doing the right thing

[majimaisms]

i think my biggest problem with the pirate game is majima's absolutely unhinged emotional sheltering being presented as like. a good and healthy and normal thing. which. like. i SUPPOSE the only acceptable situation to do that in is with a child youre responsible for. but its still not acknowledged at all that its unhealthy..? but then again this is how kiryu saga has been for years too. youre just supposed to look at it and know better. they dont really spell it out. at least they didnt until infinite wealth

[promiseiwillwrite]

Power

Power is such a subtle thing, and all you ever see are the times when it is huge, when it storms capitol buildings and Crashes markets and tears down Healthcare systems, where Millions of people die.

And when you are a teenager, you are desperate for it sometimes...  Sometimes all you want is the taste of autonomy on your tongue.  To never again have to deal with some old fool’s stupid, arbitrary consequences ever again.  To have control of your life, and to not have anyone have control of you.

But what you don’t see is that the moment you decide that the consequences of your parents no longer matter to you...  The Moment that you take that power, you are saddled, invisibly with all the responsibility that comes with the consequences of autonomy.

The Instant you decide to start making decisions for yourself as an adult person, you Never get back the protection afforded by those old fools, who would seek to create a safe harbor for you, for learning, by providing you with small consequences that are Easy to understand, with clear cause and effect.

Outside of that harbor, there are only the consequences of reality.  The Cold crush of physics and causality, and its millions of unpredictable and inexorable butterfly-effects that reach out from your Now and shape your life for twenty years to come, impossible for any man, no matter how intelligent, to fathom in all their unfolding.

And Woe be unto those who decide early that they don’t give a fuck.

Because they will find later, and indeed, much too late, that this was a terrible, and absolutely irreversible error.  Because it is only by caring that you ever learn who you are and all the different ways that can look.  You may think you know, but you’d be wrong.

And it is long and lonely row to hoe when you don’t understand, and have no chance to learn when you are older.  Because there are always more pressing matters.  Food.  Shelter.  Bills...  The list is continually expanding.  and these demands are about survival.  This is no longer assured by people taking care of you.  It changes the equation.  

And it never changes back.

The odds are Never again in your Favor. Physics don’t give a Fuck that you are cold or hungry.  Debt Collectors do not care that you can’t get work.  Landlords will fucking wait until you go out to look for a job and set all your crappy furniture on the curb, and change the lock before you get back.  The consequences out here are real.  They will control you, and are worse masters than any parent could ever be.

And I know your game.  I have seen it played by better players.

I know that it looks like a sweet arrangement, not going to school, not having to work, just coasting like this.  You can pretend all you want that this will last forever, but it won’t.

But I am watching you.  And if this is what you want, I will step back.  Slowly.  But I will watch.

And when you blow off the opportunities presented to you...  When you decide that you’d rather fuck around and play games, and then can’t get a job later, do not ask me for money.  I offered you my Money and My Time, and my Effort while you were still safe, and could build yourself a windfall, and build the skills you would need to continue to create opportunities for yourself.  You decided it wasn’t worth your time.

And you will reap what you have sown, because you decided that the possibility of our consequences did not work for you. You would rather have the power than learn to choose better problems.

I hope it is not bitter fruit.  I hope it is not dust in a barren field.

For I have walked there, and it is a long way out of that hell.

[theconservativebrief]

In the past decade, David Lowery has made movies about thieves, runaway kids, ghosts, and giant dragons. But really, they’re all about the same thing. Whether Lowery’s films are set in the past, the present, or the distant future, they’re all suffused with a gentle melancholy about the irreversible slip of time. What we lose and who we love shape whoever it is we will become. But no matter what, we can’t go back.

“Nothing truly is ours. The cyclical nature of history consistently reveals that,” Lowery told me following the release of last summer’s A Ghost Story. “Things keep getting built up and then falling apart, because nothing is permanent.”

That’s why all of Lowery’s films feel elegiac — none more than his newest, The Old Man & the Gun, which stars Robert Redford in what the actor has said will be his last role. Now 82, Redford is not just a Hollywood legend but also a key figure in the history of independent American film as the founder of the Sundance Film Festival.

In The Old Man & the Gun, both Redford and Lowery are returning to their roots. For Redford, a role as a lifelong bank robber feels like a fitting cap to a career effectively launched half a century ago with his role alongside Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

And Lowery’s career was launched when his second feature film, 2013’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. It’s about a pair of thieves in love, seemingly modeled on Bonnie and Clyde; when their life of crime comes to an abrupt end, they’re forced to figure out a way to keep living.

So The Old Man & the Gun — which, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is based on real characters — is a natural fit for both star and director, and in Lowery’s hands, it feels like both an homage to the past and a gentle step toward the future.

Sissy Spacek and Robert Redford star together in The Old Man & the Gun. Fox Searchlight

Lowery adapted the screenplay from a 2003 New Yorker article about Forrest Tucker, a career bank robber who simply refused to stop “working,” even after 18 successful escapes from prison. (David Grann, the New Yorker staff writer who reported on Tucker, also wrote the article on which 2016’s The Lost City of Z was based.)

The real Tucker died of lung cancer in prison in 2004, at the age of 83. The Old Man & the Gun picks up late in his career — he’s said to be in his “late 60s” — when he robs a bank with his gang of aging thieves (Danny Glover and Tom Waits), in the most polite way possible. Yes, he threatens the bank teller by quietly showing a gun. But then he compliments her and smiles at her, and he does it in such a gentle manner that she’s stymied and kind of charmed, and he gets away with it, as he has for decades.

On his way out of town, being chased by the cops, he stops to help a woman (Sissy Spacek) whose car broke down by the side of the road. (Among other things, the vehicle provides good cover from the cops.) She’s a little skeptical of him, but he seems gentlemanly, and when he offers her a ride, she accepts.

Her name is Jewel; her husband died a few years ago, and now she lives alone on a ranch. In one single scene in a diner, she explains her past to him; he tells her, in so many words, what he does for a living, though he doesn’t reveal his real name. They fall in love in the blink of an eye, and we witness it happen.

Sissy Spacek and Robert Redford in The Old Man & the Gun. 20th Century Fox

Redford and Spacek’s chemistry is easy and lived-in, though the two have somehow never been in a film together. Their characters connect in a way that makes sense for two people who’ve seen most of life and know the precise nature and contours of its hard knocks, yet retain just enough idealism to fall in love.

Watching them together is the greatest pleasure of The Old Man & the Gun, especially because Lowery chooses to settle the film in the 1970s visually as well as narratively, with the kinds of long, slow takes and zooms and the sort of film grade and coloration you’d see in a film from that much earlier era.

Of course, both Redford and Spacek (who is 68) were much younger back then, so we haven’t had the opportunity to watch either of them act through that particular, literal lens. But it’s easy to imagine they’d have starred in this film if it were made in the 1970s and they’d been stars from a much earlier age.

So the effect of The Old Man & the Gun is pleasantly disorienting: It looks old, but the actors in it are old now, which gives it the feel of having been made in some alternate timeline, or of an homage to both something that could have happened and something that did.

But The Old Man & the Gun isn’t just a love story. Tucker is being chased by a police officer and a family man named John Hunt (played by long-time Lowery collaborator Casey Affleck), who becomes moderately obsessed with Tucker’s case once he realizes that Tucker and his gang have been pulling off ultra-polite robberies all over the country, from Texas to Oklahoma to Missouri. Tucker and his crew carry guns, but they never hurt anyone. At one point, someone tells Hunt that if Tucker said he’d never fired his gun in his life, it’d be easy to believe.

What makes Tucker so interesting — and so dangerous — as a character is how he upends what people expect of a bank robber. The gentleman thief is a long-established character in fiction, and robbers, thieves, and celebrity outlaws were among the most famous American celebrities in the 19th and 20th centuries, virtual household names. John Dillinger, Jesse James, George “Baby Face” Nelson, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, and Butch Cassidy himself were all familiar figures, their movements and exploits and arrests tracked breathlessly in the papers and, eventually, turned into films.

Some of them did actually hurt civilians. But in scene after scene, Tucker’s victims speak to Hunt admiringly, even gratefully, of the way he robbed them. He was so charming! He was so friendly! He was kind. He was a gentleman.

Redford as the gentlemanly thief Forrest Tucker in The Old Man and the Gun. Eric Zachanowich/20th Century Fox

Of course, Tucker is a rascal and a criminal. He’s a thief, not to mention a liar. He doesn’t tell Jewel his real name, even after multiple conversations in diners and on her porch. She suspects as much, but it doesn’t quite sync with what she knows of Tucker the man, who is attentive and interesting and gentle and funny and strangely honest about a lot of who he is.

That’s probably why watching The Old Man & the Gun also feels like an exercise in cognitive dissonance. Technically, Forrest Tucker is more of an antihero than anything else. He is the definition of incorrigible, and he’s a criminal who takes advantage of other people not because he can really justify it, but because he just really likes doing it. He has to face the consequences, sometimes, but he’s skilled at escaping them, too. Even at the end of the film (no spoilers!), he’s barely changed in this respect. The Old Man & the Gun is not a movie about the redemption of Forrest Tucker.

What it is, in typical Lowery fashion, is a longing look backward at a bygone era, with a cocked eyebrow. From where we sit now, it seems incredible that someone who escaped from prison so many times and robbed so many banks just kept getting away with it over and over, when many others — especially others who weren’t friendly, charming old white men — couldn’t imagine doing the same.

But the glamorous-thief-as-celebrity — someone we’re fascinated by and root for, even as we see them doing something bad and getting away with it — is an American institution, because we gravitate as a culture toward the alluring rogues who just refuse live the life they’re expected to live. (The 2018 analogue is probably our clear fascination with grifters.)

So there’s an element of privilege running through the story. And when The Old Man & the Gun puts Tucker up against Hunt — a younger, law-abiding man who isn’t quite as besotted with the rogue’s failure to face consequences as everyone else — the film’s generational contrast comes into focus. In showing the ways Tucker’s life both attracts and hurts Jewel, The Old Man & the Gun suggests that thieves can be fascinating and cruel, glamorous and deadly, charming and loving and incapable of really being connected to anyone. (That’s in line with Lowery’s take on the Bonnie and Clyde myth in his film Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which depicts the toll that a life of crime can take on a romance, a family, and a life.)

It’s a gentle inversion of the glamorous thief trope, so gentle that if you’re not paying attention, you might miss it. But in his typical fashion, Lowery both pays homage to older films with thief heroes and bends the ending around to make us think. It’s his best film yet, a fitting marker for his first 10 years of filmmaking. And as a capstone for Redford, it’s a stellar finale: A man who started out playing a thief ends by playing one again — one who hasn’t grown any wiser, but maybe the world around him has, a little bit.

The Old Man & the Gun opens in theaters on September 28.

Original Source -> Robert Redford bids farewell to the silver screen in the pitch-perfect The Old Man & the Gun

via The Conservative Brief

[nebris]

How climate change and disease helped the fall of Rome

At some time or another, every historian of Rome has been asked to say where we are, today, on Rome’s cycle of decline. Historians might squirm at such attempts to use the past but, even if history does not repeat itself, nor come packaged into moral lessons, it can deepen our sense of what it means to be human and how fragile our societies are.

In the middle of the second century, the Romans controlled a huge, geographically diverse part of the globe, from northern Britain to the edges of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia. The generally prosperous population peaked at 75 million. Eventually, all free inhabitants of the empire came to enjoy the rights of Roman citizenship. Little wonder that the 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon judged this age the ‘most happy’ in the history of our species – yet today we are more likely to see the advance of Roman civilisation as unwittingly planting the seeds of its own demise.

Five centuries later, the Roman empire was a small Byzantine rump-state controlled from Constantinople, its near-eastern provinces lost to Islamic invasions, its western lands covered by a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms. Trade receded, cities shrank, and technological advance halted. Despite the cultural vitality and spiritual legacy of these centuries, this period was marked by a declining population, political fragmentation, and lower levels of material complexity. When the historian Ian Morris at Stanford University created a universal social-development index, the fall of Rome emerged as the greatest setback in the history of human civilisation.

Explanations for a phenomenon of this magnitude abound: in 1984, the German classicist Alexander Demandt catalogued more than 200 hypotheses. Most scholars have looked to the internal political dynamics of the imperial system or the shifting geopolitical context of an empire whose neighbours gradually caught up in the sophistication of their military and political technologies. But new evidence has started to unveil the crucial role played by changes in the natural environment. The paradoxes of social development, and the inherent unpredictability of nature, worked in concert to bring about Rome’s demise.

Climate change did not begin with the exhaust fumes of industrialisation, but has been a permanent feature of human existence. Orbital mechanics (small variations in the tilt, spin and eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit) and solar cycles alter the amount and distribution of energy received from the Sun. And volcanic eruptions spew reflective sulphates into the atmosphere, sometimes with long-reaching effects. Modern, anthropogenic climate change is so perilous because it is happening quickly and in conjunction with so many other irreversible changes in the Earth’s biosphere. But climate change per se is nothing new.

The need to understand the natural context of modern climate change has been an unmitigated boon for historians. Earth scientists have scoured the planet for paleoclimate proxies, natural archives of the past environment. The effort to put climate change in the foreground of Roman history is motivated both by troves of new data and a heightened sensitivity to the importance of the physical environment. It turns out that climate had a major role in the rise and fall of Roman civilisation. The empire-builders benefitted from impeccable timing: the characteristic warm, wet and stable weather was conducive to economic productivity in an agrarian society. The benefits of economic growth supported the political and social bargains by which the Roman empire controlled its vast territory. The favourable climate, in ways subtle and profound, was baked into the empire’s innermost structure.

The end of this lucky climate regime did not immediately, or in any simple deterministic sense, spell the doom of Rome. Rather, a less favourable climate undermined its power just when the empire was imperilled by more dangerous enemies – Germans, Persians – from without. Climate instability peaked in the sixth century, during the reign of Justinian. Work by dendro-chronologists and ice-core experts points to an enormous spasm of volcanic activity in the 530s and 540s CE, unlike anything else in the past few thousand years. This violent sequence of eruptions triggered what is now called the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’, when much colder temperatures endured for at least 150 years. This phase of climate deterioration had decisive effects in Rome’s unravelling. It was also intimately linked to a catastrophe of even greater moment: the outbreak of the first pandemic of bubonic plague.

Disruptions in the biological environment were even more consequential to Rome’s destiny. For all the empire’s precocious advances, life expectancies ranged in the mid-20s, with infectious diseases the leading cause of death. But the array of diseases that preyed upon Romans was not static and, here too, new sensibilities and technologies are radically changing the way we understand the dynamics of evolutionary history – both for our own species, and for our microbial allies and adversaries.

The highly urbanised, highly interconnected Roman empire was a boon to its microbial inhabitants. Humble gastro-enteric diseases such as Shigellosis and paratyphoid fevers spread via contamination of food and water, and flourished in densely packed cities. Where swamps were drained and highways laid, the potential of malaria was unlocked in its worst form – Plasmodium falciparum – a deadly mosquito-borne protozoon. The Romans also connected societies by land and by sea as never before, with the unintended consequence that germs moved as never before, too. Slow killers such as tuberculosis and leprosy enjoyed a heyday in the web of interconnected cities fostered by Roman development.

However, the decisive factor in Rome’s biological history was the arrival of new germs capable of causing pandemic events. The empire was rocked by three such intercontinental disease events. The Antonine plague coincided with the end of the optimal climate regime, and was probably the global debut of the smallpox virus. The empire recovered, but never regained its previous commanding dominance. Then, in the mid-third century, a mysterious affliction of unknown origin called the Plague of Cyprian sent the empire into a tailspin. Though it rebounded, the empire was profoundly altered – with a new kind of emperor, a new kind of money, a new kind of society, and soon a new religion known as Christianity. Most dramatically, in the sixth century a resurgent empire led by Justinian faced a pandemic of bubonic plague, a prelude to the medieval Black Death. The toll was unfathomable – maybe half the population was felled.

The plague of Justinian is a case study in the extraordinarily complex relationship between human and natural systems. The culprit, the Yersinia pestis bacterium, is not a particularly ancient nemesis; evolving just 4,000 years ago, almost certainly in central Asia, it was an evolutionary newborn when it caused the first plague pandemic. The disease is permanently present in colonies of social, burrowing rodents such as marmots or gerbils. However, the historic plague pandemics were colossal accidents, spillover events involving at least five different species: the bacterium, the reservoir rodent, the amplification host (the black rat, which lives close to humans), the fleas that spread the germ, and the people caught in the crossfire.

Genetic evidence suggests that the strain of Yersinia pestis that generated the plague of Justinian originated somewhere near western China. It first appeared on the southern shores of the Mediterranean and, in all likelihood, was smuggled in along the southern, seaborne trading networks that carried silk and spices to Roman consumers. It was an accident of early globalisation. Once the germ reached the seething colonies of commensal rodents, fattened on the empire’s giant stores of grain, the mortality was unstoppable.

The plague pandemic was an event of astonishing ecological complexity. It required purely chance conjunctions, especially if the initial outbreak beyond the reservoir rodents in central Asia was triggered by those massive volcanic eruptions in the years preceding it. It also involved the unintended consequences of the built human environment – such as the global trade networks that shuttled the germ onto Roman shores, or the proliferation of rats inside the empire. The pandemic baffles our distinctions between structure and chance, pattern and contingency. Therein lies one of the lessons of Rome. Humans shape nature – above all, the ecological conditions within which evolution plays out. But nature remains blind to our intentions, and other organisms and ecosystems do not obey our rules. Climate change and disease evolution have been the wild cards of human history.

Our world now is very different from ancient Rome. We have public health, germ theory and antibiotic pharmaceuticals. We will not be as helpless as the Romans, if we are wise enough to recognise the grave threats looming around us, and to use the tools at our disposal to mitigate them. But the centrality of nature in Rome’s fall gives us reason to reconsider the power of the physical and biological environment to tilt the fortunes of human societies. Perhaps we could come to see the Romans not so much as an ancient civilisation, standing across an impassable divide from our modern age, but rather as the makers of our world today. They built a civilisation where global networks, emerging infectious diseases and ecological instability were decisive forces in the fate of human societies. The Romans, too, thought they had the upper hand over the fickle and furious power of the natural environment. History warns us: they were wrong.

Kyle Harper is professor of classics and letters, and senior vice president and provost at the University of Oklahoma. His latest book is The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2017).

https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-the-fall-of-rome