#cut it off and move it next to california see what happens (another civil war probably OKok cut it

[toxooz]

I'm sorry if the question isn't about your ocs and it's too personal but with the hurricane news coming i just wanted to ask if you are okay and in a safe zone, this situation is getting worrying.

im good im good👍 it looks like its just going to T bone through florida and not go up inland so i *shouldnt be affected at all unless it wants to hurl a fuckload of rain up again

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

September 6, 2020

My weekly view of things I am up to and thinking about. Topics include the future of Earth, housing in California, the national debt, carbon pricing, and software complexity.

Earth’s Future

The funder is interested in developing a timeline of Earth’s past and future and placing human history in the geologic context. It’s a bit off the beaten path for us, but a fun project, and I spent some time this week on it. It got me thinking about Earth’s long term future.

We all know, in at least a vague sense, that Earth’s days are numbered. I think most of us know that we expect the Sun to go nova some billions of years from now (about 7.6 billion I think is the best estimate), and barring intervention from a future advanced civilization, no life will be able to survive that.

I found this paper by O’Malley-James et al. to be an interesting read. It discusses the future of life from an astrobiological perspective, asking what biosignatures a distant civilization might observe from Earth in the distant future. Plant life that depends on C3 photosynthesis, and by extension most animal life, has maybe 500-600 million years left, beyond which point carbon dioxide is too depleted. Plant life based on C4 photosynthesis might make it 900 million years. From then on it’s only microbes. Eukaryotic life might last 1.2 billion years before the oxygen is depleted. Prokaryotic life was here first, and it will probably be here last. The paper estimates 2.8 billion years as an upper bound for any microbes at all to survive in caves or underground. For the remainder of its existence, Earth is a sterile, lifeless world without oceans, an atmosphere, or geological activity.

Before all that, Earth’s biosphere may go into an irreversible decline after the formation of Pangaea Ultima, about 250 million years from now. At that time, the combination of merging of continents, cooling of the Earth’s core, and increasing of solar luminosity will result in a falling of carbon dioxide to the point where today’s biological productivity cannot be sustained. Earth is now 95% of the age it will be when this happens.

It is an unspoken and open question of how this general picture might be altered by a civilization that is capable of effecting meaningful change over geological timelines. Human civilization is not at this level presently, and it is unclear if we will attain it.

I wonder too how contemplation of the biosphere’s mortality influences how we think of environmentalism and sustainability. Perhaps 250+ million years is so vast a time that it cannot be distinguished from infinity in our minds. For my part, I can admit that the prospect genuinely bothers me.

Housing in California

California’s legislative session expired at the end of August, and with it, another opportunity for statewide zoning reform. Scott Wiener’s SB1120 would have allowed duplexes on single family lots. It is a modest but valuable proposal which had majority legislative support, but some last minute parliamentary shenanigans from the party leadership ran out the clock.

I continue to think that the housing issue in California is intractable, and that with its current strategy, the YIMBY movement will not be able to attain any but the most marginal victories. The Bay Area needs to increase its housing supply by at least 50%, maybe 100%, to really solve the problem. To achieve those kinds of numbers, allowing duplexes and ADUs is not going to cut it. The region needs to be open to horizontal as well as vertical expansion. Something must be done to break the dysfunction in the construction industries that prevents buildings and infrastructure from being delivered at a reasonable time and speed. The movement should also stop diddling around with measures that feel good but will backfire, like rent control and vacancy taxes.

Meanwhile, the tech industry is continuing to make tentative moves toward remote work. I continue to be hopeful but skeptical that widespread adoption of remote work can finally get housing costs under control.

My suspicion is that the YIMBY movement has succumbed to the Shirky Principle, which posits that “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” An ever-growing share of its energy is devoted to playing the Reds vs. Blues game, which is more than redundant in California. They have no vision of what an affordable California or Bay Area look like, no credible plan for getting there, and ideological blinkers that foreclose many important aspects of the solution.

As I’ve done several times before, I go back to Citizens Climate Lobby, which I see as the gold standard for political advocacy done right. They have a clear vision of passing a federal carbon fee and dividend plan. They don’t dilute their efforts on ancillary priorities or play partisan games. They have commissioned detailed economic modeling of the plan and have made every effort to insure it works from both a technical perspective and from a range of value systems. I don’t know if CCL will succeed, but at least they can succeed, unlike most activists, and CCL is one of the few major organizations I feel good supporting.

Red Ink

The Congressional Budget Office released an unsurprising but grim report on the national debt. The debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 98%, the highest ever except for a brief time at the end of World War II. It should cross the 100% mark next year and reach 109% by 2030.

Deficits are a classic gnarly problem. They are harmful but not catastrophic, and the harms are mostly at some indeterminate point in the future and are not clearly visible. This makes them easy to ignore, and ignoring the debt, or at best using it as a partisan talking point, is now an established bipartisan tradition.

Japan somehow continues to function with a debt-to-GDP ratio exceeding 230%. I don’t know how high the US can go on this metric and hope not to find out. We’ve seen debt crisis in Europe and Argentina recently. What I think is more likely is that debt service will be another ball and chain, along with population aging, stagnant productivity, and broken housing, health care, and education markets, on the American economy.

Carbon Pricing

Resources for the Future has a new carbon pricing calculator tool out, evaluating several proposals from the current Congress.

At the $52/ton level, four of the eight proposals stand out as having a positive benefit/cost analysis when economic costs are weighed against CO2 reduction alone. In all eight cases, “secondary” health benefits exceed the CO2 benefit as well as economic costs. As economic intuition would suggest, benefit/cost ratio goes down the higher the carbon price goes, since as the price goes up, we move down the ladder from most cost-effective emissions reductions to less cost-effective.

For my own part, I’ve generally been using a social cost of carbon of $50/ton. A few years ago, that seemed like a reasonable median estimate. At some point I want to review the literature again to see if I should be using a different figure.

The large health benefits are good for making the case for carbon pricing, but they raise some questions. The numbers strongly suggest that we should be thinking about air pollution reduction as the primary goal with CO2 reduction as a secondary goal. But if we do that, is carbon pricing really the most effective policy on air pollution?

Software and the Collapse of Civilization

I found this talk from last year by the game developer Jonathan Blow. He details ways in which the software industry is unable to deliver fast, reliable products and analogizes to historical failures of technological reproduction that are associated with past civilizational collapses. The talk is about an hour. I have to say it is a bit odd, but I found it worth watching.

Several time throughout my life, I have made attempts to get into the software industry, and at other times such as now I have programmed on a hobbyist basis. While I don’t see bad software as a major existential risk to civilization, there are clearly problems. Blow identifies what could also be called the bloatware problem: programmers tend to reach for libraries and abstractions in their code, needlessly inflating size, complexity, runtime, and bugs. He worries that abstraction has become so pervasive that the industry is not even capable of delivering reliable software at this point, and the knowledge of machine code programming has been largely lost.

Blow’s argument is reminiscent of the success problem, as described by Samo Burja, or the notion of social reproduction.

I’ve toyed with the idea of trying to develop the analogy between software bloatware and policy bloatware, a term to describe the phenomenon of public policy being designed in ever more complex manners. An overly complex policy environment increases the difficulty of coordinating the entities required for a solution, and it causes solutions to look more like patches and kludges over problems rather than actual solutions. An example is the attempt to address housing affordability problems by developing complex, multi-government affordable housing subsidies. Kludgeocracy is the best term I’ve seen for this phenomenon so far.

Casey Muratori identifies the same problem, which he called the 30 million line problem, so named because he estimates that to write the most basic “Hello World” web app requires, between the server and the client, at least 30 million lines of code and probably far more, with present technology. He proposes a solution based on a universal CPU instruction set and restoring root access to developers. Ironically, the talk (excluding Q&A) is over an hour when I think 10 minutes would have been sufficient to convey the key points without loss of essential detail.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Juneteenth takes on new meaning amid push for racial justice (AP) Protesters marched over the Brooklyn Bridge, chanted “We want justice now!” near St. Louis’ Gateway Arch, stopped work at West Coast ports and paused for a moment of silence at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, as Americans marked Juneteenth with new urgency Friday amid a nationwide push for racial justice. The holiday, which commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, is usually celebrated with parades and festivals but became a day of protest this year in the wake of demonstrations set off by George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police. In addition to traditional cookouts and readings of the Emancipation Proclamation—the Civil War-era order that declared all enslaved people free in Confederate territory—Americans of all backgrounds were marching, holding sit-ins or taking part in car caravan protests. Thousands gathered at a religious rally in Atlanta. Hundreds marched from St. Louis’ Old Courthouse, where the Dred Scott case partially played out, a pivotal one that denied citizenship to African Americans but galvanized the anti-slavery movement. Protesters and revelers held signs in Dallas, danced to a marching band in Chicago and registered people to vote in Detroit.

Law enforcement families face harassment, vandalism, and threats at home (Washington Examiner) Law enforcement officers say they and their families face harassment and bullying by strangers and neighbors as a result of a nationwide crackdown on law enforcement following protests around the death of George Floyd. One former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, faces a charge of second-degree murder over the 46-year-old black man’s death. The episode triggered nationwide protests over police practices and some violence and looting. At the same time, police officers around the nation, facing scrutiny by local, state, and federal officials, say morale is down in local departments. Budgets have been cut, and overtime pay for shifts during protests has been slashed. And the homes of police officers have been vandalized while anti-law enforcement activists have watched them from outside. Paul Chabot, a retired deputy sheriff reserve out of San Bernardino County, California, who runs a website that helps officers relocate to police friendly municipalities, told the Washington Examiner that officers and their wives who reach out to him reveal their children are targeted as well. “It’s not the same like it was even just two weeks ago, three weeks ago, just because they’re a law enforcement family now. Their kids are being targeted by people in the neighborhood.”

The battle over masks in a pandemic: An all-American story (Washington Post) In this sprawling, heterogeneous country, the pandemic has become yet another thing on which Americans are divided. Mask-wearing for some people is an identifier of broader beliefs and political leanings. Like so many issues rooted in science and medicine, the pandemic is now fully entangled with ideological tribalism. This has played out before: helmets for motorcyclists, seat belts in cars, smoking bans in restaurants. All of those measures provoked battles over personal liberty. Now it’s masks and the coronavirus, with face coverings emerging as an emblem for what cleaves the nation. A flurry of recent studies supports wearing cloth face coverings as a means to limit transmission of the novel coronavirus, which causes the illness covid-19. To many people, masks represent adherence to civic duty and a willingness to make individual sacrifices for the greater good of public health. To others, masks symbolize government overreach and a violation of personal liberty.

U.S. Watched George Floyd Protests in 15 Cities Using Aerial Surveillance (NYT) The Department of Homeland Security deployed helicopters, airplanes and drones over 15 cities where demonstrators gathered to protest the death of George Floyd, logging at least 270 hours of surveillance, far more than previously revealed, according to Customs and Border Protection data. The department’s dispatching of unmanned aircraft over protests in Minneapolis last month sparked a congressional inquiry and widespread accusations that the federal agency had infringed on the privacy rights of demonstrators. But that was just one piece of a nationwide operation that deployed resources usually used to patrol the U.S. border for smugglers and illegal crossings. Aircraft filmed demonstrations in Dayton, Ohio; New York City; Buffalo and Philadelphia, among other cities, sending video footage in real time to control centers managed by Air and Marine Operations, a branch of Customs and Border Protection. The footage was then fed into a digital network managed by the Homeland Security Department, called “Big Pipe,” which can be accessed by other federal agencies and local police departments for use in future investigations, according to senior officials with Air and Marine Operations.

Barber offers hope in Peruvian barrios devastated by virus (AP) Once a week, barber Josué Yacahuanca makes his way up the dusty hills of Peru’s capital, heading into its poorest neighborhoods carrying a treasured golden briefcase that holds his life’s passion—five clipper blades, 20 combs, four scissors and a bottle with alcohol. Yacahuanca seeks out clients devastated by a coronavirus lockdown that has gone on for nearly 100 days in an attempt to stem the wave of new infections. He does it for free. “I want them to look in the mirror and see a bit of hope,” said Yacahuanca, who though just 21 years old is a veteran barber, having started cutting hair at age 13. Yacahuanca had a rocky start in life himself. Abandoned by his mother, he was raised by his godmother, Gloria Alvarez. Despite obstacles, he discovered a business savvy at a young age. He hustled at odd jobs, selling sweets, cleaning houses, working in outdoor markets and at a bus station.

Brazil tops 1 million cases as coronavirus spreads inland (AP) Brazil’s government confirmed on Friday that the country has risen above 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases, second only to the United States. Official data show a downward trend of the virus in Brazil’s north, including the hard-hit region of the Amazon, a plateau in cases and deaths in the countries’ biggest cities near the Atlantic coast, but a rising curve in the south. In the Brazilian countryside, which is much less prepared to handle a crisis, the pandemic is clearly growing. Many smaller cities have weaker health care systems and basic sanitation that’s insufficient to prevent contagion.

European powers refuse to back U.S. call for escalating Iran sanctions (Washington Post) France, Germany and Britain said they will not support reimposing sanctions on Iran if a U.N. arms embargo is not extended, but they urged Tehran to allow inspectors into sites where nuclear material may be stockpiled.

China unveils details of national security law for Hong Kong amid backlash (Reuters) Beijing unveiled details of its new national security law for Hong Kong on Saturday, paving the way for the most profound change to the city’s way of life since it returned to Chinese rule in 1997. The much-anticipated legislation, which has provoked deep concerns in Washington and Europe, includes a national security office for Hong Kong to collect intelligence and handle crimes against national security, the official Xinhua news agency reported. It said Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam could also appoint specific judges to hear national security cases, a move likely to unnerve some investors, diplomats and business leaders in the global financial hub. China says the draft law is aimed at tackling separatist activity, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces, but critics fear it will crush wide-ranging freedoms that are seen as key to Hong Kong’s status as a global financial centre.

Egyptian president says Libyan city Sirte a ‘red line’ (AP) Egypt’s president Saturday warned that an attempt by Turkey-backed forces in Libya to attack the strategic city of Sirte would cross a “red line” and trigger a direct Egyptian military intervention into the conflict. Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, in televised comments, said Egypt could intervene in neighboring Libya with the intention of protecting its western border with the oil-rich country, and to bring stability, including establishing conditions for a cease-fire, to Libya. El-Sissi warned that any attack on Sirte or the inland Jufra air base by forces loyal to the U.N.-supported but weak government in Tripoli would amount to crossing a “red line.” “Let’s stop at this (current) front line and start negotiations to reach a political solution to the Libyan crisis,” he said.

Ethiopia to fill disputed dam, deal or no deal (AP) It’s a clash over water usage that Egypt calls an existential threat and Ethiopia calls a lifeline for millions out of poverty. Just weeks remain before the filling of Africa’s most powerful hydroelectric dam might begin, and tense talks between the countries on its operation have yet to reach a deal. In an interview with The Associated Press, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedu Andargachew on Friday declared that his country will go ahead and start filling the $4.6 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam next month, even without an agreement. “For us it is not mandatory to reach an agreement before starting filling the dam, hence we will commence the filling process in the coming rainy season,” he said. “We are working hard to reach a deal, but still we will go ahead with our schedule whatever the outcome is. If we have to wait for others’ blessing, then the dam may remain idle for years, which we won’t allow to happen,” he said. He added that “we want to make it clear that Ethiopia will not beg Egypt and Sudan to use its own water resource for its development,” pointing out that Ethiopia is paying for the dam’s construction itself. He spoke after the latest round of talks with Egypt and Sudan on the dam, the first since discussions broke down in February, failed to reach agreement.

Congo president’s chief of staff guilty in corruption trial (AP) A court in Congo on Saturday sentenced the president’s chief of staff, Vital Kamerhe, to 20 years of forced labor after he was found guilty of corruption and embezzlement of more than $50 million. His lawyers said they would appeal. Kamerhe, 61, has called the trial a political attack on himself and President Felix Tshisekedi, who has not commented on the case. The charges stem from what the court said was “unequivocal” participation in the embezzlement of money from projects undertaken by the president during his first 100 days in office last year.

[ucflibrary]

For the month of December, the UCF Libraries Bookshelf celebrates the favorite books of employees of the UCF Libraries. And you know a major thing about librarians? They love talking about their favorite books. The books listed below are ones we have (and will continue to) read many times over the course of our lives. The genre for our 2018 staff favorites is science fiction and fantasy.

Click on the link below to see the full list, descriptions, and catalog links for the staff favorite science fiction and fantasy titles suggested by UCF Library employees. These 30 books plus many, many more are also on display on the 2nd (main) floor of the John C. Hitt Library next to the bank of two elevators.

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray It’s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma’s reception there is a chilly one.  To make things worse, she’s been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence’s most powerful girls—and their foray into the spiritual world—lead to? Suggested by Dawn Tripp, Research & Information Services

 Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor  Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she's albino. She's a terrific athlete, but can't go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits in. And then she discovers something amazing—she is a "free agent" with latent magical power. Soon she's part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But will it be enough to help them when they are asked to catch a career criminal who knows magic too? Suggested by Rich Gause, Research & Information Services

 An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She’s used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she’d be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world. Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship’s leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot—if she’s willing to sow the seeds of civil war. Suggested by Rachel Mulvihill, Teaching & Engagement

 Born of Legend by Sherrilyn Kenyon Hunted. Hated. Betrayed. Outcast Dagger Ixur is on the run for his life. As one of the most recognizable members of his royal house, he has a bounty on his head that guarantees him no quarter from any friend or even family. But surrender isn’t in him. He will fight to the bitter end. A resolve that is sorely tested when he narrowly escapes a trap that leaves him severely wounded. With what he believes is his dying breath, he saves a boy born to an extinct race from a group out to enslave the kid for his legendary abilities. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Dune by Frank Herbert Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides—who would become known as Muad’Dib—and of a great family’s ambition to bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream. Suggested by Shane Roopnarine, Rosen Library

 Ender’s Game by Scott Orson Card In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut--young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training. Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers, Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister. Suggested by Mary Rubin, Special Collections & University Archives

 Exit West by Mohsin Hamid In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. Suggested by Andrew Hackler, Circulation

 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television. When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life. Suggested by Larry Cooperman, Research & Information

 Galactic Pot-healer by Philip K. Dick A powerful and enigmatic alien recruits humans and aliens to help it restore a sunken cathedral in this touching and hilarious novel Sometimes even gods need help In Galactic Pot-Healer that god is an alien creature known as The Glimmung which looks alternately like a flaming wheel a teenage girl and a swirling mass of ocean life In order to raise a sunken city he summons beings from across the galaxy to Plowmans Planet Joe Fernwright is one of those summoned needed for his skills at pot-healing-repairing broken ceramics But from the moment Joe arrives on Plowmans Planet things start to go awry Told as only Philip K Dick can Galactic Pot-Healer is a wildly funny tale of aliens gods and ceramics. Suggested by Seth Dwyer, Circulation

 Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones In the land of Ingary, such things as spells, invisible cloaks, and seven-league boots were everyday things. The Witch of the Waste was another matter.  After fifty years of quiet, it was rumored that the Witch was about to terrorize the country again. So when a moving black castle, blowing dark smoke from its four thin turrets, appeared on the horizon, everyone thought it was the Witch. The castle, however, belonged to Wizard Howl, who, it was said, liked to suck the souls of young girls. The Hatter sisters--Sophie, Lettie, and Martha--and all the other girls were warned not to venture into the streets alone. But that was only the beginning. In this giant jigsaw puzzle of a fantasy, people and things are never quite what they seem. The Witch has placed a spell on Howl. Does the clue to breaking it lie in a famous poem? And what will happen to Sophie Hatter when she enters Howl's castle? Suggested by Emma Gisclair, Curriculum Material Center

 Kindred by Octavia Butler Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin. Suggested by Rachel Edford, Teaching & Engagement

 Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin  A lone human ambassador is sent to Winter, an alien world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants can change their gender whenever they choose. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters. Suggested by Athena Hoeppner, Acquisitions & Collections

 Lie Down with Lions by Ken Follett Ellis, the American. Jean-Pierre, the Frenchman. They were two men on opposite sides of the Cold War, with a woman torn between them. Together, they formed a triangle of passion and deception, racing from terrorist bombs in Paris to the violence and intrigue of Afghanistan—to the moment of truth and deadly decision for all of them. . . . Suggested by Ven Basco, Research & Information Services

 Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider. Suggested by Raynette Kibbee, Administration

 Mars Attacks! The Art of the Movie by Karen R. Jones Looks at the development of the motion picture "Mars Attacks," and discusses the work of illustrators, costumers, computer artists, and model builders in creating the science fiction comedy Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony Shooting Death was a mistake, as Zane soon discovered. For the man who killed the Incarnation of Death was immediately forced to assume the vacant position! Thereafter, he must speed over the world, riding his pale horse, and ending the lives of others. Zane was forced to accept his unwelcome task, despite the rules that seemed woefully unfair. But then he found himself being drawn into an evil plot of Satan. Already the prince of Evil was forging a trap in which Zane must act to destroy Luna, the woman he loved. Suggested by Martha Cloutier, Circulation

 Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle In the not-too-distant future, three astronauts land on what appears to be a planet just like Earth, with lush forests, a temperate climate, and breathable air. But while it appears to be a paradise, nothing is what it seems. They soon discover the terrifying truth: On this world humans are savage beasts, and apes rule as their civilized masters. In an ironic novel of nonstop action and breathless intrigue, one man struggles to unlock the secret of a terrifying civilization, all the while wondering: Will he become the savior of the human race, or the final witness to its damnation? In a shocking climax that rivals that of the original movie, Boulle delivers the answer in a masterpiece of adventure, satire, and suspense. Suggested by Jon Hanie, Circulation

 Red Dwarf directed by Ed Bye Notoriously, and entirely appropriately, the original outline for Doug Naylor and Rob Grant's comedy sci-fi series Red Dwarf was sketched on the back of a beer mat. When it finally appeared on British television in 1988, the show had clearly stayed true to its roots, mixing jokes about excessive curry consumption with affectionate parodies of classic sci-fi. Indeed, one of the show's most endearing and enduring features is its obvious respect for genre conventions, even as it gleefully subverts them. The scenario owes something to Douglas Adams's satirical Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, something to The Odd Couple, and a lot more to the slacker sci-fi of John Carpenter's Dark Star. Behind the crew's constant bickering there lurks an impending sense that life, the universe, and everything are all someone's idea of a terrible joke. Suggested by Robin Chan, Research & Information Services

 Seraphina: a novel by Rachel Hartman Four decades of peace have done little to ease the mistrust between humans and dragons in the kingdom of Goredd. Folding themselves into human shape, dragons attend court as ambassadors, and lend their rational, mathematical minds to universities as scholars and teachers. As the treaty's anniversary draws near, however, tensions are high. Seraphina Dombegh has reason to fear both sides. An unusually gifted musician, she joins the court just as a member of the royal family is murdered—in suspiciously draconian fashion. Seraphina is drawn into the investigation, partnering with the captain of the Queen's Guard, the dangerously perceptive Prince Lucian Kiggs. While they begin to uncover hints of a sinister plot to destroy the peace, Seraphina struggles to protect her own secret, the secret behind her musical gift, one so terrible that its discovery could mean her very life. Suggested by Lily Flick, UCF Connect Libraries

 Slippage: previously uncollected, precariously poised stories by Harlan Ellison Harlan Ellison celebrates four decades of writing and publishes his seventieth book, this critically acclaimed, wildly imaginative, and outrageously creative collection. The Edgar Award–nominated novella Mefisto in Onyx is the centerpiece, surrounded by screenplays, an introduction by the author, interspersed segments of autobiographical narrative, and such provocatively titled entries as “The Man Who Rowed Columbus Ashore,” “Anywhere But Here, With Anybody But You,” “Crazy As a Soup Sandwich,” “Chatting With Anubis,” “The Dragon on the Bookshelf,” (written in collaboration with Robert Silverberg), “The Dreams a Nightmare Dreams,” “Pulling Hard Time,” and “Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral.” Suggested by John Venecek, Research & Information Services

 Stardust by Neil Gaiman Tristran Thorn will do anything to win the cold heart of beautiful Victoria Forester—even fetch her the star they watch fall from the night sky. But to do so, he must enter the unexplored lands on the other side of the ancient wall that gives their tiny village its name. Beyond that stone barrier, Tristran learns, lies Faerie...and the most exhilarating adventure of the young man's life. Suggested by Christina Wray, Teaching & Engagement

 Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder. Suggested by Selma Jaskowski, Administration

 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein Raised by Martians on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith is a human who has never seen another member of his species. Sent to Earth, he is a stranger who must learn what it is to be a man. But his own beliefs and his powers far exceed the limits of humankind, and as he teaches them about grokking and water-sharing, he also inspires a transformation that will alter Earth’s inhabitants forever. Suggested by Tim Walker, Information Technology & Digital Initiatives

 The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden Winter lasts most of the year at the edge of the Russian wilderness, and in the long nights, Vasilisa and her siblings love to gather by the fire to listen to their nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, Vasya loves the story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon. Wise Russians fear him, for he claims unwary souls, and they honor the spirits that protect their homes from evil. Then Vasya’s widowed father brings home a new wife from Moscow. Fiercely devout, Vasya’s stepmother forbids her family from honoring their household spirits, but Vasya fears what this may bring. And indeed, misfortune begins to stalk the village.  But Vasya’s stepmother only grows harsher, determined to remake the village to her liking and to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for marriage or a convent. As the village’s defenses weaken and evil from the forest creeps nearer, Vasilisa must call upon dangerous gifts she has long concealed—to protect her family from a threat sprung to life from her nurse’s most frightening tales. Suggested by Cindy Dancel, Research & Information Services

 The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin This is the way the world ends...for the last time. A season of endings has begun. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy. Suggested by Schuyler Kerby, Rosen Library

 The King Must Die by Mary Renault Renault starts with Theseus' early years, showing how the mystery of his father's identity and his small stature breed the insecurities that spur his youthful hijinx. As he moves on to Eleusis, Athens, and Crete, his playfulness and fondness for pranks matures into the courage to attempt singular heroic feats, the gallantry and leadership he was known for on the battlefield, and the bold-hearted ingenuity he shows in navigating the labyrinth and slaying the Minotaur. In what is perhaps the most inventive of all her novels of Ancient Greece, Renault casts Theseus in a surprisingly original pose; she teases the flawed human out of the bronze hero, and draws the plausible out of the fantastic. Suggested by Brian Calhoun, Research & Information Services

 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now…. Suggested by Jacqui Johnson, Cataloging

 The Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams The off-beat and occasionally extraterrestrial journeys, notions, and acquaintances of galactic traveler Arthur Dent are illustrated with digitally generated graphic images and tricky visual puns Suggested by Missy Murphey, Research & Information Services

 The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's classic tale of true love and high adventure: the "good parts" version, abridged by William Goldman Anyone who lived through the 1980s may find it impossible—inconceivable, even—to equate The Princess Bride with anything other than the sweet, celluloid romance of Westley and Buttercup, but the film is only a fraction of the ingenious storytelling you'll find in these pages. Rich in character and satire, the novel is set in 1941 and framed cleverly as an “abridged” retelling of a centuries-old tale set in the fabled country of Florin that's home to “Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passions.” Suggested by Jamie LaMoreaux, Acquisitions & Collections

 Twentieth-century American science-fiction writers. Pt. 1, A-L edited by David Cowart and Thomas L. Wymer The two-volume “Twentieth Century American Science Fiction Writers”, edited by David Cowart and Thomas L. Wimer, was published in 1981 and consists ofVolume 8: Part 1: A-L and Vol. 8: Part 2: M-Z of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Michael Rogers wrote that "it is hands-down the best overall literary reference work ever published" but that many reference librarians had probably never heard of it. Choice has named the DLB an Outstanding Academic Book four times and The American Library Association's Reference and User Services Association has twice named it as an Outstanding Reference Source. Suggested by Mary Lee Gladding, Circulation

[hutchhitched]

The Vintage Joshifer Series: End of Love—Chapter 16

End of Love by hutchhitched

Author’s note: My sincere apologies for the wait between this chapter and the last. It’s been a very busy semester, and the aftereffects of Hurricane Harvey have been rearing their ugly heads. The rest of the story is complete, so there should not be a wait for the future chapters. The world keeps beating up our hero and heroine, but they find continued comfort in each other. Thank you to each of you who have read, reblogged, hearted, and supported this story. You are all rock stars.

Historical events in this chapter include the following:

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist on Thursday, April 4, 1968, at approximately 6:00 pm at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, which is the current location of the National Civil Rights Museum. He was 39 when he died. He was in Memphis working on a campaign to end unequal pay for African-American sanitation workers. On the night before his death, he delivered his final sermon, which is commonly called the Mountaintop Speech. The subject was of a future utopia he didn’t believe he would live to see. As a result, many believe he predicted his own death.

The original Planet of the Apes released on March 27, 1968. It was a commercial blockbuster and inspired a series of franchise films for decades after its release. 

Chicago, Illinois, April 1968

“Tell me there’s coffee.”

 Josh turned over his shoulder and grinned. “Good morning, sleepy head. You’re going to be late to work if you don’t get a move on.”

 “Mmmm,” Jen mumbled as she took the mug of coffee he extended to her. She couldn’t stop staring at his broad, muscled back and the cut of his hips above his cotton boxers. “I could be late if you wanted to distract me.”

 “Tempting, tempting,” he murmured and pulled her into a side hug before kissing her on the cheek. “Wish I could, honey. I have an early meeting and need to get out of here pretty soon.”

 “Fine,” she grumbled and took a sip of her drink. “If you want to go save the world instead of having sex with your…whatever I am, then go ahead.”

 His eyes flashed, and he retorted, “What I’d rather do is not get shipped off to fucking ’Nam and get killed, so if I have to go to work at Big Brothers to do it, I’m gonna go every god damned day, Jen. Jackson’s already over there. Do you want me to die?”

 She gripped her coffee mug and stared at him with wide eyes. She’d meant her words as a joke, but she realized now he hadn’t taken them that way at all.

 “No, I don’t want you to die, Josh,” she whispered in a trembling rasp.

 He turned his back and pressed his palms flat on the countertop. “I’m sorry. I had a nightmare last night about it. I’m a little on edge.”

 She crossed to him, set her mug on the table, and wrapped her arms around his waist. She pressed her cheek to his back and then kissed him in the dip of his spine right between his shoulder blades. “Jackson’s going to be okay, and so are you. So is Andre if his draft number gets called. We both need to go to work, but when I get home tonight, be ready.”

 “For what?” he asked, a tinge of humor lacing his words.

 “Good stuff. That’s all I’ll say. Go get ready. Besides, it’s Thursday. The week’s almost over. Maybe we could go see that movie you want to see. Monkeys or something?” She quirked her eyebrow at him.

 “Planet of the Apes. I’m free tomorrow night. It’s a da— Uh, yeah, we could go.”

 She swallowed her frustration at his refusal to admit going to the movies together was a date and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She chugged the rest of her coffee as quickly as she could down the hot liquid and returned to her bedroom to get ready for work.

 “This war has to end,” she grumbled as she slipped from her building and hailed a cab. She didn’t have the patience to brave the bus system in her frame of mind.

 The past few months had flown by, and Jen was grateful every day for Josh coming back into her life. The day after the Tet Offensive, once they’d satisfied themselves physically after their time apart, Josh insisted they discuss what had happened back in California. The conversation stalled after a few minutes since she was unwilling to admit anything beyond what she already had. She’d slipped from his bed because the depth of feeling and pleasure he’d stoked in her that night had terrified her. Josh was too passionate and too intent on social change to commit to a full-fledged relationship. That hadn’t changed over the past two years, and she cared about him too much to admit how she felt when she knew he’d not respond in kind—even though she was convinced his feelings for her were every bit as intense.

 She hadn’t asked him how many women he’d been with during the time they were apart. She knew there were some and forced herself not to care. She’d enjoyed herself during her senior year in college too, but no one else had driven her as far over the peak as Josh had. She craved him, but she also recognized the need to focus on and develop her career. Married women didn’t last long in the field of journalism, so that wasn’t something she could entertain at this point anyway. As the cab pulled up to the Tribune building, she shook her head to clear it. She needed all her faculties today if she was going to deal with her misogynistic pig of an editor.

 Jack waved at her as she entered the office, and she stopped by his desk to check in. He greeted her with his gruff smile and informed her, “Headlines of the day: the president’s in Hawaii trying to make peace with the Vietnamese. Everyone’s a flutter about the Mountaintop speech King gave last night. We’re working every angle—civil rights leaders, everyone who was part of the Chicago Freedom Movement two years ago, people who might have run into him on the street once.”

 She snorted with laughter at his droll commentary. “Thanks for the update. I thought I was going to get here early today, but I should have known you’d beat me into the office.”

 He studied her thoughtfully for a few minutes before asking, “Have you ever thought about television reporting?”

 “Are you trying to get rid of me, old man?” she teased. Jack was one of the few people in the office she really liked. He was talented and conscientious, and she’d learned a lot from him in the ten months she’d been at the paper.

 “Never. I just think you could be happier than you are here with Mr. Murrow leering at your legs. Just keep it in mind in case you want to get out of here. Or in case he ever becomes completely unbearable. I’m lucky. He doesn’t like my legs.”

 “Thanks, Jack. I really appreciate it,” Jen said with a soft smile and chuckle. She crossed to her desk and picked up the manila folder with her day’s assignment. She heaved a deep sigh and got to work.

 The day flew by as she worked on a follow up article to the day’s front page news about President Johnson in Honolulu and his attempts to bring the situation in Vietnam to a peaceful conclusion. As she typed her story, she forced herself to remain calm. Thoughts of Josh being drafted and shipping out scared her enough that her hands shook as she typed. She tried to ignore the list of names that came down the wire every day and prayed every time she perused it until she made sure Jackson’s name wasn’t on it.

 “Jennifer, where’s your story? Your deadline was ten minutes ago.”

 Shaking from a work-induced haze, she glanced at her watch and gasped when she realized it was almost 6:00 in the evening. Her brief lunch break had been almost over six hours ago.

 “I’m so sorry, Mr. Murrow! I didn’t realize how late it was.” She glanced at his stern expression, but he seemed appeased when he handed her the sheet from her typewriter. “Here’s what I have. I think it’ll work without any editing. Because of the deadline, I mean.”

 “I’ll be the judge of that,” her editor barked. Glancing over her words, he nodded and waved a copy editor over to make the necessary corrections.

 Jen swallowed a scowl and straightened the papers on her desk. She was just about to gather her belongings and head out the door when another reporter shrieked from the corner of the room. “What’s happening now?” she grumbled and shut her purse back in her drawer. The television screen showed a crowd of people milling outside what looked to be a hotel.

 Her editor bellowed across the newsroom, “Everybody to their desks. We’re going to have to work up a different front page in the next few hours. Call home if you need to, but I need everyone ready to go in five minutes.”

 “What’s happening? Jack, what’s happening?” she begged desperately as he rushed by her.

 He whipped around to face her, his eyes wild, and explained in a dazed voice, “Dr. King’s been shot.”

 Ice flooded her veins, and she shook her head in disbelief. “But he just gave a speech last night! He was in Memphis working with the sanitation workers! How could they shoot him? He’s got to be all right! He’s got to be!”

 As she sank into her chair, it quickly became apparent that the civil rights leader was not okay. The wire pumped out report after report from Memphis. None of them seemed to have any answers or a report of his condition for almost an hour. Just as she felt as if she must surely be experiencing a terrible dream, the news broke that the assassination attempt had worked. Dr. King was dead.

 Jen sat stunned, unable to move until a fellow reporter barked at her to pass him a folder she’d been holding listlessly. She closed it carefully and extended it toward him. When he took it, she sprinted from her desk to the nearest bathroom and vomited into the toilet until her stomach ached. Gasping for air, she rose from the concrete floor and splashed water on her face in the sink. She gulped handfuls of liquid in a futile attempt to dispel the foul taste. After several minutes, she stumbled back to her desk and waited for further instructions.

 “Lawrence!” Mr. Murrow barked from his office. “You can go, sweet cheeks. Be here early tomorrow. It’s going to be a huge day. I need my best tits and ass on the beat.”

 Jen resisted the urge to flip him the finger. Instead, she calmly gathered her belongings and bolted for her apartment.

 “Josh?” she called as soon as she stepped through the door. “Josh, where are you?” Frantic, she threw down her purse and jacket and entered the small living room. The overhead fixture was off, and the lamps remained dark.  He sat on the couch, facing the television. Flashes of light streaked across his face from the images on the screen. The volume was turned down so low, she could barely hear it as she stood next to it.

 “Josh?” she asked softly.

 He raised his red-rimmed eyes to her, and her heart broke at the pain reflected in them. Tear tracks stained his cheeks, and she took a step toward him. He didn’t move or speak as she crossed the room and sat next to him on the couch. When she reached over to grab his hand, she was shocked to find it was ice cold.

 “He’s gone,” he mumbled, and she nodded.

 “I know. I’m so sorry, hon.”

 He crumpled then, bending over onto himself and releasing a howling scream that echoed through her bones. He pounded his hands against his knees and unleashed a stream of profanity. She sat helpless, terrified of his reaction, and unsure how to help.

 “They fucking murdered him, Jen. They shot him down like a dog.”

 Tears streamed down her cheeks, her heart breaking for him and all those who felt a connection to King and the work he’d done during his lifetime. She knew Josh was horrified by the act every bit as much as he worried about Jackson’s reaction once he heard the news. She knew Josh would insist that he spend time with Jackson’s family as soon as he could. Most of all, she feared that King’s assassination would be the catalyst for him to leave Chicago and become more heavily involved in the protest movement. He’d been semi-idle for months, and she wasn’t sure their relationship—whatever it was—would be enough to keep him from rejoining his friends as they fought to change the system.

 After several minutes of bellowed rage, he finally turned to her and crushed her to him. He sobbed into her neck as she held his quaking body firmly in her arms. His mouth sought hers desperately, and before she knew what was happening, he pressed her backward onto the cushions and was grinding hard against her. He grunted as he thrust his hips, and she shimmied her skirt upwards to free her legs. He broke from her briefly to fumble with the button on his jeans while she pulled off her panties, but his mouth returned to hers almost immediately.

 “I fucking need you,” he gasped as his fingers slipped into her folds, and she arched her back at the contact.

 “Whatever you need. I’m here,” she panted. She squealed her surprise when he flipped her over and pulled her hips up to rest above her bent knees before nudging in between her legs. Without warning, he slammed into her, and she cried out as he filled her.

 “Jennifer,” he groaned into the darkened room. “Fuck, you feel so good.”

 She braced her hands on the arm of the couch and reared back against him. As his hips slapped against her bare ass, she yelped his name as he stretched her. Her cries grew louder and more erratic as his pace increased. Within seconds, he bucked against her frantically, practically lifting her off her knees as he fucked her from behind.

 “Josh! Josh, slow down! I can’t—” She broke off as he pounded her and bit her lower lip before releasing a prolonged wail. What he was doing to her was painful, but it also felt amazing to bear the brunt of such frantic passion. She knew he needed her, even if he was lost within himself.

 Josh cursed as he drove into her, practically incoherent as he released his frustrations. He smacked her bare right cheek twice as he neared his climax and grunted her name repeatedly. When he began to chant a warning of his impending climax, Jen braced herself on one forearm and reached down to rub her clit furiously.

 “Holy fucking hell,” she howled as her walls pulsed. Josh cried out his release and poured into her as she expelled a gush of fluid. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her back against his chest as he stroked her several more times. Their skin dripped with sweat as they collapsed in a ruined heap on the brown plaid sofa.

 His body shook behind her, and her heart broke when she realized he was still sobbing. She pulled from him gently and grimaced as he slid out of her and a gush of his ejaculate streamed down her inner thigh. She swiped at the mess with her discarded panties, but it didn’t help. Instead, she turned her attention to the broken man she desperately wanted to help feel better.

 Jen tried to kiss him, but he pulled away from her. Stung, she slapped at his chest and struggled to disentangle herself from him. When she finally freed herself, she ran to the bathroom where she caught a glimpse of her image in the bathroom mirror.

 Startled, she studied her tear streaked face and the mascara that had bled to black half-moons under each eye. Her lipstick was smeared across her left cheek, and her hair stuck up in several directions. She looked like she’d just been bedded by a paying customer, and a rush of shame flooded her. Josh had never been so rough with her, and it scared her that she liked it as much as every other time they’d been intimate in more gentle ways.

 After cleaning Josh’s semen from her legs, she swallowed her pill and sent up a silent prayer of thanks for reliable birth control. Josh had made no secret of his belief in free love, so condoms weren’t something she wanted to push. She simply prayed that he’d been careful during the time they’d been apart.

 When she’d finally regained her composure, she returned to the living room to see Josh sitting lifeless on the couch, his fly still unzipped, and his flaccid dick hanging loosely out of his pants. His eyes were vacant as he lifted them to hers. He blinked slowly several times before rising and stumbling to her bedroom. Once there, he stripped and fell into her bed. He curled his body into the fetal position until she slid in next to him. She kissed his bare skin until he unwound enough to pull her against him.

 “Don’t leave me again,” she whispered against his chest as they lay together in the dark. “I know you’re hurting right now and that you feel like you need to make a difference, but don’t go.”

 He barked a wry laugh and argued pointedly, “I didn’t walk out on you, Jennifer. If I remember correctly, you snuck out in the middle of the night so I woke up to an empty bed the next morning.”

 “You were leaving Berkeley. You weren’t going to be sticking around for more than a few days, and I didn’t think I could stand to say goodbye to you after…”

 “After what? After you let me get you off? After I helped you realize Nick was a jerk who didn’t care about whether or not you enjoyed yourself? I tried to find you every day between graduation and the day I left. I wasn’t the one who wanted to say goodbye.”

 Wincing at the bitterness in his words, she knew she needed to word her next statement carefully. She couldn’t risk driving him from her when he was hurting so badly. “I know that now, and I’m sorry. My only excuse is the one I’ve told you—that you were already leaving and I didn’t want to beg you to stay. I didn’t want to ask when I knew you felt the call to go. Jackson needed you then, but I need you right now, and I think you need me too. Please stay in Chicago—at least for a little while longer.”

 “I can’t promise that, Jen. You know I can’t.” She trailed her fingers over his chest and grinned as his skin twitched under her light touch. His physical reaction to her made her feel much more powerful than she ever had.

 “I know, but please stay until you can’t any longer. Don’t choose to go.”

 He didn’t answer. Instead, he rolled her over and kissed her deeply. Her mouth opened under his, and she felt the beginnings of another erection poking against her inner thigh. Realizing there wasn’t anything else to be said that could alter the situation, she lost herself in the feel of him.

 “More,” she begged as he teased her with just the tip of his shaft.

 “I’m sorry if I hurt you,” he murmured into her ear as he sank in another two inches before pulling out. When she moaned her disapproval at his absence, he stroked her deeper. “Forgive me.”

 “Forgive me too,” she begged. When he breathed his surrender into her neck, she shuddered and conceded to him and the orgasm he’d stoked inside her.

 They came together repeatedly throughout the night, clinging to each other as he woke from nightmares of burning jungles, maimed bodies, and pools of blood. His anguished cries haunted their bed for weeks, and Jen lost track of the number of times she woke with bruises from him thrashing against her in the throes of panicked, restless sleep. The time together was hard, but she kept reminding herself that it was better than being without him again.

 For weeks, Jen clung to the hope that her comforting presence would be enough to convince him he shouldn’t leave. Unfortunately, soon enough, it wouldn’t be.

[toshootforthestars]

(NYCLU on twitter, link to video) (alt. source)

On Mr. Watkins

As bosses did little, Syracuse cop coerced women for sex, they say; ‘I was terrified’

Ex-Syracuse cop who had sex on the job ‘doesn’t yet want to plead’ in tampering case, ADA says

Activists hammer Walsh with demands, frustrations in marathon police reform meeting

The meeting took place almost exactly a year after a similar episode at St. Lucy’s Catholic Church. Advocates — many of whom were at City Hall Thursday — unloaded frustrations and stories of police brutality to Walsh and Buckner at that meeting, following the violent 2019 arrest of Shaolin Moore on Grace Street.

Moore was dragged from his car and punched during a stop for loud music. Buckner deemed the use of force appropriate, drawing backlash from some in the community.

Thursday, several speakers referred to that 2019 meeting. Andrew Croom, an attorney with Legal Services of Central New York, said he presented a 17-page document to the mayor at that meeting detailing well-researched changes needed to the department’s use of force policy.

After a year, he said, there had been no follow-up on that.

“For the past year you’ve talked about the use of force policy,” Croom said. “But when we show you it’s not enough, nothing happens.”

The department revised its use of force policy last spring, but activists say it still needs to improve to include language about protecting human life.

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir, director of the local chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, led the meeting. He spoke before and after each attendee and often challenged or corrected the mayor and the police chief.

Speaking for the groups, he demanded radical change to overhaul the police force — an institution he said evolved out of white supremacy.  “Business as usual is over,” he said.

Abdul-Qadir promised that activists would not ease the pressure they’re exerting, nor would they stop protesting until significant change is evident. The desired changes include cutting millions of dollars from the police department’s annual budget and forcing officers to live in the city.

The annual budget for police is $49.5 million, which is about 20% of the city’s $253 million overall budget.

(Trevon Logan)

(Asher Vollmer)

(source)

…

Me: 

Syracuse is in dire, dire straits, and it’s solely due to failed leadership, City, County, and State.  Just absolute zero fucks.

No one in charge in Syracuse, from cops to the water department to DPW to the Mayor’s Office to the Onondaga County Legislature, no one in charge gives a single fuck about Syracuse or the people that live there. A few examples:

Lead paint is a problem in Syracuse.  STILL.

Look what Syracuse Fire Department did back in 2017.

The Syracuse Citizens Review Board struggles to do its job.

The Syracuse PBA is just as you’d expect.

Here’s a brief summary of the 2010′s in Syracuse. Here’s another one.  Remember the Syracuse Billion proposal to rebuild the collapsing water system in Syracuse?  Never went anywhere.  No progress with Mayor Walsh, seen being scolded in the video above.

Yes, the surrounding tony suburbs are all racist as fuck.  Many people that work in Syracuse (and for Syracuse) live OUTSIDE Syracuse, and the argument that Syracuse’s municipal payroll props up the ‘burbs is a good one.  Sure, the argument already seems to be “iTs A dRoP iN tHe BuCkEt” yet imagine what this is like in bigger cities, like NYC?

Don’t get me started on Interstate 81.  (The mega-project has stalled.)

There’s this reddit thread…

Finally, read this...

The Atlantic:  How to Decimate a City (Nov. 2015)

Neighborhoods like this one, in the south part of Syracuse, have historically been poor, but residents here say they’ve seen things worsen in the last decade. Darlene Sanford, 38, runs a daycare in her great-grandmother’s spacious 19th-century house near the highway. Sanford remembers walking to the black-owned small businesses that lined the streets here when she was a girl, but most of them have disappeared.

Although most of the houses on Sanford’s street have well-mowed lawns and manicured bushes, she now feels a sense of unease. A few weeks ago, she had to call 911 after a man living next door was targeted in a drive-by shooting, just after Sanford had put the younger kids in her care down for a nap. She no longer leaves her house at night. She’s thinking of leaving the city entirely.

“Over the last few years, it’s been pretty tough,” she said. “The violence has gotten worse.”

The week before I visited Syracuse, seven people had been shot in four days, including a public-bus driver whose cell phone blocked the bullet.

“We see a lot of generational poverty here,” Rebecca Heberle, who runs the local Head Start program for PEACE Inc., a nonprofit in Syracuse, told me. “People face so many challenges—their power has been turned off, they have infestations, they need money for food, formula, diapers, a bus pass.”

It wasn’t always this way.

Search for Syracuse in the rankings of cities with the highest poverty rates in America, and the city has moved up every 10 years like an underdog racehorse gaining on the winner (or in this case, the loser). In 1969, the city’s poverty rank was 72nd in the nation of cities with a population of 100,000 or more, with 14 percent of its residents living in poverty. By 1979, it had snuck up to 44th, with a poverty rate of 18 percent.  By 1989, it was tied for 26th with a poverty rate of 23 percent.

The story of how poverty became one of the defining characteristics of Syracuse is specific to the city and the region, but in some ways it is illustrative of the many policy decisions that have made all American cities more segregated by race and income over the last 15 years.

Like many cities in the north, Syracuse became home to a growing African American community in the post-World War II years, as migrants fled persecution in the South and came north looking for jobs.

Many settled in the 15th Ward, a neighborhood adjacent to downtown. Clarence “Junie” Dunham, who is now 81, lived there in an apartment with no hot water, at a time when a milkman still delivered bottles from a horse and buggy.  Dunham’s parents and their friends had moved to town from the south, and many had little beyond a middle school education, but they worked in the factories and farms in the region and made a good enough living. There was poverty then, he told me, but he remembers that time fondly, largely due to the existence of a close-knit black community that socialized around Wilson Park, a square of green grass and trees in the center of town.

But to outsiders the majority-black neighborhood was “slum land,” ripe for redevelopment because of its proximity to downtown, according to Joseph F. DiMento, who was born and grew up in Syracuse and is now a professor of law, planning, and policy at the University of California-Irvine School of law.

In the early 1950s, a small group of builders proposed that the city obtain “slum land,” clear it, and get it ready for development—for private industry to do so would be too costly, they said, according to DiMento, who authored a paper on so-called urban renewal in Syracuse.  “Racial barriers have created an overcrowded condition that many experts felt may some day lead to troubles,” The Syracuse Post-Standard wrote in an article in 1954.

At the same time, the city was working to get a piece of some of the money made available in the 1956 Federal Highway Act, which authorized money for the construction of the Interstate system.

A strong highway network, city leaders argued, would make Syracuse one of the largest cities in the country because people would be able to easily commute to downtown from outlying areas. In 1956 the state approved a $500 million bond for a project that would raze the 15th Ward and erect an elevated freeway that bisected downtown. That this construction would destroy a close-knit black community, with a freeway running through the heart of town, essentially separating Syracuse in two, did not seem of much concern to local leaders.

They wanted state and federal funding, and were willing to follow whatever plans were proposed to get it.  “The city was almost unimaginably passive about these decisions,” DiMento told me.

“Rather than fostering a sense of neighborhoods, city officials viewed distinctive city sections as expendable or blighted areas needing to be razed,” DiMento wrote in his study of the construction of I-81 in Syracuse.  

Today, I-81 runs north to south through the city; its most prominent part is a 1.4 mile section of elevated highway that separates Syracuse University from downtown and the city’s high-poverty South Side. Underneath the elevated highway, the streets are dark and clogged with cars trying to get on the road, and next to it are some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city.

It runs over Wilson Park, the place Dunham used to play as a child, and over the blocks where he and his childhood friend Manny Breland used to collect scraps to take to the junkyard for extra money.  “That’s where I used to live,” Breland told me, pointing to a stairway in a parking garage that abuts the freeway.

[nelliievance]

Meditation Is More Than Stress Relief: The Transformational Path

In a recent post, I mentioned that I’ve tried to reframe sheltering-in-place during the Covid-19 crisis as a retreat. This has worked pretty well. I’ve made progress in my “mental fitness” during this time, so I’ve decided to go into a few blog posts about it, which this post will kick off.

Meditation is great for relieving stress and other health effects, as I reviewed here. But if you practice it and other disciplines that go along with it consistently, its benefits go beyond that. We know there are some healthful aspects of physical fitness, but if you put in the astonishing amount of dedication elite athletes put in, you can totally transform yourself physically. There is a mental analogy to this. The more you put into it, the more you get out.

Many people, myself included, believe that we can aspire to becoming a better version of ourselves: kinder, calmer, more compassionate, etc. There are specific techniques to do this, and if you follow them consistently, they form a “path” to follow. This is often referred to a spiritual path, but “spiritual” can have connotations, like the occult or wearing exotic robes and burning incense, that can turn some people off, so I prefer to call it transformational.

I’ve been following such a path since 1992, as I’ll describe in a bit. All the world’s religions have some concept of a higher self [1,2]. But this higher self, or better version of yourself, can also be interpreted psychologically and through neuroscience. For example, if you can calm down your amygdala a bit and improve the activity of your prefrontal cortex, you can overreact less and think things through more. Also, as I recently described, we can change our brains by using willpower. By working at it diligently, we can train our brains and get better at it.

This allows us to live less compulsively, as in being more able to enjoy eating healthy food but easily stop when we’ve had enough. Beyond that, it helps us to live from our highest ideals, being more loving, kinder, compassionate, less hostile and selfish.

Practicing transformational techniques does not require joining a monastery or ashram or living in a cave in the Himalayas, but can be done as part of regular life. This introduction is for motivation. Subsequent posts will go into the details of how to do it.

My Story

I was raised as a Catholic in the pre-Vatican II era, including attending first and second grade in Catholic school. My exposure to religion was pretty negative, with a picture of a stern, judgemental God. The purpose of being good, and following the ten commandments, was to assure going to the good place instead of the bad when I died. I was not exposed to the notion that ethical behavior might actually make me a happier person now I rejected this belief system upon reaching adulthood, but didn’t replace it with anything else because I was too busy making my way in life. This happened around the time I left West Point.

I’ve mentioned previously that I attended West Point for plebe year in 1970. That had been a childhood dream. I had an Uncle I admired that was a career Army officer, and his son was a historian who regaled me with stories of heroic deeds of my ancestors. 1970 was unfortunately not a good time to be there, it was the height of the Vietnam war and morale was not great, so it was a pretty cynical place. I was disillusioned by the end of the first year (plebe year) and left. I at least can take pride that I didn’t leave because I couldn’t hack it, because plebe year is the toughest. But this ended up being a bad idea psychologically. It was pointed out to us, while I was there, that one of the purposes of plebe year is to break you down, so they can then build you back up as a future leader. Having left at that point, I had been through the breaking down part, but not the building back up part.

So I went home with the dreams of my youth unfulfilled. I questioned a lot of my earlier beliefs at that time, which fit in well with the counterculture attitude prevalent in society at the time. Fortunately I had my then girlfriend, Karen to provide an anchor or I may have run off to a hippie commune or something. I was also an angry young man, tending to overreact. Things that perhaps should have annoyed me made me lose my temper. I don’t know how Karen hung with me during that period. But with her help I made it through school and graduated as a civil engineer. My temper still reared its ugly head occasionally. Thank goodness I was never physically abusive, but I would yell when I “lost it”.

Slide Mountain in the Catskills

Around this time I had the first of a few spontaneous “transcendent” experiences I’ve had. It was my first time hiking in the mountains for fun. I had done plenty of hiking at West Point with full a pack and an m14 rifle, but not for fun. I was on a trip with some college friends to hike up Slide mountain, the highest in the Catskills of New York at 4190 feet. I wasn’t in the greatest of shape at the time so it was a long slog. We got to the top, where we would camp for the night, just as the sun was going down. I could see a beautiful panorama. This took my breath away, but also temporarily took my thoughts away. I felt incredibly at peace and at one with all I saw. So a little before John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain high” came out, I guess I had a Catskill mountain high. I didn’t know what to make of the experience, it did not occur to me there might be techniques for cultivating feeling this way. But I think it planted a seed of loving nature and I always seek to have some sort of blissful peak experience when I’m doing athletic adventures. Trail runners call it “looking for the pixie dust”. You can’t force it, I’ve found, but you can encourage the conditions that allow it. I’ve had a few of these experiences since, always in beautiful settings: like seeing an incredible view of the milky way at high elevation in Colorado, or watching the sunset over the ocean in Pacific Grove.

I now took my first full time job, working for a civil engineering consulting firm in Camp Hill (central Penssylvania). I liked it for the first few months, it was exciting to be using engineering concepts, and techniques I’d learned in school, for something useful (designing water treatment plants). But when we started our second project I realized it was pretty similar to the first. I wasn’t learning much new. I could see a future of this stretched out in front of me, and it seemed pretty dull, so I was depressed.

This was around the time that transcendental meditation (TM) was at its peak of popularity. The Beatles had been to visit Maharishi in India, and TM had been highlighted on the cover of Time magazine. It was being touted for scientifically proven benefits, which appealed to me. So Karen and I signed up for a course that lasted several nights and learned TM. We practiced it pretty diligently for the first few months (twice a day, 20 minutes), and it helped. The technique (explained in the next post under mantra meditation) was effortless. The ceaseless chatter in my mind just naturally calmed, at least for short stretches, and I felt at peace. Yes it did relieve stress. But in my case it had a more profound effect. It practically cured my temper. I won’t say I never raised my voice since, but it took much more provocation, I no longer “flew off the handle at the drop of a hat”. This was a pretty solid example that meditation can actually make a dramatic change in your personality. I later learned of the work of Dr. Herbert Benson (author of The Relaxation Response) and realized the benefits could have come from various meditation techniques, they were not limited to TM.

Around this time we moved to northern California where I continued to work as a Civil engineer, this time on sewage treatment plants. That didn’t always work out well at dinner parties. “So, what do you do for a living?”. But the work done nationwide on quality of sewage treatment in that era improved water quality considerably, which I was glad to be a part of. Nevertheless, the actual work was still pretty dull for me. Fortunately I was able to get into grad school at Stanford, and got a fellowship so I could afford it.

That was huge for me, I now went through several years of profound learning, and afterwards I never had a dull job. I was always working on cutting edge things and continued to learn. Meditation had been long forgotten by this point, because I didn’t feel I needed it. But while my temper remained calmed down, life was still not perfect. Any job has some tedium, even an interesting one. And there are always personality issues with neighbors, coworkers etc. But life was still pretty good.

My first job was with the the US National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colorado (now National Institute of Science and Technology). The work was great, and so were my co-workers, and Boulder was beautiful. If we had moved straight from New Jersey or Pennsylvania to Colorado, I think Karen and I would still live there. Unfortunately we’d been spoiled by the northern California weather and after 3 years we moved back. This time I got work at IBM research in south San Jose.

IBM Almaden Research Center. I was working here, and got to ride my bike to work on a nice country road. And I left for another job with a horrible commute in North San Jose? Hmmm…

Hitting Bottom

After three years I quit my job at IBM research to do a start up. That was a much more stressful environment because of all the pressure we were under, and it also involved a nasty commute. This came to a head a few years later during the buildup to a big new software release where I really felt the spotlight was on me. I was using running to control my stress, but got injured so I couldn’t do that for awhile. I got so stressed out I didn’t sleep much for about 3 weeks, and ended up having a breakdown and spent a few days in a hospital. Wake up call, big time!

After this I went to a therapist for a while. It came out that part of me regretted having quit West Point, and part of me wished I had never gone at all. I was 39, and here I was deciding one way or another I’d ruined my life with a mistake I made as a teenager. We worked through this, and I felt ready to move on. But I figured there had to be a better way to live and something was missing.

Discovering the Transformational Path and the Perennial Philosophy

That was when I blundered into Eknath Easwaran’s book Conquest of Mind [1]. There was an interesting serendipity in that particular book being the one the bookstore had: I was still pretty skeptical of religion at the time, and could have been easily turned off. It turned out that of all his books, Conquest of Mind was based mostly on Buddhist teachings, and had the subtitle “Take charge of your thoughts and reshape your life through meditation”. The emphasis was very practical, but introduced me to what I now call the transformational path. I had always been into amateur athletics in one form or another as a hobby, and Easwaran made the analogy of how hard someone would train to go to the Olympics, and said if you put that kind of effort into meditation and what he called allied disciplines, you could dramatically change your life for the better. I was hooked. This book had an appendix with a brief description of his transformational program, which I followed diligently.

After a couple of months, I read his book Meditation which gave more detail about his style of meditation and the other disciplines, as well as showing that these teachings could be found in the core of all the world’s religions or could be interpreted psychologically,. By now I was more prepared to consider that idea. Of especial interest to me was how this related to Christianity. He described the lives and writings of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Theresa of Avila, and others. Now why was I never told about them in Catholic school as a kid?

This was my introduction to the concept of the perennial philosophy: this is a concept dating back at least to the renaissance in the west, and further in Asia, that “all religions, underneath seeming differences, point to the same Truth”. Human beings have a false self, referred to as the “ego” or “small self” which is basically the combination of our instinctive behaviors and our untrained minds. Through transformational practice we can transcend this, and discover our true nature, which is one with ultimate reality. This reality is referred to in most religions by terms like cosmic consciousness, God, or in Native American wisdom as “the Great Spirit”.

In Buddhism, however, it is often not specified. Teachers will just say “go and see for yourself”. But our true nature is described in terms like “pure unconditioned awareness” [2]. This is why Buddhism is more accessible to skeptics and amenable to scientific inquiry, because it does not require belief in something which might be thought of as “supernatural” [3]. Of course, this all made me wonder if the spontaneous peak experiences I’d had were some sort of glimpse into my true nature (or a glimpse of ultimate reality), and eager to try techniques to make that type of experience more accessible.

I read books by various other authors at the time, from various traditions, including The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, and books on Insight Meditation and Centering Prayer, coming away convinced that there are many valid approaches but with common elements.

That all started around 1992, and I have been following the path ever since, with varying degrees of diligence. The same is true for my physical training, it ebbs and flows, but I never let it go to less than about 30 minutes a day, while other times I may get more enthused and train for a marathon, a century bike ride, or equivalent. With self-transformation, I keep meditation up at least 30 minutes a day, and sometimes do more, and I vary in how well I follow the other elements. I also try to be mindful, one of the elements, as often as I remember to.

Benefits

The result of 28 years of doing this? I haven’t reached enlightenment or Nirvana, but I’m a lot calmer. I don’t sweat the small stuff very much anymore. It feels like I’m in more control, like there is a slight buffer of time between stimulus and response. It’s nice to be able to catch myself and not overreact. I’m not always perfect at it, but a lot better than I used to be. And during meditation I often get glimpses of the feeling of “oneness” I mentioned, that previously only came spontaneously in peak experiences.

Some other benefits:

Calming your inner voice, the one that’s always commenting/interpreting/criticising, etc. In the book No, Self, No Problem, Dr. Chris Niebauer discusses the crucial importance of getting control of this inner voice from the perspective of neuroscience and psychology.

Behaving more inline with your highest ideals. Reading inspirational books, or going to church or temple may motivate us to be better people. But even if you believe in the golden rule, being kinder, more courageous, etc, it is easier said than done. because our behaviour is often more of a conditioned response than rational. I’ve found that meditation and similar disciplines can help.

As I mentioned, I’ve taken my practice up another notch during the Covid19 shutdown. And I’m starting to notice a difference. I mentioned previously how working on being more unconditionally loving towards my shelter-mate has benefitted us both. My meditation is going a bit deeper, I seem to be more mindful during the day, and able to make better decisions and act less compulsively, especially with my eating habits.

And what of my beliefs now, someone who started out pretty skeptical? What is this oneness? It’s possible it’s just some phenomenon in my brain, like my logical left brain has calmed down and my more holistic right brain has taken over. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like something more. It definitely doesn’t feel like some stern judgemental old guy on a throne in the clouds. It’s more like connecting with an unconditionally loving spirit or intelligence. Maybe this is what Native American’s mean by “the Great Spirit that moves through all things”. But I’m not trying to convert anybody. Go and see for yourself. For me, the journey on the transformational path to “go and see” is its own reward. It gives life meaning, helps me to better be of service, and makes me happier.

For those who think all of this might be useful, I’ll discuss the elements of self-transformation in my next post.

References

Easwaran, Eknath, Conquest of Mind, Nilgiri Press, 2019.

Richard, Matthieu, Singer, Rolf, Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience, MIT Press, 2017.

Batchelor, Stephen, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening, Riverhead Books, 1998.

Meditation Is More Than Stress Relief: The Transformational Path published first on https://steroidsca.tumblr.com/

[mindframe64-blog]

11th STREET WALK

On one of the few sunny days in September 2018 I did a short walk up Charles Street in the West Village (the fruits of which will be on a separate FNY page) and then on 11th Street east to Avenue A. I was aware there were quite a few interesting items along this east-west route in the Villages.

I did not cover the western portion of West 11th, which turns southwest from Greenwich Avenue in alignment with the West Village street grid. Something has always perplexed me about the area: the extension of the numbered West 10th through 12th Streets into it, which was done in the mid-1800s. Before that, the streets were called Amos Street; Hammond Street; and Troy Street. Hammond Street was named for Elijah Hammond, who owned a 55-acre estate there formerly belonging to Sir Peter Warren. One of Hammond’s townhouses still stands at 282 West 11th. 

The intersection of West 11th, 7th Avenue and Greenwich Avenue is one of NYC’s true “five points.” This used to be the southern end of 7th Avenue, but in the early 1910s, 7th Avenue was extended south, as 7th Avenue South, to the intersection of Clarkson, Varick and Carmine, with Varick accepting 7th Avenue South’s traffic.

The intersection makes for some interestingly-shaped apartment houses, like this one on the NW corner. There is a Two Boots pizzeria at ground level. The franchise takes its name from the boot-shaped Italy and Louisiana. Two Boots pizzas are made with cajun spices.

155 West 11th Street, a.k.a. Greenwich Lane, is an anonymous condo complex built at the site of St. Vincent’s Hospital, a West Village institution between 1849 and 2010. A great number of people from all over the metropolitan area found themselves in the St. Vincent emergency room at some time between their 18th and 30th years. The hospital inspired the middle name of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, a Villager, and was the place where Dylan Thomas expired after a bender at the White Horse Tavern. The few 9/11/01 and Titanic survivors were treated there in different centuries.

Not all trace of St. Vincent’s Hospital has vanished. One of the administrative buildings, #145, still has a marked entablature. The owners of Greenwich Lane also redeveloped it for residences.

The Unadilla Apartments, 128 West 11th, must have been named for an upstate NY town in Otsego County, population approximately 4400. Perhaps the developer came from there. The town hosts an annual motocross race.

6th Avenue at East 11th Street, looking east. The apartment building on the right, built in 1915 on the southeast corner of Sixth and West 11th, stands in place of an old roadhouse built in 1830 called The Old Grapevine. Village locals would congregate here to exchange gossip and catch up on what was happening. During the Civil War, a certain phrase was adopted that inferred that certain information was being distributed through back channels that only insiders would know.

The phrase was, of course, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and, in the early 1960s, Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong were sufficiently inspired by the phrase to write a song that went on to be recorded by several artists in Motown‘s stellar stable, including Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, Gladys Knight and the Pips and by Marvin Gaye, who had unquestionably the most successful version, hitting #1 with it for seven weeks in December 1968 and January 1969. The song has also been covered by King Curtis, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Temptations, the Undisputed Truth, Ike & Tina Turner, Paul Mauriat, Elton John and of course, the California Raisins.

Not a bad showing for a saloon that was torn down ninety years ago!

The five boroughs are chock full of odd little cemeteries, left over from long-gone family homesteads, or from churches or congregations that have since moved away. The greatest concentration of these is in Queens and Staten Island, but Manhattan has a few as well — the New York and New York City Marble Cemeteries off East 2nd Street in the East Village, for example, and the three Shearith Israel Cemeteries in St. James Place in Chinatown, here on West 11th off 6th Avenue, and 10 blocks north on West 21st off 6th.

Shearith Israel was the only Jewish congregation in New York City from 1654 until 1825. During this entire span of history, all of the Jews of New York belonged to the congregation. Shearith Israel was founded by 23 Jews, mostly of Spanish and Portuguese origin. The earliest Jewish cemetery in the U.S. was recorded in 1656 in New Amsterdam where authorities granted the Shearith Israel Congregation “a little hook of land situated outside of this city for a burial place.”

… This cemetery is much smaller than it originally was. Burials began here in 1805, in what was a much larger, square plot extending into what is now the street. The Commissioners’ Plan had established the city’s grid in 1811, but not until 1830 was West 11th Street cut through, at that time reducing the cemetery to its present tiny triangle. The disturbed plots were moved further uptown to the Third Cemetery [below] on West 21st Street. In 1852 city law forbade burial within Manhattan, and subsequent interments have been made in Queens. Sephardic Studies

In 2018, if a cemetery stood in the way of a new street grid the street would, most likely, be interrupted, or be made to angle around the cemetery somehow. In 1830, this part of Manhattan was mostly farms and fields punctuated by the Minetta Brook, and the city was not to be deterred by an apparently insignificant Jewish cemetery. Today, the cemetery is a leftover curio from a former age, overlooked by most passersby; I remembered it from Village jaunts in the 1980s, and it became one of the touchstones when I first began to photograph and compose FNY in 1998.

Two other Shearith Israel cemeteries are still in place in NYC: one on St. James Place south of Chatham Square, and another on West 21st Street west of 6th Avenue. All are well cared for and protected behind gates.

18 West 11th Street, near 5th Avenue, has an unusual V-shaped front, jutting out toward the street quite unlike its row of fellow brick townhouses. It is about 135 years younger than the overall row, in fact, because it replaced a building that was accidentally blown up by a lair of domestic terrorists.

Henry Brevoort, of the apple orchard that helped redirect Broadway, built the row of handsome brick dwellings along West 11th Street in 1844, about 14 years after the street itself came into existence. The buildings blithely carried on for the next 126 years — actor Dustin Hoffman, then near the peak of his early fame after The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy — had recently become a tenant at 16 West 11th.

Five members of the Weathermen, a domestic terrorist group in the 1960s, had set up a bomb factory in the basement of No. 18, purportedly meaning to destroy Low Library at Columbia University. But on March 6, 1970, some of their dynamite cache accidentally exploded. Three Weathermen were killed; two, Cathlyn Wilkerson and Katherine Boudin, escaped and avoided capture for more than a decade.

In 1978 architect Hugh Hardy completed a new building at #18 the largely resembled its mates, except for the jutting front, meant, perhaps, as a reminder of the violent end of its predecessor. For many years the owners kept a Paddington Bear in the window, with ever-changing outfits. The house sold for over $9M in 2012.

Coal chute covers are a relic of the era before central heat. Coal would be delivered via horse and cart and emptied into a chute under the cover that went to a coal burner in the basements of the townhouses. Remaining coal chute covers often have the names of their long-defunct manufacturers, including this one, the M.J. Dempsey Iron Foundry at 548 West 55th Street in Hell’s Kitchen. 

The former Hotel Albert, at the SE corner of University Place and East 11th Street, was constructed in 1883 by architect Henry Hardenburgh, whose most famous work is likely the Plaza Hotel at 5th Avenue and Central Park South. It was completed by additions in 1904 and 1924. Originally called the St. Stephen, it was thought it acquired the name Hotel Albert because of its association with painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, who was a frequent visitor, but the name came from the hotel’s owner, Albert Rosenbaum.

Over the years the Hotel Albert gained a reputation for bohemian and cultural figures that stayed there. In that way, it could be called the Hotel Chelsea of its era. Mark Twain, an East Village fixture, gave lectures at the hotel while Hart Crane wrote his paean to the Brooklyn Bridge (“The Bridge”) while staying there. Anaïs Nin, Jackson Pollock, Rocky Graziano, and the Mamas & The Papas were all patrons. In the 1970s, it slipped into decrepitude and became an SRO, but it was revived into condo-hood a decade later.

The Hotel St. Denis bookends the block of East 11th between University Place and Broadway. Before a horrible modernization in 1920, it looked like this. It was once one of NYC’s most fashionable hotels after it was built in 1853 [James Renwick, architect–he also designed Grace Church across the street]. Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Chester Arthur were guests in its early days, as were actress Sarah Bernhardt, P.T. Barnum, “Buffalo” Bill Cody. Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his telephone here.

The St. Denis was named for an early hotelkeeper, Denis Julian. The land had previously been part of the Henry Brevoort (see above) estate. 

Unfortunately the building has now been cleared out as a developer has purchased it, intending to raze it for a much taller residential building. 

Here’s some “uptown” cast iron on Broadway and 11th, across from Grace Church. (Most of NYC’s cast-iron front buildings are concentrated in Tribeca and SoHo, though you do find some along 14th and 23rd Streets.) This is a former department store, McCreery’s, opened in 1868 by Irish immigrant James McCreery. He arrived in 1845 as a 20-year-old and originally sold Irish goods, but soon expanded into general dry goods. McCreery became a philanthropist and patron of the arts, and his funds helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Though historic Grace Church fronts on Broadway where it bends at East 10th Street, it maintains a presence on 4th: an opening between buildings vouchsafes a glimpse.

East 11th Street is interrupted between Broadway and 4th Avenue by James Renwick Jr.’s 1883 Grace Memorial House, which was reputedly the first day care center in NYC. 11th Street is interrupted, according to legend, because landowner Henry Brevoort refused to budge when the streets were being cut through in the early 19th Century. By contrast, 11th was bruited through the Second Shearith Israel Cemetery on West 11th Street near 6th Avenue (see above), forcing the disinterment of remains and reinterment in a cemetery on West 21st just off 6th.

My favorite post office in Manhattan, other than the massive Farley PO now being remodeled as the “Moynihan Train Hall” near Penn Station, is this one on the corner of 4th Avenue and East 11th, with a wraparound facade with Doric columns.  It was constructed in the mid-1930s by the Works Progress Administration. This is the PO where Newman, the scheming postman from Seinfeld played by Wayne Knight worked — at least the exterior shots indicated as such.

Midafternoon shadows make it tough to get a good picture of the old St. Ann’s Parochial School on East 11th between 3rd and 4th Avenues. 

One of two reminders of the now-defunct At. Ann’s Roman Catholic parish, founded in 1853, can be seen here on East 11th between 4th and 3rd. St. Ann’s School was a no nonsense brick structure built in 1870 to the rear of the main church on East 12th, an 1847 building that had been acquired that same year.

When Webster Hall, from the first a concert and entertainment venue possessing a liquor license, was built next door in 1886, pastor Thomas Scott Preston and parishioners set up a hue and cry hoping to close it, and some newspaper editorials agreed:

“A place such as this dance hall draws to it and about it characters with whom children should not become familiar, and creates noise and confusion intolerable in the immediate vicinity of a school and church.  The proprietor of this establishment deserves no consideration at the hands of the Excise Commissioners, who have full authority, and are under positive obligation to refuse him a license.” NY Sun

However, Webster Hall’s owners got to keep their liquor license. After St. Ann’s parish church closed, the school became the Delehanty Institute; it has now been converted into apartments.

St. Ann’s Church itself, a block north on East 12th, is an even stranger relic. The bell tower is all that remains of the former church at 120 East 12th between 3rd and 2nd Avenues. The church was constructed in 1847, and had been an Anglican church and later a synagogue before it was purchased by St. Ann’s parish in 1870. Retaining the bell tower, architect Napoleon Le Brun demolished most of the existing building and built a new structure.

After a demographic change, the church was re-established as St. Ann’s Armenian Rite Catholic Cathedral, where masses were celebrated in Latin and according to pre-Vatican II rubrics. However, after the Landmarks Preservation Commission failed to landmark the building, it was ultimately sold to NYU, which ripped down the church and built a dormitory, retaining only the original bell tower. “The effect is of a majestic elk, shot and stuffed”, sniffs the AIA Guide to NYC.

Webster Hall, shrouded under construction netting in mid-2018 at 125 East 11th Street, has operated continuously as an entertainment venue since its 1886 opening. It is a mix of Queen Anne and Renaissance Revival styles and attained its present size after an 1893 addition. It has endured several fires during its history, in 1902, 1911, 1930, 1938, and 1949. It has hosted labor union rallies, weddings, meetings, lectures, dances, masquerade balls and military functions as well as concerts, attaining a leftwing reputation early in its history, from Emma Goldman to Pete Seeger.

In the 1950s, RCA Records used it as a recording venue. Soundtracks for Hello, Dolly! and Fiddler on the Roof were recorded here and pop legends such as Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, Perry Como, Ray Charles and even Elvis Presley used the studio to make records.

Webster Hall became The Ritz concert hall from 1980-1989 before moving to the old Studio 54 space. The Ballinger Brothers opened the current Webster Hall concert space in 1992. In that new incarnation, top acts like Linkin Park, Sonic Youth, The Hives, John Mayer and Modest Mouse have all appeared. I saw Robyn Hitchcock play here 27 years apart, in 1986 and in 2013.

The NYC Webster Hall Landmarks Preservation Commission report provides architectural details that assured that it would take its place among NYC landmarks. 

All Saints Ukrainian Orthodox Church, 206-208 East 11th, east of 3rd Avenue. It doesn’t look like it but this is actually one of the oldest churches in the East Village —  it was constructed in 1851 and has had Welsh (Welsh Congregationalists) and Hungarian (Free Magyar Reformed) parishes. In 1960, a showman named St. John Terrell turned it into an off-Broadway playhouse. Its first production, “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl” in 1962, featured a young James Earl Jones. All saints Ukrainian had moved in by 1971, and recently had added decorative mosaic work to the exterior.

Constructed in 1901 and designed by architect Ernest Flagg, the St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery Church rectory was severely damaged in a 1988 fire, but was subsequently reopened as the Neighborhood Preservation Center in 1999 and is also home to the St. Mark’s Historic Landmark Fund, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, and the Historic Districts Council. 

In 1975 drummer Roger Earl of Foghat sat in the middle of the street for the LP cover of their biggest seller, “Fool for the City.” The manhole isn’t around anymore, and neither is front man Lonesome Dave Peverett. The Flagg rectory can be seen in the background.

Handsome brick walkup buildings from the late 18th Century on the north side of East 11th.

A portion of St. Mark’s Churchyard wraps around the back end of the church, seen from East 11th. This portion of the churchyard is usually closed to the public, but the other side, where the burial vaults (including that of Peter Stuyvesant) is open to the public. The church is built on the former holdings of the last Dutch Director-General before the British takeover in 1664.

The parking garage at 310 East 11th, between 1st and 2nd Avenues, has a clue to its former use above the second floor windows. There you can find a faded sign “Knickerbocker Boarding.” Boarding horses–the building is a former stable. According to the Indispensable Walter Grutchfield, the building was only called the New Knickerbocker in 1915 and 1916, but was in use as a longtime stable from at least 1907 to 1925, when automobiles took over the space. 

New York City is big enough that you can find a store dedicated to virtually anything. At #322 East 11th we find John Casey Rubber Stamps, which makes custom stamps and ink pads. When I was a kid, I loved using rubber stamps. I was able to use them in an official capacity when I worked for the Brooklyn Business Library, which was demolished a couple of years ago. 

There are many facets to this neck of the East Village woods. There’s a Ukrainian population; this was the hotbed of Jewish theater; it used to be Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany; if you go back far enough you find remnants of Dutch rule–Stuyvesant Street used to be the driveway to Peg Leg Pete’s plantation. And, along East 11th, you find a number of pasticcerias, or pasta bakeries, such as Veniero’s, with its still functioning neon sign. It was founded by Antonio Veniero of Sorrento, Italy in 1894 as a pool hall that served Italian pastries to patrons.

Though Veniero’s is a pasticceria, Russo’s next door is an actual pasta shop. It is nearly as venerable, having been founded in 1904. 

There are two huge, interesting building murals on the south side of East 11th Street on either side of 1st Avenue. This one is by Shepard Fairey, best known for his “Obama Hope” banner from 2008. This, rendered in 2016, depicts his daughter when she was age three. Fairey said he painted it for the kids coming and going from nearby PS 19.

Across 1st Avenue we find Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra‘s work depicting pop star Michael Jackson in his “I Want You Back” and “Black and White” eras. It was done in his signature style of overlapping color patchworks layered over a realistic portrait. It went up on East 11th in mid-2018. Unfortunately, Kobra’s “The Kiss,” depicting the soldier and nurse kissing in Times Square on V-J Day in 1945, visible from the High Line at 10th Avenue and West 25th Street, was painted over. 

Another well-known Kobra work is Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie, on a housing project in north Jersey City. He depicted Bob Dylan in Minneapolis, MN and Salvador Dali in Murcia, Spain.

One more mural–by the basketball court on East 11th between 1st Avenue and Avenue A. “Build It and They Will Ball” is the slogan associated with Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant’s charity initiative. 

Please help contribute to a new Forgotten NY website

Check out the ForgottenBook, take a look at the gift shop, and as always, “comment…as you see fit.”

10/7/18

Source: http://forgotten-ny.com/2018/10/11th-street-walk/

[sserpicko]

Oscar: How Each 2018 Best Picture Nominee Got Here

There can only be one winner, but each of the Best Picture nominees overcame creative, financial and logistical hurdles to get this close to the finish line. Here are their war stories.

Black Panther

Fifty years ago, the phrase ‘Black Panther’ carried more political baggage than it does today, immediately summoning up images of a militant African-American revolutionary, named after by the controversial civil rights party founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966. Created by Stan Lee in a bid to deliver the world’s first non-stereotype black superhero, the comic book of the same name materialized around the same time. Unusually, The Black Panther wasn’t an alter ego—it was the formal title for T’Challa, King of Wakanda—but Lee described the overlapping of names as “a strange coincidence”, adding that “maybe if I had it to do over again, I’d have given him another name”. The sensitive politics of the next two decades might explain why the character lay dormant as a movie property until 1992, when Wesley Snipes began work on the concept, eventually securing support from Columbia in 1994.

Directors John Singleton and Mario Van Peebles showed interest, but the project stalled, only to be resurrected by Marvel Studios in 2005, when then-CEO Avi Arad announced it as one of ten new films on the company’s slate. This time development moved forward at a faster pace: a script was commissioned in 2011, and by 2013, elements of the story began to appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with the character, played by Chadwick Boseman, debuting in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. Ava DuVernay was briefly attached, then F. Gary Gray, and finally Creed director Ryan Coogler agreed to take the helm. Marvel President Kevin Feige acknowledges that it was a slow but sure process, and defends the timescale. “The only way we ever wanted to do this project was the right way,” he says, “and that meant finding a filmmaker who had something personal to say, who had a vision and could take this character into another arena, and showcase the power of representation on a canvas of this size.” —Damon Wise

BlacKkKlansman

When Jordan Peele pitched Spike Lee on the story that would become BlacKkKlansman, and lead to the iconic filmmaker’s first Oscar nomination for directing, Lee was sure he was making it up. “It was one of the greatest pitches ever,” Lee recalls. “Black man infiltrates Ku Klux Klan. That’s high concept. I said, ‘I’ve seen this a million times, it’s the Dave Chappelle skit.’ He went, ‘Nah, nah, this is real.’”

And real it is, even though Lee’s film bends the truth here and there to offer an engine to a story that seizes on the rhetorical parallels with the violence in Charlottesville last year, takes a sideways glance at the legacy of DW Griffith and Gone with the Wind, and revels in its 1970s setting to play on the tropes of Blaxploitation movies. Ron Stallworth, a black police officer in Colorado Springs, really did infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. And really did interact with one-time Grand Wizard David Duke.

Lee turned to an old collaborator to play Stallworth. John David Washington was six years old when he was given a line in Lee’s Malcolm X. Reunited for BlacKkKlansman, Lee kept Washington away from the real Stallworth until the table read, determined that he find his own version of the character in prep. “It was my thinking that he would meet Ron and want to walk like him, talk like him,” Lee says. “It wasn’t like Malcolm X. No one knew who Ron Stallworth was, and that gives you freedom.”

Lee casts aside criticism of the film’s forthright allusions to current politics. “These are dangerous times. The film had to end the way it did,” he says, with footage of the Charlottesville rally and a tribute to Heather Hayer, who was murdered there.

And it took the commitment of all of his collaborators, including nominee Adam Driver and the iconic Harry Belafonte—a key player in the Civil Rights Movement—to fully realize it. “This film, the teamwork was amazing. We were like the Golden State Warriors, or the New York Knicks. We didn’t have to sit around saying, ‘Oh this is such an important film and we have to…’ It wasn’t even discussed. Everybody knew what we had to do.” —Joe Utichi

Bohemian Rhapsody

Bohemian Rhapsody is the miracle Oscar nominee this year. Typically when a production is mired with on-set problems, its doom is inevitable, but in the year-plus wake of director Bryan Singer’s firing, Bohemian Rhapsody has had immense luck, with the producers determined to buck sour Singer headlines, after he clashed with Oscar nominated star Rami Malek. Graham King shepherded Bohemian Rhapsody for eight years, and nothing was going to stop it now.

Sacha Baron Cohen expressed interest in the project early on, but dismissed it when King opted against a warts-and-all biopic.

Then King’s partner had a sense that Emmy-winning Mr. Robot star Rami Malek could do the trick, and indeed he did, with a dedication that went to masochistic measures.

“I told Graham King if he gave me this role, I’d bleed for it, and he showed me a picture of blood on the piano keys after the final day of our Live Aid shoot,” Malek says.

Editor John Ottman gets proper credit here with his first Oscar nomination, working with the producers to hammer an impressive first cut, before Dexter Fletcher stepped in for Singer to finish a handful of scenes. While a director always gets credit for a final cut, Bohemian Rhapsody is an example this season that there’s no ‘I’ in team.

The press has repeatedly asked the production team for their thoughts on Singer in the wake of the film’s success, especially on Golden Globes night when it won for Best Motion Picture, Drama and Best Actor.

King waved off the question, but Malek answered, “There was only one thing we needed to do: celebrate Freddie Mercury. He is a marvel. Nothing was going to compromise us. We’re giving him the love, celebration and adulation he deserves.” —Anthony D’Alessandro

The Favourite

It took two decades for Deborah Davis’s script for The Favourite to make it to screen. A searing three-hander based on the true history of the British Queen Anne and the two women who fought for her affections, Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham, it was a tough sell even for a market in Britain that specializes in costume drama. A film in which three women rule the roost over their male counterparts, fall in love—and graphic lust—with one another and scheme their way to dominance? Whatever to make of that?

But Davis knew she had something groundbreaking, and producers Ceci Dempsey, Lee Magiday and Ed Guiney weren’t prepared to let the project go without a fight. In an inspired move, they showed the script to Yorgos Lanthimos, whose twisted and unique earlier features, including Dogtooth, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer seemed like an odd fit for a story based in true history. And yet, working on the script with Australian writer Tony McNamara, Lanthimos found a lens on the story through his own fascination with the more awkward aspects of human interaction.

“I was intrigued in trying to create these three very complicated and complex characters for women, and work with three great actresses,” Lanthimos says. “It was in my mind thinking you never see that: three female strong leads.”

For Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, the three actresses cast in these roles, all of whom picked up Oscar nominations, it was just as enticing a prospect. Lanthimos started them off with an unconventional rehearsal period, challenging them to play trust exercises, tie themselves up in knots and say one another’s lines.

“It’s strange and not strange,” Stone notes. “By the end, I think one of the most effective aspects of it was that we all felt very, very close to each other. We all touched each other, embarrassed ourselves in front of one another, and became more reliant on one another.” —Joe Utichi

Green Book

Nick Vallelonga had been carrying the story for Green Book in his head ever since he was five years old, and yet it was not until his 50s that he was able to see his dream become a reality. The plot came directly from a period of his father’s life, when, in the early ’60s, Tony “Lip” Vallelonga was hired by an African-American classical pianist named Don Shirley to be his driver and bodyguard during a potentially dangerous concert tour of the racially segregated southern states. “Even as a child, it struck me as something you’d see in a movie,” says Vallelonga. There was only only one problem: even though both subjects gave him their blessing, they also made Vallelonga give his word that the film would not be made in their lifetimes. After Tony and Don passed in 2013, within just three months of the other, Vallelonga began to map out this extraordinary road trip.

To help shape the script, Vallelonga turned to writer/actor Brian Currie. Then, two years later, during a chance encounter, Currie outlined the project to Peter Farrelly, and the idea stuck. “Home run!” exclaimed Farrelly. Together, all three began shaping the production, which passed through Focus Features and Participant Media before landing at Universal, with Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali as the leads. The result was Farrelly’s first non-comedy outside of the long-running partnership with his brother Bobby. “People had asked me over the years, ‘Do you think you’ll ever do a drama?’” Farrelly says. “And my answer was, ‘Sure, when it happens,’ because I never really planned. I probably should have, by the way, because I look at Rob Reiner’s career, and he was so smart. He did Spinal Tap, and then he did The Sure Thing, and then he goes off to do Stand by Me and A Few Good Men. He showed he could do everything. But we were just doing what came into our universe next, and we never really planned it. I didn’t plan this, but finally this dropped into my lap—I heard the story, and I thought, I gotta make this.” —Damon Wise

Roma

Alfonso Cuarón’s ode to his childhood in Mexico City, and in particular the domestic worker who helped made him, Roma was non-negotiable. “I had to do the film,” he says. “I told Carlos, my brother, ‘I don’t know if anybody is going to care about or like this movie. I have to do it because it’s something I need to do.’”

The notion started to form more than a decade ago, as Cuarón finished up 2006’s Children of Men. But there had been threads drawn from his youth in other projects—in his heralded Y Tu Mamá También, a voiceover for Diego Luna’s character tells a backstory that isn’t far off from Cuarón’s own—and he felt driven by a desire to tap more directly into that past.

Cuarón teamed up with Participant Media, who greenlit the $15 million the filmmaker needed; a tall order for a film that he knew he had to shoot primarily in Spanish, and in black-and-white. But so slavish was his desire to draw all this from his own very specific memories that Participant CEO David Linde would become one of the first and last people to ever see a script during production. He had intended to tap Emmanuel Lubezki to shoot the film, but ‘Chivo’ was unavailable when the dates finally set, and so Cuarón served as his own DP. He instructed his heads of department directly to get the details exactly as he saw them, rather than have them riff on the script. He gave his actors only what they needed for the scenes they shot, and then, only moments before they shot them. In the film’s lead, Cuarón found Yalitza Aparicio after an exhaustive search of Mexico. She was training to be a teacher when she heard about the audition. She is now an Oscar nominee.

Still, it was only after the process was completed that Cuarón understood the real challenge of Roma. With no stars, his black-and-white, Spanish-language opus was not built for the current realities of global theatrical distribution. Netflix came on board in April, when the film was looking set to debut at Cannes, and the controversy surrounding the streamer’s stance on theatrical put paid to a slot at the festival. It later debuted at Venice. But Cuarón is determined Netflix was the right home. “Our viewing habits are changing,” he says. “The challenge is now, how we can adapt ourselves, but present something that you believe is amazing and great cinema? It’s not so much about, ‘Let’s impose this kind of cinema on audiences.’ It’s also the conversation with them about how they want to watch.” —Joe Utichi

A Star Is Born

It’s hard to overstate the difficulty of shooting on stage in the middle of a music festival. Yet the cast and crew of A Star Is Born pulled off exactly that, with only a four-minute window for director and star Bradley Cooper to perform.

Serendipitously, it worked out thanks to the star of the film’s 1976 version. Kris Kristofferson happened to be playing Glastonbury on the planned shoot day, and offered a window of time in his own set.

“Bradley jumps on stage,” producer Lynette Howell Taylor recalls, “and says, ‘Hi, I’m Bradley Cooper. I’m here to perform a song from A Star Is Born, but you won’t be able to hear it. Please just look like you’re excited.’” With his vocal feed cut, only the front few rows could hear some of what Cooper sang. “We didn’t want the music to leak out.”

“There were many minutes along the way where we were running and gunning,” adds producer Bill Gerber, “But that one in particular wasn’t just a logistical threat, it was also incredible for Bradley to go from playing in controlled situations to all of a sudden literally singing live in front of 80,000 people.”

Gerber had been on the project since its early days, when, before timing got in the way, Clint Eastwood had been set to direct, with Beyoncé in the Lady Gaga role. Casting Gaga was initially a stretch for Warner Bros., Gerber says. “Even though Bradley and I were really blown away by the chemistry, the studio still wasn’t 100% sure. But to their credit, they said, ‘Do a test, spend what you have to spend, and let’s see.’”

During that test, Gerber saw the magic happen. “Bradley picked her up, and they walked out the doors of her house onto her lawn, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean. They looked at each other and it was undeniably brilliant. I thought, well, there’s our Gone with the Wind moment.” And the rest, of course, is history. —Antonia Blyth

Vice

Adam McKay probably wouldn’t have made Vice, his irreverent biopic of former Vice President Dick Cheney, if he hadn’t fallen ill for a couple of weeks at the end of 2015. The director had recently finished up The Big Short, an arch look at the financial crisis of 2008, and followed it immediately with a worldwide publicity tour, then a punishing awards season schedule. The net result was that McKay got sick, and while he was shivering with a particularly evil flu, he looked up at his bookshelves. “People give you books through the years,” McKay told the ACLU, “and you just shove them up there and don’t really think about them. And there was one about Dick Cheney, and it kind of struck me, like, ‘Wow, the book of history is about to close on that guy.’ I mean, you don’t really hear his name mentioned that much anymore, and you don’t hear [George] W. Bush’s name really mentioned, but, holy cow, those were a rough eight years.”

McKay started reading the book and found he couldn’t put it down. “I was amazed by what a large, epic American tale Cheney’s life story is—how far back it reaches, how many monumental moments in history he was around for. He had this Zelig-like presence in the ’70s through the ’80s. And then of course, I was amazed by how brilliant he was at manipulating the system.” The final impetus to tell Cheney’s story came in 2016. “Somewhere along that line,” recalled McKay, “Donald Trump got elected, and all of a sudden we started hearing people say, ‘Hey, I kinda miss George W. Bush. He wasn’t that bad, him and Cheney.’ And I really felt like I had to make the movie. I was like, ‘This is crazy that people are saying this.’ And that was it. We were off to the races.” —Damon Wise

Source: deadline

by Joe Utichi and Damon Wise and Anthony D’Alessandro and Antonia Blyth

[mbtizone]

Kitty Forman (That '70s Show): ESFJ

Dominant Extroverted Feeling [Fe]: Kitty is very emotionally expressive. It’s very easy for her to talk about her feelings, and she wants other people to discuss theirs as well. When there’s a conflict in her household, Kitty wants to talk it out. Sometimes, Kitty feels unappreciated and taken for granted by her husband and children. She loves validation, attention, and compliments. Kitty wants to be needed and useful to others. Because she’s so compassionate and kind, Kitty is a natural at taking care of people (especially since she’s a nurse) and has very keen maternal instincts, accepting all of Eric’s friends into her home and often acting as a surrogate mother to them. She doesn’t want Eric growing up and leaving home because she enjoys her role as a mother and a nurturer. It’s almost as though she doesn’t know who she is without anyone to look after. When Kitty begins menopause, she’s very upset at the thought of not being able to have another baby, but when Red reminds her that someday she’ll have grandchildren, she gets very happy and excited. When Eric wants to move after graduation, she’s angry and upset. When someone says Kitty is pretty, she becomes overjoyed, giggling and smiling. Kitty likes for things to be civil and harmonious. Whenever there’s tension between Eric and Red, she tries to smooth it over. “What your father means is…” Kitty is warm, affirming, and encouraging, and can become sensitive when others don’t reciprocate. She’s always there for people who are in need. Kitty cares what other people think of her, as well as her family and wants to project a good image to the outside world. She wants to be socially appropriate and she likes for other people to think that she has the “perfect” family.

Auxiliary Introverted Sensing [Si]: Tradition is very important to Kitty. She enjoys holidays and making a big deal out of birthdays. Kitty isn’t particularly adventurous and doesn’t mind her daily routine for the most part. Kitty often returns to her familiar comforts, such as drinking or smoking. She likes to do things the right way. Kitty has an eye for detail and likes everything just so. She goes to church every Sunday because that’s the right thing to do, and gets very upset when her family doesn’t want to continue going, believing that they won’t get into Heaven. She’s also uncomfortable going alone, because she’s afraid of what other people might think or say (Fe-Si).

Tertiary Extroverted Intuition [Ne]: Every once and a while, Kitty wants to do something spontaneous, and gets upset when Red gives her a hard time about it. Let’s go dancing! Let’s go out to dinner somewhere nice! However, because Red has higher Si than she does, and therefore, lower Ne, he has no desire to deviate from his usual routine. He’s very happy to go to work, come home, and spend the entire day in the house. Sometimes, Kitty is good at making connections and seeing what’s really going on. On occasion, Kitty’s imagination can be a bit overactive, imagining vivid fantasies or possibilities that would never really happen, like when she visualized her ideal family life, filled with singing, dancing, and happiness, just like the Brady’s (Fe-Ne). However, because she has lower Ne, these possibilities can easily turn negative, and she uses them to think of all the worst-case scenarios, such as when Eric and his friends are celebrating his birthday in the house while Kitty and Red are next door at Bob and Midge’s, and she imagines Eric strapped to a chair while his friends engage in morally questionable behavior.

Inferior Introverted Thinking [Ti]: It’s not easy for Kitty to put her feelings aside and think rationally. She can be overly sensitive at times, and instead of taking the time to analyze situations, she typically just reacts emotionally instead. Kitty will place importance on facts that she agrees with, and dismiss what she disagrees with. After Red’s heart attack, the doctor gives them a list of things that need to be cut out of his diet, and, in order to be supportive, she tells him that she’ll do it with him to be healthier. She accepts every point on the list, until she gets to the part about giving up alcohol, and immediately calls the doctor “a quack.”

Enneagram: 2w3 So/Sp

Quotes:

Kitty: Okay Red, I’m sure you’ll do fine. Just remember, Santa is a cheerful, jolly fellow, who never calls a child “dumbass”.

Little Girl #2: I want a flying car. Red: I did too when I was your age, kid. But then the future came… and took my dreams away. Just like it’s gonna take yours. [the girl gapes] Kitty: Okay, okay little girl, y’know what? I bet if you’re extra good, you’ll get your flying car one day. [Kitty and the girl walk away] Red: [calling after them] Don’t listen to her, it’s a lie. [Kitty turns to Red, glaring at him] Kitty: [chiding] Bad Santa!

[Red has just finished telling the boy his version of Vietnam War] Red: …and that’s what really happened in Vietnam. Young Boy #2: [confused] I don’t understand. Red: [glumly] Neither do I, kid. Neither do I. Kitty: Okay, little boy, time to say goodbye to Santa. [Kitty leads the boy away. The boy turns to her] Young Boy #2: What’s an “ambush”? Kitty: [smiles] It’s a pretty bush with yellow flowers. [Red gets up and approaches Kitty] Red: Kitty, I gotta tell ya, I’m good with kids. I really taught him something. Y’know, I think I’m beginning to feel the Christmas spirit. Kitty: Well, I’m glad Red, but let’s try telling a Christmas story where nobody gets caught in a fire fight.

Donna Pinciotti: This entire room is an example of bad taste. [Kitty and Red walk into the living room] Kitty: Excuse me? Donna Pinciotti: Mrs Forman- Kitty: I have spent years picking out every item of this room, surrounding myself with the things I love and the people I thought loved me.

Kitty: Oh he gave you shoes. What do you say Red? Red: [To Bob] What the hell’s wrong with you? Kitty: Or we say thank you very much.

Red: Shoes are an innaprorpiate gift to give to another man. Kitty: How about when you joined the service? Another man issued your boots. Red: So he gave me a gun so I let it go. Kitty: Why can’t you just accept the gift because Bob is your friend? Red: Kitty you don’t understand how men work out. We dont give each other presents. We just basiclly ignore each other until we score a touchdown.

Kitty: You have been such a big help, working yourself nearly to death. I made you your special sandwich. Eric: Awww. The ‘Eric McSweety’.

Donna Pinciotti: You’re babying him. Kitty: I’m not. Donna Pinciotti: Are there crusts on that sandwich? Kitty: Of course not! Crusts are icky, they make Eric sicky. Oh, my God, I am babying him!

Red: [not looking up from paper] You don’t have a date, do ya? Eric: [Walking over, Donna mirroring his direction] Okay. You know what? It’s not about “can I get a date?” It’s about this great book that I’m like, halfway through. Plus, you know, I could get a date. [Red laughs once] Eric: I got numbers, Buddy. Kitty: Sure you do, Honey. You’re number 1 with me!

Kitty: [Kitty is recording an audio tape for Eric in Africa] Eric! Steven just punched Michael! [regains composure] Kitty: And although I am upset with Steven for hitting Michael, it was very exciting!

Reginald ‘Red’ Forman: So you’re too proud to take her back? And what do you have to be so proud of? You’re not an athlete. The only smart thing about you is your mouth. And look at you. Kitty: Red… Red, he looks fine. He’s just so darn stupid! I’m… I’m very upset. Eric: Well, stop, okay? Because, I already feel bad enough as it is. Kitty: Well, you should. Eric: Well, I do!

Kitty: [talking to a fish in a distorted voice] Um… people really depended on me, which I kind of miss, although I don’t really miss the bedpans.

Red: [to Hyde after yelling at him for taking the blame for Jackie having dope] If you ever do anything like that again I’ll kick your ass until your nose starts to bleed. Kitty: And we love you.

Kelso: Ya know guys, there are a lot of ladies out there and I haven’t seen nearly enough of them naked. From now on, I’m gonna live free. I’m going to be boldly going where no man has gone before. [the next scene shows the Forman’s front door. The doorbell rings and Kitty answers the door. Kelso is standing there holding flowers] Kelso: Is Laurie here? Kitty: [laughs] Don’t you mean Eric? Kelso: No, Laurie. Your other kid. [Hyde walks by and stops when he sees Kelso] Hyde: You’re dating Laurie? Man, you’re going where every man has gone before. Kitty: [turns around] Steven it is not nice to be so… truthful. [Laurie comes down the stairs] Laurie: Hi, Kelso. [notices the flowers] Laurie: Did you buy those for me? Kelso: Yep, just like you told me. Laurie: No, I told you roses! Come on, doofus! [she walks out the door with Kelso] Hyde: You know Mrs. Forman, those two could have the dumbest babies ever. Kitty: [starts to laugh then abruptly stops and turns toward Hyde] That’s not funny.

Kitty: Sweetie, white lies help relationships. Like, ‘Kitty, even though your pot roast was overdone, I still loved it.’ Red: Oh for the love of God, I did love it. You’re a pot roast genius, okay? It was like eating gold. Hyde: So you’re saying lying is good? Kitty: Exactly. Now go do the right thing, and lie to the woman you love.

Eric: Then they go into this bar and there are all these space creatures. Then someone makes the mistake of picking on Obi-Wan Kenobi. And then he takes out his lightsaber and he goes “whoosh” and he chops this guy’s arm right off… ’cause it’s a saber that’s made out of light! Kitty: You know, this doesn’t sound like a nice movie. Now, The Way We Were, that’s a nice movie.

Kitty: We are very disappointed in you, Eric. Even though going to California to rescue Donna is one of the most romantic things I have ever heard of.

Eric: Oh, hey, here comes a dumb question. Uh, I wasn’t a mistake, was I? Kitty: Oh, for… for… Okay! Who wants some cocoa?

Kitty Forman (That ’70s Show): ESFJ was originally published on MBTI Zone

[chateaugrief]

Donner Lake

Welp. Christmas is over, so all those happy feels, you can forget about ‘em. This is Donner Lake, site of one of the greatest horrors that ever happened in America. (seriously, you've been warned) It was 1846. Ninety pioneers set out from Missouri to take an unusual route to California called the Hastings cutoff which would allegedly save them some time versus the Oregon Trail where they only would have died of dysentery. Instead, they either starved to death, froze to death or were hunted down by the other guys and eaten. Everyone was eaten. See isn’t that a nice picturesque lake, perfect spot for some cabins in the winter time?

The Donner Party expedition was trouble from the start, the biggest takeaway I got from reading the diaries of these guys was that they absolutely hated each other, even from the beginning. There was a big shoving match between some of the more notable guys over who should be leader, and throughout the journey, you had people getting in fights and just taking off and leaving everyone, guys stabbing each other, everyone threatening to hang people. It was just all downhill from here, buckle up. Oh and even starting out some of these guys had tuberculosis. That was the first death, granny.  

So they all start out from Independence Missouri, following a svengali by the name of Lansford Hastings who said ‘don’t worry about a thing, I’ll blaze the trail across the great salt lake in utah ahead of you and leave notes nailed to trees and things so you know where to go’. Not everyone thought this was a great plan. James Reed, one of the warring leaders thought it sounded like a good idea though and won this argument, so from Fort Bridger (aside: I’ve mentioned Jim Bridger before, haven’t i? He’s the guy who left Hugh Glass for dead after he got attacked by a bear and Glass crawled two hundred miles back to civilization with a broken leg and his back ripped off) Well Bridger had a hand in convincing the Donner party to take the Hastings cutoff - Bridger was all like ‘oh sure theres lots of water, it’s a totes easy route, friendly indians’. For reference they filmed that crazy sequence from Pirates of the Caribbean where it’s flat white sand for the entire horizon in the salt flats that the Donner party crossed. As they were fighting through the difficult terrain of the Wasatch mountains they could see the salt below them stretching out for ever  and they started to realize that they were in a desperate situation. The second TB death happens. The wagons broke through the salt crust on top and sunk into the mud beneath, so everyone was Jack Sparrowing their way across 80 miles of insanity desert. Their cattle ran away from them they were so thirst crazed, or they just died in their tracks still yoked to the wagons, the remnants of whichwere still sitting out there in the desert in 1920’s and I doubt have moved. Six days without water, but no one died.  

Instead they all said, ‘we’re gonna kill James Reed for this’.  

Actually Reed and another guy got in a fight and Reed killed him with a knife.

“Snyder told that he would whip him, “anyhow;” and turning the butt of his whip, gave Mr. Reed a severe blow upon the head, which cut it very much. As Reed was in the act of dodging the blow, he stabbed Snyder a little below the collar-bone, cutting off the first rib, and driving the knife through the left lung. Snyder after this struck Mrs. Reed a blow upon the head, and Mr. Reed two blows upon the head, the last one bringing him down upon his knees. Snyder expired in about fifteen minutes.”

or

“Reed at this time was on the opposite side of the oxen from Snider, and said to Snider, “you have no business here in the way;” Snider said “it is my place.” Reed started toward him, and jumping over the wagon tongue, said, “you are a damned liar, and I’ll cut your heart out!” Snider pulled his clothes open on his breast and said, “cut away.” Reed ran to him and stuck a large six-inch butcher’s knife into his heart and cut off two ribs.”

So everyone was going to hang him, but instead they banished him into the wild, supposed to be without even a rifle, but one of his kids smuggled him a gun so he could hunt. Reed was all like, screw this lame wagon train and made it to Sacramento in 22 days, although he was very hungry by the time he got there. He knew that there would be trouble back at the wagon train so he tried to organize a rescue party immediately, but the snow had set in and he couldn’t get up the pass again. He’s one of the founding citizens of Santa Clara.

Meanwhile, back at the wagon train from hell, everyone distrusts each other, and won’t even travel together. Everyone’s hungry, the animals are so weak that they can’t pull anything extra. An old man, William Hardkoop age 70 was told that he had to walk or die. Why not both, you say? He walked until his feet split open, but still wasn’t fast enough and the others left him behind to die alone wandering through the forest. Also indian attack! and a man is killed (later one of the pioneer guys confessed on his deathbed to this killing, wasn’t the indians, these guys really hated each other)  

And now we come to 7000 ft Donner Pass. This is the low spot in these mountains, but the terrain is unimaginably difficult, and they make it to the lake just as the snow flurries start to fall. Pic related.  They can still barely keep this road open in the winter and they have round the clock snow removal. Donner Pass averages 411 inches of snow per year. The record snowfall was in 1938 and 1952 with over 800 inches. That is 70 feet of snow. Also we got winds gusting 100 mph because this is a high mountain pass. All time temperature low record is -45 F.  

Into all this roll the surviving Donner party. They had no food, even from the beginning, though they killed all their remaining cattle immediately, recognizing how bad this was going to get. To start out the winter, a guy is accidentally shot and killed by another guy who was ‘loading his gun’. They survived on leather, on mice, on anything. One guy managed to shoot and kill an 800 pound bear. Four men die at the Donner cabin of starvation. Mrs. Reed tries to take her children and hike out, but after four days in the snow have to turn back.  Two more people starve to death. It’s decided, the strongest must go get help. 14 pair of snowshoes are made out of the precious ox hide that everyone’s eating, and 17 people are selected to get help, men women and children, everyone with strength left to walk. The ten year olds weren’t given snow shoes. They called this party the “Forlorn Hope”. In three days everyone was snow-blind. Six days in all food was gone.  A man fell behind and died. The next they, they started talking about someone should volunteer to die in order to feed the others. Two people died in the night. Problem solved. Now people began to go crazy, one guy stripped off his clothes, ran around like a headless chicken and died. He was eaten. More people died. There was more discussion about killing others, a kindly person warned the targets and they snuck out on their own. Everyone who died was carefully cut up and eaten. Eventually they stumbled on the two who’d managed to sneak away. They shot them and ate them. After 33 days of this insanity, they ran into an indian village, and the indians gave them acorns and grass to eat, and they made it to Sacramento. Five women and two men survived.

But that’s hardly the worst part of this story. Back up in Donner pass,  

“Denton with his cane kept knocking pieces off the large rocks used as fire-irons on which to place the wood. Something bright attracted his attention, and picking up pieces of the rock he examined them closely; then turning to my mother he said: “Mrs. Reed, this is gold.” My mother replied that she wished it were bread.“ - Virginia Reed

“Then the little child of Mrs. Eddy who, with her two children, were with us, her husband having gone with the Forlorn Hope, died, and was not buried until its mother died two days later, and they lay in this same room with us two days and nights before we could get assistance to remove their corpses to the snow.” - William Murphy

Meanwhile the first relief party sets out from Sacramento and battles into the mountains for a week to reach the stranded Donner Party:

“19th at sundown reached the Cabins and found the people in great distress such as I never before witnessed there having been twelve deaths and more expected every hour the sight of us appeared to put life into their emaciated frames” - MD. Ritchie & Reasin P. Tucker

“The people were dying every day. They had been living on dead bodies for weeks.” - Daniel Rhoads

“Then they showed us up into their cabins, and we saw the bodies of them who had gone. Most of the flesh was all stripped off an’ eaten. The rest was rotten It was just awful. Ten war already dead and we could see some of ther others was going. They were too weak ter eat, an’ our pervisions bein’ scant, we thought it were best to let ’em go an’ look after th’ stronger ones.” - Riley Moutrey - though this account is disputed as being embellished

The relief party rests for a day or two and then turns around and attempts to take 20 of the strongest remaining women and children out. They’ve got a 7 days hard journey over the mountains, and their first cache of food had been found and eaten by a bear, so they promptly set about starving to death too. The people from the Donner party continue to weaken, and they had to leave one behind alive to die in the snow because he couldn’t walk anymore. Some of the children died. But they made it out to Bear valley where James Reed was leading a second relief party. He and Mrs. James Reed were reunited in what was by all accounts a very touching reunion, but he continued on his way because he had children who were still up there.

Both children were still alive, to his immense joy. “His party immediately commenced distributing their provisions among the sufferers, all of whom they found in the most deplorable condition. Among the cabins lay the fleshless bones and half eaten bodies of the victims of famine.” - J.H. Merryman

Reed takes 21 people out with him and his relief party, with his children and many of the others. He gets caught in a major storm.

“Still Storming verry cold so much so that the few men employed in Cutting the dry trees down have to Come and warm about very 10 minutes, hunger hunger is the Cry with the Children and nothing to give them freezing was the Cry of the mothers with reference to their little starving freezing Children Night Closing fast and with it the Hurricane Increases” - James Reed  

Children died, Reed’s cache of food had also been eaten by animals. There was no way to go but out.

“The next they traveled ten miles, and the great toes of many having bursted, they could have been tracked the whole distance by their blood. They now had been four days without provision” - James Reed

Really this just keeps getting worse and worse. Wanna read all the gory details start here at this excellent site.

The Third relief party gathers up the remaining people alive from Donner lake, and it wasn’t pretty lemme tell ya, and there’s a fourth relief party too. It was bad.

Of the ninety who set out, only forty-five people lived.  

If you made it this far, the comic is hardly the worst thing you could read today.  

[theconservativebrief]

Even Sen. John McCain’s adversaries admired him. “He’s a man of integrity,” Obama said once on an appearance on Jay Leno in 2013. Joe Biden tweeted when he was diagnosed with cancer: “John and I have been friends for 40 years. He’s gotten through so much difficulty with so much grace.” And, of course, McCain’s best friend, Joe Lieberman, wasn’t even a member of McCain’s party when he rode around on the campaign trail with him in 2008.

His office released a statement Saturday evening: “Senator John Sidney McCain III died at 4:28pm on August 25, 2018. With the Senator when he passed were his wife Cindy and their family. At his death, he had served the United States of America faithfully for sixty years.”

McCain was a rare Washington figure who was liked and respected — for who he was. It made him a popular figure nationally, seen by the public as a man above politics. But he was never quite popular enough to take the White House, leaving him in the Senate where his bipartisan friendships, ironically, didn’t serve him as well.

McCain died today at age 81. His leaves behind a momentous — and complex — legacy for American politics.

McCain’s political career has always been intimately connected to his service in the Vietnam War. Both his father and grandfather were naval officers and he followed in their footsteps, graduating the US Naval Academy in 1958. He became a naval aviator, was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and endured nearly six years of captivity and torture before returning home in 1973.

US Navy Airforce Major John McCain being examined by a Vietnamese doctor in 1967. AFP/Getty Images

Twenty years later, McCain was a United States Senator and worked in collaboration with John Kerry, a fellow Vietnam vet turned politician whose wartime service and subsequent political career took a very different direction, to begin laying the groundwork for normalization of relations between the US and Vietnam.

McCain not only did legwork that was important to the Clinton administration’s full normalization in 1995, his strong support for the move offered a crucial dose of political cover from a Republican, a defense hawk, and a Vietnam veteran who’d suffered mightily at the hands of the enemy. Normalization has been so successful that there’s been barely any controversy over it since it happened in a way that can obscure what a potentially dicey move this was at the time and it stands as perhaps McCain’s clearest enduring legacy in American politics.

McCain’s personal experience with torture also inspired another signature issue stance of his, one whose durability is more in question — a steadfast years-long effort against torture committed by the American government. After revelations that the Bush administration had permitted torture tactics in interrogations, McCain helped lead the charge for legislative changes. And while McCain at times disappointed civil libertarians and human rights activists by not drawing as hard a line as they would have liked, the reality was, again, that his stature as a Republican defense hawk with a profoundly relevant personal story was key to forging a workable anti-torture politics.

Sen. John McCain was honored for over 63 years of dedicated service to the nation and the U.S. Navy at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia on November 14, 2017. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Trump has never gone forward with his 2016 campaign promises to bring torture back, in part because McCain clearly indicated that this was a red line for him. His passing raises a serious question of who, if anyone, could mount a politically effect anti-torture push in congress were Trump to change his mind on this.

Notably McCain was really not a civil libertarian on any broader set of issues related to surveillance or criminal justice. Torture was, to him, a unique evil and something he took very personally — part of a larger pattern of a highly personalized view of the political landscape.

A deregulation of elements of the banking industry in the early 1980s led to a boom in new lending activity from Savings and Loan institutions, many of whom ended up taking on unwise risks and going bust — at great expense to the taxpayer via FDIC guarantees.

One of the over 700 S&Ls that went bust was the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, California whose chairman Charles Keating was a generous donor to a number of politicians’ campaign funds. Beginning in 1985 the Federal Home Loan Bank Board began to look askance at Lincoln’s activities, and Keating called in political favors to try to get the dogs called off. There were a bunch of ins-and-outs to this but the climax was a 1987 meeting between FHLB officials and five United States Senators — Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), John Glenn (D-OH), John McCain (R-AZ), and Donald Riegle (D-MI) — at which pressure was brought to bear for regulators to go easy.

Senators John Glenn (D-Ohio) left, Dennis DeConccini (D-Ariz.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) arrive at the Senate Ethics committee hearing on Nov.15, 1990. The senators were facing charges that they took part in alleged influence peddling to help former savings and loan owner Charles H. Keating, Jr. John Duricka/AP

Lincoln ended up going bust and its allies in the Senate — known as the Keating Five — became a major 1980s political scandal. The Senate Ethics Committee concluded that McCain had exercised “poor judgment” but not done anything formally wrong.

The incident, however, became a serious black mark on his reputation, a mark that he sought to excise in part by becoming a leading champion of campaign finance reform during the 1990s. The key issue of that era was that while federal regulations capped individual donations to a campaign, they allowed for unlimited donations to a political party. Prominent politicians — and especially presidential candidates — would thus engage in extensive raising of what was called “soft money,” unlimited contributions to the DNC or RNC that could then be used to buy ads or engage in other political spending.

McCain championed legislation to close this soft-money loophole in the 1990s, it became a key issue during his 2000 primary campaign against George W. Bush, and his signature bill — the McCain-Feingold bill — was passed into law in 2002. The Supreme Court, however, both ruled some of its key provisions unconstitutional and in later rulings opened up the loopholes that have created the modern-day Super PAC — an institution that owing to its lack of formal affiliation with a party or a candidate can raise unlimited unregulated sums of money. Politicians can even appear at Super PAC fundraiser events and meet with donors, they just need to step out of the room for the part where the check actually exchanges hands.

Consequently, McCain’s dalliance with political reform ended up having little practical impact. It did, however, the course for perhaps the most interesting political trajectory of the 21st century.

McCain does not appear to have consciously intended his embrace of the campaign finance reform topic to be a major act of ideological heterodoxy.

But as he discovered when he ran for president in 2000, essentially all the major interest groups and players in Republican Party politics saw it as a threat to their interests. So riding high on a wave of then-unprecedented small dollar donations and positive media coverage, McCain’s criticisms of Bush during the primary became increasingly broad criticisms of the larger universe of conservative politics. He slammed Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance” and analogized his campaign to Luke Skywalker doing battle with an evil empire of institutional interests.

George W. Bush, Gary Bauer, and John McCain during a debate at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH., on January 6, 2000. Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

McCain lost, of course, but upon returning to the senate was a substantially changed figure. He voted against Bush’s signature 2001 tax cut (a bill that earned support from a dozen Senate Democrats) and then again against its 2003 sequel. For a brief time in 2002 it was even in vogue for pundits to tout the idea that McCain should switch parties and run for president as the leading figure of the then-ascendant hawkish wing of the Democratic Party.

Joshua Green, David Broder, Timothy Noah, and Jonathan Chait (in an article that sadly seems to be no longer available online thanks to turmoil at The New Republic where it ran) all made versions of this argument conceding, of course, that McCain would need to discover newfound pro choice convictions on the abortion issue but otherwise seeing it as the logical next step.

This didn’t happen. But for a time in the mid-aughts, McCain positioned himself as a kind of independent third force in politics drawing explicit analogies to Theodore Roosevelt and even allowing aides to draw even more explicit analogies to Roosevelt’s 1912 third party campaign. The basic outlines here were hawkish on foreign policy, reformist on political process, and favorable toward high-minded elite projects like comprehensive immigration reform and carbon emissions pricing.

President George W. Bush with US Sen. John McCain after speaking to US troops at Fort Lewis Army Base in Washington, on June 2004. Luke Frazza/AFP/Getty Images

But national security has always been the topic on which McCain has the deepest convictions, and escalating partisan conflict over the Iraq War after the 2004 election tended to push him consistently closer to the Bush administration while alienating his more progressive fans. By 2007, McCain was beating a retreat back toward establishmentarian politics and in light of Bush’s deep unpopularity by the end of his term it became clear to Republican leaders that a nominee distanced from Bush in the public mind would be a good idea. McCain not only became the 2008 nominee, but was the establishment’s favorite choice for the job — and as a candidate he promised to permanently extend the tax cuts he’d once opposed.

McCain, of course, not only lost in 2008 he lost badly with Barack Obama carrying such unlikely states as Indiana and North Carolina on the way to what remains the biggest presidential landslide of the past 25 years. And it was in many ways an epic bad beat. McCain was very popular on Election Day 2008 with an approval rating that far outpaced either candidate in the 2012 or 2016 elections.

It’s just that Obama was also very popular and, more importantly, the larger Republican Party had totally discredited itself with a series of scandals, a failed war in Iraq, and then an epic economic collapse. McCain was a strong candidate swimming against a much stronger current of adverse objective circumstances. But he’d also made a risky and ultimately failed gamble with his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to serve as his Vice Presidential nominee. In some sense, taking a risky bet was the right play since he was so clearly on track to lose at the time of the national conventions that there was really no downside to picking her. But McCain has always cared deeply about his reputation as an honorable figure, and selecting a lightweight demagogue who he barely even knew to serve a heartbeat away from the presidency was a serious blow to that reputation, especially in elite circles.

Sen. John McCain and wife Cindy campaign with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (left) and husband Todd Palin in Tucson, Arizona, on March 26, 2010. Darren Hauck/Getty Images

And McCain responded to the loss of both the presidential election and elite esteem by retreating back into orthodox conservatism. During its critical first two years in office, the Obama White House found no help from the one-time maverick on any topic including issues like the DREAM Act where both earlier and later in his career he would tend to side with Democrats.

Later, in Obama’s second term when much of the GOP establishment reacted to his 2012 reelection by deciding that Republicans had to embrace immigration reform to survive in an increasingly diverse America, McCain was back on the immigration reform bandwagon. He served as a leading member of the “Gang of 8” comprehensive immigration reform bill that overwhelmingly passed the Senate only to be refused a vote on the House floor. And then he watched as Donald Trump stormed to obtain the GOP nomination on the precise opposite platform.

In terms of temperament, Trump and McCain are in certain respects very much cut from the same cloth in terms of having a highly personalized approach to politics and little investment in the economic policy debates that are at the core of most partisan conflict.

But on the plane of character, they’re nearly inverse. McCain courted the press corps assiduously while Trump disdains it. McCain relishes a reputation for probity, honor, and integrity while Trump revels in shamelessness. McCain is a profound believer in a sense that America has a grand, “exceptional” role to play in the world while Trump sees foreign affairs through a narrow transactional lens. McCain’s vision of the Republican Party’s future is to recruit and embrace upwardly-mobile people of Latin American ancestry, while Trump’s is to reconceptualize the GOP as a vehicle for white identity politics.

Trump even went so far as to directly criticize the foundational myth of McCain’s political persona, arguing that he’s not a real war hero since he was captured.

[embedded content]

Trump, meanwhile, once described avoiding sexual transmitted diseases while cadding around in the 1970s as his “personal Vietnam,” clashed with McCain on torture, and of course is profoundly at odds with him on the question of Vladimir Putin and the US-Russia relationship.

Since Trump’s accession to the presidency, McCain (or, as his illness has worsened, his press office) has repeatedly criticized Trump on a variety of grounds. But with one very noticeable exception, he hasn’t genuinely done much about it.

Last summer, Affordable Care Act repeal efforts were hanging in the balance on the strength of an odd notion known as “skinny repeal” that, rather than replace the ACA with some coherent alternative vision of health care, would have simply destabilized it by knocking out the individual mandate to purchase health insurance and sending premiums skyrocketing.

At the time, Republican Senators generally acknowledged that this was a bad idea. The point was less to pass a bill than simply to pass something and move on to conference committee with the House.

“The whole emphasis is we’re trying to get something to go to conference committee with,” a Senate Republican aide told Vox’s Dylan Scott at the time. “I don’t know if it’s the main plan. But we have to get something done.”

At the literal last minute, McCain swooped in, made a dramatic thumbs down gesture, and provided the critical third Republican vote to kill the bill.

“We Republicans have looked for a way to end [Obamacare] and replace it with something else without paying a terrible political price,” he said at the time. “We haven’t found it yet, and I’m not sure we will.”

Oddly, though, just a few months later both McCain and his fellow skinny repeal opponents Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME) would vote in favor of a regressive, deficit-busting tax cut that included repeal of the individual mandate. That’s fairly emblematic of Trump critics’ frustrations with McCain’s behavior in the final chapter of his political career. He has been doggedly — and seemingly quite sincerely — critical of Trump across a whole range of issues, but with relatively little efficacy on any topic.

The issue, on some level, is that while McCain’s personalistic approach to politics succeeded at its proximate goal of making him a well-regarded and frequently pivotal figure in American public life it never quite managed to land him in the presidency. It’s very conceivable that he would have won either the 2000 or the 2004 nomination had he obtained the Republican or Democratic nominations, and he was certainly popular enough to win in 2008 had the circumstances been different. And as president, he could have left his stamp on America just as, in their very different ways, his hero TR and his nemesis Trump did. But legislating is essentially a team sport, and McCain was a genuine maverick rather than a team player — frequently at odds with his own party’s congressional leadership, uninterested in organizing a moderate bloc of his own, and certainly uninterested in enlisting as a reliable foot-soldier in anyone else’s ongoing legislative products.

The result is a great American story that left its mark on a range of policy topics without having an incredibly clear through-line as a set of ideas that can or will be carried forward by a successor generation.

Sen. John McCain leaves after a vote at the Capitol on September 5, 2017. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Original Source -> John McCain, who died at 81, explained

via The Conservative Brief

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Firefighters battle exhaustion along with wildfire flames (AP) They work 50 hours at a stretch and sleep on gymnasium floors. Exploding trees shower them with embers. They lose track of time when the sun is blotted out by smoke, and they sometimes have to run for their lives from advancing flames. Firefighters trying to contain the massive wildfires in Oregon, California and Washington state are constantly on the verge of exhaustion as they try to save suburban houses, including some in their own neighborhoods. Each home or barn lost is a mental blow for teams trained to protect lives and property. And their own safety is never assured. Oregon firefighter Steve McAdoo’s shift on Sept. 7 seemed mostly normal, until late evening, when the team went to a fire along a highway south of Portland. “Within 10 minutes of being there, it advanced too fast and so quick ... we had to cut and run,” he said. “You can’t breathe, you can’t see.” That happened again and again as he and the rest of the crew worked shifts that lasted two full days with little rest or food. They toiled in an alien environment where the sky turns lurid colors, ash falls like rain and towering trees explode into flames, sending a cascade of embers to the forest floor. “The sky was just orange or black, and so we weren’t sure if was morning or night,” he said. “My crew and I said that to each other many times, ‘What is going on? When is this going to end?’”

Rescuers reach people cut off by Gulf Coast hurricane (AP) Rescuers on the Gulf Coast used boats and high-water vehicles Thursday to reach people cut off by floodwaters in the aftermath of Hurricane Sally, even as a second round of flooding took shape along rivers and creeks swollen by the storm’s heavy rains. Across southern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, homeowners and businesses began cleaning up, and officials inspected bridges and highways for safety, a day after Sally rolled through with 105 mph (165 kph) winds, a surge of seawater and 1 to 2 1/2 feet (0.3 to 0.8 meters) of rain in many places before it began to break up. Crews carried out at least 400 rescues in Escambia County, Florida, by such means as high-water vehicles, boats and water scooters, authorities said. In Alabama, on both sides of Mobile Bay, National Guard soldiers from high-water evacuation teams used big trucks Thursday to rescue at least 35 people. At least one death, in Alabama, was blamed on the hurricane. Nearly 400,000 homes and businesses were still without power Thursday night, mostly in Alabama and Florida.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies at 87 (AP) Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a towering women’s rights champion who became the court’s second female justice, died Friday at her home in Washington. She was 87. Ginsburg died of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, the court said. Her death just over six weeks before Election Day is likely to set off a heated battle over whether President Donald Trump should nominate, and the Republican-led Senate should confirm, her replacement, or if the seat should remain vacant until the outcome of his race against Democrat Joe Biden is known.

Flights to nowhere (Washington Post) With international travel in much of the world still disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, some airlines are resorting to “flights to nowhere” that target passengers who long for air travel—and some are willing to shell out plenty of money for the tickets. Qantas, among the latest to advertise a flight that departs and arrives at the same airport, told Reuters that the trip sold out less than 10 minutes after going on sale on Thursday. “It’s probably the fastest-selling flight in Qantas history,” a spokeswoman for the airline said.

Health-care workers make up 1 in 7 covid-19 cases recorded globally, WHO says (Washington Post) Health-care workers account for 1 in 7 coronavirus cases recorded by the World Health Organization, the U.N. agency said this week. “Globally, around 14 percent of covid-19 cases reported to WHO are among health workers, and in some countries it’s as much as 35 percent,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference in Geneva. The figures are disproportionate: Data collected by the WHO suggests that health workers represent less than 3 percent of the population in the majority of countries and less than 2 percent in almost all low- and middle-income countries. In April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that health-care workers accounted for 11 percent to 16 percent of covid-19 cases during the first surge of infections in the United States. When covid-19 began spreading through Western nations early this year, health-care workers faced critical shortages of personal protective equipment, also known as PPE. Even now, well over half a year into the pandemic, there are shortages of tests.

Bank of England considers negative interest rates (Yahoo Finance) The Bank of England yesterday indicated that it could cut interest rates below zero for the first time in its 326-year history as it tries to shore up a U.K. economic recovery that is facing the dual headwinds of the coronavirus and Brexit. After unanimously deciding to maintain the bank’s main interest rate at the record low of 0.1%, the nine-member rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee said it had discussed its “policy toolkit, and the effectiveness of negative policy rates in particular.”

Why French Politicians Can’t Stop Talking About Crime (NYT) In the Babel Tower of French politics, everyone agrees at least on this: Crime is out of control. The leader of the far right warned recently that France was a “security shipwreck” sinking into “barbarity.” A traditional conservative conjured up the ultraviolent dystopia of “A Clockwork Orange.” On the left, the presumed Green Party candidate in the next presidential contest described the insecurity as “unbearable.” And in the middle, President Emmanuel Macron’s ministers warned of a country “turning savage”—the “ensauvagement” of France—as they vowed to get tough on crime and combat the “separatism” of radical Muslims. The only catch? Crime isn’t going up. The government’s own data show that nearly all major crimes are lower than they were a decade ago or three years ago. But like elsewhere, and mirroring the campaign in the United States, the debate over crime tends to be a proxy—in France’s case, for debates about immigration, Islam, race, national identity and other combustible issues that have roiled the country for years.

India’s coronavirus cases jump by another 96K (AP) India’s coronavirus cases jumped by another 96,424 infections in the past 24 hours, showing little sign of leveling. The Health Ministry on Friday raised the nation’s total past 5.21 million, 0.37% of its nearly 1.4 billion people. India is expected to have the highest national total of confirmed cases within weeks, surpassing the United States, where more than 6.67 million people have been infected. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his birthday on Thursday made a fresh appeal to people to wear masks and maintain social distance as his government chalked out plans to handle big congregations expected during a major Hindu festival season beginning next month.

Russia boosts its military presence near Chinese border (Foreign Policy) Russia is bolstering its troop presence in the country’s east in response to growing geopolitical threats in the region, though the Kremlin did not say what those threats are. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that 500 units of new, advanced equipment were being sent to the region, but he did not specify the destination. The moves are likely a response to China’s growing assertiveness, though some parts of the region have been gripped by protests against the government of President Vladimir Putin in recent weeks. In July, people took to the streets in the city of Khabarovsk, which lies along the border with China, after the arrest of the region’s hugely popular governor, Sergei Furgal, who beat out Putin’s favored candidate in an election in September 2018.

Taiwan scrambles air force as multiple Chinese jets buzz island (Reuters) Taiwan scrambled fighter jets on Friday as multiple Chinese aircraft buzzed the island, including crossing the sensitive mid-line of the Taiwan Strait, in an escalation of tensions the same day a senior U.S. official began meetings in Taipei. Earlier on Friday, China’s Defence Ministry announced the start of combat drills near the Taiwan Strait, denouncing what it called collusion between the Chinese-claimed island and the United States. Beijing has watched with growing alarm the ever-closer relationship between Taipei and Washington, and has stepped up military exercises near the island, including two days of mass air and sea drills last week.

Apprehensive Thais await major political rally in Bangkok (AP) A two-day rally planned this weekend is jangling nerves in Bangkok, with apprehension about how far student demonstrators will go in pushing demands for reform of Thailand’s monarchy and how the authorities might react. In an escalation of tactics, organizers plan to march to Government House, the prime minister’s offices, to hand over petitions. The initial demands of the alliance of groups behind a series of anti-government demonstrations were for a dissolution of Parliament with fresh elections, a new constitution and an end to intimidation of political activists. But the main organizers behind this weekend’s rally have been promoting an additional point. They want restraints on the power of the monarchy, an institution long presented as the nation’s cornerstone and untouchable. This open challenge to the palace has dramatically raised the political temperature.

‘Boiling again’: Lebanon’s old rivalries rear up amid crisis (Reuters) An old rivalry between Christian factions who fought each other in Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war has flared again on the street and in political debate, renewing fears of fresh unrest as the nation grapples with its worst crisis since the conflict. The feud between supporters of Michel Aoun, now Lebanon’s president, and Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces (LF) led to a tense standoff this week near Beirut. Gunshots rang out, but no one was hurt. The rivalry today is about more than Christian politics: Aoun is allied with Hezbollah, the heavily armed, Iran-backed Shi’ite party. Geagea spearheads opposition to Hezbollah, saying it should surrender its weapons. The standoff was the latest in a country that has seen sporadic violence intensify as an economic crisis that erupted last year has deepened. It was compounded by a huge blast that ripped through Beirut on Aug. 4. The government has resigned and efforts to form a new one under French pressure are floundering. “The security situation is reaching a breaking point,” said Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center.

Israelis Prepare to Celebrate the Year’s Holiest Days Under Lockdown (NYT) As Israelis prepare to celebrate the holiest days on the Jewish calendar under a fresh lockdown, organizing prayer services is proving to be more of a mathematical brainteaser than a spiritual exercise. Rabbis are having to arrange worshipers into clusters of 20 to 50, separated by dividers, determining the number and size of the groups based on complex calculations involving local infection rates, and how many entrances and square feet their synagogues have. Masks will be required, and many seats will have to remain empty. The three-week national lockdown was timed to coincide with the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur holy days and the festival of Sukkot, in the hope of causing less economic damage because business slows down in any case around the holidays. It was also aimed at preventing large family meals that could become petri dishes for the virus. Israel successfully limited the spread of the virus in the spring, but recently its infection rate has spiraled into one of the world’s worst. The country has had more than 300 confirmed new cases per 100,000 people over the last week—more than double the rate in Spain, the hardest-hit European country, and quadruple that of the United States.

Violence in Ethiopia (Foreign Policy) More than 30 people were killed in militia attacks in western Ethiopia last week, officials said on Thursday, underscoring the country’s worsening security situation and creating new problems for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. The attackers are “groups aimed at overturning the reforms journey,” Abiy said in a tweet. Abiy entered government promising sweeping reforms of the country’s political system, but his efforts have since faced criticism from opponents and former allies. Last week, the country’s Tigray region held parliamentary elections despite the national government’s decision to postpone the vote over coronavirus concerns. The region is home to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the country’s dominant political force before Abiy’s takeover in 2019.