#dont bring the myths - and the religion it comes with them - if you never had the work to open a book about the myths

[deliajackson]

Imagine saying the Gods from the Myths are not the embodiment of natural law because you don't like how they are portrayed in a children's book.

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Want Lower Taxes

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-want-lower-taxes/

Why Do Republicans Want Lower Taxes

Democrats Vs Republicans On Taxes

Why Do People Think Lower Taxes Help the Economy?

While Republicans believe in balancing spending cuts with tax cuts across the board, Democrats believe in cutting taxes for the middle and lower class, while raising them for the upper class. They believe in a higher marginal rate, with income tax being higher for those who make more, as opposed to the Republican views that taxes should be equal percentages for all income levels. In the 2012 Party Platform, 56% of republicans opposed raising taxes on those who earned over $250,000. This isnt to say that Republicans do not believe in focusing relief on the middle and lower classes; they do, however, believe in relief for all Americans, and not in raising taxes on the upper classes.

What Do Republicans Believe In

Do all Republicans believe the same things? Of course not. Rarely do members of a single political group agree on all issues. Even among Republicans, there are differences of opinion. As a group, they do not agree on every issue.

Some folks vote Republican because of fiscal concerns. Often, that trumps concerns they may have about social issues. Others are less interested in the fiscal position of the party. They vote they way they do because of religion. They believe Republicans are the party of morality. Some simply want less government. They believe only Republicans can solve the problem of big government. Republicans spend less . They lower taxes: some people vote for that alone.

However, the Republican Party does stand for certain things. So I’m answering with regard to the party as a whole. Call it a platform. Call them core beliefs. The vast majority of Republicans adhere to certain ideas.

So what do Republicans believe? Here are their basic tenets:

Conservatives Dont Hate Socialism They Hate Equality

They want to take away your hamburgers, former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka in February. This is what Stalin dreamt about America will never be a socialist country! The Conservative Political Action Conference audience cheered. The video played on my phone as I waved at Danny, the homeless man who begs for food every morning at the Newark Penn Station, where scores of poor people sleep in wheelchairs or lean on crutches or stand by the delis to ask for change.

These folks need more than hamburgers. They need jobs and homes. Yet, as the 2020 election season starts, Trump has branded progressives as socialists who will steal property and bring tyranny. The presidents fearmongering contrasts with the actual Green New Deal that some Democrats support but failed to pass in the GOP-controlled Senate. Its a fear driven by ideology. Republicans paint the poor as undeserving, marked by cultural or personal character flaws. Whereas Democratic Socialists believe people have the ability to run the economy and society to meet their needs. Why this difference in perception? It is because Republicans arent afraid of socialism they are afraid of equality with people they see as inferior.

Read Also: How Many Democrats And Republicans Are In The House

To Fund The $35 Trillion Budget Plan Democrats Aim To Undo Trump Tax Cuts

To Fund The $3.5 Trillion Budget Plan, Democrats Aim To Undo Trump Tax Cuts

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The 10% cuts were “across the board,” as he liked to say, implying they were of equal value to all. The dollar value of the cuts was, of course, far larger for those with larger incomes. Moreover, the tax law changes that accompanied the rate cuts made it easier for individuals and corporations to “write off” various forms of income and spending to lower their tax bills further. The tax rate for capital gains, money made from successful investing, would come down from 28% to 20%.

Reagan did not get everything he sought in this initial foray against high taxes and progressivity. The Senate trimmed the third year of the tax cut from 10% to 5%, and it would take a second bill, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, to pull the marginal top rate all the way down to 28%.

But Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 constituted the strongest move away from progressivity in the income tax since the tax was initiated in the Civil War.

They were the culmination of rising anti-tax sentiment in the late 1970s, when some states adopted tax limitations by popular referendum. That spirit was kept alive in the decades to come by groups such as Americans for Tax Reform, led by activist Grover Norquist. Starting in 1986, Norquist has challenged candidates for office to sign his “taxpayer protection pledge” not to raise taxes. The great majority of Republicans have signed.

Reagan Pared Back Progressivity

Reagan was able to reverse what had been a decades-long commitment to at least the look of progressivity. He could do it in part because his 1980 election coattails enabled his party to capture control of the Senate for the first time in a quarter century. Moreover, while Democrats still had a House majority, their ranks included scores of members from Southern and Midwestern districts that had also voted for Reagan.

When the budget resolution passed in that summer of 1981, 63 House Democrats joined all 190 Republicans in backing it. And when the tax package came to its critical votes in July, dozens of Democrats sided with Reagan and the Republicans rather than their own leadership.

In 1982, Democrats added to their majority in the House and negotiated some revenue increases with the Senate and the White House. And in Reagan’s second term, momentum built quickly for a tax overhaul that would combine still lower marginal rates with new business taxes and a paring back of tax preferences and other “loopholes.” The new overhaul’s main appeal to Democrats was that it exempted far more middle- and lower-income earners from the income tax altogether.

Career anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, here in 2018, called the Trump administration’s 2017 tax cut “Reaganite” the ultimate compliment from the founder of Americans for Tax Reform.hide caption

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Gop Real Estate Owners Make Out Big

Besides the laws benefits to real estate pass-throughs, real estate in general was hugely favored by the tax law, allowing property exchanges to avoid taxation, the deduction of new capital expenses in just one year versus longer depreciation schedules, and an exemption from limits on interest deductions.;

If you are a real estate developer, you never pay tax, said Ed Kleinbard, a former head of Congresss Joint Committee on Taxation.;

Members of Congress own a lot of real estate. Public Integritys review of financial disclosures found that 29 of the 47 GOP members of the committees responsible for the tax bill hold interests in real estate, including small rental businesses, LLCs, and massive real estate investment trusts , which pay dividends to investors. The tax bill allows REIT investors to deduct 20 percent from their dividends for tax purposes.;

Who We Are

The Center for Public Integrity is an independent, investigative newsroom that exposes betrayals of the public trust by powerful interests.

Its Not Easy Being Green

Democratic socialism is not a Marxist fever dream; its a call for help. Its less socialism than humanitarian aid for a people in crisis. Millions of Americans are in dead-end jobs, slipping behind on bills, deep in debt and scared of climate change.

Something is wrong with capitalism, Martin Luther King Jr. told his staff in 1966. There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Saying the economic system causes pain means moving beyond the conservative image of the poor as flawed, personally or culturally, or the liberal image of them as unlucky victims of a more or less functioning meritocracy. To honor our human potential, capitalism must be dismantled, its pieces taken apart and recombined into a new world.

Climate change is one of the biggest existential threats to our way of life, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said at the rollout of the Green New Deal. To combat that threat, we need to be as ambitious and innovative as possible. In its 14 pages, the plan envisions a World War II-scale mobilization of millions of workers. They will repair roads and bridges, build smart grids, upgrade industry to be zero carbon, build green public transit, remove carbon from the air, clean up waste sites, and clean up the poisoned land and waterways. When they come home, those workers can rest in new, green housing, and if sick or injured, they can go see a doctor, using a Medicare for All card.

Recommended Reading: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

Most Welfare Recipients Are Makers Not Takers

The first myth, that people who receive public benefits are takers rather than makers, is flatly untrue for the vast majority of working-age recipients.

Consider Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, formerly known as food stamps, which currently serve about 42 million Americans. At least one adult in more than half of SNAP-recipient households are working. And the average SNAP subsidy is $125 per month, or $1.40 per meal hardly enough to justify quitting a job.

As for Medicaid, nearly 80 percent of adults receiving Medicaid live in families where someone works, and more than half are working themselves.

In early December, House Speaker Paul Ryan said, We have a welfare system thats trapping people in poverty and effectively paying people not to work.

Not true. Welfare officially called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families has required work as a condition of eligibility since then-President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law in 1996. And the earned income tax credit, a tax credit for low- and moderate-income workers, by definition, supports only people who work.

Workers apply for public benefits because they need assistance to make ends meet. American workers are among the most productive in the world, but over the last 40 years the bottom half of income earners have seen no income growth. As a result, since 1973, worker productivity has grown almost six times faster than wages.

Religion And The Belief In God Is Vital To A Strong Nation

Lower Taxes, Higher Revenue

Republicans are generally accepting only of the Judeo-Christian belief system. For most Republicans, religion is absolutely vital in their political beliefs and the two cannot be separated. Therefore, separation of church and state is not that important to them. In fact, they believe that much of what is wrong has been caused by too much secularism.

Those are the four basic Republican tenets: small government, local control, the power of free markets, and Christian authority. Below are other things they believe that derive from those four ideas.

Read Also: When Did Democrats And Republicans Switch Platforms

Orrin Hatch Tom Coburn And Richard Burr On Health Care

More recently, senators Orrin Hatch of Utah, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and Richard Burr of North Carolina have headed up the Republican fight on health care. Their proposal was named the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility and Empowerment Act, and is based upon the principle of providing more flexibility and purchasing power to the individual. It shares some important similarities with the Affordable Care Act, such as the requirement to allow dependent coverage through the age of 26, and the inability of insurance companies to provide lifetime limits. When the three senators released their proposal, Burr stated The American people have found out what is in ObamaCare broken promises in the form of increased health care costs, costly mandates and government bureaucracy. We can lower costs and expand access to quality coverage and care by empowering individuals and their families to make their own health care decisions, rather than empowering the government to make those decisions for them.;The group stated that their proposal is designed to be roughly budget neutral over the first 10 years, leaving the financial burden on the American people at nothing. Coburn commented that they created this proposal because Its critical we chart another path forward. Our health care system wasnt working well before ObamaCare and it is worse after ObamaCare.

What The Needy Deserve

The second myth is that low-income Americans do not deserve a helping hand.

This idea derives from our belief that the U.S. is a meritocracy where the most deserving rise to the top. Yet where a person ends up on the income ladder is tied to where they started out.

Indeed, America is not nearly as socially mobile as we like to think. Forty percent of Americans born into the bottom-income quintile the poorest 20 percent will stay there. And the same stickiness exists in the top quintile.

As for people born into the middle class, only 20 percent will ascend to the top quintile in their lifetimes.

The third myth is that government assistance is a waste of money and doesnt accomplish its goals.

In fact, poverty rates would double without the safety net, to say nothing of human suffering. Last year, the safety net lifted 38 million people, including 8 million children, out of poverty.

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An Exhaustive Lobbying Campaign

Almost immediately after Mr. Trump signed the bill, companies and their lobbyists including G.E.s Mr. Brown began a full-court pressure campaign to try to shield themselves from the BEAT and GILTI.

The Treasury Department had to figure out how to carry out the hastily written law, which lacked crucial details.

Chip Harter was the Treasury official in charge of writing the rules for the BEAT and GILTI. He had spent decades at PwC and the law firm Baker McKenzie, counseling companies on the same sorts of tax-avoidance arrangements that the new law was supposed to discourage.

Starting in January 2018, he and his colleagues found themselves in nonstop meetings roughly 10 a week at times with lobbyists for companies and industry groups.

The Organization for International Investment a powerful trade group for foreign multinationals like the Swiss food company Nestlé and the Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell objected to a Treasury proposal that would have prevented companies from using a complex currency-accounting maneuver to avoid the BEAT.

The groups lobbyists were from PwC and Baker McKenzie, Mr. Harters former firms, according to public lobbying disclosures. One of them, Pam Olson, was the top Treasury tax official in the George W. Bush administration.

This month, the Treasury issued the final version of some of the BEAT regulations. The Organization for International Investment got what it wanted.

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How Democrats And Republicans Differ On Matters Of Wealth And Equality

A protester wears a T-shirt in support of Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is part of … a group of Democrats looking to beat Trump in 2020. Photographer: John Taggart/Bloomberg

If youre a rich Democrat, you wake up each day with self-loathing, wondering how you can make the world more egalitarian. Please tax me more, you say to your elected officials. Until then, the next thing you do is call your financial advisor to inquire about tax shelters.

If youre a poor Republican, however, you have more in common with the Democratic Party than the traditional Wall Street, big business base of the Republican Party, according to a survey by the Voter Study Group, a two-year-old consortium made up of academics and think tank scholars from across the political spectrum. That means the mostly conservative American Enterprise Institute and Cato were also on board with professors from Stanford and Georgetown universities when conducting this study, released this month.

The fact that lower-income Republicans, largely known as the basket of deplorables, support more social spending and taxing the rich was a key takeaway from this years report, says Lee Drutman, senior fellow on the political reform program at New America, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

Across party lines, only 37% of respondents said they supported government getting active in reducing differences in income, close to the 39% who opposed it outright. Some 24% had no opinion on the subject.

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Us House Democrats Seek To Roll Back Trump Tax Cuts For Wealthy Corporations

WASHINGTON, Sept 13 – Leading Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday proposed a substantial roll-back of former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, including raising the top tax rate on corporations to 26.5% from the current 21%.

Democrats on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee said they will debate legislation this week that would achieve the changes as part of their broader, $3.5 trillion domestic investment plan.

In an attempt to finance the new spending, the Democratic-led committee will debate a proposal to raise $2.9 trillion in revenue over 10 years, according to a document circulated among members of the panel.

Besides increasing corporate taxes, wealthy individuals would see a jump in their income taxes as well as higher capital gains and estate taxes.

Even if the legislation as proposed passes Congress and is signed by Democratic President Joe Biden, corporate taxes would still be lower than they were before the enactment of the tax cuts pushed through by Republicans in 2017. But the top individual income tax rate would revert to its pre-2017 level.

The tax-writing Ways and Means Committee has scheduled work sessions for Tuesday and Wednesday to debate tax policy and other matters under its jurisdiction to be included in the $3.5 trillion “reconciliation” bill, which would require a simple majority to be passed in the Senate.

REPUBLICANS OPPOSED

Republican Senators Push Social Security Medicare And Medicaid Cuts After Supporting Ineffective Tax Cuts

Republicans Target Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

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The economy is recovering from the depths of the pandemic in large part due to the massive relief packages that Congress passed in 2020 and 2021. Just in time for this recovery, Senate Republicans are pushing for cuts to vital programs. According to news reports, five GOP senators are proposing a commission that would come up with proposals to balance the federal budget within a decade. Given that four of the five sponsors of this idea have signed on to the tax pledge to never, ever under any circumstances raise taxes, they are looking for programs to cut. They consequently take aim mainly at cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

These targeted programs are already and will continue to prove crucial to the financial and physical health of millions of Americans that have suffered from the pandemic. Many workers, especially older ones, have lost their jobs permanently and will move into early retirement with permanently lower benefits and little or no savings outside of those benefits. Millions of Americans, again particularly among older ones, experience long-term consequences from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel virus. Those hardest hit by pandemic will need strong, expanded retirement and health benefits, not cuts to an already basic system.

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[nikkilaurinaitis]

Hello! To start off your Ambassador work, can you tell us about common superstitions in your country? Thank you! (If you would like a different question, let me know)!

Common german superstitionsit is then! Or, to use the german name, “Aberglaube”, literally translated “But-Belief”! But first, let us talk about the Origin of the word “Superstition” in general! The word “Superstition” comes from the latin word “Superstitio”, what meant “Overbelief”. The Romans used the word to describe the fall from the “true beliefs” and this word was later used to describe non-christian religions, giving them a demonic touch! So much to that! To be quite honest, there doesnt seem to be too many things that bring bad luck like in other cultures. Many things, like black cats or breaking a mirror, seem to be internationally accepted to bring misfortune! None the less, I was able to find a few that where more specific to Germany! So with this, I shall list what you definetly SHOULDNT do if you dont want to have misfortune: 1.) Never congratulate someone to their birthday if it isnt yet their birthday! It brings bad luck, and if the birthday is a complete failure it may be your fault! Dont bring bad luck over your german friend like that! 2.) What seems to be quite international as well, but still worthy to note.If you dont want bad luck, you are not allowed to spill salt! Salt was very expensive and rare in the past, not to mention it was always seen as pure and used to ward off evil. If you would spill, and with that waste it, it would bring bad luck! Good luck, on the other hand, would be to get salt and bread as a present when moving in a new house! Its said to bring good luck and would ward off hunger in the house in the future! 3.) Also international, but still worthy to note down. Black cats from left to right bring bad luck since the middle ages! Both the colour black and everything “left” was interpreted to bring bad luck! Small Hetalia related fact, Prussia was probably seen as a demon at that time! Left handed, which was seen as a bad omen, would have probably been interpreted that he was in contact with the devil. 4.) Friday the 13th. Now, this is also international, though if you didnt knew the origins of that myth, please let me tell. One of the many guesses on why Friday the 13th is seen as a bad luck bringing day, is that its argued that The Order of the Knights Templar is said to have been completly annihilated that day. As the myth goes The Order was betrayed and all of its Knights had been imprisoned, just to be all burned alive or horribly murdered. That is one of the argued reasons for why exactly Friday the 13th is seen to bring bad luck. 5.) To bring in a bit less serious matter again, to a less serious superstition! If you dont look the other in the eye when clinging glasses in Germany, its said you would then have bad lovers for seven years! Nobody knows the origins, and lets be honest, I dont think anyone really needs to know. 6.) The last one for the bad luck bringing superstitions! This one more serious again. You are not supposed to light cigarettes with candles! Its said that if you do, you would be at fault for killing a sailor! The Origin of that superstition is that, when Sailors would be on land and couldnt get new fishes to sell, they instead made matches in their free time! So if you would light your cigarettes with your candles instead of matches, you would be responsible for the hunger death of a sailor! With that, I hope I could be of help! I am happy to get every ask in the future and shall do my best to answer all of them properly!

[apsbicepstraining]

Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age | Claire Armitstead

The Handmaids Tales joyful reception on the small screen reminds us of its ever-energetic generators spooky prescience

Once or twice in a generation, a tale is suggested that vaults out of the literary corral studying to be a phenomenon, well known to beings the world over who have never read the book: George Orwells 1984 is one and Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale is another.

So its perhaps not remarkable that a new 10 -part TV series based on the romance has struck a chord. Starring Elisabeth Moss as handmaid Offred, the succession launched in the US last-place month and comes to the UK later this month trailing superlatives.

At 77, Atwood blends the loftiness of a high priestess who does not stand moron gladly with an unstinting generosity to those she deems not to be foolhardy. She is a heartfelt environmentalist, with a special interest in chicks, which she shares with her husband, Graeme Gibson.

If her determination to live by her principles occasionally seems incidentally comic as when she embarked by barge on an international tour of a stage show publicising the second tale of her MaddAddam trilogy, The Year of the Flood she also brings to her politics a healthy dose of intentional humour.

On a recent trip to her Toronto home, her longtime UK publisher Lennie Goodings was amazed to converge her carrying a paper bag bellying with four large-scale rubber turkeys. She established them to me with that joke, manager on a tilt, wicked smile of hers. They yelped when she pressed them. It turned out that she and Gibson were about to present the trophies at an annual RSPB competition. The winners each receive a rubber goose from Margaret, at which point she deports them in a squeezing squawking choir.

Atwood traces her refer with the environment back to a childhood spent criss-crossing the groves of Canada with her entomologist leader. She was the second of three children, and the familys itinerant life meant that she did not going to see full-time academy until she was eight years old. She embarked producing her poetry while a student at the University of Toronto, acquired her firstly major literary award for a poetry collection are presented in 1964, and three accumulations later diversified into fiction in 1969 with The Edible Woman, about the status of women driven mad by consumerism.

She is a exceedingly hands-on person, says Goodings, a fellow Canadian, who has been her publisher at at the feminist imprint Virago since 1979. Her self-sufficiency comes from her childhood but also from her participation in the early days of CanLit[ Canadian Literature ]. She designed her own cover for her first journal of poetry, The Circle Game, with the red-faced specks you buy at stationery stores. In the early days of Virago she enjoyed and learned alongside us bookshop point-of-sale information such as shelf airstrips and dumpbins.

Once she and I passed in a taxi to an happen with a large cardboard lady a replication of the figure on the handle of[ her 1988 novel] Cats Eye. She loved it.

Her hands-on approach has carried her forcefully into the digital period. As an internationally successful author who has been awarded 24 honorary magnitudes in six two countries, been shortlisted five times for the Booker prize( acquiring it in 2000 for The Blind Assassin ), and who was more recently invited to Norway to implant a manuscript for 100 years as the first participant in The Future Library project, she faced the tricky issue of a monumental carbon footprint. She undertook it by inventing the LongPen, which enabled her at least to do volume signals without leaving her home.

Her penultimate novel, The Heart Goes Last, began its life on the fanfiction scaffold Wattpad, and she has 1.6 million Twitter partisans, to whom she tweets a dozen times a day on subjects arraying from the urgent need to protect the monarch butterfly to the vilification of Hilary Clinton.

She has also made cameo appearances in The Handmaids Tale, and as an cataclysm survivor on Zombies, Run !, a fitness app blending an audio drama with an immersive jogging competition, which was devised by her protege, the English novelist and gaming wizard Naomi Alderman.

The two were brought together through a mentoring strategy run by Rolex. Four of us got flown out to Canada to meet her and I belief she picked me because I was funny, says Alderman, who ascribes Atwood with the convent settle of her recent novel, The Power, which is in the running for the Baileys prize. Shes really implied me in their own families in a way I hadnt expected. Ive been bird watching in Cuba with her brother and his wife, and to the Arctic.

Atwood has said she was reluctant to get involved with the strategy, and some of her more institutional mentoring rapports ought to have little encouraging. As a teacher she was pretty hectoring, says one former student on a imaginative print MA. She read all our first assemblies and we each had one grilling with her about our journals. Almost all the questions she requested was, And then what happens? And then what happens? so I predict plot is pretty important.

Her abrasive line-up has also been evident in run-ins with the science fiction parish as to which category her fictions are all part of, insisting that they are speculative myth on the basis that: Discipline story has demons and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen.

The veteran SF columnist Ursula K Le Guin countered in a Guardian inspect: To my memory, The Handmaids Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future thats half prediction, half wit.

Published in the mid-1 980 s, with a Canadians mounting chagrin at the religion revitalization she was detecting over their own borders in the United States, The Handmaids Tale, a legend of a theocratic territory in which young woman are treated as clutch mares by a merciless revolutionary upper-clas, has become a staple of the curriculum in the English-speaking world.

In the late 20 th century, when a progress in feminism appeared irreparable, it seemed a cautionary tale of what might well. At the Hay festival in 2003, Atwood herself argues that it had little general relevance than the first fiction in what was to become her MaddAddam trilogy about a world-wide facing the consequences of environmental meltdown. Oryx and Crake, she said, addressed world-wide issues whereas The Handmaids Tale was specifically about America.

But three decades after The Handmaids Tale was produced, there are many all-too-real the locations where the denizens of the fictional republic of Gilead would feel at home, from Donald Trumps increasingly dictatorial and misogynistic US where objectors against two abortion-related greenbacks turned up at the Texas senate in March dressed in the long ruby-red costumes and white bonnets of Atwoods handmaids to a Nigeria in which schoolgirls are seized en masse, and a changing number of theocratic countries across Asia and the Middle East.

The Year of The Flood, are presented in 2009, boasts Gods Gardeners, a religious sect devoted to the melding of science, religion, and sort, whose hymn-singing was promulgated in a strange roadshow.

Atwood herself opened the depict, intoning on a monotone from a wooden throne. As Diana Quick, one of the musicians, echoes: Peggy was rather eerie on that amusing promo make because she had written all their carol of praise and she took to blessing everyone, as it were, ex cathedra. I recall she had had great hopes for it and was quite theatre struck, and then very disappointed in its implementation of the piece.

Perhaps we were too far away to see that wicked smile, though an endnote to the tale proposed to not. In it, Atwood invited readers to listen to the Gardeners hymns on her website and to use them for amateur devotional or environmental purposes. If she sometimes takes herself preferably too seriously, she has surely gave the right to do so over a 60 -book career which shows no sign of ceasing to produce spookily prescient books.

Anyone inclined to be said that The Handmaids Tale is still a parochial parable should consider its relevant to even presumably radical societies in an age of a mass surveillance that would have been inconceivable when the novel was written. Like their fellow citizens of Gilead, we have internalised the distorted reasoning of Atwoods sinister Aunt Lydia, the apparently kindly supervisor who is actually a commonwealth stooge. There is more than one various kinds of democracy. Discretion to and exemption from, she says. In the days of disorder, it was freedom to. Now “you think youre” being given discretion from. Dont underrate it. As Orwell almost said, Big Sister is Watching You.

Potted profile

Born: 18 November 1939

Age: 77

Career: Started out as a poet and has to date written roughly 60 books for adults and children. She has also created opera libretti, television dialogues and a graphic novel.

High spot: Prevailing the Booker prize in 2000 with The Blind Assassin, the fourth of her fictions to be shortlisted.

Low quality: The Handmaids Tale has been censored from schools and libraries all over the US for being anti-Christian and sexually lurid and has appeared on the 100 Most Frequently Objection Books for the last 20 years.

What she says : Optimism necessitates better than world; despair entails worse than actuality. Im a realist.

What they say : The National Book Critics Circle of America gave her a lifetime achievement give this year for her groundbreaking myth, environmental and feminist activism, and work to community as a co-founder of the Scribe Trust of Canada.

The post Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age | Claire Armitstead appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[tuthillscopes-blog]

The 30 Things I Learned By The Age Of 30

check it out @ https://tuthillscopes.com/the-30-things-i-learned-by-the-age-of-30/

The 30 Things I Learned By The Age Of 30

My make an effort to convey the understanding Ive acquired previously 3 decades, has shown to be tougher than initially anticipated. It was not simply dependent on listing a number of learning, but prioritising deciding on probably the most critical ones, which have created a lengthy-lasting imprint on me and also have formed my persona in the manner people and that i recognise it today.

Captured, I visited the greatest mosaic museum on the planet known as the Zeugma museum in Gaziantep, Poultry. I recall on that day, after i lurched among the traditional ruins gloriously erected, I almost felt like travelling back in its history. Every mosaic told a tale every coloured stone symbolized an instalment, that when put together, recreated an entire era.

When I was approaching 30, a cascade of questions and solutions was triggered within my mind. What have I learned previously 3 decades? Have I learned anything more? I reflected, dug up hidden recollections, relived vivid souvenirs, so that they can recreate the mosaic of my very own existence.

1. Things are transient.

Like lots of people, I increased up believing in eternity. Eternal existence, eternal love, and eternal happiness are the eternals I aspired to achieve. Whether instigated by religion or fear, eternity is really a myth, a phantom we secretly nurture within the shadows in our ideas, wishing itll become real eventually. This is exactly what my recurring losses helped me understand. My existence occasions were really like waves where I surfed, just for a short while. All of them hit my inner shores eventually, and disappeared within the sands of my recollections. Several things remained, yes, however they weren’t exactly the same again. Things are temporary. Dont you believe?

2. The grass isnt greener on the other hand.

We spend a lot of our time wanting to have what we should do not have. If there exists a garden, get married want a forest, and there exists a forest, get married want a jungle, and when there exists a jungle, well, get married want an outdoor. We believe that other bands life is better. We believe their moon is definitely full as well as their stars will always be better. I personally, wasn’t safe from this type of demeanour. But oh how mistaken we’re! Dont we all know that everyone has an encumbrance to hold, that people each one is soldiers of existence fighting a fight nobody knows of? I learned to invest time watering my inner garden and sowing my very own seeds. In the end, our vegetation is all prone to droughts and worms, regardless of by which land they grow. Grass is grass.

3. The ego is really a weapon of mass destruction.

I increased in a culture that constantly attempts to prove itself. Held in challenging between conservatism and liberalism, we constantly look for a name that defines us, and reclaim the lost bits of ourselves scattered between your East and also the West. This can be more pronounced within my culture compared to others, however i dare say it is not uncommon to anybody. Dont all of us attempt to prove ourselves in lots of ways? Dont everybody wants to demonstrate we exist? This really is known as ego. A dominating energy that reflects our need to impose, conquer, overtake, and win. I personally, fell prey to my ego many occasions. Pride, arrogance, and pretension are signs and symptoms of the magnified I and major hurdles to achieving ones full potential. Our ego destroys us, destroys others, and blinds us. I learned to become more humble, more loving, to compromise, and also to forgive. In a nutshell, I learned to determine more with me for it is just using the heart that you can see appropriately what’s essential is invisible towards the eye.

4. Kindness is really a weapon of mass construction.

Are we able to all recall a period when weve been mistreated? It takes place nearly anywhere: at the office, in your own home, around the roads, as well as in our social circles. Doesnt it? Mistreatment is a kind of violence that fuels the demons of revenge laying dormant beneath our ego. Our reactions frequently mention similar amounts of anger, abuse, and harshness. Ive done that the couple of occasions, until I finally learned to target your product more frequently. Being kind one of the baby wolves is neither cowardice nor weakness, as our ego falsely signifies. Kindness is really a weapon of mass construction, the best expression of maturity and knowledge. It rebuilds the dismantled bits of love, restores ones dignity, and soothes the hardest emotional wounds. Visiting consider it, kindness happens to be rewarding in my experience and it has always done me justice. So regardless of how strong the need to harm or destroy another may be, I learned to allow kindness prevail, because its only then that i’m a champion.

5. Locating a lifetime partner isn’t a pre-requisite for happiness.

We reside in a world where finding our spouse is regarded as essential, a supreme goal by itself. The majority of us recognize the eternal symphony and it is traditional movements sang everywhere: locating the (right) one, marriage, and getting children. While with a this can be a secret recipe for happiness, in my experience its known as noise, an annoying resonance without anyone’s knowledge. I learned how to disregard it. Actually, I realized which i met many ones, but these were okay. Simply because they didnt stay, doesnt mean these were wrong. With time, I learned to write my very own sonata and produced different movements. I known as them self-sufficiency, autonomy, freedom, and independence. I’m each one of these four. I’m grounded. I’m proud.

6. Happiness hides in tiny problems.

After I was more youthful, I produced a picture of myself at age 30 that is today a black and white-colored picture resting within the album of my memory. I stored it there purposefully to help remind me of methods far I had been from reality. All of the expectations and hopes I’d for which a contented existence appears like were just a fantasy. For the reason that photo, I had been posing having a husband and three children, all whom I havent met yet. My existence today is basically traditional. It doesnt meet our societys minimum standards of the happy existence. But oh how wealthy I’m! How free and lucky I’m to see adventures unusual and moments of infinite pleasure! I discovered happiness in tiny problems: within the corners of coffee houses, in a single type of a magazine, in greeting a destitute, in exchanging a grin having a stranger, in wandering in an exceedingly old castle. We do not need to follow along with the norms. We do not need be conventional. Browse around! Happiness hides in tiny problems.

7. Things are poisonous, there is nothing poisonous, it’s all dependent on dose.

This learning dates back to my chemistry class in class. I did not know in those days that it is a philosophy I ought to apply in every aspect of my existence. It’s known as moderation, an important component in my equilibrium. Moderation for each other, in fun, in ambitions, brings inner peace even going to probably the most turbulent souls. It’s stored me solidly grounded and stable. I notice that almost all people find it difficult to keep things in balance and therefore are very likely towards extreme opposing rods. They either come with an overdose of all things or choose not to taste anything. This really is possibly why my pace can’t be synchronised using the majority. My irritation doesnt originate from the things they say or do, but exactly how frequently they are saying the things they say or attempt what they are doing. An excessive amount of love can suffocate, while not enough love can result in starvation. I learned to like sufficient, have some fun sufficient, cry sufficient, and become sufficient.

8. Persistence is really a virtue.

I’m an impatient person. I live more later on compared to present. My imagination is definitely racing as time passes. I paint images of the flowers thatll grow next spring. I’ve found waiting to be really hard. Irrrve never got accustomed to its bitterness. I believe waiting is probably the heaviest burden borne through the spirit. Yet, waiting is inevitable. Searching back inside my existence, I understand that the great stuff that became of me found an effective solution after lengthy periods of waiting. It is a fact these periods were intercepted with bouts of eagerness, however they were developed, formed, and polished by persistence. The questions that when tormented me about love, friendship, careers, self-worth yet others, all found their solutions within my persistence. It may be true in the end so good things arrived at individuals who wait.

9. Top quality relationships matter.

This can be a little scientific but research has proven so good quality relationships are connected with better health outcomes, which is not only health. Loneliness for example increases the chance of depression and it is connected having a lower existence expectancy. The findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development lately presented on TEDx confirmed an old knowledge everyone knows. The research viewed the lives of individuals for more than 75 many figured that good relationships stop us more happy and healthier. I learned to nurture the relationships I’ve, to safeguard and safeguard them. I still dislike the abundance of individuals within my existence. I do not have neither time, nor energy, nor hunger to gather buddies and acquaintances. I’m just happy and grateful using the couple of ones I’ve.

10. We accept the romance we believe we deserve.

Approximately Ive heard for many years not understanding what this signifies exactly. Ive recognized mistreatments many occasions. I wept because of it many occasions. Yet Ive built the same choices repeatedly. So why do we re-engage, again and again, in encounters that when made us suffer? Today the solution may come as clearly as always: because we dont think we deserve better. With time, I learned to understand myself, value myself, respect myself, love myself, and it is only then, only if I saw how worthy I’m, that my choices grew to become rightful, healthier, nurturing, and enriching. I actually do deserve a great existence. You do too. I actually do should be loved. You do too. I actually do should be treated well. You do too. Today, I’ll never accept anything less. Which means you will.

11. Studying is definitely an antidote to mediocrity.

Possibly for this reason the world is mediocre. I had been oblivious towards the miraculous results of books for many years until I’d my very own space. I stepped in to the mystical realm of books and enjoyed swimming within an sea made from ink with waves made from ideas. Each time I open a magazine, Personally i think like lifting a curtain from my soul. And each time I close a magazine, I understand that i’m a measure nearer to myself. I found that studying cures loneliness, solutions our most complex questions, transcends distance and time, and unites us with humanity, history, space, and also the future.

12. Many people are hungry for love.

Have you been verbally or emotionally mistreated? Well, I’ve. Although me hasn’t become safe from negativity, hurtful language, unkindness, and cruel conduct, Ive learned something which eventually altered my perception towards such absolutely common behaviours. I have faith that behind every negative comment, every wounding word, every insensitive gesture, there’s somebody who hasnt been loved enough. Exactly what a pity! The number of people crave to become loved yet never admit so! The possible lack of love should have produced a massive painful void within the soul. In my opinion everyone has a bird inside ourselves. When loved enough, the bird flaps its wings and fly. So when not, it uses its beak to eliminate. Things I learned, would be to always do my favorite to like that bird.

13. Silence is healing.

Possibly for this reason the world is really ill. My culture loves noise. Laughs are loud, greetings are loud, farewells are loud, everything howls. There’s surely grounds why many people hide behind the noise. Will we know what it’s? I believe to prevent silence. Alone, people can hear themselves and theyre very frequently scared to pay attention. Silence is sort of a stream of freshwater running within the spirit, and filling the cracks produced by noise having a soothing tranquility. Silence heals, clears up confusions, rectifies prejudices, brushes from the remains of uncertainty, and brings people nearer to one another. I learned to hear the seem of silence. Silence is really a story teller, a counsellor, along with a friend.

14. Between love and hate, indifference may be the worst.

There’s nothing worse than being stuck inside a condition of nothingness. A condition in which you feel neither hot nor cold, neither excited nor tired, neither interested nor bored, neither happy nor sad, neither calm nor angry. You float inside a vacuum that is filled with oxygen yet without any existence, filled with space, yet without any freedom, filled with silence, yet without any peace. Will we exist simply because the problem creating your body is alive? Or does existence exceed the problem, beyond survival, where the soul vibrates, sings, loves and hates all simultaneously? I exist after i love, after i hate. I exist since i feel. Indifference is dying.

15. A job is simply a job.

A lot of us operate in jobs it normally won’t like. We invest a lot of our time, mental, intellectual and emotional energy at work. We project our whole being and obtain compensated for this in the finish from the month. At the office we like, we envy, we seek attention, we yell, we agonise, we bare burdens, because many of us are humans wherever we’re. However, we frequently neglect to recognise that everyone has potentials past the work we all do, the task we perform, and also the salary we obtain. Employment is simply a job. We’re even more than that. Many people think I’m able to alter the world because Im a humanitarian worker. It normally won’t realize that Ive altered the planet a lot more outdoors my job: in your own home, on the telephone, inside a pub, in in person conversations, in coffee breaks, within my dreams. My job is simply a job and i’m even more than that.

16. Its never far too late to alter a existence path.

The conviction our existence path is sort of a ladder we have to climb requires a very straight line method of existence, a trail that can take you against One place to another inside a straight line. The truth however is extremely different. Many lines intersect, bend, elongate, as well as shrink to almost only a point. This is the way my existence continues to be to date. An elaborate geometry with multiple beginning points, endings, parallels, and spirals. As Im continuing to move forward, unwrapping my inner gifts and starting to warm up within my passion flames, Im finding who I truly am and just what I truly want. Now i realize that basically awaken eventually and choose to stop, I’ll quit. Its never far too late to veer, never far too late to alter directions. I it’s still carrying out a line, a line that me will draw, and that i know, insidewithin all, this line won’t be straight line.

17. Every the truth is wrong, every the truth is right.

Individuals are a mix of rainbows and water. A variety of mellow colours that will get either diluted or saturated with values, opinions, perceptions, and attitudes, throughout the path of their lives. This eclectic nature to be engenders multiple realities which are faithfully recognized by its creators, by us. People have realities that appear to be to them but wrong to other people, acceptable for them but dejected by others. Ive requested myself: why is yet another right compared to other? What truth can there be when all facts hold in keeping with one individual a minimum of? I found that everything could be right and everything could be wrong. The treatment depends on whos knowing.

18. Promises are simpler damaged than satisfied.

I learned to vow absolutely nothing to nobody. Why would I invest in the next that falls completely outdoors of my control? We frequently underestimate the strength of words stated today not realising that theyll have a big responsibility tomorrow. We enjoy playing methods using the future by imagining it, fantasising about this, creating and re-allowing the finish results. After which what goes on when its there? Thanks for visiting the land of disappointments! Our promises are words that point at random and playfully rearranges until another chapter is created, another meaning is fathomed and also the promise is totally damaged.

19. We’re more fragile than we believe.

You will find moments in existence when everything appears to become all right, once the forces of nature appear to become directed for the center maintaining an account balance, an equilibrium. Then out of the blue, from the tender placidity in our being, increases a turbulent whirlwind: breakdowns in relationships, divorces, deaths, rejections, disappointments Moods begin to swing, ideas dismantle, concepts collapse, promises break, infidelities erupt, so we lose balance. The self-portrait we once colored that demonstrated an invincible persona, all of a sudden loses these very traits among the transformation in our existence occasions. Then we remember how fragile we’re. We remember how delicate orchids could be. We remember that we’re breakable. We remember, the intolerable lightness of (our) being.

20. Concepts must only be forged with experience.

I learned never to bind myself to some principle by which I havent tested my temptations yet. This realisation came once i broke many concepts I remember when i thought are unshakable. Ive learned to eliminate and rebuild my concepts with experience. As time passes, I learned to calibrate the right amounts of right and wrong, those that I judge as acceptable in my experience. I forged new methods for thinking. I defined my values. And it is only then, which i could articulate what my concepts are.

21. Some chaos is essential.

I originate from a culture adorned by chaos. Even our breathes are chaotic and lack rhythm. You are able to argue its pollution I believe its fear. 2 yrs ago, I became a member of a culture that loves discipline. Things are very newly made: the roads, a persons behaviours, not to mention The Machine. Getting experienced the 2 sides from the discipline gold coin, I deducted that some chaos is essential. It boosts creativeness, gives ample space that people think, to do something differently, to generate different solutions. Tough rules, systemisation, policies, and automation would be the opponents of creativeness. Chaos is symbolic of existence. You’ll want chaos inside you to provide birth to some dancing star. Now we all know why each time I consider the sky, all I see are shooting stars.

22. Magic is real.

Do you experience feeling at occasions our world talks to us inside a mysterious code that we’re not able to fathom right into a obvious language? The greater the year progresses, the greater I’ve found myself searching in the world with reverence and awe. How small we’re within this infinite world! Were finite entities within an infinite world! It is true that people arrived at a good degree of understanding in cosmology, physics, mathematics, and biology, yet there are plenty of things we still have no idea. Our world is outstanding! How about the notions of future, serendipity, significant coincidences, synchronicities? My existence continues to be filled with such mysterious occasions. In my opinion in magic. In my opinion magic is real.

23. Whether it doesnt feel right, then it’s wrong.

We sometimes choose to move within our existence. We elect to simply do it now, because everything around us informs us its right. We believe and re-think concerning the whole scenario, analyse it, link the reasons towards the effects, but, regardless of how coherent and logical all of the data appears to become, something (inexplicable) leaves us worried and doubtful. Will it seem familiar? Well, it’s certainly in my experience! I’d describe this something like a tickle within my heart, just a little vibration within my beats unusual. And That I feel it, regardless of how low the regularity is. I learned to believe my intuition and listen more to my inner voice. I found that its the one which informs the reality.

24. Sometimes, when walking you’re ready to move ahead.

Throughout my walk of existence, there have been occasions after i stopped for any (lengthy) while and permitted me to land, beat harder, and obtain attached. Get mounted on what? To individuals, objects, places, comfort zones After which I acquired stuck. This is exactly what attachments do, dont you believe? They wreck havoc on space and time dimensions, disorient us, and then leave us lost inside a circle dancing tango alone! Sometimes, its only when walking away that people can re-established our space and time coordinates. It requires time, courage, along with a strong will to allow go, but eventually, the show must continue.

25. Art is really a language we ought to learn.

It required me time for you to comprehend the language of art. Much like silence, art includes a healing power. Painting, writing, dancing, sculpting, all speak an identical language: the word what of beauty, spirituality, and existence. Museums in my experience are just like sacred temples. Fortunate are the pious who bow with admiration to the good thing about art! Let’s stand still and marvel in the strategies of a painting! Let’s permit the silence in colours brush-off the noises within our heads! A global without art is sort of a desert without sand: lonely and incomplete. So let’s rejoice!

26. It’s how it’s.

Why do you consider heaven is blue? Why the shades don’t have any smell? Why the sounds can’t be seen? Well, since it is how it’s. How frequently will we find ourselves lost within the maze of existence occasions, being unsure of the why and how, the reason and also the effect? We have seen people die every single day without no reason. We have seen people split up, marry, be sad, laugh, fall, fully stand up so we just have no idea why and how. As time progresses, we accept to reside with this particular mystery. We believe that some questions don’t have any solutions. Actually, we accept silence to become our perfect solution. A cigar is simply a cigar, which is all we have to know.

27. Its not necessary lots of money to become happy.

In situation we havent observed yet, many of us are slaves of consumerism. Income generating keeps climbing the ladder in our priorities, less by readiness as by sheer necessity. I acknowledge we all do take some money to reside a good existence where our rents are covered, our bills are compensated, our meals are provided, or perhaps our travels plans are guaranteed. However when I browse around me and then try to understand the unhappiness in peoples eyes, such things as low self-worth, anxiety about closeness, a desire to become understood, a have to be loved, a requirement to become recognised, a dissatisfaction using the present, a shyness to exhibit the actual self, a wish to bond using the other Theyre everything that cant be purchased by money yet are must be happy.

28. That which you resist persists.

Sometimes, when our emotional buttons are pressed because of say, dying of the closed one, rejection with a partner, or perhaps a tough conversation, we either deny or confront individuals very bitter and acidic feelings bubbling inside ourselves. But dont you are feeling its sometimes larger than you? Dont you are feeling it does not matter how you strive to get rid of that bitterness, the after taste remains lengthy following the incident? I learned to neither deny nor confront, but to embrace. I learned to embrace my sadness and accept it, until sadness itself dissolves within the warmth from the embrace, and finally, evaporates.

29. We’re good naturally but corrupted by society.

This can be a philosophy by J.J. Rousseau that goes back towards the 1700s. I’m a believer from it. In my opinion individuals are born good, until they become layer makers. Exactly what a masquerade we reside in! Individuals have become too busy building and embellishing their layers: layers of power, fear, hesitation, take your pick. Its an enormous amount of fake smiles instead of genuine tears. A global where praise is articulated within the most polite and formal manner, instead of through eyes sparkling with admiration. People learned how you can breathe behind masks. I found that the planet around use is a fantasy.

30. My 30 training are basically static.

I’m a flower that withers within the wind, blooms under the sun, hides within the snow, dies within the desert. My existence is a cycle of seasons that is inconsistent, every occasionally. If the is true, then how do i not change, transform, mutate, collapse, get restored, almost constantly? When the world is dynamic, infinitely expanding and contracting, then how do i not dance by using it? How do i take everything I distributed to you as static? My 30 training are basically static. They’ll change, transform, mutate, collapse, get restored, almost constantly. Captured, I visited the greatest mosaic museum on the planet. Now I recall the mosaics I loved probably the most, would be the people that are partially erased, those whose colours happen to be partially altered. Theyre those that have bore the traces of your time. Now we all know that in another 3 decades, this really is how my mosaic is going to be.

Find out more: http://thoughtcatalog.com/lara-ghaoui/2016/05/the-30-things-i-learned-by-the-age-of-30/

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Why Do Republicans Want Lower Taxes

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Why Do Republicans Want Lower Taxes

Democrats Vs Republicans On Taxes

Why Do People Think Lower Taxes Help the Economy?

While Republicans believe in balancing spending cuts with tax cuts across the board, Democrats believe in cutting taxes for the middle and lower class, while raising them for the upper class. They believe in a higher marginal rate, with income tax being higher for those who make more, as opposed to the Republican views that taxes should be equal percentages for all income levels. In the 2012 Party Platform, 56% of republicans opposed raising taxes on those who earned over $250,000. This isnt to say that Republicans do not believe in focusing relief on the middle and lower classes; they do, however, believe in relief for all Americans, and not in raising taxes on the upper classes.

What Do Republicans Believe In

Do all Republicans believe the same things? Of course not. Rarely do members of a single political group agree on all issues. Even among Republicans, there are differences of opinion. As a group, they do not agree on every issue.

Some folks vote Republican because of fiscal concerns. Often, that trumps concerns they may have about social issues. Others are less interested in the fiscal position of the party. They vote they way they do because of religion. They believe Republicans are the party of morality. Some simply want less government. They believe only Republicans can solve the problem of big government. Republicans spend less . They lower taxes: some people vote for that alone.

However, the Republican Party does stand for certain things. So I’m answering with regard to the party as a whole. Call it a platform. Call them core beliefs. The vast majority of Republicans adhere to certain ideas.

So what do Republicans believe? Here are their basic tenets:

Conservatives Dont Hate Socialism They Hate Equality

They want to take away your hamburgers, former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka in February. This is what Stalin dreamt about America will never be a socialist country! The Conservative Political Action Conference audience cheered. The video played on my phone as I waved at Danny, the homeless man who begs for food every morning at the Newark Penn Station, where scores of poor people sleep in wheelchairs or lean on crutches or stand by the delis to ask for change.

These folks need more than hamburgers. They need jobs and homes. Yet, as the 2020 election season starts, Trump has branded progressives as socialists who will steal property and bring tyranny. The presidents fearmongering contrasts with the actual Green New Deal that some Democrats support but failed to pass in the GOP-controlled Senate. Its a fear driven by ideology. Republicans paint the poor as undeserving, marked by cultural or personal character flaws. Whereas Democratic Socialists believe people have the ability to run the economy and society to meet their needs. Why this difference in perception? It is because Republicans arent afraid of socialism they are afraid of equality with people they see as inferior.

Read Also: How Many Democrats And Republicans Are In The House

To Fund The $35 Trillion Budget Plan Democrats Aim To Undo Trump Tax Cuts

To Fund The $3.5 Trillion Budget Plan, Democrats Aim To Undo Trump Tax Cuts

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The 10% cuts were “across the board,” as he liked to say, implying they were of equal value to all. The dollar value of the cuts was, of course, far larger for those with larger incomes. Moreover, the tax law changes that accompanied the rate cuts made it easier for individuals and corporations to “write off” various forms of income and spending to lower their tax bills further. The tax rate for capital gains, money made from successful investing, would come down from 28% to 20%.

Reagan did not get everything he sought in this initial foray against high taxes and progressivity. The Senate trimmed the third year of the tax cut from 10% to 5%, and it would take a second bill, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, to pull the marginal top rate all the way down to 28%.

But Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 constituted the strongest move away from progressivity in the income tax since the tax was initiated in the Civil War.

They were the culmination of rising anti-tax sentiment in the late 1970s, when some states adopted tax limitations by popular referendum. That spirit was kept alive in the decades to come by groups such as Americans for Tax Reform, led by activist Grover Norquist. Starting in 1986, Norquist has challenged candidates for office to sign his “taxpayer protection pledge” not to raise taxes. The great majority of Republicans have signed.

Reagan Pared Back Progressivity

Reagan was able to reverse what had been a decades-long commitment to at least the look of progressivity. He could do it in part because his 1980 election coattails enabled his party to capture control of the Senate for the first time in a quarter century. Moreover, while Democrats still had a House majority, their ranks included scores of members from Southern and Midwestern districts that had also voted for Reagan.

When the budget resolution passed in that summer of 1981, 63 House Democrats joined all 190 Republicans in backing it. And when the tax package came to its critical votes in July, dozens of Democrats sided with Reagan and the Republicans rather than their own leadership.

In 1982, Democrats added to their majority in the House and negotiated some revenue increases with the Senate and the White House. And in Reagan’s second term, momentum built quickly for a tax overhaul that would combine still lower marginal rates with new business taxes and a paring back of tax preferences and other “loopholes.” The new overhaul’s main appeal to Democrats was that it exempted far more middle- and lower-income earners from the income tax altogether.

Career anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, here in 2018, called the Trump administration’s 2017 tax cut “Reaganite” the ultimate compliment from the founder of Americans for Tax Reform.hide caption

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Gop Real Estate Owners Make Out Big

Besides the laws benefits to real estate pass-throughs, real estate in general was hugely favored by the tax law, allowing property exchanges to avoid taxation, the deduction of new capital expenses in just one year versus longer depreciation schedules, and an exemption from limits on interest deductions.;

If you are a real estate developer, you never pay tax, said Ed Kleinbard, a former head of Congresss Joint Committee on Taxation.;

Members of Congress own a lot of real estate. Public Integritys review of financial disclosures found that 29 of the 47 GOP members of the committees responsible for the tax bill hold interests in real estate, including small rental businesses, LLCs, and massive real estate investment trusts , which pay dividends to investors. The tax bill allows REIT investors to deduct 20 percent from their dividends for tax purposes.;

Who We Are

The Center for Public Integrity is an independent, investigative newsroom that exposes betrayals of the public trust by powerful interests.

Its Not Easy Being Green

Democratic socialism is not a Marxist fever dream; its a call for help. Its less socialism than humanitarian aid for a people in crisis. Millions of Americans are in dead-end jobs, slipping behind on bills, deep in debt and scared of climate change.

Something is wrong with capitalism, Martin Luther King Jr. told his staff in 1966. There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Saying the economic system causes pain means moving beyond the conservative image of the poor as flawed, personally or culturally, or the liberal image of them as unlucky victims of a more or less functioning meritocracy. To honor our human potential, capitalism must be dismantled, its pieces taken apart and recombined into a new world.

Climate change is one of the biggest existential threats to our way of life, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said at the rollout of the Green New Deal. To combat that threat, we need to be as ambitious and innovative as possible. In its 14 pages, the plan envisions a World War II-scale mobilization of millions of workers. They will repair roads and bridges, build smart grids, upgrade industry to be zero carbon, build green public transit, remove carbon from the air, clean up waste sites, and clean up the poisoned land and waterways. When they come home, those workers can rest in new, green housing, and if sick or injured, they can go see a doctor, using a Medicare for All card.

Recommended Reading: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

Most Welfare Recipients Are Makers Not Takers

The first myth, that people who receive public benefits are takers rather than makers, is flatly untrue for the vast majority of working-age recipients.

Consider Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, formerly known as food stamps, which currently serve about 42 million Americans. At least one adult in more than half of SNAP-recipient households are working. And the average SNAP subsidy is $125 per month, or $1.40 per meal hardly enough to justify quitting a job.

As for Medicaid, nearly 80 percent of adults receiving Medicaid live in families where someone works, and more than half are working themselves.

In early December, House Speaker Paul Ryan said, We have a welfare system thats trapping people in poverty and effectively paying people not to work.

Not true. Welfare officially called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families has required work as a condition of eligibility since then-President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law in 1996. And the earned income tax credit, a tax credit for low- and moderate-income workers, by definition, supports only people who work.

Workers apply for public benefits because they need assistance to make ends meet. American workers are among the most productive in the world, but over the last 40 years the bottom half of income earners have seen no income growth. As a result, since 1973, worker productivity has grown almost six times faster than wages.

Religion And The Belief In God Is Vital To A Strong Nation

Lower Taxes, Higher Revenue

Republicans are generally accepting only of the Judeo-Christian belief system. For most Republicans, religion is absolutely vital in their political beliefs and the two cannot be separated. Therefore, separation of church and state is not that important to them. In fact, they believe that much of what is wrong has been caused by too much secularism.

Those are the four basic Republican tenets: small government, local control, the power of free markets, and Christian authority. Below are other things they believe that derive from those four ideas.

Read Also: When Did Democrats And Republicans Switch Platforms

Orrin Hatch Tom Coburn And Richard Burr On Health Care

More recently, senators Orrin Hatch of Utah, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and Richard Burr of North Carolina have headed up the Republican fight on health care. Their proposal was named the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility and Empowerment Act, and is based upon the principle of providing more flexibility and purchasing power to the individual. It shares some important similarities with the Affordable Care Act, such as the requirement to allow dependent coverage through the age of 26, and the inability of insurance companies to provide lifetime limits. When the three senators released their proposal, Burr stated The American people have found out what is in ObamaCare broken promises in the form of increased health care costs, costly mandates and government bureaucracy. We can lower costs and expand access to quality coverage and care by empowering individuals and their families to make their own health care decisions, rather than empowering the government to make those decisions for them.;The group stated that their proposal is designed to be roughly budget neutral over the first 10 years, leaving the financial burden on the American people at nothing. Coburn commented that they created this proposal because Its critical we chart another path forward. Our health care system wasnt working well before ObamaCare and it is worse after ObamaCare.

What The Needy Deserve

The second myth is that low-income Americans do not deserve a helping hand.

This idea derives from our belief that the U.S. is a meritocracy where the most deserving rise to the top. Yet where a person ends up on the income ladder is tied to where they started out.

Indeed, America is not nearly as socially mobile as we like to think. Forty percent of Americans born into the bottom-income quintile the poorest 20 percent will stay there. And the same stickiness exists in the top quintile.

As for people born into the middle class, only 20 percent will ascend to the top quintile in their lifetimes.

The third myth is that government assistance is a waste of money and doesnt accomplish its goals.

In fact, poverty rates would double without the safety net, to say nothing of human suffering. Last year, the safety net lifted 38 million people, including 8 million children, out of poverty.

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An Exhaustive Lobbying Campaign

Almost immediately after Mr. Trump signed the bill, companies and their lobbyists including G.E.s Mr. Brown began a full-court pressure campaign to try to shield themselves from the BEAT and GILTI.

The Treasury Department had to figure out how to carry out the hastily written law, which lacked crucial details.

Chip Harter was the Treasury official in charge of writing the rules for the BEAT and GILTI. He had spent decades at PwC and the law firm Baker McKenzie, counseling companies on the same sorts of tax-avoidance arrangements that the new law was supposed to discourage.

Starting in January 2018, he and his colleagues found themselves in nonstop meetings roughly 10 a week at times with lobbyists for companies and industry groups.

The Organization for International Investment a powerful trade group for foreign multinationals like the Swiss food company Nestlé and the Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell objected to a Treasury proposal that would have prevented companies from using a complex currency-accounting maneuver to avoid the BEAT.

The groups lobbyists were from PwC and Baker McKenzie, Mr. Harters former firms, according to public lobbying disclosures. One of them, Pam Olson, was the top Treasury tax official in the George W. Bush administration.

This month, the Treasury issued the final version of some of the BEAT regulations. The Organization for International Investment got what it wanted.

Recommended Reading: Snopes Trump Republican Dumb

How Democrats And Republicans Differ On Matters Of Wealth And Equality

A protester wears a T-shirt in support of Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is part of … a group of Democrats looking to beat Trump in 2020. Photographer: John Taggart/Bloomberg

If youre a rich Democrat, you wake up each day with self-loathing, wondering how you can make the world more egalitarian. Please tax me more, you say to your elected officials. Until then, the next thing you do is call your financial advisor to inquire about tax shelters.

If youre a poor Republican, however, you have more in common with the Democratic Party than the traditional Wall Street, big business base of the Republican Party, according to a survey by the Voter Study Group, a two-year-old consortium made up of academics and think tank scholars from across the political spectrum. That means the mostly conservative American Enterprise Institute and Cato were also on board with professors from Stanford and Georgetown universities when conducting this study, released this month.

The fact that lower-income Republicans, largely known as the basket of deplorables, support more social spending and taxing the rich was a key takeaway from this years report, says Lee Drutman, senior fellow on the political reform program at New America, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

Across party lines, only 37% of respondents said they supported government getting active in reducing differences in income, close to the 39% who opposed it outright. Some 24% had no opinion on the subject.

Read Also: Senate Democrats Vs Republicans

Us House Democrats Seek To Roll Back Trump Tax Cuts For Wealthy Corporations

WASHINGTON, Sept 13 – Leading Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday proposed a substantial roll-back of former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, including raising the top tax rate on corporations to 26.5% from the current 21%.

Democrats on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee said they will debate legislation this week that would achieve the changes as part of their broader, $3.5 trillion domestic investment plan.

In an attempt to finance the new spending, the Democratic-led committee will debate a proposal to raise $2.9 trillion in revenue over 10 years, according to a document circulated among members of the panel.

Besides increasing corporate taxes, wealthy individuals would see a jump in their income taxes as well as higher capital gains and estate taxes.

Even if the legislation as proposed passes Congress and is signed by Democratic President Joe Biden, corporate taxes would still be lower than they were before the enactment of the tax cuts pushed through by Republicans in 2017. But the top individual income tax rate would revert to its pre-2017 level.

The tax-writing Ways and Means Committee has scheduled work sessions for Tuesday and Wednesday to debate tax policy and other matters under its jurisdiction to be included in the $3.5 trillion “reconciliation” bill, which would require a simple majority to be passed in the Senate.

REPUBLICANS OPPOSED

Republican Senators Push Social Security Medicare And Medicaid Cuts After Supporting Ineffective Tax Cuts

Republicans Target Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

getty

The economy is recovering from the depths of the pandemic in large part due to the massive relief packages that Congress passed in 2020 and 2021. Just in time for this recovery, Senate Republicans are pushing for cuts to vital programs. According to news reports, five GOP senators are proposing a commission that would come up with proposals to balance the federal budget within a decade. Given that four of the five sponsors of this idea have signed on to the tax pledge to never, ever under any circumstances raise taxes, they are looking for programs to cut. They consequently take aim mainly at cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

These targeted programs are already and will continue to prove crucial to the financial and physical health of millions of Americans that have suffered from the pandemic. Many workers, especially older ones, have lost their jobs permanently and will move into early retirement with permanently lower benefits and little or no savings outside of those benefits. Millions of Americans, again particularly among older ones, experience long-term consequences from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel virus. Those hardest hit by pandemic will need strong, expanded retirement and health benefits, not cuts to an already basic system.

Don’t Miss: Can Republicans Vote On Super Tuesday

[apsbicepstraining]

Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age | Claire Armitstead

The Handmaids Tales joyful reception on the small screen reminds us of its ever-energetic generators spooky prescience

Once or twice in a generation, a tale is suggested that vaults out of the literary corral studying to be a phenomenon, well known to beings the world over who have never read the book: George Orwells 1984 is one and Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale is another.

So its perhaps not remarkable that a new 10 -part TV series based on the romance has struck a chord. Starring Elisabeth Moss as handmaid Offred, the succession launched in the US last-place month and comes to the UK later this month trailing superlatives.

At 77, Atwood blends the loftiness of a high priestess who does not stand moron gladly with an unstinting generosity to those she deems not to be foolhardy. She is a heartfelt environmentalist, with a special interest in chicks, which she shares with her husband, Graeme Gibson.

If her determination to live by her principles occasionally seems incidentally comic as when she embarked by barge on an international tour of a stage show publicising the second tale of her MaddAddam trilogy, The Year of the Flood she also brings to her politics a healthy dose of intentional humour.

On a recent trip to her Toronto home, her longtime UK publisher Lennie Goodings was amazed to converge her carrying a paper bag bellying with four large-scale rubber turkeys. She established them to me with that joke, manager on a tilt, wicked smile of hers. They yelped when she pressed them. It turned out that she and Gibson were about to present the trophies at an annual RSPB competition. The winners each receive a rubber goose from Margaret, at which point she deports them in a squeezing squawking choir.

Atwood traces her refer with the environment back to a childhood spent criss-crossing the groves of Canada with her entomologist leader. She was the second of three children, and the familys itinerant life meant that she did not going to see full-time academy until she was eight years old. She embarked producing her poetry while a student at the University of Toronto, acquired her firstly major literary award for a poetry collection are presented in 1964, and three accumulations later diversified into fiction in 1969 with The Edible Woman, about the status of women driven mad by consumerism.

She is a exceedingly hands-on person, says Goodings, a fellow Canadian, who has been her publisher at at the feminist imprint Virago since 1979. Her self-sufficiency comes from her childhood but also from her participation in the early days of CanLit[ Canadian Literature ]. She designed her own cover for her first journal of poetry, The Circle Game, with the red-faced specks you buy at stationery stores. In the early days of Virago she enjoyed and learned alongside us bookshop point-of-sale information such as shelf airstrips and dumpbins.

Once she and I passed in a taxi to an happen with a large cardboard lady a replication of the figure on the handle of[ her 1988 novel] Cats Eye. She loved it.

Her hands-on approach has carried her forcefully into the digital period. As an internationally successful author who has been awarded 24 honorary magnitudes in six two countries, been shortlisted five times for the Booker prize( acquiring it in 2000 for The Blind Assassin ), and who was more recently invited to Norway to implant a manuscript for 100 years as the first participant in The Future Library project, she faced the tricky issue of a monumental carbon footprint. She undertook it by inventing the LongPen, which enabled her at least to do volume signals without leaving her home.

Her penultimate novel, The Heart Goes Last, began its life on the fanfiction scaffold Wattpad, and she has 1.6 million Twitter partisans, to whom she tweets a dozen times a day on subjects arraying from the urgent need to protect the monarch butterfly to the vilification of Hilary Clinton.

She has also made cameo appearances in The Handmaids Tale, and as an cataclysm survivor on Zombies, Run !, a fitness app blending an audio drama with an immersive jogging competition, which was devised by her protege, the English novelist and gaming wizard Naomi Alderman.

The two were brought together through a mentoring strategy run by Rolex. Four of us got flown out to Canada to meet her and I belief she picked me because I was funny, says Alderman, who ascribes Atwood with the convent settle of her recent novel, The Power, which is in the running for the Baileys prize. Shes really implied me in their own families in a way I hadnt expected. Ive been bird watching in Cuba with her brother and his wife, and to the Arctic.

Atwood has said she was reluctant to get involved with the strategy, and some of her more institutional mentoring rapports ought to have little encouraging. As a teacher she was pretty hectoring, says one former student on a imaginative print MA. She read all our first assemblies and we each had one grilling with her about our journals. Almost all the questions she requested was, And then what happens? And then what happens? so I predict plot is pretty important.

Her abrasive line-up has also been evident in run-ins with the science fiction parish as to which category her fictions are all part of, insisting that they are speculative myth on the basis that: Discipline story has demons and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen.

The veteran SF columnist Ursula K Le Guin countered in a Guardian inspect: To my memory, The Handmaids Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future thats half prediction, half wit.

Published in the mid-1 980 s, with a Canadians mounting chagrin at the religion revitalization she was detecting over their own borders in the United States, The Handmaids Tale, a legend of a theocratic territory in which young woman are treated as clutch mares by a merciless revolutionary upper-clas, has become a staple of the curriculum in the English-speaking world.

In the late 20 th century, when a progress in feminism appeared irreparable, it seemed a cautionary tale of what might well. At the Hay festival in 2003, Atwood herself argues that it had little general relevance than the first fiction in what was to become her MaddAddam trilogy about a world-wide facing the consequences of environmental meltdown. Oryx and Crake, she said, addressed world-wide issues whereas The Handmaids Tale was specifically about America.

But three decades after The Handmaids Tale was produced, there are many all-too-real the locations where the denizens of the fictional republic of Gilead would feel at home, from Donald Trumps increasingly dictatorial and misogynistic US where objectors against two abortion-related greenbacks turned up at the Texas senate in March dressed in the long ruby-red costumes and white bonnets of Atwoods handmaids to a Nigeria in which schoolgirls are seized en masse, and a changing number of theocratic countries across Asia and the Middle East.

The Year of The Flood, are presented in 2009, boasts Gods Gardeners, a religious sect devoted to the melding of science, religion, and sort, whose hymn-singing was promulgated in a strange roadshow.

Atwood herself opened the depict, intoning on a monotone from a wooden throne. As Diana Quick, one of the musicians, echoes: Peggy was rather eerie on that amusing promo make because she had written all their carol of praise and she took to blessing everyone, as it were, ex cathedra. I recall she had had great hopes for it and was quite theatre struck, and then very disappointed in its implementation of the piece.

Perhaps we were too far away to see that wicked smile, though an endnote to the tale proposed to not. In it, Atwood invited readers to listen to the Gardeners hymns on her website and to use them for amateur devotional or environmental purposes. If she sometimes takes herself preferably too seriously, she has surely gave the right to do so over a 60 -book career which shows no sign of ceasing to produce spookily prescient books.

Anyone inclined to be said that The Handmaids Tale is still a parochial parable should consider its relevant to even presumably radical societies in an age of a mass surveillance that would have been inconceivable when the novel was written. Like their fellow citizens of Gilead, we have internalised the distorted reasoning of Atwoods sinister Aunt Lydia, the apparently kindly supervisor who is actually a commonwealth stooge. There is more than one various kinds of democracy. Discretion to and exemption from, she says. In the days of disorder, it was freedom to. Now “you think youre” being given discretion from. Dont underrate it. As Orwell almost said, Big Sister is Watching You.

Potted profile

Born: 18 November 1939

Age: 77

Career: Started out as a poet and has to date written roughly 60 books for adults and children. She has also created opera libretti, television dialogues and a graphic novel.

High spot: Prevailing the Booker prize in 2000 with The Blind Assassin, the fourth of her fictions to be shortlisted.

Low quality: The Handmaids Tale has been censored from schools and libraries all over the US for being anti-Christian and sexually lurid and has appeared on the 100 Most Frequently Objection Books for the last 20 years.

What she says : Optimism necessitates better than world; despair entails worse than actuality. Im a realist.

What they say : The National Book Critics Circle of America gave her a lifetime achievement give this year for her groundbreaking myth, environmental and feminist activism, and work to community as a co-founder of the Scribe Trust of Canada.

The post Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age | Claire Armitstead appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[apsbicepstraining]

Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age | Claire Armitstead

The Handmaids Tales joyful reception on the small screen reminds us of its ever-energetic generators spooky prescience

Once or twice in a generation, a tale is suggested that vaults out of the literary corral studying to be a phenomenon, well known to beings the world over who have never read the book: George Orwells 1984 is one and Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale is another.

So its perhaps not remarkable that a new 10 -part TV series based on the romance has struck a chord. Starring Elisabeth Moss as handmaid Offred, the succession launched in the US last-place month and comes to the UK later this month trailing superlatives.

At 77, Atwood blends the loftiness of a high priestess who does not stand moron gladly with an unstinting generosity to those she deems not to be foolhardy. She is a heartfelt environmentalist, with a special interest in chicks, which she shares with her husband, Graeme Gibson.

If her determination to live by her principles occasionally seems incidentally comic as when she embarked by barge on an international tour of a stage show publicising the second tale of her MaddAddam trilogy, The Year of the Flood she also brings to her politics a healthy dose of intentional humour.

On a recent trip to her Toronto home, her longtime UK publisher Lennie Goodings was amazed to converge her carrying a paper bag bellying with four large-scale rubber turkeys. She established them to me with that joke, manager on a tilt, wicked smile of hers. They yelped when she pressed them. It turned out that she and Gibson were about to present the trophies at an annual RSPB competition. The winners each receive a rubber goose from Margaret, at which point she deports them in a squeezing squawking choir.

Atwood traces her refer with the environment back to a childhood spent criss-crossing the groves of Canada with her entomologist leader. She was the second of three children, and the familys itinerant life meant that she did not going to see full-time academy until she was eight years old. She embarked producing her poetry while a student at the University of Toronto, acquired her firstly major literary award for a poetry collection are presented in 1964, and three accumulations later diversified into fiction in 1969 with The Edible Woman, about the status of women driven mad by consumerism.

She is a exceedingly hands-on person, says Goodings, a fellow Canadian, who has been her publisher at at the feminist imprint Virago since 1979. Her self-sufficiency comes from her childhood but also from her participation in the early days of CanLit[ Canadian Literature ]. She designed her own cover for her first journal of poetry, The Circle Game, with the red-faced specks you buy at stationery stores. In the early days of Virago she enjoyed and learned alongside us bookshop point-of-sale information such as shelf airstrips and dumpbins.

Once she and I passed in a taxi to an happen with a large cardboard lady a replication of the figure on the handle of[ her 1988 novel] Cats Eye. She loved it.

Her hands-on approach has carried her forcefully into the digital period. As an internationally successful author who has been awarded 24 honorary magnitudes in six two countries, been shortlisted five times for the Booker prize( acquiring it in 2000 for The Blind Assassin ), and who was more recently invited to Norway to implant a manuscript for 100 years as the first participant in The Future Library project, she faced the tricky issue of a monumental carbon footprint. She undertook it by inventing the LongPen, which enabled her at least to do volume signals without leaving her home.

Her penultimate novel, The Heart Goes Last, began its life on the fanfiction scaffold Wattpad, and she has 1.6 million Twitter partisans, to whom she tweets a dozen times a day on subjects arraying from the urgent need to protect the monarch butterfly to the vilification of Hilary Clinton.

She has also made cameo appearances in The Handmaids Tale, and as an cataclysm survivor on Zombies, Run !, a fitness app blending an audio drama with an immersive jogging competition, which was devised by her protege, the English novelist and gaming wizard Naomi Alderman.

The two were brought together through a mentoring strategy run by Rolex. Four of us got flown out to Canada to meet her and I belief she picked me because I was funny, says Alderman, who ascribes Atwood with the convent settle of her recent novel, The Power, which is in the running for the Baileys prize. Shes really implied me in their own families in a way I hadnt expected. Ive been bird watching in Cuba with her brother and his wife, and to the Arctic.

Atwood has said she was reluctant to get involved with the strategy, and some of her more institutional mentoring rapports ought to have little encouraging. As a teacher she was pretty hectoring, says one former student on a imaginative print MA. She read all our first assemblies and we each had one grilling with her about our journals. Almost all the questions she requested was, And then what happens? And then what happens? so I predict plot is pretty important.

Her abrasive line-up has also been evident in run-ins with the science fiction parish as to which category her fictions are all part of, insisting that they are speculative myth on the basis that: Discipline story has demons and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen.

The veteran SF columnist Ursula K Le Guin countered in a Guardian inspect: To my memory, The Handmaids Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future thats half prediction, half wit.

Published in the mid-1 980 s, with a Canadians mounting chagrin at the religion revitalization she was detecting over their own borders in the United States, The Handmaids Tale, a legend of a theocratic territory in which young woman are treated as clutch mares by a merciless revolutionary upper-clas, has become a staple of the curriculum in the English-speaking world.

In the late 20 th century, when a progress in feminism appeared irreparable, it seemed a cautionary tale of what might well. At the Hay festival in 2003, Atwood herself argues that it had little general relevance than the first fiction in what was to become her MaddAddam trilogy about a world-wide facing the consequences of environmental meltdown. Oryx and Crake, she said, addressed world-wide issues whereas The Handmaids Tale was specifically about America.

But three decades after The Handmaids Tale was produced, there are many all-too-real the locations where the denizens of the fictional republic of Gilead would feel at home, from Donald Trumps increasingly dictatorial and misogynistic US where objectors against two abortion-related greenbacks turned up at the Texas senate in March dressed in the long ruby-red costumes and white bonnets of Atwoods handmaids to a Nigeria in which schoolgirls are seized en masse, and a changing number of theocratic countries across Asia and the Middle East.

The Year of The Flood, are presented in 2009, boasts Gods Gardeners, a religious sect devoted to the melding of science, religion, and sort, whose hymn-singing was promulgated in a strange roadshow.

Atwood herself opened the depict, intoning on a monotone from a wooden throne. As Diana Quick, one of the musicians, echoes: Peggy was rather eerie on that amusing promo make because she had written all their carol of praise and she took to blessing everyone, as it were, ex cathedra. I recall she had had great hopes for it and was quite theatre struck, and then very disappointed in its implementation of the piece.

Perhaps we were too far away to see that wicked smile, though an endnote to the tale proposed to not. In it, Atwood invited readers to listen to the Gardeners hymns on her website and to use them for amateur devotional or environmental purposes. If she sometimes takes herself preferably too seriously, she has surely gave the right to do so over a 60 -book career which shows no sign of ceasing to produce spookily prescient books.

Anyone inclined to be said that The Handmaids Tale is still a parochial parable should consider its relevant to even presumably radical societies in an age of a mass surveillance that would have been inconceivable when the novel was written. Like their fellow citizens of Gilead, we have internalised the distorted reasoning of Atwoods sinister Aunt Lydia, the apparently kindly supervisor who is actually a commonwealth stooge. There is more than one various kinds of democracy. Discretion to and exemption from, she says. In the days of disorder, it was freedom to. Now “you think youre” being given discretion from. Dont underrate it. As Orwell almost said, Big Sister is Watching You.

Potted profile

Born: 18 November 1939

Age: 77

Career: Started out as a poet and has to date written roughly 60 books for adults and children. She has also created opera libretti, television dialogues and a graphic novel.

High spot: Prevailing the Booker prize in 2000 with The Blind Assassin, the fourth of her fictions to be shortlisted.

Low quality: The Handmaids Tale has been censored from schools and libraries all over the US for being anti-Christian and sexually lurid and has appeared on the 100 Most Frequently Objection Books for the last 20 years.

What she says : Optimism necessitates better than world; despair entails worse than actuality. Im a realist.

What they say : The National Book Critics Circle of America gave her a lifetime achievement give this year for her groundbreaking myth, environmental and feminist activism, and work to community as a co-founder of the Scribe Trust of Canada.

The post Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age | Claire Armitstead appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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