#end up being right wing policy makers

[communist-hatsunemiku]

As someone who's been there, the "identity stuff" is way more confusing than answering what do you want to do. I knew I wanted to get on feminizing HRT 10 years before I accepted I'm a trans woman.

In general I believe that both gender identity and gender expression belong to the "do what you want forever" category. Do you want to try out these specific clothes? Just do. Do you want to get on fem-HRT? Just do. Do you want to present yourself in a specific way on the net? Just do. Surgeries? Just do.

EXACTLY its such an obvious truth to me that we should all do whatever we want with our bodies and identities and the only reason this is a radical idea is because other people(mostly right wingers but even so-called leftists do this shit) think its their fucking life mission to police everybody around them and make sure no one is living their life the 'wrong' way.

[queerpunktomatoes]

Here is the pdf version of Project 2025. It's long and dry, so here are some talking points for you.

Note the page numbers so you can back yourself up. Most people are not going to read the whole document (because it's awful to read tbh) so you need to be able to defend your critiques.

We don't need false arguments to weaken our entirely correct conviction that Trump is a fascist.

Page 5 "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children... should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered." Translation: Transgender people should be seen as pornographic, and those who make/distribute porn should be imprisoned. Being transgender should be illegal.

Page 94 "Sustain support for Israel." Translation: Continue funding the Palestinian genocide with taxpayer money.

Page 97 "Senior acquisition leaders should design a system that allows decision-makers to stay within the law but bypass unnecessary departmental regulations that are not in the best interest of the government and hamper the acquisition of capabilities that warfighters require." Translation: Reduce workplace safety regulations in the interest of making more money.

Page 103 "Require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery the military entrance examination—by all students in schools that receive federal funding." Translation: Children in public schools have to take the military entrance exam. Children in private schools do not.

Page 104 "Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service." Translation: Keep trans people out of the military.

Page 155 "Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinformation efforts... The entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One." Translation: End FBI's effort to combat disinformation.

Page 246 "Conservatives will thus reward a President who eliminates this tyrannical situation. PBS and NPR do not even bother to run programming that would attract conservatives." Translation: Don't publically fund anything that isn't explicitly right-wing, including children's entertainment.

Page 259 "The next conservative Administration should rescind President Biden’s 2022 Gender Policy. It should remove all references, examples, definitions, photos, and language on USAID websites, in agency publications and policies, and in all agency contracts and grants that include the following terms: 'gender,' 'gender equality,' 'gender equity,' 'gender diverse individuals,' 'gender aware,' 'gender sensitive,' etc. It should also remove references to 'abortion,' 'reproductive health, and 'sexual and reproductive rights'... produces unnecessary consternation and confusion among and even outright bias against men.” Translation: All language related to gender, equality, and sexual rights should be removed from all official USA websites and documents.

Page 260 "PLGHA requires foreign NGOs, as a condition of receiving assistance, to agree not to perform or actively promote abortions as a method of family planning in foreign countries... The new pro-life executive order should apply to foreign NGOs." Translation: American doctors are not allowed to perform abortions domestically or internationally.

Page 285 "The department [of education] is a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, which—as the COVID era showed—is not particularly concerned with children’s education. Schools should be responsive to parents, rather than to leftist advocates intent on indoctrination—and the more the federal government is involved in education, the less responsive to parents the public schools will be. This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm. For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states." Translation: The Department of Education should be eliminated.

Page 302 "Return to the Original Purpose of School Meals. Federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs... To serve students in need and prevent the misuse of taxpayer money, the next Administration should focus on students in need and reject efforts to transform federal school meals into an entitlement program." Translation: Roll back free school lunches to apply to ~185% fewer people than it does currently.

Page 320-322 "In July of that year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after Congress reached a consensus that the mistreatment of [B]lack Americans was no longer tolerable and merited a federal response... In 1973, [Congress] passed the Rehabilitation Act, and, in 1975, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act... The next Administration will need a plan to redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government, eliminate those that are ineffective or duplicative, and then eliminate the unproductive red tape and rules by entrusting states and districts with flexible, formula-driven block grants." Translation: Repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Page 372 "The U.S. nuclear arsenal needs to be updated and reinvigorated... Fund the design, development, and deployment of new nuclear warheads, including the production of plutonium pits in quantity. Expand the U.S. Navy and develop new nuclear naval reactors to ensure that the Navy has the nuclear propulsion it needs to secure America’s strategic interests. End ineffective and counterproductive nonproliferation activities like those involving Iran and the United Nations." Translation: Withdraw from "let's not use nuclear weapons" agreements, build more nuclear weapons, and resume nuclear weapons testing.

Page 451 "Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on 'LGBTQ+ equity,' subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families. Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children, but the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is ruining our children’s futures... homes with non-related 'boyfriends' present are among the most dangerous place for a child to be. HHS should prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, health, and welfare policies. In the context of current and emerging reproductive technologies, HHS policies should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them." Translation: The cishet nuclear family is the only valid, legally recognizable family.

Page 474 "Reissue a stronger transgender national coverage determination. CMS should repromulgate its 2016 decision that CMS could not issue a National Coverage Determination (NCD) regarding 'gender reassignment surgery' for Medicare beneficiaries. In doing so, CMS should acknowledge the growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous and acknowledge that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such coverage in state plans." Translation: Remove all gender-affirming care coverage from government insurance plans.

Page 482 "Eliminate the Head Start program." Translation: Remove free education/health programs for low-income families.

Page 508 "Repeal climate change initiatives and spending in the department’s budget request." Translation: End all programs that address climate change.

Page 524 "Rescind the Biden rules and reinstate the Trump rules regarding... The Endangered Species Act rules defining Critical Habitat and Critical Habitat Exclusions." Translation: Remove protections for endangered animals.

Page 524 "Reinstate President Trump’s plan for opening most of the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska to leasing and development." Translation: Expand Arctic drilling.

Page 587 "The Working Families Flexibility Act would allow employees in the private sector the ability to choose between receiving time-and-a-half pay or accumulating time-and-a-half paid time off." Translation: Employers are not required to pay extra for overtime.

Page 592 "Employers and employees should be able to set a two- or four-week period over which to calculate overtime. This would give workers greater flexibility to work more hours in one week and fewer hours in the next and would not require the employer to pay them more for that same total number of hours of work during the entire period." Translation: The 40-hour work week should become a 160-hour work month, so employers can make you work extra hours with no overtime pay by cutting your hours later in the month.

Page 664 "The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories." Translation: Americans should not get free extreme weather warnings. We should have to pay for it, and watch commercials between segments.

Page 708 "The next conservative Administration should take affirmative steps to expose and eradicate the practice of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ... Treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment." Translation: Fire any/all government employees who participated in DEI training.

And remember:

[jfbuckley]

Big man. What a hero!!

==========

I don’t condone the “far right”, but there is considerable conjecture about what it actually is.

To most people it probably means Hitler - but it shouldn’t be forgotten that in addition to his anti-semitism, Hitler was also a Socialist - albeit a “National” one.

When weasley people like tool maker’s son Starmer talk about “far right”, they actually mean people who have perfectly normal conservative values. Obviously NOT people who believe in current Conservative Party policies, as that is quite left wing.

=======

Clamping down on genuine “far right” activities is of course a laudable aim. To show that your intentions are pure though Keir, I would ask that you end the current disgraceful situation of two tier policing, whereby Pro-Palestinian demonstrators get away with chanting genocidal slogans, and climate change activists not only get away with blocking main roads but seem to get police assistance in doing so. It would also be nice to know what is being done about the thugs who attacked the police officers at Manchester Airport last week.

Remember Keir that “if it is sauce for the goose, it is sauce for the gander too”. I have no doubt that you will follow up on the far right, but I have absolutely NO faith that you will show any determination at all when it comes to the other issues I’ve mentioned.

[jordanianroyals]

Princess Dina Mired of Jordan wants to improve global cancer control in her new role 

Wednesday, 18 Jul 20183:30 PM MYT By WONG LI ZA

Despite jetlag and a back-to-back schedule, Princess Dina Mired still looked sharp, without a strand of hair out of place.

More importantly, she knows her facts and does not hesitate to speak her mind.

The Princess of Jordan was in Kuala Lumpur for a four-day visit, on the invitation of the National Cancer Society of Malaysia (NCSM) to promote the upcoming World Cancer Congress (WCC) to be held in Kuala Lumpur in October.

The down-to-earth princess was warm and in good spirits as she met young cancer patients at the NCSM premises in Kuala Lumpur before having one-to-one interviews with members of the media.

Princess Dina, 52, is president-elect of the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) – the world’s largest international cancer-fighting organisation with over 1,000 members in 164 countries – and a global advocate for cancer control and non-communicable diseases (NCD).

She was also the Honorary Chairperson of the Jordan Breast Cancer Programme from 2006-2016, advocating early detection and screening of breast cancer for women in Jordan.

In 2011, she was chosen to deliver the keynote speech on behalf of civil society at the first ever United Nations High-level Meeting on NCDs, raising cancer’s profile on the global health agenda.

The Jordanian princess also led the King Hussein Cancer Foundation (KHCF) in Jordan as director-general for 15 years, elevating the organisation’s standing into a leader in the global movement for people affected by cancer.

Born Dina Mohammad Khalifeh, Princess Dina married Prince Mired Raad in 1992. Together, they have three children – Princess Shirin, 25, Prince Rakan, 23 and Prince Jafar, 16.

For the princess and her family, cancer was something that they came face-to-face with 20 years ago.

In 1997, their second child Prince Rakan was diagnosed with leukaemia when he was barely two years old. He had a relapse during his treatment and underwent bone marrow transplant, with the donor being his sister Princess Shirin.

Prince Rakan successfully completed his treatment in 2000. (Source: The Star)

Asked how that experience has changed her and the family, the princess replied, “I think nobody who goes through such a traumatic journey comes out the same. When you go through something like that, you really understand that the most important and precious thing in life is health. Because when you lose it, you lose control, and you cannot do anything,” she said, as her voice and eyes softened.

Going through such a journey also puts things into context, she added.

“I think what happens is when you come out the other end, you start to enjoy the simple things in life, and you stop sweating the small stuff. You put things into perspective and, I think, you almost say that it’s a blessing to had the cancer because you got the wake-up call,” she said.

Princess Dina readily admitted that they were lucky to be able to afford to go for treatment abroad in the United States and Britain, and that her husband and immediate family were very supportive.

“And even with all of that, it was still very hard, so just imagine the poor people who have to go through cancer. I always say the equation for poverty and cancer is catastrophe.

“So I think people should realise and remember this fact because people who lack financial and emotional support need a lot more support,” she emphasised.

Fighting tobacco and cancer head-on

In line with her cancer advocacy, Princess Dina is also Honorary Chair of the Tobacco Free Portfolios steering committee and Honorary President of the Harvard University Global Task Force for Expanded Access to Cancer Control and Care in the Developing World.

Having been briefed about the local fight against tobacco in Malaysia during her visit, she shared some advice.

“Malaysia, I understand, has had some successes. You raised the price of cigarettes a little, banned smoking in some places, but unfortunately, even though those are positive steps, they are limited.

“I would love for Malaysia to be able to make a dent in the fight against tobacco, and to stop the new generation from smoking. The amount of price hike needs to be able to deter new and young customers from buying cigarettes,” she said.

She pointed out that Malaysia is a signatory to the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which has clear guidelines pertaining to things like smoke-free areas, advertising, packaging and labelling.

“I think the people, decision-makers and policy makers should understand that because the wings of the tobacco industry have been clipped in Europe, America and so on, it needs new markets and therefore, is zooming in on the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Why? Because we don’t have strict regulations,” said Princess Dina, who holds a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Financial Analysis from Warwick University and a Master’s degree in International Banking and Financial Services from Reading University, both in Britain.

“People need to know that CEOs of big tobacco industries don’t smoke because they know there are thousands of chemicals in it. They know how harmful it is but what they do is they focus on our youth, get them addicted, take our money and then go and sunbathe somewhere!” said Princess Dina unreservedly.

Overall, she commented that Malaysia has some good treatment plans and early detection programmes, but felt that Malaysia’s national cancer control plan needs to be implemented and not just be “sitting on the shelf”.

“What’s the point of having it then? But if it is costed, has a budget and there is an action plan with deadlines and KPIs (key performing index), then it’s going to trickle down to all the policy makers,” she urged.

She also highlighted the need for the country to update the national cancer registry, which was last updated in 2011.

“We are in 2018. How can policy makers make better decisions or know the successes or weaknesses if you don’t have the numbers? Other countries have moved on not only with cancer data, but with non-communicable diseases’ data. And this doesn’t cost money, just political will and organisation,” she emphasised.

Bridging the gap

One of the key roles of UICC is to narrow the gap of cancer control between developing and developed countries.

“What we work on is to unite the global cancer response because many organisations in the cancer community, in earlier years, were working in silos, meaning the cancer agenda was not top priority in the global health community,” said Princess Dina, who will commence her term as UICC President, the first from the Arab region, in October this year.

UICC also holds governments accountable when it comes to implementing the Global NCD Action Plan 2013-2020, which wants to reduce premature mortality from NCDs by 25% by the year 2025. The action plan came about after the UN Political Declaration on the Prevention and Control of NCDs was adopted in 2011.

Equitable access to care is another goal of the UICC.

“The gap has been narrowed but if countries continue at the rate they are at now, we will not be able to reach our goals by 2020.

“And what that means is, we are not saving the lives that we should be saving. People are dying needlessly due to lack of political will and lack of focused policies to fight cancer head-on to make it part and parcel of the health agenda,” she pointed out.

The WCC will be held for the first time in Malaysia, and South-east Asia, in October, bringing together over 3,500 cancer control and public health experts from 150 countries, with 500 renowned speakers.

The programme includes about 90 multi-disciplinary sessions and will cover topics ranging from obesity, tobacco control, HPV vaccination and screening programmes as well as complimentary medicines and economics of cancer care.

The World Cancer Leaders’ Summit – a major annual high-level policy meeting dedicated exclusively to furthering global cancer control – will be held on the first day of the Congress.

The WCC is organised by the UICC every two years in a UICC member country. This year’s congress is hosted by NCSM.

“It is a great opportunity for Malaysia to capitalise not only on the Cancer Leaders’ Summit but also on the Congress. It is an amazing knowledge-sharing event, with a wealth of opportunity to meet top experts in one place and to unite the national effort.

“It is also the time to advocate and pressure decision-makers that cancer and NCD should be the top priority for the Malaysian government, especially with the new government. This is the time to do it right,” she said in conclusion.

[robert-c]

Abortion Solution?

Most reliable scientific polls show that an overwhelming majority of people in the US want abortion to remain legal and safe for women to choose. While I have seen no polling data on this, I would imagine that most would also prefer that it didn’t happen often. As someone who has been close to women who chose abortion, I know that it isn’t an easy decision, even when they decide it is the best choice. It is an extremely personal and difficult choice, which no one else can fully appreciate without a complete and total understanding of someone’s life, which is never possible.

When people approve of various restrictions, they are buying into the extremist’s viewpoint, that their feelings and opinions about the decision have some standing. Even when of good will, I think these people are simply talking about their own feelings of where they would personally draw the line for themselves, but imagining (as anti-choice forces wish) that it is up to someone else other than the woman involved. I believe that as long as something is in your body, then you have the final and only say about what happens to that growth.

In order for there to be a solution, there first has to be an acknowledgement that the choice is the woman’s. But those who wish there weren’t so many abortions could do something about that which would be a lot more constructive than trying to outlaw them.

I’ve often wondered what would happen if the massive amounts of money spent trying to outlaw abortion were instead spent on services that are lacking for most candidates for abortion. If these services were available, free or for little cost, perhaps the choices would be less influenced by circumstances that were transient.

The Guttmacher Institute has gathered statistics about abortion for decades in order to have reliable scientific data available for policy makers. Most of the data is not surprising; for example, most (59%) had one or more children already and even more (75%) were poor. In addition, most of the women were in their 20’s (61%).

This paints a picture of women choosing abortion when they cannot afford (another) child. Anti-choice forces would love to paint a simplistic picture of “why not carry the baby to term and offer it for adoption”. Aside from personal choice issues including health and risk to the mother, that may well be a false choice for most of these women. Poor means low income jobs, most likely without health insurance. These are the sort of jobs that don’t come with maternity benefits and which might even be dangerous for pregnant women to engage in beyond a certain point. And of course the most adoptable babies come from mothers with good nutrition, healthy lifestyle and who have had regular prenatal exams, the very sort of thing a poor young woman with no health insurance cannot afford. She could even lose her job for taking off to see the doctor, even if she could afford it.

This sort of rigid moralist thinking about abortion is creating societal problems that the very anti-choice proponents claim they don’t want to see – viz. unwanted children growing up in the foster care system or in unfit homes with inadequate supervision.

So I’m just imagining what if there was a place where a woman could go to get free, or nearly so (sliding scale?), prenatal care. Perhaps the place would even have job training for getting better paying jobs. Its hours would be very flexible so that people wouldn’t have to take off work, and risk losing their jobs, to avail themselves of the services. There would have to be a dinner prepared and a place for their existing children to be watched while in the after-hours programs. Perhaps the key would be to assign a case worker to each person so that their particular needs, training and assistance could be assessed and provided. At the very least, those whose primary reason for the abortion was inability to afford the prenatal care would be able to carry to term for adoption, and some who couldn’t support another child may be able to after additional job training. But in any event, it would be the woman’s choice, uninfluenced by many of the economic circumstances that might force her choice.

These are just “spit balling” ideas. I’m sure someone better than me could flesh them out more. But the key point here is that, contrary to Right wing propaganda, abortion doesn’t appear to be a casual decision, or a first line of birth control. The idea here isn’t to impose a morality on someone else, but to find a solution to the needs of real people so that the choices they make aren’t unduly influenced by things that can be changed.

One of the (many) ironies of anti-choice folks is that IF women choosing abortion were as flighty and casual about the choice as they like to believe, who would want to have them raising a child let alone adopting one from them? Successfully forcing these women to carry a pregnancy to term will not give them the financial ability to provide for the child (before or after birth) or turn someone into a caring and responsible parent.

There really are only a few reasons that the anti-choice forces are willing to spend so much money in an effort to outlaw abortion again, instead of using those millions to help create a world in which it is less frequent by choice. A big part of it is about imposing a simplistic morality on others. Then they can bask in a self-righteous sense of moral superiority and deftly avoid having to consider the complexities of real human being’s lives and the choices they have to make to get by. It may not be “let them eat cake”, but it demonstrates the same complete lack of understanding and empathy.

To top off the inconsistencies of their proposals, let’s remember what happened before when abortion was illegal. The well off women found doctors who would discretely perform the operation, some doctors would coach the women on symptoms to report so that a D&C would be needed, ending any pregnancy as a byproduct of the procedure. As usual, only the poor and people without those connections had to resort to more dangerous versions of abortion. Since the poor are overwhelmingly people of color, the anti-choice agenda is essentially racist as well. And yet at odds with other right wing ideas that see the poor as criminals and welfare cheats, and other alt-right folks who just want to eliminate or reduce the population of non-whites.

Of course these inconsistencies won’t split conservatives from the “right to lifers” because they have long sense quit being about principles and are all about voting blocs. Even the “right to lifers” have no consistent philosophy to pursue; some favor the death penalty, others do not, some are OK with contraception and others oppose it. Apparently the only thing they agree on is that they should (for some reason) have control of women’s bodies.

If the human race were on the verge of extinction for lack of enough children being born, then there might be some reason for their position. As it is, with human over population being one of the main stressors on the environment and threat to human survival, their position is ludicrous and dangerous.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

The Cryptoliberal creep/the left is dead: Anarchist-Individualist critique of the left in Ireland

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; Freedom is something that people take and people are as free as they want to be” — James Arthur Baldwin

“I think my basic viewpoint is that everything the left and right say about each other is true. And the reason it’s true is because they have so much in common.” — Bob Black

The so called “radical left” has been a total failure, has done nothing and has not made any “radical change”. The “radical left” has only been successful in re-creating institutions of hierarchy and dominance via its parties, unions and front groups/campaigns. Many leftists building nice careers for themselves in the process.

The “radical left” of the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s (most notably former members of the Workers Party) are now the very people that have been pushing and implementing neoliberalism in Ireland. The old “radical” leftists have swapped their radical language and false promises for Mercedes cars, designer suits and high waged state or union positions.

There is no doubt that many modern leftist will have the same faith as their counterparts. It’s not hard to imagine. The exact same problems that existed within the left today are the very ones that were always there. These problems can be broken down into factors such as: populism, opportunism, careerism, and reformism (to name but a few).

There is no order of importance, all these factors have equally damaging effects. These factors are not specific to any one current within the left but to the whole left. These factors contribute differently but equally to the left’s failure to create any “radical change” or transformation they proclaim to want.

Let’s break it down a little:

“SOCIALISM: Discipline, discipline; obedience, obedience; slavery and ignorance, pregnant with authority. A bourgeois body grotesquely fattened by a vulgar christian creature. A medley of fetishism, sectarianism and cowardice.

ORGANIZATIONS, LEGISLATIVE BODIES AND UNIONS: Churches for the powerless. Pawnshops for the stingy and weak. Many join to live parasitically off the backs of their card-carrying simpleton colleagues. Some join to become spies. Others, the most sincere, join to end up in jail from where they can observe the mean-spiritedness of all the rest.” — Renzo Novatore

Opportunism:

Whether as an individual activists or as a member of a party, union or some other type of organization, leftist take part and use struggles for a whole lot of reason. These struggles could be in a workplace, housing, abortion rights, even supporting struggles in other countries that are a popular, etc. In struggles leftists use political maneuvers in order to hijack, centralise, and harness the energy, power, and enthusiasm of angry people for their own political gain, aims and motivations. Leftists use campaigns and struggles as ways of gaining followers and support for their programmes, building their own power cliques and personal networks, climbing the political or union careerist ladders, or even at the least, for activist scene points.

Careerism:

Many leftists take part in struggles to use them as means to build careers. The career could be in politics, unions, academia, journalism, NGOs, etc. Some Leftists becoming “experts”or “specialists” on certain topics/struggles, using the gained knowledge to further their career.

Populism:

Populism is a curse in the fight for liberation. Populism is dangerous, populism risks losing or gaining “the party”, “the movement”, “the organization” or “the campaign” support, credibility or new members. Populism also creates a dynamic within left organisations that will determine what “the party” or “group” will support or what actions taken, projects, or campaigns they will get involved with. They will always go with the popular option, even if it is wrong. If activists in a campaign, party, or group swerve off the populist road, they are at risk of being punished and vilified by the majority. They could have their names tarnished, blackened, lies made up and spread about them. All attempts at discrediting and to remove people seen as opposition. Populism will make people tell lies to mislead others and tarnish opponents. Struggles have been destroyed and lost because of populism. These dirty tactics are used against any threats to their positions, to discredit and isolate people that are opposed to their strategies or views, to remove opposition in campaigns or projects to clear the field which will help with them hijacking, having more influence and control; making people look “bad”,“mad”, “crazy” or “troublemakers” so no one will listen to their opinion or ideas, to save or gain support.

Reformism:

A large majority of the left, whither they call themselves, socialists,marxists, leninists, trotskyists, and even some anarchists, are in fact crypto-liberals. These liberals disguise themselves with radical language and bullshit. They do not want to overthrow or destroy the state and capitalism, although they may say they do. They want to reform it away, make it more “nicer” for people bit by bit. They naively believe this can be done peacefully and with well thought out arguments, protest marches and lobbying. The “resistance” they proclaim is of pacifism, delegation, negotiation and compromise with the state and bosses.

Trade unions like all formal organizations based on growing in membership are prone to populism and the other factors I mentioned above. At worst union officials undermine and disempower struggles, compromising with bosses, negotiating deals on what would appear to be the best outcome for workers, but realistically contribute towards keeping this society intact. At best unions are reformist that help to make improvements to conditions of exploitation making the daily toil of work a little bit more bearable. Ultimately unions are a cog in the machine of capitalism, with the outcome of helping towards the creation of social peace between exploited and exploiters. There is no revolutionary potential from trade unions.

For the leftist politico their intentions are to run in elections which they hope to win so they can make “radical changes” to the state and therefore make life better for “the people” (as they view it anyway).

The politicos say if they do not have enough power in parliament to make “radical change” at the least they will be able to make “radical” challenges to the government.

The outcomes of such bullshit tactics are well known. If a leftist is elected into parliament they can make counter arguments to the government, this usually falls to nothing. We have seen this in the South of Ireland with socialist TD’s (elected representatives) making arguments against a variety of issues such as the use of Shannon airport by the US military, the Shell oil company plundering natural resources in Mayo, the struggle for housing, and the struggle against water privatization.

If a Leftist party wins enough seats to win power or share power with another party they end up watering down their “radical” views and implement the most right wing of policies, we have seen this in recent history with the Irish Labour party in the South of Ireland and we have seen it with Sinn Fein in the North of Ireland (not that either party had very radical views to start off with, but they gave lip service to socialism at some point), both parties completely selling out to every person that voted for them implementing neo liberalist policies.

Politicos running in elections and playing in the parliamentary circus water down their “radicalism” the more they take part in it, constantly being on the watch, making sure they don’t lose support and wanting to gain support. This inevitably makes them compromise and sell out little by little, till they finally stop preaching any type of “radicalism”.

During the struggle against water privatization we have seen the crypto-liberals use their vanguardist tactics blatantly. From when people from working class neighbourhoods defended their neighbourhoods against the installation of water meters in homes in many communities throughout Ireland. The resistance sparked off sporadically. People resisting from different neighborhoods linked up together to help each other. Politicos and union bureaucrats infiltrated different neighborhoods that were resistant, to hijack the struggle. The politicos (Parties such as Sinn Fein, Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of Ireland, Eirigi; and unions such as Unite and Mandate) invented “Right2Water” a campaign group which plonked itself on top of the struggle attempting to claim to be the representative of the all the people resisting water privatization. The politicos used this campaign as means to bring the struggle down the road of parliamentary politics. In lots of areas the politicos were successful in their hijacking, in some neighbourhoods people were wise to them.

Every couple of months there would be a call for a “peaceful march” through the streets of Dublin with loads of bull shit boring speeches at the end, from politicos of course. Any people at the march that didn’t go by the “peaceful march” narrative were tarnished as the “bad protesters” and “trouble makers”. These so called “troublemakers” would block traffic or occupy buildings (usually banks) and blocking busy roads. These type of tactics didn’t suit the politicos because it was out of their control and did not suit their narrative. During a demonstration in a working class neighbourhood a youth threw a brick at a pig car. A Socialist Party politico (and member of parliament) that had infiltrated the water struggle, publicly condemned the youth calling for the pigs to arrest, charge and convict the youth. Others were denounced by politicos for burning vans that belonged to the company that was installing water metres.

The water struggle came to a head when the Right2Water politicos and union bureaucrats thirsty for any scrap of power, sat on “the Expert Water Commision” which was created by the government, and accepted that a private company would own the water services (ie the privatization of water). Charges for domestic use of water have been put on hold (for now). The leftist politicos and bureaucrats try to claim this as a “great victory”. To this day the Irish Water company continue to put in water meters into homes, laying the ground for in the future when it wants to implement charges for using water in homes. The politicos and bureaucrats done this without any consent, and ultimately they disempowered the struggle in the process.

These tactics are used time and time again by the crypto-liberals. It was seen in popular struggles such as: struggle against water privatisation in the late 1990’s, the anti war movement in the early 2000’s, struggle against bin charges 2000’s, struggle against property tax in the 2010’s and recently in the struggle for housing, with the same sex marriage and abortion referendums — crypto liberals maneuvering themselves into position of mediator between the state or bosses and excluded and exploited individuals. Of course all these struggles were (and some still are) hot topics and were high up on agendas for electionaring.

[border-spam]

Leech Lord: Allies

Troy

Gar is about as native as a Pandoran can get, and has for years had a very soft spot for the bratty King.

He's old colonist, thinks his parents might have been with Atlas on one of the many failed corporate town setups that plagued Pandora 30-ish years ago. He was too young to remember who's banner they flew under when his family stepped out of the shuttle and onto the dust planes they’d been instructed to settle, just that things went wrong fast and anyone still alive 18 months later had needed to adapt quickly to what constitutes living on this planet.

He was drawn to the Holy City for the same reasons as most survivalists, it was an opportunity for safety and a roof over your head. Not needing to fight to eat or scrabble to stay alive is a blessing for most Pandorans, and he's one of the thousands who live within the walls who don't quite worship the twins as Gods, but praise them as holy... because the twins gave them a chance to have a home. Wether they are deities or not isn't a factor in the loyalty they've’ earned.

He's skilled with food. Knows how to spice spoiled flesh to hide the rot, pickle cactus root and delicate rock blossoms for long storage, or how long rakk wing needs to be slow roasted to turn from gamey string to meat that melts in the mouth.

Like most in the HC, he ended up where his skills have value and has ran the kitchens in the Grand Cathedral since its founding bricks were set.

It didn't take very long for him to find Troy in it one night - picking through ingredients and half finished dishes in the early AM.

While he'd expected to need to drop to his knees and grovel, the God King had seemed more embarrassed than anything, awkwardly explaining he hadn't eaten that day and asking if there was anything left from the after sermon banquet. 

His eager politeness had hit Gar hard, but his reaction to finding out the leftovers had been destroyed was what left a lasting impression.

Gar had thought the twins affluent spoiled little shits who'd hit things lucky on Pandora and been clever enough to know how to use their wealth to culture worship, so when Troy was genuinely upset to the point of disgust that food had been wasted like that? It changed his perception immediately.

This wasn't the reaction of some egotistical little shitbag from a wealthy background, this was the visceral panic and anger of someone who'd starved before, who understood the insult of food being destroyed when there were so many hungry... when he'd known hunger.

It took less than 24 hours for the kitchen policies to be changed and Gar's team to find out nothing was to be wasted. Uneaten and unused stock was to be transported at end of day to the Slums from now on, where it would "Bolster the flesh of the faithful."

Every time he finds Troy hunting through his kitchen at 4 am over the years, their chats grow a little longer.

By late COV, Gar's meals delivered to his sanctum are some of the only things God King Calypso still trusts enough to eat.

Tyreen

Xanshi Ur-Vendit is obsessed with the God Queen.

As her Saint of Marketing, he's got both her ear and a position of high authority within the organisation that he covets viciously, and takes great personal offense towards newer Saints he doesn't deem worthy of the title.

His pedigree speaks for itself, the man had quite a reputation on Promethea among the media departments of the high corporations. An expertly trained and cut-throat money maker that was the exact kind of egotistical, nasty piece of work that would be drawn to the God Queen's side.

Has direct tie in's with the esteemed Katagawa family, something he's used to his benefit throughout his career.

He fawns over her, she can do no wrong around him, and he spends as many hours of the day as he can trailing behind her heels like a lapdog, reaffirming her beauty and intelligence and infallibility with every breath he can manage between the underhanded threats he aims towards anyone possibly about to draw her attention away from him.

Hates Troy. Fucking hates him.

Too much of a hole-sucking little coward in his $60k three piece suit to actually do anything about it of course, but he takes plenty of his vitriol out on Troy's departments instead.

Marketing has such massive reach within the internal structure of the COV that he's able to throw his weight around far more than some of her other Saints, and regardless of if they actually like him, they tend to back Xan and his opinions automatically.

A huge amount of the conflict between departments and heads is driven by this imagined competitiveness, that Troy's people, Troy's chosen, must in some way be inferior to Tyreen's.

Xan is her right hand in his own mind, he's her holy knight. If she holds too much misplaced love for her brother to see how pathetic he is in comparison to her radiance, then it's up to Xan to keep Troy's people in place...

In reality? Tyreen isn't even invested in him enough to remember Xanshi's full name.

Seifa

Sei makes friends in low places far easier than higher ones, always has. People at the bottom of the ladder, folks who have struggled? They recognise each other. Doesn't matter where on the scales they currently stand, there's an unspoken nod, a side glance. You see your own - even if who you are has been lucky enough to change over time.

While she's never been in one place long enough to set up a friend network before that was tangible and not based on e-comms and data feeds, she's woven one since settling in the HC without really even noticing it was happening.

One-hand Jim in the King's Call, that high end rave bar near the cathedral grounds. Not so gruff now he's not drowning in debt, few more smiles while he's mixing cocktails.

Cleo in munitions stocks, breathing a bit easier since her son landed that underling role in the Mechanica, more food on the table with less worry.

Feliz and Irgo running deals in the western slum backstreets. Not competing against the HammerClaws for territory anymore since JK "got wind" of the shit they were cutting their gear with and had Vanguard waiting at their quarters for a polite discussion about unspoken laws. What Fe and Iggy are selling isn't exactly high quality but at least it won't rot your brain inside the skull.

Sei will tell you she's a lone wolf. She'll insist she’s a one woman show, runs shit on her own and doesn’t need others.

But watch closely when out with her in the city, check how often she buys a drink, how often it's not on an invisible tab the barstaff nod knowingly about as they hand her glass over with a smirk.

She's never asked to pay.

That should tell you plenty.

Seifa and Tyreen

- Early COV

"Ty, you ever wish you were born a guy?"

Of all the things Tyreen had expected to hear from Sei tonight, that... wasn’t it. She stopped reading the same piece of nonsensical math in the sheet she was holding to gawk at Seifa instead, staring at the other woman’s back as she continued to work on the data records they'd been passing between them all evening.

"No.. god. What, and look like Troy?" she snorted with a wince. "Nooooo thanks" Ty sighed as she leaned back and heard her stiff spine pop, waiting for a response that didn't come. She felt a pang of concern as Sei's shoulders sank a little lower in front of her, deflating.

This wasn’t normal, where was the bitchy retort, or joining in on insulting her brother? She shuffled together the files and stood, walking to her friend's side and sitting slowly next to her in the quiet of the twin's shared office. Sei still hadn’t responded, pretending to be completely absorbed by the notes she stared at. Ty cleared her throat with a cough.

"Uhhh.. why?"

Seifa silently reached to her side to take the offered files from Ty as she sat, pointedly not making eye contact, though the younger woman picked up on the redness in them easily enough.

"Sei, I need to have someone's hands cut off?" 

Ty pouted, hitting her mark as Seifa failed to completely hide a smirk in response.

"I need to have someone thrown into a pit? Huh? C'mon Sei, talk to me. You always tell me I need to talk more about things that me down, right?" she weedled, hands clasped over her heart as she faux whined, earning a quiet laugh from her companion.

"Oh god Tyreen SURE, if you'll shutup." Sei groaned, leaning back in her chair and running hands over her eyes. She was tired. Beyond tired, really. Always said she knew how to not outstay her welcome but had been wondering recently if that had ever been true. Day to day in the cult, managing people she’d never meet and holding the weight of more responsibility than she’d ever wanted was eating at her. Had been for some time. Nights like this helped, shooting shit with Tyreen, bitching, sometimes gently bullying Troy together if he’d decided to grace them with his janky presence, but still.. it was heavy, and Seifa was tired. 

"Ahh.. just the usual shit" she whispered, thumbing through the papers as Tyreen leaned a little closer, as much of a comforting presence as she could muster all things considered. An arm around the shoulder or gentle stroke of hair wasn’t an option. All Ty had was words and honestly, they weren’t exactly her forte.

“It's just like. Sometimes when I'm talking, and it's about something they think I shouldn't know shit about, like how Burgess is spending too much of your budget on expensive, low grade gear-assemblies when if we went off brand I can prove it would be better, they just zone out."

"It's like.. if they thought I had a cock, if I was 6'4, they'd be listening. " she added, eyes burning again.

She groaned, leaning over the table and resting her cheek across her folded arms.

"I got so angry. I'm used to dealing with it, it's always happened, but I just boiled over. This week has been.. long, I guess." she whispered, pinching the bridge of her nose as Tyreen watched quietly. "I ate into him in front of like, 6 other people Ty, couple of heads were there. That doesn't help my reputation does it.. that's just making shit worse. I'm sabotaging myself. They think I'm a bitch already without me starting a fight and stirring the pot."

Tyreen shifted in her seat, eyes thoughtful as she rested her chin in her hands, elbow propped on the table edge.

"Nah. "

"Just sounds like they're dumb. I keep telling Troy we need people with actual brains leading this shit Sei, if you're getting ignored cause you have tits? Haha. Wait till they meet me in person. " she grinned, a genuine act peeking through her usual haughty persona as Seifa chuckled.

"I mean my rack is way bigger than yours, you're flat as a fuckin' plank in comparison."

Asks are Open!

[nikkoliferous]

In spite of what you might have heard, Democrats aren’t stupid. Nor are they spineless, cowardly, incapable of messaging, or any of the other things offered as explanations for their decades-long failure to win most elections in most places, or to secure meaningful policy reforms for their voters. In the now famous words of Marco Rubio, spoken during his campaign-ending broken robot moment on the 2016 debate stage, “Lets dispel with this fiction that Barrack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”  

Yes, he does.  And so does the rest of the Democratic Party.  If you understand the Democrats as a party whose first priority is to win elections and then serve their voters once in office, then you have to look for far-fetched explanations for their actions, which often appear to be completely at odds with those objectives. What party eager to win over the middle of the country would repeatedly vote to make a wealthy San Francisco doyenne like Nancy Pelosi their Speaker? She’s a walking advertisement for the image of Democrats as a party of out of touch elites, more concerned with arcane speech codes than labor laws. But if you understand the Democrats as a party primarily concerned with raking in big bucks from wealthy donors, while drawing enough superficial distinctions with their opponents to maintain their identity as a separate party, then everything they do is pretty frikkin’ brilliant. Like forcing Joe Biden on their voters.

Let’s be absolutely clear: Bernie Sanders would undoubtedly have been the party’s nominee this year without the interference of its leadership. A lot of ink has been spilled about the failings of Bernie 2020, and some of those points are valid, but let’s not forget that Sanders won the first three states in the primary calendar, all while facing unprecedented hostility from the corporate media and party elites, so clearly he did a lot of things right. No other candidate has ever won the first two states without going on to secure the nomination, much less all three.

But no other candidate so universally feared and loathed by the money people and the consultant class has ever gotten so close to the big prize. Close enough that they were willing to drop all pretense of neutrality and fairness to ensure on the eve of Super Tuesday that instead of facing a fractured field of milquetoast moderates, Sanders would be going mano a mano with only Joe Biden, a man who voters had completely rejected in humiliating fashion right up until South Carolina. Remember, this was before we understood exactly how bad the coronavirus was going to be, or how badly Trump and the GOP would botch their response. No modern Democrat has ever won without high youth voter turnout, and there’s no way they didn’t understand that crushing the candidate of young voters was going to suppress their vote. Nor has any modern Democrat ever won without a high share of the Latino vote, and yet they chose to publicly and openly conspire against the candidate who was the clear choice of Latino voters.

All this in order to run a notoriously thin-skinned politician in the obvious throes of cognitive decline against the world’s most infamous bully. Without coronavirus, Biden was a sure loser and there’s no way the party’s decision makers and strategists didn’t understand that. No, they aren’t that stupid. If you consider that the battle they’re fighting is only secondarily against the GOP, and primarily against the left wing of their own party, what they did was actually very smart.

These folks can read a poll as well as anyone, and they understand that in the normal course of things their days are numbered. For years, Democrats have talked up their coalition of the ascendant; the new, young, diverse, and thoroughly blue no matter who electorate that was going to someday hand them majorities as far as the eye could see.  But now that it’s on the verge of arriving, it doesn’t look quite like what they were expecting. Turns out that rising electorate wants policies that will actually allow them to rise in more than a symbolic sense and isn’t quite as satisfied by platitudes and kente cloth as the old white liberal coalition was. They want universal health care, they want higher wages, they want student loan forgiveness, they want free college; in other words, they want the people they vote for to do something for them beyond diversifying their office staff. The problem for Democrats is that all the things they want them to do are a direct threat to the grift they’ve been running since the day Bill Clinton formally announced the death of the party’s animating FDR spirit by proudly informing the public that “the days of big government are over.” The Reaganite small government ethos that’s ruled both parties ever since, simply cannot be reconciled with the demands of voters whose first priority is economic justice.  So what do you do when your base sees through the hollowness of your politics and demands that you do better? Find a different base. And that’s where Joe Biden comes in.

The Biden campaign is a Trojan horse in the truest sense: it’s an empty vessel through which the Dems are attempting to substitute a portion of the GOP’s base for a portion of their own. The Democrats gearing their message towards white, professional class suburban voters is nothing new. They’ve been doing it for at least 30 years, first winning over the socially liberal/economically conservative “Rockefeller Republicans” in order to make up for their losses with union voters in the wake of NAFTA. Now they’re attempting with this election to win over the even more conservative “moderate Republicans” of this generation by running the kind of candidate who would promise in the midst of a pandemic and an ongoing populist uprising to veto Medicare for All, and not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400K a year. They’re not worried about handing over control of the party to Republicans in the process, because a Democratic Party dominated by moderate Republicans doesn’t look very different from what we have now – there’s hardly a shade of difference between your average liberal and your average “Never Trumper” ideologically.

The rising left, however, is an existential threat to the party’s modern make-up, ideology, and standard operating procedures. If they lose to Trump while trying to make the shift, something that was almost guaranteed at the time they decided to force Biden down the country’s collective throat, that’s really not a problem. Trump is great for fundraising and his sheer awfulness takes the onus off the Dems to be much better. Just being a little better than Trump is all they really need to be for as long as he’s in office. Seen from that perspective, Biden is a win-win. They either crush the left by assembling a new, even more conservative coalition, or they once again scapegoat the left for their losses and spend another four years pretending the country didn’t go to shit until 1/20/17. So if you’re a deeply corrupt member of the fake-left half of the country’s ruling elite, where’s the downside? It’s nothing but upside for everyone except the voters.

There’s only one flaw in this plan.  It doesn’t take into account the dangers of breaking the social contract so severely that the population becomes ungovernable.  Only a fool would believe that we can continue on our current course of spiraling wealth inequality combined with a collapsing quality of life, now severely exacerbated by a global pandemic, without a reckoning. Unfortunately, in keeping with their French, Chinese and Russian predecessors, our leaders are those fools. History shows us that those most in danger of getting on the wrong end of a People’s Tribunal, are always the last to see it coming. With Trump we get there a little faster, with Biden a little slower (maybe), but the American economic and political system as currently constituted is clearly unsustainable.

Vote your conscience in November in light of these realities (personally, I’m writing in Dave Chapelle), but know that the real battle is going to start the day after the voting ends.

[hunterinabrowncoat]

I’m having a lot of trouble articulating how I’m feeling at the moment. I’m constantly switching back and forth between absolute unbridled rage and utter despair.

There’s just so much happening at the moment and none of it good.

Like I know hopelessness is a symptom of depression. But look at the goddamn BBC News homepage and tell me it’s not actually a pretty fucking normal reaction to what’s going on.

I know ‘feelings of despair’ are a symptom of depression, but things haven’t been getting better. In fact they’ve been steadily getting worse for my entire adult life.

And I just hate so much that I know if I put this up as a facebook status, lots of people would tell me lockdown is hard, and it’s easy to feel hopeless when there’s a virus going around, but there’s an end in sight, or we’ve got to hold on to hope or some shit.

But that’s not it! I’m not angry about there being a virus. I’m not depressed because I’m stuck in the house.

I am ENRAGED because a report literally came out detailing a mile-long receipt of the government’s deliberate ignoring of this crisis, and all of the criminally negligent or intentionally cruel actions the government took that have irrefutably cost thousands of lives. And then I feel absolute despair, because.... nobody gives a shit.

They have provably killed thousands of people through negligence and mishandling of this crisis. And there isn’t going to be an inquiry. The leaked Labour Report has shown that even when inquiries DO happen, they actually mean jack diddly squat, because nothing happens.

I don’t know why I’m acting like this is new. We’ve known for years that Tory austerity policy killed well over 130,000 people, and didn’t even improve the economy one iota like they claimed it would. And.... nothing happened. Absolutely no consequences. Over 13 million people still voted for the Tories in December.

And now they’re talking about easing lockdown. The chancellor has said people are going to become “addicted to furlough” so they need to reduce the amount of money people are receiving in order to “incentivise them to find a new job”. They’re happy to just let the poorest and most vulnerable of us die for the sake of the economy, because GOD FORBID we give people a dread ~handout.

I’m done. I’m so goddamn done. I just... I don’t know how to exist in a world where we’re sleepwalking into fascism, where right-wing governments can do whatever they like, kill as many people as they please, and face not one single consequence. I don’t want to live in a world where the govt uses a pandemic to try and push through anti-trans policy to strip back trans rights by over a decade.

I don’t know how to not be depressed when I live in a country where my rights are constantly being stripped back, where the policy makers literally are happy to sacrifice my life to line their pockets, and my friends, people that I love, have repeatedly thrown their weight behind the people and the policies that make that happen.

[alexsmitposts]

Pandemic Intensifies Divisions Among US Elite On Thursday April 30th, protesters, some carrying firearms, marched into the Michigan state capitol building. The demonstration was just the latest of a stream of protests demanding an end to the lockdown and social distancing. Despite giving daily briefings to the country amidst the pandemic, and urging social distancing, US President Donald Trump has tweeted in support of these protests, which are taking place across the country. Trump has also singled out Michigan’s democratic governor for criticism. It seems there is a widespread mobilization opposing necessary health measures throughout the United States. It is unclear what the protesters want. Some echo the sentiments of Glenn Beck and Texas Lt. Governor, Dan Patrick, that the lives of elderly and vulnerable people should be sacrificed for the sake of revving up America’s economy. Others echo claims circulating on social media, alleging that the pandemic is a hoax conducted by enemies of Donald Trump. Signs follow the ideological brand of the 2008-2010 Tea Party protests that opposed Obama’s healthcare plan. Slogans include “Social Distancing is Communism” and there are placards containing references to Hitler, the US Constitution, Liberty, and Tyranny. Meanwhile, there are also mobilizations of the organized political left. Examples of these include: car caravans calling for a rent freeze, strikes and organizing among essential workers. Unrest is brewing in US society as the economy is the worst it has been in decades. Unemployment numbers have reached level not seen since the Great Depression. The chasm between two factions in the US economic ruling class, divisions which expanded under Obama and became even more intense following the 2016 elections, are sharper than ever. Who is Behind The Anti-Lock Down Protests? The people responsible for the right wing mobilizations are a coalition of millionaires and billionaires who feel like they are locked out by the ultra-rich. This is the coalition that took Trump to the White House in 2016. Amidst the pandemic, these lower levels of American capital are watching the blood gush from their financial wounds. With oil prices lower than they have ever been, an essential part of the Trump coalition, fracking companies, have begun to face the possibility of their ultimate demise. Frackers were already extracting oil and natural gas from American shale on credit from banks, with low oil prices hurting their profit margins. The New York Times published an op-ed by Bethany McLean with the headline: “Coronavirus May Kill Our Fracking Fever Dream” predicting that the pandemic will finish them off for good. Meanwhile, the other big names among the Trump camp are also suffering. AmWay, the multi-level marketing scheme that enriched Trump’s billionaire Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has watched its sales plummet. Hobby Lobby, whose CEO, David Green, was one of Trump’s most outspoken supporters, closed all of its stores until further notice on April 7th. NASCAR is hoping to resume its season in late May, but its CEO, Jim France, son of outspoken Trump supporter, Brian France, has undoubtedly lost significant amounts of money from the cancelled races and lost advertisement revenue. While Home Depot, owned by Trump supporter, Bernie Marcus, has managed to stay open as an essential business, it has been forced to accept limited hours, and sales have significantly decreased in the spring months that usually generate about 30% of annual sales. The desperation to end the lockdown on the part of many millionaire and billionaire capitalists is quite real. They face financial ruin. Meanwhile, they are very well aware that certain competitors are fortified enough to ride out the storm. Who benefits from the lockdown? Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos is an outspoken opponent of Donald Trump. He owns the Washington Post, a publication that has been harshly critical of the administration. While the lockdown has been bad for most US businesses, on April 14th, Amazon’s stock reached its all-time high. Amazon is hiring new employees to deliver products, and Bezos has made billions. The big four super-major oil companies that dominate the New York Stock exchange and function like a mini-cartel, are happily watching their competitors in fracking and drilling suffer amidst the oil price drops. With the elimination of frackers, Exxon-Mobile, BP, Chevron, and Shell Oil would walk out of the lockdown with an even more well established monopoly than before. Social media giants are certainly not suffering as Americans sit at home, updating their status, tweeting, posting pictures and watching ads. These types of corporations that already function as a natural monopoly are quite happy to see a large percentage of the US population working from home. Many of the conspiracy theories that claim the pandemic is a hoax focus on Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft. Bill Gates is an outspoken Malthusian who believes the human population must be decreased. In the conspiracy theories, Bill Gates has become a stand in poster boy for a faction of the US ruling class long-labelled “The Eastern Establishment.” The Rockefeller Family, whose Standard Oil is now reincarnated as Exxon-Mobile, the Morgans, the Duponts, the Mellons, and the “old money” elite that has been the most powerful faction in US politics for generations, represents a more managerial wing of the American elite. These are the elements that worked with Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table Group, and eventually gave birth to the Council on Foreign Relations. Rockefeller money worked to create the Trilateral Commission, Planned Parenthood, the Asia Society, and many of the other institutions that have crafted US government policy in a long-term and strategic way. These forces favor stability and long-term hegemony over their own short-term economic growth. They are closer to the Intelligence Agencies than the military, and friendlier to Silicon Valley than to retail owners and industrialists. The ideological right-wing has long targeted this wing of American politics, from the 1950s when the John Birch Society accused the Rockefellers of being Communists, up to the rants of Alex Jones denouncing Goldman Sachs and calling for “real capitalism.” These forces have entrenched themselves well enough, and built up enough of a monopolistic position, that the pandemic will not put them out of business. Rather, the pandemic is a convenient way to clear out their competitors and secure their position. As the lower levels of capital bleed, they call out their powerful nemesis with rage, realizing that while they have much to lose, the Eastern Establishment is likely to emerge even more powerful and dominant. What Comes After Lockdown? As restrictions are starting to be lifted across the USA, many questions remain about what will happen. Unemployment, poverty, and hunger are already starting to boil over. Food banks are overwhelmed. Catholic Charities in the Queens Borough of New York City encountered blocks and blocks of desperate people lined up in the hopes of receiving assistance. There is much talk in leftist circles of the 1930s and how the Communist Party USA organized hungry people to confront elected officials and demand relief. Various calls for a “rent strike” and a revival of anti-capitalism is taking place on the left.Voices that were calling for a “universal basic income” to ease economic pain have only gotten louder. Leftist film-maker Michael Moore produced and released a new film called “Planet of the Humans” arguing that economic growth is bad, and that overpopulation is the main the problem causing climate change. Alarm bells are ringing among the circles of power who can see that social unrest is pretty much inevitable. The national suicide hotline reported a 338% increase in call volume during March. Opioid deaths have also risen. The Trump faction, that was already hostile to China, is looking to point the finger of blame at Beijing. Liberal voices also condemn China but in a somewhat softer tone. The divisions among the American ruling class have become thicker than ever, and the scramble for profits is likely to intensify. A burning question for the American elite is how intense will the climate be in the lead up to the Presidential vote in November and how the results will be affected.

[antoine-roquentin]

Issues of race also continue to stain every aspect of St. Louis schools and compound the difficulty of reviving democratic governance.

St. Louis is historically one of the most racially segregated school systems in America, but under state-appointed governance, the district phased out its desegregation program. At its peak, St. Louis’s racial integration plan, one of the longest running in the country, involved almost 13,000 black urban students in suburban schools and 1,500 white suburban students who attended urban magnets. But beginning this year, the district is phasing out the desegregation plan, limiting new students participating in the program to siblings of those already enrolled.

While helping to sunset the desegregation program, state-appointed leaders did nothing to address the effects of housing patterns in the city that cause intensely segregated schools. The district continues to have attendance zones that recreate the segregation in the underlying neighborhoods rather than remedy the separate school systems.

Instead of integrating black students with their better-off white peers, the city seems intent on getting rid of them. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, black residents are fleeingthe city in record numbers and at a rate that, if it continues, will result in white residents outnumbering black residents by 2025.

Black residents are being pushed out of the city in part because of lack of investment in their neighborhoods. While real estate developers ignore black residential zones, they are busy remaking the central corridor of the city into a playground for young professionals and corporate office workers. City leaders incentivize the development with generous tax abatements that provide millions in discounts for new construction—money that should be used to fund schools and other public services.

City leaders also openly discourage development that would attract parents with school-aged children, with one official recently presenting a hierarchy of “makers” and “takers” in the city that equated “families with children in public schools” to “criminals.”

While black residents and young families with children are on the way out, many of the agents who undermined democratic governance of public schools have not gone anywhere—in fact, they seem more entrenched than ever.

Among the most prominent in the inner circle of the powerful is Rex Sinquefield, a retired billionaire who made his fortune leading a Chicago investment firm that pioneered index funds. Sinquefield emergedin Missouri politics in the early 2000s as a deep-pocketed donor to mostly Republican candidates who aligned with his views on eliminating income taxes and transforming public education.

With a personal mission of “rescuing education from teachers’ unions,” Sinquefield, in 2012, claimed public schools were a plot by the Ku Klux Klan to “hurt… African American children.” The next year he nearly single-handedly bankrolled a campaign to end tenure protection for public school teachers.

In addition to financing candidates, Sinquefield employs an army of lobbyists to press his concerns in the state capital and gives millions to the right-wing think tanks—such as the Show-Me Institute, which he also founded, and Missouri Club for Growth—that produce advocacy materials blasting public schools and promoting charter schools and voucher programs.

In 2017, Sinquefield met in secret with Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s education secretary.

Sinquefield is also a primary funder of the Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri (CEAM), a non-profit organization that promotes charter schools, online learning, and voucher programs.

CEAM’s executive director is Laura Slay,owner of a public relations firm that often representsSinquefield. Laura Slay is a cousin to former St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay. Sinquefield donated $75,000 to Francis Slay, a Democrat, in 2012, when he was still mayor, and Francis Slay and Sinquefield recently teamed up in a campaign to privatize the St. Louis airport.

As mayor, Slay engineeredthe decision to hire outside contractors to run the district. After the consulting firm ran the district into the ground, Slay called for the state takeover. Slay also became known as“a recruiter of charter schools,” and he used $750,000 in private donations and $50,000 from the district to contract with Teach For America, the nonprofit that recruits recent college graduates and others to commit to two years of teaching after a short training period.

TFA has continued to be influential in the city not for its teachers but for its leadership pipeline and political work. TFA has financially backed school board candidates multiple times, and two recently elected members to the new board, Adam Layne and Tracee Miller, are former TFA recruits.

Former State Director of Policy for the CEAM Katie Casas is also a former TFA recruit. Casas recently left CEAM to form her own lobbying firm, Nexus Group.

These influential actors, and others, ensure that despite the transition to democratic governance, their power remains baked into the cake of education politics in the district, similar to how, in national government, big money donors and Washington, D.C., lobbyists continue to wield political leverage regardless of who is elected to office.

[scifigeneration]

What if we ran society not based on the market but on evidence?

by Spyros Samothrakis

Will it soon be possible to draw a blueprint of our future society? Viktoriya/Shutterstock.com

Following the successful Brexit campaign, Dominic Cummings – the then campaign director of Vote Leave – published a series of blog posts describing how the campaign was run and what his plans were for a successful civil service. The last of these posts was released on June 26 2019, just before he became the special advisor to the current prime minister, Boris Johnson. The idea this post resurrects is a promise in public policy that has died since the 1970s – the use of hard scientific (knowledge-based) methods to guide policy choices.

In what looks like to be Cumming’s version of public policy, an elite group of administrators trained in the disciplines of pure thought – mathematicians and philosophers – would run society based on evidence. Collected data points would be used to create a machine simulation (often called the model). Policy makers would then be able to test the simulations with hypothetical policies (“what if drugs were legal?”) and, according to the results, adjust public policy.

A complete cybernetic version of economic policy was advocated, but not practised, in the Soviet Union by the likes of nobel-prize winning economist Leonid Kantorovich and mathematician and computer scientist Victor Glushkov. They hypothesised the possibility of taking things a step further – getting the machines to identify what actions to take to reach optimal outcomes. That is, policy makers would need to decide what they are looking to achieve (“maximise the production of butter”) and machines would come up with the the policy of how to allocate resources to achieve this.

Outside the Soviet Union, this kind of thinking was actually enacted with Project Cybersyn, an effort put together by management consultant Stafford Beer in the 1970s for the government of Chile under the then president, Salvador Allende to help manage the economy (the project was dismantled following the coup by General Augusto Pinochet).

Though Cybersyn was never fully operational, it was rushed into use so as to help break one of the biggest anti-government strikes, which was instigated by a right-wing union. Beer’s vision is far more decentralised and democratic than its Soviet counterpart, but it still falls within the same line of thought.

As you will have gauged by now, the cybernetic vision tends to be securely located on the left of the political spectrum.

The market

Sitting on the opposite side of the cybernetic vision, one will find the fathers of modern liberal economics, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. Their arguments, taken more broadly, consider the cybernetic dream impossible from a computational perspective, either due to not being able to model the world efficiently, or not having appropriate signals to evaluate the quality of solutions.

They argued that another mechanism that exists inside the real world (in their case, the market) needs to do the heavy lifting, by providing a signal – which, in the case of goods and services, is prices. For them, a good policy is not one that lays out what steps need to be taken towards a solution, but focuses more on setting a “game” of sorts with the right incentives and punishments. This basically just leaves room for one real public policy which can be summed up as “privatise everything, create a competitive arena, let the market sort the problems out”.

Leaving all real policy decisions to the market has been a very traditional (post-1980s at least) right-wing idea. This raises the question as to why someone advising the current UK government is even discussing concepts that are not purely market-driven. In his latest post, Cummings laments the inability of the British state to do serious modelling. This seems a superb contradiction – shouldn’t the market be able to solve everything?

It is worth mentioning that conceptions of planning methods differ a lot across individual thinkers – there are even advocates of socialist markets on the left. Though there is a clear left-right divide, in terms of actual party politics it seems that the idea of some planning has been partially accepted (somewhat grudgingly) by the historical right for some time.

Market signals. Tony Stock/Shutterstock.com

AI and public policy

So, does the progress in AI and (the concurrent) massive increase in computational power and availability of data allow us to circumvent the liberal arguments? I would say yes, but only partially. One can easily envision a solution where the latest AI methods are used to affect policy directly. It’s quite plausible that one could plan and re-plan millions of products and services on a daily basis, find the optimal set of actions to help tackle social ills and generally push for an overall brighter future.

This isn’t, however, trivial – delivering causal models to drive simulations is extremely hard, requires significant expertise, and can only be done in a limited capacity. On top of this, current AI methods lack a concept of “common sense”. A model created with a specific task in mind might be able to optimise for said task, but is prone to generating unwanted side effects. For example, an AI-optimised factory that aims to optimise production will do so without care for the environment.

But the mother of all problems in AI is that a lot of the more modern probabilistic planning algorithms are not stable without excessive human tuning, due to a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this article. In practice, this means that outside straightforward, traditional planning (such as linear programming), getting value from modern AI requires significant human expertise. At the moment this sits mostly within private AI research labs and some university departments. Any serious attempt to create a cybernetic state would need both significant human resources to be moved towards the project and some further algorithmic breakthroughs.

Unfortunately, current AI deployments in public policy do not adhere to the ideas above. It seems that AI is mostly deployed only for simple predictive tasks (“will person X will commit crime Y in the future?”). For this reason, public bodies are finding this technology increasingly useless. But technological innovations almost always experience a series of failures before they find their pace, so hopefully AI will eventually be implemented properly.

Back to Brexit

What does Brexit have to do with any of this? My understanding is that Brexit (according to Cummings) is needed in order to help disrupt the civil service enough so as to allow it to be rebuilt. It would then be possible to deploy serious AI public policy solutions (which is another name for scientific planning). So the British state would be deploying projects that can model the future, with machines or civil servants probing the model for golden paths.

What is truly surprising, in my view, is that such proposals don’t come from the broad political left (though there are, of course, extremely interesting takes on the topic of scientific planning) – but from the right. This might imply the use of AI to hasten the free-market agenda by asking questions like “what is the best propaganda to produce in order to get everyone on board with increasing state pension age to 95, privatising every public service and getting people to accept a ban on immigration?”.

All this AI talk might be a red herring – the more traditional right-wing Brexit party policies are simply an intensification of a deregulation agenda, though again the signals are mixed. Alternatively, it might be the case that there is a split between One Nation Conservatives and free marketeers across the board.

It’s hard to imagine the EU allowing for direct planning (it goes against most of the principles of the internal market), but it’s equally hard to envision post-Brexit Britain doing the same. Most institutions see the market as the only legitimate form of organisation.

But some cracks in the consensus seem to be appearing. Perhaps we may end up in a position where actively planning using AI towards a “good society” is actively pursued.

About The Author:

Spyros Samothrakis is a Lecturer in Analytics and Data Science at the University of Essex

This article is republished from our content partners over at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[elizabethrobertajones]

14x01 watching notes

RIP Kip, we hardly knew ye.

Well hey, returning friends and people who unwittingly clicked on this not knowing exactly what they're in for. Blowing off the dust and starting a new season of Dabb fuckery, which I spent way too long trying to think of a portmanteau for when I already have the episode downloaded

It's 5am, let's DO THIS.

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So they start with Dean's Hi I Am A Cop On The Day Before I Retire speech re: hula girls and hawaiian t-shirts which is remarkably prescient of me to have been irrationally upset about that one detail after I binged most of season 13 last night to get me back in the mood. So now I have to elaborate on my one line textpost >.>

Because yes, that is the perfect note to start the season on: Dean thought the good times had rolled, allowed himself to hope, assembled himself a family with mom and step-pop (Bobby counts as a full father but AU Bobby is step-pop), brother, husband, kid... Said kid was promising A World Without Monsters aka Dabb's showrunning tagline for an endgame he teases them. And Lucifer was tucked safely away in an AU with the murderous Michael... And then in a series of events it all came crumbling down and with this amount of goodness in his grasp, he gave up what even when the real Michael was hounding him for it, he couldn't before.

Because in season 13 it is beyond obvious that Dean is tired, an Old Hunter, the best of his game but ready to bow out on that note, and yet for him it's not a matter of stepping back and letting someone else handle it because when Michael and Lucifer were involved, it was beyond personal. He and Sam only EXIST because Lucifer and realMichael wanted them to. And so there was no way this trouble would come to someone else's door, when it was the nasty angel on his shoulder and the devil on Sam's and we have Nougat as their collective responsibility who's the nexus of it all anyway.

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Eeee the Road So Far text is glowy grace colour on a dark blue background. I'm JIZED for the title card.

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Goodness, the Road So Far is a weird journey because we see Jack being all useful and magic and then callbacks to 13x01 and 2 where he was a messed up 2 day old and Dean just wanted to murder him.

I haven't outlined any expectations for this episode or even this recap but I suddenly realise that I should probably be wondering how much DeanCas we're gonna get in it, and this rage against Jack is subtextually motivated, for sure, but for me the first 6 episodes of Dean's grief arc were wonderful character stuff but removed from the main plot and therefore in my head I keep boxing them off like a bubble season, like 10x01-3 are, and I legit wasn't even expecting to SEE content from them in the recap, because brilliant as they are I sort of just forgot they were a part of this season despite watching them yesterday. The season for me became so much the Jack And Mary Search that this hiccup at the start didn't meet the requirements to be in season 13 :P

They're just That Time Dean Was Really Sad About Cas Then He Came Back And They Were Cowboys

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Oh good there was "everybody we've lost" and then a recap of Cas dying and then - oh, we're recapping plot again? Er... everybody? Dean? Who else? DEAN?

this was the thinly veiled subtext of that line anyway since Dean waved off Mary and made it all about Cas anyways but. Yikes, editing team.

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Jesus I watched season 13 yesterday and I forgot about Asmodeus. You know what, this is pre-coffee AND the 2 types of anti-brain fog medication I gobble in the morning.

But he's that much of a useless lump

Also too much Lucifer nipple on screen pre-coffee. Ick.

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Nice recapping of Not The Levitating Fight.

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NOW

Stock photo Nyoom of the season!! Hi Baby! You aren't in this episode because Eugenie said the car wasn't being used this season

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Sam's got his Vengeance Eyes on but he's all scruffy and grown up so I trust him 10000% to get the job done.

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OW. FUCK. OW. OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW. GOOD USE OF INTERSTITIAL MUSIC

Why were you even listening to Dean's tapes if they fuck you up that badly? IS THIS YOUR VENGEANCE PLAYLIST? I'VE BEEN WAITING 10 YEARS

Actually, I haven't, I binged 4-5-6 as one unit after thinking the show was cancelled during the writers' strike but the point is that Sam and his ipod in 4x01 is immediately in my head because he was listening to his own music and being a hipster douche, but now he is not on demon blood he has not installed an ipod dock because he's GETTING DEAN BACK, DAMMIT but at the same time he's also realising that this means a heavy toll that the only driving music in the car is Dean's stuff...

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Oh no, this must be the guy from the SDCC clip we hadn't seen because Osric Chau is banned forever for illegally uploading them all for us in the past, and all I know is that Deanchael is going to Fuck Him Up and I feel very bad for him

*raises my mug to Osric* I'm sure you tried, dude. And thanks for the previous years.

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Hi Deanchael. I noticed in a promo pic that his tie has that sacred geometry type pattern on it which is a detail I made a mental note to type out literally anywhere in the like month between there and here and did not so here it is at a hopefully appropriate place.

Based on every other scene setting detail I suspect that this faithful man is actually still within the USA because this is literally the cabin set they re-use for everything. The spoilers made it sound like Deanchael was globe trotting to raise his army but now I see what's around us... Yeah no he's as focused on the US as every other big bad before.

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Anyway they really specifically chose this prayer to Allah because of how pointed it was about being only for Allah and how he was the best, so I'm assuming Deanchael is here to be like yo God's gone and I'm your last chance of faith

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Like just ruin his day and he got up at like 4am or whatever the first prayer is to do it and all

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I hope, like, no offence to any Muslim viewers or anything >.> They sure play fast and loose with a lot of this stuff because Christian cultures are full of bitter non-believers raised in the culture and looking to kick up at the big guy in the sky, which is not an impression I get that Islam is as used to cultural flippancy, regardless of personal beliefs of residents of predominately Muslim countries and cultures. I'm not 100% sure though, because the closest link I've got is my raised-Christian Iranian friend who applies Christian eye-rolling to the issues with being in Iran and heathen so I still get that perspective of middle fingers up at Organised Religion from our discussions about it all... anyway big diversion, still waiting for coffee to kick in :P I just swallowed the last of it so I can only get more jittery from here on out!

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It's so fuckin weird to see Dean's face confidently reciting verse in Arabic

I mean you don't need the hat, sir. I get it. It's not you in there.

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Well so far anyway he's playing on the fact that the guy does pray to god and his angels.

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Lol @ this man guessing his way through God AND Gabe to Deanchael's annoyance that he's the 3rd guess and he has to clarify that he's the better one.

Man, Gabriel worked on his reputation. I wouldn't have been able to tell you who Michael was because there wasn't even a kid in my class with that name when I was age 4 busy portraying Gabriel in a nativity play with full impish glee that the real deal would have been proud of.

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Uhoh things aren't looking good for Jamil D: Asking for peace and love is good, you funky little hippy.

Is Deanchael implying that the Syria insurgency is the route to peace? I honestly don't know enough about the American foreign policy politics to know what sort of stance this is though from a liberal leaning show (I mean come on Bobo is a card-carrying socialist, I've seen it on Twitter :P), though to an outside viewer well aware of how fucked up it all is should this have been said on a British program, this is a vast over-simplification.

But we know Michael's main traits are Likes War and then also Warmonger and of course, spoilin' for a fight. So this may be a personal judgement and as much as they're bringing politics into their show I'm just backing right on out and going with this :P That he thinks it is more honourable to stay and fight and that Jamil is a hypocrite for not sticking around to work for peace actively.

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Oh Jamil hooked up with a woman called Darleen. He is FOR SURE in America.

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It's so funny to me that Deanchael can fly anywhere and they could have set this anywhere but it still ends up being a wooden cabin in the US. This has to turn out to be a lead to follow with a news report about the poor guy or else this is just hysterical that they couldn't be arsed to mock up even a hint of another country :P

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He knew all this about Jamil beforehand so I have to assume he's really just here to drag him.

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Man, that throw was GOOD. I'm assuming they either spent all summer playing with wires and stunts or else they've gone back to the drawing board on all this flinging people around business.

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"A better world" oh we are so on for this World Without Monsters malarky still. This lines up with the clip from Dean they opened on so well - the dark irony of he and Michael working on the same project but from different angles. Dean wants to sort out monsters and bad things so he can go on a beach, aka his version of paradise, and Mikey wants to smush all the sinners, and clean up the planet, which is HIS version of paradise.

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HECKIN GOOD TITLE CARD

now photoshop those wings on everyone

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I LIKE SCRUFFY BULLET MAKER FROM THE AU.

He's like so happy to be in a world where you just casually have resources.

Meanwhile poor Maggie has become the de facto nurse and hates it.

Ugh the Bunker is a place where people just show up who yell "Soup's on!"

In my redshirt betting pool, Soups On is the first guy who dies.

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Promo sceeeeene

I'm so happy Sam and Mary are doing this together. Last season Sam was so upset that Dean got to have a relationship with her, and he had missed out, but without Dean around - no offence to him - Sam and Mary may be focused on FINDING him but this is the work they also need to do for their relationship to start to ground it in something real. It's taken this long with all the separations, but remember that Mary also worked through some of her issues about Sam only last season in the AU with 6 month old Jack. And if she needed that sort of reminder and relationship to warm her up for Sam, her suddenly-grown 6 month old, then there were still a LOT of underlying issues that dated back to the start for her to overcome. Hopefully this puts them on a level playing field, though there's a new conflict brewing for them, with Mary's determined optimism vs Sam's pessimism, born of that depression from last season that never really got treated or resolved, they just managed to power past its current main triggers. Of course now it all just shifts in a Deanward direction.

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I love how Ketch has been punted to London, at Buckleming discretion to drag him back. This wasn't even Bobo punting him out the door, and he and Buckleming have a violent back and forth over favourite characters, started in 9x06 with Bobo's very first episode when he banished Professor Morrison forever.

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MARY TRIES MOMMING SAM TO GO TO BED

THEN SCRUFFY GUN GUY IS LIKE "CHIEF"

Chieeeeeeef.

Sam runs the shooow here and I love it. He's their badass MoL hunter leader, a scruffy saviour from another world.

Given Sam is wearing the same shirt and jacket in the promo pics I'm guessing he does not sleep, though I hope he gets to eat the soup.

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"Maggie can you hack the traffic cams?" "um. no."

I love and support Maggie. She is a normal person who happened to live in apocalypse world and she just wants to flirt with the guy from the Gas n Go who probably hasn't talked to her since that got blown up and Jack attacked him over her... I mean, this is better than the AU world but maybe she just wants to be normal? Did anyone ask Maggie what she wanted??

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SAM. You can eat your soup and run things at the same time! Get back here and eat that soup!

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"yes sir"

Goodness, this is wonderful. Sam's doing what he was born to do, and then not because that was leading a friggin demon army, but then yes because he's got inherent leadership traits that he defers to Dean all the time because, well, he's there, and he's big bro.

Look, sometimes you need big bro to murder Satan's ass for you forever, but you also should be calling the shots. There's a balance here, where Dean can be the older brother, but Sam can be the boss. Work/life balance. Dean's got your back but you command an army of hunters, like we've all been salivating over since like season 8 when they first said the MoL ran the Bunker as the hub of operations dictating stuff to trusted hunters and the like.

Of course, if Sam is the Bobby here, then who is the AUBobby? I hope we see what's up with that soon, I've been wanting them to bristle those beards in an alpha way at each other for months, because AUBobby was their leader before Sam because Sir Chief.

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"Sam."

"i'm good"

*mothering intensifies*

"i'm GOOD"

*mothering intensifies*

"How's Jack"

You aren't used to being mothered and it's murdering me completely to my soul. Dean's got SO MUCH MOTHERING all through the show compared to you. He even sees Jody as a mom friend while you crush on her like crazy so you haven't even got that!!!!

Because Chief Sam is the boss of this lot but at the SAME TIME he's getting all these soft tender mom moments he's never got to have before. It's a wonderful balance of nuances to his current life. He's overworked but surrounded by a supportive care team that respects him, gives him soup, and holds his hand, literally in Mary's case. And yet he's the scruffy macho competent boss who knows how to call all these shots, deputise, set up missions, but still knows more than them, how to do traffic cams, I'm sure years of lore over most of these hunters who only learned to deal with what got thrown at them in the apocalypse by trial and error because when do they get lore books? Mary and Bobby and other pre-apocalypse hunters would be few and far between to offer competent training to a populace suddenly all turned hunter.

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Oh, AUBobby is beating up Jack. Perfect.

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AAAH DIRECTED BY TJW

WAS NOT ADEQUATELY HOLDING ONTO SEAT

WARN A GIRL

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I love finally seeing the training room but I'm deeply conscious that this is where Put Up Your Dukes starts and I can't get that fan fic out my mind so I'm just like, Jack, don't lie on the floor, your dads have banged there.

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I'm so happy that AUBobby is nurturing a grandson, because this is the difference between him and Bobby - that our Bobby had that with Sam n Dean, but AUBobby never did. Though he DID have Mary Campbell to crush on, I doubt it would have softened him and rounded out the harsh places in his soul the same way raising Sam and Dean did, because he had an unrequited love and she hadn't gotten over John, while this recently widowed Mary Winchester actually has made better progress just because of the circumstances of the loss. Anyways Jack has no preexisting history with Bobby so there's nothing weird about him and AUBobby stepping into a nurturing relationship, that Sam n Dean would find uncomfortable in a way, given their relationship with Bobby. And Jack gets yet another strong figure to teach and guide him.

AUBobby looks slim and stands tall compared to Bobby, which I'm largely putting down to posture, and not being drowned in layers. I like this difference - Bobby almost never voluntarily dressed in 1 layer, but AUBobby has a more military slant, and this training sergeant routine with Jack is a good fit to show a difference in his character, that isn't surly old Bobby behind his desk, that he's involved in teaching Jack to fight, rather than helping hunters with lore and swigging whiskey.

I'd assume given the lack of availability in his AU, he's considerably less alcohol dependant, so this is a very different character thing. If Bobby were doing this training, and nothing else was different, he'd be taking a breather to pour them both a whiskey as he imparts wisdom.

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Demon in nice shoes and dark sunglasses at night to indicate that yes I am a demon I have black eyes :P I assume this is a demon anyway not just because of this detail but pre-season spoilers

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Ah hearing Cas's name is enough to make my heart pick up. MY GUY!

But then, "Castiel, darling"

Stop trying to make Good Omens happen, it's not going to happen. You can't just "darling" up to an angel and expect that good good romance. Crowley took years to wear Cas down and Cas never actually LIKED him, down to their last real interaction where Cas was just "WTF???? LEAVE ME TO ROT AND DIE" when Crowley saved him in 12x12

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God I miss that

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"Oh god."

Same, buddy.

You do, however, realise this is your first words of the season gifset line, though?

Someone ought to write to Dabb and inform him that people make first and last word gifsets and to be more careful.

Especially if in the last episode at the end of the season, Cas's last word is "Dean"

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Anyway Cas has said 1 line and I can tell he's on top form. Unlike 10x01 he's in a hipster hogroast joint.

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This demon, with dark black sunglasses inside at night (douchebag) just ordered a coffee, black. WE GET IT, ENOBY DEMENTIA DARKNESS RAVEN WAY, YOU ARE GOFFIC AND IT'S AS BLACK AS YOUR SOUL

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LOL Cas is sitting under the JACK'S sign.

Demon douche sits under Schultz, which is the death beer. And lemme tell you, TJW is well-versed in this. So well-versed in it he's sat Cas in front of a classic El Sol flyer with the subtle touch required to tell Dean that Cas is his dream girl. He knows his shit.

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This seriously seems to be implying that the rise of hipster food joints is an effort from Hell to spread chaos on earth

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Cas sitting with his back to the fire is such an interesting visual, but this is just a note to self for later to guess what it all means

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THIS FUCKIN DEMON TOOK  HIS BLACK SUNGLASSES OFF TO SHOW OFF HIS BLACK EYES

Dabb is so good at incidental characters, and making me hate this guy for nuanced nonsensical reasons is amazing. This is... art...

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This is a callback to 5x08 and Dean ranting about hating procedural cop shows then him and sam taking their sunglasses on and off at night every time they made  a pun and I'm 100% convinced since 12x01 and Cas busting through that Mystery Spot sign that Gabriel has been subtly influencing events

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Okay so we know exactly what is written on demon bathroom walls. I'm taking that as a sideways confirmation that Cain knew full well that Dean had his Colette because he'd seen crude doodles of them doing it

Anyway douchedemon just outright told Cas that all the demons assume he and Dean in particular are banging. Not that Cas bangs Winchesters, as some have implied, without knowing all the details. They've narrowed this info down.

I assume this is also in the Winchester Dossier that Barthamus studied from before meeting them. I love that demons probably do have a filing cabinet somewhere of all the notable assholes they run into in their work, and the Winchesters take up a whole cabinent, but the refresher file summarising them in a paragraph if you don't have time is like, Sam: Lazy boyking, will stab you. Dean: fucking Castiel, will stab you.

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Cas doesn't even move an eyebrow. Incredible.

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Cas rarely gets hit with these compared to Dean in the history of the show, and Dean is full of bluster or anger or confusion or alarmed eyebrows. Cas is like... no. fuck you. i'm party!Cas, I have my shit in order.

Though this is from a demon. It's an entirely different thing when Heaven is involved, as they also have their dossier on the winchesters.

Sam: abomination. will banish you. Dean: fucking Castiel. Will stab you.

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*loud coffee slurp* "what's in it for moi?

Cas, stab him. Stab him now. This is not worth the information. You can find another guy.

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I'm starting to think Cas with his back to the flames is his unwitting danger from this hellish hogroast place.

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They use Shultz beer containers to hold the sauces and menus on the table. DEEEEATH

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Cas speaking slower and threatening to burn him to ash "right here and right now"

this is a gifset that will get a lot of notes from thirsty Cas fans

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Whaaaaaaaa the entire joint turned out to be owned by and filled with demons who would ever have guessed based on one open fire and that metal hogs head from the promo pics :P

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Stop hurting him!!!! Misha can't stage fight! This is really unfair!!

I wonder how the poor new awesome fight coordinator took to Misha

"let's just... um..." "hide him behind all these demons?" TJW suggests The fight guy nods sadly.

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Aww Sister Jo got back to work. Good for her.

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Sister Jo has no fear and can stroll down a shady alley counting her money

*t-shirt meme* One fear: *flappy wing noises*

"Hey Jo."

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GHOLY SHIT TRUE FORMS TYHUEOJDSHGFSH DS TRUE FORMS WE SEE WHAT ANGELS SEEE OH MY GOD OH MY GOD SCIENCE HAS CAUGH T UP TO THE DIVINE, SPN CAN FINALL Y SHOW US WHAT ANGELS SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

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Holy shit I want the gif of this as my blog header. That's shitting amazing.

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Burning HALO

ALL HIS CHI POINTS LIT UP EVEN WHEN IT MAKES IT LOOK SILLY TO HAVE HIS CALVES GLOWING

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I wonder if this is what Danneel sees when she looks at Jensen all the time

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"Why would he say yes to you?"

"Love"

I'm dying and I am dead. I gather that Dean is 100% absent from this episode, but that one comment puts him front and centre and I am in paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain. Everything happening around Michael and because of Michael is because Dean loves his peeps. From Sam staying up hacking traffic cams on vampires to Cas getting his ass handed to him by demons.

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I bet Cas looks like that single glowstick he had on in the cave when angels look at him.

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Party!Cas

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I ruined the fun

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Jensen gently touches Danneel's face and that's just rude because that's all his tenderness for his wife being turned into a scary villain move between Deanchael and Jo. Don't do this to them!!!

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Oooof Deanchael pulls from Dean's memory of Anael about what she was like, describing her in the most Cas-like terms, then cuts through her hilarious bull about wanting handbags (this is so meta about sticking middle fingers in the faces of people who think she's a well-paid beard) and then starts telling her she wants love and a family.

Deanchael has used the word "love" twice in a scene and it's horrifying to see the word come out of his face, when Dean is so guarded. Now Deanchael is just looking through Sister Jo and analysing what she wants - and she's playing this game very well but this move of his might still beat her. Because ow. Telling her she wants belonging and family. When she's very much established as a Cas mirror by the reminder she ran away from Heaven and doesn't want to play by their rules.

"It's very, very human of you. And so disappointing." Did all those times Lucifer sucked her grace bring her close to feeling it? To the point of permanent damage? I only ask because I know another guy this might apply to.

-

I wonder how much Deanchael is projecting based on conjectures because he knows Cas through Dean's eyes.

-

"But if they're all these sad, lost, fallen things..." Ya, that's Cas too for suresies

-

SAM AND JACK SAM AND JACK

Jack sitting quietly in meditation, clearly unsettled. A parallel to 13x23 when Dean came rushing in to him having a nightmare, now Sam is having a crack at parenting the boy.

-

Jack lying about how things were fine. Nougat. Hon. You're human now. But not that good at being human. Sam knows your tells :P

-

Sam interrupted mid pep-talk by Mary with some nonsense.

Jack is always so ugh... accepting and kinda flippant. He knows parental figures can be disappointing and get dragged away mid peptalk by some business.

Which he's apparently not involved in. I guess after we see him going on hunts with them in 13x23, he's grounded until he goes through basic training so not only is he useless to help with his powers to find Dean, but he can't even do the easy hunter stuff because he's just a kid.

-

Aww my poor baby Nougat :( He's so angsty. He's a TEEN. Lookit him! All growed up!

-

Uuugh I guess this is Nick. "I didn't talk to him. I can barely look at him."

What I'm getting from this sequence mainly is the sound of Triss's rage at the Bunker layout.

-

*Mary pats Sam's shoulder supportively and walks off*

You're on your own, Chief.

-

Ugh I am not ready for this bull if it's Nick but I have to keep watching to be sure :P

-

Ew it is. EW. What does Mark P HAVE on you all.

At least TJW is shooting the heck out of this to show us how gross Sam finds this all.

Sam's shadow falling over Nick.

I really want to know how this bullshit happened. And yet. No, not really.

-

Oh gross AND they're making Mark P take off his shirt. The nipple I didn't want to see in the Road So Far was not warning enough.

Pre-season ugh speculation was that whatever Crowley did to Nick made him stronger and more permanent apparently even than Lucifer being stabbed out of him.

-

So yeah anyway I guess Jack is in part also sulking about this and I'm with him, because Sam being pulled away from their pep talk time to deal with Gross Man Associated With My Father But Not Actually Him Because Biologically I Am The Son Of A Non-Historical President...

-

Making Sam the one who has to care for Nick is utterly cruel. He has so many deputies. Maybe this is just his personal fear that Nick's still a bit Lucifery. Maybe he just sees this as a gross burden, a manifestation of the ongoing trauma from Lucifer, that even when he's dead he lingers.

-

Plus, it's giving us some reassurance that an angel can be ousted from a vessel without killing them, to throw some options into the Deanchael pot.

-

Still. Nick. Really.

-

I bet Jack is sulking because some little cosmic part of him regenerating deep down in his core, that one lil gold glowy chi point in his big toe, knows that Eugenie forgot his name at SDCC and called him "Nick" and this shit from your creator just weighs on you. Jack is an entity beyond Buckleming and yet born from them, and this is what they beget: forgetting their own child in favour of this old carcass.

-

bitter? moi? *sips coffee noisily*

-

Actually, that's not true but I need some tea because I'm sulky so I'm taking this ragebreak to go make some and then I will sip it noisily in Nick's direction. :P

-

Everything henceforth is under the jurisdiction of hot drink no.2

-

"I don't understand how Lucifer could die and I could live"

I hate you

Eurgh, I bet you anything Dabb pulled a Buckleming and just took the post-it note they gave him when he asked, er, HOW does this happen? and transliterated it into dialogue because 1: all the writers shade Buckleming all the time because I can literally see it ooze out of Perez and Yockey and Bobo's writing but this is the showrunner, guyses. 2: it's such a dumbass convoluted explanation that it only burns out the archangel but if you non-fatally stab it then the guy is fine.

Which begs the question of how the fuck is Gabriel because if we get anything good from this, that fucker is in one hell of an interesting vessel situation compared to Old Nick.

-

PS: I am not sure how culturally saturated this is so we are all clear that Old Nick is a historically used name for Satan and his name has been a joke since 5x01 thanks to Kripke, and now we have to actually deal with that.

-

And then Nick is actually sympathetic to how Sam feels looking at him. I guess Mark P really wants us to feel sympathetic to his new dude.

-

"And Michael... did he tell Lucifer anything about his plan?"

Listen, we NEED acknowledgement that for a month or so Lucifer and AUMichael roadtripped together to assemble from their AU the key of solomon, the fruit of the tree of life, and the blood of a most holy man.

There was a lengthy downtime while people settled in and Dean was allowed to think the Good Times were rolling, and all that time, the weirdest brother roadtrip show ever was going on in the AU, mad enough that I would actually find it hilarious to watch despite enduring Mark P as a result of it.

-

SAM DOES NOT DESERVE THIS

He's not allowed to rest, ever.

-

I bet this is douchdemon phoning him from Cas's phone.

-

"Hello Sam!" says a perky voice down the phone. It's INCREDIBLE how unlikeable this demon is making himself. He's actually my favourite character now.

-

Oh no, Nougat is wearing a different grey shirt. He's really depressed. Someone help him.

-

"He just told you he was a demon?" "he seemed proud of it too"

Sam hates him as well. I can't wait for Sam to come scowl at him.

-

"What do we do?" Maggie asks, completely wide-eyed. Oh honey. Poor, innocent, sheltered Maggie. What were you doing all apocalypse until we caught up with you? You aren't hardened, you're adorable.

-

AUBobby and Rufus (his gun)

-

"I'm coming too!" YAY JACK. Your father is in trouble, he's on a hunting trip and he hasn't been home in a few days, but what a different world all the rest is

-

"I'm not as strong, but I can help," he says, looking tiny beside Sam, bruised up from AUBobby's training, a single layer to make him look even smaller...

(we do not talk enough about how all these jackets are a sort of alpha being shoulder plumping thing like when you make yourself look huge to scare off a mountain lion but that's 100% what this is)

IT MADE JACK SMILE yey he's allowed to feel useful! Pop is allowing him to go on a mission to rescue Dad who was looking for Papa when this all went down.

Grandpapa is not so pleased, because AUBobby has been measuring how useful Jack is and I feel like lil Nougat bab is going to do something mildly heroic for Cas or else get pasted for his ongoing character development for the season...

-

"He needs this, Bobby."

-

Dear LORD does he not quit? We don't even know his name? "Are you sure I can't get you anything... hot... or black?" FUck OFF

No wonder by the promo pic Cas looked so utterly done. This is exhaustingly annoying for him. Cas's personal hell is just irritating people. A line of Crowleys and Lucifers and this jerkwad chattering at him.

-

And yet Dean runs his mouth all the time and Cas is in luuuurve

-

Oh lordy are we really doing this coffee metaphor now? "Coffee has no effect on me" (but he once acquired the taste, and it was a core part of him being human and learning to human in the opening shot of 9x06 for him as his metaphor for how he was learning)

"me either *sluuuurp* not any more. But it's like saltwater taffy or infants. I just like the taste."

-

"I'm just being a good host like mother would have wanted"

Cas stops mid eyeroll to eyeroll HARDER at meeting ANOTHER demon with mommy issues. Like, please. Don't. I like Rowena now but can we NOT.

-

Party!Cas of Dabb era is my favourite iteration of Cas by a country mile.

-

"Why are you using me as bait?" "it's kind of what you're for"

Oh Cas. Now he's just the damsel in distress, which I guess is a step up from being an attack dog, but still isn't that great for the ego stroking about his role and use within the Winchester family, an ongoing source of stress for him, this reminds us.

-

Cas's faith in Sam is wonderful. like, as soon as douchmon says he needs something from Sam, Cas just SMIRKS like, OH BUDDY. BUDDDYYY. No, I'm not gonna say it. I'm just - "you think he'd make a deal with you?" I'm ... I don't laugh as a rule but inside? Hilarious.

-

"Somebody asked me what it was that I wanted" You know, I think Deanchael is INCITING people. he's not killing any of them, just using the revelation of his appearance to motivate them - moving Sister Jo to do what she wants, which is to re-organise Heaven with the ideas she had as a button pushing functionary... visiting world leaders and holy men, and this douche...

To what end, though? Chaos? This is a roundabout way to make a better world.

-

"Destroying, Drinking, Defiling, you know, the 3 Ds" they absolutely have posters up in Hell with this on for the newbies to learn.

-

We've seen Heaven's staffroom, I DEMAND to see the break room in Hell, with all its lurid Destiel smut doodled on the walls and so on

-

Anyway it's a hell of a question, pun intended, because demons have no real purpose, even the named baddies have largely been slaves to someone else's will (Lucifer or Crowley) and Crowley could not have answered that question from the start of season 6 through to the moment he chose to sacrifice himself... I don't think any of TFW 2.0 or Bunker Squad could answer it fully. Cas can't, and that's the question that's been bugging him since 9x06 -

EPHRAIM Shh-shh-shhh. It'll be over soon. I'll take the pain away.

CASTIEL I want to live.

EPHRAIM But as what, Castiel? As an angel? or a man?

and it's what his entire crisis in season 10 was over... Who ARE you Castiel? What do you WANT?

-

Dean wants a Beach Vacation Ending. He figured it out and as narrative punishment, he's Deanchael. No one else has sorted it out, though, but Sam got close - he had his pizza dream and was immediately punished with being eaten by vampires and resurrected by Lucifer and all that drama... Sam's work isn't done. Though his growth has taken a huge leap, now he has to figure out what he wants in this NEW setting, and we're only just MEETING Chief Sam in this iteration, so he's got a lot of work to do.

-

"I gave it a good think and I worked out exactly what I wanted. Everything."

Deanchael definitely is planning for this, so watch out buddy.

-

SAM DRIVING, MOM IN SHOTGUN

RED ALERT

-

Uhoh Sam's snapped because of the optimism Mary exudes. Yep, he really was nearly at the last straw in their earlier convo when he scoffed at her attempts to cheer him up.

Look, she's trying to mom you with no experience except adopting Jack. Work with her.

-

Sam is spiralling with the depression, this time all the bad things that could have happened to Dean and how they're never going to find him, throwing these horrible scenarios at Mary to stop her trying to comfort him.

-

"I know. I know he's out there, scared and alone." She sees lil 4 year old Dean. Because, I mean, that is the soul Dean bears to her when they have moments sometimes. And her optimism is a wall against thinking of her toddler in this scenario.

"I know. I know he might not come back. Never think I don't know that. But I can't - I have to think about the good, Sam. Because if I don't, I will drown in the bad." I wonder who that directly relates to who is currently driving this car.

I really hope this is a bit of vindication for Mary - or redemption to the eyes of the people who don't like her - that she does care, and she's spelling out her approach to all this. In the start of season 12 when she was trying to keep afloat she used a lot of optimism and furious paddling on the surface, because she has been doing that her whole life. When she was being raised a hunter, when she was a housewife with no clue what she was doing, a mom but he marriage beginning to fall apart... And then thrust into the present day, and it's 360 degrees of combat and loss and sadness and a ill-advised hook up with Ketch... Furious doggy paddling on the surface.

"For Dean's sake, I can't do that. We can't do that." And she shows that she is prioritising Dean, that she's driven and motivated to keep going FOR him.

Come on, give her a chance.

-

Nyooom.

-

Meanwhile in the Jack and Bobby truck, Jack is the one angsting and Bobby is the one driving.

Jack is one years old and not legally old enough to drive.

-

Bobby peptalks him with the reminder that when Jack had his grace he did hero things for these people, which is why he can ride shotgun, and even if he feels useless now, they'll have his back, that he has earned this squad even if he can't be as awesome as he used to.

-

Maggie is like, I'm getting a reaction shot... Am I going to develop feelings for Jack? That would be super weird, he's one years old. I hope no one is implying this even though I'm in a bunch of scenes getting character focus.

-

Eeeeeeee Sam trusts Mary with the demon killing knife. I am sure they don't call it Ruby's knife to her and he has never, ever told her about that time that thing happened with Ruby.

-

This fucker had his back turned for Sam to enter just so he could turn around dramatically. God he's repellent.

-

An extra was hired to pat Sam down. What a job.

-

"The shoulders. The hair! You are my Beyonce!" I mean, same. Except. Cas is Agent Beyonce so this fuckhead has totally misread this situation.

This gives Sam a moment to look over at Cas and Cas silently says, yes I know he's a total fuckhead, I've been dealing with this all day. I'm so sorry bro, can you just stab him so we can go home and follow a different lead. I don't even care what this one knows, I can't handle him another minute.

-

"I'm more embarrassed than I am hurt" I understand this to my core, and I'm so sorry, Cas.

-

"Kipling. Kip for short."

"Cool. Kip. I'm here." Sam being exactly as "fuck you" as I wanted towards Kip.

Sam is now standing with his head in an El Sol sign. TJW what are you up to bud?

-

Oh no Jack and Maggie got caught skulking. Sam and Cas have the same "my boy!" reaction when they see Cas.

Maggie is here too, you monsters.

But Kip has missed Mary and AUBobby

-

"It's just late capitalism, you understand" Yeah, and fuck you Kip.

-

How is Kip so irritating that he can make tapping a stool somehow the most obnoxious thing a man could do? He's WONDERFULLY well-cast. I love this actor. He's chewing scenery and it's incredible.

-

"What do you want?" Ow, Sam being twisted into asking the same thing Deanchael asked Kip

-

"Ass-modeus Kentucky Fried" listen you are still the worst but that drew a sympathetic smile and I hate it and I hate you.

-

Oh, Sam just Sammed something from that side glance, random demon side-eye. Oooh. Oooooooh.

But yeah, Kip asking for the "Crowley Deal" as if it's a package that can be bought from the Winchesters, and not something that Crowley wormed his way into via much back and forth power plays and drama. The Winchester have always had a back and forth with Hell, and since Crowley there have been a lot of demons, like Bart, trying to figure out what exactly it WAS that they all had. But someone has to be in charge, and the Winchesters are the top dog destined hunters with their fingers  in all the world-saving pies, so clashes come naturally. Approaching them like this, first Bart, now this douchenozzle, is meta, presumptuous, overstepping what builds naturally... An attempt to leapfrog to the end where the equilibrium is established.

But Crowley had time to build a long game. These new pretenders are working in a world where the Winchesters' actions have devastated Heaven and Hell alike, and are, like Mary, just trying to keep afloat on the whole thing.

"We never gave Crowley that deal." Because yes, that's how it seemed to play out, and from outsider eyes that's how it may have looked... But each and every interaction came about naturally through the plot, there was no wrangling it. That's just how the Winchesters and Crowley ended up.

And that hole can't be filled by someone just leaping into the chair and asking for it.

Though it is nice if Motown Meats is the new seat of Hell on Earth instead of the outdated exterior asylum interior castle dungeon look Crowley set up.

-

"You're no Crowley. I know that. So do they." I think that was what Sam Sammed out of the demons, and also true, and ALSO is this the boyking accidentally exerting himself, knowing what's good for Hell? I always get a lil tingle in my thumbs when Sam gets too involved in knowing what's up with Hell.

-

Holy shit Kipling was a Mongolian warlord who rode with Genghis Khan in life. PLEASE survive this episode, I want to hate you all season. PLEAAAASE I BEG YOU.

-

Oh my god this insecure whinging asshole, chowing down on the scenery like there's no tomorrow. "I'D EAT YOUR HEART" *turns to weepy and quiet* "before I show you who I really am..."

This is Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending levels of scenery eating. He's gonna pick up a barstool and take a bite out of it now.

-

Sam is doing this all unarmed, which is something to remember, because this is the fucker who talked his way into killing the Alpha Vamp while MOSTLY unarmed for a majority of that chat.

-

Sam Fucking Winchester.

-

AUBOBBY AND RUFUS!!!!

Also mary.

-

But AUBobby gets a slow mo for Rufus shooting demons.

-

HOLY SHIT MARY'S SLOW MO

I am pregnant

-

MARY THROWING SAM THE KNIFE

-

TJW was like this fight is too fast, my guy. We need to slow it down.  You're so good at your job no one's gonna see what happened unless we go slow mo.

he and the fight guy high five

-

"Aw, balls."

Hey, Nougat tried. He's got a squishy hero centre.

Looks like he weighs nothing and now he's human he goes down in one punch. Owie.

-

"Here take this. You know how to use it?" "Uh! Stab them with the pointy end!?" "pretty much"

Maggie you precious girl why are you HERE. Why is Soups On or Gnarly Gun Guy not here?

-

Cas you fucking damsel in distress

-

Fight guy is like "uuuuh do I have to"

Misha is like "I'm good here, tbh"

-

SAM FUCKING WINCHESTER

(Aw, Kip's dead, he was fun)

-

"ENOUGH"

YES SIR

-

"There will be NO NEW KING OF HELL"

You are gonna get demon minions like fucking ducklings you ass

-

"Not ever. And if anyone wants the job, you can come through me" Sam is technically immortal so long as Rowena is alive and vice versa you know. Also, how long is he planning on defending Hell? Ever?

I'm stalling from how much I have to scream about how badass Sam was throwing down that declaration that he's now essentially the trial a pretender to the throne has to pass to take the job.

Because if I was a demon... FUCK NO would I want to tangle with this fucker.

-

Sam's file, updated: Current King Of Hell. Will Kill You. AVOID.

-

Sam is fucking terrifying. I love it. He scared demons out of their meatsuits. Sam walking into a room is now a reason to eject and abort mission. God. This guy.

-

Remember in season 1 when demons were scary? Oo er this isn't our sort of thing... halp.

Now Sam looks them in the eye and is like, fuck off. I'm scarier than any of you.

-

"That's what I thought"

Cas is literally giving you the reverse look of in 4x16 when you marched in and fried Alastair's brain.

-

SAM GOT A NEW SHIRT thank god.

I should amend: he did all this wearing blue plaid with orange stripes.

Sam Fucking Winchester.

The BMoL definitely didn't have the right birth certificate because that's his legal middle name.

-

Sam n Caaaaas my GUYS. I hope this is the 10x01 convo but, like, not. Flip flip flip those pancakes, Dabb my guy.

-

Cas, hon, you're still so beat up you have blood trails coming out of your nose. There's not really caring about your meatsuit because it heals eventually, but there's also washing your fucking face, because Sam's had time to change his shirt and get a beer so what were you doing?

-

Probably staring at a picture of Dean on his phone and sighing.

-

Anyway he's here to ask how Sam is, rather than care about himself. Symbolism.

"I've been better. And worse." Worse is 10x01.

Or 4x10's flashbacks. For sure those are the worstest.

Though, this time you are the king of hell and you're wearing a dark shirt and I don't think you have thought this through.

-

The most well-meaning accidental king of hell ever.

-

Sam and Cas share the "to find Dean I'd do anything" look. Be CAREFUL. Cas is literally choosing to wear hubris on his face because he feels bad about his fuck up with going to Kip.

-

Mary! Casual Mary chilling in the kitchen!!

Although, with everyone in the bunker, these rooms are taking on different meanings. The people are chasing out the heavy shadows and ghosts of all the oppressive silences Sam and Dean have filled these corners with.

-

Aw it's Mary and AUBobby. I was half-hoping we'd have her giving beer to Jack, but I guess we need to set up the forward momentum on their relationship for this season.

"Not bad today, old man." "you too, Sunshine."

You do realise that Mary is sitting in the exact same spot as where Dean was when he called Cas "Sunshine" You do know that right I mean you KNOW? This is TJW, he knows. He's a Destiel Shipper of the highest order.

-

Cas pops in on Jack, staring at his busted up face in a mirror, now filling more Winchester angst tropes to make up for lost time. "I'm fine," he says without being asked.  Because 10x01 or 10x02 was where Cas defined "fine" for Hannah and explained to her it's what humans say when things are really not fine but they can't admit it.

-

"You did well." "All I did was get punched. In the face."

I love snarky teen Jack.

"To be fair, we all got punched in the face," Cas says, still covered in hubris.

He has a POINT. He has full right to pull the "I should feel more useless than you" card on Jack.

-

Jack doing the "i'm useless" thing that Cas had to go through when he lost his grace, and Jack was allowed to stay in the Bunker. Is this how Cas would have felt had he not been kicked out?

-

Jack says Michael's out there and he still feels responsible to stop him. There's a very, very very very ver very weird Hamlet vibe from Jack, being forced into a position of emotional responsibility to kill his uncle, but Cas is his once dead now back and not a ghost father, and Jack couldn't kill Michael and so Dean got possessed... I mean, it's not a neat overlay, but Jack wants to kill an uncle, an AUncle, and I feel like in terms of uncle-killing narratives, AU Michael making off with Dean fits about as well to Hamlet's uncle marrying his mom as we're gonna get... I'd love to see how this shapes out because these family narratives since season 11 are becoming deeply shakespearean in the amount of nonsense going on. This sort of supernatural drama is a modern world way to have this kind of heightened emotion and the stakes you find in Shakespearean tragedies, and to force the sorts of reflection on the world and self... I really really dig it. Watching season 13 yesterday really hit me with this feeling all over and I'm delighted that Jack has this arc because I'm so amused/interested to see where this weirdo Hamlet parallel goes for him.

-

"I don't have anything." "Oh Jack" thanks Cas that's what I said out loud "you have me. You have all of us. You have your family." *SHOULDER GRASP*

No hug. Fuck off Cas, with your reassuring shoulder grasps. I know that's the language you've been taught but Dabb era is hug era and you suck.

-

I love that with all of Sam and Mary's doubt and Jack's lack of self worth, it's down to CAS. CASTIEL. CASTIEL WINCHESTER. CASTIEL FUCKING WINCHESTER. PARTY!CAS. to give the actual pep talk of the episode which has ANY conviction behind it. Cas has been fuelled with something MAGNIFICENT since the Empty, and he's turned it up to 11 for Jack here :')

-

Jack makes the smallest smile, then turns back to his mirror.

-

Sam opening the door to his bedroom, framed in darkness. 10x01 parallels again - this shot as well as the demon dean one were repeated a few times through the 3 episode arc, and the demon dean one became iconic but Sam did it too, to Dean's room. Now he goes into his own... empties his pockets... he still has the fucking engraved money clip from Tall Tales because Gabriel is not only not dead but telling this entire story for us... He has the phone, that's off, because Dean is not there, not communicating with him, blah blah. And he has the keys to the Impala. Because he's the chief.

Well, the King of Hell. Damn, it took 14 years to get him there. Azazel is fucking spinning in his grave.

-

Ooh, phonecall! Is it Deanchael? "What do you want?"

Nope, it's Sister Jo! :D She's been standing there ALL NIGHT weighing her options and working out what she wants.

SPIN THAT CHAOS, DEANCHAEL.

-

Deanchael approaches a vampire, and it's that purity of Purgatory, that just wanna eat that fuelled so much of the badass stuff in season 7 with the Leviathan, everything Dean's struggled with when it comes to the black and white world of killing monsters no problem that dates back to Gordon in 2x03, that draws Deanchael to them. Because this is Dean's safe space with Benny, a real relationship based on a bond forged in pure, kill or be killed, eat or be eaten purgatory. Deanchael has the same inner machinery as Dean, because Michael is the worst version of Dean, engineered to be Dean but without love. Dean as a monster. And so it all leads here... D:

-

Well this will be fun :D

[bloojayoolie]

America, Clothes, and cnn.com: MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR ISSUE 35& 36 AUGUST 26 &SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 https://ift.tt/Ol6IOt AMERICAN FREE PRESS 2 A PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR Radical Leftists Commit Most Political Violence hortly before a demonstration pro- moting free speech kicked off in downtown Portland, Ore. on Aug. 17, President Donald Trump tweeted, "Major consideration is being given to Mass.), and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) would never denounce them. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif) went so far as to entertain violent leftist Joseph Alcoff. Al coff is currently in prison, facing felony charges after he and a cowardly group of about a dozen antifa-affiliated individuals at tacked two Marines in Philadelphia, one of whom is Hispanic. And one doesn't have to look very hard to find examples of this from the likes of CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. CNN hosts Chris Cuomo and Don black man. In antifa's twisted logic, the simple fact that they are all on the right of the politi- cal spectrum justifies antifa's violent targeting Contrast that with the breathless reports about the threat posed by "right-wing" vio- lence and terrorism. Groups like the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center have satu- rated the airwaves with the bogus assertion that "white supremacists" and "white nation- alists" are the leading threat in the country to- day-a claim that AFP writer John Friend de- bunks in his article on pages 22-23 in this naming antifa an 'organization of terror' Port- land is being watched very closely. Hopefully the mayor will be able to properly do his job!" We at AMERICAN FREE PRESS have been fol- lowing political violence on the part of the radical left very closely for a number of rea- sons, first and foremost being that the goal of antifa has always been to quash Americans' right to free speech and assembly-a right Lemon have repeatedly defended antifa live we believe to be critical to our great country just as our Founding Fathers did. A little background is important here. It actually has already been proven that antifa is a domestic terrorist organization, given its long history of violence for political purposes. What is standing in the way of that designa- alized that it's "okay to punch Nazis," even tion, however, is support from powerful groups and people on the left including the majority of the mainstream media, which con- tinues to downplay, explain away, and even apologize for the violent acts committed by this group. Individuals associated with antifa have car- ried out attacks on federal facilities. A mass murderer connected to antifa in Dayton, Ohio, killed multiple people including his transgen- Yiannopoulos deserve it because of their Hitler himself these days. der sibling. They have attacked journalists without cause, sending one prominent film- maker-who happens to be gay and the son of Vietnamese immigrants-to the hospital with a brain bleed. Meanwhile, far-left members of Congress like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D- week's issue. The truth is, the left is behind much of the political violence in the country today, but you'd never know that if you only relied on the big media. Circling back to the protest in Portland on Aug. 17, were it not for the Inter- net-and AMERICAN FREE PRESS the world would be clueless about the brutal attacks that went on there, all of which were carried though they never tell you these so-called out at the hands of radical leftists associated "Nazis" are actually conservatives who advo- with antifa. According to multiple sources including the mayor's office in Portland- which had the audacity to claim the rally was peaceful-there were no reports of violence targeting innocent people by the conserv tive Proud Boys or Patriot Prayera shock- ing admission, given that we conservatives are supposed to be the reincarnation of Adolf on the air. NBC host Chuck Todd went so far as to in- vite antifa apologist Mark Bray on his Sunday morning talk show "Meet the Press" to ex- plain why antifa's violence is "ethical." The Post and the Times have both editori- cate free markets, free speech, and capital- ism. 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[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Political Confessional, a column about the views that Americans are scared to share with their friends and neighbors. If you have a political belief that you’re willing to share with us, fill out this form — we might get in touch.

Here’s Matt, a 32-year-old white man from Massachusetts who works in publishing. When Matt first got in touch, he wrote:

Democracy is pretty overrated. I would be totally content with a benevolent oligarchy making policy decisions for me. I’m not an expert in medicine, so I don’t decide who gets to be a doctor, and I’m not an expert in engine repair, so I don’t decide who gets to be a mechanic. Since I’m also not an expert in government, so why insist that I decide who governs me?

As Americans, we are so thoroughly conditioned to hold voting rights sacred and to insist that we have a say in our government. I think we’d all be a lot happier if we worried less about who was running for what office and let someone else make those decisions for us, but to a lot of people that sounds downright un-American.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Clare Malone: How did you come to this position about democracy?

Matt: Something that got me started thinking about this was all the nastiness that happened after the last presidential election. There’s this guy who was my best friend growing up and apparently he no longer speaks with his parents because of disagreements over politics. And to me, that’s just absurd. I have a particular religious conviction that the family is the fundamental unit of society. And I think that if our politics are getting in the way of that rather than enforcing it, we’re doing something wrong.

I think a lot of people get worked up over things that they aren’t in a position control, and that makes them really unhappy. People would be a lot happier if they gave themselves permission not to care about election outcomes.

CM: Do you have examples of things that people get really worked up over that they can’t actually control?

Matt: There are certain public figures who become very well-known nationally, especially in the age of having information available instantaneously. People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance. She’s not my congressperson. It shouldn’t really matter to me what she’s doing. But I think most marginally informed people have heard of her, and probably all of those people have a very strong opinion of her. I’m not immune to that. But if you take a step back, why should I? Why is it worth me getting invested in what this person from a different state is talking about? I think the instinct is to take being informed as a per se good. I don’t know if that’s the best thing because, in the end, what are you going to do about that?

CM: What should people be doing with all that space that politics and news inhabits in their life?

Matt: I think attending to making yourself a better person, improving personal relationships. You could look to your community, strengthen bonds with your neighbors and local businesses and education and that sort of thing.

CM: Let’s talk about your benevolent oligarchy. What do you mean by “benevolent oligarchy”? What does it look like? What kind of policies are they enacting? Who are these people?

Matt: These are people who are genuine experts in the things they’re tasked with running. I want an economist who is going to make data-driven decisions about doing things with the economy, and I want that person to be in charge of the Federal Reserve. I want someone who has a lot of expertise in military strategy to be in charge of the armed forces, etc. I wish that we valued expertise.

CM: Don’t we have those things right now? Economists in the Fed, people in the military running the military. What would you propose, for instance, should take the place of Congress and the presidency?

Matt: I don’t know if I’ve thought that far about it. But I think in terms of listening to politicians, I really don’t like ideological, emotionally-driven arguments. Like, “Oh, we should do this because it supports freedom or supports equality or whatever.” And I really do like things that have results or things that have numbers behind them. And I think that’s a lot more of an objective way to look at things rather than, like, rhetoric.

CM: How would we select these people?

Matt: Boy, I don’t know if I’ve thought that deeply about that.

CM: Are there any countries in the world right now that you think have the right idea about their form of government?

Matt: I think a lot of it has to do with scale and how different things work better for small or big places. I was recently in Singapore. I really like the way they do things there. It’s a bit too harsh of a system for a lot of people. There’s severe fines for littering, for instance, or you can be caned for bringing drugs in the country, but on the flip side, the county’s really clean, and there’s no drugs. I don’t know if you can implement that somewhere as big and as grand as the U.S., but it’s a good experience to visit a place like that.

CM: What would be the ideal population for the democracy we have right now in the U.S.?

Matt: I think on the size of a local community. That’s something a small group of individuals can actually influence, and I think on that scale you can actually get to know your representative and there’s more of an incentive for them to represent you rather than be answerable to a party or to a radical wing of a constituency.

CM: So you’re sort of arguing that the only time our form of democracy worked was back in the 1700s when the country was actually that small.

Matt: I don’t know that I’d go that far. I think you can find counterexamples, but I think it probably works best when it’s as decentralized as possible.

CM: When you spoke about political vitriol earlier, does that have to do specifically with our democratic form, or does it stem from other things in American culture?

Matt: It’s certainly a combination. The idea that you have all the information in the world readily available when you want it is pretty new still. I don’t know if we as a society have become mature enough to use it properly. I think that would persist no matter how we’re governed. The idea of thinking you can control the outcome of an election, combined with this technological advance that we’re not really sure how to use properly, leads to a lot of emotion and things like that.

CM: You’re OK with the benevolent oligarchs making decisions for you. What happens if the oligarchy turns out to be not so benevolent and people don’t like what’s happening — at that point isn’t the only recourse to change things with violence or revolution?

Matt: I would hope not. That’s the obvious flaw in the plan. It only works out if the decision-makers are looking out for everyone’s best interests. I suspect that not everybody would be as satisfied with it, but I also just can’t help but wonder if a lot more people would be a lot more content knowing that things are well and truly out of their hands.

CM: How would you describe yourself politically?

Matt: I would describe myself as a Libertarian-leaning moderate. I used to be a lot more Libertarian, and I sort of drifted back toward the center. There’s a lot of things on both the left and the right that I’m pretty sympathetic to. But I definitely don’t think that either fringe has it right, and I don’t think that them yelling at each other is a constructive way to do things.

CM: Have you shared your anti-democracy, pro-benevolent-oligarchy opinion with other people? How do they respond?

Matt: I’ve talked to my wife about it, a few friends. As Americans, we’re conditioned from elementary school to think that the right to vote is sacred. People tell me, “Oh, you should vote anyway, it’s your duty.” I don’t agree with that.

CM: How would you respond to someone saying, “Listen, Matt, you’re a white guy, your demographic was never disenfranchised in the United States, so you don’t have the same emotional attachment to voting that we do.”

Matt: It’s true and I can’t blame them for wanting to exercise that as much as possible given, say, a person of color’s history. But I also think that the right to vote should not be the same as the compulsion to vote.

CM: Are there democracy tweaks you would make that would give us a healthier democratic system?

Matt: Abolish political parties. Emphasize local institutions, emphasize working things out at a community level instead of expecting state or federal governments to do it for you. I think any situation where somebody is guaranteed to be elected to Congress based on the party letter next to their name is not good.

Want to tell us about a belief that you’re scared to share with your friends and neighbors? Fill out this form!

[taylordmorris]

Gloom Lifts From Emerging Currencies After Rate Hikes: EM Review

New Post has been published on https://worldwide-finance.net/news/commodities-futures-news/gloom-lifts-from-emerging-currencies-after-rate-hikes-em-review

Gloom Lifts From Emerging Currencies After Rate Hikes: EM Review

© Bloomberg. Pedestrians gather near a gold and currency exchange store at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey, on Friday, Aug. 17, 2018. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan argued citizens should buy gold, then he said sell. Add dramatic swings in the lira, and the country’s traders are now enthusiastically doing both. Photographer: Ismail Ferdous/Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) — Emerging-market assets gained last week as Russia unexpectedly raised interest rates and Turkey hiked its one-week repo rate by more than forecast.

Highlights for the week ended Sept. 14:

Turkey’s lira was the best performer among 22 emerging-market currencies tracked by Bloomberg; policy makers defied President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by jacking up rates more than expected to bolster the flagging lira, lifting rates by 625 basis points to 24 percent; the decision came just after Erdogan said the nation “should cut this high interest rate”

Russia’s ruble flipped to gains from losses on Friday after the central bank unexpectedly raised interest rates for the first time since 2014; inflation risks have been mounting with a slumping currency and threats of U.S. sanctions

President Donald Trump is said to have instructed aides to proceed with tariffs on about $200 billion of Chinese products, even as Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin proposed another round of trade talks with Beijing

China’s economic momentum weakened a notch in August, with a continued slowdown in investment overshadowing solid retail sales and industrial production data

The White House sent contradictory messages to North Korea, announcing it’s ready to start planning a second meeting with Kim Jong Un just hours after President Trump’s top national security adviser said nuclear talks were stalled

Asia:

The onshore and offshore both declined for a third week; more than 60 percent of U.S. businesses operating in China were hurt by the initial round of tariffs between the Chinese and U.S. governments, with 74 percent foreseeing harm from future U.S. tariffs and 68% from potential Chinese retaliatory duties, according to a survey of more than 430 American companies

S&P Global Ratings lowered its credit ratings on seven Chinese local government financing vehicles by one notch

South Korean won strengthened; the country’s jobless rate rose to 4.2 percent in August, the highest since January 2010 and up from 3.8 percent in July; it will be difficult for the country’s job situation to improve in the short term

Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon said it is time to start thinking about rate increases

Demand-side inflationary pressure remains tepid and it’s “dangerous” to take preemptive monetary measures at this stage, Bank of Korea board member Shin In-seok said

The economy is continuing to recover, led by exports and domestic consumption, the finance ministry said in its monthly green book report

President Moon Jae-in asked heads of the country’s four biggest conglomerates — Samsung (KS:), Hyundai Motor, SK, and LG — to join his visit to Pyongyang to participate in the inter-Korean summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un next week, Chosun Ilbo reported

India’s rupee dropped to a record low before trimming the week’s loss; the government unveiled measures to prop up the sagging currency, including steps to facilitate bond issuance by local companies and possible curbs on imports

Officials from the finance ministry have asked the Reserve Bank of India to do more to maintain adequate liquidity in the banking system, people with knowledge of the matter said

The nation’s inflation eased below 4 percent for the first time in 10 months

The Indonesian rupiah posted its first weekly gain in five; Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said authorities want to tighten some rules on exporters and are seeking a fair share of export earnings to be retained in the country

Thailand’s SET Index of stocks rallied as King Maha Vajiralongkorn approved two laws, one for the election of members of parliament, and the other for the selection of senators, according to an announcement in the Royal Gazette

Thailand has no need to raise the key interest rate now as the nation’s inflation remains benign, Finance Minister Apisak Tantivorawong said

The government plans to borrow 1.16 trillion baht ($36 billion) in fiscal year 2019

The Malaysian ringgit rose, halting a 12-week losing streak; the trade war may benefit Malaysia over the next year or so, especially in electronics and steel industries; in the long term, U.S.-China trade conflicts would be negative for the country, Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng said

Lim said Malaysia is paring expectations for how much money it can recoup from the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund, and the country would be “very lucky” to get back just half

Recouping all funds lost through 1MDB may not be possible as the government wouldn’t be able to sell assets at the purchase price and some funds have been squandered, Anwar Ibrahim, president-elect of ruling People’s Justice Party, said

Police are investigating bond sales and transactions by institutions linked to 1MDB, according to Deputy Inspector General Noor Rashid Ibrahim

The Philippine peso weakened a fifth straight week, prompting the central bank to have reactivated a hedging program first introduced during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis to support the peso; the program offers currency forward contracts to bank clients with foreign exchange obligations of at least $50,000

President Rodrigo Duterte agreed to nine measures to contain inflation and a corresponding executive order to implement them immediately, Economic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia said

First-half current-account deficit came in at $3.1 billion, compared with a $130 million shortfall a year ago

EMEA:

Turkish lira advanced a second week; President Erdogan appointed himself chairman of Turkey’s sovereign wealth fund and got rid of the entire management staff that had presided over two years of inaction

Gross domestic product rose 5.2 percent during the three months through June from a year earlier

Russia’s ruble halted a 3-week slump as policy makers said they’ll “consider the necessity of further increases” after lifting their benchmark to 7.5 percent, a level last seen in March, from 7.25 percent

Governor Elvira Nabiullina, who first broached the possibility of a rate hike earlier this month, said easing may not resume for more than a year

The two Russians accused by the U.K. of carrying out a nerve-agent attack on a former spy denied the charges in an interview with RT state television

Russia’s economy expanded faster than was earlier estimated in the second quarter

South Africa’s rand strengthened; the country’s stable ratings outlook means there’s little chance of a change in its assessment soon, Moody’s Investors Service said

Business confidence declined to the lowest level this year as industries raised concern about policy uncertainty

South Africa may collect less revenue than forecast and trim its growth prediction for the year after the economy fell into a recession, Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene said

The Hungarian forint rose; the European Parliament adopted a recommendation to punish the country for the perceived erosion of the rule of law, a process that is still unlikely to yield concrete sanctions

Prime Minister Viktor Orban received an unprecedented EU censure as European lawmakers called for his government to face possible sanctions for eroding democratic standards

Ukraine was given a boost in its fight with Russia over a defaulted $3 billion bond after the U.K. Court of Appeal ordered a full-blown trial

Polish zloty climbed; the country’s Monetary Policy Council kept FX intervention as an option while maintaining a floating exchange rate, according to its policy guidelines for 2019 published on the parliament’s website

Saudi Arabia is said to be raising about $2 billion from the sale of Islamic bonds

The nation’s sovereign wealth fund will sign an $11 billion loan, marking its first-ever borrowing, people familiar with the matter said

Ghana’s long-term foreign currency debt rating was upgraded to B from B- by Standard & Poor’s

Latin America:

The Brazilian real was the second worst performer; right-wing presidential front-runner Jair Bolsonaro underwent more surgery Wednesday evening after being stabbed on Sept. 6; Bolsonaro’s son said he is not in shape for the first round campaigning

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva endorsed his running mate Fernando Haddad as the Workers Party’s candidate after electoral officials barred the imprisoned former president from running in the October vote

The latest XP/Ipespe poll published Friday showed Bolsonaro leading the pack with 26% support in a 1st round scenario, rising from 23% in prior survey; the former Ceara state Governor Ciro Gomes secured 12 percent while Fernando Haddad captured 10 percent voter support

Argentina’s peso was the worst EM performer, setting a new record low on a closing basis as the IMF said it would delay a $3b disbursement to the nation until talks finish

The government is aiming to save 196 billion pesos ($4.9 billion) through spending cuts next year as it attempts to reach a fiscal balance, according to a report by La Nacion newspaper

August national consumer price index increased 3.9 percent in the month

The Mexican peso was the best performer in Latin America, mostly tracking gains across emerging-market peers; Mexico is open to moving ahead with a bilateral trade pact with the U.S. if Canada can’t reach a deal on Nafta with the Trump administration, FT reported

President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s chief of staff Alfonso Romo said the new government will respect oil contracts and work with companies that already have contracts to achieve success; comments are reassuring to the market, according to a client note from Citigroup (NYSE:)

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