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youthkenworld · 3 years ago

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Another look at Kamala Harris, Part 2

By Mike Huckabee

Last week, given the difficulties President Biden was having just getting through an incomprehensible townhall meeting, we took a look at what Vice President Kamala Harris brings to the Oval Office if (when) the 25th Amendment is used to “retire” him. It’s not encouraging news, as you know if you read it.

https://www.mikehuckabee.com/latest-news?id=01A2837A-8710-4A6B-9A96-3021399FE349

Of the many reader responses we received, a couple of them pointed to a report on her that appears in the book PROFILES IN CORRUPTION, by Peter Schweizer. In fact, she’s Chapter 2.

http://www.jack-ass.net/art/pic/pic2a.html

The chapter begins with a story that shows the close connection between Harris and President Obama. She first supported him when he was running for the Senate in Illinois in 2004. Then, after he was elected, he flew to San Francisco to attend a fundraiser to help retire her campaign debt after being elected San Francisco district attorney. In 2007, when Obama announced he was running for President --- SO SOON after winning the Senate --- Kamala and several family members joined his campaign and, as Schweizer described it, worked tirelessly. When Obama won, Kamala was there in Chicago’s Grant Park for the celebration.

As Schweizer wrote, “Harris is widely admired in progressive circles as the ‘female Obama.’ Smooth, polished and confident” –- this was obviously written before that unnerving cackling began –- “she has worked hard to ‘cultivate a celebrity mystique while fiercely guarding her privacy.

What we wrote concerning her early life and Marxist influences is confirmed in Schweizer’s reporting.

And, yes, Harris’ political rise is tied to “one of California’s most corrupt political machines,” namely, the one connected to former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, Jr. As Schweizer put it, “Kamala Harris’s entre into the corridors of political power largely began with a date.” At the time, he was Speaker of the State Assembly, the second most powerful political figure in California. Brown’s relationship with Harris was well-known; as Schweizer reports, “Their affair was the talk of San Francisco in 1994.” Though he was married, her own mother is quoted as defending the affair: “Why shouldn’t she…?”

Schweizer has detailed the various boards and commissions Brown put her on; these did not require approval from the legislature. These were an extremely lucrative way to pad her salary of $100,000 a year as a county employee. He also bought her a new BMW. But most important of all was the access he gave her to “his vast network of political supporters, donors and sponsors. Soon she was arm in arm with Brown in the most elite circles of San Francisco, including lavish parties and celebrity galas.” And this was before he was even elected mayor.

In fact, it was shortly after Brown became mayor that he and Kamala split up; details aren’t known. She started dating TV talk show host Montel Williams. She and Brown were still political allies, though, and he continued helping her career, through “the most powerful political machine in California,” which he ran.

Kamala went on to head the Career Criminal Unit in San Francisco, and apparently the DA who hired her, Terrence Hallinan, soon regretted his decision. When he didn’t give her a promotion she had wanted, hiring someone else instead, she ended up with Brown’s political machine backing her to run against HIM, and, as Schweizer wrote, “the flow of money directly into her campaign was unlike anything the district attorney’s race had ever seen.” The SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY said, “She’s hauling in money like there’s no tomorrow.” The San Francisco elite with whom she’d connected while dating Brown forked over the big bucks. Schweizer’s chapter details the various ethical conflicts concerning this money and her use of city employees to do political work.

Harris outspent Hallinan two-to-one and came in second behind him in a three-person race. But in the run-off, she won and was sworn in as San Francisco DA. She took her oath on a copy of the Bill Of Rights rather than the Bible. Given her party’s anti-constitutional proclivities, I doubt the Bill Of Rights was any more honest for her to use than the Bible would have been.

Schweizer’s chapter also tells of Harris’s unimpressive history with the issue of sexual abuse of children by priests. This was a widespread scandal in California. Hallinan, as her predecessor, had uncovered documents going back 40 years, previously sealed by the Church, and had prosecuted numerous cases of child sexual abuse by priests.)

It turns out that according to San Francisco election disclosures, the Catholic Church donated big-time to Kamala Harris’s campaign against Hallinan, though she had no particular ties to the Catholic Church or Catholic organizations. And once she became DA, even though she had prosecuted sex crimes earlier in her career, she oddly moved in the opposite direction of Hallinan and worked to cover up the records. Victims’ groups wanted those records made public and were outraged that she wouldn’t do it.

From 2004 to 2011, when she was San Francisco DA, and then from 2011 to 2016, when she was California attorney general, she never brought a single documented case forward of an allegedly abusive priest.

There’s much more in Schweizer’s chapter about her performance in these jobs, and it is not pretty. He provides numerous examples of her selective enforcement of the law, to benefit friends of her “ex,” Willie Brown, and also of her husband, after she married Los Angeles attorney Doug Emhoff. We’ve also heard from readers in California who told us of her dismal performance there. Recall that when she ran for President, she bowed out even before her own state’s primary. She didn’t win one primary. And yet here she is, virtually destined to be the next President of the United States.

Throughout her career, Kamala has used her associations with powerful people to help her move forward, so it’s not surprising that her closeness to former President Obama would have led her to her current position. Before Biden was nominated in 2020, some had thought Michelle Obama might be the choice. (One of my staffers went on record with that prediction, writing at length about why she believed this would happen.) Certainly if Michelle had wanted it, she would have been the nominee and probably the next President, as the fawning media would have made sure of that. But the Obamas managed to accomplish the same thing, in a way that would still allow Michelle to sit at the beach with friends, sipping exotic drinks with little umbrellas. They did this by putting the woman known as “the female Obama” –- the far-left woman who shared their views in every way but who could never have even made it to her party’s nomination –- on the ticket with “moderate” (ha) Biden, knowing that Biden would never make it through a first term.

At this point, Biden can hardly make it through a town hall meeting.

What the left has done to our country through this scheme will not be forgotten --- or forgiven.

LEAVE ME A COMMENT here>>>, I READ THEM!!!

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possiblyimbiassed · 4 years ago

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John’s “therapeutic” blog

I’ve been fascinated by the wealth of content in John Watson’s blog since I first noticed it; I think it was some time after S2. For being a complementary work to a TV show, it’s surprisingly well crafted and packed with information. Joe Lidster, who has written the fictional blogs and websites of John, Sherlock, Molly and Connie Prince, is a screenwriter who has been working also with Doctor Who and its spinoff Torchwood.

Unlike the rest of the content within the BBC Sherlock franchise, for example the online game ”Sherlock the Network”, the escape room “The Game is Now” or the book “Sherlock Chronicles”, John’s blog is fully available online for free, you don’t even have to register anywhere. And unlike the other blogs of the franchise (Molly’s and Connie Prince’s blogs and Sherlock’s website), John’s blog is lengthy and has a lot of posts in it. It gives us background and explanations of cases that aren’t mentioned in the show, or only referred to, and I also think it provides a “second opinion” of what we see in the show. It’s a bit like what John says in TLD:

It certainly seems like this blog has been created as a special little treat for the fans, since most of the casual viewers of the show probably don’t even know it exists ‘IRL’. But I think the blog is much more than that; partly because it’s so heavily referenced in the show – with frequent, accurate and exact pictures of it (at least until S4) – and partly because it tells us so much about John’s character. I think John’s blog is significant and important in trying to analyse BBC Sherlock. And maybe the version of John we see in the show will actually get more nuances to it if we look at the blog, which is expressly written by John himself?

More under the cut.

As some of you might know, I’ve written a meta series (X) where I try to explore the idea (originally from @raggedyblue) that the blog describes the ‘real’ events in John’s and Sherlock’s life more accurately than the show, and that what we see in the show up until HLV is Sherlock reminiscing their life together while reading up on the blog. In my view, the show might be Sherlock’s embellished and dramatized version of the events - ironically a bit similar to what Sherlock usually accuses John of doing in both Doyle’s canon and on the blog. But I find the blog’s writing style far more prosaic than the show, and also more prosaic than Watson’s stories in ACD canon; in BBC Sherlock the roles might have been inverted compared to canon.

An example of this would be the scene in TEH (which I talked about in this meta over a year ago) where Mary is (supposedly) reading the following un-published post directly from John’s blog editor:

“His movements were so silent. So furtive, he reminded me of a trained bloodhound picking out a scent. I couldn’t help thinking what an amazing criminal he’d make if he turned his talents against the law.”

Something doesn’t seem quite right here, though. While the rest of the post is text from another, already published, post (The Speckled Blond), this first part is taken almost verbatim from ACD’s story The Sign of Four (SIGN). It describes a crime scene where Holmes has just “whipped out his lens and a tape measure and hurried about the room on his knees, measuring, comparing, examining, with his long thin nose only a few inches from the planks and his beady eyes gleaming and deep-set like those of a bird”. I see a big style difference between this and the rest of John’s blog. Since the quote above never appears on the ‘IRL’ blog, I’d rather believe that in BBC Sherlock this is merely wishful thinking from Sherlock that happens inside his Drama Queen Mind Palace. This impressive description is, I think, what he would truly wish that John had written. ;)

I also suspect that the continuing references to different blog posts in S4 are all made up in Sherlock’s mind, since John’s blog ‘IRL’ stopped updating after TSoT, when Sherlock hacked it and took over the storytelling.

Be that as it may, this meta is a reflection upon what John Watson’s famous blog actually might stand for, and what I believe it tells us about his character. In these months of quarantine, I’ve been passing the time by reading through the whole online version of the blog and taking notes of it.

Therapeutic origin

It seems like the initiative for John to start a blog came from Ella Thompson, his therapist. I believe Ella’s initial idea was therapeutic; if it was almost impossible for John to talk to her about his feelings and inner problems in their sessions, she might have found it difficult to help him. Therefore she suggested that he write it all down on his own instead. And if Ella could persuade him to talk about his life on an online blog, she would also be able to read it.

Of course this wouldn’t be the same as if John told her about his inner reflections in confidence, in a real therapy session, but maybe the blog would give him an incentive to talk about his life at all. And you have to start somewhere.

At the end of TST we see Sherlock visit Ella, but when she asks him to “open up completely” he refuses.

If S4 is happening inside Sherlock’s head (as I believe it is), this might have been Sherlock’s way of trying to psychoanalyse John, to ‘solve John’s case’, by envisioning the therapy situation in his mind palace. A well-known method of Sherlock Holmes is that he tries to put himself in the other person’s place and think about what his own response would have been to the situation. In ACD’s story The Musgrave Ritual (MUSG), Holmes says: “You know my methods in such cases, Watson. I put myself in the man’s place, and, having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances.”

Which is also evidence that the character of Sherlock Holmes does indeed not lack empathetic capacity. Also in the show, John’s assertion that Sherlock “doesn’t feel things that way” etc. is basically BS in my opinion. The problem is that John refuses to see this.

John’s state of mind before Sherlock

John’s first three blog posts (in the middle of December - January) seem to completely lack motivation.

And this is maybe what one could expect from the deeply depressed John (as he appears in the beginning of the show), isn’t it? No surprises there.

Everything seems meaningless, and John only makes two attempts at blog posts to comply with Ella’s recommendations, but he doesn’t actually write anything in them. After the second attempt his old army friend Bill Murray tries to contact him, but John seems to have cut off his ties with the rest of the world; he doesn’t answer the comment.

At the third attempt over a month later, John seems to want to delete the blog he has started, but lacks the technical knowledge to do so. The fourth attempt is just a snide comment to Ella:

She doesn’t respond, however (not very surprisingly perhaps). Instead, John’s sister Harry discovers the blog and tries out this means of communicating with him. But John ignores her.

But at the fifth attempt at least John has gone out with some friends and describes it – almost bitterly. Sadly, it also seems like John met up with them mainly to avoid his therapy session with Ella.

So, the problem is that whatever Ella may have thought that the blog would mean for John’s healing, I think she aimed well but unfortunately missed the target. John Watson does not ‘open up’ himself on the blog. When he finally starts to really write - after he met Sherlock - it’s not actually about him (supposedly); it’s all about Sherlock. Basically, John goes directly from ‘Nothing happens to me‘ to ‘Sherlock happens to me‘.

What the blog tells us about John ‘after Sherlock’

John’s blog may be all about Sherlock, but there isn’t actually that much praise for Sherlock in the blog posts as one might think. My impression is that John applies his (perhaps somewhat overestimated) writing skills to project his own failures and self-loathing on his closest friend. More than anything else, I think the blog is John’s emotional outlet for his frustration over his unsatisfactory relationship with Sherlock and his own inability to improve it. Instead of trying to actually talk to Sherlock, he uses the blog to vent his frustrations over Sherlock, speculating wildly about what he believes Sherlock is thinking and feeling.

The stories and adventures are thrilling and entertaining, yes. But his assessments of Sherlock’s character are really not very uplifting. John doesn’t strike me as an ‘analytic’ person, which in this case means that John’s theories about Sherlock are rather based on his personal emotions than logical conclusions. It’s sometimes even a bit difficult to follow the chain of events in John’s posts, because it’s usually so intertwined with his gossipy and out-of-context comments about Sherlock’s personality.

Unfortunately, Sherlock doesn’t seem to realise this projection, and neither do we see him address the issue of John’s misconceptions about him. I believe Sherlock takes many of John’s jibes and insults at him at face value, which – sadly - only adds on to his own self-loathing. I also think that Sherlock trying to draw conclusions about his mysterious friend through the written blog might be a mistake; it may eventually tell him a lot about John’s problems, but to see these he needs to look behind all the cover-up of blatant criticism of him, Sherlock. Maybe that’s what Sherlock’s trying to do in S4, by setting up scenarios in his mind palace?

Judging by how John comes across on the blog – and in the show – I think Sherlock’s claim “You’re abnormally drawn to dangerous people and places” in HLV is a perfectly sound analysis - on the surface. However, I think one must read between the blog lines in order to see other possible motives for John wanting to hang out with Sherlock. Reading John’s posts textually, he gives a strong impression that he’s there for the adventures; when there is danger in the air, John’s never bored.

In the comment section Sherlock never mentions John’s evaluation of his character. Instead he repeatedly criticises John’s writing style. I get the impression that this is Sherlock’s subtle way of getting back at John without having to directly address John’s misconceptions about him. As I said above, I think John’s writing style is very different from Watson’s style in canon; far less respect for Sherlock and a far more prosaic and simple language. Canons Watson seems careful not to speculate much, while John does this all the time.

Examples that form a pattern

There’s a good deal of praise of Sherlock in John’s posts, but it has almost exclusively to do with his admiration for Sherlock’s intellectual capacity; he’s repeatedly described as ‘clever’ and after the Fall, John claims that “nobody ever really outwitted Sherlock”. But in fact, I’ve found very few blog posts where John doesn’t also criticise or complain about Sherlock in some way or another. And there are only two posts (out of a total of 45) where John says something positive about Sherlock’s character:

1. After their first meeting he calls Sherlock “strangely likeable” and “charming”.

2. In what John meant to be his last post ever (he believed Sherlock was dead), he calls Sherlock “funny”, “charming” and “everything a good person should be”.

On the other hand, there seems to be nothing in John’s own (supposed) opinions about Sherlock that he regards as too negative or inappropriate to publish online. I very much think this is about self-loathing; he projects his own shortcomings on his “psychopath” friend and flatmate. Like it’s always a relief to have a scapegoat. An additional explanation might be that if John is closeted and in public denial about any romantic feelings for Sherlock, this makes him not want to appear too ‘besotted’ on the blog. ;) Thus, he might believe he needs to compensate the praise with criticism. Problem is, with this contradictory approach the readers might ask: What is John’s actual relationship to Sherlock? Handler? Hostage? Lover? Concerned citizen? It’s hard to claim he’s a ‘real’, professional colleague, since John’s actual profession is a medical doctor. But why would John be friends with a psychopath?

To seriously claim that his best friend is a psychopath seems perfectly OK to John, though – he does it repeatedly, and quotes Donovan’s claim that Sherlock “gets off on it”. At the end of A Study in Pink, John talks about Sherlock and the serial killer as if they were both psychopaths, one undistinguishable from the other:

“The taxi driver drove him to a college of further education so they could both educate each other on - well, on how their minds worked, I guess. It's not something I'll ever really understand and, to be honest, I'm not sure I ever want to understand it. To be that much of a psychopath. To be that above the rest of us.”

John even seems to pretend to prefer ignorance to understanding, only to find one more opportunity to blame Sherlock. Here are some examples of other things John calls Sherlock publicly on the Internet:

Arrogant

Rude

Imperious

Pompous

Madman

Freak

Childish and

Not safe.

He also says on the blog that Sherlock is spectacularly ignorant about some things, like the solar system.

Little Freudian slips

In the post titled The Speckled Blonde

(which is basically a re-count of canon’s The Speckled Band - SPEC) John’s closet angst reaches new heights:

Apparently John finds it important to preventively point out to his readers that he was not sharing a bed with Sherlock. Or, actually, that he even preferred sleeping on the floor before sharing a bed with his flatmate. The thing is, however, that the information that they spent the night in Julias bedroom isn’t at all necessary for the story, since - unlike in ACD Canon - nothing of importance apparently happened during that night. John actually tells us nothing about the night as such. The only ‘feature of interest’ is that Sherlock found a suspect bottle of bubble bath on the victim’s night table, which he took to Barts for analysis (and he was right - the bath had killed Julia by poisoning). Obviously, John could have described this crime scene investigation entirely without mentioning that they had spent the night there. So, if this little morsel of information was so embarrassing for him, why did he even include it? Hmm...

In my biased mind, I can only think of two alternative explanations (not mutually exclusive, though): 1. John had spent so much fantasies and subconscious energy on reliving this night that he just couldn’t keep this info entirely to himself (Freudian slip), or 2. Something actually happened that night - something that had no bearing on the case. After all, John never says that he slept on the floor, only that he was going to sleep on it. ;)

Speaking of bubble bath, I find the fact that Julia died from it slightly suggestive, and even metaphorical, as such. Because there’s also another case on John’s blog describing someone dying in a bath: The Deadly Tealights. The victim suffocated in a bathroom where the candles consumed all the oxygen. John has included this little comment:

Why does John bring up the idea that a person taking a bath with candles would potentially be judged? What has his own bath routines to do with the crime case? Does the victim really need John to find excuses for his private life? Methinks this rather might be John’s closet angst speaking again. Someone has tried to belittle John for liking baths, and apparently John seizes the opportunity to vent about it on the blog. Metaphorically, this tells me that the closet is suffocating for John, and that the ‘chemistry of love’ is involved.

John - The Moral Compass

John is often referred to as the part of the duo who a) is more sociable and b) works like a sort of moral guide to Sherlock. The detective, on the other hand, is shown as a “sociopath” who supposedly doesn’t understand this kind of things. And – to be honest – Sherlock doesn’t actively say much to contradict this perception; sometimes he even appears to agree with it.

(I think his actions should be a clue to the contrary, though).

According to the blog, John seems to believe he himself is the adult one in this acquaintance, the one who does understand the rules of society. He repeatedly calls Sherlock “childish”. Judging by John’s descriptions in the blog, one might almost think that John had been forced to hang out with Sherlock, trying to do the best of it. But seeing as it’s entirely voluntarily it’s a bit hard to understand, for example, how John can blame Sherlock for “leaving me and Sarah to be kidnapped” in The Blind Banker:

John makes is sound like Sherlock left them to the enemy deliberately, knowing that someone would come after them. But weren’t they at home, supposedly on a date? If John didn’t like it, couldn’t he have left any moment and gone out to continue the date he was supposed to? But no; John counts himself among the innocent persons whom Sherlock “involves in his adventures”:

After reading the whole of John’s blog, all I can say is that this guy is a living, breathing contradiction. How can he be Sherlock’s moral compass if his needle is spinning all the time? :))

In The Great Game John describes himself as just a “pawn” in Sherlock’s and the killer’s great game, equalling himself with the other victims. With his insinuations, he indirectly blames Sherlock for the death of 12 people and goes back to Sally Donovan’s “freak” accusations:

Another interesting bit is this, describing Sherlock’s reaction at the pool, when John for a moment appeared to be behind everything: “I should have been horrified that he'd even doubt me for a second…” Wait – what!? John is capable of telling the whole world the most damning rubbish about his friend, but if Sherlock for any second doubted John, he’d be horrified? This part is also of interest: “But the laser sight simply moved to Sherlock's head and I was forced to let go. For a second, I wondered if Sherlock would have done the same for me but then all I knew for certain was, at that moment, I knew I was going to die.”

Before that, John had just described what could easily be interpreted as Sherlock calmly trying to talk Moriarty out of having John killed, but to John this was just “The two men talked, both clearly pleased to…”. In John’s view, he was the only one who was forced to let go of the killer because of the threat to Sherlock. Honestly, who is it, between the two of them, that most appears to lack empathetic capacity?

Creds and Competence

John appears to be a rather honest, humble and straightforward in the show, quite competent in his medical profession, and in TSoT he is highly praised by Sherlock:

But on the blog John is more ambiguous, and he isn’t always modest. Sometimes he appears to enhance his own role in the crime solving and take credit also for things that are clearly Sherlock’s doing. For example, in The Great Game there’s this:

“Between us, we worked out that while Connie's death had been made to look like the result of a tetanus infection, it had actually been caused by poison - their houseboy, â–“â–“â–“â–“â–“, had overdosed her on Botox!”

But if we’re supposed to believe the show, John actually believed it was a tetanus infection, while Sherlock deduced and later demonstrated poison:

John also expresses a slightly childish vindictiveness in making a lot of fuss about Sherlock’s failures; every single time Sherlock can’t solve a case, John points it out on the blog with glee. It almost gives me the impression that the doctor is suffering from inferiority complex. He even uses “Sherlock Holmes Baffled“ as a title for one of their cases.

This seems to be written in jest, since Sherlock frequently is rude about other people’s lower intellectual capacity, but actually hates ‘not knowing’.

I admit that this may be funny to joke about once, but it gets a little tiresome that John has to point it out every time. Why does John even do this, even as Sherlock has explicitly asked him to not publish the unsolved cases? Which I assume would not be good for their business?

If John truly is Sherlock’s colleague, wouldn’t he also be more interested in helping to solve the cases, rather than talk about the failures? It seems to me that John is struggling so hard against his own feelings for Sherlock that he feels the need to provoke rather than help him.

The Most Inhuman Human

Sherlock’s supposed lack of humanity is a recurring theme for John; he claims that “people” want to know that Sherlock is human, as if anyone - on the blog or in the show - except John had ever questioned this.

I can’t remember anyone on the blog except John showing an interest in this issue, though. In the post Many Happy Returns he writes this (my bolding):

“Yet the video... it showed the other side to him. He was rude, yeah. Arrogant. Apparently lacking in anything resembling empathy. But I'd forgotten just how funny he could be. He was so charming. So... human. It's bizarre because most people would say he was the most inhuman person they'd ever met. But he wasn't.”

He wasn’t? Wow - great revelation, John! [sarcasm :)]. But who said that, actually? Not even the haters and trolls on John’s blog ever claimed Sherlock was inhuman. It’s one thing that Donovan and Anderson called him a freak and a psychopath, but John is the only character I can think of who has ever implied that Sherlock would not be a human being. Only John calls him a ‘machine’. Which is a load of BS of course; John really doesn’t strike me as a professional doctor when he says this, even less as a friend - always trying to mark the distance.

So what’s Sherlock’s ‘complete lack of empathy’ in that video actually about (mini-episode here)? Was it because he didn’t want to go to a birthday dinner with people? Hardly - John seems to understand this about Sherlock. Or was it maybe because of his comment: “How can John be having a birthday dinner? All his friends hate him!” Well, this probably hurt a bit (even if I rather think he sounds bitter and jealous - he wants John for himself ;) ). On the other hand, Sherlock then backtracks and seems to regret his little outburst:

Mary’s role in John’s life

The blog is where Mary Morstan appears to be introduced to John; on John’s first blog post about at least a year after Sherlock’s ‘death’, she suddenly just shows up in the comment section, sending him kisses and inviting him out:

John ignores her, though, and when his sister asks him who Mary is, he doesn’t answer. Mary seems to hang in there, however, and the next time she appears is on the Deadly Tealights post (the one with the dead flatmate in the suffocating closet bathroom). And now she’s called Mary Morstan. Next time is The Inexplicable Matchbox. Both times her only comment is ‘ignore the trolls’. John rather seems to ignore her, though. Finally, he finishes his Many Happy Returns post (which was supposed to be his last) with saying that he has now “found someone” (without naming them) and should concentrate on that.

All this is a little bit weird, though, considering Mary’s comment in TEH, when she is logged in and reading aloud from the editor of John’s blog: “The famous blog, finally!” As if she hadn’t already read all his posts and tried to interact with him on the blog? Hmm.

In the show Mary just seems to come from out of nowhere, suddenly showing up in the graveyard holding hands with John.

Her anonymity reminds me of Doyle’s treatment of Mary in canon, where she’s only mentioned by name when she’s still a client, before she marries Watson.

On the blog Mary is not mentioned by name until over a year after John met her, in spite of her presence in the comment section long before that. And it’s not until John’s first post after Sherlock’s return - The Empty Hearse - that John says something appreciative of her. Suddenly she is (still without name) "...the best thing that's ever happened to me. Sorry, Sherlock :)”. For the rest of the blog posts, John’s (very scarce) answers to Mary’s comments are never flirty or appreciative in the least. Mary’s own last comment, on the very last post - this time written by Sherlock who hacked the blog after John’s and Mary’s wedding - is this: “SHERLOCK! SHUT UP NOW!”

None of this gives me the impression that John has fallen in love with Mary. The silence with which he treats Mary on the blog rather makes me think of her as someone basically not very important; a sort of substitute in a desperate attempt to fill an emptiness in his life. And I think it might be significant that as soon as John recognises the existence of Mary in his life, he seems to use her as a sort of buffer towards Sherlock. A façade. First it’s the gleeful “Sorry Sherlock :)” comment above. Vindictive, it appears. And then, in the post Happily Ever After, John insists that his and Mary’s impending (heterosexual) marriage must clearly be the reason why Sherlock chose to help a gay couple getting together, one of them leaving an abusive marriage which was basically a façade. This whole ‘conclusion’ is so stupid that I’m rendered speechless.

Summary

To summarise - for those of you with enough patience to have followed all my ramblings in this marathon meta - I think the picture of John’s character that we can discern from reading up on the whole of his blog possibly tells us even more about him than the show. If the show reflects Sherlock’s mind, albeit almost entirely focused on his own perception of John Watson, this blog might actually give more insight into how John’s own mind works. I think it shows us someone who is struggling desperately with his own feelings. Someone who is trying to mark a distance that he believes is healthy for him, but that he actually doesn’t want, towards the object of his affection, by criticising them. The full-fledged, living, breathing contradiction that is John Watson comes to its full right by the blog. We could almost say he’s ‘human’ :). Kudos to Joe Lidster and the other showmakers for providing us with this gem.

Tagging some people who might be interested: @raggedyblue @ebaeschnbliah @gosherlocked @sagestreet @sarahthecoat @tjlcisthenewsexy @elldotsee @88thparallel @sherlock-overflow-error @yeah-oh-shit

#John's blog is important #John's blogging is his therapy

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arcticdementor · 3 years ago

Link

I’ll be transcribing select podcasts from now on. The one I recently did with Misha Saul had a lot of great insights, so I thought it was a good place to start.

It’s been lightly edited to make it more clear and legible, and sometimes for grammar, while maintaining the general ideas.

…

Richard has hit the spotlight in a big way over the last year – he’s been on Tucker Carlson and is increasingly known for his iconoclastic style. His podcast is excellent, and his essay drawing out the mechanism for how Wokeism grew out of the Civil Rights Act in the US has made waves.

This conversation picks up on a strand that I’ve been thinking a lot about. Diana Fleischman in my conversation with her said: Institutions are increasingly reflecting the values of middle-aged women. Tyler Cowen often writes about the feminization of society at Marginal Revolution. No one, as far as I’m aware, has really buttoned down what that means and what it looks like.

I don’t think that’s quite what we do here.

It’s a pretty free-flowing exploratory conversation about what we might call the feminization of society. What do we mean when we talk about it? Where can we see it? What are its benefits and derangements? We have a crack at the subject, anyway. Think of this as an experiment in chatting through some observations, live.

…

Richard: Sure. This is going to be a very American-centric analysis because it goes back to American history and American law but a lot of Americans don’t actually know this story. A lot of liberals have this idea of the Civil Rights Act… there used to be racism, they still think there is racism, but there used to be official state-sanctioned racism, Jim Crow, private businesses would discriminate against blacks and women to a lesser extent, or the same extent in some people’s minds. Then you pass the law of the Civil Rights Act and things got better. And a lot of Republican politicians, those doing the most superficial kind of analysis, don’t have much of a different story than that. They just think that “whatever, now the wokeness has come and now maybe it’s something a different and that’s a problem.” And they’ll throw in “oh and by the way, those who opposed the civil rights were Democrats." They try and claim the mantle for the civil rights movement for the Republicans, which is nonsense because a lot of those people left and became Republicans specifically over that issue, and a lot of their voters left the party. So it’s really a nonsense narrative they try and throw back at them.

It says you can’t discriminate in government and you can’t discriminate in private business. And most people at the time thought that basically meant you couldn’t put up a sign that says no black people. Even the gender thing they say was added as a joke actually. Somebody was trying to kill the bill, they didn’t want the racial equality parts. They said, “it would be so absurd to have a society where you didn’t discriminate based on sex” so they put sex in there hoping to kill the bill. And it ended up passing. I’m not 100% sure, I was told this by a law professor at the University of Chicago, so it’s not like I read it on Twitter somewhere. It’s credible though I haven’t looked into it.

Misha: American politics is basically a rerun of the producers, like hilarious accidents that keep escalating forever.

Richard: Right. So what does not discriminating mean? It wasn’t long after that that the phrase affirmative action comes along. It comes along in a series of executive orders. Government contractors first under Kennedy and then LBJ in the 1960s. Under Nixon for the entire federal government. Basically it said that the government would have to keep racial and gender statistics and make sure there weren’t any disparities between groups. You also had development of these other legal doctrines developed from the Civil Rights Act which includes a hostile work environment, sexual harassment law, stuff like that.

And lots of people have raised questions about free speech: If I think men and women are different and I’m in a private business and I want to say that, that’s of questionable legality… mainstream conservative views on things. They went after a lot of companies for this. There were some major corporations, I think Mitsubishi was one, they ended up paying a lot of money to the government, that made examples out of certain places.

Another doctrine, which was invented by a combination of the courts and executive agencies, is disparate impact. So if you give standardized tests, Grigg vs. Duke Power Company, this was a case early after the Civil Rights Act. It said if you give an IQ test and it has a disparate impact between groups… you can still use it but it’s a little complicated, it has to be related to the work, but it becomes harder. Everything you do that has a racial disparate impact, and by the way everything in the world has a racial disparate impact, if you find something that doesn’t I’ll be surprised, they can come after you for it either through the government directly coming after you or through people suing you.

So what happened? What happened starting in the 1960s is you see the growth of this human resources industry. You can just look at the chart of the number of human resource workers in the US going through the roof. Now if you had just said quotas, hire this many blacks, this many women, that would have been simple. You wouldn’t need a full-time bureaucracy to do that. The fact that it was vague and there were potentially substantial penalties sort of put business on edge. You needed a full-time bureaucratic class to interpret the laws and what was going on.

So the DEI industry is derived off of the rise of human resources. So you know, the way people see woke institutions today, “well they’re just deciding to be woke, there’s just a class of people deciding to take the leftwing issue on anything related to race and gender,” and some of that is obviously right. But you’re ignoring that basically legally you’re only allowed to be on one side of the culture wars. You’re not really allowed to say… if you’re a government contractor you can’t say “I don’t want to count my employees by race or gender. I don’t want to collect that data. I don’t want to take affirmative action to help black people or women out, I believe in a colorblind policy.” Mainstream conservative views, conservatives believe this stuff, it’s not legal. Conservatism is illegal for a lot of institutions. Not everything is covered but huge portions: the federal government, government contractors, subcontractors, it covers a huge portion of the private and public sectors.

And then it filters down, you have these big corporations and other people sort of follow them. And then you have these norms that apply to everyone. Courts will look at best practices, saying “Oh, discrimination is wrong, what are the best practices in the industry? What are people doing to fight discrimination?” And if that’s Robin DiAngelo at one point in time, you start to worry if you don’t have Robin DiAngelo coming to give speeches you might get in trouble. Not specifically Robin DiAngelo, but you get the idea. You have these intellectual fads that come and go and everyone’s jumping on the same train because it’s necessary.

…

But anyway, let’s get back to the feminization issue. I think this is a discussion that can easily devolve into two cranks kind of sounding conspiratorial and bitter. The one place outside this conversation that’s been steadily beating the drum of this thing has been Tyler Cowen on his blog Marginal Revolution. I think we can generally be quite normatively neutral around this trend, it’s not necessarily a good or bad thing, but if you go to Marginal Revolution and search “feminization,” you notice that it does pop up quite periodically.

For example, one thing that Tyler Cowen recently said, and I’ll quote: “one thing the contemporary world definitely has not come to terms with is how much a highly feminized culture will be rather strongly enforcing new forms of discrimination, albeit cloaked under different and rhetorically emancipatory principles.” I think last year or the year before Tyler Cowen said “the feminization of our culture is for me, trend #1,” noting that basically all the top ten selling books had female protagonists and seven were authored by women. And I think you can go through different professions, education and other institutions, over the past 50 years, and I guess it’s not surprising since the kind of increased participation of women in the workforce and democratic process, you’d kind of expect our cultural and institutions to change. But I guess this is what I wanted to spend today talking about, when you kind of took the piss out of DiAngelo and just said “this is just estrogen and mental illness.” Let’s talk about what has happened in our culture, what does feminization mean?

Richard: Well, I think it means a lot. It’s a broad topic. I think what Cowen is referring to is, you have men and women, and men and women deal with conflict and challenges in different ways. We as a society are leaning more towards doing things in the feminized way rather than a more masculine way. Robin DiAngelo is just a great example of this. I mentioned the human resources industry. I also have a chart in my Substack that shows the changing demographics over time, shows something like 60-70% female. So this idea that you have problems with people and then you talk to them about it and you talk to them not for say, an instrumental purpose, “we’re going to work something out,” but talking is a reward in and of itself. You need something, you need to re-establish the relationship, you need to feel heard, feel validated. This is a very feminine thing.

So you have these protestors at universities, and it’s funny because you look at identity politics in the past, anti-colonization or something. It’s just “we want to get the occupiers out of our country, we want to fight them, we want to have our own society” it’s a kind of masculine idea. And you now have these sort of identity politics where it’s like “hire more diversity counselors and have them talk to the people who are mean to us forever.” It’s a very strange thing compared to what identity politics was 30, 40, 50 years ago. It’s a sort of nationalism, a tribalism, an us vs. them that’s there in every society. But it’s morphed into something different.

So DiAngelo, the rise of human resources, even things like how we understand cost-benefit analysis. I think Safetysim is a more female way of looking at things. Bryan Caplan in his book The Myth of the Rational Voters has a few predictors of thinking more like an economist, and one of them is being male rather than female.

…

Richard: Well, if you go to the places where it’s most purely about consumer preferences, just walk though the girls section in the toy store… now they announce there’s no girls section or boys section, but they’ll have one isle that’s all cars and one isle that's all dolls. I was at Target not long ago just looking at the dolls and the Barbies, now they’re in different colors, black, brown, and they have careers, doctor Barbie, astronaut Barbie. I didn’t see a fat Barbie, I didn’t see a trans Barbie, I didn’t see a bald-headed Barbie, I didn’t see a tattooed Barbie…

Misha: Not now, but every joke becomes a reality.

…

Richard: I think things like anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, these things are higher in women. Neuroticism, I think these things are clearly… everyone sort of understands that. Especially the way we talk about things like mental health. Simone Biles… the idea that she quit right before a match, a meeting? A game? Whatever they call it?

Misha: An Olympics thing? A sports thing? We’re the wrong guys here. And she says she doesn’t want to do it anymore?

Richard: Anyway, there’s some kind of competition which she quit. And it’s not about her specifically, it’s about the media reaction which is that this is more heroic than if she would have won.

Misha: The quote in The New Yorker, I think it is, “her radical courage.” It’s deranged! To your point, even the best have blowups and absolutely no judgment, whatever. It’s the cultural reaction to it that is totally hilarious and idiotic.

Richard: Even stuff like therapy, the rise of mental health discourse. If you watch some normal TV shows, it’s amazing how everyone has a therapist. It’s seen as everyone has these problems they gotta work through, and the idea of it is that everyone is walking around damaged. I’m not going to say that’s normal for males or females. But we are tilting towards… it’s closer to the female norm than the male norm. There’s a minority of women who are very anxious and go through life feeling a lot of pain, and even for all our so-called gender equality, there’s still an idea that it’s much more socially acceptable for women to complain about things; for women to cry about things is much more socially acceptable than men.

So women tend to have these negative emotions at higher rates and it’s more acceptable for them to express negative emotions, so what happens is female concerns are overrepresented in the things we talk about. Not even all female concerns, I mean it’s very specific. Elizabeth Bruenig, this is a Washington Post writer for those who don’t pay attention, I think she just wrote some article that said “I became a mom at a young age and this made me happy,” that was the whole article. And every person on Twitter lost their mind and said it’s white supremacy or something. So it’s not the women like Elizabeth Bruenig, though she is a columnist and has a voice, she’s not representative of her class. It tends to be single, urbanized, less connected to family or marriage or a committed relationship. Those people talk the most and they tend to go into journalism and academia. They tend to have a disproportionate influence. This isn’t just women who have influence, but is true of human beings in general and who ends up mattering and having influence. The prominence we give to mental health and the way we talk about it are both signs of feminization.

…

Richard: To go back to what you said about whether it’s an American thing, I don't have much experience traveling overseas. I did a semester abroad in Russia when I was an undergrad, that was about 10 years ago, around 2008-2009.

Misha: That’s awesome, where did you go in Russia?

Richard: St. Petersburg.

Misha: Cool! How’s your Russian?

Richard: Not very good. I have a minor in it but it’s been 12 years so I barely know anything.

So I was there, and I saw Tyler Cowen say this: the gender dimorphism is very high there. I didn’t see any women with short hair. I didn't see any women with sweatpants or anything like that. I traveled a bit in Europe and I think it’s the same way. ‘Letting yourself go’ as a woman is more of an American thing. I don’t know if it’s an Anglo thing, you can tell me about Australia, but it’s sort of like… some women have gotten in their heads the idea that to appeal to a man is somehow sexist or wrong. But it’s human nature, men want to appeal to women and women want to appeal to men.

Misha: Yeah, but you can have an argument that’s regressive and that’s reflective of traditionalist values, that’s basically behind rather than an alternative. I know they look at the anglosphere and see everyone as totally deranged. I can’t even say it on here but the things they say about this whole dynamic is pretty funny. How do you think about that? Maybe it’s just a function of liberation, that you don’t need to be on parade all the time.

Richard: Why is that liberation? You could say someone being obese is liberation, why do they feel like they have to watch their weight? Not caring about how you look, this is a form of liberation.

Misha: You joke, but the US is way heavier than it was 50 years ago. You are seeing all these big is beautiful schtick kind of everywhere, you know what I mean? I kind of get the everyday person rolls their eye at this, but it seems to be a meaningful…

Richard: Do an experiment. Find a woke woman, tell her “you’ve put on a few pounds recently.” Say it in the nicest way possible, and see if she takes it as an insult. The things we say, “big is beautiful,” but try it sometime. Tell someone “I’m a liberal, I don’t have any judgement on these things.” It doesn’t work. There’s what we’re supposed to say and the reality.

…

Richard: Yeah, that’s some of it, and to go back to civil rights law, some of these things have been forcibly integrated. Some big golf course, something related to the PGA… they had men’s only golf and some big lawsuit. I think that’s right… Harvard within the last few years got rid of single gender fraternities and sororities, I don’t know if they went after the sororities too but they at least went after the fraternities. You think about why you’d need a male only space, or an all female space, and the justification would be “men and women are different, I can speak and talk in a way with other men that I can’t in a room with all women,” and that idea of fundamental differences is verboten, it’s something you’re not allowed to say or think.

You do get some all female spaces. It’s sort of like you could have an all black club but not all white club; because that’s the preference of the protected group, people will justify it somehow. They’ll say “blacks or women face unique challenges” not because they’re biologically different but because they’re facing unique challenges due to sexism or whatever. Sometimes they won’t deny the biological, but basically you don’t have to think too much about it, because they’re the “good people,” women and minorities.

And if you’re a man, now you’re talking about differences. And you’re implying those differences in some way favor the men. It’s funny, Daily Caller is a conservative website and they went to some member of the Congressional Black Caucus, a Democrat, and asked him “why do you think that men are arrested for crimes more than women?” Now the joke is that the Congressional Black Caucus says that it’s racism if blacks are arrested more for crimes than white people. And the Congressional Black Caucus, one of the guys was like “oh of course, because men are more violent.” It was nothing. So they sort of got him. There’s not a consistency. Sometimes you can believe in differences, sometimes you can’t. It’s not about if you believe in differences or not, it’s about if you’re flattering the group that needs to be flattered or insulting the group that needs to be insulted.

…

Misha: Just leave the crusty old dudes alone! There’s like 50 female gyms down the road from that same club and no one cares. But this is literally front-page news. No one can get enough of these crusty old dudes getting together for lunch.

Richard: The thing is men don’t want to do identity politics against women. You do have these guys online, men’s rights activists…

Misha: They’re losers! Who wants to be those guys?

Richard: Right. So there’s got to be a way to pushback, while not falling into the “we’re just like women, we’re going to have a fight on equal terms.” I mean if you do do that, you end up with the Taliban. Men will win, if you fight on equal terms with women… Trust me, it’s not going to be much of a fight. You don’t want to go in that direction.

…

Misha: I meant more, does being an immigrant allow you to speak truth to power? People can’t accuse you of being some rich, boat-shoe wearing fancy-boy who is speaking from a place of power in the US. Do you know what I mean?

Richard: Maybe. Let’s say there was a blond-haired blue eye guy who was just like me.

Misha: And you’re light haired and light eyed by the way!

Richard: I’m light eyed and dark haired. But yeah, I think it would be more difficult. I do think that’s certainly the case. There’s a guy named Madison Cawthorn, a young Republican, he looks like an SS officer. But he’s in a wheelchair, he had an accident, so it’s sort of strange that way. But he’s a typical dumb Republican who says dumb things. The media freaks out at him, it’s the way he looks. The wheelchair thing makes it a little strange. From what I can tell he’s not different from any Republican in Congress, just different in the way he looks.

Misha: So this is one of my favorite things about you. And whoever’s outraged at this point would have switched off or stopped listening already, but you’ll kind of point to the demographics or insane institutions in the US and you have this whole wokeness piece, you’re a pretty loud critic of that. But then you look at the Republicans and go “these idiots are totally worse. These idiots couldn’t organize a root in a brothel.” What’s going on there? To go in a different direction, what is with the state of conservatism in the US?

Richard: This is something I actually want to write about. There’s a narrow problem which is that they have never done the things I recommend they do, which is look at civil rights law and honestly face what’s happening. But then there’s a broader question as to why they think about this stuff and why they never intend to do anything about it. So that’s sort of a broader question.

The liberals are ideologically motivated. You look at which sources of news and information liberals trust more, and it’s usually the written word. The New York Times, Washington Post, it’s these other publications. The base driving the Democratic party and the left in the US is journalism and academia. For the right it’s talk radio and TV. Talk radio and TV is not ideological, it has a short attention span. It likes to fight, it likes the reality TV side of things. Sometimes it can win, it can win over the majority of the public because it’s good at showmanship and fighting.

And you have these groups that are issue focused, the gun people and anti-abortion people. These people do well, they’re organized and get the bills passed that they want. But in general, I think conservatism is more of a reaction to an ideological movement and liberalism is the ideological movement.

#richard hanania #substack #misha saul #transcript #podcast #read the whole thing

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chemicalarospec · 4 years ago

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A Look At Dan’s Recent Branding

AKA I Make Up a Bunch of Stuff About Media and Perception and Promotion and Branding and Say the Same Things Over and Over

I’m so sorry this is actually horrendously long. I’m a loquacious a$$hole.

So I started rambling in the tags of this post began thinking about Dan’s presence recently. The reason so many of us fell for the red chairing was because it actually seemed possible -- perhaps not a proper joint video, but a cameo or side role.

Now that the video’s out, I can see it has very strong Solo Phil vibes, but I can still imagine a few different ways Dan could have been in it if he wanted to be. (Side note: It also feels like a run-of-the-mill, everyday, video, though seasonal, and not a festive special, despite the content. idk, I blame it on the lack of decoration and boring grey wall. cue clowning for more spoopy content though.) Dan is not in the video, so he must not have wanted to be in it. Why?

Before I talk more, let’s just talk about “branding” for a bit. I use it interchangeably with “image”/”public image”/”public persona”/”common connotations”/”associations” here (kinda wrongly), but I default to “branding” because it’s what the phandom (possibly even Dan and Phil themselves?) use the most frequently -- “image” is perhaps the best-fitting term. Regardless, in a very general example, if Stephen King wrote a fluffy teenage romance book, it would be “off-brand” for him. That’s what we’re talking about here. Except with Dan and smaller differences.

It’s also worth noting that Dan and Phil were not always Dan-and-Phil -- I remember seeing an early liveshow clip where Dan says they’re not a double act. I’m pretty sure the radio show in 2013/early 2014 followed by the launch of the gaming channel in 2014 is when they became a “double act” -- the BBC absolutely billed them as such.

You can see what I’m getting at here: Dan is trying to drop the “and Phil” in a softer way than he dropped the “isnotonfire” back in 2017. However, it’s definitely worth noting that he had already distanced himself quite a bit from it before the official name change, with first the shorter fringe and then the curls being a visual representation of that. And it’s probably just a mental thing on my part, but curly Dan now looks different from curly Dan-with-Phil.

Okay so first, why is he trying to change his image? Like his first evolution, a major component is being more mature -- llamas and malteasers didn’t simply not represent Dan anymore, they represented a younger, less mature Dan. He didn’t like it anymore. Does Dan not like who we view him as now? My first instinct is “no,” because his current connotations are fairly empty, but I don’t really know, so I’ll just move on.

What do we associate with Dan right now? i. e. what’s “on brand” for him? Well, again, there’s not a lot of strong specifics, at least for me. After two years for being nearly absent from the internet and very clearly growing a lot as a person, Daniel hasn’t talked enough for there to be only the basics left: tall, British, memes, and gay.

Okay, but the gay. Dan and Phil have been out for one year, but being part of The Gays is a pretty big part of their branding. This is because of their already long-standing reputation, more specifically their attachments to the community -- all those teenage girls turning out to be lesbians and, of course, the shipping.

The Gay is also an answer to the next question: What different aspects of his image is he pushing? Again, that he’s more mature and serious -- the UN talk, for example. I’m not counting the book here because that’s the product of the changes, not content being used to create a shift.

The big thing I want to focus on is the attitude video series. I’m very curious as to how this came about to be and don’t know enough details to say some things, but one thing I can note is that the plug for You Will Get Through This Night is a really small part of it. It’s literally the last thing he says, and they don’t even show the cover. It’s so skippable, and while it’s good that means they all really care about the important content of the series, it does create some questions.

To be honest, all of the attitude/This Night content is kind of strange to me. For example, the quote they used to promote it doesn’t mention the book, which just looks bad. This Night isn’t really the center of the collab -- it’s more general mental health awareness and activism.

So that’s the first thing Dan’s trying to put into his image. The podcast (Get Britain Talking or something like that) is, I feel, more directly part of marketing This Night, though of course, like with the video series, the content itself is emphasized and important and I should treat it as such.

Back to attitude. attitude is “the UK’s best selling gay magazine.” Why is Dan trying to build connotations to things he already is? No, but actually this gives insight on how he’s trying to be perceived: he’s a confident gay man. This magazine with its connotations (formal media, queer, well-established) will come up should someone new search up Dan -- obviously that’s not the direct reason; it’s a representation of his public image.

Why is he trying to create this image? Right now, us in the phandom are probably 90% of the people tuned into Daniel’s actions. We’ve already built up a lot about him, and though we don’t want to admit it, we do like Dan-and-Phil, the double act. Overall, I do think Dan will not change our image of him as much as he’d like, but he has changed it more than we might think -- for example, people talking about how “mature” and “grown-up” he is in new photos.

I think I’m just stupid, but these pushes don’t seem to be needed for You Will Get Through This Night. Okay so the problem here is “how do you get people to buy a book?” An author’s broader public persona doesn’t really impact this. I’m not going to hear about a mental health book written by an ex-Youtuber and search up the author. I’m not going to hear about a mental health book written by an ex-Youtuber in my normal book searching, period.

You know where I could see myself finding out about a book like this, and what would get people to buy the book? Doing mainstream interviews specifically about it; I’ll read TIME interviews with anyone, so long as it seems mildly interesting. But Dan’s not doing that, not a lot, not yet. (I bet he will later.)

I guess what I’m saying is the attitude video series is periphery media that impacts his branding but does not reach a large audience; it’s impact is atmospheric, not promotional.

(Dude it’s 10:30 at this point I’m not sure what I’m saying.) (also I rearranged these paragraphs sorry if it reads poorly)

Dan is a private person. He has made this extensively clear throughout the years and in the most recent content. What this means is I don’t believe he wants to update his branding just for the sake of accuracy to self.

So it’s (partially) for something else, but the public framing clearly goes beyond This Night. The obvious answer is that Dan’s just trying to return to the public eye, but then I still ask why???

The attitude series is not an end goal -- i. e. it is a building block for something. I mean, I just don’t think Dan’s like “yeah I want to create content again and this is the content I want to create,” simply because it started out seeming like an extension of the interview and now it’s clearly more than that, but it’s still like, for the magazine. It’s not his.

So what’s Dan going to do with this status of being a queer content creater and mental health advocate he’s curating? So remember how there’s a 99% chance he’s doing something w/ television but there’s been no official announcement? Yeah, that.

I had a few paragraphs talking about book-adjacent media (interviews, reviews, ect.) vs television-adjacent media but all of it was me 100% making stuff up so it’s gone now. Basically, I *think* if he were to make a show, fiction or non-fiction, people would search him up and write a small description of him, and I *think* this is less likely for You Will Get Through This Night, so I *think* this reputation-building is in preparation of the former, not the latter.

Isabelle, you spent over an hour on this, do you actually have anything interesting to say?

Freaking *waves hands* promotional-- social dynamics-- what the heck actually is branding at this point-- Dan show.

TL;DR: It might just be the French in me (or just *my* French relatives?), but life is manipulation and Dan is trying to drop “and Phil” from his name and is manipulating his public image to be more mature, with a focus on being one of The Gays and a mental health advocate. Because it’s not vibin’ as This Night promotion/set-up, it is likely setup for promotion for another project, probably the TV one.

TL;DR 2: Just read the tags on the original post I literally didn’t have to say any of this except for “television theory”.

#dnp #dan howell #daniel howell #you will get through this night #dan and phil #sorry dan #but i know our people lol #u can't escape i apologize #I said this #things I've said #my writing #god why the frik i hae al;flkajdsf;lkj acan't type 100 million tags #dan #dan book #this night #hey actually just reaidng the bolded parts and skimming the rest words well #that was a smart move on my part #for readability

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kenzie-ann27 · 5 years ago

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My Obnoxiously Long Analysis of Danny Torrance and Richie Tozier

I have thought about this particular analysis for a while, and this has been a really fun thing to write, but at the same time, I feel like I am missing a large part of the story because I am struggling to figure out why? I know these characters are connected in some way, that part is obvious, but I am unsure of the significance. Why are these two characters so similar yet so different? This isn’t a case of the Stephen King self-insert where every male lead is an author but grew up in a weird place and lost a family member that causes him great distress even in his adult life (looking at you, Bill Denbrough and Gordie LaChance). The case of these two characters is different, as their personalities and lives are so different as to not have them be carbon-copies of each other, but at the same time they share so many traits and they have this connection that is interesting to me (though not as interesting anymore, thank you so much, Mike Flanagan).

First, I will talk about the gifs, since I think that’s probably the best place to begin. That quote by Dick Hallorann is so, so interesting to me because it directly relates back to It. Towards the end of the book, Richie recalls a very distinct moment when Bill killed a mosquito that was on the back of Richie’s neck, and he talks a bit about it and how bugs were often drawn to them (though he uses pheromones as an example). Leeches are also mentioned quite descriptively in It as well, them being Patrick Hockstetter’s fear and what kills him in the book. The other gifs are mainly a visual comparison, as I think that the way those two moments were carried out was pretty interesting. I was going to make another visual comparison with the weird cloudy eye effect that both films utilize very well, but that part in It: Chapter Two with Richie does make me pretty uncomfortable. In both movies, essentially, characters’ eyes get clouded over when they get into someone else’s head: Danny Torrance does this to Rose the Hat, while It does it to Richie.

To start off, both Richie and Danny grew up as only children in a family where they had close relationships with their parents despite them having a hard time understanding their children. They both felt closer to their mothers, as their fathers were often busy with work; both Maggie and Wendy seemed to ensure that Richie and Danny grew up with strong moral values, and both of the children were affected greatly when their mothers died. As children, they are forced into an environment where they deal with a supernatural evil, though they are not in any real danger unlike other characters until the end of the story (when Jack chases Danny and when Richie and the other Losers fight It for the first time); all other times, they mainly see things that make them aware of the danger that is present. Notice that with Richie, unlike the other Losers, is not physically affected by It really at any point. This is very different from how It works with the others because that danger is still there even after the event has passed. The blood in Beverly’s bathroom is still there even after she leaves and goes back. But with Richie, in the park, he is able to make the danger go away, he puts those glasses back on and everything goes back to normal (the others physically run away from the danger, but Richie is psychologically running away from it by telling himself it isn’t real). Anyway, this event stays with them long after they’ve grown up and moved far away from the place where the trauma occurred: Richie moved from Maine to California (Chicago in the film) while Danny moved from Colorado to Florida (later to New Hampshire). They then, turn to drugs and/or alcohol, which is said in Doctor Sleep to sort of repress the ability to shine and keep those negative past memories at bay; Richie seems to lean more towards drugs than alcohol, and vice versa for Danny. When they are 40, they are drawn back to the place where they were mainly abused as children and are able to use their abilities to destroy the evil thing finally before returning back home to their pets and their co-workers that they have weirdly close relationships with and all is good. That's essentially their main stories, but I'm also going to talk about a few specific connections that I think are cool to see.

Both Danny and Richie use their hands as the main source of their shining abilities. This is not obvious with Richie in the movie, but it is for Danny with him and Tony. However! In the book, Richie's main goal in life as a child is to become- of all things- a ventriloquist. You know, a person that uses their hands a lot like how Danny does to make it look like Tony is more than just a voice. Speaking of voices, that's Richie's main thing. Who is to say all those voices aren't like Tony in that they're a personification of the shining? (more on this below) This is also a connection between the two because neither of them is particularly good at doing voices, they essentially still just sound like themselves; this doesn't mean that those voices don't represent other people, though, even if they do come out of Danny's and Richie's mouths. The whole hands thing also works for the other members of the Losers Club, with each of the Losers relying on their hands for their jobs, just like Danny, who, in Doctor Sleep, is mentioned as being a janitor before becoming an orderly at a hospice (I would classify him more as an unregistered nurse, as he does say he’s had medical training). Hands and arms in general play huge roles in these two stories, which I think sort of puts the nail in the coffin of this argument. As a child, Danny Torrance gets his arm broken by his father, which is the moment when he starts talking to his imaginary friend/personification of the shining, Tony. While nothing huge happens to Richie’s arms in the book or movie, I would go as far to say (I am aware this goes off-topic, but bear with me here) that in the hierarchy of who shines the brightest of the Losers, Eddie is up there since not only does he get his arm broken twice in the book, it’s also what causes him to die because he gets his good arm bitten off and he bleeds to death. Eddie in his final moments is so strange to me, and I think the reason why that is is that he physically cannot shine. His only arm left is broken. Of course, It would want to take that away from him because it’s aware that Eddie has the ability to kill it.

Both Danny and Richie rely on the guidance of an old (dead) friend to keep them on the correct path. For Danny, this is Dick Hallorann, as he appears in Doctor Sleep to guide Danny to return back to the hotel. For Richie, this is Stanley, as a memory of Stan keeps Richie from going back home.

Both Danny and Richie are able to form a connection with the dead/dying. For Richie, he's mostly connected to those who have already died, while Danny seems to help more with people who are dying. I mostly noticed this in It after realizing the voices of people (rather than original characters) Richie seems to do more often- Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, and Pancho Vanilla (based on Pancho Villa, the Mexican general)- are all people who have died before 1958. I like to imagine that this is just Richie flexing with his shining ability and him being able to form those connections with those people by taking their voices and making them his own. Notice that in the book, “voices” is usually capitalized, as if it represents something a lot more important than just a kid doing an impression.

Both Danny and Richie have confusing relationships with others, specifically their bosses. This is more a personal thing rather than a fact, but I have realized that these characters do have rather strange relationships with others. With Danny, he meets Billy after taking a bus to New Hampshire, and Billy gives him a job and a place to stay. They become fast friends, though I mainly attribute this to their shared ability to shine (yes, of course, I’m going to mention that Danny often sings along to YMCA while working). Danny eventually tells Billy about what’s going on with the missing kids, and Billy is just unusually calm with the situation and agrees to go with him to Idaho to find Bradley’s glove. With Richie, however, I would say the strange coworker comes in the form of Steve, who is his manager in both the book and the movie. Obviously, if you have never been to my blog before, I really like Steve. He’s a fun character to look at not only because of the way he interacts with Richie but because I am willing to bet that that’s who Richie ends up with (at least, in the movie, since that was the plan in the 2010 script). Like Danny with Billy, Richie wants to tell Steve about the crazy stuff that’s happening, if he remembered what happened at all. I know this isn’t really a good explanation for the comparison between Danny and Richie, but I feel like their relationships with Billy and Steve are just really interesting and something that stuck out to me in the books and the movies.

Of course, now, I feel like I need to justify all of this. I need to come up with some reason why these two characters are connected and why I felt the need to write all of this garbage. And for the longest time, I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why these two characters stick out so much in this universe.

And then I rewatched It: Chapter Two.

Richie sticks out the most in that movie because of the way he acts is so different from the others. He feels distant, almost. From the minute I see him on screen I am able to look at him and say “that’s Richie”, but at the same time he feels so different to me, as someone who has looked at this character for a long time to try and dissect him. In his opening scene, for one, unlike all of the others, Richie gets a moment on stage where he stares out blankly and he hears these voices, memories from his past (I don’t remember the exact things they said, but essentially they were the voices of himself, Stanley, Eddie, and Henry). That sticks out to me so much because he is the only character that that happens to, even after he drank a glass of bourbon like a minute beforehand (of course, this also can sort of be explained as the shining is dulled by alcohol, not always taken away completely). To be honest, all of the Losers tend to turn to alcohol when faced with stressful memories throughout the movie. But it wasn’t until later that I realized that Richie was seen differently by the Losers. In the Neibolt House, I feel like the Losers tend to somewhat overreact when it comes to Richie after being attacked by the spider-Stanley (like… when Eddie broke his arm, most of them were focused more on Pennywise rather than helping Eddie). And later after Eddie got stabbed, he looks to Richie as if Richie is going to help him.

This goes back to my hierarchy statement before, but essentially, what I’m getting at is that Richie shines the most. Like… Danny Torrance levels of shine. That’s why they are connected. It’s shown in Doctor Sleep that those who shine the most tend to connect to each other, so who’s to say that Danny didn’t know about Richie? In my hierarchy, by the way, I would say that the order of who shines the most would be: Richie, Stanley, Eddie, Beverly, Bill, Mike, and then Ben. Of course, this would bring up the issue of “if Richie shined the most, then why didn’t the Turtle talk to him instead of Bill?”, and that can just simply be put down to the fact that Bill is the leader. That came to be not because of his shining, but rather simply because of the way he looked; the other Losers (I believe it was either Eddie or Richie) mention that they look up to Bill, mainly because he is taller and stronger and more handsome. Why would the Turtle go to Richie for help with this when Richie has been running away from himself his whole life? Bill was the logical reason because he could lead them in a way that Richie never did.

Overall, I feel like both Richie and Danny have these super similar qualities that are hard to ignore. I love both of these characters, so writing this long piece of garbage was a lot of fun. It was also fun to rewatch these movies and see that there is just this big connection that is there for fans of the books, so I am dying to see where it goes. It feels like they are waiting for The Dark Tower to bring them together with the mentions of the Turtle and Ka and space and all of that, but I feel like a whole new story would be really interesting as well. Plus, you know, I am dying to see a teenaged Abra trying to explain to shining to Richie.

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astudyinfreewill · 5 years ago

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tbh i get queer fans being mad/sad about kavinsky being killed off in that yeah, bury your guys can always be upsetting no matter the character. but it's weird to me when people go the 'he didn't DESERVE it blah blah' route because like, that has nothing to do with the trope. like i agree with queer characters always getting killed off being exhausting, but i don't get people going hard for this particular character lmao

hmm i… sort of agree. i guess i can understand fans being sad about kavinsky being killed off if they empathise with him, even though personally i just… can’t imagine relating to a character like that. but i honestly, genuinely don’t believe he’s an example of Bury Your Gays. it would be BYG if kavinsky was the only queer rep in the books, or even he killed himself specifically for being gay… which, no matter what people argue, he didn’t. but rather than give my opinion on it, i’m gonna take this chance to go through the trope systematically and explain why the shoe doesn’t fit. it’s meta time!

Why Kavinsky Dying is Not “Bury Your Gays”

[All quotes are taken directly from TvTropes, though the emphasis is mine.]

The Bury Your Gays trope in media, including all its variants, is a homophobic cliché. It is the presentation of deaths of LGBT characters where these characters are nominally able to be viewed as more expendable than their heteronormative counterparts. In this way, the death is treated as exceptional in its circumstances. In aggregate, queer characters are more likely to die than straight characters. Indeed, it may be because they seem to have less purpose compared to straight characters, or that the supposed natural conclusion of their story is an early death.

Kavinsky is never viewed as “more expendable than his heteronormative counterparts”. If you see Kavinsky as simply Ronan’s foil, then the reasoning doesn’t apply, because Ronan is gay himself, so he can’t be a “heteronormative counterpart”. However, Kavinsky apologists like to latch on to Gansey’s “We matter” quote to prove Kavinsky is treated as unimportant – but that’s a fallacy for several reasons. First, you’re taking Gansey to speak for the author, or for objective truth, when Gansey is one of the most unreliable narrators in the book, and his world view is extremely biased. Secondly, Gansey isn’t Kavinsky’s counterpart. Kavinsky is an antagonist, so you have to look at what happens to the other antagonists – his actual heteronormative counterparts. And, well: they pretty much ALL get killed off. Not just that, but they often get killed off in a way that does not have the emotional/narrative impact implied in Kavinsky’s death. By that reckoning, he gets the better shake. Additionally, we get 4 heteronormative villains killed off - Whelk, Neeve, Colin, and Piper. So in the series, queer characters are not more likely to die than straight characters (even among the protagonists, Gansey and Noah are the ones who “die”, where Ronan and Adam do not).

The reasons for this trope have evolved somewhat over the years. For a good while, it was because the Depraved Homosexual trope and its ilk pretty much limited portrayals of explicitly gay characters to villainous characters, or at least characters who weren’t given much respect by the narrative. This, conversely, meant that most of them would either die or be punished by the end.

This is not applicable to TRC, as portrayals of explicitly queer characters are not limited to villainous characters; Adam and Ronan are both explicitly queer and they are treated with huge amounts of respect by the narrative. So Kavinsky isn’t being killed for being the odd one out/the Token Evil Queer; plus, there are other reasons why he doesn’t fit the Depraved Homosexual trope (while sexual molestation is a part of this trope, TVTropes encourages you to “think of whether he’d be any different if he wasn’t gay” – and Kavinsky wouldn’t. Not only because DHs are usually extremely camp while Kavinsky’s mannerisms aren’t particularly queer-coded, but also because he is not shown to have any more respect for women than he does for men, and his abuse would look the same if he was straight).

However, as sensitivity to gay people became more mainstream, this evolved into a sort of Rule-Abiding Rebel “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude. You could have sympathetic queer characters, but they would still usually be “punished” for their queerness in some way so as to not anger more homophobic audiences, similar to how one might write a sympathetic drug addict but still show their addiction in a poor light.

Again: Neither Ronan nor Adam – the two sympathetic queer characters – are punished for being queer, hence subverting this form of the trope.

This then transitioned into the Too Good for This Sinful Earth narrative, where stories would tackle the subject of homophobia and then depict LGBT characters as suffering victims who die tragic deaths from an uncaring world. The AIDS crisis also contributed to this narrative, as the Tragic AIDS Story became its own archetype, popularized by films like Philadelphia.

Okay, this is DEFINITELY not Kavinsky’s case. Kavinsky’s death isn’t specifically connected to being gay (e.g.: a hate crime or an STD), and he’s never depicted as some innocent suffering victim. As for the “uncaring world”… eh. Kavinsky may not have a valid support system, but that’s just as much by choice as by chance - and when Ronan extends a helping hand and tries to save him, Kavinsky rejects it. Too Good For This Sinful Earth is definitely not in play.

The only trope that kind of fits the bill is Gayngst-Induced Suicide… but only on the surface. As TVTrope puts it, Gayngst-Induced Suicide is “when LGBT characters are Driven to Suicide because of their sexuality, either because of internalized homophobia (hating themselves) or experiencing a miserable life because of their “deviant” gender or sexuality: having to hide who they are, not finding a stable relationship, homophobia from other parties, etc.”. Kavinsky certainly has quite a bit of internalized homophobia, but he is absolutely not experiencing a miserable life because of his sexuality – i.e. he’s not being bullied or taunted or subejcted to hate crimes. He doesn’t have to hide who he is: his parents are effectively out of the picture, his cronies worship him, and he constantly makes gay jokes to Ronan and Gansey. As for “not finding a stable relationship”… well that’s not exactly the problem, is it. He’s not looking for a stable relationship – he’s pursuing Ronan specifically, obsessively, through stalking and abuse. So even this trope is not applicable.

And then there are the cases of But Not Too Gay or the Bait-and-Switch Lesbians, where creators manage to get the romance going but quickly avoid showing it in detail by killing off one of the relevant characters.

Once again this is not the case with Kavinsky, as 1) there was no romance going between him and Ronan, and 2) he is not killed off before the nature of his obsession with Ronan is revealed – he gets the chance to both admit (sort of) he wants Ronan, and to confront Ronan about his sexuality, to which Ronan admits that yes, he is gay, but he is not interested in Kavinsky. So, there is no But Not Too Gay nor any Bait-and-Switch here.

Also known as Dead Lesbian Syndrome, though that name has largely fallen out of use post-2015 and the media riots about overuse of the trope. And, as this public outcry restated, the problem isn’t merely that gay characters are killed off: the problem is the tendency that gay characters are killed off in a story full of mostly straight characters, or when the characters are killed off because they are gay.

This is a very good definition of the trope and why it doesn’t apply to Kavinsky: he’s not killed off because he’s gay, and he’s not killed off in a story full of mostly straight characters; TRC is definitely not overwhelmingly diverse, but 2 of the 4 protagonists are queer, giving us a solid 50% ratio (I’m not counting Noah because his “character” status is vague, and I’m not counting Henry because he came in so late, and also because his sexuality is the matter of much speculation).

For a comparison that will make it even clearer: take a show like Supernatural. Supernatural’s range of characters is almost entirely presented as straight white cis men (as of canon – despite much of the fandom’s hopes and speculation). They’ve had problems with diversity in general, with a lot of black characters dying immediately, and a lot of women getting fridged for plot advancement or male angst (a different problematic trope altogether). Now, apart from minor inconsequential cameos, Supernatural had ONE recurring gay character: Charlie Bradbury. And they killed her off for no discernible reason other than plot advancement and male angst, in a context that had elements of Too Good For This Sinful Earth (Charlie being a fan-favourite, ~pure cinnamon roll~, being killed by actual nazis, who historically targeted gay people). See, THAT was Bury Your Gays, AND Dead Lesbian Syndrome, AND Fridging…

However, sometimes gay characters die in fiction because, well, sometimes people die. There are many Anyone Can Die stories: barring explicit differences in the treatments of the gay and straight deaths in these, it’s not odd that the gay characters are dying. The occasional death of one in a Cast Full of Gay is unlikely to be notable, either.

…But that is not the case with TRC. As I’ve said above, there are no explicit differences in the treatments of the gay and straight villain deaths. Kavinsky’s death is not Bury Your Gays; it’s Anyone Can Die – even a protagonist’s foil who has magic powers and is present for most of the book.

Believe me, I would not be cavalier about this. As you rightly said, queer characters always getting killed off is exhausting, and as a bi woman myself, I am deeply affected by instances of Bury Your Gays. When Supernatural killed off Charlie, I wrote a novel-length fix-it fic and basically stopped watching the show – a show I had been following, flaws and all, for 10 years. I don’t take it lightly. But Kavinsky’s death isn’t Bury Your Gays, nor is it homophobia. Sometimes, a character death is just a character death.

#anonymous #answer #meta #trc #trc meta #tropes #joseph kavinsky #mp #my meta

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twentiethcenturymoviesandtv · 4 years ago

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Frankenstein: Legacy and Impact

If I sat you down with a pencil and paper and asked you to draw me a picture of the Frankenstein monster, odds are, I can tell you exactly what you’d draw.

A large figure with a flat-top head, greenish-pale skin, with bolts sticking out of the neck, and heavy eyelids. If you were particularly ambitious, you might even draw the place of its creation: a lab full of electronic equipment and tables.

For the most part, if I were to take that picture, unlabeled, and pass it around to about thirty people or so without telling them what it was, most would probably identify it as the Frankenstein monster in the lab it was created in. Some might even chuckle and quote: “It’s alive!”

Ironically, the image that you would have drawn, and indeed, even the quote itself, are not native to the original Frankenstein story.

As a matter of fact, the image you would have drawn came from one, very specific place: James Whale’s 1931 horror classic: Frankenstein.

By 1931, monster movies certainly weren’t new. As far back as the silent films of the 1920s, films like Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera, The Man Who Laughed, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had already begun exposing audiences to the scary side of movie magic, using film-gimmicks to make these frightening stories come to life in a way that audiences were wholly unused to. Even beforehand, a film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s sci-fi/horror classic Frankenstein had already been produced in the year 1910, almost a hundred years after the original book’s publication.

By the time talkies rolled into the theaters, audiences were already used to being scared. But even so, in 1931, something happened that shook the horror world, and audiences, right to their core: Tod Browning’s Dracula.

Dracula became a monster (ha!) hit, propelling lead actor Bela Lugosi, the character of Dracula, and horror itself to new heights. It was dark. It was creepy. It was interesting, and, most importantly, it was iconic. Since Lugosi’s turn in the role, Dracula in the pop-culture understanding has never been the same.

But this isn’t an article about Dracula. It’s an article about Frankenstein.

It just so happens that you can’t have one without the other.

Dracula took America by storm, shot with weird, Gothic shadows and angles, with a grand story and a truly chilling monster, played absolutely straight. There were no humorous bits, no last-minute Scooby-Doo twists that rendered the supernatural totally natural, this was pure, undiluted horror. This matters in the long run, and it certainly matters to Dracula, but it also matters, quite a bit, to Frankenstein too.

Without Universal’s Dracula, we’d never have Universal’s Frankenstein.

Directly after Dracula’s massive reception (selling fifty-thousand tickets in its first weekend), Universal started production on another big-budget horror film. Deciding to follow a similar path as Dracula, Gothic source material was selected: Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel: Frankenstein.

In November of 1931, the film was released, and changed horror, and Frankenstein, forever, just as much as Dracula had.

Spawning multiple sequels (including almost-as-famous film, Bride of Frankenstein), James Whale’s version of the Frankenstein story lived on for over ten years under the Universal brand, concluding with horror-comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. During this period, the Frankenstein creature met up with both Dracula and the Wolf Man in some of the original examples of a cinematic universe, before Universal laid the character to rest in 1948.

But, of course, much like within the story, Frankenstein wouldn’t stay dead for long.

British company Hammer Film Productions resurrected the story, and character, in 1957 for The Curse of Frankenstein, making several films about the creature for a few more decades. Italy and Japan had their own turns with the character for their own films, such as Lady Frankenstein and Frankenstein Conquers the World. The character model of the monster would appear in everything from Scooby Doo to The Munsters, even appearing on cereal boxes. (Frankenberry is a classic.)

The character of the Frankenstein monster has been in the public consciousness constantly since 1931, remade, rebooted, genre-twisted, parodied, quoted and referenced in more films than almost any other story to date.

That doesn’t seem so terribly surprising. After all, Mary Shelley’s book came out over two hundred years ago. Of course, a story that old would still be kicking around today in many different versions, right?

Right.

But also wrong.

Remember that picture I asked you to draw?

Like I said earlier, the elements of that picture, from the iconic, blocky look of the monster to the mad-scientist lab around him, come from the 1931 film. But that’s not all.

Igor? Originated in the Universal monster lineup of Frankenstein films (albeit a composite of Fritz, the hunchback assistant played by Dwight Frye in the original and the actual character Igor, played by Bela Lugosi in later films).

The idea of the monster being assembled from the parts of freshly-dead corpses? First appeared in the original Universal film.

Electricity bringing the monster to life? Also this movie.

The monster being mute? One guess.

It’s not unusual for stories to become lost in adaptation. It happens all the time. It explains why the Wicked Witch of the West is green so often, despite the fact that she wasn’t in the original Wizard of Oz novel. It’s why we associate the quote “Here’s Johnny!” with Stephen King’s novel The Shining, even though it never appeared in the book. It’s the reason that we assume that John Rambo is a heroic good-guy survivor, when in the original First Blood book, he was on the more ambiguous side, and died in the final confrontation.

What is a little more unusual is that while there have been a few versions of Frankenstein on film that have tried to follow Mary Shelley’s original book a little closer, for the most part, almost every single film instead adapts James Whale’s story.

The monster is almost always mute (or learns to talk in a stilted manner, as in Bride of Frankenstein). He’s made from bodies of the dead. He’s reanimated by electricity, worked on by a manic Dr. Frankenstein and his hunchback assistant, Igor. And, almost always, the monster looks like Boris Karloff.

Whether just appearing in films like The Monster Squad or being lovingly lampooned in direct parodies such as Young Frankenstein, James Whale’s 1931 film made a huge mark, not just on Frankenstein, not just on horror, but on film in general. Despite the fact that there have been multiple versions of the Frankenstein story told on film, somehow, the original Universal picture has remained the definitive adaptation in the pop-culture consciousness, enduring almost ninety years while still being considered the most popular, most iconic, and best version to date.

How on earth did that happen?

You’d think a film made in 1931 clocking in at one hour and eleven minutes would be easy to top. Scarier movies have been released since then. More accurate movies have been released since then. In fact, there have been over thirty-five films made since this movie, all bearing the Frankenstein name, and even more films without the monster getting top billing. Why is it that this film in particular is so persistently loved?

If you’ve been with us for any length of time, you’ve already figured out that that’s going to be the question we’re looking at.

Why is Frankenstein so adored almost ninety years after it was first released? How is it that one skewed vision of Mary Shelley’s novel has become the definitive version? What was it about that film that is so iconic and beloved that almost every version since then has at least referenced it, if not outright copied it?

That’s what we’re going to be trying to answer in the articles ahead. Stay tuned for an in-depth discussion of James Whale’s 1931 monster movie classic: Frankenstein.

Thank you guys so much for reading, and I hope to see you all in the next article.

#Movies #Film #Frankenstein #Frankenstein 1931 #1931 #30s #Horror #Science Fiction #Sci-Fi #Drama #PG #Boris Karloff #Colin Clive #Mae Clarke #Dwight Frye #Edward Van Sloan #James Whale

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thisbibliomaniac · 5 years ago

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I didn’t know there was a difference between being prolife and against abortion. Would you be willing to explain this for me?

Absolutely, although I have no doubt there's going to be a lot of backlash lol.

I don't think the main difference tends to lie with the average prolifer. Most of them are against abortion for moral / religious reasons, but don't tend to think about it beyond that. I certainly never did. We gave all our change to the pregnancy centers around Sanctity of Life Sunday, and let that be that. I think most prolifers believe abortion is morally wrong. I think most of them do what they think they need to do to stop it. They give to pregnancy centers. Some of them go to clinics to offer alternatives to the abortion minded. Here's where the differences tend to come in;

- The Prolife Movement (PLM) tends to be against abolishing abortion. Please note when I talk about the PLM, I don't mean the average individual. I mean the movement as a whole, starting with its leaders. When an abolitionist bill, which could've completely abolished abortion in Texas at any stage was introduced, Republican prolife representative Jeff Leach killed it. Abby Johnson publicly speaks against abolishing abortion. It's relevant to mention here that Johnson charges $10k-$20k per speaking engagement. You can find that on her website. She doesn't profit when abortion is illegal. Many other prolife groups are directly responsible for bills of abolition being stopped, and I cannot remember them off the top of my head, but they're all brought up in Babies Are Still Murdered Here, which is on YouTube and deals with the PLM specifically.

- Abolitionists tend to be in favor of the total criminalization of abortion, and the PLM is not. In my personal opinion, that would look like the abortionist being charged as a hitman, the employees as accomplices, whoever drove the mother to the clinic knowing what she was going there for as an accomplice, and the mother as the murderer who hired a hitman to kill her baby. I didn't used to believe that. I used to believe that women were lied to, and they didn't know what abortion was. I don't believe that anymore. There's a quote from R. C. Sproul, saying that if we could only educate these women, they'd understand and they'd stop. That's a very old quote, and he changed his mind drastically as soon as the humanity of an unborn baby could no longer be denied, and abortion became more profitable than ever.

A big part of the reasons Roe v Wade went the way it did is because no woman had even been convicted of abortion, even when it had been illegal. The court rationalized that, if it had never been punished as murder, we can't continue to say that it is murder.

Women know. If you think women don't know, you're saying you think they're stupid. The women who come in past us often pull in with multiple born children in their cars. They know their baby is alive. They tell us they know their baby is alive. They go in anyway. One particular interaction stands out to me. A pastor friend called out to a women going into pretern, offering her help. She said, "are you going to pay my medical bills?" He said "yes." She laughed and went in anyway. We are actually prepared to pay for bills, provide for needs, and set up open and closed adoptions. Those offers are rarely taken up on.

- The PLM considers the mother a second victim, while we consider her the perpetrator. See reasons above, and also NotAVictim.com. Sandy is an old lady who comes out with us. She tells us she knows she killed her baby, and she regrets it every day.

- The PLM is in favor of incrementalism, while we only support total abolition. Most prolifers would argue that saving even one baby with something like a heartbeat bill, pain bill, or age ban is better than saving none at all. I struggled with coming to a decision on that for a long time, until I came to a realization; they weren't actually saving anyone. While it might be illegal to kill a baby past a certain age in Ohio, it's incredibly easy to move the ultrasound wand just slightly off place, and come up with a totally different image. Sarah Cleveland, ultrasound technician, demonstrates this in one of the Babies Are Murdered Here movies (both available on YouTube). The same goes for heartbeat and pain bills. One could assume that there may be abortionists with more integrity that wouldn't do something like that, but to make that assumption, one would need to forget that these are literal baby killers we're talking about. And even if you found some that wouldn't break the law, one who would is never far away.

Lakesha Wilson is an example of that. She was turned away by multiple clinics for being over the state limit, until she came to preterm, where they were willing to lie about the age of the baby on their forms. She and her baby died that day. You can search her name. She died in Cleveland.

So not only is incrementalism immoral because it's ageist, it doesn't actually do anyone any good. Do we believe that even saying one baby is worth our time? Absolutely. So we stand outside clinics and offer help and alternatives. And we see babies saved. Not enough. And fewer and fewer all of time. But we plead with every mother who walks in, because every single baby is worth saving. But we don't sacrifice the babies below the limit in favor of the ones above.

- PLM tends to make exceptions for rape and incest. Abolitionists believe the circumstances don't matter, the humanity of the baby matters. Prolifers who are against abortion in cases of rape and incest argue with those who are for it that it's such a small percentage (less than 1%) that it shouldn't be kept legal for those cases. That's how I used to think. Abolitionists, myself included now, believe that even one baby legally killed is too many.

- The names themselves. Prolife is passive. Nothing about what I believe or am doing is passive. I intend to be among those changing the laws, and changing history. I am an abortion Abolitionist.

I am not going to include any links here because I don't want everything I just wrote to crash with this post, but all of these sources are easily found!

Abolitionists- Jeff Durbin, Jon Speed, Sarah Cleveland, Sye Ten Bruggencate, C. R. Cali, Laura Klassen (I'm not 100% sure if Laura uses the Abolitionist label, but she's saying the same things)

Websites- freethestates.com, defytyrants.con, notavictim.com

Books- The Doctrine of Balaam by C. R. Cali, Gosnell by McElhinney and McAleer

Movies- 180 Movie, Babies Are Murdered Here, Babies Are Still Murdered Here. All free on YouTube. Gosnell: The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer. Not 100% accurate to events or the message of abolition, but good for exposing how easily a clinic can get away with the littlest, and the biggest things.

Other- The doctrine of the lesser magistrate, about the steps needing to be taken to outlaw abortion.

I hope this answers your question, and feel free to message me for further clarification, as this is an already long post and I won't be having discussions on it :)

*edited to add*

I don't have anything against individual prolifers. I think they've been lied to by their movement and don't know what they're supporting.

#this better post!!!#please tell me about any typos #my phone hates me #and changrs words after the fact

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 5 years ago

Photo

The thing I love about Otto, he is the guy who...Peter Parker is supposed to be the everyman, and in a lot of ways he is, but he is always dating the most beautiful women in the world...supermodels, Gwen Stacy...And Otto was the guy, I am not a big fan of the late-90s as an era of Spider-Man. There was a character called Stunner who came along and was this big Amazonian woman with super-strength, who was Otto's partner and love-interest and the big reveal was that she was a virtual reality simulation and the real person was an overweight woman in a virtual reality machine. But when Otto finds out he says, I didn't love you for what you looked like, I loved you for your mind...I can’t remember if she [Aunt May] saw Betty [Brant] as a bit of a Jezebel because she was older

We er...we really need to unpack this. I already did a post where I cited the above as part of why Christos Gage should never have been allowed to write Spider-Man.

But lets dive deeper into the idiocy of this.

First of all if nothing else the above quote and panels really do prove beyond doubt that Marvel knew what they were doing when they paired Slott and Gage...well sorta. Gage and Slott’s approaches to Spider-Man fundamentally come from the same place of fundamental misunderstanding and regressive beliefs thus they were perfect to work together. It’s just that Gage is a comparatively more competent writer than Slott and therefore Slott should’ve been HIS understudy and fill-in guy not the other way around.

So let’s dive into the less awful bits first. Like Slott Gage doesn’t know his continuity and is too lazy to even google it.

Let’s put aside how Stan Lee himself stated Betty Brant is younger than Peter NOT older, the age difference would’ve been insignificant enough (Peter was a senior in high school when he was dating Betty, that’s stated in the issues) so what is this ‘Jezebel’ crap? The fact his mind would go to that rather than just Aunt May thinking MJ would be a better match is at best eyebrow raising.

Moving on, the crux of his assessment of Otto and Stunner’s relationship is way off the mark. Ignoring the fact that Stunner and the reveals made about her occurred in 1994-1995 (so literally not the LATE 1990s at all), he’s totally distorted the story as it unfolded. As such let me show you some of the relevant pages.

Gage’s assessment of Otto and Stunner’s relationship hinges upon two interconnected ideas.

a) Otto was unaware that her stunning appearance was a facade and

b) That he didn’t care upon finding out

As you can see that is a distortion of what the actual stories conveyed.

Otto was always aware Stunner’s appearance was a facade because he invented the technology that made it possible in the first place!

Otto also began dating her BEFORE she became Stunner. This does indeed support the idea that for him outer beauty is not that relevant.

For myself I find this idea debatable for a few reasons. Not only in the above images does he directly refer to Stunner as beautiful and the love of such a beautiful woman makes him happy but in the classic Spec #75 Bill Mantlo implies Otto took a fancy to Felicia due to her being attractive.

I grant you it’s far from impossible to interpret that Otto in fact was referring to Stunner’s personality as beautiful and took a shining to Felicia for reasons beyond her looks. In fact I find that interpretation interesting. But both examples hurt the narrative of Otto being a man who doesn’t care about outer beauty, even before you get to the fact that in Superior he was oggling and actively trying to fucking rape Mary Jane! What exactly about her ‘inner beauty’ led to him doing this?

Then of course you have his relationship with Aunt May which has been treated as genuinely romantic when it’s very unlikely to be that.

The truth is Doc Ock has been inconsistently written over the decades so pinning down that he’s a man who doesn’t care about a woman’s outer beauty in regards to his feelings for them is extremely iffy.

His dynamic with Stunner and Gage’s assessment is even iffier as the pages detailing his ‘courting’ of her prior to her becoming empowered can definitely be interpreted as him actively manipulating her for his own ends. He needed a test subject for his technology, a technology he was hoping could essentially ensure he’d live beyond the demise of his mortal body and mind (which obviously happened in Superior). Angela was that test subject, he either came across or scouted her out with the explicit intention of having her use his machine.

Because we only get brief flashes of their relationship it’s unclear if he was 100% decieving and manipulating her (as he was to Anna Maria and Mary Jane) or if he was sincere in his affections, at least on some level. Maybe he even started out manipulating her but grew to genuinely care for her before or after her transformation into Stunner.

My point is it’s not this grand moral victory for Otto that he cared for Angela even though she was overweight.

Which brings me to the most damning thing about Gage’s comments.

According to him Otto is better than Peter because Otto didn’t date supermodels or sexy cat burglars.

Much like all his work with Otto before and during his Superior run, Gage practically wanks off the character.

You see Otto is ‘different. He’s not like ‘those other guys’, or more specifically ‘that Peter Parker guy’. HE doesn’t date supermodels or sexy cat burglars.

He just keeps the sexy cat burglars as his ‘guests’ that he won’t let leave his lair, will date by deception and attempt to rape the supermodels and will probably manipulate vulnerable overweight women for his own selfish scientific pursuits and date them sincerely once they’ve transformed into wrestling divas.

Of course in reality, romantic and sexual attraction is something none of us can help and we are going to feel about whoever however we’re going to feel, and the harsh truth is a lot (but not all) of the time outer appearences do matter, or at least they do when it comes to initial attractions. Often in healthy relationships they matter less as time goes by, but are rarely totally irrelevant. Nobody, of any sex, gender or sexuality, is shallow for on some level taking looks into account for how they feel about a romantic or sexual partner, at least on some level.

In Peter’s case Gage’s assessment (which synchs up with Slott’s) of him as shallow is so asinine because he clearly doesn’t just care about looks. In fact semi-famously in the classic Romita stories his initial attraction for Mary Jane fades after he (incorrectly, and unfairly) starts to view her as shallow and little more than her looks.

No doubt about it that chicks’s as pretty as a pumpkin seed...and just about as shallow.

ASM #45*

Peter late of course dumps Black Cat in part because she doesn’t love him for who he is, and only cares about him as Spider-Man. He wants someone who will share a life with him, whom he can connect with. If he was only interested in her because she was sexy why would he do that?

And of course this is to say nothing of the absolute denigration Gage’s comments pay to both MJ and her relationship with Peter.

I’ve felt this way for awhile now but to be blunt, if a writer ever just sums up MJ as a ‘supermodel’ I’m going to presume they either don’t understand her character and/or hold some messed up opinions. Putting aside how MJ hasn’t a model (super or otherwise) for most of her history it’s just messed up that everything else about her is dismissed in favour of pushing that profession and treating it as a summation of who she is as a character.**

Because whenever creators or characters sum up MJ as a supermodel what they really mean is ‘she’s just a shallow, pretty face’. Which is so facepalm worthy ironic because the crux of Mary Jane’s entire character since The Death of Gwen Stacy in 1973 has been that people THINK she is just a shallow pretty face but she in fact absolutely isn’t!

And aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the stuff that is relevant to why she isn’t is literally the reason Spider-Man fell in love with her in the first place. All the guilt, regret, insecurities, bravery, sense of responsibility and inner strength that subverted what we thought we knew about her, that’s the shit that her and Spider-Man’s romance is built upon.

How the fuck does anyone miss that! It’s not even like you need to read deeply to see it, just read a Wikipedia entry!

It isn’t the crux of Felicia’s character, but the same applies to her. What jackass in this day and age (or indeed since the 1980s) honestly thinks Black Cat is nothing but sex appeal? There is an entire goddam Black Cat ongoing series demonstrating she is more than that! Gage is a goddam relic at this point!

On the flipside of course is poor Anna Maria.

Once upon a time Anna Maria was the best character in Spider-Man. Back in the dark days of 2013 and 2014 when Superior was going strong, MJ was out of the picture and the best Spider-Man books on the stand were about a kid replacing a dead AU Peter Parker and Peter Parker’s clone, Anna Maria was a stand out.

A new character with a personality, likable, a new love interest for ‘Spider-Man’ that on paper made a certain amount of sense even though the circumstances were disgusting. And on top of that she provided a dash of representation that was handled in an appropriate way.

As time went by she gradually devolved as a character and went way off the rails to the point where now she’s being a misogynistic asshole to other women by judging them for their looks. It’s so fucked up because she herself has been judged for her looks, just in a very different way whilst the likes of those ‘shallow’ women she cites have never said a bad word to her or to my knowledge anyone else on the basis of how they were born.

Good job Gage, this is probably the last time we’re going to see Anna Maria and you’ve fully transitioned me from a guy who kind of wanted her to stick around in some capacity as a regular supporting player for Peter into a guy who would be delighted for her to forgotten and never appear again.

Fuck Gage.

Fuck Superior

Fuck the entire asinine, mishandled, clusterfuck of an era that outstayed it’s welcome circa December 2012!

*In fairness he does bring up he might just be thinking ill of MJ because he’s upset about other things. See, THAT is a more even handed and on point depiction of Peter Parker being flawed. But Stan Lee being a better writer than Gage or Slott shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

**Not to mention ‘supermodel’ shouldn’t even be used as shorthand for ‘shallow person’ in the first place. Are supermodels not people too? Are they incapable of being intelligent or having worth outside of their looks? I mean FFS we live in a world where this (starting at 3:37) really happened:

youtube

#Christos Gage #Spider-Man #Superior Spider-Man #Anna Maria Marconi #otto octavius #Doc Ock #Dan Slott #Doctor Octopus #mjwatsonedit #Mary Jane Watson #Mary Jane Watson Parker #Black Cat #Peter Parker #Felicia Hardy

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fortheheavenssake · 5 years ago

Text

💙Humble Attempt Anon💙

*** All submitted by @anon-annoyed on @skippyv20

May 20

For fun and entertainment - gave the riddle a try

MM ANON ………

5 years old ‘ COVID security ………

There is video of Fauci stating a pandemic was coming I think it is 5 years old

transmission admission??………

Will China admit it knew more then started earlier? WHO?

1st. June. ……………

HMTQ People cover comes out

A pollution solution …………

Covid 19 has taught lessons in solving pollution problems

free at last………

PH? Free finally? Annulment?

kiss 💋 me 😱😱😱…………

HMTQ can get kisses from her 3 Cambridge grandchildren?

another Father???……………

Artificial’s real dna Father is announced?

Spanish,French and judo 😂😂😂……………

MM riduciliousness

lies,damm lies, and MM………

Damm. (archaic and original) a small, essentially worthless coin from India So

Money flaunting PR homes are lies

an expensive squat…………

The cost of pr using TP’s house is going to be an expensive bill to pay In terms of owed favor?

A Greece-y gamble. …………

A double word play on greasy person from Greece that MM took a chance on and will be burned by it?

“ is one sitting comfortably’ good, Once apon a time “

Apon is front eh Middle Ages meaning same as upon. Are we about to see a Middle Ages divorce reminder in this fairy tale of dread?

Great job! Love it! Thank you😊❤️❤️❤️❤️

——————

May 29

2nd attempt at a MM ANON riddle

First want to say my thoughts and prayers are with you dearest Skippy. May your family be surrounded by Light!!

MM ANON ………

looting/ shooting …………

DT;s statement

“ tic-toc Nanny”…………

Nanny doing the dance

“ ok! Charlotte, get Louis too” ………

Including Louis on the tic toc

“ George,do it properly “………

Charlotte bossing George around

W&K , It’s a challenging schedule ma’am” …………

Laughing at the Tatler article with HMTQ

” there having a bike day at Brands Hatch with Ducati “ ………

The whole Cambridge family went to track and rode bikes while PW rode Ducati

“ Nottingham cottage ma’am”…………

Prince Harry finally able to say he is there

“like old times ma’ am”……………

Prince Harry able to be honest about being at NC like old times with a pause of relief

” I’ll have a quiet word with Donald “…………

HMTQ having to give DT the details of the soon Anulment anouncments

“ not Philip, his diplomacy is wanting”…………

PP not handling the details since he is not delicate

“exiting times ma’am”………

Exiting the drama, announcing the A Nul ment and finally being free !!

“ one shall insist on compliance Christopher “

Insisting on being compliant with all the agreements for A Nul ment (hope so)

Wonderful! Thank you😊❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

——————-

June 8

Another humble attempt at the MM riddle

MM ANON ……

D.O.J.………

DOJ requesting PA to appear in JE court

A Stern retort. …………

Hmmmmmmmmmmm can figure anything for this one.

the sept. Soothsayer ………

Fortune teller - when Kate is due with 4th baby

A 14 day suicide for the trade…………

Tatler magazine has created a suicide for themselves with the Kate article

in court today ………

Is this regarding MM or PA? The demand for PA to be in court or that MM is in court …hmmmm

Beatrice tooo tu!! ……………

Beatrice looks to become a senior royal as she is showing great charm and ability

wonderful Wessex………

Sophia being praised for her awesomeness

more photos from Kate??? ………

All 3 kids will have a new picture released soon thus 3 question marks?

no fuss birthday …………

PP wants no fuss for his birthday on the 10th

“ shall one suggest a gathering of 8 .” ………

Cambridges are 5, HMTQ and PP make 7 and Harry makes 8??

” no, silly’ Balmoral?? ………

headed to Balmoral for the meet up of 8

MM desperatum iri videbatur……

MM desperate situation hmmmm hers or the BRFs?

Great! Thank you….I think MM is the desperate one….😊❤️❤️❤️❤️

——————

June 9

Riddle humble answer another attempt

MM ANON ………

everyone and their brother,brother ………

Trooping the Colors…PH will be there this Saturday?

wow!! What a photo Kate!!……………

A second photo coming like the umbrella one ?

little Louis gets a surprise ……………

Agree with PG that this is them telling him a baby is coming

a well rounded future of three( four) ………

Well rounded meaning the 4th will be a girl?

A birthday tic-toc dance…………

PP gets a tic toc dance for this birthday on the 10th

“ do Catherine , come and bring the children “…………

DoC bringing the children for Trooping the Colors mini even

“maybe a change of routine “…………

Trooping the colour change of routine will be at 2:00 AM - 5:00 AM Saturday, June 13

“ Both of you are an example hope”………

Sophie and Catherine are shining examples of hop for the monarchy

“ yes George,I’ll see if we can get to a match”

George is missing sports and hoping to see a match

Thank you…looks great!❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

——————

June 10

super humble attempt at the riddle (love these riddles so much )

MM ANON …

Gone……………

Covid 19 gone from New Zealand with a capital G

everything is now B&W……………

The protests and movements are making everything B&W

“ but’ tomorrow is another day”…………

Gone with the Wind famous line - echos of Carrying On

“ but old thing, I look like bloody Bela Lugosi” …………

PP complaining about something he was asked to wear

“ shutup Philip”………

Telling him to just get o with it

“ just Take the bloody picture “.………

PP famous quip at the photographer most likely said again

”they’ve hardly ever been on a train William “…………

Taking the train to Balmoral

“ yes , they’d be very excited 😜 “ …………

How excited the kids will be to ride the train

🎼we’re all going to the zoo tomorrow 🎼……………

Hmmmm can’t crack this one (PG’s the smart song one!! So grateful)

she lies for exposure………

MM;s never ending lies for keeping in the press

yachting’ secret exposure !! ……………

Ohhhh a yachting owned secret coming - a picture thus exposure

this time it’s explosive!! …………

It will be a big explosive exposure this time

“ great scoop Beth.”

Hmmmm can’t crack this one

Wonderful! Thank you😊❤️❤️❤️❤️

——————

June 14

Humble Riddle Attempt…THANK YOU MM ANON!!!!!!!!!

MM ANON ……

Adeleville……… Adele’s connection to Grenfell memorial and IT connecting to her….does Adele use Sunshine Sacks? hmmmm

Westfield?? ………… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Group the malls in LA The Grove are owned by this group https://caruso.com/ and I remember seeing the CEO in a pr fluff of IT

Charlottes delivery …………… Maybe referring to Baby 4 coming same as Charlottes. But not possessive plural hmmm

🎼grab the cash with both hands🎼………… Pink Floyds “Money” Dark Side of the Moon 1973…hmmm

another scam charity …………… BLM has been showed to be directly connected to Dems …scam?

she’s a race… ist …………IT is a race onto her self for sure and clearly is a ist..and JM is now going to turn

she publishes the book ………………… Will JM publish a book now? With all the skeletons?

we will destroy her, we have the tapes…… JM saying she has the tapes and will leak them?

“ no more Mrs, nice ma’am!! “ …………IT no longer Mrs???? TOOO exciting to think about….

“ ones gloves are orf Christopher ………… Hmmm https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/orf/ of disease of sheep to human. Could the sheep following IT finally be seeing the disease she is? And LG is able to move forward with final finals?

“ it was a very good year,old thing “……..PP telling HMTQ it has been a great year (period)

This is great! Thank you😊❤️❤️❤️❤️

——————

June 16

humble riddle notes - PG & LK THANK YOU I learn so much and am so grateful

MM ANON ………

Shetland lift-off……… https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-53049513

LIZA with a ‘ don’t know em…LM;s public facebook post that she has never met them

” it’s shopping Jim, but not as we show it……… PG & LK have linked to Star Trek, I have never watched that show so completely miss the reference and am so grateful to them for their interpretations. Interesting that it is half a quote. Does this have to do with MM mirror site? Maybe LK was right and the Jim reference is supposed to lead us to a person within the firm? Maybe Prince Edward’s youngest son?

“ matter of fact it’s all dark” .. everything to do with IT..dark and ugly …LK’s interpretation was enlightening and taught so much. Wanted to add that June 21st is also Father’s day in the United States.

first jet easy …………Jet return to Scotland so easy to get to Balmoral

Brexit,old white guys drinking a lot. …………LK & PG interrupted this I am lost

a moment of reckoning ……… According to the Cambridge dictionary “a time when the effect of a past mistake is experienced or when a crime is punished”

a virtual Wimbledon?? …………plans to show highlights from past games

Catherine to the rescue …… baby 4 to lift the spirits of all or maybe she will narrate/ host the virtual Wimbledon event? Or BOTH?

“ Ahhh , a relaxing night old thing “ …“Sydney’s provided a new box set” ……“Boardwalk Empire” ………“ bit violent old thing” ………“ Epic Philip!!”…… “ones usual Sydney “…“great!! No bloody tic toc. PG’s excitement was so fun to read and lifting THANK YOU for that PG, MM Anon and LK for these riddles and interpretations.

This is great! Thank you!😊❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

———————

June 16

riddle attempt humbly (Love how I learn through these, I now search the news for clues0 THANK YOU MM Anon!!!!!!!!

MM Anon

“she Ascot nothing on me” ………… IT only went to Ascot once and it was when Doc did not attend https://www.express.co.uk/news/royal/1296617/meghan-markle-news-kate-middleton-royal-ascot-megxit-royal-family-latest-spt

para-thanks William ……… PW visiting the paramedics to thank them first outing https://people.com/royals/prince-william-steps-out-for-first-official-public-duty-to-thank-first-responders-during-covid-19/

PC , LOST weight??…………That PC lost “dead weight’ of IT with 2 question marks meaning Artificial and IT…hope so!!!!

Oxford,Oxford ……… Protests https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8428313/Black-Lives-Matter-protesters-march-Oxford-ahead-meeting-Cecil-Rhodes-statues-future.html

STIR-oid ………news that steroids help with sick Covid patients? https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/16/health/dexamethasone-covid-drug-recovery-trial-bn/index.html “Stirring an old remedy” “Finding value in an old medicine”

U-Turndinner…https://london.eater.com/2020/6/16/21292624/marcus-rashford-free-school-meals-coronavirus

falling tragedy …………UK headed to recession a tragedy from falling to the Covid 19 https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/06/how-uk-has-been-left-worst-all-worlds-over-covid-19 and/or the tragedy of IT is falling into place to a end!!! A NUL ment (hopefully)

the Paris peasants are revolting ……… ……… There are 2 spaces for answers to this one so thinking there must be 2 meanings : 1) the anniversary of Richard II’s chat with the Revolting Peasants at Mile End (1381), and of Owen Glendower’s declaration that he was allying himself with the French against Henry IV, in 1404. Perfidious Welshman. No wonder there are a couple of border towns on the English side where it’s still legal to kill a Welshman as long as you do it with a bow and arrow and at certain times of the day or week. And today https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/france-medical-workers-protest-unrest-and-fires-ensue/1879407 So happening on this day in past and present

“ we can still dress-up cabbage 🥬 “ …“Anne, my yellow ensemble”…“Sydney ‘ a photo”…“that’s a keeper, old thing” …“ here we go , tic-toc, the three of them”… “O, and Catherine!!” … “ ehhhh, And William “ … “ make it a double Sydney “… “ how entertaining Philip “ PP telling HMTQ they can still dress up for Ascot/his bday and she wears the yellow dress and PP thinks it is a good shot and then he sees all 3 Cambs o tic toc and Catherine and then William join in as well so he tells Sydney to double the drink and HMTQ is very happily entertained by it all.

You are doing a great job! Thank you😊❤️❤️❤️❤️

——————-

June 18

another humble attempt…..LOVE LOVE the riddles!!!!!

MM ANON ………

“NEVER………… No chance of IT returning to BRF

“ ………” mon dieu” …… “ “ My God (in french) President telling PC he can’t believe IT is still around and feels sorry for the BRF

🎼some sunny day 🎼……… Well Meet Again (Alternate) Vera Lynn a remembrance of her as she passed away

“ good to meet again Mr President “………HMTQ speaking with French President

air corridor ………Britons could yet take foreign holidays this summer as ministers draw up a list of countries who could be exempt from tough quarantine laws, Matt hancock confirmed today.

“ to be honest,he was an obnoxious old bastard” ……… Maybe Lord Hague being described ? https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-53061432

world beating cherry …trace testing hoping to be the cherry on top of COvid19 getting in control …https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/boris-johnson-foreign-aid-dfid-coronavirus-test-trace-a9572941.html

non app- licable …… What does not applicable mean in court? “Not Applicable” or “N/A” is often seen on forms or in tables or for questions. It’s the answer you would give if a question did not apply to you. For example, if there were a question “What is your date of marriage?”, but you have never been married, you could answer “N/A”, because the question does not apply to you.

“ Bolt-hole. ………… Another markled celeb https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-8435543/David-Victoria-Beckham-LOSE-planning-row-neighbours-31-5m-London-mansion.html

self interest

………https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/18525189.letters-triumph-naked-self-interest/ Something to do with Scotland’s feeling toward the UK serving their self interest

BOE- more money!! ……………https://www.wsj.com/articles/central-banks-pump-more-cash-into-economy-to-fight-recession-11592482055 Bank of England printing more money as many countries are.

pepper sprayed……… hmmm lots of stories of pepper spray by police hurting protestors was IT in the ned just a pepper spray on the BRF….annoying and painful but forgotten and healed up in a little bit of time….hmmmm

“ O Philip, it’s the last one “……… “Always Downton Abbey old thing”

HMTQ being bummed Boardwalk is doe and PP saying can always watch DA…..does this maybe mean that the gangster back room drama of IT is over and that they can go back to just living the DA life again…….We can HOPE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wonderful! Thank you😊❤️❤️❤️❤️

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June 20

another humble attempt at MM Anon riddle - LOVE YOUR RIDDLES

MM ANON

Hello!! ………… Welcome back to the family being together - a BIG HELLO!!

“ It’s a rally Jim , ……… “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer broke down what drove Tuesday’s market rally.

viva espana ………… People were singing this in SF along protests

🎼drink, drink, drink,🎼…………… “Drinking Song” or “Drink, Drink, Drink” is an exuberant song composed by Sigmund Romberg with lyrics by Dorothy Donnelly. It is the most popular piece in the 1924 operetta, The Student Prince.[1] It was a success for tenor Mario Lanza, who performed it in the 1954 movie, though the part was played on screen by another actor, due to a contract dispute.[2]

black wall……… History of Black Wall being destroyed 99 years ago and Trump trying to bring bring attention there by holding rally there

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/19/tulsa-1921-massacre-trump-violence-legacy

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-20/on-black-wall-street-hope-and-fear-as-trump-comes-to-tulsa

MM , another agenda!! ………… IT’s new agenda of BLM the never ending circling door of IT’s missions and agendas

bollotics …… this meaning fits all this for nothing to resolve it BLM feels like bollotics

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bollotics

Bollotics The art of defining why something can’t be done without any real reason - is a urban word for Red Tape, when everyone knows it is total bollotics that is preventing things from progressing and yet nobody can resolve it.Often found in the work place e.g. when a department refuses to allow a change because there isn’t a process for it, that is Bollotics, just do it and shut the **** up.by MowgliCub October 10, 2013

“ Kate and William,the children are with nanny “ ………… “ Dover Sole and lemon parfait old thing “………… cream caramel,and Irish coffee Sydney!! ………… “September 9th ma’am. …… “ Stay over Catherine “ –

Sounds like the family is celebrating and knowing the children won’t go back til September so asking them to stay in Balmoral for the summer

This is great! Thank you!😊❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

——————

June 21

Thank you! This is great😊❤️❤️❤️❤️

short attempt at riddle (LOVE THE RIDDLES)

MM ANON …

give us a hug…………PH is back and with the family? getting/giving a hug

Duchess of Cambridge Royal collection ………Her amazing photographs

in the footsteps of lord Lichfield ………… photographer in RF now is DoC https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/nov/12/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries

EOS C700 Christmas present … … camera ready for Christmas present Camb baby 4?? https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/details/cameras/cinema-eos/eos-c700

“slow the testing down”…………President Trump said that’s how you slow the spread stop the testing

Kung-flu…………… PT also called the COVID 19 this i his speech

Size matters………… School class sizes will be small in the fall

reopening NYC……… NYC opening up after Covid19 lockdown- IT going there?

“ get ya hair 💇🏽‍♀️💇🏼‍♂️cut” …………… hmmmm hair salon open

“ 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️🍺 “ ………… Everyone excited for the pubs to open - PW said he was

Rachel for president?? …………… LC said IT has presidential ambitions

archificial daddy day?? ……… hmmm no father’s day cause no real Archie

spotted in St Johns Wood………PH seen there? St John’s Wood An affluent district of leafy residential streets, St John’s Wood is known for Lord’s Cricket Ground, the headquarters of English cricket and a venue for domestic and international matches. The Beatles made many recordings at Abbey Road Studios and fans use the crosswalk outside to recreate the iconic album cover for photo ops. Boutique stores and chic eateries dot St John’s Wood High Street.London borough: Westminster; CamdenLondon Assembly: West Central; Barnet and CamdenPostcode district: NW8Sovereign state: United Kingdom

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thinkveganworld · 5 years ago

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Lefty journalist Eric Alterman wrote a comprehensive book concerning the frequency of presidential lies, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences. Presidential lying is unfortunately the norm. This is an article I wrote a few years ago about George W. Bush’s many lies, and his most egregious one was lying the country into the Iraq War. The links are old and no longer work, but some people might find the article worth checking out.

In a May 2003 article for The American Prospect, Drake Bennett and Heidi Pauken write "it is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush's signature as president . . . More distressing even than the president's lies, though, is the public's apparent passivity. Bush just seems to get away with it."

The Bush administration lied and deceived its way into the Iraq war. (See below list of links to articles that detail the Bush administration's lies.)

Bush has also misled the public with fallacy and deceptive rhetoric. In The Progressive, April 2003, editor Matthew Rothschild talks about Bush's manipulation of language. Rothschild quotes a line from Bush's February 10 speech to a conference of religious broadcasters: "Before September the 11th, 2001, we thought oceans would protect us forever."

Later that day at an informal press conference, Bush repeated the "ocean" catchword, saying: "The world changed on September 11 . . . In our country, it used to be that oceans could protect us -- at least we thought so." He used the "oceans" example again in his March 6 press conference.

Rothschild asked Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon, what he makes of Bush's rhetoric. Miller replied: "This notion of unprecedented vulnerability is absolutely crucial to the Bush team's anti-constitutional program. The true meaning of anything Bush says is connotative. What that statement really means is, 'We were safe, now we're in danger, and the danger is so severe that you must give me all possible power. What the oceans once did now only I can do."

Rothschild notes the Bush description is irrational, because oceans haven't really served as a buffer since Pearl Harbor. In fact, says Rothschild, the Soviet Union's intercontinental ballistic missiles were aimed at the U.S. for years despite the oceans' barrier.

However, when words are used in ways that manipulate public fear, facts and rationality are beside the point. The aim of the corruption of language -- whether conscious or unconscious -- is to confuse rather than clarify, and to cause the listener to believe an illusion rather than the truth.

In his article, "Fallacies and War," Dave Koehler points out misleading public arguments the administration uses to justify war. For example, the Bush team often presents the false dilemma -- claiming there are only two possible options when, in fact, more choices are available.

Kohler refers to the statement Bush issued right after 9/11: "You're either with us or with the terrorists." As Kohler says "Countries can be both against terrorism and not an ally of the U.S . . . Many countries are showing they are both against a preemptive war and against the current Iraqi regime." Bush said the U.N. must vote for war or face irrelevance. As Kohler points out, the U.N. can simultaneously survive and disagree with Bush.

The Bush team also repeatedly uses the fallacy of exclusion, meaning they leave out important aspects of any given argument. For example, Colin Powell and George Bush spoke about aluminum tubes being used for uranium enrichment for nuclear weapons use. Kohler notes they failed to take into account the essential fact that U.N. inspectors said the tubes were conventional rocket artillery casings.

Kohler points to another fallacy, argument from ignorance -- the claim that what hasn't been disproved must be true. The Bush administration implies Iraq must have weapons of mass destruction because of Iraq's failure to prove it doesn't. As Kohler says, the burden of proof is on the party making the claim, therefore the U.S. "must prove that Iraq has WMD. It is impossible for Iraq to prove they don't."

In his article, "An Orwellian Pitch," John R. McArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine, writes about the Bush team's manipulation of public opinion. He says, "Effective propaganda relies on half-truths and the conflation of disparate 'facts' (like Saddam's genuine human rights violations)." McArthur says the Bush team has managed to get away with this deceptive fact twisting because they use a tactic George Orwell described as "slovenliness" in the language.

Both Orwell and Aldous Huxley have written about dictatorial leaders and their methods of managing public opinion. In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley wrote that tyrants often use propaganda techniques that rely on the following. (1) Repetition of catchwords, (2) Suppression of facts the propagandist wants the public to ignore. (3) Inflaming mass fear or other strong emotional reaction for the purpose of controlling public opinion and behavior.

Huxley talks about Adolf Hitler's propaganda efforts to appeal to the emotions of the masses instead of reason. He notes that Hitler systematically exploited the German people's hidden fears and anxieties. The Bush administration has clearly exploited the American people's fears of terrorism since September 11.

According to Huxley, Hitler said the masses run on instinct and emotion rather than facts and are easy to manipulate, while society's intellectuals and independent thinkers insist on factual evidence and logic and easily see through fallacies. Huxley says Hitler encouraged the masses to attack or shout down intellectual dissenters rather than engage them in logical debate, because the rational dissenters would likely win any argument on the basis of fact.

Bush supporters have tried to silence dissent. Media bulldogs such as Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage often use Hitler's suggested technique of attacking and shouting down antiwar voices.

Huxley quotes Hitler's statement that "all propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas . . . Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd." Bush has delivered the stereotyped formulas "You're either with us or with the terrorists;" "the oceans can't protect us;" and Saddam is connected with "al Qaeda," using constant repetition.

There can be little doubt the Bush administration has worked to coerce Congress, the public and the media into supporting Bush's Iraq policy. On MSNBC, reporter Jeff Greenfield discussed the administration's war propaganda with news anchor Paula Zahn. Greenfield said propaganda isn't necessarily a negative thing, because it can influence an enemy regime to behave in ways that help U.S. troops and government officials.

The problem is, Bush's propaganda has targeted average American citizens and Congress, using tactics that were once reserved to influence enemy governments abroad. Propaganda is negative when it promotes lies and encourages people to act against their own best interests, as the Bush administration's spin has done.

In the months before Congress gave Bush the authority to wage war on Iraq, Bush administration officials tried to influence members of Congress by briefing them with reports that alleged Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger, a central African country. Later it was revealed the Niger documents had been forged.

Congressman Henry Waxman said the Bush administration likely hoodwinked members of Congress. According to a March 25 Mother Jones article, Waxman said he voted to give Bush authority to invade Iraq in large part because he believed the administration's claims about Iraq's effort to purchase nuclear weapons.

The Mother Jones article includes an excerpt from a reproachful letter Waxman sent to George W. Bush. Waxman wrote: "It appears that at the same time that you, Secretary Rumsfeld, and State Department officials were citing Iraq's efforts to obtain uranium from Africa as a crucial part of the case against Iraq, U.S. intelligence officials regarded this very same evidence as unreliable. If true, this is deeply disturbing: it would mean that your Administration asked the U.N. Security Council, the Congress, and the American people to rely on information that your own experts knew was not credible."

When Congress gave Bush virtually unlimited power to wage war, many legislators were unaware Bush officials had essentially planned the invasion of Iraq and "regime change" years before September 11. For more on this, see:

The Plan - Were Neo-Conservatives' 1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War? Nightline, 3/5/03

Practice to Deceive - Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan, by Joshua Marshall, The Washington Monthly, April 2003

Just the Beginning - Is Iraq the opening salvo in a war to remake the world? by Robert Dreyfuss, The American Prospect, 4/1/03

Bush sold the Iraq war by repeatedly (and falsely) linking September 11 with Saddam Hussein.

In a March 14 article for The Christian Science Monitor, Linda Feldmann writes, "In his prime-time press conference last week, which focused almost solely on Iraq, President Bush mentioned Sept. 11 eight times. He referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11. Bush never pinned blame for the attacks directly on the Iraqi president. Still, the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persists among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks. A New York Times/CBS poll this week shows that 45 percent of Americans believe Mr. Hussein was 'personally involved' in Sept. 11."

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of former CIA officers, argues that the Bush administration's evidence on Iraq's alleged threat to the U.S. and purported ties to Al Qaeda are not credible. According to a March 14 Associated Press article, members of VIPS accused Bush administration officials of "cooking" the intelligence books and promoting "information that does not meet an intelligence professional's standards of proof."

In a speech in early February, Colin Powell told the nation he had a transcript of a new Osama bin Laden tape -- one that proved a "partnership" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. However, in a February 12 article for Salon, "War, lies and audiotape," reporter Joe Conason points out Powell misrepresented the transcript. The actual document, says Conason, "clearly contradicted the headlines [Powell] was trying to make."

The Bush administration also lied about Iraq's weapons capabilities. According to a March 10 ABC news website report: "Before Congress, and in public, President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have repeatedly pointed to aluminum tubes imported by Iraq which they say are for use in making nuclear weapons. But on Friday, head United Nations nuclear inspector Mohammad ElBaradei told the Security Council that it wasn't likely that the tubes were for that use."

According to another article on the subject of Iraq's weapons capabilities: "On February 5, Colin Powell told the U.N. Security Council that the Iraqis possessed a drone plane that could fly 500 kilometers, violating U.N. rules that limit the range of Iraqi weapons to 150k." According to the article, Jane's Defence Weekly, one of the most respected publications on defense matters, reported it was "doubtful" the drone could have flown the distance claimed by Powell. Drones expert Ken Munson said on the Jane's web site there was no possibility the drone could fly "anywhere near 500 kilometers." Munson added, "The design looks very primitive, and the engines -- which have their pistons exposed -- appear to be low-powered."

Since September 11, the Bush administration and its various media mouthpieces have tried to intensify the public's fear of terrorism, using lies to build a case for war and other questionable policies. Members of Congress, with few exceptions, have abdicated their responsibility to the American people by giving Bush unprecedented freedom to make war at will with virtually no congressional oversight.

Fortunately, Representatives Henry Waxman, Dennis Kucinich and a handful of others in the House, and Senator Robert Byrd, Senator Edward Kennedy and a few others in the Senate have challenged some of the Bush policies. However, too many in Congress have acquiesced to Bush on almost every important legislative issue and failed to fully investigate the Bush administration's most egregious misdeeds.

U.S. diplomat John Brady Kiesling resigned from the State Department on February 27. In his letter of resignation, Kiesling said: "We have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq . . . The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests."

The American people should urge Congress to exercise its oversight role and check the Bush administration's power. The U.S. Constitution requires such checks and balances, and American democracy won't thrive without them. If high crimes and misdemeanors can be established, Congress shouldn't rule out impeachment.

The following are links to articles that describe the Bush administration's many lies:

Articles detailing a long list of Bush lies on a variety of issues.

Articles showing the Bush administration planned to invade Iraq and reshape the Middle East long before September 11 -- though they have portrayed the invasion as a response to the World Trade Center attacks.

Articles showing Bush administration used forged evidence to convince the public and U.N. that Iraq tried to obtain WMD from Niger.

Articles showing U.S. spied on friendly governments and/or doctored evidence to promote war with Iraq.

Articles on Bush's lying and/or using fallacious "reasoning" to gain support for war.

Article showing Bush administration has exaggerated "smart bombs"' ability to avoid targeting civilians.

Articles showing the Bush effort to show an alliance between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein was misleading.

Articles related to Bush/Powell deception about Saddam's ability to deliver weapons of mass destruction.

Article on Bush administration's choice of a convicted embezzler to oversee Iraq.

Article detailing reasons Bush could be criminal in attacking Iraq.

"All the President's Lies - Bush's rhetoric bears no resemblence to his policies. How does he get away with it?" by Drake Bennett and Heidi Pauken, The American Prospect, 5/1/03 http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/5/bennett-d.html

[Start with] "Reap What You Sow", by Dwight Meredith, P.L.A. - A Journal of Politics, Law and Autism, 2/27/03 http://www.pla.blogspot.com/2003_02_23_pla_archive.html

"The Plan - Were Neo-Conservatives' 1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War?" Nightline, 3/5/03 http://abcnews.go.com/sections/nightline/DailyNews/pnac_030310.html

"Practice to Deceive - Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan," by Joshua Marshall, The Washington Monthly, April 2003 http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0304.marshall.html

"Just the Beginning - Is Iraq the opening salvo in a war to remake the world?" by Robert Dreyfuss, The American Prospect, 4/1/03 http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/4/dreyfuss-r.html

"Who Lied to Whom? Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq's nuclear program?" by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, 3/31/03 http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1

"A Spurious 'Smoking Gun'," by Chris Smith, Mother Jones, 3/25/03 http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2003/13/we_338_01.html

"The Blame Game Between Bush and the Brits," by Richard Wolffe, Mark Hosenball and Tamara Lipper, Newsweek, 3/17/03 http://www.msnbc.com/news/883164.asp?cp1=1

"Fake Iraq documents `embarrasing' for U.S.," from David Ensor, CNN.com, 3/14/03 http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/14/sprj.irq.documents/index.html

"Google Search: africa uranium forged documents" http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=africa+uranium+forged+documents

"Spies Like Us," by Joel Bleifuss, In These Times, 3/14/03 http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=118_0_3_0_C

"Ex-CIA Officers Questioning Iraq Data," by John Lumpkin, Associated Press, 3/14/03 http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/linkscopy/IraqDataQ.html

"The impact of Bush linking 9/11 and Iraq - American attitudes about a connection have changed, firming up the case for war," by Linda Feldmann The Christian Science Monitor, 3/14/03 http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.htm

"An unproven case, a spurious war - Sans evidence, polls show Americans rallying around the White House," by Joe Conason, Working For Change, 3/24/03 http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=14705&CFID=6125472&CFTOKEN=92732152

"Fallacies and War - Misleading a nervous America to the wrong conclusion," by Dave Koehler, phillyburbs.com, 2/27/03 http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/50401.html

"An Orwellian Pitch - The inner workings of the war-propaganda machine," by John R. McArthur, LA Weekly, 3/21/03 http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=42761

"Military Precision versus Moral Precision," by Robert Higgs, The Independent Institute, 3/24/03 http://www.independent.org/tii/news/030323Higgs.html

"Bin There Before - But New Tape May Be Iraq Link U.S. Seeks," by William Bunch, Philadelphia Daily News, 2/12/03 http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/5157847.htm

"War, lies and audiotape - What Colin Powell failed to mention about the bin Laden tape," by Joe Conason, salon, 2/12/03 http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/02/12/osama/index_np.html

"Iraqi drone `very primitive': expert," from correspondents in London, News.com.au, 3/15/03 http://www.news.com.au/common/printpage/0,6093,6130936,00.html

"Questionable Evidence - Is Weapons Case Against Iraq Disintegrating?" Martha Raddatz, ABCNEWS.com, 3/10/03 http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/2020/GMA030310Iraq_weap ons_evidence.html

"Who will trust our man in Iraq? - White House prepares to install convicted embezzler to oversee Iraqi 'freedom'," by Joe Conason, Working For Change, 4/16/03 http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=14845&CFID=6668624&CFTOKEN=43382939

"Attack on Iraq Could Turn Bush into Criminal," by Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star, 3/18/03 http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0318-02.htm

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afrikanerritter-blog · 6 years ago

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Sales / Service :: How You Can start A Cleaning Service

Nobody wants to call home in the messy house. One good idea before speaking to any companies is to accomplish your personal walk through the home. Each person has its own priorities. Large business organizations have to maintain their standing in the corporate world.

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veale2006-blog · 6 years ago

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THE TRUTH BEHIND THE JFK ASSASSINATION

November 22, 2018 53 Years later we still search for the truth!!!

John F. Kennedy was far from perfect, in his personal life, or in some of the decisions he made as president. However, unlike most presidents, he had some good ideas, and he had plans to enact them. For example, he had plans to abolish the Federal Reserve system, which prints worthless money backed by nothing, and charges interest on it, making us a debtor nation to a group of international bankers. He wanted to use United States Notes, and he signed a presidential document, called Executive Order 11110, on June 4, 1963.

This gave JFK, as U.S. President, legal clearance to create true money, that would belong to the people, and eliminate the Federal Reserve Bank, and their false money. Kennedy had already begun issuing U.S. government money that was free of debt to replace the Federal Reserve dollars we have been using. A number of "Kennedy bills" were indeed issued - with the heading "United States Note", instead of "Federal Reserve Note" - but were quickly withdrawn after Kennedy's death. Records show that Kennedy issued $4,292,893,825 of true money. It was clear that Kennedy was out to eliminate the criminal Federal Reserve System. It is interesting to note that, only one day after Kennedy's assassination, all the United States notes which Kennedy had issued were called out of circulation. All of the money President Kennedy had created was destroyed, and not a word was said to the American people.

A "KENNEDY BILL" ISSUED IN 1963, WITH "UNITED STATES NOTE" REPLACING "FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE"

In 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented Kennedy with Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods would have had our own government inflicting terrorist attacks upon US citizens, and blaming it on our enemies, to justify wars and political assassinations. Kennedy rejected it. He planned to abolish the CIA's right to conduct covert operations, and eventually dismantle it. Kennedy said he would "splinter the CIA into a Thousand Pieces". Kennedy's intent to abolish the Federal Reserve Bank, his rejection of Operation Northwoods, and his plan to eliminate CIA covert operations planted the seeds for the CIA's assassination of him.

Lee Harvey Oswald was linked to virtually every group that had a reason to want Kennedy dead. In the years before Kennedy's death as a Marine, Oswald worked as a radar operator at U-2 spy plane bases. After leaving the Marines he defected to the Soviet Union. While in Russia he married the niece of a KGB colonel, and he lived in relative luxury, likely in exchange for false or already outdated information on the U-2 that he passed to the Russians. Oswald apparently pretended to be a traitor to America, while actually working for the CIA. On returning to the U.S. Oswald propagandized for Castro's Cuba out of a New Orleans building he shared with a CIA/FBI agent trying to overthrow Castro named Guy Banister. Delphine Roberts worked for Banister. She said that, "Mr. Banister had been a special agent for the FBI and CIA." She saw her CIA agent boss meet with Lee Harvey Oswald in September 1963. This story was supported by her daughter, who also met Oswald during this period. Oswald also distributed Pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans in 1963, with the address of his CIA contact Banister stamped on them. There was a three-page letter from CIA Director John McCone to Secret Service Chief James Rowley in which McCone acknowledges Oswald worked for the CIA, and was in Russia for that purpose, not as a defector. It discussed how this information should be withheld from the Warren Commission. Allen Dulles' advice to other members of the Warren Commission was that CIA operatives consider it their patriotic duty to lie under oath if necessary to protect "Company" secrets. A Dallas deputy sheriff, Allen Sweatt, was quoted as saying that Oswald was being paid $200 a month by the government at the time of the assassination, and had been assigned an informant number. In October 1963 Oswald moved to Dallas where he got a job in the Texas Book Depository for $1.25 an hour boxing and shipping books.

It's beyond strange how someone who was so clearly connected to the CIA would just happen to get a job working at one of the best sniping points in Dallas, by which the President's open car motorcade would just happen to pass a few weeks after he started working there. Oswald was set up to be the fall guy. On November 22, 1963 at the book depository, around 12:15, secretary Carolyn Arnold saw Oswald in the second floor snack room, where she said he went for a Coke. He was sitting in one of the booths alone, as usual, and appeared to be having lunch. She testified: "I did not speak to him, but I recognized him clearly. I remember it was 12:15 or later. It could have been 12:25, five minutes before the assassination, I don't exactly remember." At the same time, Bonnie Ray Williams was on the sixth floor until 12:20, and he saw nobody. Down on the street, Arnold Rowland saw two men in the sixth floor windows, presumably after Bonnie Ray Williams finished his lunch and left.

Kennedy's motorcade was running late. He was due at the Trade Mart at 12:25. If Oswald was one of the assassins, he was pretty nonchalant about getting himself into position. Later he told Dallas police he was standing in the second floor. A maximum 90 seconds after Kennedy was shot, patrolman Marrion Baker ran into Oswald in that second story lunchroom. He asked Oswald's boss, "Do you know this man? Is he an employee?" He told Baker that he was. As Baker moved on, he told Oswald, "The President's been shot!" Oswald reacted as if he had heard it for the first time.

What the Official Party Line would have us believe is that after firing 3 bolt action shots in 6 seconds, Oswald then left three cartridges neatly side by side in the firing nest, wiped the rifle clear of fingerprints, stashed the rifle on the other side of the loft, sprinted down five flights of stairs, past Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles, who would have, but never saw him, and then showed up cool and calm on the second floor in front of Patrolman Baker within 90 seconds of the shooting the president. Was he out of breath? According to Baker, absolutely not. Was Oswald a "patsy", as he claimed? Most certainly. Whatever can be said of Oswald, one thing is certain: he either knowingly or unknowingly was a pawn for those responsible for assassinating Kennedy.

Jack Ruby, Oswald's assassin, had been stalking Oswald from the time immediately following the assassination, to the moment he shot him. Phillip Willis took a series of 12 photos of Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot, in the minutes before and after the assassination. Mr. Willis' photos and testimony before the Warren Commission appear in the Warren Commission's report. He was not questioned about the eighth photo, a shot of the Book Depository entrance shortly after the assassination. As Willis later pointed out, one of the men in the photo "looks so much like Jack Ruby, Oswald's soon to be assassin, it's pitiful". F.B.I. agents questioning Willis agreed with him that the man bore a powerful resemblance to Ruby. When Willis mentioned this to the Commission, no interest was shown. When the photo was published in the Warren Report, a considerable part of the Ruby lookalike's face had been cropped away.

What was the final straw that pushed our own government to assassinate Kennedy?

On October 11, 1963 John F. Kennedy signed national security memorandom no. 263, which ordered 1000 American advisors home from Vietnam by December 25, 1963, and that the remainder of the U.S. military be withdrawn by 1965. Kennedy's and Johnson's Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara has said that Kennedy was going to pull out of Vietnam after the 1964 election. In the film "The Fog of War", not only does McNamara say this, but a tape recording of Lyndon Johnson confirms that Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam, a position Johnson states he disapproved of. The day after Kennedy's funeral, on November 26, 1963, Lyndon Johnson signed national security resolution no. 273, which completely reversed Kennedy's plan for a withdrawal from Vietnam. Then Johnson fraudulently used the gulf of Tonkin resolution as a blank check to fund the massive military buildup in Vietnam, an agreement Johnson apparently made with the CIA in exchange for them taking out Kennedy, and handing the presidency to him.

"THE WINK": CONGRESSMAN ALBERT THOMAS KNOWINGLY WINKS AT A SMILING LBJ AFTER THE ASSASSINATION

There is evidence that Lyndon Johnson was directly involved. Johnson was seen ducking down in his car a good 30 to 40 seconds before the first shots were fired, even before the car turned onto Houston street. Lyndon Johnson was acting as if he knew bullets would soon be flying, ducking down repeatedly before the shots went off. At the ceremony of Johnson being sworn in as president, Congressman Albert Thomas was photographed knowingly winking at a smiling LBJ, while JFK's grieving widow stood next to Johnson.

The night before the Kennedy assassination Johnson met with Dallas tycoons, FBI moguls and organized crime kingpins. Johnson's mistress, Madeleine Duncan Brown recalled that "Johnson emerged from the conference to tell her, "'after tomorrow those S.O.B.'s, the Kennedy's, will never embarrass me again - that's no threat - that's a promise.'" "They had this lodge outside of Dallas and they met there on November 21, 1963. Johnson chose different people to do certain things for him, and the group included Oswald's assassin, Jack Ruby. Brown described Ruby as the "in man" in Texas who could be trusted to arrange call girls, drugs, gambling fixes and even contract killings.

According to Madeleine Brown, the group at the meeting included J. Edgar Hoover, Clyde Tolson, John J. McCloy, Jack Ruby, numerous mafia kingpins, several newspaper and TV reporters, and Richard Nixon." Oddly enough, over ten years later Richard Nixon was forced to resign because of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The break-in at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee would have never become the issue to topple a President, except for the need to protect just WHY the crime had been committed. The Democrats had obtained photographs which showed Nixon "associate" E. Howard Hunt to be one of the three tramps arrested and then released in Dealey Plaza.

This is why Hunt led the break-in at the Watergate. He was protecting his own posterior. Rather than risk exposure of a far worse scandal, Nixon resigned, turning over the White House to Gerald Ford, the Warren Commission member who would later admit that he had altered the official location of JFK's back wound for the commission. Johnson was still irate when he called Madeleine Brown the morning of the assassination, telling her the Kennedy family would never embarrass him again. Brown highlighted how people who were set to testify against Johnson for indictment proceedings, related to illegal kickbacks Johnson was receiving from agriculture programs before the assassination, were mysteriously set-up in homosexual scandals or found dead, having allegedly shot themselves five times in the head. "Had the assassination not happened the day that it did, Lyndon Johnson would have probably gone to prison - they would have gotten rid of him - he was so involved in this."

Immediately following JFK's assassination in Dallas, government agents fanned out through the crowd, and confiscated all the films that were being taken of Kennedy's motorcade. One exception was Abraham Zapruders home movie. This film was purchased by Time magazine. Time magazine promptly altered key frames,and eliminated others, in order to obstruct and eliminate key evidence of a conspiracy. Those home movies that were seized by the government that afternoon, were never seen or heard again. Regis Kennedy, one of the FBI agents who was gathering up those home movies that afternoon, was supenoed by the House select committee on assassinations, to explain what happened to all those home movies. On the very day he was to testify to that committee, he was found murdered. Over 200 key witnesses to JFK's assassination, who could have testified to the truth of what happened that day, have died under mysterious circumstances, or have been outright murdered.

THE THREE TRAMPS. RAOUL IN FRONT, STURGIS AND HUNT IN THE REAR

So exactly who shot JFK? The same hit men the CIA planned to use against Cuban president Fidel Castro, including the famous Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, were brought into Dealy plaza on November 22, 1963. Immediately after JFK's assassination, law enforcement officers conducted a search of the area behind the grassy knoll, from which many witnesses heard gunshots and saw smoke just after the shots rang out. There were several railroad boxcars in this area. Some of these witnesses saw men running from the fence behind the knoll toward the boxcars. As a result three men were found in one boxcar.

They were arrested. These men came to be known as "The three tramps". They were arrested right after the president of the United States was killed, but strangely enough the police did not book, photograph or fingerprint them, and they were released. One thing they didn't expect however, was that as the police led the three derelicts through Dealey Plaza to the sheriff's office, they were photographed by several press photographers. When allegations of a CIA connection with Kennedy's death emerged, these photographs received wide publicity in newspapers, television and in the April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek magazine. Two of the derelicts or "tramps", as they had come to be called, bore striking resemblances to Nixon burglars E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis respectively, who both worked for the CIA. The 3rd tramp is often referred to as "Raoul", and is a bullseye for the Martin Luther King assassination suspect circulated by the police after King was killed. James Earl Ray would later claim he was set up by a man named "Raoul".

STURGIS AS TRAMP IN 1963, AND AS NIXON BURGLAR IN 1973 HUNT AS TRAMP IN 1963, AND AS NIXON BURGLAR IN 1973

A book titled Coup D'Etat in America, by Alan J. Weberman and Michael Canfield, came out with compelling evidence that two of the three "tramps" arrested in Dallas on November 22 were E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis. When Coup D'Etat in America came out, Hunt sued for millions of dollars in damages, claiming he could prove that he had been in Washington D.C. that day, on duty at CIA. It turned out, however, that this was not true. So, he said that he had been on leave and doing household errands, including a shopping trip to a grocery store in Chinatown. Weberman and Canfield investigated the new alibi and found that the grocery store where Hunt claimed to be shopping never existed. At this point, Hunt offered to drop his suit for a token payment of one dollar.

But the authors were determined to vindicate themselves, and they continued to attack Hunt's alibi, ultimately completely shattering it. Using the principles of Bio-metrics, lines and angles are measured and compared to create a template. The templates are then overlaid for matching. When the pictures of two of the derelicts were tested bio-metrically against Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, they came up as 100% perfect matches. It would seem beyond a shadow of doubt that both Hunt and Sturgis worked for the CIA not only as Nixon burglars, but also as part of the team the CIA sent out to assassinate JFK.

Assassinating Kennedy, and putting their man Johnson into the presidency helped the military industrial complex and the shadow government reassert their power, and that will help you understand what's been going on in America ever since Kennedy's assassination. These treasonous murderers are opposed to everything the United States is supposed to represent, such as truth, freedom and justice. This is why they go to such great lengths to keep their methods of operation, their true purpose, and even their existence, under a cloak of secrecy. If Americans knew the truth about all of this, they would rise up in anger, and hold them all accountable. As long as these forces remain in control of the government, the coverup will continue.

The truth behind the JFK assassination will never be told by the establishment. You and I are subject to their corrupt and unjust court system, while they are above the law. International bankers and all of their branch organizations are at the head of this shadow government, and the assassination of president Kennedy was nothing short of a coup, implemented by them. Their pawns in the media keep the American people from learning how their government has been overthrown by them, and they have been, more or less, in complete control of the U.S. government ever since they assassinated JFK on November 22, 1963.

We must always seek the truth for the truth SHALL MAKE US FREE!!

Have a blessed day and never forget the LIES THE GOVERNMENT CONTINUE TO COVER-UP!!! May Yeshua the Messiah bless you, Love, Debbie

JFK Assassination Conspiracy Documentary | Best Evidence New 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRwFBKwQDSM

2015 Unfortunate Truth JFK, 9/11, and Beyond - The World We Live in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0bOm5c43js

JFK "TRUTH" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvxJXzVBZrs

The Truth About Rafael Cruz And The JFK Assassination https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpZ1_zwfTMQ

Why The CIA Killed Kennedy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLHRUV01PR8

JFK - The Speech That Killed Him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8HTr-F-FVM

Finally, The CIA Admits Covering Up JFK Assassination / 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmXIFm5OODE

George Bush / CIA / JFK Assassination (Dark Legacy) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCuTwqr5qng

JFK assassination .C.I.A agent tells all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tl5AV4jHvc

JFK Secret Societies Speech (full version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdMbmdFOvTs

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