#genuinely i am bedeviled by him

[rubyfunkey]

Exactly one person asked me to share my thoughts on Leander so here's all the notes I've been taking and thoughts I've had since playing the demo a billion times (not all of these are polished thoughts some are simply just observations that i think might be important to understanding him)

- Leander seems to value information the most out of all the LIs

     - He is the only LI that asks the MC what they think about everyone

      - He asks the most questions

      - He repays the MC for their information by providing them with room and board

- Leander sways the MC's opinion

      - When discussing Vere, no matter what the MC says about him, Leander makes it clear that getting close to Vere is a bad idea, and that he is a very dangerous individual. Notably, he says "-but like any monster, he's dangerous." which seems to conflict with how he views Ais, despite both being monsters.

      - When discussing Ais, when the MC mentions that they met him at the Seaspring, Leander chokes on his drink. If the MC states that Ais was upfront, Leander asks if the price of the Seaspring's effects seem worth it, and implies that he views Ais's "red-eyed minions" as another form of pet that Ais keeps. The topic seems to upset him so deeply that he requests a change of subject. If the MC states that Ais was intimidating, his reaction is almost the complete opposite, almost pleasant, and the subject of the Seaspring drops entirely. When asked if Leander is afraid of Ais, he says not at all, and explains that he sees the two of them as rivals. The MC worries if being rivals with a monster is smart, and Leander downplays the seriousness of it, saying that Ais isn't a bad guy. To me, when paired side-by-side, these two interactions read as Leander trying to sway the MC away from the Seaspring, or maybe even Ais himself. His reaction to knowing that the MC is intimidated by Ais is casual and amused, because he doesn't need to say anything else about it; The MC is already scared of Ais. If the MC WASN'T intimidated by Ais when choosing to say the former option, they probably would have been at least a little more apprehensive after seeing Leander's reaction to the Seaspring's effects.

- When discussing Kuras, regardless of what dialogue option the MC chooses, Leander seems to think fondly of him, with the exception of his bedside manner. If the MC chooses to say that Kuras seems like a good person, they will then ask Leander if he believes that Kuras could cure them. When asked this, Leander's face will drop*, and he will pause before responding, saying that Kuras is good, but he's "only a doctor". If the MC states that they found Kuras to be cold, Leander heartily agrees, saying that "he never warns you when something's gonna sting, and he's stingy with the pain medicine too". His response to both options is mostly the same, what caught my eye was his reaction to asking whether or not Kuras could cure us. Maybe he has some bitter experience with the limitations of Kuras's capabilities, or maybe he just doesn't want to entertain the possibility of the MC seeking assistance from someone outside of himself. Considering his response to hearing that you visited the Seaspring while meeting Ais, I'm inclined to believe the latter.

*I’m not sure how reliable the sprite expressions are re: understanding character motivation, but I’m going to use them anyway. With a grain of salt.

- When discussing Mhin, if the MC chooses to say that Mhin seems lonely, Leander states that he believes that Mhin actually prefers things that way, and goes on to say that if Mhin wanted to be our friend, we would know. If the MC chooses to say that they find Mhin to be irritable, Leander simply agrees, saying that even paying Mhin for work can be a struggle. His responses while discussing Mhin aren't as foreboding, but they don't really need to be. Leander seems to shoot down any hope the MC may have of being close to Mhin, and if they don't show interest in befriending Mhin, then there's nothing more to say.

- Leander is "friends" with everyone, but has something to say about each LI that makes them seem unpleasant or even dangerous to be around

- Leander is the only LI whose silhouette is unaltered

      - "not all monsters are inhuman"

- When selecting Leander on the Choose Your Fate screen, the description reads: 

Leander offers you something that should be impossible: a taste of normalcy free of your curse. As the first person to withstand your touch, he could change your life, but some things are simply too good to be true.

      - When discussing the Senobium with Leander, Leander states "things that seem too good to be true are often just that". He then proceeds to offer himself as "something that should be impossible" for the MC, as the Choose Your Fate screen says.

- LEANDER is an ASSHOLE

      - During the scene where Leander is asking you to show him the curse, regardless of whether or not you hold back or choose to trust him, he will grab your hand to prevent you from pulling away. IF YOU CHOOSE TO HOLD BACK, his grip is tight, his face falls, he takes a deliberate step closer, and even reaches for the MC's throat causing the player to worry that they've just ruined him and are now going to get choked out for the second time that day as a result... He then smiles and says he's just fine. I've seen a few people stating that they believed this was the curse beginning to take effect before he managed to push it away, but personally, i think he was just being an asshole. Like, some small punishment for you not trusting him like he asked you to. A silly little guy moment. I hope he chokes

     - When first mentioning the Senobium to Leander, his face falls, but he doesn't immediately comment, instead he continues to drink, ignoring the fact that his Bloodhounds have begun verbally accosting you. He only speaks up and snaps at them once he notices you're looking. The first couple times I read this part, Leander's response seems uncharacteristically snide in comparison to how he acts for the rest of the demo, which is NOT me saying he's been written inconsistently, it is me saying he is fake as hell. I hate this dude

- He seems genuinely concerned when asking the MC if they're alright after their run-in with the roughneck. When he asks them if they'd like a drink, he orders the same as them regardless of what they choose. He doesn't do this when you first meet him, he orders beer regardless of your choice. I don't know if this is important to my research. Compels me though

- "Acquaintances are merely friends you haven't shared a drink with yet" -Guy That Has No Friends

Here is a small list of things I believe I could confidently conjure some bullshit out of upon further research (or with enough imagination):

- The Bloodhounds' motto (As Above, So Below)

- Leander's earring. Maybe.

- Leander's quote, "They [flowers] don't last long, but they leave an impression"

- Another quote, "There are solutions to every problem, and alternatives to every solution"

- The ouroboros on Leander's Kickstarter charm

- The fact that Leander likes masquerades and hates sleep

Here is a list of things relating to what the other four LIs think about Leander that caught my attention:

- Literally everything that Vere said

      - Vere either has history with Leander that neither of them have talked about (unlikely given how "subtle" Leander was about his relations with Mhin), or Vere is able to read Leander in a way that the others either can't or don't make known to the MC. Vere clearly has sharp senses and sees through the MC like they're made of water, I'm not sure if this is just a thing for the MC but it could probably be assumed that he sees things in Leander that we can't.

- Ais' comment about Leander's resolve

- I could pretend like something Mhin said re: Leander interested me, but I don't think there was any deeper context to their words other than the not-at-all-subtle feelings of forced-down affection and open annoyance. Love Mhin though

- My thoughts on what Kuras had to say are similar to Mhin's, he seems to be fond of Leander and didn't have much untoward to say, unless you count what he said about the company that Leander keeps

I have no idea what's going on with this man. I believe that he may be involved in some harmful magick-y malarky that is having unseen and horrific effects, or maybe he's simply a charismatic manipulator whose personality is just as monstrous as his peers. I have silly little theories but I would be very shrimpterested in hearing what other people have to say.

TLDR; there's something WRONG with this man and I will be spending the next two years crafting a version of him in my brain that is almost certainly dead-wrong but goodness won't it be fun

[snotsloth]

Finished Empire of Ivory! I am distraught! This one took me a bit longer to finish. The initial urge to binge read my latest obsession has abated and I got distracted halfway through by another book, but then I got to the final quarter of the book and Ms. Novik came out swinging with a steel chair!

No symphony but Temeraire did make some comments about wanting to write a book

Lawrence has finally realized that he kind of accidentally an entire daughter with Emily. He's straight up having flights of domestic fancy in his mind to the point of proposing to Jane, which was hilarious!

Still no first naming of Laurence! Either it's never going to happen or it's going to happen in like the last book and I will immediately expire.

No Jolly Cooperation. Instead Laurence and Riley are fighting for most of the book, which was genuinely great character work for both of them.

Temeraire had zero time to write a book but he does have his own sand tables and is seriously considering writing one.

Dragon revolution still pending. We had a plague to cure.

Still have not met the Native American dragon.

The British dragons did tease Temeraire a bit about putting on airs, but they were mostly just sick and miserable

We did indeed go to Africa. No one had a good time, except maybe Dulcia?

We had no major war sections of the book, so Temeraire did not get to show off what a clever strategist he is.

Iskierka did indeed continue to be a chaotic delight. She's Granby's firecracker and he loves her so much. (Also I love the dynamic of grumpy older sibling and annoying, pestering younger sibling that she and Temeraire are developing)

No additional dragon babies yet

Temeraire is definitely closing in on a uniting theory of anti-slavery, and anti-colonialist, pro-universal equality including dragons. He just hasn't fully synthesized it yet

No Tharkay this book. I have been spoiled that de does eventually return, so I will continue to operate under the assumption that his ass will show up in the least likely circumstance

Something had indeed gone VERY AWRY in England.

Arkady and his band were indeed agents of merry chaos and now they have Iskierka as a second ring leader and they are menacing every French ship that dares brave the Channel

Lien did not need to cause problems. There were enough already

Things I Did Not Expect

A FUCKING PLAGUE!!!

Admiral Jane Roland!!!

Genuinely good, period accurate, abolitionist discourse

A nuanced portrayal of black Christians returning to Africa and trying to tease out the difference between culture and religion; and having to figure out how they will reintegrate with the family and society they were violently taken from. And choosing to stay and mostly reintegrate!

Laurence continuing to be vexed and bedevilled by the tension between what is "proper" for women and what is best for the individual women around him, and ultimately always choosing to respect the autonomy of women (including a black woman)!

A full throated acknowledgement of how England and other slaver colonialists permanently damaged not only the West Coast but all of Africa and how no amount of reparations will ever truly make amends for the crimes they committed and the lives that were taken.

Genuinely, I did not go into this series expecting such excellent integration of postcolonial/anti-colonial thought that is so seamlessly and naturally integrated into the narrative. Many historical novels that take place in this period will only pay lip service to the crimes of colonial England or try to ignore it altogether. Instead Naomi Novik deliberately turns the focus of the story directly towards the blood-soaked heart of English colonial power and says, "Look at it. This is the point. This is the engine that drives the whole thing. There is no enjoyment or true understanding of 19th century England without grappling with the grim facts of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. Also there's dragons, and they are people."

Pirate (privateer) Iskierka and her merry band of ferals! They were so great and offered some much needed levity

We're only on book 4 and Laurence has committed treason! Book 4! There are 5 MORE BOOKS TO GO!!!

A face-to-face meeting between Napoleon and Laurence!

Unhinged Predictions Part 4

More pirate Iskierka, please!

Obviously Laurence is going to live though I have no idea how. Maybe Temeraire stages a rescue? A general strike by the corps? I guess I'll find out.

I think we might stay in Europe this book. I'm not certain.

Temeraire finally gets to show off what a military genius he is.

So. Much. Angst.

More Napoleon being very abnormal about Laurence (I have been spoiled for how intense he is about Laurence through the series)

Dragon strike!

Unhinged Temeraire predictions based on having only read In His Majesty's Service:

Temeraire's Symphony No. 1

Temeraire and Tchaikovsky are going to become best fucking friends mostly based on their shared opinions that artillery belongs in a proper percussion section.

Laurence and Temeraire are DEFINITELY going to mutiny at some point.

Temeraire learns to sing and Lawrence is very soft about it.

At some point in the next 2-3 books, Lawrence will realize he has acquired an entire daughter without intending to. Temeraire and Roland are only surprised it took him so long to notice.

I'm not entirely certain that Temeraire will ever call Lawrence Will, but if he does I will disintegrate.

The Chinese government gets involved.

Temeraire commissions either gigantic books, or some sort of magnification device so he can fucking read when Lawrence isn't there. They continue their evening reading sessions still because it's their thing.

Some good old fashioned JOLLY COOPERATION between the Navy and the Dragon Corps.

Temeraire writes a book. He subsequently causes a paradigm shift in his chosen field of study.

I will keep updating until I start book 2. Please do not confirm or deny my predictions. Let me suffer.

[protomun]

Shadowgast Promt! Essek asks Caleb just where exactly he learned Gravity Sinkhole.

It is one thing to camp above ground, to hear the howl of the winter wind cresting the snowfields, the occasional cry of a lonesome predator on the move. It is quite another to make their beds here miles beneath the earth, where the stillness and the silence hang heavy, a pestilence that has seeped - much like the creeping brown mold - into the cracks and crevices of an age of decay. Here in the abyss, where dwells darkness - fathomless - nothing at all like the endless night of Xorhas with its the soft glow of streetlamps, its ocean of stars hanging bright in the canopy above. This is not peace; it is peril: constant, looming like a looming gargantuan maw that swallows and snuffs out every essence of life beneath it. How frightful such a place is. Or would be, if it weren’t for the sound of distant laughter - a blue tiefling commiserating with a mortified half-orc bedeviled by a halfling’s boisterous taunts, two warrior women exchanging sweet nothings workout routines with a fervor. Life. And love. And more of either than a century of study could have prepared him for. The (former) shadowhand is seated apart from the others (bright queen forbid he should disrobe in front of their ever curious eyes). His mantle is lain beside him across the stones, his deft practitioner’s hands applying something green and faintly glowing to the wounds across his arms - the remnants of the day’s aggressions. Behind him, a familiar figure fiddles with components. “You surprised me back there.” Essek’s voice carries the distance between himself and his colleague. “From all of our prior encounters, and what you’ve shown-” A room of infinite possibility. “- I had taken you for a quick study. I underestimated, perhaps, just how quick indeed.” A self-satisfied smirk quirks the edge of Caleb’s lips, but, much like Essek, he avoids eye contact focuses on the work of preparing the dome for their companions. Liked that, did you? he thinks. It is only the beginning. I am capable of so much. Give me but the opportunity and I will show you. “Ah, well...this mind that devils me at times does have its uses, and the effectiveness of your methods could not be argued.” It’s Essek’s turn to smile - a small but genuine one, something the him of old would have tampered down, but he indulges in now, if only to himself. If your mind devils you an ounce of how you devil me, he thinks, and shakes his head, dispelling one of so many things he wants to say. Instead, with that off-hand air, he remarks, never once looking up from his work: “They say that mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery. Consider me flattered.” Caleb’s hand hesitates, nigh imperceptibly, but against the pervasive stillness the pause in movement reverberates.

[loveatz]

BEDEVIL. | 박성화

TYPE: badboy!au, badboy!seonghwa, park seonghwa

WORD COUNT: 760

SYNOPSIS: never fall in love with the most popular boy in school.

you should have listened to all the other girls at school. how you should never fall in love with the most popular boy in school. unless, that is, you have a death wish. but... you couldn’t help it. he had you under his spell.

park seonghwa owned you. he had you by the neck at all times. you were his, and so were the other girls under his spell. if only he paid attention to you. if only.

the only times you think he cared about you were the times where you’re being fucked into his mattress. screaming, moaning his name and desperate for him. he liked you the most when you were a mess because of him. when your desperation unravels by a mere touch on a cheek, he loved that about you.

“would you ever date anyone?” you had asked him one time, buttoning up your blouse and preparing yourself for the future rejection. seonghwa scoffed, his eyes trained on you as you got dressed and ready to leave his house.

“what are you implying?” he asked, rolling off the bed to put on his boxers a pair of sweatpants. you looked at him in disbelief. “commitment is.. something else. why’d you ask?”

“it’s nothing,” you told him, grabbing your skirt to head to the bathroom. “i’ll be right out.”

“get your ass back here,” seonghwa said, curling his finger at you. sighing, you walked back up to him, heart racing so fast it would win a grand prix. seonghwa studied your face, a finger snaking under your chin. “i asked you something. why’d you ask?”

“don’t you feel lonely?” you blurted, sincerity glossing over your eyes as you looked at him. seonghwa’s finger left your chin, stepping back a little to lean against his window sill. “do you?”

“i guess,” he mumbled, loud enough for you to hear. the same empty void in seonghwa’s eyes bore into yours, as if he wanted someone to be with him and fill in the space in his heart. “where am i going to find someone i would love? i’m not going to hit up the past girls i was with before you.”

hearing him say that gave you very little hope, thinking you had a chance with seonghwa. after all, the thing between you and him had been going on for a longer time than the past flings.

“when are you going to realize?” you told him, zipping up the zipper of your skirt before crossing your arms at him. seonghwa’s eyes blinked, it was so... bland and emotionless.

“realize what?”

“that i’m in love with you,” you said, which took seonghwa by surprise. how could you be so in love with him? he ruined you in many ways possible, deprived you of his presence and made you think you will never have hope in terms of relationships with him. how could you still fall in love with him? “i.. i’m in love with you, seonghwa.”

“why?” he asked, genuinely confused as to why you were in love with him. seonghwa was up to no good, and will never be good enough for you. oh, you were too good for him. “why me? out of all the guys in school, me?”

“because.. i know they’ll never make me feel good like you do,” you said, hoping it was something seonghwa would want to hear. but it wasn’t. he wanted something genuine out of your mouth. “because i know you’re a good person.”

“how could you still fucking say that,” he said. everything became a joke to him. you were merely a clown to him at this point.

“i’m serious and look at me,” you told him. “i.. i just really like you. i like all the late night talks every time after we do things.. you make me feel good in myself.”

seonghwa’s eyes flickered at you, avoiding your image at once. he didn’t know what else to tell you, he didn’t want to admit to you. why should he? would it make things better?

“think about it,” you told him, grabbing your backpack from the cluttered floor and heading to his door. assuming it would be the last time you’ll see him, you looked at him one last time. seonghwa had stood up from the window sill, grabbing a shirt to put on.

“where are you going?”

“home?”

“stay here,” he told you, tossing you an oversized shirt. “stay the night. let’s talk about everything.”

seonghwa wasn’t great with words, but he was better at expressing himself through actions.

[vischys]

Another moment of tense silence, hinting that it has been quite sometime ever since he last fell into a proper sleep that he needed to recall it, not a brief respite of shutting his eyes for no more than an hour.

“The night we returned from the Underworld,” he answered matter-of factly a heartbeat later. Months of being thrusted into constant vigilance and skirmishes took its toll upon even his inhuman stamina that his body forced him into a deep, healing sleep that shut his brain completely and therefore prevented it from bedeviling his unconsciousness with nightmares. Compared to that level of exhaustion, a sleepless night spent working upon paperworks was nowhere nigh that level.

“I'll have you know that I am impeccably capable to continue functioning in mind and body even without genuine sleep so long as I take but a moment of repose regularly,” he added with that familiar haughty-stubbornness, still refusing to meet his brother's eyes but not pulling himself away either.

Tosses him a stack of long overdue bills from a certain devil huntress. “Explain this squandering.”

“Umm.. I, uh ..” Dante rubbed the back of his neck, blushing scarlet around his cheeks. “I owe her some cash, is all. It’s not that bad, to be honest. It was a lot worse when I was younger. She helps with rent – “

[promiseiwillwrite]

::glares::

I anthropomorphize things all the time. I just looked up at the enthusiastic wiggling of the tent above me with genuine angry contempt because I know it means I am not going to get to do my freakin' cardio again today. Because if the wind gets any worse, it is going to start carrying dust and sand and make it impossible to breathe.

Urgh. Trying to exist in a dust storm just isn't worth it. It is such a pain in the butt.

It's not as bad as it has been the last two days, but the weather app says it will get there, though, and that fucks everything I wanted to do with my free time except posting on this weird little blog that no one reads.

Sometimes I feel a staggering sense of loss at having put down some of my coping strategies. The exquisite personalities and their majestic house where I would go for comfort and love. The gods and my free access to talk with them whenever I liked. I don't know what I should do with these things, these parts of myself, these memories anymore. Are they valid? Probably as valid as any diversion like reading or watching TV. They represent escapist tendencies, a retreat from the moment. They represent me, not being in the moment. So I have stepped away from them, because I've never tried that before. So I have no comfort, but I don't constantly Need comfort. Sometimes I am just Okay. And that's fine.

Other times I miss being free to imagine them taking me in their arms, whispering into my ear, and trailing kisses down my neck. I have always wanted humans to do this sort of thing to me and for me, but people I've been around aren't really into that.

They're not wrong or bad for it, they just don't think of being that way because they aren't. In fact, Most people aren't. They're just people. And my Others Aren't just people. They are hypersexual metaphysical entities that I made to slake my own Lusts.

Or other things. Some of them exist to bedevil me. And draw my attention again and again to the truth when I continue to run the other way.

Some of them lead me through gardens of razors to try to show me my truth, and won't cut me an inch of slack when I am Not behaving according to my own values.

I am trying to learn what "health" really is, and I feel like I am building it slowly with little rocks. They keep rolling away, and I keep having to start over. I feel like I have a lot of little unconnected pieces. I KNOW they really do go together, but it's like Skull reconstruction, and I feel like I am missing about half the pieces, so it's very slow going.

I have noticed a theme lately in some of my fantasizing and selfing, and I don't know what to make of it. The Prince of Dogwood Winter, and Satan, and a couple of other entities in the last 6 months have been in my mind, and trying to get close to me. I very patently do not want this, except that I do. I feel two things about it. I feel like I want them around, and what they have to offer and I feel very reckless in that urge. But Mentally I am dead fucking set against. I keep telling them to go fuck themselves when they want me to fuck them, and agree to things, and when they tell me I've already agreed, and I just don't know it yet.

They can go fuck themselves right in the Ear with a fucking Barrel cleaner, because I am allowed to feel and think and say anything I want at the same time, whether it is confusing and dissonant or not.

There is really no telling what is actually fucking with me. Maybe it is a thing I need to go and Kill. Maybe they are what they say they are. Maybe Loki is trying to get me to branch out. I have been under his wing for about a quarter century. And I don't think he can tolerate stagnation.

Maybe it is a thing within me that I need to accept.

Though at the moment the killing sounds like a better option.

Maybe it is all him.

This all comes back to me, not knowing what is real.

This thing I ran up against in therapy the other day.

Circumstances and situations defined as real are real in their consequences.

My refusal to accept some things as real, my rejection of other things I had long held dear, my struggle to just Be in the moment is continuous.

Except when it isn't. I guess I really just have to Decide what is real for me, in terms of religion, and in terms of my inner world. But to do that, I have to Believe that I can, believe that I have the power to do that.

Yes. I feel it. This is the right path. This is the way, this promotes Agency in myself. I have to Decide, and no one can decide for me.

I HAVE already decided that I'm happier with religion than without, and that I love my messed up patron and his happy little disaster-clan. But I have to remove anything that supports unhealthy paradigms from my practice and belief structure. It can be mythology, but it will be balanced against the reality of my own intuitions, and it will not tolerate their abuses.

I have decided to love my others as myself, and to be more in tune with myself through them, and that I can never again use them as an excuse or a crutch or to feed the self pity obsession. Maybe I will walk again in their halls, and greet them in the morning of my mind. Perhaps we will write a book after all, and I will be able to show their creation to the world.

[freelanews-blog]

I will not waste my time embarking on White Elephant Projects – Gov Emmanuel

The AkwaIbom State Governor, Mr. Udom Emmanuel has said he would rather embark on life-touching projects than on monumental projects which have no direct impact on the people of the state. He stated this at the wake of criticism from the opposition in the state that he has never executed a monumental project since he became governor in 2015. In his Christmas Broadcast on Tuesday, the governor said, “I will like to make this profoundly fundamental point: we are not engaged in building monuments that have no direct impact or meaning to our everyday lives; we are not grandstanding with the construction of white elephant projects, we are not on a course for fleeting applause. “We are not here to create a cult of personality or to play God or to define ourselves as the sole repositories of knowledge and power; we are not here to sell our State on bended knees or to cut deals that will imperil the future of our State or our children. We are not here sorely to protect our selfish interest while sacrificing the collective good. “We are here because we genuinely care about you, your children’s future, the place of our State in the socio-political calculus of our Nation. We are here, because we believe the resources God has so generously endowed our people with, should be used to develop Akwa Ibom State and empower our people to rise further to the faith of their greatness.” Emmanuel said he would remain focused in fostering development projects for the benefit of his people and never to feel deterred or intimidated by the antics of the opposition. “I will not be intimidated, I will not bend, I will not give in to blackmail, lies or attacks on my person or my administration. I will not cut deals to sell our State to the highest bidder neither will I sacrifice the elements that define us as a people simply to further a political goal,” he said. He also explained that his administration had done much for the past three and half years despite the election litigation the government was bedevilled with at inception. “Three and half years ago when we came in, we were bogged down by issues of election litigations but we nonetheless kept our eye on the ball, because we came in here with a bold agenda predicated mainly on the need to rapidly industrialize this State and engender in our people’s psyche a new attitude, a new mind-set predicated on the dakkada philosophy and nothing, I mean nothing was going to derail us from pursuing that path of sustainable development,” he added. Giving insight to his sectoral achievements, the governor said, “Our public education system is one of the best in the nation. We have improved the free and compulsory education by insisting on recruiting over 3,000 quality teachers to teach our children, we have provided modern tools and a conducive environment for our children to learn, preparing their future and getting them ready to compete fairly with their counterparts all over the world. This has been an abiding article of faith that I am dedicated to pursuing. “Health is wealth and this critical positive right is key to our developmental strides. From the remodelling and equipping of the Methodist Hospital, Ituk Mbang, to those of Etinan, Ikono, Emmanuel Hospital, Eket, the General Hospital, Ikot Okoro, the General Hospital in Iquita among others, to the great works my wife, Her Excellency, Mrs. Martha Udom Emanuel has done through FEYReP, we will continue to invest heavily in this sector. “Electricity has improved tremendously across the State because of the huge investments we have made in the power sector; most of our major streets are well illuminated at night. Our investment in agriculture is yielding results. Staple food prices have dropped significantly compared to what was obtained at our advent. We will be flooding the market with our locally produced rice from Ini Local Government, whose mill we had commissioned about two weeks ago. “My fellow Akwaibomites, these are what in the Western world form what is called Kitchen table issues: issues that form part of the positive and negative rights and which directly affect the people, not monuments, not white elephant projects. Any responsible government must provide these critical services and I make bold to say here, that we have done well in providing these drivers of development and in my second term by the grace of God and your support, we will continue to provide these services to you my dear people.” On the Infrastructural development, the governor said, “Our infrastructural drive is moving steadily and assuredly, in spite of what the naysayers may say, the roads we have built are all there for everyone to see, and these roads cut across the entire three senatorial districts. The strategy of the other side is to lie to you that what we have achieved are all lies. In their hurry to lie to you, they forget the fact that Akwa Abasi Ibom people are smart and can see things for themselves. Ibom Deep Sea Port is moving steadily, soon, IBOM AIR, the only State owned, State run and State operated airline in the whole of Africa will be in operations. I think we should all be very proud to be Akwaibomites and shame those who only traffic in lies and have nothing to offer you.” He also said that his government has attracted close to 15 verifiable industries to the State. According to him, “if you go to the Coconut Refinery, you will see a gigantic project that should bring joy and pride to us all as Akwaibomites, yet the other side say it doesn’t exist, which leaves me wondering why a few mischief makers should take delight in lying to cover up their lack of plans to move our people forward? The Flour Mill will soon be commissioned, yet the opposition say it doesn’t exist, do they think you don’t have eyes to see good things that are happening in our State? The Syringes Manufacturing Company occupies a sprawling space and is producing syringes that are being used in hospitals, clinics and other health care facilities, yet the opposition say they don’t exist; do they think we are all so gullible? The Metering Solutions can hardly keep up the demands for meters nationwide, yet the opposition say they do not exist. “Do they think we don’t have eyes to see the good things that are happening in our State? Two weeks ago, we commissioned our Rice Processing Mill in Ini yet the opposition say the mill does not exist, do they think our people are so gullible? The AKEES Mini Industrial Park is helping interpret our vision of encouraging small scale enterprises, yet the opposition say they don’t exist, same with Fertilizer Blending Plant and other industries.” The governor, however, prayed that those fanning the embers of war and violence in the state shall be put to shame. His words “The future of Akwa Abasi Ibom people is very important to be sacrificed at the altar of those who want to return us to the days of slavery and servitude. “A few years ago, we lived in the inglorious world as captured by Thomas Hobbes- a society where life was nasty, brutish and short, you are all living witnesses to those dark years when our people were kidnapped, murdered or brutally killed for holding different political opinions; you are all living witnesses to a sick and inglorious times when old men and women were not spared the horrors of politically motivated killings. “Three and half years as your Governor, no one has been kidnapped for political reasons, no one has been assassinated for holding a different political view point; no one has been harassed for speaking his or her mind. I have been insulted, called all manner of names but I have taken it all in the chin, knowing full well that our people who enjoy the peace and security in this State are with us. Do you, my dear Akwa Ibomites want to go back to the days of horror, of killings and of kidnappings? The same people who brought you those years of horror are back together and they have promised you and the entire world that they will unleash violence upon you in the fashion of Warsaw saw war. “As we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, may their plan to unleash violence on our peace-loving people never come to pass; may the peace and progress we currently enjoy continue to be our portion in Jesus name, and you my dear people say Amen! “We are not arming people and sewing fake army and police uniforms to unleash terror on our innocent children just to win elections, we are here, because we genuinely care about you, your children’s future, the place of our State in the socio-political calculus of our Nation. We are here, because we believe the resources God has so generously endowed our people with, should be used to develop Akwa Ibom State and empower our people to rise further to the faith of their greatness. “My dear Akwaibomites, when they tell you these politically motivated lies, tell them that you have seen what Udom Emmanuel has done in three and half years and that you are satisfied and you will go with the train of peace and security; of development and industrialisation. “Politics will come and politics will go, but Akwa Abasi Ibom State will remain non-negotiable and sacrosanct. May we have a peaceful and violence-free electioneering campaign and elections come 2019 and may the might and the will of the people supersede every other “might” and our people say ‘Amen’.” Read the full article

[toptecharena]

Mato made the assertion in a lead paper he presented at a conference with the theme, “Restructuring and Federalism in Nigeria”, organised by Department of History, Kaduna State University.

Prof Kabiru Mato, Kaduna State Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, said in Kaduna on Monday that only genuine change of attitude to one another would solve Nigeria’s problems not any form of constitutional amendment.

Mato made the assertion in a lead paper he presented at a conference with the theme, “Restructuring and Federalism in Nigeria”, organised by Department of History, Kaduna State University.

Mato, a Professor of Political Science, said that Nigerians must change their attitude to one another, to governance and in their relationships at all times for any positive impact to be made in transforming the country.

“Nigerians must change their attitude towards one another for the good of the nation. No amount of constitutional change would guarantee the needed peace in the country except Nigerians embrace peace and accept one another as equal member of the union.”

According to him, good attitude towards one another is the foundation for the needed nationalism in the journey towards building a strong united nation.

“But due to bad attitude, the country is bedevilled by corruption, religious and ethnic sentiment, and all forms of social ills which open the roof for numerous challenges,”  the professor said.

Mato, however, supported the devolution of power to federating units, stressing that states and local governments deserve to get “more funds, more responsibilities and more power because they are closer to the people.

Gov. Nasir El-Rufai, represented by his Deputy, Barnabas Bala-Bantex, said that Nigeria would thrive as a federation only when more powers are given to states.

El-Rufai argued that the current pressure for reform was because what Nigerians anticipated from the federal structure was unattainable.

He called for the adjustment of the revenue sharing formula to allocate more funds to states and local governments, to fast tract development at grassroots.

Earlier, Head of the History Department of the university, Dr Terhemba Wuam, pointed out that since 1960, various attempts at restructuring the country have not been fully successful.

He recalled that the restructuring had cut across several areas including political, administration, fiscal, economic, education and socio-ethical, and security system of the country.

According to him, the restructuring was often made in response to the vociferous cries of marginalisation by various segment of the country.

“It however appears that these attempt have not succeeded in either resolving all the nation’s challenges or those of any ethic group hence the renewed call for restructuring.

“The conference is therefore, organised for participants to look at the issue and guide Nigerians and those in authority on the best way forward.”

The Vice Chancellor of KASU, Prof. Muhammad Tanko, commended the department for organising the conference “to interrogate the issues that pollute the political landscape.”

Tanko, who was represented by Prof Abdullahi Ashafa, Vice Chancellor Academic, pointed out that partisan and interest groups are using the issues of restructuring and true federalism to create unnecessary tension as 2019 general election approaches.

He said that the coming together of academicians as patriotic segment of non-partisan experts to discuss the issues would provide a fruitful direction for the country.

According to him, restructuring and devolution of power “would certainly not provide all answers to our national development challenges.

“What we need is to restructure our mindset to reflect being true Nigerians in line with President Muhammadu Buhari’s call that change must begin with us.

“I am in support of the idea of restricting, but only if it would make the federating units self-sustaining to be able to develop critical infrastructure and amenities.

“If the federating units can undertake development projects with minimal or no interference from the federal government.” 

Go to Source Author: Pulse News Agency Local by NAN Restructuring: Constitutional amendments will not solve Nigeria’s problems – Prof. Mato made the assertion in a lead paper he presented at a conference with the theme, “Restructuring and Federalism in Nigeria”, organised by Department of History, Kaduna State University.

[apsbicepstraining]

He’ll be back: why old age can’t impede Arnold Schwarzenegger down

The man they call the Austrian Oak has swung a sword, a shotgun and a governors pen. But as he revolves 70, is time eventually catching up with Arnie?

All his life, Arnold Schwarzenegger has incarnated preeminence. Mr Olympia, Conan the Barbarian, the Terminator, the Governator on screen or on a rostrum he was the most difficult, the most prominent, the mightiest. Whether swinging a sword, a shotgun or a governors pen, as a film attribute or himself, he gloated in success in victory.

Crush your opponents, construe them driven before you and discover the lamentation of the women. Ill be back. If they dont have the intestines, I call them girlie mortals. He was, and seemingly ever would be, the Austrian Oak.

A preternatural stage of trust, focus and ambition propelled him from the forest village of Thal to prevail in bodybuilding, Hollywood and US politics. The accent and a call once deemed unpronounceable did nothing to slow him. Even the puns, such as Clive James equating him to a brown condom full of walnuts, merely bolstered the mystique.

But as Schwarzenegger approaches his 70 th birthday on Sunday he meets a relentless, insidious rival not even he can subjugate: time. Schwarzenegger, after all, is human. And the clock, unlike alien predators and competitive cyborg from the future, cannot be stopped. As it ticks, his ascendancy ebbs.

He precisely wants to be number 1, in whatever context. He would do anything to sustain it. But the ageing process … its never hospitality, said Barbara Outland Baker, a former lover. I repute deep inside him there is some annoyance: What am I supposed to do with this excursion? I only want to be number 1. If not number one, what am I supposed to do?

Schwarzenegger persists famed, favourite and busy manically busy. Early mornings they are able to spot him in Santa Monica, belting up Ocean Avenue on his bicycle, operating through red lights for his cardio. He still pumps cast-iron, behaves, travels and champions political nominees and causes.

He is like a Terminator machine in terms of ceaseless extending, disappearing, starting, striving, endeavor, endeavor, said Bonnie Reiss, world-wide director of an institute that countenances his figure at the University of Southern California.

Striving, but no longer quelling. Schwarzeneggers recent movies have fizzled at the box office. He stumped in vain for John Kasich in last years Republican primaries. Chatter of him moving for Senate or mounting some type of political comeback has faded. The former war hero who passed California is greater number one.

He has invested his remaining political capital in the worthy if arcane issue of redistricing reconstruct – restraining the gerrymandering which bedevils local and country polls and fuels partisanship. He is ginning up fund and scrutiny for a subject which will reach the Supreme court of the united states in October.

Hes a gadfly. He doesnt genuinely have much of a constituency in the Republican party, said Jack Pitney, a politic prof at Claremont McKenna College. California Republican dont talk about him any more. Hes virtually a non-person.

Schwarzenegger used to be political royalty. He married Maria Shriver, John F Kennedys niece, and as an outsized GOP outsider brushed off sexual abuse accusations dubbed gropegate and acquired Californias governorship in 2003.

It was a rocky term. He lampooned Democratic adversaries as girlie husbands, clashed with unions and other potent interest groups and watched the recession erupt a monetary crisis. He deflected meltdown and triumphed re-election by rebooting his government, moving to the political core and grinding out legislative gains. Upon leaving place in 2011 he tainted his gift by commuting the penitentiary convict of the son of a political ally. His divorce from Shriver amid disclosures of an thing and secret son with their housekeeper further dented his reputation.

For all his political attainments he mobilised California in the fight against climate change the loss of executive clout must injure, said Outland Baker. He really likes glory and influence and the movie industry cant provision the same level of real fulfillment, she said. Their relation ended in 1974 but they remained in signature and he opened an interrogation for her 2006 memoir, Arnold and Me: In the Shadow of the Austrian Oak .

Schwarzenegger, who became a US citizen in 1983, dreamed of the White House. But an effort to amend the constitution, the so-called Arnold amendment, failed to lift the ban on foreign-born candidates. A big jolt, said Outland Baker: You want to be the best, the pinnacle, if youre Arnold. If he had been able to move, he would try.

The ascent of another celebrity-turned-GOP politician to the Oval Office, however, has invoked an unexpected character, one with a world spotlight and rapt gathering: needler of Donald Trump.

The two used to be on good terms but Trumps rise triggered a discord. It spews in slug and counter-slug every few weeks. The chairperson branded Schwarzenegger a total cataclysm and pathetic as multitude of Celebrity Apprentice, which he used to host himself. He told a national prayer breakfast throng: I want to only pray for Arnold … for those ratings.

Schwarzenegger has swung backwith gusto. Hey Donald, I have a great sentiment, he said in a video positioned on social media. Why dont we switch activities? You take over Tv because youre such the panel of experts on ratings and I take over your job and then people can finally sleep comfortably again. When Trumps approval ratings sank he gloated: The ratings are in, and you got morass.

Speculation abounds over Trumps motivation for the trolling.

A competition with someone he thinks is worthy of being an opponent, indicated Joel Fox, a taxation policies consultant who collaborated with the Governator. I think he acquires Schwarzenegger warning because he has this deep danger about his manhood, said Pitney, the specialist.

Photograph: Allstar/ ORION PICTURES

Whatever the reason, the Terminator star has become a subtle irritant and agent provocateur to the worlds more powerful gentleman, said Michael Blitz, co-author a 2004 profile titled Why Arnold Concerns: The Rise of a Culture Icon. Arnold may not be able to pump much cast-iron anymore but he remains a continue artist of pumping irony into the bizarre commonwealth of American politics. He is the has-been who still is .

Schwarzenegger is well equipped for battle in this nexus of politics and luminary, said Reiss, of the Schwarzenegger Institute. Trash-talking and heading psyching comes within the framework of the bodybuilding world, she said. The future head honed his taunting sciences against a bodybuilding contender, Lou Ferrigno, the future Incredible Hulk, in the 1977 documentary Spouting Iron.

Trump and Schwarzenegger convert the feud into advertisement, said Outland Baker: They have enough in common that they are likely understand the soul of each other better than the rest of us.

Schwarzenegger had more to income, said Fox, the implementation of policies consultant. If the president wants to engage with Arnold, its advantage Arnold. The former head has used the attention to spotlight climate change issues and an after-school programme, both generates close to his heart.

Trump-trolling aside, Schwarzenegger drives hard to sustain his label against the ruin of time. It conspires to downsize him, literally: his official meridian, 6ft2in, has been feuded over its first year by doubters who claim he is closer to 5ft10in.

He still works out at Golds gym in Venice, trundles around Los Angeles in his( biodiesel) Hummer and travelings widely to promote climate change issues steps, bodybuilding contests and movies.

The bankable sun of war flicks such as Predator, Commando and Total Recall, and comedies such as Twins and Kindergarten Cop is long gone. Recent war jaunts such as The Last Stand, Escape Plan and Sabotage misfired. Swiveling to smaller, quieter films Maggie, Aftermath won over some pundits( Arnie can play !) but gatherings remained away. He plays a hitman in the upcoming slapstick Why Were Killing Gunther.

Schwarzenegger still draws stardust and policy mastery to affairs promoting the environment, bipartisanship, voting reform and youth programs. France lately recognised his climate change issues exertions with the Legion dHonneur.

A packed, honoring life for most people but Arnie? The implication of life, he one said, was not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to reach, to defeat.

The post He’ll be back: why old age can’t impede Arnold Schwarzenegger down appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2xw9yvd via IFTTT

[moracrutchfield-blog]

The Succession Battle In Osun

LET me start by declaring that, no matter the difficulties encountered on Osun State’s journey to greatness, I’m of the tribe of Caleb; a harbinger of good report and nothing seems capable of obliterating this perception buttressed by what is on the ground.

Having said that, let me also confess that I did not originate the title of this article. It is a product of interactions between passengers in a commercial bus, yours sincerely inclusive – on a recent trip from Ijebu-Jesa to Osogbo in Osun State. The discussions went back and forth until the discussants decided to look ahead, post-Rauf Aregbesola’s tenure. By way of illustrating my stand further, may I state that I do not have any clue on the incumbent governor’s preferred aspirant; not even the colour of his fabrics. In any case, it is not my call! I listened with rapt attention as names of both pretenders and genuine aspirants were mentioned one after another. And, finally on this, let it be known that I have come across diehards of the incumbent governor who are prepared to stake their lives for performance as the most important deciding factor. I have also seen some ‘bread-and-butter’ Gentiles and ‘10-for-10 kobo’ hypocrites – quite a few of them – whose joy is in doubling the people’s troubles.

All said, there is a great political battle ahead in Osun State and only the Strength of Israel knows how it will end! Already, posters of different shades and colours have started competing for available space in the state; with the political atmosphere gradually heating up with melancholic provocations; and tempers supposedly flaring with grandiose bellicosity. There are cracks here and there within the parties. These may eventually lead to realignments here and there. Some aggrieved politicians from the ruling party are talking in the same tone with some disgruntled members from the inveterately enervated opposition and its crude appendage of unreconciled dancers and clappers. That the battle ahead, therefore, has the capacity to be fiercely chaotic, even giftedly bitter, is a forgone conclusion!

Also, with the loss of power at the centre by the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in 2015, followed by last year’s demystification of Iroko in neighbouring Ondo State, and, lately, the tragedy of depletion that has struck its national membership base like a plague, it may not be out of place to say that All Progressives Congress, APC, as the only party standing well in Osun State, is not unlikely to repeat the feat of August 9, 2014. Besides, with some great jobs done by the current administration, especially, in areas like infrastructure development, road construction, agriculture revolution, investments in education, and its huge contributions to the political stability and economic growth of the state, coupled with other legacy interventions scattered here and there, the clock is likely to tick in favour of a successor committed to following in the footsteps of the incumbent governor and most invariably endorsed by him.

Well, while political permutations may not translate into outright victory for the ruling party or ‘by any means necessary’ for the opposition, one cannot but wonder when idle and unrewarding sobriquets like ‘Home-based’, ‘Lagos-based’, ‘Osun Abroad’, ‘Pathogens’, ‘Awon Omo Online’ (Yahoo Boys), and ‘Atohunrinwa’ (Hinterland dwellers) criminally crept into Osun State’s political lexicon. Among other premises which paint a rather frightening picture of a society that is lacking in the use of its conscience are zoning (that it is the turn of a certain Senatorial District to produce the next governor); current economic realities (trying to make Osun the Guinea pig of other states); as well as primordial anxieties about the current administration’s capacity to complete ongoing projects before leaving office.

Henry Brooks Adams describes politics as "the systematic organization of hatreds." I have once argued that the Nigerianness of politics in which every negative thing is not only a right but also a command is one that makes one angry, sad and sympathetic. Otherwise, exploiting ‘Place of Residence’ as an obstacle to one’s political aspiration in a state of his birth is tantamount to asking Donald Trump to uphold, even unleash the full force of his travel ban order on Nigerians living in the USA for the pointless excuse of ‘dollar’ flight from America to Nigeria. It is like driving the highly-technical Julius Berger out of the country on the fallacious reason of ‘naira flight’ from Nigeria to Germany. For instance, who is a ‘home-based’ politician and who are ‘Atohunrinwa’? What are the characteristics of ‘Awon Omo Online’ and what does it take to be deregistered from the cult of ‘Osun Abroad’?

At times, Nigerians are too greedy, and, in the exact sense of the word, deficient when confronted with reality. That’s why some people may never want to learn from Lagos State’s story of success. Aregbesola is not an indigene of Lagos State. Yet, he was a two-term Commissioner in the Bola Tinubu-led administration. I am sure the experience he gained from that duty post has helped him in successfully steering the affairs of Osun State away from the paranoiac edifice of plunder, wastage and malady that was once its defining characteristic. Rotimi Agunsoye, also, an indigene of Osun State, once served as Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs in Lagos State. As we speak, he is a member of the House of Representatives, representing Kosofe Federal Constituency of Lagos State. Dele Alake (Ekiti), James Faleke (Kogi), Idowu Ajanaku (Ondo), and Ben Akabueze (Anambra) are other examples of deeds which have continued to speak for Lagos State. So, if our sons and daughters could serve and excel elsewhere, what stops them from giving their best to the state of their birth?

In Dwight Eisenhower’s words, "the history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!" At a time like this, exploiting the global glut as a fig leaf for crucifying the current administration can be likened to a divisive falsity that doesn’t offer an example of faithful commitment to democracy as the best form of government. For example, Saudi Arabia, with not less than 18% of the world’s petroleum reserves and world’s largest exporter of petroleum, has not been spared the aftereffects of the oil price plunge that has for some time bedeviled the crude oil world. Same goes for India which imports not less than 70% of its crude oil requirement.

Essentially therefore, if the ‘gold’ in Saudi Arabia, with about 12.9% of the world’s oil supply to its credit, could rust, then, pity the ‘iron’ in Nigeria, which produces only about 2.7% of the world’s oil supply. By extension, pity a state like Osun which has for a long time depended, largely, on allocations from the centre.

Komolafe writes from Ijebu-Jesa, Osun State.

[readbookywooks]

Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born–the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various “other worlds,” with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception “of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe” (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain’s normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows.

The ability to remember and to “think straight” is little if at all reduced. (Listening to the recordings of my conversation under the influence of the drug, I cannot discover that I was then any stupider than I am at ordinary times.)

Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.

Though the intellect remains unimpaired and though perception is enormously improved, the will suffers a profound change for the worse. The mescalin taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular and finds most of the causes for which, at ordinary times, he was prepared to act and suffer, profoundly uninteresting. He can’t be bothered with them, for the good reason that he has better things to think about.

These better things may be experienced (as I experienced them) “out there,” or “in here,” or in both worlds, the inner and the outer, simultaneously or successively. That they are better seems to be self-evident to all mescalin takers who come to the drug with a sound liver and an untroubled mind.

These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can’t be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. In some cases there may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. In the final stage of egolessness there is an “obscure knowledge” that All is in all–that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to “perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.”

In this context, how significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! For certain animals it is biologically very important to be able to distinguish certain hues. But beyond the limits of their utilitarian spectrum, most creatures are completely color blind. Bees, for example, spend most of their time “deflowering the fresh virgins of the spring”; but, as Von Frisch has shown, they can recognize only a very few colors. Man’s highly developed color sense is a biological luxury–inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. To judge by the adjectives which Homer puts into their mouths, the heroes of the Trojan War hardly excelled the bees in their capacity to distinguish colors. In this respect, at least, mankind’s advance has been prodigious.

Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the socalled secondary characters of things are primary. Unlike Locke, it evidently feels that colors are more important, better worth attending to, than masses, positions and dimensions. Like mescalin takers, many mystics perceive supernaturally brilliant colors, not only with the inward eye, but even in the objective world around them. Similar reports are made by psychics and sensitives. There are certain mediums to whom the mescalin taker’s brief revelation is a matter, during long periods, of daily and hourly experience.

From this long but indispensable excursion into the realm of theory, we may now return to the miraculous facts–four bamboo chair legs in the middle of a room. Like Wordsworth’s daffodils, they brought all manner of wealth–the gift, beyond price, of a new direct insight into the very Nature of Things, together with a more modest treasure of understanding in the field, especially, of the arts.

A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St. Michael and all angels. Four or five hours after the event, when the effects of a cerebral sugar shortage were wearing off, I was taken for a little tour of the city, which included a visit, towards sundown, to what is modestly claimed to be the World’s Biggest Drug Store. At the back of the W.B.D.S., among the toys, the greeting cards and the comics, stood a row, surprisingly enough, of art books. I picked up the first volume that came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was “The Chair”–that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this was only an emblem. Such emblems are sources of true knowledge about the Nature of Things, and this true knowledge may serve to prepare the mind which accepts it for immediate insights on its own account. But that is all. However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

It would be interesting, in this context, to make a study of the works of art available to the great knowers of Suchness. What sort of pictures did Eckhart look at? What sculptures and paintings played a part in the religious experience of St. John of the Cross, of Hakuin, of Hui-neng, of William Law? The questions are beyond my power to answer; but I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art–some refusing to have anything to do with it at all, others being content with what a critical eye would regard as second-rate, or even, tenth-rate, works. (To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

I returned the Van Gogh to its rack and picked up the volume standing next to it. It was a book on Botticelli. I turned the pages. “The Birth of Venus”-never one of my favorites. “Mars and Venus,” that loveliness so passionately denounced by poor Ruskin at the height of his long-drawn sexual tragedy. The marvelously rich and intricate “Calumny of Apelles.” And then a somewhat less familiar and not very good picture, “Judith.” My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim’s hairy head or the vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith’s pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts.

This was something I had seen before-seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers–what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel–how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli’s picture.

Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake—or, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational-the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many colored variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero’s draperies. Torn between fact and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces of rhetoric–the heroism, the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most part in vain. And here are El Greco’s disquietingly visceral skirts and mantles; here are the sharp, twisting, flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his figures: in the first, traditional spirituality breaks down into a nameless physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized sense of the world’s essential strangeness and hostility. Or consider Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get ready for balls and harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble trees, for the Cythera of every lover’s dream; their enormous melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their creator find expression, not in the actions recorded, not in the gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the relief and texture of their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and doublets. Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation–inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand—of tone into tone, of one indeterminate color into another. In life, man proposes, God disposes. In the plastic arts the proposing is done by the subject matter; that which disposes is ultimately the artist’s temperament, proximately (at least in portraiture, history and genre) the carved or painted drapery. Between them, these two may decree that a fete galante shall move to tears, that a crucifixion shall be serene to the point of cheerfulness, that a stigmatization shall be almost intolerably sexy, that the likeness of a prodigy of female brainlessness (I am thinking now of Ingres’ incomparable Mme. Moitessier) shall express the austerest, the most uncompromising intellectuality.

But this is not the whole story. Draperies, as I had now discovered, are much more than devices for the introduction of non-representational forms into naturalistic paintings and sculptures. What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being. More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with “is-ness.” To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say. Is it, perhaps, because the forms of folded drapery are so strange and dramatic that they catch the eye and in this way force the miraculous fact of sheer existence upon the attention? Who knows? What is important is less the reason for the experience than the experience itself. Poring over Judith’s skirts, there in the World’s Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli–and not Botticelli alone, but many others too-had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that morning. They had seen theIstigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the Power of even the highest art to express. But in Judith’s skirt I could clearly see what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old gray flannels. Not much, heaven knows, in comparison with the reality, but enough to delight generation after generation of beholders, enough to make them understand at least a little of the true significance of what, in our pathetic imbecility, we call “mere things” and disregard in favor of television.

“This is how one ought to see,” I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers, or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves, at the legs of my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair. “This is how one ought to see, how things really are.” And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else. Just looking, just being the divine Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel. That would be enough. But in that case what about other people? What about human relations? In the recording of that morning’s conversations I find the question constantly repeated, “What about human relations?” How could one reconcile this timeless bliss of seeing as one ought to see with the temporal duties of doing what one ought to do and feeling as one ought to feel? “One ought to be able,” I said, “to see these trousers as infinitely important and human beings as still more infinitely important.” One ought-but in practice it seemed to be impossible. This participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence, above all for concerns involving persons. For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of the categories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant. Compelled by the investigator to analyze and report on what I was doing (and how I longed to be left alone with Eternity in a flower, Infinity in four chair legs and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!), I realized that I was deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with me in the room, deliberately refraining from being too much aware of them. One was my wife, the other a man I respected and greatly liked; but both belonged to the world from which, for the moment, mescalin had delivered me “e world of selves, of time, of moral judgments and utilitarian considerations, the world (and it was this aspect of human life which I wished, above all else, to forget) of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of overvalued words and idolatrously worshiped notions.

At this stage of the proceedings I was handed a large colored reproduction of the well-known self-portrait by Cezanne–the head and shoulders of a man in a large straw hat, red-cheeked, red-lipped, with rich black whiskers and a dark unfriendly eye. It is a magnificent painting; but it was not as a painting that I now saw it. For the head promptly took on a third dimension and came to life as a small goblin-like man looking out through a window in the page before me. I started to laugh. And when they asked me why, “What pretensions!” I kept repeating. “Who on earth does he think he is?” The question was not addressed to Cezanne in particular, but to the human species at large. Who did they all think they were?

“It’s like Arnold Bennett in the Dolomites,” I said, suddenly remembering a scene, happily immortalized in a snapshot, of A.B., some four or five years before his death, toddling along a wintry road at Cortina d’Ampezzo. Around him lay the virgin snow; in the background was a more than gothic aspiration of red crags. And there was dear, kind, unhappy A.B., consciously overacting the role of his favorite character in fiction, himself, the Card in person. There he went, toddling slowly in the bright Alpine sunshine, his thumbs in the armholes of a yellow waistcoat which bulged, a little lower down, with the graceful curve of a Regency bow window at Brighten–his head thrown back as though to aim some stammered utterance, howitzer-like, at the blue dome of heaven. What he actually said, I have forgotten; but what his whole manner, air and posture fairly shouted was, “I’m as good as those damned mountains.” And in some ways, of course, he was infinitely better; but not, as he knew very well, in the way his favorite character in fiction liked to imagine.

Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction. And the fact, the almost infinitely unlikely fact, of actually being Cezanne makes no difference. For the consummate painter, with his little pipeline to Mind at Large by-passing the brain valve and ego-filter, was also and just as genuinely this whiskered goblin with the unfriendly eye.

For relief I turned back to the folds in my trousers. “This is how one ought to see,” I repeated yet again. And I might have added,’ ‘These are the sort of things one ought to look at.” Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their Suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of god.

“The nearest approach to this,” I said, “would be a Vermeer.”

Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was truly gifted-with the vision that perceives the Dharma-Body as the hedge at the bottom of the garden, with the talent to render as much of that vision as the limitations of human capacity permit, and with the prudence to confine himself in his paintings to the more manageable aspects of reality; for though Vermeer represented human beings, he was always a painter of still life. Cezanne, who told his female sitters to do their best to look like apples, tried to paint portraits in the same spirit. But his pippin-like women are more nearly related to Plato’s Ideas than to the Dharma-Body in the hedge. They are Eternity and Infinity seen, not in sand or flower, but in the abstractions of some very superior brand of geometry. Vermeer never asked his girls to look like apples. On the contrary, he insisted on their being girls to the very limit–but always with the proviso that they refrain from behaving girlishly. They might sit or quietly stand but never giggle, never display self-consciousness, never say their prayers or pine for absent sweethearts, never gossip, never gaze enviously at other women’s babies, never dirt, never love or hate or work. In the act of doing any of these things they would doubtless become more intensely themselves, but would cease, for that very reason, to manifest their divine essential Not-self. In Blake’s phrase, the doors of Vermeer’s perception were only partially cleansed. A single panel had become almost perfectly transparent; the rest of the door was still muddy. The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in living creatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were in repose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless. In these circumstances Vermeer could see Suchness in all its heavenly beauty—could see and, in some small measure, render it-in a subtle and sumptuous still life. Vermeer is undoubtedly the greatest painter of human still lives. But there have been others, for example, Vermeer’s French contemporaries, the Le Nain brothers. They set out, I suppose, to be genre painters; but what they actually produced was a series of human still lives, in which their cleansed perception of the infinite significance of all things is rendered not, as with Vermeer, by subtle enrichment of color and texture, but by a heightened clarity, an obsessive distinctness of form, within an austere, almost monochromatic tonality. In our own day we have had Vuillard, the painter, at his best, of unforgettably splendid pictures of the Dharma-Body manifested in a bourgeois bedroom, of the Absolute blazing away in the midst of some stockbroker’s family in a suburban garden, taking tea.

Ce qui fait que I’ancien bandagiste renie Le compioit dont le faste allechait les passants, C’est son jardin d’Auteuil, ou, veufs de rout encens, Les Zinnias ont I’air d’etre en tole vernie.

For Laurent Tailhade the spectacle was merely obscene. But if the retired rubber goods merchant had sat still enough, Vuillard would have seen in him only the Dharma-Body, would have painted, in the zinnias, the goldfish pool, the villa’s Moorish tower and Chinese lanterns, a corner of Eden before the Fall.

[apsbicepstraining]

He’ll be back: why old age can’t impede Arnold Schwarzenegger down

The man they call the Austrian Oak has swung a sword, a shotgun and a governors pen. But as he revolves 70, is time eventually catching up with Arnie?

All his life, Arnold Schwarzenegger has incarnated preeminence. Mr Olympia, Conan the Barbarian, the Terminator, the Governator on screen or on a rostrum he was the most difficult, the most prominent, the mightiest. Whether swinging a sword, a shotgun or a governors pen, as a film attribute or himself, he gloated in success in victory.

Crush your opponents, construe them driven before you and discover the lamentation of the women. Ill be back. If they dont have the intestines, I call them girlie mortals. He was, and seemingly ever would be, the Austrian Oak.

A preternatural stage of trust, focus and ambition propelled him from the forest village of Thal to prevail in bodybuilding, Hollywood and US politics. The accent and a call once deemed unpronounceable did nothing to slow him. Even the puns, such as Clive James equating him to a brown condom full of walnuts, merely bolstered the mystique.

But as Schwarzenegger approaches his 70 th birthday on Sunday he meets a relentless, insidious rival not even he can subjugate: time. Schwarzenegger, after all, is human. And the clock, unlike alien predators and competitive cyborg from the future, cannot be stopped. As it ticks, his ascendancy ebbs.

He precisely wants to be number 1, in whatever context. He would do anything to sustain it. But the ageing process … its never hospitality, said Barbara Outland Baker, a former lover. I repute deep inside him there is some annoyance: What am I supposed to do with this excursion? I only want to be number 1. If not number one, what am I supposed to do?

Schwarzenegger persists famed, favourite and busy manically busy. Early mornings they are able to spot him in Santa Monica, belting up Ocean Avenue on his bicycle, operating through red lights for his cardio. He still pumps cast-iron, behaves, travels and champions political nominees and causes.

He is like a Terminator machine in terms of ceaseless extending, disappearing, starting, striving, endeavor, endeavor, said Bonnie Reiss, world-wide director of an institute that countenances his figure at the University of Southern California.

Striving, but no longer quelling. Schwarzeneggers recent movies have fizzled at the box office. He stumped in vain for John Kasich in last years Republican primaries. Chatter of him moving for Senate or mounting some type of political comeback has faded. The former war hero who passed California is greater number one.

He has invested his remaining political capital in the worthy if arcane issue of redistricing reconstruct – restraining the gerrymandering which bedevils local and country polls and fuels partisanship. He is ginning up fund and scrutiny for a subject which will reach the Supreme court of the united states in October.

Hes a gadfly. He doesnt genuinely have much of a constituency in the Republican party, said Jack Pitney, a politic prof at Claremont McKenna College. California Republican dont talk about him any more. Hes virtually a non-person.

Schwarzenegger used to be political royalty. He married Maria Shriver, John F Kennedys niece, and as an outsized GOP outsider brushed off sexual abuse accusations dubbed gropegate and acquired Californias governorship in 2003.

It was a rocky term. He lampooned Democratic adversaries as girlie husbands, clashed with unions and other potent interest groups and watched the recession erupt a monetary crisis. He deflected meltdown and triumphed re-election by rebooting his government, moving to the political core and grinding out legislative gains. Upon leaving place in 2011 he tainted his gift by commuting the penitentiary convict of the son of a political ally. His divorce from Shriver amid disclosures of an thing and secret son with their housekeeper further dented his reputation.

For all his political attainments he mobilised California in the fight against climate change the loss of executive clout must injure, said Outland Baker. He really likes glory and influence and the movie industry cant provision the same level of real fulfillment, she said. Their relation ended in 1974 but they remained in signature and he opened an interrogation for her 2006 memoir, Arnold and Me: In the Shadow of the Austrian Oak .

Schwarzenegger, who became a US citizen in 1983, dreamed of the White House. But an effort to amend the constitution, the so-called Arnold amendment, failed to lift the ban on foreign-born candidates. A big jolt, said Outland Baker: You want to be the best, the pinnacle, if youre Arnold. If he had been able to move, he would try.

The ascent of another celebrity-turned-GOP politician to the Oval Office, however, has invoked an unexpected character, one with a world spotlight and rapt gathering: needler of Donald Trump.

The two used to be on good terms but Trumps rise triggered a discord. It spews in slug and counter-slug every few weeks. The chairperson branded Schwarzenegger a total cataclysm and pathetic as multitude of Celebrity Apprentice, which he used to host himself. He told a national prayer breakfast throng: I want to only pray for Arnold … for those ratings.

Schwarzenegger has swung backwith gusto. Hey Donald, I have a great sentiment, he said in a video positioned on social media. Why dont we switch activities? You take over Tv because youre such the panel of experts on ratings and I take over your job and then people can finally sleep comfortably again. When Trumps approval ratings sank he gloated: The ratings are in, and you got morass.

Speculation abounds over Trumps motivation for the trolling.

A competition with someone he thinks is worthy of being an opponent, indicated Joel Fox, a taxation policies consultant who collaborated with the Governator. I think he acquires Schwarzenegger warning because he has this deep danger about his manhood, said Pitney, the specialist.

Photograph: Allstar/ ORION PICTURES

Whatever the reason, the Terminator star has become a subtle irritant and agent provocateur to the worlds more powerful gentleman, said Michael Blitz, co-author a 2004 profile titled Why Arnold Concerns: The Rise of a Culture Icon. Arnold may not be able to pump much cast-iron anymore but he remains a continue artist of pumping irony into the bizarre commonwealth of American politics. He is the has-been who still is .

Schwarzenegger is well equipped for battle in this nexus of politics and luminary, said Reiss, of the Schwarzenegger Institute. Trash-talking and heading psyching comes within the framework of the bodybuilding world, she said. The future head honed his taunting sciences against a bodybuilding contender, Lou Ferrigno, the future Incredible Hulk, in the 1977 documentary Spouting Iron.

Trump and Schwarzenegger convert the feud into advertisement, said Outland Baker: They have enough in common that they are likely understand the soul of each other better than the rest of us.

Schwarzenegger had more to income, said Fox, the implementation of policies consultant. If the president wants to engage with Arnold, its advantage Arnold. The former head has used the attention to spotlight climate change issues and an after-school programme, both generates close to his heart.

Trump-trolling aside, Schwarzenegger drives hard to sustain his label against the ruin of time. It conspires to downsize him, literally: his official meridian, 6ft2in, has been feuded over its first year by doubters who claim he is closer to 5ft10in.

He still works out at Golds gym in Venice, trundles around Los Angeles in his( biodiesel) Hummer and travelings widely to promote climate change issues steps, bodybuilding contests and movies.

The bankable sun of war flicks such as Predator, Commando and Total Recall, and comedies such as Twins and Kindergarten Cop is long gone. Recent war jaunts such as The Last Stand, Escape Plan and Sabotage misfired. Swiveling to smaller, quieter films Maggie, Aftermath won over some pundits( Arnie can play !) but gatherings remained away. He plays a hitman in the upcoming slapstick Why Were Killing Gunther.

Schwarzenegger still draws stardust and policy mastery to affairs promoting the environment, bipartisanship, voting reform and youth programs. France lately recognised his climate change issues exertions with the Legion dHonneur.

A packed, honoring life for most people but Arnie? The implication of life, he one said, was not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to reach, to defeat.

The post He’ll be back: why old age can’t impede Arnold Schwarzenegger down appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2xw9yvd via IFTTT

[apsbicepstraining]

He’ll be back: why old age can’t impede Arnold Schwarzenegger down

The man they call the Austrian Oak has swung a sword, a shotgun and a governors pen. But as he revolves 70, is time eventually catching up with Arnie?

All his life, Arnold Schwarzenegger has incarnated preeminence. Mr Olympia, Conan the Barbarian, the Terminator, the Governator on screen or on a rostrum he was the most difficult, the most prominent, the mightiest. Whether swinging a sword, a shotgun or a governors pen, as a film attribute or himself, he gloated in success in victory.

Crush your opponents, construe them driven before you and discover the lamentation of the women. Ill be back. If they dont have the intestines, I call them girlie mortals. He was, and seemingly ever would be, the Austrian Oak.

A preternatural stage of trust, focus and ambition propelled him from the forest village of Thal to prevail in bodybuilding, Hollywood and US politics. The accent and a call once deemed unpronounceable did nothing to slow him. Even the puns, such as Clive James equating him to a brown condom full of walnuts, merely bolstered the mystique.

But as Schwarzenegger approaches his 70 th birthday on Sunday he meets a relentless, insidious rival not even he can subjugate: time. Schwarzenegger, after all, is human. And the clock, unlike alien predators and competitive cyborg from the future, cannot be stopped. As it ticks, his ascendancy ebbs.

He precisely wants to be number 1, in whatever context. He would do anything to sustain it. But the ageing process … its never hospitality, said Barbara Outland Baker, a former lover. I repute deep inside him there is some annoyance: What am I supposed to do with this excursion? I only want to be number 1. If not number one, what am I supposed to do?

Schwarzenegger persists famed, favourite and busy manically busy. Early mornings they are able to spot him in Santa Monica, belting up Ocean Avenue on his bicycle, operating through red lights for his cardio. He still pumps cast-iron, behaves, travels and champions political nominees and causes.

He is like a Terminator machine in terms of ceaseless extending, disappearing, starting, striving, endeavor, endeavor, said Bonnie Reiss, world-wide director of an institute that countenances his figure at the University of Southern California.

Striving, but no longer quelling. Schwarzeneggers recent movies have fizzled at the box office. He stumped in vain for John Kasich in last years Republican primaries. Chatter of him moving for Senate or mounting some type of political comeback has faded. The former war hero who passed California is greater number one.

He has invested his remaining political capital in the worthy if arcane issue of redistricing reconstruct – restraining the gerrymandering which bedevils local and country polls and fuels partisanship. He is ginning up fund and scrutiny for a subject which will reach the Supreme court of the united states in October.

Hes a gadfly. He doesnt genuinely have much of a constituency in the Republican party, said Jack Pitney, a politic prof at Claremont McKenna College. California Republican dont talk about him any more. Hes virtually a non-person.

Schwarzenegger used to be political royalty. He married Maria Shriver, John F Kennedys niece, and as an outsized GOP outsider brushed off sexual abuse accusations dubbed gropegate and acquired Californias governorship in 2003.

It was a rocky term. He lampooned Democratic adversaries as girlie husbands, clashed with unions and other potent interest groups and watched the recession erupt a monetary crisis. He deflected meltdown and triumphed re-election by rebooting his government, moving to the political core and grinding out legislative gains. Upon leaving place in 2011 he tainted his gift by commuting the penitentiary convict of the son of a political ally. His divorce from Shriver amid disclosures of an thing and secret son with their housekeeper further dented his reputation.

For all his political attainments he mobilised California in the fight against climate change the loss of executive clout must injure, said Outland Baker. He really likes glory and influence and the movie industry cant provision the same level of real fulfillment, she said. Their relation ended in 1974 but they remained in signature and he opened an interrogation for her 2006 memoir, Arnold and Me: In the Shadow of the Austrian Oak .

Schwarzenegger, who became a US citizen in 1983, dreamed of the White House. But an effort to amend the constitution, the so-called Arnold amendment, failed to lift the ban on foreign-born candidates. A big jolt, said Outland Baker: You want to be the best, the pinnacle, if youre Arnold. If he had been able to move, he would try.

The ascent of another celebrity-turned-GOP politician to the Oval Office, however, has invoked an unexpected character, one with a world spotlight and rapt gathering: needler of Donald Trump.

The two used to be on good terms but Trumps rise triggered a discord. It spews in slug and counter-slug every few weeks. The chairperson branded Schwarzenegger a total cataclysm and pathetic as multitude of Celebrity Apprentice, which he used to host himself. He told a national prayer breakfast throng: I want to only pray for Arnold … for those ratings.

Schwarzenegger has swung backwith gusto. Hey Donald, I have a great sentiment, he said in a video positioned on social media. Why dont we switch activities? You take over Tv because youre such the panel of experts on ratings and I take over your job and then people can finally sleep comfortably again. When Trumps approval ratings sank he gloated: The ratings are in, and you got morass.

Speculation abounds over Trumps motivation for the trolling.

A competition with someone he thinks is worthy of being an opponent, indicated Joel Fox, a taxation policies consultant who collaborated with the Governator. I think he acquires Schwarzenegger warning because he has this deep danger about his manhood, said Pitney, the specialist.

Photograph: Allstar/ ORION PICTURES

Whatever the reason, the Terminator star has become a subtle irritant and agent provocateur to the worlds more powerful gentleman, said Michael Blitz, co-author a 2004 profile titled Why Arnold Concerns: The Rise of a Culture Icon. Arnold may not be able to pump much cast-iron anymore but he remains a continue artist of pumping irony into the bizarre commonwealth of American politics. He is the has-been who still is .

Schwarzenegger is well equipped for battle in this nexus of politics and luminary, said Reiss, of the Schwarzenegger Institute. Trash-talking and heading psyching comes within the framework of the bodybuilding world, she said. The future head honed his taunting sciences against a bodybuilding contender, Lou Ferrigno, the future Incredible Hulk, in the 1977 documentary Spouting Iron.

Trump and Schwarzenegger convert the feud into advertisement, said Outland Baker: They have enough in common that they are likely understand the soul of each other better than the rest of us.

Schwarzenegger had more to income, said Fox, the implementation of policies consultant. If the president wants to engage with Arnold, its advantage Arnold. The former head has used the attention to spotlight climate change issues and an after-school programme, both generates close to his heart.

Trump-trolling aside, Schwarzenegger drives hard to sustain his label against the ruin of time. It conspires to downsize him, literally: his official meridian, 6ft2in, has been feuded over its first year by doubters who claim he is closer to 5ft10in.

He still works out at Golds gym in Venice, trundles around Los Angeles in his( biodiesel) Hummer and travelings widely to promote climate change issues steps, bodybuilding contests and movies.

The bankable sun of war flicks such as Predator, Commando and Total Recall, and comedies such as Twins and Kindergarten Cop is long gone. Recent war jaunts such as The Last Stand, Escape Plan and Sabotage misfired. Swiveling to smaller, quieter films Maggie, Aftermath won over some pundits( Arnie can play !) but gatherings remained away. He plays a hitman in the upcoming slapstick Why Were Killing Gunther.

Schwarzenegger still draws stardust and policy mastery to affairs promoting the environment, bipartisanship, voting reform and youth programs. France lately recognised his climate change issues exertions with the Legion dHonneur.

A packed, honoring life for most people but Arnie? The implication of life, he one said, was not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to reach, to defeat.

The post He’ll be back: why old age can’t impede Arnold Schwarzenegger down appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2xw9yvd via IFTTT