#i never changed it using those mass editors or whatever out of fear it would delete//suspend my blog but i heard this yeeeears ago

[shuicheese]

okay but if i tried to change one of my tags to something else using some mass tag replacer will that destroy my blog or was that solved years ago-

[things2mustdo]

I doubt anyone needs to be reminded that the media is rotten to the core; even the most reluctant and closed-minded people are accepting this as a given now. But despite the media being widely condemned nowadays (my special thanks to Germans for bringing the word “Lügenpresse” back), few people know or understand what’s really going on in the journalistic kitchens, where the foul slop of lies that people are fed every day is cooked up. However, there is always a way in—through purposeful infiltration or, in my case, by accident.

I have an old friend—let’s call him Sven—whom I always knew as a kind-hearted and sincere man. However, these traits are also coupled with always assuming the best of people and being rather naive. Due to this, he keeps ending up in awkward and sometimes dangerous situations. One of them turned out to be a short stint as a journalist for a popular online newspaper. He barely maintained contact during his employment and eventually went completely off the grid. In about a month, he resurfaced a changed man, and not for the better. As he explained, he quit the job and then shut himself in for a while, armed with nothing but alcohol, to cope with the depression working as a journalist gave him.

Now, this probably sounds very soft to many of you, including myself. Men don’t sink into depressions or try to drink themselves out of problems. While I granted my friend the clemency of explaining his failures to him, I also recognized the usefulness of his experience and started questioning him about what he saw and heard at the job. I will relay his findings below; however, I will not disclose his true name or the name of his employer—given the “free” country we live in, this can land him in very hot water.

Whoever pays you, owns you

Sven joined the ranks of journalists to tell people the truth. To his credit, he believed he would be doing exactly that. His first assignment sounded so simple, after all—talk to a person, record the conversation, write an article, publish it. The reality turned out to be diametrically different—after our fresh-baked journalist returned from his first interview, he was immediately ordered to transcribe the recording and email it to the content manager. Half an hour later Sven received a heavily edited version of the transcript, with the parts he considered most crucial replaced with meaningless buzzwords or removed completely. When he went to the manager to voice his indignation, the manager simply replied: “This man did not pay us for an article that would disparage him. Get back to your desk.”

This was far from the only case of Sven witnessing how much pull money has in journalism. His numerous colleagues almost never produced independent content—they were too busy publishing one paid article after another. When Sven asked whether these articles should be marked as sponsored, the only reply he got was a bitter laugh. Very often the content manager would come over to his desk and say something along the lines of “Do you know the guy you are writing about is a close friend of our boss? Do not screw this article up.” Sven was also surprised to see that many interviewees (usually politicians) would not even bother to talk to him, instead referring him to their secretaries or assistants. One of them even went as far as to hand him a pre-written speech, tell him to work with it and walk away.

However, our Sven also happens to possess a burning sense of justice, which has several times led him to ignore the “recommendations” his content manager gave him, deviate from the official story and allow small snippets of truth to make their way into public view. For each of such occurrences he was called to the manager’s room, given a strict admonishment and had his paycheck for the month reduced. Any “unsanctioned” things that he wrote were quickly edited away afterwards—even if the article had already been read by thousands of people. And his was supposed to be a “neutral and objective” media outlet!

Standards? Never heard of ’em.

It was a big shock for Sven when he finally realized that his employers were beings without conscience who whored themselves out to the highest bidder. It was an even bigger shock when he discovered how nonchalantly his colleagues treated their responsibilities. Investigative journalists relied on information they got from Google searches and Twitter posts, editors and sub-editors used rumors and hearsay to write scathing op-eds, website managers just posted any content that caught their fancy as long as they could come up with a flashy enough headline for it to attract people. Fact-checking was almost unheard of, unless someone specifically paid for it.

When it came to choosing topics and writing articles, the guideline for the entire establishment was simple: do not make the people angry. Not the regular people, mind you—those were not even considered human beings, just a faceless mass that one threw articles at and got pageviews and money in return. No, the label “people” was reserved for people who mattered. This included representatives of the powers that be, well-known public figures, moneybags with fingers in the political pie and, of course, personal buddies of the outlet’s owner.

These were to be protected, coddled and praised at all costs, while everyone else was fair game. Needless to say, politics held as much sway in the outlet as money did—whenever something noteworthy happened, “protectors of truth and objectivity” immediately went to work spinning the events in a way desirable for those holding their leashes. Hit pieces against political opponents and undesirables were churned out, smokescreens were cast, facts were omitted, denied and misinterpreted. Sven confessed to me later that the day his outlet covered the parliamentary elections was the first day in his life when he spent the entire evening drinking. Journalistic ethics, a term that the media loves throwing left and right, turned out to be nothing but hot air.

In the media omelet, you are an egg

The title says it all. For top dogs in the media business, a rank-and-file worker is not just a pawn—he is a condom. Contrary to what many people think, a typical journalist’s existence is quite pathetic: underpaid, undervalued, thankless and constantly bossed around. Staff turnover in the “kitchen” is very high, and not because people are getting promoted. In this field, the term “veteran employee” frequently means a poor sod who has no alternatives and cannot quit.

According to Sven, plenty of his colleagues worked only for the sake of getting their paycheck, which explains their negligence. Grey faces, pinched mouths, shifty eyes and sour attitudes—whatever it takes to get through the day. In addition, the higher-ups avoided any responsibility for the published content: whenever an angry reader called the office and complained about an article, the guy who wrote it was immediately thrown under the bus, even if his work was reviewed and approved by the management before publication. After all, what does it take to find another office drone with half-decent writing skills?

However, Sven also describes those of his coworkers who enjoyed their job. They arrived at the office with a spring in their step, a smile snaking across their faces and a mischievous glint in their eyes. These were the “talented” favorites of the outlet’s boss—unfeeling, cold assholes who would sell their own mothers for a juicy piece of gossip that they would later smear all over the website. Whenever they got a chance to write a hit piece, spread a nasty rumor or ruin someone’s life, one could almost see them light up from within. Remember all these smug, holier-than-thou, oh-so-intellectual articles churned out by rags like Salon, Dagens Nyheter and Huffington Post? You can bet your pinky finger they were (and are) written by these people. Which brings us to the next topic.

No wrongthink allowed

As you have probably noticed long ago, the media field is a huge and accommodating Petri dish for all varieties of Kulturbolschewismus. In Sven’s case, it wasn’t just a fear-based company policy of snitching and self-censorship, but an actual agenda at work. He told me there was a flowchart hanging in the newsroom explaining what to do when reporting crimes and incidents. It went something like this: “Was the perpetrator native (white)? Y = report in detail, amplify, N = gloss the details over, downplay.”

Sven wrote an article about a national holiday once, but his content manager refused to approve it for publishing due to it being “too patriotic,” advising him instead to “write more inclusively about minorities’ participation in the festival.” Anything praising the country and its indigenous inhabitants was undesirable and omitted whenever possible, while any piece that brimmed with self-hate, praised inhabitants of other (read: African and Muslim) countries or attacked the natives and their way of life was a big hit and flew through approval like a bird.

Needless to say, the outlet’s newsroom was crammed full of women, their pet cucks and, of course, Jews. The former enjoyed absolute power regardless of their position—a simple complaint to HR was enough to fire anyone, no proof required. The cucks, represented by twig-armed, piercing-laden, wispy-bearded creatures in Che Guevara shirts, were very pleased with the way things were going, sipping lattes and snitching to HR on those who expressed ideas incompatible with the narrative. Jews were in their native element in the newsroom, doing their usual “arrogant intellectual” schtick and getting promotions out of nowhere. The majority of articles bashing natives, their culture and values came from them, as later study of the newspaper’s website showed me.

Liars for hire

So, to sum it all up: the media is not composed of good but misguided people, as many still think. On the contrary, it is a very purposeful and self-aware entity that positions itself somewhere between an unscrupulous opportunist and a loyal lapdog of the state. At best, it is faux-patriotic (“such a wonderful country we have, let’s invite more immigrants!”), while at worst, it is openly hostile towards the indigenous population of the country it exists in.

Moreover, it allows for consolidation and self-affirmation of globalist forces—the traitorous governments, the world Jewry, the multinationals, the entertainment industry and the like—against the increasingly disenfranchised and declining native population. And last but not least, the media is complicit in crimes committed in the West by non-White immigrants due to purposeful obfuscation of them and, if that fails, rabble-rousing to pressure the courts into letting the criminals off scot-free. To me, the latter reason alone is enough to send all the journalists and their owners to the gibbet.

The bottom line is to always remember that the media is not your friend in any way, shape or form, even if its lowest tier operatives fit the description of hapless victims rather than nation-wrecking enemies. The media must be opposed, exposed and boycotted at every turn until it starts bleeding money and choking on its own venom.

Read More: Is Washington Post Writer Adam Taylor A Shill Or Part Of Something Larger?

While reading  Roosh’s article about Adam Taylor and the Washington Post, I noticed quite a few things I would like to share with people here. The direct link between Adam Taylor and the Radio Free excerpt is an anomaly. Such blatant copying is a very rare thing to occur because it gives away a possible collusion between entities.

Looking for these open relationships is long and hard. The better way to analyze  the relations and motivations of certain publishers, policy makers and other manipulators  is to study the various themes they put out and where these themes repeat. While Roosh  might assume that Adam Taylor is the paid shill by himself, I’ve noticed that his writing changes to whoever publishes it. Therefore the Washington Post Worldviews section may be the one that is parroting US State Department themes not just Adam Taylor.

As is shown in Roosh’s article, the similarities between Adam Taylor’s piece and Radio Free Europe are quite telling. It is a possibility that it is a coincidence but a small one. People that try to influence public opinion go to great lengths to ensure things like this do not happen which is why I’m assuming that Adam Taylor is  part of larger machine and not a shill by himself.

Looking back at Adam Taylor’s writing for the Huffington Post, he wrote fluff pieces about gay dogs and other mass consumption items for that audience. His writing about geopolitical intrigue only takes the current form when he begins writing for the Washington Post. All his articles are the Who’s Who of what the US State Department doesn’t like. The roster includes Russia, China, Venezuela, Syria, and Zimbabwe. He writes nothing critical of any American allies.

Could this mean that his change in format indicate that someone turned him? I doubt it. Compare his work at the Washington Post to the rest of the “world views” section there, his writing is merely a contribution to a giant echo chamber and not unique to him.

As I said earlier, it’s very rare for open evidence of collusion such as the similar quotations to present themselves. A better technique to discern propaganda and collusion is to analyze trends and themes.You should look for such things as what the work attempts to convey, does it try to get you to think or act in a certain way, and does it try to get you to disregard other things.

In the Adam Taylor case, the pattern changes significantly from the Huffington Post to the Washington Post. You can also apply this trend analysis to pretty much any author. You can even apply to the contributors here at  Return of Kings and see what you get. Do the trends indicate that the publisher may dictate what the writers write about? Do the trends indicate whether or not the writers have freedom to write about whatever they want? To help you readers out on this exercise I’ll inform you there were two articles I did at the direction of the publisher. They were my article for fat shaming week and my article for #backtothekitchen. ��Feel free to comment on any other trends you might notice and if they do not line up with the “about” page.

[annakie]

An Annotated Mass Effect Playthrough, Part Eight

List of Posts: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

I accidentally messed up the numbering on part Seven’s link to post six, so if you missed post six (or yesterday’s part seven), the numbering up there is correct.

Wherein we get back out into the galaxy, explore, help some people, and kill some others!

So now that we have Liara, it’s time to really dig into the galaxy.  We have a few people we talked to on the CItadel who need help, and maybe we’ll stumble into a few more things along the way.

First of all, let’s check out the galaxy map...

Hey wait a sec, what’s this?

Petra Nebula!?  Oh hey, another new addition by the ME1 Recalibrated mod.

Gorgeous map, only one system available.

Heeeey we recognize this place, we’ll get to go there in.... two games!

Can’t land there (or anywhere in the system) but it’s cool that it exists! There are a couple of other neat little things in the system I didn’t screenshot so that you can have a cool new experience yourself if you decide to use the mod on your next playthrough.

What I really miss from ME3, by the way, is the % markers which note when you’ve fully explored a system or if there’s more stuff to find there.

Anyway, my PLAN had been to take a screenshot of each planet or spacecraft before I entered it to help orient the playthrough better, and then the non-screenshotting couple of hours happened, so we lost some of that along the way, sorry.  

Still, let’s see what kind of trouble we can get ourselves into.

I love this planet.  The lava juuuuust below the surface, peeking out.  Just some of the coolest terrain in the game.

What a great view, let’s get a little clo--

OOPS.

I meant to do that.

Wide open spaces with no fears of a thresher maw living in the lava! ...I hope?

Ah, here’s our objective, a distress signal being sent from this location, let’s see if we can help...

FUCKING GETH AMBUSH.

Aw yeah, jumping over those explosives like a pro!

...most of the time.

Well this planet was a bust.  Let’s see if we can actually help someone.

Another planet, scanned a few things, not sure what we’re doing here but hey, I found a lone building!

Ah yes, a prefab which is totally different from all the prefabs we’ll enter because the creates are stacked in a different configuration.

Honestly they should have put one of these prefabs in ME3 for Old Times Sake. (The ones that actually look like homes/labs/whatever make so much more sense.)

Annnd we’re being attacked.  Not sure why, but here we go!

Awww yeah, Throw!  And Ash and Kaidan managing to be useful I think?

Except they let a guy slip by us, but luckily there’s a convenient explosive nearby.  That got ‘em.

OK back to facing forward OH FUCK A KROGAN.

Kaidan’s biotics and my shotgun, a favorite combination.  Now stay down!

Sweet, level up!

And that fight’s over, time to explore this pla...

Whew, thanks Kaidan.

This guy thought he could sneak past me.  Well me, my shotgun and my 20 shield strength sure showed him.

ME1 combat is so... messy though.  I mean, I honestly still enjoy it, but I’m in the camp that agrees combat gets better every game, Andromeda included.  Of course, I just REALLY LOVE Vanguarding in ME3... charging into a group of enemies, hitting Nova, spamming charge again praying that I’ll find a good target to charge to in time.  ME1 combat is basically all just... spam abilities from cover and hope your companions are doing something useful.  Being a Vanguard is more about style over substance in ME here.  I mean you do get some really useful abilities, but your shotgun isn’t that much use unless things get too close.

Which, you know, they do pretty often.

Anyway, remember... I WILL DESTROY YOU!!!

FUCK I hadn’t been back to the Citadel to pick up Nassana Dantius’ quest yet.  Let’s just reload the quicksave from outside and we’ll... come back and do this the right way later and see the entire quest.

I do this more often than I care to admit.

Also no screenshot for this but... I also found Wrex’s personal quest planet and recognized it only when I saw the building, since it’s in a pretty memorable location.  Still, grabbed everything else off the planet so it’ll be quick when it’s time to go back and do that quest.

Well let’s go back to poking around the galaxy.

Message coming in.  Patching it through.

Ah, yeah, hey Hackett.  What’s that?  You’ve got some dirty work you need me to do for you?  Cool, be right there.

Before the ME2 DLC Arrival came out, Hackett was one of Mass Effect’s biggest mysteries.  Who is this guy?  Why is he telling us to do things?  Does he have some secret agenda?  Why is he so sketchy?  Our Shepards seemed to trust him but WOW he sure did send us on some touchy missions.  Speculation was all over the place on what he looked like and what he was really doing.

Turns out, he’s just a pretty cool guy who wants you to take on all the secret spy missions the Alliance doesn’t want to take credit for.

I wish I’d saved it, but just a week or two ago I saw a pretty great post circulating about Hackett.  He IS the guy that’s going to make sure a job gets done, even if he’s not going to do it himself.  He’s the back-room Admiral with the squeaky clean image up front.  He’s the Gus Fring of the Alliance.

Also getting Lance Riddick to voice him was great.  Just a real authoritative, steady guy who you actually want to trust.  

And it turns out he looks basically exactly like most people thought, but maybe with a few more scars. (I mean, he really looks a lot like Lance Riddick, tbh)  But we don’t know that yet.  For now, let the mystery be.

Time to actually go help someone.

Ah yeah, Chairman Burns, we do negotiate with terrorists, in this case.  But they needed negotiating with.

Maxing out the Paragon-meter is worth it for moments like this.  These guys have probably suffered and it’s no surprise that no one has really listened.  Sounds like a lot about the galaxy hasn’t changed since we got out there.

This is also an excellent moment for Kaidan.

Being able to let Kaidan reason with them is fantastic.  Although he probably ultimately doesn’t make a difference mechanics wise, it’d be nice if maybe the check is easier if he’s here.  I don’t know.  But Kaidan knows, even if he’s one of the “lucky” ones who “only” gets migraines.  

One of the grossest posts I’ve seen about Kaidan are people who argue she shouldn’t be on the team because of his implants and since he has a “disability”.  Or that it’s “kinder” to sacrifice him on Virmire.  That’s some real gross ablism you’ve got there.  

Anyway, I love being able to keep this situation under control. Burns actually comes through if you do, even if those guys probably go to prison for awhile for terrorism.  Better than being dead.

Time for... another planet!

Again, didn’t take a screencap of this one but... there’s a missing survey team? I must have picked this quest up in the elevators, because normally you get it on Noveria.  Anyway,  Let’s go find them on Trebin, I’m sure they just can’t broadcast anymore or something.  It’s cool

FUCK. SHIT SHIT SHIT.  FUCK!!!

I probably could have actually used Warp or Throw or even Barrier there but... too late now!  We lived!

I was all ready to blame this on Cerberus, but creepily, there’s no explanation for who huskified them or why.   I’m still going to blame Cerberus, seems like something they’d do.

Well, time to move on.

Honestly, I can’t believe anyone who says ME1 isn’t beautiful.

And driving the Mako is FUN in places like this!

Oh there’s a camp up ahead, we’re here to find the remaining crew of a crashed ship for our new friend in the Citadel Tower.  

Again, no footage/screenshot but eventually you find where the mercenaries tracked down Willem (the brother) and killed them.  Shit.  We were too late.  I actually tear up sometimes telling Garoth that his brother died.  They held out for awhile, too, but we were too late.

It would have been nice if, say, if the very first thing we did after leaving the Citadel was to come here, we could have saved him, but I guess this quest is another way of Bioware telling us that sometimes, there’s just nothing you can do to change things.

One more quest this update, then we’re stopping back off at the Citadel next.

Presrop, one of the most well-known of the sidequest planets. (OKok, technically it’s a moon.)

One of my favorite landing sequences, just because the stars make it so... dramatic.

I mean DAMN.

Klendagon's most striking feature is, of course, the Great Rift valley that stretches across the southern hemisphere. What is most fascinating about the Rift is that it does not appear to be natural. The geological record suggests it is the result of a "glancing blow" by a mass accelerator round of unimaginable destructive power. This occurred some thirty-seven million years ago.

It took a solid three minutes of Flycam flying to get that closeup shot, btw.  I actually flew all the way in the first time I came here, and didn’t take screenshots.  Took about six minutes.  The updated texture is impressive.

Well, Hackett sent us here, let’s deal with Major Kyle.

Being nice and non-threatening gets you into places.

I’ll admit, before I came in here, I decided to cheat in enough paragon points to max out Paragon already.  For me personally, I’m trying to make sure this is an “ultimate” playthrough, a save file I can just use over and over from here on out.  I want everything to import into ME3 the first time around with all the plot flags set how I want them without messing with Gibbed’s Savegame Editor, so making sure I can convince everyone how I want them to is important.  So hey, Major Kyle, stand down.

I don’t think I’ve ever played as a Ruthless Shepard in ME1, or if I have, it’s been so long I’ve forgotten how it goes.  But he was the commanding officer at the battle of Torfan, and your CO if you’re Ruthless.  He’s also a reminder of how serious PTSD can be, and what it can do to a person.  

I also love this tidbit from the Wiki, which I didn’t know since I’d never done these particular choices before:

(In Mass Effect 2)  If Martin Burns was not saved in 2183, a news report on the Citadel will announce that Kyle is trying to form an all-biotic community as the reparations were not given to L2 biotics and they have become even more alienated from galactic society.

I really liked that if you reason with him, he doesn’t give you any trouble and turns himself in like he says.

Hey, this negotiation thing is easy when you’re the best person in the galaxy at it!!

[elizabethrobertajones]

(part 1) this is random but something im curious about is do you think the next few years will see a radical shift in more lead lgbt couples in shows? i feel like when supernatural started it was all about subtext/queerbating between characters we would never see canon (maybe), the last few years have seen an update in more side lgbt characters/couples and while not a lot, more main lgbt characters then we had before. I don't know if tumblr/twitter fandom translates to general audience...

Yeah, I mean, the only way is up. I feel lucky that I managed to encounter a fair amount of queer content in my formative years, whether targeted programming on TV, or taking the route of not really differentiating the perceived cultural value of independent media like webcomics and webnovels etc from the mass media as I was young enough to naturally grow up on the internet as the internet itself was growing up and web 2.0 was pretty much taking off alongside my use of the internet. And that I had liberal parents who didn’t regulate our internet, and lived in a community where culturally I didn’t really fear being discovered casually accessing all this like in particularly this terrifying seeming evangelical christian community in America.

Which really makes me feel like A: everyone should feel that comfortable in themselves via the media as I did as a mass accessible thing or B: that the world at large should be soaked in as much representation and more that I encountered as a curious teen because at the very least it did me no harm and at best helped handhold me through an awful lot. 

And then brings us to the problem that the world isn’t actually like that and for a lot of people their media is restricted one way or another, from everything such as the era of social media weirdly making us much LESS broadly travelled on the internet as I was back in the day (SO many bookmarks - I had like 100 that I would check either daily or on their weekly update schedule, with enough habit that I had pretty much memorised it all without using an RSS feed or just following everyone’s twitter and waiting for update announcements, never mind the vast pit of things which I occasionally checked to see if their sporadic but very worth it updates had occurred somewhere in the last month/year) to the vastly overwhelming amount of media accessible to us. It seems almost to flood the market and creates this panic about watching the worthiest shows and campaigning for them and raising awareness and the FOMO and how things slip by and zomg you have to watch this that and the other, when even just making this list on Netflix now contains more hours of TV than a human lifetime and also one liable to disappear from the service at some point or another without warning. 

And then on top of that you have the absolute cultural monoliths that if you’re not going to have a cohesive culture - which now includes the entire population of the world because of our connectivity on the internet and mass-joining of services - based around smaller shows and stuff, then at the very least everyone is going to watch anything under the main Disney umbrella, other superhero flicks, animated things, and all the really big studio franchises and remakes, as well as a few TV monoliths which manage to get enough people talking to make it seem like “everyone” (again - these days it seems like that’s presumed to be the entire western world plus everywhere else these things air) are watching, like Game of Thrones or whatever… THESE properties are the inescapable ones and on that basis they’re the things we have to lean on the most for representation and then again barely get any, when it comes to gender and sexuality, due to them shooting for such worldwide markets that they can’t imply gay people exist to censors in places such as China. And it exposes the cultural awfulness inherent just in getting a white female character in the lead role of some things, or the absolute garbage fire lurking underneath that if you dare have a black stormtrooper or make one of your female ghostbusters black when you’re already ruining the childhoods of so many how dare… 

In those respects, having side characters who aren’t even major well-known superheroes or jedis or ghostbusters or whatever also be gay (because even well-known lesbian Kate McKinnon didn’t manage to get her ghostbuster to be canonically gay even if we All Knew) would be absolutely groundbreaking, even if it was, like, a role that could be snipped out for the Chinese market or something. And that’s probably exactly what would happen, and cue ensuing riot from whichever fandom, along with everyone rightly pointing out that even for us who got to watch it it was still a tiny side character… I mean Disney is still at the stage of what they did with Beauty and the Beast’s ~canonical gay character~ 

So yeah… that’s thrown back to TV and smaller movies to lead the way and because the generations showing most likely the real global percentages but actually just the young western world stats on queerness in any form (like… 25% instead of 1% or whatever and that’s STILL probably too low) are still teens to young adults. The previous gayest generation above them are still just arriving in power and settling in, and the excellent changes we already have from the generation before that is what we are seeing now... But given THEIR cultural context, even their best can still seem to younger eyes, moderate and not generally placing queer characters in lead roles except in niche or indie or otherwise “acceptable” places to take those risks. I think change is always coming and culturally each generation being more open and accepting that the last is really making changes and so on, hopefully things WILL change rapidly and what was the common state of affairs in the sort of indie media I consumed as a teen will be the mainstream soon because a lot of those creators 10 years later are kicking off… 

All that said, TV in the mainstream is still controlled by Mark Pedowitz types exercising their power over the Bobos who have their Wayward Sisters pitches with the clearly labelled main character for the main teen demographic being queer. The culture is very much that we’re now pretty open and can happily have queer characters, but the main characters are still largely held separate. A good example is Riverdale, which is on the CW, a newer show with writers such as Britta Lundin, who is young, queer, and wrote a novel blatantly based on being a Destiel shipper and fan interacting with the cast and crew in fandom spaces, and whose first solo episode of Riverdale featured a looooot of the gay stuff (yay). 

But while she’s a story editor and writer for the show and can use it as a platform for writing stories for its audience using a whole range of canonically queer characters, the show still keeps all 4 of its mains at a strict remove from this. Cheryl can come out as a lesbian in the second season after a lil ho yay in the first but no clearly marked storyline about her identity, but even though Betty and Veronica kissed in the first episode it was blatant fan service (for Cheryl in-story, lol) and mostly just set the tone that they are the sort of seemingly straight girls kissing for attention while having strong romantic or physical attraction to guys. In the second season the kiss comes up again in joking that Jughead and Archie are the only ones of the main 4 who haven’t kissed, Archie gets one planted on him by a dude as a “judas kiss” moment of betrayal in season 3 and he and Jug are teased that they were expected to get together because they were close but in the same sort of homophobic undercurrent tones as early Destiel snarking from side characters, seemingly less about their relationship and more to unsettle them with implications… I mean it was a complicated moment but in the long run it didn’t seem entirely pleasant to me, especially given the overall emotional state they were in and later plot etc etc. (My mum is 1000% invested in Riverdale now as a former Archie Comics reader as a kid so this is now my life too as I was in the room when my brother callously exposed her to it, hi :P) 

Anyway that’s just one case study but aside from SPN it’s probably the most mainstream teen demographic thing I watch… Other examples would be things like B99 which had Rosa come out as bi and that’s awesome, and made us all cry a lot, but Jake, the clear main character even in a very strong and well-treated ensemble, has a great deal of bi subtext, there’s no way given Andy Samberg’s apparent habit of ad-libbing MORE progressive jokes that he’d ever be intentionally harming people if that’s how his brain works (you know, like other people quick-fire offensive stuff from their mouth working faster than brain sense of humour :P). But at the same time for all Jake’s quipping about crushes and such and the fact the show clearly knows how to be sensitive to bisexuality with Stephanie Beatriz being a strong advocate, just because Jake’s the main character and adorably married to Amy. In NO WAY can that be threatened because they’re SO GOOD, so there’s STILL uncertainty that this will pay off in the same special episode “I love my wife but I am bi” kinda way that seems obvious that could just be said. We all carry on without it affecting anything because obviously Jake’s found his soulmate so we don’t mess with that but they should know it’s important to clarify it… Even with B99′s track record, I’m nervous solely because Jake’s the main character and main characters tend not to get self-exploratory arcs about latent queerness and ESPECIALLY not if they’re happily married. If ANY show was going to do it right and trailblaze in this exact era it would be them, but… gyah :P 

Anyway I guess the conclusion right now is that the more mainstream you are the more uncertain it feels, but we are right at that cliff edge, especially with shows putting in SOME of the work. If B99 doesn’t get us there (or the Good Place where they’ll happily confirm Eleanor is bi in interviews but I believe she hasn’t said it outright on the show despite clearly showing attraction to female characters, again, the denials we know so well in SPN fandom reflect a wider audience view of dismissing this stuff as jokes and not reflective of character feeling and identification without a Special Episode dedicated to confirming it >.>) then we’re very clearly on the cusp of SOME mainstream or massively well-known show doing it at least once in a meaningful way that has an Ellen-style cultural impact on TV writing. 

Let’s make it a goal for 2019 or 2020, and hope that a NEW show with a canonically queer main from the start is pitched and becomes a mainstream hit in the next 5… Still got a ways to go before Disney level mainstream but again there IS work going pushing the envelope, especially if we get a movie of a franchise such as idk Further Legends of Korra, or Steven Universe or something else that’s massively pushed the envelope with sexuality or gender for their main character on the small screen in the experimental petri dish they’ve had there for children’s TV. Something that would force Disney to blink about a lesbian princess or Star Wars to let Finn and Poe kiss or Marvel to let Steve and Bucky hold hands or something in order to remain relevant.

Once the Big Cultural Monoliths get in on it, I expect culture as a whole to first of all react quickly on the small screen, but honestly I’ve been waiting for them to snap pretty much my whole life since adolescence and they’re taking such wee tiny baby steps, and some factors are enormous geopolitical awfulness, that the story as a whole is unpredictable and we can only really hope that things don’t slow down. 

(Where this affects SPN is just impossible to say right now, given its almost unique position in this mess due to longevity vs fandom vs almost entirely new generation of writers’ room) 

[schadenfreudefreude-blog]

This is what youth and adolescence feels like

There are beautiful, wonderful, tender memories from childhood I could put in this story; my childhood loves and my pleasant life in gentle, loving surroundings filled with light. But I am interested here only in the steps I have taken in my life to arrive at myself. I will leave in the glowing distance all the lovely oases, blessed isles, and paradises whose magic I experienced; I have no desire to set foot in them again.

And so, for as long as I stay with my girlhood years, I will speak of only the things that felt new, that pushed me onward, broke me loose.

Then came the years when I had to recognize once again the primal attraction within me, one that had to cower and hide in the permitted world of light. Like everyone else, I too experienced my slowly awakening sexual feelings as an enemy and a destroyer, as something forbidden, as temptation and sin. The great mystery of puberty, which I was desperately curious to solve and which gave rise to dreams, lust, and fear, did not fit at all in the sheltered bliss of my peaceful childhood world. So I did what everyone does: I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child. My conscious life was lived in the familiar space of what was allowed, and denied the world rising like a new dawn to me. At the same time though, my life was lived in dreams, urges, longings of subterranean kind across which my consciousness built ever more anxious and fearful bridges as the childhood world within me fell apart. Like almost all parents, mine did nothing to help the life forces awakening within me, which were never spoken about when I turned thirteen and I got the first guy who courted me and I ghosted because I'm so afraid and innocent and then while I was one of the cheerleaders of the cheerleading squad, there's this musician volleyball player Senior Captain guy who became my first boyfriend for six months and broke up with me in Yahoo Messenger because we were in a long distance relationship and I'm not fulfilling the girlfriend duties enough or maybe he found someone else in Manila. After that, I only involved myself to feel attraction through having crushes and I never had a boyfriend after that year and in my college years. My mother strictly taught me when I was fourteen to only give it to the man I'll marry in the future; my future husband should be the first one to get it. And until now, I still obeyed it and I'm still choosing to wait for the right time and the right person. My parents only tried, endlessly and untiringly, to help me in my hopeless efforts to deny reality and stay in a child's world that grew more and more false and unreal everyday. I do not know if parents can do anything else, and I am not criticizing mine in particular. It was up to me to finish growing up and find my own way; I did it badly, like most well-raised children.

Everyone passes through these difficulties. For the average person, this is the moment when the demands of his life come into the starkest conflict with his environment, when he has to fight the hardest to make his way farther along his path. Many people experience the death and rebirth that is the destiny of us all only this once, as childhood rots from within and slowly disintegrates, as everything we have grown to love abandons us, and we suddenly feel the solitude and deathly cold of the universe around us. And very many people remain stuck at this hurdle their whole life long, desperately hanging on to the irretrievable past and clinging to the dream of a paradise lost, the worst and most deadly of all dreams.

The sensations and mental images with which the end of childhood proclaimed itself in me are not worth telling here. The important thing was that the dark world, the other world, was back. At the same time, the other world outside me was gaining more and more power over me, too.

When vacation was over before college, I went to Baguio. Both my parents came with me and entrusted me with all possible care to a condominium dormitory. They would have frozen with horror had they known the kind of life they were letting me wander into.

The question was still whether I would, with time, turn into a good daughter and useful citizen, or whether my nature was pushing me onto other paths. My last attempt to be happy under the shadow of the parental house and its spirit had lasted a long time, for a while it had almost succeeded, but now it had finally and completely failed.

The strangest emptiness and isolation I had come to feel for the first time the summer before my sophomore year in college (and oh, how well I got to know it later; this emptiness, this thin air!) did not pass away quickly. I found it oddly easy to leave home, I was a little ashamed of not being sadder, in fact; my mother expressed her worries, but I couldn't. I was amazed at myself. I had always been a sensitive child who expressed her feelings; a good girl, when it came down to it. Now I had completely changed. I acted with total indifference toward the outside world and spent days at a time attending only to myself, listening to the dark, underground currents rushing and roaring inside me. I had shot up very quickly in the past six months and looked miserable, skinny, and immature. Everything girly boyishly lovable about me disappeared; I was well aware that it was impossible to love me as I was, and I did not love myself either. I missed myself who loves writing much of the time and there I was memorizing the periodic table and formulas, solving Physics and Chemistry problems for my pre-med course.

So, when I shifted to Communications from Pharmacy in the next semester, I was neither liked nor respected because I was a new face in the Humanities department. They would say hi to me and asked me if I'm Chinese or Korean. I have no friends at all. No one knows me. Boys teased me and then left me alone, having decided I was a weird, distant, unpleasant sort. I took pleasure in this identity and even exaggerated it, grumbling my way into a solitude that looked like a feminst superiority and contempt on the outside while secretly I suffered constant fits of depression and despair. At school I got by for a while on what I had already studied back home, the class was a bit behind me where we had been because I love writing and journalism when I was in high school because I was the news editor of our school paper in my senior year and I was part of the editorial staff for 4 years in high school, and I got into the habit of viewing the other students my age with a certain contempt, as children. It went on like that for a year. Nothing changed on my first few visits home, and I was always glad to go back to school.

Then it was early November of year 2014. Whatever the weather, I would take little intellectual walks, which often gave me a kind of pleasure that was full of melancholy, scorn for the world, and contempt for myself as well. That was how I felt one evening as I strolled through the city of Baguio in the damp, misty twilight. The wide avenue of public park was completely deserted, and inviting; as I walked down the lane, thickly covered with fallen leaves with a dark, voluptous desire. It smelled wet and bitter; distant trees loomed up eerily out of the mist, tall and shadowy.

I stopped at the end of the road, not knowing what to do next. I stared down at the dark vegetal mass and greedily breathed in the wet smell of death and decay, which something inside me responded to and welcomed. Oh, how insipid the taste of life was!

Someone approached down a side path, his coat billowing in the wind. I wanted to keep walking, but he called my name.

"Hello, Lianne. Huy, Lianne!"

He came up to me. It was Lance, the first guy I seriously liked when we were living in my first condominium dormitory when I was first year in college. He is now a physicist and he studied in UP Baguio. I confessed to him that I like him when I was 16 and we were both cool about it and we are good friends after that. I always enjoyed seeing him and had nothing against him except that he always treated me like a baby.

"And what brings you here?" he called out affably, in the tone that bigger kids liked to take when condescended to talk one of us. "Writing a poem, I bet."

"Never occured to me," I snapped back.

He laughed out loud and walked next to me, chatting. I had completely forgotten what that felt like.

"Don't think I wouldn't understand Lianne. I know how it is, when you're taking a walk like this in the evening mist, with 6PM thoughts, you want to write poems, I know. Poems about dying nature, of course, and the lost youth it's a symbol of."

"I'm not that sentimental. How dare you!" I defended myself.

"Alright, nevermind. Alam mo kapag ganito ang weather it's good to find a nice quiet place with a glass of wine or something along those lines. Sama ka saken? Come with me. I happen to be all alone. Or ayaw mo? Ayaw kita mapariwala if may plano ka maging good model student."

Soon we were sitting in a small pub at the edge of the city, drinking a dubious wine and clinking out our glasses together. I didn't like it very much at first, but still it was something new. Soon though, not used to drinking wine, I started talking my head off. It was as though a window had opened inside me, and the world was shining in; how long, how terribly long it had been since I'd said anything I really felt! I started to give my imagination a free rein, and before I knew it I was telling Lance the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible.

Lance listened with delight. Finally, someone to whom I have something to give! Someone who could make deep talks with me. He clapped me on my shoulder, he called me a deep one fellow and my heart swelled with pleasure: I could finally let myself go, indulge in the need to talk and communicate that had been pent up so long, and feel acknowledged by someone older than me, like I was worth something. When he called me brilliant and smart, what he said sank into my soul like sweet, strong wine. The world shone in new colors, thoughts came to me from a hundred mischievous sources, wit and fire blazed up within me. We talked about our teachers, our schools, our classmates, and it seemed to me we understood each other splendidly. We talked about the Greeks, paganism, and Lance insisted on turning the conversation into confessions of amorous adventures. Here I had nothing to contribute. I had not had any adventures, not worth telling. And what I had felt, built up by my imagination, burned within me but the wine did not free it or enable me to talk about it. Lance knew a lot more about girls than I did, and I listened passionately to his fairy-tale stories. What I learned was unbelievable: things I had never thought possible entered ordinary reality and seemed obvious, normal. These girls in his stories have already acquired quite a store of an experience. Among other things, that girls always want nothing but chivalry and attention, which is fine as far as that goes but not the real thing. You could get farther with women. They were much more reasonable.

I remember the night very clearly. When the two of us started home late, past the dully burning gas lamps in the cool wet night, I was drunk for the first time. It did not feel pleasant. It was excruciating. But still, there was something about it: sweet excitement, rebellion, spirited life. Lance took good care of me, even while gripping about what a total beginner I was, and he brought me home, half carrying me, and managed to smuggle us into the dorm through an open hall elevator.

But after a short dead sleep, I woke up to a headache, sobriety, and terrible sadness. I sat up in bed, still wearing my shirt from the day before, with my other clothes and shoes lying around the floor and stinking of smoke and vomit. Between headache, nausea, and unspeakable thirst, an image rose up in my soul that I had not seen for a long time: I saw my parents' house, my hometown, Father and Mother, my siblings, the garden; I saw my quiet, comfortable bedroom, the school, and the market square, all of it flooded with bright light, radiant, all of it wonderful, godly, and pure, and I now knew everything, had still belonged to me the day before, just a few hours ago, had been waiting for my return, but now, only in this moment, it had sunk forever under the waves, was cursed, was no longer mine. It had thrown me out and now looked upon me with disgust! Everything I had so profoundly loved, everything back to the most distant, golden garden of my childhood that my parents had given me, every bless, every Christmas, every bright, pious Sunday mornings at home, every flower in the garden, it was all laid to waste, I had trampled it under my feet. So that's how I looked in the inside! I, who went around despising the world, proud in spirit. I was a pig, like scum, drunk and filthy, disgusting and low, a wild animal taken unawares and overpowered by hideous urges. I, who had come from the garden where everything was purity and radiance and blessed tenderness, who have loved poetry and Bach music, now looked like that inside. I could still hear my laugh ringing in my ears, drunk and out of control, bursting out in idiotic stops and starts and it filled me with rage and disgust. That was me!

Despite everything, it was almost pleasurable to suffer these torments. I had crept around blind and numb for so long, my heart cowering poor and miserable in the corner, that even this self-hatred, this horror, this whole horrible feeling in my soul was welcome! At least I felt something! The embers still flickered with some kind of fire, a heart still beat in there! I was confused to feel something like liberation and springtime in the middle of all my misery.

Meanwhile, to the other side, things went downhill with me in a hurry. My first binge was soon only a first to many. There are a lot of drinking and running wild went on as I meet more friends who asked me to go out. I once belonged to the dark world. At the same time I felt miserable. I was living in a self-destructive riot. I can still recall how tears came to my eyes once when I left a bar on Sunday afternoon and saw children playing in the street, bright and happy, with freshly combed hair, in their Sunday clothes. And the whole time that I was entertaining and often shocking my friends with my monstrous cynicism at the dirty tables of cramped pubs between puddles of beer, in my heart of hearts I still respected what they were mocking. On the inside I kneeled in tears before my soul, before my past and my parents, before God.

I never felt truly one with my companions. I was still lonely when I was with them, and that's why I suffered so. And I never went along with my buddies to see boys. I was alone and full of burning longing for love. A hopeless longing even while I talked like a hardened libertine. No more was more fragile, more full of shame, than I was. I was anxiously ashamed of the warm, shy moods I so often felt, the tender thoughts of love and care that so often came over me.

I cannot summarize in brief about what I learned from my adolescence stage. The most important thing I learned from it was another step on the path to myself. I'm now young adult. I was an unusual young woman around twenty-two years old, precarious in a hundred ways but very far behind and helpless in hundred ways. When I compared myself to the other people my age, I sometimes felt young and full of curiosity. There were times when people see me gifted and creative. They admire how I write and how I sketch and paint. During college, I was eaten up with worries and self-hatred about how hopelessly isolated I was from other people, how cut off from life. They are all dating but I'm closed.

After college, I lived again at my hometown with my family. This new environment gave me courage and taught me to keep my self-respect. The way people always found something valuable in my words, my dreams, my thoughts and imaginings, always took them seriously and discussed them in earnest, became exemplary for me.

I like music because it's outside morality. I can't keep comparing myself to other people. I sometimes feel like I don't belong, I blame myself for following a different path than most other people. I have to unlearn that and I did. Stare into the fire, look at the clouds, and when ideas and intuitions came to me and the voices of my soul start to speak, I trust them and I don't worry about anything.

[calorieworkouts]

7 Reasons You *Need* to Be Doing Deadlifts

Deadlifts legit altered my workout regimen. I 'd spent years creating my skills as a cardio bunny, yet after enjoying a YouTube video clip concerning how Chris Evans got torn for his function as Captain The U.S.A., I chose to resort to a professional. Until after that, I would certainly tried everything: yoga exercise, pilates, barre-- I 'd also dipped my toe right into lifting weights at my regional gym, however my expertise was a combination of Google searches as well as an university gym class that produced couple of outcomes. The very first workout my trainer included in my workout regimen? Deadlifts.

EDITOR'S PICK

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I 'd never done them before (OK, I would certainly never ever even touched a barbell), and I was hesitant. Surely a single workout couldn't change my workout in a method years of experimentation had failed? But fortunately, I was (dead, heh) wrong. Deadlifts transformed my shape-- whittling my waistline as well as offering my butt a much-needed boost-- while improving my position, raising my overall stamina, and making me really feel like a positive badass.

So why must you be doing deadlifts?

1. Deadlifts function your whole body.

' The deadlift targets numerous muscle teams in a single lift, using even more value than an isolation exercise,' claims Zach Mayer, a master instructor at Burn 60 Studios (studio of choice for Reese Witherspoon, Alessandra Ambrosio, as well as Naomi Watts). 'Including deadlifts 1 or 2 days a week into a weight training session will certainly develop toughness in the hamstrings, glutes, reduced back, and upper back.'

They also depend on core strength to support your body throughout the lift, which means you'll be functioning your abdominal muscles in addition to whatever else. As if you needed a lot more persuading, deadlifts often function your glutes greater than squats do. Inning accordance with Mayer, this implies you could get faster results on your behind compared to relying on squats alone.

Building muscle aids increase your metabolic process too, which subsequently assists you lose more fat long-lasting.

2. Deadlifts construct awesome strength.

One research study revealed that deadlift training created massive enhancements in toughness as well as security-- specifically in ladies that were relatively new to lifting. Since you're making use of muscular tissues on both the front as well as back of your body, deadlifts protect your joints from unnecessary stress as well as future injury, which is an amazing included benefit.

Even if strength isn't really your main objective (or if you hesitate lifting weights will certainly make you cumbersome ... which, no, it will not), this is still a great advantage-- particularly because it makes you seem like a badass.

3. Deadlifts aid enhance your posture.

A strong back can absolutely aid with your pose, but an additional way deadlifts help repair poor stance is by helping correct it. To execute deadlifts effectively, you should ensure your type is right-- and also excellent form during deadlifts often means good posture.

' You can anticipate a visible modification in strolling upright and sitting without rounded shoulders after on a regular basis executing this lift,' Mayer says, which is specifically important for those people that invest a great deal of time stooped in front of a computer system screen.

4. Deadlifts could in fact make you stronger in genuine life.

Instead of dealing with totally aesthetic gains, deadlifts involve motions and also muscle mass regimens that are a big part of our lives. This means deadlifts will make it simpler for you to carry out standard jobs, which straight opposes the assumption that fitness center training doesn't really prepare you for the actual world.

' Deadlifts are very functional,' Mayer states. 'Increasing stamina by deadlifting will prepare you for circumstances like bring grocery stores, grabbing a person who dropped, or aiding a pal on moving day.'

5. Deadlifts help to stop injury.

Some may avoid deadlifts from fear of back injury, yet research studies have revealed that deadlifts could be helpful for decreasing low-back pain in some cases.

' The deadlift calls for complete control of the deep abdominals, the hips, as well as the pelvis, which is paramount in the therapy and also avoidance of reduced neck and back pain,' says Nicholas Licameli, a physical therapist at Expert Physical Therapy.

Because the deadlift trains the posterior chain-- that includes the spinal erectors, lats, rhomboids, glutes, as well as hamstrings-- Licameli says it helps to avoid injury in muscle teams that are usually ignored.

' As a matter of fact, two predictors of tearing the ACL are in fact an inequality of strength in the quads and hamstrings, and gluteal weakness/instability,' Licameli adds. 'The deadlift will have you covered.'

Remember that building toughness requires time, so do not jump right into also heavy weights or made complex lifts prior to you're all set. Make certain to enjoy your posture and method to develop muscular tissue and also ward versus injury.

6. Deadlifts will conserve you priceless, precious time.

Compound workouts like deadlifts function more than one muscle team at once. As opposed to servicing three various machines, you could work the same muscular tissue teams in less time by executing the deadlift-- making it the ultimate time saver.

7. Deadlifts are very easy to include into your workout.

You do not require accessibility to a barbell to make use of deadlifts, however it certainly doesn't harmed. Dumbbells or kettlebells can be utilized to do the exercise, especially variations like the straight leg or Romanian deadlift variation.

' Ask a fitness instructor or instructor for his/her assistance,' Mayer advises. 'Your pal who is an 'serious lifter' might be well-intentioned, but possibilities are they don't know the most effective way to coach a beginner through the deadlift. While educational videos may likewise appear practical, for novice lifters who are establishing body understanding, it is best to function with an experienced specialist.'

Basically, deadlifts are the unicorn of the health and fitness globe. They're a fantastic means to get a whole host of outcomes without investing a great deal of time in the gym, as well as fitness newbies could utilize them. Still not certain? Enjoy this badass granny deadlift 225 extra pounds like an employer. Allow her be your deadlift motivation and enjoy gaining all of the benefits deadlifts need to offer.

Jandra Sutton is a writer, historian, as well as speaker. After finishing from Huntington College with a B.A. in history, she took place to receive a master's level in modern-day British history from the College of East Anglia. In her extra time, Sutton enjoys fangirling, running, as well as anything pertaining to ice cream. Pluto is still a world in her heart. She stays in Nashville with her spouse and also their 2 dogs. You could follow her on Twitter and also Instagram.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW TO BE AN EXPERT IN 13 SENTENCES

I'm going to start a company before 23 is that people like the idea of having a lot of startups would never get started. Addictive things have to be solved in one big brain. Surely at some point. It's because the adults, who are too intimidated to try. An undergrad could build something better as a class project. In outline, it was years after high school before I could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then. I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids had barely begun. Americans do of what goes on in Brazilian slums.

I'm still not entirely sure they're correct.1 He's a former CEO and also a corporate lawyer, so he gave us a lot of what looks like work.2 The problem is not so much the money itself as what comes with it. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like I don't know the answer. But hierarchy there must be. In the long term, because if you stop paying attention to the business as you wanted.3 Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. For the angel to have someone to make the food good.

It might actually carry some weight. Market.4 If moving up the disagreement hierarchy may inspire him to try moving up to counterargument or refutation. Ideally you want between two and four founders. I worried about how small and obscure we were. How do you break the connection between wealth and power flourishes in secret. Ok, so we get slower growth.5 If you're content to develop new technology as fast as startups, the ball is in your court to explain how. Plus if this works it will deprive all the programmers who take pleasure in making multithreaded apps of so much amusing complexity.6

When you're looking for space for a startup location is very important. If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to have a vision of what you built for the previous ones, then you're dead, whatever else you do or don't do. The answer, I think, is that you should put users before advertisers, even though the advertisers are paying and users aren't.7 They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as you're profitable. Rich people don't get better design or craftsmanship here. Actually it's merely tedious.8 The main reason was that we feared a brand-name VC firm would stick us with a newscaster as part of the conversation. The only way to do this well.9

But you can't solve the problem in a different way, but to get the rest you have sit through a movie. We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart.10 Not simply to do well in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids had barely begun. When designing for other people you have to figure out what's going to happen, and it will be a great idea for someone else to execute. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery.11 How do you find them? Mass-market digital cameras are doing it to the car makers that preceded him.12 There are of course examples of startups that change their plan en route.

Notes

I said by definition if the company does well and the cost of writing software. The story of creation in the nature of server-based software will make it easy. If a company tried to unload it on buyer after buyer. That's why there's a continuum here.

University Press, 1996.

The next time you raise them. Obviously, if you want to work not just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's random; but it turns out to be about 50%.

Obviously this is: we currently filter at the moment the time of unprecedented federal power, so we should, because the test for what gets included in shows is basically zero. It's lame that VCs may begin to conserve board seats for shorter periods. The founders we fund used to build their sites. Some genuinely aren't.

It's not a chain-smoking drunk who pours his soul into big, plus they are public and persist indefinitely, comments on e. I was writing this, on the Daddy Model, hard work.

In practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other people who make things: what determines rank in the postwar period also helped preserve the wartime compression of wages—specifically increased demand for unskilled workers, and how good you can do it mostly on your board, consisting of two things: the editor, written in C and Perl. Acquisitions fall into a form you forgot to fill out can be explained by math.

You can just start from scratch today would say we depend on closing a deal led by manipulation or wishful thinking into trying to make up startup ideas, but they seem like a little too narrow than to confuse everyone with a truly feudal economy, at which startups develop new techology is the last batch before a fall. Indeed, it could become a problem if you'll never need to fix once it's big, plus they are public and persist indefinitely, comments on e. Without the prospect of publication, the approval of an extensive biography, and they succeeded. Ii.

It's true in the case, because they could probably starve the trolls of the markets they serve, because the test for what she has done to painting may be that some of the word content and tried for a public company not to. If you want to either.

I should add that none of them is a scarce resource. A Timex will gain or lose about. 1886/87.

I'm not going to call them whitelists because it might be a big deal.

What I'm claiming with the high score thrown out seemed the more corrupt the rulers. Which means it's all the free OSes first-rate technical people do not take the form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly neutral that they're practically different papers. The few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while the more powerful version written in C and C, and that they discovered.

They did try to accept that investors are just not super thoughtful for the talk to feel tired. I've deliberately avoided saying whether the 25 people have told us that the middle class first appeared in northern Italy and the foolish. Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions.

Thanks to Daniel Gackle, Paul Buchheit, students whose questions began it, Robert Morris, Marc Andreessen, and Steve Huffman for reading a previous draft.

[tatooedlaura-blog]

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This is the last one, folks ... hope you enjoy it ... I have had the best following ever for it :) ... the readers are wonderful, the comments are fantastic, the tagging warms my heart and the reblogging is phenomenal ... I love you all more than you know ...

I started this insanity in October for FicFest and it was only going to be two or three stories at most ... finished #47 in November for NaNoWriMo and have been holding myself back from posting the whole damn thing at once for nearly two months ... I need a drink ...

I have another series in the works to follow up my Undercover post and I’ll start those in a few days ...

Right now, my editor/cousin Dave is demanding I do my book edits so off I go ...

______________

The series is as follows :

Mama Scully’s Party …. Morning … Underwears … Maps … Nachos … Foul Ball … Promises … Stay … Phone Calls … Flannel Interruption … Awakening… Friendly Compromises … Scrabble … Apart …  A Long Week … Lightning … Missing You … Interim … Stuff … Waiting … Going … Hands … Unsteady … Fear … Fast … Slow … Regardless … Into the Dark … Light … Surfboards … Curbs … Showers … Borders … Canyons … Soaked … Ice Cream … Never Happened … Deep South … Almost … Blue-Suede Shoes … Unwelcome … Remarkable … Stars … Doorbells … M&Ms … Knees ... Home

___________

He tried to catch her one more time as she changed the next morning but in his zeal to get around the corner quickly, he stumble-hopped into the wall, crashing gracelessly then slid to the floor. Scully appeared in the hall immediately, fearing he’d finally killed himself but instead found him grinning on the ground, rubbing a goose egg on his forehead, “I should probably stop trying to sneak a peek at you.”

She shook her head, then crouched down beside him, “just can’t wait a few more days, can you?”

Unabashedly ogling her breasts, rounded and smooth under the Lucky Charms t-shirt she stole from him five minutes earlier, “Lucky Charms indeed.”

She stood, leaving him prone, “I’m going to take the bags down while you think about what you’ve done, young man.”

He bit his tongue from firing back with ‘and more about what I haven’t done yet’ because he was a gentleman, after all, and sitting with a smile, he gave her a minute or two before he began scooting down the stairs, dragging his ever-present crutches behind.

She had the car packed within the hour and once done, she came back in, grabbing them the two granola bars and the pudding cup with disposable spoon she’d left on the counter, then beckoned him out to the back porch. They both settled on the steps, eating the bars and sharing the pudding. Eventually holding out the last spoonful to her, “I wonder what your mom is making for dinner?”

“Should we tell her we’re coming back today,” he watched her lick the spoon clean, his fingers bobbing under the pressure of her tongue against plastic, “or just drop on by and surprise her?”

He went full-on male for a moment and never heard a word she said, the processing power needed for what he just witnessed demolishing any rational thought capabilities he had. It was only when he saw her lips curve into a radiant smile to rival the sun rising overhead that he woke back up, “what?”

Her smile grew exponentially, “you are totally my Mulder, aren’t you?”

“Was there every any doubt?”

&&&&&&&&&&&

The drive home was easy; traffic was easy, food was easy, music was easy, his hand in hers was easy, her palm on his thigh was easy …

The mini-make-out session they had in the back of the rest area parking lot was very easy.

It was nearly five when they pulled to a stop in front of Maggie’s house, the pair recognizing Dave’s car as well as Charlie’s. Scully turned the car off but didn’t get out, her fingers around the steering wheel, “are we actually doing this, Mulder? Are we going to go in there and proclaim whatever the hell we are now because honestly, I really don’t know and it makes me nervous to think that Dave and Charlie and Sarah and Joanna and my mother will be the first witnesses to the train wreck that is ‘Mulder’n’Scully: the Early Years’.”

Peeling her fingers from the fake leather, he held her hand a minute, “first, we are well beyond ‘The Early Years’. Everybody who has ever seen us interact and is not your older brother is expecting this. They’ve witnessed the flirting and the near-death hospital bed vigils and the quarantines and the card games and plenty enough Sunday dinners that at this point, Charlie or Dave are going to beat me if something doesn’t happen between us.”

Finally turning towards him, “can we maybe just sit on this a little longer? Possibly … pretend we haven’t exchanged spit and red M&Ms?”

“Is this the freak out I should be expecting or is this just the tip of the iceberg?”

There was no annoyance in his tone, his demeanor still relaxed, still perfectly Mulder in every way and she was grateful for it, “I would just like to get us together in some ordered fashion before we bring in the masses, all right?”

“So … right now … we’re just … two friends who’ve spent six weeks together in two countries surfing, breaking shit and getting drunk?”

One side of her mouth pulled up, her eyes crinkling in amusement and memories, “maybe substitute ‘shit’ for ‘stuff’ given there will be kids present.”

Kissing her knuckles, he knocked them against his chin, “come on, woman, I’m hungry.”

Scully got out, grabbing the bag of souvenirs from the backseat before meeting him beside the bumper, “ready for some chaos?”

“When am I not?”

Starting across the lawn, the front door of Maggie’s house opened, several children tumbling out, racing towards the pair, yelling ‘Aunt Dana’ and ‘Mulder’ as they surrounded them, demanding stories of sharks and aliens and asking about presents. Once Scully had shoo’ed them back inside with promises to answer all questions, Mulder tugged on her arm, “Scully?”

“Yeah?”

“They just answered your question.” When she gave him a confused look, he shrugged and nodded towards the house, amusement playing on his face, “about what we are? We’re ‘Aunt Dana’ and ‘Mulder’ and that appears to be damn good enough for them so it is damn good enough for me.”

“Is it damn good enough for me?”

“Damn right.”

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Maggie just shook her head when they wandered into the house a minute later, hugging tightly first, then, “leave it to you two not to call. Luckily I made extra food.”

Mulder kissed her on the cheek, “I could have invited a platoon with me, Maggie and there still would have been leftovers but it was your kid’s idea not to call so yell at her while I go sneak something from the oven.”

The rest of the time before dinner and the entire meal showcased Mulder at his finest storytelling abilities. Scully hadn’t really sat and thought about everything they’d been through in the last month and a half and listening to Mulder, she realized tonight would just be the beginning. At one of the few moments Mulder stopped to breathe and everyone calmed enough to hear her, she promised plenty of pictures the following Sunday, complete with more adventures she couldn’t remember at the moment but she was sure Mulder had managed to document on his ever-present camera.

Eventually, they had finished dinner and were in the living room, discussing who was hungry for the waiting dessert of pie and ice cream. About to make a joke about Scully still looking for a piece of pie she might like, instead Mulder watched her cup her hand under her nose to catch the flow of blood streaming down. Grabbing the dishtowel from over Maggie’s shoulder, he held it up, moved it under Scully’s now dripping hand and seamlessly helped her scoot it below her nose. She turned towards the stairs to go clean up, hoping most people hadn’t noticed and shook her head, motioning him back when he tried to follow.

After she’d disappeared, he rotated on his good foot, knowing what he’d find; a roomful of silent people staring after Scully, looks ranging from confused interest by the kids to fear from the adults to downright terror from Maggie. She looked like she was going to faint, going whiter than eggshells and Mulder shifted to guide her to sit in the nearest chair, which Charlie vacated promptly, “she’s fine, Maggie. She’s perfectly fine.”

Looking like she didn’t believe him, “that hasn’t … that hasn’t happened since … she was sick.”

“She’s fine. I swear to you, she’s fine.” He knew there were other words for fine but at that very second, he couldn’t think of any, relegating himself to sounding like a parrot, regurgitating the same word over and over. Taking a deep breath, “the same thing happened at the beginning of vacation and when we got to San Diego, we went to the hospital and they ran tests and gave her an MRI and everything is fine. Honest to God, everything is fine.”

Maggie stood, then stopped, hovering over her chair, trying to decide whether to follow her daughter, “you are telling me everything?”

“I swear to you. It’s happened a few more times but she really is okay. I would not lie about this to you, I swear. She really is fine. All the tests and the scans came back clear. They told her her iron was low. That’s it.” Watching carefully, Mulder put his hands on Maggie’s shoulders, leaning over to look her square in the eye, “if you are feeling the same thing I did for that three days, there is no earthly way I would keep you in the dark about anything, I promise you.”

He could see the relief creep in, taming the panic somewhat until she nodded, “all right. Should I go up?”

“I’ll go. Sit back down and take a deep breath, all right?”

Deciding he’d just defined them as a pair, he waited until Maggie sat down, then hopped to the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the bannister, one on the railing, “Scully!?!”

His yell startled her as she struggled into one of the t-shirts she’d grabbed from the stash she always left behind, and coming to the top of the steps, “what?!”

“I love you!!”

Nearly falling down the stairs, she held onto the railing at the top, looking at him, eyes wide, “what?”

Dave, lovable, pain in the ass cousin Dave, from his place lying on the floor, “He said he loved you! Are you deaf now or something? Answer him back, for God’s sake.”

“Yes, I heard him, Dave, thank you!”

“Welcome!”

Shaking her head, she gave Mulder a tilting, serious look, “why do you say that now?”

“What’d she say?”

“Shut up, Charlie!”

“Kiss my toe, Dana!”

Maggie smacked her son on the knee, “quiet.”

Grinning at his mother, “well, she needs to talk louder, Ma, or else we’re never going to hear anything.”

Mulder, his own smile wide, looked up at his partner, “get down here, Scully.”  Giddy to her core in a sudden rush, she smiled at him, then hiked up her shirt and bra, flashing him for a moment before settling the cotton smooth and walking down the steps. Mulder let out a laugh that made the room smile but by now, he’d forgotten about them, only having eyes for her as she stopped two steps above him, lined up perfectly with his mouth, which he stared at for a long moment, “What was that for?”

Leaning in, forehead to forehead, nose to nose, “you’ll never catch me otherwise so I thought I’d help you out a little.”

Eyes shutting, “I would give you every red M&M in the world if I could.”

“I love you, too. You have no idea how much.”

This time, it was Maggie who chimed in, totally out of character and not caring in the slightest, “would you just kiss her already? Some of us have ice cream and pie to serve.”

So, he did.

Again.

And again.

And again.

________________

a/n: yes, I know ... The Sex has not happened == not yet anyways ... but I wanted to make something that my 12-year old kid could read and enjoy ... 8^) ... there will probably be a more serious toned follow-up (with The Sex) to this but it’ll be a little while in the making ...

[wendyimmiller]

Fear, Loathing, Capitulation, Relapses, A Cry for Help, and Another Empty Promise to Do Better; In a world of unfairness and charlatans, these are the real things!

Déjà vu all over again. In what is apparently becoming an abusive relationship, I again find myself the victim of Marianne Willburn’s poison pen, which, I now believe she nightly wields in her dreams, inflicting dagger-sized wounds on a field of retreating lesser writers in Play Station-like battles. For again, right here on Garden Rant, my home turf, another rebuttal. Actually, a rebuttal to my rebuttal of her rebuttal to my happy, harmless, and humorous little column, “Time for A Grexit,” which appeared in the July/August 2019 Horticulture Magazine. Just a 500-word bit of sophomoric snark I dashed off last summer when I was still sweet and hopeful. It was cute. It was funny. And, despite itself, it did manage to make a surprisingly cohesive case for American gardeners taking all their English gardening books and dumping them into Boston Harbor. I was innocent back then, and my life was so much simpler. Appallingly, it turns out that having a stalker is nowhere near as much fun as you might imagine.

The end of life as I knew it.

The most recent blog site equivalent to being repeatedly chased down the street by your neighbor’s dog.

This most recent rebuttal wasn’t unexpected.  Red flags were up after her first rebuttal, and my family and I worried that Marianne could possibly be a serial-rebuttaler. I could see her in her classy, tastefully appointed, mountain retreat, seething from my jovial retort to her first rebuttal, and working. Working! I cowered, knowing she would soon, on a day of her own choosing, emerge with another 15,000 word tirade. All of it letter perfect and grammatically correct, and crafted to turn all my loved ones against me and laying waste to all I am, all I ever was, all I’ll ever be, and everything I’ve ever loved. Including all my dead pets. And all my dead Stewartia. And, I’ve got to admit, I’ve been a nervous wreck. Pretty much, this has been the worst period of my life, which includes the bout with cancer I mentioned in a previous missive and, in fact, bring up in almost all my conversations.

The rebuttal that came out of the blue.

This is my jovial retort to her first rebuttal. Jovial, yet at the same time devastating.

Here’s the deal. After my last rebuttal, I was out of ammo. I’d used up everything I had. No quotes left in the stockpile. No more references back in the magazine. No last cache of jabs, nudges, innuendo, and implications. Not even a dull, rusty bayonet on the end of my empty rifle/poison pen with which to inflict dagger-sized wounds. So I hunkered down in my ramshackle, mismatched, patched together, horticulturist-class, Midwestern hovel, tried not to notice the leaks in the ceiling and the paint peeling from the walls, and prayed for a miracle.

And, whatya know, I actually got one. Apparently Marianne was out of ammo too. So when the inevitable time came and I looked over and saw the grenade roll into my bunker and blow up, I was pleasantly surprised that it did so with only a soft doink. No blast. No shrapnel. No carnage. What happened was more akin to an uncomfortably loud airing of the “We Are the World” video interrupting your conversation in a bar. Or maybe it’s better described as something like hearing the “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial playing on a scratchy transistor radio on a hot day by some kid in line ahead of you at the snack bar at the community pool who walks off with the last French Chew. Or maybe it was more like an overly-affectionate, dripping wet kiss from an older aunt with a weird accent right on the face of your much younger self. Whatever metaphor best describes my response to Marianne’s newest rebuttal–and you get to choose–the fact is that while indeed unpleasant and unwanted, I survived it.

But that doink? Came to find out it was pretty passive-aggressive. One that snuck back up on me after another day and a second look. “Garden Regionally, Get Inspired Globally” was Marianne’s banner, her battle cry and l’appel aux armes. Well, who the hell can argue with that?

Brian at work.

Marianne, you pulled a good one on me. Left me dangling and looking like a real jerk. Reminds me totally of a time when I introduced another friend/nemesis and co-worker named Brian to the audience at one of our symposiums at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. Our ongoing “feud” was pretty well-known to most of the audience, although not all of it, and I decided to deliver the most personally insulting introduction I could imagine, laying it on thick for an awkwardly long time, bringing up typically off-limits things like divorces, and, in my mind, generously setting him up for one of his patented hilarious ripostes. But he said nothing. Just went into his talk. With big sad eyes. Made me look like a complete asshole! A master stroke!

Yep, Marianne, you got me. You got to the reasonable position first and now here I am a rubber ball dangling from a string on your paddle. Well done.

As I’ve made plain, I am but a simple gardener from the heartland forever drawn by the magnetic pull of my next Big Gulp, teetering constantly on the cusp of diabetes, and free of an opioid addiction by reasons no one understands. As such, I too am not without need of nor appreciation for inspiration. So, for you Marianne, yes, if you get that from English writers who for some reason hope to cross how-to manuals with great literature, go for it. It’s kind of weird, but whatever. Just don’t be tricked into trying Meconopsis. It’ll break your heart.

I, on the other hand, I turn to the bottle for inspiration. And, believe it or not, I only discovered that about myself while pondering this. Ironically, it also occurred to me that my method might be even more cosmopolitan than Marianne’s! While plenty of good Kentucky bourbons are close at hand, I sometimes find my inspiration from a single malt Scotch. Or a spicy Caribbean rum. Or a sexy French vodka. Or a hot-tempered Greek Ouzo. Sometimes a warm Japanese sake is just the ticket, but there are times when a smooth Canadian whisky will do just fine. Or a Mexican tequila. Or wines from almost every continent. Even, and I’m gritting my teeth a little as I admit it, an English gin. Fact is, turns out pretty much the whole planet is lousy with spirits ready to light up the masses with inspiration. This whole revelation humbles me. It fills me with wonder. Heck, I’m but a tiny speck in this big Universe. All of us are. And maybe, deep down inside, somehow, we’re all pretty much the same.

I took that idea to bed with me last night. I laid there thinking about people. And Marianne. I pictured her in her home, sitting by the fire with a cat on her lap and a Christopher Lloyd book in hand, sighing at the better passages and finding inspiration. At least between those times when she’s not shrieking abuse towards Ohio and pounding out another manifesto of a rebuttal on her keyboard. Nope. I suppose that when she settles in and watches Monty Don on Netflix that she really isn’t that much different from me when I find my inspiration by stumbling around in the garden at night, a half empty fifth of Jameson in hand, condemning myself to damnation for all the neighbors to hear by way of whatever blaspheme I bellow when I discover brittle, dead branches where my daphne used to be.

A daphne.

Daphnes. My God, how many have I loved? How many I have lost. I feel my mood changing. You know, it just isn’t fair. I just can’t get over the disparity. The disproportionate distribution of the wealth. I’m thinking here in terms of gardening. Those lucky bastards. Those haughty English, PNW, and Japanese gardeners who ply their passion where the soil is rich, the weather is benevolent, and every person who scratches a mountain laurel into the ground gets drunk on their overnight and over-sized success. And they say to themselves, “I’m bloody great. I can grow everything.” And they take a creative writing class on Tuesday nights at the community college and peck out some frilly, freakin’ best seller!  Books that we here in the nether regions see in the windows of the five and dime, which draw us inside just to get out of the cold for a minute. But we slobber all over the pictures and the manager comes and makes us buy it, accepting a chicken and a few eggs as partial payment. Figuring that since we now own it, we might as well read it, we do. And then get all “inspired.” Then on the one half of that one spring day that’s sort of nice, we go out, religiously follow all the advice, and then invariably, inevitably, unsurprisingly experience the kind of catastrophic disaster that can only come when you live here and are daft enough to follow gardening advice from those who live over there. In God’s green Eden. In freakin’ Eden!

Wait. Whoa. What happened? It seems I’ve gone back down that rabbit hole. I apologize.

But, you know, there’s another thing that isn’t fair. Here in the continental part of the country, hard-working, decent, good gardening folk who can write and who really need a break never get brought in from the bullpen. Good writers, people who have willed lush, magnificent oases out of hardpan in weather that kills the people whose central air breaks on all but three or four days a year, never get that call from Timber or any other publisher. Why? Because all of their editors are tied up ushering dozens and dozens of spoiled English and PNW writers through their “masterpieces.” So-called gardeners for whom a daphne could fall off a truck and roll into their ditch and still grow like a Callery pear.

Another daphne.

Dammit. Angry again. Wait. I’ve got an idea.

I’d like to buy the world a home, And furnish it with love, Grow apple trees and honey bees, And…

 Well, that got annoying really quick. Screw it. I’ve got issues. I’m off to the liquor store.

            Fear, Loathing, Capitulation, Relapses, A Cry for Help, and Another Empty Promise to Do Better; In a world of unfairness and charlatans, these are the real things! originally appeared on GardenRant on November 20, 2019.

from Gardening https://www.gardenrant.com/2019/11/fear-loathing-capitulation-relapses-a-cry-for-help-and-another-empty-promise-to-do-better-in-a-world-of-unfairness-and-charlatans-these-are-the-real-things.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[turfandlawncare]

Fear, Loathing, Capitulation, Relapses, A Cry for Help, and Another Empty Promise to Do Better; In a world of unfairness and charlatans, these are the real things!

Déjà vu all over again. In what is apparently becoming an abusive relationship, I again find myself the victim of Marianne Willburn’s poison pen, which, I now believe she nightly wields in her dreams, inflicting dagger-sized wounds on a field of retreating lesser writers in Play Station-like battles. For again, right here on Garden Rant, my home turf, another rebuttal. Actually, a rebuttal to my rebuttal of her rebuttal to my happy, harmless, and humorous little column, “Time for A Grexit,” which appeared in the July/August 2019 Horticulture Magazine. Just a 500-word bit of sophomoric snark I dashed off last summer when I was still sweet and hopeful. It was cute. It was funny. And, despite itself, it did manage to make a surprisingly cohesive case for American gardeners taking all their English gardening books and dumping them into Boston Harbor. I was innocent back then, and my life was so much simpler. Appallingly, it turns out that having a stalker is nowhere near as much fun as you might imagine.

The end of life as I knew it.

The most recent blog site equivalent to being repeatedly chased down the street by your neighbor’s dog.

This most recent rebuttal wasn’t unexpected.  Red flags were up after her first rebuttal, and my family and I worried that Marianne could possibly be a serial-rebuttaler. I could see her in her classy, tastefully appointed, mountain retreat, seething from my jovial retort to her first rebuttal, and working. Working! I cowered, knowing she would soon, on a day of her own choosing, emerge with another 15,000 word tirade. All of it letter perfect and grammatically correct, and crafted to turn all my loved ones against me and laying waste to all I am, all I ever was, all I’ll ever be, and everything I’ve ever loved. Including all my dead pets. And all my dead Stewartia. And, I’ve got to admit, I’ve been a nervous wreck. Pretty much, this has been the worst period of my life, which includes the bout with cancer I mentioned in a previous missive and, in fact, bring up in almost all my conversations.

The rebuttal that came out of the blue.

This is my jovial retort to her first rebuttal. Jovial, yet at the same time devastating.

Here’s the deal. After my last rebuttal, I was out of ammo. I’d used up everything I had. No quotes left in the stockpile. No more references back in the magazine. No last cache of jabs, nudges, innuendo, and implications. Not even a dull, rusty bayonet on the end of my empty rifle/poison pen with which to inflict dagger-sized wounds. So I hunkered down in my ramshackle, mismatched, patched together, horticulturist-class, Midwestern hovel, tried not to notice the leaks in the ceiling and the paint peeling from the walls, and prayed for a miracle.

And, whatya know, I actually got one. Apparently Marianne was out of ammo too. So when the inevitable time came and I looked over and saw the grenade roll into my bunker and blow up, I was pleasantly surprised that it did so with only a soft doink. No blast. No shrapnel. No carnage. What happened was more akin to an uncomfortably loud airing of the “We Are the World” video interrupting your conversation in a bar. Or maybe it’s better described as something like hearing the “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial playing on a scratchy transistor radio on a hot day by some kid in line ahead of you at the snack bar at the community pool who walks off with the last French Chew. Or maybe it was more like an overly-affectionate, dripping wet kiss from an older aunt with a weird accent right on the face of your much younger self. Whatever metaphor best describes my response to Marianne’s newest rebuttal–and you get to choose–the fact is that while indeed unpleasant and unwanted, I survived it.

But that doink? Came to find out it was pretty passive-aggressive. One that snuck back up on me after another day and a second look. “Garden Regionally, Get Inspired Globally” was Marianne’s banner, her battle cry and l’appel aux armes. Well, who the hell can argue with that?

Brian at work.

Marianne, you pulled a good one on me. Left me dangling and looking like a real jerk. Reminds me totally of a time when I introduced another friend/nemesis and co-worker named Brian to the audience at one of our symposiums at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. Our ongoing “feud” was pretty well-known to most of the audience, although not all of it, and I decided to deliver the most personally insulting introduction I could imagine, laying it on thick for an awkwardly long time, bringing up typically off-limits things like divorces, and, in my mind, generously setting him up for one of his patented hilarious ripostes. But he said nothing. Just went into his talk. With big sad eyes. Made me look like a complete asshole! A master stroke!

Yep, Marianne, you got me. You got to the reasonable position first and now here I am a rubber ball dangling from a string on your paddle. Well done.

As I’ve made plain, I am but a simple gardener from the heartland forever drawn by the magnetic pull of my next Big Gulp, teetering constantly on the cusp of diabetes, and free of an opioid addiction by reasons no one understands. As such, I too am not without need of nor appreciation for inspiration. So, for you Marianne, yes, if you get that from English writers who for some reason hope to cross how-to manuals with great literature, go for it. It’s kind of weird, but whatever. Just don’t be tricked into trying Meconopsis. It’ll break your heart.

I, on the other hand, I turn to the bottle for inspiration. And, believe it or not, I only discovered that about myself while pondering this. Ironically, it also occurred to me that my method might be even more cosmopolitan than Marianne’s! While plenty of good Kentucky bourbons are close at hand, I sometimes find my inspiration from a single malt Scotch. Or a spicy Caribbean rum. Or a sexy French vodka. Or a hot-tempered Greek Ouzo. Sometimes a warm Japanese sake is just the ticket, but there are times when a smooth Canadian whisky will do just fine. Or a Mexican tequila. Or wines from almost every continent. Even, and I’m gritting my teeth a little as I admit it, an English gin. Fact is, turns out pretty much the whole planet is lousy with spirits ready to light up the masses with inspiration. This whole revelation humbles me. It fills me with wonder. Heck, I’m but a tiny speck in this big Universe. All of us are. And maybe, deep down inside, somehow, we’re all pretty much the same.

I took that idea to bed with me last night. I laid there thinking about people. And Marianne. I pictured her in her home, sitting by the fire with a cat on her lap and a Christopher Lloyd book in hand, sighing at the better passages and finding inspiration. At least between those times when she’s not shrieking abuse towards Ohio and pounding out another manifesto of a rebuttal on her keyboard. Nope. I suppose that when she settles in and watches Monty Don on Netflix that she really isn’t that much different from me when I find my inspiration by stumbling around in the garden at night, a half empty fifth of Jameson in hand, condemning myself to damnation for all the neighbors to hear by way of whatever blaspheme I bellow when I discover brittle, dead branches where my daphne used to be.

A daphne.

Daphnes. My God, how many have I loved? How many I have lost. I feel my mood changing. You know, it just isn’t fair. I just can’t get over the disparity. The disproportionate distribution of the wealth. I’m thinking here in terms of gardening. Those lucky bastards. Those haughty English, PNW, and Japanese gardeners who ply their passion where the soil is rich, the weather is benevolent, and every person who scratches a mountain laurel into the ground gets drunk on their overnight and over-sized success. And they say to themselves, “I’m bloody great. I can grow everything.” And they take a creative writing class on Tuesday nights at the community college and peck out some frilly, freakin’ best seller!  Books that we here in the nether regions see in the windows of the five and dime, which draw us inside just to get out of the cold for a minute. But we slobber all over the pictures and the manager comes and makes us buy it, accepting a chicken and a few eggs as partial payment. Figuring that since we now own it, we might as well read it, we do. And then get all “inspired.” Then on the one half of that one spring day that’s sort of nice, we go out, religiously follow all the advice, and then invariably, inevitably, unsurprisingly experience the kind of catastrophic disaster that can only come when you live here and are daft enough to follow gardening advice from those who live over there. In God’s green Eden. In freakin’ Eden!

Wait. Whoa. What happened? It seems I’ve gone back down that rabbit hole. I apologize.

But, you know, there’s another thing that isn’t fair. Here in the continental part of the country, hard-working, decent, good gardening folk who can write and who really need a break never get brought in from the bullpen. Good writers, people who have willed lush, magnificent oases out of hardpan in weather that kills the people whose central air breaks on all but three or four days a year, never get that call from Timber or any other publisher. Why? Because all of their editors are tied up ushering dozens and dozens of spoiled English and PNW writers through their “masterpieces.” So-called gardeners for whom a daphne could fall off a truck and roll into their ditch and still grow like a Callery pear.

Another daphne.

Dammit. Angry again. Wait. I’ve got an idea.

I’d like to buy the world a home, And furnish it with love, Grow apple trees and honey bees, And…

 Well, that got annoying really quick. Screw it. I’ve got issues. I’m off to the liquor store.

            Fear, Loathing, Capitulation, Relapses, A Cry for Help, and Another Empty Promise to Do Better; In a world of unfairness and charlatans, these are the real things! originally appeared on GardenRant on November 20, 2019.

from GardenRant https://ift.tt/37s0CpZ

[randybenedict]

MPR: Getting medical device development back on track

In this podcast, experts from MPR discuss what medical device companies can do if things go sideways during the product development process. Drawing from their own experiences, engineers from the firm spoke with MassDevice.com editor Sarah Faulkner about how they tackle device development challenges when they are called into action.

Sarah Faulkner: Hey, everyone. Thanks for downloading this podcast. I’m really excited to bring you this conversation about what to do when things go sideways during the product development process.

Faulkner: I spoke with a group of experts from MPR. They’re a product development firm that specializes in this kind of crisis management technique. They have a history of tackling really hard problems. In fact, their founders, they were at the forefront of the nuclear power movement, helping to guide the successful development and implementation of nuclear power for submarines.

Faulkner: Anyway, I spoke to them about how to navigate some of the challenges that can crop up when you’re designing and developing a product. So without further delay, let’s jump right in.

Faulkner: Let’s start with a story. Based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, MacuLogix developed the first and only diagnostic aid that can detect subclinical age-related macular degeneration. Early detection is critical so the doctors can step in and provide treatment early enough to stop blindness from creeping into the patient’s eyes. But the company had a problem. Its devices were experiencing unusual, intermittent instrument failures in the field. The instrument is a complex mix of hardware and software, and the MacuLogix team couldn’t untangle the two to determine a root cause.

Faulkner: After CEO Bill McPhee put a request out to people within his network, he was eventually connected to MPR. And within one day, MPR was in touch with MacuLogix to solve the problem. In a letter to MPR, the company CTO, Greg Jackson, is quoted as saying, “From the outset, MPR treated our problem as if it were their own, as if MPR’s reputation was on the line.” He went on to say, quote, “What was probably most impressive was the speed with which they integrated into our team. Within a day, it’s as though they had worked with us for years. Their extraordinary test facilities and state-of-the-art tools provided us with the level of diagnostic intensity that simply doesn’t exist in-house in most early stage medical device companies.”

Faulkner: Needless to say, MPR got to the root of MacuLogix’s problem, and this is just one example of the countless fire-fighting missions that MPR is hired to tackle. The process that the MPR team follows when they’re called in by a friend to help reroute product development, that process is both methodical and analytical. According to MPR’s Director of Product Testing, Lynessa Erler, the first thing MPR has to do when they’re called in is to identify and wrap their brains around the problem.

Lynessa Erler: Understanding the problem has already been done. Just try to solve it. Try to get all the data. Get the data, not just the opinions as to what conclusions they’ve drawn from the data, but get to the actual data.

Erler: A lot of times, what you find is either they’ve drawn a faulty conclusion on the data, or the data itself was flawed. And that can be very difficult to piece apart if you’re not digging into the details. So that’s where I start, you probably …

Eric Claude: Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. Here’s the way I think about it, an analogy is, it’s like walking into a crime scene.

Faulkner: That’s Eric Claude, by the way, VP of Product Development at MPR.

Claude: So we start with the forensics. Let’s collect all the data that can be collected, and see if we can find the murder weapon and the fingerprints. And all of the data that surrounds whatever the incident might be, and then start with that.

Erler: But see, with really complicated medical devices, if it’s an intermittent problem, that is half the battle, is finding what conditions lead to the issue, in a repeatable manner. Because that may be your first challenge, is trying to repeat the failure. And until you can do that in a reliable way, you’re just stabbing in the dark. And you’re saying, “Okay, something like that, what might it be?” And then you’re looking around. But until you can recreate it, it’s very difficult.

Faulkner: And it isn’t just the technical challenges that MPR faces when it’s called in to help fix a problem. It also comes down to navigating a company’s culture and working through the tendencies that are brought about by human nature. That’s according to Craig Mauch. He’s MPR’s Director of Product Design.

Craig Mauch: It always goes something like this, is that you’re in a root-cause mode, and invariably, there are people who are engaged in the problem, trying to solve it, sometimes not that happy to see us. Sometimes they’re happy to see us. But there’s usually a lot of preconceived notion of what the problem is, and the notion of doing this root-causes and getting to the bottom of things is to setting up a good framework of, “Let’s identify everything that could cause the problem, and then let’s, in a methodical way, do some kind of test or analysis or thought experiment, or look at the data for each and every one of those conceivable possibilities to prove or disprove whether or not it could contribute.”

Mauch: And sometimes, your hardest problems can be two or three things all at once, massed together, so that’s why a methodical approach is really important. And then because invariably there’s always one person saying, “No, no! It’s this! It’s this, it’s this, it’s this, it’s this! It’s really this!” And there’s usually a more reserved person over in the corner who’s got all the answers but is not necessarily as boisterous.

Erler: I think everybody has hunches, as to … Everybody has their best guess as to what’s wrong when you go in, yes. How strongly they advocate for their theory I think depends on the person. But yes, you get some personalities involved, you get people who feel like you’re blaming them, and it’s really important to come in and make it clear that you really aren’t. The only thing you’re trying to do is solve the problem. You’re not trying to point blame, you’re not trying to get somebody fired, but at the same time, recognize that you’re dealing with human beings and so these anxieties and fears are gonna be there, and you just have to stick to the facts. You just focus on that and try not to bring the emotional component into the root cause.

Claude: To your point about constraints and attitudes, that’s one of the hardest things. It’s human nature to follow your hunches, and it’s often the case in a rescue operation when things go sideways that you have to listen to the customer as they describe, “Well we think it might be this, we think it might be that”, which are largely hunches. But then you have to put all that aside, and you have to say, “Okay, let’s really take an impartial look at what’s happening here, and try to understand what’s going on, and develop facts, the set of facts that either prove something could be the problem, or disprove, and make those fact-based decisions”, which can be hard when the human nature aspect of it is to say, “Well, I have a hunch,” and that can be challenging.

Claude: And as you described with regard to communication, that’s an important aspect of managing those preconceived notions that people often start with on these things.

Claude: We had- so to that point, I’ll share another example of a situation when things go sideways. We had a customer that had launched a new product with a battery-powered surgical tool. And this particular tool had some very strange behavior. After it was used, it would start to heat up unexpectedly. It’s not even being used, it’s starting to heat up. And so the notion there was, “Well clearly there must be a hardware fault happening with this device. It just randomly fails, there must be some electrical component in there that’s causing trouble.” Well it turned out, at the end of the day, the hardware was fine, it was actually a software issue which was the problem, which was completely unexpected. No one expected that to be the challenge. In that case, it was fortunate in a way, because it’s a little bit easier to make a software change and upgrade all the software than to recall a bunch of devices and redo the hardware inside of them.

Claude: So it’s often the case, again, that’s an example of, “It’s easy to have preconceived notions about why we’re having a problem, but often it’s not that. It can be something very unexpected.”

Erler: Or to have preconceived notions as to what’s possible without challenging the why. “Why do you think that this can’t work this way?” And really getting to the bottom of that, because maybe you’re falsely constraining the solutions.

Faulkner: So how can companies avoid these kinds of pitfalls in product development? According to Craig Mauch, it’s all about the basic tenets of engineering.

Mauch: One of the things that’s really big at MPR is about the first principles of engineering, so we like to design the products, and then build the products, and then test the products. And it sounds very rational when you say it that way, but you’d be surprised how many people skip a step or get going too fast and don’t do enough fundamental design work.

Faulkner: Like Mauch said, it sounds obvious: design, build, and then test. But Mauch sees it all the time. People skip steps and they end up paying for it down the line.

Faulkner: I asked Mauch why it is that people are prone to missing these steps that seem like the fundamentals of creating a product.

Mauch: Because they’re not used to development, I think. They come at it from different perspectives. Sometimes they’re researchers, and researchers are never done researching, so the other part of that is you have to tear that away from them and say, “Stop changing it. Stop making it better. You can always make it better, but if you keep changing it, then we’ll never finish.” So that’s on the researcher spectrum on the business perspective, people are excited about what they’re doing and they want to get it to market, and they’re in a great big hurry. And often, it’s either, for the start-ups, it’s they have limited funds and they gotta get to market. With large companies, they’ve got mandates for revenue coming out of new products and so, “I need a new product to make those goals.”

Mauch: And so big and small, you see the same pressures for slightly different reasons. And so well-intended people get themselves in situations that can maybe wanna go forward, sometimes too quickly.

Mauch: The other part of that, too, is design is a really difficult thing. You start, in a lot of cases, with the proverbial clean sheet of paper, and you start putting some building blocks down of things you think are ready to go and some unknowns. And most people can get to what I call the 95% Solution, and they’ve figured 95% of it out, and they keep pushing off that nagging 5% into the corner, and they’re like, “Oh, well, that’ll come together, we’ll figure that out.” And if you’re not careful, that 5% can be your undoing, and be the thing that comes back to bite you in the end. So it really does take a lot of discipline, I think, to have the approach to not just assume that 5% will get better later. And for that reason, I’ve coined a term, which I think I’ve coined, maybe somebody else said it, but the Vertical Slice. I’m a big believer in the Vertical Slice.

Mauch: A lot of people will do A and solve that problem, and then B comes next, and they’ll work on that and solve that. Then there’s a C and a D and an E, and they just magically assume that as they progress, a solution comes and they move on to the next thing and life is great. But life never works out that way. A lot of times, you get to D or E and there’s some great big disconnect that causes you to go back and change the stuff you did before. So what I like to do with the Vertical Slice is think about A, B, C and D all at once, and in a very fast path through there, prototype or work with each one of those elements, so that they all work together and they don’t do everything that you need to do, but you touch on enough of them such that when you need to rely on them, you’ve kicked the tires already, and you know whether it is promising or not. And that helps to avoid big disconnects.

Faulkner: Mauch said that fundamental engineering, it’s just a part of the culture at MPR. And that attitude has its roots in the company’s heritage.

Mauch: We do some pretty fundamental engineering here, and it’s baked into the culture. The founders of MPR designed the first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus. So they had to … you can’t really prototype a nuclear submarine so well, you have to really design it right and then build it because it’s a pretty expensive thing to go tinker around with. And so I think that’s baked into our culture. First, we design it, and we know why it’s designed the way it is, and then we build it.

Mauch: And I remember specifically, we were working on an infusion pump project years ago, where we were in our design phase and going through other requirements, and figuring out pumps and tubing and sensors and size of bubbles and all the things that you do for that kind of thing. And we’d been probably on the job for a couple of months, and the client said, “I know you guys are working hard, but I haven’t seen anything go together in the lab yet.” And I’m really nervous because they were used to tinkering and prototyping and iterating, right? And I turned to the client and said, “First, we’re going to design it, and then we’re gonna build it.”

Mauch: And then the first prototype that came together on the bench worked quite well because we had all the fundamentals behind us. “Why are the pumps sized the way they are? Why is the tubing this kind of tubing?” And so on and so forth. And so it goes together better the first time when you do that way, and we used that early prototype to validate those models that we put together in the design phase. So not just cut, try, and repeat kind of thing. Believe it or not, a lot of development goes on that way.

Erler: We don’t just have a book, “Oh let’s open the book and figure out how.” These are all, almost all, first-of-a-kind problems where you really have to pick the problem apart and understand the basics, the first principles of the system that you’re working with, to understand how it could go wrong, and then think, “Okay, if that were going wrong, what would that look like? What would the evidence be?” And then you can see if it fits what’s been seen. So if there’s evidence that matches that, then you know you’ve got a theory.

Faulkner: Despite their analytical methods, Claude and Erler told me that there’s always a bit of nervousness when they first present a solution to a client. Especially when there’s a lot at stake.

Erler: I think you’re always nervous, yeah. You’re always questioning yourself. I think, to some level, it’s the fact that you’re always questioning yourself that leads you to question every piece of data that you come across, that makes it that much more rigorous a process.

Claude: I would say, we’re always a little bit anxious when we get into solving, trying to solve a problem that’s not been solved before, and you don’t know what the answer’s gonna be. But I think a big part of both managing that and ultimately being successful is the team. That you can always go and consult with another expert, subject matter expert, or just talk it out with somebody. You get enough really smart people in the room, combine intelligence and analytical capabilities with creativity, and you’ll always find a way.

Mauch: Yeah, the cool thing about working here is that there’s usually, we’ve been in business for 50 years, and there’s usually somebody down the hall who’s done something similar or has been exposed to something, and it can even be across industries. Whether it’s medical, power, or ships and so on. So the neat thing here, we did a thing for a medical device that was a cell expansion chamber. You seed it with cells, and then you put it an incubator and then you come back and you have many more cells than when you started with. But we had people that normally do fluid dynamics and nuclear power plants helping us design this cell chamber because we were trying to move fluid through there in a very uniform and distributed fashion. And so by us not necessarily doing that every day in medical, we were able to tie into our power business, who we have experts that’s all they do, is thermal hydraulics and fluid design, things like that, so it was really neat to tie the two sides of that expertise together and solve a problem.

Faulkner: The team at MPR is pretty clear. When it comes to rerouting a product development effort that’s gone sideways, it takes more than just following that solid foundation of basic engineering. At the end of the day, it’s really all about the team.

Faulkner: Thanks to the folks at MPR for speaking with me, and thanks to you for listening. For more on this and other newsworthy items in the medical device space, visit massdevice.com. Until next time, I’m Sarah Faulkner.

The post MPR: Getting medical device development back on track appeared first on MassDevice.

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[artsoccupychi]

Open Letter To A Cancer Patient…My Alternative Cancer Treatment Plan

I recently had this PM conversation with a GreenSmoothieGirl follower, when she asked me:

What can I do to help my friend who has cancer?

I share that conversation here, because I am asked a question just like hers, often.

Those who follow my work tend to be more educated than most, about the problems with the cancer industry and Western Medicine in general. As well as how diet contributes to the cancer epidemic.

People who have pre-educated themselves are far more likely to ask sophisticated questions, if they ever face “The C Word.” And they are likely to venture outside the highly restricted, proprietary treatments of the oncology industry that I refer to as “Standard of Care” Medicine.

They are more likely to see cancer as completely different than an invader or a foe to be vanquished, which is how the oncology industry sees it. This is not how functional (root-cause) medicine sees cancer, at all.

Folks who are have already had significant exposure to other modalities and schools of thought are more likely to understand why alternative cancer treatment can be exceptionally effective.

Not only at getting on top of the aberrant growths in the body, but also in restoring equilibrium and health for the patient who wants to live many more decades of healthy life.

Those of us who know a lot about cancer options outside “Standard of Care’s” oncology industry, are often anguished, when people we love refuse to look at anything but the radiation and chemotherapy they are offered in the oncologist’s clinic.

People who have pre-educated themselves are far more likely to ask sophisticated questions, if they ever face “The C Word.” And they are likely to venture outside the highly restricted, proprietary treatments of the oncology industry that I refer to as “Standard of Care” Medicine.

I hope sharing this conversation helps you in understanding the psychology of a cancer patient, and helping those in your life who will be diagnosed.

This is an important conversation, with 50% of American men being diagnosed with cancer, and about 40% of American women.

Like you, dear reader, I have lost many people close to me, to this terrible disease. People I love, right this minute, are, as the cancer industry calls it, “battling” the disease.

But I’ve also been studying cancer for 25 years, and I’ve traveled to 19 clinics all over the world, interviewing the world’s best functional medicine doctors, and studying what they do, what works, in helping cancer patients heal.

I’ve also met and interviewed many cancer survivors—some of them who beat Stage IV cancers decades ago—and many who are in treatment.

I’ve asked them detailed questions about their experience, to learn from them, and then share with you, in my 200+ posts on cancer, and alternative cancer treatment plans, over the years.

We will all face the cancer issue, in one way or another, in our families and communities.

Here’s how the recent conversation went:

Heather: Hi, I’ve been following your work, including your world-wide cancer research, for many years. I have a friend who has been through four courses of treatment, and was never open to anything else that I brought up.

She’s been sent home to die, though, now. She’s been given a few months to live. How can I help her?

Me: You can hold her hand, show up for her, and be there to love her. Whatever her choice is, from this point forward.

Heather: She’s never been open to holistic treatment. I’ve talked to her about it a few times, during her journey. Now that she’s failed out of conventional treatment, she is listening and says she’s motivated.

Me: I’ve been in this position many times. While there are many books you could suggest she read, the best resource I’ve ever seen, as a starting place, comes from my dear friend, Chris Wark.

Send her this link, and tell her you’ll follow up in 2 days, to chat about it. (You should read it, too! Since cancer touches all of our lives, we should all be educated.)

When she gets Chris’ “20 Questions for Your Oncologist” on that link, she’ll actually learn a lot, to help her think differently about her diagnosis and treatment.

I used to suggest to people that they do the Gerson protocol. But the Gerson method, while very effective, is far more than just the diet part. And some of it is hard to do, on your own.

Particularly when you’re very ill, unless you have a fulltime caregiver.

Chris’ cancer course, Square One, is absolutely everything that I, personally, would do, if faced with cancer, and even if one of my children did.

It’s incredibly well guided. It’s “Square One,” to take someone who feels like a deer in headlights, having just gotten their diagnosis, through all the emotional healing, dietary changes, and even supplements they should take, in a first stage, and then a second stage, of getting back to health.

Heather: What would you do, besides give her that link?

Me: Well, tell her you will follow up, in two days. When you do, if she hasn’t read it, she isn’t really motivated.

At that point, it’s best to just continue checking in with her, on how you can support her. Then, do that, whatever it is.

Heather: That seems like giving up.

Me: I remember that I thought the same, too. Let me share an experience.

My friend Shelley beat metastatic breast cancer, about 18 years ago, without chemo or radiation. (Like my grandmother, my first influence, did when I was in high school.)

Shelley changed to an all-raw, vegan diet, along with some other lifestyle changes—especially managing her stress load.

She put up a website years ago about her experience, and people would reach out, and say, “My sister in law was just diagnosed—will you talk to her?” And Shelley said no.

I was little shocked when Shelley told me that she refuses to get on the phone with someone’s friend and relative. I dug a little deeper with my questions.

Her experience back then, 18 years ago, parallels mine exactly.

You see, she told me, if people don’t already have a deep mistrust of the methods of oncology, as well as a self-taught education in what the alternative cancer treatment plans are, they simply aren’t going to do anything besides what their doctor tells them.

Or, they certainly aren’t going to opt out of chemo and radiation, even if they change their diet and do a few “integrative” treatments, too.

Their first meeting with an oncologist will scare the devil out of them, with the prognosis and statistics, and they will be told warm, promising things about their improved chances, if they are treated with poison and burning rays.

Sadly, it’s about 4 percent of cancers that these treatments actually work for. The statistics are highly manipulated, and any “gains” in cancer treatment are generally due to the Stage 0 and Stage 1 breast cancers now being diagnosed en masse.

The statistics are so manipulated, that Marcia Angell, MD, said this: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” [source: Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption” Jan 15, 2009]

Your functional medicine doc will tell you that the body has detectable masses several times in a lifetime, that your normal immune system will metabolize so you never even know about it. So, these breast cancer patients would have lived, anyway, without treatment.

I have come to the same conclusion Shelley did, all those years ago. She is happy to talk to the sister-in-law herself, if it’s her reaching out to Shelley—rather than a concerned relative contacting her online.

Heather: Can’t my friend just start reading now, and get up to speed? I mean, now she doesn’t have any more options.

Me: Sure, she can.

But like everything in holistic (or functional, or biological) medicine, your chances for success are greatest when you get on the treatments, whole-heartedly, early.

First. Before you have lots of chemical damage from chemo. Burning rays from radiation, which continue to burn and mutate cells and cause secondary cancers.

And that doesn’t mean there’s no hope for Stage IV patients who have been through several rounds of chemo and radiation.

If they get very serious and committed to the approaches of functional medicine, I’ve seen so many of them reverse the cancer and actually get well.

Heather: Can’t she do just some parts of the treatment?

Holistic treatment is different from what oncology offers. One of the biggest differences is that submitting to chemo and radiation is a totally passive experience.

Me: Yes. But holistic treatment is different from what oncology offers. One of the biggest differences is that submitting to chemo and radiation is a totally passive experience.

Get in the chair, put the needle in your arm, take a nap, with a warm blanket over you.

This feels good, to a person with a new diagnosis. The doctor will take care of me. Medicine will kill the cancer. I’m scared—paralyzed, really.

A patient with a new diagnosis is led to believe she has to act, immediately. And you and I know, from lots of life experience, that when we are in paralyzing fear, it’s not a great time to be making decisions. Right?

Heather: For sure.

The path the oncologist leads you on is very tempting. They will tell you about the common short-term side effects, like neuropathy, hair loss, and brain fog.

They won’t tell you about the secondary cancers that chemo makes extremely likely (especially leukemia).

You show up for your radiation treatment. The oncologist’s office is virtually always lacking in knowledge about the role of nutrition. They’ll feed you sugary processed food, while you have chemo. Wonderful, caring nurses will tend to your needs.

They’ll send a Stage IV patient whose cancer is metabolizing their muscles, home with Ensure in a can.

It’s what they know. Oncology does not study the massive evidence about how processed sugar, and salts and oils, and animal products, feed cancer growth.

It’s not taught in medical school. There’s no insurance code to bill, to counsel patients about lifestyle and nutrition, detoxification and rehab of the immune system.

So why would they? No education in it, no compensation for it.

Heather: I think I learned from you that oncologists actually get money for prescribing chemotherapy.

In private practice, which is most of oncology (the exception being public-health clinics a small number of doctors work for), they get a significant commission on chemo.

Me: They do. In private practice, which is most of oncology (the exception being public-health clinics a small number of doctors work for), they get a significant commission on chemo.

Heather: That seems like it should be illegal!

Me: Agreed. I don’t understand why this practice is allowed. Giving only this specialty, oncology, compensation for the drugs they prescribe, when others cannot, creates a terrible incentive to over-prescribe chemotherapy.

Oncologists are one of the highest-compensated specialties, for this exact reason. I believe it’s about 40 percent of their income that comes from overrides on chemo.

Even 10 years ago, drug companies were allowed to give cash bonuses to the doctors who prescribed the most. That has now been banned by the AMA. As it should be.

But, now the drug companies just take them on incredible, all-expense-paid trips, compensating them “in kind” for massively prescribing their drugs. A friend recently told me about a small group of oncologists, flown first class, Mercedes picking them up at the airport, to take them to a $30,000 venue to watch horse racing.

All of this to incentivize them to sell more chemo.

And the vast majority of chemotherapy being prescribed today is actually the exact same stuff they were prescribing in 1972. In the failed Nixon “war on cancer.”

Heather: So, the best thing I can do for my friend is what?

Me: Love her, support her decisions.

See if she is going to marshall her family to help her recover. Work with them. You could do some of the significant food prep she hasn’t likely been doing, as she’s even ill from the disease, possibly, but very ill from radiation and chemo treatments for sure.

If she doesn’t even read the “20 Questions for Your Oncologist” you link her to, which is a tiny step to take, know that the words she is saying, and her actual willingness to do what it takes, for a massive diet and lifestyle turnaround, are two different things.

Listen to the actions more than the words.

It sounds a terrible thing to say, that once you’ve entered the oncologist’s office, you have entered the Fear Machine.

For 98 percent of people, even most who are holistic-leaning, they absolutely will not veer off the path their oncologist charts for them.

In fact, before they even have that conversation with an oncologist, is when I love to have a conversation with them.

If I were diagnosed with cancer, I would walk into the oncologist’s office with a statement about what I do, and do not, want to hear from him.

I would not want any prognostications. Do not tell me what the percentage odds are, that I will die, with or without the treatments you normally prescribe. I’ll get back with you, on my treatment choices, if my early choices aren’t working.

I would say that I only want suggestions about tests for cancer markers. I’d be clear that I’m open to hearing about surgery, depending on the cancer type, but not chemo or radiation.

I would be clear that I will be getting treatment within functional medicine. And if he takes issue with that, we don’t need to continue the conversation. I’d ask for my records to be transferred to someone open to just periodic cancer marker testing as I begin my chosen course of treatment.

If I were diagnosed with cancer, I would walk into the oncologist’s office with a statement about what I do, and do not, want to hear from them.

I start a conversation by asking them some questions. Rather than firehosing them with info.

I want to know what their background is, how much they really know, about cancer. How much they want me to tell them, about my research about other options.

The fact is, we all “have” cancer. Unlike most cancer patients, I have no confidence at all in a doctor’s pronouncement, after surgery: “We are pretty sure we got it all.”

Cancer is never really “Stage I.” It always exists in other parts of the body.

(We are all making 50,000 to 100,000 cancer cells daily. In healthy people, the body’s immune system is taking care of it. When that fails, it seems obvious to me that the immune system’s function is my Priority #1. After all, it has to serve me, for life.)

What an oncologist won’t tell you, is that we all have cancer, and the difference between you and me—and a person “diagnosed” with cancer—is that their immune system has been struggling, and “down for the count,” for many years before the growth became significant enough.

Before it developed a vascular system of its own and became substantial enough–that it caused the person to become noticeably ill, and get tested.

An oncologist sees cancer as a tumor, an invader, something to be destroyed. The functional approach sees the cancer as part of you. And fighting it, is fighting yourself.

And what is needed is a serious detoxification, as well as rebuilding a broken immune system.

And lots of treatments,  to that end, are available and extremely effective. More so, in earlier staging, and when the patient is highly committed, and understands why she’s doing it.

I have sent my own friends and family to this exceptional clinic, in Switzerland. They get treatments by European functional medicine M.D.’s, and all their food, and lodging is on-site.

It’s not cheap. Insurance companies have no interest in paying for this kind of care. Pharma and Big Medicine don’t want you to know there are other options, and they want you to believe that all of it, outside the cancer industry, is “quackery.”

But a 3-week stay at this clinic in Switzerland is, amazingly, cheaper than all the others I studied, while also being the “best of the best” in terms of quality of care.

If your friend takes the first step, getting Chris Wark’s “20 Questions for Your Oncologist,” and gets his course (very inexpensive, the cheapest thing she’ll do in all of her care–he’ll offer it to her at a big discount), then some next steps in her education would be:

Listen to my podcast episode with Dr. Veronique Desaulnier. Episode #72.

Listen to my two podcast episodes with Chris Wark. #21 and  #38.

These will bring her “up to speed” even more.

Chris Wark highly recommends my 26-Day Detox. In fact, he says it’s the only detox he ever recommends. And this is another great step she can take, to jump-start start the healing process. Thousands of Chris’ followers have done our detox, which I built from 20 years of research in what works.

He tells his huge following that our detox is the only one he recommends.

And we love supporting them through the process.

I’ve found that generally educated people, and people who were already more likely to question various institutions and orthodoxies, usually begin to seriously question “Standard of Care” treatment after they’ve been through a few rounds.

Sometimes even those who weren’t holistic-leaning, at all, in the beginning, change their point of view significantly.

By the time they’ve been in that “Fear Machine” for a while, they’re often pretty angry and disillusioned.

If she takes these easy, early steps, to get educated–jump in and help her with food prep, research, making the purchases for supplements Chris recommends online. You can help her do a serious detox.

Find out what her primary caregivers need. So she can be really dedicated to the process of getting well.

Heather: That’s a great approach. I don’t want to criticize her treatment choices of the past. They are in the past. I want to help her move forward.

Me: Agree! One thing that is clear, from published research, is how important it is, that people need to believe in their treatment.

Believing that chemotherapy is “medicine,” and could save you, is important. If you’re going to choose chemo.

That’s why, AFTER they choose their treatment, I am silent about my own misgivings about this, and I just pour love and support on my friend or family member who chooses it.

When they are already in chemo or radiation treatment is simply not the time to add to their already crippling fears.

One of many reasons I could never choose chemo—I’d choose to prepare myself and leave the world sooner than maybe I might have, otherwise, rather than submit to chemotherapy—is that I know too much.

I would not see the needle in my arm as healing “medicine.” I’d be crying, and emotionally and mentally resistant.

That does not serve. Others look at that needle, and see it as agents to the rescue, chemicals that kill bad guys. Their hope at a future. Once they make that choice, our job is to simply support and love.

After all, do we really have a choice in someone else’s care?

And, I believe a patient should get to decide what they do, with whatever time is left, as they leave the world. (Which we all will do.)

If she decides to eat ice cream and Ensure, from here on out—she should enjoy the ice cream and the love of her friends. It’s just not a time for judgment, or for tearfully begging them to eat something else, do something else.

If she needs food-prep help, that’s a great way you can serve. If she has metastases in her lungs and liver now, plus the massive toxicity in her body from the chemicals injected in her veins and the big radioactive exposure, her chances of survival are slim, indeed.

But, if eating a diet that starves some cancer cells and helps her immune system rebuild, gets her a few more months….what is that worth?

For many, that’s worth a lot. Think of trips she could take with the kids, memories she could make. Time she could spend preparing those she loves and having those meaningful conversations.

Packing your fridge with greens, root veggies, organic fruits—doing the juicing (very important, nutrition is so easily absorbed this way, oxygenating the body—cancer hates oxygen and alkalinity!) is critically important in healing from the near-total shut-down of the immune system that allowed cancer to get the upper hand.

It’s not everyone’s choice. Some decide to die, and manage that process instead.

But the holistic approach is not a passive one. Packing your fridge with greens, root veggies, organic fruits—doing the juicing (very important, nutrition is so easily absorbed this way, oxygenating the body—cancer hates oxygen and alkalinity!)—getting clear on the unresolved trauma in your life, the way lack of forgiveness has affected you biologically���

–all of this is critically important in healing from the near-total shut-down of the immune system that allowed cancer to get the upper hand.

All of this is covered in Chris’ Square One course. It’s far more than a diet.

Heather: Thank you so much for taking the time to explain this to me.

Me: It’s a great honor. It’s actually a really spiritual experience, to sit with someone you love, as they face a serious risk to their life, and find ways to support them. The ways they want. Even if their choices aren’t the ones we would make.

Robyn Openshaw, MSW, is a researcher and author of 15 titles.

She spoke in 450 cities in 6 years, on human detoxification, and rebuilding your health using a plant-based, nutrient dense diet. You can take her free video masterclass on how to detoxify, bi-annually, for disease prevention and optimal health.

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[nothingman]

I remember the day, 9/11/2001, like it was yesterday.

I was a student in New York City.  I’d been living there for a while at that time—I was still adjusting to being in the big city. I was a Native kid, a rez boy who grew up as a hip-hop head, and so I was living out my childhood fantasy of living in the birthplace of hip-hop while going to school and trying to pay my monthly rent.

Not easy.

I had class at nine o’clock that morning on September 11. I had a formula—it took me eight minutes to get dressed, wrap my hair in a t-shirt (on fleek!) and get to class.  That meant that I could sleep until 8:52 in the morning.  I always listened to the radio when I slept, so my dreams were often influenced by whatever I heard on the radio.  I’ve done that since I was a little kid—I remember having nightmares about playing basketball with the “Thriller” version of Michael Jackson when I was little guy and I tumbled many, many times with Boy George as well!

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But I digress.

On this particular morning—September 11—I remember hitting “snooze” in the morning time and going back to sleep. When I passed back out, I remember dreaming about a plane, a small crop duster in my dream, hitting a small building and falling to the ground. When I woke up, I hurried through my five-minute “get ready” routine—splash water in my face, brush my teeth, wrap my hair in a t-shirt and throw on the cleanest clothes in my room. Out of my apartment as quickly as I could!

At that time, my apartment was ONE block away from my school so I could make it in literally no time.  When I rounded the corner from my block to the school, there were hundreds of people just standing outside on the corner and in the street.  Now granted, this is New York City, White Harlem, so hundreds of people on a random street is not necessarily earth-shattering news.  Yet, this was different—people were crying in the street, people looked confused in the street, and most important, these folks were right in front of my school, which was not really a sexy or fun street to hang out on.

Plus, it was 9 in the morning—I made it just in time for class.  There were never hundreds of people there at 9 in the morning when class just started.

I saw my dear friend Vanessa and ran over to her.  At that time, there were virtually no Natives at my school so Vanessa and I hung very, very close together and supported each other protectively. When I saw Vanessa, she was crying, so I asked her what was wrong.

“You haven’t heard?” she asked me as if I was the most oblivious person in the world, which apparently I was.

“Heard what?” I asked her, confirming my ignorance and obliviousness.

Vanessa answered incredulously, “Somebody flew a plane into the World Trade Center. There was also one that went down at the Pentagon. I don’t know if anything else happened down in Virginia…”

At that point, I knew why Vanessa was crying so passionately; her brother was stationed in Virginia.  The scale of the destruction and tragedy still hadn’t dawned on me—I just wanted to find out if her brother was okay.  At that moment I also understood why I had the weird dream about the crop duster running into a building—I heard that news on the radio right before I woke up and it crept into my subconscious.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t call to find out if her brother was okay; all the phone lines were compromised, even landlines.  That remained the case for almost a week.  I later learned that my mom thought I was dead because she had never been to New York—how would she know that I was on the complete opposite side of Manhattan?

I thought I was dead too.  When I learned of the destruction and evil behind the plane crashes, I figured that somebody was coming back to finish us off.  There were bomb threats so everybody returned to their apartments and were no longer in the streets. I’m a country boy, a rez boy—this stuff was making no sense to me. I wanted to be home, on the rez, where people cry together and laugh together, where we mourn together, feel fear together and face death together. I remember when the smell crept uptown and I could smell the fire and destruction and it forced me to close my apartment window despite the late summer heat. I wished I could share that claustrophobia with someone.

But this was the city, not my homelands, where everyone knows each other.  Instead, this was a place with millions and millions of people within extremely close quarters and nobody knows each other.

It was weird. Not scary—I was cool dying, if that’s what was gonna happen. I was just sad that I couldn’t get my mom and my little brother on the phone to tell them that I loved them first.

Two women hold each other in shock and grief on Sep. 11, 2001 after planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City

Obviously I didn’t die. Obviously a lot of information came out later that showed the enormity of the day that I didn’t understand initially. Obviously it was much, much bigger than my little take on the day.  Turns out that September 11th is probably the most important date in recent history—that date became the excuse for a whole new branch of government, a racist war against a nation that had nothing to do with that date, a racist war against an idea, terrorism, that is impossible to win.  Because of that date, we’re still spending hundreds of millions of dollars a day on a war that had nothing to do with September 11th that could be instead dedicated to education, health care, social security, veterans’ benefits or any number of more worthwhile things.

It was undoubtedly a tragedy. But September 11th wasn’t a surprise, at least not for Native people and many people of color. No, Native people were already well aware of how destructive and evil people could be. How did we know? AMERICA TAUGHT US THAT; really, September 11th was only a surprise for white people and for those who didn’t realize that America had already perpetrated many September 11ths of its own. Native people knew that. We knew that America had a whole bunch of blood on its hands and that there was always a harvest season, always a reckoning. Sir Isaac Newton gave that harvest a name in his Third Law of Motion, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Oh yeah, that means that there will be more September 11ths as well—it’s inevitable unless America works to acknowledge and reconcile with its many victims of domestic terrorism against its own people. We see that energy right now—the current distrust of the federal government, the distrust of law enforcement and peoples’ movements of all colors that don’t believe in the legitimacy of the “powers that be,” like Idle No More, the Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter and the Tea Party. Obviously the viewpoints of those various movements are vastly different, but the energy is largely the same.

“We don’t believe you. This Nation is build upon raw power and deceit and not freedom, equality or opportunity.”

There will be more September 11ths unless we change, folks. God forbid, but unless we do something it will happen. There will be rectification for the Marias Massacre, for the Sand Creek Massacre, for Wounded Knee, for North Tulsa/Black Wall Street, the Mankato mass hanging, the Red Summer of 1919, Joe Coe, Emmett Till, internment camps of Japanese, Chinese Exclusion Act, slavery, Jim Crow, genocide, forced tubal ligation of Native women, Tuskegee experiments, etc., etc., etc.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the words of Ron Burgundy, “It’s science.” So, how do we stop this horrible cycle? Acknowledgment. Conversation. Painful conversation. Hell, restitution, reparations. Not punitive—just what the US owes. To wit, honor treaties with Native people and recognize aboriginal title, whether that be via monetary compensation (a disgusting compromise for many Native people, yet one that acknowledges practical realities) or specific performance. Monetary compensation for black folks for 40 acres and a mule—what is that in today’s dollars?

Formally apologize. Acknowledge. Treat us as human beings—the inhumane way that many white folks on this continent treated people of color for 400 years still influences the way they perceive us today, hence the incredibly disproportionate amount of deaths for Native and Black people at the hands of law enforcement.

Not civil rights– human rights—treat us like human beings.

Otherwise there will be more September 11ths. It’s physics. Natural law. We’re stuck with each other—none of us are going anyplace. But acknowledgment, reconciliation and restitution of America’s past crimes will move help us move to a new age, where we can get past these historical demons and actually start living in the 21st Century.

God bless the families of all who were harmed by September 11th. God also bless the families devastated by all instances of terrorism, including those perpetrated by the United States.

This story was originally posted on September 11, 2015.

  Two women hold each other in shock and grief on Sep. 11, 2001 after planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City

Gyasi Ross, Editor at Large Blackfeet Nation/Suquamish Territories NEW PROJECT “ISSKOOTSIK” (BEFORE HERE WAS HERE) AUDIOBOOK AVAILABLE NOW at shop.krecs.com Twitter: @BigIndianGyasi

  The post The Day White Innocence Died: An Indigenous Take on #September11 appeared first on Indian Country Media Network.

via Indian Country Media Network

[viralhottopics]

Skeleton cities and snipers: the shocking photographs that show the scale of Syria’s loss

From the shelled-out mall that never opened to a family reclaiming their possessions from rubble, Pulitzer-winning photographer Sergey Ponomarev captured Syrias tragedy from the inside

In the middle of 2014, after the Syrian government had retaken the city of Homs from rebel fighters, Sergey Ponomarev stood with his camera and surveyed the damage. The photojournalist found a family who had returned to their old flat and captured the scene: in a street buried in rubble and lined with destroyed buildings, they load whatever possessions they can salvage into a taxi. Their son wears a brightly coloured party hat he has found. It is at once mundane the family calmly going about their business and devastating.

In another photograph, four boys play amid the rubble. They have been burning the plastic from electrical cables theyve found in shelled buildings to get to the copper wire, which they can sell. Another shows a recently built shopping centre. Never opened, it is now crumbling and skeletal, a giant portrait of Syrias president Bashar al-Assad adorning the front.

The rebels didnt have a lot of arms or fighters, says Ponomarev. But they had snipers and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. If they saw a tank, a sniper would hit a small hole in the tanks armour and an RPG man would try to hit the same spot so the RPG would go deeper into the tank and explode. The tanks suspected that, in every window, every hole in the wall, there were snipers. So the tactic of the Syrian army was to shell every suspected window.

Homs, June 2014: Abu Hisham Abdel Karim and his family bundle salvaged possessions into a taxi.

Ponomarevs photographs, from his series Assads Syria, are about to go on show at the Imperial War Museum in London. His series The Exodus which documents the resulting refugee crisis and features photographs that won Ponomarev, along with New York Times colleagues, the 2016 Pulitzer prize will also be on display.

Were in the museums cafe, surrounded by the machinery of war. Ponomarev tells me what he looks for when taking a photograph: Everything should come into the right place at the right time the light, the people, the event or action. Everything should be well balanced, so the frame will be perfectly shaped. Thats the skill you develop over years.

Ponomarevs other talent is to capture vast, complex situations the war in Syria, the Arab spring and set them on a relatable, human scale. In Damascus, near the rebel-held zone, a shell hit a car. It exploded and set other cars on fire, he says. Instead of rushing about and shooting the burning cars, I decided to capture a pedestrian. The photograph, taken from behind, shows a man holding on to his bicycle, calmly standing and watching. Its obvious hes a resident who just stumbled on the scene.

Ponomarev went to Damascus in 2013. Before you can even check into your hotel, he says, you have to go to the information ministry and they assign you a translator a minder who will escort you. The minder would report back to the government. Id see him reporting on what we did, says the photographer with a smile. I was doing my stories, he was doing his.

Damascus, August 2013: A cyclist watches the fire caused by an exploded mortar. Photograph: Sergey Ponomarev

There was, at one point, a frustrating period when he was trying to find out if there had been a chemical attack in the suburbs. But most of the time, he says, there wasnt a huge amount of conflict between what he wanted to see and what his minder, or rather the government, allowed. I wasnt intending to meet with any diehard supporters of the opposition. My photography is slightly different. Im showing the life of normal people, whether they are inside this government-controlled bubble or outside.

One of the most striking things about reporting from the parts of Syria controlled by the regime, he says, was witnessing how people went along with government propaganda. You see that they have their own truths, none relevant to real things that are happening. But much of the western medias reports were from the rebels side, he adds, so that wasnt balanced either. I got this possibility to get inside, to see that its a normal society, to explain why they support the government.

The photographer asked to visit Assads prisons. At one, according to a recent Amnesty report, thousands of detainees were tortured, starved and executed in mass hangings. His request was granted, but Ponomarevs visit was tightly controlled. They showed us several detainees. One was a Russian-speaking Syrian who was trying to bring in money for fighters. There were four others who also spoke Russian, but pretended they didnt. They were, the state said, producing explosives and car bombs. We were requesting to meet with some Chechen detainees but [prison officials] said they were not ready yet. I guess they were probably beaten and their bruises were still visible, so they cannot present them to journalists.

June 2014: Homeless children play in the ruins of Homs after opposition forces fled their district. Photograph: Sergey Ponomarev

Ponomarev, who is 36, started taking photographs as a teenager and studied photojournalism at Moscow State University. He worked for Russian papers, and was a staff photographer for Associated Press for eight years, before going freelance in 2012. A year later, he was largely working for the New York Times.

Although he doesnt think of himself as a war photographer, Ponomarev has seen plenty of crises and conflicts. At Associated Press, he covered the Beslan school siege in 2004, the Lebanon war in 2006, and the fall of Tripoli in 2011. He has also shot stories in Ukraine and, last year, was in Mosul when Iraqi forces launched an offensive against Isis.

Then there was the month he spent in Gaza: Youre constantly hearing the metal buzz of drones flying around, like metal mosquitoes. If you dont hear the sound of the drone, that means its cleared the airspace for a jet. So a jet will come and bomb something. That was scary you dont know which house it will bomb.

He has a therapist. Thats the best way, to talk to a professional who will try to get all your bad feelings and fears out, rather than talking to your friends. Your friends will say, This dude just constantly talks about war its not that fun. He smiles.

Sergey Ponomarev. Photograph: Andrew Tunnard

Having been to all these places, does Ponomarev think photography can change the world? No, he says. We are now so overwhelmed with visual information, its always around us. However, he does think his pictures might disturb people from living in their normal, cosy lives and probably encourage them to take action. This could be making a donation or volunteering.

But its not like the late 1960s and early 70s, he says, when photographs of the Vietnam war had the power to really shock in particular, Eddie Adamss picture of a Vietcong prisoner being executed or Nick Uts photograph of a nine-year-old girl running from a napalm attack. Those images could stop war, but not any more.

These days, he says, were used to distressing images, and find it easier to turn away. Some people are feeling like they dont want to be disturbed and some editors now put warning signs before images. Imagine if the napalm girl had been shown with a warning saying, You will see war crimes and nudity. Its not that shocking. You click or you dont click. It wont provoke you to take action.

In a way, the value of our work has been a little bit lowered. He pauses then adds: But still we are able to produce strong and iconic images. We have to do that.

Sergey Ponomarev: A Lens on Syria is at the Imperial War Museum, London, 27 April to 3 September.

Read more: http://bit.ly/2ovqBtI

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