#i would like to hear if others have DIFFERENT reasons for the hill house discourse or if this is the prevalent issue

[greygilberti]

My main issue with flannagan is that Shirley Jacksons work is all about the perils of the nuclear family etc

And to me flannigan was like fuck that family is great

It just goes info the heart of what Jackson was saying and shits on it for no reason?

He kinda made the story more conventional and I hate that

Whatever walked there walked alone is like. Theee core of the story and to be like fuck that is shitty

Jackson isn't some hugely outdated bigoted writer who's ideas need subverting and challenging (at least not in this story. Idk about the rest of her work)

Jackson novel was about how people who don't fit are vunerable a chewed up and spat out by institutions like romance and family

And it's like flannigan didn't get that. Or idk thought yay family was a more radical take

Idk i haven't seen the show recently so I may be misremembering but I feel like the majority of the criticism was that he didn't get / ignored the really interesting thing the book was doing.

I completely understand and respect those views.

I guess to me he did adapt it and made it his own and to me he wanted there to be hope in something that is supposed to be the end all be all of one's support. I HEAR you and yes, agree that the ideals weren't exactly what Jackson had in mind when writing the book and setting the tones and ideas. But for a creator who DID change it as much as he did, I personally feel that he did his best to take the subject matter into consideration, unlike other things I've seen where they just completely disregard certain aspects.

Like, as a quick example: Theo's sexuality. He stated himself that it was important to him and Kate (Theo) to open with her in the night club hooking up with a woman to immediately recognize that part of the character whereas the 1999 movie more or less skated over. In the novel, Theo is very much hinted at being a lesbian (because of course when the book was published, things were a lot different). My point being that while he lost some aspects while filming, he tried hard to make something good. Did he succeed? That's up for debate and that's totally fine. The thing with art is that people interpret it differently. There's the possibility that we're seeing exactly what he was thinking when reading it himself. I'm not saying your analysis is wrong and that he's right for missing the mark in any way, just that he interpreted it differently

There's also the perils of the filmmaking process as a whole in the rewrites and what Netflix wanted and how the writing process actually went. I know that when they started filming they didn't have everything written out. Maybe there were other writers or the production company making changes (I do know there were several scenes cut that he didn't want to get rid of), I don't know. All we have is the final product, that's all we get to see. We don't know what got pushed, saved and cut.

It's been a few years since I've read the book and even though I remember a lot about it, the human mind is fallible and maybe I'm on the other side of you where the show is more prevalent in my mind so I'll definitely need a reread and to reexamine the show, do a side by side comparison. But thank you for pointing all of that out, I can understand your plight with him in that sense.

[I do not have an english degree and it has been years since I was in college (even more since I was in the class where we actively discussed the book itself) so there's a lot that I may misspeak on as far as themes of the book, etc. ]

Let me say this to close: separating the show from the book, in my personal opinion, the show is one of the best I have ever seen and greatly appreciate his work on it. KNOWING he did not initially come up with the ideas for the story and that he had a fuloundation to build upon, I still think he did really well. He could've done worse and not worked as hard to preserve as much of the original story as he did. (I think I made the distinction in my original post but to reiterate: I think I'm okay with a lot of it because I feel like this is a fanfic he's made of Jackson's work )

Thank you for your honest opinion, I like hearing others and why they have certain views

[theoxofthezodiac]

THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; Mun & Muse - Meme.

fill out & repost ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OC’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm.

My muse is:   canon / oc / au / canon-divergent / fandomless /

Is your character popular in the fandom?  YES / NO.

Is your character considered hot™ in the fandom?  YES / NO / IDK.

Is your character considered strong in the fandom?  YES / NO / IDK.

Are they underrated?  YES / NO.

Were they relevant for the main story?  YES / NO.

Were they relevant for the main character?  YES / NO / THEY’RE A PROTAG.

Are they widely known in their world?  YES / NO?

How’s their reputation?  GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL.

How strictly do you follow canon?  — Generally I like/try to stick as closely to canon as possible, but I also LOVE AUs and looking into stuff that happens after the canon and before the canon!!

SELL YOUR MUSE! Aka try to list everything, which makes your muse interesting in your opinion to make them spicy for your mutuals.  —  Aaahh fuck um listen: I trust myself to do two things exceptionally well—shitposting and feeling feelings. That in mind, I’d like to say I’m also very good at writing top-tier, big brain crack threads and “oh fuck that shit hurted” angst. Also, Haru is the best of both worlds: he can give you himbo AND soft boy. He’s a big brother who’s split a watermelon. Are you a pussy who can��t handle haunted houses (like myself) he’s the muse for you, turning irrational fear into a tear-jerking cathartic experience. Pls interact.

Now the OPPOSITE, list everything why your muse could not be so interesting (even if you may not agree, what does the fandom perhaps think?).  —  I’m gonna level with you: I’ve got a bit too much of a soft spot for soft boy Haru, and thus my skills at writing Dark Haru are not the best developed. Also I can be quite slow with replies oop.

What inspired you to rp your muse?  —  Furuba means so much to me. Like a lot of people I found it around age like 14ish and it’s stayed with me ever sense. It’s my favorite book series and I believe the strongest argument for graphic novels/manga having literary merit. It has the best character development I’ve ever read. It’s so cathartic and I related so deeply to many of the characters.

What keeps your inspiration going?  —  A lot of my inspiration comes from watching the anime and rereading the manga, also reading other people’s threads and seeing memes. I go through periods of focusing on my various hyperfixations and I hyperfixate on them...and sometimes that’s Furuba.

Some more personal questions for the mun.

Give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

Do you think you give your character justice?  YES / NO.

Do you frequently write headcanons? YES / NO.

Do you sometimes write drabbles?  YES / NO.

Do you think a lot about your Muse during the day?  YES / NO.

Are you confident in your portrayal?   YES / NO.

Are you confident in your writing?  YES / NO.

Are you a sensitive person?  YES / 50/50 / NO.

Do you accept criticism well about your portrayal?  — Of course!! As long as it’s like actual criticism and not just an anon saying “fuck u, u suck” 

Do you like questions, which help you explore your character?  — YES

If someone disagrees to a headcanon of yours, do you want to know why?  — Yes!! A lot of my headcanons come from my personal experiences and my personal interpretation of Furuba. Like any other book/series everyone interprets it different and I love hearing other interpretations, even if we choose different hills to die on.

If someone disagrees with your portrayal, how would you take it?  —  It makes me kinda sad, but tbh if someone doesn’t like it they don’t have to follow me and we can just kindly ignore each other lmao.

If someone really hates your character, how do you take it?  —  My portrayal? Ight whatever. The character itself? I’d like to know why. Like, Haru isn’t one of them, but I know there are problematic characters but that doesn’t mean you can’t like them as a character. Idk I understand hating characters but I’d only love to hear (valid) reasons why. Tangential but I am EXHAUSTED by all the Kagura hate and “discourse.”

Are you okay with people pointing out your grammatical errors?  —  PLEASE DO HOLY SHIT!!! Sometimes I notice them after I see the thread and I want to shove my entire laptop down my throat but if I do I always try to go back and fix them before anyone notices (oops) but if you notice it and I don’t pls tell me.

Do you think you are easy going as a mun?   —  I really try to be as non-intimidating as possible because I’m actually intimidated by everyone else lmao. Like I know my rules may come across a bit cold/blunt but I myself try not to be.

That’s about it, congrats for filling out!

Tagged by: @jezebelsmultimuse​  thank you!!

Tagging: anyone who wants to/sees this!!!

[willpowerbutch]

Willpower Butch: In Profundis

Dawn clambered over the LA quarantine like a wearied soldier storming a hill – the hill that has become the burning bosom of the Gay-Transgender. Since NASA identified God in the night sky, flying toward earth to assess His children, society has been thrust into a state of nihilistic chaos. The Christians rejoice, and the Gay plot on how to turn Him over to their wickedness. The Transgenitalists, banned from public restrooms, desecrate suburban streets with their bodily fluids in an expression of protest, making neighborhoods where once children could freely get hit by cars while playing Pokémon Go into a biohazard.

(God, who is due to arrive this summer, is shooting through space right now.)

Morning threw these degenerates into relief as they staggered over the pavement of Duplass Avenue and into oncoming traffic, waving stolen underwear on long strips of decrepit building vinyl: the art gallery spinsters who invented Mitski; adults who cosplay as memes; “grandfathers” who loiter in the Youth Bibles section of book stores; and, most troublingly, the bodies of fallen straights, levitating up through the storm drains on the wands of gay necromancers – in short, the entire Green Party – were only the first denizens I encountered along the harrowing road to James Franco’s homo-cidal circus. Everywhere, there were the remnants of bar food and suspicious in-laws. All this was the plutonic vision which greeted my trusted correspondent and I as we strode heterosexfully down the block.

Paragon Shag beside me had not been the same since our eviction from the House of Those Motherfuckers Who Wear Sandals. Only the whiff of pedicure oils on a passing European businessman would send him into such extravagant declamations on the aesthetics of marginalization that I would be impelled to beat the fuck out of him.

“Shag,” I spoke unto him as we arrived at our destination, the Villa de Hermaphrodita, that crypt of human bipedalism. “What is this stench wafting from your chest?”

“Deodorant,” said he.

“I fear for you, Shag. You are aware that deodorant is a witch’s brew intended to inculcate children into the homosexual lifestyle.” He knew as I did that those who use it too much become ravenous beasts, mere British culture journalists, addicted to the scent of Orientalism and male crying.

“Precisely so. We cannot allow ourselves to be overtaken by those limping nancies. With this, we shall confuse their predatory instincts.” And just then, a furious piss communist passed us by, navigating by the odor of listless pretension to James Franco. “You see?” said Shag, turning to me suddenly. He took my arm in the manner of the Romans, up to my elbow. “We are brothers, Mr. Butch, and not in a YouTube Red sort of way, nor in the sense that two different-looking male roommates claim to be, nor in the manner of college boys who make out at strangers’ house parties and tell everyone that it’s part of their fraternity hazing ritual, nor like bohemian male friends who have a large age gap in a hot way, nor indeed like the Quakers, who we all realize developed oatmeal as a gateway to eating spunk.”

He spoke prettily, and I could do nothing but convert my doubt into glorious masculinity. We had come to investigate Franco, after all, whom we suspected of creating twinks to try to turn himself gayer.

We entered the villa -- and there he was, directly before us, barefaced and shockingly confident for a man who looks like a toilet squeegee, licking chocolate off the thighs of a servant boy. James Franco: provocateur of the Gay and war poet of their slick uprising against biological persons.

“Wow,” he greeted us running a hand through his hair. “This is, like, crazy. I haven’t been tag-teamed by two bears since I was on the set of Milk. Did you come to see how I kidnap women and transform them into twinks to make myself gayer?”

We were speechless before this display of arrogance, but Franco’s attention had already been diverted. The servant boy’s epaulet had come unbuttoned.

“Well,” said Franco, hooking him by the shoulders, “the evidence is piling up, huh?”

“Sir?”

“Tell me,” Franco mewled in a squalid attempt to sound erotic, “while you’re existing in a state of, like, untroubled happiness because of straight privilege, do you ever wonder how it feels to have ornery fetish sex with glamorous-yet-blasé strangers every second of your life like the Gay-Transgender are expected to do?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, now you’ll have nothing but time for that, man – as the newest member of the Heterosexual Circus.” Turning mercurially, as if astonished to discover that Shag and I had not moved, Franco addressed us. Raising his arms, he shouted, “Birth is Death! Reason is Treason! Empiricism is Imperialism!”

We could not bear to witness the poor boy’s torture by being forced to be bad at dancing in front of gay perverts. As Shag and I shuffled back onto the street, idly kicking the shit out of a taxi that had parked on the sidewalk, I was emasculated by a notion unrelated to the sweating power of my manhood: that we had not heard the last of these frightful slogans.

*******************************************************************************************

It did not take long for us to find a trap door at the other side of the villa, under a cypress tree. It was locked, but not for a man. Reducing it to smithereens with a mere touch of my beard to it, we descended into a lively disco club where, clinging to the shadows, we moved about curiously. There was in one of the dance-floor cages a sight which startled us.

“Gayflame!” called Shag. “Reddie Gayflame!”

“It’s just Sexchaynge now,��� she whispered above the music, on the verge of tears because her body was undergoing a dramatic change.

“But, Sexchaynge,” Shag advanced fretfully, leaving enough distance so as not to be endangered by her femininity, “I thought you were a Gay as well.”

“I was, but I gave it up. You see, I believe in doing things as hard as I can, like Hugh Dancy -- but I knew that I would never be the gayest of all. Not while Ben Whishaw still has a career as an international sex fae... So, why not become a transgender instead, I thought to myself, since there’s less competition?”

Shag nodded sagely.

“Anyway, there is somebody else here that you ought to meet. Follow me.”

My correspondent and I were led into the adjacent hallway, where loomed a misshapen yet familiar silhouette. Suddenly recognizing it, I cried out, “It is the Lord of Lust, the fluent horizontal dancer ‘himself,’ Ben Whishaw! You fiend! You devil!”

But when the vampire stepped into the light, it turned out to be only Twinkathee Charlotterampling, who is merely probably an insatiable fairy.

He threw himself into Paragon Shag’s arms, weeping. “I knew you would never go back to Italy, so I came here to find you. Oh, please say that we can stay together, Daddio. Listen, I can even help you out: Gay Franco isn’t only turning women into twinks, he is then cloning the normal homos! Next, there will be enough fit gay guys to have sex with each other, and Franco will be our only option. Then where will I get any action with men who don’t look like a rejected Muppet? It’s a direct assault on bottoms, and not the fun kind, like when Benedict Cumberbatch gets turnt on Corvo and tries to turn my ass into Christmas lights,” spoke Timpani, gulping. “It’s against my huwoman rights.”

The dimensionless sex balloon’s discourse rained down upon me the spume of flaccid object permanence, and I was forced to rebuke him. “You skinny-jeaned Socratic, you purveyor of gay lies. Humans are not women. And the only right you have is to stop dangling your driftwood in front of every sailor you lay eyes upon. Knave!”

We resumed our progress down the hallway, the two of us and our limpid sidekicks, who stopped every so often to slather their tongues over errant broomsticks. At last, we cruised into a large room, which contained in its rear a glass chamber that held a strange, dark machine within.

“It’s the TRANSporner,” said Timpani Gayparade.

Turning to Shag, I asked, “What do you suppose it is, my macho companion? I cannot well understand the cartoon elf’s French.”

“It must be how Franco transfigures women into the Gay. My God,” Shag exclaimed, “it’s full of emo music.” Grabbing Gayparade’s weird jaw, he brought him into his line of sight so he could address him. “You – What else has Franco created?”

“He has an entire lab devoted to cloning the Gay,” Timpani laughed drily. “And it’s completely, like, impenetrable. Any man who goes in there is brainwashed into Franco’s horde. Only a woman could do it.”

“A woman?” we shouted together.

Twinkathee nodded.

“But we have so few in our warehouse. What if Franco merely kills them? We cannot afford to risk one,” Shag bemoaned.

“You see this?” Twinkathee peered up at Shag and shook his head despondently, pendulating his curls like Quentin Crisp’s spinal column. “This is only the first step. Once Franco masters cloning, the gays will be able to have orgies with themselves, and then they’ll spend eternity competing to see who can suck the most of his own dick. We can’t let God know that we ripped off twincest from Leviticus; he’ll think that we’re total fucking nerds. Shag,” Timpani huffed Frenchtastically, “I know this is the last thing you want to hear–”

“Silence, you animated meringue.”

“—but Ben Whishaw is the only homo who still dares to manufacture women. We need him.”

(A diagram of some of the unique anatomical characteristics of women.)

There was little sound then – nothing but the shaking swallow of breath and a distant applause, floating down from the circus where Franco was, variously, receiving his latest recruits. Tears of frustration had sprung up to rim Gayparade’s eyes. There was something accusatory in his gaze at my friend; such a look might have paused me in my celebrations of erectile power, if it had been produced by a man and not by a melancholy bagel fingerer.

Twinkathee lifted his chin, which surprised me because most homosexuals lose executive function of their necks by his age. “You know I’m right. And you know that you have to make him come.”

“He already has,” I interjected, “Whim Bitchaw, Colin Firth, Tom Tykwer, Patrick Stewart, and Judi Dench all at the same time. Oh, you mean come here.” I turned unto Shag, who shirked his eyes. “Why, Shag? What can this eroticized bungee cord mean?”

Slowly and with great shame, Shag reached into the pocket of his suit jacket, right above his heart, and pulled out a condom. “This – this is how we summon Ben Whishaw.”

“With a condom?”

I was surprised, but my skepticism soon changed to heroic terror as Shag tore at the wrapper with his teeth and emptied its contents onto the floor.

“Ben cannot resist the scent of a condom that is left unused. He will come now whether we want him to or not.”

Soon, Ben Whishaw came.

He came – in a flourish of glitter and sharpie tattoos -- attended by his insidious Cummunists: nudists brandishing firecrackers at uncomfortably-pretty busboys, male lingerie models, lions mounted by braless Valkyries, weeping Bavarian youths, the entire population of Barcelona, Michael Shannon, and a parade of cats, all singing “Cake” by Rihanna at the top of their lungs. BBC4 was empty that day; all the mouthwash Mary-Janes were on earth, rutting against children’s harmonicas, instilling fear in all but the most excellent specimens of manliness.

“Rejoice,” Ben Whishaw sang as his silky knees folded to the ground, chafing immediately. “Rejoice, you who have beheld the bawds of my bedchambers, the Greeks of old beachfront restaurants, the harbingers of fantasy sex tours like Ezra Miller’s career. I have come, and so shall you.” Swanning over to address Shag, he bit his lip. “Darling, I am here for you! What do you need, hot stuff?”

“Women!” he shouted manfully.

“What for? You aren’t still trying to figure out which hole is the mouth, are you?”

“Nay,” he replied, “my brother Butch told me. We need them to infiltrate Gay Franco’s hideout and destroy his cloning technology.”

“And you,” the hunch-hip padded towards me, “this is your brilliant plan? You send women to do your dirty work for you? What are you afraid of, big boy, and what can I do to ease that stress?”

“Naw, son,” called out Michael Shannon from afar, “do you want a garden salad with that skewer, or should I just serve you a knuckle sandwich?”

But Whishaw held up a slim, delicate wrist, jangling his fetish jewelry, silencing him. “I will say it to you strai—” he hacked painfully, “directly. I will give you my women, whom I had intended to use to lure fathers into a gay orgy, thereby undermining their paternal confidence. This, of course, would homosexualize the youth. But I will command them to join your cause instead... for a price.”

“Speak, elongated child!”

“Your beard,” said he.

I was struck silent.

“I need your beard,” he repeated, endless tears gathering in his eyes. “It’s for my play. The director is afraid that I’m not hairy enough to be Marilyn Monroe.”

“Why,” I puffed my chest, but it didn’t look gay or like breasts, “of all the evil perversions your kind have committed against man, this is the one that I shall never entertain to forgive.”

“That is the deal, Comrade Butch: your sublime brush for my women.”

There was no canon fire, there were no memorial barbecues where suburbanites play a game of subconsciously adulterous cat-and-mouse over the grill, for the sacrifice I made that day. Dear reader, it is a day that shall be marked forever with infamy, for that is the sin that hangs over whatever circumstance impels a straight man to give any piece of himself over to a queer Nancy. Do not mourn for Faust, do not pity Dante the Pilgrim for his travails in Hell; in the flash of a scalpel, I fell into a greater damnation than those dramatic homos could ever conceive.

*******************************************************************************************

When he had his ill-gotten prize, Ben Whishaw parted our company as he has left each of the tens of thousands of men he’s seduced around the world, with a lachrymose little smile, a wiggle of the ass, and a soliloquy on the transient beauty of tricking straight men into thinking you’re a woman until they’ve already removed their pants. Being a consummate phallic god, I was immune to his European witchcraft; Paragon Shag, I’m afraid, was somewhat awestruck by this coy display. But there was no time for either of us to dwell on his fabulous sorcery. The deal was done, and there awaited before us creatures yet almost as feminine as that enchanted nymph.  

“So,” I said, stalking around their strange mass, “these are the notorious ‘women.’” A slim shadow fell across my face, and a chill entered my heart. “Shag, what do you make of all this?”

He proceeded to inform me, “It is supposed that women were invented by the early Catholics, at the decree of the Pope.”

“The Catholics?” I interrupted him. “But what do those queers need from women? They themselves gave rise to the two cruxes of gay culture: old men who sort of cross-dress, and bottoms who think they can top.”

“Like Michael Kors,” added Shag, “but with less herpes.”

“So, what, by God, did they want with women?” Yet Shag could only shake his head. “Women!” I shouted unto them, for their ears ring incessantly from all the cock they swallow. “What are you for?”

They seemed to consider my question. “We like Shakespeare!” shouted one. “We create life, and we perpetuate culture,” replied another thoughtfully. Said the third, “We’re trying to eliminate baby-faced depressives from the gene pool.”

“Then you’ve certainly backfired on the Catholics.” I stroked the remnant of my beard and turned to Shag. “Sir, we should waste no time in bringing them to the safety of our suspicious roadside barn. Send Gayparade back through the TRANSporner and let us put a plug in James Franc’n’o in a firm and impressive way.”

Shag nodded apprehensively, taking the marionette by the elbow and helping him toward the entry port. “Fear not,” he advised the waif, “for soon you will have no rap career again. Iggy.”

“Iggy,” Gayparade murmured after him. “Iggy, Iggy.”

They came upon the threshold of the TRANSporner, its dilated cavern of unnatural lust that had given Iggy Azalea talent and genitalia so many years before. The twink gulped, appraising it, unsure of how to proceed.

“Timpani?” Shag inflected. “What is the matter?”

But the twisted, hollow-cheeked spaghetti said nothing, impelling Shag to grip him by the hair, repeating his query in a low growl.

“Oh, Paragon!” cried the gimp at unimpressive length, “I can’t do it, brother! Being a girl is bullshit!”

“Truly,” said Shag. “I’ve read Nietzsche.”

“I won’t go back into the TRANSporner,” he wailed. “I would rather die than look like an adult human.”

Shag leant down, menace in his eyes. “Then we must leave, Timpani, quickly -- before Master Butch is able to transfer sufficient power from his penis into his legs to follow us.”

“You mean...?”

“Yes,” my noble friend, my eternal companion responded, turning to me. “I am prepared to accept my animal nature, the amoral truth of my life: there can be no more good taste, because that is for the straights. I am a total gay forever.” And thus, Shag tore the bomber jacket from his shoulders, and it fell away like his erection, revealing a strapless silver gown and taffeta stole. Rising by fabulous vampirism, he glared down at me; nevertheless, I could discern a cold and implicit sadness in his gaze, the gaze of young man after the golden summer of 1914.

“Shag,” said I, my loins quivering, “get ahold of your senses. There is no future in the Homosexuality. Every country where gay queers establish their warrens, penises shrink. This is because the Nancy makes healthy public arousal impossible by constantly bringing up Madonna.”

But he had already vanished, along with Gayparade, into a vortex of passionate mid-century female friendships.

The silence that prevailed in his wake was deafening; it was interrupted, at last, only by the genital whir of the TRANSporner and the soft, incomprehensible chattering of the women. And after much prayer, my noble witness, I still cannot say which of us in that final instant had been more the queer Dorothy: Shag, his crystal-blue eyes darkened with looming cocks, cutting loose to spend his life spoon-feeding treacle to a preteen girl’s gay skeleton; or myself, at the realization that, more than my box of horse condoms, more than my brass knuckles, more than even my beard, I needed Paragon Shag with me. It brings me shame to confess this, but we live in such times as make masculine pride scarce, and I do not foresee Western civilization’s return to glistening worthiness until the metrosexuals have been pounded back into almond butter and adult coloring books.

I crossed myself, still in a state of disbelief, and turned toward the threshold of hell, where Sexchaynge stood waiting. She had pressed her cheek against her fist, and her gaze lifted to me sympathetically. “What are you going to do now, Master Butch?”

In a supreme display of muscular eminence, I diverted my erection away from the heart of the sun, boring it into the ground, quaking the earth with my righteousness. “I must pursue Shag, and I must put an end to his delirious transsexual rampage at any cost. Even at the cost of his life. Before he encounters God and offends Him with Sapphic literature.”

“Take solace,” Sexchaynge whispered. “I don’t believe it will come to that. Shag has become a gay slut, so you will always know where to find him...” She smiled sadly as I considered her words. “And lucky for you, sweet-meat sandwich, I know just the ‘man’ to get you in.”

To Be Continued

 About the Authors

In preparation for the BAFTA ceremony, Admiral Willpower Butch is studying how to act prissy and entitled by sitting in on liberal arts film classes. His former beloved companion, Paragon Shag, hasn’t been seen in public since he scandalized a group of children with a flamboyant Broadway medley at their school vape bar; now, he prefers the privacy of the abandoned crime scene he shares with Timpani Gayparade and his twenty-two hot brothers. Their secretary, international murder victim and street gastroenterologist Dead Summer Days, will never get into heaven, but he will loiter around the gate smelling of weed.

[dailyaudiobible]

03/28/2019 DAB Transcript

Deuteronomy 9:1-10:22, Luke 8:4-21, Psalms 69:19-36, Proverbs 12:2-3

Today is the 28th day of the month of March. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I'm Brian. It is a pleasure to be here with you on this 28th day of March where we will take our 28th step of this month forward as we continue our journey through the Bible this year. So we’ve been reading our way through the book of Deuteronomy, the final words of Moses to the children of Israel before they would move forward without him and we’ll continue with Moses second discourse today by reading from the Good News Translation, which is what we’re doing this week by reading chapters 9 and 10 of the book of Deuteronomy.

Commentary:

Okay. So, we have been going through the giving of the law in the previous weeks that we’ve been together, at least for the last month. Now here we are in the book of Deuteronomy where a lot of summary has happened and is happening. And, so, there's like a lot of rules and customs and rituals and methods that have been laid out. And, so, we might wonder, like this is pretty complicated how do you know if you're doing it right and we can even think that in our Christian walk. What are the rules? Like, what are the fundamental rules that we’re supposed to do because it is hard to even remember all of these rules. So, what are we supposed to be doing and is there an order that these things are supposed to be done? And is there a way that they're supposed to be done, right? What’s the recipe? What’s the magic that we should follow and bake at 325 and come out with a strong faith? What will make it all work like it's supposed to work? Moses actually answered that question today in the book of Deuteronomy. We can read all of the rules and normally we’ll start thinking like, you know, like, what do I have to modify in my behavior to be adhering to that rule? As if all of the rules are about caging us in from doing things that maybe we want to do but shouldn't. What Moses revealed is that the rules boil down to something deeper than modifying your behavior. So, quoting Moses, “listen to what the Lord your God demands of you. Worship the Lord and do all that he commands. Love Him, serve Him with all your heart and obey His laws. I’m giving them to you today for your benefit.” So, basically, revere the Lord and honor the Lord. And because you’ve fallen in love with Him, serve Him with all your heart and soul. So on the one it seems like it seems like it should be a little more complicated than this, at least for the children of Israel because we’ve just gone through the giving of the law. There’s so many rules and rituals and customs and observances and so many reminders that have to be obeyed, but when we begin to peel all that back we begin to realize what’s happened here. The rules were certainly the rules but those were the outer boundaries beyond those boundaries was a road that would lead to death and destruction. So, the law wasn't to be a cage to control the people. It existed to do what Moses said it had to do, to remind people who they were, where they'd come from, and who God is. And, so, all of these rules and rituals and customs and remembrances and holidays, this is all things that are baked into the culture itself, constant reminders of who their true source is. Our faith in Jesus is not different although we can often look at it the same way. Like, just tell me the fundamental rule, like a how do I live into this? And we have to recognize it that God isn't interested in rule-based dominance over His people, that was never what He was after. A faithful loyal holy relationship is what He's always been interested in. He wants to be known. And if we really do love God, right, if we love the Lord with all our heart and mind and strength, we’ll be obeying the rules and we won’t even have to think about them anymore, they'll be apparent, they’ll have meaning. This is how all relationships are shaped and there are things we shouldn't participate in because we’re in love with God, we’re unwilling to betray the love that we have for God. And, so, that is how obedience begins to take form and shape in our lives. God didn't offer rules to humanity so that humans could have boring lives. He’s been all along showing us what will lead us to life and what will destroy us and we saw that kind of playing out in Moses talk today when he's telling the people, “you're not going across the Jordan River to take this land because you deserve it. You do not deserve it. You're going into this land because there was a promise and the people who are currently living in that land have become so wicked that they have gone as far as God is going to permit.” So, may we all remember, we don't deserve anything from God. He doesn't owe us anything at all, ever. The fact that you are about to take another breath is a gift and when you exhale that breath may it be an act of worship. Moses is warning the children of Israel about what they will face when they enter into a land of plenty and that warning is no different for us but the way that we can stay on the narrow path that leads to life is to fall in love with God. The rules and regulations of our faith show us the outer boundaries. We can go out beyond those outer boundaries if we want, but it will only lead to destruction. But the deeper we fall in love with God and the deeper that intimacy grows the less we even think about the rules because we don't want to be anywhere outside of God's presence.

Prayer:

Father that’s our declaration at the outset here. We want to be wherever you are and nowhere else. We don't want to be doing things that you aren't and we certainly don't want to be doing things that will lead us to destruction. So, we humble ourselves before you, we repent, we invite your Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth, that we might walk on the narrow path that leads to life. And as we've prayed many times, you've been clear that few find this path. We want to be the few. Come Holy Spirit we pray. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, home base, we’re you find out what's going on around here. So, be sure to stay tuned, stay connected, pray for one another, and love one another in any way that you can, in any way the that you want to. There's plenty of ways to stay connected and those can all be found at dailyaudiobible.com.

The other thing that we’re mentioning is the More Gathering for women that is coming up April 11th. And registration for the More Gathering for this year will close on the 31st of March in just a couple of days from now. So, keeping that on the radar. If you want to come and you’ve been thinking about it and you’ve been procrastinating, then registrations closing in a couple of days. So, hope to see you there.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com as well. There is a link that's on the homepage. If you're using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hey everybody this is Pelham from Birmingham Alabama. The Lord has brought be a house and it’s perfect for me to return to the city I was born in and I am going to be running an Italian ice truck called Rippicis’ Italian Ice. How about that? No more pizza. Thank God we didn’t open a restaurant in Coleman. Thank God because it wasn’t gonna work out. God does what’s best. I don’t know anything. So, I’m calling in and just to say…Annette, I heard your call. Girl, hearing your voice, just hearing the first three words out of your mouth made me smile, brought joy into my room, into my atmosphere, just listening to you talk. Dahs, fist pump to you man. Guys, I just want to say, don’t ever give up, don’t ever give up, just keep moving forward because whatever you’re facing God knows that it’s happening for a reason, everything has a purpose. And one thing I’ve learned in the season is the suffering and loneliness can be turned into a relationship with Jesus and that is something that’s forged. It’s incredible. I mean I was loading the van to go DJ an event and a friend that I’d work for that was next to the entertainment company overheard me saying that I couldn’t find a place and called that night to say he had a house fully furnished, available right now with a backyard for Otis and horses, yup horses are back there for Otis and me. Love you guys.

Hello my Daily Audio Bible family this is Leah Nora from the Florida Panhandle. I just finished listening to March 25th‘s podcast and Bridget just finished her plea for prayer for the two men, the two young men that were involved in her son-in-law’s death and it left an impression on me very strongly that I needed to call. Bridget, first of all, God is smiling on you. You are a child of God and to think of those two young men as you are in the midst of the tragedy and the loss for your daughter says so much and that’s exactly what God wants us to do is to pray for those that are hurting. And we are all sinners, we’ve all made mistakes and He needs us to lift these two young men up in prayer. Nothing happens by chance and something good no matter when it may occur will come out of this. And I pray for your daughter as well that she will get through this difficult time and for you as well Bridget. And just thinking of all of you. And family we lift up these two young men, that God may use them. Open their hearts, their minds, their eyes to receive His light and His love and know that they are loved by our Lord and Savior and we pray this in Jesus’ name. Thank you, family. Thank you, Brian. God bless all of you for all you do. Bye-bye.

Hey Daily Audio Bible family it’s Dr. John from Jordan New York. I need you prayer warriors to be praying for a young lady that I saw. For HIPAA purposes I’m just gonna use her initials, AR. She’s 18 years old. She was living with her boyfriend who beat her up. He previously had gotten her pregnant and she had to get an abortion and she needs Jesus desperately. I was very fortunate that I was able to share Jesus with her and give her a lot of hope I hope to find what she needs for peace. But she’s been looking for it with a guy. So, please pray for her and please pray for her salvation and for her safety and that she’ll have the strength to press charges and make sure that he’s accountable. You know, it’s just one of those situations that really tears my heart up. So, thank you Daily Audio Bible for lifting AR up in prayer and…and I know that she’s…she…I might…I’m gonna say she doesn’t stand a chance for salvation because we’ve got for now. I know you guys prayers will bring her to faith in Jesus. Thank you Everybody. Love you. Dr. John from Jordan signing out.

Hi, it’s I’m Hidden in Him calling from California. I’m calling this morning just to encourage all our family from our Daily Audio Bible and especially to thank Brian because Brian has been such an inspiration to me. I’ve been listening to you now for the past four years and listening to him reading the word of God morning by morning has just brought new meaning to me and I’ve grown so much just following him every day step-by-step. And this morning I’d also like to say a big thank you to his little Cherry. Whenever she calls in I just have to listen to her because she is just so inspiring and just the sound of her voice, I just love the sound of her voice. And I just want to thank God for her because she’s such an inspiration to this community. And I thank you because I don’t really have a family church that I go to but I do go to churches and I listen to messages online. And for the past four years Brian has been my church, just listening to Brian reading the word of God and listening to all the wonderful people that call in to encourage and just to uplift one another and just to stand in the gap for one another. It’s just so beautiful and I love all of you. And every single prayer that is, you know, called out that is made known Jesus helps us. I record every single one of them I do not…

[ebburke]

Kate

“Dear Ms. Ellis,

        You don’t know who I am. I go to Brighton Academy. My name is Sidney, or Sid for short. I have wanted to talk to you for a year. I didn’t think it would be a good idea.

        I’ve been reading your blog. I did before you stopped posting. I hope you’re doing okay.

        I know you’re probably sick of hearing this. I’m sorry for your loss. Michael sounds like he was a good guy. I never knew him but I’ve seen him at school and he seemed nice.

        I think you should know that I look up to you. You have been able to go on a whole year after losing your son. That is not something everyone can do. My mum sure couldn’t.

        Anyway, I don’t really know what I wanted to say. Nothing seems like it’s worth saying. I won’t tell you to keep holding on because that seems like a load of bollocks. I guess I’m just saying hello, you are very strong, I hope you are well.

Sincerely,

Sid Hennessy

The paper sat, worn from all the times it’d been folded and unfolded, stained on the edges by coffee and red wine and bourbon, side effects of Ms. Kate Ellis’s attempts to skip the day and stay awake all night. It had come around only a few days ago, and yet it was just scarcely visible under a clutter of other condolences and dying flowers and dishes smeared with the remains of casseroles that’d been pouring into the house since New Year’s. The freezer was now far past full. With the curtains drawn, there was a coolness that surpassed what would be expected in the U.K. in winter, and the whole of the house was blanketed in dust, except for the paths along which Kate drudged every day; those paths were free of anything except the worn carpet and the shade of the curtains. The kitchen surfaces were free of the loneliness suffered by the counters of others, laden with dishes and packaging and spills now long dried and cat hair, a peculiar addition given the absence of any cat living in the house, but attributable to the neighboring cat who often found herself entering any and all open windows in any and all houses within cat distance. The bin in the corner would be full if Kate had been capable of making the trip to it when needed. Given her current state, however, it was tidy and bored and the neighbor to a piece of notebook paper that had slipped off the refrigerator door in the middle of the night, which was nothing of importance now that the date written on it had passed.

The house wasn’t unused to an occasional state of disarray: that’d been happening with increasing frequency for a year and a few days now. Granted, the past four months had passed in relative tidiness, but that tidiness died at the anniversary. Kate’s friends and family had come to call and, of course, had offered help. Her sister, Georgia, went so far as to hire a cleaning service, but she only had so much patience on which to lean her empathy, and letting in the housekeepers would have involved Kate leaving her bed. Why would she bother, when the repeated knocking at the door was so soothing? As if another heartbeat existed in the house again.

The fall had been mild. The rains were light and the sky amicable to negotiation. The general discourse even seemed to let go of some of its usual tensions. The winter had brought wind, and Christmas was a mild affair due to Kate’s unwillingness to travel; her sister had come around on Boxing Day, but the presents she’d brought still lay wrapped at the foot of the loveseat by the fireplace. They’d thought it best not to condemn a tree. And, of course, New Year’s was spent in absolute darkness and isolation, bathed in the lukewarm ambience of out-of-date muscle relaxers and a made-for-TV movie about university students up to no good.

That just about lead up to present, where Kate was lying on her couch, one socked foot sticking out of the blanket, her wrist hanging limply off the edge, eyes closed under askew glasses, bushy brown hair done up in a bun, though mostly falling out. Light made its usual fruitless attempt to strain through the heavy curtains as morning seeped through the seams to no great effect. The title of a David Lean film flashed noncommittally from the television screen across the room, reflecting in Kate’s lenses. A tinny ring of the old aircon unit hummed from the window behind the kitchen, the only thing breaking the silence. The air in the living room settled around piles of magazines, newspapers, and books stacked haphazardly on the thick carpet, sprinkled with used cigarette filters and loose shreds of tobacco. The smell was just as stale, though diluted with incense and scented candles. Essentially everything but fresh air pervaded in the room. Kate had been good. She’d earned this relaxation. A few more days, that’s all. It was easier that way, to lean in to this regression rather than fight back up that hill. Even Sisyphus must take breaks when the gods aren’t watching.

Cards now were coming in the post, a few every day. Evidently, the private messages had circulated on various social media, whispers out the backdoor to remember it had been a year now, a whole year, can you believe it, since Michael had died. Still so tragic, though we never think about it anymore. We should send Kate a card. Have you posted it yet? No, forgot, will tomorrow. Post office is closed, oh well, it can wait until Monday. It’ll get to her soon enough. She’s got a lot on her mind, won’t notice if it shows up late. Then the cakes and sweets, dropped off with a quiet knock that was never meant to be answered. Needless to say they went stale on the stoop. Flowers, not many people sent flowers, they seemed to know no one would see them, let alone water them, before it was much too late for them to be worth watering. Only the flowers carried into the house by Georgia ever saw vases. Voicemails were the one thing Kate couldn’t escape. She’d silenced her phone, but messages get recorded no matter what you do. She didn’t have the stomach to play them nor the heart to delete them, so they were left to be patient. Set a good example.

What was more exhausting, the tsunami of the past year, rocking her tiny boat, threatening to capsize, springing leak after leak that she wasn’t fast enough to plug up, or this post-war battleground, bloody and still, bathed in horrid, ironic sunlight with no one left alive to warm, only the dead to make odoriferous? Was it worse hanging on for dear life or letting go and being suspended, nowhere soft to fall? Kate didn’t have the energy to seek an answer. It was all shit, it would always be shit. No, actually, the worst was that she didn’t even want to die. She sure as hell wasn’t interested in living, but death wouldn’t help anything. She’d had her suicidal phase of grief, the phase nobody talks about, the forgotten sixth phase, but that’d passed.

Two weeks past New Year’s, Kate knew it was time to get back to the routine. She was badly broken, but still disciplined, she knew time would go on, and, however badly she wanted it to do so without her, Kate knew she needed to compromise. She got groceries and take-away. Every other day, she made herself walk all the way to the sea and along the pier. The cold wind felt good on her face, strong. When the weather was exceptionally bad, she took herself to the Lanes for a tea. She taught herself to compliment the young man or woman at the till and to indulge and allow for two sugars. It was a system of give and take, work and reward. Kate wasn’t lonely, though she never engaged anyone else in her goings-on, except Martin.

When they’d begun meeting again in July, Kate hadn’t seen Michael’s father since the funeral, and, before that, for quite a few years, not since the custody had been settled. They’d been civil, always, of course. It was Georgia who didn’t like Martin, who thought he was controlling, manipulative, “emotionally abusive” - everything one can’t ever really concretely persuade a judge of, let alone convince Kate of. After Michael, it didn’t seem as though they had any reason to see one another ever again, even when it simultaneously felt like a reason to collapse back into each other’s arms, a conflict which had reached tenuous resolution in monthly drinks at the pub in Hove, where Martin lived. Drinks had a sentimentality about them that reached back past Michael, much before Michael, to their days at uni. It was strange to remember, it was strange to imagine there’d been time unburdened by what had happened a year ago, a time where they’d been unable even to imagine such a thing, nor to imagine any positive experience they had been so fortunate as to live out together. 

The two of them would drink three pints each, broken up by a cigarette or two on the terrace under the fairy lights, sat at picnic tables with a hundred other people, all there for the same thing but for vastly different reasons. Kate could get lost there, in them, in him, in the warmth of cider. It was the closest to relaxation she could get while still looking into eyes so much like her son’s. She often thought she’d quite like to love Martin again, in the old way, but he either refused to take the hint or was missing it entirely. 

As she crossed Eaton Road, on the third Tuesday of the month, as usual, Kate went back and forth in her mind between two options. Yes, she thought, she could keep her many promises to move on and not let Martin be her window back - she could make her sister and her brothers happy, respect her mom’s memory by not going back to Martin, not letting herself be pulled into him like a boat into a maelstrom. Or - a sheepish grin played across her face, she could let herself seek comfort and not exist like this alone. After all, who else felt the loss in the same way as the only other person to have called Michael son? 

Kate took her seat at their usual table and checked her watch. Martin was always late. The pack of straights in her purse was unexpectedly empty, so she pulled out a pinch of tobacco from the backup bag and rolled, cracking open the window next to her and letting in the crisp, winter air. She could’ve just as easily gone out to the garden with everyone else having a smoke, but the bartenders knew her here and usually bent the rules in solidarity. 

The door opened and, in with the gust of wind, came Martin, his tartan scarf draped unevenly around his neck, his tie loose. As he always did, he approached the bar and ordered their first round of drinks, overpaid, and gave a flirty line or two to the poor girl behind the tap with an hour left in her shift. The girl avoided his eyes and poured their ciders and didn’t play along, the sooner may he leave. Kate observed this interaction with compassion.

“Evening, lovely,” he said, sitting down heavily, ducking out of his scarf and jacket. His rapidly thinning hair was damp. “It’s just started to rain. You’re lucky you’re allowed to smoke inside, eh?”

“There’s the silver lining, is it?”

“Bound to be somewhere, wasn’t it?” 

“Cheers.” 

They drank, they conversed, they did as they did. They never did talk much about Michael if avoidable. These meetings were purely reminiscent of the before, far before, their old life. Before he left the first time, when she got pregnant. He came back a few times over the years from there, but Kate knew she kept too close an eye on him and that he needed his freedom and that is exactly why this new relationship was perfect. Once a month, always plenty to say. Plenty to hear.

A conversation about Kate’s sister and how annoying she always was about their relationship. An inquiry about Martin’s mother’s health. An exchange about the Albion football team’s performance in last weekend’s match. And then - 

“Yeah, yeah, I think Chloe’s well pleased - her brother trains them, you know.”

Kate did not, in fact, know. Kate didn’t recognize the name Chloe, not in the context of Martin, not other than the 26-year-old data-analyst or whatever-the-hell who worked in his PR office, currently running a campaign for the new Green Party candidate running on a platform of bin-beautification. That candidate would win, too - that’s how good Martin was. But Chloe, why did Kate feel as though he’d mentioned her before, why did that name pull at her stomach, he must’ve mentioned her before. Kate must hate this girl for a reason. Was she …

“Your girlfriend?” Kate raised her eyes at Martin. No nonsense, no hard feelings. Give it to her straight.

“Yes, about a month now.” Right.

“Good one, Mart. She’s beautiful.” Kate had met her once. No, seen her, through the office window on one of her detours over the summer before the two of them had gotten back in touch.

“Yes, isn’t she. Listen, Kate.…” Martin drained his glass. He looked in her eyes then thought better of it. He gave her some bullshit about taking a holiday next month that would make him miss their drinks. And a conference the following month that would interfere with that month’s meeting. And she took that in as he ducked back into his scarf and jacket and waved over his shoulder and opened the door and let it close. And she let him go as she took it in and wondered how she felt more nothing than before.

It wasn’t until she was buried deep under the blanket of white rum and ginger soda that the din of her echoing mind would tire to the point where all but one thought could drift out of focus. What remained was, not motivation per se, more of the subtle bounce-back one experiences when a car brakes slowly and finally completes its stop. Nothing left to do, all momentum gone, a residual propulsion nudging her back to life, or the next-best thing. 

Real life started back up officially the following Monday. Kate’s bills were piled up higher than she was comfortable with and she’d been off work for a full month. Julianne had offered Kate that long, Julianne was kinder and more supportive than she had to be, but Kate had never been one to take advantage of someone like that. Kate envied people like that, so she honored them.

Her office was uptown, an old flat converted into a semi-divided workspace, mostly stuffed with bookshelves and file cabinets, Kate’s desk, Julianne’s desk, Rosie’s desk, and Richard’s corner cubicle, an addition he’d insisted upon - the better to maintain his privacy. Kate and Julianne joked between the two of them that he was planning their downfall from behind the chest-high walls, conspiring to usurp them with Rosie at his side. Kate personally thought she and Julianne were benevolent rulers of their four-person kingdom, one they generously referred to as an agency for local writers who needed their work edited and put in the right hands up in London. 

Kate watched her espresso dribble into her chipped mug, delaying her impending confrontation with what would surely be thousands of emails from clients and potentials who had been waiting so long for her to get back to them. She’d never programmed an out-of-office message alerting those trying to reach her to instead try Julianne or Rosie. 

Sitting at her desk, she warmed up a lethargic desktop that was even more reluctant than she was to return to the routine. There were the usual emails from the news sites she subscribed to for daily updates; receipts from Netflix and Amazon; a few query letters with 500-word novel introductions attached - she’d get to those after lunch. One, however, caught her eye. The subject line: Hello Again. Kate clicked. 

Dear Ms. Ellis,

My name is Sid. I wrote you a letter a few weeks ago - I don’t know if you got it. Anyway, I want to know if maybe we could have tea. I don’t know why. Maybe we could help each other. I want to know how you get through things, and why my mum couldn’t. And maybe I can be helpful for you, too. 

Sincerely,

Sid Hennessy

Kate held her last sip of coffee in her mouth, letting it cool under her tongue. She recognized the name, of course - it was the only letter she’d consciously kept, solely because she was so fascinated with the concept of a ten-year-old knowing who she was and caring. She’d been trying to answer for herself if she wanted to know him too, but something about it was wrong…She deleted the letter and closed her laptop, taking her mug to be refilled.

[thetwomeatmeal]

Beloved‘s title character is a girl who shows up, weird-witted and dripping wet, on ex-slave Sethe’s doorstep in Ohio. If Beloved were a ghost story, the question of who Beloved is and what she wants would animate the rest of the book. Morrison actually wrote more and less than a ghost story: the less is glimpsed in the immediacy with which these questions find answers: first Sethe’s daughter Denver, then Sethe herself, come to the conclusion that Beloved is the revenant spirit of Sethe’s dead child. She even has the scar to prove it.

The more is that this answer, once stated, is never final. By the end of the book, the town is unanimous on the dead-daughter theory, though where Sethe has responded with a self-abnegating imitation of motherhood, they resolve the situation with a climactic exorcism. At the same time, we hear murmurs of other opinions, notably that Beloved was a girl “locked up in the house with a whiteman over by Deer Creek” -- a more naturalistic story, and one that underscores Sethe’s own guilt over her daughter’s death and need to replace her. There’s a less naturalistic story too. Beloved is allowed to speak for herself just once, in a surreal and disjointed narrative about “a hot thing” that recalls at once the Middle Passage and the grave. “All of it is now  it is always now  there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too...” White people, “men without skin”, push a hill of dead people into the sea with poles, among them a woman “with my face” that Beloved comes to think is Sethe. Now, in a book about the continuing ripples of trauma wrought by slavery, Beloved comes to stand for its founding horror, and refers an already multigenerational story to a centuries-old history.

I don’t mean to talk about Beloved per se, but to use it as an illustration of how contradictory facts can simultaneously function in a narrative. If Beloved were just a family ghost, just an abuse victim mistaken for one, or just a metonym for the slave ships, the novel would be a ghost story, a detective story, or just overwritten. Instead, Morrison raises all these possibilities, and never asks for a definite answer; in doing so, she links Sethe’s own guilt, the primal evil of the slave ships, and the ongoing abuses of post-slavery racism.

This should lead us to a more general principle: If a story gives several answers to a question, all are true.

While the Principle of Non-Contradiction rules reality, at least for the time being, stories have always enjoyed more freedom. Our impulse to reconstruct their unwritten details along classical-logical lines is an impulse to make their worlds real. This impulse, the mere attempt to fill out the consistent fictional world the stories purportedly describe, dominates popular discourse about narrative, as far as the highly speculative “Rugrats are dead” sort of fan-theories -- it’d be legitimate to tell r/fantheories that the Simpsons are Lisa’s dream, but not to argue that Bart and Lisa are each other’s dreams. Yet authors do omit, repeat, and contradict themselves, and the choices available to the reader are just as broad. We can hold two facts in our heads at once. We can disappear the characters when they leave the page. We can, with Breton, not go into Dostoevsky’s room.

I’ll give a few more examples. One of my favorite theories about Kubrick��s The Shining is that the whole thing is a metaphor for the Native American genocide. The theory has only a little to go on -- a few set-design choices, a passing mention of a Native American burial ground under the hotel, and a biiiiiig reach on the word “Overlook” -- but more to the point, to either argue the theory as the movie’s coded truth or to try to disprove it is to wall oneself off from the contradictory data the movie actually makes available. The horror in the hotel, that haunts Jack Torrance and pushes the movie to its conclusion, is the horror of Native death and dispossession. It’s also the horror of a man who took an axe to his twins. It’s also the horror of a guy who got blown by a furry or whatever. Some of it is the ugliness and neurosis inside Jack, who’s always been the caretaker, himself. Now given that the film never makes a choice between these things, why should we? Aren’t they all operative in helping us understand the story?

American Psycho, the book and the movie, end Patrick Bateman’s descent into sadism with an anticlimax, a refusal of the rest of his world to react. If we think that Bateman, an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, did the things he claimed to, this reads as a final indictment of Wall Street’s banal evil: you can kill and kill again, and class renders you impervious to justice and even to being noticed. If we think that Bateman made the whole thing up, then, as one of the book characters says against his insistence on his own evil, he’s too much of a coward to have done anything like that. His sadism is all mental, and maybe not even all that unique. Wealth breeds monsters who nevertheless conform. Now we could argue back and forth about whether the man is a killer or a fake, but what would be the point? The story shows him killing just as vividly as it denies it, and therefore both things are true. Which lets us read either description into Bateman, and a third, their paradoxical conjunction: Bateman a man who contains an inconsistency, of a sort endemic to the story’s duplicitous and blank yuppiedom.

David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. is my favorite example of this, partly because it generates these fan-theory rationalizations like nothing else. Without getting too much into the plot, the movie falls into two halves in which Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring play two different pairs of characters. The loose consensus is that the first half is the dream of Watts’s character in the second half. But no such ontological priority is stated or even implied in the film: rather, what links the two halves is an oneiric complex of recurring figures, desires and colors. As Timothy Takemoto puts it: “What is special, and wonderful, about Mullholland Dr. is, I believe, the fact not only the first part of the film is clearly a dream, the second part is another dream. There is (almost) no reality to which the film returns. The film is made up of two interwoven dreams, each of which present a different interpretation of the only event that we know is for real: someone has died and it is probably a suicide.”

The logic of the real world, a logic that affirms the Principle of Non-Contradiction, I’ve been calling “classical” or “consistent”. Logics that deny the PNC, admitting certain contradictions, called paraconsistent. Graham Priest, one of analytic philosophy’s more full-throated defenders of paraconsistency in general, defends paraconsistency in fiction here, even writing a short self-contradictory story to argue his claims. As I hope I’ve shown, there’s no need to be a philosopher about it; paraconsistency is here already. This is how stories are, but it’s also a tool that’ll help you read good.

Part of the deeper point is that, on some level, there’s nothing more or less than what’s on the screen or in the text. A setting isn’t a world, though it’ll often try to remind you of one. A character isn’t a person, though like a person, it can be named, act, and form relationships. As Barthes shows in S/Z, characters might not even be atomic narrative units, but rather constellations of individual signifiers or “semes”. Look how un-personal this point of view can make a character seem:

When identical semes traverse the same proper name several times and appear to settle upon it, a character is created. Thus, the character is a product of combinations: the combination is relatively stable (denoted by the recurrence of the semes) and more or less complex (involving more or less congruent, more or less contradictory figures); this complexity determines the character’s “personality,” which is just as much a combination as the odor of a dish or the bouquet of a wine.

What about the limiting case, the detective story or similar, where despite throwing out false leads the story does zero in on a final truth? To begin with the obvious: the principle of paraconsistency just isn’t going to work equally well on all stories; and just as one can betray a text by ignoring its multiple truths, to ignore its denials is an even more flagrant betrayal. Even so, even when the text lies to you and ends up admitting it, the lies are more than just bare lies. This is part of the reason I mention S/Z. The Balzac story Barthes analyzes feints, puns, and minces words to delude its protagonist and its reader about the character Sarrasine’s gender, and if nothing else, these false leads play a vital function of dragging out the story. But they signify in other ways as they do this, and end up contributing positively to the story’s meditations/anxieties about gender. (At issue is not just what’s said in those moments but how it’s said: Barthes identifies the protagonist’s urge to possess and replicate Sarrasine’s femininity, which he can only do by reference to other femininities, beautiful women of art and literature, characteristically feminine qualities, etc., thus adding further links to a chain of signifiers that can end at nothing real, and does so to great irony.) In this case, it’d be wrong to call the plot paraconsistent, but its apparent contradictions contribute to narrative levels outside the plot.

[makerof150papermasks]

Hamlet Mariofied Act 3 Scene 4

Bolded names refer to the Mario characters playing the roles. The character role names remain the same in the context of the play and its dialogue.

Peach = Gertrude

Kamek = Polonius

Mario = Hamlet

Donkey Kong = Ghost

Act III, Scene 4

The Queen’s closet.

Enter Peach and Kamek Tune of Mushroomy Kingdom.

Kamek. He will come straight. Look you lay home to him.

Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with,

And that your Grace hath screen'd and stood between

 Much heat and him. I'll silence me even here.

Pray you be round with him.

Mario. [within] Mother, mother, mother!

Peach. I'll warrant you; fear me not. Withdraw; I hear him coming.

[Kamek hides behind the arras.]

Enter Mario. Play Castle Theme from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island.

Mario. Now, mother, what's the matter?

Peach. Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.

Mario. Mother, you have my father much offended.

Peach. Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.

 Mario. Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.

Peach. Why, how now, Hamlet?

Mario. What's the matter now?

Peach. Have you forgot me?

Mario. No, by the rood, not so!

  You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife,

And (would it were not so!) you are my mother.

Peach. Nay, then I'll set those to you that can speak.

Mario. Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge;

You go not till I set you up a glass

 Where you may see the inmost part of you.

Peach. What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murther me?

Help, help, ho!

Kamek. [behind] What, ho! help, help, help!

Mario. [draws] How now? a rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!

 Makes a pass through the arras and kills Kamek. 

Kamek. [behind] O, I am slain! Game over music from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island commences as Kamek dies.

Peach. O me, what hast thou done?

Mario. Nay, I know not. Is it the King?

Peach. O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!

 Mario. A bloody deed- almost as bad, good mother,

As kill a king, and marry with his brother.

Peach. As kill a king?

Mario. Ay, lady, it was my word.

Lifts up the arras and sees Kamek. Cue Castle Music from New Super Mario Bros.

 Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!

I took thee for thy better. Take thy fortune.

Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger.

Leave wringing of your hands. Peace! sit you down

And let me wring your heart; for so I shall

 If it be made of penetrable stuff;

If damned custom have not braz'd it so

That it is proof and bulwark against sense.

Peach. What have I done that thou dar'st wag thy tongue

In noise so rude against me?

 Mario. Such an act

That blurs the grace and blush of modesty;

Calls virtue hypocrite; takes off the rose

From the fair forehead of an innocent love,

And sets a blister there; makes marriage vows

 As false as dicers' oaths. O, such a deed

As from the body of contraction plucks

The very soul, and sweet religion makes

A rhapsody of words! Heaven's face doth glow;

Yea, this solidity and compound mass,

 With tristful visage, as against the doom,

Is thought-sick at the act.

Peach. Ah me, what act,

That roars so loud and thunders in the index?

Mario. Look here upon th's picture, and on this,

 The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.

See what a grace was seated on this brow;

Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself;

An eye like Mars, to threaten and command;

A station like the herald Mercury

 New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill:

A combination and a form indeed

Where every god did seem to set his seal

To give the world assurance of a man.

This was your husband. Look you now what follows.

 Here is your husband, like a mildew'd ear

Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?

Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,

And batten on this moor? Ha! have you eyes

You cannot call it love; for at your age

 The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,

And waits upon the judgment; and what judgment

Would step from this to this? Sense sure you have,

Else could you not have motion; but sure that sense

Is apoplex'd; for madness would not err,

 Nor sense to ecstacy was ne'er so thrall'd

But it reserv'd some quantity of choice

To serve in such a difference. What devil was't

That thus hath cozen'd you at hoodman-blind?

Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,

 Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,

Or but a sickly part of one true sense

Could not so mope.

O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell,

If thou canst mutine in a matron's bones,

 To flaming youth let virtue be as wax

And melt in her own fire. Proclaim no shame

When the compulsive ardour gives the charge,

Since frost itself as actively doth burn,

And reason panders will.

 Peach. O Hamlet, speak no more!

Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul,

And there I see such black and grained spots

As will not leave their tinct.

Mario. Nay, but to live

  In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,

Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love

Over the nasty sty!

Peach. O, speak to me no more!

These words like daggers enter in mine ears.

No more, sweet Hamlet!

Mario. A murtherer and a villain!

A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe

Of your precedent lord; a vice of kings;

A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,

 That from a shelf the precious diadem stole

And put it in his pocket!

Peach. No more!

Enter Donkey Kong in his nightgown. Initiate Gangplank Galleon. 

Mario. A king of shreds and patches!-

 Save me and hover o'er me with your wings,

You heavenly guards! What would your gracious figure?

Peach. Alas, he's mad!

Mario. Do you not come your tardy son to chide,

That, laps'd in time and passion, lets go by

 Th' important acting of your dread command?

O, say!

DK. Do not forget. This visitation

Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.

But look, amazement on thy mother sits.

 O, step between her and her fighting soul

Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.

Speak to her, Hamlet.

Mario. How is it with you, lady?

Peach. Alas, how is't with you,

 That you do bend your eye on vacancy,

And with th' encorporal air do hold discourse?

Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep;

And, as the sleeping soldiers in th' alarm,

Your bedded hairs, like life in excrements,

 Start up and stand an end. O gentle son,

Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper

Sprinkle cool patience! Whereon do you look?

Mario. On him, on him! Look you how pale he glares!

His form and cause conjoin'd, preaching to stones,

 Would make them capable.- Do not look upon me,

Lest with this piteous action you convert

My stern effects. Then what I have to do

Will want true colour- tears perchance for blood.

Peach. To whom do you speak this?

 Mario. Do you see nothing there?

Peach. Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.

Mario. Nor did you nothing hear?

Peach. No, nothing but ourselves.

Mario. Why, look you there! Look how it steals away!

My father, in his habit as he liv'd!

Look where he goes even now out at the portal!

Exit Donkey Kong. Composition of the boss theme from Super Mario Bros 2.

Peach. This is the very coinage of your brain.

This bodiless creation ecstasy

 Is very cunning in.

Mario. Ecstasy?

My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time

And makes as healthful music. It is not madness

That I have utt'red. Bring me to the test,

 And I the matter will reword; which madness

Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace,

Lay not that flattering unction to your soul

That not your trespass but my madness speaks.

It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,

 Whiles rank corruption, mining all within,

Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven;

Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;

And do not spread the compost on the weeds

To make them ranker. Forgive me this my virtue;

 For in the fatness of these pursy times

Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg-

Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good.

Peach. O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.

Mario. O, throw away the worser part of it,

 And live the purer with the other half,

Good night- but go not to my uncle's bed.

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.

That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat

Of habits evil, is angel yet in this,

 That to the use of actions fair and good

He likewise gives a frock or livery,

That aptly is put on. Refrain to-night,

And that shall lend a kind of easiness

To the next abstinence; the next more easy;

 For use almost can change the stamp of nature,

And either (master) the devil, or throw him out

With wondrous potency. Once more, good night;

And when you are desirous to be blest,

I'll blessing beg of you.- For this same lord,

 I do repent; but heaven hath pleas'd it so,

To punish me with this, and this with me,

That I must be their scourge and minister.

I will bestow him, and will answer well

The death I gave him. So again, good night.

  I must be cruel, only to be kind;

Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.

One word more, good lady.

Peach. What shall I do?

Mario. Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:

 Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed;

Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;

And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,

Or paddling in your neck with his damn'd fingers,

Make you to ravel all this matter out,

 That I essentially am not in madness,

But mad in craft. 'Twere good you let him know;

For who that's but a queen, fair, sober, wise,

Would from a paddock, from a bat, a gib

Such dear concernings hide? Who would do so?

 No, in despite of sense and secrecy,

Unpeg the basket on the house's top,

Let the birds fly, and like the famous ape,

To try conclusions, in the basket creep

And break your own neck down.

 Peach. Be thou assur'd, if words be made of breath,

And breath of life, I have no life to breathe

What thou hast said to me.

Mario. I must to England; you know that?

Peach. Alack,

 I had forgot! 'Tis so concluded on.

Mario. There's letters seal'd; and my two schoolfellows,

Whom I will trust as I will adders fang'd,

They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way

And marshal me to knavery. Let it work;

 For 'tis the sport to have the enginer

Hoist with his own petar; and 't shall go hard

But I will delve one yard below their mines

And blow them at the moon. O, 'tis most sweet

When in one line two crafts directly meet.

 This man shall set me packing.

I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room.-

Mother, good night.- Indeed, this counsellor

Is now most still, most secret, and most grave,

Who was in life a foolish peating knave.

 Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you.

Good night, mother.

Exit Peach. Then exit Mario, tugging in

Kamek.

[biofunmy]

Fighting Big Tech Makes for Some Uncomfortable Bedfellows

It was not a given that Steve Hilton, the conservative Fox News host, and Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor who worked in the Obama White House, would get along.

But when they met by chance at a cocktail party in Washington last year, they quickly landed on one surprisingly strong point of agreement: It was time to break up Big Tech.

“We thought the same way,” Mr. Hilton said.

Mr. Wu, who is also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, agreed. “There’s unusual constituencies arising,” he said. He later went on Mr. Hilton’s show, “The Next Revolution,” for a congenial interview.

The antitrust movement has been revived by a bipartisan loathing of Big Tech that extends beyond lawmakers to the furthest firmaments of the right and the left.

On one side is the progressive left, whose members have been appalled by Facebook’s handling of pro-Trump Russian disinformation campaigns and Silicon Valley’s consolidated power. On the other side is the Trumpist right, whose members see the power of social media companies to ban content as censorship and worry that the arteries of communication are controlled by young liberals.

The common cause has made for some strange new bedfellows. The left and the right now often have similar anti-tech talking points on cable news and at congressional hearings. Conservatives are showing up at largely liberal conferences, while liberals are going on conservative TV shows.

On Tuesday, that alignment will be evident at an antitrust hearing on Capitol Hill featuring executives from Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, as well as policy experts like Mr. Wu. The hearing, held by the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, will examine “the impact of market power of online platforms on innovation and entrepreneurship.”

“To the bewilderment of many observers, the ascendant pressures for antitrust reforms are flowing from both wings of the political spectrum,” Daniel A. Crane, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote last year in a paper called “Antitrust’s Unconventional Politics.”

Now those who have found mutual understanding need to figure out if they can actually get along.

It is not easy. Often, it is awkward.

“I think we should be skeptical,” said Sabeel Rahman, the president of the progressive think tank Demos and an associate law professor at Brooklyn Law School. “What are the coalitions that we ought to embrace? Who’s the we?”

Mr. Rahman said that he was wary of these new conservative allies and that progressives in the movement needed to be cautious. Yes, they both want to take power out of the hands of large tech companies — but then the two sides have to agree on whose hands that power falls into.

“How do we operationalize this? Who’s doing the moderating? Are these new allies coming in good faith?” Mr. Rahman asked. “The devil’s in the details.”

The detail here is who exactly should be in charge of a company like Facebook, if it is not Mark Zuckerberg. The two sides may both want third-party ombudsmen of some sort, but agreement seems to fall apart beyond that.

“Most people getting involved haven’t really gamed out what this means,” said Katy Glenn Bass, the research director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, an advocacy group for free speech.

Regulation of online speech is not exclusively an antitrust concern, but today these threads are becoming interwoven. Critics argue that big tech companies need to be broken up or regulated because they are suppressing speech.

Ms. Bass, who is organizing a Knight Institute symposium in October on tech giants, monopoly power and public discourse, said she worried that popular enthusiasm for aggressive regulation of speech on the platforms could get out of hand. She worries that now arguments for moderating speech are coming from groups that once stood against government intervention.

“The idea that these platforms should be pretty tightly regulated on what speech they can host is not a traditional conservative argument,” Ms. Bass said. “This has all been a real whiplash.”

A case in point: On Thursday, The Washington Post published an essay by Charlie Kirk, the president of Turning Point USA, a group for young conservatives, proposing that digital platforms be regulated the way publishers are.

“Fighting back against private companies with governmental action is a politically and ideologically fraught idea for those of us on the right,” he wrote. But he went on to add, “There is now ample reason to believe the market’s normal corrective powers are being blocked by anti-competitive forces.”

Traditional conservatives said they were feeling the whiplash. James Pethokoukis, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-market think tank, was at a party this spring that included Republican donors in Washington when the conversation took a turn toward big tech companies.

“They were talking about breaking them up, turning them into utilities,” Mr. Pethokoukis said. “It’s a breathtaking change from even a year ago.”

He was shocked. To him these companies were American jewels and some of the best bulwarks against rising power abroad. He has since been writing against the movement with pieces like “The Astonishingly Weak Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google, and Amazon.”

Tech bias has been a longtime concern for the right, and Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, frequently mentioned it. Little came of it.

Now the movement is finding more mainstream allies. Mr. Kirk and others who have complained of an anti-conservative bias by Facebook, Google and Twitter attended a social media summit at the White House on Thursday. At the event, Mr. Trump accused the companies of exhibiting “terrible bias” and said he was calling representatives from all of them to the White House over the next month.

On Friday, Mr. Trump took the tech companies to task again, calling them “crooked” and “dishonest” and adding that “something is going to be done.”

“In my circles right now,” Mr. Pethokoukis said, “if you say, ‘I don’t think we’re seeing systemic bias against conservatives,’ it’s like they wonder about your sanity.”

Matt Stoller, a former Democratic congressional staff member who is now at the antimonopoly think tank Open Markets Institute, which leans liberal, said he noticed the same thing.

“The white supremacists liked to appropriate this language around antimonopoly and free speech,” said Mr. Stoller, who has written a book on the antimonopoly movement, “Goliath.” “But now there are real networks on the right that are not white supremacist networks, and the people in them are genuinely concerned about the power of Big Tech.”

He said he was having to reassess his relationships with conservatives.

“I always knew we were aiming at different things,” he said. “Now, we have some of the same goals.”

And so they are building wary coalitions. Mr. Wu said he was working on a movement of state attorneys general to take the antitrust fight to individual courtrooms across the country. The most eager allies are Republicans, he said.

Mr. Hilton, a former British political adviser, built his Fox News show in 2017 around what he predicted would be an anti-elitist populism movement. The 2016 presidential election was just the start, he figured. But the rallying cries fizzled out, and party lines remained unchanged.

Today, he sees a bright spot: the shared antipathy for big tech companies.

“Three years on, it looks like the only remnant of that is this antitrust issue and, if we’re really specific about it, anti-Big Tech,” Mr. Hilton said.

On Mr. Hilton’s show, Mr. Wu argued for breaking up Facebook by forcing its two other popular apps — Instagram and WhatsApp — to be spun off.

But Mr. Wu worried about being seen as having a friendly chat on Fox News and felt uncomfortable sharing his appearance on the show with his mostly liberal followers.

“I didn’t publicize it a great deal,” he said. “I took a selfie. But then I decided not to broadcast it.”

Sahred From Source link Business

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[lindyhunt]

After 10 Hours of Questions for Mark Zuckerberg, Here's What I Still Want to Know

Having grown up in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, I can say with confidence that April is one of the months with which I most fondly remember the region.

The cherry blossoms are in full bloom. And when I was a wee lass, before the Washington Nationals came to fruition, April also meant that the Baltimore Orioles were kicking off the baseball season at Camden Yards.

This week marked one of my first visits back to D.C. during the month of April since I was an undergrad. Things felt different. My parents live in Florida now. Penn Quarter has completely transformed, as has its neighboring Capitol Hill, where my work brought me for the week. The city has become very expensive.

And despite spending my days in the trenches of the tech industry and the businesses that comprise it, somehow, visiting Washington, D.C. as Congress played host to one of Silicon Valley's highest-profile CEOs felt, in a word, odd.

Over the course of two days, my colleague, HubSpot's Social Campaign Strategy Associate Henry Franco, and I spent no fewer than ten hours sitting in on Mark Zuckerberg's congressional hearings, as he answered questions from Senators on Tuesday and Representatives on Wednesday.

There was a mixed response to these questions and Zuckerberg's answers alike. Were the lawmakers properly prepared for and informed about these events? Was Zuckerberg? And was 10 hours really enough to get to the bottom of the data privacy and other issues the Facebook CEO was invited to Capitol Hill to speak on?

What makes this situation -- Mark Zuckerberg's congressional testimony and the events leading up to it -- so complex is that it cannot be boiled down to a single issue. Instead, it’s comprised of many issues, each of which have many sides. Should Facebook be regulated? Should it stand alone in this regulation? What would that regulation look like? And for all its talk: How likely is it that such federal regulation will actually come into force in the U.S.?

And those are only a few of the questions I have. The irony, of course, is not lost on me that a week of hearings intended to respond to lawmaker inquiry -- as well as the public it represents -- has only led to more questions.

Here's a deeper look at some of the more crucial of them.

Will there be regulation?

As I noted in yesterday's recap of Zuckerberg's House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, the topic of regulation drew a stark party line on which Representatives fell staunchly one side or the other. Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois firmly stated that Facebook's "self-regulation simply does not work." Representative Chris Collins of New York called her remarks "aggressive" and "out of bounds," adding that when he was asked if he agreed with the idea of regulating Facebook, "I said no."

Regulation seems a point of contention among lawmakers, and not just when it comes to Facebook, especially in the context of the European Union's General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) coming into force next month. It reflects an era in which consumer demands for data protection are growing, with the latest turn of events concerning Facebook being only one of the more recent examples.

Throughout the hearings -- and in the weeks leading up to them -- Zuckerberg was asked numerous times for his stance on the GDPR, though he hasn't fully spoken to his complete stance on it. In an interview with Reuters, he said he agrees with it "in spirit." In a call with members of the press last week, he remarked, "if we are planning on running the controls for GDPR across the world ... my answer [is] yes." And on Tuesday's Senate hearing, he noted that he believes it "get[s] some things right."

Sen. Graham: "Why should we let you self-regulate?" ZUCK: Senator, I'm not opposed to regulation. Graham: Do you think the Europeans got it right? ZUCK: I think ... they ... get things right ...

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW) April 10, 2018

But when it comes to Facebook extending GDPR-like protections to global Facebook users, including those in the U.S., Zuckerberg has given wavering and at times contradictory answers. Rep. Schakowsky pressed him on this yesterday, noting that it sounded as though Zuckerberg's version would be far from "an exact replica" of European regulations. 

It reflects a historical corporate resistance to regulation in the U.S., with many consumers long holding that it lags behind the E.U. in terms of transparency and what is disclosed to consumers. (As a non-tech example, throughout most of Europe, food companies are required to label genetically modified products, whereas in the U.S., similar legislation has struggled to pass.) 

Which raises the initial question here: Will there be regulation? With the public, along with some lawmakers, calling for increased data protection globally, it leaves us at a watershed moment in the relationship between consumers and the businesses they use. 

"This is proof to me that self-regulation simply does not work," she says, pointing to the Secure and Protect Americans' Data Act: https://t.co/7nzQGcIhQ9

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW) April 11, 2018

But there's also the ongoing discussion of how well-equipped lawmakers are to regulate a company with the reach and breadth of Facebook's. (At certain points in the hearings, for instance, Zuckerberg was questioned about Facebook's possible monopoly.) As I noted earlier, questions from committee members left the impression that they were either ill-prepared for Zuckerberg's testimony, or simply uninformed about the tech industry as it currently stands.

That was particularly true at Tuesday's hearing, where much of the discourse from Senators suggested a broad lack of understanding of online platforms and where data becomes involved with them.

If that misunderstanding is as widespread throughout Congress as some have suggested, the timing of regulation and the swiftness with which it could be passed comes into question. And it may require further information and testimony -- not just from Zuckerberg and Facebook.

That brings me to another key point.

Why Facebook?

On my way back to Boston after the hearings, a friend texted me to ask how my visit went and what the hearings were like. And then, he made a joke about it.

"I wish there had been this much congressional outrage when Equifax was hacked," he said. "Although, in fairness, Facebook allowed strangers to see my vacation photos and the bands that I like, while Equifax only lost highly sensitive financial information that could ruin people's lives."

Even if my friend's comments were meant to be funny, they did bring up an interesting question: Why Facebook?

Of course, there are some ways to answer that question that are more obvious than others. Facebook experienced the highest-profile weaponization of its platform, after all, for several purposes: alleged election interference, the spread if misinformation and divisive content, and -- as was raised numerous times by Representatives on Wednesday -- ads for opioids and other controlled substances.

Zuckerberg says that if people flag these ads, Facebook will "look at them as fast as we can" and "take [them] down if they violate our policies."

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW) April 11, 2018

It brings up Facebook's (and, by default, Zuckerberg's) siloed spotlight in the wake of user privacy and data collection, and how it could possibly be abused. Here's what we do know: Zuckerberg confirmed that app developer Aleksandr Kogan sold the user data he obtained to outlets beyond Cambridge Analytica (one being a firm called Eunoia Technologies), and that Zuckerberg's own data was one the 87 million accounts jeopardized.

But we also have reason to believe that Facebook isn't alone in the volume and breadth of user data it possesses.

To start, have a look at this lengthy but comprehensive Twitter thread from self-described privacy consultant Dylan Curran, who goes into detail about the depth of information that Google possesses on users.

Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

We also know that this isn't just about data privacy, including where Facebook and the week's hearing are concerned. It's also about the weaponization of online platforms, which are not limited to Facebook, to spread misinformation and divisive content.

Other tech giants have come under fire for falling victim to that. Twitter, for its part, has even submitted a request for proposals to measure the health of its network and how to fix its many problems. And on more than one occasion, Google and YouTube have both been accused of failing to quickly remove false news content during major events.

So, I'll pose the question again: Why Facebook, and Facebook alone?

Zuckerberg listens to opening remarks from House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden on April 11, 2018. | Amanda Zantal-Wiener

There may not ever be an answer to the question that satisfies everyone. But as I noted in yesterday's recap, before any firm, sustainable outcomes can result from these ongoing issues, I suspect more hearings will take place. After all, before this week's events, some lawmakers also wanted to include the CEOs of Google and Twitter in the questioning.

"I realize the issues we're discussing today aren't just issues for Facebook," says Zuckerberg. "I'm ready to take your questions."

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW) April 10, 2018

On top of that, time constraints played a major role in this week's hearings, with Senators being limited to five minutes of questioning each on Tuesday, and Representatives to four minutes each on Wednesday. For that reason, it may not come as a surprise if Zuckerberg is also asked to appear for an additional round of questioning -- perhaps involuntarily on future occasions.

Furthermore, a Special Counsel investigation into overall election interference is still underway, for which Zuckerberg said in Tuesday's hearing someone from Facebook was questioned. It seems that I'm not the only one who still has questions, and as I wrote yesterday: The testimony, it seems, is far from over.

If Facebook truly puts community before advertising revenue, what will happen?

In his full written testimony for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Zuckerberg concluded with a sentiment and promise that would be alluded to throughout the hearings:

"My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together. Advertisers and developers will never take priority over that as long as I’m running Facebook."

Which poses the question: If that's true, and Facebook continues to move away from the "platform before participants" mentality, as HubSpot VP of Marketing Jon Dick put it -- what happens to the businesses who have come to rely on it?

After all, it was something that Zuckerberg repeated throughout the week: Facebook does not sell data. Rather, advertisers build targeted ads on the platform based on the data that Facebook possesses on user behavior and preferences.

That data, Zuckerberg was sure to remind lawmakers, was largely comprised of information that users had to opt-in to providing when they joined the network (such as Page and post Likes) and could not be personally identifiable when used properly.

There was also a time when Facebook partnered with other firms, such as Experian and Acxiom, to provide advertisers with supplemental data that could be synthesized in tandem with Facebook's own aforementioned data, helping to match (or target) promoted content to the most relevant audiences. But in the weeks leading up to the hearings, Facebook shuttered that program.

Source: Facebook

  For its own part, Zuckerberg has suggested that were it not for this model, Facebook's livelihood could certainly become compromised. In 2017, for instance, advertiser-related income made up 98% of its global revenue -- which many expect to take a hit if the network truly makes good on its promise to de-prioritize advertiser content, or if it continues to limit targeted ad capabilities.

Rep. Loebsack asks if it's possible for Facebook to exist without collecting and using personal data. Zuckerberg: WE DON'T SELL DATA. But Loebsack pushes back and asks if it would exist without *sharing* data. Zuckerberg implies that it might not.

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW) April 11, 2018

But what didn't come up nearly as much throughout the hearings was the impact that these changes could have on the advertisers themselves -- the good actors who don't weaponize Facebook, but have come to depend on it to build and reach an optimized audience.

That concept actually revisits the topic of regulation, and what it could look like when applied to Facebook. As I already covered, if such regulation does come to fruition, there's a fair chance that it won't only apply to Facebook, but could also extend to the tech industry in general. That could cause a major ripple effect in the way all online companies conduct business, and the way consumers and advertisers alike can use them.

Even if the implications of regulation are massively widespread, it might not be an entirely negative thing. As Zuckerberg and lawmakers were both sure to remind us this week, the issues at-hand are fundamentally about trust. And further restrictions -- or at least rules around how Facebook can manage and allow advertising -- could potentially lead to a larger degree of consumer trust on how, exactly, advertisers reach them.

In other words -- Facebook moving away from the "platform before participants" mentality might not be entirely bad for advertisers, many of whom are all too familiar with pressure to grow which leads to equal pressure and temptation to use short-cuts or overly aggressive tactics for reaching customers.

The better alternative, perhaps, comes in the form of promoted content that is at least more personalized, which Zuckerberg spoke to this week. Facebook users would prefer an ad that's relevant, he maintained throughout the hearings, than non-ad content that isn't relevant at all.

Zuckerberg adds: "It would impact our revenue somewhat, too," but he doesn't seem to want to dwell on that

— Amanda Zantal-Wiener (@Amanda_ZW) April 11, 2018

"This is still all due to the misalignment in economic incentives," said HubSpot Marketing Fellow Sam Mallikarjunan -- adding that Facebook's recently-announced data abuse bounty could help, "since even if firms like Cambridge Analytica still abuse openings like that, individual potentially malicious actors may find it more profitable to report privacy vulnerabilities rather than exploit them."

That profitability aspect, Mallikarjunan said, will always be core to the degree of Facebook's self-regulation. "Until Facebook designs a system where spamming is less profitable than creating a good experience for users -- what search engines and e-mail inboxes have done -- this will continue to be an issue."

But, at this point, much of this is a hypothesis. We still don't know what regulation would look like, if it even came to be, and we don't know how many additional changes Facebook is going to make to the way it collects, uses, or retains this data -- or to the way advertisers can best leverage the platform.

And, we don't know if this visit was his last to Capitol Hill -- though I think not. And according to the Washington Post, his presence has once again been requested by European lawmakers, after previously declining to testify before United Kingdom Members of Parliament.

We still don't know what leaders at Google, YouTube, and Twitter have to say -- or if they'll be asked by lawmakers for their input.

And we still don't know who else will be held accountable, and to what degree, as these issues continue to be discussed -- like Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, or Eunoia, to name a few.

Most of all -- we don't know if we will ever come to learn more about these lingering questions.

But if we do -- I'll let you know.

[96thdayofrage]

Let’s Talk About Bernie’s Capitulation To The Democratic Establishment

People keep asking me to write about the way my beloved Senator Sanders has been feeding more and more into the xenophobic McCarthyist hysteria of the corporate Democrats, and to be honest I’ve been avoiding it like the plague because if I don’t do a good job here it’s going to generate a bunch of painfully stupid arguments wherever it gets shared and help stagnate the national dialogue rather than bringing consciousness and skillful nuance to a critical issue. There are a lot of weird dynamics surrounding this one, so I would ask the reader to please try and set aside preconceived notions for a few minutes if possible and try to read with an open mind, and to please try to really hear one another in whatever dialogues this article opens up.

We all bring different gifts to this revolution. Some bring passion, some bring strategy, some bring resources, some bring dank memetic prowess, and we all bring our unique perspectives based on our own unique backgrounds and conditioning. All of these things are gifts, and we should be grateful for them. I bring a knack for coming up with colorful insults for CNN’s Chris Cuomo to the table myself, but that’s hardly a gift that we need in spades. Our diverse array of weaponry gives us the ability to attack the corporatist establishment with a dynamic agility that all their billionaire-funded think tanks and strategy teams simply cannot keep up with. We’re each a very important part of the equation, but none of us can do it all; we all have our own strengths and limitations.

Bernard Sanders has served on Capitol Hill since 1991, first as a member of the House of Representatives and now as a US Senator, and though he’s an Independent he caucuses with the Democrats so much that he’s become essentially a de facto party member when it comes to legislation. Like every single one of us, his position has advantages, and it has limitations. Bernie didn’t get to where he’s at by running as hard as he can toward the light like many of us clear-eyed rebels do, he got there by being a shrewd politician, by picking his battles, shoring up alliances, and grinding his way through the muck and the mire of Washington to try and inch us toward what he sees as the greater good from his own unique perspective as a congressional lawmaker. Clearly this is a powerful tool to have on our side. It is also clearly not enough.

Bernie has been bending over backwards to ingratiate himself so extensively to the Democratic establishment that today whenever you hear someone citing him as an authority on an issue, it’s a safe bet that they’re arguing in favor of the corporatist establishment. It’s obvious to anyone with some intuition and critical thinking skills that all the frenzy and freakouts over Russia are highly suspicious and are likely being used to manipulate us in a way that favors the political establishment, and Bernie’s been helping to forward that narrative. As we’ve discussed before, normal Americans do not actually care about Russia; the nationwide hysteria we’ve been seeing is deliberately manufactured, and Bernie has been helping to make this happen.

This is wrong. Bernie is wrong. We’re allowed to say that he’s wrong here. He should not be contributing to the psychological brutalization that the political establishment has been inflicting upon the American people month after month after month through media psy-ops and baseless fearmongering. He should not be collaborating with these intelligence agencies who lied to us about WMDs in Iraq in their attempt to force interventionism in Syria and increase tensions with a nuclear superpower. No.

Does this mean that Sanders isn’t a useful part of our team? He was obviously instrumental in waking a lot of us up and showing us how much power we have to fight the establishment, but does his subsequent capitulation to that establishment mean that his role in the revolution is over?

Personally, I doubt it. Bernie has never been perfect when it comes to foreign policy, but he’s a consistently powerful voice when it comes to domestic policy and economic justice for Americans. That’s a great gift to our movement and it will remain so for however long Bernie keeps it up.

That said, Bernie is not our leader. He isn’t. The extent to which the establishment has sunk their talons into him proves that we can’t afford to allow him to lead us. They will use him to steer us in unwholesome directions and guide us away from our desire to destroy their sick institutions. “Bernie says” should not be received with any more authoritative weight than “Noam Chomsky says,” “Julian Assange says” or “Caitlin Johnstone says”; it should always be taken as data about someone’s opinion, never as gospel truth.

We’re each seeing this thing from a slightly different angle but also —and this is important— those of us speaking from the outside have far more freedom to say what we see than those on the inside. It’s like telling a woman in an abusive relationship that she needs to just lay into him and leave. Sounds great and she knows you’re right but she knows better than anyone that doing so could get her killed, so getting mad at her for not standing up for herself is just victim-blaming. We can’t see the forces at play from the inside like Bernie Sanders can, and we don’t know what he’s up against.

Does that make him a liability? It turns out that it doesn’t. None of us are buying his Russia rubbish so it’s not dangerous to the woke ones.

It’s possible to trust him but not listen to him. He’s working his own magic in his own way every day now, getting more prime time exposure advancing ideas like universal healthcare than we ever dreamed possible during the primaries, and his revolutionary vision for working and middle-class Americans is becoming a part of the mainstream conversation and sounding more and more like the common sense approach that we know it is. That, my friends, is a miracle. Only a year ago, his ideas were seen as nutty and fringe and not doable. Now they are a standard part of the discourse. In that context, you can see how far he has taken us.

But he’s not our leader and he never was. It was never him, it was us. He knew that, and now we know it for sure. Like the leader of a cycling team, he took his turn out front taking the resistance and the flak and now he’s drifted back into the pack. That’s how collaboration works, and that’s how our way of leading will work. We are not sociopaths all vying for the number one spot, so our leadership will necessarily take a different form. The days of an alpha dictating everyone’s moves from a position of authority are numbered. As we move into our new healthy paradigm, we’ll see more and more examples of this style of rolling leadership where people like Sam Ronan or Michael Green or Tulsi Gabbard or that guy Zach who stood up for us to Donna Brazile at the post-mortem election meeting of the DNC — where these people pop up out of nowhere to take the lead for a moment and push humanity forward just a little more.

I welcome this new way. It naturally sheds corruption as we roll along while the wisdom of the group shakes off any pernicious mind viruses and we get things done much more organically and with less co-ordination and more inspiration. It’s also the reason why we’re winning this thing — the old way requires too much legwork, too much time and a lot more energy to sustain. If we trust our inner intuition first to know what to do, and we trust each other to do what they need to do, then we’re creating a very efficient model for getting shizz done.

So yeah, Bernie’s not perfect, and some of what he’s saying right now is wrong and weird to us, but he’s dominating the discourse in the Democratic party right now and that is an incredible victory for us all. We have a guy in the top spot and he’s doing great things, and moving mainstream America along in leaps and bounds, far beyond my wildest dreams way back when the mainstream media refused to even cover his campaign in the most rudimentary way. He really is working wonders and for that I am very grateful.

He’s totally wrong about Russia though. And that’s okay too. As long as we all stand confident in our own authority and our own respective strengths, we've got this.

[dailyaudiobible]

03/23/2019 DAB Transcript

Numbers 36:1 - Deuteronomy 1:46, Luke 5:29-6:11, Psalms 66:1-20, Proverbs 11:24-26

Today is the 23rd day of March. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It's great to be here with you today. I can't believe we are this deep into March. I can't believe this is deep into the year, but I can, I mean, this is like, the years go by and should start getting used to it but some days I sit down here and look at the calendar and look at where we are in the year and look at where we are in the week and it just like takes my breath away. How did we get here so quickly? So, today we’re gonna read from the God's Word Translation, which is what we've been doing all week, but we will also conclude the book of Numbers today and move into the book of Deuteronomy, which is the final book of the Torah and we'll talk about that when we get there, but before that, let's conclude the book of Numbers by reading Numbers chapter 36 today.

Introduction to the book of Deuteronomy:

Okay. So, that concludes the book of Numbers, which brings us to the final book in the Pentateuch, of the Torah, the book of Deuteronomy, which literally means second law. And we may feel like we’re going through again some additional redundant review as if maybe we've already read this, but we haven't. What's happening is that the leadership is about to change, and a new generation has emerged, and an old generation has passed away. They’ve been wandering around for 40 years. An entire generation that came out of slavery has passed away. Moses's brother Aaron has died. Moses sister Miriam has died. Moses is the only one left in his family and he’s leading Israel, but he will not be leading Israel across the Jordan River into the promised land. Joshua will become the leader in Moses stead and will lead the people into the land of promise. Moses will stay on the eastern side of the Jordan River and die there. So, as we move into the book of Deuteronomy what we will be reading is essentially three different discourses, like three different talks that Moses gave to the entire community of Israel. These are his parting words. And, so, yes, a bunch of this will be review, but think about it. Think about the story of Moses, right? He’d been put in a wicker basket and put in the river and being raised by Pharaoh's daughter being raised by his own mother and then killing an Egyptian and fleeing. Remember all of the drama of the story? The burning bush, he comes back, all of the signs and wonders, the plagues on Egypt, the going through the Red Sea. This is all under Moses leadership, right? So, it has been epic since we met Moses as if it weren't epic before that. But Moses has carried a significant burden and carrying these people and overseeing the change in shift of identity from slave to chosen he’s endured much. He's given his life to these people under God's command and he's not going to be going forward with them. He’s actually going to be taking steps backward and he's going to become a part of their history as they move forward into their future. So, of course, you would have some final things that he would need, that he would feel compelled to say. That’s what we’re reading in the book of Deuteronomy. So, if we understand that then we can gather with the children of Israel because we’ve been wandering around and watching their story take place over centuries of time. Like, we have never been in the promised land yet in the Scriptures, we haven’t crossed the Jordan, this has just been a mythic place since we wandered around it with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When we move out of the book of Deuteronomy we’re going to be moving forward with the children of Israel. So, we’re here kind of at the banks of the Jordan River gathered around listening to what Moses feels is absolutely pivotal and critical for the people to hear before they move forward and before he disappears. And there is a lot to apply to our own lives as we consider our own moving forward. So, with all of that said, we begin the book of Deuteronomy chapter 1.

Prayer:

Thank You, Father for another week in Your word. Thank You for bringing us all the way this far into the Old Testament to the final book of the law, the final book of the Torah. And as we review, as we listen to Moses words, his final words of counsel, we invite Your Holy Spirit to speak into our own lives. And as we prepare to move into a new week and spend another week at Your side Jesus as we continue to move through the gospel of Luke, we invite Your Holy Spirit to draw us deeper into relationship and intimacy with You. This is what we see, this is what were after - friendship, intimacy, relationship with You and You alone. Come Holy Spirit we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, it's of course we’re you find out what's going on around here. So, be sure to check in and check it out.

Check out the Daily Audio Bible shop while you're at it. There are resources that are available there to accompany you on this journey through the Scriptures, things like the Daily Audio Bible journal and all of our black wing our writing paraphernalia. It's a good idea if God speaks something in His word to write it down so that you can refer back to it. You’ll need it again someday. So, all kinds of resources are available in the Daily Audio Bible shop. So, check that out.

The More Gathering for women is coming up here in just a couple weeks and registration for the More Gathering is about to close down as we prepare to do the event. So, it's kinda getting to be last call if you want to come. You can get all the information at moregathering.com or go to dailyaudiobible.com and click the Initiatives section and you’ll find the More Gathering there.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that dailyaudiobible.com as well. There’s a link, it’s on the homepage. Thank you, thank you profoundly for your partnership. If you're using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always if you have a prayer request or comment, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Good morning Daily Audio Bible family, it’s Mary Lynn from New Brunswick calling again, and I just want to give a sincere heart felt thank you to Tim from Tampa and Kristi from Kentucky for your prayers. Terry the trucker said it the other day, you know people are praying for you but when you hear your name called out it’s is just very emotional. So, thank you so much. The other thing that I wanted to just talk about was, I heard a couple people saying how that it’s difficult to get through the community prayer and I can understand that being daunting sometimes, a three hour podcast, but for me, I’m a self-employed housekeeper, I do two residential clients a day and I have my beautiful headset that my husband bought me for Christmas it’s Bluetooth and I plug that thing in and I’m actually halfway through my fourth time through this past week’s community prayer. And I don’t have a chance to call in and pray openly for all of you, but I wanted you to know that every single one of you, not just in words, every one of your prayers has been prayed for by me as I hear them online. Its…for me it’s a way of focusing my mind and not allowing the world to get ahold of my thoughts and to take them down the wrong direction. So, I just want to know that I truly do pray for every one of you. I hear so many people talking about their addictions and their struggles and I can honestly say that right now my addiction has become the community prayer. I cannot get enough of it. And, so, I thank you Brian and your family for putting that together. I can’t even imagine the work that must entail but thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom I my heart. And as I vacuum this house for the rest of the afternoon know that you are all being prayed for. God bless, and I do love each and every one of you. Thank you.

Good afternoon DABbers I need to come to you tonight in prayer for my relationship. I’ve made several moves. I’ve relocated for this man and a lot of things that my spirit and my good instinct tells me not to. And I just ask for prayer. Found some things tonight that broke my heart and I’m heartbroken, so heartbroken. I constantly try to seek God on which way to go and I just feel so hurt and I just ask you all to pray for me and ask God to help me guide me where I need to be and give me the strength to get there. I have nothing right now and I’m scared, and I only knew to call and ask for prayer. I feel hopeless and I feel numb and all the things that I’ve given up for this relationship I feel so ridiculously stupid and blinded. So, I ask for your prayers and I ask God to open doors for me in the location we’re I need to be and a job and just to get back on my feet and look forward and not look back anymore, not look back to this relationship anymore. I thank you all and thank you for listening and thank you for praying and I’ll be praying for each of you as well.

God bless Kristi from Kentucky in Jesus’ name amen. I have no idea why the Holy Spirit will not leave me alone about Kristi from Kentucky. Even before I began listening to the Daily Audio Bible for tonight the name Kristi from Kentucky just kept ringing in my head and I don’t even know why. I don’t even remember a specific reason. I don’t know but now I’m listening to the community prayer, most recent community prayer, and I’m not able to make it through the entire thing because Kristi from Kentucky name keeps popping up in my head. So, I don’t know what it is, what you need, or whatever, but I pray that the Lord blesses you indeed with whatever you need at this very moment that you’re hearing this. I love you and I pray continuously for all of you. Sean 316.

Hi Daily Audio Bible family, this is Salvation is Mine in San Leandro California. it is Wednesday, March 20th I believe. I just wanted to call in because I haven’t called in in a very long time and I am listening and hearing your prayers and I wanted to just pray for you all and ask God to work a miracle in your lives because he is there for us even sometimes when we don’t feel Him. So, heavenly Father I come before You now standing in the gap for the Daily Audio Bible family, for those who call in, those who don’t call in, those who are calling for prayer and those who call in and pray for others. Help us to feel Your presence through those prayers. Help us to realize that You listen to every…every prayer Lord God whether it’s a praise report or whether we’re just struggling Lord God. And there’s so many of us struggling that we just need You Lord God to come in and put a word down in our Spirit, to cleanse our soul, to clean out our years from all the noise and the hustle and bustle of our daily life that seems to be so hard and that we focus on so much that we don’t hear You. Open up our years Lord God, open up our hearts, open up our minds to receive a word from You even if it’s just to say I’m there. Give us comfort in that Lord God. Help us to realize that You are our Savior, that You sent Your son Jesus Christ to love on us in a way that we can barely understand sometimes but that You are there for us. This I pray in the name of Jesus Christ and His Father God. Daily Audio Bible God bless you, God keep you, have a great day. Bye-bye.