#if the democrats were smart they’d be using the shit out of this in their campaign and to pass some bipartisan bill

[theriverdalereviewer]

obsessed with the way the republican party’s two biggest platforms (pro police and anti gun control) literally led to its presidential candidate getting shot at

[blank-space-daisy13]

Why I won’t invite my biological father to my wedding.

I wanted to post this on Instagram or Facebook but I don’t want to deal with people saying I’m “drama.” But I wanted to write this out just in case someone is ballsy enough to ask me.

Let’s start off with the fact that after he got with my step mom, he wasn’t really around. He also never really cared or tried to take care of us (my brother and me) unless he absolutely had to.

Before my step mom and when we still lived in the apartment, On nights he had us my mom would drop us off already fed, he’d turn the tv on and go play on his computer until we had to go to bed. If he had us on a weekend, same thing. We’d wake up and he’d feed us breakfast, then tv with him in his room on the computer, lunch, tv, dinner, tv, and bed. When we moved from the apartment we stayed at his buddy’s house where he rented a room but guess what? He’d send us down to the basement all day to watch tv, and let us up for meals.

When my stepmom came into the picture, we started going to Canada. On every single one of his weekends. She was nice, at first. Sooner or later everyone shows their true colors. But she started slowly to get a hold of my dad. (My dad had no boundaries with us and she wanted to “help” my dad learn to discipline, but she’s a little extreme.) I once got punished for saying the word “butt” because we only say, “bum” and he yelled at me. Yelled. I was about 7 or 8. Then I heard my future step mother telling him how good he did. Also while we were there, I remember very few times we actually hung out with my dad. It was always being shoved into the playroom with my brother, future stepsister, and sometimes future stepbrother. (Step mom never had full custody of stepbrother.) We’d never leave the playroom other than for meals like the TV. But at least we weren’t rotting our brains, I guess.

After awhile he decided he wanted 50/50 custody. My stepmom at this point could be brutal emotionally. I remember getting yelled at for not knowing any of my immediate family member’s birthdays. I was about 8 or 9. Kind of shitty don’t you think? Going back to the wanting 50/50 custody, he didn’t actually want us. Looking back I understand this now. He just didn’t want to pay as much child support, and that’s probably the only reason my step mom agreed to this. They treated us (my brother and i) horribly. He moved close to my mom’s to prove he’d be willing to do the 50/50 custody, and at that point it was hell. If we did something wrong, immediately we’d get soap in the mouth. My brother later on was getting hot sauce. It would be for things such as, “not sharing with your step sister,” (which she would’ve lied about) or “talking back,” when as a kid I was asking a simple question about their rules. They had so many rules to the point you didn’t realize you were breaking a rule until they told you it was one. My *fondest* memory was when they’d send us kids to the basement for a few hours during the weekend and then got mad when we went through boxes and such to find toys to play with. Because when they first sent us down there, they sent us down there with nothing at all. Sure we probably shouldn’t have gone through boxes, where my brother and I found our toys that they never put with our step sister’s toys, but they sent us down there with nothing at all. They expected us to “imagine” things with no toys. I also got yelled at one weekend because they asked us to clean our bathrooms. (Step sister and I shared a Jack and Jill bathroom and my brother had his own bathroom as well.) We went and picked things up and went back to play. They both yelled at us and said, “If I had meant pick up I would’ve said pick up. I said CLEAN.” At this point I had never cleaned a bathroom in my life. They gave us the cleaning supplies and we went to work. I did what I thought was the best I could do and then my stepmom yells at me, “That wasn’t nearly long enough!!!! Haven’t you ever cleaned a bathroom before?!” Uh no ma’am, I was literally 10. But that was her favorite way to make us feel like shit. To yell, “Haven’t you done XY&Z before?” Or “You don’t know (blank)?! So disrespectful! You should know these things!” (That was said about the birthdays. Again I was a decently young kid.) But going forward, towards the end of them living there, they had a baby together, my other brother J.

Luckily for my brother and I, he eventually gave up going for the 50/50 custody. But with doing this, he left and we didn’t see him for a long time. 5-6 years approximately. I was 15 when he decided he wanted to see us again, and because of everything we had gone through before, we didn’t want to. I had a choice but my brother didn’t, and I was forced to go.

At this point he had married my stepmother, and was living in the same subdivision, and one road away, where had had a house with my mom when they were married. Kind of awkward but ok.

And I have to say, they were better. To a point. They wanted us to feel bad that we didn’t want to be there. At the time I had a really old phone, not a smart phone, that didn’t lock, but they expected my phone to be on the counter at 9pm every night. They read my texts and held them against me, but when I called them out on reading my texts, they told me I was crazy. I would text my friends that I didn’t want to be there, and that I was uncomfortable. They asked me, “Why don’t you want to be here? Why are you uncomfortable? We understand what we did in the past was wrong, but the past is the past and you have to forgive us!” (One wrong thing I was always taught was you always have to forgive. You don’t always have to forgive for things that hurt you.) Finally at the end of this period, they sat us down and tried to make us feel bad by saying, “If you don’t want to be here, we don’t want you here. We want you to want to be here.” At 15 I tried to explain why this was hard, but they didn’t care. It wasn’t their way so they weren’t ok with it.

Fast forward to my Senior Year of high school, I don’t remember how, but my father and I got in touch. My step mom wanted nothing to do with me because of a dumb YouTube video I made at 14 where I “talked shit” about her daughter and herself. Yes, I did, but who didn’t do something dumb at 14? I wasn’t allowed around their house because HER son had a “drug problem.” (Marijuana) Whatever, I didn’t care. Slowly we lost touch because I was the only one calling, and I got sick of it. I was done. But I was still young.

Fast forward to me being a sophomore in college. I was 20 or 21. My brother had an issue that got the police and CPS involved. My father decided to text me and ask me what was going on. I called him and told him that he had “no fucking reason to know what was going on” because he was never around. He gaslighted me into feeling bad because I cussed him out for 10 minutes. But we kept contact after that because I had thought about it and I wanted to get to know my little brother J more. We did lose contact again but then we gain it back later on.

Skip forward a couple years and I’m talking to my cousin, (another thing was he kept us from his side of the family and I had lost contact with most of them until I was an adult.) my cousin told me he was going to MY little BABY sister’s 1st birthday. My father had been talking to me for a few months at this point and NEVER mentioned I had a baby sister. He told me, “I thought your aunt posted about it. I saw it on Facebook and assumed you knew!” It doesn’t matter whether I saw it on Facebook or not. He should’ve told me. But whatever, I let that go too.

Here is where I get frustrated. I wouldn’t call for a couple weeks because I didn’t think about it. I’ve only seen him twice in the past 9 years. But he would blame me for us not talking, when he’d never call or try to talk to me. It drives me crazy when people think like that. It’s not just my responsibility and mine alone.

Skip forward to a few months ago when he brought up politics. I hated this because I’m mostly liberal/democrat and he’s 100% republican. He called liberals “libtards” and goes, “you’re not a libtard are you?” And when I tell him it’s offensive he says, “It’s just a joke!” But now we’re here and yet again it’s been 2 or 3 months since we’ve spoken because he’s blocked my number. It goes straight to voicemail and my texts aren’t going through as iMessages. I’ve decided after trying for over two months, he’s uninvited to the wedding. He’s never met my fiancé, ever. We were only inviting him to be civil. But if he can’t even speak to me, I feel it’s not my problem, and it’s one less drama issue to worry about at the wedding.

My family can believe what they want. There are so many things left out of this 15 year drama circle of my father just disappearing. And I don’t care anymore. I hope someone asks why he wasn’t invited because I know for a fact he’ll be at least telling the whole family that he wasn’t invited. And I don’t mind sending them this so they can know why.

[florrickandassociates]

TGF Thoughts: 5x03-- And the court had a clerk...

Hello again! It’s nice to have this show back. This episode was a bit less of a standout than the previous two, but I’m still happy with the overall direction for this season. More under the cut (or here, because tumblr sucks). 

When Robert King tweeted the episode title, I asked him if all the titles this season were adding up to one long sentence/story, hoping he’d confirm it and give a little more information. He did! He said it’s “in the Farmer in the Dell mode” and while I think I get what he’s saying, I’m very curious to see how it plays out. Haven’t been able to track down 5x04′s title yet, but the promo is out. (As of this morning! It’s interesting they’re not putting them after the episode this year; I kind of like it.) 

Kurt’s job is up in the air given the new administration. I think this scene exists mostly just to remind us where Kurt works and the stakes.

What month is this supposed to be in? The transition seems recent but no one is wearing masks.  

Kurt spots a poster asking for help ID’ing people at the Capitol on January 6th. He thinks he recognizes someone...

And now we’re in case of the week land. This case is about a small business owner whose business went under after someone created fake news articles accusing him of pedophilia.  

I think the whole point of this (kind of long) scene is to show that this case is a pretty small deal. Low stakes, inexperienced opposing lawyer. (Not even sure why Liz would be arguing this in court, but whatever.)

Tbh I thought this was going to wind up in 9 ¾ court.

Now that we have junior level characters, we get scenes showing that there are, in fact, people at RBL who are mid-level. Liz asks an associate to work on something, he asks another associate to work on it, she delegates to other associates, and they delegate to Marissa and Carmen. This work seems terrible.  

It’s so funny to me how this is probably more realistic than most of the lawyering on the show and yet it only shows up selectively. We only see the hierarchy here to make it clear that Marissa and Carmen are at the bottom.  

David Lee interrupts and asks for Carmen. He’s very rude to her. Interestingly, she’s hesitant to leave her grunt work and follow David, even though she must know he outranks the associate who gave her the grunt work.

“Why am I supposed to know you?” David asks her as they walk through the halls. “I don’t know if you are,” Carmen responds. “Why does Benjamin Dafoe know you?” he asks. She doesn’t know who he is.  

“Who are you?” Dafoe asks when Carmen enters. She states her name, again. “Why are you important?” he asks. “I don’t think that I am,” Carmen responds.  

Then Dafoe says his top client, and it’s a name that the characters all know. I’m glad this scene is free of any “he’s the white OJ” expository lines (that’s from Sweeney’s introduction) -- it’s clear from the reactions and the discussion of police and rape that the top client is a bad guy, probably a rapist. The rapist wants Carmen to represent him.

Putting 2 and 2 together, Carmen asks if the rapist knows Rivi. He’s not, but he’s at the same prison. As soon as Carmen says she’s representing Rivi, David Lee switches gears, understanding the situation and trying to sign the new business. He’s so shameless!  

Marissa sorts ALL the papers. There are a LOT of papers. I’m swamped. Look at all this paper.

She catches the associate who assigned her the task leaving for the night just as she finishes up, and cheerfully notes she’s finished the task. Then the associate mentions this was only half of the bills. Marissa does not like that. Since her goal in wanting to be a lawyer is mostly just to give her something exciting to do and earn respect... this hierarchy thing is not going so well.

Marissa decides that after her rough day, she’s going to stop by Wackner’s court. He’s in the middle of a case about Emily in Paris fanfiction and he’s very happy to see Marissa.  

Wackner’s night court has a program—it notes the sponsor is Copy Co-op (I thought it was Copy Coop?) and the paper products were also provided by them. And “there will be regular intermissions at the discretion of Judge Wackner.” It’s very theatrical.  

Wackner takes a recess and calls Marissa to his “chambers.” He asks for her thoughts on the case. “All they want is attention and to feel like they’ve won,” Marissa notes. Wackner’s on the same wave length and compares it to the Scarecrow’s diploma at the end of The Wizard of Oz. So, he makes copyright certificates and some minor modifications to each of the fanfic books. They say “I respect you and I love you” and that’s that.

Wackner catches Marissa before she leaves and asks her to be his law clerk—part time or full time, 10% of all the legal filings and unlimited use of copy machines. She is hesitant because she “doesn’t even know what this is.”

Wackner says his court is “the future.” Marissa turns him down; notes she wants to pass the bar. “You know why all these people are here? ‘Cause the courts and the lawyers and the appeals have made justice... unattainable. Out of reach. To anyone who doesn’t have a shitload of money to wait it out. That’s why Exxon beats out Mr. Nobody. Read Kafka’s Before the Law.”  

I just read it, and you should too! It literally is a page, but tl;dr, there’s a man who wants to get to the law and instead he spends his whole life trying to win over the first of many gatekeepers on the path to the law. He never gets through the gate.  

“Justice is only just if it’s available to everyone,” Wackner says. Marissa thinks about that.

As I said last week, it’s smart that Wackner makes so much sense. Hearing him say all this, knowing that it’s true... it makes it very easy to get on board with the thought experiment. Of course there would be huge repercussions to this kind of system, but it makes so much sense it’s compelling TV!

Kurt’s showering when Diane gets home, which gives her time to stumble across the WANTED poster and notice that Kurt has drawn facial hair onto one of the pictures. “Who is this?” she asks him. “No one,” he says. “Well, you drew in a beard and a moustache on him,” Diane notes. Kurt says he was doodling, but Diane calls him out as he is the “exact opposite of a doodler.” Kurt says he thought it was someone he knew, but he’s not sure. Diane pushes him to tell the feds. Kurt reiterates he’s not sure, but it’s someone he went shooting with. “Oh my God, then it’s him,” Diane jumps to (not incorrect) conclusions. Kurt says he didn’t talk that way; he’s a veteran. “Kurt! That’s the profile!” Diane argues. Kurt isn’t convinced and he doesn’t want to be responsible for naming names. He notes he’ll be threatened with indictment for not naming names and then only lawyers will end up benefitting. Diane is not convinced.

I think this is an interesting conflict for Kurt and Diane. I understand why Kurt is hesitant to speak out before he’s sure. And I understand and agree with Diane that it’s important to identify the attackers and prevent anything like that from happening again.

I don’t mean to blame Kurt, exactly, but I feel like all of what happens next could’ve played out differently if Kurt had been just a little clearer with Diane about why he was hesitant to ID the man. Like, the threat of indictment for not naming names sounds like some typical anti-government rambling. Saying you specifically are afraid that this will turn back on you and you need to weigh your options and come up with a plan first would put Diane in a very different mode, in which they’d work together to craft the best strategy. Because this man would’ve been ID’d by someone, sooner or later, and Kurt would’ve needed to be prepared.  

Diane stares at the wanted poster at work and asks Jay to find his identity. He’s on the FBI TEN MOST WANTED? Ten!? Ok!  

Diane shares the extra information she has—the gun range and that he’s a veteran—and Jay gets to work.  

Turns out there’s no money in the case that Liz, a name partner, is working on and Marissa just spent all those hours sorting bills for. I could’ve told you there was no money in that case lol.  

Jay IDs the guy very fast. He’s faster than the feds because they didn’t know where he shot. The range had his license on file, and Jay got ahold of it.

“Well, we don’t pay you enough,” Diane says. “Oh, I know that,” Jay laughs.  

Diane says she’s going to think about calling the feds—it's definitely the same guy.

Marissa notes someone high profile (David Cord, who I presume is a thinly veiled stand-in for David Koch given the name, his role in the plot, and the fact that he is “David Cord of the Cord Brothers”) in the lobby giving a fake name and goes to tell Liz.  

David Cord is performing magic tricks for the receptionists (they don’t recognize him) when Liz and Marissa show up. “I knew your father. I hated your father,” Cord says. “Yes, well, he hated you too,” Liz says. He says he gave a fake name to see what the reception would be like since he’s kinda infamous.  

Liz introduces Marissa as one of the law clinic lawyers. Marissa knows what to say in this situation. Specifically, she knows that it is the exact right moment to name drop her father.  

“Democrats as far as the eye can see,” Cord notes. At that, Liz asks Marissa to get Julius involved.

More good expository work! (No, editor feature of Word, I do NOT want that to say “Better expository work,” that would change my meaning, go away and please stop grading my recap??? I don’t know how I brought this up but it’s telling me my score is 72%, so a C, and it’s driving me crazy. Oh, now I’m a 71%. It had me at like, 50%, because I had written “Wackner” and “Wackner” is not a word. No shit.)  

Anyway, back to the exposition. I like that we don’t get a line like, “Liz! David Cord, the Republican super donor, is here!” We just get to see Liz’s reaction, Cord’s hate of Liz’s father, and the line about democrats. Then it becomes clearer who Cord is.

Just noticed Liz is wearing an Apple Watch.

Liz stands for her meeting with Cord, likely to maintain power. Cord says January 6th changed everything to him and now he’s all about unity and loving America.  

Cord has something to say about Liz’s case, the one that’s not making any money, and he seems to know quite a lot about it. That spooks Liz.  

Then Cord offers her $12 million to continue the case for another six months (all of these months, seemingly, will play out in the couple of days the rest of this episode takes, but, whatever). He just wants them to go after the social media company that distributed the fake news... and Section 230.

Don’t know what that is? Now you do, because there is a Good Fight short! These work so much better when they’re actually needed (explaining concepts, etc.) than when they’re trying to force one into every episode (remember that Downton Abbey one? What... was that?)  

I was talking to @mimeparadox about this short and he pointed out that this short has a VERY clear POV on an issue that actually doesn’t seem to be all that straightforward. If you’re like me and only had a vague sense of what Section 230 was prior to this episode, this short is telling you what to think of it—it isn’t just explaining what it is.

I do tend to agree with the show’s POV on most things, but this is an issue I’d like to read more on. I love how Section 230 was something I hadn’t really read up on prior to this episode and now that it’s been on TGF I realize it’s something that actually, yes, I would’ve been interested in knowing about earlier. Is this because things that are on TGF are interesting to me because they’re on TGF or is it because TGF generally only discusses things that would be interesting to me? Probs a little bit of both.  

Diane asks Jay how to make an anonymous phone call and he hands her a burner phone. She calls the FBI with the rioter’s name. She doesn’t leave her name and then she dumps the phone.  

Credits! Did you catch there’s a Jordan Boatman in the credits? She plays one of the associates who passes down the grunt work to Marissa, and she’s Michael Boatman’s daughter in real life! She’s also been in one other episode, in season 3.  

I never get tired of these credits!  

The RL partners (and some associates who are on the case? I think these are the same ones who delegated the work to Marissa?) debate whether or not they should take Cord’s money. Madeline notes that he’s funded a lot of Republican campaigns; Julius notes that both Republicans and Democrats agree that Section 230 is flawed and this is an opportunity for unity.

Diane notes that the right doesn’t want to stop conspiracy theories from spreading, so is this really that bipartisan? “It would help if the boomers would stop falling for those conspiracy theories and sharing it with their friends,” an associate (I believe this is Michael Boatman’s daughter again) notes. That quiets the room and the partners all glare at her. Yeah, that was a kind of stupid thing to say. First of all, it’s just not appropriate to say to the partners, and it’s also, like, missing the point? If it’s easy for conspiracy theories to spread among boomers, maybe just expecting each member of that generation to suddenly have a millennial’s understanding of the internet is the wrong strategy? Maybe there’s some structural issue here? That maybe, just maybe, this case is actually about?  

The associate also points out that the internet is currently a place where people can speak out about sexual harassment-- “they repeal section 230, and there would be no #MeToo.”

One of the partners says he doesn’t believe that—if they regulate section 230, then newspapers can actually be competitive and there’s still free speech online.  

“We’re not going back to reading newspapers, grandpa,” some associate says. What the actual fuck, dude? Who talks like that to their boss?! It’s so condescending. He’s also wrong! “Newspapers” are not just physical things... reporting by major publications still matters and will continue to matter. Like, is he suggesting that in the future all news will just be random people tweeting things they think are true with no fact checking or curation? Sure, journalism is struggling right now—but I don’t think that’s because there’s a lack of desire for well-reported news.  

I am glad the partners call him out on saying “grandpa” and honestly I’m shocked he isn’t asked to leave the discussion after that rude remark. Unless this young looking dude is a partner too? But I don’t think he is.  

Julius notes that if they’re going to pursue this case, they need money like Cord’s. At that, Liz starts to leave the meeting. “We haven’t decided if we’re taking this Cord money yet,” Madeline protests. “Of course we are,” Liz says and leaves.  

Now that’s more like it! I’m not sure if this is necessarily the best way to handle this, but she’s a) correct, they were always going to take the money because it is $12 million and an issue of interest and b) using her authority. Should Liz be making decisions totally on her own? Maybe not. Does Liz making this decision and then leaving (with everyone accepting that she’s correct) cut through a lot of bullshit and establish Liz as the one in charge? Yup.

Diane says, “Ooh-kay” with a little bit of an eyeroll after Liz exits, but she’s still laying low. I think in a different season Diane might’ve tried to push back.  

Is it me or does Baranski get a lot of material this episode we haven’t seen before? Lots of really good reaction shots/tones in this episode I don’t really think we’ve seen from Diane before. I’m impressed there’s still new stuff after 12 years.

At some point maybe I will actually write the essay I’ve been wanting to write for ages about how TGF is still so relevant despite being in a universe that should be showing its age by now. I wish I could find the first time that I called TGW a period piece set in the present day (I know it would’ve been during season five) because I think that’s the key to TGW/TGF’s enduring success. The shows always feel timely because they try to capture the present moment (which is, of course, always changing) and don’t get stuck in any one moment in time. Further, the fact that the writers are always so tuned in to events and skilled at quickly reacting to what happens in the world makes them VERY good in a pinch, which is (I think) why they’re able to make the most of unexpected situations (Josh leaving TGW, the pandemic).  

Liz and Julius bring a suit against ChumHum to attack 230. Judge Friend is initially skeptical of their argument that 230 is unconstitutional; then she’s intrigued. I am too. This argument about the press is a very interesting one. I obviously have a lot of reading to do on 230, but my take after this episode is pretty much that social media platforms have to be held responsible in some way, but I don’t think it’s feasible or desirable for them to be responsible for every single one of billions of posts. I think there has to be some way to regulate social media giants that would allow everyday people to share things and speak out but would prevent the curated (even by an algorithm) spread of fake news and make social media giants accountable when there are very public bad actors using their platforms. What that regulation would be I have no idea. I just refuse to believe that our options are to give the social media sites full immunity or to regulate the internet so strongly that no one is able to speak freely because all the platforms are worried about lawsuits.  

Over at the VA, people are being fired. When Kurt gets into his office, Madeline Starkey (wait, are there two characters named Madeline in this episode?) is waiting for him. She’s still very quirky and scary.  

Starkey says the guy that Diane reported is now saying Kurt trained him on using assault rifles and buying ammunition in bulk. Kurt notes these were topics covered in a group setting, which Starkey knew—and what she’s really after is the names of the others in the group. (She may already know them, since she knows there were five of them.)

Kurt refuses to name names and just stares at her.  

Case stuff happens! (I liked the last two episodes a lot but it’s much faster for me to just write, “case stuff happens” for some of the scenes.)

Hey, surprise Aaron Tveit! (Not really a surprise; he is in the credits. But still yay!)  

I don’t really know why Liz and Julius are talking about newspapers specifically and not all types of fact-based journalism/press? I feel like their argument is most convincing when it’s about actual newspapers (especially local ones) but still would apply to cable news...

Marissa’s still hard at work sorting papers when the associate comes back in and informs her she can stop; they’ve changed strategies and everything she’s done is now irrelevant. She also says “I forgot to tell you” at the start of that thought, meaning that she neglected to tell Marissa this important information earlier and wasted her time. Marissa is not pleased and so she goes to Wackner’s court, where Wackner now has a deli ticket machine and is wearing super-sized novelty sunglasses. Why not!

He sees Marissa and calls a five-minute recess. In “chambers,” Marissa tells him she’d like to work for him part-time but keep her RL job.  

Wackner needs her help processing more copyright certificates. He’s priced them competitively at $20 and found that a lot of writers want these certificates, even though they have no legal value. (Neither do actual copyrights, Wackner notes. And he notes that if anyone plagiarizes, they can sue in HIS court.)  

“Marissa, I’m building something here. I want you to join me. I want your advice on cases. I want to bounce legal theories off you,” he says. “What are your legal theories?” she asks. “I don’t know. That’s why I need to bounce them,” he says.  

Marissa gives him from noon to 2 and 5-7, which seems awfully ambitious for someone working at a law firm!

“That’s how revolutions are made. Back rooms of copy shops,” he says, accepting her offer.  

Kurt is sulking in the dark when Diane arrives home. He lets her know about Starkey’s visit and she immediately goes into lawyer mode. Notably, this scene does not spend much time on how Starkey found out the rioter’s name. Curious if they’re saving that for later or if Diane and Kurt both know what Diane must have done or if Kurt think’s it’s a coincidence.  

Kurt SET UP A TOUR OF THE CAPITOL for one of the veterans in his shooting group, and that tour was ON JANUARY 6TH! I really do wish he’d told Diane that upfront.  

Maybe the long pause where Kurt refuses to tell Diane which congressperson arranged the tour even after she promises she won’t say is him letting on that he knows that Diane ID’d the guy? Or maybe it’s just Kurt.  

I do not like the dead birds in Starkey’s office, mostly because I do not like thinking about dead birds.

Starkey compares Diane and Kurt to the Conways.  

And now more case stuff happens.  

Julius gets to question a witness for the first time in two years! He’s a little shaky at first but then he does a fantastic job! Yay Julius!

When Diane arrives at the office, reception is filled with around a hundred teddy bears. “What?” she asks. “Build-a-Bears. They were sent to Marissa,” the receptionist explains. “Okay... why?” Diane asks the logical next question. The receptionist does not know.  

“This one’s a Marissa bear,” she says, showing Diane a bear wearing boots and a wig. It does not look much like Marissa and it says “Hug me.”

Diane looks confused and furious at the same time. Her look here is, like, a milder version of the death stare she gives Alicia in Outside the Bubble when she learns about Alicia and Cary’s plan to leave.  

“Why don’t we, meaning you, take all these stuffed animals and put them in the conference room,” Diane instructs the receptionist. She is NOT! HAPPY! The receptionist seemed to be having fun with the bears, but clearly the right answer was to have done something with them and... not to have put them over every surface in reception. Eeek.  

Carmen’s new client, the rapist, arrives at the firm before anyone can hide the bears. “This may not be the firm for you,” his advisor/lawyer (I’m not totally sure what this dude’s job is) warns.  

Madeline notices the rapist and glares at the receptionist. “I know. I’m putting them in the conference room,” the receptionist says, thinking Madeline is upset about the bears. She is not upset about the bears.

Diane finds Marissa, who’s working with Carmen again. She asks Carmen to give them a moment.

“Why are there hundreds of teddy bears in our reception?” Diane asks. Marissa is confused. Diane shows her the Marissa bear. Marissa looks horrified and amused. “That doesn’t even look like me,” Marissa notes, completely missing how pissed off Diane is. I don’t think we have seen Diane be this direct/no-nonsense in ages.  

“That would seem to be beside the point. What is going on, Marissa?” Diane demands. Marissa suspects this is based on some advice she offered to a client who was buying a Build-a-Bear franchise and thinks this is a thank you gift. “What client? You’re not a lawyer! Why do you have clients?” Diane says exasperatedly.  

Marissa gives her a look, and Diane immediately understands that she’s been back to Wackner’s court. “Oh my God, this is about that Copy Coop court?”

“Marissa, no. By participating in that simulacrum of a courtroom, you exposed this firm to malpractice, sanctions, and God knows what,” Diane says. If that were really true, she wouldn’t have sat there and argued. I mean, I don’t know the legality of this all, but I feel like it’s a bigger optics issue than legal issue if Diane and other lawyers are willing to even consider participating?  

“If you wish to continue your employment at this firm, you will never do anything like that again. Do you understand?” Diane says. She will not hear any arguments.  

I love that Marissa is the thing that keeps Wackner coming back. It’s a good plot for her, but structurally, it also allows the show to keep Wackner around without many contrivances. Wackner sees that Marissa would understand what he’s up to, she sees that he shares some of her frustrations with the law, and they both want to work together again. It’s not like suddenly everyone’s talking about Wackner’s court and all the cases somehow end up there or anything.

The receptionist, who is having a truly terrible day, comes into announce that Kurt and Starkey have arrived. “Don’t put them in the conference room!” Diane commands, knowing that the teddy bears will be there. It’s too late, though, because the receptionist (who previously seemed to be fine at her job if bad at recognizing public figures and understanding that partners might not find teddy bears amusing) has already put them in the conference room. I feel bad for her, and don’t think the other things were her fault, but I feel like she could’ve seen this one coming...  

I find the teddy bears HILARIOUS, mostly because the reactions to them are so funny. It’s kind of the same gag as the balloons for Lucca in season two, but I don’t really care, because I’m getting to see Diane Lockhart treat hundreds of Build-a-Bears like they are a real work problem.

Starkey jokes about the bears; Kurt is silent.  

The rioter from the poster is now accusing Kurt of coming up with the STRATEGY for January 6th, which Kurt and Diane both dismiss as bullshit.  

I could do without Starkey’s musical cues.

I can’t tell if Kurt is in trouble here or if she’s just pressing him to name names. Why wouldn’t she just have rioter guy name names if he’s so eager to blame Kurt? I guess maybe if the others were actually there, he might be less likely to name the names of his actual co-conspirators? Or, Starkey might already know the names (surely the shooting range has logs) and be using this to raise the stakes.  

No one (except maybe the partner named Daniel) is happy about the rapist in reception. “Since when are we representing people like Wolfe-Coleman?” Julius asks. Didn’t these people help both Sweeney (though I think Sweeney was in some weird police brutality case and they didn’t actually want to represent him) and Bishop? And Rivi? But they draw the line here? Sure.  

Ah, there we go, an expository line-- “he’s the next Jeffrey Epstein”. Almost made it the whole episode without one of these. I’ll forgive it since it’s so late in the episode lol.  

“Did you approve this, Liz?!” Madeline demands. Liz did not. Daniel wonders if that means Diane approved it. Liz doesn’t think so and calls Diane (who happens to be walking past) in.  

“I know, the teddy bears. I’m working on it,” Diane says when she opens the door. I think the teddy bears are a bigger issue to Diane than to anyone else.  

Diane didn’t approve representing Mr. Rapey either. She’s uncomfortable that a meeting was happening without her; Madeline notes that she is standing there specifically because they wanted to involve her.  

David Lee pops up out of nowhere with the answer: one of the new associates (not Marissa, “the real one”) pulled in Mr. Rapey. Are there only two associates now even though orientation was for a big group?  

Firth is gone, btw. David Lee is the new Mr. Firth. I have no idea why David would want to be STR Laurie’s guy for managing RL but... sure, whatever? David Lee is an effective antagonist, especially in small doses, and this allows the writers to keep him around and continue the STR Laurie plot without a key guest star. If STR Laurie is still a thing, and it seems like it is going to be a thing for a while, then having David Lee take on this role makes sense for plot. Otherwise they’re going to have to shoehorn him in to every plot somehow. At least now he has a reason to be around.  

Liz and Diane take a walk to chat. Diane is worried about having David as their boss. Liz says she has a worse worry—David Lee knew exactly when to come downstairs with information, suggesting he know what they were talking about. “Would he do something like that?” Liz asks when Diane wonders if there’s a bug. “Oh, yeah,” Diane replies. Hah, yeah. He absolutely would.  

They decide to have Jay search for bugs and Liz is frustrated with how much time they have to spend on things other than lawyering. Yup.

“What is going on with all the teddy bears in the conference room?” Liz asks as they head back to the office. “It’s a long story,” Diane sighs. I also love that the teddy bears link the various pieces of the episode together—it feels like all of these threads are happening simultaneously because of that constant.  

I don’t get RL’s approach to clients. Bishop and Rivi are ok, Wolfe-Colman is not (except that actually he is fine). Cord is okay too. Do they draw the line anywhere? I know Liz was right when she said that OF COURSE they were taking the money, but is there really nothing that differentiates that situation from this one? I feel like there should be.

Marissa goes back to see Wackner. Since someone refuses to say “I respect and I love you,” Wackner reverses his ruling. This is part of the “Bad Loser Law of last Wednesday,” so the rules of Wackner’s court are clearly a work in progress.

Marissa explains she can’t be the law clerk because of Diane. She tries to connect him with a real lawyer, still not understanding exactly what Wackner’s after. “You know just enough not to crush what I’m doing here,” Wackner explains. “A real lawyer will look for reasons why not. I need someone to look for reasons why.”  

Case stuff happens. I cannot read Cord’s handwriting. Liz and Julius lose the case because Judge Friend says what’s happening isn’t fair, but it is constitutional. (So here we have, at least in the show’s POV, a good and attentive judge who can’t make decisions that make sense because she’s bound by a document written before anyone had ever dreamed of the internet.)  

Cord is waiting for Liz in her office. He’s prepared to bankroll an appeal. Did they blow thorough that $12 million already? Impressive; it’s been like a day.  

Cord says they are definitely the firm he wants. Interesting.

Now Liz wants a meeting with Carmen, so it’s Marissa who leaves the room. This scene seems like it was meant to be a different day?  

Liz wants to talk about Mr. Rapey. Carmen is, yet again, chill about the case. “Carmen, is there anyone that you would not represent?” Liz asks. Funny, Liz, I could ask you the same. Being hesitant about it is not changing the fact that you’re representing bad people. Carmen’s just cutting the bullshit.  

“I don’t understand. Is there someone you don’t want me to represent?” I love how Carmen’s incredibly polite responses always seem very pointed. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Carmen’s reply, and yet it puts Liz in a place where she can’t dance around what she’s trying to say.  

“I’m just trying to get a sense of who you are,” Liz explains.  

Then Liz decides she’s going to help on the Craig Wolfe-Colman (Mr. Rapey) case, and they will keep talking about her career path. Liz, this does not seem like the right solution! You're worried about your associate representing bad people so you’re like, I know, what if I ALSO represented bad people? If your goal is to convince Carmen not to take clients like this, you’re kinda shooting yourself in the foot!  

“Are you worried about me?” Carmen says, again turning things on Liz. “I don’t know what I am about you,” Liz replies. Me either. Well, I know I'm intrigued, but beyond that, no clue!

All the bears have ended up in Diane’s office, where Wackner is waiting. He jokes about how his court is always seen as informal, yet this real fancy law office is covered in Build-a-Bears. Then he says he wants to hire RL—he's willing to pay. He wants consultation from Marissa (“consultation on legal issues”) and he’s prepared to spend a lot. And, if there’s one thing we know, it’s that they’re always going to take the money. So, they do.

I love that Wackner’s goal is to “perfect my little clubhouse of the law.” It’s a fun plot, and it also allows for the rules in his court to change (I’m sure we’re going to be treated to/subjected to a lot of whimsical gags around changing and ridiculous rules). It's also a good way to work through the thought experiment over the course of the season. It’s not like Wackner already has a system set up and it’s perfect—I'm sure we’re going to see his system run into issues and explore that more, too.  

Wackner monologues a bit here about why he’s running fake court, and he lets us know he’s going to monologue. Basically he thinks people no longer want to help people and are only motivated by their own self interest. He notes that no one talks about the Peace Corps anymore and asks the last time Diane heard anyone say those words. I’m sure I’ve heard a reference more recently but my mind went RIGHT to season one Cary Agos saying “Peace Corps. Belize,” as some kind of smarmy pickup line. This is likely not where my mind was supposed to go.

Wackner wants “A new Peace Corps. For America.” Diane’s sympathetic to that and agrees to take him on as a client.  

Wackner asks if he can take a bear. Diane instructs him to take two.  

Aaaand Wackner and Cord end up on the elevator together. Wackner hands Cord a bear, the elevator doors close, and the episode ends. Since last episode ended with Marissa and Carmen in the elevator together, I’m hoping this will be how every episode this season ends. I think using the Kings’ favorite liminal space to transition between episodes is kind of fun, and it fits with the ellipses at the end of every episode title.  

Speaking of... did you see today’s elevator-themed episode of Evil? It was written by the Kings. Those two have been obsessed with elevators for at least a decade.  

[firelord-frowny]

honestly like!

i HATE!!!! the very CONCEPT of guns. and i’m theoretically SO fundamentally opposed to violence. 

but that opposition is based on an idealist assumption that no one is doing anything that they need to be stopped from doing. 

and there are obviously a fucking hell of a lot of people doing a fucking hell of a lot of vile shit, and no amount of ~peaceful protesting~ or litigating or campaigning or Reaching Across The Aisle is going to stop them, and it’s fucking RIDICULOUS that anyone at all thinks people should just wait patiently for The Powers That Be to spontaneously manifest a conscience and finally quit trying to maim and murder people For Funsies. 

i would LOVE it we could just hug them into submission and invite them over for tea and chit chat and take their ugly ass hand and smile at them and show them that I’m Just A Normal Person Like You and have them finally decide to stop wanting me to die. and honestly, some people REALLY CAN be reached through those kinds of methods. and i don’t think people should stop trying to do that. and if anything, i think MORE people need to be trying to do that.

but i ALSO think that more people need to start punching some bigots in the fucking face. 

if self proclaimed conservatives and right wingers and proud wimpy boys get to go around committing terroristic acts against other peoples, and if the politicians and ceos they stan for refuse to take any actions to stop them at best, and at worst go out of their way to FACILITATE the suffering of all but bigoted, well-off white people....

then we should get to punch them in the fucking face and not have anyone say WORD ONE about it. 

they wanna be all big and bad and parade around threatening and committing violence against teachers and health care workers and black people and asian people and jewish people and indigenous people and women of all backgrounds, then they should be fucking tough enough to cope with a goddamn punch in the face every now and then. they should WELCOME every fist that ever collides with their flesh. 

if they want a fucking fight, we should GIVE THEM A FIGHT! and make sure they fucking lose.  make sure the pathetic little ~civil war~ they’re begging for is HUMILIATINGLY short. chase their fucking asses into the most barren, useless parts of the world where they can be vile all by themselves. 

bc i SWEAR TO GOD, the only reason why these people have any power at all to impact anything or anyone is because people LET THEM. not because they’re soooo smart, or they’re soooo dangerous, or there are sooooo many of them. it’s STRICTLY because an enormous majority of bare-minimum-decent people care more about Taking The Moral High Ground than about actually doing what’s necessary to disable evil people from doing evil things.

This is a hella problematic way to put it, buuuut

black people know not to do or say certain things to a cop because we’ve been conditioned to fear the consequences of even the most benign ~infractions.~ We swallow our fucking pride and whip out those “yes sirs” and “no sirs” and we move slowly and we try to keep our hands visible at all costs because we’ve seen, over and over again, for DECADES (centuries, really) what those people might do to us if our hand isn’t totally visible for a fraction of a second. And sometimes it doesn’t even work. Sometimes we do everything in our power to demonstrate that there’s no need to hurt us, and we get murdered anyway. 

WOULDN’T IT BE NICE if those wack ass bigots could learn to fear the consequences of being disgusting out loud and in public? 

Imagine if, over the last several decades, malicious bigots were met with SWIFT physical consequences every time they did some fucked up shit. 

do you think they’d be so bold now? 

i don’t. 

i think if they thought for one second that whoever they pull a gun on might pull one out back at them, then they would keep their fucking mouths shut and behave. i think if they LEGITIMATELY thought that they’re actual lives and their actual freedom were at stake, they wouldn’t say SHIT. Because they know that whether or not they have to wear a mask or get vaccinated or whateverthefuck has absolutely NO real impact on their place in the world. there is NO. WAY. that they would be all up in arms over something so fucking absurd if they thought anyone would actually try to hurt them in response. 

they don’t think anyone is going to show up at their dumb lil protests with tear gas. they don’t think an angry BLM activist is going to shoot up their country club in retaliation against the oppressive policies they support. they don’t think anyone is going to stop them on the street and start screaming in their face and threaten to kill them. they don’t think they’re going to lose a damn fucking thing. they think they’re literally going to just waltz into some of the most secure buildings in the world and wreak havoc, and that NO ONE is going to do shit about it. 

that’s the problem :) :) :) :) :) :) 

the problem isn’t that these people exist. i mean, it fucking sucks that they exist and if they could somehow cease to exist, whether by alien abduction or some sort of freak simultaneous lightning strike or WHATEVER, i would be THRILLED. but just existing doesn’t hurt anyone. Having a stupid belief doesn’t automatically make someone dangerous. It just makes them a shitty person.

But to have a stupid belief and to feel SO ENTITLED to acting upon those beliefs???

those motherfuckers need to fear for their safety. those motherfuckers need to be SO PETRIFIED that they dig themselves underground and bury themselves alive and NEVER resurface. 

i don’t understand how, at this point, with over half a million people DEAD because of the actions of these assholes, and with thousands of people CONTINUING to drop dead over it every day, the so-called “good guys” still don’t see fit to resort to drastic measures to render these people INCAPABLE of causing further harm. 

so many people have died. not just in the time of covid, but decades before that. so many people are murdered in the name of carrying out the pettiest whims of the most wretched people on earth. People get injured. People get poisoned by their own water supply or the very air they breathe. People get sick because they’re forced to live under unhealthy circumstances, and then they DIE because they can’t afford treatment for the illnesses they developed because of the unhealthy circumstances that made them sick in the first place! Children starve. Global warming sets people on fire and drowns them and destroys homes and lives and landscapes. 

literally, at WHAT point does it become acceptable to finally just declare war on these fucking demons? WHEN do we meet them where they’re at and start punching back instead of just curling up and trying to survive the attack?

i KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW that there are groups out there who are taking direct action in some form or another. but CLEARLY it’s not enough.

and i ALSO know that there are MANY PEOPLE who have the actual skills and resources to stage a legitimate countereffort, and they’re just. not. doing it. 

we’ve got all these vile-ass ~ex military~ types boasting about their arsenal and how they intend to use it to reign terror upon innocent people. these fuckfaces who are LITERALLY HOLDING PUBLIC OFFICE and saying Out Loud that they want to attack us. and their peers exalt them for it. 

you CANNOT tell me that there are 0 ~ex military~ people who are sympathetic to the cause of resisting these malicious bigots. you CANNOT tell me that there aren’t people in public office who know that something MUST be done, and who have the POWER and ACCESS to do something - even if it’s “unlawful.” 

but they’re not doing it. :) because they’re weak. :) and they fear for their lives in a way that ~the right~ has NEVER had to contend with. A democratic state senator knows someone might hunt them down and try to kill them if they say anything ~too radical~. a republican state senator is confident that he could literally call for the public execution of someone and be met only with a pathetic verbal reprimand from some spineless liberal congressman who bends over backward to be Respectful And Fair as they gently try to explain why it’s not okay to facilitate mass death in every demographic but their own.

can somebody with the actual power and means to do so PLEASE start doing ANYTHING to terrorize these people back to the bland, tasteless, spiritually bankrupt cesspit they congealed in? When one of these american terrorists brandishes a gun in someone’s face, can someone PLEASE brandish their own gun right back at them? THEY should be the ones who are too terrified to speak up. Not us. THEY should be the ones compelled to look over their shoulder. 

im so sick of a world where mass suffering and exploitation are accepted as Just The Natural Order Of Things. instead of a harrowing dystopia that should be burned to the ground quick, fast, and in a motherfucking hurry.

[landofgatesandconstellations]

An assortment of quick lands

I recently made a bunch of lands for a session, so here they are. Warpbound players, leave now or be promptly shot.

Archipelago of Oases and Haboobs (AOOAH) Witch of Breath This is a land of mistakes and bad decisions. With tamed 'striders' which are basically horses they can travel all across the land. Well, if they stayed on the path, but they never do. These consorts just. cant. stop. doing stupid shit. It's up to you to redirect their unrestricted freedom towards less dumb paths. Some of that shit isn't quite as easy to figure out how to fix, and you'll have to figure out the path of the haboob and do some politics to fully get them to not be dumb.

District of Ice and Unrest (DOIAU) Prince of Blood In a frosty, almost glacial wasteland, wolves, beaten down by the denizen and the elements toil away, working the stone. No one dares rebel or they'd be killed. The hero has to move quickly or they'll be captured. Eventually they must enter a camp, start a revolution and go through liberating each camp. Once you have enough soldiers, attack the denizen or unite the people into a democratic government.    

University of Pretension and Poison (UOPAP) thief of mind This land is a huge school full of hundreds of pompous professors and zero students. Everyone is super smart and looks down on you for not being practically omniscient. However, the consorts here aren't just super smart, they're only super smart in their own field. They avoid situations that would have them need to know about things they are bad at. Thing is, a huge piece of old tech stuck near the core is shattering and poisoning the land. The consorts refuse to cooperate with people of a different expertise as them so it comes to the hero of uopap to take their knowledge for himself, steal the "cool statues" that are parts of the machine needed to deactivate it and save the world.

Kingdom of tech and floods (KOTAF) Mage of light This is a land of great machines that could shatter worlds and build utopia. Unfortunately, no one knows how to use them. They are left with a subsistence farmer society which uses broken teleporters as coffee tables. They are slowly losing land to a material replicator lodged in the ocean floor which keeps creating water. Help them and also yourself by using their advanced tech or your friends god tiers to move or destroy the slowly encroaching sea.

Location of, uh Canvas and Frogs? (LOUCAF?) Heir of space What? No! You're not supposed to be here yet. We're not done making this land. This planet is just a single town right now. The rest of the world is an eerie, smooth blank surface. Luckily, It doesn't have to stay that way for long. Anything drawn or painted onto the whitelands comes to life, or just regular existence if it's an inanimate object. There are a couple frogs around, but they only appear in painted areas, but the town is too inhabited. You'll have to create some habitats and draw some lava for the second forge if you want to complete this quest. Denizen? Aw, dang we need one of those, don't we. Hm, lets just use echidna. Oops, our echidna is kinda awful. Well that's okay, this weird pool noodle can be the denizen.

Cluster of Parsecs and Toads (COPAT) Rogue of space This is actually a version of the land in my pfp. Fun! This is a land of scattered fragments. Stars and comets abound outside the system. Supposedly it once was whole, but no one remembers that time. Consorts live on these fragments as normal, unaware that their land is weird. The forge must be lit by kicking a star into it, when it will blast all of the fragments into a globe. This makes it easier to find the denizen who now lives underground. Many fragments and dust clouds will still surround the land even once whole. The frogs, or rather toads, float idly around the land, but special toads can be found hiding within comets and as rewards for sidequests.

Mausoleum of Ashes and Dust (MAUAD) Bard of Doom This land is chock full of ghosts. A couple zombies too. They seem scary, but most of them are pretty nice people. They're also the only way you'll get any information about the volcanic winter. Oh yeah, volcanic winter. Everything is dying because there isn't enough light and heat getting through the thick ashy cloud cover. Looks like it's being spewed by copat's forge. Stop the ash or find another source of heat.

Hey, wait, this session has two space players? And no time players? Well, ok, some of the lands in this session were made by my co-dm who might not want them here and they aren’t my content. The time player is using a land ripped from another classpect blog because last time we tried to make one for this player, it wasn’t exactly good. Hope lands are real hard. This is most of the session though. Plus loucaf? which i made and then realized that our heir of space wasn’t actually playing. 

[cksmart-world]

The completely unnecessary necessary analysis

by Christopher Smart

March 30, 2021

BURGESS OWENS HATES GOD AND MORONI

Did Utahns know who they were getting when they elected a former NFL player to Congress who may have CTE from taking too many hits on the gridiron. Lately Burgess Owens (whose real name is Owen Burgess) has been acting strangely and we don't know if he's got brain damage or if he's just crazy. As most people know — except Republicans — Donald Trump tried to nullify the presidential election so he could stay in power. But who's the dictator? Joe Biden, of course, said Owens on Fox News. “We don’t have anything close to a constitutional republic right now. We have a dictatorship.” And as for Black Lives Matter, the movement seeking to stop police shootings of African Americans, Owens said this: “They hate God. They hate capitalism and they hate the family... .” Ah, the old, GOP playbook — we have nothing to offer but  tax cuts for the rich, so let's demonize Democrats. This is how they brand people like Nancy Pelosi as a she-devil. We could go on Radio From Hell X-96 and say Owen Burgess hates God and Moroni. It could be true, we just don't know. One thing is clear: Owen Burgess does not have a personal relationship with Jesus — in fact, he may be the Devil. Get thee behind me, Satan, you shithead.

WATER (NOT BOOZE) OUTLAWED IN GEORGIA ELECTIONS

OK, the staff here at Smart Bomb will never complain about alcohol in Utah ever again. It's true, you can't buy vodka on election day here in the Beehive State. But at least you can get water. Not so in Georgia if you're standing in line to vote on election day. And they have long, F---ing lines at Georgia polls — especially in low-income, minority areas. If someone tries to sneak you a bottle of water, they'd get busted by the  water police. “Illegal distribution of a controlled substance, to wit, H2O.” It remans unclear whether mini-bottles of Jack Daniels could be passed out to thirsty voters. But white Georgia officials say the new, restrictive voting laws are good because white voters in the Peach State no longer trust the system after white Republicans lost two U.S. Senate seats and Donald Trump said it was rigged. The former president even begged (threatened) the secretary of state to find him 11,700 votes to un-rig the polling. State Sen. Buzz de Vaut, who sits on the state election board, praised the new legislation, noting that thirsty black people might pledge their votes to Democrats for a bottle of water — which would be totally unfair to Republican white supremacists.

HUNTSMAN SUES LDS CHURCH FROM A SAFE BEACH

Holy heck. He's gone and done it. And it could really screw up his Temple Recommend. James Huntsman — the scion of the late industrialist Jon Huntsman Sr. — is suing the LDS Church for fraud and he wants $$$ millions in tithing returned. Oh, boy. The Celestial Kingdom could hang in the balance for the brother of former Gov. Jon Huntsman (Jr.) and Paul Huntsman, the jefe at The Salt Lake Tribune. In a lawsuit filed from a safe and secure beach in California, James Huntsman said the church repeatedly lied about billions going to charitable causes. Yikes! “[R]ather than using tithing funds for the promised purposes, the LDS Corporation secretly lined its own pockets by using the funds to develop a multibillion-dollar commercial real estate and insurance empire that had nothing to do with charity,” the suit said. Double Yikes !! Church officials may be wishing Mark Hofmann was back — at least they'd be getting something for their money. On the other hand, suing the LDS Church for millions in such an embarrassing way could provoke the wrath of every good Mormon in  Zion. Some advice, James: Don't be caught in Utah or you could end up like Brigham Young's scapegoat, John D. Lee — digging your own grave. (Yes, literally.)

Post script — Spring is here and crocuses are croaking and like the swallows in Capistrano, the Turkey Vultures will soon be circling the Avenues. Easter is upon us and that means bunnies and colored eggs (why, we don't know). In some countries Catholics celebrate the resurrection for an entire week and because they can confess their sins and get absolution, they really party down. Forgiveness is a great thing. Too bad its in such short supply. If you wrote or tweeted something stupid decades ago in high school or when you were drunk at college, watch out. You can apologize over and over again and spend 20 years in a convent but that just won't get it — no way. These are some mean times we're living in. But the hate that spreads like Covid didn't happen overnight. For more than three decades a lot of money and effort has gone into the campaign to divide Americans. When people like evangelical preacher Rick Joyner call on Christians to arm themselves for a civil war against liberals, who are allies of the Devil, you know we're in deep shit. Where do we go from here? Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Hate begets hate; violence begets violence. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.” Think about it.

Alright Wilson, if spring can't put you in a good mood, what can? You're right, the band is almost always in a good mood, but we can't talk about that here. So anyway, do you and the guys have something in your Easter basket that will lift us up and float us away on a fragrant spring breeze:

I can see clearly now, the rain has gone I can see all obstacles in my way Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind It's gonna be a bright, bright sun-shining day It's gonna be a bright, bright sun-shining day I think I can make it now, the pain has gone All of the bad feelings have disappeared Here is that rainbow I've been praying for It's gonna be a bright, bright sun-shining day Look all around, there's nothing but blue sky Look straight ahead, nothing but blue sky

Gonna be a bright, bright sun-shining day Gonna be a bright, bright, bright sun-shining day

(I Can See Clearly Now — Johnny Nash)

[obiternihili]

Something about property rights

I felt like I needed to rant yesterday and decided to adapt the discord messages into a tumblr post.

I spent most of a class this morning thinking about the Anglo interpretations and notions of property rights, trying to actually contrast it with workable alternative notions of property rights and feeling kind of hopeless about it and finding it hard to actually come up with anything that isn't literally communism.

And in retrospect it made the whole “philosophically questioning the whole notion of property rights” feel more, idk, respectable than it had before, when it just sounded like the USSR and China opposed its inclusion in the UDHR for technical reasons or pure self interest in covering their own atrocities.

The whole thing started with thinking about the Zapatist slogan “la tierra es de quién la trabaja”. “The land belongs to those who work it.” To me, the Zapatistas were pretty cool guys, who sided with the little guy and the indigenous peoples of México. But I thought immediately about how a colonial American might react to it, and I couldn’t escape the idea that they’d hear the slogan and go, “ah, yes, we should kill the savages and steward the land correctly”.

As much as the magna carta is held up as this great precursor to democratic rights in this country, its origins are far more dismal and petty. It wasn’t really a democratic impulse, it was more like a bunch of petty-kings coordinated to overwhelm a high king. But it doubtlessly had a strong effect on feudalism and came to be a part of English identity before that even really made sense from a modern perspective. In short it came off almost as a promise that “every man is a king of his own home” and that helped to make property itself sacrosanct.

So when capitalism changed the people’s relationship with the land, the serfs were “liberated” as the commons were siezed by their de jure owners. The collapse of the commons fundamentally changed people’s relationships with property, exacerbating the whole “every man is a king of his own house” issue, and making property the be-all-end-all of basic needs like shelter. To the degree that the Magna Carta made property sacrosanct, in a literal “this is a divinely appointed right” sort of sense, the collapse of the commons codified exactly what that meant, making that sacrosanctity intrinsic to thriving.

So because of tying these issues together so deeply, it made sense to steal the lands of people “not working it” according to how you might work it. So that it made sense to go to war because the yankees were stealing your chattel, and horror of horrors not even repurposing them! So that telling South Africa “hey, no, black people are people too” was unholy, violating their sacred authority to clean their own house. So it makes sense that Australia continues to break promises to its Aboriginal communities, if, say, their homes have a potentially profitable mine to work. So it makes sense that Canada breaks promises to its indigenous population, if there’s an oil pipeline they can lay. So that it made sense, paradoxically, for the US to strong arm México into changing articles of its constitution about indigenous land rights in order to pass NAFTA and be able to threaten to go United Fruit Company on the people for not being profitable to the corporations. And the EZLN, which formed directly because of the anxieties of these moves as the Maya genocide was still very fresh on everyone’s minds, are neo-Zapatistas; the land belongs to the one who works it! The Maya who always has, or the companies that want to (exploit it)? 

I remember once as a teen confronting the attitudes this bears on a small chan.

Before the BLM stuff, actually regarding OWS and those "rich punks arguing for socialism with their iphones" and shit;  I'd made an off hand comment about things not being worth more than lives at some point and someone replied "I'd totally kill someone if they stole my phone".

I made a comment in utter exasperation (this was on a board that was like /pol/ before that was really what it is now and there was no reason to believe they weren't serious), saying something like "Is, what, a month's pay really worth a human life to you?" ($800 really was more money than my mom was making at the time, let alone taking out rent and shit first, and I gave them benefit of the doubt that they weren't rich first world fucks who could afford to take a hit. At that point I’d learned that most people in India, even dirt poor people who couldn’t afford water, generally had smart phones in order to help with work and things; conscientious of this, the fact that I know and knew dirt poor almost homeless people in the US who needed phones for work, I was trying to allow for “if I lose this phone, I lose my job, my home, my health, and my life” which is a reality a lot of people live with, and at least somewhere to come at this issue with).

(But) the commentators, both the user I was arguing against and several people using trips, proceeded to mock me for apparently living in a 3rd world country for thinking a phone cost more than one paycheck.

To these people a phone wasn’t even worth a week’s pay, let alone two. And yet, to them, another person’s life, no matter how desperate they were, no matter how hungry or sick or anything they were, they were worth less than that.

This exchange was about the time I started nurturing (or giving in, depending on your perspective) the idea that "maybe some people aren't just, mistaken, or seeing something I don't, or have some complex network of beliefs making them bite a bullet, but like, actually goddamn legitimately evil in terms of their fundamental values". I gather absolutely that there’s a lot going on with this; that you could understand the guy to mean “I think thieves should be killed” as opposed to ““humans”“ or whatever. But, like, still.

Traumatizing is an overly dramatic word for what that conversation all those years did to me, but maybe it was. And it’s not like a phone’s *nothing*. But the way the users undercut me, and revealed not only how worthless the phone was to them, but how little human lives were worth to them in relation to the phone just kind of knocked the wind out of me

This made the rounds recently. This is the legacy of that property is sacrosanct bullshit.

And, like, fuck, this is the whole cultural underpinning of what’s been going on with the gun shit here. It’s why guns are so important to us. Why we feel it’s absolutely justified to shoot a kid in the back for lifting a $2 bottle of beer from a convenience store and leaving him to bleed to death without so much as calling the police. The entire fucked up thing we got going on w/r/t race here in the land of the free? It’s because of our relationship to property rights.

At the same time, you get climate change from people who feel it’s their right to do whatever to their property. Oil’s money. Dairy farms, meat, cash crops like almonds. You don’t like your water dirtied? But I’m only fracking over ma plotte!

What’s going on in Brazil? Some natives won the right to their lands against farmers who wanted to clear the forest, and mysteriously within a few weeks everything’s lit on fire. 𝅘𝅥 Dark torrents shake the airs, as black clouds blind [São Paulo] ♫

You even get the nimby zoning shit out of this. How dare you let colored people into my neighborhood! That’s stealing from my property values! A tall building? That’s stealing my sunlight!

In a more mixed sort of way, you got homeless shelters, oil wells, chemical plants, industrial parks, military bases, fracking, wind turbines, desalination plants, landfill sites, incinerators, power plants, quarries, prisons, pubs, adult entertainment clubs, concert venues, firearms dealers, mobile phone masts, electricity pylons, abortion clinics, children's homes, nursing homes, youth hostels, sports stadiums, shopping malls, retail parks, railways, roads, airports, seaports, nuclear waste repositories, storage for weapons of mass destruction, cannabis dispensaries, recreational cannabis shops and the accommodation of persons applying for asylum, refugees, and displaced persons - a list i just lifted from wikipedia’s articles on nimbies. Looking at that, there’s some clearly sympathetic issues too. I mean do you really want a train cutting through your farm, no matter how well you’re recompensated, no matter how much it will objectively improve the lives of the people in the cities, no matter much better it is for the environment to commute together?

But, like, what exactly are the alternatives?

We could look at other cultures. What did Belgian property notions look like? Leopold of the Congo? What do French notions look like? Forcing Algieria to pay back the “investment” France made by colonizing them? Well, the English and the French go back a long, long ways, maybe we could look at Germany?

The first genocide of the 20th century is often recognized to be that of the Herero, in Namibia’s, Germany’s biggest steal  in the struggle to carve up Africa like the Black Dahlia.

I already mentioned Brasil.

What about China? Surely they aren’t western!

By some notions they were the first feudal nation in the world, and yet only left the system really in the 20th century. That’s a lot of cultural baggage that underlays the reality the Chinese live under today.

The early republican period saw the rise of warlords and other petty bastards effectively continuing the feudal reality in much the way sharecropping and jim crow continued chattel slavery in the US. The successor states aren’t pretty either; Taiwan, continuing republican ideals, cleared out much of its indigenous population for the Han in ways analogous to what European powers did to the natives of their countries; the PRC, which was born to challenge the ideals of the old republic for its own, took back “what was theirs” with Tibet.

The PRC, explicitly rejecting property rights as the west understands it, doesn’t even have a legal analog to eminent domain, and in effect can seize property on a whim without compensation, forcibly engaging in actions like people moving, which I feel it should be known when done to a community often results in genocide.

Something else illustrative of the conflicts of interest in the problem lies with the 3 Gorges Dam project. Ostensibly to control flooding to villages downstream, over a million residents of the Chongqing area were forcibly relocated, with rumors of people who resisted the project being explicitly drowned and because everything’s just hopelessly corrupt the money actually provided for recompensation never made it to the hands of farmers now stuck in a big city without the education for work.

Similar stories to Taiwan’s play out in other capitalist countries; similar stories to the PRC’s play out in countries that reject those notions.

Generally you just reinvent the same concepts drawing from the lord and serf mentalities of old. There’s shit like this going down in the Muslim world, in East Africa, South America, South Asia, whereever. It’s not just an Anglo thing, even though I’ve let myself believe it were, because of how I was taught about history, from my culture’s perspective.

Then you have to ask yourself, when there’s no net, when you have to provide for yourself first, do the commons necessarily make sense?

Is it even viable, economically or politically, to abolish private property and return to the commons like people have advanced? Would, to enjoy the benefits of something evidentally only stable under feudalism, we have to return to some kind of practice of feudalism? Is that even worth considering?

There are more people alive today than ever before. And that didn’t happen just by accident. We really, actually, seriously have made incredible improvements to agricultural yield and safety, ensuring that the only places on the planet that starve are those that are being starved, by monsters like the Saudis. But the scale we need, the scale we want, the scale we have - is much more than just what one farmer can provide for himself. And the fact that we do have other farmers do the mass farming with their bulk fertilizers, machinery, pesticides, and such, means that most of us don’t have to spend time every week tending to our gardens making sure we have enough staple foods to survive, so we can pursue our own hopes and hobbies and dreams and undertakings and services and so on.

All of it sort of leads to the question, Who deserves the land?

The worker whose blood sweat and tears are wrought into the soil? That could lead to the issue of killing my Yokuts friends' gatherer ancestors for stewarding their lands, husbanding their ecosystem and managing burns and wild populations, instead of raping the lands, burning everything to ash to farm foreign crops that aren’t even adapted to the water issues here. And it doesn't proclude the workers from choking us with smoke, if they feel they need to. The guy on the oil rig isn’t doing it because he endorses what the oil companies do or because he thinks it’s necessarily a good thing, he does it because it makes him bread. Why would worker’s self management solve that? Shareholders and workers alike would only care about taking home what they can.

The "owners” in the English sense? Taking subsidy after subsidy, fighting actively to drain our rivers, collapse the formerly self-renewing resources entirely, bringing us droughts, feeding even the lactose intolerant among us the lie that we need fatty heart clogging cheeses to be healthy? Illegally hiring, exploiting, and deporting the vulnerable? Big farms are just any other business, their owners are the same venture capitalist vultures preying on anything else in that world. South of me used to one of the biggest lakes in North America, virtually the entire south valley was lake Tulare. It’s a bunch of cities now.

So, the people who need it?

Maybe but who decides that? War for territory is a fundamental struggle built deep into us; war is even practiced by chimps. Military ration planning like we saw in the USSR and PRC cause Holodomors. United Fruit and their entire coalition caused the Silent Genocide. Abolishing private property entirely would, what, return us to the times when the lands were unclaimed? That would just lead to petty struggle after petty struggle, like a chimp disemboweling another.

And now, having written this a second time, I’ll end with what I wrote earlier

[radramblog]

Who should I vote for in the WA state election?

Full disclosure, this is directly inspired by this article, by someone from my high school as part of a youth newspaper he was working on. Considering said newspaper hasn’t updated since, oh, 2017, I think it’s fine to step on a few toes.

According to the ABC there are 19 parties vying for votes in the 2021 Western Australia State Election, which is coming up on Saturday. Some of them are good, some of them are very very not. Let’s go through each!

Animal Justice Party

The Animal Justice Party is a single-platform party masquerading as a multi-platform party, and while they have bland but reasonable positions on common issues everything, and I mean everything, on their page circles back to animals. Mental Health? Animal therapy and volunteering are good for that! Foreign Policy? We only care about trophies and wildlife trade! Domestic Violence? Abusers kick puppies, not just spouses! You get the idea. They mean well, but I don’t think they’re even close to a top pick, especially considering some of their odder platforms (banning processed meat sales to minors like they’re cigarettes, sure ok).

Vote for them if you’re the epitome of the obnoxious vegan.

 Australian Christians

I mean, obviously I’m not religious, but I’m pretty sure these folks don’t speak for all Christians. They’re first on the list of whackjobs, anti-abortion and same-sex marriage, pro “sexual morality” (read: puritanism) and have out-of-context bible quotes on their statement of intents. Oh, sorry, statement of beliefs. Clicking on this webpage made my skin crawl- protip, if a person or party claims to support “family values” or “Christian ideals” 99 times out of 100 they’re just using it to justify bigotry.

Vote for them if you’d feel right at home in Cromwellian England.

 Daylight Savings Party

This one’s website was broken for me, so I couldn’t really get a hold of anything beyond the name and what was on their facebook page, which is pretty much just what their mission statement is- Western Australia but we have daylight savings time. Despite being ridiculously sunny all the time. But….but why though….

Vote for them if you enjoy changing your clocks twice a year, like a weirdo.

 The Great Australian Party

There are two really obvious jokes here screaming at me to be made. The GAP wants to make Australia great again, and despite the name it doesn’t involve jeans. These guys think taxes are bad but it would be good if they were instead handled by corporations, which is the most laughably stupid idea that itd be enough to bottom-vote them just on that- fortunately, their stance on firearms (we’ll get to it later) and immigration (withdrawing from UN treaties, seriously?) make it pretty clear they’re just a bunch of cunts. Their policy pages complain about political correctness and want to make fucking with a flag a crime like it is in the US, so the comparisons to a certain US party keep going.

Vote for them if you’re the proud owner of a red hat that your children will burn out of shame.

 Health Australia Party

The fact that these people have an entire page dedicated to going “no, we aren’t anti-vax, we just have a lot of concerns” answers any questions you could possibly have. They also advocate for “natural medicine” to be placed on equal footing with, you know, medicine, which is obviously not a great idea.

Also, that they spell it “anti-vacc” and that their policy list is in fucking Calibri bugs me to no end.

Vote for them if you’re on a lemon detox.

 Legalise Cannabis Western Australia

Take a guess. Take a wild fucking guess what single issue these guys are about. I don’t even have anything against this idea, their policies aren’t awful or anything, but it’s a heck of a hill to spend so much of your time on.

Vote for them if you’re high off your tits, I guess.

 Liberal Democrats

What is this, libertarians? I’ll be frank, most of their policies are rooted in economics stuff I don’t really understand, but they’re against COVID lockdowns. You know, despite how effective they’re shown to be around here since we don’t fuck them up (mostly).

These guys seem to be one of the bigger of the small parties but their website is super unhelpful so ???

Vote for them if… I dunno?

 Liberal Party

The first of the two major parties. They lost power in the last state election, and I couldn’t be more thankful- they’d been doing nothing but cock up for years at that point, and the premier was a fucking joke. Considering that their leader has apparently already conceded defeat, I suspect they aren’t looking to repeat the process.

The Liberals seem to be the default for a lot of people, thanks to their incalculable media bias and being one of the big two. I suppose if you’re reading this, you aren’t voting for them anyway.

Vote for them if your mum voted for them and you’re proud of that for some reason.

 Liberals for Climate

If you voted in the last election, you might remember a party called the Flux network, which was a party where their policy was just online voting for everything. This is, uh them again? But they seem more concerned about climate than last time.

Vote for them if you haven’t watched this video.

 No Mandatory Vaccination Party

…no. just no.

Antivaccination is an opinion that makes my skin crawl. The fucker that effectively started the movement, Andrew Wakefield, effectively did so for the money, and as such is indirectly responsible for thousands of deaths. The people who believe this shit know nothing of chemistry or medicine but hear a few buzzwords and do a google or two and think they’re the greatest geniuses of our time. They think they’re soooo fucking smart. Confident incorrectness can be funny at times, but not when such a huge issue is at stake.

Vote for them if you want me to call you out on twitter dot com.

 Pauline Hanson’s One Nation

Oh christ she’s still trying this shit? For reference, in the last election these xenophobic cunts were rightfully punted out of our state, despite massive campaigning, proving that we aren’t the bogan capital of the country quite as much. Their policy pages make me want to vomit, but who the fuck voting for One Nation reads the fucking policy page?

Pauline Hanson was a fish and chip shop owner who made a political party to get her xenophobic bullshit out on the national stage, and was arrested for election fraud, yet still is allowed to run a party for some reason. She’s switched the target of her ire from China to the Middle East to reflect modern bigotry better, but it’s the same old shit. The only good thing ever to come about her was the Pauline Pantsdown song, and she obviously wasn’t involved in that.

Vote for them if you’re interested in joining the Proud Boys.

 Shooters Fishers and Farmers

Oh and the hits just keep coming. Funnily enough I don’t have an issue with their fishery policy, but that’s not the main one, obviously. Australia has harsh gun control laws on account of a mass shooting back in 1997, and we’ve stayed that way for 23 years with, shockingly, no further mass shootings (that I’m aware of). You can disguise your policy by saying its for the sport all you want, but I’ve got no interest in bringing guns back to WA.

Vote for them if you think the NRA having massive political sway in the USA is a good thing.

 Socialist Alliance

Full disclosure, I consider myself a socialist, so I’m probably a little biased here. But yeah, these look like good policies. They want to remove the USA military presence in Australia which I am personally very for, they support royal commission into the big banks which should have been done a decade ago, and they want to lower the voting age to 16 which considering that the youth are generally more politically minded these days seems fair enough to me. I’m for it.

Vote for them if you would have voted for the Greens, and don’t know which to put higher.

 Sustainable Australia

Despite the name, the policy of this party is more concerned about population than climate, an issue I’m not sure is especially pronounced in this neck of the woods. I’d put them fairly middle of the road, seeing as they have some policies I’m for (no new coal mines or fracking) and some I’m very against (increased police funding, lowered immigration).

Vote for them if you too don’t know the common usage of the word Sustainable in modern times.

 The Greens

Why everything is alphabetical until this and the next one are beyond me. Regardless, I suspect you already know if you’re voting Greens, but bluntly: They’re basically the only ones with a real, functional plan about Climate Change. And considering that’s the biggest problem facing humanity at large right now (yes, including COVID), that’s a pretty solid claim.

Vote for them if THERE IS NO PLANET BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

 The Nationals

The nationals end up in coalition with the Liberals basically all the fucking time so if you’d vote for the Libs you’ll vote for the Nats. They’re basically the liberals, but they pay lip service to caring about poor rural areas while continuing to suck big buisness’s cock like a kid with an icy-pole.

Vote for them if you’re a genuine country bumpkin.

 WA Labor

I’ll be frank, I don’t think there’s a single way Labor doesn’t win this election. Mark McGowan has developed a minor cult of personality, and they’ve handled the old COVID situation remarkably well. I don’t agree with everything they’ve done in the past 4 years, but their track record is certainly better than the Liberals. Still, they’re not going to be the top of my preference sheet.

Vote for them if you don’t know what small parties to preference first.

 WAxit party

I’ve admittedly entertained the idea of a Western Australian Secession, and provided it is handled well am not entirely against it. It does make me feel vaguely Texan, though, and that’s not a position I enjoy being in. This party wants to massively invest in defense so WA can protect itself from an invasion- one that will never, ever come, and I really don’t expect to eat those words. We don’t matter enough to target.

Vote for them if you think Brexit 2 sounds like a good idea.

 Western Australia Party

Look at this point I’m fucking sick of all these parties. They have Family Values on their policy list so I’m just taking that as a red enough flag not to vote for them.

Vote for them if you actually read their shit and were a fan of it.

 And that’s…everyone. Wait no not everyone hang on.

Independents

I must confess, I basically always forget to read about the independents prior to an election. This is going to be different in every district, so do your research- or just do what I do and stick them all smack bang in the middle between the parties I like and the parties I don’t like.

 Ok now that’s everyone. This took a long time and a lot out of me, so I hope you appreciate this shit. Hopefully you are now prepared for what may come on Saturday the 13th, and won’t be too disappointed when your minor party of choice doesn’t win the seat because everyone in your area votes Liberal for some fucking reason.

[megacircuit9universe]

Alien Tip Off

WED SEP 16 2020

Woodward’s tapes of Trump, extensively admitting how well he understood the dangers of SarsCoV2, way back in the spring... that it was airborne, that it was far more deadly than the flu, etc... have stayed in the news all week, with longer and longer clips being released that utterly destroy any possible, devil’s advocate, arguments in Trump’s favor on this... the single most important issue facing the nation.

It’s safe to say we’re all stunned!

He was simultaneously smart enough to grasp the true danger of the virus... yet stupid enough to... agree to go off about this on tape with Woodward and... still do what he did in his response to the threat.

The tapes don’t JUST justify his impeachment, and expose every Senator who voted to acquit, as dastardly cowards... but they gut any possible, devil’s advocate, arguments for Trump, by anybody with any grip on sanity.

This puts the current GOP Senate in great peril... even as it reduces the base of loyal Trumpist voters they were banking on... to only the criminally insane.

No more fluffy padding of evangelicals, and other right wing conservatives who, held their nose, so does speak, and went along for the sake of the party. They’ve now formed a very visible, and powerful movement to deny Trump, and any of his hardcore Senate loyalists... another term. 

And they’re doing it for the same reason they originally held their noses and went along... to save their party from the brink of irrelevance in a world where the blast doors of history are closing on old school conservatism.*

Which brings us to TikTok...

The deadline for the TikTok ban, as outlined by a sketchy executive order by Trump a while back, draws near.  

And while American companies like Microsoft and WalMart scrambled to get a deal done in time, China also chimed in last week and said... Yeah, no... if ByteDance sells it’s American operations... the new owners can’t have the algorithm without our say so... and... we’d rather see TikTok die in America than bow to Trump’s silly demands so... haha, just saying! :D

Meanwhile, TikTok has been challenging the original executive order in court, and everybody is now saying even if the deadline passes, Trump can’t just shut down an app like that... and he’d have to get both Android and Apple to agree to disable it in their app stores... which would lead to more litigation and... well, it could take many more months than Trump has left in power, to sort out.

Unless he gets reelected... or successfully remains in power despite being voted out.

Which brings us to the aliens!..

Monday night (September 14th) TikTok was suddenly flooded with videos of UFO sightings over the United States... concentrated in, but not limited to New Jersey, Colorado, and Nevada.  

The earliest and most viral of these was being debunked immediately as the GoodYear Blimp, but... the people at Goodyear Blimp have since said, no... that was not our blimp.

The videos depict a lot of different types of UFOs... they don’t all look the same.  Some were singular glowing orbs, or true flying saucer looking crafts, while other videos showed groups of strange lights acting in concert.

The common denominator for all of them, however, was... all are pretty lengthy and clear... corroborated by multiple TikTokers in any given area... and all have so far defied any rational explanation.

Blimps, drones, skydivers with flares, swamp gas, you name it... none of the off the cuff discredits have yet proven out... much less any explanation for why so many sightings happened simultaneously across the continent.

Of course, lots of alien lovers have been quick to tell us this is some message of peace or whatever... but when something like this happens, I can only go to my own model, as established here in this blog.

And I can draw no other conclusion than this... the Aliens were behind it, and they were deliberately using TikTok to spook Trump... and the other powerful men in his Junta (Barr, McConnell, etc).

Recall that earlier this year I speculated that Kim Jong Un was not only dead, but that it was likely the Aliens who killed him, because he was too likely to start a nuclear war.

North Korea has yet to admit that Jong Un is dead... but the rest of the world assumes, these many months later, that he must be.  He’s not re-emerged, and the few video reels of him released this year... barely even try to be convincing.

The media hasn’t talked much about this, because so much other shit’s been going on this year... but no... I’m not backing off my conclusion that he’s dead, because nothing’s come along to even slightly prove me wrong on that, much less embarrass me about that conclusion.

He’s dead.  

The aliens killed him.

And now those same aliens are using TikTok to spook Trump.

This implies that Aliens are a lot more familiar with the intimate details of our daily life than we normally think... knowing not only that we all have smart phones with cameras, but that we also have a hugely popular app that would ensure any sightings would go viral immediately... and that this is the same app Trump is trying to shut down.

What’s the message for Trump?

Well, first... a bit more context...

This past week, the other huge story in the news has been the west coast wild fires.  We’ve seen out of control wildfires on the Pacific coast in late summer for the past four years, as we did in Australia in their late summer, this past January... but this year’s fires in America have been record breaking in terms of their devastation.

The aliens... who’ve been monitoring this planet periodically since humans first learned of fire... paying closer attention after we developed electricity... and who have been permanently stationed in the solar system since we figured out fission bombs at the end of WW2... have had, as their main objective, to stand down, and observe us... unless the planet is in danger of a cascading failure due to either a nuclear or climate catastrophe... or both.  

In such cases, they are willing to intervene... for the sake of preserving the level of intelligence, and diversity of life that’s evolved here... because it takes so goddam long for this kind of intelligence, and this kind of diversity to evolve in the first place.  

Still, they’d always rather just hang back and observe.  

So... since World War Two... they’ve tolerated all kinds of nuclear bomb testing, and everything else, without feeling the need to do much more than hint, to world leaders, that humanity may not be alone in the universe.

Until very recently, when they pinpointed two individuals who were a direct threat to the planet... Kim Jong Un, and Donald Trump.  

Jong Un had no real impact on the climate, but he did pose a nuclear threat, dangerous enough, they had to intervene and just off him.

Trump poses both a nuclear threat, and a climate threat, so... Jong Un’s death was a first warning sign, and this latest stunt on TikTok, at the peak of the wildfires, is yet another.

Don’t think you’re commanding the most powerful military force in the universe, because you’re not.  We’re real, and you can’t touch us.  We know what you’re doing.  We know what you fear (TikTok), and we WILL take you out, Space Force or no Space Force... buddy!

Assuming I’m right about this... which I think you at least have to grant is possible this late in the game, given all that’s happened... it’s an unprecidented show of force, from an intergalactic army so shy of confrontation, we barely have any evidence they exist.

That tells you what a dire juncture we are at, right now, on this timeline**.

But the fact that the aliens would use TikTok to make this statement... does seem to suggest that they do have AI bot agents, on our internet, who are in communication with our own advanced AI bots from the future, left behind by our time travelers... and that they are all in cahoots to save the timeline.

Recall that while Alien propulsion tech is likely based in the manupulation of microsingularities, or mini-black holes, to frame-drag spacetime around the ship... for Aliens it’s more about space travel, than time travel.

Time travel doesn’t really mean anything on intergalactic scales.  It only has meaning for primitive humans hanging very close to Earth, moving back and forth through the span of a few decades locally, to grab objects, get footage, and leave bot agents behind to promote human rights.

The aliens hanging out in our solar system are more or less just as pinned to our timeline as we are... or the bots those time travelers leave behind.

And if you don’t get that by now, I would suggest reading back in earlier entries, but maybe I’ll do another one as a refresher soon.

It was encouraging to see a TikToker on my For You Page this past week actually mention John Titor, and go into a little depth about him, but as usual, nobody could follow it.***

But more encouraging was this display by the aliens, that gave the first confirmation I’ve seen, that they do know and care what’s going on down here, in times as dire as we’re currently living through.

And with that roundup of a week’s news... it is time for bed.

*With GenX turning 50, Millenials turning 30, and GenZ turning 20, the tide is turning forever away from old school conservatism, with all of it’s racism, sexism, and classism. November 2020 could be the first time, all three of these generations turn out to the polls in force (millenials were too apathetic before this, and Z was too young to vote) to drown out the fading influence of the Boomers and Silents, once and for all.

My guess, as I’ve said, is that the current anti-Trump conservatives will all move to the Democratic Party, leaving the Republican Party to die as a haven for neo nazis and KKK sympathizers... while the progressive left will form a new party to counter the comparatively conservative new democrats, who at least acknowledge climate change, and don’t pin everything else on the single issue of abortion.

**Worth noting that this passed week news also broke that scientists had detected a marker for microbial life in the atmosphere of Venus.  It appears to be the strongest evidence yet that life is not exclusive to Earth.

***Not to suggest I’m so much more clever than ordinary people.  It took me upwards of fifteen years of studying physics through videos, lectures, and audio books to get the full picture of how Titor’s distortion unit worked, and how the many worlds theory resolves the kinds of paradoxes most people imagine would happen. 

[tessatechaitea]

Suicide Squad #15

Super-tits?

Not that he can draw any body type particularly well.

Now that Amanda has appeared to yell, "Surprise! Everything is different than you thought it was, Rustam!", Katana slips out of her bonds and chops Deadshot's hand off. That's okay. He probably wasn't using his left hand too much anyway. Except probably to masturbate. That might seem improbable but I'm right-handed and I masturbate with my left hand. I switched up decades ago when I was still a teenager because I was masturbating so much that my penis was curving to one side. I had to even it out! Eventually, I just got used to using my left! Plus, it's much sexier this way. Guess what? Harley Quinn also isn't dead! I know, right?! What the hell! Suicide Squad? More like Cozy Time Fun Blast Squad. I bet Hack didn't die either! And I bet Deadshot's cut off arm was one of those fake plastic Halloween ones that my creepy uncle pretends he's wearing when he touches all the cute young mother's butts. The Burning World Buddies realize maybe they should be named the Suicide Squad as Captain Boomerang cuts off Ravan's head and Killer Croc begins to eat Manticore and Enchantress casts a death spell on Jinn. Or Djinn? Whatever. Finally, Deadshot shoots Rustam in the back because Deadshot always works for Amanda Waller. He works for her so hard that he's willing to have a hand cut off while doing it. It was obvious he was still with the Squad or else Katana would have cut off his right hand. Even for Deadshot, it's tough to make accurate shots with his left wrist pistol when he can only look out of the scope visor over his right eye. In the end, it turns out Amanda was controlling everything the whole time, just like everybody reading this knew. So obvious. I was just joking when I kept repeating that Amanda Waller was really dead. I never actually believed it for once! No, really! I didn't! I just said it for laughs! Seriously! Why won't you believe me?! I'm a Grandmaster Comic Book Reader, dammit! Later, Amanda checks out Hack's body down in the morgue so she can say a thing she's never said since The New 52 began.

If by "some," you mean "a few Man-bats here and there," then sure, I guess.

Deadshot gets a new metal arm because it's cool and shit. Plus he gets to see his daughter and spend a weekend on the coast with her. Apparently the only way to get Amanda Waller to play nice is if you open a fucking vein for her. Amanda Waller explains the magic of how she made it look like she died in the second story. It's the usual stuff, magic and assassins. Plus she explains that the president has given her permission to use General Zod in her Suicide Squad. Because why not? Nothing can go wrong there as long as she's got a little Kryptonite in her back pocket, right? The Ranking! No change! I totally don't believe Hack is dead! Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on you! Fool me three times, shame on you! Fool me four times, shame on you! Fool me five times, shame on you! Fool me six times, shame on you! Fool me seven times, shame on you! Fool me eight times, shame on you! Fool me nine times, shame on me!

[kikiauske]

KIKI! 1,3, AND 7 FOR EACH OF THOSE OC THINGS! (I picked at random because Anything I can learn about Gyn is amazing AF tbh.)

omg prepare for long answers! XD 

@zombbean

I’m putting this in a read more because this is gonna be a lot. 

Gyneth is amazing AF tbh. I love her dearly. 

A. Psychology

1. What of the Meyers-Briggs personality types they most fit into? INFP, ENFT, et cetera…

I took the test here and she’s apparently ENTP-A, the Debater. 

3. Do they have any emotional or psychological conditions? Are they aware of it? Do they try to treat it?

I didn’t give her any specific conditions, but she has an increased level of anxiety during her second and third pregnancies. She’s well aware and takes several cautionary measures to try and reassure herself. Her husband is also a huge support.  I didn’t give her anything because I was concerned I wouldn’t portray them properly, accurately, and respectfully. 

7. Is your OC confident in their reactions to life in general, or do they get embarrassed or easily shamed for it? I.e., if something startles them, do they insist it WAS scary? When they cry, do they feel like they overreacted?

She will rarely be embarrassed over her reactions. If something startled them, she will admit she was startled, but it wasn’t THAT scary. When she cries she will apologize but thinks the tears are more of a sign of weakness than they are an over-reaction. 

B. Social

1. Do they believe you have to give respect to get it, or get respect to give it?

You have to give respect to get it. If you don’t get it back, don’t give respect to them till they’ve earned it again. 

3. Under what situations would they get angry at servers, staff, customer service, et cetera?

being someone who owns/manages/ and works at a bar, she has a really high patience for things like that. Unless the staff is being consistently rude, she understands how stressful it can be. 

7. How do they respond to babies crying in public?

Her heart cracks a little every time a baby cries. She’ll look in the direction to see what how the parent/guardian is handling the situation. She wants to make sure that baby is getting the proper care it deserves. 

C. Morality

1.Does your OC have a moral code? If not, how do they base their actions? If so, where does it come from, and how seriously do they take it?

She has a moral code. It comes from her Grandparents, and she takes it pretty seriously. 

3. Is it important for them to be with people (socially, intimately, whatever) whose major ideological tenets align with their own?

I’d say it’s a bit important to her. It helps so she’s not arguing with someone all the time. that’s stressful. 

7. Do they believe people change over time? If so, is it a natural process or does it take effort? 

People rarely change over time, and for those who do it takes a lot of effort and work. 

D. Religion / Life and Death

1.How religious is your OC? What do they practice, if anything? If they don’t associate with any religion, what do they think of religion in general?

as someone who has studied history & ancient cultures, she doesn’t have a particular faith. She loves learning about religion and how it impacted the cultures and societies that surround it. She’ll use curses like “by the goddess” or “ Shi’halli, I’m fucked.” 

3. How comfortable are they with the idea of death?

Gyn has never been comfortable with the idea of death/dying. Sure, death is a inescapable reality, but she has so much to discover/learn before she can even be mildly comfortable with it, and with her kids now in the picture she doesn’t want to leave them until they are ready to survive & thrive without her. (which she wants to be able to provide for them as long as possible)  

5. (there was no 7 for this one)  Do they believe in ghosts? If not, why? If so, do they think they’re magical/tie into their religion, or are they scientifically plausible?

She 10000% believes in ghosts. If nightmares are real, so are ghosts. They most certainly have a magical tie to the land. 

E.  Education & Intelligence

1. Would you say that your OC is intelligent? In what ways? Would your OC agree?

Gyneth is very intelligent. She has a bachelor’s in Archeology, an MD in anthropology, and an MBA. She won’t flaunt it, but she is well aware of her smarts. 

3. How many languages do they speak?

 She is fluent in 3 languages; Common, Skyling, and Spanish. She is proficient in cajun french (thanks, hubby).

7. Are they a good note-taker? Are they a good test-taker? Do exams make them nervous?

She is a TERRIBLE note taker. At work, she won’t write down your order, or else she’d forget it. She’s an audial learner. She’s really good at taking tests, and hardly gets nervous when it comes to exam time. 

F. Domestic Habits, Work, and Hobbies, 

1.What sort of home do they live in now, if at all? How did they end up there?

She has a pretty spacious 1-story home. (in game, it’s only like 2 rooms but those kids have rooms. Clarence and Pete probably share a room since they are twins, but Max and Marie have their own rooms.) 

3. Could they ever live in a “tiny home”?

She’d be content with a tiny home once the kids have left the nest. Of course, she would want to make sure there’s a guest room (+ extra beds) in the event they visit. 

7. What’s their “dream career” or job situation?

She already had her dream job of leading several archeological digs and finding new information on skyling history. She’s very happy with her bar and would love to see it grow in recognition and quality as the years go on. Maybe she could teach a class or two, but doesn’t want to do that while the kids are still in school. (she does want to embarrass them but promised she wouldn’t interfere with their education like that.)

G. Family & Growing Up

1. Is your OC close to their family?

with her grandparents? Yes. her Mother and Father? No. Her siblings? Kinda. they grew closer when she left home. 

3. Does your OC find their family supportive? If not, what would be an example why not?

Her grandparents? YES. Her grandfather taught her how to eat nightmare feathers and her grandmother showed her the importance of being happy with yourself before you can make others happy. 

Her parents? not so much. Her mother arranged several marriages and contracts for her, to the point Gyneth changed her last name in an effort to make those arrangements null and void. Her father is kind but will not try to dissuade her mother nor try to interfere in any way. That frustrates her more than he realizes. 

7. Do they have any childhood memories they’d rather forget or be less affected by?

She’d rather forget her first contract, and after years of letting that influence her life, she put it behind her and was able to find love. Sometimes she wonders if it affects some of her choices in how she raises her kids, but if it did, she assumes it’s gonna be for the better.  

She’s actually willingly let 2 contracts sleep with her, and felt disgusting the entire time. She’d rather forget those times but is thankful she never had a nest from those contracts/ took measures to prevent them. 

She tries to forget the time she went to a party in HS when other students realized she was partial skyling. It involved lots of racial slurs, a feather eating incident, and getting in a fight. She left early and spent the night at her grandparents’ house. She worries something like that will happen to her kids, or that they’ll be bullied for their bloodlines. 

H. Romance & Intimacy

1. What is your OC’s orientation, romantic and/or sexual? Has it ever been a source of stress for them? Have they always been pretty sure of their orientation?

Demiromantic, Bisexual. Romance used to stress her out a lot, as she wasn’t certain if any proclaims of love towards were honest or not. (it happened several times)  She’s been very sure of her sexual orientation since her early teens. 

3.  Does your OC believe there’s only one ideal partner (or multiple ideal if not monogamous) for everyone, or that there are many people who could be right? 

Sometimes she can hardly believe she found love. She hopes there’s more than one for those important to her, so they have better chances of finding them. For her, she’s got 1 ideal partner and she’s going to cherish him with all her heart. Maybe there’s another one out there, but she doens’t care to find out. 

7. What do they look for in partners? (Emotionally, mentally, physically..)

She likes someone with self-confidence, empathy, honesty (big on this), and a good sense of humor. Physically, she has a weakness for pretty eyes and a good physique. She wants someone who can keep up with her, and if she ever falls she wants someone who can help her back on her feet. 

I. Food

1. What are their favorite kinds of flavors– Sweet, salty, sour, spicy, creamy, et cetera?

She loves savory foods & seasonings. She also loves sweet treats, and likes spicy foods.  Probably cannot handle as much spice as her hubby. (he can probably handle super-hot, she’s more of a medium). Sours are good in drinks but that’s really about it.  

3. Are they vegan/vegetarian (if their overall culture/species generally aren’t)? If so, why? Do they think animal products are wrong in all circumstances?

No. Her cultural upbringing always includes a meat somewhere.

5*. Are they a good cook?

you darn bet your gumbo she is. 

J.  Politics, Current Events, Environmental Aspects  

1. Where does your OC stand most politically? What would they align with most?

middle leaning democrat I’d think. 

3. How politically active are they?

considering I haven’t really thought too heavily on the politics of the ATTS universe I’m not sure? She’d be pretty active in the real world. She’d host fundraisers, help with events, ect. 

*edit: because I’m a dunce and forgot about human politics shit, she’s active in the ATTS verse.  with what I’m not 100% sure but she’s helping out one way or another. 

tbhshe’sprobablyworkingonmakingcontractsathingofthepastormakingthembetterfortheinvolvedpartiesbecauseshe’sgothighlevelsofsalttowardsthem.

7. How much interest in environmental health do they have?

She cares a lot for the environment since it can impact dig sites and artifact quality. She also cares because she doesn’t want her children and their potential children to suffer for stupid choices she made. 

K. For OCs in Reality-Based Worlds Who Are Unusual in Paranormal Ways (such as magical abilities, being another species, having a curse like lycanthropy, sci-fi abilities, being from another time, et cetera)– Also for OCs where the scenario is similar even if their universe isn’t based on reality

(since she’s human [rare spp.] and skyling [female rare] I think these questions can apply? Probably to her skylng bloodline.) 

1. Does your OC have to keep their paranormal aspect (PA) a secret from general society? If so, how? I.e., they can’t discuss their abilities, they have to hide a tail, they have an alter-ego, et cetera. What would happen if society found out about it?

She’s part Skyling, and normally does not tell people about it unless it is a life or death scenario. The kids don’t even really know. 

3. Does your OC have any friends who know about their PA? Any enemies?

I think nightmares would be able to tell. They seem the type to have a strange sense like that. Sam knows. Mrs. B probably knows (I can imagine them going on some wildly dangerous adventures together).  

7. Does your OC’s PA affect their dietary habits so that they are unusual or problematic by their society’s standards?

She has a special section of the cupboard dedicated to feather eating & skyling-beneficial foods. In case she has to eat feathers again or meets any other skylings who can benefit from different throat-soothing treats she’s learned to make over the years. Her honey-echinacea drops are rather delicious. 

L. For the Writer/Owner

1.How have your characters changed since you created them?

Oh golly, Gyneth has changed so much since her initial design. And all the better, she’s grown as I have grown and continues to be a character I look to for strength when I’m not feeling my strongest. She’s changed race, name, age, and attitude. She’s still beautiful (inside and out), confident, physically built, and still will take no shit. 

3. Which OC do you think is the most decent morally or behaviorally?

most likely? Rytzar. she tries her best to be good, even if she gets in a lot of trouble. It’s kinda like Stitch. Philomena doesn’t care about behaving unless Morticia is in earshot and even then the pirate queen encourages her to cause trouble. Ki’Daro doesn’t care for morals. It’s survival first. 

 Gyneth has good morals, but wasn’t on her best behavior for a while. even now I can imagine she stirs up a bit of trouble. 

7. Which OC do you think is the most attractive? AKA, which is supposed to be a “bad guy”?

Gyneth. 100%. She’s attractive, she knows what she wants (it took her a while in the love department but she eventually figured it out), and loves doing things that make her feel free. She had a motorcycle in her teens/ early adult phase, will totally rock leather and spikes, and has totally ruined other girl’s contracts/dreams by snatching their man (aka Sam Morricun. He’s a dreamboat and she’s totally commandeering that ship).  

[alaric-greyson]

An Outsider’s Take On The British Election

So preface this with the fact that I’m not British, not a political expert, and mostly interested in British politics because the coverage is in English and allows me to care about politics a bit more vicariously since it’s not directly personal.  My personal politics are definitely lefty, which at least influenced the news sources I was following.

So the Conservatives got a major victory last night (and Britain’s inverted political colors makes looking at the maps confusing until you remember).  Personally I was rooting for a Remain alliance to win, or at least do well enough to force Johnson’s hand.

To some degree I’m writing this for myself so I can try and process the news, as it’s been bugging me for a while.

So what the hell went wrong...

1) First past the post continues to suck:  When all of our republics were getting going in the 16th to 18th centuries, local elections with the local who got the most votes winning made a certain kind of sense.  Trying to administer some kind of national proportional election across whole countries with communication limited to people on horseback would have been problematic.  Now though it’s bullshit.

Labour, Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party combined for 47.7% of the vote.  They won 40.3% of the seats in Parliament.  Conservatives got 43.6% of the vote and 56.1% of the seats.  In other words, Conservatives got 2 million votes less than their opponents but will absolutely dominate Parliament.

2) Labour kind of shit the bed:  Personality politics don’t really affect me too much for British politics because they’re not my politicians.  So I don’t really have either admiration or distaste for Corbyn, which obviously is a big deal in Britain.  I’m also not reading the right wing news sites, so I’m not getting their anti-Corbyn stuff directly, but it obviously filters into general news sources the same way Fox News content gets into things like the New York Times or Washington Post.

All that said Corbyn was a key component of their flawed strategy.  The defining fight of this election, and really much of the last five years was Brexit.  However for much of that time Labour never really seemed to have a good answer to the question “What would you do different about Brexit?” 

Corbyn was rather publicly pro-Leave back during the referendum, even while campaigning for Remain.  Large traditional areas of Labour support voted Leave and so the party under Corbyn’s leadership steered a wishy-washy course of opposing Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s plans, while not committing to an anti-Brexit position either.  Until very late in the process, Labour’s position tended to be “We want Brexit to happen, but we want to be the ones negotiating with the EU.  If that were to happen we’d obviously get a better deal.”  However by this point everyone knows that there’s no magic wand that will somehow give Britain all the benefits of Brexit and none of the penalties.

By the time they came around to “Labour will back a second referendum” they’d already muddied their position.  Yes, Labour had a whole platform of ideas and were making strong arguments about defending the NHS etc.  But on the defining issue of the generation you could vote for the Conservatives who would be pro-Brexit, the Liberal Democrats and SNP who were clearly anti-Brexit from very early...or Labour who wasn’t a comfortable fit for either and whose leader was kind of wishy-washy at best on the issue.

3) The Left will always be held to a higher standard: The anti-Semitism scandal basically rocked Labour.  In a different election it might have blown over but it was another nail in the coffin for this one.  Left leaning parties in the modern world are based around social justice as much as economic justice.  So racism, sexism, anti-semitism, anti-LGBTQ+, etc are the antithesis of the party’s public ethos.  So when a scandal arises it’s lethal to a left leaning politician or party while meaningless to a right leaning party.

If a conservative politician says something racist it’s basically a dog bites man kind of story.  If a liberal politician says the same thing, it’s a major news story.  Al Franken’s fall is a good example here in the US.  The same history wouldn’t have even touched Ben Sasse or James Lankford, but a Democrat couldn’t survive it.  Especially at that time.

By the same token “Conservative politician wildly lies to the public” has also become a dog bites man story.  So even the revelations about the NHS memo weren’t enough.  Especially since the subject was just a bit complicated to explain in a quick soundbite.

4) Strategic Voting only works if the parties ally - This goes back to point one, but a system where you have more than two parties dividing the left only benefits the right.  Labour explicitly rejected forming a real alliance with the other left leaning parties (ie agreeing to not run candidates in specific districts in order to avoid dividing the vote).  Would it have been enough...probably not, especially since that’s not usually done on a national level.  But there’s almost certainly a fair number of districts where the conservatives won thanks to divided opposition votes.  Strategic voting sounds good in theory (people are smart enough to figure it out) but in practice most people don’t have access to reams of polling data nor the time to analyze it.

5) Scotland and Northern Ireland are going to be a thing for a while - This is more of a post-election look than a what went wrong but the consequences here are interesting too.  For Scotland, their core opposition to Brexit, the handful of Conservative MPs, and the dominance of the SNP really makes questions about Scotland’s future even more pointed.  The Scottish referendum was predicated on the fact that independence would have been kind of meaningless, since both countries would still be in the EU.  Now the political divide is growing sharper with every election.

For Northern Ireland, all the questions about the Irish backstop just became irrelevant to Brexit.  When the DUP’s votes were needed to maintain the government, they could force May or Johnson to bend over backwards to try and appease them.  Now...the Conservatives can just stick a customs border in the Irish Sea and say “cool we’re Brexited.”  Of course that’s going to give us a LOT more questions about the future status of the two Irelands.

[tuess]

Infinity War - Story Issues

So I ran across this post on Pinterest the other day claiming the story writing of Infinity War was bad (I couldn’t find the original source on tumblr, so this is a second-order link, but credit for op goes to sneakyfeets). And...

I respectfully would like to disagree. 

Infinity War most definitely had issues, both plot, morality, and character-wise. But I don’t think it’s fair to call it structurally bad, and, while most of the concerns raised in the original post are valid, I don’t think all of them are necessarily problems with the story. 

Recall first of all that most Marvel movies are somewhere between “loveable hot mess” and “brilliantly chaotic wonder”. Partially that’s probably a genre thing - superhero movies are necessarily based on the comics, and in comics A LOT of weird stuff happens that doesn’t necessarily translate well to film. It is not surprising that most superhero movies are questionable on the details. So Loki walking up to Thanos with one dagger and three sass is idiotic, but not unforgivable in terms of story. Not more so than Steve’s habit of jumping off things without a parachute. Also, it does provide a somewhat reasonable continuation of his character arc, and is important for Thor’s. 

What I’m trying to get at is that, while Loki the character may be doing a stupid thing, it makes narrative sense. Characters can do idiotic stuff without undermining the overall story. Quite the opposite, in fact, as for many types of story characters doing stupid things is integral to the plot (I refer here to absolutely every Shakespeare comedy and like half of the tragedies). And I think Infinity War is one of these stories.

First of all, Infinity War is a tragedy, and that in itself is worth talking about. I know that some of the DC movies have experimented with the whole tragedy thing, but I’m not super familiar with that fandom. Also, to my (limited) knowledge they weren’t super successful. Marvel’s first tragedy-like film was Captain America: Civil War, not because it ended badly, but because a significant part of the reason as to why it ended badly was the character’s own flaws. We can have Team Cap/Team Iron Man debates ‘till kingdom come, but both sides were not acting reasonably.

The tragedy aspect is one of the reasons as to why I consider Infinity War quite good, story wise. One of the basic aspects of a (classical Greek) tragedy is that the hero have some sort of fatal flaw that ultimately causes his own downfall. Contrast this with your garden-variety superhero, who can have flaws, but none that can cause his downfall. Especially classical comics, and the early superhero movies, do not allow it [1]. Infinity War plays with the tragic hero element in a way that’s really quite nice.

The original post mentions the actions of Wanda and Peter Q. specifically, but it’s actually a wider theme in the movie that all the heroes do stupid shit because of love. Every time there’s a conflict over an infinity stone, the heroes are forced to choose between their loved ones and doing “what is right/what is sensible”. They always choose love. And, in the movie, it’s what frames them as heroes. Thanos throws away love (literally - I’ll return to this later) for power, while the heroes throw away power for love. 

This is different from the usual tragic flaw, where it is some kind of bad quality that makes the heroes lose (Macbeth - the power thing; Creon - not being able to let it go). In Infinity War, it is the heroic qualities of the heroes that cause the heroes to fail. And that is interesting, and fun to watch. I consider it good writing. So seeing our characters do stupid things? Seeing them make the wrong choices for all the wrong reasons? Seeing them lose control and be illogical and selfish? Good stuff. 

Having said that,

Yeah. The abuse thing. It’s hugely problematic, and one of the more glaring flaws in Infinity War as a whole. I don’t feel qualified to comment on the details of it, but I recognise that the entire Thanos’ Children and/or Gamora-Nebula plotline is fraught with issues, to say the least, and I do wish that they’d found a better way to deal with it in Infinity War. I think that Thanos is clearly cast as an abuser, and Gamora and Nebula as abuse survivors, but I agree that the framing of Gamora’s death was bad. I have to state here that I went into Infinity War not having seen either GOTG movie, so I wasn’t paying huge amounts of attention to the subplot at first, and I don’t really know how to deal with it in this essay either [2]. I don’t think it’s a narrative issue as much as a discursive issue, in that both Gamora and Thanos’ actions make sense in the story, but the framing of it can be seen to perpetuate an unhealthy discourse about abuse survivors and abusers. 

We can only hope that Nebula will get to kick Thanos’ ass in Endgame.

What remains now is the motivation behind Thanos’ actions, and the problems with it. As has been frequently remarked, they do not make sense. This is not a problem. Narrative-wise, Thanos cannot make sense. He is the villain of the movie. If he were to have a perfectly sensible plan [3], that would improve the lives of everyone on in the universe, and have no obvious drawbacks, he could no longer be a villain as the definition classically applies to the comics/action/epics genres. Infinity War would go from an action movie to one on moral philosophy. An excellent example of a movie with no clear villain, only people being assholes to various degree, would be something like Mean Girls. Infinity War, to adhere to its genre conventions and satisfy the expectations of the audience, needed a villain. Thanos is this villain, and his villainous plan needed to affect the entire universe in order for it to be threatening enough to bring three disparate sets of heroes together to fight him. From this point of view, Thanos’ plan and motivations make complete narrative sense, despite not making any actual sense. 

Thanos is, I’m pretty sure, modelled after the idea of an enlightened despot gone wrong. The idea of enlightened despotism is basically that you pick one guy to be in charge of a country, but, wait for it, you pick a smart guy who knows how to solve problems. This was popular especially in 18th/19th century Europe [4], when monarchies were falling like mayflies and people started thinking about what to do next. The advantages of an enlightened despot would be that there would be none of this silly democratic arguing and influence of, shudder, the working classes [5]. The disadvantages, I believe, are really fucking obvious, and the reason why nobody installed this as a form of government. Both Robespierre and Napoleon are examples of people who briefly tried, only for everyone to see why this is a really really fucking bad idea. So I can see how casting Thanos as a failed enlightened despot, with a shitty plan and some elements of genocide thrown in for good measure, would sound like a surefire way to make sure your audience really really hates your villain. 

I therefore really don’t know what to say about the goddamn neonazis and eugenicists, except good goddamn, please read any actual science ever. 

Ok, this essay got away from me. But the main points were that, narrative wise, Infinity War is quite good because it allows its characters to be idiots. The framing is problematic at times, especially in the Gamora-Nebula-Thanos relationship, and this detracts from the movie as a whole. It’s not, however, fair to call the entire story bad. Plenty of movies have framing issues that don’t automatically mean they’re terrible (see: Out of Africa, Pocahontas, etc). Thanos’ villainous motivations are narratively sensible, but perhaps not well-received in the current political climate. I don’t see an intrinsic issue with them, however, as they’re supposed to not make sense - that’s what makes him a villain, and not a hero.

Also, yeah, where did Valkyrie go? That’s just stupid and I can’t talk it away. 

[1]: More modern runs do allow heroes do have significant, palpable flaws, (Daredevil, and also Iron Man) but the original medium... not so much. 

[2]:... so if I said something hugely harmful or downright stupid without realising it, please please please call me out on it. Also, my first essay on Infinity War, which is linked somewhere in the body, did not at all acknowledge this problematic and actually applauded the scene without looking into some of the issues around it. My apologies. 

[3]: Like, for example using the infinity stones to generate resources, as has been pointed out multiple times. 

[4]: Arguably also the Roman Emperors. Correct me if any of this is wrong, I’m not actually a historian. 

[5]: This is meant ironically. 

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND THINGS

One could have described Microsoft and Apple in exactly the same work, except with bosses. On the blunderometer, this episode ranks with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license for DOS.1 When you scan down the list of most popular web sites, the number of new users was a function of the number of founders in the same position is asymptotic or merely large, there are other ways to arrange that relationship. So how can I claim business has to learn is that people will hold you to it. There's a shocking amount of shear stress at every point where a startup touches a more bureaucratic organization, like a big arrow pointing users to the test drive rose immediately from 60% to 90%. My relationship with my cofounder went from just being friends to seeing each other all the time, fretting over the finances and cleaning up shit. A mere 15 weeks. When you can't get users, it's hard to say whether the problem is lack of exposure, or whether the product's simply bad.

Bugs turn up quickly. I suspect the pin will be wielded by a couple of guys sitting in a corner somewhere with a copy printed out on paper, trying to force a crappy product on ambivalent users by spending ten times as much on sales as on development.2 Mikey likes it.3 Disk crashes won't be a thing of the past, everyone wants funding from them, closing the deal after a comparatively short 8 weeks. The buildings are all more or less the same, their exteriors express very little, and they were wondering what to call it.4 Most VCs can't do anything that would sound bad to the kind of people who wanted to buy them, however limited. So presumably that's what this brainstorming session was about. The catch is that because this kind of bug is the hardest to find, and also economically ones's own.5 Here's a VC saying no: We're really excited about your project, and we got Java applets. We would leave a board meeting, rather than having brilliant flashes of strategic insight.6

Most VCs can't do anything that would sound bad to the kind of doofuses who run pension funds. Even the startups are different this time around. What they mean by blogger is not someone who publishes online. Back when I was working on spam filters I thought it didn't, but the most important advantage of being good is that it often looks better than real work.7 But until this does start to happen, we know VCs are being too conservative. So are talks useless? Their revenues aren't as high as any on the Internet, all have the same sullen resentment as children made to do something that will cost a lot, start by doing a cheaper subset of it, and expand your ambitions when and if to engage the other ship. Never make users register, unless you fail. If a company is doing well, investors will want founders to turn down most acquisition offers. As I was waiting to hear back, I found I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was hoping they'd reject it.

Even if you were willing to pay for might as well stop there. With purely Web-based software is such a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it.8 And in fact they do all look the same. We could never stand it.9 It cost $2800, so the only people who could afford to go were VCs and people from big companies. O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first.10 At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't. At least, it better not be, because investors regularly do things that might look bad. At most software companies, support people are underpaid human shields, and hackers are little copies of God the Father, creators of the world just doesn't get startups, and partly to get exactly what we wanted.

Obviously one case where it would help to be rapacious is when growth depends on that. Web 2.11 One is that you have in your desktop machine. That's what you want to be a VC by convincing asset managers to trust you with hundreds of millions of dollars. Aircraft shooting down an F-18.12 A lot of founders that was the right way to search for components. You can measure this fear in how much a startup differs from a job. Perhaps most convincingly, it would have seemed in, say, New York Times. You can use whichever is best for each. Most I find through aggregators like Google News or Slashdot or Delicious. The reason this won't turn into a company.

I've learned that some suits are smarter than others. The solution? You can shift into a different mode of working. The closest you'll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. There's a lot of money. The specific thing that surprised me is how the relationship of startup founders seem to be superficial reasons. You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas.13 People often tell me how much my essays sound like me talking.14 And it's not just the way offices look that's bleak. Watching users can guide you in design as well as buildings you need roads, street signs, utilities, police and fire departments, and plans for both growth and various kinds of disasters. This trick may not always be enough. There are several types of investors.

In the process of developing the pitch for the first few months comforted ourselves by treating the whole thing as an experiment that we might call off at any moment. But guys like Ed Roberts, who designed the Altair, realized that they were just good enough. They will give you major coverage for a major release, meaning a new first digit on the version number, and generally getting things in place for what needs to happen a few months later saying This is supposed to suggest efficiency. They have the same inexpensive Intel processors that you have to be willing to change your idea. I assume it's infinite. With Web-based applications. So you don't have significant success to cheer you up, it wears you out: Your most basic advice to founders is just don't die, but the energy to keep a company going in lieu of unburdening success isn't free; it is siphoned from the founders themselves. That generates almost as good returns as actually being able to test-drive any Web-based applications are an ideal source of revenue.15 Once you have users to take care of. It's a smart move to put a startup in a place that's different from other places. But if you look, there are certainly a lot of data about how they work.

Notes

If they agreed among themselves never to do video on-demand, because it has to be.

Philadelphia is a variant of the lies we tell. A preliminary result, comparisons of programming languages either take the line?

By decreasing the difference between being judged as a day job writing software. This is why they tend to be considered an angel.

The shares set aside an option pool. Founders also worry that taking an angel.

A termsheet with a toothbrush. I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example I've deliberately avoided saying whether the program is no grand tradition of city planning like the iPad because it is the precise half of it in the few cases where VCs don't invest, regardless of how hard they work. By this I mean this in terms of the world in verse. Bad math is merely an upper bound on a form that would scale.

We didn't try to become merely stubborn. In practice most successful investment, Uber, from hour to hour that the stuff they're showing him is something there worth studying as a type of x. Similarly, don't make their money if they had to push founders to try to become addictive. If you want to start startups.

Since capital is no personnel department, and the Imagination by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen. There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. I never watch movies in theaters anymore.

In fact, if you get to college, you'll find that with a slight disadvantage, but hardly any type we tell. This is an instance of a problem that I knew, there was a special title for actual partners. The chief lit a cigarette. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the early years.

This law does not appear to be actively curious.

Incidentally, the big winners aren't all that matters financially for investors. People only tend to be the next year they worked together mostly at night. This is a scarce resource.

Which means if the fix is at least accepted additions to the sale of products, because you're throwing off your own time in your own mind about whether you realize it till I started doing research for this point for me to put in the usual way will prove to us that the big winners if they were connected to the size of the movie, but those specific abuses. I phrased this in terms of the markets they serve, because unions will exert political pressure against Airbnb than hotel companies. But it is unfair when someone works hard and not end up with an excessively large share of a press conference. See, we don't have to recognize them when you have to rely on social conventions about executive salaries were low partly because so many people's eyes.

At Princeton, 36% of the tube of their works are lost. Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them Google Video is badly designed.

A in the sense of the problem to fit your solution. But people like them—people who want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: suppose prep schools do, but no doubt often are, so you'd have to spend a lot of detail. Surely no one can have margins big enough, it becomes an advantage to be on the basis of intelligence or wisdom. The reason the dictionaries are wrong is that their local network infrastructure would be great for VCs if the founders lots of exemptions, especially if you were going about it.

If this is why we can't believe anyone would think twice before crossing him. My guess is a convertible note with no business experience to start or join startups. I know randomly generated DNA would not know his name. Though they were regarded as 'just' even after the Physics in the right startup.

Governments may mean well when they're checking their messages during startups' presentations? The hard part of creating an agreement from scratch. They therefore think what they claim was the last round just happened, the company they're buying.

[trendingnewsb]

5 Real World Problems That Are Straight Out Of Black Mirror

The future! Rocket ships, lasers, robots — it is truly a far-flung, fantastical place. Except, uh … we have all those things right now, and have for some time. The future isn’t some vague, to-be-determined period of existence; it’s literally tomorrow. So today, humanity has to address issues that would have been inconceivable a few paltry years ago. And frankly, some of this stuff still kind of sounds like someone got stoned and then tried to pitch a Black Mirror episode.

5

Fitbits Are Giving Away Military Intelligence

Nowadays it’s routine for people to wear a fitness tracker, but by allowing our data to be shared, we’re also allowing our habits to be shared. That normally shouldn’t be problematic, unless your spouse is learning that your weekly jog takes you straight to the strip club … or you’re exercising on a classified military installation.

Read Next

Britain Just Created An Immigration Crisis Dumber Than DACA

Thanks to a map that shows the jogging habits of the 27 million people who use Fitbits and the like, we can see splotches of activity in otherwise dark areas, like Iraq and Syria. Some of those splotches are known American military sites full of exercising soldiers, and some, by extrapolation, are sites that the military would rather keep unknown. One journalist saw a lot of exercise activity on a Somalian beach that was suspected to be home to a CIA base. Someone else spotted a suspected missile site in Yemen, and a web of bases in Afghanistan were also revealed.

StravaYet another example of why we at Cracked continue to condemn exercise in all its forms.

By analyzing the data, you could theoretically figure out patrol and supply convoy routes, and make educated guesses as to where on these bases soldiers eat, sleep, etc. That’s a lot of useful information for someone planning an attack. You could also track individuals, potentially important ones. One researcher claimed they tracked a French soldier’s entire overseas deployment and subsequent return home.

This wasn’t an evil ploy by a terrorist cell in league with Big Fitness; you can turn that data tracking off. It’s just that no one even thought about it until someone finally pointed out that it was a huge security issue. American rules for fitness trackers in the military are now being “refined,” which we assume is PR speak for “Goddammit, turn that shit off.” But it’s only a matter of time until another seemingly innocuous technology accidentally gives away state secrets.

4

Space Commercialization Might Contaminate Planets

Elon Musk set a new precedent when he launched a car into space, and not only for tacky egotism. The rules about what corporations can and can’t do in space are essentially nonexistent, because the government’s authority ends somewhere around the thermosphere. Governments, however, have legal responsibilities listed in the Outer Space Treaty — one of the few things America and the Soviet Union agreed on. Most of the world has signed as well, and in addition to promising not to put nukes on the Moon or claim all of Jupiter for the proud people of Denmark, adherents agree not to send Earth germs to other planets like the interplanetary version of coughing on the guy next to you at the movie theater.

That sounds a bit silly, but there’s a real point: If Earth microbes accidentally end up on other planets and moons, it becomes impossible for scientists to tell if their “discovery” of life on Io is native, or if it originated from someone sneezing in a Tesla factory. So NASA and other government space agencies follow a strict anti-contamination protocol. American Mars rovers, for example, had all of their parts heated to 230 degrees before launch, and they are routinely sterilized with alcohol. Even if your mission is only to orbit a planet (or swing by one), you have to prove that the odds of an accidental crash landing are equivalent to that of winning a fair-sized lottery.

Kim Shiflett/NASA“Like, Powerball odds. No Pick 3 crap.”

In theory, governments are also responsible for ensuring that any corporations within their borders follow the same rules. But once you move beyond launching satellites into Earth’s orbit, the government’s ability to enforce the law is about equal to your ability to enforce a responsible bedtime on yourself. Maybe that flying Tesla was carefully sterilized, or maybe Musk went out of his way to fart it up before launch. We don’t know. And as more and more corporations talk about going to the Moon and Mars, we may have a germ problem.

There’s also the issue of debris. While we like to think of space as a pristine void, the Solar System is starting to resemble a freshman’s dorm room. Space missions are supposed to be as clean as possible, and a mission to another planet should either purposely burn up in the atmosphere or land when it’s done. Musk’s car was heading toward Mars, where plans for it were sort of a vague shrug. It could have eventually broken up and left debris around the planet, or it could have infected the surface. But instead, it went off-course toward the asteroid belt … where it could also very well hit something and break up. Worst-case scenario, we end up with a bunch of junk floating around that could take out a future mission. Even if his car never hits anything, Musk still broke bold new ground in space litter.

3

Moderators Have To Watch All The Heinous Garbage That Gets Posted On Social Media

Try to imagine the worst job possible. Sewage sampler? Elephant masturbator? How about social media moderator? It sounds like a joke at first: “Facebook has moderators? Then explain all the crap I see every day!” Then you learn that their job is mostly to filter out pornography, and it sounds awesome. Aren’t you supposed to get paid to do what you love?

But then you learn about the truly awful shit that moderators see as they cruise through a thousand flagged posts an hour, and you want to give them all hugs and raises. Child pornography, bestiality, hate speech, extreme violence … if you can imagine something awful, someone has put it online. Specific examples included a man’s testicles getting crushed, a boy getting his legs mangled by a truck, someone getting hit by a train, a man shooting himself in the head, suicide bombings, a man hurting and possibly killing small birds by having sex with them, and a woman whose body had been blown in two. Imagine dealing with images like that for 40 hours a week. It’s like playing roulette, except the closest you get to winning are shots of consenting genitals smashing together.

Imagine being forced to watch Logan Paul videos and considering that a good day.

Over 100,000 people trawl through e-trash to keep Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other major sites (relatively) safe to use. And you can’t click away the moment you can tell a video is getting nasty — you have to verify that the content is real, and learn as much as possible so you can try to destroy it at its source. And while you will become somewhat numb, dealing with the worst of what humanity has to offer day after day can haunt you. Turnover is high, and there are few resources for moderators who need counseling. Which, shit, has to be all of them, right?

2

Facebook’s Fake News Problem Is A Feature, Not A Bug

Despite the fact that you probably took at least one break from reading this to check your Facebook feed, we still think of the site primarily as a vehicle for vacation photos where the worst thing that could happen is getting into a bitter argument with some friends about how to pronounce “GIF.” We’re all too smart to get suckered into politics, right?

But Facebook’s politics come after you. Ten million users saw “Russian-linked” ads placed during the 2016 election, mostly focused on big, controversial issues like immigration and gun control. Facebook also admitted that they placed about $100,000 in ads from “inauthentic accounts.” The issue isn’t ads spamming “Vote for Clinton / Trump / X’algax, Destroyer of Souls!” Everyone already saw those a million times; they’d sway no one. The problem is that they spread stories like “FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE,” which linked to a fake newspaper, quoting a man that doesn’t exist, who lives in a town that doesn’t exist (they spelled the town’s name wrong).

The Denver PostAt this point, we’re starting to doubt the existence of Denver too.

If you see that stuff in your feed, wedged in between a cat video and your friend’s new spaghetti sauce recipe, you don’t click through to verify it. So it weasels into your brain as something you vaguely remember that may or may not be true.

Facebook has also become a playground for trolls, regardless of whether they have a political agenda or just want to watch the e-world burn. If you can think back to the Las Vegas shooting (before all those other shootings removed it from the headlines), a slew of hoaxes spread from the moment the news broke. Some people invented fake dead and missing victims solely to see how many likes they could get. Others claimed that the shooter was still active, invented fake perpetrators, assigned nonexistent motivations to the shooter, or claimed that he was a Democrat, a left-wing activist, or a recent convert to Islam (in reality, if the shooter had any political motives, he took them to his grave).

It’s the cruelest and most devious form of misinformation, because it’s hard to keep your bullshit detector functioning when you’re in shock. Maybe some of those moderators could get a well-deserved break from the animal torture to focus on this crap instead?

1

Someone Could Steal Your Face And Make Porn

We have the technology to swap someone’s face onto someone else’s face in a video. That’s fun if we’re putting Nicholas Cage into Raiders Of The Lost Ark …

… but it’s a problem if someone is making it appear that a person said or did something they didn’t really do. And that problem gains an extra level of creepiness when someone’s face is slapped into a porn video. All it takes is some training, some raw footage of the subject, and a few spare hours. And if you’re the sort of person inclined to make fake porn, you’ve probably got a lot of time on your hand.

Reddit had an entire community dedicated to this “hobby,” until it was shut down, but that only made enthusiasts migrate elsewhere. Called “deepfakes,” after the Reddit user who pioneered the practice, they started editing the faces of celebrities onto preexisting porn. Some of the fakes ended up on porn sites being pitched to viewers as real, because porn is now a genre of fake news.

While it’s unlikely that anyone would believe Taylor Swift was suddenly so hard up for money that she appeared on FuckBrothers.biz, it’s still an ethically off-putting mess. It’s not limited to the living. Someone made a video “starring” a young Carrie Fisher. And it’s not limited to celebrities, either. Anyone armed with a scraper can pull photos from Facebook and Instagram, combine them with any of several search engines that look for porn stars by facial recognition, and make a fairly convincing video of anyone doing pretty much anything. Reddit users were making videos of their friends, co-workers, classmates, and exes. They were “only” for private use, but what happens when someone wants to manufacture revenge porn? So there you go: We’re reaching a point in history where we can’t even trust our pornography. And then what’s left to believe in?

Mark is on Twitter and has a book.

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[lord-nicho]

Something I don’t really share online is the fact that I’m moderate when it comes to politics. I don’t know if it’s because choosing one of the two parties blocks off half the opportunities around here for me, or maybe it’s because my beliefs lie somewhere in the middle of Republican and Democrat. I was raised with conservative values and for the most part I enjoy the country people and their ways. The country kids I was raised with are just more respectful but you have to earn it from them. That’s the thing about republicans that I like, there are no hand outs. I was raised to believe help made me weak so I do more for myself which is great! I’m more driven to raise my own chickens for food than to spend $4 on a few nuggets at McDonalds. On the other side of the coin there’s learning how to ask for help which was a hard thing to learn at age 17. But even the best homesteader might need to ask his neighbor for a hand. I believe being raised conservative and then going to a high school where the Obamas changes to make it more progressive really fucked my education up because I was prepared for the old school system and like a lot of Americans I can be stubborn and old fashion dispite being a transgender man which one would think I’m progressive. Having two parties has always effected my life. And I owe nothing to the Obamas (whos administration passed some shit that made my dad lose his business) just like I owe nothing to the Trumps. And this was a difficult conclusion for me to come to because I grew up dreaming about being in the US Air Force but I can’t even believe in my leaders so I haven’t enlisted even though I’ve never felt more prepared to. When Obama was in office the Liberals were more focused on middle class and immigrants instead of the lower class people already living here. Then again I’m not against immigration because I believe as humans we’re born free and only restricted by our leaders. Sometimes people needed to move their families, usually due to weather or war; or maybe they live the nomadic life. I don’t think too much has changed in the last 1,000 or so years beside how divided we are, our weaponry, and how important printed green paper became. Perhaps I need to learn the history of cash money to understand the why of it but digging into history can really suck. Everytime I learn something new I feel more and more like my entire world is a lie, that’s just the government for you not any one party. My problem with liberals aren’t just from Obama. Liberals seem to think it needs to all be easy for everyone when it’s impossible for a country as large as ours to cater to everybody while keeping all these restrictions. If liberal leaders wanted everyone to be equal they’d have tried to strip the government into nothing since the only equal ground we would be able to achieve would be having nothing and fighting for every step up you can get. But we already did that to form our government now and we see how one group got ahead and they’re all these fake ass out of touch people with hardly any human aspects left. Maybe we need to rebuild maybe we need more hope all I know is I’m just one man and I wouldn’t be able to solve the problems myself. Although I do agree with the liberals on systematic racism being a problem, at the same time with the mockery capitalism has become if you have no money then you’re systematically oppressed as well. Then again maybe not as much as a poor brown person would be but if you’re born poor very high chance you’ll die young, depressed, and still poor. And if the government should take care of anyone it should be it’s veterans. They sent these people to fight then come back and be forgotten? I say hell no! They owe them! But the rich people in charge can forget about them because they don’t see anything they don’t want unless it treads on their fake ass beliefs. Back when I hardly understood what drove the government and our two parties I assumed the Republicans were suppose to set the system up for their supporters: for the poor, conservative, midwest/southwest/southern folk. Biig surprise! That’s not what government is about. It’s been a series of hidden chutes and ladders, this country is, and it’s all so money can keep flowing up the few ladders while we’re suppose to be complacent with the scraps splitting and falling down the millions of chutes for us little guys. But we’re the lucky ones because we’re in the game that some groups are not allowed to play even though we’re all created equal right? We’ve got people on the street saying our government has been lying and our police aren’t here to protect the American people. -And let me say nowhere does it say police protect the people. They protect the country’s assets, which sometimes include tax paying individuals. - I’ve got people in my real life orbit who just found out about the insurance that was written up before 9/11 to cash out on the towers falling. And in the same orbit I’ve got people who blindly believe the government wouldn’t fuck it’s own people because deep down they’re afraid or maybe they really can’t see between the cracks. I know that I’m a little afraid of what’s to come. Sometimes so much so that I can’t figure why I’m still living it. These days with a little smarts and the interweb people are learning more of what’s behind the government because of freelancers and whistle blowers. Most people are finally figuring out that the rich people that run for seats in our government don’t care about anyone outside their lives once they get what they want. That’s kind of a normal human thing as well, it’s hard to care about everyone when you’re trying to accomplish a big personal goal. That’s why it makes no sense to assume a group of people who died centuries ago would know what system works best for the giant population that America has become. It also makes no sense that we’re holding onto this illusion. We’re always being lied to by these guys who are free to go and get what they want as long as they spew some apology so a few people can unclench. The only way to experience what free America is to become rich and in control of something that the people need. In conclusion, why are we still listening to those rich assholes? None of this really makes sense other than keeping the control.

(p.s. I didn’t finish high school so if you think I’m an idiot just know the facts and move on or please explain where I messed up. I do enjoy learning still and I’m 18 so I’m still forming beliefs and trying to become an adult. Don’t be a prick towards me and I’ll listen but it’s cool if you’re heated about something I said though I can understand that.)