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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years ago

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Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid

It’s been just over a year since the death of activist, writer and anthropologist Gavid Graeber — a brilliant speaker, writer and thinker who helped give us Occupy, “we are the 99%” and “Bullshit Jobs.”

On the anniversary of David’s death, his widow Nika Dubrovsky convened the first “Art Project” discussion, a fascinating debate between Thomas Piketty and Michael Hudson, a pair of political economists whose work is neatly bridged by Graeber’s own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWT0uvBLDbo

Piketty, of course, is the bestselling French economist whose 2013 Capital in the 21st Century was an unlikely, 700+ page viral hit, describing with rare lucidity the macroeconomics that drive capitalism towards cruel and destabilizing inequality

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Hudson, meanwhile, is the debt-historian and economist whose haunting phrase “Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid,” is a perfect and irrefutable summation of the inevitable downfall of any system that relies on household debt to drive consumption.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

Like Hudson, Graeber was obsessed with the history and politics of debt. His 2012 book “Debt: The First 5,000 years” influenced not just Piketty’s work, but the work of many non-economists, including a large group of science fiction writers.

https://www.tor.com/2012/04/16/the-best-science-fiction-ideas-in-any-non-fiction-ever-david-graebers-debt-the-first-five-thousand-years/

Like Piketty, Graeber was capable of writing extremely long books that were so engaging that people actually read them, absorbing complex and nuanced subjects. DEBT clocked in at 534 pages, and not a dud among them.

And like both Hudson and Piketty, Graeber was obsessed with long timescales and the ways that history is pressed into service to assert that various political situations are inevitable products of human nature, meaning that there’s no point in asking for a fairer system.

In Debt, Graeber reaches back 5,000 years to question (among other things), the “money story” that money was created by individuals who wanted to make barter more efficient, settling on coins as a way to make change for someone who wants a cow but only has chickens to trade.

Graeber shows the “confluence of needs” theory of money to be a fairy tale, something that orthodox economists literally made up as the “most likely” source of money, without ever asking historians about what the record tells us about the origins of money.

Which is a pity, because historians know a lot about this stuff! For example, they can tell you about the Babylonian use of ledgers to record the issuance and redemption of debt in the largely agricultural economy of the day.

This early money would be recognizable to farmers today: during planting season, a share of the eventual harvest is promised in exchange for the inputs needed to plant, nurture and reap the crops.

Like Graeber, Hudson also treats Babylonian policy as key to economics — specifically, the Babylonian understanding that “debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid,” which is why the state would periodically declare a jubilee in which all debts were declared void.

Without these periodic jubilees, the entire productive economy is swallowed up by debt service — every poor harvest or other unforseeable circumstance drives producers (who are also debtors) further into debt, whose interest creates an inescapable gravity.

Without some way to escape debt’s gravity, all productive labor becomes oriented toward debt-service, and the economy grinds to a halt. If this sounds familiar, you’re probably paying attention to today’s political economy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

Piketty also works in long timescales, though his historical analysis is an order of magnitude more recent that Hudston or Graeber’s. At Capital XXI’s core is a data-set, painstakingly assembled by Piketty and his grad students over more than a decade.

That data-set traces “capital flows” (the distribution of wealth and income) for 300+ years, rigorously traced and normalized, so that we can understand things like the relative degree of inequality in different societies over centuries.

Famously, Piketty concludes that no matter how fast an economy is growing — no matter how productive its makers are — that wealth grows faster, making the takers who financed growth even richer than the people whose work is propelling the economy.

This fundamental truth (expressed in economic notation as r > g, or “return on capital is greater than economic growth”) means that “meritocracy” is a lie: the richest people in a market economy aren’t the people who do the best work, it’s the people who started off rich.

Like Hudson, Piketty’s work looks at the relationship between inequality and instability: Piketty uses his data to show that inequality crises trigger political crises, and that high degrees of inequality precede upheavals like the French Revolution and the World Wars.

Given all that, a discussion between Piketty and Hudson, convened in Graeber’s memory, is bound to be fascinating, and they don’t disappoint (if you prefer text to video, check out Naked Capitalism’s transcript):

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/09/michael-hudson-and-thomas-piketty-debate-inequality-debt-and-reform.html

Here’s my highlight reel of the discussion, with commentary. Hudson opens with a skeptical take on Piketty’s conclusion to Capital XXI, in which he proposes a global wealth tax. Such a tax is nearly impossible to enforce, says Hudson — unlike a jubilee.

Hudson says the source of today’s global vast fortunes is not earnings or income — rather, it’s central banks’ subsidy of the value of stocks and bonds, through rock-bottom interest rates, bond guarantees, etc. These fuel speculative bear markets that run up asset prices.

These state-subsidized fortunes are pumped into the financial markets, becoming the loans that everyone else has to pay debt on, just to survive. As in ancient times, the finance sector eventually swallows the productive economy whole. Without jubilee, you get collapse.

This is true within rich economies, but it’s even more pronounced in the relations between poor debtor countries who were coerced into taking on massive debts by the IMF, who are going to pay an ever-larger share of their GDP to offshore creditors as the economy slows.

The only way for poor countries to service those debts is by imposing crushing austerity, which means starving domestic producers of investment, education and health services, reducing productivity, requiring more austerity — until the whole thing collapses.

Remember: debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid. It’s an iron law, and cannot be repealed — not by austerity, not by “better management,” not by “living within your means.” Can’t be paid = won’t be paid.

Piketty doesn’t dispute any of this, saying that he’s reconsidered some of the solutions in Capital XXI in light of subsequent events, like the pathetically inadequate global minimum corporate tax of 15%, which only rich countries’ treasuries will get to participate in.

Piketty points to his followup to Capital XXI, the even weightier (and sadly less influential) Capital and Ideology for his more up-to-date thinking on the way to address inequality and instability.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/19/capital-and-ideology-by-thomas-piketty-review-if-inequality-is-illegitimate-why-not-reduce-it

He reiterates his thesis that inequality self-corrects, thanks to the instability it engenders. Left on their own, market economies collapse, torn apart by the bill for guards to defend lenders’ fortunes, the bill for interest payments that enrich lenders.

Impose sufficient austerity and brutality on a society and the cost of defending it exceeds the wealth its productive sector manages to produce, and boom — French Revolution, the World Wars, etc.

Piketty proposes that mounting “catastrophic climate change” might precipitate the next crisis, which is certainly a safe bet, though of course, the question is whether that crisis will come after the point of no return for a habitable planet.

Hudson has ideas about how we might hasten transformative change without risking civilizational collapse. He points out that Piketty’s work identifies inherited wealth as inequality’s wellspring and points out that estate taxes are much more enforceable than wealth taxes.

Certainly, inherited wealth is a live issue today. The latest installment of Propublica’s essential IRS Papers reporting shows how the richest Americans abuse a bizarre loophole to avoid ANY tax on indescribably vast estates:

https://www.propublica.org/article/more-than-half-of-americas-100-richest-people-exploit-special-trusts-to-avoid-estate-taxes

No one knows exactly how much tax avoidance grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs) drive, because they are shrouded in secrecy. In 2013, the lawyer who created GRATs said they’d allowed the ultra-wealthy to evade $100b in taxes. Their use has increased since then.

Another lever for reducing inequality is political competition. Hudson points out that during the Cold War, capitalist states took steps to prevent runaway inequality in a bid to show that market economies were more stable than centralized, planned economies.

Hudson suggests that competition with China might serve that function today. Without forgiving China for its autocracy and human rights abuses, he gives favorable marks to its economic planners for reining in the finance sector.

It’s true that China intervened heavily in credit markets during the covid crisis, to prevent rentiers from destroying productive businesses that couldn’t service their debts during lockdown, preserving larges swathes of otherwise vulnerable productive firms.

He reminds us that the original meaning of “free market” was “a market free from rents,” where unproductive creditors were not allowed to lay a private tax on productive manufacturers.

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, the meaning has been reversed — a market is “free” if creditors face no limits on rent-extraction.

But there’s good reason to be skeptical of claims that China’s economy is being well-managed, as Anne Stevenson-Yang writes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/annestevenson-yang/2021/09/25/chairman-xi-chinas-looming-crisis-and-the-myth-of-infallibility/

Stevenson-Yang paints a picture of chaotic state management of the Chinese economy, hidden by state-owned media and its rosy outlook. Watchwords like “common prosperity” are empty buzzwords, used to paper over self-interested, corrupt business practices.

State initiatives measure progress through short-term, easily gamed KPIs, something she says is documented in Red Roulette: “a new book written by a disaffected property developer named Desmond Shum.”

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Red-Roulette/Desmond-Shum/9781982156152

Now, I’m willing to stipulate that for investors and property developers “corruption” or “incompetence” might be indistinguishable from what the rest of us would call good governance, but some of Stevenson-Yang’s charges seem factual and well-made.

42I found the discussion between Piketty and Hudson fascinating, and if there was anything more that I’d add, it would be a dose of technopolitics (unsurprisingly). After all, technology has a huge bearing on the timing and nature of the shifts that both economists study.

For Piketty, inequality-driven instability collapses when the cost of guard-labor rises too high to bear — other words, eventually, a society gets so unequal that it costs more to stave off guillotines than even the ultrarich can afford.

For Hudson, debt-driven instability collapses when debtors begin to default because they have no ability to service their debts.

Technology changes the nature of both of these collapses. Take guard labor: mass surveillance and technological controls make it cheaper than at any time in history to isolate and neutralize political threats to elite rule.

How much cheaper? Well, in 1989, the Stasi employed one in sixty East Germans to spy on the whole nation.

Today, the NSA spies on the whole world, at a spy:subject ratio that’s more like 1:10,000 — two orders of magnitude more efficient than the spies of a generation ago. That’s a huge productivity gain, and it’s all thanks to digital technology.

When it comes to debtor default, the tension is between coercion and ability to pay. Yes, “debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid,” but “can’t be aid” is not a hard limit — it turns on how much the debtor is willing to hurt themselves and their loved ones to make payments.

Every mafia armbreaker knows this. When someone can’t pay their debts, you can break their arm and they’ll cash in their kids’ college fund and secretly remortgage their house to make the next payment.

When that runs out, if you threaten to break their legs, the debtor will start breaking into cars. Eventually, this comes to an end, when the debtor goes to prison for 25 years. But in the meantime, coercive force can wring a fair amount of blood from the stone.

Debtor coercion has been transformed by digital technology, from an artisanal, retail handicraft to a scaled up, industrial practice.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

We don’t need the threat of repo men to keep you paying your car note — miss a Tesla payment and your car will phone home and lock its doors. When the tow arrives, it will flash its lights, honk its horn and back out of its parking space for repossession.

The ability to digitally repossess, or partially repossess (as in India, where loan-shark cellphone companies disable your most-used apps if you miss a payment) the tools you rely on for life and livelihood makes it cost-effective to apply coercion at scale.

Cheap guard-labor and cheap coercion mean that crisis can be deferred for ever-longer timescales. Thus, societies up the only kind of debt that really matters: policy debt. Lives are ruined, productive capacity tanked, the planet poisoned.

Add tech to Piketty or Hudson’s analysis and things start to look a lot less self-correcting, and the odds tilt against our civilization, our species and our planet. If a correction only comes after the point of no return, we’re in very deep shit indeed.

#pluralistic

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thinkveganworld · 4 years ago

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I just watched the Convention for a People’s Party and heard the speakers including Cornel West, Chris Hedges, Nina Turner, Jimmy Dore and several others. I liked what most of them said, but I was disappointed in Marianne Williamson for saying she would ultimately vote for Biden. Luckily the other speakers didn’t say that. Here are some links politijohn posted. Biden:

Led the fight against desegregating schools even years after it had been proven a success and defended by Republicans.

Voted for the disastrous Iraq War and still says he’d “do it again.”

Wrote the racist Crime Bill that intentionally led to record-breaking mass incarceration, positioning himself to the right of even Reagan and Bush.

Opposed Roe v Wade and voted to allow states to overturn it like they are now, worked to undermine the ACA’s coverage of birth control, does “not view abortion as a choice and a right” and still opposed federal funding for it multiple times including during this election.

Long history of creepily groping/sniffing/kissing/grabbing/condescending women and young girls so many times, even including intimidation and continuing even now after his non-apology.

Racist comments like this and fondness towards if not impassioned support for so many of the worst racists and segregationists like this whom he chose to work with, as well as Republicans like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Mike Pence, and Jeb Bush.

Generally has no understanding of racism in America

As part of his crusade against desegregating schools he was the only member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to block two black appointees to the Department of Justice.

Lies about marching in the Civil Rights movement multiple times, and seems to lie about attending an HBCU.

Horrible treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas hearing.

Supports cutting Social Security and Medicare and raising the retirement age on multiple occasions, backing Paul Ryan’s efforts to do so, while voting to gut welfare.

Led the disastrous War on Drugs, and somehow still opposes cannabis legalization, yet two of his children escaped consequences for drug use.

Pushed to expand death penalty, even to those on drug charges.

Sided with banks to overturn Glass-Steagall and deregulate, leading to financial crisis.

Led the disastrous Bankruptcy Bill resulting in increased debt and dismisses the plight of Millennials who are now the most indebted generation ever.

Defends billionaires hoarding wealth and promises to ensure it keeps happening at the expense of everyone else while voting to slash the top income tax rate and cripple the estate tax, resulting in $83 billion lost annually.

Opposes Medicare for All while he and his campaign lie about it what it would entail. Wants to bring back penalizing those who can’t afford to pay for private insurance. He continues to praise Big Pharma to his ultra-wealthy donors and is the only candidate to refuse to meet with disabled healthcare activist Ady Barkan.

Was the only senator to vote against expanding a child care tax credit.

Originally claimed he “doesn’t have time” to propose his own healthcare plan, then proposed one that would kill 125,000 Americans and leave over 10 million uninsured (which he’s lied about) in a rollout sponsored by Big Pharma (even his own wife admits he’s not good on healthcare, and he’s let slip the true reality of his proposal)

Personally fought to make cancer medication unaffordable for patients in developing nations. ---------------------------------

We do need a People’s Party. We need to not support Biden or any other corporate Democrat.

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nsfwviolets · 5 years ago

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hello everyone !! my name is ally & i hail from the est timezone. i really should be studying for my exam tomorrow or at least trying to get some rest but here i am !! i don’t think anything has really changed about vi but everything you need to know about her is under the cut !! & like always, please like this post so i could bother you for plots !!

❛ new york’s very own violet lennox was spotted on broadway street in jimmy choo thigh high boots. your resemblance to taylor hill is unreal. according to tmz, you just had your twenty-third birthday bash. while living in new york, you’ve been labeled as being avaricious, but also enticing. i guess being a gemini explains that. three things that would paint a better picture of you would be elongated limbs tangled in pink silk sheets, the lingering smell of yves saint laurent mon paris, & oversized faux fur coats draping sun kissed shoulders ( cisfemale & she/her ) + ( ally, 21, she/her, est )

basics ;;

full name: violet ( soft & sweet ) faith ( unquestioning belief and complete trust in god ) lennox ( northern irish / scottish last name ).

nicknames: vi, v.

age: twenty-three.

birthday: 18 june 1996.

zodiac: gemini.

gender: cisfemale.

pronouns: she / her / hers.

sexual orientation: bisexual.

nationality: american.

hometown: aspen, colorado.

parents: diane galindo ( brooke shields ) & richard lennox ( rob lowe ).

siblings: older sister.

pet(s): one year old miniature labradoodle named tate.

religion: roman catholic.

height: 5′10.

occupation: victoria’s secret angel / instagram model / socialite.

positive traits: honest, loyal, passionate, responsible, authentic, affectionate, reliable, kindhearted, & courageous.

negative traits: loud, manipulative, stubborn, materialistic, selfish, abrasive, hypocritical, insecure, & dramatic.

hobbies: shopping, audrey hepburn movie marathons, traveling, being the center of attention, photography, spontaneous dance parties, working out, massages, doodling, pilates, online shopping, & journaling.

habits: interrupting someone mid sentence, excessive hair tucking, shoulder rolling, lip biting, & impatiently tapping her heels or acrylic nails when she is at a loss for words & or annoyed.

labels: the vixen & the babydoll.

aesthetics: silk dresses, lip gloss, the deafening sound of designer heels making contact with marble floors, lipstick stained coffee mugs, matte nail polish, glitter, diamonds, snow days, satin sheets, impulsive shopping sprees, romantic comedy binge watches, ocean waves, lolita, bright lights, day drinking, champagne for breakfast, iced matcha, lingerie as outerwear, yves saint laurent mon paris perfume sprayed on the nape of her neck & her decolletage, lavender oil, acrylic nails, snow blanketing trees, hardwood mahogany floors, hgtv reruns, vintage chanel, pretty in pink, rose gold accents, bubble baths after a long day, half naked pictures, & rose water.

style inspo: taylor hill, kylie jenner, candice swanepoel, josephine skriver, kendall jenner, blair waldorf, & cher horowitz. here are just a few examples of her wardrobe !! ( x x x x x ) muse inspo: brooke davis ( one tree hill ), cher horowitz ( clueless ), blair waldorf ( gossip girl ), gabrielle solis ( desperate housewives ), lydia martin ( teen wolf ), fallon carrington ( dynasty ), sadie saxton ( awkward ), lauren cooper ( faking it ), mini mcguinness ( skins ), holly golightly ( breakfast at tiffany’s ), maddy perez ( euphoria ), brooke maddox ( scream ), samantha jones ( sex & the city ), tahani al jamil ( the good place ), jackie burkhart ( that ‘70s show ), naomi clark ( 90210 ), cece parekh ( new girl ), cassie howard ( euphoria ), madison montgomery ( american horror story ), jenna maroney ( 30 rock ), kelly kapoor ( the office ), elle woods ( legally blonde ), rachel green ( friends ), paris hilton, & mona-lisa saperstein ( parks & recreation ).

background ;;

violet faith lennox is diane galindo’s & richard lennox’s youngest child. born three weeks early on 18 june 1996 at aspen valley hospital in aspen, colorado. the very moment they held their daughter ( who they lovingly referred to as a ‘ blessing ‘ ) in their open arms, they knew that their family was finally complete.

her mother ( diane ) is her parents’ pride & joy. as the eldest daughter of wealthy wall street executives, she has done nothing but make her family proud her entire life. growing up, her dream in life was to help her father’s business but her career quickly changed course when she decided to pursue a career in medicine. the new york native eventually ended up going to harvard medical school in boston, massachusetts where she would end up meeting her future husband. to this day, dr. galindo is one of the most recognizable names in medicine & is world renowned for her work as a reproductive endocrinologist ( fertility specialist ).

her father on the other hand ( richard ) was born to an influential family in los angeles, california. from an early age, he was exposed to the spotlight due to the fact that his own father was governor of california & hoped to become president one day. however, things seemed to go off course the day the former governor was caught in his own cheating scandal all while being married to a former pageant queen. scandal erupted when the politician not only cheated on his stunning wife with a young secretary but when his mistress announced to the world that she was pregnant. the entire news circuit covered this affair for months & the governor resigned from his position when news broke that he urged his mistress to get an abortion.

following the scandal, the family fell out of the public spotlight. they spent years trying to repaint their public image after it was tarnished for nothing but selfish desire. approximately ten years later, the family made news again but this time about their newly found faith in god joining the long list of religious right wing politicians. richard’s father felt as if the only way to redeem himself was to devote himself to god. after years of distancing themselves from the catholic church, the family dove right back in which became the start of their fundamental catholic values that ruled every aspect of their lives.

as the only son in the family, richard’s parents had high expectations for him. however, he seemed to have different plans for himself that didn’t involve making his family proud or practicing what they preached. as an undergraduate student at yale, his interests were far & few between. his days only seemed to consist of sleeping with random women & binge drinking to his heart’s content. he knew that he didn’t have to be an astounding student because he had a giant trust fund waiting for him at home. but after a drunk driving accident that resulted in a 40 year old woman’s hospitalization & his own arrest, richard knew he had to clean up his act.

he eventually followed his family’s lead & became an ultra religious catholic. he even managed to boost up his grades & get an academic scholarship to harvard law school where he met diane. diane didn’t come from a strong religious background. in fact, she liked to tell people that she only believed in science & didn’t have faith or trust in a superior figure. but when she met a young richard lennox, her entire world was turned upside down. she let him into her life, converted to catholicism, & the two got married after three years of dating. flash forward to 1992. the married couple is moving to aspen, colorado for diane’s new job at an upscale hospital. they even received a generous check from richard’s parents to buy a mansion in the mountains !!

life for the couple in colorado was serene. they eventually welcomed their first child into the world ( a daughter ) & a few months later, their families moved to help them raise their children. both diane & richard always wanted a big family due to their catholic faith. they both agreed they would stop after 6 kids, however, their minds were quickly changed when she became pregnant with violet.

her pregnancy was extremely difficult to say the least. between being on bed rest for months & frequent hospitalizations, she didn’t know if she could do this again. on top of her own health issues, she also had problems with her unborn child. there was even a night where they thought they would lose violet after diane experienced unexplainable bleeding & her fellow colleagues at the hospital couldn’t detect a heartbeat.

luckily, they were able to find a heartbeat after 6 minutes of deafening silence & hushed prayers for a miracle. after that night, they knew that their daughter was a blessing which is why they agreed to give her the middle name faith which symbolizes their unrequited devotion to god.

eventually, violet was born !! she was born three weeks early & spent a week in the icu but overall she was healthy. she was a bit underweight but she was miraculously healthy. but after everything the family had been through, they decided that violet would be their last child.

as a child, violet did every thing her parents had asked of her. their faith played a large role in her upbringing which is why she spent every sunday inside of church.

by the time she was 8 years old, her family decided to move to new york city due to the fact that her mom received a prestigious job on the upper east side. at the age of 8, violet was already a competitive gymnast who’s likes included spending time with her family, competing, & going to school. even then she knew she could do everything she loved in another state which is why she didn’t put up much of a fight when she was told that they would be moving across the country.

moving from snowy open colorado to the upper east side of manhattan was definitely a culture shock for violet even at an early age. nonetheless, she eventually got used to new york city life & to this day she doesn’t think she would survive a week in colorado.

even after she moved to a new part of the country, violet remained devoted to gymnastics & her family. she had dreams of one day going to the olympics for gymnastics & everyone who knew her saw her potential. she even competed in world events & became a household name !! although, her parents often emphasized that school & religion come first which is why they made her & her sister attend a private catholic school all the way through high school.

in high school, she was a classic goody two shoes church girl. she was a strong student who received perfect grades in order to please her parents. for the longest time, she didn’t have time for anything other than school & sports but that changed by the time she was 16.

despite attending an all girls school, violet met her first boyfriend through one of her mutual friends. & like all stereotypical teen romances, it was love at first site. she was so infatuated with him that she was willing to put everything in her life on the back burner in order to focus on him.

& by the time she was 18, she received numerous academic & sports scholarships to prestigious colleges. however, violet decided to take a gap year in order to spend more time with her boyfriend of two years. she knew that she would eventually go to college but she wanted to make some time for herself first. her parents weren’t exactly happy about her decision due to the fact that she has big shoes to fill but they eventually came around the idea & were even happy for their daughter & her wholesome catholic boyfriend.

during her gap year, they spent an entire year traveling the world. they went to bali, greece, peru, brazil, iceland, dubai, thailand, argentina, & morocco. throughout the course of the year, violet documented her travel on her instagram & other social media platforms which is when she started gaining a lot of followers who wanted to watch her travel the world with the love of her life. before her influx of instagram followers, not a lot of people outside the world of gymnastics knew who she was. people of course knew who her parents were ( a famous doctor & lawyer ) but the world did not really know who exactly violet lennox was.

by the end of her gap year violet already had over 1 million followers on instagram !! & she was already getting paid doing what she loves which is travel the world. & since all of this happened during her year off, violet ended up telling her parents that she didn’t want to go to college which damaged their relationship as a result.

since her parents were so unsupportive of her decision to not go to college & ultimately quit gymnastics, violet ended up moving out of her house & moved in with her boyfriend at only the age of 19. & because her parents were completely unsupportive of her decision not to attend college, they cut her off financially & she was forced to make a living for herself. by this point, her career as a social media influencer was booming so she was already making a lot of money just through promoting detox teas, teeth whitening kits, etc.

it may seem as if life for violet was perfect by this point despite her falling out with her parents. however, that was not the case. even though she fooled the entire world by thinking that she had a perfect relationship, her boyfriend was incredibly abusive towards her & had been ever since the two started dating. although he was never physically abusive, he was mentally, emotionally, & verbally abusive. for years violet made excuses for him & blamed herself for their problems which only made her feel more miserable than she already was. this was her first real relationship & she genuinely thought that they were destined to be together even though she was severely unhappy.

he would constantly cheat, manipulate her, make fun of her appearance & insecurities, & wouldn’t let her do anything without his permission. the two were together for three years & there even was a time where violet became pregnant but quickly had an abortion without him knowing as soon as she found out. just three months after living together, she finally found the courage to break up with him. although it wasn’t easy at first, she’s thankful that she finally got out of a dangerous relationship. she also understands the dangers of social media better than anyone else because she fooled the world into thinking that she was in a happy loving relationship when that was far from the truth.

when violet told the world about their breakup ( most likely in an instagram live or an instagram story ) she ended up losing millions of followers. the majority of her followers only followed her to watch her travel the world with her boyfriend so once they found out that they were no longer together ; they didn’t see the point in following her anymore.

for an entire year following her breakup, violet began to spiral out of control. she started using drugs, alcohol, & partying as coping mechanisms in order to help her move on & forget about everything she had endured. that of course didn’t work but that didn’t stop her from partying every single night of the week & ending up in a stranger’s bed. eventually, she even leaked her own sex tape & naked pictures to the press in hopes that the press coverage would help make up for the millions of followers she lost on instagram.

& as she expected, the world would not stop talking about her sex tape for months. she gained the most followers she has ever done & eventually she got real modeling jobs as a result of her popularity. she hasn’t exactly told the world that she was the one who leaked the 20 minute video but everyone in their immediate circle knows she did it & also knows that she has other videos lying around for ‘ emergency ’ situations.

however, her parents cut off all contact with her following her scandal & it is still something that cuts deep two years later. she tells herself & everyone around her that she doesn’t need a family but everyone knows that’s a lie. it’s just a lie she keeps on telling herself to feel better about herself.

violet managed to clean up her act & went from being a social media influencer to an actual model. many people don’t respect her name due to her troubling past with her sex tape & being an instagram model but that doesn’t seem to stop her. she has been featured in the love advent calendar, the victoria’s secret fashion show, & many fashion weeks since then.

she became the youngest victoria’s secret angel at the age of 20 !!

she is also the youngest global ambassador for lancôme & ralph lauren !!

although she has become more of an actual model rather an instagram model, she still stays loyal to her social media platforms which is why she has over 100 million followers.

she lives a happy life after being so unhappy for so long but she still seeks her parents approval even though they have no contact with her.

personality ;;

for someone who is incredibly smart, she pretends to be dumb sometimes. she doesn’t think that guys like smart girls so she dumbs herself down. but she could also be a ditz at times ( unintentionally ).

she likes to think of herself as approachable but she also knows that she can be intimidating. nonetheless, she tries to be nice to everyone who comes her way unless they say the wrong thing to her & then she switches on her mean girl switch that comes far too easy for her.

even though violet is a lot to deal with, she is a nice person !! although she does have a flair for the dramatics & denies being dramatic all the time. she also likes to think of herself as a ‘ good girl ’ even though she is far from one. she loves sex & isn’t afraid to shy away from that but she still tells people that she’s good or an angel because it makes herself feel better about herself.

she also goes to confession 1-2 times a week to pray for her sins in order to get into heaven. she thinks with the amount of adultery she commits on a daily basis she needs to pray for her sins otherwise she won’t go to heaven & she thinks she looks way better in white than in red.

if you do her wrong, she will go out of her way to make your life a living hell. she is incredibly protective over the people in her life so she will do just about anything for them including berating people. revenge might as well be her last name !!

she may be loud and unnecessary at times but she is kind hearted and does mean well. even if she does have a bad way of showing it at times.

miscellaneous ;;

since she comes from a strict traditional upbringing, she was taught that being anything other than straight is wrong. so when violet first started experimenting with girls & even developed feelings for one, she told herself that she was going to hell. this is one of the reasons why she has not come out of the closet or has even come to terms with her sexuality. she denies all past same sex encounters & relationships which isn’t healthy. but since her parents disowned her following her sex tape, she knows that they would hate her more than they already do. if they ever found out that their daughter was anything but straight they would lose their minds & she’s still hoping that one day they could repair their relationship. apparently being bisexual is worse than having a sex tape !!

when she was a competitive gymnast for the united states national team, she was often put on strict diets in order to keep up. as a result of the strict dieting & unrealistic body images, violet developed bulimia as early as 12 years old. so when she quit gymnastics after deciding not to attend college, she was happy. she loved the sport but hated the pressure. even to this day, the sport isn’t actually sure what happened to her because she was an olympic hopeful. they all thought that she could have been the next gold medalist but she values her own mental health & sanity over a couple of medals. & even though she sought help for her eating disorder that reared ugly heads at times, she did slip up a lot while she was with her boyfriend who would make fun of her appearance. even now she isn’t 100% but she is better than she has ever been.

is extremely flirty & alluring.

violet also believes that the world revolves around her. many people may find her confidence to be annoying or superficial but she takes pride in it because it took her so long to learn how to love herself after being with her first boyfriend.

speaking of relationships, she’s terrible at them. she often runs away when things become too serious, manipulates the people she’s with, or breaks up with them for no reason. her logic is that she wants to hurt someone before they have the chance to hurt her. she still has yet to understand that the rest of the world isn’t like her ex but her past still haunts her every time she catches feelings.

she likes to tell people that monogamy isn’t the life for her which is why she prefers casual sex. she is also a proud sugar baby & has many sugar daddies !! most of them are old & married but she is a sucker for anyone who buys her nice things.

also has an instagram account for her dog !!

her most used emojis in her phone are the halo, the suggestive face, & the pink glitter heart.

she’s a gemini which means that she is expressive, quick-witted, sociable, and affectionate.

her favorite tv show is gossip girl.

her favorite movie is the notebook.

has a passion for photography but hasn’t explored it seriously. she understands that she makes a living off of being another pretty face but she also wants to explore other aspects of her career like photography & maybe even acting.

she often considers going to college or even going back to gymnastics a lot but she not made up her mind yet. she is happy right now as a model but she does miss aspects of her old life.as an instagram model, she is like kendall jenner or gigi hadid. in other words, she has a large following & people book her for photo shoots & fashion shows in order to boost their own notoriety because it looks better on their part. her walk is average at best but she does have a beautiful face. people hate instagram models working in the real modeling business as it is so they despise an instagram model with a sex tape !!

she lives in a townhouse in chelsea that has been featured in architectural digest twice. her home is filled with hardwood floors, marble, gold accents, & constantly smells like lavender.

the last concert she went to was lana del rey.

the last song she listened to was everybody loves you by charlotte lawrence.

the last show she binge watched was you.

the last movie that made her cry was tangled.

loves wellness shots after dogpound workouts.

gets daily massages by her french masseuse.

all & all, she is a mess but she loves the people in her life !!

here’s her pinterest board if you want to take a look !! i also have a wc page here that will most likely be updated over the weekend. & my discord is علياء#4067

#wealthyhq:intro #emotional abuse tw #eating disoder tw #abortion tw #hi #i def missed a lot #but kjhalsdf #love me anyway

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candy--heart · 5 years ago

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If we nominate a candidate plagued by a litany of disqualifying issues, Trump will win. We can’t make that mistake again.

---- ---- ----

JOE BIDEN

has been personally involved in nearly every bad policy decision of the last 50 years. Currently coasting on name recognition and association with Obama, he can only go down from here as people realize he is more comparable to Trump than he is to anyone else. With all the negatives of Hillary’s failed campaign but none of the positives, he would almost surely see us lose the general election again. If you love your grandchildren at all please do not vote for Biden.

TOP 5 HIGHLIGHTS:

Led the fight against desegregating schools even years after it had been proven a success and defended by Republicans [Expanded 7/6]

Voted for the disastrous Iraq War, then escalated it, then lied about it, still says he’d “do it again,” and just hired a foreign policy advisor who helped Bush orchestrate the war before joining a lobbying firm for the military-industrial complex [Expanded 8/13, 8/29, 9/6]

Wrote the racist Crime Bill that intentionally led to record-breaking mass incarceration, positioning himself to the right of even Reagan and Bush

Long history of creepily/patronizingly groping/sniffing/kissing/grabbing/condescending women and young girls just so many times, even including intimidation and continuing even now after his non-apology [Expanded 10/14, 10/29, 11/9]

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL:

Racist comments like this and this, and fondness towards if not impassioned support for so many of the worst racists and segregationists like this whom he chose to work with, as well as Republicans like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Mike Pence, and Jeb Bush. Generally has no understanding of racism in America [Expanded 7/27, 8/8, 9/13]

As part of his crusade against desegregating schools he was the only member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to block two black appointees to the Department of Justice

Has lied about marching in the Civil Rights movement multiple times, and seems to lie about attending an HBCU [Expanded 8/31, 10/29]

Horrible treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas hearing

Supports cutting Social Security and Medicare and raising the retirement age on multiple occasions, backing Paul Ryan’s efforts to do so, while voting to gut welfare

Led the disastrous War on Drugs, and somehow still opposes cannabis legalization (while simultaneously trying to destroy the growing industry by handing it over to the Big Pharma), yet two of his children escaped consequences for drug use [Expanded 8/31]

Pushed to expand death penalty, even to those on drug charges

Opposes Medicare for All while he and his campaign lie about it what it would entail, and wants to bring back penalizing those who can’t afford to pay for private insurance. He continues to praise Big Pharma to his ultra-wealthy donors and is the only candidate to refuse to meet with disabled healthcare activist Ady Barkan [Expanded 7/6, 7/27, 9/21, 10/14]

Personally fought to make cancer medication unaffordable for patients in developing nations [Added 10/14]

Opposed equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community even very recently, only eventually coming around just 7 short years ago, and is still awkward at best on the issue [Expanded 9/22, 10/14]

Supported the NRA in passing massive anti-gun control legislation, and has blamed videos games for mass shootings multiple times [Expanded 8/5]

Opposes meaningful action on the climate crisis like the Green New Deal, instead pursuing the “middle ground” while his campaign attacks publications for accurately reporting this

He’s rated D- by Greenpeace in part because he supports fracking, oil and gas exportation, and the building of new fossil fuel infrastructure, and his campaign shot down the proposed climate debate and skipped MSNBC’s climate forum [Added 8/23, Expanded 9/6, 9/16]

Plagiarized fossil fuel groups’ language in his woefully inadequate climate crisis plan after his climate advisor made $1 million from one natural gas company alone. He then made uncomfortable physical contact with and rudely dismissed a young woman who asked him about this [Expanded 10/14]

Broke his own pledge to not accept fossil fuel money by attending a fundraiser hosted by his former advisor and current oil corporation co-founder/owner Andrew Goldman, and lied about it twice [Added 9/6, Clarified/Expanded 9/7, 10/14]

Voted to expand deportations and indefinite detention for immigrants multiple times and opposed amnesty for immigrants and supports requiring them to learn English

As VP his administration deported more people than any other in American history, deporting people at a higher rate than Trump’s administration even according to ICE themselves, and expanding the anti-immigrant system Trump now uses by 3,600%. He still refuses to answer for this and has gone as far as calling the police on immigration activists for passing out flyers [Expanded 7/9, 10/14]

As VP his administration built the inhumane concentration camps in which children separated from their families are still illegally caged, beginning the practice which Trump has now continued and resulting in the ongoing lawsuit claiming that ICE is violating the Flores Agreement by not providing basics like toothpaste and soap [Added 7/9]

Voted to build border walls and supported sending military to the border long before Trump

Voted to ban immigrants with HIV, locking Haitian refugees up in Guantanamo Bay

Spearheaded the Alliance for Prosperity which increased deportations, border militarization, privatization, and oil pipelines for American exploitation while worsening the refugee crisis

Architected Plan Colombia, internationalizing the War On Drugs resulting in mass death, displacement, and destruction of food crops, while opening the country to US business interests

Sides with Trump in backing right-wing coup in Venezuela

Voted to authorize invasion of the Netherlands if an American is tried for war crimes by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, refusal to participate in UN peacekeeping unless the US obtains immunity, and withdrawal of aid to countries that ratify ICC treaty

Supports Israel’s right-wing regime and apartheid in Palestine purely to protect US interests. A self-described Zionist, he blames Palestinians for multiple US-backed Israeli massacres, including an attack that killed 9 peace activists. Calls BDS “anti-semitic” and has a 100% rating from AIPAC [Expanded 7/4]

Recklessly threatens nuclear war with North Korea

Sided with banks to overturn Glass-Steagall and deregulate, leading to financial crisis, and has dishonestly tried to take credit for the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau despite actually helping strip state consumer protection [Expanded 10/18]

Led the disastrous Bankruptcy Bill resulting in increased debt and specifically fought to make student loan debt more difficult to live with before dismissing the plight of Millennials who are now the most indebted generation ever [Expanded 8/26]

Lied about his own student debt multiple times, his own scholarship, and his own academic achievements, and has not proposed any plans to make public college tuition free or to abolish student debt [Added 8/26]

Voted against abolishing the electoral college that undemocratically elected Bush and Trump

Took $200,000 to help a Republican beat a Democrat to Congress despite being anti-abortion

Voted against enhancing labor protection enforcements

Voted for NAFTA, supports TPP, is generally to the right of Trump on trade, and argued against the prediction that China would become an economic competitor [Expanded 9/13]

Works with union-busters, voted to cut union pensions, continues to snub unions, and is generally bad for workers [Expanded 10/14]

Consistently sides with special interests and corporations against antitrust regulation and voted for the first antitrust exemption since 1922

Opposes net neutrality

Driving force behind the Patriot Act, supports warrantless wiretaps / mass surveillance while his son partially owns the Chinese government’s Islamophobic mass surveillance system [Edited 9/13]

Personally tried to prevent Ecuador from providing asylum for Edward Snowden

Says the CIA torture report is not a “black stain on this country” but a “badge of honor”

Worsened the opioid epidemic and made it harder to treat

Wants to make up reasons to jail anyone associated with a rave and literally bulldoze it down while his RAVE legislation lets kids die from preventable drug overdoses

Was the only senator to vote against expanding a child care tax credit [Added 7/29]

Has questionable electability based on receiving less than 0.22% in 3 previous Democratic primary elections. He has a history of insulting voters and is currently skipping major party events, hiding from the press, and holding only between a quarter and half as many public events as his rivals

Has questionable electability based on his infamous propensity for awkward “gaffes,” including many, many, many, many, many, many, many in this election cycle alone, to the point where he is literally unable to campaign [Added 8/9, Expanded 8/11, 8/13, 8/15, 8/23, 8/24, 9/2, 9/17, 10/14]

Plagiarized law school papers and campaign speeches (in which he lied about having coal miner roots), which ended his 1988 presidential run

His anti-progressive campaign surrogate Ed Rendell is a sexist, pro-fracking, pro-AIPAC Fox News supporter who approved bombing a black neighborhood in Philadelphia, killing 5 children and 6 adults [Added 6/26]

Used Charlottesville as a prop in his campaign video despite never even visiting once

Lied about getting shot down in Iraq and experiences in Afghanistan [Added 8/31]

Has no plan to reform the court system or counter its Republican takeover, has proposed re-nominating the failed Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, a nearly 70 year-old “moderate” who has opposed voting rights and human rights for Guantanamo detainees, and is fine with Kavanaugh remaining on the Supreme Court for life [Added 7/6, Expanded 9/16]

Is still openly courting Republican billionaires for donations, including John Catsimatidis, who’s compared taxing the wealthy to Nazi persecution of Jews

Endorsed by Alan Dershowitz, the millionaire Trump supporter accused of taking part in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring, after Biden’s son ensured a similar billionaire pedophile avoided prison after raping his own toddler

Voted to deregulate the credit card industry while a credit card company was his top donor from 1989–2000 and then hired his son

His administration awarded a $1.5 billion contract to his brother’s construction firm despite his brother having no prior residential construction experience

Has a long history of generally Trump-esque nepotism that he refuses to address [Added 10/14]

Broke his own pledge to take over 2x more money than Trump from lobbyists and special interests, including at least 13 billionaires, has the same general donor base as Trump, and very openly partakes in general corruption [Expanded 8/5, 8/11, 8/23, 10/14]

Flip-flopped on his initial opposition to using Super PACs and established one with military industrial complex and private healthcare lobbyists, even after admitting, “You shouldn’t accept any money from a Super PAC, because people can’t possibly trust you” just one year prior [Added 10/25]

His Senate chief of staff is now running Fox News’ lobbying operation [Added 10/14]

Hasn’t released any tax returns since 2015, which people seem to care about now [On 7/9 he released them to no media attention, revealing an $11 million increase in income in his first year out of office alone]

Seems to have found a loophole to avoid paying his interns [Added 7/12]

Unconvincingly co-opted Bernie’s education plan and slogan, and a Biden PAC plagiarized Kamala Harris’ slogan for its name

Despite his supposed frontrunner status he is a distant 5th in individual donors, raising questions of electability [Added 10/14]

“A lot of us sit around thinking up ways to vote conservative just so we don’t come out with a liberal rating. I’m really quite conservative…”

Meghan and the McCain family and Strom Thurmond have endorsed him, and Trump has donated to him

The worst part? He’s still not sorry for any of this (but wants a black man to apologize to him)

#bidrn #joe biden

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lenakluthor · 6 years ago

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i’m sorting through some political things so i’m gonna put this under a read more but i have some Thoughts that i just wanna get out

right, so i grew up very republican. like. ultra conservative. until very recently, i considered myself conservative. i cared about one issue, and one issue only. in my eyes, if you didn’t support that one thing, nothing else mattered. (i’m not gonna get into that because it’s a v v unpopular opinion that i still hold but i digress)

but here’s the thing. i grew up republican. i was basically told how it was. that being liberal or being a democrat meant that you were some crazy hippie who thought everyone should get free handouts and that the only way to solve problems was to sit in a circle and sing kum-ba-ya.

i just read a conversation between AOC and greta thunberg. an oil company literally proved climate change and then funded campaigns to put doubt into the media. the entire reason people didn’t believe climate change was real was because the oil companies didn’t want you to. i read that and it blew my mind.

here’s the thing. being liberal doesn’t mean you’re in denial, like i was taught to believe. it means you care about people. i don’t know if it’s always been like this, but conservatives really only care about keeping things easy for corporations in the name of economy when in reality, it’s just a veiled attempt to keep the rich, rich.

a wage you can live on without living paycheck to paycheck. access to healthcare. an environment and economy that supports the earth we inhabit. access to education without crippling debt. these are all things i believe in. my parents consider this radically liberal. why? to me, that sounds like something the USA should literally already have. most conservatives think this is giving people free handouts.

idk maybe it’s because i grew up in the upper middle class. tbh, i consider my parents wealthy. and yeah, i do believe you should work for your money, but honestly. after living the life i’ve lived now that i’m out on my own, that’s not even the half of it. the system doesn’t support the american dream. “work hard and you’ll get the picket fence” i go to work every day. i make $12/hr. the idea that you can live on one job just isn’t realistic right now.

i lost my job because of anxiety. i’m on thin fucking ice rn with my current job because of anxiety. there are zero programs in place to support people with mental illness. you lose your job because of something largely out of your control? tough guess you’re gonna be homeless with no way to earn to money.

i grew up being taught that people who are homeless and people on welfare and unemployment were drug addicts or low lifes that were just looking for handouts. from what i understand, that’s literally what conservatives believe. that’s what i believed until recently.

idk if any of this makes any sense i’m just rambling. i guess it just blows my mind how many lies i was fed growing up by the republican party. now that i’ve been living on my own for a little bit it’s just.... it’s mind blowing how broken our government is and how the system is structured. there’s a reason they call it the 1%.

gjdfkaljgdkal idk i’m just working through shit if you’ve read this far you’re an angel i don’t even know what i’m trying to say i’ll probably delete this i just work through shit better when i write it down anyway ily stay green

#katie speaks #politics tw #idk what this is #truly i have no idea #to delete

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glenngaylord · 6 years ago

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HUSTLE & BLOW - My Review of SAUVAGE/WILD (3 1/2 Stars)

I’ll never forget the buttplug scene. Not because it’s disturbing and somewhat graphic, but because it prompted my favorite indignant Writers Guild walk-out I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing, and there have been many. As soon as things got hot and heavy, a woman across the aisle from me stood up, waved her arms furiously, and muttered, “I CAN NOT E-V-E-N!!!” And here, my friends, is why good, challenging films can’t have Oscars!

The delicate sensibilities of professional writers notwithstanding, SAUVAGE/WILD, the debut feature of writer/director Camille Vidal-Naquet, traces the downward spiral of a young, gay street hustler in small town France and it pulls no punches. It’s a dour, violent, explicit, drug-fueled tale of a man who for better or for worse (and let’s face it, he leans into worse), lives life on his own terms. The unnamed hustler called Leo in the credits and played by the remarkable Félix Maritaud (KNIFE + HEART, BPM) spends his time turning tricks, dancing in clubs, squatting in crack dens or sleeping on curbs. Leo pines after a fellow hustler, dynamically played by Eric Bernard, who does “gay for pay” only and has attached himself to a wealthy, older gentleman.

Leo also faces some looming health issues yet charges forward from one horrific incident to the next. Vidal-Naquet, however, manages to instill this upsetting film with a lot of unexpected tenderness, whether it’s coming from his crush, a fellow gay hustler, and in one breathtaking moment, a female doctor who allows Leo the space to speak his truth. The film feels like a direct descendant of the late, great Agnès Varda’s 1985 film, VAGABOND, which told the story of a homeless female drifter. Both films share the DNA of a propulsive docu-style of storytelling and a difficult but empathetic lead character. I’m also reminded of the New Queer Cinema films of the 1990s, such as HEAD ON and THE LIVING END, which also pointed its cameras at people living on the edge.

Despite the similarities, SAUVAGE/WILD has its own voice. It’s harsh and brutal, but Leo has agency and owns every decision he makes. The world may want to fix him, but he has other plans. He’s aware of the horrors, but also feels alive whenever he charges into the flames. One person’s existentialist nightmare may be another’s paradise. Think of Alex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. After all of the brainwashing, the change in appearance and attitude, don’t you think he was way more interesting and fun as a practitioner of the old ultra-violence? SAUVAGE/WILD risks asking this same question. You may not like Leo’s decisions or actions, but they’re his, not yours.

The film also benefits from some incredible cinematography by Jacques Girault. Yes, many scenes feature the usual handheld camera, but then we’re thrust into evocative strobing images in a club, or beautifully framed scenes by the park roads where the hustlers work. Still, it’s not a film for everyone. It often feels stuck on repeat as Leo’s life goes from one dark moment to the next, and it has plenty of nudity and some really aggressive sex. It also has plenty of bloody violence, yet spares us the most intense of these episodes, showing us only the aftermath. Did I mention there’s lots of sex? If on-camera thrusting and blow jobs aren’t your jam, you might want to go down the hall and watch MISSING LINK instead. And yes, that buttplug scene may end up as notorious as the peach scene in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, but for me, its unforgettable quality lies in how Leo responds to every humiliating demand of his sociopathic johns.

Credit goes, however, to Félix Maritaud for injecting his character with empathy and heartbreaking fragility. He allows that vulnerability to peak out in key moments, yet it never feels overly sentimental. It’s as if he’s letting a little of angst out so he can steel himself for whatever comes next. Leo also has no issues kissing his clients, a line most hustlers won’t cross. It’s as if his character will accept love and affection anywhere he can get it. Camille Vidal-Naquet reportedly spent a few years researching the lives of hustler in order to write his screenplay and it shows in the ways they interact with their customers. You may wince at the methods they employ to drug and rob one client, but it also feels very believable.

I admired this film’s unblinking determination to give us something new in this gritty, tried and true genre. Leo lives for the moment, seemingly relishing not having a road map. Not everyone will want to follow him in his freefall, but, as it turns out,  I CAN E-V-E-N!

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ppdoddy · 4 years ago

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Michael Moore

AN OPEN LETTER TO JOE BIDEN Dear President-Elect Biden:

First of all, congratulations! YOU did it. WE did it! You stopped the madness. A grateful nation - and myself - are in a state of joy, hope and relief. Thank you for that! We are all eager to join with you to repair the damage done to our country — and to eliminate that about our society and our politics which gave us Donald Trump in the first place.

Mr. President-Elect, I first met you at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004. It was clear to me from our talk that day that you were not the politician I remembered from the 1990s. On that day in Boston, we were by then over a year into the Iraq War, a war you voted for. My “Fahrenheit 9/11“ had just come out and you wanted to let me know that you were aware of the folly you had been sucked into. It seemed to me that you were doing a lot of soul searching and you wanted to hear my thoughts. To be honest, I was distracted by how perfect your teeth were, and I wondered, could you really be from the working class? By the end of our talk I was convinced there was something that was quite real and very good about you, though perhaps somewhat buried inside. Would it ever come out so the public could see it? As I reflect today on it - and you - I am sincerely hoping that you will indeed govern as a president who’s from the working class. You - one of us - in the White House. That’s how it should feel. Your actions, if bold, and brave, will make that true.

You are also our second Catholic president. I believe you are a person of faith. You and I were taught the same lessons in Catholic school: to love our neighbor, even our enemy; to create a world where everyone regardless of status or station has a seat at the table, and everyone gets a slice of the pie; a world where “the rich man will have a harder time getting into heaven than a camel will have getting through the eye of the needle.” We were taught that we will be judged by how we treat the least amongst us. Do I have that right? Are these not the moral, foundational principles of the coming Biden presidency?

I was so moved by your victory speech Saturday night when you told the immigrants and the children of immigrants that the Dreamers no longer had to live in fear. That Muslims were once again welcomed into our country. That the world could breathe a sigh of relief because we were going to let the planet Earth itself breathe and have some relief. And you told the teachers of America that starting January 20th, “one of your own will be living in the White House.” That just felt instantly good.

So if I may, I’d like to suggest a few things that might make your presidency one of the best this country has ever had. You and I may have our political differences (you like Amtrak trains, I’d like to ride a bullet train from New York to LA in 10 hours!😎), but I know that you and I - and tens of millions of others - all want and believe in the same basic things: • Health Care is a human right and every American must be covered; • Everyone must be paid a living wage and all of us must work to eliminate poverty and rebuild our broken middle class; • The massive and growing gulf between the ultra rich and everyone else must be narrowed — and the wealthy must go back to paying the taxes they should pay; • Women must be paid the same as men, and no man or government has the right to tell them what they can do or not do with their bodies.

So here’s my two cents:

1. You are right to make containing Covid-19 Job #1. Had Trump won, I’m guessing up to a million people in the next year or so would have died from him ignoring this virus. Yesterday you named your Covid task force of doctors and scientists and you are putting them to work. We don’t have a second to lose. Thank you for this.

2. As soon as you can, please provide much more unemployment relief for the jobless, stimulus checks for all, help for small businesses, and the creation of jobs we desperately need.

3. Millions have lost their health insurance because our system ties one’s health coverage to their employer. What happens when the employer, like now, is suddenly gone, or the boss wakes up one morning and decides these employees’ health benefits are too costly and must be cut? BOOM! Millions of families suddenly have no health insurance. This is nuts.

You MUST create a health system like every other industrial democracy — one backed by the government, not by the whims of the boss where you work or the pandemic that has shut him or her down. This is just plain common sense.

4. I see various people trying to take credit for your victory — and using their personal agendas to push you away from the progressive Left and toward the cowardly center which believes that the best way to beat Republicans is to just be a more easily-digestible version of Republicans. They think because Trump got 70 million votes the Democrats should reject Black Lives Matter, AOC, and anything that vaguely sounds like socialism — at a time when the majority of our citizens under the age of 35, according to most polls, prefer the idea of democratic socialism over the greed of modern-day capitalism. Why risk losing them? We need to listen to and understand why they feel this way. They’ve been saddled with crushing student debt and we’ve handed them a planet In the middle of its 6th extinction event as their future. You and Barack introduced them to the benefits of democratic socialism by letting them stay on their parents health insurance until they’re 26! The result: They just set a record by coming out and voting for you in the largest youth numbers ever.

But you know all this. And you also know how you won these razor-thin victories in the final five states as we nervously watched the final ballots come in from Black Philly, Black Detroit, Black Atlanta, Black Flint. Out west, it was Latinx and Navajo voters who delivered Nevada and Arizona to you. In your speech on Saturday you acknowledged it. And never in our history have I heard a President-elect single out the Black community and thank them “for having my back. And I promise you, I will have your back!” Black and brown and indigenous peoples, plus a landslide of women and young adult voters made this happen. Wow. I absolutely know you’ll keep that promise.

5. Please do not make the same mistake an otherwise well-meaning President Obama made in his first two years. He wanted everyone to get along. He was willing to compromise on anything. Kumbaya. The Republicans had already decided they were going to block EVERYTHING Obama proposed and that’s exactly what they did for eight long years with a discipline and a ruthlessness we should probably envy.

Don’t let this happen to you. Charge in on January 20th like FDR on steroids. You have no choice. People are dying! You need to sign executive orders and cajole, demand and shame Congress into action. And GO BIG! Eliminate the Electoral College through the National Popular Vote Act! DONE! Ratify the Equal Rights Amendment for women! Just one more state needed! DONE! Send in the Army Corps of Engineers to Flint to replace the poisoned water pipes! DONE!!

And none of the above needs a single vote of the United States Senate! In fact, this past summer, your “Biden-Bernie” unity joint task force identified a whopping 277 policies and decisions of Trump’s that you have the legal authority to immediately reverse by executive order or presidential policy decision https://prospect.org/…/277-policies-biden-need-not-ask-per…/. Find that big fat black marker of his and do it!

But, yes, we also desperately need those two Georgia Senate seats to get the Biden/Harris years off to a blazing start. So let’s make that happen! All hands on deck between now and January 5th!! We will all do whatever is needed.

Friends of mine on the Left who are more cynical than I am are probably wondering why I’m sending you this letter. Haha! Well, because I saw you kiss the head of that young grieving man at the Parkland, Florida memorial for the shooting victims of Stoneman Douglas High School. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMa96yOel0

And because I saw you in New Hampshire this year while we were there working for Bernie, and you were doing a campaign stop and there was a restless five-year boy in the front row. His parents were trying to get him to settle down. You stopped and spoke to the boy. “Hey buddy,” you said in a kind but parental way, “if you can hang on and be a good boy for just a little bit, I’ll buy ya an ice cream!” The boy quieted down, you wrapped up and afterward you went over to the boy and his parents and you gave the kid five bucks so his mom and dad could go get him an ice cream cone. And I thought to myself, this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen — and then I started to cry because I wanted so much for that piece of America to come back — goofy, kind, and focusing on what’s truly important: a goddamned ice cream cone!

I think that’s why you won. People saw what I saw with you there in New Hampshire and back in Boston on that day 16 years ago — they knew that maybe, just maybe, their lives might just get a bit better - hopefully a LOT better - with you in the White House. Maybe less of them will die from the virus, this preventable horror. Trump, of whom we knew many despicable things and thought we’d already seen how low the bar could possibly go for one human being — but we never considered him under the moniker of mass killer, terrorist or superspreader. Then you, Joe, came along and offered us a respite, a break from the insanity — “Mr. Biden, we’ll be happy if you just give us four years of ‘Not Trump!’”

But I think you can give us much more than that. What could our lives be like in four years or eight years (with a Democratic Senate to boot)? How ‘bout no one ever goes bankrupt again because they got sick? How ‘bout no one is sitting in a prison cell for possessing marijuana or actual drugs? How ‘bout every child gets to go to a great school and every neighborhood has an expanded free library open seven days a week? How ‘bout paid family medical leave so you can take care of your elderly parents and not lose your job? How ‘bout my bullet train! You and we can make all this happen. It’s not rocket science. 30+ other countries already do it. (https://www.amazon.com/Where-Invade-Next-Micha…/…/B01EGW9EOU) They’re happier. Why not us? Our founders promised it to us in their second sentence: “the pursuit of Happiness.“ They said that’s what America would be — and it’s been a rare day when we’ve actually had a glimpse of it.

Joe, you’re the guy to fulfill the promise. I’ll help. So will my neighbors on the floor where I live. As will the woman who delivers my mail, the workers who stock the shelves of my neighborhood market, the nurse who just wrote me in tears because yesterday she watched her 22nd patient die, alone, no family allowed, from Covid. Not to mention the millions upon millions of Americans who are ready to be foot soldiers in your army of justice, equality and love. We’re all in! We don’t want to go back to the old “normal.” We want a new normal!

We want ice cream.

All my best, Michael Moore

P.S. You know why I think you can and will do this? You picked Kamala Harris to run with you! Ranked as the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate. A woman. A Black woman! I saw the first debate, the one where she challenged you and threw shade on your younger self. Most people (including me), if that had happened to us, we probably wouldn’t have gotten over it. You did. I’m guessing your conscience whispered to you, “well, dang, maybe she has a point.” You hold no grudges. You are a forgiving soul. But then you didn’t just forgive her — you put her on the Big Ticket! Who would do that? You did! That’s why my cautious, hopeful bet is on the good hands we’re now in — both your hands, Kamala’s hands, and the hands of the mass millions who voted for you and will continue to rise up and fight for this new, better, post-Trump, post-pandemic America.

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marcjampole · 7 years ago

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Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains fills in blanks in Jane Mayer’s Dark Money narrative

According to the standard leftwing narrative about the current dominance of Republicans on both the state and national levels is that the economic rightwing has contrived a deal with racists and social conservatives (among which groups there is some but not complete overlap) by which the ultra-wealthy have manipulated poor and middle class whites to vote against their own economic interests while seeking to disenfranchise large groups of left-looking voters. It’s a storyline which I think pretty accurately describes American politics over the past three decades.

Duke University history professor Nancy MacLean, however, makes a strong case in Democracy in Chains, that the techniques for gaining absolute power and the ultimate objective of the Koch, Mercer, Anschutz, Bradley, DeVos, Prince and other ultra-rich, ultra-right families derive from the original racist reaction to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed segregation of the races in public schools.

According to MacLean, the key figure in transforming the reactions of segregationists to the working game plan of the 21st Republican Party was James McGill Buchanan, who stands out among Nobel Prize winners for Economics for his focus on theory and disuse of empirical evidence. His great contribution was to bring economic ideas into the realm of politics, primarily through what is called the “public choice theory,” primarily the idea that individuals always behave in politics in their own best interests. While at the University of Virginia, Buchanan put together the plan in Virginia to resist segregation by ending public schools and giving parents vouchers for private schools. Later he founded the Center for the Study of Public Choice, into which the Koch brothers poured millions of dollars. Once Buchanan transferred the program to George Mason University, the focus shifted from educating thinkers to dispute the constitutional thought that led to Brown v. Board to training operatives for the far-flung network of think tanks and lobbying groups funded by the Kochs and their pals. This network, which includes the Cato Institute, the Mt. Pelerin Society, the Heritage Foundation, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Reason Foundation, among others, spews out deceptive information and ideas on a variety of matters such as healthcare policy, gun rights, climate change, school policy and public sector employment. You see their bogus work all the time as opinion or expert pieces in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Atlantic and elsewhere.

Underlying the convoluted gobbledygook of public choice theory is the basic belief that the majority should never constrain the minority. Public choice theory “elevates property rights as to paralyze the use of government for democratically determined goals,” as MacLean puts it. At the same time, public choice theory insists on the primacy of individual players, believing that collections of individuals, such as unions and other special interest groups, too often get their priorities approved by government, a terrible situation for Buchanan, Koch and others if it leads to any constraint on property. Buchanan and his ilk (disciples all of Hayek and Milton Friedman) want the government to operate like an absolute free market—each entity representing only itself, even if a small number of ultra-wealthy entities can therefore control everything.

Constraint of the majority was the original Southerners’ idea during the debate on the Constitution to prevent the growing, non-slave-owning North from gaining too much power through the federal government, leading to the Electoral College, Senate and the counting of slaves as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. Later it became the basis for all segregationist arguments, and still later the rationale for the opposition to environmental regulations, higher taxes on the wealthy, LGBTQ rights and a variety of other policies approved by a majority of Americans. In its extreme, as presented by Buchanan (and co-author Gordon Tullock) in The Calculus of Consent, it means that only those who agree to being taxed for public schools or building a road should pay and only programs with unanimous consent of all governed can be implemented by the government.

MacLean reports that after losing the battle against integration, Buchanan and some associates used what she calls Leninist ideas to put together a stealth plan to inject public choice theory into the mainstream of American political thinking and to turn the United States into the type of oligarchy that existed in Virginia and other southern states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The plan seems to follow the lead of corporate mobilization called for in Lewis Powell’s famous 1971 memo in which the future Supreme Court Justice calls for corporate American take a more aggressive role in shaping America’s social and political ideas. It’s not mentioned by MacLean, but the process that Buchanan outlined and the Kochs and their pals funded seems right out of socialist G. William Domhoff’s public policy model. In simplified terms: rich folk put together foundations and think tanks, which propose ideas that rich folk find politicians to endorse; once elected, the politicians form commissions and committees on which sit the rich folks’ experts to promulgate the policies and laws that the rich folk wanted in the first place. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/Sounds like the plot of Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, required reading for anyone interested in learning why our democracy has been commandeered for the benefit of a few ultra-wealthy and very selfish families.

Right-wingers have panned MacLean’s book, asserting that she made a selective use of Buchanan’s work, citing what damned him as an anti-democratic racist and ignoring other evidence that suggests otherwise. But as with the more than 150-year-old defense of the racist and strategically mediocre Robert E. Lee, the defense is based on snippets in an ocean of information. Democracy in Chains joins Dark Money, Domhoff’s Who Rules America Now and The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy and C. Wright Mill’s The Power Elite as essential reading to understand how rich folk manage to always get their way in the United States, even if their way hurts just about everyone else.

#democracy darkmoney @republicans

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theliterateape · 5 years ago

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Hope Idiotic | Part 40

By David Himmel

Hope Idiotic is a serialized novel. Catch each new part every week on Monday and Thursday.

LOU AND MARK DRANK BEERS AT DOUBLE SHOT, the next-best local hole in the wall since Zigler’s Tavern was overrun by the ultra hip. On a Thursday night, Double Shot was busy with the perfect mixture of hipsters, frat boys and after-work stiffs. Lou and Mark liked it for its patron variety—a slice of Chicago life—the food, the affordable drink specials and the friendly waitresses.

It had been three months since Lou last saw and spoke to Michelle, but it seemed that every single conversation he and Mark had somehow led back to her. While Mark debated the benefits of L.A. and New York, Lou managed to connect Mark’s future to Michelle’s past.

“We never went to New York. We talked about it but never went. I wonder whether Michelle will move to L.A. She talked about that all the time; how she wanted to be closer to her parents and where it was warmer. Her firm has an office out there. God, wouldn’t that be weird if you and Michelle both moved to L.A.? I don’t know, I hate to think that Michelle…”

Mark slapped Lou across the face.

“What the fuck!”

“That’s it. No more.”

“No more what?”

“Every time you say her name, I’m going to smack you. Right across the face.”

“What? Michelle?” Mark slapped him again. “Oh, come on!”

“You have got to stop talking about her. You need to start moving on.”

It wasn’t that Lou was hung up on Michelle, it was that the past three years of his life had been so focused around her. She was central to everything, and it was all he had to talk about. Talking about anything before The Age of Michelle seemed entirely out of context. That’s the hardest part about breakups: finding a new definition of yourself. Since the breakup, Lou had continued sinking in a sea of whiskey and cigarette smoke while searching for that new definition among the fragments of the past three years. He didn’t talk about Michelle because he missed her; he talked about her because he didn’t know how not to.

“All right. Jesus,” Lou said. “No more Michelle.” SLAP! The sip of beer he had just taken shot out of his mouth and sprayed across the bar. “Goddammit!”

“Are you boys okay over here?” asked the cute waitress who had been serving them for the past two hours.

“We’re fine,” Mark said. “I’m just breaking my friend of a bad habit.”

“What habit would that be?”

“Talking too much,” he said.

“Okay then. Can I get you boys some more beers? It’ll help keep you quiet.” She looked at Lou and flirtatiously touched his arm. “Maybe some ice for your face?”

“Is it swelling up? Jesus, Mark.”

“No, sweetie, it’s fine. I’m just teasing you. Another round?”

“Yes, please,” Mark said.

“Did you see that? She was flirting with me,” Lou said.

“She flirts with everyone. That’s how she makes her money. Be careful of waitresses and female bartenders. They care less about you than strippers and work twice as hard to get you to like them.”

When she returned with the beers a few moments later, Lou asked her name.

“Niki,” she said.

“Niki, you are the best waitress we’ve ever had here. And we’re here all the time. Are you new?”

“Nope. I’ve been here about a year.”

“How is it possible that we’ve never seen you before?”

“I usually work the day shift. I have another waitressing job across town.”

“I guess we’ll have to start coming in here for lunch.”

“You’re getting creepy,” Mark said.

Niki smiled. “No, he’s fine. But unfortunately, this is my last day. I start a new job tomorrow.”

“Another bar?” Lou asked.

“Nope. A real, big-girl job. I’m going to be an assistant editor for a magazine.”

Lou’s eyes grew wide. “How about that,” Mark said.

“Which magazine?”

“Chicago Style.”

“Sure! I know that rag. It’s all society and fashion and travel.”

“That’s the one,” she said.

“You use freelancers?”

“Of course. That’s how I got the job.”

“Well, look I’m a writer, and if it’s okay I’ll send you some pitches, and you can throw some work my way, or both.” He dug into his wallet and pulled out a sad-looking homemade business card.

“Oh, that’s great! We’re getting ready to start putting together the next issue, so yeah, we’ll need some good story ideas. I’ll definitely email you.”

She asked if she could get them anything else at the moment, then returned to her other tables.

“Don’t let anyone ever tell you that nothing good comes out of drinking yourself stupid in a bar,” Lou said.

“You got a story in mind?”

“I don’t know. I did a little blog writing for a minute a while back for this interior-design guy. He does some pretty interesting stuff. Could be something there.” Mark gave him a look of uncertainty. “Hey, it’s not a column in Vanity Fair, but it’s a gig. And it’s a writing gig. Step by step. This wouldn’t have happened if I were still with Mich…” Mark raised his hand. “This wouldn’t have happened if I were still with What’s-her-face.” Mark took hold of his beer glass and raised it up in a toast. Lou did the same. “Shots?”

✶

LOU WAS ABLE TO WRITE HIS STORIES FOR CHICAGO STYLE AT THE SHEET-METAL SHOP since business was so slow—the economy had affected the construction industry, as well; America as a whole, was on hold. The editor in chief loved his first piece on the interior designer. When the magazine hit the stands, Lou grabbed a free copy from one of the kiosks on the street. Seeing his name in a byline again made him feel incredible, like he belonged to the huddled masses. He went home that night and sent an email to every other Chicago magazine editor he could think of with clips of his stuff, including his most recent piece, asking them to keep him in mind for any assignments they have lying around and to forward their editorial calendars along so he could create story pitches to fit with each editor’s plan.

The work slowly came in. There wasn’t a magazine for which he wouldn’t write. There was Chicago Style, Chicago Brides, Chicago Agent, a rag for real estate agents about the real estate business, Avenue Magazine, a high-end society glossy, which seemed to exist solely for the city’s wealthy elite to be able to read stories about themselves. The stories were fluff pieces, advertorial junk, restaurant, bar and hotel reviews, travel stories about golf courses, and B & Bs that he never had visited, profiles of the movers and shakers throughout Chicagoland. It wasn’t the kind of writing for which he wanted to be known when he died, but he was racking up a few extra hundred bucks a month. Lou was back in the game.

And then he received an email from the HR manager at a small marketing/advertising agency called Spark. It did a lot of packaging, product development and brand marketing. The HR manager said she was looking for a copywriter to add to the team. She said she found his résumé on ProCore.

Holy shit, he thought. ProCore actually worked.

The company’s office was located in the West Loop in an old loft building that used to house the world’s leading casket manufacturer. His interview was held inside of a small conference room that had been where the oven that dried the casket’s wood stain had been. The room’s door was a giant metal fire door that required an inordinate amount of effort to open and close it. Lou liked the old industrial look of the office. It inspired the idea of manufacturing creativity—blood and sweat of the mind rather than with the body.

He had called in sick to Don at the shop so he could attend the interview. He managed to avoid drinking anything the night before to make sure he was at his best for the interview. It took him twenty minutes to fix his tie since he wanted to get it perfect. He styled his hair three different ways before settling on the way he usually wore it; casually combed over. Nothing could be out of place. Lou had to give the impression of his life. And he did. Despite his tendency to joke himself out of countless good situations when important matters were on the line, Lou charmed and impressed the HR manager. She pulled in the agency’s creative director, a friendly and confident guy named Ted, to meet with Lou. Ultimately, Lou’s employment was Ted’s decision and after an hour-long conversation, Lou had the job.

The smile never left Lou’s face as he rode the bus back to the apartment. The HR manager was at first impressed with his wide range of experience. Ted was looking for a clever mind to join the small creative team at Spark, which was made up of Ted and two designers. The crash had hurt the agency, and Ted was well aware that his may be the only one hiring creatives, but for it to survive, he said, it needed to provide its remaining clients with the best work possible and be ready when more work began coming in. That, and he wanted a writer who was going to approach the work from a different perspective. Ted was tired of working with copywriters who had spent their careers in advertising and who prayed daily to the almighty power of the Apple brand. Lou’s inexperience as an agency writer was a benefit. The compilation of his media, marketing, corporate communications and journalism was ideal. His starting salary was sixty thousand dollars a year, more than he’d ever made. He would begin as soon as he could gracefully walk away from the sheet-metal shop.

It was late afternoon when he got home, and he was excited to call Don, apologize for lying about being sick, admit to going on an interview and let him know that he would work another two weeks while Don found a replacement estimator. But first, he called Chuck to share the good news. Someone answered in Spanish, and Lou’s gut twisted as he remembered that Chuck wasn’t answering phone calls anymore. He quickly hung up and called me while he poured himself a glass of scotch.

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX Part X Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21 Part 22 Part 23 Part 24 Part 25 Part 26 Part 27 Part 28 Part 29 Part 30 Part 31 Part 32 Part 33 Part 34 Part 35 Part 36 Part 37 Part 38

#David Himmel Author #Hope Idiotic #David Himmel Novel #Fiction #Bildungsroman #Dark Humor

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joannrochaus · 6 years ago

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British Airways jet lands in wrong country on purpose

Listen to The Daily Article Podcast, then subscribe.

When you’re in London, Düsseldorf, Germany, is 357 miles to the east. Edinburgh, Scotland, is 403 miles to the north. If you’re flying to Düsseldorf, you’d not expect your airplane to land in Edinburgh.

But that’s just what happened Monday.

The aviation company operating British Airways Flight 3271 filed the wrong flight plan, sending the jet to Edinburgh. The pilots, cabin crew, and air traffic controllers thus assumed the plane was supposed to go to Scotland.

When they landed, confusion ensued. Flight attendants asked for a show of hands of passengers who thought they were traveling to Düsseldorf. When every hand went up, they realized that every passenger was now in the wrong place.

We can be both sincere and wrong

There are many ways to be sincerely wrong today.

Same-sex marriage supporters are convinced that biblical, moral, or religious liberty objections are irrelevant or wrong. The same is true with abortion advocates. Their claims seem simple and persuasive: “Everyone should be able to love who they love,” “A woman is the best person to decide what to do with her own body,” and so on.

It is easy to be sincerely wrong. In The Daily Article today, “British Airways jet lands in wrong country on purpose,” I explore some examples that affect our souls and culture, inviting us to engage our world with redemptive love. https://t.co/XGs9GUKpZl pic.twitter.com/pPal3vwiJp

— Jim Denison (@JimDenison) March 28, 2019

But as British Airways proved, it’s possible to be both sincere and wrong. Another topic making today’s news illustrates the same point.

Underwater hotels and restaurants are being built for the ultra-wealthy. One submerged hotel offers an underwater villa for $50,000 a night. “Billionaire bunkers” are being constructed around the world, enabling the wealthy to survive nuclear attacks and other catastrophes.

But all is not well on the wealth frontier.

As Bloomberg reports, deceptive billing for private and corporate jet users is escalating. The Department of Education has opened a probe into the $25 million college admissions cheating scandal in which fifty people were criminally charged. And the ex-wife of a man who won a $273 million jackpot does not want him back, telling reporters: “I have morals.”

Another story on our theme is being reported by the New York Times: “Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good.” The wealthy are discovering that human engagement is vital to their well-being. They are spending on experiences such as luxury travel and dining rather than technology and other goods.

Clearly, possessions cannot produce happiness, even when we sincerely think they will.

Three dead ends to avoid

No one thinks in a vacuum.

You and I inherited our Western culture from the Greeks and Romans. Centuries before Christ, their worldview divided the soul from the body, determining that the former is positive while the latter is evil. This belief led centuries of Christians to venerate monastic withdrawal from the world as the highest form of spirituality.

A second version of cultural engagement we inherited from our cultural ancestors splits religion from the “real world.” As we noted yesterday, transactional religion teaches us to placate the gods so they will do what we want. “Go to church on Sunday so God will bless you on Monday” is the formula today. We are therefore told to live in two worlds: the religious and the secular, valuing each as we wish.

A third view is rising quickly in our culture: there is no soul or supernatural reality, so we are free to focus on the material. According to a new survey, 23.1 percent of the American population has “no religion,” slightly more than Catholics (23 percent) and evangelicals (22.5 percent).

Withdrawing from the culture, separating faith from life, or ignoring the supernatural—none of these is the way God intends us to relate to our world.

“The righteous will flourish like a green leaf”

I am studying Proverbs these days and found chapter 11 especially relevant to today’s conversation. Solomon, one of the wealthiest men of all time, warned us: “Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death” (v. 4). He added: “Whoever trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will flourish like a green leaf” (v. 28).

If we are not to trust in material wealth, how are we to relate to the material world?

We are to be righteous so that God can bless the fallen culture through us: “By the blessing of the upright a city is exalted, but by the mouth of the wicked it is overthrown” (v. 11).

We are to offer biblical wisdom to others: “Where there is no guidance, a people falls” (v. 14).

We are to be generous with all: “One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want” (v. 24).

In short, we are to use the material for the spiritual, the temporal for the eternal.

We are to use the material for the spiritual, the temporal for the eternal.

Those we know who do not know Jesus may well be sincere in their unbiblical beliefs, from denying God’s existence to rejecting Jesus’ divinity to questioning the truth or relevance of Scripture. The fact that they are sincerely wrong means they don’t know how wrong they are.

And it means they need our witness and ministry much more than they think they do.

Torn up Bibles and lost souls

Ben Malcolmson played on the 2006 University of Southern California football team that won the Rose Bowl. He told Fox News yesterday, “From the moment I made the team, I knew God had a purpose for me there. I started pressing into that mission from day one.”

But he didn’t know how hard it would be to help his teammates meet his Lord.

He started a Bible study, but no one came. He began a prayer group, but no one joined him. He then placed Bibles at each of his teammates’ lockers on Christmas Eve, days before the team was to play in the Rose Bowl. When he returned to the locker room two days later, he found the Bibles torn up and shredded.

“It was the culmination of a season full of discouragement,” he said.

Nearly four years later, working as an assistant to Coach Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks, an old friend connected with Malcolmson. He told him that one of the Bibles he gave his fellow players had been picked up and read by a teammate who accepted Christ three days before passing away.

Malcolmson concluded, “Even when I couldn’t see [God’s] hand in the moment, he truly was at work all along.”

How will you follow his example today?

The post British Airways jet lands in wrong country on purpose appeared first on Denison Forum.

source https://www.denisonforum.org/columns/daily-article/british-airways-jet-lands-in-wrong-country-on-purpose/ source https://denisonforum.tumblr.com/post/183768842337

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago

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New York to revolutionize antitrust

The New York legislature is about to take up SB933, an historically significant antitrust bill that is poised to reverse decades of monopolism by repudiating the destructive, corporate-power enhancing, deceptively named “consumer welfare” principle.

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/s933

40 years ago, Ronald Reagan adopted the “consumer welfare” standard, a fringe idea pushed by Nixon’s crooked solicitor general Robert Bork in an influential book called “The Antitrust Paradox” (Reagan’s successors, Republican and Democrat, have all bolstered Borkism).

Prior to “consumer welfare,” the US government prosecuted monopolies because they created unaccountable concentrations of power, allowing a few ultra-wealthy executives to decide how we worked and lived, corrupting politicians and breaking laws with impunity.

Bork insisted that “your business is too powerful” was too squishy and subjective a basis for law-enforcement, and insisted that we should make trustbusters empirically prove a) that harm had occurred; and b) that it was due to monopoly power.

This may sound reasonable, but it was a stalking horse for ending antitrust enforcement altogether. Bork’s “empiricism” meant that trustbusters would need to demonstrate “consumer harm” (in the form of higher prices) and prove that the harms were due to monopoly.

This effectively ended antitrust enforcement. The standard for proving a merger would result in higher prices, (or post-merger price-hikes were the result of monopoly) was to build and interpret a complex, esoteric mathematical model than only Bork and his cronies understood.

Unsurprisingly, the models always affirmed that a merger would be efficient, not harmful — and that post-merger harms were not the fault of the merger. Big business loved Bork, and spent lavishly to promote his theories.

40% of federal judges attended the Manne Seminars — swanky junkets that “educated” the judiciary on Bork’s theories.

Borkism’s elevation of “consumer welfare” didn’t just end antitrust enforcement — it shifted our societal priorities.

When monopolies were about corporate power, it meant that everyone who suffered from excessive corporate power had a legitimate stake in antitrust policy: people poisoned by pollution or hurt by corrupt laws won by the lobbying power of concentrated industries.

What’s more, the focus on “consumer harm” denied our power and duty as citizens. A “consumer” is an ambulatory wallet who “votes” by buying things (the fatter the wallet, the more votes you get!). A citizen is someone who has a stake in their society.

Delcaring antitrust’s stakeholders to be “consumers” and “businesses” excluded a key constituency: workers, who are particularly vulnerable because labor markets are far more sensitive to “buyer power” (fewer employers) than consumers are to “seller power” (fewer retailers).

“Monopsony” (market control arising from few buyers) occurs far sooner than “monopoly” (control from few sellers). We see this around us right now, with Amazon’s slave-labor conditions for delivery drivers pushing down wages and worsening work conditions across the sector.

Every “consumer” is also a “worker” (with the notable exception of “investors” — the tiny minority that makes it living by owning things, rather than doing things), which means that any consideration of “consumer welfare” that ignores workers’ rights is bad for consumers.

Which is why “consumer welfare” created a world of spiralling labor precarity, environmental devastation, political corruption, and pervasive cynicism about politics and the ability of democracies to craft and enforce good policy.

Enter New York’s SB933, introduced in the wake of the Amazon HQ2 fiasco, where the company tried to shake down cities and states for massive subsidies and exemptions from labor and other regulation.

Amazon pulled out of NYC when activists and politicians dared to question the wisdom of giving this wildly profitable monopolist a massive subsidy that would lead to the destruction of local businesses and skyrocketing housing prices.

Today in his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller interviews NY’s Senator Mike Gianaris, who introduced SB933, which explicitly broadens the basis for antitrust enforcement to include curbing unaccountable corporate power and protecting workers.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/new-york-state-to-revolutionize-antitrust

As Stoller and Gianaris point out, there’s nothing radical about considering a broader range of harms when enforcing against monopolies: “harmful dominance” was the longstanding American legal tradition, spread to Europe after WWII.

Borkism was a radical break with tradition, and SB933 restores antitrust to the muscular suite of protections we enjoyed before Reagan.

“Harmful dominance” means that monopolists will no longer get to set the terms for their own regulation. For example, it sidelines the often farcical debate over “market definition” (“which market is the monopolist accused of dominating?”) which is incredibly easy to game.

For example, when Facebook bought Instagram, it claimed that the acquisition wasn’t about buying up a nascent social media competitor to whom Facebook was losing millions of users — rather, it claimed that Insta was a camera app.

And since every phone comes with a camera app, FB’s merger with Insta would give it an unmeasurably tiny share of the camera app market.

This sophistry isn’t unusual in antitrust debates. To see it in action, check out this debate between Tim Wu and Tyler Cowan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Jp-GJ9LM0

Wu claims that Facebook has a social media monopoly — meaning that it dominates, sets prices and terms for social media. Cowan counters that the relevant market isn’t “social media” but rather every way that people socialize: SMSes, phone calls, dating apps, etc.

And, of course, by that measure, FB controls very little of “social” (Amazon makes the same argument when it defines its market as “every retail transaction”). “Consumer welfare” invites this kind of absurdity — while “harmful dominance” sweeps it aside.

If you are a New Yorker, you can and should contact your state rep to support SB933. State lawmakers are very sensitive to constituent emails! You can look up your lawmaker here:

https://nyassembly.gov/mem/search/

#pluralistic

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denisonforum · 6 years ago

Text

British Airways jet lands in wrong country on purpose

Listen to The Daily Article Podcast, then subscribe.

But that’s just what happened Monday.

We can be both sincere and wrong

There are many ways to be sincerely wrong today.

It is easy to be sincerely wrong. In The Daily Article today, "British Airways jet lands in wrong country on purpose," I explore some examples that affect our souls and culture, inviting us to engage our world with redemptive love. https://t.co/XGs9GUKpZl pic.twitter.com/pPal3vwiJp

— Jim Denison (@JimDenison) March 28, 2019

But as British Airways proved, it’s possible to be both sincere and wrong. Another topic making today’s news illustrates the same point.

But all is not well on the wealth frontier.

Clearly, possessions cannot produce happiness, even when we sincerely think they will.

Three dead ends to avoid

No one thinks in a vacuum.

Withdrawing from the culture, separating faith from life, or ignoring the supernatural—none of these is the way God intends us to relate to our world.

“The righteous will flourish like a green leaf”

If we are not to trust in material wealth, how are we to relate to the material world?

We are to be righteous so that God can bless the fallen culture through us: “By the blessing of the upright a city is exalted, but by the mouth of the wicked it is overthrown” (v. 11).

We are to offer biblical wisdom to others: “Where there is no guidance, a people falls” (v. 14).

We are to be generous with all: “One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want” (v. 24).

In short, we are to use the material for the spiritual, the temporal for the eternal.

We are to use the material for the spiritual, the temporal for the eternal.

And it means they need our witness and ministry much more than they think they do.

Torn up Bibles and lost souls

But he didn’t know how hard it would be to help his teammates meet his Lord.

“It was the culmination of a season full of discouragement,” he said.

Malcolmson concluded, “Even when I couldn’t see [God’s] hand in the moment, he truly was at work all along.”

How will you follow his example today?

The post British Airways jet lands in wrong country on purpose appeared first on Denison Forum.

source https://www.denisonforum.org/columns/daily-article/british-airways-jet-lands-in-wrong-country-on-purpose/

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nsfwviolets · 6 years ago

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hello everyone !! my name is ally & i hail from the est timezone. what you need to know about me ( other than me never understanding how technology works ) is that i love wealthy & all its members with all my heart. i don’t think anything has really changed about vi but everything you need to know about her is under the cut !!

❛ new york’s very own violet lennox was spotted on broadway street in jimmy choo thigh high boots. your resemblance to taylor hill is unreal. according to tmz, you just had your twenty-second birthday bash. while living in new york, you’ve been labeled as being avaricious, but also enticing. i guess being a gemini explains that. three things that would paint a better picture of you would be silk sheets, diamond necklaces, & faux fur coats . ( cisfemale & she/her ) + ( ally, 20, she/her, est )

basics ;;

full name: violet ( soft & sweet ) faith ( unquestioning belief and complete trust in god ) lennox ( northern irish / scottish last name ).

nicknames: vi, v.

age: twenty-two.

birthday: 18 june 1996.

zodiac: gemini.

gender: cisfemale.

pronouns: she / her / hers.

sexual orientation: bisexual ( in the closet ).

nationality: american.

hometown: aspen, colorado.

parents: diane galindo ( brooke shields ) & richard lennox ( rob lowe ).

siblings: older sister.

pet(s): one year old miniature labradoodle named tate.

religion: roman catholic.

height: 5′10.

occupation: victoria’s secret angel / instagram model / socialite.

positive traits: honest, loyal, passionate, responsible, authentic, affectionate, reliable, kindhearted, & courageous.

negative traits: loud, manipulative, stubborn, materialistic, selfish, abrasive, hypocritical, insecure, & dramatic.

habits: interrupting someone mid sentence, excessive hair tucking, shoulder rolling, lip biting, & impatiently tapping her heels or acrylic nails when she is at a loss for words & or annoyed.

labels: the vixen & the babydoll.

aesthetics: silk dresses, red lingerie, lip gloss, lipstick stained coffee mugs, matte nail polish, glitter, diamonds, snow days, satin sheets, impulsive shopping sprees, romantic comedy binge watches, ocean waves, lolita, bright lights, day drinking, champagne for breakfast, iced matcha, lingerie as outerwear, yves saint laurent black opium perfume sprayed on the nape of her neck & her decolletage, lavender oil, freckled skin, acrylic nails, snow blanketing trees, hardwood mahogany floors, hgtv reruns, vintage chanel, pretty in pink, rose gold accents, bubble baths after a long day, half naked pictures, & rose water.

background ;;

life for the couple in colorado was serene. they eventually welcome their first child into the world ( a daughter ) & a few months later, their families moved to help them raise their children. both diane & richard always wanted a big family due to their catholic faith. they both agreed they would stop after 6 kids, however, their minds were quickly changed when she became pregnant with violet.

as a child, violet did every thing her parents had asked of her. their faith played a large role in her upbringing which is why she spent every sunday inside of church.

earlier this year, she became the youngest victoria’s secret angel at the age of 22 !!

she is also the youngest global ambassador for lancôme & ralph lauren !!

although she has become more of an actual model rather an instagram model, she still stays loyal to her social media platforms which is why she has over 100 million followers.

she lives a happy life after being so unhappy for so long but she still seeks her parents approval even though they have no contact with her.

personality ;;

she may be loud and unnecessary at times but she is kind hearted and does mean well. even if she does have a bad way of showing it at times.

miscellaneous ;;

is extremely flirty & alluring.

also has an instagram account for her dog !!

her most used emojis in her phone are the halo, the suggestive face, & the pink glitter heart.

she’s a gemini which means that she is expressive, quick-witted, sociable, and affectionate.

her favorite tv show is gossip girl.

her favorite movie is the notebook.

she lives in a townhouse in chelsea that has been featured in architectural digest twice. her home is filled with hardwood floors, marble, gold accents, & constantly smells like lavender.

the last concert she went to was lana del rey.

the last song she listened to was everybody loves you by charlotte lawrence.

the last show she binge watched was you.

the last movie that made her cry was tangled.

loves wellness shots after dogpound workouts.

gets daily massages by her french masseuse.

all & all, she is a mess but she loves the people in her life !!

here’s her pinterest board if you want to take a look !! i also have a wc page here that will most likely be updated over the weekend. & my discord is @taylorshill#4067

#wealthyhq:intro #emotional abuse tw #eating disoder tw #abortion tw #i definitely missed a lot but-#it's fine aakshlfjew

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