#martin grant fall 2012

[stylestream]

Emma Stone | Martin Grant Fall 2012 ensemble | MTV Movie Awards | 2012

[disabled-dragoon]

The Disability Library

I love books, I love literature, and I love this blog, but it's only been recently that I've really been given the option to explore disabled literature, and I hate that. When I was a kid, all I wanted was to be able to read about characters like me, and now as an adult, all I want is to be able to read a book that takes us seriously.

And so, friends, Romans, countrymen, I present, a special disability and chronic illness booklist, compiled by myself and through the contributions of wonderful members from this site!

As always, if there are any at all that you want me to add, please just say. I'm always looking for more!

Edit 20/10/2023: You can now suggest books using the google form at the bottom!

Updated: 31/08/2023

Articles and Chapters

The Drifting Language of Architectural Accessibility in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, Essaka Joshua, 2012

Early Modern Literature and Disability Studies, Allison P. Hobgood, David Houston Wood, 2017

How Do You Develop Whole Object Relations as an Adult?, Elinor Greenburg, 2019

Making Do with What You Don't Have: Disabled Black Motherhood in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Anna Hinton, 2018

Necropolitics, Achille Mbeme, 2003 OR Necropolitics, Achille Mbeme, 2019

Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Zygmunt Bauman, 2004

Witchcraft and deformity in early modern English Literature, Scott Eaton, 2020

Books

Fiction:

Misc:

10 Things I Can See From Here, Carrie Mac

A-F:

A Curse So Dark and Lonely, (Series), Brigid Kemmerer

Akata Witch, (Series), Nnedi Okorafor

A Mango-Shaped Space, Wendy Mass

Ancillary Justice, (Series), Ann Leckie

An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon

An Unseen Attraction, (Series), K. J. Charles

A Shot in the Dark, Victoria Lee

A Snicker of Magic, Natalie Lloyd

A Song of Ice and Fire, (series), George R. R. Martin

A Spindle Splintered, (Series), Alix E. Harrow

A Time to Dance, Padma Venkatraman

Bath Haus, P. J. Vernon

Beasts of Prey, (Series), Ayana Gray

The Bedlam Stacks, (Series), Natasha Pulley

Black Bird, Blue Road, Sofiya Pasternack

Black Sun, (Series), Rebecca Roanhorse

Blood Price, (Series), Tanya Huff

Borderline, (Series), Mishell Baker

Breath, Donna Jo Napoli

The Broken Kingdoms, (Series), N.K. Jemisin

Brute, Kim Fielding

Cafe con Lychee, Emery Lee

Carry the Ocean, (Series), Heidi Cullinan

Challenger Deep, Neal Shusterman

Cinder, (Series), Marissa Meyer

Clean, Amy Reed

Connection Error, (Series), Annabeth Albert

Cosima Unfortunate Steals A Star, Laura Noakes

Crazy, Benjamin Lebert

Crooked Kingdom, (Series), Leigh Bardugo

Daniel Cabot Puts Down Roots, (Series), Cat Sebastian

Daniel, Deconstructed, James Ramos

Dead in the Garden, (Series), Dahlia Donovan

Dear Fang, With Love, Rufi Thorpe

Deathless Divide, (Series), Justina Ireland

The Degenerates, J. Albert Mann

The Doctor's Discretion, E.E. Ottoman

Earth Girl, (Series), Janet Edwards

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Emily R. Austin

The Extraordinaries, (Series), T. J. Klune

The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict, (Series), Trenton Lee Stewart

Fight + Flight, Jules Machias

The Final Girl Support Group, Grady Hendrix

Finding My Voice, (Series), Aoife Dooley

The First Thing About You, Chaz Hayden

Follow My Leader, James B. Garfield

Forever Is Now, Mariama J. Lockington

Fortune Favours the Dead, (Series), Stephen Spotswood

Fresh, Margot Wood

H-0:

Harmony, London Price

Harrow the Ninth, (series), Tamsyn Muir

Hench, (Series), Natalia Zina Walschots

Highly Illogical Behaviour, John Corey Whaley

Honey Girl, Morgan Rogers

How to Become a Planet, Nicole Melleby

How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager, (Series), D. N. Bryn

How to Sell Your Blood & Fall in Love, (Series), D. N. Bryn

Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites, Joy Demorra

I Am Not Alone, Francisco X. Stork

The Immeasurable Depth of You, Maria Ingrande Mora

In the Ring, Sierra Isley

Into The Drowning Deep, (Series), Mira Grant

Iron Widow, (Series), Xiran Jay Zhao

Izzy at the End of the World, K. A. Reynolds

Jodie's Journey, Colin Thiele

Just by Looking at Him, Ryan O'Connell

Kissing Doorknobs, Terry Spencer Hesser

Lakelore, Anna-Marie McLemore

Learning Curves, (Series), Ceillie Simkiss

Let's Call It a Doomsday, Katie Henry

The Library of the Dead, (Series), TL Huchu

The Lion Hunter, (Series), Elizabeth Wein

Lirael, (Series), Garth Nix

Long Macchiatos and Monsters, Alison Evans

Love from A to Z, (Series), S.K. Ali

Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses, Kristen O'Neal

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

The Never Tilting World, (Series), Rin Chupeco

The No-Girlfriend Rule, Christen Randall

Nona the Ninth, (series), Tamsyn Muir

Noor, Nnedi Okorafor

Odder Still, (Series), D. N. Bryn

Once Stolen, (Series), D. N. Bryn

One For All, Lillie Lainoff

On the Edge of Gone, Corinne Duyvis

Origami Striptease, Peggy Munson

Our Bloody Pearl, (Series), D. N. Bryn

Out of My Mind, Sharon M. Draper

P-T:

Parable of the Sower, (Series), Octavia E. Butler

Parable of the Talents, (Series), Octavia E. Butler

Percy Jackson & the Olympians, (series), Rick Riordan

Pomegranate, Helen Elaine Lee

The Prey of Gods, Nicky Drayden

The Pursuit Of..., (Series), Courtney Milan

The Queen's Thief, (Series), Megan Whalen Turner

The Quiet and the Loud, Helena Fox

The Raging Quiet, Sheryl Jordan

The Reanimator's Heart, (Series), Kara Jorgensen

The Remaking of Corbin Wale, Joan Parrish

Roll with It, (Series), Jamie Sumner

Russian Doll, (Series), Cristelle Comby

The Second Mango, (Series), Shira Glassman

Scar of the Bamboo Leaf, Sieni A.M

Shaman, (Series), Noah Gordon

Sick Kids in Love, Hannah Moskowitz

The Silent Boy, Lois Lowry

Six of Crows, (Series) Leigh Bardugo

Sizzle Reel, Carlyn Greenwald

The Spare Man, Mary Robinette Kowal

The Stagsblood Prince, (Series), Gideon E. Wood

Stake Sauce, Arc 1: The Secret Ingredient is Love. No, Really, (Series), RoAnna Sylver

Stars in Your Eyes, Kacen Callender [Expected release: Oct 2023]

The Storm Runner, (Series), J. C. Cervantes

Stronger Still, (Series), D. N. Bryn

Sweetblood, Pete Hautman

Tarnished Are the Stars, Rosiee Thor

The Theft of Sunlight, (Series), Intisar Khanani

Throwaway Girls, Andrea Contos

Top Ten, Katie Cotugno

Torch, Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Treasure, Rebekah Weatherspoon

Turtles All the Way Down, John Green

U-Z:

Unlicensed Delivery, Will Soulsby-McCreath Expected release October 2023

Verona Comics, Jennifer Dugan

Vorkosigan Saga, (Series), Lois McMaster Bujold

We Are the Ants, (Series), Shaun David Hutchinson

The Weight of Our Sky, Hanna Alkaf

Whip, Stir and Serve, Caitlyn Frost and Henry Drake

The Whispering Dark, Kelly Andrew

Wicked Sweet, Chelsea M. Cameron

Wonder, (Series), R. J. Palacio

Wrong to Need You, (Series), Alisha Rai

Ziggy, Stardust and Me, James Brandon

Graphic Novels:

A Quick & Easy Guide to Sex & Disability, (Non-Fiction), A. Andrews

Constellations, Kate Glasheen

Dancing After TEN: a graphic memoir, (memoir) (Non-Fiction), Vivian Chong, Georgia Webber

Everything Is an Emergency: An OCD Story in Words Pictures, (memoir) (Non-Fiction), Jason Adam Katzenstein

Frankie's World: A Graphic Novel, (Series), Aoife Dooley

The Golden Hour, Niki Smith

Nimona, N. D. Stevenson

The Third Person, (memoir) (Non-Fiction), Emma Grove

Magazines and Anthologies:

Artificial Divide, (Anthology), Robert Kingett, Randy Lacey

Beneath Ceaseless Skies #175: Grandmother-nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds, (Article), R. B. Lemburg

Defying Doomsday, (Anthology), edited by Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench

Josee, the Tiger and the Fish, (short story) (anthology), Seiko Tanabe

Nothing Without Us, edited by Cait Gordon and Talia C. Johnson

Nothing Without Us Too, edited by Cait Gordon and Talia C. Johnson

Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens, (Anthology), edited by Marieke Nijkamp

Uncanny #24: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction, (Anthology), edited by: Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Dominik Parisien et al.

Uncanny #30: Disabled People Destroy Fantasy, (Anthology), edited by: Nicolette Barischoff, Lisa M. Bradley, Katharine Duckett

We Shall Be Monsters, edited by Derek Newman-Stille

Manga:

Perfect World, (Series), Rie Aruga

The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud, (Short Stories), Kuniko Tsurita

Non-Fiction:

Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education, Jay Timothy Dolmage

A Disability History of the United States, Kim E, Nielsen

The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access, David Gissen

Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism, Elsa Sjunneson

Black Disability Politics, Sami Schalk

Borderline, Narcissistic, and Schizoid Adaptations: The Pursuit of Love, Admiration, and Safety, Dr. Elinor Greenburg

Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, Eli Clare

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, Barker, Clare and Stuart Murray, editors.

The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship, Stacy Clifford Simplican

Capitalism and Disability, Martha Russel

Care work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Catatonia, Shutdown and Breakdown in Autism: A Psycho-Ecological Approach, Dr Amitta Shah

The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays, Esme Weijun Wang

Crip Kinship, Shayda Kafai

Crip Up the Kitchen: Tools, Tips and Recipes for the Disabled Cook, Jules Sherred

Culture – Theory – Disability: Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies, Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem, Moritz Ingwersen

Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition, Liat Ben-Moshe

Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally, Emily Ladau

Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World, Ben Mattlin

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From the Twenty-First Century, Alice Wong

Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability and Making Space, Amanda Leduc

Every Cripple a Superhero, Christoph Keller

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation, Eli Clare

Feminist Queer Crip, Alison Kafer

The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Growing Up Disabled in Australia, Carly Findlay

It's Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability, Kelly Davio

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

Language Deprivation & Deaf Mental Health, Neil S. Glickman, Wyatte C. Hall

The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, Elizabeth Barnes

My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World That Is Sick, Lyndsey Medford

No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s, Sarah F. Rose

Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment, James I. Charlton

The Pedagogy of Pathologization Dis/abled Girls of Color in the School-prison Nexus, Subini Ancy Annamma

Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature, Essaka Joshua

QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology, Raymond Luczak, Editor.

The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, Jasbir K. Puar

Sitting Pretty, (memoir), Rebecca Taussig

Sounds Like Home: Growing Up Black & Deaf in the South, Mary Herring Wright

Surviving and Thriving with an Invisible Chronic Illness: How to Stay Sane and Live One Step Ahead of Your Symptoms, Ilana Jacqueline

The Things We Don't Say: An Anthology of Chronic Illness Truths, Julie Morgenlender

Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability, Scott T. Smith, José Alaniz 

Uncomfortable Labels: My Life as a Gay Autistic Trans Woman, (memoir), Laura Kate Dale

Unmasking Autism, Devon Price

The War on Disabled People: Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of a Human Catastrophe, Ellen Clifford

We've Got This: Essays by Disabled Parents, Eliza Hull

Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life, (memoir) (essays) Alice Wong

Picture Books:

A Day With No Words, Tiffany Hammond, Kate Cosgrove-

A Friend for Henry, Jenn Bailey, Mika Song

Ali and the Sea Stars, Ali Stroker, Gillian Reid

All Are Welcome, Alexandra Penfold, Suzanne Kaufman

All the Way to the Top, Annette Bay Pimentel, Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins, Nabi Ali

Can Bears Ski?, Raymond Antrobus, Polly Dunbar

Different -- A Great Thing to Be!, Heather Alvis, Sarah Mensinga

Everyone Belongs, Heather Alvis, Sarah Mensinga

I Talk Like a River, Jordan Scott, Sydney Smith

Jubilee: The First Therapy Horse and an Olympic Dream, K. T. Johnson, Anabella Ortiz

Just Ask!, Sonia Sotomayor, Rafael López

Kami and the Yaks, Andrea Stenn Stryer, Bert Dodson

My Three Best Friends and Me, Zulay, Cari Best, Vanessa Brantley-Newton

Rescue & Jessica: A Life-Changing Friendship, Jessica Kensky, Patrick Downes, Scott Magoon

Sam's Super Seats, Keah Brown, Sharee Miller

Small Knight and the Anxiety Monster, Manka Kasha

We Move Together, Kelly Fritsch, Anne McGuire, Eduardo Trejos

We're Different, We're the Same, and We're All Wonderful!, Bobbi Jane Kates, Joe Mathieu

What Happened to You?, James Catchpole, Karen George

The World Needs More Purple People, Kristen Bell, Benjamin Hart, Daniel Wiseman

You Are Enough: A Book About Inclusion, Margaret O'Hair, Sofia Sanchez, Sofia Cardoso

You Are Loved: A Book About Families, Margaret O'Hair, Sofia Sanchez, Sofia Cardoso

The You Kind of Kind, Nina West, Hayden Evans

Zoom!, Robert Munsch, Michael Martchenko

Plays:

Peeling, Kate O'Reilly

---

With an extra special thank you to @parafoxicalk @craftybookworms @lunod @galaxyaroace @shub-s @trans-axolotl @suspicious-whumping-egg @ya-world-challenge @fictionalgirlsworld @rubyjewelqueen @some-weird-queer-writer @jacensolodjo @cherry-sys @dralthon @thebibliosphere @brynwrites @aj-grimoire @shade-and-sun @ceanothusspinosus @edhelwen1 @waltzofthewifi @spiderleggedhorse @sleepneverheardofher @highladyluck @oftheides @thecouragetobekind @nopoodles @lupadracolis @elusivemellifluence @creativiteaa @moonflowero1 @the-bi-library @chronically-chaotic-cryptid for your absolutely fantastic contributions!

---

Submit a Book:

[ladygarfunkel]

[official-lucifers-child]

An Incomplete List Of Racially Murdered People Over 65 Years:

Emmett Till: 1955, 14 years old, lynched by a white couple after being falsely accused of offending a white woman. Mississippi

James Chaney: 1964, 21 years old, chain-whipped, beaten, and castrated before being shot three times by Klu Klux Klan members. His body, along with two other (white) men who were killed with him, weren’t found for 44 days. He was killed for being black, and being a civil rights activist. Mississippi

Jimmie Lee Jackson: 1965, 26 years old, fatally shot by a State Trooper (who was only just convicted in 2007 and served for less than a year) for protecting his mother who was being beaten. Alabama

Fred Hampton: 1969, 21 years old, fatally shot by a tactical unit of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in his bed during a raid of his apartment. Illinois

Amadou Diallo: 1999, 23 years old, fatally shot by four Ney York City Police Department plainclothes officers for standing outside his apartment. New York

Oscar Grant: 2009, 22 years old, fatally shot in the back by a police officer whilst lying unarmed in prone position. He was detained for fitting a description. California

Trayvon Martin: 2012, 17 years old, fatally shot by neighbourhood watch who claimed he did it in self-defence. Martin was unarmed, and only had a pack of skittles and an iced tea at the time. Florida

Jordan Davis: 2012, 17 years old, fatally shot by a white man for listening to music in his own car with two friends. Florida

Eric Garner: 2014, 27 years old, choked to death by a New York City Police Department officer. New York

Michael Brown: 2014, 18 years old, fatally shot by a police officer for supposed altercation due to him “fitting the description” of a robber. Missouri

Ezell Ford: 2014, 25 years old, fatally shot by police officers during an “investigative stop”. There are many, many conflicting accounts of what happened including conflicting ones from the two officers present and many different witnesses. California

LaQuan McDonald: 2014, 17 years old, fatally shot by Chicago Police officer for damaging a windshield (McDonald was backing up from the officer who shot him who was advancing with a firearm. It should be noted that the officer shot once and McDonald fell to the ground. The officer then shot 15 more rounds at McDonald as he lay on the ground). Illinois

Tanisha Anderson: 2014, 37 years old, died while restrained in prone position under custody of police officers during a bipolar episode. Ohio

Tamir Rice: 2014, 12 years old, fatally shot by a police officer for having a toy gun. Ohio

Walter Scott: 2015, 50 years old, fatally shot by an officer after being stopped for having a non-functioning brake light. After the officer had returned to his car, Scott ran and the officer gave chase and fired 8 rounds at Scott. South Carolina

Freddie Gray: 2015, 25 years old, died after sustaining injuries to his neck and spine from police officers due to possessing a knife, and then falling into a coma after sustaining more injuries while being transported in the police vehicle. Maryland

Sandra Bland: 2015, 28 years old, hanged in police custody in what was reported a suicide but is extremely suspicious. She was arrested for changing lanes without using her turn signal. Texas

Alton Sterling: 2016, 37 years old, fatally shot by two police officers for reaching for his wallet. They thought he was reaching for his handgun. Louisiana

Philando Castile: 2016, 32 years old, fatally shot by police during a traffic stop for fitting a description of robbers. Minnesota

Stephon Clark: 2018, 22 years old, fatally shot by police officers in the backyard of his grandmothers house for having a phone in his hand. California

Botham Jean: 2018, 26 years old, fatally shot by off-duty patrol officer for being in his own apartment. The patrol officer had entered it falsely thinking it was her own and shot him dead. Texas

Atatiana Jefferson: 2019, 28 years old, fatally shot by a police officer in her own home. Texas

Ahmaud Arbery: 2020, 25 years old, fatally shot for jogging. Georgia

Breonna Taylor: 2020, 26 years old, fatally shot by police officers while sleeping for being in her apartment during an unwarranted raid. Kentucky

George Floyd: 2020, 46 years old, suffocated to death by a police officer who knelt on his neck, for allegedly using a counterfeit 20-dollar-bill. Minnesota

Rayshard Brooks: 2020, 27 years old, fatally shot by a police officer for sleeping in his car which was. locking a drive-thru lane. Georgia

(The youngest on this list was 12 years old. The oldest was 50. The average age of people on this list is 25 years old. Majority of the killers were white, majority were police officers or authorities of some kind, and majority of these people had unjust cases where the killers were ruled not guilty, or in some cases not even tried.)

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 5.19

639 – Ashina Jiesheshuai and his tribesmen assaulted Emperor Taizong at Jiucheng Palace. 715 – Pope Gregory II is elected. 1051 – Henry I of France marries the Rus' princess, Anne of Kiev. 1445 – John II of Castile defeats the Infantes of Aragon at the First Battle of Olmedo. 1499 – Catherine of Aragon is married by proxy to Arthur, Prince of Wales. Catherine is 13 and Arthur is 12. 1535 – French explorer Jacques Cartier sets sail on his second voyage to North America with three ships, 110 men, and Chief Donnacona's two sons (whom Cartier had kidnapped during his first voyage). 1536 – Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII of England, is beheaded for adultery, treason, and incest. 1542 – The Prome Kingdom falls to the Taungoo Dynasty in present-day Myanmar. 1568 – Queen Elizabeth I of England orders the arrest of Mary, Queen of Scots. 1643 – Thirty Years' War: French forces under the duc d'Enghien decisively defeat Spanish forces at the Battle of Rocroi, marking the symbolic end of Spain as a dominant land power. 1649 – An Act of Parliament declaring England a Commonwealth is passed by the Long Parliament. England would be a republic for the next eleven years. 1655 – The Invasion of Jamaica begins during the Anglo-Spanish War. 1743 – Jean-Pierre Christin developed the centigrade temperature scale. 1749 – King George II of Great Britain grants the Ohio Company a charter of land around the forks of the Ohio River. 1776 – American Revolutionary War: A Continental Army garrison surrenders in the Battle of The Cedars. 1780 – New England's Dark Day, an unusual darkening of the day sky, was observed over the New England states and parts of Canada. 1802 – Napoleon Bonaparte founds the Legion of Honour. 1828 – U.S. President John Quincy Adams signs the Tariff of 1828 into law, protecting wool manufacturers in the United States. 1845 – Captain Sir John Franklin and his ill-fated Arctic expedition depart from Greenhithe, England. 1848 – Mexican–American War: Mexico ratifies the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo thus ending the war and ceding California, Nevada, Utah and parts of four other modern-day U.S. states to the United States for US$15 million. 1911 – Parks Canada, the world's first national park service, is established as the Dominion Parks Branch under the Department of the Interior. 1917 – The Norwegian football club Rosenborg BK is founded. 1919 – Mustafa Kemal Atatürk lands at Samsun on the Anatolian Black Sea coast, initiating what is later termed the Turkish War of Independence. 1921 – The United States Congress passes the Emergency Quota Act establishing national quotas on immigration. 1922 – The Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union is established. 1933 – Finnish cavalry general C. G. E. Mannerheim was appointed the field marshal. 1934 – Zveno and the Bulgarian Army engineer a coup d'état and install Kimon Georgiev as the new Prime Minister of Bulgaria. 1942 – World War II: In the aftermath of the Battle of the Coral Sea, Task Force 16 heads to Pearl Harbor. 1950 – A barge containing munitions destined for Pakistan explodes in the harbor at South Amboy, New Jersey, devastating the city. 1950 – Egypt announces that the Suez Canal is closed to Israeli ships and commerce. 1959 – The North Vietnamese Army establishes Group 559, whose responsibility is to determine how to maintain supply lines to South Vietnam; the resulting route is the Ho Chi Minh trail. 1961 – Venera program: Venera 1 becomes the first man-made object to fly by another planet by passing Venus (the probe had lost contact with Earth a month earlier and did not send back any data). 1961 – At Silchar Railway Station, Assam, 11 Bengalis die when police open fire on protesters demanding state recognition of Bengali language in the Bengali Language Movement. 1962 – A birthday salute to U.S. President John F. Kennedy takes place at Madison Square Garden, New York City. The highlight is Marilyn Monroe's rendition of "Happy Birthday". 1963 – The New York Post Sunday Magazine publishes Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail. 1971 – Mars probe program: Mars 2 is launched by the Soviet Union. 1986 – The Firearm Owners Protection Act is signed into law by U.S. President Ronald Reagan. 1991 – Croatians vote for independence in a referendum. 1993 – SAM Colombia Flight 501 crashes on approach to José María Córdova International Airport in Medellín, Colombia, killing 132. 1996 – Space Shuttle program: Space Shuttle Endeavour is launched on mission STS-77. 1997 – The Sierra Gorda biosphere, the most ecologically diverse region in Mexico, is established as a result of grassroots efforts 2000 – Space Shuttle program: Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched on mission STS-101 to resupply the International Space Station. 2007 – President of Romania Traian Băsescu survives an impeachment referendum and returns to office from suspension. 2010 – The Royal Thai Armed Forces concludes its crackdown on protests by forcing the surrender of United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship leaders. 2012 – Three gas cylinder bombs explode in front of a vocational school in the Italian city of Brindisi, killing one person and injuring five others. 2012 – A car bomb explodes near a military complex in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor, killing nine people. 2015 – The Refugio oil spill deposited 142,800 U.S. gallons (3,400 barrels) of crude oil onto an area in California considered one of the most biologically diverse coastlines of the west coast. 2016 – EgyptAir Flight 804 crashes into the Mediterranean Sea while traveling from Paris to Cairo, killing all on board. 2018 – The wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is held at St George's Chapel, Windsor, with an estimated global audience of 1.9 billion.

[oberlincollegelibraries]

Weekend Edition: Women’s Prize for Fiction Winners

The Women’s Prize for Fiction is a prize awarded annually for the best novel written in English by a woman and published in the UK during the previous year. And it just so happens that OCL holds all of the previous winners since the Prize started in 1996! Scroll below for links to all of the books. 

2020 Winner Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell "A thrilling departure: a short, piercing, deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare's 11 year old son Hamnet--a name interchangeable with Hamlet in 15th century Britain--and the years leading up to the production of his great play. England, 1580. A young Latin tutor--penniless, bullied by a violent father--falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman--a wild creature who walks her family's estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when his beloved young son succumbs to bubonic plague. A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest masterpieces of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent departure from one of our most gifted novelists"--Provided by publisher.

2019 Winner An American Marriage by Tayari Jones Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy's time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy's conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

2018 Winner Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie "From an internationally acclaimed novelist, the suspenseful and heartbreaking story of a family ripped apart by secrets and driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences. Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother's death, an invitation from a mentor in America has allowed her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can't stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who's disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. When he resurfaces half the globe away, Isma's worst fears are confirmed. Then Eamonn enters the sisters' lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to--or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz's salvation? Suddenly, two families' fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined, in this searing novel that asks: What sacrifices will we make in the name of love?"-- Provided by publisher

2017 Winner The Power by Naomi Alderman A rich Nigerian boy; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. When a vital new force takes root and flourishes, their lives converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls and women now have immense physical power-- they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And everything changes.

Previous Winners 1996: A Spell of Winter by Helene Dunmore 1997: Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels 1998: Larry’s Party by Carol Shields  1999: A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne 2000: When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant 2001: The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville 2002: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett 2003: Property by Valerie Martin 2004: Small Island by Andrea Levy  2005: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver 2006: On Beauty by Zadie Smith 2007: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2008: The Road Home by Rose Tremain 2009: Home by Marilynne Robinson 2010: The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver 2011: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht 2012: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller 2013: May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes 2014: A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride 2015: How to Be Both by Ali Smith 2016: The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney

[insanityclause]

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

A Director Making His Mark in More Ways Than One

LONDON — The director Jamie Lloyd was giving me a tour of his tattoos. Not the Pegasus on his chest or the skeleton astronaut floating on his back, though he gamely described those, but the onyx-inked adornments that cover his arms and hands, that wreathe his neck, that wrap around his shaved head.

When I asked about the dragon at his throat, he told me it had been “one of the ones that hurt the least,” then pointed to the flame-licked skulls on either side of his neck: his “covert way,” he said, of representing drama’s traditional emblems for comedy and tragedy.

“I thought maybe it’d be a little bit tacky to have theater masks on my neck,” he added, a laugh bubbling up, and it’s true: His dragon would have eaten them for lunch.

It was early December, and we were in a lounge beneath the Playhouse Theater, where Lloyd’s West End production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” starring James McAvoy in a skintight puffer jacket and his own regular-size nose, would soon open to packed houses and critical praise.

Running through Feb. 29, and arriving on cinema screens Feb. 20 in a National Theater Live broadcast, “Cyrano” — newly adapted by Martin Crimp, and positing its hero as a scrappy spoken-word wonder — capped a year that saw Lloyd celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic.

In London last summer, his outdoor hit “Evita” traded conventional glamour for sexy grit, while his radical reinterpretation of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” starring Tom Hiddleston, was hailed first in the West End, then on Broadway. Ben Brantley, reviewing “Betrayal” in The New York Times, called it “one of those rare shows I seem destined to think about forever.”

When Time Out London ranked the best theater of 2019, it gave the top spot jointly to all three Lloyd productions, saying that he “has had a year that some of his peers might trade their entire careers for.”

Lloyd, who is 39, did not spring from the same mold as many of those peers. There was for him, he says, no youthful aha moment of watching Derek Jacobi onstage and divining that directing was his path. Epiphanies like that belonged to other kids, the ones who could afford the tickets.

If there is a standard background for a London theater director — and Lloyd would argue that certainly there used to be — that isn’t where he came from, growing up working class on the south coast of England, in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

The first time I laid eyes on him, chatting in the Playhouse lobby after a preview of “Cyrano,” he was the picture of working-class flair — the gold pirate hoops, the pink and black T-shirt, the belt cinching high-waisted pants.

He looks nothing like your typical West End director. Which of course is precisely the point.

What’s underneath

“It’s quite often said of him,” McAvoy observed by phone, once the reviews were in, “that he strips things away or he tries to take classical works and turn them on their head. I think he’s always just trying to tell the story in the clearest and most exhilarating way possible.”

The “X-Men” star, who put the number of times he’s worked with Lloyd in the past decade at a “gazillion,” calls theirs “probably one of the most defining relationships that I’ve had in my career.”

Yet Lloyd himself is on board with the notion that his assertively contemporary stagings pare back stifling layers of performance history to lay bare what’s underneath.

Like the tiger and dragons that he had emblazoned on his head just last May, though, the unembellished nature of his shows — as minimalist in their way as his tattoos are the opposite — is a relatively recent development.

Lloyd’s first “Cyrano de Bergerac,” starring Douglas Hodge in 2012, was also his Broadway debut. It was, he said, “absolutely the ‘Cyrano’ that you would expect,” with the fake nose, the hat, the plume, the sword-fighting.

There is, granted, sword-fighting in the new one — but the audience has to imagine the swords.

Lloyd’s productions, including a lauded revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Passion” in 2010, long marked him as a hot young director on the rise. But he sees in some of his previous work a noisy tendency toward idea overload.

The pivot point came in 2018, with a season that the Jamie Lloyd Company — which he formed seven years ago with the commercial producing powerhouse Ambassador Theater Group — devoted to the short works of Harold Pinter. The playwright’s distillation of language forced Lloyd to match it with his staging.

That immersion led to what the director Michael Grandage — one of Lloyd’s early champions, who tapped him at 27 to be his associate director at the Donmar Warehouse — called Lloyd’s “absolute masterpiece.”

“I had quite a lot of ambition to do a production of ‘Betrayal’ in my life,” Grandage said. “And then when I saw Jamie’s, I thought, ‘Right, that’s it. I don’t ever, ever want to direct this play.’ Because that’s, for me, the perfect production.”

Playing dress-up

Charm is a ready currency in the theater, but Lloyd’s is disarming; he seems simply to be being himself, without veneer. Like when I fact-checked something I’d read by asking whether he was a vegan.

“Lapsed vegan,” he confessed immediately, with a tinge of guilt about eating eggs again.

Pay no attention to any tough-guy vibe in photos of him; do not be alarmed by the sharp-toothed cat on the back of his head. In conversation, Lloyd comes across as thoughtful and unassuming, with an animated humor that makes him fun company. If he speaks at the speed of someone with no time to waste, he balances that with focused attentiveness.

His father, Ray, was a truck driver. His mother, Joy (whose name is tattooed on his right forearm, near the elbow), cleaned houses, took in ironing and ran a costume-rental shop, where young Jamie would sneak in to dress up as the children’s cartoon character Rainbow Brite.

“It’s very embarrassing,” he said, squelching a laugh.

Seeing professional theater wasn’t an option then for Lloyd, whose grown-up passion for expanding audience access — one of the things he has made himself known for in the West End — grew out of that exclusion. His company has set aside 15,000 free and 15,000 £15 tickets for its current, characteristically starry three-show season, which will also include Emilia Clarke in “The Seagull” and Jessica Chastain in “A Doll’s House.” At the 786-seat Playhouse, that adds up to just over 38 full houses.

Lloyd, who was studying acting at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts when he decided he wanted to direct, found his way to theater as a child by acting in school shows and local amateur productions. Twice he was cast as a monkey; in “The Wizard of Oz,” thrillingly, he got to fly.

The details of his early days have always been colorful — like having a clown as his first stepfather, who performed at children’s parties under the stage name Uncle Funny. But Lloyd is quick to acknowledge the darkness lurking there.

“It sounds a little bit like some dodgy film, because he was actually a really violent man,” he said. “And there were times where he was very physically abusive to my mum. There was a sort of atmosphere of violence in that house that was really uneasy. And yet masked with this literal makeup, but also this sense of trying to entertain people whilst enacting terrible brutality behind the scenes.”

This is where he locates his own connection to Pinter’s work.

“A lot of that is that the violence is beneath the surface,” he said. “And on the top there is this sort of, what I call a kind of topspin, a layer of cover-up.”

Long relationships

Lloyd was still at drama school when he staged a production of Lapine and William Finn’s “Falsettoland” that won a prize: assistant directing a show at the Bush Theater in London. Based on that, Trevor Nunn hired him, at 22, to be his assistant director on “Anything Goes” in the West End — a job he did so well that Grandage got word of it and hired him to assist on “Guys and Dolls.” While Lloyd was doing that, he also began directing in his own right.

The costume and set designer Soutra Gilmour, who has been a constant with Lloyd since he cold-called her for his first professional production, Pinter’s “The Caretaker,” said theirs is an easy relationship, with a “symbiotic transference of ideas.” Even their creative aesthetics have evolved in sync.

“We’ve actually never fallen out in 13 years,” she said over mint tea on a trip to New York last month, just before “Betrayal” closed. “Never! I don’t even know how we would fall out.”

Of course, the one time she tried to decline a Lloyd project five years ago, because its tech rehearsals coincided with the due date for her son’s birth, he told her there was no one else he wanted to work with. So she did the show, warning that at some point she would have to leave. Now, she says, he understands that she won’t sit through endless evening previews, because she needs to go home to her child.

Lloyd and his wife, the actress Suzie Toase (whose name is tattooed on one of his arms), home-school their own three boys (whose names are tattooed on the other). Their eldest, 13-year-old Lewin, is an actor who recently played one of the principal characters, the heroine’s irresistible best friend, on the HBO and BBC One series “His Dark Materials,” whose cast boasts McAvoy as well.

Enter the child

Lloyd’s interpretation of “Betrayal,” a 1978 play that recounts a seven-year affair, imbued it with a distinctly non-’70s awareness of the fragility of family — the notion that children are the bystanders harmed when a marriage is tossed away.

Its gasp-inducing moment came with the entrance of a character Pinter wrote to be mentioned but not seen: the small daughter of the couple whose relationship is imperiled. In putting her onstage, Lloyd didn’t touch the text; it was a simple, wordless role. With it, he altered the resonance of the play.

To me, it seemed logical that Lloyd’s production would have been informed by his experience as a husband and father — and maybe also as a child in a splintering family. How old had he been, anyway, when his parents split up?

“Five,” Lloyd said. “The same age as the character would be.” He paused. “Oh God, yeah, fascinating. I’d not thought about that. Exactly the same age.”

If that fact was of more than intellectual interest to him, he didn’t let on. He volunteered a memory, though — of being a little one “amongst these kind of big giants, and I guess what we can now see as the mess of their lives.”

Blazer-free

Doing “Betrayal” in New York, Lloyd was struck by how eager Americans were to chat about his tattoos. Still, he told me after I texted him a follow-up question about them, he hadn’t expected his appearance to be such a talking point in this story.

It’s not just idle curiosity. It’s about what the tattoos signify in a field where, in Britain as in the United States, the top directors tend to have grown up very comfortably. It’s about who is welcome in a particular space, and who gets to be themselves there.

For a long time after Lloyd started working in the theater, he wore a blazer every day: a conscious attempt to conform in an industry where he felt a nagging sense of difference.

“Every other director at the time was from an Oxbridge background,” he said, “and looked and sounded a particular way. I spent a long time pretending to be like them.”

It was a performance of sorts, with a costume he donned for the role.

It was only about seven or eight years ago — around the time he left the Donmar and started putting together his own company — that he stopped worrying about what people might think if he looked the way he wanted.

“My dad had tattoos” was the first thing he said when I asked him about his own.

“I guess it’s partly getting older,” he mused, “but it’s just sort of going, ‘You can’t pretend to be someone. You’ve got to be who you really are, in every way.’”

The tattoos that have gradually transformed him are from a different aesthetic universe than his recent work onstage. Yet the impulse, somehow, is the same.

In shedding the blazer, in inking his skin, Lloyd has peeled back layers of imposed convention to show who’s underneath.

And should you spot him at the theater, where he is hard to miss, you’ll notice that he looks just like himself.

[happyweddingblogs]

17 Movies Every Bride & Groom Should Watch Before Their Wedding Day

Source: Happy Wedding App

When it comes to watching movies, Romantic movies top the list. Most people prefer to watch cheesy romances on the screen. We all love to see, boy meeting girl, and then they fall in love with each other, then they go through several problems, and finally, they marry. No matter how regular the whole stuff looks like, romantic movies have a flavor of its own. And these movies look more beautiful when you are about to get married. So here is a list of the 17 best movies every bride and groom should watch before their wedding day.

Let’s have a look on the selection….

1. My Big Fat Greek Wedding

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a 2002 independent romantic comedy film and is one of the classic movies. It is a cheerful love story, which revolves around an unconfident sheltered woman, Fotoula “Toula” Portokalos (Nia Vardalos), struggling to discover her own identity before meeting the man of her dreams, Ian Miller (John Corbett). It is a good romantic dose in case you need a little inspiration before the big day. Do watch and see how a Greek American woman falls in love with a non-Greek man and what happens next.

2. Wedding Crashers

An excellent movie for all those who are going to miss all of the fun of being single. It is a 2005 American romantic comedy film; it follows two divorce mediators (Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn) who crash weddings in an attempt to meet and seduce bridesmaids. Both Wilson and Vaughn jump from one marriage to another, to meet and have sex with women. They keep doing it until they realize that sometimes all you need is that one perfect person.

3. Bachelorette

Bachelorette is a 2012 American romantic comedy film starring Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan, and Isla Fisher. All three women are featured as the troubled women who reunite for the wedding of a friend (Rebel Wilson) who was ridiculed in high school. You will surely love this spicy and sweet romantic comedy. You may even relate yourself with any of the three characters in the movie, from party girl Lizzy Caplan to control freak Kirsten Dunst.

4. The Wedding Singer

The Wedding Singer is a 1998 American romantic comedy film starring Adam Sandler as a wedding singer in the 1980s and Drew Barrymore as a waitress with whom he falls in love. It has it all! It’s funny, it’s cute, and overall, it’s a fantastic movie every bride & groom should watch before their wedding day.

5. Meet the Parents

Meet the Parents is a 2000 American comedy. Starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller, the movie chronicles a series of unfortunate events that befall a good-hearted but hapless nurse while he visits his girlfriend’s parents. You will be surprised to see the sequence of events that take place in Meet the Parents. Do Watch!

6. Runaway Bride

Runaway Bride, a 1999 American romantic comedy film that stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. Maggie Carpenter (Julia Roberts), a spirited and attractive young woman who has had several failed relationships in the past. Maggie, nervous about being married, has left a trail of fiancés waiting for her at the altar on their wedding day. All of these were caught on tape, earning Maggie tabloid fame and the dubious nickname “The Runaway Bride.” The lead character in the movies shows that most important love in life is for their own self. No matter how many times you get a heartbreak, you undoubtedly get the right guy.

7. 27 Dresses

27 Dresses is a 2008 romantic comedy starring Katherine Heigl and James Marsden. Jane Nichols (Katherine Heigl) who has been a bridesmaid for 27 weddings meets Kevin Doyle (James Marsden), who helps her get home while attending two weddings almost simultaneously, Doyle discusses his cynical views of marriage with her and with whom she falls in love later. A great movie to have some gorgeous ideas on your bridesmaid gown selections.

8. Bride Wars

Bride Wars is a 2009 romantic comedy film starring Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Bryan Greenberg, Kristen Johnston, and Candice Bergen. Emma Allan (Anne Hathaway) and Olivia “Liv” Lerner (Kate Hudson) are best friends who have been planning every detail of their weddings, since the time they were little girls. They have been planning each and every aspect of their future weddings, which include choosing the same destination: New York’s famed Plaza Hotel. However, when a clerical error causes a clash in wedding dates, Kate and Liv became hostile to each other.

9. My Best Friend’s Wedding

My Best Friend’s Wedding, a 1997 romantic comedy film starring Julia Roberts, Dermot Mulroney, Rupert Everett, and Cameron Diaz. Both Julianne Potter (Julia Roberts) and Michael O’Neal (Dermot Mulroney) were childhood friends, and they had a deal to tie the knot if they were still single by age 28. Right before Julianne’s 28th birthday, she discovers that O’Neil is marrying a gorgeous 20-year-old girl named Kimberly (Cameron Diaz). Suddenly she realized that she’s in love with him, Julianne vows to stop the wedding at all costs. Just watch how things get complex after that!

10. Bridesmaids

Bridesmaids is a 2011 comedy film starring Maya Rudolph. Rose Byrne, Melissa McCarthy, Ellie Kemper, and Wendi McLendon-Covey. The film centers on Annie (Kristen Wiig), a single woman whose own life is a mess. But when her lifelong best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), got engaged, Annie has no choice but to serve as the maid of honor. Lovelorn and almost penniless, Annie suffers a series of misfortunes after being asked to serve as maid of honor for her best friend, Lillian. Just watch how she winds her way through the strange and expensive rituals associated with her job as the bridesmaid.

11. Monster-in-Law

Monster-in-Law is a 2005 romantic comedy film starring Jane Fonda, Jennifer Lopez, Michael Vartan, and Wanda Sykes. The movie centers on Charlotte (Jennifer Lopez), who was smitten when she meets Dr. Kevin Fields (Michael Vartan). So when Kevin proposes her for the wedding after they start dating, Charlotte happily accepts. But soon, she realizes that Kevin’s mom, Viola (Jane Fonda), is not very happy to have her as his son’s bride. Viola, who is a newscaster, has just lost her job, and suddenly, she starts feeling attached to Kevin. She regards Charlotte as her new competition — and does anything to make her son call off the wedding.

12. The Proposal

When it comes to watching a wedding romance, then “The Proposal’ probably is the most preferred choice of most couples. The Proposal is a 2009 romantic film starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. The story revolves around a pushy boss (Sandra Bullock) forces her young assistant (Ryan Reynolds) to marry her in order to keep her visa status in the U.S. and avoid deportation to Canada. You will love to watch the crazy chemistry between the two. Don’t miss to watch this movie; it is simply magical!

13. The Wedding Planner

The Wedding Planner is a 2001 American romantic comedy film starring Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey. Mary Fiore (Jennifer Lopez), an ambitious San Francisco wedding planner starts to believe in love when she is rescued from a near-fatal collision with a runaway dumpster by handsome pediatrician Steve Edison (Matthew McConaughey) while she celebrated her newest and most lucrative account — the wedding of Internet tycoon Fran Donelly (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras). After she spent the most enchanting evening of her life with Steve Edison (Matthew McConaughey), Mary thinks she’s finally found a reason to believe in love. What happens later is the thing to watch…..

14. Sweet Home Alabama

Sweet Home Alabama is a romantic comedy film released in 2002 starring Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey, and Candice Bergen. The story revolves around New York fashion designer Melanie (Reese Witherspoon), who suddenly finds herself engaged to the city’s most eligible bachelor. But Melanie’s past holds many secrets, which include Jake (Josh Lucas), the man she married in high school, who refuses to divorce her. Bound and determined to end their relationship once and for all, Melanie sneaks back home to Alabama in order to confront her past. But, rather, they rediscovered the love that they lost.

15. License to Wed

A 2007 American romantic comedy film, License to Wed stars Robin Williams, Mandy Moore and John Krasinski. Newly engaged couple Sadie (Mandy Moore) and Ben (John Krasinski) plan a traditional wedding in St. Augustine’s Church. But, sadly, for the lovebirds, the Rev. Frank (Robin Williams) refuses to bless the union until they pass his onerous marriage-prep course. While the clergyman puts the couple through holy hell, Ben and Sadie had to believe that they are truly destined to love each other till death and that their love could withstand any test.

16. Father of the Bride

Father of the Bride is a 1991 comedy film starring Steve Martin, Diane Keaton, Kimberly Williams, Martin Short, B. D. Wong, George Newbern, and Kieran Culkin. George Banks (Steve Martin) and Nina (Diane Keaton), are the proud parents of Annie (Kimberly Williams). They love their daughter to the point of almost losing her. When Annie returns from studying abroad and announces that she is engaged. The very moment their whole world turns upside down, especially George’s, who is overprotective father. Watch how George get into troubles, from meeting the in-laws to planning the wedding with an over-the-top consultant (Martin Short) and his buoyant assistant (B.D. Wong). Throughout the movie it seems as if the troubles are never going to end.

17. Corpse Bride

Corpse Bride, famously known as Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is a 2005 stop-motion-animated fantasy film voiced by Johny Depp, Emily Watson, Helena Bonham Carter, and Richard E. Grant. The movie is about Victor (Johnny Depp) and Victoria’s (Emily Watson). Their families arrange their marriage. They like each other, but Victor is nervous about the ceremony. He heads to the forest to practice his lines for the wedding, suddenly a tree branch becomes a hand and drags him to the land of the dead. It belongs to Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), who was murdered after she eloped with her love and wants to marry Victor. Victor must get back aboveground before his fiancé Victoria marries the villainous Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant). If you’re looking for something outside of the norm, then this the movie.

AND FINALLY…..

So, these are the 17 best movies every bride and groom should watch before their wedding day. If you are also set to get hitched, do watch all these movies with your partner-to-be. Have a great time!

Happy Wedding…..

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Against Innocence Race, Gender, and the politics of Safety

Saidiya V. Hartman: I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical questions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the status of the other. It’s as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: “Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.” That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day — the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to ...

Frank Wilderson: [laughter] A nigga on the warpath!

While I was reading the local newspaper I came across a story that caught my attention. The article was about a 17 year-old boy from Baltimore named Isaiah Simmons who died in a juvenile facility in 2007 when five to seven counselors suffocated him while restraining him for hours. After he stopped responding they dumped his body in the snow and did not call for medical assistance for over 40 minutes. In late March 2012, the case was thrown out completely and none of the counselors involved in his murder were charged with anything. The article I found online about the case was titled “Charges Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offender’s Death.” By emphasizing that it was a juvenile offender who died, the article is quick to flag Isaiah as a criminal, as if to signal to readers that his death is not worthy of sympathy or being taken up by civil rights activists. Every comment left on the article was crude and contemptuous — the general sentiment was that his death was no big loss to society. The news about the case being thrown out barely registered at all. There was no public outcry, no call to action, no discussion of the many issues bound up with the case — youth incarceration, racism, the privatization of prisons and jails (he died at a private facility), medical neglect, state violence, and so forth — though to be fair, there was a critical response when the case initially broke.

For weeks after reading the article I kept contemplating the question: What is the difference between Trayvon Martin and Isaiah Simmons? Which cases galvanize activists into action, and which are ignored completely? In the wake of the Jena 6, Troy Davis, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and other high profile cases,1 I have taken note of the patterns that structure political appeals, particularly the way innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of anti-racist political campaigns. These campaigns often center on prosecuting and harshly punishing the individuals responsible for overt and locatable acts of racist violence, thus positioning the State and the criminal justice system as an ally and protector of the oppressed. If the “innocence” of a Black victim is not established, he or she will not become a suitable spokesperson for the cause. If you are Black, have a drug felony, and are attempting to file a complaint with the ACLU regarding habitual police harassment — you are probably not going to be legally represented by them or any other civil rights organization anytime soon.2 An empathetic structure of feeling based on appeals to innocence has come to ground contemporary anti-racist politics. Within this framework, empathy can only be established when a person meets the standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity, which requires Black people, in the words of Frank Wilderson, to be shaken free of “niggerization.” Social, political, cultural, and legal recognition only happens when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized, and made unthreatening. The “spokesperson” model of doing activism (isolating specific exemplary cases) also tends to emphasize the individual, rather than the collective nature of the injury. Framing oppression in terms of individual actors is a liberal tactic that dismantles collective responses to oppression and diverts attention from the larger picture.

Using “innocence” as the foundation to address anti-Black violence is an appeal to the white imaginary, though these arguments are certainly made by people of color as well. Relying on this framework re-entrenches a logic that criminalizes race and constructs subjects as docile. A liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of Blackness with guilt (criminality). Perhaps association is too generous — there is a flat-out conflation of the terms. As Frank Wilderson noted in “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” the cop’s answer to the Black subject’s question — why did you shoot me? — follows a tautology: “I shot you because you are Black; you are Black because I shot you.”3 In the words of Fanon, the cause is the consequence.4 Not only are Black men assumed guilty until proven innocent, Blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt. Authentic victimhood, passivity, moral purity, and the adoption of a whitewashed position are necessary for recognition in the eyes of the State. Wilderson, quoting N.W.A, notes that “a nigga on the warpath” cannot be a proper subject of empathy.5 The desire for recognition compels us to be allies with, rather than enemies of the State, to sacrifice ourselves in order to meet the standards of victimhood, to throw our bodies into traffic to prove that the car will hit us rather than calling for the execution of all motorists. This is also the logic of rape revenge narratives — only after a woman is thoroughly degraded can we begin to tolerate her rage (but outside of films and books, violent women are not tolerated even when they have the “moral” grounds to fight back, as exemplified by the high rates of women who are imprisoned or sentenced to death for murdering or assaulting abusive partners).

We may fall back on such appeals for strategic reasons — to win a case or to get the public on our side — but there is a problem when our strategies reinforce a framework in which revolutionary and insurgent politics are unimaginable. I also want to argue that a politics founded on appeals to innocence is anachronistic because it does not address the transformation and re-organization of racist strategies in the post-civil rights era. A politics of innocence is only capable of acknowledging examples of direct, individualized acts of racist violence while obscuring the racism of a putatively colorblind liberalism that operates on a structural level. Posing the issue in terms of personal prejudice feeds the fallacy of racism as an individual intention, feeling or personal prejudice, though there is certain a psychological and affective dimension of racism that exceeds the individual in that it is shaped by social norms and media representations. The liberal colorblind paradigm of racism submerges race beneath the “commonsense” logic of crime and punishment. This effectively conceals racism, because it is not considered racist to be against crime. Cases like the execution of Troy Davis, where the courts come under scrutiny for racial bias, also legitimize state violence by treating such cases as exceptional. The political response to the murder of Troy Davis does not challenge the assumption that communities need to clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the claim that Davis is not one of those feared criminals, but an innocent Black man. Innocence, however, is just code for nonthreatening to white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other Black men — the bad ones — and the legal system is diagnosed as being infected with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is the constituent mechanism through which racial violence is carried out (wishful last-minute appeals to the right to a fair trial reveal this — as if trials were ever intended to be fair!). The State is imagined to be deviating from its intended role as protector of the people, rather than being the primary perpetrator. H. Rap Brown provides a sobering reminder that, “Justice means ‘just-us-white-folks.’ There is no redress of grievance for Blacks in this country.”6

While there are countless examples of overt racism, Black social (and physical) death is primarily achieved via a coded discourse of “criminality” and a mediated forms of state violence carried out by a impersonal carceral apparatus (the matrix of police, prisons, the legal system, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, etc). In other words — incidents where a biased individual fucks with or murders a person of color can be identified as racism to “conscientious persons,” but the racism underlying the systematic imprisonment of Black Americans under the pretense of the War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and generally remains invisible because it is spatially confined. When it is visible, it fails to arouse public sympathy, even among the Black leadership. As Loïc Wacquant, scholar of the carceral state, asks, “What is the chance that white Americans will identify with Black convicts when even the Black leadership has turned its back on them?”7 The abandonment of Black convicts by civil rights organizations is reflected in the history of these organizations. From 1975-86, the NAACP and the Urban League identified imprisonment as a central issue, and the disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans was understood as a problem that was structural and political. Spokespersons from the civil rights organizations related imprisonment to the general confinement of Black Americans. Imprisoned Black men were, as Wacquant notes, portrayed inclusively as “brothers, uncles, neighbors, friends.”8 Between 1986-90 there was a dramatic shift in the rhetoric and official policy of the NAACP and the Urban League that is exemplary of the turn to a politics of innocence. By the early 1990s, the NAACP had dissolved its prison program and stopped publishing articles about rehabilitation and post-imprisonment issues. Meanwhile these organizations began to embrace the rhetoric of individual responsibility and a tough-on-crime stance that encouraged Blacks to collaborate with police to get drugs out of their neighborhoods, even going as far as endorsing harsher sentences for minors and recidivists.

Black convicts, initially a part of the “we” articulated by civil rights groups, became them. Wacquant writes, “This reticence [to advocate for Black convicts] is further reinforced by the fact, noted long ago by W.E.B. DuBois, that the tenuous position of the black bourgeoisie in the socioracial hierarchy rests critically on its ability to distance itself from its unruly lower-class brethren: to offset the symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African Americans must forcefully communicate to whites that they have ‘absolutely no sympathy and no known connections with any black man who has committed a crime.’”9 When the Black leadership and middle-class Blacks differentiate themselves from poorer Blacks, they feed into a notion of Black exceptionalism that is used to dismantle anti-racist struggles. This class of exceptional Blacks (Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) supports the collective delusion of a post-race society.

The shift in the rhetoric and policy of civil rights organizations is perhaps rooted in a fear of affirming the conflation of Blackness and criminality by advocating for prisoners. However, not only have these organizations abandoned Black prisoners — they shore up and extend the Penal State by individualizing, depoliticizing, and decontextualizing the issue of “crime and punishment” and vilifying those most likely to be subjected to racialized state violence. The dis-identification with poor, urban Black Americans is not limited to Black men, but also Black women who are vilified via the figure of the Welfare Queen: a lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society (particularly hard-working white Americans). The Welfare State and the Penal State complement one another, as Clinton’s 1998 statements denouncing prisoners and ex-prisoners who receive welfare or social security reveal: he condemns former prisoners receiving welfare assistance for deviously committing “fraud and abuse” against “working families” who “play by the rules.”10 Furthermore, this complementarity is gendered. Black women are the shock absorbers of the social crisis created by the Penal State: the incarceration of Black men profoundly increases the burden put on Black women, who are force to perform more waged and unwaged (caring) labor, raise children alone, and are punished by the State when their husbands or family members are convicted of crimes (for example, a family cannot receive housing assistance if someone in the household has been convicted of a drug felony). The re-configuration of the Welfare State under the Clinton Administration (which imposed stricter regulations on welfare recipients) further intensified the backlash against poor Black women. On this view, the Welfare State is the apparatus used to regulate poor Black women who are not subjected to regulation, directed chiefly at Black men, by the Penal State — though it is important to note that the feminization of poverty and the punitive turn in non-violent crime policy led to an 400% increase in the female prison population between 1980 and the late 1990s.11 Racialized patterns of incarceration and the assault on the urban poor are not seen as a form of racist state violence because, in the eyes of the public, convicts (along with their families and associates) deserve such treatment. The politics of innocence directly fosters this culture of vilification, even when it is used by civil rights organizations.

WHITE SPACE

[C]rime porn often presents a view of prisons and urban ghettoes as “alternate universes” where the social order is drastically different, and the links between social structures and the production of these environments is conveniently ignored. In particular, although they are public institutions, prisons are removed from everyday US experience.12

The spatial politics of safety organizes the urban landscape. Bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort must be made disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure a sense of safety for whites. In other words, the space that white people occupy must be cleansed. The visibility of poor Black bodies (as well as certain non-Black POC, trans people, homeless people, differently-abled people, and so forth) induces anxiety, so these bodies must be contained, controlled, and removed. Prisons and urban ghettoes prevent Black and brown bodies from contaminating white space. Historically, appeals to the safety of women have sanctioned the expansion of the police and prison regimes while conjuring the racist image of the Black male rapist. With the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s came an increase in public awareness about sexual violence. Self-defense manuals and classes, as well as Take Back the Night marches and rallies, rapidly spread across the country. The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in public campaigns targeted at women in urban areas warning of the dangers of appearing in public spaces alone. The New York City rape squad declared that “[s]ingle women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.”13 In The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (1975), women were told, “a little paranoia is really good for every woman.”14 At the same time that the State was asserting itself as the protector of (white) women, the US saw the massive expansion of prisons and the criminalization of Blackness. It could be argued that the State and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of the feminist movement and appropriated feminist rhetoric to establish the racialized Penal State while simultaneously controlling the movement of women (by promoting the idea that public space was inherently threatening to women). People of this perspective might hold that the media frenzy about the safety of women was a backlash to the gains made by the feminist movement that sought to discipline women and promote the idea that, as Georgina Hickey wrote, “individual women were ultimately responsible for what happened to them in public space.”15 However, in In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, Kristin Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was actually “a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized society”: by insisting on “aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism,” feminists assisted in the creation of a tough-on-crime model of policing and punishment.16

Regardless of what perspective we agree with, the alignment of racialized incarceration and the proliferation of campaigns warning women about the dangers of the lurking rapist was not a coincidence. If the safety of women was a genuine concern, the campaigns would not have been focused on anonymous rapes in public spaces, since statistically it is more common for a woman to be raped by someone she knows. Instead, women’s safety provided a convenient pretext for the escalation of the Penal State, which was needed to regulate and dispose of certain surplus populations (mostly poor Blacks) before they became a threat to the US social order. For Wacquant, this new regime of racialized social control became necessary after the crisis of the urban ghetto (provoked by the massive loss of jobs and resources attending deindustrialization) and the looming threat of Black radical movements.17 The torrent of uprisings that took place in Black ghettoes between 1963-1968, particularly following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, were followed by a wave of prison upheavals (including Attica, Solidad, San Quentin, and facilities across Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Illinois, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania). Of course, these upheavals were easier to contain and shield from public view because they were cloaked and muffled by the walls of the penitentiary.

The engineering and management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettoes and prisons as “alternate universes” marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places that are removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of a “void” zone that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. What happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an “injustice” does register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms.

When I think of the public responses to Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, it seems significant that these murders took place in spaces that the white imaginary has access to, which allows white people to narrativize the incidents in terms that are familiar to them. Trayvon was gunned down while visiting family in a gated neighborhood; Oscar was murdered by a police officer in an Oakland commuter rail station. These spaces are not “alternate universes” or void-zones that lie outside white experience and comprehension. To what extent is the attention these cases have received attributable to the encroachment of violence on spaces that white people occupy? What about cases of racialized violence that occur outside white comfort zones? When describing the spatialization of settler colonies, Frantz Fanon writes about “a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region,” where “Black is not a man.”18 In the regions where Black is not man, there is no story to be told. Or rather, there are no subjects seen as worthy of having a story of their own.

TRANSLATION

When an instance of racist violence takes place on white turf, as in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, there is still the problem of translation. I contend that the politics of innocence renders such violence comprehensible only if one is capable of seeing themselves in that position. This framework often requires that a white narrative (posed as the neutral, universal perspective) be grafted onto the incidents that conflict with this narrative. I was baffled when a call for a protest march for Trayvon Martin made on the Occupy Baltimore website said, “The case of Trayvon Martin – is symbolic of the war on youth in general and the devaluing of young people everywhere.” I doubt George Zimmerman was thinking, I gotta shoot that boy because he’s young! No mention of race or anti-Blackness could be found in the statement; race had been translated to youth, a condition that white people can imaginatively access. At the march, speakers declared that the case of “Trayvon Martin is not a race issue — it’s a 99% issue!” As Saidiya Hartman has asserted in a conversation with Frank Wilderson, “the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced.”19

In late 2011, riots exploded across London and the UK after Mark Duggan, a Black man, was murdered by the police. Many leftist and liberals were unable to grapple with the unruly expression of rage among largely poor and unemployed people of color, and refused to support the passionate outburst they saw as disorderly and delinquent. Even leftists fell into the trap of framing the State and property owners (including small business owners) as victims while criticizing rioters for being politically incoherent and opportunistic. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, responded by dismissing the riots as a “meaningless outburst” in an article cynically titled “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” Well-meaning leftists who felt obligated to affirm the riots often did so by imposing a narrative of political consciousness and coherence onto the amorphous eruption, sometimes recasting the participants as “the proletariat” (an unemployed person is just a worker without a job, I was once told) or dissatisfied consumers whose acts of theft and looting shed light on capitalist ideology.20 These leftists were quick to purge and re-articulate the anti-social and delinquent elements of the riots rather than integrate them into their analysis, insisting on figuring the rioter-subject as “a sovereign deliberate consciousness,” to borrow a phrase from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.21

Following the 1992 LA riots,22 leftist commentators often opted to define the event as a rebellion rather than a riot as a way to highlight the political nature of people’s actions. This attempt to reframe the public discourse is borne of “good intentions” (the desire to combat the conservative media’s portrayal of the riots as “pure criminality”), but it also reflects the an impulse to contain, consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white, Euro-American traditions. When the mainstream media portrays social disruptions as apolitical, criminal, and devoid of meaning, leftists often respond by describing them as politically reasoned. Here, the confluence of political and anti-social tendencies in a riot/rebellion are neither recognized nor embraced. Certainly some who participated in the London riots were armed with sharp analyses of structural violence and explicitly political messages — the rioters were obviously not politically or demographically homogenous. However, sympathetic radicals tend to privilege the voices of those who are educated and politically astute, rather than listening to those who know viscerally that they are fucked and act without first seeking moral approval. Some leftists and radicals were reluctant to affirm the purely disruptive perspectives, like those expressed by a woman from Hackney, London who said, “We’re not all gathering together for a cause, we’re running down Foot Locker.”23 Or the excitement of two girls stopped by the BBC while drinking looted wine. When asked what they were doing, they spoke of the giddy “madness” of it all, the “good fun” they were having, and said that they were showing the police and the rich that “we can do what we want.”24 Translating riots into morally palatable terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence — rioters, looters, criminals, thieves, and disruptors are not proper victims and hence, not legitimate political actors. Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize.

With that being said, my reluctance to jam Black rage into a white framework is not an assertion of the political viability of a pure politics of refusal. White anarchists, ultra-leftists, post-Marxists, and insurrectionists who adhere to and fetishize the position of being “for nothing and against everything” are equally eager to appropriate events like the 2011 London riots for their (non)agenda. They insist on an analysis focused on the crisis of capitalism, which downplays anti-Blackness and ignores forms of gratuitous violence that cannot be attributed solely to economic forces. Like liberals, post-left and anti-social interpretive frameworks generate political narratives structured by white assumptions, which delimits which questions are posed which categories are the most analytically useful. Tiqqun explore the ways in which we are enmeshed in power through our identities, but tend to focus on forms of power that operate by an investment in life (sometimes call biopolitics) rather than, as Achille Mbembe writes, “the power and the capacity to decide who may live and who must die” (sometimes called necropolitics).25 This framework is decidedly white, for it asserts that power is not enacted by direct relations of force or violence, and that the capitalism reproduces itself by inducing us to produces ourselves, to express our identities through consumer choices, to base our politics on the affirmation of our marginalized identities. This configuration of power as purely generative and dispersed completely eclipses the realities of policing, the militarization of the carceral system, the terrorization of people of color, the institutional violence of the Welfare State and the Penal State, and of Black and Native social death. While prisons certainly “produce” race, a generative configuration of power that minimizes direct relations of force can only be theorized from a white subject position. Among ultra-left tendencies, communization theory notably looks beyond the wage relation in its attempt to grasp the dynamics of late-capitalism. Writing about Théorie Communiste (TC), Maya Andrea Gonzalez notes that “TC focus on the reproduction of the capital-labor relation, rather than on the production of value. This change of focus allows them to bring within their purview the set of relations that actually construct capitalist social life – beyond the walls of the factory or office.”26 However, while this reframing may shed light on relations that constitute social life outside the workplace, it does not shed light on social death, for relations defined by social death are not reducible to the capital-labor relation.

Rather than oppose class to race, Frank Wilderson draws our attention to the difference between being exploited under capitalism (the worker) and being marked as disposable or superfluous to capitalism (the slave, the prisoner). He writes, “The absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is symptomatic of [an] inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late capital’s over-accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories that structure conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation.”27 Historian Orlando Patterson similarly insists on understanding slavery in terms of social death rather than labor or exploitation.28 Forced labor is undoubtedly a part of the slave’s experience, but it is not what defines the slave relation. Economic exploitation does not explain the phenomena of racialized incarceration; an analysis of capitalism that fails to address anti-Blackness, or only addresses it as a byproduct of capitalism, is deficient.

SAFE SPACE

The discursive strategy of appealing to safety and innocence is also enacted on a micro-level when white radicals manipulate “safe space” language to maintain their power in political spaces. They do this by silencing the criticisms of POC under the pretense that it makes them feel “unsafe.”29 This use of safe space language conflates discomfort and actual imminent danger — which is not to say that white people are entitled to feel safe anyway. The phrase “I don’t feel safe” is easy to manipulate because it frames the situation in terms of the speaker’s personal feelings, making it difficult to respond critically (even when the person is, say, being racist) because it will injure their personal sense of security. Conversation often ends when people politicize their feelings of discomfort by using safe space language. The most ludicrous example of this that comes to mind was when a woman from Occupy Baltimore manipulated feminist language to defend the police after an “occupier” called the cops on a homeless man. When the police arrived to the encampment they were verbally confronted by a group of protesters. During the confrontation the woman made an effort to protect the police by inserting herself between the police and the protesters, telling those who were angry about the cops that it was unjustified to exclude the police. In the Baltimore City Paper she was quoted saying, “they were violating, I thought, the cops’ space.”

The invocation of personal security and safety presses on our affective and emotional registers and can thus be manipulated to justify everything from racial profiling to war.30 When people use safe space language to call out people in activist spaces, the one wielding the language is framed as innocent, and may even amplify or politicize their presumed innocence. After the woman from Occupy Baltimore came out as a survivor of violence and said she was traumatized by being yelled at while defending the cops, I noticed that many people became unwilling to take a critical stance on her blatantly pro-cop, classist, and homeless-phobic actions and comments, which included statements like, “There are so many homeless drunks down there — suffering from a nasty disease of addiction — what do I care if they are there or not? I would rather see them in treatment — that is for sure — but where they pass out is irrelevant to me.” Let it be known that anyone who puts their body between the cops and my comrades to protect the State’s monopoly on violence is a collaborator of the State. Surviving gendered violence does not mean you are incapable of perpetuating other forms of violence. Likewise, people can also mobilize their experiences with racism, transphobia, or classism to purify themselves. When people identify with their victimization, we need to critically consider whether it is being used as a tactical maneuver to construct themselves as innocent and exert power without being questioned. That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors — but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and being conscientious of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts.

On the flip side of this is a radical queer critique that has recently been leveled against the “safe space” model. In a statement from the Copenhagen Queer Festival titled “No safer spaces this year,” festival organizers wrote regarding their decision to remove the safer-space guidelines of the festival, offering in its place an appeal to “individual reflection and responsibility.” (In other words, ‘The safe space is impossible, therefore, fend for yourself.’) I see this rejection of collective forms of organizing, and unwillingness to think beyond the individual as the foundational political unit, as part of a historical shift from queer liberation to queer performativity that coincides with the advent of neoliberalism and the “Care of the Self”-style “politics” of choice).31 By reacting against the failure of safe space with a suspicion of articulated/explicit politics and collectivism, we flatten the issues and miss an opportunity to ask critical questions about the distribution of power, vulnerability, and violence, questions about how and why certain people co-opt language and infrastructure that is meant to respond to internally oppressive dynamics to perpetuate racial domination. As a Fanonian, I agree that removing all elements of risk and danger reinforces a politics of reformism that just reproduces the existing social order. Militancy is undermined by the politics of safety. It becomes impossible to do anything that involves risk when people habitually block such actions on the grounds that it makes them feel unsafe. People of color who use privilege theory to argue that white people have the privilege to engage in risky actions while POC cannot because they are the most vulnerable (most likely to be targeted by the police, not have the resources to get out of jail, etc) make a correct assessment of power differentials between white and non-white political actors, but ultimately erase POC from the history of militant struggle by falsely associating militancy with whiteness and privilege. When an analysis of privilege is turned into a political program that asserts that the most vulnerable should not take risks, the only politically correct politics becomes a politics of reformism and retreat, a politics that necessarily capitulates to the status quo while erasing the legacy of Black Power groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. For Fanon, it is precisely the element of risk that makes militant action more urgent — liberation can only be won by risking one’s life. Militancy is not just tactically necessary — its dual objective is to transform people and “fundamentally alter” their being by emboldening them, removing their passivity and cleansing them of “the core of despair” crystallized in their bodies.32

Another troublesome manifestation of the politics of safety is an emphasis on personal comfort that supports police behavior in consensus-based groups or spaces. For instance, when people at Occupy Baltimore confronted sexual assaulters, I witnessed a general assembly become so bogged down by consensus procedure that the only decision made about the assaulters in the space was to stage a 10 minute presentation about safer spaces at the next GA. No one in the group wanted to ban the assaulters from Occupy (as Stokely Carmichael said, “The liberal is afraid to alienate anyone, and therefore he is incapable of presenting any clear alternative.”)33 Prioritizing personal comfort is unproductive, reformist, and can bring the energy and momentum of bodies in motion to a standstill. The politics of innocence and the politics of safety and comfort are related in that both strategies reinforce passivity. Comfort and innocence produce each other when people base their demand for comfort on the innocence of their location or subject-position.

The ethicality of our locations and identities (as people within the US living under global capitalism) is an utter joke when you consider that we live on stolen lands in a country built on slavery and genocide. Even though I am a queer woman of color, my existence as a person living in the US is built on violence. As a non-incarcerated person, my “freedom” is only understood through the captivity of people like my brother, who was sentenced to life behind bars at the age of 17. When considering safety, we fail to ask critical questions about the co-constitutive relationship between safety and violence. We need to consider the extent to which racial violence is the unspoken and necessary underside of security, particularly white security. Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats. White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjection of bodies that they project hostile feelings onto, which allows them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual violence. The precarious founding of the US required the disappearance of Native American people, which was justified by associating the Native body with filth. Andrea Smith wrote, “This ‘absence’ is effected through the metaphorical transformation of native bodies into pollution of which the colonial body must constantly purify itself.”34 The violent foundation of US freedom and white safety often goes unnoticed because our lives are mediated in such a way that the violence is invisible or is considered legitimate and fails to register as violence (such as the violence carried out by police and prisons). The connections between our lives and the generalized atmosphere of violence is submerged in a complex web of institutions, structures, and economic relations that legalize, normalize, legitimize, and — above all — are constituted by this repetition of violence.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE

When we use innocence to select the proper subjects of empathetic identification on which to base our politics, we simultaneously regulate the ability for people to respond to other forms of violence, such as rape and sexual assault. When a woman is raped, her sexual past is inevitably used against her, and chastity is used to gauge the validity of a woman’s claim. “Promiscuous” women, sex workers, women of color, women experiencing homelessness, and addicts are not seen as legitimate victims of rape — their moral character is always called into question (they are always-already asking for it). In southern California during the 1980s and 1990s, police officers would close all reports of rape and violence made by sex workers, gang members, and addicts by placing them in a file stamped “NHI”: No Human Involved.35 This police practice draws attention to the way that rapeability is also simultaneously unrapeability in that the rape of someone who is not considered human does not register as rape. Only those considered “human” can be raped. Rape is often conventionally defined36 as “sexual intercourse” without “consent,” and consent requires the participation of subjects in possession of full personhood. Those considered not-human cannot give consent. Which is to say, there is no recognized subject-position from which one can state their desires. This is not to say that bodies constructed as rapeable cannot express consent or refusal to engage in sexual activity — but that their demands will be unintelligible because they are made from a position outside of proper white femininity.

Women of color are seen as sexually uninhibited by nature and thus are unable to access the sexual purity at the core of white femininity. As Smith writes in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Native American women are more likely to be raped than any other group of women, yet the media and courts consistently tend to only pay attention to rapes that involve the rape of a white woman by a person of color.37 Undocumented immigrant women are vulnerable to sexual violence — not only by because they cannot leave or report abusive partners because of the risk of deportation, but also because police and border patrol officers routinely manipulate their position of power over undocumented women by raping and assaulting them, using the threat of deportation to get them to submit and remain silent. A Mexican sociologist once told me that women crossing the border often take contraceptives because the rape of women crossing the border is so normalized. Black women are also systematically ignored by the media and criminal justice system. According to Kimberle Crenshaw, “Black women are less likely to report their rapes, less likely to have their cases come to trial, less likely to have their trials result in convictions, and, most disturbingly, less likely to seek counseling and other support services.”38 One reason why Black women may be less likely to report their rapes is because seeking assistance from the police often backfires: poor women of color who call the police during domestic disputes are often sexually assaulted by police, criminalized themselves, or have their children taken away. Given that the infrastructure that exists to support survivors (counseling, shelters, etc) often caters to white women and neglects to reach out to poor communities of color, it’s no surprise that women of color are less likely to utilize survivor resources. But we should be careful when noting the widespread neglect of the most vulnerable populations by police, the legal system, and social institutions — to assume that the primary problem is “neglect” implies that these apparatuses are neutral, that their role is to protect us, and that they are merely doing a bad job. On the contrary, their purpose is to maintain the social order, protect white people, and defend private property. If these intuitions are violent themselves, then expanding their jurisdiction will not help us, especially while racism and patriarchy endures.

Ultimately, our appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable and rapeable, even if we are trying to strategically use such appeals to protest violence committed against one of our comrades. When we challenge sexual violence with appeals to innocence, we set a trap for ourselves by feeding into the assumption that white ciswomen’s bodies are the only ones that cannot be violated because only white femininity is sanctified.39 As Kimberle Crenshaw writes, “The early emphasis in rape law on the property-like aspect of women’s chastity resulted in less solicitude for rape victims whose chastity had been in some way devalued.”40 Once she ‘gives away’ her chastity she no longer ‘owns’ it and so no one can ‘steal’ it. However, the association of women of color with sexual deviance bars them from possessing this “valued” chastity.41

AGAINST INNOCENCE

The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the State as “criminals.” When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the State. This ignores that the “enemies” in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror are racially defined, that gender and class delimit who is worthy of legal recognition. When the Occupy movement was in full swing in the US, I often read countless articles and encountered participants who were eager to police the politics and tactics of those who did not fit into a non-violent model of resistance. The tendency was to construct a politics from the position of the disenfranchised white middle-class and to remove, deny, and differentiate the Occupy movement from the “delinquent” or radical elements by condemning property destruction, confrontations with cops, and — in cases like Baltimore — anti-capitalist and anarchist analyses. When Amy Goodman asked Maria Lewis from Occupy Oakland about the “violent” protestors after the over 400 arrests made following an attempt to occupy the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, I was pleased that Maria affirmed rather than excised people’s anger:

AMY GOODMAN:Maria Lewis, what about some of the reports that said that the protesters were violent?

MARIA LEWIS:Absolutely. There was a lot of anger this weekend, and I think that the anger that the protesters showed in the streets this weekend and the fighting back that did take place was reflective of a larger anger in Oakland that is boiling over at the betrayal of the system. I think that people, day by day, are realizing, as the economy gets worse and worse, as unemployment gets worse and worse, as homelessness gets worse and worse, that the economic system, that capitalism in Oakland, is failing us. And people are really angry about that, and they’re beginning to fight back. And I think that that’s a really inspiring thing.

While the comment still frames the issue in terms of capitalist crisis, the response skillfully rearticulates the terms of the discussion by a) affirming the actions immediately, b) refusing to purify the movement by integrating rather than excluding the “violent” elements, c) legitimizing the anger and desires of the protestors, d) shifting the attention to the structural nature of the problem rather than getting hung up on making moral judgments about individual actors. In other words, by rejecting a politics of innocence that reproduces the “good,” compliant citizen. Stokely Carmichael put it well when he said, “The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. I want to state emphatically here that violence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right, nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.”42

The practice of isolating morally agreeable cases in order to highlight racist violence requires passively suffered Black death and panders to a framework that strengthens and conceals current paradigms of racism. While it may be factually true to state that Trayvon Martin was unarmed, we should not state this with a righteous sense of satisfaction. What if Trayvon Martin were armed? Maybe then he could have defended himself by fighting back. But if the situation had resulted in the death of George Zimmerman rather than of Trayvon Martin, I doubt the public would have been as outraged and galvanized into action to the same extent.

It is ridiculous to say that there will be justice for Trayvon when he is already dead — no amount of prison time for Zimmerman can compensate. When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that requires passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead Black boy to make its point. It’s not surprising that the nation or even the Black leadership have failed to rally behind CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman who was recently convicted of second degree manslaughter after a group of racist, transphobic white people attacked her and her friends, cutting CeCe’s cheek with a glass bottle and provoking an altercation that led to the death of a white man who had a swastika tattoo. Trans women of color who are involved in confrontations that result in the death of their attackers are criminalized for their survival. When Akira Jackson, a Black trans woman, stabbed and killed her boyfriend after he beat her with a baseball bat, she was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter.

Cases that involve an “innocent” (passive), victimized Black person also provide an opportunity for the liberal white conscience to purify and morally ennoble itself by taking a position against racism. We need to challenge the status of certain raced and gendered subjects as instruments of emotional relief for white civil society, or as bodies that can be displaced for the sake of providing analogies to amplify white suffering (“slavery” being the favored analogy). Although we must emphasize that Troy Davis did not kill police officer Mark MacPhail, maybe we also should question why killing a cop is considered morally deplorable when the cops, in the last few months alone, have murdered 29 Black people. Talking about these murders will not undo them. Having the “right line” cannot alter reality if we do not put our bodies where our mouths are. As Spivak says, “it can’t become our goal to keep watching our language.”43 Rejecting the politics of innocence is not about assuming a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective — it is a lived position.

1 This article assumes some knowledge of race-related cases that received substantial media attention in the last several years. For those who are unfamiliar with the cases:

The Jena 6 were 6 Black teenagers convicted for beating a white student at Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, on December 4, 2006, after mounting racial tensions including the hanging of a noose on tree. 5 of the teens were initially charged with attempted murder.

Troy Davis was a Black man who was executed on September 21, 2011 for allegedly murdering police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia, though there was little evidence to support the conviction.

Oscar Grant was a Black man who was shot and killed by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California on January 1, 2009.

Trayvon Martin was a 17 year-old Black youth who was murdered by George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman, on February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida. 2 This was a real situation that I heard described by Michelle Alexander when I saw her speak at Morgan State University. While she was working as a civil rights lawyer at the ACLU, a young Black man brought a stack of papers to her after hearing about their campaign against racial profiling. The papers documented instances of police harassment in detail (including names, dates, badges #s, descriptions), but the ACLU refused to represent him because he had a drug felony, even though he claimed that the drugs were planted on him. Later, a scandal broke about the Oakland police, particularly an officer he identified, planting drugs on POC. 3 Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9.2 (2003): 225-240. 4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Uniform Title: Damnés De La Terre (New York: Grove Press, 1965). 5 Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13.2 (2003): 183-201. 6 H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, Die, Nigger, Die! : A Political Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002). 7 Loïc Wacquant, “Social Identity and the Ethics of Punishment,” Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University, 2007. Conference presentation. 8 Ibid. 9 Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3.1 (2001): 95-134. 10 Ibid. 11 Cassandra Shaylor, “‘It’s Like Living in a Black Hole’: Women of Color and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex,” New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement 24.2 (1998). 12 Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners, “Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.1: ( 2011) 270-290. 13 Georgina Hicke, “From Civility to Self-Defense: Modern Advice to Women on the Privileges and Dangers of Public Space,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.1 (2011): 77-94. 14 Mary Conroy, The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1975). 15 Hickey, “From Civility to Self-Defense.” 16 Kristin Bumiller, In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 17 Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis.” 18 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 19 Hartman and Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought.” 20 Zygmunt Bauman described the rioters as “defective and disqualified consumers.” Žižek wrote that, “they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive.” 21 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Harasym Sarah, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990). 22 Riots erupted in LA on April 29, 1992 after 3 white and 1 Hispanic LAPD officers were acquitted for beating Rodney King, a Black man, following a high-speed chase. 23 Zoe Williams, “The UK Riots: The Psychology of Looting,” The Guardian, 2011. 24 “London Rioters: ‘Showing the Rich We Do What We Want,’” BBC News, 2011 (Video). 25 Biopolitics and necropolitics are not mutually exclusive. While the two forms of power co-exist and constitute each other, necropolitics “regulates life through the perspective of death, therefore transforming life in a mere existence bellow every life minimum” (Marina Grzinic). Writing about Mbembe’s conceptualization of necropower, Grzinic notes that necropower requires the “maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathscapes that are unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” Though Mbembe focuses primarily on Africa, other examples of these deathscapes may include prisons, New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Palestine, and so forth. 26 Maya Andrea Gonzalez, “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,” Communization and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles (New York: Autonomedia, 2012). 27 Frank B. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order 30.2 (2003): 18-28. 28 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 29 This tactic is also used to silence and delegitimize other people, such as femmes who are too loud, or queers who engage in illegal actions. 30 In “Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work,” Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners offer the following definition of affect: “Affect is the body’s response to the world—amorphous, outside conscious awareness, nondirectional, undefined, full of possibility. In this framing, affect is distinct from emotion, which is understood as the product of affect being marshaled into personal expressions of feeling, as shaped by social conventions.” Affect is useful to think of the way ‘the criminal’ and ‘the terrorist’ become linked to certain racialized bodies, and how people viscerally respond to the presence of those bodies even when they consciously reject racism. Jackson and Meiners, “Fear and Loathing.” 31 Post-leftists, perhaps responding to the way we are fragmented and atomized under late-capitalism, also adamantly reject a collectivist model of political mobilization. In “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,” Maya Andrea Gonzalez advocates “inaugurating relations between individuals defined in their singularity.” In “theses on the terrible community: 3. AFFECTIVITY,” the idea that the human “community” is an aggregate of monad-like singularities is further elaborated: “The terrible community is a human agglomerate, not a group of comrades. The members of the terrible community encounter each other and aggregate together by accident more than by choice. They do not accompany one another, they do not know one another.” To what extent does the idea that the singularist (read, individualist) or rhizomatic (non)-strategy is the only option reinforce liberal individualism? In The One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power discusses how individual choice, flexibility, and freedom are used to atomize and pit workers against each other. While acknowledging the current dynamics of waged labor, she shows how using the “individual” as the primary political unit is unable to grapple with issues like the discrimination of pregnant women in the workplace. She asserts that thinking through the lens of the individual cannot resolve the exploitation of women’s caring labor because the individualized nature of this form of labor is a barrier to undoing the burden placed on women, who are the primary bearers of childcare responsibilities. She also discusses how the transition from a feminism of liberation to a feminism of choice makes it so that “any general social responsibility for motherhood, or move towards the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities is immediately blocked off.” Gonzalez, “Communization and the Abolition of Gender.” Nina Power, One-Dimensional Woman. (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). 32 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. 33 Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism (New York: Random House, 1971). 34 Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005). 35 See Amy Scholder, Editor, Critical Condition: Women on the Edge of Violence, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1993) and Elizabeth Sisco, “NHI—No Humans Involved,” paper delivered at the symposium “Critical Condition - Women on the edge of violence,” San Francisco Cameraworks, 1993. 36 New Oxford American Dictionary gives a peculiar definition: “the crime, committed by a man, of forcing another person to have sexual intercourse with him without their consent and against their will, esp. by the threat or use of violence against them.” To what extent does this definition normalize male violence by defining rape as inherently male? 37 Ibid. 38 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241-99. 39 Because the sexuality of white women derives its value from its ability to differentiate itself from “deviant” sexuality, such as the sexuality of women of color. 40 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.” 41 Early rape laws focused on the “property-like” aspects of women’s sexuality that liberal feminists are today attempting to reclaim. Liberal feminists frame debates about women’s health, abortion, and rape around a notion of female bodies as property. But using bodily self-ownership to make our claims is counter-productive because certain bodies are more valued than others. Liberal feminists also echo arguments for free markets when they demand that the State not intervene in affairs relating to our private property (our bodies), because as owners we should be free to do what we want with the things we own. In order to be owners of our bodies, we first have to turn our bodies into property—into a commodity—which is a conceptualization of our corporeality that makes our bodies subject to conquest and appropriation in the first place. Pro-choice discourse that focuses on the right for women to do what they want with their property substitutes a choice-oriented strategy founded on liberal individualism for a collectivist, liberationist one. (Foregrounding the question of choice in politics ignores the forced sterilization of women color and the unequal access to medical resources between middle class women and poor women.) While white men make their claims for recognition as subjects, women and people of color are required to make their claims as objects, as property (or if they are to make their claims as subjects, they must translate themselves into a masculine white discourse). In the US, juridical recognition was initially only extended to white men and their property. These are the terms of recognition that operate today, which we must vehemently refuse. Liberal feminists try to write themselves in by framing themselves as both the property and the owners. 42 Carmichael, Stokely Speaks. 43 Spivak and Harasym, The Post-Colonial Critic.

[pharology101]

LOTD: Pigeon Point

(from: http://www.ibiblio.org/lighthouse/ca.htm)

 Pigeon Point

1872. Active; focal plane 148 ft (45 m); white flash every 10 s. 115 ft (35 m) brick tower, painted white; lantern is black. The original 1st order Fresnel lens was removed from the tower in 2011 and is now displayed in the fog signal building; Michael Martin has a 2021 photo. The active light, a DCB-24 aerobeacon, is mounted on an extension of the gallery. Anderson has a good page for the lighthouse, Trabas has Boucher's closeup photo, Tim Newsome has a 2021 photo, Lighthouse Digest has Gary Martin's January 2001 feature story, Marinas.com has aerial photos, Huelse has a historic postcard view, Joshua Kaufman-Horner has a street view, and Google has a satellite view. The lighthouse, a shorter sibling of Bodie Island Light,  North Carolina, is one of the best known and most photographed California lighthouses, but now it is critically endangered and a member of the Lighthouse Digest Doomsday List. The historic light station is managed by California State Parks and the modern Coast Guard buildings are used as a youth hostel operated by Hostelling International - American Youth Hostels. The adjacent property was saved from development by the Peninsula Open Space Trust in 2000; the Trust later bought 3/4 mile (1.2 km) of beachfront to protect the light station. In December 2001 a section of the cornice fell and the light tower was closed to climbing. It has remained closed ever since. In October 2002 the station was listed for transfer under the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act; the trust and state parks developed a joint application for ownership. In March 2004 the National Park Service recommended approval of this application. Two nonprofit groups appealed the decision, but the light station was transferred to the state in May 2005. The  California State Parks Foundation launched a campaign for $5 million to fund a restoration of the lighthouse. The aerobeacon failed in October 2008 and the backup light also failed in April 2009, but a new aerobeacon was installed later in 2009. In a $310,000 project in the fall of 2011 the Fresnel lens was removed and is now on display in the fog signal building. (For many years it was believed that this lens came from the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina, but Kevin Duffus has proved that this is not true; see his November 2002 article in Lighthouse Digest.) The project also stabilized the upper portion of the tower. In May 2012 the California Coastal Conservancy granted $200,000 to prepare architectural plans for a general restoration, then estimated to cost $7 million. In late 2016 the State Parks Foundation ended its fundraising with $3 million raised, but engineers now estimated the cost of restoration would be at least $11 million. The lighthouse was "in critical condition," according to a State Parks engineer. In 2019 the state parks agency requested $12.2 million to stabilize and reopen the lighthouse. The legislature appropriated $9.2 million but that money was redirected. Finally in 2021 the state budgeted $18.9 million for a complete restoration. Located on Pigeon Point Road just off CA 1 about 5 miles (8 km) south of Pescadero. Site open; fog signal building open Friday through Monday; tower closed. Owner: California State Parks. Site manager: Pigeon Point Light Station State Historic Park . ARLHS USA-599; Admiralty G4006; USCG 6-0320.

(photo found here (link will be edited in later; copyright Wikipedia user Sanfranman59)

[patriotsnet]

What Do Democratic Republicans Believe In

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-do-democratic-republicans-believe-in/

What Do Democratic Republicans Believe In

Famous Republican Vs Democratic Presidents

Republicans have controlled the White House for 28 of the last 43 years since Richard Nixon became president. Famous Democrat Presidents have been Franklin Roosevelt, who pioneered the New Deal in America and stood for 4 terms, John F. Kennedy, who presided over the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis, and was assassinated in Office; Bill Clinton, who was impeached by the House of Representatives; and Nobel Peace Prize winners Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter.

Famous Republican Presidents include Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery; Teddy Roosevelt, known for the Panama Canal; Ronald Reagan, credited for ending the Cold War with ; and the two Bush family Presidents of recent times. Republican President Richard Nixon was forced to resign over the Watergate scandal.

To compare the two parties’ presidential candidates in the 2020 elections, see Donald Trump vs Joe Biden.

The Third Party System

The Third Party System lasted from about 1854 to the mid-1890s, and featured profound developments in issues of nationalism, modernization, and race. It was dominated by the new Republican Party , which claimed success in saving the Union, abolishing slavery and enfranchising the freedmen, while adopting many Whiggish modernization programs such as national banks, railroads, high tariffs, homesteads, social spending , and aid to land grant colleges. While most elections from 1874 through 1892 were extremely close, the opposition Democrats won only the 1884 and 1892 presidential elections. The northern and western states were largely Republican, save for closely balanced New York, Indiana, New Jersey, and Connecticut. After 1874, the Democrats took control of the âSolid South. â

What Was John Quincy Adamss Childhood Like

John Quincy Adams was the eldest son of and Abigail Adams. Growing up during the American Revolution, he watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from Penns Hill and heard the cannons roar across the Back Bay in . He accompanied his father on diplomatic missions to Europe and studied in  and , Netherlands.

Democratic Socialism Vs Trumpism

What probably rankles the Trumpians and scares the bejeebers out of them is the fact that more Americans, especially young folks, are giving democratic socialism a look and liking what they see hence the rise of the Sanders movement.  

The old red-baiting and the lies that democratic socialism or social democracy is the same as Stalinism are falling on more and more deaf ears.

Communism is about gone. In Russia, Trumps pal Putin, the ex-KGB guy, has replaced Marxism-Leninism with fascism even after 27 million Russians died fighting Hitler and fascism.

And in America, Trumpism is looking more and more like Putinism. If we can turn back Trumpism in this election, perhaps we can begin the discussion about what sort of nation we really want to be. And that discussion should include democratic socialism.

30

What Is The Most Distinctive Feature Of Democracy

The most distinctive feature of democracy is that its examination never gets over because:

As people realise the benefits of democracy, they ask for more and want to make democracy even better.

The fact that people complain regarding the working of democracy is a testimony to the success of democracy.

What Does Democratic Mean

Starting alphabetically, the word means pertaining to or of the nature of democracy or a democracy.

Simply put, the lowercase democratic is a word used to refer to anything that resembles or has to do with a , a form of in which the supreme power rests with the people and is exercised by them directly or by politicians that they elect to them. In practice, this is usually accomplished through a fair, organized system of voting, in which  or cast votes in support of political or societal issues . 

So, the word democratic is used to describe government systems that are or resemble democracies and the people that run these types of governments. The United States of America is a representative democracy in which the people elect representatives to perform the demands of politics on their behalf. This is why we say that the US is a democratic country or that we have a democratic form of government. 

The English word democratic dates all the way back to the late 1500 and early 1600s. It is derived from the Greek word dmokratía . The government system of the ancient Greek of Athens, in which the people held the power , is considered the worlds first democracy. Considering that Athens was a slave-owning society, its form of democracy was much different than the democratic governments of today. 

Trump Loses Then Attempts A Coup

In Georgia, Trump is attacking the Republican governor, lieutenant governor and secretary of state. In Arizona, he is attacking Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who has been a GOP statewide officeholder for more consecutive years than Trump has been a Republican.

The reason? They are not willing to try to overturn duly certified election results in their states.

There has been an attempted coup of the presidential election taking place. But Trump is not the victim. He is the perpetrator.

The legal strategy was to delay certification of election results. The political strategy was to pressure Republican officials to ignore the election results, irrespective of whether they were certified, and have Republican state legislatures chose Trump electors in states where Biden won the vote.

What Are The Basic Ideals Of The Democracy

According to American political scientist Larry Diamond, democracy consists of four key elements: a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; the active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; protection of the human rights of all citizens;

Democratic Views On The Death Penalty

Democratic views on the death penalty revolve around the opinion that it must only be used in certain cases. The 2012 Democratic Party Platform stated, we believe that the death penalty must not be arbitrary. DNA testing should be used in all appropriate circumstances, defendants should have effective assistance of counsel, and the administration of justice should be fair and impartial. Previous Democratic platforms have stated, in all death row cases, we encourage thorough post-conviction reviews. We will put the rights of victims and families first again. And we will push for more crime prevention, to stop the next generation of crime before its too late. As a party, Democrats believe that stricter punishment, such as the death penalty, work as a preventative measure to keep crime from happening to begin with. Democrats strongly support the death penalty in cases of those who have murdered policemen and terrorists. Bill Clinton and Al Gore fought to have this punishment put into place for these criminals. The party is currently divided on whether or not the death penalty should be applied to all convicted murderers. However, not all Democrats share this view. Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsome of California says, I think we should repeal the death penalty. Its not a deterrent; there are racial components to it. Martin OMalley, governor of Maryland, believes similarly. He says Its wasteful. Its ineffective. It doesnt work to reduce violent crime.

Regulating The Economy Democratic Style

The Democratic Party is generally considered more willing to intervene in the economy, subscribing to the belief that government power is needed to regulate businesses that ignore social interests in the pursuit of earning a for shareholders. This intervention can come in the form of regulation or taxation to support social programs. Opponents often describe the Democratic approach to governing as “tax and spend.”

Why Did The Democratic And Republican Parties Switch Platforms

02 November 2020

Around 100 years ago, Democrats and Republicans switched their political stances.

The Republican and Democratic parties of the United States didn’t always stand for what they do today. 

During the 1860s, Republicans, who dominated northern states, orchestrated an ambitious expansion of federal power, helping to fund the transcontinental railroad, the state university system and the settlement of the West by homesteaders, and instating a national currency and protective tariff. Democrats, who dominated the South, opposed those measures. 

After the Civil War, Republicans passed laws that granted protections for Black Americans and advanced social justice. And again, Democrats largely opposed these apparent expansions of federal power.

Sound like an alternate universe? Fast forward to 1936. 

Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt won reelection that year on the strength of the New Deal, a set of Depression-remedying reforms including regulation of financial institutions, the founding of welfare and pension programs, infrastructure development and more. Roosevelt won in a landslide against Republican Alf Landon, who opposed these exercises of federal power.

So, sometime between the 1860s and 1936, the party of small government became the party of big government, and the party of big government became rhetorically committed to curbing federal power. 

Foreign Policy And National Defense

Republicans supported Woodrow Wilsons call for American entry into World War I in 1917, complaining only that he was too slow to go to war. Republicans in 1919 opposed his call for entry into the League of Nations. A majority supported the League with reservations; a minority opposed membership on any terms. Republicans sponsored world disarmament in the 1920s, and isolationism in the 1930s. Most Republicans staunchly opposed intervention in World War II until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. By 1945, however, internationalists became dominant in the party which supported the Cold War policies such as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO.

Working Role Of Government And Society

The Democratic point of view sets standards for American society and the role of the government in that society. The fundamental beliefs about society and government is that:

Societies must have laws that the majority of the people support and accept.

Dissenting minorities are protected and have the right to have an opinion different than the majority.

The people rule and thus, the people rule elect a government.

The government should respect and protect individual rights.

The government should also protect and respect individual freedoms.

Civil liberties must be guaranteed for ALL citizens by the government.

The government must work for the common good.

Most, if not all, of these solid Democratic beliefs, are outlined and protected by the United States Constitution. Many of todays hot issues violate some of these tenets. The Homeland Security Act, for example, removes some of the individual freedoms and rights from American Citizens. Republicans feel that the loss of these rights is for the common good; Democrats disagree.

Before pledging membership or allegiance to either political party, Americans should educate themselves about what each party believes and what each party stands for to be sure that their own beliefs agree.

June 27, 2018

Who Created The First Political Parties

It featured two national parties competing for control of the presidency, Congress, and the states: the Federalist Party, created largely by Alexander Hamilton, and the rival Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, formed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, usually called at the time the Republican Party (note:

READ: What does it mean when a girl says talk soon?

Why The Gops Lack Of Party Platform Matters

President Trumps refusal to commit to accepting Novembers election results is the latest example of this president abandoning the norms of constitutional democracy. And although high-profile Republicans have issued statements affirming that they support a peaceful transfer of power, they have also been carefully deferential to Trump.

This is a notable continuation of the party slowly becoming the party of Trump. Nowhere was this clearer than in the decision not to have a 2020 party platform and instead simply affirming enthusiastic support for Trump and his America First agenda. That move, more so than statements pledging fealty to the peaceful transfer of power, signals wavering Republican commitment toward equal rights and democracy.

Platforms declare a partys values and commitments. While the substance of the Democratic and Republican platforms often differs sharply, both have historically used certain key words, like the American Dream, economic opportunity and freedom from discrimination. Examining Republican platforms over time shows that what once had been a big-tent strategy of carefully managing intraparty differences over equality has been replaced by a hierarchical model of leadership where the party faithful should acquiesce to one individuals vision of political community. Indeed, the 2020 resolution ruled out of order any effort to adopt a platform.

Who Are Prominent Democrats

Notable Democrats include Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the only president to be elected to the White House four times, and Barack Obama, who was the first African American president . Other Democratic presidents include John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. The latters wife, Hillary Clinton, made history in 2016 as the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major U.S. political party, though she ultimately lost the election. In 1968 Shirley Chisholm won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first African American woman elected to , and in 2007 Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to serve as of the House.

Democratic Party, in the United States, one of the two major political parties, the other being the Republican Party.

political cartoon: donkey Harper’s Weekly

Democrats Think Many Republicans Sincere And Point To Policy

Democrats, however, were somewhat more generous in their answers.  More than four in ten Democratic voters   felt that most Republican voters had the countrys best interests at heart .  And many tried their best to answer from the others perspective. A 45-year-old male voter from Ohio imagined that as a Republican, he was motivated by Republicans harsh stance on immigration; standing up for the 2nd Amendment; promised tax cuts.  A 30-year-old woman from Colorado felt that Republican votes reflected the desires to stop abortion stop gay marriage from ruining our country and give us our coal jobs back.

Other Democrats felt that their opponents were mostly motivated by the GOPs opposition to Obamacare, lower taxes and to support a party that reduced unemployment. 

Energy Issues And The Environment

There have always been clashes between the parties on the issues of energy and the environment. Democrats believe in restricting drilling for oil or other avenues of fossil fuels to protect the environment while Republicans favor expanded drilling to produce more energy at a lower cost to consumers. Democrats will push and support with tax dollars alternative energy solutions while the Republicans favor allowing the market to decide which forms of energy are practical.

Public Opinion On Foreign Policy

In June 2014 the Quinnipiac Poll asked Americans which foreign policy they preferred:

A) The United States is doing too much in other countries around the world, and it is time to do less around the world and focus more on our own problems here at home. B) The United States must continue to push forward to promote democracy and freedom in other countries around the world because these efforts make our own country more secure.

Democrats chose A over B by 65%-32%; Republicans chose A over B by 56% to 39%; Independents chose A over B by 67% to 29%.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.  

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

History Of The Democratic Party

The party can trace its roots all the way back to Thomas Jefferson when they were known as Jeffersons Republicans and they strongly opposed the Federalist Party and their nationalist views. The Democrats adopted the donkey as their symbol due to Andrew Jackson who was publicly nicknamed jackass because of his popular position of let the people rule. The Democratic National Committee was officially created in 1848. During the civil war a rift grew within the party between those who supported slavery and those who opposed it. This deep division led to the creation of a new Democratic party, the one we now know today.

Adams And The Revolution Of 1800

Presidency of John AdamsThomas JeffersonJohn Adams

Shortly after Adams took office, he dispatched a group of envoys to seek peaceful relations with France, which had begun attacking American shipping after the ratification of the Jay Treaty. The failure of talks, and the French demand for bribes in what became known as the XYZ Affair, outraged the American public and led to the , an undeclared naval war between France and the United States. The Federalist-controlled Congress passed measures to expand the army and navy and also pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien and Sedition Acts restricted speech that was critical of the government, while also implementing stricter naturalization requirements. Numerous journalists and other individuals aligned with the Democratic-Republicans were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, sparking a backlash against the Federalists. Meanwhile, Jefferson and Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which held that state legislatures could determine the constitutionality of federal laws.

Early Life And Career

John Adams entered the world at the same time that his maternal great-grandfather, John Quincy, for many years a prominent member of the , was leaving ithence his name. He grew up as a child of the American Revolution. He watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from Penns Hill and heard the roar across the Back Bay in . His patriot father, John Adams, at that time a delegate to the Continental Congress, and his patriot mother, Abigail Smith Adams, had a strong molding influence on his education after the war had deprived Braintree of its only schoolmaster. In 1778 and again in 1780 the boy accompanied his father to . He studied at a private school in in 177879 and at the University of Leiden, , in 1780. Thus, at an early age he acquired an excellent knowledge of the language and a smattering of . In 1780, also, he began to keep regularly the diary that forms so a record of his doings and those of his contemporaries through the next 60 years of American history. Self-appreciative, like most of the Adams clan, he once declared that, if his diary had been even richer, it might have become “next to the Holy Scriptures, the most and valuable book ever written by human hands.”

c.

Religion And The Belief In God Is Vital To A Strong Nation

Republicans are generally accepting only of the Judeo-Christian belief system. For most Republicans, religion is absolutely vital in their political beliefs and the two cannot be separated. Therefore, separation of church and state is not that important to them. In fact, they believe that much of what is wrong has been caused by too much secularism.

Those are the four basic Republican tenets: small government, local control, the power of free markets, and Christian authority. Below are other things they believe that derive from those four ideas.

Democratic Views On Health Care

The Democratic view on health care is based around the idea that accessible, affordable, high quality health care is part of the American promise, that Americans should have the security that comes with good health care. Democrats believe that no American should have to face financial destitution because they fall ill or get injured, stating that no one should have to choose between taking their child to a doctor and paying the rent. They are firm supporters of laws that prevent insurance companies from covering Americans with pre-existing medical conditions, capping or cancelling coverage, or charging women more due simply to gender. They also support allowing young Americans who are just entering the workforce to stay on their parents health care plans. They believe in preserving Medicare benefits for seniors. Democrats are strong supporters of the Affordable Care Act and of strengthening Medicare. Democrats stand in support of stem cell research, as well as other medical research, as a means to develop cures and treatments. They also support tax credits to businesses who offer quality, affordable healthcare, and tax credits to Americans who are approaching 65 and are not working, so that they can continue to afford healthcare until their Medicare benefits come into effect.

Opinion:almost Half Of Republicans Admit Theyre Ready To Ditch Democracy

Almost half of Republicans are now saying the quiet part out loud: Theyd prefer to ditch this whole democracy thing.

So finds CBS News-YouGov conducted in mid-May. The survey asked Republicans a series of questions about the required level of fealty to former president Donald Trump, their views of the 2020 election and priorities for the party going forward.

The results were bleak.

Two-thirds said it was important for Republicans to be loyal to Donald Trump now. The same share said they did not believe President Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. recent that I dont think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election.)

But the most troubling results came from a question about the partys best strategy for winning in 2022 and 2024. If you were consulting for the party, respondents were asked, would you focus on developing a message and popular policies and ideas to win over more voters? Or would you prioritize changes to the voting rules in states and districts?

A whopping 47 percent chose the latter option. In other words, nearly half of those who still identify as Republicans appear to have given up on a key premise of democracy: that you earn the right to govern by proposing ideas that appeal to a majority of the public. Theyd prefer to short-circuit that process and,instead, make it harder for their opponents to vote.

So much for party of ideas, as the GOP once called itself.

Read more:

Why Democrats Are Reluctantly Making Voter Id Laws A Bargaining Chip

While party leaders have long worried about the discriminatory effects of such laws, many now see other restrictive voting measures pushed by Republicans as a more urgent threat.

WASHINGTON Congressional Democrats, searching for any way forward on legislation to protect voting rights, find themselves softening their once-firm opposition to a form of restriction on the franchise that they had long warned would be Exhibit A for voter suppression: voter identification laws.

Any path to passing the far-reaching Democratic elections legislation that Republicans blocked with a filibuster on Tuesday will almost certainly have to include a compromise on the bills near-blanket ban on state laws that require voters to present photo identification before they can cast a ballot. As such laws were first cropping up decades ago, Democrats fought them tooth and nail, insisting that they would be an impossible barrier to scale for the nations most vulnerable voters, especially older people and people of color.

But in recent years, as the concept of voter identification has become broadly popular, the idea that voters bring some form of ID to the polls has been accepted by Democrats ranging from Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia on the center-right to Stacey Abrams of Georgia, a hero of the left.

For me, the larger debate that is probably more critical is reforming the filibuster, he said.

The Fight Over Voting Rights

[centrumlumina]

As part of the July 2019 AO3 Ship Stats, here are the Top 100 F/F pairings with the most total works on Archive Of Our Own.

Of the 200 names on this list, there are 53 women of colour and 27 women of ambiguous race, compared with 42 and 35 in the 2017 list. For comparison, the overall top 100 list includes 46 people of colour and 8 who are racially ambiguous.

Because of the way I produced this data, it is possible some F/F ships are missing, particularly those in fandoms dominated by other categories of ship. For more information, see the project FAQs. This project also includes an All-Time Top 100 list and 2017-2019 Top 100, and can be found cross-posted on AO3.

Edit: Fixed race classification for Éponine Thénardier.

A text-only version of this data is given below the cut.

Rank Change Pairing Fandom Works Race 1 0 Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Emma Swan Once Upon a Time (TV) 11388 Whi/POC 2 0 Clarke Griffin/Lexa The 100 (TV) 10838 White 3 1 Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor Supergirl (TV 2015) 9460 White 4 3 Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer Supergirl (TV 2015) 5231 Whi/POC 5 -2 Laura Hollis/Carmilla Karnstein Carmilla (Web Series) 5094 White 6 -1 Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam Homestuck 4174 Ambig 7 -1 Korra/Asami Sato Avatar: Legend of Korra 4106 POC 8 15 Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught Wynonna Earp (TV) 3685 White 9 -1 Alphys/Undyne (Undertale) Undertale (Video Game) 3334 Ambig 10 11 Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long RWBY 2987 POC 11 5 Chloe Beale/Beca Mitchell Pitch Perfect (Movies) 2985 White 12 -3 Root | Samantha Groves/Sameen Shaw Person of Interest (TV) 2817 Whi/POC 13 -1 Kara Danvers/Cat Grant Supergirl (TV 2015) 2734 White 14 -4 Krista Lenz | Historia Reiss/Ymir Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan 2645 White 15 10 Ruby Rose/Weiss Schnee RWBY 2422 Whi/POC 16 2 Fareeha "Pharah" Amari/Angela "Mercy" Ziegler Overwatch (Video Game) 2376 Whi/POC 17 -6 Santana Lopez/Brittany S. Pierce Glee 2369 Whi/POC 18 -5 Peggy Carter/Angie Martinelli Agent Carter (TV) 2106 White 19 8 Serena Campbell/Bernie Wolfe Holby City 2032 White 20 2 Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Chloe Price Life Is Strange (Video Game) 2030 White 21 -7 Rachel Berry/Quinn Fabray Glee 1948 White 22 N Jirou Kyouka/Yaoyorozu Momo Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia 1932 POC 23 -8 Allison Argent/Lydia Martin Teen Wolf (TV) 1818 White 24 5 Lapis Lazuli/Peridot (Steven Universe) Steven Universe (Cartoon) 1791 Ambig 25 12 Miranda Priestly/Andrea Sachs The Devil Wears Prada (2006) 1644 White 26 N Cheryl Blossom/Toni Topaz Riverdale (TV 2017) 1640 Whi/POC 27 -7 Jemma Simmons/Skye | Daisy Johnson Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV) 1570 Whi/POC 28 -11 Delphine Cormier/Cosima Niehaus Orphan Black (TV) 1568 White 29 N Sara Lance/Ava Sharpe DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV) 1499 White 30 -11 Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells Warehouse 13 1490 White 31 N Asui Tsuyu/Uraraka Ochako Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia 1440 POC 32 16 Luna Lovegood/Ginny Weasley Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling 1412 White 33 N Adora/Catra (She-Ra) She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018) 1382 Whi/POC 34 -10 Erin Gilbert/Jillian Holtzmann Ghostbusters (2016) 1343 White 35 -9 Mikasa Ackerman/Annie Leonhart Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan 1322 Whi/POC 36 -6 Anna/Elsa (Disney) Frozen (2013) 1318 White 37 3 Clary Fray/Isabelle Lightwood Shadowhunters (TV) 1315 Whi/POC 38 -10 Maura Isles/Jane Rizzoli Rizzoli & Isles 1259 White 39 N Lena "Tracer" Oxton/Widowmaker | Amélie Lacroix Overwatch (Video Game) 1257 White 40 43 Kimberly Hart/Trini Power Rangers (2017) 1237 POC 41 -9 Sansa Stark/Margaery Tyrell Game of Thrones (TV) 1224 White 42 -4 Female Shepard/Liara T'Soni Mass Effect Trilogy 1164 Ambig 43 N Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan Doctor Who (2005) 1072 Whi/POC 44 -2 Maria Reynolds/Elizabeth "Eliza" Schuyler Hamilton – Miranda 1061 POC 45 6 Anya/Raven Reyes The 100 (TV) 1050 POC 46 -15 Tara Maclay/Willow Rosenberg Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV) 1048 White 47 -3 Pearl/Rose Quartz | Pink Diamond Steven Universe (Cartoon) 1046 Ambig 48 -12 Pepper Potts/Natasha Romanov The Avengers (Marvel Movies) 1044 White 49 -6 Maria Hill/Natasha Romanov Marvel Cinematic Universe 1038 White 50 -16 Gwen/Morgana (Merlin) Merlin (TV) 1016 Whi/POC 51 1 Pamela Isley/Harleen Quinzel Batman - All Media Types 1013 White 52 1 Alex Danvers/Kara Danvers Supergirl (TV 2015) 993 White 53 -7 Nyssa al Ghul/Sara Lance Arrow (TV 2012) 977 Whi/POC 54 -13 Pacifica Northwest/Mabel Pines Gravity Falls 972 White 55 -10 Faith Lehane/Buffy Summers Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV) 970 White 56 -17 Terezi Pyrope/Vriska Serket Homestuck 962 Ambig 57 -10 Shimizu Kiyoko/Yachi Hitoka Haikyuu!! 945 POC 58 -2 Astra/Alex Danvers Supergirl (TV 2015) 934 White 59 3 Betty Cooper/Veronica Lodge Riverdale (TV 2017) 925 Whi/POC 60 -27 Ashlyn Harris/Ali Krieger Women's Soccer RPF 924 White 61 -26 Ruby/Sapphire (Steven Universe) Steven Universe (Cartoon) 854 Ambig 62 6 Mila Babicheva/Sara Crispino Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime) 839 White 63 2 Princess Bubblegum/Marceline Adventure Time 795 Ambig 64 25 Carol Aird/Therese Belivet Carol (2015) 788 White 65 -1 Gabrielle/Xena Xena: Warrior Princess 781 White 66= -16 Amethyst/Pearl (Steven Universe) Steven Universe (Cartoon) 773 Ambig 66= -17 Malia Tate/Kira Yukimura Teen Wolf (TV) 773 Whi/POC 68 N Hermione Granger/Pansy Parkinson Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling 761 Whi/Amb 69 -14 Female Hawke/Isabela Dragon Age II 750 Amb/POC 70 N Misty Day/Cordelia Foxx | Cordelia Goode American Horror Story 725 White 71 -10 Maya Hart/Riley Matthews Girl Meets World 723 White 72 -13 Charlie Bradbury/Jo Harvelle Supernatural 720 White 73 N Diana Cavendish/Atsuko "Akko" Kagari Little Witch Academia 711 Whi/POC 74 N Rachel Amber/Chloe Price Life Is Strange (Video Game) 702 White 75 -21 Leliana/Female Warden Dragon Age: Origins 697 Whi/Amb 76 4 Ayase Eli/Toujou Nozomi Love Live! School Idol Project 692 POC 77 -10 Kaiou Michiru/Tenoh Haruka Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon 688 POC 78 -3 Camila Cabello/Lauren Jauregui Fifth Harmony (Band) 673 POC 79 -10 Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/Emily Prentiss Criminal Minds (US TV) 658 White 80 -17 Cosette Fauchelevent/Éponine Thénardier Les Misérables - All Media Types 657 Whi/Amb 81 N Emily/Lena "Tracer" Oxton Overwatch (Video Game) 656 White 82= -25 Jane Crocker/Roxy Lalonde Homestuck 654 Ambig 82= -7 Tobin Heath/Christen Press Women's Soccer RPF 654 Whi/POC 84 -2 Amethyst/Peridot (Steven Universe) Steven Universe (Cartoon) 652 Ambig 85 -27 Octavia Blake/Raven Reyes The 100 (TV) 649 Whi/POC 86 N Trixie Mattel/Katya Zamolodchikova RuPaul's Drag Race RPF 648 Whi/POC 87 N Evie/Mal (Disney) Descendants (Disney Movies) 647 Whi/POC 88 N Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova Killing Eve (TV 2018) 645 Whi/POC 89 N Kathryn Janeway/Seven of Nine Star Trek: Voyager 642 White 90 N Haruno Sakura/Yamanaka Ino Naruto 639 POC 91 4 Nishikino Maki/Yazawa Nico Love Live! School Idol Project 628 POC 92 N Moira O'Deorain/Angela "Mercy" Ziegler Overwatch (Video Game) 612 White 93 -21 Female Inquisitor/Sera Dragon Age: Inquisition 591 Whi/Amb 94 -34 Tobin Heath/Alex Morgan Women's Soccer RPF 589 White 95 N Charity Dingle/Vanessa Woodfield Emmerdale 584 White 96 N Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau Captain Marvel (2019) 582 Whi/POC 97 -19 Dorothy Baum/Charlie Bradbury Supernatural 570 White 98 N Samantha "Sam" Arias/Alex Danvers Supergirl (TV 2015) 568 Whi/POC 99 N Beauregard/Yasha (Critical Role) Critical Role (Web Series) 565 Whi/POC 100 N Weiss Schnee/Yang Xiao Long RWBY 564 Whi/POC

[pedalfuzz]

The Sea And Cake

The Sea And Cake have been making elegant, assured, and singularly unique music for over two decades. The band is made up of a who’s who of Chicago experimental/indie/jazz/post-everything musicians that include Sam Prekop, Archer Prewitt, and John Mcentire.

Their latest album on Thrill Jockey Records is Any Day. Sam Prekop (singer, guitarist) sat down to talk with Pedal Fuzz about writing and recording the record, just after a soundcheck in Durham, NC, ahead of their performance at The Pinhook.

 Pedal Fuzz: Your Last album Runner came out in 2012. When did you start working on the songs that would make up Any Day?

Sam Prekop: So it was probably February 2017. Got a bit of a slow start I guess. I started actively playing guitar for that mainly on my acoustic, roaming around my house cooking dinner for the kids. Strumming the guitar, getting it together kind of. And then Archer Prewitt (guitar) and I spent a fair amount of time together before John McEntire (drums) showed up. And then the three of us rehearsed at the practice space for probably about a week with the new material. And then we went into the studio to record the basic tracks.

PF: Is that generally how it's worked in the past, you starting just with the guitar then bringing everyone else in?

SP: So Archer and I spend a lot of time without drums to work out the intricacies of the arrangements. Of course John contributes as well, but to get the ball rolling usually I start, get the basic gist of it, and then I have Archer come in. There's a few songs on the new record that Archer and I came up with just sort of messing around improvising and stuff. So it happens that way as well. "Any Day," the title track comes out of that, and also the last song "These Falling Arms."

PF: Did you record in John’s studio, Soma Studios?

SP: His studio in flux now because he moved to California. So it was different in that regard, so we used a different studio in Chicago. He had already moved right around the time I started working on the guitar stuff.

PF: So did you track in two locations, or just go out there to L.A. and track?

SP: We never made it to L.A. actually. The original plan was to go and mix it and finish it in L.A. And John moved to L.A. but then he bought a house more northern, east of San Francisco. So that kind of threw our plans for a loop a little bit. So John would mix, and then he would send us the files and we would give input on it.

PF: As far as the songwriting. how collaborative does it get once everybody else joins in? By that point do you already have the structure set, or is there room for change?

SP: So when we have the basic tracks, it can still change because I haven't done any singing yet. So I get the basic tracks into my home studio - and I have been doing it this way for a while where I record the vocals at home and mix them later with John. So I spent quite a bit of time writing and singing and recording the vocals on my own basically. I spent more time doing that this time around than other records I would say. I'm not sure why, I think I just found myself with more time.

There were a few setbacks. One was how we thought the studio would be ready in time, so we were kind of waiting for it. Things were hinging on different factors as we were working, so I wound up like, “OK, I have another month to do other stuff,” and so I ended up redoing a lot of things this time around which was good. I think because I got a little bit of time away from what I had done, I got a slight amount of perspective. I could discover that it could be better if I tried to rewrite certain lines or words.

PF: Was it mostly lyrics and vocals you were changing, or other elements?

SP: Sometimes it was just the delivery of it, like I can sort of get more out of the performance. Other times it might be some slight adjustments to the words, or rhythm things, but usually it was that I felt like I could inhabit these vocals more...not intense exactly, but just be more familiar with them. Just to be able to really perform the song.

PF: That's something striking about the record too, it kicks right off with the vocals.

SP: I know - this is the most vocal-centric record of all, and when rehearsing for this tour and playing some older stuff I'm like, "Oh my god I hardly sing at all in long spots." And I have to say the shows have been quite the vocal workout. It's an hour and a half show and I'm singing the whole time. I'm quite burnt by the end.

PF: Are you having to come up with like a honey/lemon regimen?

SP: I should maybe! It's getting better, you know. So this will be maybe our seventh show tonight, and each night it's getting a little easier. It depends on if the monitoring is good and if the sound is good on stage. If I have to over-sing, that's a problem, and sometimes that's the case if I don't hear it properly.

PF: It seems that on this album, compared to some older songs like "The Argument" or even "Harps" from the last record, there's less electronic elements. It has much more of a band feel. How did you decide that was going to be the vibe this time?

SP: Well, usually with these things the project tells you what it wants as you're working on it. I feel like my job is to pay attention as much as possible to what the material is leading you towards. So I didn't start out like, "Oh this should be a super vocal-heavy record and it should be all about that." So as it was leaning in that direction, it seemed like there was just less room for electronic stuff. And I think I think there would have been more of that if we had been in the studio together during the overdub process - which we had planned, but didn't quite happen because of logistics. So that's also part of the reason I think.

PF: Let's talk about gear a little bit. What guitar and amp are you using on the record?

SP: So I started writing on my acoustic. It's a pretty old beat up Martin 000-17. It's a Mahogany, small body kind of deal. And so I write a lot on that. I've never played it live and I don't plan on it - too many problems involved with drums and stuff.

And my main guitar is not actually a Fender Telecaster, though it looks like one. I got it maybe 15 years ago. It was built by Greenwich Village Custom Guitars (GVCG). It's sort of a legendary builder (Jonathan Wilson) which I didn't know at the time. But as soon as I tried it I'm like, "This is my guitar." So that's been my main guitar for a while.

And I use a Fender Bassman amp - but it's not actually a Fender. It's made by Victoria Amp Company out of Chicago (Victoria 45410 Tweed, modeled after a 1959 Bassman). And I've been using that for a long time as well, at least 10 or so years.

PF: What do you like about the Victoria?

SP: It sounds very acoustic. Not like an acoustic guitar, but the sound of the wooden box is very forward in a way. It feels very lively and unveiled in a way that feels very direct. It's very responsive to the way you play, very quick and responsive. There's no reverb or anything, it's a very direct, classic amp design. I imagine it's probably pretty simple. It's designed originally for bass players but it works really well as a guitar amp.

PF: And are you putting anything between the guitar and the amp?

SP: Yeah, I have a few BJFEE pedals, from Norway. Björn Juhl made them, he went on to design Mad Professor pedals. I have one that’s a very subtle overdrive I use all the time called the Honey Bee. And a BJFE EQ pedal (Sea Blue EQ) that’s amazing. I also have a Mad Professor Deep Blue delay pedal I use for a little color – I’m not big on changing my sound per song very much.

PF: You have a very crisp, but full, clean sound.

SP: On the song “Color The Mountain,” I play some pretty distorted guitar. On that I use this Swedish Himmelstrutz Fetto Nord 70 distortion pedal I’ve had a long time. But I don’t use it much.

PF: You’re in a band with people that are in so many other bands, and so many different collaborations. Does that become difficult for everyone to juggle what they have going on?

SP: There’s no real difficulty. That’s why there’s sometimes longer breaks in-between records. So Tortoise had a record in-between, so that was about two years of the lag time. I also make solo records and usually tour on those. No problems really, it’s just a matter of making the plan and it works out.

EDDIE GARCIA PLAYS GUITAR AND ALL THE PEDALS AS 1970S FILM STOCK. YOU CAN ALSO HEAR HIM REPORTING ON NPR AFFILIATE 88.5 WFDD IN WINSTON-SALEM, NC. IN THE WEE HOURS HE RUNS PEDAL FUZZ, WHICH IS A PROUD RECIPIENT OF A GRANT FROM THE ARTS ENTERPRISE LAB / KENAN INSTITUTE FOR THE ARTS. 

[pennsylvaniaprelawland-blog]

Former College Football Player Sues The NCAA

By John Martin, University of Pittsburgh Class of 2020

September 18, 2020

As college students, we often come across classmates that are a foot taller than us and look strong enough to lift a car. They are the people we see decked out in official team merchandise with their special backpacks. Of course, I am referring to college football players. We cheer them on with all our hearts on Saturdays, and go crazy when they pull off a big win. Many students know that it can be very challenging to be in a student-athlete’s position. A full course load in conjunction with morning lifts and afternoon practice every single day seems daunting, to say the least. However, what if I told you that our mighty peers are dealing with a little more than a busy schedule? They could be dealing with serious head injuries, as well.

It is no secret that football has been starting to discover a trend of serious head injuries. First discovered and published by pathologist, Dr. Bennett Omalu, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease stemming from repeated head injuries. The disease encompasses a wide range of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive issues. Unfortunately, there is no definitive test to positively identify CTE in people until their brains are analyzed postmortem. However, according to a study conducted by neuropathologist, Dr. Ann McKee of Boston University School of Medicine, it is extremely common in football players. Of the 111 brains donated to science from deceased NFL players, 110 were positive for CTE. As part of the same study, it was found that 9 out of 10 college football players’ brain had the same outcome[1]. That leaves us with this particular question: is the NCAA, the governing body of college athletics, doing enough to warn and protect athletes from suffering this debilitating neurological illness?[8]

Meet Matthew Onyshko. He was a Pittsburgh firefighter and played linebacker for the California University of Pennsylvania (Cal U) football team from 1999-2003. Now, he suffers from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) that has caused him to suffer from paralysis and loss of speech. He claims that the cause for him developing this neurological degenerative disease was the head trauma he endured while playing football at Cal U[2]. Because of this, Onyshko filed a lawsuit in June of 2014 against the NCAA for their failure to inform him of the dangers of playing football.

The complaint cites two-counts against the NCAA: negligence and loss of consortium. They allege that the organization breached their duty to supervise, regulate, and minimize the risk of long-term brain injuries. The loss of consortium would involve the damages paid by the NCAA for their negligent actions causing Onyshko’s injuries. The NCAA filed a pre-trial motionto dismiss based on a multitude of reasons, which include the suit falling outside the two-year personal injury statute of limitations, lack of the NCAA’s legal obligation to the plaintiff, and others[3]. The courts ruled that Onysko was still within the statute of limitations because he was not aware that he suffered from repeated head trauma until 2012[4]. Thus, the proceedings continued, and the jury selection began April 29th, 2019.[9]

The trial lasted roughly a month, revolving around a few different main issues. The defendant insisted that there was no duty to protect an athlete from the potential risks of a sport. The plaintiff countered, asserting that the NCAA failed to provide adequate education and safety standards as the governing body. Another claim made by the NCAA was that there is no evidence that the ex-athlete suffered any head-trauma while playing at Cal U. Though Onyshko testified that he sustained at least 20 concussions during his college career, the cross-examination produced evidence that he only reported one injury to the training staff in that time (bruised thigh). [4] Additionally, the defendant stated that there is no generally accepted link between ALS and head-trauma. The plaintiff refuted that by bringing in Dr. Omalu to testify that ALS can be triggered by concussion-related trauma[5]. After all was said and done, the jury entered deliberation and ruled in favor of the NCAA.

Onysko appealed this decision, and the case is currently being brought to the Superior Court of Pennsylvania seeking revival. They appeared in court on August 25th, 2020. The plaintiff claims that the trial court judge improperly allowed testimony from a Cal U administrator. This person set the policies to educate the athletes on the signs and symptoms of head injuries. The plaintiff argues that this administrator was not personally in the meetings that apparently educated these players, therefore he could not definitively say whether the student-athletes actually received that information or not. Onyshko’s legal team insists that by allowing this testimony, it potentially swayed the jurors. Additionally, the jury selection process is in question, as Onyshko’s representation was forced to use their preemptive strikes as interviews were being conducted for potential jurors, rather than after. They argue that, in accordance with state laws for civil proceedings, parties are allowed to save their strikes until after the interview process. The NCAA’s representation denies, saying it was in accordance with local rules and did not contradict the state’s rules [6]. The case was heard in front of a three-panel judge, and we await their decision.

For now, Onyshko is currently waiting to hear if he was granted a new trial, and it could be months until we know.

________________________________________________________________

John Martin is graduating in December of 2020from the University of Pittsburgh with a Bachelor’s degree in Legal Studies with a minor in Administration of Justice. He has plans to attend law school in the future.

________________________________________________________________

1-     Chan, Nicholas. “CTE in Football: Is Brain Injury in NFL Players Being Misdiagnosed?” Being Patient, 2 May 2020, www.beingpatient.com/cte-in-football-nfl-brain-injury-misdiagnosed/. 

2-     Miller, Barbara S. “Former Cal U. Football Player Testifies at Trial with Electronic Communication Device.” Observer Reporter, 7 May 2019, observer-reporter.com/news/localnews/former-cal-u-football-player-testifies-at-trial-with-electronic/article_f4d7e9e6-7043-11e9-9a9b-aba3a2f1475f.html. 

3-     Corleto, Anthony B. “Jury Rules for NCAA in First Sports Concussion Case Tried to Verdict.” The National Law Review, 21 Aug. 2019, www.natlawreview.com/article/jury-rules-ncaa-first-sports-concussion-case-tried-to-verdict. 

4-     Dennie, Christian. “Onyshko v. NCAA: NCAA's Motion for Summary Judgment Denied.” Barlow Garsek& Simon, LLP, Wpadmin, 4 Apr. 2017, bgsfirm.com/onyshko-v-ncaa-ncaas-motion-for-summary-judgment-denied/. 

5-     Linaberger, Anne. “Doctor Whose Story Was Made Into a Movie Testifies in Trial.” Sparkt, Good News | Sparkt - Sparkt.com, 24 Feb. 2020, sparkt.com/matthew-onyshko-concussion-doctor-testifies. 

6-     Santoni, Matthew. “Ex-College Athlete Seeks To Revive NCAA Concussion Suit.” Law360, 25 Aug. 2020, www.law360.com/articles/1304271/ex-college-athlete-seeks-to-revive-ncaa-concussion-suit. 

7-     Miller, Barbara. “Verdict: NCAA Not Negligent in Onyshko Case.” Observer Reporter, 23 May 2019, observer-reporter.com/news/localnews/verdict-ncaa-not-negligent-in-onyshko-case/article_0b6963b4-7d7e-11e9-a95e-5fb04cce452c.html. 

8-     “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.” Wikipedia.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy Onyshko v. NCAA. Washington County, PA Civil Division. Case No

[patriotsnet]

What Do Democratic Republicans Believe In

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-do-democratic-republicans-believe-in/

What Do Democratic Republicans Believe In

Famous Republican Vs Democratic Presidents

Republicans have controlled the White House for 28 of the last 43 years since Richard Nixon became president. Famous Democrat Presidents have been Franklin Roosevelt, who pioneered the New Deal in America and stood for 4 terms, John F. Kennedy, who presided over the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis, and was assassinated in Office; Bill Clinton, who was impeached by the House of Representatives; and Nobel Peace Prize winners Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter.

Famous Republican Presidents include Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery; Teddy Roosevelt, known for the Panama Canal; Ronald Reagan, credited for ending the Cold War with ; and the two Bush family Presidents of recent times. Republican President Richard Nixon was forced to resign over the Watergate scandal.

To compare the two parties’ presidential candidates in the 2020 elections, see Donald Trump vs Joe Biden.

The Third Party System

The Third Party System lasted from about 1854 to the mid-1890s, and featured profound developments in issues of nationalism, modernization, and race. It was dominated by the new Republican Party , which claimed success in saving the Union, abolishing slavery and enfranchising the freedmen, while adopting many Whiggish modernization programs such as national banks, railroads, high tariffs, homesteads, social spending , and aid to land grant colleges. While most elections from 1874 through 1892 were extremely close, the opposition Democrats won only the 1884 and 1892 presidential elections. The northern and western states were largely Republican, save for closely balanced New York, Indiana, New Jersey, and Connecticut. After 1874, the Democrats took control of the âSolid South. â

What Was John Quincy Adamss Childhood Like

John Quincy Adams was the eldest son of and Abigail Adams. Growing up during the American Revolution, he watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from Penns Hill and heard the cannons roar across the Back Bay in . He accompanied his father on diplomatic missions to Europe and studied in  and , Netherlands.

Democratic Socialism Vs Trumpism

What probably rankles the Trumpians and scares the bejeebers out of them is the fact that more Americans, especially young folks, are giving democratic socialism a look and liking what they see hence the rise of the Sanders movement.  

The old red-baiting and the lies that democratic socialism or social democracy is the same as Stalinism are falling on more and more deaf ears.

Communism is about gone. In Russia, Trumps pal Putin, the ex-KGB guy, has replaced Marxism-Leninism with fascism even after 27 million Russians died fighting Hitler and fascism.

And in America, Trumpism is looking more and more like Putinism. If we can turn back Trumpism in this election, perhaps we can begin the discussion about what sort of nation we really want to be. And that discussion should include democratic socialism.

30

What Is The Most Distinctive Feature Of Democracy

The most distinctive feature of democracy is that its examination never gets over because:

As people realise the benefits of democracy, they ask for more and want to make democracy even better.

The fact that people complain regarding the working of democracy is a testimony to the success of democracy.

What Does Democratic Mean

Starting alphabetically, the word means pertaining to or of the nature of democracy or a democracy.

Simply put, the lowercase democratic is a word used to refer to anything that resembles or has to do with a , a form of in which the supreme power rests with the people and is exercised by them directly or by politicians that they elect to them. In practice, this is usually accomplished through a fair, organized system of voting, in which  or cast votes in support of political or societal issues . 

So, the word democratic is used to describe government systems that are or resemble democracies and the people that run these types of governments. The United States of America is a representative democracy in which the people elect representatives to perform the demands of politics on their behalf. This is why we say that the US is a democratic country or that we have a democratic form of government. 

The English word democratic dates all the way back to the late 1500 and early 1600s. It is derived from the Greek word dmokratía . The government system of the ancient Greek of Athens, in which the people held the power , is considered the worlds first democracy. Considering that Athens was a slave-owning society, its form of democracy was much different than the democratic governments of today. 

Trump Loses Then Attempts A Coup

In Georgia, Trump is attacking the Republican governor, lieutenant governor and secretary of state. In Arizona, he is attacking Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who has been a GOP statewide officeholder for more consecutive years than Trump has been a Republican.

The reason? They are not willing to try to overturn duly certified election results in their states.

There has been an attempted coup of the presidential election taking place. But Trump is not the victim. He is the perpetrator.

The legal strategy was to delay certification of election results. The political strategy was to pressure Republican officials to ignore the election results, irrespective of whether they were certified, and have Republican state legislatures chose Trump electors in states where Biden won the vote.

What Are The Basic Ideals Of The Democracy

According to American political scientist Larry Diamond, democracy consists of four key elements: a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; the active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; protection of the human rights of all citizens;

Democratic Views On The Death Penalty

Democratic views on the death penalty revolve around the opinion that it must only be used in certain cases. The 2012 Democratic Party Platform stated, we believe that the death penalty must not be arbitrary. DNA testing should be used in all appropriate circumstances, defendants should have effective assistance of counsel, and the administration of justice should be fair and impartial. Previous Democratic platforms have stated, in all death row cases, we encourage thorough post-conviction reviews. We will put the rights of victims and families first again. And we will push for more crime prevention, to stop the next generation of crime before its too late. As a party, Democrats believe that stricter punishment, such as the death penalty, work as a preventative measure to keep crime from happening to begin with. Democrats strongly support the death penalty in cases of those who have murdered policemen and terrorists. Bill Clinton and Al Gore fought to have this punishment put into place for these criminals. The party is currently divided on whether or not the death penalty should be applied to all convicted murderers. However, not all Democrats share this view. Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsome of California says, I think we should repeal the death penalty. Its not a deterrent; there are racial components to it. Martin OMalley, governor of Maryland, believes similarly. He says Its wasteful. Its ineffective. It doesnt work to reduce violent crime.

Regulating The Economy Democratic Style

The Democratic Party is generally considered more willing to intervene in the economy, subscribing to the belief that government power is needed to regulate businesses that ignore social interests in the pursuit of earning a for shareholders. This intervention can come in the form of regulation or taxation to support social programs. Opponents often describe the Democratic approach to governing as “tax and spend.”

Why Did The Democratic And Republican Parties Switch Platforms

02 November 2020

Around 100 years ago, Democrats and Republicans switched their political stances.

The Republican and Democratic parties of the United States didn’t always stand for what they do today. 

During the 1860s, Republicans, who dominated northern states, orchestrated an ambitious expansion of federal power, helping to fund the transcontinental railroad, the state university system and the settlement of the West by homesteaders, and instating a national currency and protective tariff. Democrats, who dominated the South, opposed those measures. 

After the Civil War, Republicans passed laws that granted protections for Black Americans and advanced social justice. And again, Democrats largely opposed these apparent expansions of federal power.

Sound like an alternate universe? Fast forward to 1936. 

Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt won reelection that year on the strength of the New Deal, a set of Depression-remedying reforms including regulation of financial institutions, the founding of welfare and pension programs, infrastructure development and more. Roosevelt won in a landslide against Republican Alf Landon, who opposed these exercises of federal power.

So, sometime between the 1860s and 1936, the party of small government became the party of big government, and the party of big government became rhetorically committed to curbing federal power. 

Foreign Policy And National Defense

Republicans supported Woodrow Wilsons call for American entry into World War I in 1917, complaining only that he was too slow to go to war. Republicans in 1919 opposed his call for entry into the League of Nations. A majority supported the League with reservations; a minority opposed membership on any terms. Republicans sponsored world disarmament in the 1920s, and isolationism in the 1930s. Most Republicans staunchly opposed intervention in World War II until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. By 1945, however, internationalists became dominant in the party which supported the Cold War policies such as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO.

Working Role Of Government And Society

The Democratic point of view sets standards for American society and the role of the government in that society. The fundamental beliefs about society and government is that:

Societies must have laws that the majority of the people support and accept.

Dissenting minorities are protected and have the right to have an opinion different than the majority.

The people rule and thus, the people rule elect a government.

The government should respect and protect individual rights.

The government should also protect and respect individual freedoms.

Civil liberties must be guaranteed for ALL citizens by the government.

The government must work for the common good.

Most, if not all, of these solid Democratic beliefs, are outlined and protected by the United States Constitution. Many of todays hot issues violate some of these tenets. The Homeland Security Act, for example, removes some of the individual freedoms and rights from American Citizens. Republicans feel that the loss of these rights is for the common good; Democrats disagree.

Before pledging membership or allegiance to either political party, Americans should educate themselves about what each party believes and what each party stands for to be sure that their own beliefs agree.

June 27, 2018

Who Created The First Political Parties

It featured two national parties competing for control of the presidency, Congress, and the states: the Federalist Party, created largely by Alexander Hamilton, and the rival Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party, formed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, usually called at the time the Republican Party (note:

READ: What does it mean when a girl says talk soon?

Why The Gops Lack Of Party Platform Matters

President Trumps refusal to commit to accepting Novembers election results is the latest example of this president abandoning the norms of constitutional democracy. And although high-profile Republicans have issued statements affirming that they support a peaceful transfer of power, they have also been carefully deferential to Trump.

This is a notable continuation of the party slowly becoming the party of Trump. Nowhere was this clearer than in the decision not to have a 2020 party platform and instead simply affirming enthusiastic support for Trump and his America First agenda. That move, more so than statements pledging fealty to the peaceful transfer of power, signals wavering Republican commitment toward equal rights and democracy.

Platforms declare a partys values and commitments. While the substance of the Democratic and Republican platforms often differs sharply, both have historically used certain key words, like the American Dream, economic opportunity and freedom from discrimination. Examining Republican platforms over time shows that what once had been a big-tent strategy of carefully managing intraparty differences over equality has been replaced by a hierarchical model of leadership where the party faithful should acquiesce to one individuals vision of political community. Indeed, the 2020 resolution ruled out of order any effort to adopt a platform.

Who Are Prominent Democrats

Notable Democrats include Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the only president to be elected to the White House four times, and Barack Obama, who was the first African American president . Other Democratic presidents include John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. The latters wife, Hillary Clinton, made history in 2016 as the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major U.S. political party, though she ultimately lost the election. In 1968 Shirley Chisholm won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first African American woman elected to , and in 2007 Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to serve as of the House.

Democratic Party, in the United States, one of the two major political parties, the other being the Republican Party.

political cartoon: donkey Harper’s Weekly

Democrats Think Many Republicans Sincere And Point To Policy

Democrats, however, were somewhat more generous in their answers.  More than four in ten Democratic voters   felt that most Republican voters had the countrys best interests at heart .  And many tried their best to answer from the others perspective. A 45-year-old male voter from Ohio imagined that as a Republican, he was motivated by Republicans harsh stance on immigration; standing up for the 2nd Amendment; promised tax cuts.  A 30-year-old woman from Colorado felt that Republican votes reflected the desires to stop abortion stop gay marriage from ruining our country and give us our coal jobs back.

Other Democrats felt that their opponents were mostly motivated by the GOPs opposition to Obamacare, lower taxes and to support a party that reduced unemployment. 

Energy Issues And The Environment

There have always been clashes between the parties on the issues of energy and the environment. Democrats believe in restricting drilling for oil or other avenues of fossil fuels to protect the environment while Republicans favor expanded drilling to produce more energy at a lower cost to consumers. Democrats will push and support with tax dollars alternative energy solutions while the Republicans favor allowing the market to decide which forms of energy are practical.

Public Opinion On Foreign Policy

In June 2014 the Quinnipiac Poll asked Americans which foreign policy they preferred:

A) The United States is doing too much in other countries around the world, and it is time to do less around the world and focus more on our own problems here at home. B) The United States must continue to push forward to promote democracy and freedom in other countries around the world because these efforts make our own country more secure.

Democrats chose A over B by 65%-32%; Republicans chose A over B by 56% to 39%; Independents chose A over B by 67% to 29%.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.  

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

History Of The Democratic Party

The party can trace its roots all the way back to Thomas Jefferson when they were known as Jeffersons Republicans and they strongly opposed the Federalist Party and their nationalist views. The Democrats adopted the donkey as their symbol due to Andrew Jackson who was publicly nicknamed jackass because of his popular position of let the people rule. The Democratic National Committee was officially created in 1848. During the civil war a rift grew within the party between those who supported slavery and those who opposed it. This deep division led to the creation of a new Democratic party, the one we now know today.

Adams And The Revolution Of 1800

Presidency of John AdamsThomas JeffersonJohn Adams

Shortly after Adams took office, he dispatched a group of envoys to seek peaceful relations with France, which had begun attacking American shipping after the ratification of the Jay Treaty. The failure of talks, and the French demand for bribes in what became known as the XYZ Affair, outraged the American public and led to the , an undeclared naval war between France and the United States. The Federalist-controlled Congress passed measures to expand the army and navy and also pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien and Sedition Acts restricted speech that was critical of the government, while also implementing stricter naturalization requirements. Numerous journalists and other individuals aligned with the Democratic-Republicans were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, sparking a backlash against the Federalists. Meanwhile, Jefferson and Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which held that state legislatures could determine the constitutionality of federal laws.

Early Life And Career

John Adams entered the world at the same time that his maternal great-grandfather, John Quincy, for many years a prominent member of the , was leaving ithence his name. He grew up as a child of the American Revolution. He watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from Penns Hill and heard the roar across the Back Bay in . His patriot father, John Adams, at that time a delegate to the Continental Congress, and his patriot mother, Abigail Smith Adams, had a strong molding influence on his education after the war had deprived Braintree of its only schoolmaster. In 1778 and again in 1780 the boy accompanied his father to . He studied at a private school in in 177879 and at the University of Leiden, , in 1780. Thus, at an early age he acquired an excellent knowledge of the language and a smattering of . In 1780, also, he began to keep regularly the diary that forms so a record of his doings and those of his contemporaries through the next 60 years of American history. Self-appreciative, like most of the Adams clan, he once declared that, if his diary had been even richer, it might have become “next to the Holy Scriptures, the most and valuable book ever written by human hands.”

c.

Religion And The Belief In God Is Vital To A Strong Nation

Republicans are generally accepting only of the Judeo-Christian belief system. For most Republicans, religion is absolutely vital in their political beliefs and the two cannot be separated. Therefore, separation of church and state is not that important to them. In fact, they believe that much of what is wrong has been caused by too much secularism.

Those are the four basic Republican tenets: small government, local control, the power of free markets, and Christian authority. Below are other things they believe that derive from those four ideas.

Democratic Views On Health Care

The Democratic view on health care is based around the idea that accessible, affordable, high quality health care is part of the American promise, that Americans should have the security that comes with good health care. Democrats believe that no American should have to face financial destitution because they fall ill or get injured, stating that no one should have to choose between taking their child to a doctor and paying the rent. They are firm supporters of laws that prevent insurance companies from covering Americans with pre-existing medical conditions, capping or cancelling coverage, or charging women more due simply to gender. They also support allowing young Americans who are just entering the workforce to stay on their parents health care plans. They believe in preserving Medicare benefits for seniors. Democrats are strong supporters of the Affordable Care Act and of strengthening Medicare. Democrats stand in support of stem cell research, as well as other medical research, as a means to develop cures and treatments. They also support tax credits to businesses who offer quality, affordable healthcare, and tax credits to Americans who are approaching 65 and are not working, so that they can continue to afford healthcare until their Medicare benefits come into effect.

Opinion:almost Half Of Republicans Admit Theyre Ready To Ditch Democracy

Almost half of Republicans are now saying the quiet part out loud: Theyd prefer to ditch this whole democracy thing.

So finds CBS News-YouGov conducted in mid-May. The survey asked Republicans a series of questions about the required level of fealty to former president Donald Trump, their views of the 2020 election and priorities for the party going forward.

The results were bleak.

Two-thirds said it was important for Republicans to be loyal to Donald Trump now. The same share said they did not believe President Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. recent that I dont think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election.)

But the most troubling results came from a question about the partys best strategy for winning in 2022 and 2024. If you were consulting for the party, respondents were asked, would you focus on developing a message and popular policies and ideas to win over more voters? Or would you prioritize changes to the voting rules in states and districts?

A whopping 47 percent chose the latter option. In other words, nearly half of those who still identify as Republicans appear to have given up on a key premise of democracy: that you earn the right to govern by proposing ideas that appeal to a majority of the public. Theyd prefer to short-circuit that process and,instead, make it harder for their opponents to vote.

So much for party of ideas, as the GOP once called itself.

Read more:

Why Democrats Are Reluctantly Making Voter Id Laws A Bargaining Chip

While party leaders have long worried about the discriminatory effects of such laws, many now see other restrictive voting measures pushed by Republicans as a more urgent threat.

WASHINGTON Congressional Democrats, searching for any way forward on legislation to protect voting rights, find themselves softening their once-firm opposition to a form of restriction on the franchise that they had long warned would be Exhibit A for voter suppression: voter identification laws.

Any path to passing the far-reaching Democratic elections legislation that Republicans blocked with a filibuster on Tuesday will almost certainly have to include a compromise on the bills near-blanket ban on state laws that require voters to present photo identification before they can cast a ballot. As such laws were first cropping up decades ago, Democrats fought them tooth and nail, insisting that they would be an impossible barrier to scale for the nations most vulnerable voters, especially older people and people of color.

But in recent years, as the concept of voter identification has become broadly popular, the idea that voters bring some form of ID to the polls has been accepted by Democrats ranging from Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia on the center-right to Stacey Abrams of Georgia, a hero of the left.

For me, the larger debate that is probably more critical is reforming the filibuster, he said.

The Fight Over Voting Rights

[centrumlumina]

As part of the August 2017 AO3 Ship Stats, here are the Top 100 F/F pairings with the most total works on Archive Of Our Own.

Of the 200 names on this list, there are 42 women of colour and 35 women of ambiguous race, compared with 34 and 38 in the 2016 list. For comparison, the overall top 100 list includes 41 people of colour and 10 who are racially ambiguous.

Because of the way I produced this data, it is possible some F/F ships are missing, particularly those in fandoms dominated by other categories of ship. For more information, see the project FAQs. This project also includes an All-Time Top 100 list and This Year’s Top 100.

A text-only version of this data is given below the cut.

Edit: Fixed race categorisation for Yang Xiao Long and Ruby Rose.

Rank Change Pairing Fandom Works Race 1 0 Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Emma Swan Once Upon a Time (TV) 9071 Whi/POC 2 0 Clarke Griffin/Lexa The 100 (TV) 8535 White 3 0 Laura Hollis/Carmilla Karnstein Carmilla (Web Series) 4729 White 4 N Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor Supergirl (TV 2015) 3793 White 5 -1 Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam Homestuck 3583 Ambig 6 -1 Korra/Asami Sato Avatar: Legend of Korra 3148 POC 7 N Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer Supergirl (TV 2015) 3018 Whi/POC 8 4 Alphys/Undyne (Undertale) Undertale (Video Game) 2473 Ambig 9 -1 Root | Samantha Groves/Sameen Shaw Person of Interest (TV) 2394 Whi/POC 10 -3 Krista Lenz | Historia Reiss/Ymir Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan 2359 White 11 -5 Santana Lopez/Brittany S. Pierce Glee 2218 Whi/POC 12 5 Kara Danvers/Cat Grant Supergirl (TV 2015) 2106 White 13 -3 Peggy Carter/Angie Martinelli Agent Carter (TV) 1895 White 14 -5 Rachel Berry/Quinn Fabray Glee 1839 White 15 -4 Allison Argent/Lydia Martin Teen Wolf (TV) 1700 White 16 -3 Chloe Beale/Beca Mitchell Pitch Perfect (Movies) 1630 White 17 -1 Delphine Cormier/Cosima Niehaus Orphan Black (TV) 1445 White 18 78 Fareeha "Pharah" Amari/Angela "Mercy" Ziegler Overwatch (Video Game) 1387 Whi/POC 19 -5 Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells Warehouse 13 1384 White 20 -5 Jemma Simmons/Skye | Daisy Johnson Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV) 1335 Whi/POC 21 -1 Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long RWBY 1304 Whi/POC 22 0 Maxine Caulfield/Chloe Price Life Is Strange (Video Game) 1201 White 23 19 Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught Wynonna Earp (TV) 1169 White 24 N Erin Gilbert/Jillian Holtzmann Ghostbusters (2016) 1164 White 25 7 Ruby Rose/Weiss Schnee RWBY 1101 Whi/POC 26 -8 Mikasa Ackerman/Annie Leonhart Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan 1100 Whi/POC 27 N Serena Campbell/Bernie Wolfe Holby City 1091 White 28 -9 Maura Isles/Jane Rizzoli Rizzoli & Isles 1059 White 29 23 Lapis Lazuli/Peridot (Steven Universe) Steven Universe (Cartoon) 980 Ambig 30 -9 Anna/Elsa (Frozen) Frozen (2013) 976 White 31 -8 Tara Maclay/Willow Rosenberg Buffy the Vampire Slayer 934 White 32 -6 Sansa Stark/Margaery Tyrell Game of Thrones (TV) 909 White 33 -5 Ashlyn Harris/Ali Krieger Women's Soccer RPF 870 White 34 -9 Gwen/Morgana (Merlin) Merlin (TV) 863 Whi/POC 35 4 Ruby/Sapphire Steven Universe (Cartoon) 856 Ambig 36 -12 Pepper Potts/Natasha Romanov The Avengers (Marvel Movies) 845 White 37 -10 Miranda Priestly/Andrea Sachs The Devil Wears Prada (2006) 843 White 38 -8 Female Shepard/Liara T'Soni Mass Effect Trilogy 838 Ambig 39 -10 Terezi Pyrope/Vriska Serket Homestuck 805 Ambig 40 33 Clary Fray/Isabelle Lightwood Shadowhunters (TV) 804 Whi/POC 41 -10 Pacifica Northwest/Mabel Pines Gravity Falls 796 White 42 N Maria Reynolds/Elizabeth "Eliza" Schuyler Hamilton – Miranda 791 POC 43 -9 Maria Hill/Natasha Romanov Marvel Cinematic Universe 762 White 44 -7 Pearl/Rose Quartz (Steven Universe) Steven Universe (Cartoon) 761 Ambig 45 -12 Faith Lehane/Buffy Summers Buffy the Vampire Slayer 760 White 46 -10 Nyssa al Ghul/Sara Lance Arrow (TV 2012) 749 Whi/POC 47 -6 Shimizu Kiyoko/Yachi Hitoka Haikyuu!! 748 POC 48 15 Luna Lovegood/Ginny Weasley Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling 683 White 49 -14 Malia Tate/Kira Yukimura Teen Wolf (TV) 681 Whi/POC 50 3 Amethyst/Pearl (Steven Universe) Steven Universe (Cartoon) 636 Ambig 51 47 Anya/Raven Reyes The 100 (TV) 632 POC 52 22 Pamela Isley/Harleen Quinzel Batman - All Media Types 628 White 53 N Alex Danvers/Kara Danvers Supergirl (TV 2015) 624 White 54 -6 Leliana/Female Warden Dragon Age: Origins 611 Whi/Amb 55 -12 Female Hawke/Isabela Dragon Age II 601 Amb/POC 56 30 Astra/Alex Danvers Supergirl (TV 2015) 598 White 57 -19 Jane Crocker/Roxy Lalonde Homestuck 593 Ambig 58 -12 Octavia Blake/Raven Reyes The 100 (TV) 590 Whi/POC 59 -12 Charlie Bradbury/Jo Harvelle Supernatural 584 White 60 -20 Tobin Heath/Alex Morgan Women's Soccer RPF 577 White 61 27 Maya Hart/Riley Matthews Girl Meets World 567 White 62 N Betty Cooper/Veronica Lodge Riverdale (TV 2017) 533 Whi/POC 63 -6 Cosette Fauchelevent/Éponine Thénardier Les Misérables - All Media Types 522 White 64 2 Gabrielle/Xena Xena: Warrior Princess 518 White 65 -15 Princess Bubblegum/Marceline Adventure Time 515 Ambig 66 -21 Laura Hollis/Danny Lawrence Carmilla (Web Series) 503 White 67 -11 Kaiou Michiru/Tenoh Haruka Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon 498 POC 68 N Mila Babicheva/Sara Crispino Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime) 483 White 69 -3 Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/Emily Prentiss Criminal Minds 481 White 70 -26 Quinn Fabray/Santana Lopez Glee 479 Whi/POC 71 -11 Female Inquisitor/Josephine Montilyet Dragon Age: Inquisition 476 Amb/POC 72 -4 Female Inquisitor/Sera Dragon Age: Inquisition 473 Whi/Amb 73 -18 Belle/Red Riding Hood | Ruby Once Upon a Time (TV) 464 White 74 -20 Kelley O'Hara/Hope Solo Women's Soccer RPF 463 White 75= 10 Camila Cabello/Lauren Jauregui Fifth Harmony (Band) 460 POC 75= N Tobin Heath/Christen Press Women's Soccer RPF 460 Whi/POC 77 -28 Kahlan Amnell/Cara Mason Legend of the Seeker 455 White 78 -13 Dorothy Baum/Charlie Bradbury Supernatural 453 White 79 -20 Cora Hale/Lydia Martin Teen Wolf (TV) 452 White 80 N Ayase Eli/Toujou Nozomi Love Live! School Idol Project 451 POC 81 3 Garnet/Pearl (Steven Universe) Steven Universe (Cartoon) 449 Ambig 82 N Amethyst/Peridot (Steven Universe) Steven Universe (Cartoon) 445 Ambig 83 N Kimberly Hart/Trini (Power Rangers 2017) Power Rangers (2017) 441 POC 84 -33 Rachel Berry/Santana Lopez Glee 436 Whi/POC 85 -24 Gail Peck/Holly Stewart Rookie Blue 430 White 86 -28 Kanaya Maryam/Vriska Serket Homestuck 429 Ambig 87 -23 Clarke Griffin/Raven Reyes The 100 (TV) 421 Whi/POC 88 -19 Arizona Robbins/Calliope "Callie" Torres Grey's Anatomy 414 Whi/POC 89 N Carol Aird/Therese Belivet Carol (2015) 404 White 90 4 Costia/Lexa (The 100) The 100 (TV) 399 Whi/Amb 91 -29 Bo/Lauren Lost Girl 397 White 92 -20 Jenny Flint/Madame Vastra Doctor Who (2005) 390 Whi/Amb 93 -12 Hermione Granger/Ginny Weasley Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling 388 Whi/Amb 94 -23 Jade Harley/Rose Lalonde Homestuck 385 Ambig 95 N Nishikino Maki/Yazawa Nico Love Live! School Idol Project 383 POC 96 -26 Sam Carter/Janet Fraiser Stargate SG-1 382 White 97 -20 Akemi Homura/Kaname Madoka Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica 373 POC 98 -23 Irene Adler/Molly Hooper Sherlock (TV) 363 White 99 -8 Maxine Caulfield/Victoria Chase Life Is Strange (Video Game) 361 White 100 N Alana Bloom/Margot Verger Hannibal (TV) 360 White