#maybe ill finally start contributing to reddit

[verm1c1de]

if tumblr dies ill just kill myself purrobably

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Fear and Loathing in 2018: How Hunter S. Thompson would vote today

There are two times in my life when I felt Hunter S Thompson, the infamous gonzo journalist who wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, had missed out on something big. The first was in 2000 when my then boss and Time Magazine editor Walter Isaacson invited Thompson (who had just contributed a cover story) to join us on a reporting trip to Burning Man. 

Thompson had never been, and was curious — but balked at the last minute when he learned the event wouldn't let him bring any of his precious guns. He died 5 years later. I often wonder what the ultimate freak writer would have made of the ultimate freak festival. 

SEE ALSO: Hunter S. Thompson's weed is coming to pot shops soon

The second regret is one I've held for the past two years. I really, really wish Thompson had been around to see — and to help us see — the Trump presidency. After all, he was the writer who most clearly understood what had happened the last time the presidency fell into authoritarian hands.

His love of guns aside — because democracy was more important to him — it's not hard to see HST providing a major boost to the Resistance had he lived long enough.    

That became clear on reading Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic 10-Year Crusade Against American Fascism, which published last week — and is one of the most important books of this election season. Despite the word "Trump" not appearing in it once, it is somehow present on every page. 

Author Timothy Denevi's stated goal is to reclaim Thompson from the drug-fueled caricature of him, best represented by Johnny Depp in the movie version of Fear and Loathing and by Uncle Duke in the long-running comic strip Doonesbury. 

(He is only partly successful in this goal, as Thompson starts the book getting hooked on Dexedrine thanks to a doctor, and ends it getting hooked on cocaine thanks to an editor. Still, the point stands.) 

Instead, Denevi wants us to get to know the serious writer. The one who saw atavistic authoritarianism deep inside the modern GOP on the day it lurched into being. The one who spent the next decade trying to sound the alarm with half-funny, half-fictional, all searingly true prose. 

The extreme conservative wing of the GOP first made itself known at the 1964 Republican convention, and Thompson was there in the pit of the Cow Palace in San Francisco for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater's acceptance speech. This was where the party base's champion proudly declared his "extremism." 

At that word, the sea of white male delegates around Thompson started screaming and literally pounding their bodies against chairs. 

The young reporter was terrified, and at the same time perversely fascinated by this primitive display. What was it in the soul of America that could bring forth this sea of unthinking support for Goldwater, a man who wanted to threaten Soviets with nukes while rolling back Civil Rights reforms at home? 

"I was thinking, 'God damn you Nazi bastards, I really hope you win it,'" Thompson wrote to a friend, "because letting your kind of human garbage flood the system is about the only way to really clean it out." 

He would soon learn to be careful what he wished for (kind of like Susan Sarandon in 2016). Although Goldwater didn't win, his followers laid the groundwork for the modern GOP. Besides, the thing he had glimpsed, that savage chunk of the American heart, turned out to be everywhere in the 1960s.

Hell's Angels in the 1960s: the Alt-Right of their day.

Image: Alan Messer/REX/Shutterstock

Thompson saw it again when he wrote the book that made him a star, Hell's Angels — the same sense of aggrieved and violent victimhood, the rage that was soon to be unleashed against Vietnam war protestors, was present in the 1960s blue-collar bike gang. 

"Their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is," Thompson wrote. "They have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill." 

These days, they'd be on Reddit. 

He saw this same dark spirit in the old South when he wrote his groundbreaking gonzo article, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." He saw it in the casinos of Las Vegas that preyed on suckers, which was his ultimate metaphor for the future of the American Dream. 

He saw it in the police state that Chicago became in 1968 for the Democratic Convention, where Thompson was clubbed by cops in riot gear simply for observing their beating of protesters. And of course, he saw it in Richard Nixon, the opportunist who had introduced Goldwater that day in 1964, until Nixon finally crashed and burned with Watergate exactly 10 years later. 

Fight from the inside

Nixon's election in 1968 radicalized Thompson, but his immediate instinct was to work within the electoral system. Like many Resistance members 50 years later he decided to run for office himself, almost unseating the reactionary sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, partly in the hopes of stopping Aspen from becoming the elite resort it now is. 

Thompson also started reporting on stories like the Chicano Civil Rights movement in Los Angeles. The only reason Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas exists? Thompson needed a place he could talk off the record with Chicano lawyer Oscar Acosta without fear of being bugged by the LAPD (which literally had a "conspiracy division" to infiltrate the movement). Where better than a long drive to Vegas with the top down?

On a second trip to the city, which Thompson blended into the first in the book, the pair charged straight into the savage heart of American authoritarianism by attending a police convention while fueled by booze and pills. 

(Thompson was too paranoid to smoke the giant suitcase of weed Acosta abandoned when he left, fearing Nevada's repressive drug laws; maybe that's a third regret, that he didn't live to see a weed-friendly Vegas.) 

Thompson vs. Trump

HST would have been horrified to see what happened in 2016. The political journalist who opposed Nixon and everything he stood for with every fiber of his being would not have taken kindly to a GOP president who was even more venal, who lied more frequently, who actually looked more like his Ralph Steadman caricature than even jowly old Tricky Dick. 

But goddammit if Thompson wouldn't have been the ideal journalist for this moment. There are almost none whose writings have aged this well. (Certainly not Bob Woodward, the Watergate reporter who got so played by the perpetrators of Stupid Watergate that he thought backing the murderous Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia was a good idea.) 

SEE ALSO: Bob Woodward's Trump book is bad, boring, and bogus

HST would have seen through every ounce of Trump's bullshit in a nanosecond, and told us why. He wouldn't have let that guff about voters with "economic anxiety" stand. His columns would have been more essential than any iteration of the Daily Show. 

Having seen the Nixonian nightmare earlier than anyone, knowing the playbook better than anyone, Thompson could have been the de facto leader of the Resistance. Perhaps, given his Aspen campaign experience and his frequent musings about running for Senate, we'd be electing this ultimate iconoclast to federal office today. 

Or maybe not. Maybe Thompson would be too focused on chronicling the twists and turns these supremely strange times ("when the going gets weird," he famously wrote, "the weird turn pro" — which is exactly why I thought he'd love Burning Man).

But here's what is certain: at the very least, as the author of a book on the 1992 election that described politics in its title as Better Than Sex, Thompson would tell us to get off our asses and vote. 

"I believe he would be voicing with a kind of clarion call not just that our system is fragile but that it’s up to us to protect it and contribute in a manner that protects and upholds Jeffersonian democracy," his son Juan Thompson told Rolling Stone last year. 

For those who know how to read his work, HST still is voicing that clarion call.

The question is: are we listening? 

WATCH: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No. It's an inflatable Trump baby flying around London

[theginawestheadxox-blog]

KEY BLOG POST- Monday 14th May (Reflection)...

The most unfamiliar scenario I have found within Unit X is the amount of group work that the unit has entailed. My course doesn’t very often require collaboration, so this is something new for me and doing so much of it e.g. “most likely to succeed screening” workshop and “Abraham Moss Primary School” workshop has made me realise that I struggle with it as  it was hard to pin down a time where everybody was free meaning some members of the group knew more than others and we had to do most of the planning over messenger which got quite confusing as some people didn’t see certain messages/ didn’t respond etc. However, despite these group difficulties, it has also made me see that sometimes these complications can be worth it as bouncing ideas off each other was helpful and created a final product that was an accumulation of all our ideas. This was better than any of us could have achieved alone. After reflecting on my primary school placement, I also now appreciate just how much work goes into controlling a class and managing to teach the curriculum whilst also keeping their attention. It’s made me have a new-found awareness of just how committed I need to be if I am to pursue educating going forward.

Within Unit X, Educator the main thing I have found out about myself is the age group that I wish to work with. I went into Unit X thinking that I had an interest in maybe working with primary school children, but have come out the other side of the unit confident that either high school or AS/A level is right for me due to the primary school experience and the various engagements I’ve been to e.g. the PGCE drop in. These things combined made me see that I wouldn’t find primary school fulfilling due to previously mentioned reasons such as me not being able to take pride in the learning there doing as I struggle to identify and appreciate it with a young age group. I also realised just how much I do enjoy making art. It feels strenuous and difficult whilst doing my studio practice but stopping that to do Unit X has made me miss it so much that I know realise it’s something I always want to keep in my life and therefore, I want to undertake a more serious teaching of the subject with an older age group as opposed to it just being a part of what I teach in a Primary school. Engaging with the things that I have during unit X has made me have a wider understanding of the differences between the different kinds of educators as I have had an opportunity to talk to numerous people who have taught from primary through to A level. This has informed the way I see lesson planning and engaging with learners heavily as I now see that the common factor between all of them is ensuring that you always make the learner feel validated and never undermine. I also strongly feel that Unit X will help me in my studio practice too in the sense that realising how much I miss making which encourage me to do it much more passionately and produce much more work and push myself to make the best things I can.

I feel that I committed to most aspects of the unit as education and art’s place within it is something I am very passionate about. I took part in all the initial sessions at Stockport market place (other than the week I was too ill to attend) and have thoroughly engaged with the blogging, ensuring that I took lots of documentative pictures and blogged about the day’s tasks on the night when I got home so it was fresh in my mind and as sincere and helpful to me when reflecting as possible. Writing about things such as the failing workshop and the maker’s palette task helped me to start grasping an understanding of the kind of things I wanted to be as an educator from early in the unit, so this is something I am glad I engaged with. Blogging has also been helpful in helping me decide what I want from this unit and what I want going forward. I also feel that I committed and contributed to both workshop activities I was directly involved in. These being the “most likely to succeed” workshop and the primary school workshop. Both went well, and I contributed plenty of ideas to both, especially the primary school workshop in which I was also the person to organise and provide all the materials as well. Due to this and other aspects of the primary school workshop I feel that in this one especially, I took a leadership role in the collaborative work side of things. This was a learning curve for me as I didn’t realise that I had the confidence in myself to do this and not worry about judgement from others. I’m so proud of myself for this and it’s a skill I will utilise going forward. There were two aspects of the unit I feel I didn’t contribute too well enough. Firstly, the tutorial opportunities with Elle and Clare. I missed a fair few of these chances due to placement but if I had the opportunity to do the Unit again I would ensure that I made time for at least 3 or 4 tutorials before the end of the unit as I feel more of their input would have helped me even more with my reflection and understanding. Secondly, I could have done much more when it came to the Cass Art workshop despite my placement. I couldn’t go and be there on the night as I attended the PGCE drop in and this was more of a priority for me in terms of my personal learning needs, however I wish I’d have made time to go and help set up during the day. Reflecting on how I regret these things has made me realise that in future I need to be taking advantage of all opportunities I must engage as this is the way I will learn the most and gain a wider understanding of educating and what it takes. The more I do in different setting will also serve to further my contextual understanding of educating and the responsibility that comes with it.

I feel that I could have carried out further research in my spare time by doing things like reading ALL the links that Clare and Elle posted to the educator group and trying to find more TED talks about education. This is something I should have been doing throughout the whole course, rather than just at the end of the unit like I did, as it would have taught me more and would have been helpful material to reflect on within my blog. I feel that there should have also been more in-depth research and a higher level of interrogation when it came to planning the two workshops I was involved in. We should have been more organised as groups and spent longer investigating the different options for materials and workshop layout to do something more unique. This way we could have delivered workshops that stuck in people’s minds and maybe encouraged the primary teacher to teach more things with an interdisciplinary aspect of art. If I could go back I would start planning workshops immediately so that I could spend as long as possible amending the idea so that all of it was the best it could be as although both workshops I was involved in were successful, in my opinion they weren’t one of the “WOW” workshops that Clare always talks about. After reflecting on the whole unit I feel that my idea development is quite well rounded and I have come out if the unit knowing what kind of educator I want to be and what key stage I want to do this at, however I feel that if I would have done more experimentation with my workshop planning I would also have a more well rounded idea about how I wished to go about passing on my skills in a memorable way in the future.

I think during Unit X Educator I have done a lot of learning when it comes to knowing how to communicate my ideas clearly and how to get a lot of work done when feeling time pressured e.g. workshop planning. After reflecting on my experience in the primary school and my experiences within the educator class, I also feel that I am now much better at small talk and interacting with people that I don’t know at all which is something I’ve struggled with in the past. I feel that I could improve upon how heavily I interrogate workshop opportunities and how many things I try and achieve in terms of the ambitiousness of the workshop. For example, if I was to have another chance to deliver a workshop I would want to spend longer making sure I had a unique idea that would expose the learners to at least one thing they hadn’t done before. As I previously mentioned, this is something I feel I didn’t achieve and I plan to do further research on ways to make my workshop much more creative. I feel that an aspect of the Educator course that I could develop further in line with my studio practice is the idea of using workshops as a way of researching for my art. In my 10 minute microteach I planned to get people to draw/tell me their perceptions of Brutalist architecture as an aid to understanding my work and reflecting on this has made me realise that would be a really good way to gather research. Since then I have done this over social media sites such as Reddit and have achieved a larger amount of research that is richer in variety than I managed to get throughout the whole course of this year.

Overall, the experiences I have had within this unit and reflecting upon them have shown me how much I value the opportunities to make art and develop my practice that university gives me. I value this greatly and as a result will work harder at it in the future. It has also shown me what path I want to take in the future and given me a clear idea of how I’m going to get there. Unit X had been a really positive learning experience for me and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in educating.

[distinguishedreviewtrash-blog]

If you want to Opt-in For This Characteristic

If you wish to Choose-in For This Feature

Effectively, that’s the thriller - nobody seems to know for certain, as no actual information worthy of such worth motion got here over the wire. There is maybe one threat to the way forward for Bitcoin: competing cryptocurrencies. Positively the cryptocurrencies as well are going to be regulated quickly. A report from The People’s Every day from China received focus on Tuesday as it stated the Chinese language Academy of Social Sciences admitted banning cryptocurrencies is difficult. 270 million in enterprise capital rounds, lending additional credibility to the claims made within the report. To know how such murky actions eat away a big portion of the income we need to have a take a look at some current statistics. In Simple Ways To Buy And Invest In Bitcoin , ICO has helped many startups to lift the funds they want for their initiatives. Users of the hardware wallet Ledger haven’t been capable of access Bitcoin Money (BCH) on their machine, and they’re freaking out on Reddit.

George Soros has teamed up with the Rockefellers and Rothschilds so as to begin buying and selling in crypto and buy up huge quantities of Bitcoin. For desktop users it better to mine bitcoin buy joining mining swimming pools. How can I purchase a Bitcoin? All your Bitcoin transactions happen within the wallet, which you'll be able to nonetheless use to arrange your utterly nameless Bitcoin handle. That is unacceptable; it should take milliseconds. My advice is to have some money accessible ready to take a position in the ETF when it's obtainable to be traded. There is no denying it - the final 12 months was largely formed by the two most divisive forks in Bitcoin historical past - the Bitcoin Cash hard fork and the SegWit tender fork. So you pay in money. The particular options of Flitpay are its promotional wallet and referrals. So here are Is Bitcoin As Good As Gold? will likely be using for those of you who might be reading this sooner or later.

That's the bubble, and the bursting of the bubble can be good for the cryptocurrency market as a complete. In the long term, because it gets harder to search out new coins, and because the economic system will increase, the fees shall be an incentive for miners to keep creating extra blocks and keep the financial system going. “Satoshi’s a little bit of a mysterious determine,” says Jeff Garzik, a member of that core staff and founder of Bitcoin Watch, which tracks the Bitcoin financial system. Local Bitcoins helps you to search and flick through varied sellers of Bitcoin in your area. There are particular similarities which can be shared by bitcoins and gold; each can be used as alternate currencies and are great choices for funding. There is a fascination with something that's new, that is technologically created and that’s hard to hack. From then on, you’ve compromised the anonymity of that wallet. Avoid contact between your Bitcoin account and your checking account(s) to keep away from hyperlinks between you and your Bitcoin wallet. Should you receive coins and cannot spend them, you then start to doubt whether you'll be able to spend them,” Blockstream CEO Adam Again told the audience on the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Madrid.

By leveraging basic examination, bitcoin traders can get a better sense of the cryptocurrency's true price and get a greater sense of irrespective of whether or not it is a good time to amass or promote. One of the best strategy to learn about bitcoin, is to jump in and get a few in your "pocket" to get a really feel for how they work. Although this is a marginal amount, it's an improvement in contrast to a few weeks in the past. The most safe passwords are those generated by applications designed particularly for that purpose. I even commerce Eurodollar futures that are even more highly divorced from reality. Derivatives and Futures do help to an extent, but they cannot stabilize prices long run. This can be very safe and no one can seize or steal coins. The complete thread is worth studying for the quite a few purple flags the doge designer uncovers. 30,000 value of bitcoins. Japanese internet big GMO has launched a service to permit clients to lend their bitcoins to the company. He is the president of a company of tech analysts. Yes, ThePiachu's Bitcoin Blog is on the cards too but most people think this MoneroV is another "parasitic" rip-off made worse by Air drops which requires handing over non-public keys for them to be available.

Irrespective of your downside, blockchain is the answer to your ills. What’s wanted to adopt the blockchain in enterprise? As well as to those consumer advantages, the code change additionally helps developers, since the new algorithm is way simpler to know for a technical standpoint. Michael: The chance is that folks do not bounce on board and do contributions to the hardware design code base. To Todd’s point, BIP seventy five does make it simpler for corporations (monetary in nature or not) to gather data on their customers. 394 by April 1 - the bottom level since Dec. 7, in keeping with Bitfinex data. This shows the perspective regarding cryptocurrency is fairly constructive total. As mentioned on Monday, the loss of life cross isn't a reliable indicator, as the most important portion of the promote-off has already occurred (RSI shows oversold situation) by the point the crossover is confirmed. And whereas regulations ought to sign potential acknowledgment, Bitcoin's price, in addition to that of most major altcoins, continues to swing like a pendulum.