#only in early Gov’t

[artcalledinsect-ieunts]

The posts before

Without Red pilled bill capped

MAGA

Answer first ? Question Sir!

Trump / Rump T

Ill

In your being

Come on

Public Records

Campaign Dollars spent

Grab fists and drop

Hold the Bible

Let Trump Hold a Power!?

You still will spend life for!

Fore

Watch the heads

Egotistical

Oversteer

When Democrats had bodies enslaved!

When Democrats had bodies enslaved!

When Democrats had bodies enslaved!

Right the right Trump

I’m all mixed up

Don’t get mad

Frustrated,

Master

{[Added 230824 (MASA)] overseer}

CEO

Ex Former President

Convinced

Conduct

Convict

Electrical lines from where you can’t see!

Orichalchum in pictured

Olive green like that skin tone

If you kept your teeth

Well

Pretty Orc

Look down at all of U S gems

$$$$$

We the money

Rockin’ that

Rollin’ them

Account

Accountants

In my Campaign

Public Records

Since Paid For(e)

Golf that Swing Swig

X3

Walk Away

[mint-moon25]

Expecting Miracles - Excel in Your Calling, Part 4

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HOMELESS - RENT - $556

APARTMENTS . com

DOESN’T - EVEN - SAY - THAT

LABRE PLACE - APARTMENTS

ARE - LOW - INCOME - APARTMENT BUILDINGS

JESSICA - TOLD - ME

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LEMONADE - RENTERS - INSURANCE

BEGINS - $5 - MONTHLY

SECURITY - DEPOSIT - $30

ELENA QUIROS - PAYS - BOTH

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TIME - 4 - FREE - PICK UP - APPLIANCES

FURNITURE - JESSICA - SAID - ALL FREE

WELL - JESSICA - NOT - THERE - TODAY

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2 HISPANIC - FEMALES - AND - CASE

WORKER

ALSO - GIRL - STUDENT - OF - MBA

MARY BRICKELL - ACADEMY

BLK - FEMALE - ALSO - WAITING

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SPEAKING - MY - APT - WILL - NOT BE

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7 DAYS - BUT - BY - OUTSIDE - LICENSED

WORKERS - NOT - BY - HIM - HE FINISHED

HIS PART - 7 DAYS - BY - PROFESSIONALS

EARLIER - THAN - 15 OCT 2024

SO - NOT - THIS - WEEK - MAYBE - 2ND

WEEK - OF - OCTOBER - INSTEAD - YES

WAKING - UP - EARLY - ANYWAY - 4 - I’M

GOING - 2 - STORAGE - TOMORROW

EARLY - INSTEAD - GET - WHAT - ME

NEED - THEN - GOING - 2 - BACK OF

GOV’T - CENTER

FRONT - OF - JRK! - RESTAURANT

BUS - 836 EXP

FOR - 24 HOUR - FITNESS

WILL - TAKE - CHANCE - WITH - MY

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PLACES - 2 - GO - TOMORROW

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DAY - BECAUSE - JAIL - IS - YES

BETTER - THAN - OUTDOORS OF

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IS - A - GARBAGE - STATE - AND

THEY - PLAN - OF - GARBAGING

SENIORS - WHO - NO - LONGER

HAVE - MONEY - THEY’RE ALSO

HOMELESS - BUT - HERE I SAW

HOMELESS - RENT - $556.00

INSTEAD - OF - $1,191.00 - 4 APT

SO - THEY’RE - CONFUSED

HAVEN’T - SIGNED - LEASE

CLOSED - ACCOUNT

EMAILS - SENT - ME

UNSUBSCRIBE

MARK - AS - SPAM

DELETED - FOLDER - MESSAGES

YANDEX - MAIL

HUNGRY - EATING - SOON

JESUS - IS - LORD - TRULY

JOINING - OTHERS - HOMELESS

1ST - WEEK OF OCTOBER - 2024

[truegeorge]

Speed Boat Chase

After leaving the gov’t office early so that I can arrive home in time to attend the virtual Union delegate meeting. Yes, True_George is not only a supervising government bureaucrat, in addition True_George is the location elected Union Delegate. Well, after the meeting True_George decided to lay down a bit, well the experience that took place seemed like a movie playing in the subconscious. I…

[whatisonthemoon]

On “The Family” or “The Fellowship”

There has recently been a post on WIOTM discussing the Fellowship or the Family (not to be confused with the Family International, or the Children of God), linking this organization to both the Moral Re-Armament Movement and the Moonies. Understanding this organization has helped me understand the UC’s role in politics, too, especially from the 80s-early 2000s. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a Netflix documentary on the Family, but it still holds back from giving much of its history and shying away from its covert political activities.

This excerpt from 'C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy' should be read by those who want to understand parapolitics and the Moonies, and how religion has been creatively weaponized by the United States gov’t. I bolded certain parts of the section of the book myself.

Pres. Biden at the Fellowship-run National Prayer Breakfast

EXCERPT:

THE CONFESSIONS

“As much as I did talk about going to the Appalachian Trail ... that isn’t where I ended up.” — South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, at the June 24, 2009, press conference at which he confessed to cheating on his wife.

In 2008 I published a book called The Family, which took as its main subject a religious movement known to some as the Fellowship and to others as the Family and to most only through one of the many nonprofit entities created to express the movement’s peculiar approach to religion, politics, and power. One of these entities is the C Street Center Inc., in Washington, DC, or, simply, C Street, made infamous in the summer of 2009 by the actions of three Family associates: a senator, a governor, and a congressman, each with his own special C Street connection.

The senator lived there; the governor sought answers there; and the congressman’s wife says he rendezvoused with his mistress in his bedroom at the three-story redbrick town house on Capitol Hill, maintained by the Family for a singular goal, in the words of one Family leader: to “assist [congressmen] in better understandings of the teachings of Christ, and applying it to their jobs.”

Among the men thus assisted by the Family have been Sen. Tom Coburn and Sen. Jim Inhofe, Oklahoma Republicans racing each other to the far right of the political spectrum (Coburn has proposed the death penalty for abortion providers; Inhofe, who was a defender of the Abu Ghraib torturers, hosts regular foreign policy meetings at C Street); Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who insists that the Bible teaches we cannot serve both God and government; and Sen. Sam Brownback (R- KS), who says that through meetings of his Family “cell” of like- minded politicians he receives divine instruction on subjects as varied as sex, oil, and Islam. There’s also Sen. John Thune (R- SD), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R- IA), and Sen. Mike Enzi (R- WY); Rep. Frank Wolf (R- VA), Rep. Zach Wamp (R- TN), and Rep. Joe Pitts (R- PA). And Democrats, too: among them are Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida; North Carolina’s Ten Commandments crusader, Rep. Mike McIntyre; its newest Blue Dog, Rep. Heath Shuler; and Michigan’s Rep. Bart Stupak. In 2009 Stupak joined with Rep. Pitts to hold health care reform hostage to what Family leaders, pledging their support for Pitts early in his career, called “God’s leadership” in the long war against abortion.

Buried in the 592 boxes of documents dumped by the Family at the Billy Graham Center Archives in Wheaton, Illinois, are five decades’ worth of correspondence between members equally illustrious in their day: segregationist Dixiecrats and Southern Republican converts Sen. Absalom Willis Robertson (Pat Robertson’s father) and Sen. Strom Thurmond; a Yankee Klansman named Ralph Brewster and a blue- blooded fascist sympathizer named Merwin Hart; a parade of generals, oilmen, bankers, missile manufacturers; little big men of the provinces with fast food fortunes or chains of Piggly Wiggly supermarkets or gravel quarry empires. There was even the occasional liberal — Sen. Mark Hatfield, Republican of Oregon, and Sen. Harold Hughes, Democrat of Iowa — men of good faith and bad judgment who lent their names to the causes of the Family’s “brothers” overseas, the Indonesian genocidaire Suharto (Hatfield), the Filipino strongman Ferdinand Marcos (Hughes).

“Christ ministered to a few and did not set out to minister to large throngs of people,” says a supporter. The Family differs from more conventional fundamentalist groups in its preference for those whom it calls “key men” over the multitude. “We simply call ourselves the fellowship or a family of friends,” declares a document titled “Eight Core Aspects of the vision and methods,” distributed to members at the 2010 National Prayer Breakfast, the movement’s only public event. One of the Eight Core Aspects is the movement’s interpretation of Acts 9: 15 — “This man is my chosen instrument to take my name ... before the Gentiles and their kings” (emphasis theirs). The Family’s unorthodox reading of this verse is that it is an injunction to work not through public revivals but through private relationships with “ ‘the king’ —or other leaders of our world — who hold enormous influence — for better or worse — over vast numbers of people.” The Family sees itself as a ministry for the benefit of the poor, by way of the powerful. The best way to help the weak, it teaches, is to help the strong.

In 2008 and 2009, the Family did so by helping Sen. John Ensign (R- NV), Gov. Mark Sanford (R- SC), and former representative Chip Pickering (R- MS) cover up extramarital affairs, and in Ensign’s case secret payments. Not to avoid embarrassment for the Family, an organization that until 2009 denied its own existence, but because the Family believes that its members are placed in power by God; that they are his “new chosen”; that the senator, the governor, and the congressman were “tools” with which to advance his kingdom, an ambition so worthy that beside it all personal failings pale.

On June 16, 2009, Sen. Ensign flew home to Las Vegas to confess his affair. Ensign, fourth- ranking Republican and a man with Iowa and Pennsylvania Avenue on his mind, had made a career of going against the grain of his hometown. He was a moral scold who’d promoted himself as a Promise Keeper — a member of the conservative men’s ministry — and a family values man. He’d been a hound once, according to friends, but he’d come to Christ before he came to politics; for Ensign, the two passions were intertwined. He didn’t just go to church, he lived in one, the Family’s house at 133 C Street, SE, registered as a church for tax purposes.

I’d met Ensign there once, when I was writing an earlier book on unusual religious communities around the country. I’d seen some strange things: a Pentecostal exorcism in North Carolina; a massive outdoor Pagan dance party in honor of “the Horned One” in rural Kansas; a “cowboy church” in Texas featuring a cross made of horseshoes and, in lieu of a picture of Jesus, a lovely portrait of a seriously horned Texas Longhorn steer.

But C Street was in its own category, simultaneously banal — a prayer meeting of congressmen in which they insisted on calling God “Coach” — and more unsettling than anything I’d witnessed. Doug Coe, the “first brother” of the Family since 1969, used to say that Jesus was not a sissy. That disdain for weakness infuses the movement’s theology so completely, so naturally, that it comes across as almost amiable. “I’ve seen pictures of the young men in the Red Guard,” he says in a videotaped sermon, a tall man in a rumpled suit, spreading out his hands like he’s setting up a joke. “They would bring in this young man’s mother ... he would take an axe and cut her head off.” Coe makes a chopping motion. That, he says, is dedication to a cause. But there’s nothing grim about his presentation; he sounds like he’s inviting you to join a team or a fund-raiser. And he is. “A covenant! A pledge!” he exclaims, setting up the punch line. “That’s what Jesus said.” Such is the C Street style, the most violent metaphors imaginable deployed as maxims for everyday living, from the prayer calendar on the wall that called on the house’s congressional tenants to devote a portion of each morning to spiritual war (combat by prayer) against “demonic strongholds” such as Buddhism and Hinduism, to Coe’s routine invocation of history’s worst villains as models for the muscle he’d rather see applied on Christ’s behalf. The first time I met Coe, he was in the midst of a spiritual mentoring session in which he cited “Hitler, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh [and] bin Laden” as models with which to understand the “total Jesus” worshipped by the Family. He sipped hot cocoa while he lectured.

Ensign seemed to fall on the banal end of that spectrum. He missed the prayer meeting, bouncing into the foyer in red jogging shorts and a white T- shirt that made his tan — the most impressive tan in the Technicolor portrait gallery of golf-happy, twenty-first-century political America — glow beneath his equally striking silver hair. Ensign’s hair, prematurely gray, is his most senatorial feature; it possesses a gravitas all its own. The man beneath it, though, square-jawed and thick-browed, is something of a giggler. Jogging in place, grinning, bobbing his head back and forth, he boasted to a young female aide who’d been sent to fetch him about the time he’d clocked on his run. “That’s great!” she said, then asked him what kind of time he could make showering and getting ready for work. Up popped Ensign’s arched black brows: a challenge! “I’m all about setting records today!” he said.

And away he went. When I wrote The Family, I devoted only a sentence to him, describing him as a “conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling- fortune name.” After his press conference, a magazine editor, noting Ensign’s Washington address and recalling my book, asked me if I wanted to write something about Ensign’s apparent hypocrisy. I didn’t. The senator’s sins were his own.

Next up was Mark Sanford, the weather- beaten governor of South Carolina, his tan the result of days spent in the woods, hunting, or on his tractor, planting. He was famous for his frugality. As a congressman, he slept on a futon rolled out across his office rather than coughing up rent, and as governor he turned down $700 million in federal stimulus money because he feared it would lead to “a thing called slavery.” In 1995, when Ensign and Sanford were at the vanguard of the right- wing revolution, Ensign quietly continued business as usual, collecting $450,000 from political action committees, more than any other freshman. Mark Sanford refused to take a dime. By 2009, even more than Ensign Sanford was being spoken of as presidential material for the GOP, fabric to be cut, folded, and sewn.

So, when on June 18, 2009, Sanford disappeared, some assumed it was for a good or maybe even a noble reason. For days, there were whispers about where the governor had gone — gone being the operative word, because nobody knew where the governor was. Not in the governor’s mansion in Columbia, not in the airy beach house on Sullivan’s Island he shared with his wife, Jenny Sanford, and their four boys, not at Coosaw, the semi- feral, falling- down plantation along the Combahee River that had originally brought the Sanford clan, Floridians, to South Carolina. Calls to his wife, the state’s elegantly beautiful First Lady, a gentlewoman, in the antique parlance of the state’s finest matrons, led reporters to believe the governor was thinking, working on a book about the meaning of conservatism. Calls to his staff led seekers to the woods: to the Appalachian Trail, to which the governor was said to have taken in contemplation.

Contemplation of what? Hopes rose, résumés rustled, ambitions flared, as Sanford’s circle imagined the governor emerging from the wilderness as a new kind of contender. They didn’t see the truth coming. “Mark Sanford literally likes to go his own way,” gushed GOP consultant Mark McKinnon, whose clients have included George W. Bush and John McCain. “For this act alone, we’re going to move Sanford up at least a notch on our Top 10 GOP contenders for 2012.” In the days ahead he’d become a laughingstock: a symbol of all that is pathetic about politics, men, middle age, even romance itself at the tired end of a decade celebrated by no one. But before that, while he was still gone, so long as nobody knew where he was, when the governor for a moment occupied a space in the realm between the possibility of tragedy (was he silent because his broken body lay at the bottom of a gully?) and the transcendent (would he walk out of the woods with the wisdom of one who knows how to quiet the world’s noise?), he was almost a folk hero.

His supporters — the true believers who loved his Roman nose and his leathery skin and his wry smile, and the Washington slicks who would sell these features as the face of a modern-day Cincinnatus, a reluctant philosopher-king for the common man — asked themselves if this strange departure would herald his arrival. Would the governor return from the wilderness to announce a higher aspiration?

Yes, in a sense: love. On June 24, after a reporter for the Columbia State tracked him down in a Georgia airport and discovered he’d returned from Argentina, Sanford called a press conference at which he mused on his genuine affection for the Appalachian Trail, then pledged to “lay out that larger story” — the story of where he’d been the previous week. “Given the immediacy of y’all’s wanting to visit,” he said, he was forced to intrude private concerns into a public meeting. He began with apologies to Jenny and his four boys, “jewels and blessings,” his staff, and an old friend — the memory of whose early support brought the governor close to tears. “I let them down by creating a fiction with regard to where I was going,” he said. He had been on an “adventure trip,” indeed, but not on the Appalachian Trail. He rubbed his forehead, his eyes glanced off into nowhere, his voice wobbled. “I’m here,” he continued, still deferring any concrete explanation of why he actually was there, “because if you were to look at God’s laws, they’re in every instance designed to protect people from themselves.” He warmed to the subject of religion, firmer ground, he knew, for the narrative of public confession. “The biggest self of self is indeed self.”

The answer to that riddle was a woman. The “biggest self of self” for Sanford was love; he’d fallen into it, and he wanted us to forgive him.

To that point, I’d been interested only in the convoluted candor with which he was testifying. It was some good church, tension building, a parade of emotions not often on display in political life. I admired him for it. Then came the kicker. In answer to a question about how long his family had known (five months), Sanford paused, as if lost in recollection. Then: “I’ve been to a lot of — as part of what we called C Street when I was in Washington. It was a, believe it or not, a Christian Bible study — some folks who asked members of Congress hard questions that I think were very, very important. And I’ve been working with them.”

Another spiritual adviser, Warren “Cubby” Culbertson, was at the press conference. Every month, Cubby and two seminary professors invited fifteen well- connected men for a meeting at a downtown office where Cubby, a wealthy entrepreneur, would train them in the use of “spiritual weaponry,” with distinctly political implications. “Never underestimate the influence the ungodly have upon the godly,” he warned. “The ungodly want to unlord the Lord, but they must first unlord the law.” It was a ministry for men who had already achieved financial success and yet wanted more — meaning greater influence. The “up and out,” as the Family calls such people. “The ostrich has wings,” Cubby taught, “but cannot fly.” By which he meant: “The almost saved are totally damned.” No half measures. The men Cubby brought to God were instructed to become the “most holy,” to “enter God’s playing field,” to take God’s “litmus tests.” Ask yourself: Do I keep my eye on “the enemies known as the world”? “The children of the devil are obvious,” Cubby advised, citing 1 John 3:9; avoid them or become an “eternal inhabitant of Sodom.”

At the press conference, you could almost see Sanford weighing his options, trying to hold on to his ambition, lamenting the loss of the woman he’d already described to Jenny as his “heart connection.” Then he made his choice: C Street. “A spiritual giant,” Sanford said of Cubby, who was looking on from the back of the room, and finally tears began to fall.

* * *

I was stunned. One of the first rules of C Street is that you don’t talk about C Street. “We sort of don’t talk to the press about the house,” C Streeter Bart Stupak, a conservative Democrat, had told a reporter back in 2002. Another C

Streeter, Zach Wamp, spoke out against transparency in the wake of the Ensign scandal. “The C Street residents have all agreed they won’t talk about their private living arrangements, Wamp said, and he [Wamp] intends to honor that pact,” reported the Knoxville News- Sentinel , after scandal forced the press to pay attention.

“I hate it that John Ensign lives in the house and this happened because it opens up all of these kinds of questions,” Wamp told the paper. “I’m not going to be the guy who goes out and talks.”

From the Family’s point of view, C Street’s code of secrecy is not a conspiracy but a matter of simple efficiency. “The more invisible you can make your organization,” Doug Coe observes, “the more influence it will have.” True enough; that’s why we have lobbying and disclosure laws. It’s also part of why we have the Fourth Estate, the press, to hold the powerful accountable. If the press can’t comfort the afflicted, as the old saying goes — and even as a onetime employee of a freebie paper used primarily by homeless men for warmth in the winter, I doubt that it can — it may, on occasion, afflict the comfortable.

But most reporters have never shown much interest in C Street or the organization behind it. The exceptions are remarkable for the scrutiny that didn’t follow. Not in 1952, when the Washington Post noticed that the Secretary of Defense had granted four senators the use of a military plane for international Family meetings; questions were raised, then dropped. No questions at all followed the New Republic’s 1965 report on the Family’s only public event, the National Prayer Breakfast (then the Presidential Prayer Breakfast), an evangelical ritual of national devotion that politicians skipped at their peril. In 1975 Playboy published an exhaustively researched report on how the Family functioned as an off-the-books bank for its congressional members. Then, nothing.

Not even Watergate could goad the press into real action. The New York Times noted that President Ford had convened his old all- Republican congressional prayer group — organized by the Family — to consider Nixon’s pardon, but asked no questions about what criteria it would use. Time did a little better, identifying Doug Coe as the top man of what it described as “almost an underground network,” an “intricate web” of Christian activists in the capital, but left it at that. In December 1973, Dan Rather challenged his deputy press secretary to explain why Watergate conspirator Chuck Colson continued to make frequent visits to the White House he’d left in criminal disgrace. “Prayer,” came the answer. “Now we all know the way Washington works,” Rather replied. “People ingratiate themselves with people in positions of power, and at such things as, yes, a prayer breakfast, they do their business. Isn’t someone around here worried at least about the symbolism of this?” Apparently not; the questions that followed were bemused. Nobody seriously wondered why the soon-to-be- convicted Watergate conspirator, a man who had allegedly proposed firebombing the Brookings Institution, needed to worship in the White House. Not even a few years later, when Colson, never good at keeping his mouth shut, told the story of Doug Coe’s collaboration with the CEO of Raytheon, manufacturer of missiles, to bring Colson into the Family fold. “A veritable underground of Christ’s men all through government,” as Colson called the network that would vouch for his parole after only six months in prison.

Coe himself boasted of what the press couldn’t see, declaring that the single public event, the Prayer Breakfast, “is only one-tenth of one percent of the iceberg ... [and] doesn’t give the true picture of what is going on.” Ronald Reagan almost dared someone to ask questions in 1985, announcing at the Prayer Breakfast that he wished he could say more about the sponsor of the elite gathering. “But it’s working precisely because it’s private.” By the age of Reagan, much of the press had come to see that as a virtue. “Members of the media know,” said Reagan, “but they have, with great understanding and dignity, generally kept it quiet. I’ve had my moments with the press, but I commend them this day, for the way they’ve worked to maintain the integrity of this movement.” Time, for instance, ran a feature on the “Bible Beltway,” rife with factual errors and seeming to almost celebrate “the semisecret involvement of so many high-powered names.” There was Secretary of State James Baker and his wife, Susan; the Kemps; the Quayles; and a Democrat, Don Bonker of Washington, since departed from Congress to become a free trade lobbyist. The presence of Democrats as well as Republicans, the magazine proposed, proved there could be no politics involved.

The first serious report in decades came in 2002, when Lisa Getter, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times, published a major front-page exposé in which she revealed that the Family dispatched congressmen as missionaries to carry the Gospel to Muslim leaders around the world — and did so with a “vow of silence.” The media response was — well, there was no response. Several months later, the Associated Press reported on C Street’s subsidized housing for the anointed, describing the Family as “a secretive religious organization.” Nobody followed up on that story, either. That spring, I published in Harper’s magazine an account of a month I’d spent living with the Family in Virginia. I included a C Street vignette, a spiritual counseling session between Doug Coe and Rep. Todd Tiahrt, a Kansas Republican. Tiahrt came seeking wisdom on how Christians could win the population “race” with “the Muslim” and left contemplating Coe’s advice to consider Christ through the historical lens of Hitler, Lenin, and Osama bin Laden. Like the other stories before it, mine was left to stand alone, giggled over and gossiped about by media colleagues but treated as a true tale of the quirks of the political class that demanded no further investigation.

Or, worse, it fell victim to the rule of reductio ad Hitlerum, the sensible Internet adage that holds that the first party in a debate to compare an opponent to Hitler loses. In 2004, a Democratic candidate for the northern Virginia congressional seat held by Republican Frank Wolf noted Wolf’s association with Coe. Coe’s Hitler talk wasn’t limited to the example of power I’d witnessed him offering Rep. Tiahrt at C Street, although it has to be said, immediately and emphatically, that Coe is not a neo-Nazi. He uses Hitler, his defenders declare, as a metaphor. For what? For Jesus. The lion and the lamb are too abstract for Coe. He asks his followers to imagine pure power, as modeled by Hitler and other totalitarians; then, he instructs, imagine that power used for Christ, for good instead of evil.

When the Virginia Democratic candidate pointed to these unorthodox teachings, the Washington Post would have none of it, editorializing against this low blow and dispatching a reporter to prove it untrue for good measure. He did so by asking the aggrieved parties and their friends if the accusations were true; they assured him they were not. Case closed — until 2008, when NBC aired videotape given to me by an evangelical critic of the Family’s “spiritual abuse,” as he put it, depicting Coe rattling on to a group of evangelical leaders about the fellowship model offered by “Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler.” There was more: audio buried deep on the website of the Navigators, a fundamentalist ministry, of Coe going into greater detail on the depth of commitment he thought his disciples should learn from such men: “You say, hey, you know Jesus said, ‘You got to put him before mother- father- brother- sister’? Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that’s what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn’t murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom.”

None of this, not even the NBC News video, broke the story beyond a few isolated blips in the news cycle. There was no conspiracy of silence. Rather, all of these reports were lost in the black hole of conventional wisdom. A scoop, for most reporters, isn’t actually a new story; it’s a twist or a new variation on a story people already think they understand, a story that reassures the reader that his or her cynicism is justified and yet contained within the known realm of vice: stuffed in an envelope next to a wad of Ben Franklins or tucked into bed beside a stripper. The parameters for stories about religion in politics are even narrower: fundamentalism sells, but only if it’s low-class, the purview of sweaty Southern men in too-tight suits pounding pulpits and thumping Bibles. C Street — a distinguished address, an upscale clientele, an internationalist perspective — simply did not register.

Until, that is, sex entered the story. Suddenly, the media that had ignored C Street for years needed to know all about it. Or, rather, not all about it, not its implications for democracy and desire; interest was limited to the topic of hypocrisy, publicly pious Republicans, and their secret lovers. Ensign’s affair was at that early stage still mostly limited to his two-minute press conference and a few grubby, isolated details: that his best friend’s wife was the best friend of Ensign’s wife, for instance. Mark Sanford, on the other hand, offered both sex and schadenfreude, an exotic mistress and love letters exposed, a wife, Jenny Sanford, who refused to stand by her man, and a man who refused to stop talking about his lover. And then there was C Street, the mysterious address linked to both scandals.

I was the only reporter to have written from within its walls, and suddenly that mattered in a way it hadn’t before, when I’d been bleating on about the Family’s support for murderous regimes in Haiti and Indonesia and Somalia, machete militias and “kill lists” and rape rooms, all blessed by the Family’s faith and financed by its “leaders led by God” in Washington. Boring! Or, as one young radio producer put it, “What’s a Somalia?”

But consensual sex between adults? That could be news. Only by dispensing with the dead, though — “Let’s save Somalia for another time!” another producer suggested brightly — and kicking the heartbroken while they were down. That’s what Sanford was. The man had fallen in love, and everybody has done stupid things for love, and most of us, at one point or another, have done something awful. That’s not really news, it’s an Aesop’s fable. Evangelicals ritualize this truth with the declaration that we’re all sinners; secular folk speak of psychology’s contradictions. But such recognitions are reserved for private lives, and Mark Sanford’s self-destruction was public spectacle, served up for our satisfaction.

Shortly after the governor’s press conference, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow invited me on her evening show. I’d spoken to Maddow several times during her radio days, and I knew she was one of the smartest hosts in broadcast journalism. But I was conflicted about discussing Sanford. Sanford was done. The question that remained was, Do we gloat over his hypocrisy? Or do we welcome him into the human race — where the heart wants what it wants and that’s not always a simple or good thing, even when it’s a true thing?

I don’t think I would have been able to do that in a five minute television interview, which is why I thank God for the sad intervention of Michael Jackson. I imagine Mark Sanford said much the same thing on June 25, the day the Sanford scandal started to crest, and also the day Michael Jackson died. Suddenly, one southern governor’s affair was very small news.

I was buying a new pair of shoes when I heard. When I’d received the invitation to be on the Maddow show, I was wearing flip- flops. That seemed too casual for a TV studio, and besides, I needed a new pair of shoes. I tried Shoe Mania, in Manhattan’s Union Square. The store was abuzz: He’s dead! Who? Michael Jackson! Michael Jackson is dead. I was stunned. In my grief, I bought a pair of shoes Michael might have liked, long, polished, and pointy, flashier than any I’d ever owned.

I walked out onto Broadway, where drivers had opened their windows and jacked up their radios, “Rock with You” mingling with the honk and roar of the city at rush hour. Some people didn’t hear it, some didn’t care, but sprinkled up and down the avenue there was immediate mourning. I saw an old woman crying and three middle-aged white men with beer guts goofing the moonwalk and girls who hadn’t been born yet in the days of “Billie Jean” gliding backward up Broadway, smooth as Michael’s falsetto. Here was another spectacle of self- destruction, but the public responded not with vicious glee, as to a sex scandal, as to so many of Jackson’s failings in the past, but with necessary delight; with the remembrance of transcendence; with the late recognition of something that had been lost long before. Over the radio and in the faltering and fluid dance steps of the mourners thumped the beat of pop democracy, Walt Whitman you could dance to, songs that mattered more to how we all imagined and dreamed ourselves than any of Michael’s scandals — much less those of a couple of Republican politicians bent on disowning their own desires. So why the hell was I going on TV to count the sins of the love-struck governor of South Carolina?

I wasn’t. I was barely a block away from the shoe store when a call came from MSNBC. I’d been bumped. “Thank you, Michael Jackson,” I thought. The King of Pop had saved my soul, prevented me from playing the part of a puritan, scolding Sanford for his confession when his real weakness was not his transgression — seedy, selfish, and human �� but his retreat. He’d set out on the road to Damascus but had turned back too early. Instead of becoming an apostle of a love as free as his economic libertarianism, he’d fallen back on “God’s law.” And that was defined for him by C Street not as liberation but as the sort of freedom that isn’t free, that which protects us from ourselves, “this notion,” as he put it, “of what it is that I want.”

Unless, that is, what we want is power.

And then, King David drew me back to the story. Two days after Sanford’s public tears, he seemed back in control of himself. Opening a televised cabinet meeting, he spoke calmly of scripture, as if he were Cubby Culbertson himself, leading a spiritual counseling session. The topic was resignation: Sanford’s rejection of his own party’s calls for him to do so. As a congressman, he’d called on Bill Clinton to resign after the exposure of his affair. But there was a difference.

Clinton was just a president. Mark Sanford, he explained to his cabinet, was like a king. King David, in particular. “What I find interesting is the story of David,” he said, all waver and dodge gone from his voice, his tone that of a teacher, not a penitent.

“What I find interesting” — it’s an evangelical men’s movement phrase, it is interesting to note, what I find interesting, the almost casual, seemingly humble approach to a major claim based on a bit of scripture isolated from its text and put to work as a maxim, a law for leaders, an ancient justification for present- day authority. What Sanford found interesting about David was this: “The way in which he fell mightily, he fell in very significant ways.”

The governor was speaking of the second book of Samuel, chapter 11. King David, God’s chosen leader, is in Jerusalem while his armies are at war, conquering and destroying. All is well; but “all” is not enough for David. One night he wakes in the dark, restless, and goes up to the roof. From his high perch he looks down rather than up, toward the world rather than God, and spies a woman bathing. Lovely. The king snaps his fingers and off his servants go, and when they return they’ve brought with them the woman David desires, still wet from her bath. Her name is Bathsheba, and David rapes her or perhaps seduces her, offering the prospect of sex with the king in lieu of the loneliness she must feel for her husband, gone fighting the king’s wars. And she becomes pregnant.

So David tries to cover it up. He summons Bathsheba’s husband, a brave soldier named Uriah, back from the front. Take a break, David tells him, go home, see your wife — sleep with her, that is, so you’ll think the child is yours. Uriah refuses to enjoy himself while his comrades are at war. All right, says David, but wait here another night. The next morning, David sends a message to the soldier’s commander: “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retreat from him, that he may be struck down and die.” It works. Uriah, the memory of his good king and his good wife fresh in his mind, presses hard against the enemy, driving them back toward their city until Uriah stands with his sword at the gate, the enemy broken, Uriah and his men strong. Only, there are no men. They’ve fallen back. Then, an enemy archer rises from the walls and puts an arrow in Uriah’s heart.

So David wins his widow. There are consequences — God kills their first child, the one conceived in sin — but their second baby, the one born of marriage, thrives; they name him Solomon.

Yes, says Sanford, David “fell in very, very significant ways. But then picked up the pieces and built from there.” The key, Sanford declared, is humility. And he could do humility. He did some right there, apologizing to his cabinet, making clear he wasn’t going to resign. Like David, he had a calling. He was chosen. God had put him in office, and God would take him out; until then, Mark Sanford would remain governor of South Carolina.

This logic forms one of the foundations of C Street: the alchemy by which men elected by citizens persuade themselves that they were, in fact, selected by God. That sounds impossibly arrogant but it is, as Sanford said, a kind of humility. The chosen politician does not take credit for his success, he does not suppose that it was his virtue that led the people to elect him. He is just another sinner. But God wants to use him, as He used David. “God appoints specific leaders to fulfill a mission; He doesn’t hold a popular vote,” writes John C. Maxwell, a management guru on C Street’s Prayer Breakfast circuit, in a Bible study titled Leadership: Deliberate Selection vs. Democratic Election.

The other side of such humility is the abdication of responsibility. One chosen for leadership isn’t accountable for his own actions. That’s not what the rabbis teach when they speak of King David, of course, nor is it the real meaning of Calvinism’s doctrine of God’s elect. It’s American fundamentalism, a response to what one Family leader once lamented as the “substitution of democracy for religion.” The bastardization of the King David story reverses the process, replacing democracy with religion. Mark Sanford used that reversal to justify his own power in defiance of the minor sin of adultery. If David got a pass for murder, so, too, should Sanford be excused the contemplation of a beautiful woman’s “tan lines,” on which he’d rhapsodize in the love letters soon made public.

That calculation seems reasonable enough, if selfserving, until one considers the implications. David Coe, for instance, son of Doug Coe, heir apparent to the leadership of the Family, and Sen. Ensign’s C Street moral counselor, puts the application of the King David story in starker terms. The first time I ever heard King David invoked within the Family, in fact, was when David Coe visited the men with whom I was living at Ivanwald, a house I describe in The Family. They were a group of young future leadership prospects, and David Coe had come to do some spiritual training. Like his father, David Coe is tall, dark, lanky, and slow-moving, so calmly charismatic one forgets he is teaching;

Coe lessons seem like gentle musings. That day, David Coe mused on King David, who “liked to do really, really bad things.” Why, then, should we revere him?

The men were stumped. Maybe because I was raised around Judaism, a half-Jew who once celebrated Passover and Easter, I knew the answer. “Because he was chosen,” I said.

“Yes,” said Coe. “Chosen. Interesting set of rules, isn’t it?” Then he turned to another man. “Beau, let’s say I hear you raped three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?” Beau, a good- natured jock who loved wrestling, dancing, and long walks in the woods, supposed that Coe wouldn’t think well of him at all. But that wasn’t so, Coe answered. Beau, he explained, was one of God’s tools; that’s what it means to be chosen. The normal rules don’t apply. Morality — a human construct — doesn’t even apply. “Moral orders,” he said, “that’s for kids. God’s will is beyond morals.”

It wasn’t that Coe thought Beau should rape three little girls, or that he wouldn’t be horrified if Beau did; but such crimes would be beside the point. “We simply obey,” Coe said. Genghis Khan, Coe suggested, provided a good example.

According to Coe, Genghis Khan had conquered not for greed but because God told him to. When some monks asked him what justified his bloody conquests, Genghis answered, “I don’t ask. I submit.” Coe applied this logic to contemporary politics: “We elect our leaders,” he said, “Jesus elects his.”

* * *

The first of these leaders, for the Family, was Arthur B. Langlie, who was elected mayor of Seattle in 1938. Three years earlier, on a night in April, God had come to the founder of the Family, a Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Vereide. Christianity, God told Abram, as Vereide was known, had been getting it wrong for nearly two thousand years, devoting itself to the poor, the weak, the down-and-out. God told Abram that night that Abram’s calling would be the “up and out,” not life’s “derelicts, its failures,” as a friend wrote in a hagiography of Abram, Modern Viking. Rather, it should serve “those even more in need, who live dangerously in high places.” Abram immediately set to work organizing a committee of nineteen wealthy businessmen to break the spine of organized labor — Satan’s legions — in Seattle. Arthur Langlie, a thirty-five- year-old teetotaling lawyer, was their hammer. “It can be done,” he said, at one of Abram’s early prayer meetings. “I am ready to let God use me.”

God — plus the financial backing of that early cadre, a network of church workers organized by Abram, and a sieg-heiling, uniformed fraternity called the New Order of Cincinnatus — used Langlie, indeed, installing him in a city council seat vacated in fear of Langlie’s New Order men. From there he moved first to the mayor’s office — over the combined opposition of Democrats and Republicans who accused him of fascism — and then, in 1940, to the governor’s mansion, where he set about instituting God’s will as he’d learned it from Abram. It wasn’t about church or vice or soft concerns about pious women: it was about capitalism — and the invisible hand of the market with which Langlie purged the welfare rolls and ground the unions into corruption or contrition. The defining moment of Abram’s early ministry, one to which he’d return again and again over the decades, featured a labor leader named “Jimmy” — Abram rarely remembered union men’s last names — giving his teary testimony to a gathering of seventy-five God-led businessmen, apologizing for his rebelliousness in the past and pledging himself to Abram’s program, the result of which would be “no need for a labor union.” One of the businessmen clapped a hand on the humbled union man’s shoulder. “Jimmy,” he said, in words Abram would always remember, “on this basis we go on together.”

On that basis, Abram took his program — the Idea, he called it — first national and then international. By 1942 he’d organized businessmen’s committees in dozens of cities, and relocated himself first to the other Washington, the capital. In the midst of a January snowstorm, he assembled his first meeting of congressmen to hear the Christian testimony of Howard Coonley, the ultraright president of the National Association of Manufacturers. Coonley saw a third front for the war, after Europe and Asia, right there in Washington, against Franklin Roosevelt’s socialism and the death of a Christian nation in which God’s chosen vessels — the Up and Outers — were free to produce wealth for all to enjoy by way of trickle-down religion. The Up and Outers won their first battle the next year with the passage of the Smith-Connally Act, the beginning of the New Deal’s repeal. “It is the age of minority control,” prophesied Abram; democracy, he believed, had died back in 1935, no match for communism or fascism. He proposed instead what he called then — and what C Streeters call now — “the Better Way,” Up and Outers, guided by God, making the hard decisions behind closed doors.

By war’s end those doors belonged to a four- story mansion on Embassy Row in Washington, purchased with the help of a beautiful socialite widow, Marian Aymar Johnson. Abram called this prototype for C Street a “Christian Embassy,” headquarters for the movement he’d by then incorporated as International Christian Leadership (ICL). And international it was: in 1946, Abram undertook his first overseas mission with a mandate from the State Department to examine Nazi prisoners for conversion potential. He found more than a few willing to switch out the führer for the American father-god, men such as Hermann Abs, a leader of ICL’s German division and the wizard of the West German miracle — until, decades later, he was discovered by Jewish Nazi hunters to have been “Hitler’s leading banker.” But Abs was an innocent compared to many of the men Abram recruited, men from whom he learned not fascism — a European disease, to which American fundamentalism even at its most authoritarian has always been immune — but the power of forgetting. The blank slate, the sins of the powerful wiped clean — that was an idea, Abram realized, that would flourish in cold war America.

Abram had grasped the cold war before most, declaring at World War II’s end the immediate commencement of World War III. In 1955, Sen. Frank Carlson, with whom Abram had launched the annual ritual that would become the National Prayer Breakfast in 1953 by calling in favors from a reluctant Eisenhower, coined the phrase that would serve as the movement’s motto: Worldwide Spiritual Offensive. In 1959, Sen. Carlson took the fight to Haiti, where he decreed François “Papa Doc” Duvalier God’s man for the island nation and thus worthy of U.S. support, the guns and butter that kept Papa Doc — one of the most lunatic killers of the Western Hemisphere — and then his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc,” in business for decades. What was in it for ICL? Help the weak by helping the strong. They helped Papa Doc and Papa Doc helped the businessmen who traveled to Haiti with Carlson, and the businessmen helped Carlson and the Republican Party: help all around that somehow never trickled down to the Haitian people. In

1966, ICL moved on to Indonesia, where General Suharto had come to power through what the CIA would later call “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.” Abram called the coup a “spiritual revolution,” and began sending delegations of congressmen and oil executives who became champions of the genocidal regime. Help the weak by helping the strong: Suharto, ICLers believed, helped the weak of Indonesia resist the temptations of communism, by any means necessary.

Abram’s lanky young new lieutenant, Doug Coe, brought a new spirit to the organization. Abram had frowned on publicity as low- class, the currency of the masses, and Coe embraced secrecy as an expression of his religion, a mystic commitment to quiet authority expressed not through a central organization but a proliferation of “cells,” as the movement called the building blocks of their power. Each unit “should work behind the scenes,” Coe wrote. “It should have no stationery, no publicity.” Budgets should be off the books, the official sums nothing more than seed money. “It is important to note what God is doing in terms of finances that is not visible to the casual observer.” Each cell, each front, might incorporate separately, Coe wrote, but “in all cases the concept remains the same.”

What was the concept? “Men who are picked by God!” Not the many, but the few. Under Coe’s guidance, Family politicians embraced the idea that God prefers the services ofa dedicated elite to the devotion of the masses. “I have had a great and thrilling experience reading the condensed version of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, ” one of Coe’s lieutenants wrote him after Coe had given him a reading list for “the Work,” as their mission was often called. “Doug, what a lesson in vision and perspective! Nazism started with seven guys around a table in the back of an old German Beer Hall. The world has been shaped so drastically by a few men who really want it such and so. How we need this same kind of stuff as a Hitler or a Lenin.” That is, for Jesus, of course.

In 1964, Abram, his leadership dwindling, contributed to the movement a distillation of his Up and Out theology. “The Fellowship” — so ICL had come to be called — “recognizes that no one cometh into the Father and into the family relationship except by Him.” That’s a paraphrase of Matthew 11:27, the same verse I’d hear former attorney general Ed Meese open a Family prayer meeting with nearly four decades later. “The strength of the wolf is the pack,” Abram continued, “but the strength of the pack is the wolf.”

Once I asked a young Family leader about the dictators and thugs and white-collar criminals it seems to specialize in. “I don’t worry whether some of them are wolves,” he said, “because I’d rather let a wolf in than keep any sheep out.” I pointed out that there are no sheep in the Family, since the organization was only interested in leaders. “Yeah,” he agreed, “but don’t the wolves need Jesus most of all?”

As Coe’s authority grew, so did the Fellowship’s reach around the globe, with cells in the governments of seventy nations by the late 1960s, more than double that of just a few years earlier. The Catholic generals and colonels who rotated coup by coup through the leadership of Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, and other Latin American countries consented to the Protestant ministrations of the Fellowship in return for access to American congressmen. Indonesia’s Suharto, ostensibly a Muslim, declared of his Christian prayers in the presence of American oilmen, “In this way we convert ourselves, nobody converts us!” Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, who believed he was himself God, gladly became a financial backer of the Fellowship in return for the flow of American foreign aid facilitated by its members. It was a pray-to-be-paid scheme, by savvy foreign leaders who could flatter the moral imaginations of American politicians in exchange for military dollars. Sometimes the Family made possible a relationship that might not otherwise have occurred, but mostly it cloaked realpolitik in religion, allowing its politician members to imagine they were doing God’s work as they funneled guns and cash and power to dictators such as Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain, General Park Chung-hee in South Korea, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

“Leaders,” an early ICL man had written, “cannot afford misinterpretation in the public’s eyes.” In 1966, Coe took steps to ensure such misinterpretation would not be possible, urging the board of directors toward a reorganization that would, in effect, hide the organization. “Though the background organization would remain the same,” went the proposal, “yet to be more effective for the aims peculiar to the movement, its administrative operations must be moved underground.” Members should not call themselves members; if they were to identify themselves at all, it should only be as “working with” the Prayer Breakfast, never for an organization. “I work with the Prayer Breakfast folks,” Sen. Sam Brownback, whose career has been shaped by the Family from college forward, told me, Coe’s lingo precisely intact years after its concoction. At the time, Coe offered examples of men doing effective work for the movement without publicizing their connection, among them Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, the admiral in command of the Seventh Fleet, and the general in charge of the Canal Zone. “The purpose of the changes set forth,” Coe wrote, “is to submerge the institutional image of ICL.”

The C Street House would become part of that plan. Coe scrapped the name International Christian Leadership and divided its finances between several smaller offshoots, some off-the- ooks accounting — most of his income would be provided by gifts from supporters — and the Fellowship Foundation, its name chosen to cloak the movement’s religious intentions. But even that was too plainly evidence of an institution, so he began referring to the movement as “a family,” “our worldwide family,” and, eventually, “the Family” — a name that led some within the group to joke about themselves as the Christian Mafia, a label that stuck. He wanted to move the headquarters, too. He first set his eye on a Washington estate called Tregaron, twenty acres of historic gardens surrounding a massive Georgian-style mansion between Woodley Park and Cleveland Park, an address of sufficient status that the Soviet Union tried to purchase it for its embassy. The Washington Post reported in 1974 that Sen. Harold Hughes had raised $3.5 million to buy the home for “religious work,” and that there was talk of making it the official vice presidential residence — owned by the Fellowship Foundation. “We’ve asked the Lord to give it to us,” Hughes explained, in reference to what he said were his anonymously donated funds.

In fact, Hughes — a bighearted but none- too- bright Democrat seduced by Coe’s rhetoric of “reconciliation” — was a front man. Coe had found the money in the pockets of a North Carolina manufacturer and an oilman named Harold McClure, who’d already donated the use of a private plane to fly congressmen on missionary junkets to Africa’s newly oil-rich nations. “Tregaron, if handled properly, could on a low profile basis provide the following for our worldwide family,” wrote Coe: an “orientation center” to recruit politicians for a “leadership led by God,” a communications center for the worldwide work, and housing for members of “the Core,” the Family’s inner circle.

“Some asked how anything low profile can be done at Tregaron?” Coe continued. “If we have men of national reputation” — Coe proposed making Hughes and several Republican congressmen the faces of the operation — “it would be easy for the rest of the fellowship to use Tregaron in a manner which would be rather obscure.” Coe would be in charge, but not visibly: “My role as well would be done in the background.”

But Coe didn’t get his mansion. One of the old-timers, a retired marine general named Merwin Silverthorn, responded with fury to what he saw as dirty dealing, railing against Coe’s proposal to use “front men” for the work. Coe likely nodded appreciatively; with a voice like a woodchuck out for an amble and a big, dopey smile, Coe seems almost immune to displays of anger. He gave up on Tregaron, but four years later he got his wish, a mansion on a hill across the Potomac River with an even more distinguished pedigree. It was said to have been built by George Mason, though local historians insist it’s of a more recent vintage. It certainly looks like a manse fit for a founding father, white-columned and secluded at the end of a cul-de-sac in Arlington. The Family calls it the Cedars, and it’s the headquarters of the movement to this day. Across the street from the Cedars is a roomy house valued at $1 million (the Cedars is assessed at close to $8 million) called Potomac Point, used to shelter young women of good breeding who act as unpaid servants across the road. Next up the block is a circle of homes owned by Family associates; then Ivanwald, the house for young men I lived in for a brief period. When I was there, the C. S. Lewis Institute, yet another sister organization, dedicated to fighting the “infection of secularism,” was housed next door, and after that came a headquarters for the International Foundation — which is also the Fellowship Foundation.

The Family is as shifty with its properties as it is with its name. Potomac Point, for instance, went from Tim Coe, Doug Coe’s son and a leader of the movement, to his parents in 1989 for $580,000. They transferred the property to the C Street Center in 1992, which then transferred it to the Fellowship Foundation in 2002 — which, in turn, is the main financial backer of the C Street Center. Tim Coe, meanwhile, sold his house in Annapolis in 2007 for close to $1 million to the Wilberforce Foundation, on the board of which he served, like his brother David, for a salary of $107,000. The Wilberforce Foundation is something of a shell. It employs nobody, is headquartered in David Coe’s house, has no conflict-of-interest policy, and exists, according to a board member, “to hold properties” — that is, to protect the assets of the much larger Fellowship Foundation from liability claims. The same year it bought Tim Coe’s house, the Wilberforce Foundation turned around and sold Ivanwald — originally purchased in 1987 by Jerome Lewis, an oilman and major donor — to the Fellowship Foundation for $1 million.

Lewis, meanwhile, presides over a related organization in Colorado, the Downing Foundation, which operates an ivy-covered, $6 million estate in Englewood, donated by Lewis in 1997. Downing describes its mission as support of the Family’s Fellowship Foundation, to which it sends an average of $88,000 a year. It also supports the Denver Leadership Foundation, which produces the Colorado Prayer Luncheon. The Luncheon’s Host Committee — which includes Lewis — describes the annual event as modeled on Washington’s, intended to recruit public officials to “renew the dedication of our nation and ourselves to God and His purposes.” Where do the funds for such endeavors come from? Downing Partners Inc., an investment firm specializing in oil, gas, and real estate that donates hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to the Downing Foundation — its sole owner. Downing Partners, like Downing Foundation, is led, of course, by Jerome Lewis.

David Coe was one of three incorporators of the Foundation, but the estate’s manager says he rarely visits. It is not a sign of disinterest. The Family is linked to so many properties — Downing, Ivanwald, the Cedars, Cedar Point Farm in Maryland, projects across the United States — that it must be hard to keep track of them all. Which is why Richard Carver, a former assistant secretary of the air force who serves as president of the Fellowship Foundation (a post of bureaucratic leadership second to Doug Coe’s spiritual authority), told a reporter investigating C Street’s tax-exempt status that “it is simply not a part of anything we do” — despite the fact that in 2002, long before the C Street scandals, he boasted of the Fellowship’s authority over the property to another reporter. To be fair, Carver has a history of confusion over good housekeeping. At the Department of Defense he was best known for a multimillion-dollar order for fancy china, and his departure for private life and Christian work was clouded by charges of “ethical relativism” related to his decision to moonlight for investment banker Smith Barney while still on the Pentagon’s payroll.

The history of C Street as real estate is even murkier. Washington’s city tax office listed as its owner until the 2009 scandals a national fundamentalist organization called Youth With a Mission, but YWAM, as the group is known, insists that it sold C Street to the Fellowship Foundation sometime in the late 1980s. Until the C Street scandals brought the Fellowship Foundation under scrutiny, it listed C Street as a “sister organization” on its tax forms, which showed at least $450,000 in operational support for the Capitol Hill town house. But in 2009, the District of Columbia revoked 66 percent of C Street’s tax- exempt status, and a group of pastors called Clergy VOICE challenged its federal tax status as a church in 2010 — C Street fulfills none of the IRS’s criteria for churches, making its exemption an insult to the real thing, said the pastors. The Fellowship Foundation responded by declaring itself entirely separate from its sister. Just in time: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a good government watchdog, called for a congressional ethics investigation into what they charged was discounted rent for congressmen, which over the years added up to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidies for the Family’s political chosen. “It helps them out,” says Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the fundamentalist Traditional Values Coalition, who uses C Street himself for meetings with foreign diplomats. “A lot of men don’t have an extra $1,500 to rent an apartment. So the Fellowship house does that for those who are part of the Fellowship.”

That’s not all it does. Christian college girls provide maid service, turning down the sheets for the congressmen, and young men from Ivanwald are dispatched on occasion for “discipling” by the politicians. There’s a chef and a house mother and, in one of the several common areas, a giant- screen TV around which the politicians and their friends — besides Sheldon, Colonel Oliver North is a regular — gather to watch sports and talk policy. The TV replaced a grand piano left behind by former residents, but signs of the building’s earlier identity — it was a convent — remain. There is a little- used chapel, and in the formal dining room there is a stained- glass window, two large frames of snowy white bordered in blue, with a medallion of Jesus and a lamb in the middle. But it’s not about piety, declared the congressmen, when pressed to explain their residence in a “church” after the scandals broke; it’s about relationships — the polite word for politics.

That much seems true: money flows freely from one man’s political action committee to another, often across party lines. Stupak, for instance, contributed $2,500 to the gubernatorial campaign of ultra- right Zach Wamp. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R- MO), one of the few women to spend time at the house in a capacity other than cleaning or cooking, forged such a happy bond with another visitor, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (DMO), that Cleaver refused to support her Democratic challenger. And when two C Streeters — Rep. Jerry Moran (R- KS), a resident, and Rep. Tiahrt, a visitor — squared off in a Republican primary to succeed yet another C Streeter, Sam Brownback, as Kansas’s next senator, Moran racked up powerful endorsements and financial support from housemates Ensign, DeMint, Coburn, and Thune, and from former C Streeters Pickering and Rep. Tom Osborne (R- NE) — even though Tiahrt is a closer political match. “The fact that everyone that lived in the same house,” said Sen. Inhofe, commenting on the endorsements, “that can’t just be a coincidence.”

Tiahrt felt double-crossed. A “family values” man, he’d moved his small family to Washington rather than spend most of his days away from them in politics and prayer at the C Street house, as Moran did. “My roommate endorsed me,” he squeaked. “I’ve been married to her for thirty-three years.”

Tiahrt had misunderstood capital-f Family values. “I’m always third,” the wife of a Family man told Ben Daniel, a Presbyterian pastor who as a young man was a member himself until he realized that some “brothers” mattered more than others. “The Fellowship comes first in my husband’s life. Then the children. Then me.” Anne Ryun, the wife of former representative Jim Ryun of Kansas, kept her husband out of C Street for that very reason. “It appears that the Fellowship discourages congressmen to move their families to DC for the express purpose of keeping the wives out of the loop. It’s a very, very separated world.”

The Ryuns are hardly liberal critics of C Street; they’re conservative Christians, and Anne spoke out only at the request of World, a fundamentalist magazine that has come to see C Street as home to the opposite of the family values it espouses. “It’s not really about family values,” another political wife told me of her own husband’s decision to decline an invitation to join. “It’s about who you know, your so-called brothers.” The point isn’t friendship, it’s power. “In order for God to do His mighty works,” writes Coe, “He doesn’t demand the majority, but a committed minority who are absolutely centered on Jesus Christ and the love of one another.”

Love — the miracle by which the Family understands itself, religion, politics, and power subsumed into the blurry affection of a “worldwide family of friends.” “It’s a very wide vision,” declares the second of “The Eight Core Aspects,” the 2010 draft of the vision first dreamed by Abram amid 1930s labor wars. Wide, but so shallow it can’t be said to have depth at all. Rather, the vision is two- dimensional, a screen; a veil; a cloth thrown over religion, politics, and power.

Or, not religion, really, since Suharto was a Muslim, Papa Doc practiced Vodun, Ensign depends on Holy Ghost power, and Sanford is an Episcopalian, a member of God’s frozen chosen, as they say.

And not politics, really, not in the sense we speak of politics in America, electoral contests, control of Congress, Democrats versus Republicans. Consider Kansas: heads, the Family wins; tails, they win. Consider C Street, Democrats and Republicans united for the sake of — what?

Power. But even that word is a euphemism, inasmuch as it suggests purpose. At its core, the Family lacks even that: it is conservative by default, the result of its conflation of worldly power with divine will. I asked Tim Kreutter, author of “The Eight Core Aspects,” why “the kings” of this world the Family has sought as brothers are so often not just conservative but also corrupt. “Because that’s what’s there,” he answered — an honest man, in his way, seemingly puzzled by the implication of the question: the simple idea that the fact of power is not its justifi cation. Kreutter wasn’t interested in “power,” he was interested in “love,” the Family veil — “the main thing,” he wrote in the penultimate Core Aspect, the one that comes before serving kings. “And the main thing” — emphasis his — “[is] to keep the main thing the main thing.” Because that’s what’s there.

[rudolphsb9]

I revised the timeline:

1943

Litvenko is born

1956

Gal Oya riots

1958

Widespread riots in Sri Lanka Illakiyamathi’s brother killed

1963

Illakiyamathi meets Litvenko on [diplomatic mission/study abroad]; they fall in love; he takes her back home to Ukraine

5 Sep 1964

Litvenko and Illakiyamathi married

Aug 1967

Agent Program founded

Late 1960s

After trial and error, first viable clones, dubbed 1-10, born; all die shortly thereafter

1972

Clones 11-20 born; 19 is only survivor past the first year

1973

Clones 21-30 born; five survivors

1974

Clones 31-40 born; all survive into puberty

1975

Clones 41-50 born; 47 shows early signs of exceptionality 19 and the surviving 20s begin training

1976

Clones 51-60 born

1977

Clones 61-70 born (first series actively using 47’s DNA as a template)

1978

Clones 71-80 born

1979

Clones 81-89 born

1980

Clone 90/Quatre-vingt-dix/Katia Van Dees born

1 Jun 1981

Burning of the Jaffna Public Library

22 Jul 1983

Black July

1983

Illakiyamathi murdered eldest clones enter puberty, health complications become apparent

1986

30s enter puberty, 39 dies

1987

40s enter puberty, 45 dies

1989

Surviving clones 19-48 officially numbered (47 and 48 included due to exceptional performance during training despite young ages)

1989

Raid on the facility by gov’t officials

1989-1990

Litvenko hiding in Berlin

1991

Fall of the Soviet Union

2011

Litvenko spotted in a hospital in Seoul, SK, for a trial of nanoparticle inhalation therapy for stage 3 lung cancer

2015

Litvenko dies in helicopter explosion, age 72, along with Antoine LeClerq

1943

Litvenko is born

Sep. 5, 1964

Litvenko and Sriyani married

Aug. 1967

Agent Program founded

Early 1970s

Clones 1 thru 10 are born—all die shortly thereafter

1974

Clones 11 thru 20 are born—19 is only survivor past infancy

1976

Clones 21 thru 30 are born—five survivors

1978

Clones 31 thru 40 are born—all survive

1980

Clones 41 thru 50 are born—47 most exceptional among them

1982

Clones 51 thru 60 are born

1984

Clones 61 thru 70 are born Early clones begin entering puberty, health complications become immediately apparent

1986

Clones 71 thru 80 are born

1987

30s enter puberty, 39 dies

1988

Clones 80 thru 89 are born

1989

Clone 90/Quatre-vingt-dix/Katia Van Dees is born

c. 1992

Sriyani Litvenko murdered

c. 1997

Laboratory destroyed

Surviving clones vanish off the grid

[jiminslight]

hi lovelies! i received four (4) ‘butter’ albums as an early birthday gift and i’d like to give two (2)—one of each version—away to two (2) different people. most of you probably already have the album now, but there was no reason for me to keep extra albums to myself when there might be people out there who are unable to buy it. i was debating this for a long time, but i’ve decided that the giveaway will be worldwide handsome so that no one is left out. open between now and 08/10/21 11:59pm PST.

 if you’re interested, please read below! ♡ 

(photos included under the cut) 

things you should know:

i briefly opened the albums to check the photocards, but i haven’t fiddled with them since (so they are still in mint condition) 

as stated above, people outside of the u.s. are able to enter too, however, i advise you check the status of your country’s mail acceptance. you can check for suspensions here.

i will be shipping from the united states using our gov’t postal service: usps, as this is the most affordable option for me :’)

winners will be randomly selected with the help of random.org

the first person chosen by the generator will get first pick at which album they want

**(side note: each country is different when accepting international mail. i will take care of shipping costs, but i will not be held responsible for extra fees at customs. though i will certainly set the value of the item lower than it is to hopefully avoid this.)**

about the albums:

cream ver. photocard: hobi

peach ver. photocard: jungkook

comes with posters folded inside

everything will be included in the album; i haven’t taken anything out

rules:

must be 18 and older 

this is only for people following me 

we don’t have to be mutuals, any of my followers can enter ♡

like, reblog, or both to enter (2 entries at most per person)

if you win, please respond to my private message within a week :’) 

[midasinc]

les mis tween era hcs

-combeferre rockets up skyward, like oh my god this kid grows so fast in his tweens. and has the knobbiest of knees. this is also around when his eyes go to shit, so he has to get a pair of really thick and nerdy glasses. he's very insecure and tries going without them, but he is literally borderline blind and eventually gives up due to the blurriness and the migraines

-courfeyrac is the kid that wears all neon. he's also 100% class clown type because he really wants attention from multiple sources at once. this often gets him kicked to the hallway, but he's surprisingly really smart and gets very high grades despite all this

-enjolras is still an average height (but he grows taller than combeferre during the first two years of high school- his bones ache, dude) but has super crooked teeth and gets braces put on for the first time when he's 12. he doesn't speak for a week straight because he's not adjusted to them yet and has a lisp. he learns to deal with it, but the lisp is definitely there until he's 15. he's also got the worst case of puberty explosiveness ever- you piss him off and he turns into mount vesuvius

-bossuet's alopecia actually triggers when he turns 13. it's a huge blow to his self-esteem, but grantaire (who he's known since forever) shaves his head in solidarity and it really, really helps him pick back up. he also accidentally sets off a fire alarm somehow every single year- bossuet ends up in the principal's office very, very frequently despite being a very sweet kid

-joly is an anime kid. he's going around asking people if they've ever seen cowboy bebop and everybody else is like "dude what are you even saying". he's the shortest kid in his grade and kids make fun of him often for his clubbed foot, but joly doesn't let it hurt him. he keeps to himself and hums as he reads manga during lunch

-marius is a dork. he's got the knobby knees, the big ears, he is the goofiest kid you've ever seen. he has really poor social skills and joins student gov't, but there's this terrifying blonde kid who yells at him the first day and marius quits out of fear to avoid him for the rest of his life. he's also such a teacher pet and the "you forgot to give out the homework :(" student

-feuilly moves around a lot between foster homes and he's very angsty as a kid because he feels really alone. he gets really bad grades and winds up in the counselor's office because he won't explain himself. like marius, he's got big ol' ears and his face is splattered in hundreds of freckles. he wishes he has more friends and is going through a super mario 64 speedrunning phase. after school, he plays games instead of hanging out with people his age

-jehan and eponine are in a creative writing club. she likes to write happy endings to her stories, and jehan writes the EDGIEST poetry you have EVER heard. each one is objectively terrible and they believe they are the next sylvia plath.

-musichetta is always in the library. she hits her growth spurt early, like combeferre, and towers over the girls and boys in her class. she always feels a bit out of place and chooses rather to spend her lunch period with the librarians. they think she's funny for a kid and even let her file away books and keep some of the copies they plan to throw out (she's slowly collecting all of their books in the animorphs series)

-bahorel ends up in the principal's office a lot too for fights. he's always ending up in them, and when he's 12 somebody knocks out his two front teeth. to this day, his front biters are prosthetics (he likes to prank people with them in his twenties, so it's both a blessing and a curse). he's also on the junior wrestling team! bahorel grows more outward than he does upward and he puts it to good use, if you asked him. he's on the brink of his emo/punk phase, and he's listening to a CD of black sabbath every night because he thinks he's so cool

-grantaire is so edgy. but like- oh no his dandruff. this kid does not shower. it's so bad. when he shaves his head, it's actually a blessing because now he doesn't have greasy hair hanging in his eyes. he's not quite in his extroverted era yet, instead being really shy and uneasy around the other kids. bossuet is his only friend and he kinda follows him around like a lost dog. he's in an art club and he makes the edgiest art you've ever seen- but only in an anime style. in their later years, he and joly bond over being the anime kids at their schools

-cosette is homeschooled! she's an extrovert and a ball of energy and because she is almost never around real people, her social skills are WEIRD. this poor girl oh my god she has no idea how to make normal conversations and she has no idea. she's also super into acting at this time and runs through lines of shakespeare with valjean. she loves to do the mercutio death scene- she always makes his final breath this goofy and ridiculous gasp that makes valjean laugh.

[musette22]

Hi Minnie! Hope you can help me settle an argument my brother and I are having about EG!Steve. I'd love to hear your thoughts about this with shipping goggles off, looking at it purely in terms of characterization, narrative, and good writing. Better hang on though, it's going to be a long ask! (sorry in advance for spamming you!) 1/7

So my brother and I were watching FatWS and once again got into a debate about whether Steve's last actions were a disservice or in line with his characterization and narrative, given that the Russos confirmed (and therefore it's Word of God/canon, even if it did sound reactionary to the immediate backlash after EG) that Steve created an alternate reality when he went back, and didn't just live in hiding in the past of the OG timeline. 2/7

Because of this, my bro argued that: 1) the total character assassination that is the idea of Steve just sitting back and letting all the shit happen happen is no longer a problem - for all we know, the alternate reality oldman!Steve came from might have become utopic already due to his presence and foresight. He played coy when talking to Sam so we don't know for certain he didn't save Bucky, get rid of Hydra, and enact social reform when he had the chance. 3/7

Likewise, 2) the accusation that Steve would rob Peggy of her husband and children is a non-issue as Steve went back to a time before Peggy and Daniel got together - I argued here that it was still wrong for him to do given that he KNEW for a fact that Peggy lived a happy life, whereas it was a gamble if he could give her the same. My bro shot back when you truly loved someone, you want them to be happy and to have what's best for them. 4/7

So if Steve chose to go back to Peggy, he had to have believed that he could give her the best life. That Steve based that decision purely on his own assessment is pretty in character (e.g. pushing to become a soldier because he thought that was how he could do his part, even though at the time, he'd have just been a danger to himself and other soldiers; not signing the Accords because he believed in his team's judgment in crises above gov't oversight that might be influenced by politics). 5/7

And lastly 3) he might have settled into the past and started to move on, but what was wrong with him choosing to be selfish and going to the past when given a chance? Why was it wrong for him to go back to a time he knew, where he was beloved by both Peggy and the public, and when he could also save Bucky early? In terms of character growth, wouldn't it be fair for him to finally learn he could be a bit selfish and choose happiness, after a lifetime of nearly suicidal selflessness? 6/7

Our debate was based on confirmed canon with shipping put aside. So I put forth the sin of leaving a traumatized Bucky, Sam, and world behind, that Steve's actions were surely the result of a man broken by grief again and again, and that choosing the past was him running away - which, I argued, was a horrible way to end his character arc. But my brother asked me why I thought so, because wasn't this the so-called 'soft epilogue' that Steve deserved, one that was most in line with canon? 7/7

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

Hey love! Very interesting argument you and your brother are having here… I’m sure he’s a great guy but I have to say that I vehemently disagree with him (as you probably already guessed lol). Soooo many people have done an excellent job at explaining why, shipping aside, Steve’s ending in EG was absolute bollocks, and I’m certain I could never argue this case as well as all of them have. Nevertheless, I’ll do my best to explain why, in my opinion, your brother is wrong :p I’m going to put my reply under the keep reading tag, because it is long.

1.      The Russos and Markus & McFeely (the writers) never managed to agree on whether Steve really did go back to an alternate timeline, and if so, how that would have worked, exactly. When they were asked, after EG had been released, about whether Steve would have just sat back and let everything he knew was happening/going to happen in the decades to come, both to Bucky and to the world at large, they came up with this ‘alternate timeline’ solution, but they kept contradicting each other on the logistics and technicalities of it (like how would old man Steve suddenly be able to jump timelines to come back to give Sam the shield in EG? And how did EG Steve attend Peggy’s funeral, like they also suggested, which would technically have been in a different timeline?). Which makes it pretty clear that this wasn’t something they’d considered beforehand or even all agree on afterwards, and therefore it can’t technically allowed to play a role in judging the rightness of Steve’s ending in EG if we’re looking at it from a ‘the creator’s word is law’ perspective. Moreover, there is nothing to indicate in EG itself that Steve knew he’d be able to create alternate timelines, so that would’ve been a crazy gamble on his part. Also, him ‘playing coy’ in that final scene with Sam really isn’t a convincing indication that he was actually, canonically, talking about anything besides marrying Peggy.

2.      Which bring us to point two: Peggy had literally told Steve she’d lived a happy life with her family, and told him in no uncertain terms to move on. If Steve really loved her, he would have accepted her wishes and allowed her the dignity of her choice (something Peggy herself, in CA:TFA, had told Steve was important to do when you care about someone) to move on from him once she believed him dead. Steve deciding that he would be better for Peggy because he believed was a better man than the person she ended up marrying originally would be the most un-like Steve thing to do, ever. Steve has never once shown that he thinks of himself as the hero or better than other people – he simply wants to do the best he can to help make the world a better place. He would never say “Peggy deserves the best and I believe I am the best, therefore she will have me, regardless of what she thinks or wants.” Steve drinks respect women juice, that’s clear from all of his movies, and deciding the course of her entire life for her, taking away her agency, whether in his own timeline or another, would be utterly disrespectful to Peggy.

3.      As for the next point: of course there’s nothing wrong with Steve being selfish for once – Steve is human, and all humans are selfish sometimes, and that’s okay. But, as Chris Evans already explained multiple times prior to Endgame, Steve had already made selfish decisions in the past, namely when it came to getting Bucky back and keeping him safe. Shipping aside, Bucky was presented in all the Cap movies as Steve’s very best friend, and was even called his ‘soulmate’ (platonically or otherwise) by M&M (the writers). So when, in Civil War, Steve was presented with a choice between duty/what was expected of him by the government versus saving Bucky/keeping Bucky safe, Steve was selfish and chose Bucky. That, canonically, made sense. Peggy being presented as the ultimate love of Steve’s life, who he loved and valued more than anyone or anything else in the world (which is what happened in EG), canonically does not make sense. 

In CA:TWS, Peggy told Steve to move on. When Peggy died, Steve buried her and mourned her, and then not long after, he canonically kissed Peggy’s niece. Then, in Infinity War, Steve saw Bucky turn to dust before his very eyes in the “Blip” (a conscious decision on the writers’/directors’ part to show how Steve once again lost what was most important to him while helplessly standing by) – and the next thing we know, Steve is leading a support group for other people who lost loved ones in the Blip, and starts talking about losing… Peggy? Huh. Also, Steve going back to a time which your brother calls “a time when he was beloved the public” doesn’t add up, either: technically, Steve went back to a time where people loved an idea of him, but also believed him to be dead. So either he would have had to have found a way to convincingly stage his own resurrection (meanwhile possibly leaving the other version to vegetate in the ice..? depending on how this timeline malarkey was supposed to work), or he would have lived his whole life hidden behind some fake persona – which does not sound like Steve at all, does it?

4.      Finally, let’s talk about Bucky some more, because I think we need to to be able to assess the situation properly. I understand that your brother may believe that shippers are often delusional and only see what they want to see etc, but there is ample evidence, canonically, of Bucky being the most important person in Steve’s life – the person he would give up the shield for, the person he would give up his other friendships for, the person he would give up his life for. Peggy may have been a recurring character in character in the three Cap movies, but she was never presented as the principal motivator of his actions, or as the love of Steve’s life. You know who was? Bucky. Sure, that love wasn’t canonically romantic in nature, but there can’t be any doubt that Bucky meant more than anything to Steve. Therefore, Steve choosing to have a ‘soft epilogue’ that entails him spending the rest of his life without Bucky – and, more importantly, Bucky to spend the rest of his life without Steve – contradicts everything we’ve learned about their relationship (platonic or otherwise) in the rest of the movies, does it not? 

Also, the Russos have said something to the effect that Bucky and Steve were now both mentally ‘well enough’ to not ‘need’ each other anymore (because as we all know, that’s exactly how friendships work…), but it’s pretty clear from EG that Steve was still traumatized by everything he’d been through, and going back to the 50s would have meant he would never be able to get proper help with that and in fact could only talk about any of it with Peggy and Peggy alone. Moreover, M&M have literally said in interviews that Bucky wasn’t all that well yet, mentally, and TFAWTS also shows convincingly that Bucky was not actually in a good place when Steve left him. So that would have meant that Steve either did not see this (unlikely, given how close they were) or did not care (unlikely, given how close they were). 

It would have meant that for the first time in all these movies, Steve decided “to hell with Bucky’s needs, I’m gonna just be selfish because I’ve earned it and claim my trophy wife because actually I am the best man for her, despite the fact that she’s already lived a happy life that I will be negating against her wishes, but that’s fine because maybe I’ll be able to create a different timeline, and maybe I’ll be able to save Bucky from all his trauma anyway, but then again maybe not, but that brings me back to my first point of to hell with Bucky’s needs” - which does not make a lot of sense to me, personally. Not to mention that, in exchange for his ‘soft epilogue’, Steve would also leave the world to sort out the post-Blip mess without him, and leave all the other friends he still had left and clearly cared about a lot to boot. I would not call that character growth, I would call that character disintegration. If your brother insists on taking the creator’s word as gospel and that we have to accept that Steve really did do what he did at the end of Endgame, and that wasn’t just a case of bad, lazy writing fuelled by greed, then to make a decision like this, Steve would have been either an asshole in disguise all along, or mentally extremely unstable.

There you have it, my two cents! I hope this helps a little in settling the argument with your brother, anon! Lots of love ❤️

[jeannereames]

This is probably a very stupid question, but how did the Ancient Greeks measure time (in terms of years and months) ? What was their calendar like? What year would Alexander have viewed himself to be living in?

I love these sorts of daily-life details, so I may have got a little carried away…. Before I get into the weeds, however, I want to make everyone aware of a reference resource:

E. J. Bickerman, Chronology of the Ancient World. Thames & Hudson, 1968.

Yeah, it’s old now, but Bickerman spent most of his career on dating puzzles, and I don’t think there’s anything recent to match it. When I first was told about it years ago in my historiography class, I practically bounced off the walls. (My fellow grad students thought I’d lost my mind.)

I’m not sure of the best way to address this query—topically or geographically—but I’ll go with topically. I’ll also say upfront that I’m unfamiliar with Egypt, so they’re not much mentioned. Also, if you want more details on any particular system (Roman, Athenian, Babylonian, Jewish), there are plenty of online resources.

Long-count Calendar

How to number years across a span? Regnal years was most common in antiquity: year 1, year 2, year 3 of ___ king. Also, king lists detailed how long ___ ruled. The Ancient Near East (ANE) excelled at chronologies; we have some that go back to Sumer. That’s pre-Bronze Age. The span of some reigns can be deeply problematic (e.g., mythical), but we have the lists. Fun note, Neo-Assyrians named years by its major military campaign. Tells us a lot about them, no?

What about places without kings? Greece, Rome, Carthage?

The Greeks had several systems, internal and panhellenic. Internal systems often dated by the name of a prominent city magistrate. In Athens, that was the eponymous archon, in Sparta, the eponymous ephor, etc. The panhellenic system used Olympic years. In Dancing with the Lion, if you look at date plates before sections, that’s what I used. It’s a 4-year system, so, “In the year of the 97th Olympiad,” “In the first year of the 97th Olympiad,” “In the second year…,” and “In the third year…,” then we’re to “In the year of the 98th Olympiad…” In modern annotation it’s Ol. 97.1, Ol. 97.2, Ol. 97.3, Ol. 97.4. From (our year) 776 BCE down into the Roman Imperial era, the Olympics made useful anchor dating for the eastern Mediterranean (Magna Graecia).

Rome had its own system: two in fact. It counted years by both consuls, but also AUC = ab urba condita … “from the founding of the city.” Carthage used a similar system involving their two senior Judges for their senate.

When it came to “world histories,” authors such as Diodoros Siculus used several systems: Olympiad, Athenian archon, and Roman consuls. It gets a bit unwieldy, but is about as universal as we have for the Med until Christianity took over everything.

Yearly Calendars

Much of the ancient world used lunar (354 days), not solar (356 days) calendars. Yes, they knew a lunar year didn’t line up with the solar, and they used “intercalation” to fix it, avoiding summer festivals being celebrated in winter. Either a 13th month was needed every 3 years, or they added a few days to months here and there, making a “lunisolar” calendar. We have an intercalated day in our own calendar: Feb. 29th in Leap Year. To fix a calendar, however, an “anchor” is needed. This anchor is usually a solstice or equinox, which may (or may not) correspond to their New Year.

Our modern (Western) world places New Year’s in the dead of winter. But many pre-modern calendars put it in spring. Makes sense: life renews, it’s a new year. The Babylonian New Year was decided by the spring equinox—first new moon after—which pattern affected most of the ANE.

The Hebrew New Year (Rosh Hashana) is in autumn, but their first month (Nisan) is in spring. (They also have a New Year for Trees! Tú bish'vat. How cool is that?) Wanna know when your Jewish friends are having a holiday? Use Hebcal, the gold standard.

MANY ancient cultures have more than one calendar running at a time. So do we. Working in the uni, I have the “normal” year, but also the “academic” year to keep up with.

Despite the dominance of certain early systems like Babylon, counting the new year was specific to a region and people, and their religious traditions. No single Greek new year tradition existed. Both Delos and Athens used the first new moon after the summer equinox: early July. The Macedonian calendar seems to as well, so Alexander was born in the first month of the year. Other city states were different. I’ve forgotten most but do remember Sparta’s is in autumn because their new year almost falls on my birthday.

Remember, although we today talk about “ancient Greece” as if it were a country—it wasn’t. There was a landmass called Hellas, but each city-state was independent, and had its own laws, gov’t, coinage, and religious cult. Too often “Greek” winds up being conflated with “Athenian,” because we happen to have the most evidence from ancient Athens. But both Athens and Sparta were weirdos. Corinth, Thebes, Argos, Mytilene, Cos, Eretria, Miletus…all were a lot more typically Greek in their gov’t systems, etc. There were also 3 (or 4) different branches of Greek: Ionic-Attic, Doric, and Aeolic. When we talk about reading the “ancient Greek” language today, most people mean Attic Greek, or even Koine Greek (Hellenistic era common Greek).

That means every city-state had its own calendar, connected to its own festivals.

In fact, most city-states had several: sacred, civic, etc. Athens had a 12-month lunar calendar for festivals, but a 10-month civic calendar corresponding to the 10 tribes for Assembly business. Originally, they had only 4 tribes, not 10, so political changes meant calendar changes.

In each city-state, month names were derived from the major festival for that month. We have the complete month names for only a few: Athens is one and (fortunately for me) Macedon is another (specifically Ptolemaic, but it’s likely the same as the Argead). Below “Ancient Greek Month” REALLY means “Athenian month,” which annoys the hell out of those of us who don’t consider Athens the be-all and end-all of Greek history!

Because their months were lunar, they bisect our months, e.g., July/Aug = Athenian Hekatombian or Macedonian Loos [Alexander’s birthmonth], Jan/Feb = Athenian Gamelion or Macedonian Peritios [probably the month that gave Alexander’s favorite hound his name: Peritos]. Likewise, as the Athenian new year began in midsummer, dating ancient events also bisects. You’ll see 342/1 to designate the year from July of 342 BCE to June of 341.

As mentioned, most places used lunar months as the most basic time-keeping, but the moon isn’t the only way to make a “month.” Rome originally had 10 months of 30/31 days, adding 2 later, which is why our 12 months have Romanesque names.

Just remember: NO UNIVERSAL SYSTEM for months.

What About Weeks?

A seven-day week is borrowed from the Jews via Christianity. Both Jews and Egyptians had a dedicated day of rest. (For Egypt, the 10th day.) In most places, however, days off were festival related. Every month had festivals, which might last from half a day to several days in a row. You worked…took off for a festival…then you worked. No regular day of rest. (For the modern weekend? Thank unions and the Labor Movement!)

How did others subdivide a month? Athenian months were c. 30 days, divided into 10s: 1-10, 11-20, 10-1. Yup, the last is backwards. But dating also counted waxing and waning moons. So the new moon began a month, the 7th of the month would be the 7th waxing moon, the 24th the 6th waning moon. This is the Athenian system. Other city-states are less clear, but probably similar.

Romans had kalens (1st), nones (7th), and ides (15th). Nundinae (market days) means 9th, but were really the 8th day. The 7-day week is late Imperial and, again, owes to Christian take-over of Jewish weeks.

Most systems had “auspicious” and “inauspicious” days for religious activities, civic activities, and business activities. Don’t start anything on an inauspicious day! (These were manipulated, especially in Rome, but that’s a whole different discussion.) The closest modern equivalent I can think of is Mercury Retrograde. 😊 Although in modern Greece, signing a contract on a Tuesday morning is bad juju, or May 29th. Constantinople fell on a Tuesday morning May 29th, 1453. We might, in America, consider 9/11. Who wants to open a business on 9/11?

The Horai (The Hours)

When did the day begin? Again, the ANE and Med are different. In the ANE, day typically began at sunset. So yes, that’s why the Jewish shabbat starts at sunset on Friday and lasts till sunset on Saturday. (If you didn’t know, the Jewish “day of rest” isn’t Sunday, but Saturday.)

For Greece and Rome, et al., day began at dawn. Each day was then evenly divided between day and night, so there was no standard length of an hour. It depended on the time of year. Each half had twelve hours, subdivided into 4 groups of triads. Originally in Greece it seems there were only 9, not twelve, but they increased to match the lunar months. The division of 4 groups of triads also yielded the 4 seasons of 3 months each. Hora was initially a season, not an hour.

In any case, dawn was always the first hour, noon the 6th, sunset the 12th. Same deal for night (twilight, midnight, pre-dawn).

This is great for military and civic purposes, but most people tended to refer to daytime divisions more generally: dawn, midday, etc. And there was nothing like minutes or seconds. That’s totally modern. Closest, they might come would be to count “breaths.”

The gnomon (sundial) was the chief way to measure hours, as it matched longer or shorter days. But it’s kinda hard to use a sundial at night, or on a cloudy day, or inside. Night hours were approximate.

The water clock (klepsudra) was first popularized in Greece in courts and the Assembly (to time speeches), but spread to other use, for inside or on shady days. Yet water clocks are unwieldy to carry around.

The Romans did have portable sundials (below), but again…needs the SUN. Btw, I should add that sundials aren’t only a Greco-Roman thing. The Chinese had them too. By contrast, the sand-clock or hourglass is a medieval invention. Won’t find them in the ancient world.

[agallimaufryofoddments]

Here’s a quick two-part question for the Baccano! fandom:

In which year / decade do you think Ennis was created? And...

Around what time do you think she devoured the alchemist?

(Give or take a few years). 

Narita has never been very specific with the “when” of either to the best of my recollection. The “not-Zank” panel from the Fujimoto manga gives us scant visuals to work with for the latter question—at a glance I’d tentatively think the 20th century (haircut; coat), but even then my thinking is more influenced by the situation itself than the actual illustration.

What do we have besides the not-Zank panel? Well...one of the most, or only, specific details I can think of is this one line from Volume 1 (Chapter “Day One”):

Reading books was forbidden, and Ennis had never been allowed to listen to the radio (which had been invented after she was born).

Meanwhile, Christopher refers to Ennis in Vol. 7 as his “little sister.” Christopher was created in the early 1880s; per his ”almost fifty years” statement in 1933, we could guess at latest sometime in October–December 1883, 1884, or even 1895ish if we’re skittish. In the same volume, Ennis thinks to herself, “Just a few years had passed since she’d been created as a homunculus that was related to Szilard by blood...” but this must be a mistake on Narita’s part. Fundamentally, the statement’s at odds with the Vol. 1 quote. Perhaps Narita meant “lived,” not created.

If we could figure out which stage of radio’s invention Narita means, then we’d have ourselves a viable window of time to work with. The above excerpt frame radio’s invention as a singular fact when it was really a process of development over time. It happens that I’ve done some side reading on radio’s history for a Baccano! fic—the website “United States Early Radio History” is an excellent free resource that makes extensive use of primary sources—so forgive me for fussing..

TL;DR / Semblance of succinctness so you can ignore the radio history drivel under the cut:

Although the 1890s see crucial developments in longwave...long-distance radio communication (culminating in the first transatlantic signal transmissions in 1901/2), it’s entirely possible they “don’t count” as far as Narita is concerned; Narita is more likely to be referring to radio in a commercial, public sense. Since Ennis was created “before radio,” the 1890s seem like a plausible decade to me for her creation. On the other hand, the radio “broadcasting boom” begins in 1922; if Narita is thinking specifically in terms of radio’s popular use after all, then perhaps he’s thinking of pre-1922 times. 

Personally, I think most of the 1910s are “too late” for consideration—amateur radio is enough of a thing by 1917 that the American gov’t temporarily shuts it down/takes over radio due to WWI. I want to say that 1912 is a good cutoff: this is the year the Titanic sinks; all up and down the coastlines, amateur radio stations go ‘haywire’ with muddled news, deleteriously affecting major transmissions while also causing information dissemination confusion. The same year, the U.S. gov’t adopts its first act of radio regulation. If an object is so widely used that it uses necessitates federal regulation, I think it’s safe to say the object has been, ah, invented. 

May 1912 is also the month/year Firo was born, according to my calculations. Narita suggests 1911 in an old tweet, but who are you going to believe: the actual author of the series, or your local Rev? What do you mean, the actual author of the series? Point taken.

So...I guess I’ll suggest 1895–1905 (give or take five years on both sides) as a very broad possible window for Ennis’ creation? Mind you: 1910 is roughly the year of Szilard’s last pre-1930 visit to NYC; it’s the year he meets Barnes and welcomes him into the fold. Barnes contacts Ennis several times during the next two decades. 

It occurs to me that i’ve spent two (god, three?) hours on Ennis’ creation alone, so I’m just going to. not. turn my attention to the devouring event after all. For now. Please go ahead in my stead. Not to mention...the TL;DR ended up as long as the radio history drivel anyway... This is all yet another example of why I can’t be trusted to Tumblr responsibly. “Quick.” HA.

Radio history drivel

There are decades of progress in “pre-radio wireless technologies” that lead to the breakthrough of longwave radio communication in the 1890s via Guglielmo Marconi (building off of Hertz and Maxwell’s own breakthroughs). Could Narita be referring to Marconi’s work between 1895–1902 in particular? ...to the first transatlantic signals being received in December 1901—or, since some people contest whether or that actually happened, the subsequent transatlantic transmissions in 1902–1906? (1906 being the year when regulating radio transmissions becomes a discussion topic, though only that.)

As Donald McNicol writes in 1917, “the year 1904 clearly marks the beginning of RADIO'S climb to the plane of practicability...” Certainly, radio begins ascending via the cold salt seas—major passenger liners are all outfitted with radio equipment by 1912, the same year the Titanic sinks and an “Act to Regulate Radio Communication” is (consequentially) adopted. By this point, amateur radio operators have already made a name for themselves as ‘hams’, forming Wireless Clubs and whatnot. These amateurs’ stations are all federally shut down in 1917 when the U.S. enters WWI. In about five years’ time, circa 1922, the U.S. will enter a radio ‘broadcasting boom’.

So. The side of me that possesses common sense points out that Narita is probably writing with the layman in mind. Most of his readers will naturally assume Ennis is forbidden from listening to commercial radio, which they may or may not be more likely to associate with the 1920s than the 1910s. On the other hand, Szilard the character probably followed radio’s development closely—I imagine radio’s benefits and drawbacks would have been immediately apparent to him. His last visit in New York City was in approximately 1910—the same visit in which a Congressman follower of his introduces him to the realtor Barnes, whom he makes an incomplete immortal. If anything, I imagine the radio would have been a topic of conversation among his followers possessing wealth, social status, or insider knowledge.

Side note: Ennis was also taught how to drive vehicles once she was created; the history of automobile development is, like the history of radio, rather long, but the 1890s are key to both; that decade also saw patents for and production of steam, gas, and even electric-powered automobiles. 

Ennis being created before “radio’s invention” could very well actually mean “before radio’s broadcasting boom” ...agh. I’ll go put a semblance of concluding thoughts up at the top, to spare you reading this far.

[torque-witch]

Okay but on a mildly serious note. Would anyone actually support me on OF? I can’t ask on any of my other platforms. Finances are getting really bad on my end. Like, I had 6k last year and now I have less than 100 in my bank account.

That’s literally the cost of running a small creative business plus not having anymore gov’t assistance (just stimulus bills) during a pandemic plus being disabled and not being able to work my second independent job - literally so that I don’t have to work in the public with an autoimmune disorder.

Idk if I put it on here last year, but I only made 9k in sales from Etsy and all my receipts came to about 4K at the end of the year. It’s been better overall this year, but I had a savings account then from a corporate job that went directly into funding my art. After Instagram changed up their algorithm, I know many others selling online have been in the same situation. Plus of course, the pandemic “doesn’t exist” anymore so a lot of us have been forgotten for big box stores.

I also know a lot of us here can’t afford to buy art in general, and I did have to raise my prices in order to actually get paid fairly for my hourly work and supplies. And that makes shit less accessible. But I still have bills to pay and I feel like I’m running out of options as someone who currently doesn’t have the physical ability to be creating, engaging, etc all day.

What do I do? Suck it up and do DoorDash and maybe have a panic attack on the 10th floor of a hospital again? Just drive around with tachycardia? Pretend that I’m not waking up every 1-3 hours with tachycardia?

The reality is that things do normally work out every month, but it’s getting harder and harder simply because I lost the $1600 a month I was making at DoorDash. I’m eating English muffins, rice and bananas most days because I can’t really afford anything else. And it makes me feel like a failure since I was doing so financially well right before the pandemic hit. Some days I wish that I had just stayed at Napa and took the risk, but I was already developing Lupus and was emotionally losing my grip.

Idk what the point of this is, but how do I financially support myself while my body/mind is failing? I can’t apply for disability because I’m married. We married early so that I could have health insurance accessible to me. We will be fine, but sometimes I just don’t know what else I can do, and that’s paralyzing.

[marat]

Voting for the lesser evil is not actually creating a lesser evil. I like to say that voting for the lesser evil is pointless, but it’s not, it’s actually worse than that. 

Barack Obama ran under a progressive banner and when he actually won, surprise surprise, he wasn’t a progressive at all. He was actually one of the most villainous political figures of the early 2000s! And Hillary Clinton was more right wing than him, but hey, lesser evil guys. And Joe Biden is more right wing than Clinton, but hey, lesser evil, guys!!!  Voting for the lesser evil does not only keep us in place, it reinforces the system that only grows progressively more fascist as time goes on. But hey we can totally defeat fascism at the polls guys, so many fascist leaders have been voted out.  The “vote out Trump cause he’s a fascist” argument makes absolutely no sense. Like yes, he is a fascist. What on earth makes people think that a fascist, a man who has ordered troops to attack civilians and won’t even go as far as to release his tax returns, AND has the majority of rest of the gov’t on his side is gonna be like “well the other team got more votes than me!!! ok guys, you win!! let’s pack it up!!” Liberals are so obsessed with an invisible referee that’s gonna save the world on a technicality. 

but yeah we can totally vote out fascism that totally works like remember when we voted out hitler and mussolini and then they resigned

[46ten]

Hello! I love your blog and find it very informative! Could you write something about AH relationship with James Monroe?

A lovely early friendship torn apart by political rivalry and misunderstandings that descended into harsh accusations, duel invitations, and never-ending Hamilton family hatred for the man? You can read the letters between them that Founders has here. I am unaware of AH ever discussing his opinion on Monroe in greater depth than what I’ve quoted below, and I’m completely unaware if Monroe ever offered a lengthy opinion on AH personally. There’s a new Monroe biography out (James Monroe: A Life by Tim McGrath) that may be more interesting than anything I write about.

But I’ll try. Things must have started out okay between them. They were both at the Battle of Trenton (Monroe was wounded). Monroe then served as aide-de-camp to William Alexander, Lord Stirling, whose brother-in-law was AH supporter William Livingston and daughter was Catherine Alexander, who would marry AH Treasury right-hand-man William Duer. They spent time at Valley Forge together, they both became good friends with Lafayette, etc. AH wrote positively of Monroe in 1779 to John Laurens:

Monroe is just setting out from Head Quarters and proposes to go in quest of adventures to the Southward. He seems to be as much of a night errant as your worship; but as he is an honest fellow, I shall be glad he may find some employment, that will enable him to get knocked in the head in an honorable way. He will relish your black scheme if any thing handsome can be done for him in that line. You know him to be a man of honor a sensible man and a soldier. This makes it unnecessary to me to say any thing to interest your friendship for him. You love your country too and he has zeal and capacity to serve it. 22May1779

With notes of recommendation from Hamilton, Lord Stirling, and Washington, Monroe became a lt. col, but with no field command available (AH certainly sympathized), he decided to resume his studies instead of continuing with the Army. He went on to become a member of the Continental Congress, etc.

In Feb 1786, Monroe (age 27) married Elizabeth Kortright at Trinity Church NY, with Rev. Benjamin Moore presiding (see here for my notes about the Hamiltons’ church affiliation). The Hamiltons may have attended; EH gave birth to Alex Jr. three months later. Elizabeth was the niece of Cornelius Kortright, who was a frequent business partner of Nicolas Cruger, AH’s old boss on St. Croix (AH worked for Kortright & Cruger 1769-1771). So Monroe - as did many others - likely had knowledge of AH’s personal background (and despite the current narrative surrounding AH, at the time almost no one seemed to care or consider AH’s background especially noteworthy; AH also freely introduced his cousins to friends, so it’s not at all clear that he ever thought he had something to hide and offered up the “blemish” of his parents’ relationship/his illegitimacy to several people).

But Monroe was a friend of Jefferson and Madison and ended up on their side politically (Monroe preceded Madison as an anti-federalist). His position in the Senate, and his authorship of articles in response to AH’s articles (written under several pseudonyms) all certainly aggravated AH.

And then there was the matter of Gouverneur Morris. In 1792, Monroe was one of the people trying to block the appointment of G. Morris as U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary to France. (Read an account of Morris’ actions in France/England here and enjoy the pettiness of his leaving Thomas Paine in jail.) In 1794, Monroe replaced Morris as Minister to France (1794 to 1796). He opposed AH as Minister to Great Britain (x) and his reasons are pretty sound and fair-minded (John Jay famously got the position and a treaty named after himself). Monroe was replaced in June 1796, both for anonymously publishing letters criticizing Washington and just not doing as the Federalists wanted, and replaced by Pinckney. Of course, AH played a part behind the scenes in encouraging his replacement and choosing Pinckney.

So by the 1790s they are political rivals, with Monroe writing in defense of Jefferson and Monroe blocking the appointment of AH’s friends/allies and AH interfering with Monroe’s business and encouraging his removal.

But in 1797, things got really personal. Rewinding to Dec 1792, Monroe was contacted by a jailed James Reynolds, who offered information about acting as AH’s agent/partner for speculation on gov’t securities. (Why Reynolds was in jail is a great deal more complicated than this, but I’m skipping all that.) Monroe investigated, got others involved, got the disclosure from AH himself that the money was actually because of blackmail over an affair with Maria Reynolds and produced letters showing this and gave letters and asked for copies of theirs, etc. (I think this part has been written about a lot, so I’m not going to go into further details). Five years later, the following was AH’s recollection of the matter (written to Muhlenberg and Monroe, 17July1797):

It is very true, that after the full and unqualified expressions which came from you together with Mr Venable, differing in terms but agreeing in substance, of your entire satisfaction with the explanation I had given, and that there was nothing in the affair of the nature suggested; accompanied with expressions of regret at the trouble and anxiety occasioned to me—and when (as I recollect it) some one of the Gentlemen expressed a hope that the manner of conducting the enquiry had appeared to me fair & liberal—I replied in substance, that though I had been displeased wtih the mode of introducing the subject to me (which you will remember I manifested at the time in very lively terms) yet that in other respects I was satisfied with and sensible to the candour with which I had been treated. And this was the sincere impression of my mind.

But actually, Monroe didn’t entirely believe AH’s account (”I hate you” point number 1) and conducted his own further interviews with Clingman and Maria Reynolds, which AH would only learn about in 1797 with the publication of pamphlet V of the History, but then Monroe pretty much left it alone, by his own account. He stated he sent all papers about this to a friend in Va (more on this below), and this is where the matter rested publicly for nearly five years.

But it’s not a real secret. By spring 1793, everyone in major political circles knows about it (and EH knew about it, it’s impossible for me to believe she didn’t). In under a week back in Dec 1792, Monroe, Wadsworth, Wolcott, Venable, Muhlenberg, Randolph, Webb, Beckley, and Jefferson all know, and Clingman talks freely. AH had permitted copies of letters to be made (and according to Monroe’s account, knew Beckley’s clerk had copied them), and on and on. BUT, no one is going to publish stuff about it - the confession of an extramarital affair would have been seen as a private family matter that would only serve to disturb “the peace of the family” - indeed, for AH naysayers then and historians since, claiming adultery was a convenient excuse if there was financial impropriety, because the matter wouldn’t be vigorously pursued further. (Philadelphia was a huge city for prostitution, and no one wanted the private sexual escapades of famous men broadcast to the world.) AH, I’m sure, knew everyone knew too, but worked from an understanding that no one was going to try to score political points on something that would expose his wife to public ridicule. But even though it was private, it was still Great Gossip! If AH was willing to taunt TJ publicly about Sally Hemings and, according to TJ, privately about his sexual pursuit/harassment 30 years ago of Elizabeth Moore Walker (wife of one of TJ’s best friend), and J. Adams is still repeating crazy gossip about AH 30 years later, you better believe there were references made to this affair at parties, gatherings, etc. EH dealt with it however she dealt with it, and I hope that AH’s “I have paid pretty severely for the folly” confession refers to some harsh treatment by EH.

And then in June 1797 Callendar began publishing pamphlets (lost to history except where AH quotes them in the Reynolds Pamphlet), some of which were gathered in some unknown order in his The History of the United States for 1796. Remember that Monroe was recalled from France in July 1796. It seemed to be a persistent belief of the Hamilton family that Monroe authorized and perhaps himself gave copies of the letters to Callendar for publication (”I hate you” point number 2).

And to be clear, because this gets muddled in some historian’s accounts - Callendar publishes AH’s account of his “particular connection” to Maria Reynolds and continues to goad him about it in published pamphlets and letters throughout June and July 1797 (the “harassment” of AH on this point in vague terms in pamphlets and newspaper letters actually started at least as early as 1795). AH’s confession in his own pamphlet was not an out-of-the-blue revelation of an affair that hadn’t already been publicly revealed.  

Why would Monroe do this, in the Hamilton mind? Because he was pissed about no longer being French minister and blamed AH - he took a political dispute and decided to drag the Hamilton family into it. His delay in responding to AH, however, was likely seen as some kind of admission of guilt. On 5July1797, AH wrote to Monroe:

[Quoting from pamphlet V of the History] “When some of the Papers which are now to be laid before the world were submitted to the Secretary; when he was informed that they were to be communicated to President Washington, he entreated in the most anxious tone of deprecation, that the measure might be suspended. Mr Monroe was one of the three Gentlemen who agreed to this delay. They gave their consent to it on his express promise of a guarded behaviour in future, and because he attached to the suppression of these papers a mysterious degree of solicitude which they feeling no personal resentment against the Individual, were unwilling to augment” (Page 204 & 205). It is also suggested (Page 206) that I made “a volunteer acknowledgement of Seduction” and it must be understood from the context that this acknowlegement was made to the same three Gentlemen.

The peculiar nature of this transaction renders it impossible that you should not recollect it in all its parts and that your own declarations to me at the time contradicts absolutely the construction which the Editor of the Pamphlet puts upon the affair.

I think myself entitled to ask from your candour and justice a declaration equivalent to that which was made me at the time in the presence of Mr Wolcott by yourself and the two other Gentlemen, accompanied by a contradiction of the Representations in the comments cited above. And I shall rely upon your delicacy that the manner of doing it will be such as one Gentleman has a right to expect from another—especially as you must be sensible that the present appearance of the Papers is contrary to the course which was understood between us to be proper and includes a dishonourable infidelity somewhere.

And AH went ahead and wrote the following to editor John Fenno defending himself (6July1797):

For this purpose recourse was had to Messrs James Monroe, Senator, Frederick A. Muhlenbergh, Speaker, and Abraham Venable, a Member of the House of Representatives, two of these gentlemen my known political opponents. A full explanation took place between them and myself in the presence of Oliver Wolcott, jun. Esq. the present Secretary of the Treasury, in which by written documents I convinced them of the falshood of the accusation. They declared themselves perfectly satisfied with the explanation, and expressed their regret at the necessity which had been occasioned to me of making it.

But Monroe had just returned from France in June 1797, and he denied any prior knowledge of Callendar’s publication, and in general seemed to have had a “WTF!” reaction to AH’s sudden accusations. According to David Gelston’s account of the meeting between AH and Monroe on 11July1797:

Colo. M then began with declaring it was merely accidental his knowing any thing about the business at first he had been informed that one Reynolds from Virginia was in Gaol, he called merely to aid a man that might be in distress, but found it was a Reynolds from NYork and observed that after the meeting alluded to at Philada he sealed up his copy of the papers mentioned and sent or delivered them to his Friend in Virginia—he had no intention of publishing them & declared upon his honor that he knew nothing of their publication until he arrived in Philada from Europe and was sorry to find they were published. (my emphasis)

AH was so agitated that this conversation went downhill from there, seeing that “[AH] expected an immediate answer to so important a subject in which his character the peace & reputation of his Family were so deeply interested.” And then (”I hate you” point number 3):

Colo. M then proceeded upon a history of the business printed in the pamphlets and said that the packet of papers before alluded to he yet believed remained sealed with his friend in Virginia and after getting through Colo. H. said this as your representation is totally false (as nearly as I recollect the expression) upon which the Gentlemen both instantly rose Colo. M. rising first and saying do you say I represented falsely, you are a Scoundrel. Colo. H. said I will meet you like a Gentleman Colo. M Said I am ready get your pistols, both said we shall not or it will not be settled any other way. Mr C [John Church] & my self rising at the same moment put our selves between them Mr. C. repeating Gentlemen Gentlemen be moderate or some such word to appease them, we all sat down & the two Gentn, Colo. M. & Colo. H. soon got moderate, I observed however very clearly to my mind that Colo. H. appeared extremely agitated & Colo. M. appeared soon to get quite cool and repeated his intire ignorance of the publication & his surprize to find it published, observing to Colo. H. if he would not be so warm & intemperate he would explain everything he Knew of the business & how it appeared to him.

Monroe called him a scoundrel to his face! (After having been called a liar.)

And THEN, Monroe refused to sign a document absolving AH of any accusations of financial speculation with Reynolds (”I hate you” point number 4).

If I cod. give a stronger certificate I wod. (tho’ indeed it seems unnecessary for this with that given jointly by Muhg. & myself seems sufficient) but in truth I have doubts upon the main point & wh. he rather increased than diminishd by his conversation when here & therefore can give no other.

The above was sent to Burr on 16Aug 1797. AH had already pled his case to Monroe:

“...there appears a design at all events to drive me to the necessity of a formal defence—while you know that the extreme delicacy of its nature might be very disagreeable to me. It is my opinion that as you have been the cause, no matter how, of the business appearing in a shape which gives it an adventitious importance, and this against the intent of a confidence reposed in you by me, as contrary to what was delicate and proper, you recorded Clingman’s testimony without my privity and thereby gave it countenance, as I had given you an explanation with which you was satisfied and which could leave no doubt upon a candid mind—it was incumbent upon you as a man of honor and sensibility to have come forward in a manner that would have shielded me completely from the unpleasant effects brought upon me by your agency. This you have not done.

On the contrary by the affected reference of the matter to a defence which I am to make, and by which you profess your opinion is to be decided—you imply that your suspicions are still alive. And as nothing appears to have shaken your original conviction but the wretched tale of Clingman, which you have thought fit to record, it follows that you are pleased to attach a degree of weight to that communication which cannot be accounted for on any fair principle. The result in my mind is that you have been and are actuated by motives towards me malignant and dishonorable; nor can I doubt that this will be the universal opinion when the publication of the whole affair which I am about to make shall be seen.” 22July1797

In his mind, AH then believed he had to make a full accounting of the whole Reynolds debacle, since this jackass Monroe wasn’t going to sign-off on a denial of the whole matter of financial speculation on government securities. And back to the Hamilton family ire - it seemed that Monroe was not going to stop them from being slandered and dragged by doing what they felt he had already done - agreed that AH did not engage in financial speculation with Reynolds. Because Monroe would not acquiesce on that one matter, the Reynolds Pamphlet with all its detailed glory/humiliation where AH had to lay out his whole case was published, at least in the spin that occurred in the Hamilton family mind. (I’ve already written about the Reynolds Pamphlet here and here and briefly here and addressed a question about AH and infidelity here.)

Who was this “friend in Va?” Some historians have written this was TJ, but there are letters from decades later that Madison was the person who received the original letters and copies that Monroe had re Reynolds investigation, and they remained unopened until Monroe returned to the U.S. in 1797:

I have always understood from Mr. Monroe, that when he left this country he deposited with you, his packet of papers, relating to the investigation into the conduct &c of Genl. Hamilton—which was never opened, until it was returned by you to him, after his mission had terminated, and after the developement of its contents had been made from an other quarter. It would be very gratifying to me, if you have any facts, within your immediate reach, respecting the matter,if you would cause them at a leisure moment, to be communicated to me—The subject to which I refer, was, as you no doubt know, one of great feeling & excitement subsequently between Genl. H. & Mr. M., arising from causes of which I am aware, & particularly from the impression made on Genl. H. or the declaration by him of the belief, that the contents of the papers referred to, were made public by Mr. M—The children of Genl. H. have always indulged a feeling on this subject towards Mr. M. which renders it desirable that all the evidence in the case should be procured by his family. It has occasionally been hinted to me, that in a proposed publication of the Life of Genl. H., the subject might be touched, and it is equally my duty, as it would be my inclination, under such circumstances to have it in my power to do full justice to the character & memory of Mr. M. on this, as on all other occasions, where either might even by implication be assailed—I feel great reluctance in troubling you on the subject, but a conviction that you will appreciate my motives, impels me to do so. Samuel L. Gouverneur to James Madison, 1Feb1833

S.L. Gouverneur was the son-in-law of James Monroe (married their daughter) and nephew of Elizabeth Kortright Monroe. (Yes, he married his first cousin.) From the draft of Madison’s response (Feb 1833, Founders does not have a copy of the letter sent, if it’s still in existence):

I can only therefore express my entire confidence that the part Mr. Monroe had in the investigation alluded to, was dictated by what he deemed a public duty; and that after the investigation he was incapable of any thing that wd. justify resentful feelings on the part of the family of General Hamilton.

Of the public disclosure of the matter of the investigation, other than that from the avowed source, I know nothing; except that it could not proceed from the packet of papers deposited with me by Mr. M., which was never opened until it was returned to him, after his Mission had terminated.

Back to the main topic: the Hamiltons clearly saw Monroe playing a decisive role in the whole thing. But who was actually responsible for passing copies of letters to Callendar? Monroe was sure it was Beckley, former House clerk:

You know I presume that Beckley published the papers in question. By his clerk they were copied for us. It was his clerk who carried a copy to H. who asked (as B. says) whether others were privy to the affr. The clerk replied that B. was, upon wh. H. desired him to tell B. he considered him bound not to disclose it. B. replied by the same clerk that he considered himself under no injunction whatever—that if H. had any thing to say to him it must be in writing. This from B.—most certain however it is that after our interviews with H. I requested B. to say nothing abt. it & keep it secret—& most certain it is that I never heard of it afterwards till my arrival when it was published. Monroe to A.Burr, 2Dec 1797, in a letter that may have never gotten to him (entrusted to TJ)

Others at the time also believed it to be Beckley, though one historian suspected Tench Coxe too. Why was this ever published? Well, Callendar wrote in the History that it was because of the treatment of Monroe:

Attacks on Mr. Monroe have been frequently repeated from the stock-holding presses. They are cowardly, because he is absent. They are unjust, because his conduct will bear the strictest enquiry. They are ungrateful, because he displayed, on an occasion that will be mentioned immediately, the greatest lenity to Mr. Alexander Hamilton, the prime mover of the federal party.

Theodore Sedgewick told Rufus King it was Beckley, too and provides another motivation:

The House of Representatives did not re-elect Mr. Beckley as their Clerk. This was resented not only by himself but the whole party, and they were rendered furious by it. To revenge, Beckley has been writing a pamphlet mentioned in the enclosed advertisement. The ‘authentic papers’ there mentioned are those of which you perfectly know the history [46ten interjects: haha, some secret. So if Sedgewick and King know, Troup knows, Ames knows, G. Morris knows, etc. AH’s affair with Reynolds and the investigation was never a secret with this crowd], formerly in the possession of Messrs. Monroe, Muhlenberg & Venable. The conduct is mean, base and infamous. It may destroy the peace of a respectable family, and so gratify the diabolical malice of a detestable faction, but I trust it cannot produce the intended effect of injuring the cause of government.

So William Jackson is the second for AH, Aaron Burr the second for Monroe, and this Monroe-AH duel possibility stretched into the Winter of 1798 (x, x), having picked up again in December 1797 (Monroe replaces Burr with Dawson). TJ was still writing to Monroe about it in February 1798.

What had Monroe been doing that late summer/fall instead or figuring out how to conduct his affair of honor with AH? After an illness in August, oh, writing his own book (or having TJ ghostwrite it, depending on your views of Monroe’s intelligence) entitled A View of the Conduct of the Executive, in the Foreign Affairs of the United States, Connected with the Mission to the French Republic, During the Years 1794, 5, & 6, criticizing G. Washington and the administration every which way (published in Phila. 21Dec1797). GW, as he liked to do, made responses in the margins of Monroe’s little book; this editorial comment is hilarious: “GW’s remarks on Monroe and his book, taken together, comprise the most extended, unremitting, and pointed use of taunts and jibes, sarcasm, and scathing criticism in all of his writings.” Read that here.

So in the Hamilton mind, not only was Monroe trying to score points against Hamilton (and dragging private family matters into it), but he was criticizing GW too (and thereby AH, since even in retirement he continued to run the GW and Adams administrations, practically)! (”I hate you” point number 5.) In the first half of 1798, Monroe’s work got a lot of attention, earning the ire (and vocal and written condemnations) of Pres. Adams, of Timothy Pickering, and of many other Federalists. Monroe went back to Va. and appeared to lick his wounds and feel sorry for himself, based on his letters to TJ. I think it’s reasonable to speculate that Monroe is the “dirty fellow” alluded to in Angelica S. Church’s June 1798 letter to EH when the latter traveled to Albany - it was most likely seen that Monroe was the cause, or at least could have stopped, all the pain/attention of the public disclosure of the Reynolds affair. I don’t know if AH and Monroe ever really interacted after this. Monroe became Gov of Va, and then replaced Rufus King in 1803 as Minister to G.B.

EH and the Hamilton kids never forgot, see recollection here re. EH. Or watch a dramatization here. That Monroe remained a political rival of the Federalists and AH’s friends/allies also certainly didn’t help (Monroe & Madison and G. Morris continue at each other for many years.) On basic facts, it doesn’t quite make sense to me - I don’t think Monroe was culpable in the sharing of information, and I think he was being as fair-minded as he felt he could be - but there may have been additional encounters/statements/whatevers known to these parties that are now lost to history. There may also be fun details in JCH’s volumes on his father.

(For giggles, see this attached clipping: "the passage [in the Reynolds Pamphlet] in which Hamilton owns and laments his fault is admirably written.”

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t90864f94;seq=231;size=125;rotation=0

[popculture-etc]

Kenny Rogers, Adam Schlesinger,...coping with 2020

Worst year ever although there were some good.

It’s too early yet for me to do a quick look back on what 2020 is like here as we’re only going to be in the first of December tomorrow (it’s Nov 30 here) but I just have to as two losses this year broke me. Kind of, well, especially the second one.

You see, before East Asian pop, Jpop and Kpop, Western pop culture was my thing. It still is and this pandemic has made me go back to that recently starting with...the Beach Boys (their westcoast sound caught me, hook, line, and sinker and I wasn’t very fond of the Beatles to begin with...to be completely honest) I’m currently chillin’ to right now, as I write this post. I’m really weak to the westcoast sound. Beach sound/s in general, rather. I’m a big fan of the beach where nature goes, for one. Since some time, a few years ago, deep chill and tropical house music has been my go-to when I want to chill or calm myself down after an outburst of sorts and I put them on when I just feel meh, especially on Fridays. When I dream of being by the sea, the beach or in some island on my own. I live in a country with a lot of beaches and the Visayas here is basically island region Philippines, lol. Like most people, I listen to music according to mood just like the way I dress according to mood. And...it’s no wonder, really that I’m so into the Beach Boys now. RIP the Beatles. My dad played some songs of theirs on the guitar or so but the hold they have on me waned later on and I just think now how overrated they were back then. They did have good songs but when talking of good music, as in really good that it retains the same sound style or so, it’s the Beach Boys for me. Brian Wilson is the man despite his issues and personal struggles.

Anyway, we’re going quickly off tangent. I’ll save the Beach Boys fangirling for another day. lol.

I grew up with western pop culture rife all around me thanks to my American, cowboy country and folk music listening dad, my Carpenters-loving mom and then, college-aged aunts who’d made me see the Titanic film more than my fingers could count---the third is clearly an exaggeration but well...some of it is true and they were why I got into American films like Pretty Woman (we have this in good ol’ VHS in our family home, my grandparents’ in Jasaan), Mannequin, Ghost etc. in the late 80s, coming into the early 90s. So, tired of all the kdrama and uninteresting kvariety shows on tvn and the rebranded local channel, Kapamilya (long story for what we formerly know as ABS-CBN, the nation’s a mess right now and our gov’t’s just...ick!), I’d retreated to my cave and got into old tv shows I’d watched as a kid instead like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed and it’s been, well, moving on from there. I’m checking out Twin Peaks later. I’ve been watching old Hollywood films too. Some revisits on this include: Casablanca, Gone With The Wind, and especially A Streetcar Named Desire will always and forever be my favorite. Very young and cute and good looking Marlon Brando, ugh. I have some others in the stash which include Bonnie and Clyde I’ll be getting into much, much later, maybe over the weekends and holidays. In sum, I have a long history with western pop culture, especially America’s, more than I have with Japan’s and South Korea’s. The latter being very, very recent so it doesn’t really compare as much.

Let’s get right down to it...

So 2020 had us lose Kenny Rogers to natural causes on March 20 in a hospice and after, Adam Schlesinger to COVID 19 complications on April 1. I know the latter as the songwriter of The Wonders’ That Thing You Do from the film sharing the same song title. I know Kenny Rogers well because my dad listens to him over and over in the car. In pretty much the same way, I know the words to Islands in the Stream by heart and I accept and revere it as one of the best, if not THE BEST country-pop duet songs of all time between Kenny and Dolly Parton...as far as country and pop music in the US of A’re concerned, of course. Miley and Shawn Mendez’s cover of it I’d seen recently was alright but nothing still beats the OG one, as always. With music, it’s just, really always the case.

Kenny departing from us March this year was alright. He was well cared for in a hospice and at the right age too, to leave us and this mess of a world behind for the afterlife. Sounds grim but not really. Heh. He died of natural causes so we know he was at peace and accepted then that his time has come. Fans and long-time listeners of his should also be at peace with this knowledge. I don’t consider myself a fan but since he’s been around so much because my dad plays his songs in the car often, I’m the same. I’ve accepted his passing away early this year. He’s lived his life well and given us good music to listen to should we like to remember him and his works and celebrate his life and legacy doing so.

Schlesinger’s case was way worse because, well, COVID 19. And it’s well...I guess we all saw it coming, me included, that I’d just learned, watching the one of many national English news on ANC that ‘pandemic’ is the word of the year according to Merriam-Webster. Timely, huh? Yep. Predictable, really. Sarcasm noted here.

So if someone ever asks what 2020 was about, we only have to say that according to Merriam-Webster, it’s the global (COVID 19) pandemic. Short, not-so-sweet, succinct, and grim. Yep.

This one, Schlesinger’s case, is something I still find difficult to accept. He was only 52 years old! He was at the prime of his life and had some projects still he was working on at the time of his passing so WHY?! I suppose that’s all of us who followed him and his extensive work on tv, film, the stage and his own band, Fountains of Wayne when we heard news he’s passed away due to COVID 19 complications. It’s definitely me now though I learned of it late. Heh.

To cope with the sadness of losing Schlesinger, gone too soon at 52 years old and with an impressive Hollywood tv, stage, film resume to his name since and his own band’s, Fountains of Wayne (FoW) really good discography, by the way, I’ve been listening to FoW’s Welcome Interstate Managers---all of the contents of said album/record---and That Thing You Do’s OST with the Beach Boys’ Sounds of Summer Best of in between. My favorite song on Welcome Interstate Managers is the sarcastic take on real life as an everyday worker in sales, Bright Future in Sales. As much as I like chill sounds where music goes, I like me some music with lyrics jolting us back to grim reality in much the same way I like films (indies, mostly, or lesser known short and full-length ones) that tackle social issues not frequently discussed in public or so but we are aware are there, still plaguing much of today’s society. I live for cynical, satirical, ironic, and even hyperbolic stuff about real life actually. It may be why I’m so entrenched and attached to the era where we all hated ourselves---the 90s. Although one would say much of that sentiment or feeling did carry itself to the 2000s, though. I don’t know about you, but until now, I still hate or have heavy dislike for myself and everything else around me, especially our gov’t or current admin here in the Philippines, and people in general so I don’t think it ever really goes away. And going off tangent again for the nth time today.

Anyway, my 1996 was That Thing You Do on HBO in our household...on and off along with other 90s films like The Craft, Clueless, Jawbreakers (I think this still plays in Cinemax from time to time) so of course losing Schlesinger also was...rather, is hard. He’s done so much and he was supposed to be working on more and he’s left such a deep mark here for us, avid fans of American pop culture...I suppose, even the casual ones. Aside from his That Thing You Do, I’d also seen Josie and the Pussycats at some point. I don’t remember when, where...though I did watch some episodes of the cartoon on Cartoon Network (CN) so of course, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the film of it as well. He worked on a track or some tracks there, too. 

2020 sucks. COVID 19 sucks. This global pandemic sucks. But at least there’re films, tv shows, music, stage musical plays turned movies (Jonathan Larson’s Tick, Tick...Boom! is coming to us soon with Andrew Garfield in the lead---I’m wary of Garfield being a forgettable actor since The Amazing Spider Man because Dane Dehaan was what made that for me, to be quite honest so I’m not so sure of him being Jon here and as a self-respecting Larson fan since Rent, I’d rather they casted Neil Patrick Harris/NPH since he was in the London stage for this way back anyway...) to keep us entertained and fine until then. What would it take for ‘rona, and I’m not talking about the American Corona beer here that’s really popular in the west coast, to go away? I, like the rest of you in self isolation or quarantine, tend to think so but I don’t think we’ll have any answer to that until the vaccines are well underway by spring next year. Or at least, that’s what health authorities and scientists tell us anyway. I get reminded of it often in the news and I only tune in to that once in a while now because even that, following that daily, breaks my mental faculties down due to stress and pressure and all and I can’t have that when I still have so much, at the back of my mind, to do.

But anyway, time to conclude this one with one of my favorite The Wonders songs, All My Only Dreams just to end on a good note, better than the last paragraph’s ending at least and to remember Schlesinger as well that we’d lost this year along with plenty others we’d met in passing who’ve also left this world especially due to COVID 19 complications. I know we know a lot of those. For me, it’s a distant relative or family member I’d known since young but don’t have particular fluffy bunny feelings for because of some things that happened between the guy and me growing up in the NCR/Caloocan City to be exact. There’s also my good friend and former co-worker’s only remaining parent, her dad and a few more, I’m sure. So I hope 2021 would be better but I doubt it...very much. It’s still looking pretty dim, grim and bleak from here, where I’m currently standing in 2020.

Before we really end though, COVID 19 is definitely not a hoax. It hasn’t been since the first cases started in Wuhan, China. It’s just, only been getting worse and still continue to claim lives and spread to more people even those at home. So as someone who comes from a household of mostly medical workers or health care workers here, we should really be very careful about and around it. Let’s take the necessary health protocols seriously like wearing a mask out and maybe the face shield too and always keeping the sanitizers, alcohols in our bags among others---hygiene and sanitation, disinfection. It may come off really anal of me and I am not anal (I don’t like people with Type A personalities in the first place, lol...I’m just a very cautious Virgo, really, and a Type X---mix of Type C and D personalities) but seriously, SERIOUSLY, I can’t stress this enough, COVID 19, the virus SARS-COV2, that causes it is real. Very real and once it’s in your system, it can go the fatal, deadly way or just the mild and you’ll recover later anyway way. It’s not picking which people should die next and which should not, really. It’s really just there making a mess of things that are already messy since the beginning. My point being, it’s just better if we don’t spread it or are careful enough not to contract it with following health protocols set by health experts, scientists to help us get by this...pandemic. 

Well here’s to 2020 being over soon and 2021 creeping in on us soon enough. 

P.S.

Billie Armstrong of Greenday upped a cover of That Thing You Do as a tribute to Adam and the youtube live of the Wonders coming together again to pay tribute to and celebrate Adam’s life may still be up on the ‘tube. I have yet to see the latter but enjoyed the former. They are just so...sweet and precious. Ugh. Adam Schlesinger, gone too soon indeed. :(

PPS

Another songwriter/contributor in the TTYD OST passed away last year, too. Rick Elias. Cause of death is brain cancer. I had a friend from college, young and so full of life and dreams, who passed away due to the same thing so I’m kind of aware how this goes. Ugh. Cancer sucks. All of these are just so...sad. Depressing, actually.

[captaincoffeegirl515]

6 Underground Thoughts!

I'm literally gonna talk about pretty much the entire movie so lots and lots of spoilers under the read more. 

If you've already seen the movie, I would love to talk and debate and scream excitedly about the movie with you! 

P.S. This got way longer than I expected.

I gotta say I really enjoyed the movie. Of course, there's some problems and continuity errors, etc. but I'll get to them after. 

First of all, I love all the interactions between them. Found-family trope is my jam.

One and Four

Four looks up to One and seems like he tries to impress him. 

He also calls One a likeable asshole.

"See that? That's called skill." Show off. 

One was the one Four called to for help even though they all knew his way of leaving you behind if you can't keep up. And he stepped up and saved Four! That whole scene was so good! 

I will admit though that how they first met is messed up. One basically kidnapped him, tied him down, and made Four think he was gonna shoot and kill him. Seven got it down when he called them a "family more screwed up than mine" 

Two and Three

Badass lady and himbo (does Three count as a himbo?). Enough said.

I love every interaction they had together. I enjoyed their bickering and how they showed how they cared in their own way.

Tiny touches! The part near the end when Three lightly touches Two’s arm and she takes her hand out of her pocket so they could hold hands?! Nice.

When Two said "I would love to meet your mother." awwww! The way Three just brightens up!

Four and Seven

OTP! I never expected to come out with one, but here we are.

Look, I just love the concept of the free-spirited parkour expert being with the disciplined military operator. 

Seven just immediately seemed to take Four under his wing and genuinely care about his well-being. 

The others also expressed how they didn't want to leave Four behind but only Seven fought for them to stop. 

Saved Four's life not once, but twice! It was almost instinctual and he didn't hesitate to do it. 

"You're calling me Mister Seven from now on" Seven's inner dom coming out lol. 

The names scene! "I'm Blaine. I just saved your life. What's your name?" and instead of listening to One’s order, he answers. 

"Yeah, you look like a Billy." 

Seven and One

One always kept his distance from everyone, used numbers instead of names so he wouldn't get attached, and had that horrid "can't keep up, get left behind" rule. So glad that Seven pushed back, from making the shot to save Four from both drowning and from falling to his death, questioning his rules about leaving people behind, and getting them all (except One, sadly) to say their real names. 

Seven brought out One's heart and finally made him start to actually care for his team aka family. Like I'm certain that if it wasn't for him, One would have definitely left Four to die in Hong Kong and on the boat during the coup.

"You've got a soul, man. You should let it out." 

Movie highlights and thoughts:

I called it! Like based on the screen time and focus on them from the trailers, I already knew Six was the most likely one to die and Four would probably be injured at worst. 

The fucking dialogue in the opening! I can't even. Like “I’m gonna put this inside you, really deep.” and "ahhh! She's squirting!" 

"So many fucking Vias in Italy." I love how it's canon that Four isn't that good with maps and would definitely get lost in Italy. Actually he's bad with directions period. "Where are you?" "Here." "Specifics!" "Right here." Four pls

Three trying to learn the language of each new place they go to. The best! 

Did I already say Two is badass? Because she is. She really is. And they're all right when they said she'd be the most likely to survive. 

Four and Six worked so well together in the car chase scenes and Four looked so sad when he saw Six's body in that car. Honestly if Six hadn't died so early in the movie and they got more interactions together, him and Four probably would've been my OTP. 

I did enjoy how One had like momentary vulnerability like when Six died or when Four told them to leave him followed by the gunshots, etc. Those little moments where you can see that he did have feelings before he shoves them deep down and focuses back on the mission. 

Best outfit is Four in that big white sweater with the red stripes. He looked so good. 

I found the scene where Four asks One if he was a pig then spits at him weirdly hilarious. The spitting just felt so random and came out of nowhere. 

Four sleeping is! So! Cute! And when Three starts loudly complaining, he just slowly opens one eye like he's going "are you fucking kidding me right now?!"

Another funny scene was when Four easy runs across the top of the crane and then it pans to the guards chasing him and they have both arms and legs on the crane and just slowly inching their way across. 

Guy jokes about Noor. "Noor is dead. Say he's dead." "No, he's dead. He died." "Wait no. Wrong guy. He's alive!" jfc that was funny! 

The coup song is so fire! I love it! Nice choice, Four. 

Four's scream when that guy broke his arm just kills me. I kinda wish One made that guy's death a bit more painful and drawn out but I get that they were under some serious time constraints.

Actually any part where Four gets hurt... noooo bb

Now that I think about it, the fact that they have comms throughout the mission, like they can hear everything the others say, they can hear each other when they're fighting, when they get hit, everything. They heard when Three got shot in the face and Seven panicked, thinking that he just killed him. They heard Four screaming in pain when his arm broke and they couldn't do anything since they weren't there. 

Seriously though, Ben's acting is so good! He's easily the best part of the movie. And his eyes! So green and so expressive! 

“Fuck you!” “Fuck you!” “No you, fuck you!” jfc One and Three are hilarious together.

It was such a great scene when One told them he wouldn't go after Rovach bc he's going to save Four. Just. My heart. And "You’re breaking your own rules. I thought you didn't have a family". And Five's soft smile.

Four and Five are rock climbing buddies! Both their smiles can outshine the sun. They're so cute! (even though in the close-ups you can tell the rock is very obviously fake)

Ben and Adria are both so hot my little bi heart is ready to burst! 

Also, how is Micheal Bay saying this movie isn't political? They had the US gov’t staging coups in third world countries and putting dictators into power, Russia arming Rovach and his military, chemical warfare, Rovach's whole speech to his generals about hitting where he is weakest like hospitals and schools, the "our president doesn't know how to spell Turgistan" line, revolution, overthrowing dictators, throwing Rovach down to the people for them to deal their own brand of justice, etc. There were so many things that just screamed politics!

Issues:

Holy hell the kill count of this movie is just insane. It becomes over the top so fast. Same with all the gratuitous gore.

Shaky af camera work. 

Literally every explosion looked like those sparky fireworks. What. 

Lots of continuity errors. Six having a disappearing and reappearing hat throughout the chase scene. Basically any scene involving water. Like Four and Two get completely soaked at one point, but in the next scene, they're completely dry. Or the part where Four is hanging upside down on the net and big dude is trying to untangle him so he’d fall but when it cuts back to them when Seven makes the shot, it's back to the part where the guy was choking Four. 

Did anyone else notice all the skid marks on the roads even though they haven't officially driven on it yet? Didn't have enough budget left to remove or edit out the marks from all the rehearsals they did? 

And why is One hanging the eyeball right over the phone screen? That's not where the camera is dude!

Did Two and Three seriously have sex with all those dead people around?! Shouldn't they be running since they killed the 4 generals and guards would likely be on their way?? 

Also, Ben's stunt double was obvious in almost every parkour stunt. Wow. 

Why no Five backstory! I wanna know how she ended up joining the team!

They did Five dirty! She barely has lines or scenes, they took out her backstory, and gave her little to no character growth. 

I know they're hinting at Four and Five getting together, but I just don't see it. They have barely any romantic chemistry together. Eye contact and smiling is not chemistry. It just isn’t. 

[johnnyrobish]

W Virginia Gov’t Employees Suspended for Giving Nazi Salute

W Virginia Gov’t Employees Suspended for Giving Nazi Salute:  Roughly 30 employees of the West Virginia’s Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, have been suspended after a recent picture emerged showing them performing a Nazi salute in a group photo.

I guess about the only thing missing in this photograph would be the tiki torches.  Obviously, this picture must have been taken before Home Depot opened that morning, a bit too early for anyone to head over and pick them up. 

Of course, these are the very same folks who get really pissed over athletes taking a knee - because everyone knows there’s no any racism in America any more.  Oh well, I suppose it’s back to those "clean coal" jobs for these folks.

https://www.johnnyrobishcomedy.com