#really Michael has so many issues with his self and his reputation that’s he’s becomes accustomed to playing 5D chess with his life

[supercityboys]

I recently tried to read Booster’s New52 Origins but stopped bc I remembered how much I hated other characters New52 Origins, so I went back and tried to make sense of KooeyKooeyKooey. Which is hard bc JLI/JLE’s tone is a light, humorous one, and (to me) it is harder to extrapolate genuine emotion/character motivations than it is with a down tone or a neutral one.

KoKoKooey kind of threw me for a little loop bc despite how “money hungry” Michael is, he does have common sense and basic morale. He initially opposes the island, questions the project multiple times, and jumps automatically into hero mode when the island awakens, as he normally does in his own book. But a quick glance at any of Michael’s battles will show you him telling off Dirk for prioritizing money (including the huge climax where he literally fires Dirk for being money hungry). So it really baffles me that he’d let Ted go through with the casino.

My reasoning based off of Michael’s books:

My strongest guess is that in the lieu of his own group “failing” on top of losing his family, when Michael decides to join the League full time, he assumes the subordinate role in just about every capacity because he no longer believes himself capable of leading.

In his family, the family dynamics are reversed yet while maintaining a nuclear family dynamic where Michael and Michelle both assume parental roles and the mother is the child. By the third retelling of his backstory— which is told by Michael to Ted— he admits that his mom pressures him by telling him not to be like his father (whom he’s never met). And so, he carries that residual guilt with him constantly. His football career doesn’t feel like it’s so much about the sport as it is a sure fire way out of poverty.

Though by the time being a full Leaguer rolls around he’s completely at the whims of others stationed above him, it does not escape my notice that at first opportunity Michael places himself as the object that needs direction. He needs Skeets and he needs Dirk. And when the occasion arises he works in tandem with Skeets, with Rip, with Jack, but completely deserts Dirk as he is not a true partner.

I think in attendance with liking Ted, Michael also tends to bet on losing dogs. He feels like a loser, he identifies with other losers, makes bed with them, and when it falls apart he also falls apart because it conflicts with the façade that is egoism. Michael projects his egotistical persona and subconsciously tucks away his loserism. By the time KoKoKooey comes around he’s already outed as the loser, and losers need a leader. For work, Booster’s already got Jon and Batman. But for matters of the heart? Security? Who does Michael have? He has Ted. He puts his all into Ted bc Ted has everything he found in Skeets, in Trixie, in Dirk, in Rip, in Jack. He doesn’t have to play patriarch to Ted or leader. And really it boils down to Michael looking for himself in other people rather than inward (again).

[bonnie-barstow-of-flag]

Killer Knightmares:

@avictimofthejazz an au based off a KR season 2 episode of the same name & knight of the drones vibe.

Dr. Bonnie Barstow is dutifully diligent with all of her work. She obsesses over even the most minuscule and trivial details to achieve perfection. It’s one of the many reasons she’s been added to the staff at the University of San Francisco under the supervision of the reputable David Halston.

___

It’s virtually unfathomable how much damage an ill-programmed microchip the size of a finger-nail could inflict. A twisted sense of insatiable fascination clutches a bewitching grasp over her complete attention. The tiny chip captured under the view of the highly advanced microscope was an absolute marvel with it’s bright ridges of gold along with it’s small valleys and backroads paved in a far duller shade of silver. It’s a coded maze that Bonnie can easily interpret. One infinitesimal change to the programming can mean the difference between life and death. Bonnie’s searching, seeking out the one piece of the prototype keeping it from functioning as designed. She could never and would never give the go-ahead on anything that could be considered dangerous. Even more so given the incidents that occurred because of Karr.

“There’s a call for you on line four, Bonnie.” Comes Halston’s abrupt half-careless words. Placing indelicate hands upon the slopes of her shoulders, he continues. “I’m starting to feel like your personal secretary.” It’s a gripe he made in earnest. He’s been, in no uncertain terms, telling her former associates to stop calling for months now. That Bonnie’s happier here without them hounding her. He delighted in being able to get her to refuse their offers to have her return. Of course, David hadn’t bothered to asked permission to make those direct assertions. He just did. Dr. Halson needed her. Even if Bonnie wasn’t fully aware of it, she had become vital to the success of his and Margo’s operations.

He leans over her shoulder to take a non-committal glance at her progress with the microchip. “It’s quite strange really.” He cryptically starts. The rest of the explanation failing to come as an immediate continuance.

Skeptical, Bonnie’s turquoise orbs lift towards her revered mentor while he speaks. Worry warps her usually beautiful countenance as she discovers herself clinging to his every utterance. Every easy breath hinged upon what would come next.

When her attention is fully upon him, he reveals against the shell of her ear all that he’d been biting back. “It’s a hospital near Los Angeles. A nurse Langly from Hoff Medical Center or other. She ‘claims’ it’s urgent.” There’s a deep trench of sarcasm imbued when his lips reach the word “claims”. He is well aware that she has no real family in the city. At least no one she should want to have contact with, given all the bridges he’s helped her burn. The remnants of her family were located in Boston. His eyes befall her with the great expectation that she’d pass it off.

Halston’s blasé indifference to the potentially serious situation doesn’t settle right with her. It lays like a load of swallowed bricks and mortar, in the formation of a thick, impenetrable, unmovable wall might; uncomfortably heavy. “I...” She swallows thickly, “I’d better get that.” The brunette rises from the stool she had been occupying and brushes past him. “It’s probably a crank call.” Arrives her half-hopeful utterance as she moves towards the thick plastic phone.

Sweeping a buoyant wake of chestnut barrel-rolls from her face, she lifts the receiver to her ear. “Dr. Barstow speaking. How can I help you?” She answers. Her lower-lip tucking between her teeth as she actively listens to the other voice. Twirling her fingers around the curly-q chord, she attempts to sort her thoughts. “Wait? What?” Panic bubbles upwards in her tone. Her once lax stance stiffens against the nearest wall. Her grip on the phone tightens to prevent it from slipping from her hand. “Are you sure?” A pause. “Could you repeat that name again?”

Nurse Langly patiently repeats, “Michael Long.” After a few seconds, she adds, “you’re his emergency contact.”

The warmth and color that usually could be found in Bonnie’s features drains as the gravity of the situation is rapidly dawning upon her. This was either a twisted macabre prank or it was a genuine emergency. Hardly anyone outside the Foundation knew that name or the history behind it. To invoke that name was to tug at Bonnie’s heartstrings. She has no other choice but to go investigate. If it was Michael and he was in trouble, she would never be able to forgive herself for ignoring his call.

Was it possible that he still had her number in his wallet? That Michael had never gotten around to changing his ICE list? If he hadn’t- why?

“Keep him there as long as you can.” Bonnie tersely instructs. Her heart skips a series of beats as she continues, “I’m leaving now.” With a glance down at her own delicate wrist watch, she calculates the amount of time it’ll take her to get that location. “I should be there in a few hours.” As she puts down the receiver, Bonnie contemplates ringing Devon and the Foundation. But she doesn’t. Not until she can fully ascertain if this is a joke or not.

Halston snags the frantic brunette’s wrist as she races towards the door. Throatily he demands, “where do you think you’re going? I didn’t give you permission to leave, and I know class hasn’t been dismissed. If you leave in the middle of our project, you’ll be costing the University thousands of dollars. You’re potentially destroying any hopes you had of a scholarship.” His concerns obviously rest with their work.

She wrestles her arm back from her professor’s clutches. Turquoise orbs darken when they lock upon Halston’s. Her expression is obviously deeply wounded and yet, out of respect for her mentor, she delays. “I’m sorry. I have to go...” Her words leave no uncertain airs about them. “I’ll be back when I can.” Bonnie is well aware that her defiance of direct orders could potentially cost her this incredible opportunity. Yet, she does not care! The Foundation has and always would be a primary concern for her. It didn’t matter how much time had elapsed since her employment with them, they were her family.

Bonnie is keenly aware that Halston is beckoning for her, yelling intangible words in her wake. She doesn’t dare turn back now with her feet already set on a steady course.

----

Only one thought prevailed as the brunette lunges past other students and into the parking-lot. Michael Knight could be in real trouble, and he needed her. She can’t fathom any set of circumstances that would require resurrecting a name that should have been buried. In her gut, she knows something is terribly amiss. But what?

Seven hours of the endless highway and traffic sprawled between the former partners. Every minute of that time seemed to conjure up a fresh, new fear as to what the explanation could be. Internally, she had been running herself through an extensive list of people who knew Michael Knight before he was the man she’d grown to love. Stevie was murdered. Tanya walker died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Vernon Gray and the others were in rotting in jail.

With the review of every case, came the discomforting realization that Michael and the Foundation were in the habit of making ruthless adversaries. Some of them were worse than others.

A startling thought does occur to her. Garthe and Elizabeth Knight knew about Wilton’s pet project. He knew that his father rescued Michael Long from that cold Nevada desert. However, Garthe and Goliath had taken a swan dive off a cliff. He couldn’t be pulling a crude trick like this. He had to be dead. Or was he? Worse still, could this be the work of Garthe’s vengeful mother? No. Why would they call her for help and risk the Foundation foiling another one of their wicked plots? They wouldn’t. Not even if they were aiming for the absolute annihilation of Wilton’s every dream.

Could it be the Chameleon? No. The man couldn’t have uncovered Knight’s former life. As far as the skilled impersonator knew, Michael had always existed as Knight. His previous life was a mystery. Or so Bonnie hoped it had remained an unsolvable riddle.

Every trudged up possibility seems to leave Bonnie with more unanswerable questions. She returned, time and time again, to square one. Frustration wells up inside of her veins as the brunette settles on the idea that Knight’s run into deep trouble on an investigation. This had to be a cry for help.

-----

Whilst Bonnie Barstow was not known for speeding, her foot increases the pressure on the gas pedal. The rev of the engine increases. Tires find themselves turning over at a quicker and quicker rate. All four heated rubber tires give a squeal of relief when she finally pulls up in front of the Hoff Medical Center.

With haste, she abandons her car in the parking-lot and races inside. Flagging down the first nurse she can find, she spurts out. “Please, I’m here for Michael Knight.” Entreating eyes catch the vacuous look to the nurses eyes and she repeated her words. “I’m Dr. Barstow. I got a call at the University where I work. I’m here for my - Michael Knight...” Ah, that’s where the issue dwells. She cringes before correcting herself. “Michael Long.”

That name garnered the desired knowledgeable reaction from the nursing staff. “This way.” The blonde nurse instructs taking up the lead through the sanitized hallway, armed with her clipboard.

“Can... can you tell me what happened to Michael?” Bonnie fearfully presses. She swallows down every fear collecting inside of her veins and penting-up in her chest. Having a breath catch in her throat, she manages to choke out. “Is he -- is he alright?” The concern taking up residence in the concentric confines of her eyes is genuine. Lord knows, she wouldn’t be able to cope with losing him.

The nurse keenly eyes her. The sympathy evident upon all of her etched features. “We’re looking at a mild concussion and bruised ribs. He’s lucky that nothing is broken. He must be in really good shape. Built like a tank that fella of yours is.” Any other man would have been in far worse shape.

Bonnie is too taken aback by the diagnosis to correct the woman’s assumption about her and Michael. In fact, she nearly misses the correlation as she is ushered into the room.

“He’s a real charmer. Your Officer Long is.” The nurse adds casting a wink in her direction.

Officer Long? God. It still felt anomalous to hear that in a sentence even with their extensive history together. She knew about his past. She was there the day Wilton brought Michael under his care. Until today, it had been years since that name fell upon Bonnie’s ears. Now, all of the sudden, she couldn’t seem to escape the shadow of the vastly unused moniker.

“Tried to flirt his way out of X-rays and everything.” The nurse actively points out. Her amusement with the fact is fairly obvious.

A perfectly manicured brow raises as Bonnie seats herself beside the man she knows under a very different name. “He really is. Isn’t he?” She fondly agrees. That had always been a part of the problem between them. Hadn’t it? His natural charisma instantly endeared him to almost every woman on the planet. She vividly recollects that he had tactfully employed it on more than one occasion to get what he wanted. He was kind enough to polish his act every time he attempted to use it on her.

Until the moment Bonnie cast her eyes upon Michael, it hadn’t struck her how intensely homesick she’d been for his familiar presence. Her heart gives off a series of palpable pangs against her ribcage as if it was sending Mores Code. Rescue was not bound to happen. No one could heed an unspoken SOSes. Could they? Despite her efforts to reign the unruly muscle in, it kept barreling ahead like an out-of-control freight train down the tracks.

Why was it that only Michael could arouse such chaos inside of her even when she had striven so desperately to move on? She tried to replace him with Dr. Halston and many other guys. Yet, nothing could fill that awful void that Michael left behind.

In that moment, with his large frame half swallowed by the hospital bed, she uncovers a dangerous revelation. She still loved him. As loathe to admit it as she is, those deeply-rooted feelings exist. They dwell in the undismissable realms of shadows where buried emotions and feelings are destined to remain.

Bonnie’s trembling hand gingerly brushes a dark-chestnut curl from the expanse of his warm forehead. The fluffy texture under the worn-pads of her fingers causes a familiar ache to awaken inside of her. “Michael, sweetheart....” She coos the term of endearment with a gentle insistence. She dare not startle him awake after the hell he’s obviously been put through with his injuries.

Her own lips bend into a shaky smile. “I’ve come to take you home.” His home? Her home? The Foundation? It didn’t really matter so long as he was back with people who loved and would protect him. As long as he was safe, Bonnie would never issue a complaint.  

[diatriblicaljottings]

How significant is the representation of masculinity to the way Othello functions as a tragedy?

Literature review

Believed to be written in 1603, the existence of ‘Othello’ has not only been disputed to be one of Shakespeare’s most successful plays due to the “treatment of such timely issues as race, gender, homoeroticism and domestic relations” (Evans, 2015), but also one of the most controversial – mostly due to how the aforementioned topics were approached. This is particularly surprising as Othello is widely acknowledged as “the least political (Shakespeare play) and even the least philosophical but also as the most domestic and personal” (Evans, 2015). Perhaps this disdain comes from a place of misunderstanding towards Shakespeare’s often critical yet atypical approaches to what could be described as sensitive topics. However, the representation of masculinity throughout ‘Othello’ can be linked to most of the mentioned analytical approaches, particularly masculinity and race, in a way that enriches our overall understanding of the text, and how it fit into the genre of tragedy. A critical essay by John R Ford reads, “the play powerfully critiques the racist and misogynist constructions of Venice by making its codes and conventions so visible to the audience” (Kolin, 2001) Othello’s extreme desire for achieving an ultimate state of masculinity directly correlates with the gender politics of the time, a time in which the misogynistic attitudes Ford refers to were rife in popularity, yet still unidentified as problematic and were therefore routinely normalized. In their masses, men synonymous to Othello encouraged and expected each other to actively participate in the discrediting of women to obtain their dominance and in turn, their sense of masculinity, or at least, what they believed to be attributes of masculinity. Whilst they have been greatly unacknowledged for thousands of years, both gender and race have still influenced political structures, including the ‘constructions of Venice’ addressed in Othello and Ford’s critical essay. This directly contrasts with Evans’ earlier observation of Othello being ‘the least political’ play to come from Shakespeare, as it could arguably be one of the most.  Alongside political ideals being a key function in the representation of masculinity, there are many contributing factors as to why Othello as a character could be protective of his masculine ego (the manipulation he endures at the hands of Iago being a namely one), though it is undeniable that as a person of colour with the ability to exist in such a high rank of power, despite living in a racist society, he faces much harsher judgement from other characters. Naturally this would also have significant impact on Othello’s personal difficulties with his insecurities, or when approaching threats to his masculinity. This becomes one of many tragedies described in the text – one that is very much involved in how the fundamentals of tragedy are incorporated into the thematic structure of Othello. “Culture is a masculine region, and everything that lies beyond its purlieus ± untamed nature, the sea, forests, brutes, cannibals, foreigners, belongs to the domain of the wild” (Wells, 2000)  – in this case, ‘the wild’ could be referring to the existing fear of the unknown, but more importantly it could be used to define ‘the Other’ - a term that refers to “the creation of a dichotomy between Europe and its ‘others’ … central to the creation of European culture… part of the process of maintaining power over them” (Loomba, 1998). This coincides with the social context of Othello, particularly with the reference to ‘foreigners’ in the culture Wells speaks of.  The often subliminal struggles that Othello faces as a black male character propel the tale of tragedy depicted within the text – as it is these very struggles that are used against him consistently, driving him to a point of ultimate self-questioning: when he makes the decision to kill Desdemona. Burning “with a desire to avenge the imagined loss of his masculine honour” (Wells, 2000) is quite a bleak outlook, given that many would dispute that this ‘imagined loss’ is not imagined at all. Societal norms, especially in the historical setting of this play, are so very much ingrained into the typical thinking patterns of many of the characters, that it is certainly realistic for the character of Othello to predict the tarnishing of his name or reputation. The vengeance referred to by Wells would not appear to be Othello’s true motive to kill her, as he denies having any knowledge of her death, so it plays no part in the restoration of his honour. It seems to be, however, a result of extreme expectations that Othello has internalised becoming a malformation of fear and unattainably high levels of self-respect.  The main tragedy at the core of the play depicts the impact of unrealistic and limited implications of masculinity being a motive for murder. Othello had been systematically brainwashed into believing his only option was taking drastic measures to prove his worth in terms of his masculinity, threatened with the negative societal impacts the alleged misdemeanours of his wife would cause. Whilst his actions may not be remotely excusable in any way, they serve the purpose of truly representing how toxic masculinity can result in tragedy – and the lengths a man of his tragic circumstances may go through to preserve his ‘masculine honour’.

   Analytical essay

The importance of masculinity in “Othello” is crucial to the genre of tragedy, as the desired trait of authority, achieving a true masculine status, is shared amongst the primary male characters - a persistent battle that eventually results in disastrous consequences. Iago’s personal lack of masculine identity is the cause of the downfall of multiple male characters, as he so clearly uses it as a tool of manipulation. Othello being such a high-status character, linking to his "manhood and honour" - is quite vulnerable in terms of becoming increasingly paranoid and suspicious of Desdemona betraying him. While Othello is being manipulated by Iago, Iago creates insinuations of Desdemona committing adultery in order to pressure Othello into a state of jealousy - before proceeding to essentially warn Othello not to worry about it. Iago’s mockery of the very concept he introduced into this discussion proves just how manipulative he is, and how he is manifesting Othello’s insecurity in his own masculinity proves this - "Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock. The meat it feeds on." (Act 3, Scene 3). Othello’s perceived ‘fragile masculinity’, which has been even further amplified by Iago’s antics, births the creation of what would become Othello’s hamartia in the tragic events to come. Furthermore, Iago creates the lie of Cassio being a violent alcoholic. In order to steal his job, Iago persuades Cassio to partake in heavy drinking, which leads to him being disgraced from his job, and in turn, his reputation. Iago’s discrete manipulation is used once again in the form of reverse psychology “"I had rather have this tongue cut from my mouth than it should do offence to Michael Cassio" (Act 2, Scene 3). This becomes a tragic flaw in Cassio’s story, continuing to destroy not only his masculinity, but also his self-worth and livelihood. With all of this being due to Iago’s jealousy of Cassio’s higher-ranking position, it reinforces the link between the pressures of maintaining masculinity and how highly men rank in both works, but also society. “Iago seems to have too many motives for his evil and thus paradoxically, no motives for it at all." (Evans, 2015). Iago's own drive - to gain a higher rank - pushes the ideology that honour equates to your level of masculinity, something which Shakespeare is almost critiquing through his creation of Iago’s character – a erratic, self-serving and desperate person whom projects his own masculine insecurities for personal gain.  

  Within the play the character of Emilia is a key part of how masculinity is portrayed, with strong opinions and an understanding of the masculine ideology she said some of the most noticeable things about how significant masculinity is within the tragedy. “They are all but stomachs, and we all but food, They eat us hungerly, and when they are full / They belch us” (Act 3, Scene 4). This phrase clearly shows that for the men within this play, women are the source of sexual satisfaction and not much more than that. Not allowing women to have any position of authority or experience a liberty of decision-making - clearly shows how society’s obsession of masculinity at the time built a hierarchy, in terms of gender. Women only really had each other to rely on, and Shakespeare progressively shows Emilia's loyalty to Desdemona only growing stronger. As a woman of practical intelligence, shown to not be led by her emotions, Emilia becomes a key character in relation to masculinity within the tragedy. The juxtaposition between Emilia and her partner Iago creates the potential of her strong-minded personality being one of many causes towards Iago’s pathetic drive to emasculate himself. Although Emilia stands by Iago through the play, in the end she denounced his lies to defend Desdemona’s reputation after her death. With regard’s to Desdemona’s murder, after being severely wounded by her husband and close to death, she remains adamant on her refusal to reveal Othello as her murderer and claims it was suicide – “Nobody. I myself. Farewell. Commend me to my kind lord. Oh, farewell!” (Act 5, Scene 2) This may be because of how much she loved her husband, but it was primarily due to the extreme effects of Othello’s desire to achieve true masculinity – a virtue Desdemona herself intends to assist with as to prove her true loyalty in her final moments.   Othello’s goal to prevent other men from being betrayed by Desdemona, further perpetuates the idea that truly masculine men must adhere to the heroic stereotype and make sacrifices for the sake of other people, even when it concerns the love of their life.

During Shakespeare’s life, there was a strict social construct of gender norms, as well as a hierarchy of sexes. As each gender experienced their own role in society, it was only logical that they'd be shown within Shakespeare’s plays. Throughout Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ the ideology of masculinity is presented to us through the different themes that are addressed, whilst being set in a regressive and male-dominated world. The unachievable goal of obtaining an elite state of masculinity results in many conflicts of character, with horrific atrocities being committed as a result of this - from degradation of race and gender, to the sheer manipulative nature of many characters, there are a stark amount of negative consequences that can be construed as being tragic. Alongside the more obvious defining factors of tragedy within Othello, masculinity - and the constant urge to exude it – is the most consequential catalyst that results in the melancholic epilogue of this play.

 Bibliography

Evans, R. (2015). Othello: a Critical Reader, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Kolin, P. (2001). Othello: Critical Essays., Taylor & Francis Group.

Loomba, A. (2015). Colonialism/postcolonialism (Third ed., New critical idiom).

Wells, R. (2000). Shakespeare on Masculinity, Cambridge University Press.

[rcncgaades]

↪ brief introduction to prudence eaton.

BASICS

full name: prudence camryn eaton.  nickname(s): prue, percy ( vastly preferred ). age: twenty-eight. date of birth: 19 october 1992. zodiac sign: libra. place of birth: blackpool, lancashire, england, united kingdom. ethnicity: white. nationality: british. gender: cis female. sexual orientation: homosexual. romantic orientation: homoromantic. religion: she was raised in a protestant household but her family was never all that tied to actively practicing religion and it was never something percy considered all that important to her day-to-day life. as an adult she’s definitely more agnostic leaning than anything. education: bachelors of science in zoology ( university of derby ), masters in biodiversity, evolution & conservation ( university college london ), dphil in zoology ( university of oxford ). occupation: research zoologist & wildlife photographer.  language(s) spoken: english ( primarily ), french, german, russian, polish ( learned to the point of being able to carry on conversations during research projects across continental europe ). accent: she has a thick and immediately apparent northern english accent. she hasn’t lived in the united states for a significant period of time and it doesn’t take anyone more than a word or two to realize percy isn’t american.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

face claim: amelia eve. hair color: blonde ( she dyes it brown on occasion but for the most part it’s blonde ). eye color: green.  height: 5′3″. weight: 120 lbs. build: slim, athletic. tattoos: an intricate tattoo of a lion on her back ( here ), a half sleeve flower themed tattoo on her left arm ( here ), a small tattoo on the inside of her right bicep of the sun rising/falling over the ocean inspired by a drawing her baby brother gave her when they were children ( here ). piercings: she has traditional ear piercings in her firsts and seconds, she has a nose ring in her left nostril; she had an eyebrow piercing for a long while but took it out when she began guest lecturing and occasionally teaching in earnest– it’s healed up since then. distinguishing characteristics: her accent, how bright and warm she is, her tattoos & piercings, how smart she is ( or so she’s been told by many, many people after speaking to them for all of five minutes ).

PERSONALITY

label: the adventurer. positive traits: adventurous, articulate, brilliant, charismatic, charming, compassionate, considerate, dedicated, earnest, empathetic, forgiving, genuine, hardworking, intuitive, loyal, passionate, sociable, sweet, warm. negative traits: ambitious, competitive, proud, sarcastic, stubborn. assertive, boisterous, excitable, haughty, obsessive, possessive, silly, superstitious. goals/desires: to make a positive impact on her community, to live a better life as an adult than she did as a child, to spend the rest of her life doing things she loves, to fall happily in love. fears: failure, proving to everyone where she grew up that she’s just as useless as they’d always claimed, disappointing her little brother, never seeing either of her brothers again, becoming anything like the worst parts of her parents. hobbies: spending time with her family, smoking ( both weed and tobacco cigarettes ), cooking, baking, gardening when she has the time to do it and the weather’s right for it, hiking, reading, doing research of almost any kind, spending time with her friends, going out– drinking, dancing, anything that lets her be social, watching nature documentaries, listening to podcasts, playing video games, learning new things, knitting, sex.   quirks: she talks with her hands extensively, she self-corrects out loud if she uses british slang for something rather than the american equivalent, she rarely raises her voice for any reason at all, she can rattle off her favorite animals and fun facts about them at any given moment with no preparation whatsoever, she almost always has some pop song or another stuck in her head and can be heard humming it until she remembers the words. likes: animals of all kinds, mystery novels, nature documentaries, david attenborough, expensive liquor, pot brownies, baked goods of almost every kind, horror movies, music, flowers, being around people, sex, flirting, star wars, most marvel movies, rpg based video games, podcasts, true crime documentaries, her little brother, being a chef, learning anything new, talking to people about things they’re passionate about, her adopted parents & family. dislikes: her older brother, her childhood, people who don’t respect her & the hard work that’s gone into getting her to where she is in life, dark chocolate, milk, toxic people, accidentally killing plants, being alone for long periods of time, boredom, people who pick fights just to pick fights, bigots.

FAMILY

father: simon james ‘sj’ garrick ( biological ). mark william eaton ( adopted ). mother: claire ophelia ashby ( biological ). rose katherine eaton née prescott ( adopted ). sibling(s): jack charles garrick ( older ) & thomas rupert eaton ( younger ). michael andrew eaton ( older, adopted ). pet(s): a bernese mountain dog named jason & an australian cattle dog named piper.  financial status: upper middle class.

BIOGRAPHY

( TW: teenage pregnancy, infidelity, drug use, overdose )

By all accounts— by every metric Percy could use to quantify the fact as an adult— Simon Garrick and Claire Ashby had never been ready to be parents. Was anyone ever really ready to be a parent? It was a question Percy had asked herself constantly as she’d gotten older but it had never been her place to judge– her parents hadn’t done her any favors but for at least some time they had tried to be present and helpful and Percy could never fault them for that. Blackpool– a seaside resort town on the English coast– had been home to Simon and Claire as long as they both could remember but they had remained strangers to one another until they met through a mutual friend when they were seventeen years old. The attraction had been immediate– a spark neither of them were prepared to deal with but allowed to catch and ignite the moment they met, an encounter that resulted in an unplanned pregnancy and a great deal of responsibility neither of them wanted staring them both in the face. Simon dropped out of sixth form promptly to begin working in earnest and provide for the family he certainly hadn’t expected to have but was willing to work to support nonetheless; Claire, after informing her parents, remained in school at her parents’ request though their relationship became strained from that moment on.

When Jack was born the couple was delighted— Simon took to being a father rather quickly and seemed to enjoy it while Claire was an absent mother at best in spite of Simon’s many attempts to help her feel more present in their son’s life. It was no secret to anyone at all that Claire was cheating on Simon with what was rumored to be every eligible man in Blackpool and though Simon was heartbroken by the rumors and the confidence he felt in their truthfulness– he never brought the issue up with Claire– choosing instead to look after their son and try to hold their family together as best he could. It was yet another accident that marked Claire’s second pregnancy when Jack was five and though Simon wasn’t even reasonably confident that the child was his he again prepared himself to be a father as best he possibly could. Percy was born on a cool October morning and from the moment she uttered her first cry her father was devoted to her and for the first time her mother dove headfirst into caring for both of her children with a zeal she’d never demonstrated prior.

Though they were on the poorer side they were happy for a great deal of Percy’s initial childhood and seemed to be primed to be that much happier when Claire found out she was pregnant with her third child when Percy was seven. It was yet more of the same in the Garrick-Ashby household until Tommy was around two and Claire eloped with a family friend and informed Simon plainly that she couldn’t handle being stuck in a dead end town with a dead end life and three children she hadn’t wanted in the first place. Simon was devastated but for the first year or two following Claire’s departure he managed to hold both himself and the family together rather well. Percy– already a brilliant girl intellectually and a spot of sunshine in the world as far as her father was concerned– began to help around the house to take some of the worry away from her father even going so far as to look after her baby brother whenever she wasn’t at school. Jack, who was sixteen, more or less stopped coming home and though Percy was aware he was essentially living with a friend’s across town she considered his absence in her life nothing short of abandonment and even as an adult holds a deep resentment towards him for that fact.

Things for the Garrick family began to unravel slowly— Simon began to spend what money he earned from work on cocaine and other drugs– he was still present and still loving but Percy found herself more and more becoming a parent to Tommy rather than a sister. When she was twelve Simon’s habits escalated to a rather expensive heroin addiction that Percy could hardly process, let alone deal with and though she tried her best to raise her brother and herself it was difficult for a child to raise another child. She was nearly thirteen when she came home from school with Tommy in tow to find their father had overdosed in their kitchen— an overdose that would, even after her frantic call to emergency services, eventually lead to his death. Without extended family to look after them and with Jack’s refusal to take on the responsibility of raising siblings he hardly knew both Percy and Tommy became wards of court.

Percy– already with a reputation for being a brilliant student– threw herself into her studies with that much more zeal as she and Tommy adjusted to life with their first foster family; her IQ was tested and she was placed into progressively more advanced courses until she was taking university classes part-time by the time she entered year eleven. Her foster parents supported her fully and there was frequent talk of adoption for both herself and Tommy— who was easily the most important person in her life bar none. She was very nearly eighteen by the time the adoption paperwork was processed and both she and Tommy were officially members of the Eaton family. Though she was reluctant to leave Tommy behind when she’d been his primary caregiver for so many years prior to being placed with their adoptive family it was the encouragement of her adoptive parents Mark and Rose that finally reassured Percy to the point of feeling comfortable applying to universities about as far away from Blackpool as she could get without leaving the country. Higher education was a world of splendor for Percy who had always been so fiercely curious and sharply intelligent– she finished her undergraduate degree six months earlier than most of his graduating class before moving on to study further.

Animals and zoology had been passions of hers from the moment she visited a zoo for the first time on an outing with her parents when she was still very young. She was fascinated by animals of all sorts and wanted to know everything about how to care for them and preserve the environments they called home. It seemed the logical choice for her to follow her chosen course of study as far as she could-- and when she was twenty-six she walked away from Cambridge with a degree in zoology to her name and several research positions made available to her over the whole of continental Europe and beyond if she chose to take them. Traveling across Europe to do the thing she loved more than anything in the world was a gift Percy had never had any inkling of taking advantage of and she eventually began to give guest lectures at universities in major cities near her work sites as well as develop a passion for photography she found delightful to explore when she was researching in far away countries she’d never imagined even seeing as a child. When her research positions drew closer to their deadlines and the projects she’d been working on were finalized she began to search for another place to call home-- eventually settling on Turtle Bay due largely in part to the fact that Tommy had found his way to the area for college and Percy couldn’t think of anything more delightful than doing work she loved with her little brother at her side-- even if the work is a bit more sporadic than she’d like-- she’s always been able to look on the bright side of things and she doesn’t see that changing.

[sweetdreamsjeff]

LAST GOODBYE the lost Jeff Buckley interview

One of the most revealing – and spine-chilling – interviews of Jeff Buckley’s short life was conducted for a fanzine with a small readership. Phil Smith resurrects it here, with thanks to Andrew Truth for the interview and extensive contributions

In 1995, fanzine journalism was giving the established music press a run for its money. Andrew Truth had been producing Plane Truth since 1988 but issue 15 (circulation: 500) was to be his last. It had interviews with the usual unusual selection of bands, some fondly remembered and some largely forgotten.

Lurking at the back of the fanzine was an encounter with Jeff Buckley, son of Tim and on the way to becoming a legend in his own right. Andrew had conducted the interview on 3 September 1994, before Buckley’s show at what was then The Hop & Grape (now part of Manchester Academy). Buckley had only just released Grace and started touring with a full band, which Andrew remembers him enthusing about. The album was yet to slow-burn its way into the hearts of millions. He had been recording a Mark Radcliffe session and playing Reading Festival and likened the part he played at the latter to being “a circus performer”. He was about to leave for the continent for further dates. His father’s reputation preceded him and for that reason, Andrew steered away from questions about family. They got on like a house on fire, Buckley rambling excitedly about his favourite music, playing live, his choice of cover versions, songwriting and immortality.

Buckley introduced himself by impulsively diving onto Andrew’s cafeteria table. He launched unprompted and with a distant air into part of one of his favourite interview topics, a solo LP by Deep Purple’s Jon Lord, as if transmitting thoughts from a superior galaxy and with a mischievous glint in his eyes. He dabbed sandalwood oil behind his ear while mimicking a cockney accent and singing jauntily: “‘Now we’ve made it, I’d like to do my orchestral piece called Gemini Suite about the signs of the zodiac.’ [Lord’s LP is] Great! It’s partly Bonanza, partly every horrible cliché. Like in Warner Brothers cartoons, Bugs Bunny music. It’s the funniest shit alive, all that 70s stuff. I can’t listen to it for long [though]. There’s a difference between indulgence and exploration.”

It had been Buckley’s questing approach in addition to his poetic soul and natural vocal talent that had drawn Andrew towards him at this early stage in his international career. Buckley settled into the interview, describing his nomadic upbringing as “a preparation and a curse, but everyone’s childhood is. It’s made it easier [for me to tour]. You’re the stranger constantly. People will find occasions where they’re readily accepted but other times, equally [the] weight of hostility comes towards you for no reason at all. I still attract the same things from childhood. People come to the shows and either run away screaming or really like it.”

Andrew expressed his contempt for middle-ground mediocrity in music. Buckley was more nuanced in his response, describing its fleeting effect: “Nothing [from the middle ground] comes to mind, that is ’cos I’ve forgotten it already. I’ve forgotten the effect and which art it was that gave me the effect. Either you remember Bob Dylan or you remember Michael Bolton.” Bolton was another Buckley interview hobby horse and appears to have been the bane of his life, and he was arguably a collective figure of hate for all alternative music fans at the time.

At the gig, Andrew described Buckley as bouncing about in a style that induced cries of “Kangaroo!”, his face dramatic and furrowed in anguish, seeming to curse injustices with disbelief. “People project tremendous amounts of personal low self-esteem and high self-esteem upon the stage, in equal parts sometimes. That’s the catharsis of going to a live show. If the performer is right, this is very co-dependent, but people go there to unload. There is this loud person who has come to a few of my gigs and her friends insist that she’s a very nice person but she can’t help but shout at me up on the stage. It’s something I just accept. It’s not like when Murphy’s Law played at The Plaza and four or five fights erupted within the space of 46 minutes. I don’t look out to see whether I’m connecting because it’s not up to me. I look out to see where the music should go. If the crowd is hot because their skin is hot due to the temperature, the set will be different. Or if it’s very cold outside and still, I’ll want to be the fireplace as best I can though sometimes I can’t accomplish it. I’m aware of the energy in the room. Moods and music fly about of their own will and they have no order and you can be either open or closed to them and that’s how the gig will go. Either from the stage or the audience, people open to emotions, movement, stories, feeling and dancing.”

Andrew asked Buckley about the unusually high number of cover versions on his first couple of releases. “It’s usually everything about [the song that attracts me], not just one thing. It’s different in the case of [Van Morrison’s] The Way Young Lovers Do. That came about because my friend Michael, who eventually joined the band, had a dream about me and him singing [it]. On a whim, I got it together and performed it one night. Then it became something else because the tempo I liked, the feel of it; the words and the song got into me. Any time I take a cover and wear it on my sleeve, it’s because it had something to do with my life and still marks a time in my life when I needed that song more than anything ever.”

Andrew expressed some shock at how good a rescue job Buckley had done with his Lilac Wine cover, as he previously disliked the Elkie Brooks version. Buckley said: “The version I’ve heard is Nina Simone’s. I’m not even sure who Elkie Brooks is. I don’t think it’s always a fair decision to have homogeneity for its own sake. I think that human beings contain many people… I do believe that there’s this one soul that lies directly through Edith Piaf and the Sex Pistols, I really know that exists: Joni Mitchell and John Cage; Billie Holiday and Bad Brains. An album in itself is a moment and the music may require for me to make an album that’s totally homogenised but not as a rule. It’s good to be varied because without knowing what sides there are to you, knowing your depths, you pretty much die. You never change and you stay in the same unbeatable format but, sooner or later, you become obsolete.”

Failure to evolve is to stymie yourself, suggested Andrew.

“That’s true. I’m not even that concerned with changing,” Jeff replied. “Just with discovery, because through discovering you may stay on one thing for a long time. Just evolving is important. Deliberately changing all the time is like making off with somebody who must change position in order to get into every [sexual] position and you never get anything started. ‘Would you please keep still, throw away the Kama Sutra and love my ass!’”

Buckley confessed to a couple of songs to which he would feel unable to add anything: “Parchment Farm Blues by Bukka White and Well I Wonder by The Smiths because I always end up doing it exactly like Morrissey does. The impetus for having covers was necessity. In the middle of a show taking people into a world that was completely my world, ‘boom’, right over there we’re into I Know It’s Over from The Queen Is Dead.”

In a segment of the interview which Andrew admits makes him a little queasy now, he picked up on Buckley’s Eternal Life and asked him if he desired immortality. Tim Buckley died young of a heroin overdose and his son was to tragically drown in 1997, only a few years after the Plane Truth interview.

“It is possible and it happens all the time, but just not in the way you want or expect it,” Buckley Jr said. “Beyond death, I know nothing but in human life… some people have a love for people around them that is so powerful and carries so many gifts with it that even when they die, people are still accomplishing things through this person’s love in them, because this person said, ‘I see you’re a writer. I see this postcard here and you’re killing me in this, you’re a great writer.’ And he’s saying, ‘I never thought about writing before. ‘But anyway, you’re a great writer and this is a great piece of work. I don’t even want to touch War And Peace, this is it,’ and, ‘boom’, he gets hit by a car and this person goes on to be a great writer or remembers that belief, against his own hope. It’s very strange, in that way, he’ll become immortal, he’ll always be remembered. He’ll be alive in people’s hearts, inside people.

“Then there’s books, records, movies, images. Here’s immortality in a nutshell: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean. They’re all around you but they don’t exist. That’s immortality in my cynical world. That’s Tinsel Town immortality, which is bullshit. They’ve lost immortality because they’ve lost their appearance as mortals. They’re symbols, gods, tools and puppets for people. There’s a fine line between being a god and a puppet...The Bible is used as a puppet and it’s untouchable and sacred but people use it as a pair of roller-skates or joke toilet paper with a psalm on every sheet. Being mortal and rooted in the earth is a very excruciating joy and not a lot of people can take it. Sometimes they just want to be famous, with no substance underneath, no work, no reason. To be famous and known and loved. They think it’s being loved but it’s just being worshipped and idolised and that’s not even being understood. It’s not even in the ballpark. It’s better to have people around you who understand you and when you come up to people in the street and talk about bagels and talk about the game, to have that connection there, it’s very important to me.

“If I wanted to be famous, I’d assassinate the President. There’s no life in it. There’s nothing wrong with being famous for something you do well or uniquely like if I invented the cure for AIDS, I wouldn’t mind being very famous. It’d be a great achievement. Or if I wrote a song that everyone loved, I wouldn’t mind that. It wouldn’t mean everything. That wouldn’t be the object or I’d be a junkie for fame, ‘I wasn’t famous for my orange juice song. It’s a great song but nobody likes it! I must suck!’ I have to be attuned to that and must have an everlasting relationship with this particular thing that there’s a public and then there’s me. At any given time, I am the public and Evan Dando [Lemonheads] is him and I understand that exchange. It’s a very strange arena and lots of people get thrown to the lions. Lots of people come away victorious for a time but then they’re out of the arena, that’s the end of it.”

Andrew ended the interview by asking about whether Buckley regularly wrote songs based on dreams, as Mojo Pin had been. “Dreaming, both waking and asleep, [is] a reservoir of mine. The thing is, there’s no difference for me between dream states and living. They both carry truth to them. I can read them both. I feel things in my dreams and I feel all the things that human beings’ lives bring them, except sometimes there are purple monsters or a chocolate dog trying to wake you up, but it’s still all very valid to me and I read situations in waking hours just like I read them in my sleeping hours, my sleeping hour, my lack of sleep world.”

[hydecraig20-blog]

Is The Regulation of Attraction Truly A Legislation

Is the Law of Destination a Legislation? To respond to, allow's define the Regulation of Tourist attraction. "I draw in to my life whatever I provide my attention, power as well as focus to, whether favorable or negative," states Michael J. Losier in his book Regulation of Destination, The Science of Bring in More of What You Desired and also Less of What You Do not. " We speak learnedly of the Legislation of Gravitation, but ignore that similarly fantastic indication, The Regulation of Destination in the Idea Globe," William Walker Atkinson created in his 1908 writing Idea Vibration or The Law of Destination in the Thought Globe. Atkinson saw Idea as "a Force - an indication of power - having a magnet-like power of tourist attraction," as well as he declared the reason life refutes us what we want is "we close our eyes to the mighty law that draws to us things we desire or are afraid, that makes or mar our lives." If we fall in love with whatever it is we desire to obtain, if it becomes our ruling interest or need, after that the Regulation of Destination, Atkinson believed, begins. The Law, he guaranteed his visitors, will certainly draw unfavorable occasions to us if we're constantly negative and the important things we prefer if we keep a positive mindset and do not fluctuate from our desired purpose. loans , consisting of talk show host Larry King, have uncertainties about the efficiency of The Law of Favorable Destination due to the fact that, it appears to bypass those born right into dreadful destitution as well as starvation who will, no issue exactly how positive their thoughts, probably pass away without a possibility to ever increase themselves out of the circumstances into which they were born. See what's going on in Darfur. So is The Law of Attraction a Law as genuine as gravity or is it a work in progress - a "behavior" of deep space rather than an uncompromising Regulation? Rupert Sheldrake, biologist with a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge University, has actually written greater than 10 publications including A New Science of Life and The Presence of the Past. Sheldrake says the majority of the laws of nature, along with deep space, are extra habits as opposed to Regulations. He mentions, "There is no need to intend that all the legislations of nature sprang into being fully formed currently of the Big Bang, like a type of planetary Napoleonic code, or that they [these Legislations] exist in a metaphysical realm beyond time and area." Timeless laws make good sense to us. Aren't they why the world functions? This would appear, at first look, to be the instance. Sheldrake assumes differently. He believes the world finds out, just as we do. Nature proceeds, the legislations of nature also development, equally as human laws evolve over time. Sheldrake's years of research study have actually led him in conclusion that the Legislations of the World, supposed, are routines it has found out over time. The more practices are duplicated "the much more likely they end up being, various other things being equal." Habits of past participants of the varieties are sent, he states, "with a kind of non-local resonance, called morphic vibration." " Many kinds of microorganisms have habits," Sheldrake composes, "but only humans have regulations." Through what he calls Morphic vibration "the patterns of task in self-organizing systems [which we are; which the world is] are influenced by comparable patterns in the past, giving each varieties and also each kind of self-organizing system a collective memory," which is after that incorporated into what we people call Laws yet are in fact practices of the species - and habits of the universes. If Sheldrake is right, and I'm not suggesting that he is, his concepts would appear to recommend a various view of the Regulation of Tourist attraction. The Regulation of Tourist attraction, for that reason, might not be an everlasting legislation however a practice proceeding toward Regulation standing. This "Legislation" might likely be a work in progression, not a last fact. What does it suggest when we hint that the Regulation of Tourist attraction may be an operate in development and also not an infinite law instated at the time of, or before, the origin of our universe, solar system, and also planet? The effects, really, are rather exciting. In Self-Creation by George Weinberg, Ph.D., Weinberg shows that "Every time you act you include stamina to the motivating suggestion behind what you have actually done." What this suggests is, "The act retypes the inspiring message in your mind. When not acted upon, the message ends up being weak as if fading from an electronic screen. When it is acted upon it ends up being brighter, louder, reenergized, triggering more of the very same acts." Simply put, "Performing on any type of idea or sensation makes you believe or feel it much more." There is a two stage impact of any type of act, Weinberg says. "The immediate impact is to please, relieve, decrease the inspiring impulse behind it. The supreme effect, nevertheless, is to reinforce it." The paranoid person, for example, that checks and also rechecks the locks feels initial phase relief, "as well as supreme reinforcement of his fear." Exactly how does what Weinberg is claiming connection into our premise regarding "Regulation" of Destination? Incidentally, Self-Creation is not a book that mentions the Law of Tourist attraction. It's regarding just how our acts, our actions, heighten the motivating message behind the acts we carry out that makes them, to a specific degree, practices - for much better or even worse. Reading his book we find that "Any acts of avoidance based on anxiety will set the anxiety," ' Speaking about our issues is the most impressive means a depressive maintains the depression going," Weinberg composes. "Start checking out somebody [you don't trust fund] as well as you'll end up being even much more dubious." A man will certainly never ever forgive you for the wrong he has done you," Weinberg states. " That which I was afraid most has actually bumped into me," Task in the Old Testimony told his buddies. Work criticized himself and his worries for his troubles. Doesn't Job's predicament seem like the gravitation force of his anxieties, the "Legislation of Attraction" at the workplace, making his worries noticeable? Presumably so, doesn't it?

It is a paradox that "Self-protection does not relieve fear, it enhances it." " Love somebody and they seem to end up being a lot more worthy of your love," Weinberg creates. This just how Law of Attraction advocates state the Law works. We bring in the "resonances" of various other minds keyed to our ideas. In Operation Your Mind For a Change, Richard Bandler observes that "Many people motivate themselves by assuming regarding exactly how poor they will feel if they don't do something. A few individuals do the reverse. They use enjoyable sensations as motivators. Those couple of," he writes, "live in a completely different world than the majority of people." " Love a person and also they seem to become much more worthwhile of your love," Weinberg notes. Is it feasible that we, by our thoughts, activities, sensations, state of minds, and also wishes, forever or ill, are showing the Practice of Attraction how to come to be the everlasting Law of Attraction? Might it be most likely that all the terrific points people who follow the "Legislation" of Tourist attraction are doing - images, meditation, hopefulness, affirmations, cutting photos of what they desire from magazines and producing Dream Boards - are revealing the Behavior of Tourist attraction just how, as an operate in progression - to end up being a much better, extra trustworthy Regulation of Tourist attraction? If this is so, after that the Routine of Attraction is Learning from us to end up being a better, a lot more reliable, reputable close friend as well as "Regulation" to our worthwhile desires, yet it's also learning - from our human thought kinds - just how to create pictures on the screen of room colored by our inner concerns and also money concerns in addition to the photos on our every night network news. Our ideas are effective Forces! " Never forget the great concept of autosuggestion," The great therapist Emile Coue' told his patients that saw his clinic in Nancy, France, throughout the 1920's: "Positive outlook always and also in spite of everything, also when occasions do not seem to validate it." The Law of Behavior of Tourist attraction, gaining from us and ever closer to ending up being an everlasting Legislation of Tourist attraction - many thanks to us - will, if we trust it - be a powerful ally. " After that once more he starts to establish right into movement the wonderful Regulation of Destination, where he attracts to him aid, and is, in turn, brought in to others that can assist him.," William Pedestrian Atkinson composes. "This Legislation of Destination is seriously, but is a fantastic real-time functioning principle of Nature, as any person might find out by exploring and observing." Whatever side you take in this conversation, it's constantly an excellent idea to keep in mind the words of the comic George Burns who claimed, "There's something to this assuming favorable business!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTGZQgdr0ag

[peakyblinders-au]

Kassandra Shelby née Kitakis

Submit to “peakyblinders-au” on Tumblr

Tumblr Url & Your Real Name: @peakersblindy - Erika

Character Full Name: Kassandra Shelby née Kitakis

Nicknames/Alias: Kassie

Backstory for nicknames/alias/names: you don’t have to add anything here if its unnecessary

Gender: Female, she/her

Gender Role: housewife & mommy

Sexual Orientation: straight (unless may carleton shows up)

Age: 27

Birthday: November 26, 1892

Deathday: please don’t kill me i need to make sure my son is ok

Birthplace: Sparta, Greece

Ethnicity: Greek-born but raised in England (Greek English??)

Family Members: not related to any of the Shelby’s or their friends by blood but by marriage/child through Tommy

Children: Tommy and I have a son together, little James Rokko Shelby. I met Tommy while he was in France as a tunneller, I was a nurse in the army and had to bandage him up fairly often. We understood each other well and fell in love and had a baby. Jamesy was born in France and is only a few months old when we get to go home

Face shape: oval

Eye colour: green

Hair colour: brown

Hairstyle: Long and wavy like a goddess

Skin tone: light olive skin (that tans easily)

Complexion: like a goddamn porcelain doll (not really but i wish so yeah make her beautiful!)

Body type/Build: thin with proportionate features

Height: 5’5”

Weight: 125 lbs

Breast size: 34b

Facial Hair: no thank you except for eyebrows

Scars/Birthmarks/Prominent Features: septum piercing (does that count?)

Preferred hand: Rightie

Health: able-bodied

Phobias: drowning, James losing his daddy

Addictions: whiskey and cigarettes because of Tommy (but she enjoys them responsibly because mom)

Mental Disorders: Has severe daddy issues from a messed up childhood, only Tommy knows the truth about it and knows how to comfort her and help the nightmares. She just needs to feel loved and taken care of and Tommy does that for her.

Attitude: SPICY very spicy, but also very loving and compassionate and friendly to those she trusts. She’s an actual Spartan so no one messes with her. She has resting bitch face (much like Tommy which is why they understand each other). She would literally take a bullet to the head for her son.

Expressions: lots of angry eyebrows, she bites her lip when she’s nervous or worried, lots of shrugs and “idk” when she is annoyed

Residence: She lives in Tommy’s mansion. She shares a bed with him (on the nights he actually sleeps) She’s the Wifey™

Political Affiliation: She grew up dirt poor so she probably secretly admires commies but she would never join herself. She tends to take Tommy’s side on politics whatever it may be at the moment

Friends: She is close with Arthur, Ada and Finn, but tends to butt heads with John. She’s friends with mostly everyone as she is known as Mrs. Shelby and likes to keep her acquaintances in good standing. Childhood friend of Alfie Solomons. He was her older neighbor growing up in Camden Town and she spent hours playing with him to get away from her dad. She is very good friends with Ekaterina, she took her in because she saw a tiny part of her younger, wilder self in her. And also probably Nikki and Denise’s characters- if that’s okay?

Enemies: She’s a Shelby now so anyone who crosses them is dead to her. She doesn’t like Kimber, Sabini, or anyone else that takes a stab at her husband/baby daddy.

Boss: Tommy is her boss, she is an integral part of the business because she handles ALL of Tommy’s paperwork

Pets: James has a small white dog that follows him everywhere and protects him at all times (You can name him)

Finances: She works for and with the Shelby family so she’s a Rich Bitch™

Marital Status: married Tommy in France by the river after she told him she was preggy

Sex Life: HELL YEAH smut this bitch up!

Lovers: she’s only ever fucked Tommy and isn’t tryna get with anyone else YET

Turn-ons: omg all the dommy!tommy stuff pretty much: choking, spanking, spitting, hair pulling, nipple tugging; when Tommy comes home covered in blood

Turn-offs: Creepy old men, she is very wary of men who remind her of her dad

Dom or Sub: sub but can definitely be dom and take control of the situation when asked (or hinted at)

Fantasies: I’m gonna aim high and say a threesome with Tommy and Michael…

Occupation: she manages all the clerical work for Shelby Company Ltd. so she’s at the office most days, but she’s with her little boy every minute she’s not working

Income: Shelby money

Work Experience: she took care of the wounded men at the Somme

Religion: I’m with tommy on this one: ALL RELIGION IS A FOOLISH ANSWER TO A FOOLISH QUESTION

Criminal Record: A baddie at heart and when no one’s looking but never on paper

Morals: morals because she has to teach her son to be a proper gentleman but also no morals because she deals with the Shelby’s and their enemies

Main Goal: Main goal is just to support Tommy and his terrible decisions, and raise their son and try to steer him away from the family business and send him to school to become a scientist or something

Ambitions: really just wants to be a good wife and mommy, set a good example for her son

Regrets: never going to school for a proper career

Secrets: Her dad was a real piece of shit and molested her throughout her infancy and childhood hence her severe daddy issues- Tommy is the only person alive who knows about it and can soothe her

Best memories: when she told Tommy she was pregnant and Tommy looked at her wide-eyed as a single tear started to fall down his cheek and the biggest smile come over him, he took her face in his hands and put their foreheads together “so you’re havin’ my baby eh?”

Worst memories: the last few months in France were akin to torture because everyday as she sat rubbing her growing belly, she hoped Tommy would come back at the end of the day. She was so afraid of seeing him go into the tunnels and never come back out.

Hobbies: She loves to knit little hats and gloves for Jamesy, she also knits Tommy some hats and he’s been seen wearing them only to be made fun of my his brothers. She also loves to have a few whiskeys with Tommy at the end of a long day ;)

Skills: she was an army nurse so she is a first aid expert and is the one everyone runs to when they’ve gotten hurt in a fight or an accident

Likes: rainy days by the fire, dark colors, flowers, laughing, being a mommy

Dislikes: blatantly rude people, people who overstep their boundaries, know-it-alls

Superstitions: the only thing she believes in is science

Quirks: she’s weird and clumsy but also very knowledgeable about certain things

Guilty Pleasures: talking back, getting people to admit they’re wrong

Strengths: charming, good with money, loyal to a fault, organized, she just loves to make sure her people feel supported  

Weaknesses: JEALOUS, a little vain, argumentative, doesn’t like to give in, can be childish

Languages: Greek, English, and French (learned it to talk with the soldiers)

Accent: from Camden Town so ?? Londony i guess

Speech Impediments: none

Voice: kinda on the low side but gets increasingly higher when she’s excited about something

Reputation: she doesnt really have one she’s just known for being Tommy’s wife/secretary and baby momma

Backstory: She comes from immigrant parents with 4 siblings so she was always kinda scraping what she could for herself and always very independent. She had a tumultuous relationship with both her parents and at the age of 18 she left to join the army as a nurse. She didn’t care what she had to so as long as she got to get away from her awful father. She ended up breaking off all contact with her family. During her time as a nurse she saw it all: broken bones, missing limbs, and strained spirits. That is where she met Thomas Shelby. He had been shot when he was brought in. She had never seen a soldier look so handsome and perfect while lying there bleeding. That was the first of many times she bandaged Tommy up and sent him back out to the battlefield. They became very close and eventually she became pregnant. It was shock all around at first and then instant excitement and love and hope for the future. They were married by the river in front of all their friends and Tommy’s brothers. Their baby boy was born in France but soon after they were able to come home and Tommy brought his new family back to Small Heath.

[devinlucas]

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I bought a Ralph Lauren polo shirt at a rummage sale. The fabric is softer and much nicer than cheaper brand polo shirts. I got two Chanel wool coats on eBay and again, the fabric is really yummy and the cut of the coats nicer than the rest of my coats hanging in my closet. "As marketers, we had to look to diversify the fragrance portfolio . It's hard to ignore that [teen] population," jeans moda 2015 donna amazon Ms. Teen population is the fastest growing demographic segment today, said Doreen Bollhofer, assistant VP product marketing. Not only are their numbers growing, but teens are also heavy spenders and influence fashion trends, even among 40 year olds, she said.. Shirt, $195, and pants, $355, by Thom Browne New York. Shoes, $795, by Ralph Lauren. Fedora adidas goalkeeper jersey by JJ Hat Center.. The novel opens with a eulogy of sorts for the island and the summer lodge in which all the action will take place. It is summer 1988. The Lodge at Osprey Island is weathered, not so grand, "a family place." It is "a couple of hours from New York City by train, then a short ferry ride across the bay." The magnificent osprey can sometimes be seen setting its wings above the water or settling itself into its strangely inelegant nest.. Very, very wealthy. It's definitely got the "New England blue blood" feel to it. Another spot to check out would be Newbury St in Back Bay. Some designers used unusual fabrics for clothes such as rubber and vinyl that hugged the body. Sui and Liza Bruce showed tops and coats made out of a rubber fabric which didn't look too comfortable. Cynthia Rowley chose police uniform cloth for her short pleated skirts which she accessorized with helmets reminiscent of the science fiction movie, "Robocop.".

[donveinot]

To Be or Not to Be Accountable

Photo by Sandra Dempsey on Unsplash Often newly formed cults and/or high demand authoritarian groups which may be operating within the church claim they are trying to “get back to the New Testament church.” These groups have some vague idea that the first century church had an unadulterated uniform pristine faith. The church, they think, was error free under apostolic direction and all early believers held the same belief and behavior on all topics. In response we sometimes ask, “Have you read the Bible?" Nearly all the New Testament was written to correct false teaching, bad behavior, fighting amongst believers and inflated egos. That was the negative emphasis. The positive emphasis of apostolic letters to the various churches was to establish sound doctrine. We would suggest to the new ill-informed “reformers,” who almost universally believe they are now the only true Christians or church, that if they are trying to get back to the New Testament church, they have arrived. We might also mention that Christian history is littered with the carcasses of often abusive groups who saw themselves as “restoring the true Church of the first century.” The fact is, the church is dealing today with many issues which are closely akin to those that troubled the first century church, if not indeed the very same issues. Those early churches were made up of human beings still encumbered with their old nature, and in some cases their pre-Christian pagan practices. As a result, they were not at all pristine and perfectly united in spirit and doctrine – and neither are we. Sad, but true. What makes the church, the Body of Christ, the church? It is not uniformity of belief in all areas but is made up solely of imperfect individuals who have called on the Name of the Lord for salvation and have been “made one” by the Spirit. The millions have become ONE, but much like marriage, their “oneness” does not guarantee agreement on all issues. The one thing that would bring uniformity in all issues would be for all Christians everywhere to stop this nonsense and simply agree with US, or rather ME – since I don’t always agree with my spouse. But we don’t really see that happening. We can all thank God for that. In Realville, while we are yet in our fallen state, true believers must, yes, affirm the essentials of the faith and have unity in the Spirit, in spite of disagreements on other important but secondary areas of the faith. For those who wonder what the essentials might be, this will be helpful: God – monotheistic (one true God), trinitarian (within the nature of the one true God exist three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit). He created all things, is separate from creation but interacts with His creation. Man – is part of creation and was created in the image of God. As Got Questions? explains, “It is a likeness mentally, morally, and socially.” Sin – Eve was deceived into disobeying God and Adam chose to follow Eve’s lead. The disobedience (sin) caused a separation (death) between man and God. Since then, humans are born separated from God with a predisposition to sin (sin nature) and we also choose to sin. Salvation – When Adam and Eve sinned, God provided temporary payment for sin in the form of animal sacrifice. This continued until the Son, Jesus, second person of the Trinity, incarnated (took on humanity), lived a perfect life in our place and died a death we deserved, to pay the penalty for sin that we owed, providing peace with God by calling on the Name of the Son for salvation. Resurrection – The resurrection of the Savior was physical and demonstrated death itself was conquered. This pointed to the promised redemption of the whole person spirit and body. When Christians breathe their last, their spirit separates from their body and goes to be with God. At the resurrection, their physical body is raised, and their spirit is reunited with their body. The inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture – the text of the 66 books of the Bible is God-breathed or inspired, and in the original writings are error free. Once we get beyond these essentials of the faith we may, and often do, have disagreements on important but secondary issues of the faith. These disagreements often involve something we might call the “mechanics of the faith.” They deal with questions like “How does God do stuff?” How did God create the heavens and the earth from nothing? (we have no idea). When did God create the heavens and the earth? (Many divide into armed encampments over this one). How could Jesus be fully human and fully divine and not some mixture of the two? Then there are the mechanics of the faith regarding living and practicing the faith. Which day should we gather to worship? Even Paul had to address this one (Romans 14 and Colossians 2). Is baptism sprinkling, pouring, full immersion or something else? A brief article on early baptism, “How was baptism practiced in the early Church?” describes many of the elements practiced then, including fasting for a day or two in advance, anointing with oil, immersion or pouring. Obviously, each position had their preferred method. There is an odd position which has (we say thankfully) passed from the scene and is no longer a point of current contention in the church: The Apostolic Tradition explains how those to be baptized must “remove their clothing,” and go into the water “naked.” There are many issues in various categories that are still fought over – we mean disagreed on – regularly. One of the biggies is the question of Pentecostal/charismatic gifts. Have they continued since the first century (continuationism) or did they cease in the first century (cessationism)? Very few have yet asked us what the true positions on secondary issues should be, and, as a mission that focusses on cults and non-Christian religions, MCOI does not take any official positions on most of these secondary issues although it is fair to speculate, we’d say IXNAY on naked baptism ceremonies. We feel that most Christians would agree that a vast majority of people look far better – and are far less distracting – with clothes on. We are all for “leaving behind our dirty sin-stained garments” in a spiritual sense, however. The fact that we do not take official positions on many of those issues, does not mean we do not have personal views which comport with our understanding of the Bible and our respective church affiliations, but it does mean we major on the essentials and try not to get embroiled in debates on secondary issues, which debates will likely survive until the LORD sets us all straight at the time of our redemption. The Bible does address the issue of “sign gifts” directly. In First Corinthians, the Apostle Paul spent a great deal of time (3 chapters) on the question of sign gifts in the church the believer’s behavior regarding these gifts to correct wrong conduct.  Some of those who had more visible gifts were acting arrogantly against those who did not. Consequently, chaos, pandemonium and divisiveness ensued. Paul’s first correction was to make clear that these gifts were not their personal toys but: To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good (1 Corinthians 12:7) The gifts were for the benefit of the entire Body. Some would have more visible sign gifts others would not. All were to benefit and be blessed regardless of the distribution and all were to be act biblically, serving one another and being responsible in their behavior and attitudes. Unfortunately, there are some in the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement today which are unaware of – or perhaps disregarding – Paul’s instruction in this area. In spite of what Paul plainly wrote, chaos and pandemonium rule the day in some – though by no means all – Pentecostal/Charismatic circles today. Where Paul did not allow tongues in the church unless there was an interpreter of such utterances available, some churches today are a veritable cacophony of chaos. In other gatherings – particularly Word Faith and NAR – people are being routinely “bowled over with the Spirit” and being so-called “drunk in the spirit,” along with other unruly behavior. Paul’s word to the Corinthians on similar behavior was given both to bring godly order to the fellowship and protect the reputation of the faith to the outside world: If, therefore, the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your minds? (1 Corinthians 14:23) He ends this section with sobering words: But all things should be done decently and in order. (1 Corinthians 14:40) We also have a growing movement of false prophets which are operating with impunity within Pentecostalism. Sadly, one of their chief apologists seems to be Dr. Michael Brown. We have written on this issue with “False Prophets Prophesying Falsely,” in early January and “Michael Brown and the False Prophets” in late January. After Dr. Brown responded to that blog, we wrote, “Michael Brown: Fraternity Over Orthodoxy?” in March. The common thread through all three articles is simply this: We go to Scripture and recite the biblical definitions of false prophets. False prophets and false prophecies are also something Jesus warned his people to be on the lookout for. Biblically, a false prophet may even be one who gives true prophecies but use these “successes” to lead others to accept false views of God. Or alternatively, if a self-appointed prophet were to give even one false prophesy, even one teensy little prophecy that did not come to pass – they were to be recognized as false prophets and were not to be listened to. Period. The biblical guidelines are simple, easy to understand and unequivocal. The legal penalty for being a false prophet in the theocracy of the Hebrew nation was the same as sexual sin – capital punishment. The issue is so serious to God the Nation of Israel were to execute the offenders. Michael Brown and the false prophets have simply created extra biblical criteria which allows them to prophecy falsely with little or no repercussions at all. Recent times have proved to be a dark and embarrassing time for these “prophets” when a veritable blizzard of false prophecies were unleashed on the public, which stubbornly refused to happen as predicted, bringing great discredit to the church of Jesus Christ from enemies of the faith, and likely doing great harm to the faith of Christians that had believed in them. Word of these “prophecies,” when given, had been spread far and wide, so their abject failure was apparent to millions and these “prophets” were inescapably recognized for the false prophets they were. To make matters worse, even when all hope of the prophecies’ realization was past, these false prophets, men, and women, simply clung on – quite publicly – to the false hope that God would shortly do as they said. They openly and rather defiantly issued proclamations of “soon and very soon” fulfillment of said prophecies, rather than just admitting they had been disastrously wrong. After this massive public exposure of so many of these false prophets, and humiliating reality began to set in, a new tact has been taken by these false prophets. On April 29, 2021, the “Prophetic Standards Statement” was released. It seems the biblical standards are far too narrow and confining and could result in their being removed from pulpits and ministries, as we believe they should have been. It was necessary to implement a new criterion which allowed for the continued operation of false prophets while projecting at least the illusion of accountability for their false proclamations. Perhaps the two most illuminating paragraphs are: On the other hand, if a prophetic word is delivered containing specific details and dates in which the stated prophetic word will come to pass and that prophecy contains no conditions to be met in order to be fulfilled, and that word does not come to pass as prophesied, then the one who delivered the word must be willing to take full responsibility, demonstrating genuine contrition before God and people. Any statement of apology and/or explanation/clarification should be delivered to the audience to whom the erroneous word was given. For example, if it was given to an individual, the apology (and/or explanation/clarification) should be delivered to the individual. If the word was delivered publicly, then a public apology (and/or explanation/clarification) should be presented. This is not meant to be a punishment but rather a mature act of love to protect the honor of the Lord, the integrity of prophetic ministry, and the faith of those to whom the word was given. Not meant to be a “punishment? In the Hebrew Scriptures false prophets were to be executed. Execution seems like an obvious “punishment” of some kind to us. Under the newly revealed criteria, false prophets need to apologize, as well as giving an “explanation” and/or “clarification,” which means they can offer excuses for their actions. By what authority can these new prophets elevate their self-authenticating criteria above the clear word of God? It is clear the only authority they recognize is their own. This is not a matter of cessationism vs. continuationism. This is a matter of fidelity to the word of God concerning something on which He has been abundantly clear. We don’t say these false prophets are beyond the grace of God, or beyond His ultimate forgiveness, but to issue an “apology” without even coming to a real and deep understanding of the terrible seriousness to God of making false prophecies, is a very serious sin. How can they be trusted at this point? They do not seem to even know what they did wrong and should be allowed to go right back to “false prophecy business as usual.” It is a direct slap in God’s face. Obviously, false prophets are not qualified for leadership in the church. How could they lead others to understand the word, when they lack such understanding themselves, completely disregarding His clear warnings about false prophets and false prophecies. The Body of Christ, “to protect the honor of the Lord, the integrity of prophetic ministry, and the faith of those to whom the word was given” should rise up as one and call for the removal of any and all of the false prophets from leadership positions.Ω

© 2021, Midwest Christian Outreach, Inc All rights reserved. Excerpts and links may be used if full and clear credit is given with specific direction to the original content. Read the full article

[thatwasthenightthingschanged]

[translated] [page 1]

“When this album comes out, gossip blogs will scour the lyrics for the men they can attribute to each song, as if the inspiration for music is as simple and basic as a paternity test. There will be slideshows of photos backing up each incorrect theory, because it's 2017 and if you didn't see a picture of it, it couldn't have happened right?”

This text is written like an instruction in the booklet of the most successful album of the year (headline: “Here's something I've learned about people.“); it sold more than 1.2 million copies in the first week solely regarding the USA. It was written by the singer herself, Taylor Swift. The piece of art is titled “reputation” since that’s what it’s about, the reputation of someone being in the public eye. And the 28-year-old singer is the biggest superstar to exist at the moment, so she’s definitely someone being in the public eye. It’s impossible to escape form her music nowadays. And all that although she doesn’t do interviews at the moment and only a few pictures are released by her management.

You don’t become a superstar with your music, but with photos. Elvis made it through movies, the Beatles through a television transmission, Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna and following artists through music videos. Taylor Swift, born 1989 in Reading, Pennsylvania and raised in a small town in Wyoming as the daughter of a stock broker and a marketing employee, shows herself - as she’s a digital native - nearly solely through her social media pages with the advantage that she can determine what is written and said about her. She has - as I’m writing this - 74 million fans on facebook, 85,7 million fans on twitter and 104,6 million fans on instagram - no journal, no magazine, no tv show has a bigger influence than she does. Taylor Swift doesn’t need the traditional media anymore, she’s the media herself, shows herself on instagram with a clever mix of glamour and intimacy, shows herself posing for magazines, gives insight into her songs and her music videos as well as shows herself with her cats in - as it seems - private surroundings. And if you’re after all more conservative, you can buy not one but two magazines. Although there aren’t be any interviews or reports in there, you will find many photos, e.g. pictures taken by the fashion photographers Mert & Marcus, self-drawn paintings, handwritten poems and lyrics. All in all it’s like an instagram account to flip through.

Therefore, Taylor Swift is in control of everything. But it wasn’t always like this. When she was 19, she won the category “Best Female Video” with her music video for “You Belong With Me” at the MTV Video Music Awards. And during her acceptance speech, rapper Kanye West interrupted her by saying “I’m really happy for you Taylor and imma let you finish”, to loudly proclaim that the also nominated R&B singer Beyonce had produced one of the best videos of all time with her music video for “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)”. After that, he gave the girl in the silvery sparkly dress her microphone back and left the stage.

It’s a typical example of a powerful man humiliating a young woman. Happens even more lately. But West explained afterwards that the sole purpose of his interruption was that he found it to be unfair that black artists are always snobbed of their awards at shows like this. Of course he’s not wrong, but aside the fact that Beyonce eventually won the biggest award of the evening “Video Of The Year”, he did not have to intimidate a 19-year-old singer with a showcase of his power to prove his point, he could’ve also interrupted Eminem, who won the award in the category “Best HipHop Video” against Jay-Z and Kanye himself.

Of course what he did was nothing else than male power abuse to show superiority and it actually worked really well. All of a sudden, West was the nice knight in white armor and Swift like a stupid and not cool piece of bread with songs taken from a girl’s diary about first-world-problems representing the suppression of Afro-Americans in the US who are dealing with this issue for centuries now and she even wins an award for it. Hashtag #WhiteSupremacy.

Since that, talking about Taylor Swift meant also talking about feminism and racism. The young singer needed to accept her role as the international figurehead and most hated person. But she quickly learned and as the years passed by, there was always a subtle discussion of her songs and how she presented herself. On her next album, with the pragmatic title “Speak Now” which sold twice as many copies as her previous album “Fearless”, she addressed the situation with West (”It’s okay, life is a tough crowd / 32 and still growing up now / who you are is not what you did / you’re still an innocent”) and in her music video for the song “Mean”, she freed herself of the ties binding her to a train rail and switched from a country barn to Broadway.

On her album “Red”, which was released in 2012, she documents the transition from an innocent girl to a confident woman and to an autonomous artist, but the media as well as the user of social media did not want to grant her that role and assigned every song to a celebrity boyfriend and asked themselves what’s wrong with her as she cannot keep a man. Were the albums of Bob Dylan, John Lennon or even Ryan Adams also solely reduced to the aspect of privacy? No. But it was tried with Jony Mitchell, Fiona Apple or Carly Simon. The issue should be obvious (small hint: it has something to do with the gender of the artist).

[curtolson]

Liberty University needs full leadership change, not just Jerry Falwell Jr.

About the author: Curt W. Olson is a 1991 graduate of Liberty University, with a degree in communications that launched me into journalism. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at LU and the friendships I developed there remain people with whom I have close contact. I do not live in Lynchburg, VA and have no “inside information.” As a journalist, I have been a reporter and served as Religion Editor, copy editor, Editorial Page Editor, and investigative reporter. I spent about 20 years in journalism. More recently, I have been teaching English at a Christian school in Upstate New York. I am married and have two children.

An Open Letter to the Liberty University family by Curt W. Olson of the LU Class of 1991,

Everyone in the Liberty University family should desire a humble leader in Jerry Falwell Jr. after a certain period of time for his “indefinite leave of absence” that was announced August 7. If he continues being the President and Chancellor, he needs our prayers and Galatians 6:1-5 provides the biblical footprint for restoring someone.

Why wasn't restoring Falwell Jr. identified in the news releases from LU? It’s a glaring omission. The AP reported needing “time with family,” not having someone who will work with him to restore him to being a humble leader and past the issues that  have surfaced over the past decade. The short statements from the Trustees on August 7 leave far more questions than answers and that is unfortunate. That’s a common chorus with this cast. A lack of clarity and transparency will do that.

It is a separate issue whether Jerry Falwell Jr. could emerge as a different leader and those on campus he has made enemies of would suddenly call him “a new man.” Has Falwell Jr. done way too much damage? This is the question that looms over LU as the new academic year begins. 

For many in the LU family, this question has already been asked and answered: There’s too much water that has gone under the proverbial bridge. After all, we now have signs of failure. David French reported in a column on Aug. 9 something is beginning to impact LU’s freshmen applications and transfer students. If you can’t see the obvious correlation, you don’t want to to see it.

Poor judgment

Two events occurred the past three months that created problems. In June, Falwell Jr. said he would wear a face mask only if it looked like the “blackface” that caused problems for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. Falwell Jr.’s  effort to mock the governor drove a couple football players to transfer from LU and got him in hot water with African-American LU alumni. What did Falwell Jr. think was going to happen? Then on August 3, an Instagram photo emerged, which was deleted, of Jerry Jr. pictured with a female who was not his wife and his pants were unzipped. The “costume party” was a parody of the Trailer Park Boys. Falwell Jr. explained the beverage in his hand was not alcohol. That did not help Falwell  when he was on a Lynchburg radio show later in the week explaining what happened and sounding as if he was drunk during the interview. This led to the “indefinite leave of absence.” The deleted Instagram photo and the “blackface” face mask displayed a shocking level of poor judgment for a man leading any Christian ministry, let alone the largest Christian university in the world.

Pleasant image

As an alum from the Class of 1991, I understand the emotions we have for our alma mater. “Liberty is training Young Champions for Christ” and “if it is Christian it should be better” are two of the common statements we heard from LU’s founder, Jerry Falwell.  We have this pleasant image of our time there, our friendships we developed, our spiritual growth, and we want a Christian college faithful to biblical teaching and a top-level NCAA sports program. The idea of controversy, chaos, confusion, and lack of certainty is not what we envision for LU.

Harsh reality

It is time, however, to face some harsh facts. Jerry Falwell Jr.’s current leadership is toxic,  with a culture of fear and intimidation that has been felt by multiple faculty members, staff, and students. That just begins the list of grievances that have arisen dating back to around 2012. Aside from the bad judgment from the June and August incidents, we also have the following issues that could serve as the catalyst for Jerry Falwell Jr.’s dismissal as President and Chancellor. 

They include:

Self-dealing on some real estate transactions;

Self-dealing on some of the construction projects to benefit friends;

Harming the reputation of Liberty University through real estate ventures and other incidents;

Displaying a lack of justice and mercy with many faculty and editors of The Liberty Champion; 

Having a faculty member who had a muddied position on homosexuality; and 

Neglecting his role in setting the spiritual direction of the campus. 

While these would be the key indictments to compel LU Trustees to terminate Falwell Jr., in addition to the outrageous poor judgment that harms the reputation of Liberty University, these may not be a complete list of the issues. These are the known issues through prominent reporting by various entities.

‘Fake news’

I want to address the reporting by POLITICO’s Brandon Ambrosino, Reuters, a column by Will Young in the Washington Post, and others because we live at a time of the common refrain of “fake news.” It puts folks in the position of screaming “fake news,” that while perhaps the information is true, people refuse to accept anything regarded as “bad” to their tribe. Every sentence of reporting by the sources above that resembles the truth opens up a series of brand new questions for Jerry Falwell Jr., and in some cases, the LU Board of Trustees. Perhaps both of those scenarios are long overdue, and the LU family should be demanding answers to those new questions.

Additionally, Ambrosino has admitted to being a homosexual and was one at LU. His sex life has no bearing on his ability to report truth. Anyone who uses that as an excuse to distrust the information he reports has a “see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil” mindset when there’s a five-alarm fire unfolding at Liberty University. 

There are many good things happening at LU, but they are happening in spite of Jerry Jr., not because of him. 

Real estate deals 

Reuters reported in August 2019 on a real estate transaction with a gym owner in Lynchburg, VA

It reported: “In 2016, Falwell signed a real estate deal transferring the sports facility, complete with tennis courts and a fitness center owned by Liberty, to Crosswhite. Under the terms, Crosswhite wasn’t required to put any of his own money down toward the purchase price, a confidential sales contract obtained by Reuters shows.

“Liberty committed nearly $650,000 up front to lease back tennis courts from Crosswhite at the site for nine years. The school also offered Crosswhite financing, at a low 3% interest rate, to cover the rest of the $1.2 million transaction, the contract shows.” 

A real mess

Less than two weeks later, Ambrosino wrote a damaging piece in POLITICO that detailed the self-dealing, building contracts going to friends, his autocratic leadership of fear and intimidation, and activities that would only harm the reputation of LU. Those activities include:  Donald Trump attorney Michael Cohen dealing with racy personal photos, a Falwell appearance at a Miami nightclub, with photos he wanted to keep from becoming public, and the notorious Miami South Beach hostel with a seedy reputation that was owned by Trey Falwell, Jerry Jr.’s son. There are numerous things to be outraged by in Ambrosino’s lengthy report (the full article being the second comment in this FB post). When I read it for the first time a year ago some things surprised and shocked, and other things just confirmed things that I had been hearing. I know people--they will not be named--who work or had worked at LU in various capacities. They grew increasingly alarmed by Jerry Jr.’s autocratic leadership style, which I challenge anyone to make the case is condoned in Scripture. I had read Ambrosino’s previous report on the Miami area hostel, so nothing would shock me about things that Jerry Falwell Jr. did. As an alum, I was more hurt about what his actions were doing to the reputation of LU. Jerry settled a lawsuit in Miami related to that property.

The revelation that bothered me the most from Ambrosino’s September 2019 POLITICO report was the apparent lack of any, or at least sufficient, oversight of major construction on the campus. What follows is an excerpt of Ambtrosino’s reporting:

 “At the outset, some in Falwell’s inner circle were not so confident in the arrangement with (Robert) Moon. Before his CMA Inc. (Construction Management Associates Inc.) became Liberty’s go-to contractor, the school bid out its construction work through an office on campus. (‘Free enterprise tends to do pretty well,’ one high-ranking university official said.) The prospect of changing that—giving CMA control over campus construction and its associated costs—rankled some senior university officials.

“Early on in the CMA partnership, before CMA became the university’s single-largest contractor, Charles Spence, the school’s then-vice president of planning and construction, expressed unease about the high costs Moon was quoting for certain school projects. ‘Jerry I am very concerned about cost control on all the projects,’ he wrote to Falwell in a November 2014 email. ‘[Over the last couple of weeks we have had a lot of meetings and conversations on cost and cost overruns. We are just seeing the information begin to trickle in and there really don’t seem to be good answers just a response that the cost we are seeing are fair, and being handled appropriately.’ ‘I hope that I am over reacting,’ Spence continued, ‘but I assure you I am concerned.’

“ ‘I am fine with going back to bidding every project out if CMA can’t run with the big dogs!’ Falwell replied. ‘Let’s hold their feet to the fire!’

“In each of the two years that followed, Liberty paid CMA more than $62 million, part of at least $138 million in contracts from Liberty since the company was formed, according to publicly available tax documents.

“Senior Liberty officials might whisper about the propriety of these business deals, but they told me that Falwell’s decisions on campus are rarely ever challenged by the school’s board of trustees. ‘There’s no accountability,’ a former high-ranking university officer said. ‘Jerry’s got pretty free reign to wheel and deal professionally and personally. The board will approve an annual budget, but beyond that … he doesn’t go to the board to get approval. … It simply doesn’t happen.’ “

Trustees a problem too

You read that right. Jerry Falwell Jr. not only has a family friend as the assigned contractor of capital projects, but few, if any, of them have gone to the LU Board of Trustees for review. The Trustees pass an annual budget and that’s about it. These revelations open up a litany of questions for both Jerry Falwell Jr. and the Trustees on their financial stewardship of Liberty University. 

It also creates the issue of whether LU’s leadership needs wholesale change--at President/Chancellor and Board of Trustees. Consider the following for the Trustees: Isn’t it the responsibility of the Board of Trustees to make sure the President is doing the right thing for and by the university?  If Trustees were doing their job, this should never have come this far.  Since they have now done something, why did they do it now? Are they too embarrassed by repeated Falwell Jr. revelations? What took them so long to come to their collective senses?

In November 2019, Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni chastised LU Trustees in Forbes.  He wrote the following: “And Liberty University has serious problems that could benefit from more board oversight. Although Liberty has increased its endowment exponentially under Falwell and has built a massive online degree program, this expansion has come at a cost: According to HowCollegesSpendMoney.com, Liberty spends 86 cents on administration for every dollar it spends on instruction, roughly three times as much as its self-selected peer institutions. Has the board demanded a thorough audit and review?”

Issues stemming from the Trustees are simply added to the overall picture of Liberty University’s leadership. If you can’t see that something’s amiss, you have to be blind.

‘Culture of fear’

Meanwhile in July 2019, former Liberty Champion editor Will Young wrote a lengthy column in the Washington Post titled, “Inside Liberty University’s ‘culture of fear.’ ” Young’s column outlined numerous stories that gained scrutiny upon Jerry Jr.’s endorsement of Donald Trump in 2016.  He explained multiple events over a couple of years where the editors were constantly second-guessed and looking over their shoulder of what would offend Falwell’s political sensitivities. After Champion coverage of the Red Letter Christians event in Lynchburg, the student-led, directed, and written newspaper since 1983 had two editors fired from their positions in a complete reorganization of The Liberty Champion. It was a shocking turn of events.

This has always been a tension with The Liberty Champion. In my three years writing or serving in an editorial capacity, two years as the News Editor in 1989-90 and 1990-91, invariably, the faculty adviser, and for us it was Ann Wharton, would use a teachable moment to talk about boundaries that can’t be crossed. But we never, ever had a pattern of being second guessed or looking over our shoulder that Young outlined in his column.

The culture of fear that has developed under Falwell Jr.’s leadership “is a thing” as kids like to say. At some point, folks must draw the conclusion where there’s smoke there’s fire. 

Spiritual issues

Lastly, we have a couple of spiritual issues. Karen Swallow Prior was a long-time English professor at Liberty University before recently joining Southeastern Baptist Seminary. I read an interview Prior had with Julie Roys. Prior talks about her affirmation of the biblical definition of marriage. However, she has had some connections with a couple of conferences, including Revoice, that could lead one to draw a different conclusion. The Revoice conference has advocated that same-sex attraction is alright as long as the folks involved remain celibate. All one can do is take Prior at her word, even though that leads to some muddy water. If LU allowed her to remain as a professor for numerous years, one can’t help but wonder how many other professors snuck in under poor vetting that do not hold biblical views on any number of issues. Folks would say the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy. The slippery slopes in American culture we were told to not be concerned about, are now issues we are concerned about.

Then, one pairs that with Falwell Jr.’s own tweet where he underscored that his responsibility is not the spiritual direction of the campus. Yet, if one goes to the Leadership page at liberty.edu there are Doctrinal and Mission/Purpose statements that have clear spiritual focus, and a photo of Jerry Falwell Jr. is there with those tabbed links on the left side of the page. So which is it? Does he have any responsibility for spiritual direction of the university, or does he not have that responsibility?

Dr. John Maxwell has said, “Everything rises and falls on leadership.” With certain aspects of enrollment trending downward, it would appear that some parents are voting with their wallets. How much longer are Trustees willing to go with Falwell Jr.? There’s much at stake in the answer to that question. It’s a question that demands answers and full transparency with the entire Liberty University family.

The best-case scenario is Jerry Falwell Jr. resigns on his own and most, if not all, of the Trustees follow him. It would be the right thing to do. And for heaven’s sake, bring Mark DeMoss back.

[aion-rsa]

The Golden Compass Movie: What Went Wrong?

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Now that His Dark Materials is a TV show, we look back at what went wrong with the Golden Compass movie.

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With His Dark Materials currently making waves on HBO, we're taking the time to look back at what went wrong the last time someone tried to adapt Philip Pullman's beloved trilogy of fantasy novels to the screen in the 2007 flop The Golden Compass. 

Pullman's His Dark Materials was much praised for its rich, imaginative fantasy world, nuanced and ambiguous characters, and powerful anti-religious themes. Critically acclaimed, award-laden bestsellers with a young heroine in the form of Lyra Bellacqua, the trilogy seemed an obvious choice to follow Harry Potter and Lord of The Rings and become a blockbuster movie series.   New Line bought the rights after bringing Lord of The Rings to the screen, hoping for a similar success. The two stories are very different high fantasies, however, and The Golden Compass contains concepts less familiar to audiences than wizards, monsters, and swordplay. His Dark Materials was also occasionally categorized in shops as a children's book, unlike Lord of The Rings.

Further reading: His Dark Materials Season 2 Already Greenlit

This is an important factor when it comes to the adaptation. Say something is for children and for a lot of people you automatically impose limitations on what it can be. Consider how many times "for kids" is used as a derogatory term, even if that means you have to ignore the sheer abundance of brilliant stories that match that description.

It's self-perpetuating in many ways. So long as products for children have an air of complacency and simplicity their superiors will be tarred with the same brush, lending children's films a reputation that means some creators feel they don't have to try so hard.

The Golden Compass is one of those movies that taints other children's films by virtue of being compromised by an adult's idea of what children can cope with. With its unique aspects neutered, it becomes an anemic dirge at times, with exposition as subtle as a Michael Bay in the face. One character literally flies in just to explain a plot point before immediately leaving again.

further reading: His Dark Materials' Serafina Pekkala & The Witches Explained

Derek Jacobi almost salvages lines such as: "If we can save our children from the corrupting influence of Dust…" but ultimately can't do anything to stop it sounding like a line from Brass Eye. Christopher Lee is brought in to say a new line by New Line, whose own dust-strewn fingers are all over the final edit and some of the casting. Ian McKellen was also brought on board to have a fight with Lovejoy, but like the rest of the film it was a bloodless affair.   With Rogue One writer Chris Weitz both writing and directing, you'd be forgiven for thinking he should take the bulk of the blame, especially when he chose not to use a draft by renowned playwright (and Star Wars prequels dialogue polisher, yes, I know) Tom Stoppard. Weitz, having co-wrote and directed About a Boy, seemed a sensible choice after producing a seemingly light film punctuated by moments of melancholy and darkness, and got the job after making an unsolicited pitch.

further reading: His Dark Materials' Major Differences From The Golden Compass Book

Daniel Craig was cast well, as were Nicole Kidman and Sam Elliott. The child actors are occasionally guilty of being child actors, though it feels harsh to criticize them at all when their dialogue has the ring of a production enclave asking: "But are we sure people will get that Lyra's feisty and intelligent?"

The end result is dialogue telling us that Lyra is special in a film that doesn't always remember to show us the same thing. This is partly down to a studio imposed running time of two hours, cutting around an hour from Weitz' first draft. This came despite Harry Potter being successful with lengthier running times. You'd have thought that the studio who made Lord of The Rings would have more faith. But faith was another issue altogether...

read more: Who is Mrs. Coulter?

Weitz trod lightly around the religious aspects of Pullman's books, but still found himself having to remove even mentions of "sin" from the script, leaving an important part of the story flailing amid woolly and ridiculous euphemisms. He left the project—replaced temporarily by Anand Tucker (Red Riding, Indian Summer), who himself then left over creative differences—before Weitz returned to finish the movie he'd started.

According to Vulture, the faults of the film do not lie with Weitz. He apparently turned in a more faithful draft than Stoppard, whose script was apparently less about Lyra and more about meetings (according to a Philip Pullman interview with The Atlantic, which is well worth a read).

further reading: His Dark Materials TV Series Creator Discusses Religion in the Adaptation

While only a hint of the religious subtext was left in that script, much of what made Weitz’ first draft work was cut to bring down that running time. Actor Tom Courtenay confirmed that his role was drastically reduced in post-production, with the studio editing the full-length version down, removing its original ending and staging reshoots to exposit information now lost.   Ultimately, there were problems as a result of religious pressure and the studio being unwilling to risk wrath (wrath that would probably have descended on them at any rate), but this was far from unsalvageable. What really killed the film off it seems was the drive to get it under two hours, and the ensuing studio-imposed reworking of the movie. In short, it feels more like a bullet point list of things half remembered from the book than an actual film.

And we come back full circle a little here. The change in running time came because of a limited notion of what a children's movie can be, and what a younger audience can cope with. It's even more obvious in hindsight with the raft of young adult adaptations that the audience could have coped with a three-hour long version of The Golden Compass with its bleak finale, had New Line opted to go that way.

further reading: How Prisoner of Azkaban Changed Young Adult Cinema

It's hard to imagine a film in a New Line trilogy ending at a point that leaves the next film with a flapping tendril of leftover story, I know, but that's what happened in 2007: the finale of The Golden Compass was to be left over for the next film in the series, based on the book The Subtle Knife. Obviously, this film never came to pass, and we have two books unfilmed. Is this a bad thing? I'd argue that it is not.

Harry Potter had to leave out a lot of details from the books over its eight films, but His Dark Materials are books that are trying to do different things, richer still in just three novels, and so there's an inevitable loss of nuance even in a good film adaptation. 

read more: What Year is His Dark Materials Set?

There's no need to adapt every single remotely popular story, as if things don't exist until they're moving pictures on a screen, so if there's going to be an exception, it's good that it's something that rewards multiple readings. That uses prose to tell stories more effectively than cutting edge CGI even could.

Meanwhile, at New Line, the additional shoot and post-production on The Golden Compass not only increased the cost of the film, but stopped it from being good enough to recover costs. Indeed, it contributed to a financial situation at New Line that required a surefire hit from one of their properties, and lo: Peter Jackson was brought back onboard, and The Hobbit began to happen.

The decision to make three films certainly paid off in that respect...

Stay up-to-date on all things His Dark Materials here.

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Feature

Books

Andrew Blair

Dec 6, 2019

His Dark Materials

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[quakerjoe]

In case it wasn’t clear, we’ve now finished “Act I” of the Trump saga, and are quickly moving into “Act II.” Which means that if you have any interest in these issues you’re going to want to start paying closer attention, because events and their repercussions are going to really begin speeding up now. What precipitated this change? As usual, Trump did it to himself. This latest shitstorm began last week when Trump gave an interview to the NY Times in which, among other things, he speculated that he might consider firing Special Counsel Mueller. Writing for the lawfare blog, Benjamin Wittes referred to the Times piece as “…a chilling interview—chilling because of the portrait it paints of presidential paranoia, chilling for its monomaniacal view of the relationship between the president and law enforcement, and chilling for what it says about Trump’s potential readiness to interfere with the Mueller investigation.”(7) Then, multiple news organizations reported on Thursday that Trump had “shaken up” his legal team. (Translation: he fired a bunch of lawyers and replaced them.) CNN for example reported that, “Marc Kasowitz, Trump's longtime personal attorney who has been the lead lawyer on the Russia investigation, will see his role recede, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.” (1) And in case it’s not obvious, “see his role recede” is classic beltway speak for getting sacked. At the same time word also spread that Mark Corallo, the spokesman and communications strategist for Trump’s legal team, had resigned. Other than stating that “I resigned yesterday,” Mr. Corallo was unwilling to give any additional information on his abrupt departure from Trump’s legal team. But according to the New York Times, “Mr. Corallo was one of several people cautioning against publicly criticizing Mr. Mueller.” Based on reports from both the New York Times (2) and the Washington Post (3), it seems increasingly clear that Corallo’s caution is about to be aggressively ignored. According to both the Times and the Post, Trump’s legal team is seriously considering multiple ways in which to undermine Mueller’s ongoing investigations, and some of those plans include disparaging Mueller himself. The Post for example reported that, “Some of President Trump’s lawyers are exploring ways to limit or undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, building a case against what they allege are his conflicts of interest…They are actively compiling a list of Mueller’s alleged potential conflicts of interest, which they say could serve as a way to stymie his work.” As for the Times, they have reported that, “President Trump’s lawyers and aides are scouring the professional and political backgrounds of investigators hired by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, looking for conflicts of interest they could use to discredit the investigation — or even build a case to fire Mr. Mueller or get some members of his team recused, according to three people with knowledge of the research effort.” And if you’re wondering why so much effort is being expended to find “conflicts of interest,” it’s because this is one of the few legitimate grounds that an Attorney General can use to dismiss (=fire) a special counsel. Donald Trump may be politically incompetent enough not to care, but his attorneys know that he will need some form of credible cover for removing Mueller, and finding real conflicts of interest would give him that. Of course what Trump and his team consider “credible” is usually not what anyone else considers credible. In fact many congressmen are still not taking the idea of removing Mueller seriously, because it seems so far beyond the pale. Bloomberg for example reported that Republican Senator Bob Corker, when asked about this situation, stated that, “There is no possible way anybody at the White House could be seriously thinking about firing Mueller…I don’t even want to comment on that because that’s so far out of bounds it couldn’t possibly be a serious discussion.” (4) Unfortunately, while Corker’s statement is obviously true, it mostly indicates the he has not been paying attention to Trump. As the Bloomberg piece states, “Trump’s other precedent-shattering decisions have underscored that he doesn’t feel bound by Washington’s traditions, or a fear of the political ramifications.” Which is, in my view, letting Trump off too lightly. This is not about mere “Washington traditions.” On the contrary, Trump’s statements and actions have made it clear that he does not understand, respect or even care about the important boundaries intentionally designed into the legal framework of our government. Foundational structures and precedents such as the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and an apolitical and independent law enforcement community - these are all an irrelevance to Trump. Speaking to this issue, Michael McGough, the senior editorial writer for the LA Times, stated on Thursday (5) that Trump’s insistence that he would not have picked Jeff Sessions to be Attorney General if he knew Sessions was going to recuse himself indicates several disturbing things about the president. First, it indicates that Trump appears to honestly have no idea why Sessions even HAD to recuse himself. Which itself only re-establishes Trump’s complete ignorance of the norms of American governance. Second, it suggests that Trump actually views the Attorney General as his personal lawyer, rather than the chief law enforcement official and lawyer representing the AMERICAN PEOPLE. As Dahlia Lithwick pointed out in a piece for Slate several weeks ago (6), Trump “has always treated lawyers as hired help.” Speaking about her own experience as an attorney before becoming a journalist, Ms. Lithwick recounted her dealings with numerous wealthy businessmen. She was shocked to discover that they often “…held a view of lawyers I didn’t remember learning about in law school: They believed attorneys were the help and that laws were problems that—with enough help and enough money to buy even better help—could be made to go away.” That, as anyone familiar with his history knows, is Trump in a nutshell. Lithwick postulates that Trump most likely sees no difference between the White House Counsel’s office, the attorney general, his divorce attorney, or the FBI director. In Trump’s view they all “work for him,” and therefore should just do whatever he tells them to do. Benjamin Wittes goes even further when he observes that Trump essentially feels “…that the FBI should be his personal force and that all of law enforcement should be about serving him.” (7) But of course things don’t actually work that way, and if Trump wants to fire Mueller without real cause he will not be able to do it by simple diktat. Instead he will have to decapitate the Justice Department by firing at least three (and probably more) of our nation’s top law enforcement officials. And that in turn will create a constitutional crisis so striking it may even wake slumbering Republicans. And to be clear, even that would not end the issue, because getting rid of Mueller would not stop the investigations. In order to accomplish that Trump would have to install an Attorney General who was willing to publicly obstruct a major, ongoing Justice Department investigation involving issues of national security. That is a pretty big ask, even for political sycophants. Washington is full of people seeking power, but it is not full of people who want their reputation publicly shit on for a lost cause. And really, how many people at this point would put their professional and personal future in the hands of Donald Trump, even if he can theoretically pardon them later? And speaking of pardons, keep in mind that any attempt by Trump to squash the investigations by handing out sweeping preemptive pardons would create tremendous political blowback. Also, there’s a real chance that it wouldn’t actually work that well. For one thing, the president cannot pardon himself. Let’s dispense with that fiction immediately. Also, the president can only pardon people for federal crimes. The president has no power to pardon people for state crimes. And we already know that New York state AG Schneiderman has been working hard on his own investigations. Other state attorneys general are also rumored to be working on similar cases. Trump cannot pardon his way out of those problems. Here’s another key point that is not often considered when it comes to the issue of pardons: people who receive pardons don’t retain the “right to remain silent.” That right exists because of constitutional protections against self-incrimination. If someone receives a pardon however, they can no longer be charged with any crimes related to that pardon. Which means that they no longer have any right to remain silent, and can be compelled to give testimony. If they refuse to fully and truthfully give that testimony, they can be jailed until they do. So anyone Trump pardons will find themselves very quickly sitting in an "interview room." And trust me, Paul Manafort sitting in front of a bunch of FBI agents with notebooks and recording devices is pretty much the opposite of what Trump is looking to accomplish. Back in the day, many of the men who served under Nixon did terrible things. But they were true believers. Personally, I guessing that Trump doesn't have a lot of those. Can anyone really picture Bannon, Kushner, or Manafort going to jail for Donald Trump? Umm…no. Those assholes will sing so loud the FBI will have to disburse industrial strength ear protection for their agents. Beginning this week, multiple Senate committees will begin investigating issues surrounding Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the Trump campaign’s possible collusion in that interference, and other issues related to those events. In the meantime, Special Counsel Mueller has assembled a team of at least 15 top-notch investigators and prosecutors to pursue his investigations. And to be clear, the people Mueller has brought aboard are some of the best in the business. While it may be impossible to predict exactly how Trump will react to all of this, it’s not that hard to guess: badly. Just how badly he reacts will determine how quickly we go from Act II to Act III of the Trump show. It will also determine just how resilient our system really is. So this is where we find ourselves: due to what may very well be the greatest electoral mistake in American history, we now have a sitting president who does not understand or care about government. To Trump, and many men like him, the pinnacle of all American efforts is business. This is why Trump so often appears to think that all interactions, both foreign and domestic, are transactional. It is also why he unrelentingly assumes that all government agencies and agency heads simply have to do whatever he tells them to do. It’s also why he is struggling so hard to make the American government function like his own family business. First, because he begins with the assumption that business is always smarter and better than government. Second, because that is really the only way he knows or cares to function, and he's not going to change for something as unimportant as the United States government. Third, because his family members are just about the only people he trusts with his various “secrets.” But government is not a business, nor is it intended to be. A point that seems obvious, but remains oddly confusing to many people, is that governments do not exist for the same purpose, hold the equivalent priorities, or function with the same motivations as business. Trying to force the government to run as a business is like trying to force a hospital to run like a game show; it might be fascinating to watch the attempt, but in the end it will fail in a spectacularly ugly fashion. Also, you really don't want to be a patient during that particular experiment. "Government" and "Business" are different entities. They perform different functions for society and are kept separate for good reason. And quite frankly men like Trump are a large part of that reason. Even ethical and well-meaning business leaders, of which there are plenty, would have a serious problem trying to run the U.S. government like a business. When you instead begin with a businessman as unethical, self-serving, autocratic and mendacious as Trump, it is nearly impossible to avoid ending up with a form of governance that is both incompetent and dangerous. In short, it is simply not possible to run the United States government in this manner, and we are now witnessing what happens when you try. 1- http://cnn.it/2ufGvs6 2- http://nyti.ms/2uOQPKN 3- http://wapo.st/2upHMgk 4- https://bloom.bg/2tKVfgs 5- http://lat.ms/2vNNXu1 6- http://slate.me/2sYvqO1 7- http://bit.ly/2uGtbiJ

-by  Michael Arnovitz

[endangeredspeciesfullfree-blog]

Watch Endangered Species full online

Endangered Species 2021 full - https://endangered-species-uk.blogspot.com/

It's tempting to view M.J. Bassett's endangered species as Lionsgate's attempt to cash in on the revival. The trailer shows a skinny, sweaty, mid-level executive guy on safari with a brood treating him like the pathetic nerd he seems to be. We are introduced to the rebellious teenage girl with the shaved head who despises her own privilege; her new century hippie boyfriend; a younger brother who is probably gay; and a mother who wears pants in the family (even if they look like shorts).

I don't have a problem with shaved-headed girls, gay teens, hippies, or strong women. However, I'm growing tired of the doofus-daddy archetype in entertainment that incongruously portrays straight white men as both hopelessly incapable and as oppressive bullies who have ruined the planet, society, culture. , fashion, etc. Pop culture dads have ditched wisdom typefaces to limping taps that constantly need to be put back in their place - however ill-defined this place is.

Oddly enough, this phenomenon transcends race, but still falls under the rubric "Whiteness". Go figure it out.

If you think I'm reading too much into the politics of this film, consider the following lines of dialogue, addressed (directly and indirectly) to the patriarch of the Halsey family, Jack (Philip Winchester): “The old white men in suits are on the move. screw it up for us ”And“ Violence, corruption, child labor - all for [cobalt cell phone] ”.

Endangered species surface themes are so much on the nose that they might as well be zits. Fortunately, Bassett (and co-writers Paul Chronnell and Isabel Bassett - the director's daughter, who also plays Jack's daughter, Zoe) are interested in more than a regular Colonizer Comeuppance story. Which means there is some cosmic justice for Exxon Jack's executive, but the rest of the family learn ugly truths about the progressive American bubbles they have happily and critically bounced into. on daddy.

From the first minute, things go wrong for the Halseys. Their flight to Kenya is choppy. The truck they hired to visit Amboseli National Park turns out to be a junker (“I asked for a Mercedes,” Jack tells a guide with a smirk). Zoe insists on bringing glass water bottles on the trip - all of which shatter when the family's transport is loaded by a rhino after Jack smashes a security fence in order to disprove his reputation for safety.

Also in glass: the insulin vials that would have been nice to have as a diabetic mom Lauren (Rebecca Romijn) struggles in the sun. In no time, the group broke up and ran into a leopard, ravenous hyenas, and ultimately a team of poachers and their ruthless leader - the truly evil imperialist capitalist that Zoe probably thought her father was up to. that he comes face to face with the real thing.

I won't spoil the details of the Hawleys again. The trailer has done it before - including what is, in context, a really mouth-to-mouth shock that I'm embarrassed to say that made me jump. Bassett and his company have come up with a very effective and lush little thriller, which saves the most contrived plot elements for the last act and instead relies on the primitive fear of helplessness in the face of nature to carry a big part of the story.

What makes the movie a staple, however, is the deconstruction of the archetypes I listed at the start of this review. The film's title obviously refers to the animals that Mitch and his team of locals hunt, slice, and sell on the black market. But it also suggests that the nuclear family, represented by the Halseys, is also in danger of disappearing. Yes, families come in all shapes, sizes, dynamics, etc.

For much of the film, Jack is the stand-in for Friday the 13th Crazy Ralph - the character who warns everyone to use common sense in the face of very obvious peril. The problem is that any authority he could exercise in his job is completely undermined by the people who don't work for him (as well as his own pride). He refuses to acknowledge his discomfort that his son, Noah (Michael Johnston), has a boyfriend, even though everyone can see him. He angrily threatens to cut off his daughter's cell phone and cancel her summer concert tickets when Zoe gives him an attitude.

The other film "Endangered Species", which is endangered by raging animals this weekend, differs from "A Quiet Place Part II" in many ways, especially in that its characters cannot stop jerking - with correspondingly less concern from the audience to survive under extreme stress. MJ Bassett's South African-produced thriller has an American vacation clan doing the wrong things in a Kenyan wildlife sanctuary. Needless to say, to the sorrow of our protagonists, the local fauna quickly notices that there are fresh snacks available in the savannah.

The contentious human dynamic makes this outdoor suspense exercise one where we start looking for the four-legged performers too early. Smooth and scenic, but increasingly silly, in the end it has become perhaps the most preaching nature conservation adventure with a wrong head since the infamous “roar” 40 years ago. Lionsgate is released in digital, VoD and limited-edition cinemas. Blu-ray and DVD will follow on June 1st. Exxon manager Jack Halsey (Philip Winchester) is a Type A who is dissatisfied with his family vacation before it even starts. He would have preferred a beach resort to expensive safari vacationer Lauren (Rebecca Romijn), whom he insisted on. They are sped towards it in a rickety little plane that he is also holding, while the children duly notice that Dad sneaks up alcohol to deal with, while Mom turns a blind eye.

These young adult children also have their own problems with him: son Noah (Michael Johnston) is close to his father, but at the same time feels that his homosexuality is not fully accepted. Daughter Zoe (Isabel Bassett) never misses an opportunity to indict Jack's privilege as a white man or to point out that he is not her "real" parent (Lauren's first husband died when she was a baby) while working on the annoying older one Hippie friend clings (Chris Fisher as Billy) She's invited. Noah's own friend is expressly absent.

Papa complains about the less than luxury rental car they pick up at the airport, but then he has secretly cut corners on the travel budget. (It's not that it's just cheap: Although he neglected to tell her, Lauren accidentally discovers that he just lost his job due to an oil pipeline scandal.) Indeed, Jack has the expensive "Safari." “Part of their safari excursion not booked. So they leave the resort the next day for a "self-guided" tour through the nearby national park, which is hardly recommended. They also evade registration at the entrance gate, leaving park rangers unaware of their identity, medical issues, or itinerary. This is just one terrible mistake among many who can quickly leave the family stuck in the middle of a scorching hotspot with no guide, water, or cell service. Two of them were wounded and their car was turned over by an angry rhino. Diabetic Lauren's insulin supply is another victim. So the only two fully functional passengers, Noah and Billy, set out on foot to get help. Again, this turns out to be a very bad idea, as one party is excluded from an animal attack, which is the only hair-raising interlude here. The happier group crawls back to the van, which has aroused unwanted interest in a pack of hyenas.

Endangered Species film Endangered Species movie Endangered Species online Endangered Species stream Endangered Species 2021 Endangered Species full Endangered Species full free Endangered Species download Endangered Species torrent

[ntrending]

Panera is losing nearly 100% of its workers every year as fast-food turnover crisis worsens

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/panera-is-losing-nearly-100-of-its-workers-every-year-as-fast-food-turnover-crisis-worsens/

Panera is losing nearly 100% of its workers every year as fast-food turnover crisis worsens

The bakery racks at the counter of Panera Bread in Monroe, New York.

Waring Abbott | Getty Images

If you think it sounds like a mathematical impossibility for a company to lose more than 100% of its workers every year, you’ve never worked in the fast-food industry. At fast-food restaurants, losing 100% of employees — and then losing still more of the employees hired to replace those workers — is a common, and worsening, labor problem.

The case of Panera Bread shows just how deep the employee turnover issue is for restaurant companies. Panera loses close to 100% of workers every year, and by fast-food industry standards that’s considered good.

“In the restaurant industry, turnover is 130%, turning over more than a full workforce every year,” said Panera bread CFO Michael Bufano at CNBC’s @Work Human Capital + Finance conference in July. “We are a little under 100%, but still a huge number.”

The official Bureau of Labor Statistics turnover rate for the restaurant sector was 81.9% for the 2015–2017 period, but industry estimates are much higher, reaching 150%, and the problem has gotten worse in recent years. “It’s definitely been going up,” said Rosemary Batt, chair of HR Studies and International & Comparative Labor at the Cornell School of Industrial Labor Relations.

Batt said decades of fast-food industry efforts to standardize and “routinize” jobs — take the skill out of them — has been intended to create turnover-proof jobs. “If you lose someone, it is not a real cost, because they are so easily replaceable. … The industry has thrived on this HR model of turnover-proof jobs for many years, because they could get away with it,” she said, through a slack labor market or absorbing the cost of high turnover. But that model is being stretched.

“Now turnover is absolutely excessive, and some chains are beginning to put numbers on the cost of turnover. I know some chains that are focused on it,” Batt said. “Because turnover is getting so serious and because chains have the ability to do the HR analytics, they can begin to cost out turnover and say, ‘This is not a cost we have taken seriously, because historically we were counting on high turnover model as acceptable.'”

For more on tech, transformation and the future of work, join CNBC at the @ Work: People + Machines Summit in San Francisco on Nov. 4. Leaders from Dropbox, Sas, McKinsey and more will teach us how to balance the needs of today with the possibilities of tomorrow, and the winning strategies to compete.

The cost of turnover

How much does turnover cost? According to Batt, the rule of thumb in estimating the expense can be broken down into a few simple parts: the time it takes a manager to hire a worker, the time it takes to train a worker, and the time it takes for them to become proficient on a job — in fast food, that is measured in one to two months, and during that period of time, half of the pay should be considered a loss. And there are less tangible costs: organizational disruption and team disruption.

“If people get beyond 90 days, turnover really drops, and so that’s why we make investments in technology and training in those first 90 days. It has a huge return,” the Panera CFO said at the CNBC event in Chicago. “Turnover and recruiting costs you money and is felt in the guest experience.”

Robin B. DiPietro, director of the International Institute for Foodservice Research and Education at the University of South Carolina’s School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management, says that six years ago, when she was in touch with Burger King, the average cost of turnover was about $600 per employee.

Cornell’s Batt said a survey of restaurants she helped conduct in 2013 put the cost of fast-food turnover at $1,600 per worker, and that was at a time when turnover was significantly lower.

The turnover cost estimates have kept going up.

The cost per employee now is estimated by the National Restaurant Association at $2,000 per employee. Those figures will vary by restaurant type as fast-food employees are still less expensive to turn over than those in upscale dining. Restaurant research firm TDn2K calculated replacement costs at $2,100 to $2,800. But all operators feel the pinch of the deepening turnover crisis, especially with a higher minimum wage, and higher recurring business costs.

“This is an industry issue across the board, and it’s getting worse with the labor market tighter,” said David Portalatin, NPD Group vice president and food industry advisor. “Restaurants will increasingly look to technology to solve the problem. Both technology to train and automate.”

The rise of the automated order

As far back as 2003, McDonald’s tested kiosks to place orders.

Much has changed in the industry since then, but some basic economics remain unchanged: Restaurants are pressured by rising costs and the ability to pass that on to consumers. The average cost of a restaurant meal increased 2.4% in the last 12 months, according to NPD data, more than the rate of inflation and cost of a grocery basket, and the rising cost puts pressure on restaurant operators. “The economics dictate you can only pay so much and today’s labor market makes it even harder to staff restaurants.”

Making customer interactions “frictionless” and automating repetitive tasks in the kitchen would theoretically allow restaurants to be more efficient with labor.

“In China they’re way ahead of us in automation in the back of the house and front of house,” Portalatin said, referring to the food industry terms for kitchen and customer-facing positions.

Portalatin said there has been a dramatic increase in digital ordering, especially consumers placing orders from mobile phones. Total customer traffic has been flat over the past year, but there has been “a monumental shift” to digital ordering, and NPD Group expects digital orders to increase 23% a year over the next half-decade. Restaurants have an economic incentive to make sure this shift continues to accelerate. Average ticket size from a digital order is higher than a traditional order, which NPD Group attributes, at least in part, to the ability of an app or kiosk to upsell customers and “suggestively sell” based on data collected through digital order histories.

Panera just announced deals with Uber Eats, DoorDash and GrubHub for mobile order delivery. On Wednesday, McDonald’s announced the expansion of a deal with DoorDash to reach a total of 10,000 restaurants, which comes at a time when it estimates 2019 delivery revenue will reach $4 billion. McDonald’s has a total of over 14,000 U.S. locations.

“Turnover is the biggest problem in the industry,” said Jordan Boesch, founder and CEO of 7Shifts, who grew up working in Quiznos locations run by his father. The self-described “quick-service kid” started 7Shifts to provide on-demand staffing and restaurant shift scheduling to restaurants. A survey of workers using its system found that more than half wanted to grow their careers outside the food industry. Only 25% were looking for a promotion in the restaurant space, and that was heavily tilted to cooks.

Some experts believe the rise of the gig economy is hurting restaurants’ ability to recruit and retain staff, saying it is harder for any worker to justify punching a clock at a fast food restaurant offering little to no benefits.

But Batt says the gig economy, while a fascinating and growing trend, represents half of 1% of the labor force and is not a primary reason for the fast-food sector’s struggle. In fact, 7Shifts is one of many start-ups rushing into the restaurant space as a way to solve staffing woes through on-demand worker networks.

Panera is betting that better training can help. “All training had been in back of kitchen; now it is all on iPhones, and I can see it going to goggles — employees see it right in front of them, training them in a fun and interactive way,” Panera CFO Bufano said.

Panera declined to offer any additional details on its plans to reduce employee turnover beyond what its CFO said at the CNBC event. A spokesman said there was reticence to “share details on more of the secret sauce and statistical success.”

The job no one really wants

Experts who have studied the restaurant business for decades and work with national chains are divided over the extent to which fast-food jobs can be made better. Some do not believe there is no formula combining pay, benefits, training and culture that can save the human worker in this sector.

Abraham Pizam, chair in tourism management and the founding dean of Rosen College of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida, says his position is not popular among academic peers, but he is convinced the fast-food industry is on a path to be the first to fully automate.

No one who thinks of a job as temporary is motivated.

Abraham Pizam

founding dean of Rosen College of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida

Low wages, lack of career paths and an overwhelming belief among the working public that fast-food jobs should only ever be temporary all contribute to the worsening turnover issues. “You talk to an employee here in the U.S. and it is nothing to be proud of,” he said. “It’s a job until I graduate or until I’m back on my feet,” he said. “No one who thinks of a job as temporary is motivated.”

There are no other job segments in the U.S. that have higher turnover than the fast-food and fast-casual segments of the restaurant industry, according to DiPietro at the University of South Carolina’s School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management. “Not even retail.”

She said that’s due to the reputation of the restaurant industry. Many people consider these lower jobs than retail due to hours, job responsibilities and uniforms that typically have to be worn. “Even though the pay may be equal, the perception of restaurants is lower than in retail.”

It’s a devil’s bargain for the companies to accept the status quo in turnover, Pizam said, with lower wages justified by their limited ability to pass along price increases to consumers, but in turn, restaurant operators paying the price through the expense of training and retraining of personnel multiple times a year.

“Sooner or later these jobs will disappear. There is no reason a robot can’t serve,” Pizam said. “In the future, whether 20, 30 or 50 years, only the very top of the restaurant industry will have human beings. Prepared or not, we will see it.”

Customers use touchscreen kiosks to order meals at at a KFC restaurant in Shanghai, China. Parent company Yum China says 86% of transactions are cashless and about half of orders are placed via mobile app or digital kiosk at its more than 8,400 KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell restaurants.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Pizam is not making a short-term bet on full automation. Public acceptance of a humanless food-service experience will take time, as will the redesign of an entire industry so that minimal human contact is a cost-saver — the initial capital expenditures to overhaul operations, not even including the costs of the robots, will be large.

“The counterargument made is that people like to be served by people and there is no substitute to that. You can’t flatter a robot. But for the fast-food industry, there is no human contact that is personal at this point, anyway.”

“CEOs of these companies understand where we are going. The ultimate solution is robotics. In the long-run it’s menial work and they will admit they can’t satisfy employees and it costs too much in terms of the turnover cycle. Once trained, a robot, if done right — that is years of high productivity. But if they admit that, then it is like saying we failed and no one wants to say that.”

“I don’t think training can be a game-changer,” Boesch of 7Shifts said. “The bigger determining factor for someone to stay with you is if they see a future there.”

Boesch said the big food chains are overly confident: They think they are better at training than they actually are, and as a result, they recruit and hire the wrong people. Citing Jim Sullivan, a well-known restaurant consultant, Boesch said hiring is 90% of the equation and training only 10%. “There is no way to develop the wrong person.”

For the customer-facing positions that are most at risk, Boesch said the best chance of retaining staff is by doing more than just offering competitive wages and hiring people who have personalities that are conducive to service. These personality types want to be engaged and work as part of teams, and they want shift hours that suit their lives outside of work. “The No. 1 thing is interest in the people. … Pay is important, but would you go across the street to get 50 cents more if it’s a toxic culture?”

“I think it is going to happen for quick service first for sure, full automation,” Boesch said. “To me it is not a matter of if, it is when. These QSRs [quick-service restaurants] are almost going to become like 7-Eleven, a giant vending machine. I don’t know when, but for QSR I feel like it is not astronomically far, but it is not close, either,” he said, with the biggest uncertainty not being the pace of innovation but whether automated systems can meet food safety and regulation requirements. “With the introduction of more ordering kiosks, it feels like the writing is on the wall a little bit,” Boesch said.

Reasons for robot skepticism

Cornell labor expert Batt is skeptical of the robot argument. “I totally disagree with the future being 100% robot. It will take decades to get to a place where kiosks will have such a major effect.”

Batt said that the fast-food industry, which faces steep price competition, is handicapped by the inability to raise wages much, as well as its limited career advancement opportunities. It also has little history of offering competitive benefits. Only 14% of all fast-food restaurants offer sick leave, and only 16% offer paid time off.

An increase in wages mandated by a higher federal minimum wage could lead restaurants to invest more in training, a trend already playing out in many states. “When companies are faced with that kind of hard increase in cost, they have to look for ways to retain workers more in order to justify the wage increase, how to get more effort or better quality, service, and productivity, and that leads them to invest more in training.”

She said the labor problems can be solved by methods other than robots, such as chains putting more effort into hiring better managers and treating workers with more respect. That requires companies being willing to give workers more hours and more predictable scheduling. “That is not very costly for HR to invest in. It just takes managers to be frankly more competent and pay more attention to the issue. … Maybe they won’t optimize labor costs to the extent they want to, but it will pay off in lower turnover and more satisfies workers and better operations. That should not be hard problem to fix.”

Another potential solution used in other countries is the development of relationships with higher-end companies in the same sector, or what she referred to as a “cross-establishment career ladder.”

“That way workers do have an incentive to stay and shows qualifications that can move them up. … If McDonald’s would get a worker to stay for year that would be a huge improvement, ” Batt said.

McDonald’s said no executive was available to comment, but a company spokeswoman pointed to several initiatives it has undertaken to confront staffing issues, including a workplace preparedness study, youth employment program, and educational assistance opportunities for employees.

A major decline in teenagers and college students working in the U.S. and in fast food specifically are factors. Recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that in 1950, the labor force participation rate for 16- to 19-year-olds was 52.5%. It reached a high of 58.9% in 1978, dropped to 52% in 2000 and hovered at 34% between 2010 and 2018. The median age of the restaurant worker between 2005 and 2017 was 29, meaning that one-half of all workers in the sector were older than that, with many families raising children on restaurant incomes and benefits. During this same period, teen employment in restaurants plummeted to 17.8%.

The first US robot restaurant already shuttered

The first, fully automated restaurant in the U.S. already exists — or at least, it did.

Eatsa, a quinoa-bowl automat chain that started in San Francisco in 2015 and expanded to New York, shuttered its locations and has since transitioned to a new business model and been renamed Brightloom. The restaurant tech company focuses on helping other restaurants improve operations through use of technology.

Adam Brotman, a former Starbucks executive who in April took over the CEO reins at Brightloom, said although the automated restaurant run preceded his tenure, it was not a failure — some press accounts pegged it as one.

Brotman said the reasoning for the business pivot was a recognition by the company and its backers that all of the money being invested in order management and menu-management technology, and digitization of the customer experience — both out of store and in-store — would lead to a better return on investment as a technology company rather than restaurant operator.

Brotman said that for the first time next year, orders placed off-premise may equal in-store orders. “It’s an amazing stat. Half of the restaurant food consumed.”

McDonalds’ largest acquisition in 20 years was made in March when it acquired Dynamic Yield, which creates personalization and decision logic technology, to help with digital drive-through order optimization. The fast-food giant also is spending $1 billion this year to upgrade 2,000 locations with kiosks and other technology.

But Brotman said the increasing use of technology does not lead him to conclude that restaurant best practice will be “all one or the other.”

“Kiosks are great to break up the line and help drive larger sales. They upsell better and they allow you to deploy labor to optimal throughout. Really what we are seeing is a combination of front-of-the-house automation with traditional human customer experience at the point-of-sales or handoff lane, counter. That combination is ideal for quite a while.”

In order to keep the Big Mac price below $10, they will need to add technology to the restaurants and decrease the number of employees in order to ensure that they can continue to open each day.

Robin DiPietro

director of the International Institute for Foodservice Research and Education at the University of South Carolina

Batt said the Paneras of the food sector can lead the way.

“Many, even in the fast-food arena are looking for ways to upscale a little, as in the Paneras of the world, and that segment of QSR does have more wiggle room, looking to compete more on quality and service, and it pays for them to be looking into better HR practices. If the industry starts there and they set a model, then we will see others follow suit.”

Danny Meyer of Union Hospitality Group has been experimenting with many ways to retain employees at restaurants he owned, which include Shake Shack, from a four-day workweek to a hiring model for customer service positions that focuses on personality assessments.

At Panera all executives complete a short tour of duty working a frontline job in a restaurant location. “Everyone who sits on corporate side works in cafe for a few weeks. I was a terrible barista but good salad maker,” Bufano said.

University of South Carolina restaurant sector expert DiPietro, who worked in fast food for 20 years and started her professional career making drinks before moving up to restaurant manager and district manager, said technology has been talked about in fast food since she entered the field in 1980. “They said that robots were going to take our jobs even then; they did not.”

“In order to keep the Big Mac price below $10, they will need to add technology to the restaurants, and decrease the number of employees in order to ensure that they can continue to open each day. Drink stations that are automated, ordering kiosks (similar to airports), automated fryers and broilers will help, but they cannot take the people fully out of the restaurant.”

Labor academics like Batt and DiPietro say for restaurants to fully address the turnover issues, they need to focus on people, plus robots.

“Look at the hours of the restaurant. Do we need to have 24-hour McDonald’s? If we do, can we have robots run the night shift? Turning the industry around may be as simple as having more restaurants providing tuition reimbursement for employees, employee-designed uniforms, pay differential for nights and weekends, robots doing the menial, non-guest contact tasks,” Batt said.

Brightloom’s Brotman, who comes from the Howard Schultz school of employee management, said Starbucks may be an outlier in offering healthcare, stock options and free online college education to employees, but it should also be an inspiration.

“I don’t think there is a single answer on how everyone should do it. Automation can help with the issue, but I talk about digital tools to allow people to spend their time connecting with customers rather than doing menial tasks. People you have doing the job they want to do, which is ultimately the best use of time. … I don’t think the restaurant business is thinking about it as ‘we just need to replace people with technology.'”

It might also help if more respect for the fast food worker came from the dining public, according to the most-vehement prognosticators of the inevitable rise of the robot in the kitchen and at the counter. “I’ve been in thousands of fast food restaurants but never seen someone say to a manager, ‘I want to report that this worker was fantastic.’ Especially the counter,” Pizam said.

Share & Written By CNBC

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14 Sensational Books for Your Summer Reading List (2019 Edition!)

Hiya Gorgeous!

If you’ve been tuning into my weekly Wellness Wednesday live series on Instagram and Facebook, then you know that I recently launched our #CrazySexyBooks club with my friend Sheri Salata’s new book, The Beautiful No (and I also recently shared the next book I’m reading, which is also on this list!). I’ve been having such a blast connecting with our amazing community over our shared love for reading books that make us think, question, laugh out loud, vision, tear up and everything in between.

That’s why I couldn’t be more jazzed to bring you my 2019 summer reading list, hot off the press! It’s got something for everyone… fiction and nonfiction, brand new and classic must-reads. These books touch on everything from environmental issues and the powerful feminist themes behind Mary Magdelene’s gospel, to psychedelics, small business marketing and finance, wellness, and set-your-heart-on-fire inspiration!

But before you dive in, I’ve got a special gift just for you…

My 2019 Summer Reading List

1. Mary Magdalene Revealed by Meggan Watterson

This amazing new book by Meggan Watterson, a Harvard-trained theologian, dear friend and one of my spiritual teachers is my latest pick for our #CrazySexyBooks club. In Meg’s words, Mary’s gospel reveals a radical love at the heart of the Christian story (and for many of us, it’s a story we haven’t heard yet!). I feel that love as I read this beautiful book, and I think you will too. It’s a love that transforms everything—and it’s available to all of us. Add this book to your morning spiritual practice. Your heart will open and your soul will thank you.

Get Mary Magdalene Revealed here!

2. More Than Enough by Elaine Welteroth

We all have so much to learn from Elaine Welteroth, who broke barriers as the youngest Editor in Chief of Teen Vogue and paved the way for it to become the socially conscious publication it is today. I love this quote about the book from another woman I admire, Malala Yousafzai: “More Than Enough is a guide for young people who want to find their voice, a crash course for those who want to challenge the status quo, and an adventure story for all of us.” So whether you’re young in years or young at heart, this one is a must-have for your summer reading list.

Get More Than Enough here.

3. Profit First by Mike Michalowicz

Calling all dreamers, small biz owners and solopreneurs! I didn’t think talking about money could be fun, but Mike Michalowicz has proven me wrong. If talking financials makes your head spin but you want your company to grow (and be profitable!), this one is a must-read. You’ll get practical advice paired with case studies that’ll help put you and your business baby on the path to success.

Get Profit First here.

4. How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

You might know Michael Pollan for his famous food-centric books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. This time around, his unique brand of skeptical curiosity takes us into the world of psychedelics. Pollan started the research for this book by exploring how some people are using LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in psychoactive mushrooms) to treat health challenges like depression, anxiety, PTSD and addiction. In doing so, he discovered a whole world of possibilities for using psychedelics to expand our consciousness, better understand our own minds and transform our fears around dying (especially for cancer patients). If that sounds too trippy to you, I encourage you to keep an open, expansive mind! This book is fascinating.

Get How to Change Your Mind here.

5. Everything is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo

My BFF’s sizzling new book launches on September 10 and I couldn’t be more excited! I’ve been along for the behind-the-scenes ride for an entire year as Marie wrote this glorious gem. I’m devouring the advanced copy now and let me tell you, this brilliant baby is full of spirit-stirring wisdom and life-changing perspective. It’ll fire you up and fill you with hope and the knowledge that it doesn’t matter how many crazy roadblocks threaten to throw you off course, your dream is and always will be figureoutable. I may be biased, but I have a feeling you’ll agree. This masterpiece will definitely be a fall #CrazySexyBooks club pick!

Pre-order Everything is Figureoutable here.

6. A Bright Future by Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist

I had to share this book because I know how passionate this community is about protecting our planet! The authors unpack how several countries have already replaced fossil fuels with low-carbon energy sources and how the rest of the world could follow in their footsteps to (literally) save the world. This is a compelling, no-nonsense, yet hopeful book that will motivate you to influence change however you can.

Get A Bright Future here.

7. The Beautiful No by Sheri Salata

We just wrapped up chatting about this scrumptious book in our #CrazySexyBooks club, but it’s not too late if you haven’t had a chance to read it yet! Like many of us, Sheri dedicated a big chunk of her life to a career she loved (working with Oprah!). As fulfilling and magical as that was, she found herself wishing for a life she loved just as much. So she left it all and went on a soul pilgrimage. And lucky for us, she shares what she learned and how you can apply it to your own life in this transformative book. I can’t recommend it enough. And my mom agrees!

Get The Beautiful No here.

8. City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

I adore Elizabeth Gilbert and her captivating new release is perfect for this time of year. This instant bestseller is set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. It’s got love, sex, glamour, adventure and a little dose of danger—what more could you ask for in a yummy beach read? Grab a champagne cocktail and drink in these delicious pages.

Get City of Girls here.

9. From Poop to Gold: The Marketing Magic of the Harmon Brothers by Chris Jones

Team Crazy Sexy and I have been reading this book and absolutely loving it! If you’ve seen the genius ads for brands like Poo-Pourri and ChatBooks, then you know Harmon Brothers! This book takes you behind-the-scenes of these viral ad sensations that have not only cracked up millions of people, but also boosted these companies’ reputations and helped them sell a whole lotta product. If you’re an entrepreneur like me, then you’re always hungry for proven tips about what works and what flops—and this book is loaded with ‘em!

Get From Poop to Gold here.

10. Let Your Fears Make You Fierce by Koya Webb

We’ve been exploring fear and how to make it work for you (instead of against you!) in a couple of our recent Wellness Wednesdays. If those conversations resonated with you, you’re gonna love this book. Koya Webb, holistic health coach and yoga teacher, shares how she’s turned her fear into one of her greatest superpowers—and how you can too with her straightforward tips, breathing and journaling exercises, mantras and more. I met Koya at an event this spring and I instantly loved her. I can’t think of a better way to spend a summer afternoon!

Get Let Your Fears Make You Fierce here.

11. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb

I love my therapist and think folks can benefit from talking to someone. Unfortunately, there’s a long-standing stigma that going to therapy is somehow a sign of weakness. That’s why I’m so grateful for this wonderful book—we can start to break down the harmful notions our society has about mental health. Lori Gottlieb’s intimate portrait of her experiences as both a clinician and patient pulls back the curtain on the world of talk therapy. It’s funny, eye-opening, thought-provoking and so much more.

Get Maybe You Should Talk to Someone here.

12. Beauty Water by Tori Holmes

If you’ve been following me for a while or hanging out with me on Wellness Wednesday, then you already know how I feel about hydration! It’s one of the most important (yet undervalued) aspects of living a healthy life. Now you can turn your H2O routine into a nourishing self-care ritual with this gorgeous book. It landed on my desk a few months ago and I’m grateful it did. This book is packed with 50 recipes for deliciously quenching elixirs that use ingredients like CBD oil, ashwagandha and lion’s mane. Cheers!

Get Beauty Water here.

Looking for something special to read this summer? These 14 gorgeous books are at the top of my list!

13. Do Less by Kate Northrup

I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this book as soon as my dear friend Kate told me she was writing it. If you’re ready to ditch the damaging belief that your worth is based on your productivity, then I suggest picking up a copy for yourself! Instead of trying to squeeze every last thing into your time, Kate encourages a more minimalist approach to life rooted in mindfulness and presence. These powerful lessons are the soul medicine that our busy, overwhelmed, stressed out world so desperately needs! For more on this topic, check out this fascinating interview with Kate on Jenna Kutcher’s Goal Digger podcast.

Get Do Less here.

14. The Future of Fashion by Tyler Little

I’ve written a couple of articles recently about the environmental, human and animal impacts of fast fashion. If that topic moves you, you’ll really dig this book. It’ll help you understand the problems with the global fashion industry on a deeper level, as well as what innovative people and businesses are doing differently to flip the script. You’ll be inspired and empowered to make sustainable shifts in your own life!

Get The Future of Fashion here.

I can’t wait to hear what you decide to add to your summer reading list! And don’t forget to join me for Wellness Wednesday on Instagram and Facebook. Going live has become one of the things I look forward to every week—I love this special space we’re creating together. In addition to chatting about #CrazySexyBooks, we dish on lots of juicy tips to help you live your healthiest, happiest life. It’s also a chance for us to just connect and get to know each other better… so fun!

You can catch up on past Wellness episodes here and sign up for reminders (so you never miss another one!) here.

Your turn: What books are on your summer reading list?

Peace & bookworm buddies,

The post 14 Sensational Books for Your Summer Reading List (2019 Edition!) appeared first on KrisCarr.com.