#stealing from the rich is actually a net good state of mind

[movementsofmylife]

all i want from ep 9 of jack and joker is one sincere joke smile

[knittingdreams]

Fireheart - Chapter 2

Thanks so much to everybody that’s read the first chapter so far and shared it, made it into such a lovely welcoming to this tumblr community! <3

If you haven’t read the first chapter yet, you can find it here: Chapter 1  

And if you’re like me and can’t wait to read more once you start a story, then you can head to My Ao3 and read many many chapters there n_n

So, let’s get into it!

CHAPTER 2  

Infiltrating the 24th floor

The front door banged behind Celaena as she kicked it close with her heel. She dropped her bag to the floor, and walked towards the stairs as she took off the school’s jacket.

“Don’t leave your shit lying around,” Sam yelled behind her, and Celaena turned around just in time to catch her bag midair and spin in a full circle not to lose her balance as she hung the bag back over her shoulder.

“I leave my shit wherever I want, Cortland,” she quipped.

“Someone’s in a mood already?” Sam asked, walking towards Celaena and stopping only an inch from her.

“I am not in a mood, but you keep getting in the middle and fucking things up. I don’t need your damned help!” She yelled, pushing Sam with a finger against his muscly chest.

“Celaena, Sam, that is enough,” a voice called from the top of the stairs.

Sam squared his back, his jaw tightening up just a fraction, and Celaena turned around quickly, letting her pleated grey skirt fan around her.

“Arobynn,” she said with as much honey as she could add to her voice. “I didn’t expect you to be home so early,” she added, smiling broadly, as if him being home could make her happy.

“How could I not? It’s your first day of school after all, how did it feel like? It must be exhilarating to be surrounded by so many people of your age after such a long time,” he said, making his words sound like a caress, but Celaena could still feel the venom behind them.

Arobynn Hamel, their legal guardian and carer, wasn’t one to care. No, he only cared about the things that would benefit him, and this plan was not one that he had been keen on to start with. Celaena had managed to convince him, to persuade him with sweet words and perfectly planned strategies. She knew infiltrating Adarlan Elite High would lead to her finding the truth about what had happened with her parents, and convincing Arobynn had been her top priority for months.

Returning to the world of the living after nine years of living like a ghost was going to be a challenge for her, she knew that, but she was ready for it. Not that she wasn’t used to dealing with people, or to playing parts; but the crowds from her night life weren’t like the rich kids from Adarlan. She knew rich though, she knew them from the inside, from sneaking into their houses and stealing their secrets for Arobynn, she knew them from examining and stealing their most precious possessions; from plotting against them countless times.

“It was a good day,” Celaena replied, making sure not to give much away. “I still don’t understand why you sent Cortland though,” she added, not being able to avoid complaining about it. She glanced back at Sam with her eyes narrowed. 

She was almost hoping Arobynn would admit to not trusting her after what had happened the last time she went rogue.

“I think he can be a helpful asset,” Arobynn simply said, and then he walked down the stairs, brushing Celaena’s arm in a calculated caress as he walked past her. “I trust you can find out the truth,” he said, placing a finger under her chin. “But I also think you shouldn’t get too much attention to yourself, and having another new kid in school may be good for that,” he finished as he turned around, and kept walking towards the lounge.

There was no way Celaena could avoid getting attention, she wasn’t just another girl in the bunch and eyes always darted to her whenever she was in a room. Her long golden hair was the first thing people noticed, followed by the curves in her body; and her muscles. Most assumed she spent her nights in the gym, running and lifting weights, or that she was a cheerleader. They weren’t too far off, but there was so much more to her training schedule. Celaena and Sam could sometimes spend up to six hours in the basement’s gym. 

But her looks weren’t the only reason people looked at her, there was a fire in her eyes and a vibe that constantly surrounded her, and it attracted people. She had been told countless times that she could light up a room only by walking in; but she thought that was superficial bullshit coming out of people’s mouths.

“I better hurry,” she said to no one in particular as she started walking up the stairs. “I need to go check into the hotel.”

“Make sure you come over and report daily,” Arobynn said from around the corner, his voice sounding farther and farther away as she kept climbing up.

“I sure will,” she yelled before running the last few steps up the stairs and heading to her room. 

She closed the door behind her, grabbed her already packed bags and left them next to the door as she looked for a change of clothes. She had so many clothes that she had enough to pack a bag for a couple of weeks, and still leave plenty behind. Arobynn was good like that, and he often gifted her dresses, tights and skirts, as well as jewelry. She didn’t think anybody in town owned as much jewelry as she did. 

When she was younger, she used to think it was Arobynn’s way of showing that he cared, but she knew better; he didn’t care at all. He just wanted to show his power, show her how much he could do for her to keep her in his net, and keep her always owing him something.

Those days were about to be over, she was 17 now, only a year away from being able to claim her place back. All she had to do was figure out who was an ally, and who was a foe. Who was responsible for the plane crash that had killed her parents? The authorities had deemed it an accident in the end, but she knew better. She knew it had been planned, she had been young, but she could still remember her mother’s worried eyes as the plane started going down.

“We were set up,” she had said to her father as they hugged. 

Her younger self hadn’t been able to figure out the meaning of those words, but years under Arobynn’s tutelage had.

Gavriel, Aedion’s father, was her first suspect. He had been the one they were heading over to visit, and he was the one that knew the most about their schedule and plans to arrive in Rifthold that day. But he wasn’t the only one, they were many after her family’s fortune, and she would get to the bottom of it. 

She finished getting changed into her favorite black leather tights, a long sleeved red top with a considerable cleavage, her red high heels and a black leather jacket; it was time for a ride.

It only took her a few minutes to make her way to the Havilliard Hotel, and as soon as she was past the front door, there was already someone picking her bags for her and helping her over to the main counter.

“Celaena Sardothian,” she said as she leaned over the front desk, taking her sunglasses off. “I have a room booked for the next two months,” she stated.

“Perfect, I just need you to sign this paper here,” the receptionist said as she placed a form on the counter. “And here is your key. Breakfast is served between six and ten in the morning, lunch starts at midday, until two in the afternoon, and dinner is served from five until nine. If you have any questions, you can call reception, and we also provide room service.” She finished with a polite smile.

“Thank you,” she replied as she finished signing the form and grabbed the keys. 

She was excited for the freedom, it was the first time she’d be living on her own, even if it was fake; even if she still had to go to Arobynn’s mansion everyday to tell him what was going on. She'd also have to check with him regularly in case there were any more jobs he needed her to do; she was sure there would be plenty going on. 

She was glad for the facade that allowed her this freedom, claiming to be an exchange student had been the perfect excuse to get inside the Hotel. She knew everybody would buy straight into it, rich people never questioned anything that shined; and she had her glistering jewelry to prove she belonged.

She called the elevator in the lobby, and leaned on one foot as she waited, her hands on her hips.

“Are you going up?” a voice called behind her.

“Yup, not much point going down, is there?” she replied as she looked behind her shoulder.

The guy standing there was about her same height, with raven black hair and a stunning pair of sapphire blue eyes that were looking her up and down.

“Just the parking lot, actually,” he replied. “Would you mind if I joined you? Which floor are you heading to?” He asked.

“So many questions for someone who I don’t even know by name,” she replied, turning around and being fully aware of who was the guy now standing in front of her.

“Sorry, my bad,” he said as he extended a hand towards her. “I’m Dorian Havilliard Junior, son of the Dorian Havilliard.”

She looked down at his outstretched arm and then back up to his eyes before shaking his hand. 

“Nice to meet you,” she said as she purposely licked her bottom lip, aware of the attention drawing red lipstick she was wearing.

The door opened up behind them, and they both stepped into the elevator. She leaned against the back wall, her arms crossed over her chest and her right foot popped against the wall. Dorian selected the 25th floor, and then looked at her.

“May I know the floor now?”

“24th,” she replied with a smirk.

His eyebrows rose up, and he gave her an incredulous smirk before punching in the number.

“Should I know you?” Dorian asked her after a moment’s pause. He was clearly wondering what kind of teenager was staying in one of the suits from the second to last floor. After all, they were the most expensive rooms of the hotel.

“Maybe,” she said, lifting her chin up.

“You haven’t told me your name yet,” he said then, turning around to fully face her.

The number on the reader marked that they were onto the 6th floor.

“Have I not?” she asked innocently.

7th floor.

“No, you haven’t,” he said, and he took a step forward.

8th floor.

Celaena chewed on her bottom lip, as if thinking the question over.

9th floor.

She rearranged her hair, sweeping it back and then putting a few strands back to the front, careful to look down as she did, crossing her arm back under her chest.

10th floor.

She glanced up, and caught Dorian looking down at her cleavage.

11th floor.

“My eyes are up here,” she said, pointing up with one hand.

12th floor.

He looked flustered for a second, but he got rid of the look fast enough, replacing it for a smug smile instead.

13th floor.

“Excuse me, I got a little distracted,” he said, and then he cleared his throat.

14th floor.

“That’s fine, just remember where my eyes are.” 

15th floor.

“Of course, I could never forget such beautiful eyes,” he said cockily.

16th floor.

“They’re like a cup of coffee, dark, intense, but with just the smaller dab of milk.” He said as he took another step towards her.

17th floor.

“Do you always flirt by comparing girls to foods you like?” Celaena asked, sounding incredulous and offended.

19th floor.

“Who said I’m flirting?” Dorian took another small step towards her.

20th floor.

“Oh, I think you were, you even forgot you had asked about my name. It is rude to flirt with someone whose name you don’t even now,” she added, brushing her hair back over her shoulder. 

21th floor.

“Are you going to tell me your name then? I might see you around here often if you’re staying for a while. You know, this is my father’s hotel after all.”

22th floor.

“Oh, how lucky I’d be if I run into you again, right?” She said as she shrugged with one shoulder. She peeled off the wall and took a step towards him, standing only an inch away.

23th floor.

“You would be,” he replied, his breath brushing her cheeks.

24th floor.

“It’s Celaena,” she whispered in his ear as she leaned forward, and then walked past him, her shoulder bumping into his as she moved towards the door. “And you might be lucky to see me again,” she added as she stepped out and turned around to watch the doors close between them.

You will certainly see me again, she thought. You will see a lot of me. 

Also, here’s an adorable Dorian looking all fancy in a suit, because why not?

[scaplivingtogether]

~A Evillious Christmas Carol~ Act 4

By: TomboyJessie13

Act 4

Act 4

Marlon was wondering the empty streets trying to find the Spirit that was with him, but he was nowhere to be found, and to make things worse it's started to get really cold, even more so than usual. The streets actually started to look more darker than it needs to be, along with a sea of fog. Marlon was shivering, he pulled his bath robe up to his face to warm both the face and neck up. Looking at his surroundings, he noticed that the sky was a dark blue while the snow was a light blue, and feels cold and completely alone.

As he was spacing out..."OOF!" He bumped into something solid. "Wha-?..." He looked at whatever he bumped into and instantly became pale as a sheet...he fell over onto his rear while not breaking contact with the object...no...a woman wearing a long, ragged, black hooded cape with golden lining, a long black color slit dress with golden belts, black thigh high boots, fish nets for leggings, and golden chokers. The most notable trait found among her appearance is her short green hair with bangs and a white mask with one eye and red markings. Despite being only a foot or two shorter than him, he was scared out of his mind by her sudden appearance.

"...Who...A-a-are you...the G-G-Ghost of Christmas yet to come?" Marlon asked fearfully, the woman in front of him didn't say a thing, but she had nodded in response. Though he fears the woman, Marlon must know what she wants him to see, he stood up. "...Tell me Spirit...what do you want me to see?" He asks, again the no response, but instead she motioned her hand to follow her, he noticed that she's wearing fish nets for detached sleeves, black finger-less gloves, and golden bracelets, she also has long red nails. She walks down the cold and dark streets with him close behind, while following her, he noticed that the sun has started to rise over head. As they walked, Marlon could've sworn he heard voices of the people, they turned the corner to find a busy street, people were trading things and so on. Marlon hears talking nearby, he looks overhead and sees a group of men talking and laughing.

"So that's what happened?" One man asks.

"Oh yes, that poor fool, one of our own men, has died in his own home." Another man speaks. "I must say the way he runs things, funeral's bound to be cheap."

"Of course." The third one speaks. "But I'm only planning on going there if lunch is provided." They only laugh at the response. Marlon was quite confused by this, he looked at the Spirit who only silently observes, she started to move to another group, Marlon looked over to a few more men, his eyes widen when he realizes something about them.

"Those men...their one of my collaborators."

"So I heard those men talking about our partner." He started.

"Who?" Another one asked.

"I don't know."

"No I mean our partner."

"Oh...honestly I don't remember."

"Me either." They both laugh about that as well, they don't really seem to care who died.

"Hmmmm, these people seemed to be talking about someone." Marlon stated. "But who?" He asks the Spirit, no reply once again. "Well then." He sits down on a barrel. "I saw myself in the past, I'm pretty sure I'll see myself here as well...I usually meet them here from the corner of that drug store so I should be showing up soon." So he watched that one corner to see if his future self arrives...and so he waited...and waited...and waited...but he never came, instead coming out of the corner was someone else he doesn't recognize, and Marlon's partners went to greet him. "Huh...I guess I must've changed himself, huh?" He says to the Spirit, but a another wave a terror has taken him, as the Spirit was looking at him...this time with a sneer. She then took him by his shoulder and drags him off. "HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY!" He exclaimed in surprise. They walked into a very run down and disgusting looking neighborhood, full of miserable looking people.

"Hey...I know this area, this place is full of criminals and harlots, but why did you bring me?" Marlon asks, still met with silence. She stopped in front of a old dirty house and let go of Marlon's arm, she gestures him to go inside. Not wanting to be pushed or pulled, he stuck his hand on the door and it went through like it wasn't there. He enters the place alongside the Spirit only to find an old man there in front of a fireplace trying to get warm.

"Oi! Joe!" A old woman who was followed by two more of her crones called out, to which got the old man's attention, that must be Joe. "I brought in more bundles!"

"Let me guess: You stole something from that old greedy and cruel wanker's house?" The old man who is revealed to be Joe asks.

"Oh come off it, there's nothing wrong with taking things without permission." The old woman bragged. "Besides, no one's even gonna miss him or his belongings anyways." Joe thought about what she said, before shrugging.

"Ah you're right, bring it over lass, bring it over!" Joe told her enthusiastically as they went to a table, they seem to have no respect for anyone who they steal from, even those who are dead. "So what's what did you bring in this time?"

"I found a few small nick knacks in his room." The old woman took out a couple of pens and clocks. Joe looks through them before shaking his head.

"Too bad, these aren't really worth much." He gives him only one coin, much to her displeasure. "NEXT!" Another woman came up.

"I got some silver and a couple of fine fabrics." She said, but was then pushed aside by the third woman.

"I got some bed curtains and blankets, I unwrapped it from his corpse." The Third woman said, surprising Marlon and even the old ladies and Joe. "What? It would have been wasted by wrapping him in it." Marlon was appalled by what he heard.

"This is disgusting, get me out of here." Marlon said squeamishly, the Spirit then claps her hands twice, changing the atmosphere. He's now in a empty room dimly lit by candle, and in front of both Marlon and the Spirit was a bed with white sheets, but there was also a lump underneath the sheets that seems to shape like a man, it was a corpse, Marlon jumped in surprise when he saw the body. The Spirit points at his head, motioning him to remove the sheets. "You want me to...?" He asks quietly, the Spirit only nods. Marlon raised his hand to grab it...but quickly pulled it back, the Spirit only looked at him. "I can't do it, Spirit." He said in a sad tone. "After all the horrible things I did that leads me to be rich, the last thing I want is to disrespect someone's corpse upon dying alone...even if this person was cruel." The Spirit only stood there silently, this made Marlon feel a little awkward. "I can see what kind of lesson you're trying to teach me...so...we should leave." The Spirit only stared at him, this is getting really uncomfortable...perhaps they weren't done yet.

"Ok...how about this then, take me to one person who is sadden by the death of this man." Marlon proclaimed, trying to put on a brave face. The Spirit nodded and clapped her hands twice, they we're transported into a unknown home. "Hm? Where are we?" His attention was turned to the sound of the door opening, it was a depressed looking man, but Marlon quickly recognizes him. "Hey, that's one of my clients." He said as the man sat down at the kitchen table, his wife arrives.

"What's wrong dear? Did something happen?" The wife asks, sitting down next to him.

"...I just received news that the man we were in-debt to has passed away." He said. "But there is some hope."

"I see...well I don't wish to sound cruel but thank goodness, this man was a greedy miser."

"True, and we don't know who will take over our debt, but it's very unlikely that he should be such an incredible miser as the last." The man said, starting to become brighter, Marlon can only watch in surprised by how they behaved.

"...This is not what I had in mind." Marlon said, "How about something more tender, something to make me forget the horrible image of that man who died alone in that house." The Spirit nodded and clapped her hands twice again, they were taken to another home that Marlon can quickly recognize. "Say...this is Keel's home." He looks around to find the family in the living area...except something about them is...off. They were silent and depressed. Shaw was sitting by himself by the dining table while Yukina was sitting by the window, Mikina was sewing something, but had to stop because her eyes were getting tired.

"Excuse me Spirit, but I don't see Keel or Tiny Aile." Marlon said. "Where is one of them?" Hearing that question, the Spirit pointed at one corner of the room near the oven. He looked over and saw something that looked familiar...it was Aile's crutch. "...Her...crutch?...Wait...she's not dead, is she?" Upon seeing that, Marlon's stomach dropped when he began to realized what happen. "...Oh my god...she's dead!...Aile's dead!" Marlon covered his face. "It's all my fault! I didn't want this to happen!" He cried out in a desperate matter, but she was still silent, as Marlon was becoming hysterical from this horrific discovery, one of the children asked:

"Father's been coming home more later than usual." It was Yukina. "I mean he's been walking more slower each day."

"I think that because Aile's no longer around." Shaw said, looking back. "He used to run quicker because she was on his shoulders." At that moment, Keel enters, wrapped in his blanket. He looked very depressed...even more so that usual.

"Welcome home dear." Mikina said as she stood up to hug her husband, he hugs her back. Yukina and Shaw followed the same suit.

"Thank you so much, everyone." Keel started, sounding shaky. "I've visited the place where Aile's going to be buried...it was a beautiful site, so green and pure. I promised her I would walk there...every...Sunday." Just as he finished, he began to break down, he placed his face on Mikina's lap and began to cry into it. Mikina, holding back her sobs, comforts her mourning husband. Shaw only hangs his head in sorrow and wiping his tears as Yukina was covering her mouth, preventing her from breaking down as well. As for Marlon, he fell onto knees in grief, he indirectly harmed his own employee by taking away one of his loved ones. The Spirit can only watch in silence as Marlon sits their in complete guilt. The Spirit watches Keel as he goes upstairs to the room where Aile has been laid down on a bed, surrounded by flowers, even holding a bouquet in her cold hands, she looked like she can still be asleep. He composes himself, kisses her little face, then goes downstairs again.

"That reminds me." Keel said, wiping his face with a handkerchief. "I actually ran into Ayn earlier, y'know Marlon's Nephew? He wanted to give his sincere condolences, and gave us his love to us and gave me his address so we came be in touch...in case we needed anything." He sat next to Mikina on the couch. "I think I might also get Shaw a job as well."

"Shaw will soon leave us and set up with a family of his own." Yukina said, the boy nodded.

"That this may be so, but we will never forget this time together, and their first loss, of Tiny Aile, and how very good she was."

The Spirit began to move Marlon's shoulder, Marlon looked up and saw that she was motioning him that's time to leave, he complies and follows her out. Outside of the Cratchit home, the broken miser was sitting on a old carriage, overcome with guilt and sorrow. The Spirit, surprisingly enough hands him a handkerchief, probably to calm him down, he uses it to blow his nose before handing it back, she get's rid of it.

"Spirit..." He said quietly, getting her attention. "...Please...take me to that dead man's grave...I want to know who he is." The Spirit silently nods and begins to walk back into the city. They both walked through the streets in silence until they reached his counting house, but they seem to be passing through it. "Spirit...am I in there?...Can I see myself inside my counting house?". She shook her head, and points in another direction. "...I understand." He continues to walk with the Spirit quietly. Soon enough, they reached the iron gate of a churchyard, a wretched, lifeless place. The Spirit opens the gates, once they're wide open, she gestures him inside, now it is clear that she is directing Marlon to one grave in particular.

"Please Spirit...the places that you showed me...the grave robbing and tiny Aile...tell me these events can yet be changed?" He asked her with desperation in his voice. "Or will they still happen no matter what I do?" Still met with silence, but the way she's walking seems to be more determined, it's as if she wanted to show him the man's grave since the beginning. Soon she stopped, Marlon bumped into her by accident. "Sorry." He looked over, and in front of them was a lonely, neglected grave covered in vines and grass. He took two steps before stopping, he looked back at the Spirit, she quietly nods, egging him to go on. Marlon walked to the grave before kneeling down. When he pulled the vines and pulled the grass, he let out a huge gasp in shock and terror when he saw the name most familiar to him:

~Ebenezer Marlon~

The man who has died, lying under the sheets on a bed, and was robbed and mocked was him, he was that man.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Marlon, taking hold of his own head, let out a scream of horror from this revelation, knowing that he was that man, and that he will die alone and unloved...doomed to spend eternity in hell suffering for his Greed like his late partner. Once he stopped, he sat there in horror, panting. The Spirit stood behind him, Marlon turned around and grabbed her dress. "Please Spirit! I don't want to end up like this! I don't wanna die alone! I learned my lessons! I want to live life to the fullest! I want to treat others with kindness! I want to enjoy and honor Christmas with my relatives! I want to save Cratchit's daughter! I want to change myself! I'll change! I'll change! I'll change! I'll change! I'll change! I'll change! I'll change! I'll change!-" As he was repeating that phrase, the Spirit calmly grabs his hands and begins to float down to the ground with him still holding onto her.

"I'll chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang!"

End of Act 4

[violetsystems]

#personal

There’s a point where you are pushing a boulder uphill where you actually think you’re pushing it over the top.  You look up.  You look down.  There’s this exact even point between joy and dread where you don’t know which way it will go.  Seeing as how it’s an exact middle point you expect it to pass.  Like this whole process goes on for a year and you emerge mentally “over it.”  You expect something to change outside of your skill at rolling the boulder.  You say to yourself that you can keep doing this all day like some juiced up eighties American action hero.  And then you look up and down again to observe your process.  It’s still limbo.  You might even become strong enough to maintain this mirage of an ascent while doing other things.  Watching a movie or a television show.  Play a game on your phone.  But the boulder is always there.  The positioning is different these days.  It feels like I keep pushing the boulder and the hill keeps stretching.  Like there’s a bulldozer dumping other people’s shit onto the incline.  Which makes it seem I’m climbing up a relentless garbage pile of other people’s baggage, perceptions, and detritus.  This is essentially true particularly in the city I live in.  Which mind you living in a city is much closer to the edge than where I came from.  I lived in the suburbs for half my life.  It felt like the bottom.  An Irish and Italian Catholic suburb plagued by hard drugs and abuse.  I eventually found a job in the city through my friends at the time.  And later I eventually found a place to live.  And I have lived in this city long enough to know there isn’t really something wrong with me.  The incline is easy enough but sinking in other people’s shit seems to be the norm.  Around here whether it’s Chicago or America, people like to disarm you by making your priorities seem selfish.  We’re all in this together after all.  In times of crisis, we pull together and help our own.  Which is a reminder that for about a year I’ve been isolated taking care of my own.  I spent about as much time per day trying to engage people on LinkedIn without any real success.  It is place where I feel I’m successful at showing the professional side of me.  Sort of like Tumblr is a place I feel like I’m successful showing the human and empathic side of me.  Which one feels like the boulder?  After all the years I’ve spent writing to the void here, I’ve seen a connection.  Expecting too much is what shatters hopes and dreams.  But I have spent a really long time expecting the very least and being given less.  In a twisted turn of fate, I have a lot more financially than I may have in my previous life.  To have to label it previous is a sure sign I stopped pushing that boulder a long time ago.  I was forced to.  Left with a realization that the world is bigger than this and yet I can’t seem to escape it.  I played a game of magic yesterday online.  Sometimes lately the player names are a little too telling.  I had just built a Tiamat deck so I tested it out in Standard Ranked.  The username popped up as “Escapeurf8yt.”  I quit Hearthstone for less.  The last two games I played in that Blizzard game were so sus that the player names were meant to trigger me.  That last match was against a player named “Imcomingforyou.”   Nerds aren’t the most delicate when they have their chance to wield power.  I won the Tiamat game without even having to play Tiamat.  But it left me with a similar feeling.  Why do I try to be part of things that don’t have any real modicum of respect for other people’s feelings and identity?  

That example could be chalked up as being a little too sensitive I guess.  Every time I walk around the neighborhood lately it’s like I have to tiptoe around people’s feelings.  I’ve gotten mad at my situation more times than I can count the last year.  Anybody would.  I lost all my ground.  I lost everything and yet gained something in the process.  People whispered behind my back and watched.  Looking for clues to pin the blame on my downfall on me.  And yet for all the new things I tried and did to survive, I’m still pushing the same generic boulder to most people.  I’m not even good enough to be recognized as a writer by the broad public.  I’m some sneaky individual that everyone feels it’s their duty to check up on at the expense of my civil rights and general mood.  The gaslighting is at the very center.  That nobody wants to address the elephant in the room.  They can’t really.  And maybe it’s for the best.  Because the way I see everything from the inside out is troubling.  Nothing has returned to normal.  People’s privilege has been laid bare and somehow everyone is looking for the scapegoat to deflect the blame.  I’m sick of it.  Everybody being so nosy and confrontational with nothing to offer expect a bad attitude and a jokey stare.  This is why I no longer go out for anything other than groceries.  Why I decide to have things delivered instead of having to participate in a clown show parade of well intended bullshit.  Why everybody speaks for me when no one has spoken a kind word to me at all.  Everybody expects me to reach out and fix the trust they broke with me.  And it gets sadder and sadder that people don’t understand that I’m pretty much a boarded up house at this point.  Living in a little shack enclosed by people’s expectations and barriers.  Time just keeps passing.  People do keep reading.  But here is where I feel people have the most context at how horrible I feel after all of this.  Some of it is for the best.  The community people ask for in the real world without deserving it is non existent or coerced.  I know this because I’ve been welcome down here in the bowels of the internet.  You don’t expect the community here to cross the line.  Even when it does, it is a more delicate and slow process how you let people into your life.  In the real world, it’s abrasive, clumsy and inconsiderate.  And I dance around it all just the same.  But there’s a point when it just becomes macabre.  People out there might say they know me.  But I’m the one out here alone constantly.  I have a full year to prove it.  More than that to be honest.  I just gave up on trying to figure out everything that happened before that.  I’ve lost my own history in that regard.  I will never reboot my dj career.  I will never be accepted as a writer.  I will never be good enough to be called an artist.  I remember this intense discussion I had with an ex during a break up.  We were living together at the time.  We had been together for about a decade at that point.  We lived in the eastern side of this neighborhood at the time.  It was designated by the developer as an artist’s neighborhood.  My girlfriend at the time was a photographer.  I was mostly her assistant.  I paid most of the rent.  We were at a crossroads.  She cheated on me in front of my face in front of our house.  Even after telling her to go, she wouldn’t leave.  She told me to my face that I didn’t belong there because I wasn’t an artist.  I also gave up my car in that breakup.  I’m realizing just recently the reason I never renewed my driver’s license was because I knew I would never afford a car again after I lost that one.  Which is a great thing to remember when State officials yell at you asking why you haven’t renewed it.

The world says it gives a fuck.  It doesn’t show it.  It doesn’t act.  If it did we would never be in this situation.  I know this because I was born to survive.  I have pushed many boulders up many hills.  So much so that I’m grey and over the hill.  And apparently completely fucking meaningless to most people.  Only good enough to speak through T-shirts and guerilla marketing.  There’s a level beyond that I know.  There are people that actually care but the situation is impossible at best.  I’m supposed to see this and accept this out of love, care and attention.  And for a few people I barely know, I do.  The person I care about the most probably knows this too.  But I don’t know anything.  It’s blind faith.  Which is saying a lot for spending two paragraphs saying I have faith in nothing around me.  I don’t,  That’s the curse.  Seeing it how it really is.  Knowing you’ve spent half your life pushing up a boulder for other people that wasn’t worth the slough.  I gained some muscle mass.  Some context to my backstory.  But my life is dead in the fucking water aside from having actual net income.  Kanye and Trump are cash poor.  This is just a fact.  I’m not.  And yet nothing has changed.  There’s no end in sight to where I need to be a year later.  Just the same disrespectful shit.  How I’m supposed to sacrifice my humanity for some rich people’s game with my emotions.  The world uses you, eats you up and spits you out.  If you are lucky to survive this you’d be me.  Has anyone out there really thought about how I feel after all of this?  How dark it must be to know the real truth and keep pushing that boulder just the same?  How tiring and exhausting it feels to be able to write it so delicately but still be so fucking misunderstood just the same?  Is my life just to be joked about backstage as some quirky subplot to steal ideas from?  You cannot be me after all of this.  I will remind you on my very last breath.  And every day that passes is a reminder that you’ve tried.  People have tried to say they know me.  People have tried to say they speak for me.  Understand my pain.  And yet I’m never good enough to acknowledge.  I’m invisible and supposedly this is my thing.  In that case it is.  From this day forward.  Let’s not beat around the fucking bush.  I got here on my own.  I bled, I cried, I screamed and I retreated into the inevitable.  How does anyone expect me to feel if I’m supposed to accept what I accept and know what I know.  I don’t really know.  I feel awful.  I feel broken.  And I feel like everyone who cares about me knows this by now.  And the stakes are higher than my personal feelings about it all.  But my words are meant for people who read them to understand me better for the love of it.  Not to get a jump on me.  Not to subvert me.  Not to teach me a lesson or use me as a stereotype.  Not to be a punching bag or scapegoat for communities who would rather burn me at the stake than hear what I have to say.  In that you will forever fail.  I love the culture that swirls down here.  I love how hardcore it is without pinging the radar for the vultures and the marketing teams.  And yet we have this power that still goes ignored.  Gets laughed at.  Joked about.  Talked over because people are vapid, bored and only succeed by watching other’s fail.  I dropped that boulder a long time ago.  It apparently has not smashed the opposition yet.  It is a long way down as it’s been a long way up.  Tough at the top for sure.  But there’s only room enough up here for two.  And that seat is taken.  <3 Tim

[your-dietician]

The NBA Play-in: The moments the young Memphis Grizzlies grew up

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/nba/the-nba-play-in-the-moments-the-young-memphis-grizzlies-grew-up/

The NBA Play-in: The moments the young Memphis Grizzlies grew up

The play-in games were a resounding success for the National Basketball Association. Obviously, single elimination games have this fascinating mystique around them. With it added into the NBA, and with fans entering the arenas again, it made these situations that much sweeter.

The play-in games were a resounding success for the Memphis Grizzlies as well. They had great tests in both games against teams with riches of playoff experience compared to this young squad. San Antonio had Gregg Popovich — arguably the most successful NBA coach of the 21st century — and a good blend of battle-tested veterans (DeMar DeRozan, Rudy Gay, Patty Mills, to name a few). After a strong win there, they had to enter the Chase Center to battle Steph Curry, Draymond Green, and the rest of the Warriors on the road.

It was no small task ahead, but the Memphis Grizzlies prevailed and grew immensely from it.

Now after a month since the play-in tournament was played, let’s take a look at the different themes from these two games that illustrated growth for the Grizzlies.

In both play-in games, the Memphis Grizzlies got off to such strong starts. It wasn’t uncharacteristic for them to do so, as they were 11th in first-quarter net rating (+2.6) and 5th in first-period defensive rating (108). Granted, rating rankings have a slim separation statistically. Nonetheless though, it suggests they’re a pretty good first quarter team.

However, for most young teams those first 12 minutes of playoff-intensity games can be nerve racking and could start slow starts. The Grizzlies’ strong starts demonstrated great poise for a young team, as they outscored their two opponents 68-48 in those minutes. They also amassed incredible runs in those stretches as well — including a 19-2 run against the Spurs, and a 14-3 one against the Warriors.

Starting with the home game, the Grizzlies utilized the meaning of home-court advantage — a beauty that we actually got to experience in this COVID-ravaged season.

Ja Morant pulled the offense out of the 4-on-4 fast break. Jonas Valanciunas runs the floor since DeMar DeRozan oddly enough didn’t already beat him down the floor. Since Jakob Poetl — the primary rim protector — was playing the potential screen from Jaren Jackson Jr., there was an opening for Valanciunas to rumble down the lane for a thunderous jam. That’s always something that’ll get the crowd going.

Then, there was the resounding fast-break jam from Dillon Brooks that was probably the staple of the Grizzlies 1st-quarter run.

It was the classic “turning defense into offense” — a sweet way to get the momentum rolling on your end and away from the opposition. Brooks corrals the steal, audaciously looks off Morant, and throws down a vicious tomahawk slam right over Dejounte Murray.

In that same quarter, we saw the flashes from Jaren Jackson Jr. that make him such a tantalizing offensive prospect.

This sequence illustrates the duo potential of Morant and Jackson. Morant is going to garner attention off of the drive, like most good finishers. Poetl tags Morant, while Lonnie Walker — his original man — goes over to help. Since Keldon Johnson has to play help to prevent the Valanciunas bucket, Jackson relocates to a window Ja could whip a pass through for the in-rhythm 3.

This recognition from Jackson was ridiculous. He curls so far out that he’s not even in the frame here. It has to be 30 feet out! Johnson is caught ball-watching here, while probably waiting for Anderson to make the pass over to Valanciunas in order to make a deflection.

Though that 1st quarter lead vanished and didn’t seem as impactful in the process, it helped the Grizzlies establish a tone to energize the crowd, while also get its other franchise cornerstone going early.

The Grizzlies continued their excellent 1st quarter starts on the road against Golden State. That one was extremely imperative, as road games against the Warriors can still be dangerous for slumps. They possess the greatest scorer of all time in Steph Curry, and it seems like an avalanche whenever he’s humming.

However, the Grizzlies did an excellent job staying composed, setting the tone, and establishing an aggressive mindset. When it comes to those 3 things, this play pops to mind:

Dillon Brooks sent a message here that the Grizzlies were going to swarm defensively, and they were going to win every 50-50 ball. Again, turning defense into offense is a great way to find your footing early in high-stakes games.

With that in mind, this is probably the sequence most Grizzlies fans would appreciate the most:

Limited sample size, but Jaren Jackson Jr. nearly doubled his offensive rebound percentage from last season to this one (3.6 to 6.9). Though caught near the perimeter, Jackson chases the long rebound — probably gets away with a little bit of an “over the back” call — and gets reward with a trip to the line following an aggressive take to the basket.

Moving over to the offensive end, Ja Morant got going from deep en route to a career night from downtown.

Curry or Kevon Looney did not pay a single bit of respect to Morant on this jumper. Curry decided to go under the Valanciunas screen, while Looney stayed in drop coverage to play the roll. It allowed Morant to step into a 3 in rhythm to knock down his 2nd triple of the game, instilling more confidence in his outside game.

Young squads could get rattled early in playoff situations, especially when it’s unfamiliar to them. We even saw it a bit from the Grizzlies in the Utah series. Their composure and poise in the play-in games demonstrated maturity and growth from the young Memphis team.

Scott Strazzante/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

How the Grizzlies defended their opponent’s go-to scorer was one of the defining moments of the play-in games.

It served as the prelude to Dillon Brooks’ 2021 postseason breakout. He was tasked with defending DeRozan and Curry, and he lived up to his role as “defensive stopper.” He held DeRozan to 2-10 shooting as the primary defender, and Curry was 5-12 against him as well. The Curry numbers may not be as glorious as his other strong matchup data points (see: Bradley Beal, Damian Lillard or Luka Doncic), but he made it difficult for him to get shots off with a vigorous face-guard.

He surely does get more individual praise for his defensive performance against DeRozan, and rightfully so. He forced him into tough, uncomfortable shot attempts, while not falling for too many fakes.

While Brooks is fighting through the screen here, Valanciunas hedges the screen a bit until Brooks is over the Poetl pick. Once he’s free, he flies into DeRozan’s shot to force him into a rough miss.

There was another good hedge moment here between Valanciunas and Brooks late in the game. Off the high screen, Valanciunas does a great job of moving his feet until Brooks could recover. As the big man returns to drop coverage, DeRozan is forced into a tough sideline floater with a defender flying through to contest the shot.

Brooks’ physicality remained a strong trait in another resumé-building performance as a defensive stopper — the good (tough contests like this), and the bad (5 fouls).

This defensive epitomizes Brooks’ performance on DeRozan. Here, he bodies up DeRozan just enough to bother him, but not too much to create the foul call. Once he gets to that step-back, Brooks makes sure to get in a spot where he’s in his airspace without being completely in his landing spot — which would’ve given him a foul.

It wasn’t just Brooks tasked with stopping DeRozan. The Grizzlies put together an awesome scheme centered to stop him, leading to an uncharacteristic 5-21 night for the veteran star. It really ended with Jonas Valanciunas here. He’s often criticized on that end for his inability to guard out on the perimeter, but he was able to use drop coverage to a strength more against the mid-range maestro.

This sequence triggered evergreen memories of my basketball coach growing up screaming at our team to cut off the baseline. Jonas Valanciunas demonstrates one of the potential pluses in doing so. He has to hedge off the Dieng screen before Desmond Bane could recover. In the process, he forces DeRozan baseline which sends him to “no man’s land” and generates a turnover.

Again, Valanciunas showcases fantastic verticality here:

He helps off the DeRozan drive, and he maintains good rim protection instincts. He stays in control as the driver decelerates looking for contact, and he goes up with textbook verticality to swat the shot.

Switching over to Steph Curry, it was a bit of the opposite. Instead of a tough shooting night (still 13-28), the Grizzlies did a great job of blitzing him, forcing the Warriors into making quick decisions, and putting the supporting cast in positions to make plays without its star. Curry finished with 7 turnovers, the 6th time this season turning the ball over 7 or more times.

Before getting into Curry’s parade of turnovers, I want to showcase the defensive versatility of Jaren Jackson Jr.:

Jackson switches onto Curry off the screen and stays with him the entire drive. He forced him into the paint, where Xavier Tillman was ready to help. Both big men went straight up to swallow Curry’s shot and send it out of bounds to a Grizzlies’ possession.

Carrying on.

Ja Morant does a great job of stepping up into the switch, and Brooks tags the roller well too. Kent Bazemore is not the roller Curry is used to — story of the 2020-21 Warriors, right. Curry instinctually slips the short-roll pass to…nobody…leading to a turnover.

Xavier Tillman takes on the switch here and is really good at staying attached to his hip and in a spot where he could strongly contest the shot. The Grizzlies add extra pressure with Brooks stunting and Morant providing help. Curry is then forced to a mid-air decision, and the closest person near him is Juan Toscano-Anderson, and Morant is there for the steal.

The Grizzlies continued to swarm Curry and force him into quick, mid-air decisions that are either going to result in a wild shot, pass, or a travel.

Dillon Brooks and Kyle Anderson — the team’s two best perimeter defenders — blitz Curry out of the dribble hand-off. What is Anderson’s alternative? A Draymond Green 3? Though he splits between the two defenders momentarily, Anderson recovers to offer a strong enough contest — coupled with Valanciunas’ presence as well — to get him to pass cross-court out of his shot.

This play could’ve gone badly. Brooks probably should’ve played Andrew Wiggins’ roll, while Grayson Allen should’ve returned over to Steph Curry. Ja Morant saved the day here defensively though. Curry sees a sliver to whip a pass to Wiggins — and it’s a smart call, because an easy 2 for an athletic 6’9” wing is good offense. He was a bit too loose with the pass, and that — along with the pressure off Ja’s help defense — forces Wiggins to bobble the ball and turn it over.

In one of the largest possessions of the game, the Grizzlies come up with a massive turnover off of great defensive tactics. Tillman hedges the screen and forces him to the sideline, while Brooks recovers. It leaves Curry in a rough spot.

Let’s marvel at the defensive placement here:

Grizz defense -> curry turnover

Tillman and Brooks are trapping. Morant is in the corner, taking away further drives or a pass to the corner. Anderson is playing the roller and taking anything away in the middle. Grayson Allen is playing a free safety role — ready for anything baseline or crosscourt. It leads to an errant, crosscourt pass that goes over Green’s head for the turnover.

This was just a wonderful display of defensive strategy that forced their opponent into tough decisions the whole night.

Defending veteran stars like Steph Curry and DeMar DeRozan helped the Grizzlies grow in multiple ways. It illustrated the importance of locking in to create turnovers and to help your teammate tasked with stopping that player. It helped Dillon Brooks grow as a primary stopper in playoff situations. It was also a growing opportunity for Taylor Jenkins to learn, adjust, and get crafty with defensive schemes.

Photo by Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images

The biggest area of growth for the Memphis Grizzlies during the play-in games was in late-game execution. It was definitely a nervous spot, as the Grizzlies had close games with playoff contenders over the course of the season, and lack of experience typically led to losses. Those regular-season moments served as learning opportunities to set them up for success when it mattered most.

The late-game execution, for the most part, was really good — aside from that non-challenge on the Jordan Poole 3 that would’ve sent all areas of Memphis Grizzlies coverage into a frenzy if they lost.

One thing we learned in these moments is, it always pays to have floor spacing around Ja Morant. He’s the driving force of the offense, and one that savors the opportunity to make big moments. If you give him space to operate, he will do so. Others, too, have the chance to shine and contribute whenever the defense collapses on Morant.

In both plays, there are at least 3-4 defenders that are geared towards what Morant is doing at the rim. Rightfully so. Morant’s vision and poise are assets here, as he’ll dish out passes you don’t think he’ll make. In both dimes, he rises up and contorts his body in a way to sling a pass over to the lone corner man for an easy 3.

Something else to highlight with this young team is the amount of winning plays made late in the game from the role players. Xavier Tillman and Grayson Allen both made an impact down the stretch, whether it was big 3’s or hustle plays. One I want to particular point out is this put-back from Desmond Bane.

Bane tracks the ball as soon as it leaves Morant’s hands, leading to an easy put-back. No groundbreaking analysis with basketball terminology there. However, it was a momentum-swinger that ultimately changed the trajectory of the game. With that put-back, the game goes from becoming a 2-possession game to 3. When there are only 90 seconds left, that’s massive.

Another cool aspect from the Warriors game, especially in crunch-time, was the Grizzlies’ willingness to let the other guys beat them. They were not going to let Curry be the one that put the dagger in. That was evident with hilariously bad missed bunnies from both Andrew Wiggins and Draymond Green. They were going to make this supporting cast create for themselves and win them the game.

Both Brooks and Anderson played the dribble handoff extremely well, preventing any sort of look for Curry. Green is forced to turn to Poole, who dribbles it off his foot in a massive possession. Against top-heavy teams, there are two cases defensively: 1) let the star cook and worry about the other guys, or 2) stop the star and let the supporting cast beat you. Though Curry toughly got off his shots, the Grizzlies did an excellent job of forcing the ball out of his hands when it mattered most.

All of these particular executions wouldn’t be possible without a pure go-to closer. Every team has them. There are stars who face the moments head-on and live with either rising or falling in the process. Ja Morant got his first crack at the clutch, go-to moment on the road in a playoff environment.

It’s safe to say he rose above the moment.

Ja Morant got the switch he wanted, credit to the screeners for helping him do so. He was in a spot where he could hit the move that’s most comfortable for him: that hesi-dribble into the drive towards the left, then the right-handed floater. It’s absolutely money.

With a chance to ice the game, Morant didn’t falter under pressure. He sizes up Toscano-Anderson and gets back to that sweet spot where he wants his floater. Off to Cancun the Warriors go.

Yes, there were some inexperienced blunders. However, it didn’t break the Grizzlies this time. The Memphis Grizzlies grew from regular-season heartbreak to execute in the clutch when it mattered most. Role players saw the dividends from making the simple play. Coach Jenkins found the right combinations to ensure good half-court offense, while coming up with great defensive schemes. Then, its franchise point guard Ja Morant had his first moment to be a go-to scorer down the stretch in a playoff atmosphere.

These clutch moments are what expedites the growth process for a young team.

Photo by Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images

All season long, Taylor Jenkins preached the importance of growth opportunities. Whether it was a losing in the clutch to a contender, dropping a game against an inferior opponent, or a big-time win over a bonafide playoff team — the vision of sustainable success was preached repeatedly throughout the year.

Those close losses to Milwaukee and Denver back in March prepared them to perform in the clutch in a “do or die” situation.

Dillon Brooks’ battles against the league’s elite prepared him to do so in games where the best players are expected to unload the clip.

All season, the players and coaches preached locking in for all 48 minutes, and that was backed up with strong 4th quarter play and staying active with the defensive gameplay.

For a season full of growth opportunities, the play-in tournament was a growing experience you cannot beat. The young Memphis Grizzlies grew up a lot in those two games — as well as the Utah series — and they’re more ready for whatever lies ahead.

For more Grizzlies talk, subscribe to the Grizzly Bear Blues podcast network on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and IHeart. Follow Grizzly Bear Blues on Twitter and Instagram.

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[wholeworldbroken]

PART 1)  Net Neutrality, Hypernormalization, The Dinosaur Who Swindled Natural Selection & Prospered... AND... The Healthy Benefits Of Paranoid Delusional Psychosis.

TV is a dinosaur sinking into the tar. All those once giant networks are scrambling to survive just a little longer in this technological age that left them behind before they noticed. That Netflix model is alot bigger deal than it's given credit for. It's what reshaped HULU until it went legitimate. It's why there's an HBOGO, STARZ, SHOWTIME, etc. app that all outperform their parent networks.

The power of ON-DEMAND blew Amazon up from a more Wal-Marty version of eBay to the titan it is now. Disney is gearing up to yank all Star Wars, Marvel, Indiana Jones, etc. properties from Netflix to add to their own upcoming streaming channel. Even the underdogs that only Netflix could make into giant hits: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, The Defenders and The Punisher (not so much IronFist) are being carted over to the new Disney service without so much as a "thank you for making this possible" to Netflix.

CBS launched theirs earlier this year with the added ammo of the most expensive Star Trek series to date, Discovery, being only available through their site. We'll probably see about 10 new changeovers this coming year. Comcast, Verizon and Slime-Warner know that we'll pay $8 here, $10 there for the convenience of catching all that exclusive content completely at our lesiure, always waiting as soon as we feel like tapping that PLAY button.

So, the dinosaur is slowly inching across the quicksand, dragging its rip-off cable model over to the internet, embracing the technology of the future while still thriving off the scams of the past. Even Youtube, which was kind of a revolution in independent, DIY content creators and previously muted voices now given a somewhat worldwide platform, finding an audience without having to bow to the old media gatekeepers

(the Merv Griffins, Johnny Carsons, Entertainment Tonights, Morning Shows, blah, blah, blah, who were able to get rich off the young, hopefuls kissing the asses of whoever would help them be seen, LONG before any of the actual talent was consistently turning a profit. Completely self -regenerating. You can burn up the lump of coal till it's all disintegrated, but the machine ALWAYS got fresh coal being shoveled in the fire, baby)

... is now flooded with Jimmy Kimmel, SNL, Paramount, Disney studios, which seems like normal that those sketches, clips, movie trailers would end up archived on youtube...

until you consider that youtubers are paid through Google Adsense, and receive a monetary amount per video play featuring ads that are part of the program. The success and general public hunger for these independent creators has multiplied the number of young, self-made millionaires over the last 10 years. So, in come the dinosaurs, dragging that dirty-old-bag of crooked-old-ways with them.

Now you got NBC, uploading individual sketches from SNL, a television show that makes its revenue from tv ads & endorsements, each video cashing in on adsense profits seperately, rivaling the numbers from the original airing of the whole episode. Jimmy Fallon, Dr. Phil... practically EVERYbody is clawing & scratching for that youtube money all the kids were syphoning away from them. Whatever.

Big, ugly business, but still business. Dog eat dog & all that.

But what about commercials? Who the fuck clicks on the new TIDE ad showing up in their youtube feed? SOMEbody, cause it's got, like, a bajillion clicks. Are companies drafting interns to generate views and cash in on adsense? Hey, I'm paranoid, but if stupid old ME thought of it...

So, you seen the new Star Wars trailer? Shit, EACH newer version, starting with the teaser? How many did you see on youtube? ...and when you click that movie COMMERCIAL, like magic, you gotta sit through a goddamn COMMERCIAL before you can watch the COMMERCIAL you voluntarily chose to endure. Shit. I'll be DAMNED if, half the time, the ad that comes up isn't another trailer for another movie, usually from a whole other studio. Think Disney/StarWars minds you got a sneak taste of GrownUps 3 while you were waiting to drool all over a 30-second montage of disjointed scenes arranged to grease the dollar bills out of your wallet come Christmas time? `</pre> They just got paid by Adam Sandler's scam of a company for you to wait out the 5 seconds to click away from his bullshit and get up in them Star Wars guts... several million times... by an unrelated company willing to pay the opponent team for the luxury of dropping a commercial on the front of their commercial... leading to Disney (only an example. This is some across the board shit) making millions off a commercial designed to set up an installment in a franchise that will bring them automatic billions. <pre>` It's Terry Gilliam level absurdity that we've indoctrinated ourselves, as a species, to accept as "successful business practices", as we dream of one day carving our very own little chunk of the abstract money scheme balogna. I don't pretend to have a better, more functional answer than: try to resist as much of the barrage as you can, of huckster salesmen who have studied the best psychological methods of Stockholming your oblivious ass into not only continuing to prop up their pyramid scheme and perpetuating their boss's greedy manipulation of the entire world by way of its set-up-to-fail economic machinations `</pre> but ALSO, to constantly strengthen your faith in the infallible logic of those same machinations with a passion that is prepared to DESTROY any anomalous dissenters, selfish enough to be randomly fertilized and born into their designated gangsign annotated factions dividing up larger, further established, gangsign brandishing nation-states, yet still possessing the ingratious self-serving personality defect of introspection, empathy & existential contemplation. ** incoming** __VOICE__OF__GREAT__MACHINATION__LEADER,__STIFFY__O'FOOFYSKINS______ <pre>` "The enemy is all around and they hate your way of life. They whisper corruption into the ears of our unsuspecting younger generations. They bombard you with an agenda of moral codes & ideals in direct conflict to the ones you were taught. If you love the random patch of land you literally had more of a chance to be born outside of than in `</pre> and you're not some kind of infidel, basking in the luxuries provided by your assigned locale while remaining unwilling to offer up your mortal life to assure its continuation, then you already know that the RIGHT thing to do, the divine purpose you feel pumping through your heart, is stand tall & be ready to hoist your team's flag should it fall. The enemy wants to see you fail so that it can pillage its way to the holy finish line which was divinely entitled to YOU and the rest of the good guys. It preaches demoralizing propaganda designed to weaken your resolve & raise doubt toward your righteous goals. It knows ways to steal the food from your family's table... even steal your established identity and celebrate its wicked victories by splurging on the fruit sewed by YOUR noble labors. This is your preconceived understanding of the truth. There are higher levels of truth that only pertain to you as part of a bigger picture, but you need not concern yourself with such perplexing pokings & proddings into the corners of your manufactured reality. Take comfort in the ebb & flow of a pristine, global bureaucracy that, on the surface, appears to malfunction as a chaotic dumpster fire of social upheaval, random acts of blatantly hateful terrorism and increasingly violent natural disasters reminding each & every one of us that we are vulnerable and the only shelter comes from the sinister embrace of the leaders we ourselves chose to govern us, simply because that is the way the world has worked for much longer than our insignificant participation would justify constructing a new means of stability. Best not to stress over such uncontrollable details. GREEN has always meant GO. RED has always signified a mandatory STOP. ...And that proverbial cheese at the end of the maze, ever taunting the entire roster of teams? It's laced with the affectionate tongue-kiss of cyanide, the ultimate reward for any group that is able to pull ahead of the hordes and slamdunk their Nerf football into the victory bonfire. IT'S MILLER TIME... Because being on the winning team isn't what's important: WHAT COUNTS IS THAT YOUR TEAM DESTROYED AS MUCH OF THE OPPOSITION'S LIFE & LIVELIHOOD AS WAS POSSIBLE." <pre>` Over moral posturings? Over indignant evildoings? In a race to prove to the creator that your team is comprised of his chosen people and is ready to accept the role as His Holy Assassins? Over the truth behind 9/11? Over the ongoing argument concerning the actual SHAPE of the planet & the legitimacy of the very science we thought we understood, but very well may have been meticulously devised to support our indoctrinated "understanding" of a globe-shaped world, hurling through space in a cosmic dance with the star, SOL, spinning on an axis that brings it around 360° every 24 hours and marking the outlines of our 24 hour day... 7 day week... our 12 month year... An indoctrination so effective, most of us never once stop to entertain the notion that, at its essence, the concept of time in this manner, the 7 day work week (uncannily similar to the 7 days required to create the world), the weather defining 12 months adhered to by the Gregorian calendar could very logically, and historically likely, be an immeasurable, blanket imprisonment of individual human perceptions, compressing the infinite possibilities of each reality into a much more predictable & controllable number. Wrangling in those erratic, chaos-prone, possible realities that could ultimately crash the entire capitalist cabal so dependent on limiting the imaginations & therefore, the entire concept of the fabric of reality & the universe across an entire planet's population. Outrageous, right? Borderline psychotic levels of paranoia, layered with simple, obnoxious denial and a shot or 2 of worst-case-scenario gullibility, YEARS worth of nonsensical research into the ravings of like-minded lunatics whose infectious delusions have consistently contributed to the disenfranchisement and downfall of multiple promising, yet dangerously curious intellects dating all the way back to the first significant population booms & those resultant social structures that merely sought to stifle the all too common, human urge to casually rape & kill each other on the slightest of whims. When viewed in THAT light, maybe that original intent wasn't so awful. Maybe somebody just had to think of something, like, QUICK.

WE INTERRUPT THIS LITERATAL ILLUSTRATION OF AN IMPLODING BRAIN'S LAST, DESPERATE GRASP AT UNDERSTANDING TO BRING YOU THIS TEMPORARILY DEBILITATING ANXIETY ATTACK...

[jeffberwickblog]

Making A Living In A Foreign Country - Jeff Berwick

“If I expatriate, how can I make a living in a foreign country?”

It’s one of the top questions we get. After all, not all of us have sizable amounts of savings that we can nestle upon. In fact, most in the western world don’t after they’ve had most of it siphoned off by the state. And even those who think they do, and have a bank account flush full of green pieces of paper or who receive large government pension cheques backed by those same Federal Reserve Notes will soon find out that their “wealth” was illusory.

In this article we will discuss some common misconceptions of the opportunities in the world today - Jeff Berwick.

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS

The West is filled with misconceptions. The majority of what almost everyone believes is just not true – it’s what makes living there next to impossible for free-thinkers. But here are a few common misconceptions that relate to the topic we are discussing today:

We are rich, they are poor:- This is, on a generalized basis, simply not true. The perception is that the West is quite rich and the rest of the world is destitute. This was true for a period… about 40 years ago… but humans have a tough time adjusting to paradigm shifts so many continue to believe this.

When the US Government went bankrupt for the second time in 1971 it denoted the change of the world as we knew it. By that point, the Chinese had nearly finished with their disastrous communist experiment. The great criminal Mao finally shed his mortal coil in 1976 and soon ushered in the new age of Deng Xiaoping and “to get rich is glorious”. By that point the USSR was already circling the drain and, unbeknownst to most, the US began its decline as well for all the same reason as the USSR… too much government involvement in the economy (for the record the perfect amount is 0%).

When total government and personal debt is added to the average net worth in the west, almost everyone is indebted… whereas developing and “third world” countries and the people who live there have no debt. Almost everyone in places like Latin America and Asia all have cell phones, most have cars, most have computers, many have homes… the only difference is that all of it is paid for, not on their credit cards or mortgages.

There is more opportunity in the West:- This used to be absolutely true. But things change and if you get stuck in the old paradigm you’ll find yourself wasting time and money and more. The days of moving to the US, getting your kids into a good school and them building a life for themselves is mostly over. Now it is more likely to end up with them getting indoctrinated in socialist culture, pepper sprayed, heavily indebted with student loans to learn things which are all available for free on the internet and then, if our predictions are correct, forced into the military or Homeland Security to pay off their debts. The real opportunities today are mostly in Asia, Latin America and former Soviet Bloc countries as we will talk further about below.

My kids need a good job There is opportunity for my kids:- This is another anachronistic mindset. All the slaves on TV drone on about how they need jobs… but this is a direct result of placing young children in socialist child prison camps for 12 of their most formative years. Anyone remember their “Introduction to Entrepreneurship” class from elementary school? Of course not, it does not exist in public schools. That is because the entire system is designed to produce worker slaves who are conditioned to show up at 9am and not leave until at least 5pm, sit in a cubicle for the entire day and not ask questions.

Once you get outside of that mindset the world is your oyster. You don’t need someone to create a job for you… you just need to see an opportunity to add value to someone or something and seize it. This makes expatriating to a foreign country infinitely easier. - Jeff Berwick

If I stay where I am I’ll get a good company pension and Socialist Security cheques as well in 10 or 15 years. You can forget all about that right now. We’ve shown countless times how the Western nation-states socialist security systems are a bankrupt ponzi scheme.

But even corporate pensions won’t be worth much in a few years time. There are a few reasons why. For one, most corporate pensions are invested in the stock market – yes, that same stock market that has made no nominal gains for the last 10 years… or the bond market which will soon evaporate..

And, even if they do manage to grow their funds, the payments will be made in fiat currencies that simply won’t exist 5-10 years from now. Just consider them gone right now and save yourself a few years of fearful anticipation.

ESCAPE FROM AMERICA

Again, if you are stuck in old paradigms, you will not see the massive changes going on all around you. Lou Dobbs is a perfect example of this. Every night on Fox he’ll decry foreign workers from sneaking into “our” country and stealing “our” jobs. There’s just one problem. Everyone’s leaving. In fact, Lou should move his schtick to Mexico and decry the influx of Americans into Mexico as a recent Pew Research Report states, “In the five-year period from 2005 to 2010, about 1.4 million Mexicans immigrated to the United States and about 1.4 million Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children moved from the United States to Mexico.”

For first time since Depression, more Mexicans leave U.S. than enter.

Many of them are Mexicans who are returning to Mexico. This snippet from a Washington Post article shows why:

It is better to be unemployed in Mexico than to be unemployed in the United States, he said, because most migrant workers leave their families in Mexico. “They miss the warmth of being in a welcoming community,” he said, adding that with tougher border control and more deportations, Mexicans would rather be in a “precarious situation than in a situation of fear.”

Jeff Berwick - That’s not the only reason, either. There are simply more opportunities in Mexico than in many parts of the US now despite all the propaganda about there being a deadly drug war and the Obama administration running guns into the country. It would come as a big surprise to most Americans to hear that the Mexican stock exchange has gone up nearly 1,000% percent in the last ten years.

Now, as with all stock markets today, you have to take the numbers with a large grain of salt as they don’t account for inflation and the Mexican peso money supply likely plays a significant role in the rise… but certainly prices have not risen four fold in Mexico since 2005… but the Mexican stock exchange has.

A net rise in Mexican immigration vis-a-vis the US and a booming stock market? Maybe the government and the media aren’t telling you the whole story!

SEEING IT FOR YOURSELF

This is why “seeing it for yourself” is the only way to go. The governments and media is so full of propaganda and skewed world-views that it is actually dangerous to your mental health to pay attention to them.

Even listening to friends or trusted sources can’t possibly give you the big picture about any one location. Even if you were able to clone yourself and send a different clone off to the same location every week for a year, they would all have different perspectives on the area. That is because our views are formed by our experiences and it is impossible for two different people to have the exact same experiences. All it takes to ruin a location for many people is one pickpocket… and all it takes to make a place the most wonderful paradise on Earth is for you to cross paths with one beautiful girl whom you fall in love with.

For this reason it is imperative to visit any location in which you are considering living and spend a significant amount of time there first. Of course, you can listen to like-minded people are publications you feel you can trust [like The Dollar Vigilante and Whiskey & Gunpowder] but that just gives you the big brush picture. You’ll never know if a place is right for you until you actually go there.

Regards,

Jeff Berwick

The Dollar Vigilante

Article Originally Written Here!

[junker-town]

How the NBA’s suspended season will affect its best teams

The implications of the NBA’s suspended season for its best teams.

These are the implications of the NBA’s suspended season for the best teams in the league.

Before Covid-19’s accelerated, unnerving reach made everyday life feel like it was dangling by a thread, the NBA was connective tissue for millions of people who treated any random weeknight’s slate of games as both part of their daily routine and the most reliable way to preoccupy areas of the brain that might otherwise be wracked with anxiety or stress.

My doctor instructed me to self-quarantine for at least 14 days after I came in contact with Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell at Madison Square Garden earlier this month. Actually testing for the coronavirus isn’t an option, so I’ve bunkered down in my apartment, writing, podcasting, reading books (a new copy of David Halberstam’s classic The Breaks of the Game has been sitting on my night table for the past few weeks), and, for my own sanity, stealing quick solitary walks around my Brooklyn neighborhood. I’ve also, off and on, thought about what all this means for the NBA, in a world where the line between temporary and permanent grows blurrier by the hour.

As trivial as this seems, with the league’s current season on the verge of cancellation, so many long-term consequences that are unrelated to epidemiology exist. For some, pondering what may or may not occur a few months from now is a valuable distraction. This is all bewildering on an unprecedented scale, and, frankly, slow-drip speculation about how an NBA team will look on the other side of such turbulence is almost peaceful; a way to make everything feel as normal as it possibly could be.

With all that in mind, here are some theoretical, fluttering implications for a few different teams, whether the season is cancelled tomorrow or postponed until after it would normally end.

Milwaukee Bucks

If the postseason is scrapped, no good team will be flung into a more sweeping state of uncertainty than Milwaukee. All year they were the NBA’s new boogeyman, stomping through 29 other teams with near-historic ferocity. But the Bucks also had questions that could only be answered in the playoffs, when we’d finally see how their successful albeit rigid system and rotation would translate, whether they’d need another playmaker, if Eric Bledsoe would melt into a puddle, etc.

Tied to those on-court topics is Giannis Antetokounmpo’s future. No playoffs means Antetokounmpo would be robbed an opportunity to learn some critical information about his team’s championship potential before they offer him a super-max extension during the offseason. If, in the absence of knowing how far his Bucks could’ve gone in the playoffs, Antetokounmpo turns down the offer and tells Bucks general manager Jon Horst he wants to play out the final year of his current contract and then play things by ear, how will Milwaukee respond?

Antetokounmpo is the exact type of franchise player who’s worth betting the farm on. Trading him would not be on the table unless he demanded it. But several teams — in larger markets, with more resources and attractive complementary pieces — will have max cap space in 2021, and an opportunity to sell him on their vision. Losing Antetokounmpo for nothing would obliterate a franchise that’s constructed around his generational ability.

The NBA’s economic future may change how players and owners view long-term, multi-million dollar contracts as a whole, but operating off how we currently see things, no team was more looking forward to the playoffs than Milwaukee, and no team better hope they’re still played, be it in empty arenas, practice facilities, or blacktop playgrounds.

Boston Celtics

Relatively speaking, the Celtics are in decent shape if no more games are played this season. They’re young, and Jayson Tatum’s emergence as (at least) a top-15 player over the past couple months allowed for a clear hierarchy to establish itself. The league’s sudden financial uncertainty all but guarantees Gordon Hayward will opt into his contract. Nothing is guaranteed in the NBA, but this team should have as much top-end continuity as any contender next year. If games resume in a couple months, that’s critical time for Kemba Walker’s knee to recover from whatever has been bothering it.

Brooklyn Nets

Remember when Kenny Atkison got fired 19 years ago? Well, even before that happened Brooklyn’s gap year was an unmitigated disaster. Kyrie Irving had season-ending shoulder surgery on March 3, and despite Caris LeVert’s crafty scoring prowess and Spencer Dinwiddie’s pseudo-all-star capability on any given night, the Nets were skidding into a buzzsaw, regardless of who they played in the first round.

Then, earlier this week, Kevin Durant and three of his teammates tested positive for coronavirus, firmly placing professional athletes in an important role they’ve had to fill: vanguards who can spread awareness and even some modicum of hope about an illness that could very well cripple every element of life as we knew it.

In a world where those four recover — along with every other player who tests positive in the coming weeks and months — and games resume, the delay could have the slightest of basketball-related silver linings.

Regardless of what Durant’s business partner Rich Kleiman has to say in the middle of March, if the NBA playoffs pick up in July and Durant is healthy enough to compete, knowing the following year won’t begin until Christmas, it’s hard to imagine him not itching to do so. This doesn’t mean Brooklyn would be considered a favorite to come out of the East, but if Durant is able to contribute for 30 minutes a night there’s no reason why they can’t upset the Toronto Raptors in the opening round.

The trickle down effect Durant’s mere presence would have on everybody else is huge. His all-time talent overrules the power of continuity and cohesion. Throw him the ball in the fourth quarter and get out of the way. With Dinwiddie, LeVert, and Joe Harris also on the floor, guarding Brooklyn’s offense would be agonizing.

As Rudy Gay told me in a conversation about the value of chemistry earlier this year: “It’d be tough not to be able to play with somebody like Kevin Durant.”

Philadelphia 76ers

It’s always hard to get a read on this year’s most disappointing team. Even if the season comes back, their pieces still won’t fit. Al Horford won’t be younger, have a quicker release on his three-point shot, or look more comfortable as the fifth option in Philadelphia’s starting lineup — assuming he won’t come off the bench.

But the larger question here surrounds Ben Simmons. If, by June, all concerns about his ailing back are gone and Joel Embiid miraculously shows up to the practice facility in shape, this team’s ceiling may rise closer to where it was back in October. A spark of optimism will be tied to the Sixers for the first time in a long time.

Utah Jazz

Whether games are played or not, the Jazz will be greeted by two seismic decisions shortly after the NBA calendar resumes. Gobert and Mitchell are both eligible for contract extensions during the offseason. Mitchell is a lock to receive a max offer, but Gobert, who qualified for the supermax when he made an All-NBA team last year, is in a different situation.

All data collected during the playoffs would be a critical factor here, and if Utah is robbed of a chance to see how Gobert would’ve performed in that setting with Mike Conley and Bojan Bogdanovic folded into their system, how would they approach it all? In other words, if Gobert — who turns 28 in June and just made his first all-star team — is expecting the supermax, how will negotiations go? To say nothing about the state of his relationship with Mitchell — a variable that obviously matters and is unknown at the moment — the Jazz probably don’t want to invest a healthy chunk of a dropping cap in someone who barely touches the ball.

As painful as it’d be considering they clearly saw themselves as a title contender before the season began, the Jazz may take a step back for the sake of their long-term health, by shopping Gobert, letting Conley walk in free agency, and then rebuilding around Mitchell. That or they’ll come to some sort of agreement with their franchise center that’s well under the max and carry on like the shrewd franchise they are.

Houston Rockets

If the season does not return then Mike D’Antoni has likely coached his final game in Houston. Daryl Morey might not be the man who gets to hire his replacement, either. And with no firm evidence as to how their small-ball strategy would work in the playoffs, PJ Tucker, Eric Gordon, Robert Covington, and every other Rocket not named James Harden or Russell Westbrook would immediately find themselves in trade rumors.

However, if this season does return, few, if any teams will benefit more from the extended break. The tax Houston pays with their physically exhausting style of play will be less steep if Tucker, Harden, and Westbrook have several months off to recharge their batteries and hit the ground running on a chase for their first title.

Golden State Warriors

Steph Curry returned from hand surgery shortly before the break, but the Warriors are too far behind in the standings for Klay Thompson’s health to matter, whether he’s good to go in June or not. Here’s another angle, though: What happens to their draft pick?

Assuming the Warriors are looking to move that asset for more win-now contribution at some point before the draft, how does the absence of March Madness, the combine, and every other annual way for teams to study prospects impact how said teams value the picks in this year’s pool? With no obvious franchise-altering player for the taking, and no opportunity for anyone to improve how they’re perceived by evaluators, is this year’s first overall pick the least important in recent NBA history? And if the Warriors get it, knowing their unusual circumstance for a team in that type of position, what will they do?

Los Angeles Lakers

Los Angeles Clippers

Ever since Kawhi Leonard chose the Los Angeles Clippers over the Los Angeles Lakers, the basketball world was building towards a showdown between those two teams. Apologies to the Bucks, Rockets, Celtics, and Raptors, but a playoff series that doesn’t leave Staples Center was always the most important subplot of the season.

If it does not return, both franchises are humongous losers. Each has tethered itself to the present day. All their draft picks and intriguing young talent can now be found in Oklahoma City and New Orleans. LeBron James is 35 years old. Leonard and Paul George are in the middle of their respective primes but can become unrestricted free agents in 2021.

Stripping both teams of the opportunity to capitalize on the amount of talent they’ve compiled in the here and now could crush basketball in Los Angeles, even if Anthony Davis re-signs a five-year deal with the Lakers this off-season (which, like everything else in the world right now, is so far from a sure thing).

[lighthouseroleplay]

LETICIA ‘LETTY’ RAMIREZ

                          ( 22 ,  cis woman , she/her )

♪♫ currently listening  ⧸⧸  how long? by vampire weekend

bright colours and a bright smile, calloused fingers, an ever-present guitar pick. a bouquet of wildflowers, doodles in black ink along arms, the warmth of the sun on the summer’s hottest day. round sunglasses, adoring fans, quick hands flicking a pocketknife open and closed. torn jeans, the arch of an eyebrow, the burn of a cigarette. the muffled sound of music through a closed door, a flame burning ever-hotter.

    •  carter was the first person you’d ever met who loved art as much as you did. sure, they were more visual, you were more audio, but you were kindred spirits nonetheless. they designed your first tattoo, back in tenth grade, little doodles of a bonfire accompanied by sparks transforming over time, and you got it the day you turned 18. you weren’t inseparable — both of you had other friends, other groups, and class schedules that differed — but on days where you came together, it felt like no time had passed at all, and catching up on their life, as they were caught up on yours, was the easiest thing in the world.

    •  auclair became a somewhat unlikely friend when he appeared in your class your junior year. you never expected to befriend the exchange student, much less one dripping with wealth and excess like he was, but something made you two click. you didn’t have much more than your music, but he never shied away from listening to a new song or following along on one of your adventures around town. he supported you in a way you never expected, and you soon found your place at his side. even when he returned to france in the summer, snapchat and whatsapp kept you together, with the occasional skype call in between, and while sometimes you half expected him to forget about you in the face of the luxury and popularity he had back home, he never did.

taken by sam  ⧸⧸   zaira gonzalez

The green and white house that sits at 10 Leforge Avenue looks unremarkable on the outside. On the front lawn, the grass is appropriately cropped (with the exception of the occasional dandelion that makes its presence sunnily known) and the vinyl siding is worn but functional. A basketball hoop hangs dutifully over the single car garage-- the mesh of the net has been missing for years now, but it’s been almost that long since anyone has played a game with it. The flowerbed that frames the cracked asphalt of the driveway is planted with perennials that make maintenance easy; echinacea and sage flower in the warm months, and the delicate white blooms of chamomile make the walk up to the front door smell sweet. It’s the curtains that nearly give it away; the flash of vibrant colour that catches the eye of passersby, the smallest glimpse of warmth within the unassuming exterior.

The Ramirez home had always been loud on the inside. The walls were painted as soon as they moved in (white is too depressing, her father declared, gazing around the austere space) and every inch that couldn’t be coated in bright paint was covered in art. Music flowed from one room to the next, voices carried up the stairs as heavy feet thundered down them. The home had four bedrooms, but housed nine people; the five Ramirez children, their parents, uncle José (whose inability to retain a job seemed to have him on their couch, more often than not) and great aunt Maria, whose expertise in creating the perfect tamale was worth room and board all on its own, Letty’s father insisted. Their family was larger than those just living in the home; there was great aunt Yolanda, who lived in Colorado, and her sons and daughters with their families. Two sets of grandparents still lived in Mexico with a handful of other aunts and uncles. The myriad of Ramirez cousins littered all the way up the West Coast. 

The last of five, Leticia was born three years after her youngest brother. Miguel was first, and he always took that role seriously. He had been seven when Letty was born; all of her memories surrounding him are sweet-- a big brother doting on his baby sister. Even as a boy, he’d been adult-like and mature, doling out justice where he saw fit, making decisions for the group. The twins were next, Nando and Rico, double trouble and five years senior. Responsible for half of the rumours about the family, the twins, (identical and both sly as foxes) took their share of beatings for bad behaviour but did so in stride, and continued to be just as wicked. Letty recalls how they’d tug on her hair and steal her toys, finding different ways to torment her for their own amusement. The last of the boys was Rafael, the most beautiful of them all, their mother’s angelito. Even as a child, his shyness had been crippling. It was the rest of the family that brought out his personality, wrangling laughter from the wells deep within him, listening to him speak even though he stammered. 

It was uncle José who taught her how to play the guitar. (He also taught her how to curse, wicked words in Spanish that she delighted in hurling at her brothers when they provoked her). He would spend warm afternoons on the back porch, perched on the railing, instructing Letty as she strummed the same four chords. That’s all you need, mija, the rest comes later, he’d say, and then warble along with some mangled lyrics as she clumsily performed renditions of Love Me Do and Sweet Caroline. It was the performances that really got her hooked: forcing the family to sit down at the table, while she balanced a guitar on her lap that was nearly bigger than she was, then belting out the words to the songs (and whenever she forgot them, simply whatever words came to mind). After she turned ten, her father gifted her a guitar of her own. She learned more, greedily consuming all of the sheet music that she could find, trying to train her fingers to be quick and nimble as they picked at the strings. Letty never actually learned how to read music properly; all her books of sheet music became scribbled over with letters to decode the mysterious symbols. 

She shared a room with her great aunt until she turned twelve and Miguel moved out (rather, he was shoved out in a desperate need to make space). His move shuffled around the whole household; Rafael moved his things in with the twins, leaving Letty the vastness of a room all to herself. The first few weeks were surprisingly lonely. When she slept, she was certain that she could hear her thoughts echoing; her dreams felt twice as vivid. Great aunt Maria said that this was a good thing, that a girl like her needed space for her imagination to grow in. She often said things like this, half-myth and half-truth, pinches of wisdom that were offered without prompting. You mustn’t sweep the house at night, or you’ll sweep away all of your good luck. You can’t make tamales when angry, they’ll never fluff up. La polilla negra means death. Leticia absorbed it all, marvelling at the ways that her family’s superstitions transferred into their ways of living. Her mother always spiced a pot in the shape of a cross. Her father retold every nightmare he had in great detail over the breakfast table, to ensure they never came true. 

It wasn’t hard, being the baby sister to the pack of dogs that were the Ramirez boys. In their youth, they’d achieved a sort of infamy on Leforge Street that made them feel like a gang. Gangly and long-limbed, their knees always skinned, they howled through Tenebrin Port, and might’ve been an ominous group had it not been for little Letty trailing behind them, often gripping Miguel’s lowered hand. As she grew older, she learned how to hold her own amongst them-- all it took was a hard-set jaw and a disinterested look in her eye, gazing at the scrubbed-clean boys and girls that lived in the nice part of town, and it was easy to lean into the Ramirez name. They’d never have the wealth that the kids growing up in Renfrew Heights did, but as they raced through other people’s backyards on the way to the Corner Mart and dominated the best loungers at the public pool, it became apparent that they didn’t want it. They weren’t above the rich, but they were apathetic to them; they were thriving in their own way.  

As her interest in music grew, her appetite for genres became voracious. When the tiny record store in town could no longer satisfy her need for new music, Letty began writing her own. An entire summer was spent getting devoured by mosquitos and letting her fingers grow raw, then calloused, as she tried out every combination of chords to create her own songs. They were truly terrible, at first. Her great aunt compared the sound to a group of tomcats yowling, but it was Letty’s voice that always earned her praise. When the evenings wound down, she would play something traditional for Aunt Maria. La Llorona was her aunt’s favourite; moved by the music, Maria would then retell the ghost story of the beautiful woman who had killed her children out of rage towards her disloyal husband. Drowned them, Aunt Maria would sigh mournfully, her voice quivering as she shook her head, and now she weeps in the night with regret. When Letty went to sleep after she first heard that story, she swore she could hear sobs coming from the waters of the distant ocean.

In school, she’d never been the most dedicated student. She was the girl who was too tall for her age, slumped in the back of the class. Her foot constantly tapped out a beat that her fingers itched to play; the insides of her notebooks were etched with lyrics that she wanted to try out against melodies that she invented during lectures. It was one day that she stretched over to the seat beside her and saw a student in a similar state of distraction; drawing pictures in place of notes. One ruby-painted nail tapped against their sheet. That’s cool, Letty had said, introducing herself shortly after. Thanks, they returned, smiling. I’m Carter. Friendship came quickly after that, steamrolled by a mutual fascination with one another. She asked them often to draw her things, and they never minded her constant need to listen to something. Letty let them design her guitar, turning the blank canvas of blonde wood into a sea of red roses and smiling, Sharpied skulls. Carter had a gift, but better than that-- they understood what it meant to be an artist, to feel possessed by the fervent need to create.

At thirteen, Letty smoked her first cigarette. By the first week of high school, she was smoking weed in her parent’s garage almost every day. Nando and Rico had finally moved out, and with just her and Rafael (and the ever-present extended family members) in the house, the cluttered space felt bigger, emptier, quieter. She considers these years to be the ones where she truly came into her own; the scowling mask of the token Ramirez girl no longer fit, not when she wanted to be seen so badly, not when her music was finally starting to make sense and her scribbled lyrics were becoming full songs. She was still the girl who wore scavenged hand-me-downs and had famously cut her long, glossy hair into blunt bangs with her mother’s fabric scissors, but now she toted her guitar on her back and practiced at school, gathering an audience of anyone who would listen. Her voice had the same smokey quality that she had always loved in her great aunt, but her style was her own. She borrowed from her favourites, The Strokes, St. Vincent, the Arctic Monkeys, and settled into something that fit like a glove. If she was to be anything, Letty knew it was her destiny to capitalize on her talent; she would become an indie rock darling.

She was hotboxing her car the first time that she saw Auclair. The car was a piece of shit-- it had been uncle Jose’s before he sold it to Miguel for five hundred bucks, then he to the twins for half that. They’d rattled the poor thing until it misfired basically every four hundred metres, but it got her to school most of the time, and when it didn’t, it gave her an excuse for being late. Rafael had turned his nose up at inheriting it, so they’d given it to Letty for free. It was the guy’s jacket that caught her eye at first, then the chest-out, confident walk-- she’d sneered as she exhaled, look at that posh motherfucker. He’d been in her class when she’d finally slid into her seat at the back, and she sat behind him, in that beautiful (probably didn’t even have to buy it second hand) leather jacket. When he turned around, she met his gaze with a dark look from under her bangs. What’re you listening to? When he gestured to the earbuds that seemed to be a permanent fixture of her every-day aesthetic, she popped one out, offering it to him. It was when he took it, and immediately grinned at Julian Casablancas’ hoarse vocals, that she decided: they were going to be friends.

Letty remembers the week of Andrea’s death as though it were frozen in time, like something preserved in a drop of amber. She’d stayed up late on Thursday and done a gig in Seattle. The crowd had eaten her up; she’d been swallowed whole by their applause, and milked the adoration for all it was worth with a couple of encores. She’d driven home, buzzing from head to toe, and let her head hit the pillow just as the sun was coming up. It felt surreal, to have her future feel so tangible. Her dream was almost synonymous with reality. When she awoke, the house was silent in mid-afternoon. Her cell phone trilled with a handful of texts from Auclair, then an incoming call as well. Groaning, as she stretched to grab it; Letty pressed it to her ear, grumbling a string of curses about how summertime sleep hours were supposed to be respected. It was his tone that made her sit up, brow creasing. Something’s up with Andy, she’s going to Alderman’s. Come with, I’m worried. She agreed, and dressed quickly, hair still in a cowlick from the way she’d slept on it, pulling on her jeans at the same time that she shot off a text to Jasper, asking them to come as well: if anything was wrong, they’d be the one to talk anyone out of trouble. 

As she hopped around on one foot trying to get her sneakers on (why were high top Converse so challenging in a crisis?), she saw it. A black moth, bold against the scarred floorboards of the Ramirez home’s front entrance. Letty’s head tilted as she tried to recall the name for it in Spanish-- great aunt Maria would’ve known it on sight. Her phone blitzed again with another text from Auclair; she sighed. No time to be humane. Using the free shoe in her hand, she smacked it hard against the floor. She saw black wings, like crumpled velvet, and some dark residue on the bottom of her shoe; feeling strangely queasy, she darted out to her car.

Her car didn’t lock anymore-- a visit home from Rico meant that the door was busted, but today it started on the first try and in minutes, she headed to Alderman’s point. A small crowd had gathered when she arrived. Some faces she knew well; Carter was white as a sheet, Auclair waved her over with a strange look in his eye that she’d never seen before. At the very edge, far out where the lighthouse stood over the surf, there was Andy. Beautiful Andrea, she with a flair for the dramatics. Her hair streamed behind her like a dark banner in the wind. Letty slipped her fingers into Auclair’s, gripping tight. The lightning that tore from the clouds took them all by surprise-- in retrospect, she’s sure that she shrieked-- and then they were all watching, mute and motionless, as the other girl jumped into the water. It was only as she fought, swimming hard against a current that seemed determined to drag her down, that the word came to Letty’s mind. The black moth. La polilla negra. Death. Andrea Clare disappeared under the inky surface, the water frothing in her wake. 

Letty got a tattoo to remind her of the day. It was her way of processing, and making it permanent-- the tattoo sits on her thigh, on the same leg where the bonfire Carter had drawn was inked into her ankle. Andy got a moth, all black, an omen. A warning she had not heeded. She hadn’t really known Andy; Letty tried to rationalize the girl’s death to make it less than it was, but there was still a strange feeling of grief she couldn’t get rid of, simply from having been so close to death, from seeing it up close like that. Tenebrin Port grew solemn and grim in the aftermath. At the funeral, Letty sang Cielito Lindo and the bandage on her fresh tattoo peeked out from under the hem of a too-short black dress (it was all that she had in the appropriate colour). 

Her senior year of highschool was a throw-away year; Letty trained her focus on her craft instead of her studies. The heaviness of Andrea’s death was not easily shrugged off, and senioritis could be triggered by random students crying in the halls just as easily as it was triggered by the futility of trying to grasp Algebra II. There were too many reminders around, too many memorial art-projects done in Andy’s honour still keeping that day fresh. A lot of her last year of highschool was spent smoking weed in her car, listening to CDs. Her parents seemed to leave her alone for the most part. This was something that she had to get through on her own, they figured-- and like a fish swimming upstream, Letty fought through, and scraped towards graduation with grades just barely making the cut. The shackles of high school finally lifted. She was free now to pursue the things she actually wanted. Her parents’ only insistence-- revealing the worry they’d been secretly been harbouring, watching as she cut classes on Fridays to get to gigs, and stumbled home late almost every school night-- was that she still had to go to college. Letty protested this; that had not been a requirement for all the Ramirez children. Miguel had graduated the year before from a technical school, and he was now engaged and working as a craftsman-- almost ready to start his own life. The twins had opted out of education altogether, going into construction immediately after high school; shocking everyone, they were good at what they did, and had started their own company in just a few years time-- they had real employees and everything. Rafael was working hard, studying Spanish. It was his dream to become a translator, but years speaking the language without actually learning grammar had stunted his ability to write it. She looked at her brothers’ experiences, successes, and felt a particular disinterest. She had a good thing going, she argued to her parents-- the gigs were starting to pay more and more, the bookings were coming steadily, her name wasn’t recognizable yet but it would be, soon. But in the end, an obligation to the people who raised her, and the shame that would come with disappointing them, won out. 

Letty applied only to colleges in the state of Washington, all of them relatively nearby, and was accepted to a sparse few (each non-rejection letter was a miracle, given the downward trend of her grades). Whitman became her next chapter. Her first year there, she was an undeclared major; that state of indecision seemed to define her entire college experience from the start. There was nothing grounding her in the vast lecture halls that she slowly stopped showing up to. There was no spark of interest making her care about Critical Thinking 101. She was going through the motions in an institution that seemed indifferent to her, and feeling unspecial, unmoored, Letty felt restless and lost and increasingly desperate for recognition. She became a staple at parties, howling into the microphone on karaoke nights, earning herself a reputation as the girl who was willing to try anything once. Fearless, always smiling that daredevil smile, she leapt into things without ever looking first-- relationships, hook-ups, new drugs, bad ideas that seemed like good ones at 2 a.m., dares to vandalize school property that almost backfired, badly. It garnered respect from those around her, or perhaps a collective curiosity. Leticia Ramirez was a wild woman; Leticia Ramirez faced life like a bullfighter in the ring, or a lion-fighter in a cage. No fear. She was going to be a star one day-- she even gave out her autograph at parties, sealed with the imprint of red lipstick, and promised, one day, that’ll go for thousands on Ebay.

She much preferred carrying her guitar over carrying books, and began to recognize this time away from home as a launchpad for her career, rather than an opportunity to learn. Portland and Seattle were only four hours away from campus; she often made the drive for the weekend, crashing on couches and performing for cash to crowds that were sometimes a little rowdy and drunk, but always loved her material. “She sounds like early Karen O, of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” someone said once, as they left the venue, and Letty took that overheard comparison as the largest compliment, but she wanted to be her own thing too. Instead of studying, she wrote new songs, better songs. She wrote about Andy, about the town with the lighthouse where death could show up in the form of moths on your doorstep, using the folkloric traditions passed down from her great aunt to pay tribute to her heritage, her crooning voice eliciting the feeling of a crackling fire and the stories people told around it. She developed her brand. She hadn’t even completed her first year at Whitman by the time she decided it was time to go-- college had helped her find members for a band, similar-minded people who believed she was good enough to hitch their wagon to, and she’d accumulated enough experiences to have a solid bed of song-writing material. With each gig raking in a little more money than her part-time job at a local coffee shop, her mind was set. Kissing her roommate goodbye on both cheeks, Letty took off for Portland to record an EP.

Five tracks, all original pieces. She’d named it The Seamstress. It was a celebration of her life so far, she explained, twenty, fresh-faced and beaming in her first interview, her bangs framing her face more neatly now that she’d gotten the hang of cutting them. Her mother made money fixing other people’s garments; there wasn’t a time in her life that a prom dress hadn’t sat on the kitchen table, awaiting alterations, or a pair of trousers draped over the chair with the hems pinned up. There was one track called the Lighthouse, a dark, moody ballad with lyrics that she had pulled from fragments of dreams, but she never spoke about what it meant. The EP achieved moderate success-- calls to Auclair confirmed that he’d played it for almost everyone he knew back home, and the first time she heard one of her songs on local radio, Letty rolled down her windows and let it play as loud as her stereo would go, screaming along with the words.

She made a website, got a van, and learned the power of a contract after two of her bassists left her for another up-and-coming singer. This was making it; this was the uphill scramble, fighting for her place in an industry that was already saturated. Letty bore every set-back and defeat with her chin raised, clinging to her victories defiantly, showing up at dingy dive-bars and opening for acts in the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest, performing anywhere that would have her. She made merch, people bought it. She grinned and swapped her old, faded T-shirts with their stretched-out collars and constellations of holes for pristine vintage ones. Her leather jackets were real now, just like the one she’d envied on Auclair the first day they’d met. For the first time in a long time, the calls that she got from her parents weren’t worried; she could finally talk to them about her success, her adventures on tour, and they could hear in her voice how happy she was.

It was right after she found management in Chicago that the dreams started. Inexplicably, her music had resonated more in the Windy City than it did back home. She had a real fanbase there, almost halfway across the country, so she’d stayed there longer than most other stops on her tour, and then never left at all. She didn’t mind packing everything up to make the move permanent; she’d basically been a nomad since college, but it was good to take a break from living out of a van. Still, her arrival in Chicago felt strange for a reason that eluded her, like something constantly slipping out of the periphery, until she remembered Andrea Clare. She was supposed to be here-- the one time she’d gotten cornered into a conversation about colleges while coming over to see Auclair, the other girl had talked on and on about her early acceptance and how excited she was. She’d never made it, though. Letty sat with this thought as she pulled up to her new apartment. Andrea had never gotten this far. Her new place was small, a little drippy where the ceiling met the wall in the bathroom, but it was authentic, and it was hers. Art really thrives in this city, her manager said. New York’s too congested these days. Her first night was kicked-off with a sold-out performance and a few too many celebratory drinks, plus a bump of something her drummer promised was good shit. When she finally fell back against the bare mattress on her apartment floor, closing her eyes to find herself on a dizzying carnival ride, the nightmare came swiftly and blotted out everything else.

Great aunt Maria always said that your dreams couldn’t hurt you as long as they were said aloud. With no friends to be had in a strange new city, she recorded them on her phone. She wasn’t unaccustomed to strange dreams; chaotic sleep patterns had become as normal to her in college as the handful of substance issues she’d picked up along the way. But the dreams felt prophetic. It was upon listening to them again that Letty realized, night after night, in the hazy dim of half-sleep, she was having the same dream. Andrea, Tenebrin Port, her piercing scream. Never one to swallow down a hard gut feeling, she booked a flight back home. Something felt wrong; she’d ignored an omen before, and grief and suffering had followed. To make that mistake again, she’d have to be a fool. 

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How to Be Happy (Ep. 345 Rebroadcast)

Denmark consistently ranks at or near the top of the U.N.’s annual happiness ranking. Is their secret generous social programs and high levels of social trust? (Photo: Mstyslav Chernov/Wikimedia Commons)

The U.N.’s World Happiness Report — created to curtail our unhealthy obsession with G.D.P. — is dominated every year by the Nordic countries. We head to Denmark to learn the secrets of this happiness epidemic (and to see if we should steal them).

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Happy New Year! How happy will it be? Well, that depends — at least a little bit — on where you live. The Scandinavian countries, for instance, seem to be particularly good at producing happiness. How does that work? That’s the question we seek to answer in this episode, which is called “How to Be Happy”; we first released it last year but, happiness being an ongoing pursuit, we thought you wouldn’t mind a refresher. We’ll be back next week with new episodes. Thanks, as always for listening.

*      *      *

Until a few years ago, Helen Russell was leading a seemingly happy life in London, working as an editor for the fashion magazine Marie Claire. True, she did feel restless at times; also true: she and her husband had been struggling with fertility treatments. That said, she had no intention of leaving the U.K.

Helen RUSSELL: Until out of the blue, one wet Wednesday, my husband came home and told me he’d been offered his dream job working for Lego in Denmark. And we knew nothing about the country, as many people in other countries are fairly ignorant of Scandinavia. We couldn’t really have pinpointed it on a map.

They decided to go for it. But as soon as they arrived — in a small town in the rural hinterlands of Denmark, in the dead of winter— she had regrets.

RUSSELL: My husband left to go to work at 7:30 a.m. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t speak the language. I was in this freezing cold, dark country all by myself. I did a lot of howling at the moon, thinking I’d made the biggest mistake ever. And I did a lot of eating danish pastries, because as a repressed Brit, I like to eat my emotions.

But Russell had heard — as you may have heard — that Denmark is routinely at or near the very top of the annual happiness ranking compiled by the United Nations. And the other Nordic countries — Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland — pretty much dominate the top 10. Russell naturally wondered: why? What are the causes, and consequences, of this alleged happiness epidemic? Was it for real? What are the downsides? She set out to answer these questions, in a book she called The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country. Along the way, she asked nearly every Dane she met how they would rank their happiness on a scale of 1 to 10. A funny thing happened during this process: Russell herself became quite a bit happier.

RUSSELL: I was maybe — I’d have said a 6 was a good day in London, and now I’m generally on that 8, and sometimes a 9, if I’m lucky.

DUBNER: You’re practically Danish.

RUSSELL: I’m practically Danish.

*      *      *

I recently spent a few days in Copenhagen. There was one person I was very excited to meet.

WIKING: So my name is Meik Wiking, and I’m the C.E.O. of the Happiness Research Institute here in Copenhagen.

DUBNER: And is “Viking” a common surname here?

WIKING: No. I think we’re a handful of people. My dad is called Wolf. I have a brother called Kenneth. I have a couple of nephews, one is called Max Wiking, so he needs to grow up big and tall.

DUBNER: Do you do Halloween here, where you dress up as costumes?

WIKING: I see where this is going.

DUBNER: I’m just curious, were you a Viking every year when you were a child?

WIKING: No. But there was one episode, yes.

Wiking has a background in political science, economics, and sociology — all of which figure in understanding what’s called happiness.

WIKING: One of the challenges we have with happiness is to define it and to measure it. And we should first and foremost acknowledge that it’s a wide umbrella term. So you have one understanding of what happiness is, and I have another one. So we need to break it down and look at different components. The first is an overall life satisfaction. And here you essentially ask your respondents to take a step back and evaluate their lives.

Happiness researchers also track people’s moods in the moment.

WIKING: “How happy are you right now? How happy were you yesterday?” And there we can see that weather, what day of the week it is, impacts our happiness levels. People are happier — no big surprise — on the weekend, than they are on Monday mornings.

They also measure people’s sense of meaning.

WIKING: That builds on what Aristotle thought the good life was. To him, the good life was the meaningful life. So here we try to understand, do people have a sense of purpose?

A sense of purpose. A self-evaluation of life satisfaction. You may think all this sounds a bit squishy — especially to an economist, yes?

SACHS: I’m going to answer anything you’re going to ask me.

Okay, we’ll ask some questions. First one’s easy: would you please introduce yourself?

SACHS: Jeff Sachs, a university professor at Columbia University. And I am special adviser to the United Nations Secretary General on the Sustainable Development Goals. One part of that is human well-being. And so I am a co-editor each year of the World Happiness Report.

The World Happiness Report — that’s where Denmark and the other Nordic countries always come out on top. Jeff Sachs, just so you know, isn’t some woo-woo feel-good witch doctor. You may have heard him on our program before, talking about his work as an interventional economist for governments in crisis:

SACHS: I worked in Poland and in Russia after the communist system collapsed.

Also in Bolivia, trying to tame its hyperinflation.

SACHS: And I worked in Latin America very extensively for several years after the work in Bolivia.

The calls kept coming.

SACHS: And then in 1995, another quite decisive turn for me was an invitation to go to Zambia and to see what this experience and these lessons might mean for Africa.

Over time, and because of those experiences, Sachs came to believe that his fellow economists had left something out of their worldview. Something, in fact, quite vital.

SACHS: The economics profession took a very bad turn roughly 150 years ago when it decided that since it wasn’t possible to measure happiness or to compare happiness across individuals, we would look basically at consumer preferences.

The inspiration to incorporate happiness into economic modeling came from a rather unlikely source.

SACHS: So back in 1971, the fourth king of Bhutan — who also brought democracy to the country — was an extremely, extremely wise leader, he raised the question already, why are we pursuing Gross National Product when we should be pursuing Gross National Happiness? You know it’s such a wonderful phrase. And G.N.H. entered the vocabulary of a small niche of economists and a small niche of Buddhists, and others who are dreaming of this, already, decades ago.

But Bhutan went ahead as a very poor country and actually set up the mechanisms for detailed survey measurement of dimensions of Gross National Happiness. It set up a Gross National Happiness commission. It ordered that all legislation should be an evaluated happiness benefit-cost ratio.

Sachs began meeting with the king, and they brought more world leaders and economists into the happiness conversation. This ultimately led to the creation of the U.N.’s World Happiness Report. The concept was jarring to many of Sachs’s colleagues, particularly in the U.S.

SACHS: Well, in our country, we don’t talk about almost anything else in the public space. It’s all about growth, G.D.P., incomes. Of course, there is a massive industry of happiness studies, self-help manuals, helping people to overcome all sorts of unhappinesses, trying to help people find meaning in their lives, trying to help people make better decisions about their lives.

To Sachs, the booming self-help industry in rich countries like the U.S. reveals a disturbing paradox.

SACHS: We have the paradox that income per person rises in the United States, but happiness does not. And it’s not that that’s because humans are humans. It’s because the U.S. is falling behind other countries, because we are not pursuing dimensions of happiness that are extremely important: our physical health, the mental health in our community, the social support, the honesty in government. And this is weighing down American well-being.

Like the Danish happiness expert Meik Wiking, Sachs finds wisdom in the ancient Greek model.

SACHS: I go with Aristotle — he’s my guy, my favorite philosopher. And he pointed out in the Nicomachean Ethics, 2,300 years ago, that to be happy requires the good benefit of having material needs met. So don’t deny those, he said. But he also said, only aiming for wealth, single-mindedly pursuing a higher wealth, is certainly no way to happiness, and after a certain point of income, work on other things — work on your friendship, work on your mental health, work your physical health. Work on good governance, work on your charitableness. Because in this kind of world, a good life is a balanced and a virtuous life. Not a single-minded pursuit of income.

Okay, if these are the factors that supposedly generate happiness — community, good mental and physical health, good governance — and since Denmark and the other Nordic countries top the happiness rankings, let’s take a look at how they address those factors. Let’s start with the social-safety net; Meik Wiking again:

WIKING: There is obviously universal healthcare. There’s also free university education. In fact, now —

DUBNER: Up through university — from the lower level, too — it’s always free, yes?

WIKING: So, heavily subsidized kindergarten, primary school free, high school free, and university free. And you get a government grant. And that creates also a lot of social mobility.

DUBNER: As does health care not being tied to a job, which we have mostly in the States.

WIKING: Exactly.

Danes also work fewer hours: on average, 27.1 hours per week, compared to 34.2 in the U.S.  To Helen Russell, moving here from Britain, that was a big change.

RUSSELL: There’s no stigma to clocking off — people work mainly from 8 until 4 in offices. There’s no stigma to leaving at 4 because you’ve got to go pick up your kids from daycare, you’ve got to go make supper, or you just need to get on with your hobbies.

Denmark strives toward egalitarianism on the gender front, and its parental-leave policies are famously generous.

RUSSELL: So there’s 52 weeks — both parents can share it between them. And you can defer, I think, 13 weeks of this for, I believe it’s up to eight or possibly nine years. I have a friend whose family are — she has two children and the youngest one is now five, but she’s taking 13 weeks off next year to go on a big trip around Australia. And I was outraged by this, like, “Goodness, isn’t this taking the mick a little bit?” She said, “No, it’s perfectly acceptable here.” So yeah, it’s just a different mindset, I guess.

SACHS: The basic idea of social democracy is to pay attention to social cohesion, to provide ample social goods like healthcare available automatically for all, education at all levels available for all, vacation time available for all.

Jeff Sachs argues this strong social support in the Nordic model contributes to a number of healthy outcomes.

SACHS: The life expectancy is higher. Our obesity epidemic does not exist in those countries. Our opioid epidemic does not exist in those countries.

WIKING: There is also a high level of trust towards the government. And that goes hand in hand with the Nordic countries being at the low end when it comes to corruption, or perceived corruption. We have a different perception of the state. So what I see from over here, you feel you need to be protected from the state. Is that a fair assumption?

DUBNER: It’s a fair assumption for a significant fraction, at least, of Americans, let’s say — not all, certainly, but yeah.

WIKING: And people in the Nordic countries will feel that the state protects us from things. The high level of social security is one element, that there is a notion that if you fall, you will be picked up. So I think we see more the state on our side, and helping us create good conditions for good lives.

Scandinavia also gets high marks on interpersonal social trust.

WIKING: So if you ask Danes and Norwegians and Swedes, do you feel that most people can be trusted, or can you become too careful when it comes to strangers? Three out of four would say, “Yes, you can trust most strangers.” The global average is one in four.

RUSSELL: So you may have heard of — there was a story in New York a few years ago of a Danish woman who was there, who left her child sleeping outside in a pram, which is what you do in Denmark, and was arrested for child neglect. And lots of people in Denmark didn’t understand why it was such a fuss, because in Denmark people trust most people. And this plays into everything. You are not anxious if you trust the people around you, you’re not scared they’re going to rob you to put food on their table.

DUBNER: And have you become more trusting as well?

RUSSELL: Yeah, I think so. I don’t want to reveal too much about where I live, but I regularly forget to lock car and/or house.

DUBNER: But considering the very high level of support in Denmark for citizens from prenatal, really, until literally after death, my question — which is maybe unanswerable — is, would you say that the very high level of social trust is a result of such a generous social security system, or the cause of it?

RUSSELL: That’s a really interesting question, and it’s something that academics in Denmark are still very much grappling with. Some of the economists that I spoke to for The Year of Living Danishly put it that, actually, these high levels of trust have been here, that pre-date the social services and social welfare system.

Other people argue it’s the other way around. There’s something interesting about the experience of living Danishly that increases your levels of trust. So immigrants to Denmark also end up adopting Danish values, or their levels of trust rise as the experience of being around Danes and being in this environment starts to sort of filter in, and bed down. So it’s a real debate, actually — there’s a bit of both.

Russell enumerates several other factors that may contribute to a relatively high state of Danish happiness. Most people belong to at least a few clubs or community groups; they spend a lot of time on fitness and outdoor activities; and they don’t put too much emphasis on material possessions.

WIKING: Yes, it’s frowned upon to flash your wealth, to flash your success.

Meik Wiking again.

WIKING: That is quite common in the Nordic countries. So it also sort of puts a lid on conspicuous consumption.

DUBNER: So do you believe that that is a driver, major or minor, of overall happiness, that people feel less compelled to compare themselves to others?

WIKING: Yes, a minor one, but I think it’s one. And yeah, there’s so many studies out there that show that inequality is bad for health, for crime rates, for murder rates, and all sorts of things.

RUSSELL: It’s really interesting. So I — literally this morning, I’ve just come from an independent coffee bar and there’s an equality there. There is not a difference between the person who is serving me coffee and the person buying the coffee. You can talk as equals, because you know that you are both probably, after tax, taking home around about the same amount. And everybody is having a sort of decent life.

On the flip side, there’s not the same service culture. I was just back in the U.K. for work. Oh my goodness, everyone was so nice to me. And when I go to the States, that’s even more so, and I have to remind myself, “Oh, they’re being nice to me because there’s a financial imperative.” And there is more of a service culture in some places than others. In Denmark, that’s not the case. You don’t expect bells and whistles. But I’m kind of fine with that now.

There is one more Danish attribute that’s said to greatly contribute to happiness: hygge.

WIKING: So it’s pronounced “hooguh.”

DUBNER: Hygge.

WIKING: Well done. So I think the best explanation of what hygge is, is the art of creating a nice atmosphere. So it’s about togetherness. It’s about pleasure. It’s about warmth. It’s about relaxation. And that is a key cornerstone of Danish culture. To Danes, hygge is what freedom is to the Americans.

DUBNER: But I gather there are also physical components of it that are specific — a lot of candles, good lighting, and good pastries and so on. Pillows.

WIKING: Right. Because hygge is about atmosphere, lighting is important. Lamps are important. Candles are crucial. So, Danes burn twice as much candle wax as number two in Europe, which is Austria.

Wiking is the author of an international best-seller called The Little Book of Hygge.

WIKING: And I receive a lot of letters from readers saying, “I’ve been having hygge all my life. I just didn’t know there was a word for it.” So I think what we did with hygge was, we gave a word or a language for people to appreciate something they were already doing.

RUSSELL: It’s in every area of Danish life. And I’m working with UNESCO right now to get it put on the World Heritage Intangibles List. Studies show that if you are practicing hygge, it’s a bit like self-kindness, but without the woo. And it makes you nicer to other people. This has a ripple effect out into society. So it really does contribute to happiness.

*      *      *

I was recently in Copenhagen, speaking with Meik Wiking who’s C.E.O. of the Happiness Research Institute. I’d been hearing about all the factors that make Denmark and the other Nordic countries rank so high on the U.N.’s World Happiness Report — the generous healthcare and child-care and education benefits, the strong levels of social trust; and the hygge! It was all sounding a bit too good to be true.

DUBNER: Wouldn’t you think that more governments around the world would look at the Scandinavian model and say, “Wow, they are thriving economically, and they’re thriving on a happiness-and-life-satisfaction level, let’s just do what they are doing.” Why do you think it hasn’t happened even more?

WIKING: The price tag. So I think that the tax level is what scares politicians. But I do sense a larger and larger interest. I get visits on a weekly basis, especially from South Korea. We do see a lot of interest in trying to understand what is it that is working so well in the Nordic countries, that seems to have a positive impact on people’s lives.

SACHS: Now one thing that those countries do, which is unimaginable in the U.S. context as of today — they tax themselves, and tax themselves.

That, again, is the economist Jeff Sachs, an editor of the World Happiness Report.

SACHS: And they end up paying, oh, 45-to-50 percent of national income.

RUSSELL: A lot of people are paying around 50 per cent.

And that’s the recent British transplant Helen Russell.

RUSSELL: I’d say most things — if you’re doing your grocery shop, it’s maybe 20 percent more. Goods and services are very expensive. So yeah, life is more expensive. There is not very much extra when you’ve paid for everything.

But the data show that high taxes and prices are generally considered worthwhile.

WIKING: Nine out of 10 Danes are happily paying their taxes. There is an acknowledgement that we collectively invest in the public good, and that is fed back to people in terms of quality of life.

RUSSELL: There is something about the taxes. When you’re paying that much tax, you have to trust that this is all going to be worth it. And like life, you know, we’re all trapped by something — we have to choose what we’re going to be trapped by. And for me, that seems quite a good thing to put my chips on.

DUBNER: One counterargument is that, well, if you have that, what you don’t have are the huge rewards for innovation and invention. So there are a lot of things that we complain about in the U.S., including income inequality, including the lack of a lot of the social-service network that a lot of European countries have. But we are the country that makes Apple and Google. And on and on and on and on. It seems that there’s an upside to status-seeking, as well as downsides.

RUSSELL: You’re right in terms of accomplishment. There isn’t the same incentive perhaps to go the extra mile that there might be in the U.K. and the U.S., I’d say. So I know that in some places of work, for instance, if your team is working on something but it’s 4 o’clock, they’re going to go home. That can be a frustration for people coming from other countries who are used to people staying there, to really impress the boss or just to do that extra bit.

I think for me and from weighing up the pros and cons, there are always trade offs. And the idea that you can have most of the people doing okay and fairly happy — well no, pretty happy actually — that feels sort of worth it, rather than a couple of tall poppies and everyone else in the gutter.

WIKING: I think perhaps Danes have lower materialistic ambitions than in some countries. But in terms of having an interesting job, having a happy family, having a healthy hobby and keeping fit, I think there is a lot of, sort of, expectations that people want to live up to.

DUBNER: Okay, so you’ve told us that Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries are relatively very high on social trust compared to the rest of the world. And you’ve told us that social trust drives happiness. We also know that social trust decreases when diversity increases. At least, that’s what a lot of literature that I’ve seen has to say. And we know that Denmark and other Scandinavian countries are — relative to other rich countries, the U.S. and the U.K. in particular — are not very diverse. How much do you think the social trust in a place like Denmark is driven by some version of homogeneity? I’ve read that something like 85 percent of Danish citizens are not only born here, but are ethnically derived from Danes. So how much of it is just a sort of comfort with belonging to a club that you belong to?

WIKING: It’s true, in some of the Nordic countries, there is a high level of homogeneity. In Sweden it’s much less — they’ve been much more welcoming to refugees and immigrants, in the past years, than for instance, Denmark and Norway. But then again, if you see the level of trust, that has not declined.

DUBNER: In Sweden, yet, you’re saying?

WIKING: In Sweden, in Denmark, in Norway, in those countries that have accepted immigrants.

DUBNER: Has it been long enough, though, to know? Like with the refugees, coming primarily from Syria and Iraq, that’s relatively recent. And I also wonder — when I see those numbers, I wonder whether those refugees are part of the survey on social trust? Do we know?

WIKING: They are. But now it’s refugees from Syria. But when I grew up, it was refugees from Vietnam. Then, in the 90’s, it was refugees from Bosnia. Then also in the 70’s, it was not refugees, but migrant workers from Turkey. So we’ve had a lot of different waves of migrants, it’s not a new phenomenon. And I don’t see evidence that trust had fallen in the Nordic countries, in that time.

DUBNER: I’ve read and heard from people who move here either as highly skilled workers or as refugees, that Denmark works great if you’re Danish. And that it’s much harder — and granted, most countries are this way — but one particular complaint in Scandinavia is that, even when you’re being treated fairly and given opportunities, economic and educational opportunities, and so on, it can be very, very hard to break into the society.

WIKING: Yes. And that’s what I hear also from expats living here, from my international friends, that it’s very, very difficult to penetrate the social circles in Denmark and Scandinavia. So it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of time. It’s a really, really tight-knit network, and it’s also a very small country. And people still live down the block from people who they know from, they were in kindergarten together.

SACHS: I believe that social, linguistic, ethnic, religious homogeneity probably is conducive to the social democratic model, but I don’t believe that diversity is a barrier to it.

The economist Jeff Sachs again. The 2018 edition of the World Happiness Report focused on migration and happiness. One finding, he says, jumped out at his team of researchers.

SACHS: People who move from a poor, unhappy, violence-filled country to a happy Nordic country become like the Nordic citizens in the country. They do carry some of the legacy of the country that they came from. But the adjustment is remarkably fast.

But of course the adjustment depends on how welcoming a new country is.

SACHS: It matters to go to a country where people are desirous and accepting of in-migration. I’m happy to say that, despite what might appear to be the case in Trump-land right now, Americans rank rather high on acceptability of migrants and still do, and I think that’s a wonderful thing.

What I find fascinating about the social democracies — and Denmark is a good example of this — there’s a very strong anti-migrant party in Denmark that is also very economically and socially left-of-center. So it’s basically social democracy, but for the Danish people, not for migrants. Whereas in the United States — and in many other countries — we tend to think of anti-immigrant also as being right-wing. But Scandinavia has, “Yeah, we love our social democracy, but it’s just for us.”

WIKING: It’s also important to say here that, you know, Denmark, as you have seen, is by no means a utopia.

Meik Wiking again.

WIKING: First and foremost, it’s important to note that the World Happiness Report, that is based on a national average. So you have people above that average and below that average.

DUBNER: And the suicide rate here, for instance, is not wildly low — in fact it’s somewhere in the middle, correct?

WIKING: Yeah, you would expect that the happiest countries in the world have a suicide rate of zero.

DUBNER: Although truthfully, the data show that there is a paradox, in that suicide increases with well-being and prosperity, yeah?

WIKING: So, if you look at the U.S. states, the individual states, the higher level of life satisfaction, the higher level of suicide rates.

DUBNER: The most compelling explanation of suicide I’ve ever heard about — discussed with the fellow who promulgates it — because we don’t really know that much about suicide, because it’s taboo, the research is very distant and so on. But he calls it the “no-one-left-to-blame” theory. Which is that if you have problems in life, but you’ve got a toxic environment or a nasty government, you can always imagine that life will get a lot better. But if you’re surrounded by happy, shiny people and you’re not happy and shiny, it can be — so can you talk about that notion in a place that’s so happy?

WIKING: Yeah. So there is a term, “the happiness-suicide paradox,” that talks about exactly that — that it might be more difficult to be unhappy in an otherwise happy society. If everybody around you feels that life is great, that are oh-so-happy, and you yourself feel unhappy, then that could create a stronger contrast and maybe you start to blame yourself. And more developed countries have reduced the reasons why we should be unhappy. You know, eliminate poverty, have eliminated lack of education — then, “If I have all these opportunities, why am I still unhappy?” We start to internalize that cause and blame ourselves.

Helen Russell, the British expat, has now lived in Denmark for six years. You may recall that she and her husband had been trying, unsuccessfully, to have children back at home.

RUSSELL: We had been trying to start a family for years, trying many different types of fertility treatment. But it never quite worked, and the only feedback I kept getting from various medical professionals was, “Oh, we don’t know what it is, but you’re quite stressed,” — but everyone in London is stressed. It’s city life, it’s what you do. So you just carry on. Life is busy. We just carry on.

DUBNER: Then you moved to Denmark. I understand now, you have not one, but three children. So is Denmark also somehow a fertility engine — how did that work?

RUSSELL: I am now riddled with children, you are quite right. I have a litter. So, full disclosure: child No. 1, Little Red, I found out I was pregnant six months after moving here. And so, he — yeah,  that is a result of being more relaxed, and that is an incredible thing. Also the work-life balance is more conducive to being relaxed enough to conceive, and also to having a family here. Women can have a career and a family because everything’s shared a bit more equally between the sexes, and there is this heavily subsidized child care. I actually had I.V.F. for my twins who were born last year. But again, it’s cheaper to have I.V.F. here than it certainly would have been in the U.K. And interestingly, Denmark is one of the biggest exporters of sperm, so there’s a lot of genetically Danish babies that will be coming around the place in the next few years.

This suggests a nice study for some demographer out there — to see whether all those genetically Danish babies will go spreading happiness around the globe. In the meantime, Helen Russell has also adapted to the Danish style of parenting.

RUSSELL: I do leave my children outside to sleep.

DUBNER: Not overnight, presumably.

RUSSELL: Not overnight, no. I mean, I might forget one day, but no, just for nap times. And they do sleep really well, because of the fresh air, and they’re all bundled up in their old-fashioned prams, Mary Poppins-style.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Max Miller and Anders Kelto, with help from Alvin Melathe, and a special thanks to Denmark Radio for helping us out in Vejle. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Helen Russell, journalist and author.

Jeffrey Sachs, economist at Columbia University.

Meik Wiking, author and CEO of The Happiness Research Institute.

RESOURCES

“World Happiness Report 2018,” edited by John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey D. Sachs (2018).

The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country by Helen Russell (Icon Books Ltd 2015).

The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living by Meik Wiking (William Morrow 2017).

EXTRA

“The Year of Hygge, the Danish Obsession with Getting Cozy,” Anna Altman, The New Yorker (December 18, 2016).

“Trust Me,” Freakonomics Radio (2016).

“The Dark Side of Happiness,” Meik Wiking, TEDxCopenhagen (May 10, 2016).

The post How to Be Happy (Ep. 345 Rebroadcast) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/happiness-rebroadcast/

[christophertheodore-org]

REBECCA SOLNIT: THE LONELINESS OF DONALD TRUMP

Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful, or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until they betray, and not by rules, and certainly not by the law or the book. So for seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat, steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind, grabbed more baubles, and left them in ruin.

He was supposed to be a great maker of things, but he was mostly a breaker. He acquired buildings and women and enterprises and treated them all alike, promoting and deserting them, running into bankruptcies and divorces, treading on lawsuits the way a lumberjack of old walked across the logs floating on their way to the mill, but as long as he moved in his underworld of dealmakers the rules were wobbly and the enforcement was wobblier and he could stay afloat. But his appetite was endless, and he wanted more, and he gambled to become the most powerful man in the world, and won, careless of what he wished for.

Thinking of him, I think of Pushkin’s telling of the old fairytale of The Fisherman and the Golden Fish. After being caught in the old fisherman’s net, the golden fish speaks up and offers wishes in return for being thrown back in the sea. The fisherman asks him for nothing, though later he tells his wife of his chance encounter with the magical creature. The fisherman’s wife sends him back to ask for a new washtub for her, and then a  second time to ask for a cottage to replace their hovel, and the wishes are granted, and then as she grows prouder and greedier, she sends him to ask that she become a wealthy person in a mansion with servants she abuses, and then she sends her husband back. The old man comes and grovels before the fish, caught between the shame of the requests and the appetite of his wife, and she becomes tsarina and has her boyards and nobles drive the husband from her palace. You could call the husband consciousness—the awareness of others and of oneself in relation to others—and the wife craving.

Finally she wishes to be supreme over the seas and over the fish itself, endlessly uttering wishes, and the old man goes back to the sea to tell the fish—to complain to the fish—of this latest round of wishes. The fish this time doesn’t even speak, just flashes its tail, and the old man turns around to see on the shore his wife with her broken washtub at their old hovel. Overreach is perilous, says this Russian tale; enough is enough. And too much is nothing.

The child who became the most powerful man in the world, or at least occupied the real estate occupied by a series of those men, had run a family business and then starred in an unreality show based on the fiction that he was a stately emperor of enterprise, rather than a buffoon barging along anyhow, and each was a hall of mirrors made to flatter his sense of self, the self that was his one edifice he kept raising higher and higher and never abandoned.

I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures.

“They were careless people,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the rich couple at the heart of The Great Gatsby. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Some of us are surrounded by destructive people who tell us we’re worthless when we’re endlessly valuable, that we’re stupid when we’re smart, that we’re failing even when we succeed. But the opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up.  It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing.

“He is, as of this writing, the most mocked man in the world.”

We keep each other honest, we keep each other good with our feedback, our intolerance of meanness and falsehood, our demands that the people we are with listen, respect, respond—if we are allowed to, if we are free and valued ourselves. There is a democracy of social discourse, in which we are reminded that as we are beset with desires and fears and feelings, so are others; there was an old woman in Occupy Wall Street I always go back to who said, “We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.” That’s what a democracy of mind and heart, as well as economy and polity, would look like.

This year Hannah Arendt is alarmingly relevant, and her books are selling well, particularly On the Origins of Totalitarianism. She’s been the subject an extraordinary essayin the Los Angeles Review of Books and a conversationbetween scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge and Krista Tippet on the radio show “On Being.” Stonebridge notes that Arendt advocated for the importance of an inner dialogue with oneself, for a critical splitting in which you interrogate yourself—for a real conversation between the fisherman and his wife you could say: “People who can do that can actually then move on to having conversations with other people and then judging with other people. And what she called ‘the banality of evil’ was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.”

Some use their power to silence that and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning. It’s like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is whatever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation. Power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist.

We gain awareness of ourselves and others from setbacks and difficulties; we get used to a world that is not always about us; and those who do not have to cope with that are brittle, weak, unable to endure contradiction, convinced of the necessity of always having one’s own way. The rich kids I met in college were flailing as though they wanted to find walls around them, leapt as though they wanted there to be gravity and to hit ground, even bottom, but parents and privilege kept throwing out safety nets and buffers, kept padding the walls and picking up the pieces, so that all their acts were meaningless, literally inconsequential. They floated like astronauts in outer space.

Equality keeps us honest. Our peers tell us who we are and how we are doing, providing that service in personal life that a free press does in a functioning society. Inequality creates liars and delusion. The powerless need to dissemble—that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars—and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and on the lack of need to know about others who are nobody, who don’t count, who’ve been silenced or trained to please. This is why I always pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters. This is about a need for which we hardly have language or at least not a familiar conversation.

A man who wished to become the most powerful man in the world, and by happenstance and intervention and a series of disasters was granted his wish. Surely he must have imagined that more power meant more flattery, a grander image, a greater hall of mirrors reflecting back his magnificence. But he misunderstood power and prominence. This man had bullied friends and acquaintances, wives and servants, and he bullied facts and truths, insistent that he was more than they were, than it is, that it too must yield to his will. It did not, but the people he bullied pretended that it did. Or perhaps it was that he was a salesman, throwing out one pitch after another, abandoning each one as soon as it left his mouth. A hungry ghost always wants the next thing, not the last thing.

This one imagined that the power would repose within him and make him great, a Midas touch that would turn all to gold. But the power of the presidency was what it had always been: a system of cooperative relationships, a power that rested on people’s willingness to carry out the orders the president gave, and a willingness that came from that president’s respect for rule of law, truth, and the people. A man who gives an order that is not followed has his powerlessness hung out like dirty laundry. One day earlier this year, one of this president’s minions announced that the president’s power would not be questioned. There are tyrants who might utter such a statement and strike fear into those beneath him, because they have installed enough fear.

A true tyrant does not depend on cooperative power but has a true power of command, enforced by thugs, goons, Stasi, the SS, or death squads. A true tyrant has subordinated the system of government and made it loyal to himself rather than to the system of laws or the ideals of the country. This would-be tyrant didn’t understand that he was in a system where many in government, perhaps most beyond the members of his party in the legislative branch, were loyal to law and principle and not to him. His minion announced the president would not be questioned, and we laughed. He called in, like courtiers, the heads of the FBI, of the NSA, and the director of national intelligence to tell them to suppress evidence, to stop investigations and found that their loyalty was not to him. He found out to his chagrin that we were still something of a democracy, and that the free press could not be so easily stopped, and the public itself refused to be cowed and mocks him earnestly at every turn.

A true tyrant sits beyond the sea in Pushkin’s country. He corrupts elections in his country, eliminates his enemies with bullets, poisons, with mysterious deaths made to look like accidents—he spread fear and bullied the truth successfully, strategically. Though he too had overreached with his intrusions into the American election, and what he had hoped would be invisible caused the whole world to scrutinize him and his actions and history and impact with concern and even fury. Russia may have ruined whatever standing and trust it has, may have exposed itself, with this intervention in the US and then European elections.

The American buffoon’s commands were disobeyed, his secrets leaked at such a rate his office resembled the fountains at Versailles or maybe just a sieve (this spring there was an extraordinary piece in the Washington Post with thirty anonymous sources), his agenda was undermined even by a minority party that was not supposed to have much in the way of power, the judiciary kept suspending his executive orders, and scandals erupted like boils and sores. Instead of the dictator of the little demimondes of beauty pageants, casinos, luxury condominiums, fake universities offering fake educations with real debt, fake reality tv in which he was master of the fake fate of others, an arbiter of all worth and meaning, he became fortune’s fool.

He is, as of this writing, the most mocked man in the world. After the women’s march on January 21st, people joked that he had been rejected by more women in one day than any man in history; he was mocked in newspapers, on television, in cartoons, was the butt of a million jokes, and his every tweet was instantly met with an onslaught of attacks and insults by ordinary citizens gleeful to be able to speak sharp truth to bloated power.

He is the old fisherman’s wife who wished for everything and sooner or later he will end up with nothing. The wife sitting in front of her hovel was poorer after her series of wishes, because she now owned not only her poverty but her mistakes and her destructive pride, because she might have been otherwise, but brought power and glory crashing down upon her, because she had made her bed badly and was lying in it.

The man in the white house sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence. He must know somewhere below the surface he skates on that he has destroyed his image, and like Dorian Gray before him, will be devoured by his own corrosion in due time too. One way or another this will kill him, though he may drag down millions with him. One way or another, he knows he has stepped off a cliff, pronounced himself king of the air, and is in freefall. Another dungheap awaits his landing; the dung is all his; w

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Ricky Gervais States Did Nothing Incorrect At Globes Gala.

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