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lingshanhermit · 1 month ago

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Lingshan Hermit: They Have Always Been Exploring the World in a Clumsy Way

Mathematics originated in ancient Babylon, physics in ancient Greek philosophy, and chemistry in medieval Islamic alchemy, later developed and expanded by Europeans. Thus, some say that mathematics, physics, and chemistry were all invented by Westerners, considering this a symbol of Western civilization's advancement. I have always believed that the emergence of physics and various inventions in the West is unrelated to their intelligence or advancement, but directly linked to their values, cognitive systems, and lack of quicker methods to understand the universe. In my view, Western society has been exploring the world in a clumsy way since the time of Thales in ancient Greece. Using this clumsy method to explore the world, they gradually derived mathematics, physics, and chemistry, yet even today, they have not truly understood the rules and reality of the universe.

Physics tries to understand the laws governing the world by observing phenomena, summarizing the world's rules through one phenomenon and experiment after another. However, this approach lacks the ability to see the big picture, and the scope of observation is very limited. Often, their observations are confined to the realm of tangible matter. Therefore, they cannot understand invisible qi, cannot comprehend magic, and even less can they understand miracles. All of these are attributed by them to illusions and delusions from humanity's ignorant period.

Most people do not realize that all conclusions of modern physics are only temporary. So when many people discuss scientific conclusions, they don't know that what they're talking about are just temporary conclusions, merely the current understanding of the scientific community. They treat these as final conclusions. But if those were truly final conclusions, physicists would no longer need to work.

Unlike the ancient Europeans, the ancient sages of China and India also observed the laws of the universe and explored the reality of the universe and their own minds, but the methods they used were vastly different from those European counterparts. They started from investigating things and extending knowledge, beginning with the inner mind. The pioneers of exploring truth in ancient China didn't need laboratories, petri dishes, or large electron colliders; sometimes they might only need a meditation cushion. Through meditation and observing the inner mind, they gradually discovered the rules of the universe, found that everything is cause and effect, discovered the invisible connections between all things that cannot be seen with the naked eye, found that nothing is as we imagine or define it, and discovered the eternal rules of the universe. So if you have the right lineage and teachings, and you can practice correctly, with strong determination and perseverance, you might understand reality in just ten or twenty years. The difference between this approach and the Western approach is this: The Eastern way is like curing a blind person and letting them see with their eyes; in an instant, everything in the room can be seen clearly - the sofa is on the left, the clock is on the wall, a black cat is lying in the corner of the room. So you know where the door is, where the hallway is, and where the cat is. The Western way of exploring the universe's rules is like a blind person stumbling around the room, groping. You must reach out and repeatedly feel your way forward, guessing what it is after touching it. It's an enormously huge house with millions of items. And they've only just touched a few. Usually, what we call physics, chemistry, and mathematics are the products of Western society in this groping process. Some have said that Chinese society hasn't given birth to science in thousands of years, which is like criticizing a person with good eyesight for not using a white cane or walking on a tactile paving.

The exploration of India and China, being entirely based on personal experience and occurring completely within the mind, is unknown to outsiders, and the results of exploration are too special to be replicated and verified in a laboratory. If you really want to replicate it, you must find a true teacher, then accept their teaching and training, and spend decades or even many lifetimes to verify. So this is much, much more difficult than replicating an experiment in a laboratory. Moreover, for ordinary people, the realms of those who have attained enlightenment are too lofty, and their writings are completely mysterious to ordinary people, so it's hard to be recognized by the general public. Also, in the Eastern-style exploration process, there won't be by-products like cars, electric fans, or vitamin B that can bring practical benefits. Many explorers don't appear successful; some even live by begging. From the perspective of ordinary people, their exploration seems to be of no help to their own lives. The achievements of Western-style exploration, on the other hand, are the kind that can be seen and verified by ordinary people. After all, compared to a dryer, the merit of dedicating one's practice is not so intuitive.

The Western exploration was initially also to understand the world, but later they discovered a huge gold mine in the process of exploration, finding something more attractive than truth. So although many respectable scientists are still persevering, many research purposes have shifted towards pragmatism and commercial interests. Today, most people don't care about what the laws of the universe are (although this is closely related to each of them; if you don't understand the rules of the universe, don't understand how the world operates, even if you can earn a mountain of gold, it will be emptied overnight). They care about practical issues like how to lose weight, how to retire, how to profit from this AI wave.

That being said, although I think their method is not smart, it doesn't prevent me from respecting their exploration and achievements, doesn't prevent me from respecting the pioneers of Western physics, because what they did is also one of humanity's efforts to understand the universe. And even if their method is not smart, it has to some extent touched the edge of truth, which provides the best corroboration for the Dharma.

Written by Lingshan Hermit on October 7, 2024. First published on October 9, 2024.

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灵山居士：他们一直都是在用一种笨笨的方法在探索世界

数学最早起源于古代巴比伦，物理学起源于古希腊的哲学家，而化学则起源于中世纪伊斯兰的炼金术，后来在欧洲人手上发展壮大。所以有人说数学物理化学都是西方人发明的，并且以此认为这就是西方文明先进的象征。我一直都认为物理学和各种发明创造之所以会出现在西方和他们聪明与否先进与否无关，但是与他们的价值观、与他们的认知体系、与他们缺少更快捷认知宇宙的方法有直接关联。在我看来，西方社会从古希腊泰勒斯时期开始就一直都在用一种笨笨的方法在探索世界。他们用这种笨笨的方法探索世界，所以就慢慢衍生出了数学物理学和化学，而且至今他们也没有真正了解宇宙的规则和实相。

物理学通过观察现象来了解世界运行的规律，他通过一个又一个现象和实验来总结世界的规律。但这种方式缺乏综观全局的能力，而且观测范围非常有限，很多时候他们的观察只限于有实体的物质领域。所以他们无法理解看不见的气，无法理解魔法，更加无法理解神迹。所有这些都被他们归结为人类蒙昧时期的幻觉和妄想。

大多数人并不了解现代物理学的所有结论都只是暂时性的结论。所以很多人在谈论科学结论的时候并不知道他们所谈论的那些只是暂时性结论，只是科学界到目前为止的暂时认知。他们会把它当作最终结论来谈论。但如果那真的是最终的结论，物理学家们就不需要继续工作了。

和古代欧洲人不同的是，中国和印度的古代圣贤也在观察宇宙的法则，也在探索宇宙和自心的实相，但是他们所使用的方法却和那帮欧洲人大相径庭。他们是从格物致知开始，从内心下手，中国古代探索真理的先驱们不需要实验室，不需要培养皿，也不需要大型电子对撞机，有时候他们可能只需要一个蒲团。经由禅定和观察内心，他们慢慢发现了宇宙的规则，发现了一切都是因缘果，发现了万事万物之间那些肉眼看不见的关联，发现了没有任何事物是我们所想像所定义的样子，发现了宇宙永恒的规则。所以如果你有正确的传承和教授，而你又能正确修行，凭借强大的决心和毅力可能十几二十年就能了解实相。这种方式和西方人方式差别在于：东方的方式就象是治好了一个眼盲的人让他用眼睛去看，屋子里的一切一瞬间就都能看的清清楚楚，沙发在左边，闹钟在墙上，屋子的角落里卧着一只黑色的猫。所以你知道门在哪儿，知道过道在哪儿，也知道猫在哪儿。而西方探索宇宙规则的方式就像是一个瞎子在屋里跌跌撞撞地乱摸，你必须伸着手反复试探着往前摸索，摸到之后再去猜那是什么。那是一间巨大无比的宅子，有上千万件物品。而他只是刚摸到了几件而已。通常我们所说的物理学化学和数学就是西方社会在这个摸索过程中的产物。以前有人说中国社会几千年没有诞生过科学，这就像是指责一个眼睛完好的人不走盲道不用白手杖一样。

印度和中国的探索由于完全是基于个人的体验，探索过程也完全发生在内心，所以外人不得而知，而探索成果也因为过于特殊而不可能被实验室所复制和验证。如果你真的要复制，你就必须寻找一位真正的老师，然后接受他的教授和训练，花上几十年甚至很多辈子来验证。所以这比在实验室里复制一个实验的难度大得多得多。而且对于普通人来说，那些证悟者的境界太过高远，他们的著作对普通人来说完全就是个谜，所以很难为普罗大众所认可。而且在东方式的探索过程中不会出现如汽车电风扇维生素B之类可以带来现实利益的副产品。很多探索者看起来并不成功，他们有些甚至以乞讨为生。从普通人的角度来看，他们的探索对自己的生活毫无帮助。而西方式的探索所取得的成绩则是那种可以被普通人看到和验证的。毕竟，和烘干机相比，回向的功德并不那么直观。

西方人的探索最初也是为了了解世界，但是后来他们在探索过程中发现了巨大的金矿，发现了比真理更具吸引力的东西，所以虽然很多可敬的科学家还在坚持，但是很多研究的目的已经偏向于实用主义和商业利益。在今天大多数人完全不关心什么是宇宙的规律（虽然这和他们每个人都息息相关，搞不清楚宇宙的规则、搞不清楚世界是如何运行的，即便你能挣到一座金山，也会在一夜之间被搬空。），他们关心的是如何减肥如何养老如何在这波AI浪潮中获利这样的现实问题。

话虽如此，虽然我认为他们的方法并不聪明，但并不妨碍我尊重他们的探索和成果、不妨碍我尊重西方物理学的先驱，因为他们所做的事情也是人类为了解宇宙而做的努力之一。而且即便他们的方法不聪明也在某种程度上触摸到了真理的边缘，这为佛法提供了最好的佐证。

灵山居士写于2024年10月7日。首发于2024年10月9日。

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ecosmining · 1 month ago

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Introduction to Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency is like invisible online money. You can’t see or touch it, but it still works like regular cash. The cool thing is it doesn’t need banks to operate. Instead, it uses something called blockchain, which is a super safe way to keep track of transactions. People use cryptocurrencies to buy stuff, invest, or send money to others. It’s getting bigger and changing how money works in the world.

Cryptocurrency started with Bitcoin in 2009, but now there are many types, each with its own style. They give people more control than normal money, but they can also be risky because prices can go up and down quickly. Let’s dive in and learn more about how cryptocurrency works!

What is Cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency is like invisible cash on the web. You can’t hold it like coins. It’s only online, but it’s valuable. It doesn’t belong to any country’s bank. So, if you own Bitcoin, it’s yours. You don’t need a bank to use it. No one controls it, not even governments.

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency made in 2009. Now, there are thousands of different ones. Each has its own special features. Some of the popular ones today are Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin. They are all unique, but they share one thing. No single person or group controls them.

Being decentralized means no one’s in charge. Neither governments nor companies can stop it. Instead, it runs on something called blockchain. Blockchain is like a giant digital notebook. It writes down every transaction that happens. Imagine a huge public notebook anyone can peek at. But no one can change the notes in it. That’s how blockchain works.

For example, if you send Bitcoin to a friend, blockchain writes it down. Everyone can see that you sent it. But no one can erase or change it. This is why people trust blockchain. It’s safe and fair. Even though the transaction is visible, your personal info stays hidden. So, it’s both private and public at the same time.

As of September 2024, more than 420 million people use cryptocurrency worldwide. That shows how popular it is becoming. People realize they don’t need banks to send money. They can use Bitcoin or Ethereum to send money quickly. It’s fast and easy, even across countries.

And now, more and more people see the benefits of cryptocurrency. It offers freedom from banks and fees. You can control your money without needing permission. This kind of power attracts many people. No long waits, no extra charges, just simple, quick transactions. Even young people are getting into it. They see it as the future of money.

Cryptocurrency keeps growing, and many believe it’s just the beginning. Every year, more types of cryptocurrencies are created. They bring new features and ideas to the table. It’s a world that’s changing fast, and people are excited to see what comes next.

How Does Cryptocurrency Work?

Cryptocurrency works on something called blockchain. Picture a digital chain where each link is a block. Every block holds details about trades or transactions. When you send or receive cryptocurrency, it gets added to the chain. These blocks all stay connected, forming a long, unbreakable chain.

Imagine you want to send Bitcoin to a friend. First, you start the transaction. The network then kicks into action. Before your Bitcoin moves, it has to be checked. Miners help with this by solving really hard puzzles. Miners are like digital detectives — they make sure your trade is real.

Once miners finish checking, the transaction gets added to the blockchain. No one can change it after that — it’s locked forever. This is why blockchain is so reliable. It’s like a book everyone can read, but no one can erase or rewrite.

Different cryptocurrencies use different ways to confirm trades. Bitcoin uses something called Proof of Work (PoW). In PoW, miners race to solve these puzzles. The first miner to solve one gets to add a block to the chain. As a reward, they receive Bitcoin. But this way uses a lot of energy.

Ethereum, on the other hand, is moving to Proof of Stake (PoS). With PoS, instead of racing, people who own more Ethereum get picked to confirm trades. This method is faster and uses much less energy. Many people believe that PoS is the future of how cryptocurrencies will work.

Here’s a quick overview:

You send cryptocurrency to someone.

The system checks the action.

Miners or validators approve it.

The trade is added to the blockchain.

It’s done and cannot be changed.

In September 2024, Ethereum shifted to Proof of Stake, cutting energy use by over 99%. This makes it much greener. Meanwhile, Bitcoin still uses Proof of Work, which has people debating its high energy cost.

Popular Types of Cryptocurrencies

There are many different types of cryptocurrencies, each with a unique purpose. Some are used for spending, while others have special functions. Let’s explore some of the most popular ones as of September 2024.

Bitcoin: This was the first cryptocurrency, launched in 2009. People often call it “digital gold” because it holds value, similar to gold. No one controls Bitcoin, but its price can change fast. This makes it risky but also thrilling to own.

Ethereum: Ethereum is more than just digital cash. It introduced smart contracts, which are like digital deals that run on their own. For example, you can use a smart contract to automatically pay someone when a task is finished. Ethereum is also the foundation for decentralized apps (dApps). It remains the second-largest cryptocurrency in 2024.

Ripple (XRP): Ripple helps move money between countries quickly. Usually, sending money internationally can take days and cost a lot. Ripple makes these transfers happen in seconds. That’s why many banks use Ripple to send money fast and cheaply.

Litecoin: Litecoin is like a “lighter” version of Bitcoin. It processes trades faster and is often used for smaller transactions. If Bitcoin is digital gold, then Litecoin is like digital silver.

Tether (USDT): Tether is a stablecoin, which means its value is tied to the US dollar. One Tether is always equal to one US dollar. People use Tether to store money without worrying about big price changes. It’s one of the most popular stablecoins used for trading.

In September 2024, Bitcoin and Ethereum remain kings of the crypto world. Ripple continues to make international transfers easy, and Litecoin is great for small, fast transactions. Tether is the go-to stablecoin for traders.

How to Use Cryptocurrency

Using cryptocurrency is super easy. You can buy it, sell it, or just hold it. Here’s how you can use cryptocurrency step by step:

Buy cryptocurrency: To buy it, you need to use an exchange like Binance, Coinbase, or Kraken. You trade your regular money (like dollars or euros) for cryptocurrency on these platforms.

Store cryptocurrency: After buying, you’ll need a place to keep it. That’s where wallets come in. You can store your cryptocurrency in a digital wallet or even in a special hardware wallet for extra safety.

Send and receive cryptocurrency: You can easily send or get cryptocurrency. It’s faster than using banks and works globally. Just like sending an email, but with money.

Use cryptocurrency for payments: Some stores or websites take cryptocurrency as payment. It’s especially handy for international purchases where normal bank fees would be higher.

Buying and Selling Cryptocurrency

Buying and selling cryptocurrency is easy once you get the hang of it. You do it on exchanges — digital platforms where you trade your regular money for cryptocurrency. Some of the most popular ones in 2024 are Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken.

Here’s how to buy cryptocurrency step by step:

Sign Up: First, you need to make an account. Exchanges usually ask for personal info, like your name and email. Some might also ask for a photo ID.

Deposit Funds: After signing up, you need to add money. You can do this through bank transfers, credit cards, or even PayPal.

Choose a Cryptocurrency: With money in your account, you can now pick a cryptocurrency to buy. The exchange will have lots to choose from.

Complete the Purchase: You decide how much to buy, and the exchange processes your order. Your cryptocurrency will show up in your account quickly.

Store Your Cryptocurrency: Once you buy it, it stays in your exchange wallet. But for long-term storage, it’s better to use a personal wallet.

Selling cryptocurrency is just as easy. You go back to the exchange, pick what you want to sell, enter the amount, and confirm. The exchange turns your cryptocurrency into regular money or another cryptocurrency.

Storing Cryptocurrency: Wallets

Once you own crypto, you need to store it somewhere safe. A cryptocurrency wallet is like a digital vault for your coins. Instead of holding cash, wallets store something called private keys. These keys give you access to your cryptocurrency. If someone steals your keys, they can steal your money. So, keeping them safe is super important.

There are two main kinds of wallets:

Hot Wallets: These are connected to the internet, making them easy to use. But because they’re online, they can be vulnerable to hackers.

Cold Wallets: These wallets are not connected to the internet, so they’re much safer. But they’re less convenient if you need to access your crypto often.

The Benefits and Risks of Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency has both exciting upsides and tricky risks. Let’s break it down:

Benefits

Fast and Global Transactions: Since cryptocurrency doesn’t use banks, you can send money anywhere fast, with low fees.

Low Fees: Sending cryptocurrency often costs less than using credit cards or banks, especially for international transfers.

Decentralized and Private: No single company or government controls cryptocurrency. Also, your personal info stays hidden.

Great Investment: Some people invest in cryptocurrency, hoping its value will increase, like how Bitcoin grew.

Risks

Price Swings: Cryptocurrency prices can change quickly. One day it’s up, the next it’s down.

Security: While blockchain is safe, your wallet can be hacked if you don’t protect it well.

Regulation Worries: Cryptocurrency rules differ from country to country. Some places are friendly, others not so much.

Loss Risk: If you lose your private keys, you lose your money forever.

The Role of Cryptocurrency in the Global Economy

Cryptocurrency is becoming super important now. It’s no longer just for tech experts. As of September 2024, over 420 million people own some cryptocurrency. That’s a huge number compared to just a few years ago. People now use it not only for investing but for everyday payments too.

Why Cryptocurrency is Growing

One big reason cryptocurrency is growing fast? It makes cross-border payments super easy. Normal bank transfers can take a long time, especially between countries. They also come with high fees. But cryptocurrency payments are much quicker. They usually take minutes and cost less.

For businesses, freelancers, and anyone sending money, this is great news. Instead of waiting days for banks, they can use Bitcoin or Ethereum. These currencies make sending money fast and cheap. No need to wait for banks to do their job.

Big Companies Using Crypto

Even big companies like Microsoft and AT&T now accept Bitcoin for some services. This shows how cryptocurrency is becoming part of everyday life. It’s not just tech companies, either. Many other industries are seeing the value of using crypto.

For businesses, accepting cryptocurrency is useful. They don’t have to worry about currency exchange rates. Plus, they avoid banking delays. This makes it easier for companies to work with customers around the world.

Cryptocurrency in Developing Countries

In some countries, banks aren’t reliable. In places like Nigeria and Kenya, people use cryptocurrency a lot. It’s become a lifeline for many. They use it to store money, send money, and buy things.

For people without a bank account, crypto is a game-changer. There are 1.7 billion people worldwide without bank accounts. But with cryptocurrency, they can now be part of the financial world. All they need is a smartphone. That’s why it’s growing so fast in these countries.

Helping People With Unstable Money

In some countries, the local currency loses value fast. Places like Argentina and Venezuela have high inflation. People in these places are turning to Bitcoin. It’s a way to protect their savings. While Bitcoin’s value can change, it’s seen as more stable than their local money.

Even though Bitcoin can be volatile, for many people, it’s safer. People in countries with unstable economies feel more secure with cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency as an Investment

Cryptocurrency is also becoming a big part of investment portfolios. In 2024, big financial institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity started investing in Bitcoin. They even offer funds based on cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin is often called “digital gold.” That’s because it’s seen as a way to protect money from inflation, just like gold. People now invest in it to keep their savings safe. Other cryptocurrencies, like Ethereum, are also becoming important for investors.

Additionally, here are some statistics based on September 2024 data:

By September 2024, institutional investors like BlackRock and Fidelity allocated 65% of their cryptocurrency portfolios to Bitcoin, recognizing it as “digital gold.”

Ethereum, as the second-largest cryptocurrency, holds 20% of institutional interest due to its smart contract capabilities and upcoming upgrades.

Other cryptocurrencies, such as Solana and Polygon, make up 15% of institutional investment portfolios, highlighting a diversified interest in various blockchain technologies.

This investment trend reflects the growing trust in cryptocurrencies as a hedge against inflation and a valuable asset class.

Ethereum and Smart Contracts

Ethereum is more than just digital money. It has something called smart contracts. These are like digital deals that run on their own. For example, you can set up a contract to send money when a job is done.

This technology is used in many industries, like gaming and real estate. With Ethereum, people can create apps and platforms without needing a middleman, like a bank.

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)

Some countries are even creating their own digital money. These are called Central Bank Digital Currencies, or CBDCs. Countries like China and the European Union are leading the way. These digital currencies work on blockchain, just like Bitcoin.

While they’re not exactly like Bitcoin, they show how important blockchain is becoming. Governments see the value in this new technology.

The Future of Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency is changing how money moves around the world. It’s making payments faster and cheaper. It’s also helping millions of people join the financial system.

As more businesses and governments start using cryptocurrency, its role in the world will keep growing. But with this growth come some challenges. There are still issues around security and regulations. But even with these problems, cryptocurrency is here to stay.

Cryptocurrency as a Financial Asset

Many people now see cryptocurrency as a financial asset. It’s like owning stocks, bonds, or real estate. But unlike those, cryptocurrency is fully digital. It doesn’t depend on companies or governments. Its value comes from what people are willing to pay for it.

In 2024, more and more people are investing in cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and Ethereum are still the most popular, but there are many others. Investors like cryptocurrency because it can grow in value over time. It’s also decentralized, which means no one controls it.

Risks of Cryptocurrency Investment

While investing in cryptocurrency can be exciting, it’s also risky. Prices can go up and down very fast. One day, Bitcoin can be worth $40,000. The next day, it might drop to $35,000. This makes it a high-risk investment.

Unlike other assets, cryptocurrency is still new. It doesn’t have the same protections or rules. If you want to invest in it, you need to be careful. Some people see it as a way to protect against inflation. But you should never invest more than you can afford to lose.

Cryptocurrency Rules and Regulations

Cryptocurrency regulations are different in every country. In 2024, places like the U.S., Europe, and China are creating new laws. These rules are meant to protect people from fraud and market crashes.

In El Salvador, Bitcoin is legal money. You can buy things with it just like with regular money. But in China, Bitcoin mining is banned. Each country has its own rules.

Know Your Customer (KYC) and Taxes

Many countries require people to verify their identity before trading cryptocurrency. This is called Know Your Customer, or KYC. It’s used to stop illegal activities, like money laundering. While it adds safety, some people don’t like it. They prefer staying anonymous.

Taxes are another thing to think about. If you sell cryptocurrency for a profit, you may have to pay taxes on it. The rules depend on where you live.

Cryptocurrency in Developing Countries

In developing countries, cryptocurrency is really helping people. Many don’t have access to banks. But with a smartphone, they can use cryptocurrency to send and store money.

Remittances, or sending money home, are a big use for cryptocurrency. In places like Nigeria and the Philippines, people are using Bitcoin to send money across borders. It’s cheaper and faster than traditional money transfers.

In countries with inflation, cryptocurrency is also useful. When local money loses value, people turn to Bitcoin. It’s seen as a safer way to save money.

Challenges for Cryptocurrency in Developing Countries

While cryptocurrency is growing, there are challenges. Many people still don’t understand how to use it. There are also concerns about regulations and security. But despite these problems, cryptocurrency is helping millions of people in difficult economies.

What’s Next for Cryptocurrency?

The future of cryptocurrency looks exciting. Experts think that by 2030, half the world’s population could be using it. This growth is driven by new technology and people wanting more control over their money.

More Businesses Accepting Crypto

More businesses are starting to accept cryptocurrency. In 2024, companies like PayPal and Microsoft allow customers to pay with Bitcoin. Even luxury brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton are accepting it. Over time, cryptocurrency could be as common as credit cards.

New Crypto Rules Coming

Governments are paying more attention to cryptocurrency. In 2024, countries like the U.S. and Europe are working on better rules. Some people worry that too many rules could hurt innovation. But others say rules will make cryptocurrency safer for everyone.

The challenge is finding the right balance. Too many rules could drive crypto users away. But too few rules could leave people vulnerable to fraud.

Blockchain Technology Advancements

One of the coolest things about cryptocurrency is the blockchain technology behind it. As blockchain improves, things will get faster and safer. Ethereum’s move to Proof of Stake (PoS) has made transactions more eco-friendly. This change reduced energy use by 99%.

Other advancements, like Layer 2 solutions, are making transactions even quicker and cheaper. These new technologies will help crypto handle more users in the future.

Cryptocurrencies Beyond Money

Blockchain isn’t just for money. It can be used for many things, like healthcare, real estate, and supply chains. In the future, we could see blockchain being used everywhere.

Smart Contracts and DAOs

Cryptocurrencies are also evolving fast. In 2024, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are becoming more popular. These are groups that make decisions without any one person in charge. They are used for managing projects and funds.

Another growing trend is stablecoins. These are cryptocurrencies tied to real-world assets, like the U.S. dollar. They offer the benefits of crypto without the crazy price swings.

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)

Countries are also working on their own digital currencies. China’s Digital Yuan and the European Union’s Digital Euro are examples. These are like cryptocurrency but are controlled by governments. They show how important blockchain has become.

Challenges and Opportunities

The future of cryptocurrency is full of opportunities, but also challenges. As more people use it, security becomes even more important. Hackers can target individual wallets, so improving security is key.

Scalability is another challenge. As more people use cryptocurrency, networks need to handle the extra traffic. Technologies like Ethereum’s upgrade are helping, but there’s still work to do.

Bitcoin’s Proof of Work uses a lot of energy. Ethereum’s shift to Proof of Stake helped reduce this. But finding more eco-friendly ways to mine crypto is important for the future.

Despite the challenges, the future looks bright. Cryptocurrency is giving people more financial freedom. It’s making payments easier and cheaper. It’s opening new ways to invest and build businesses.

In the end, cryptocurrency will keep growing. There will be challenges, but the future is exciting. Keep an eye on this space, because cryptocurrency is changing how we live and work.

#cryptocurrency #bitcoin #mining #crypto

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pagebypagereviews · 4 months ago

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# 25 Unforgettable Books that Will Change Your Perspective Books have the profound ability to transport us to different worlds, introduce us to new ideas, and challenge our perceptions. Among the millions of books available, some stand out for their unique perspectives, thought-provoking content, and the lasting impact they have on readers. Here, we explore 25 unforgettable books that promise to change your perspective on life, society, and yourself. ## Fiction That Opens New Worlds ### 1. "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee This classic novel explores themes of racial injustice and moral growth through the eyes of a young girl in the Deep South of the 1930s. Its timeless message about empathy and compassion continues to resonate with readers worldwide. ### 2. "1984" by George Orwell Orwell's dystopian masterpiece offers a chilling exploration of totalitarianism, surveillance, and individual freedom. It serves as a powerful warning of the dangers of unchecked government power and the erosion of personal liberties. ### 3. "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho A tale of self-discovery and pursuing one's dreams, "The Alchemist" follows a young shepherd on his journey to find a hidden treasure. Along the way, he learns about the importance of listening to his heart and understanding the signs of life. ### 4. "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel This novel's rich narrative explores themes of faith, survival, and the power of storytelling. Stranded in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger, the protagonist's adventure is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. ### 5. "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak Set in Nazi Germany, this novel tells the story of a young girl who finds solace in stealing books and sharing them with others. Through the eyes of Death, it offers a unique perspective on the human capacity for kindness in the face of brutality. ## Non-Fiction That Inspires and Educates ### 6. "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari Harari's sweeping narrative of human history examines how Homo sapiens came to dominate the world. It challenges readers to reconsider everything from the development of societies to our impact on the environment. ### 7. "Educated" by Tara Westover This memoir recounts Westover's journey from growing up in a strict, survivalist family in Idaho to earning a PhD from Cambridge University. It's a compelling testament to the power of education and the quest for self-invention. ### 8. "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg Duhigg explores the science behind why habits exist and how they can be changed. Through engaging case studies, he shows how understanding the patterns that shape our lives can lead to transformative change. ### 9. "Becoming" by Michelle Obama In her memoir, the former First Lady shares the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood in Chicago to her years in the White House. It's an intimate, inspiring look at the power of resilience and hope. ### 10. "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl Frankl's memoir of his time in Nazi concentration camps discusses his theory of logotherapy, which posits that the search for meaning is the primary motivational force in humans. It's a profound exploration of suffering, survival, and finding purpose. ## Books That Challenge Societal Norms ### 11. "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood Atwood's dystopian novel imagines a future America where women are subjugated and stripped of their rights. It's a powerful commentary on feminism, autonomy, and resistance. ### 12. "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley Huxley's vision of a future society obsessed with technology, comfort, and conformity raises important questions about freedom, happiness, and the cost of progress. ### 13. "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison This seminal work explores the African American experience and the societal invisibility of black people in early 20th-century America. It's a profound examination of identity, race, and the search for self.

### 14. "Beloved" by Toni Morrison Morrison's haunting novel about a former slave haunted by her past challenges readers to confront the brutal realities of slavery and its lasting impacts. It's a powerful story of memory, trauma, and redemption. ### 15. "The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir De Beauvoir's groundbreaking work on women's oppression and liberation is a foundational text of feminist philosophy. It examines the construction of gender roles and advocates for women's autonomy and freedom. ## Books That Explore Human Emotion and Relationships ### 16. "A Man Called Ove" by Fredrik Backman This heartwarming tale of a curmudgeonly old man who finds his solitary world turned on its head when a boisterous family moves in next door is a touching exploration of love, loss, and the unexpected friendships that change us. ### 17. "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy In this post-apocalyptic novel, a father and his son journey through a burned America, exploring themes of survival, the bond between parent and child, and what it means to be human in the face of desolation. ### 18. "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami Murakami's melancholic novel captures the essence of youth, love, and loss. Set in 1960s Tokyo, it follows a young man's complex relationships and his journey toward emotional healing. ### 19. "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom This novel tells the story of Eddie, an amusement park maintenance man who dies and encounters five individuals in heaven who help him understand the significance of his life. It's a reflective exploration of the interconnectedness of human lives. ### 20. "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath Plath's semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman's descent into mental illness is a raw and powerful examination of gender, identity, and the struggle to find one's place in the world. ## Books That Encourage Personal Growth ### 21. "The Art of Happiness" by Dalai Lama Co-authored with psychiatrist Howard Cutler, this book presents

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inapat17 · 7 months ago

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Pirate of the Caribbean: the Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) or why do we go on an adventure 1/2.

In 2003, movies and pirates were not a good match. If the pirate movie was extremely popular during the 1950s, pirates were not made to be blockbuster heroes. In 1995 Cutthroat Island directed by Renny Harlin was a huge failure at the box office and headed Carolco - producer of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall - to bankruptcy. Therefore, when Disney decided to adapt the famous ride Pirate of Caribbean it was kind of a jump into the ocean. Mickeal Eisner, Disney’s CEO back then even tried to stop the production after Paul Hasting’s The Country Bears failed, thinking the Pirate of Caribbean movie would be a complete disaster. That is when Verbinsky decided to commit a mutiny and continue the preproduction. When he showed the designs and the story-board to Eisner, the captain of the Disney company agreed to continue the production but made it invisible that it was a Disney film. When the movie got released during the summer 2003 it earned more than $988 million for a budget – without marketing – of $140 million which was a great loot for a dead genre. Looking at the film, it seems the genre is symbolized by the Pearl’s crew, dead but alive through VFX, their adventure to do the film.

Story wise, it tells the adventure of Will(iam) Turner – Orlando Bloom – forced to piracy after the government chose to not chase the Black Pearl right after she and its crew attacked Port Royal and kept Elizabeth Swan – Keira Knightley –, the governor’s daughter, on the ship. She, at first, used the right of Parlay to talk to the captain Barbossa – Geoffrey Rush – and threaten to drop her medallion into the ocean. Medallion that is the object the Pearl’s crew sick to lift the curse. Captain Jack Sparrow – sadly Johnny Depp before we all knew that he is not playing the part with all the women in Tortuga arrives right before the attack in Port Royal looking for a ship to also chase captain Barbossa who committed a mutiny and stole his ship. But because he is a pirate the commodore James Norrigton – Jack Davenport – sends him to jail. Will broke him free and stole one of Norrington’s ships and forced him to chase them and so the Royal navy chased the Pearl. After that necessary summary it seems clear that each of the characters have a different reason to go on this adventure on the Caribbean Sea. But in comparison to the story of the production the first movie of the Pirate of the Caribbean saga can be read as a meta-film about its own making. Will is the alter-ego of Gore Verbinsky, the son of a pirate that he does not know and trying at first to do things the right way but when the government which portrayed Eisner and Disney tells him he has to stop and not persue his quest, Will, a craftsman which is an adjective that can easily be said of Verbinsky’s work, goes rogue and becomes a pirate. Then, the sword forged by Will that Norringhton gets at the beginning of the movie can be seen as movie Verbinsky has done in the past for the studios like Ring (2002) but even if it is good work he is not seen as the person responsible for the success but the producers are. Verbinsky even makes a joke about producer by making the person in charge of Will’s shop sleeping and only putting the final blow to Jack before he is arrested. When Will is introduced as a grown up he shows the word to the governor and he asks to Will to congratulate his boss. It is literally the producer not seeing the craft as the director work but as a creation of another man. Talking about the captain Jack Sparrow, he is the idea of a pirate that Hollywood created during the golden age: he drinks rum, he always overcomes challenges by lying and twisting people’s mind. Then when he gets imprisoned, he is not freed by the pirate’s attack, which represents the whole genre, but by Will. All happened as if Verbinsky freed the pirate to go on the adventure. Indeed, Pirate of the Caribbean: the Curse of the Black Pearl makes pirates enter the twentieth century: the characters make a lot of jokes entwined with great action; it has a post-generic sequence… All of a typical Marvel movie but only better because there is something Verbinsky does differently: he believes in his character, in the story he is telling and in the action he does. Then the producer will always remember this movie as the time they almost cancelled one of the most grossing films of all time.

After this first set piece: Jack and Will’s fight and the Port Royal attack, the film brakes all the rules of pirate’s movie. Actually, the purpose of the pirate is not looting a treasure but putting it back where he belongs. Then what’s the purpose of the adventure? What does the pirate seek? What does the Curse mean? I will answer this question in my next article! Stay tuned!

Pierre Borowczak

#pirates #Adventure #Production's story #meta-film #Pierre Borowczak

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journeydb · 2 years ago

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March 22 2022 Barcelona

HAPPY WORLD WATER DAY! There is NOTHING more essential to Life than WATER. Without water no plants or animals (which includes humans) can survive for very long. It’s the most important thing and yet many people who have access to clean water and sanitation take it for granted. The purpose of this day is to raise awareness about the importance of appreciating water, protecting water, and making clean, healthy water available to all living things.

According to Wikipedia:

“World Water Day is an annual United Nations (UN) observance day held on March 22nd that highlights the importance of fresh water. The day is used to advocate for the sustainable management of freshwater resources. The theme of each year focuses on topics relevant to clean water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), which is in line with the targets of Sustainable Development Goal. The UN World Water Development Report (WWDR) is released each year around World Water Day.

UN-Water is the convener for World Water Day and selects the theme for each year in consultation with UN organizations that share an interest in that year's focus. The theme for 2021 was "Valuing Water" and the public campaign invited people to join a global conversation on social media to "tell us your stories, thoughts and feelings about water".

In 2020, the theme was "Water and Climate Change". Previous themes for the years 2016 to 2019 were "Water and Jobs'", "Why waste Water?", “Nature for Water", and "Leaving no one behind". World Water Day is celebrated around the world with a variety of events. These can be theatrical, musical or lobbying in nature. The day can also include campaigns to raise money for water projects. The first World Water Day, designated by the United Nations, was in 1993.”

This year’s theme is “Groundwater - Making the Invisible Visible”. Many organizations, including private and public companies, universities and other centers of learning, government agencies, and nonprofits, are working hard to come up with and implement solutions to the water crisis. Individuals can and MUST make efforts to change their ways of living in order to contribute to the SOLUTIONS and minimize their contribution to the problems. Every one of us can make a difference.

Bruce and I have been focusing our efforts on raising and donating funds to a number of nonprofits which are bringing clean, safe water to people all over the world. We have also supported some water projects created by individuals in developing nations.

Every year since 2013 I have created a chartiy:water campaign to celebrate my birthday. You may have even supported those campaigns and, if you did, I thank you again. Through those campaigns we have raised nearly $25,000 for water projects, mostly in Africa. Thousands of people are being helped by having access to clean water as a result of our fundraising and millions of lives are being changed and saved by charity:water’s work around the globe.

When my friend Jenna Saldana left Intercambio, where she was the development director and went to work for El Porvenir, Bruce and I began supporting El Porvenir’s work in Nicaragua. We had supported other nonprofit water projects in the past and we knew how important they were.

For many years I had wanted to visit Nicaragua, so in 2018 when Jenna called to say that she and her daughter, Paloma, whom I had known since she was born, were going on a trip to Nicaragua to bring El Porvenir donors who wanted to see first hand the impact of their philanthropy, I decided to go. I was visiting our sister, Kathi, in Maine when I made the decision and asked her if she wanted to go with us. To my delight she said yes and Jenna said we could share rooms so it was decided!

It was the first time Kathi and I had gone, just the two of us, on a trip together, and that made it exciting enough, but adding to the allure was the possibility of spending time with Jenna and Paloma, who I hadn’t seen for a few years since they had moved with their family to Mexico and then Michigan to be near Jenna’s extended family.

Nicaragua is a developing nation and the politics there, like in so many pseudo democracies which are closer to dictatorships, are mostly corrupt and funds which are supposed to go to help the people end up in government official’s pockets. That’s why donating to a non-government organization (NGO) like El Porvenir makes so much sense. Even though it’s headquartered in Managua it has a U.S. office headed up by Jenna and the Executive Director, Rob, lives in Managua and runs the operations from there with local staff in the field. After the first day visiting Managua and Granada we headed outside the city to the rural areas where El Porvenir focuses its efforts.

We stopped at a school in San Lorenzo to visit the teachers and students there who have been helped by a water and sanitation project with latrines, which make it possible for more kids to stay in school.

We met Steve Hall who is the son of the woman who started H2O for Life, which is collaborating with El Porvenir to help fund water and sanitation projects. Children all over the United States work in their schools to fundraise for H2O to bring clean water to kids like them in developing nations.

We visited the watershed in Lorenzo, which is so important to health of the water systems and where they are planting hundreds of trees to filter the water which goes into the groundwater accessed by the wells that El Porvenir staff and the villagers dig for each village.

The kids in San Lorenzo and El Sauce were so proud of their latrines and hand-washing stations that they had personalized with their artwork!

We also visited water storage tanks and pump stations in El Sauce and Terrabona and met some of the villagers who keep the systems in working order. All along the we met with staff who do the important work in the field.

And, of course, there was time for fun like boating, zip-lining, swimming, attending local celebrations, and eating delicious local food.

After our last dinner together as a group in Managua, where we said goodbye to most of the wonderful people we had met on this adventure, a small group of us went out to Lago de Apoyo, where we rented the Quinta Lee, a beautiful private home on a lake.

Kathi and I are committed to returning to Nicaragua with El Porvenir to take up shovels, dig wells, plant trees, whatever it takes to bring clean water and sanitation to these wonderful people. Until then we’ll continue supporting El Porvenir with our own donations and by sharing our story and encouraging others to donate, as well. Here is the link to their website if you’d like to become an El Porvenir donor:

https://www.elporvenir.org/

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radishreader · 3 years ago

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There is a better way. And it's a pretty simple one: we must increase female representation in all spheres of life. Because as more women move into positions of power or influence, there's another pattern that is becoming even more apparent: women simply don't forget that women exist as easily as men often seem to.

Women in the film industry are more likely to employ women. Female journalists are significantly more likely to center a female perspective and to quote women. Female authors do the same: 69% of US female biographers wrote about female subjects in 2015, compared to 6% of male biographers. The emphasis by women on female voices and perspectives extends to the academy. Between 1980 and 2007, female history faculty in the US rose from 15% to 35%--meanwhile across a similar time period (1975-2015), US history faculty specializing in women's history rose from 1% to 0%--a tenfold increase. Female academics are also more likely to assign female authors to their students....

Women are also leading the way when it comes to closing the gender data gap. A recent analysis of 1.5 million papers published between 2008-15 found that the likelihood of a study involving gender and sex analysis 'increases with the proportion of women among its authors'. The effect is particularly pronounced if a woman serves as a leader of the author group. This concern for women's health also extends to the political sphere: it took a woman (Paula Sherriff, the Labour MP for Dewsbury) to set up the UK's first All-Party Parliamentary group for women's health in 2016. It was two rogue female Republicans who scotched Donald Trump's attempts to repeal Obamacare (which would have disproportionately impacted women), voting three times against his proposals.

And women are making a difference in politics more generally. It was two women, Melinda Gates and Hillary Clinton, who spearheaded the UN-backed organization Data2x that is aimed specifically at closing the global gender data gap. ...

And when the worst happens, women are there too, filling in the gaps left by male-biased disaster relief. Researchers found that the 'masculine and muscular image[s] of relief workers' that dominated the media post-Katrina were belied by women who were 'working tirelessly and courageously' behind the scenes. The same thing has happened in Puerto Rico, all but abandoned by the US government after Hurricane Maria devastated the region in 2017. 'The reality is that when you go to communities, mostly it is women as leaders and as community organizers,' Adi Martinez-Roman, executive director for a non-profit that provides legal assistance to low-income families, told journalist Justine Calma. These women have collected data by 'wad[ing] into flooded neighborhoods' and canvassing the abandoned communities. And they have developed and provided evidence-based solutions. They've set up soup kitchens. They've raised money and rebuilt roads. They've distributed 'solar-powered lights, generators, gas, clothes, shoes, tampons, batteries, medication, mattresses, water'. They set up 'free legal aid societies to help families navigate the confusing and ill-designed processes required to file FEMA claims'. They've even managed to source some communal, solar-powered washing machines.

The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap. When women are involved in decision-making, in research, in knowledge production, women do not get forgotten. Female lives and perspectives are brought out of the shadows. This is to the benefit of women everywhere, and as the story of Taimina, the crocheting maths professor shows, it is often to the benefit of humanity as a whole. And so, to return to Freud's 'riddle of femininity', it turns out that the answer was staring us in the face all along. All 'people' needed to do was to ask women.

–Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women (2019)

#invisible women #quotes #caroline criado perez

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thinkveganworld · 3 years ago

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Here’s Part One of a series of articles I wrote a while back:

Goebbels and today’s mass mind control: Part One

How PR opinion-shapers turn the people against their own interests By Carla Binion (”thinkveganworld.tumblr.com”)

Today’s right-wing public relations spin has much in common with the propaganda methods of Hitler’s PR man, Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels admired Edward Bernays, a self-proclaimed founder of the public relations industry. Bernays, a Vienna-born nephew of Sigmund Freud, opened a New York office in 1919. According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, (“Toxic Sludge is Good for You,” Common Courage Press, 1995) Bernays “pioneered the PR industry’s use of psychology and other social sciences to design its public persuasion campaigns.”

Bernays wrote in “Propaganda,” (New York: 1928, pp. 47-48) “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.” Bernays referred to this scientific opinion-control as the “engineering of consent."

In his autobiography, Bernays discusses a dinner at his home in 1933 where, "Karl von Weigand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Weigand his propaganda library, the best Weigand had ever seen.

Goebbels, said Weigand, was using my book ‘Crystallizing Public Opinion’ as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign."

Today, corporations spend millions on public relations campaigns to "crystallize public opinion,” often in an effort to convince the public that harmful things are actually good for us. Sometimes the companies start by bending the minds of our elected representatives.

This is the first part of a series. In part one, we’ll focus on the ways in which corporations and their public relations mind-shapers worked to destroy the Clinton health care plan. Today forty-four million Americans, about one in five people, have no health coverage, and many people cannot afford needed pharmaceutical drugs. Most Americans probably wonder why, despite repeatedly broken campaign promises, Congress never does anything to improve the health care system.

As far back as November 8, 1999, a Newsweek article reported that half or more of eligible heart attack patients are at greater risk because they can’t get needed beta blockers. The article stated that two-thirds of people surveyed say they are worried that health care is no longer affordable. Conditions haven’t improved since then.

In 1993, the Clinton administration tried to do something about the high price of prescription drugs, hinting at possible government-imposed price controls. The pharmaceutical industry then turned to the Beckel Cowan PR firm to oppose the administration’s designs on lowering the cost of prescription drugs – although, of course, the Clinton plan would have benefited the public. Stauber and Rampton write that Beckel Cowan “created an astroturf [or, fake grassroots] organization called 'Rx Partners’ and began deploying state and local organizers to, in the words of a company brochure, 'generate and secure high-quality personal letters from influential constituents to 35 targeted members of Congress.’"

At the same time, Beckel Cowan managed a mail and phone campaign "which produced personal letters, telegrams and patch-through calls to the targeted members’ local and Washington, DC, offices.” The PR firm built a network of supporters in 35 congressional districts and states. Pharmaceutical companies weren’t the only corporations to oppose an improved health care system.

The insurance industry went to work to fight against the Clinton health care plan, recruiting PR-man Robert Hoopes. According to Stauber and Rampton, the 300,000 member Independent Insurance Agents of America (IIAA) hired Hoopes as their “grassroots coordinator/political education specialist."

Campaign & Elections magazine reported the IIAA activated "nearly 140,000 insurance agents during the health care debate, becoming what Hoopes describes as a new breed of Washington lobbyists,” wrote Stauber and Rampton. Hoopes said the lobbyists “have behind them an army of independent insurance agents from each state, and members of Congress understand what a lobbyist can do with the touch of a button to mobilize those people for or against them."

In Campaign & Elections magazine ("Killing Health Care Reform,” October/November 1994) Thomas Scarlett writes of the insurance companies PR moves, “Through a combination of skillfully targeted media and grassroots lobbying, these groups were able to change more minds than the president could, despite the White House 'bully pulpit.'

Never before have private interests spent so much money so publicly to defeat an initiative launched by a president.” The Coalition for Health Insurance Choices (CHIC), an insurance company front group, led the attacks on health care reform. According to Consumer Reports, “The HIAA [Health Insurance Association of America] doesn’t just support the coalition; it created it from scratch.” Stauber and Rampton write that PR-man Blair G. Childs masterminded the Coalition.

Describing the fight against health care reform, Childs said in 1993, “The insurance industry was real nervous. Everybody was talking about health care reform. It felt like we were looking down the barrel of a gun.” He added, “We needed cover because we were going to be painted as the bad guy. You get strength in numbers. Start with the natural, strongest allies, sit around a table and build up to give your coalition a positive image."

To battle health care reform, Childs said the coalition brought in "everyone from the homeless Vietnam veterans to some very conservative groups. It was an amazing array, and they were all doing something.” (Blair Childs speaking at “Shaping Public Opinion: If You Don’t Do It Somebody Else Will,” in Chicago, Dec. 9, 1994.)

Childs advised industry health reform opponents on selecting names for their fake grassroots coalitions. He said they should use focus groups and surveys to find “words that resonate very positively.” (Examples included the words “fairness, balance, choice, coalition and alliance.”)

His own coalition sponsored the famous “Harry and Louise” television spots. Those ads used strategic words to convince the public that Clinton’s health care plan was overly complex – a “billion dollar bureaucracy.” Propagandist Rush Limbaugh also fueled the anti-health care debate on his radio show with frequent “calculated rants” aimed at his dittohead audience.

PR-man Blair Childs said his coalition ran paid ads on Limbaugh’s show to encourage Rush’s listeners to call members of Congress and urge them to kill health care reform. Stauber and Rampton say that congressional staffers often didn’t know the callers were “primed, loaded, aimed and fired at them by radio ads on the Limbaugh show, paid by the insurance industry, with the goal of orchestrating the appearance of overwhelming grassroots opposition to health reform."

During 1992 and much of 1993, before the propaganda blitz, both Democrats and Republicans were leaning toward a health reform bill according to James Fallows (The Atlantic, January 1995.) Fallows writes, "Bob Dole said he was eager to work with the administration and appeared at events side by side with Hillary Clinton to endorse universal coverage. Twenty-three Republicans said that universal coverage was a given in a new bill."

By 1994, the insurance corporations’ PR attacks had changed the political environment. Stauber and Rampton write that "Republicans who previously had signed on to various components of the Clinton plan backed away.” Even Democratic Party Senate majority leader George Mitchell “announced a scaled-back plan that was almost pure symbolism. Republicans dismissed it with fierce scorn."

Although Hitler’s propagandist used mass mind control for more sinister goals, today’s corporate propagandists have the following in common with Goebbels: They use the same opinion-shaping techniques he did, and they use them for the purpose of turning the people against their own interests. When large numbers of American citizens suffer or die because they can’t get needed medicine or surgery as a result of corporate propaganda, it becomes obvious that Goebbels and today’s industry PR spin doctors have produced fruit that is similar in kind, though different in degree.

The public benefits from understanding corporate PR and its character and intentions. Hitler said, "Only one thing could have broken our movement: if the adversary had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed with extreme brutality the nucleus of our new movement.” (Speech to Nuremberg Congress, 9/3/33.)

Corporate America’s movement to undermine affordable prescription drugs, universal health care and other public health and safety interests has to be understood before it can be fought. Stauber and Rampton say the PR industry resembles the title character in the old Claude Rains movie, “The Invisible Man.” Rains’ character uses his invisibility to get away with robbery, murder and other crimes.

The film was made using special-effects techniques such as hidden wires to make ashtrays, guns and other objects appear to float in mid-air, as if they were being moved by the invisible man. “Instead of ashtrays and guns,” write Stauber and Rampton, “The PR industry seeks to manipulate public opinion and government policy. But it can only manipulate while it remains invisible."

In part two, we’ll look at specific techniques today’s public relations ploys have in common with Goebbels’ methods, and we’ll examine the corporations’ and think-tanks’ Goebbels-like attacks on environmental protection.

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allthefilmsiveseenforfree · 4 years ago

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Wonder Woman 1984

The first 3/4 of 2017’s Wonder Woman was my favorite film of that year. The last 1/4 was my least favorite film of that year. What can I say, I have a complicated relationship with the DCEU, and the part I keep getting disappointed by is the big smash-em-up, explosions everywhere, muddy mess of orange/blue filter in the “climactic showdown” between hero and villain. I just don’t have the patience for it anymore, and I was so hoping that the Jazzercise vibes of Wonder Woman 1984 would do something different.

As it turns out, this movie was trying to warn me like so many stories that have come before - be careful what you wish for. Just how badly did my wish go bad? Well...

I’d already heard some questionable things about the movie before I tuned in, so my expectations were tempered but I guess it was on me. I should have known better than to wish for a story with reasonable pacing, some kind of consistent tone, villains with discernable motivation, or a Wonder Woman movie that was actually about fucking Wonder Woman. I’m not even mad as much as I am puzzled. That and tormented by Pedro Pascal’s manic televangelist energy in my dreams.

Some thoughts:

I have never wanted to go anywhere as much as I want to in 2020, and the place I want to go more than any other is Themyscira. Love this first sequence. Why is the whole movie not about Themyscira??

If the Olympics were like this whole long Amazonian warrior triathlon, I would be WAY more into track and field.

Also I legit don’t understand the problem with her taking the short path? Like, it’s there for a reason? She just caught up to her horse? Someone explain this to me.

So this mall...basically the hub of American commerce in the 80s that was practically printing money, it made it so fast...is secretly a front for antiquities trading on the black market? And these unorganized-ass dipshit criminals who seemingly just walked in off the street and decided to engage in some light robbery today are after antiquities? Sure, Jan.

Ohh I miss Waldenbooks so much!

This thwarting of crime sequence in the mall feels so...cheesy. Schlocky, almost. Like a 50s comic book come to life. I dunno, it just doesn’t feel like the tone I was expecting. In the context of the whole film, we really blew our action load in these first 2 sequences, and also this is the last point in the movie in which Diana actually resembles her character from the first film.

I would also be stammery and blushy when talking to Diana Prince for the first (and second) time, but I’m kinda getting a gay vibe from Barbara. This meet-cute + date is definitely playing up romantic vibes. Kristen Wiig is so good at characters like these - in less than 2 scenes, I have such a clear picture of who Barbara is, what she wants, what she fears, and that’s all down to Wiig’s choices. [ETA: This makes it all the more infuriating when Barbara suddenly is like “I want to be an apex predator” when nothing about her character’s reaction to getting positive attention indicates she would want to start shitting all over everyone else.]

Pedro Pascal is skeeving me out as our villain Max Lord, which really just shows his range, because normally I love him and find him wildly charming in everything. But he’s playing this oil baron creep to the max, as they would say in the parlance of the 80s, and it makes my skin crawl.

The mechanics of how Steve Trevor returns are wildly confusing. Why is this other guy involved at all? Are we supposed to be ok with the idea of Diana fucking *some other dude’s body* without his consent just because Steve’s spirit/consciousness/whatever is inside the guy? Also that guy DEFINITELY got fired from his job after going AWOL for a whole week, right?

I am thrilled with Steve’s clothes montage. One of my favorite things in any 80s film, and his enthusiasm really sells it.

I do really like Diana and Steve playing detective, following clues, crafting theories. In spite of the absolute dumbassery of how Steve came back, Chris Pine and Gal Gadot have incredible chemistry and I do find their scenes together delightful.

I think that’s why it’s so frustrating to me the way their entire relationship was handled. If the whole point of the wish going bad is that it has a cost, wouldn’t it have been better, instead of making Diana weak, to have Steve slowly start to be more and more of an asshole - aka not the Steve Diana remembered and loved? Make her realize that the Steve she knew and loved is really gone and she has to stop letting his memory hold her hostage. Maybe his last moment of self-awareness would be realizing that this wasn’t who he really was, and she was better off just remembering who he was and moving on rather than trying to hold on to this thing that isn’t good for her?

The sequence with the fireworks made me emotional. The only time I’ve ever been on a plane on the 4th of July was when I was coming back from a visit with my uncle in Dallas. He had flown me, my mom, and my grandma down for a whirlwind trip, and we flew back the night of the 4th. I got to see fireworks from above for the first time, and it felt so magical. My uncle passed away 2 months ago, and feeling that magic again (via Diana and Steve) made me miss him and all the adventure he brought into my life something fierce.

Am I supposed to be like...anti- the idea of Barbara absolutely kicking the shit out of this drunk catcaller who attempted to assault her earlier in the movie? It feels like the film wants us to be like “oh no that’s bad” but my empathy goes on vacation for attempted rapists.

Like...did anyone do ANY kind of fact-checking on this script? The Maya haven’t been “wiped from the face of the earth” there are still 6 million of them living in Central and South America. Escalators were invented in the 1890s for fucks’ sake. PLANES IN THE 80S DONT WORK LIKE PLANES IN 1918. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT ALL THOSE SWITCHES DO STEVE. Also...just because the plane is invisible doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist anymore. Isn’t the whole point of radar to detect things that you can’t, y’know, SEE? Seriously, how many people fiddled with this script until it turned into an incomprehensible mess?

Did I Cry? OK yeah, I did when Diana and Steve had their conversation after they escaped the White House. But I feel like I should have cried more then, as well as earlier when Diana tells Steve that she only wants this one thing. I love Gal Gadot in this role, but I do wish her acting expressed a little more emotional depth and honesty for the moments like this that should really tug on the heartstrings.

I know Wonder Woman is bulletproof, but are we saying she’s also...immune to electricity?

If there’s one thing that living through a global pandemic has taught me, it’s that we can’t rely on the inherent responsibility of every individual person to do the right thing in order to save their community (or the world). So the climax of this film really feels like a big ol’ fictional FUCK YOU to every person who has been quarantining since March as the US government twiddles their thumbs and relies on personal choice to lower infection rates. I know they made this film during 2019 and had no idea what would be coming, but this entire sequence was the most horrifying, short-sighted, offensive way to have good overcome evil I could imagine for a 2020 movie. “Just count on people to do the right thing and everything will be fine!” We’re WELL FUCKING PAST THAT, Diana.

And maybe this is my debbie downer pessimistic ass, but the message “the world is a beautiful place the way it was” feels like some real bullshit. Do you mean the world is a flawed, complicated place where beautiful things exist DESPITE all the violence, inequality, and poverty? Ok, that I’ll buy, for sure. But “Everything was fine the way it was!” is uhh not what I would have gone with. That’s a first draft edit if ever I heard one. Seriously, how did this make it through MULTIPLE studio drafts and no one thought to point this out?

I literally had to go back after the credits were over and rewind to figure out what happened to Pedro Pascal at the end. If I not only don’t care, but also can’t remember what happened to the villain at the end of the movie, that’s a big motherfucking problem.

I was giddily delighted by that first post-credits scene though! Probably the biggest moment of joy I felt during the film.

For being a Wonder Woman movie, it feels like there’s so little actual Wonder Woman IN the movie. The first film is rooted firmly in Diana finding her place in the world, understanding and coming into her power. This feels like she’s a bystander in her own life, and her most significant moments are always in the context of someone else’s narrative arc. And there’s nothing that comes even close to the breathless wonder of that No-Man’s-Land scene, aka one of the best superhero movie moments of all time.

This doesn’t have the knowing wink of Aquaman or the nuanced character arcs of Birds of Prey. It doesn’t have the childish glee of Shazam! or any of the nonsensical grimdark bullshit of Zack Snyder’s entire ouvre. It feels like Wonder Woman 1984 suffers the same fate as its protagonist - a profound lack of presence or drive. Sure there are some fun sequences, and the actors are doing the best they can with a weak script, but it’s just not enough to save it. In a year where I saw so few contemporary films (focusing more on catching up on past films I’d missed), I can’t think of one that disappointed me more.

#121in2021 #wonder woman 1984 #ww84 #gal gadot #chris pine #pedro pascal #kristen wiig #patty jenkins #wonder woman #diana prince #steve trevor

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nerdybutcute · 4 years ago

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Themes in Cyberpunk Generally and Shadowrun Specifically

What is Shadowrun about? Aside from elves with mohawks and machine guns, I mean. That much is obvious. In all seriousness, though – what should we expect from a Shadowrun game? How is the Sixth World different from other “cyberpunk” settings? What does this particular game do well, maybe even better, than other games of a similar stripe? We can answer these questions by taking a dive in the roots of cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction, but even that journey must start with the very foundations of the modern mindset, because cyberpunk as a literary movement has a real problem with modernity.The central moral concepts of the Enlightenment are autonomy and authenticity. The arguments for liberal, democratic government, capitalism, and the Scientific Revolution alike are rooted in an assumption of the importance of liberating the individual. “Liberty” is the moral center of the modern paradigm, and all the other appurtenances of modern life mentioned above are to be interpreted as mechanisms of that liberation. As imaginative fiction reflects the tenor of the times, the through-line of early 20thcentury science fiction is a utopianism based in the modern ideal, with emphasis on the liberating power of science.

But postmodernist critics soon began to question the validity of this vision. The Holy Trinity of liberal society, free markets, and scientific progress began to seem, in their analysis, less likely to free the individual than to enslave them. They posited that under capitalism, science would always be a tool for subverting democracy, and genuine freedom required taking a skeptical stance toward all three. Likewise, the cyberpunk movement in science fiction was born of these post-modern fears, envisioning a future where high-tech has ensnared the individual in a web of consumerism, drugs, virtual reality, and technological serfdom. Indeed, in the idiom of speculative fiction, cyberpunk literature could pose questions about even the moral center of the modern world, as exemplified in Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – in a world where the barrier between man and machine has eroded to the point of invisibility, what is autonomy? What is authenticity?

Cyberpunk literature, like all science fiction, leaned heavily on the science aspect – hence the “cyber” – but it was skeptical, rather than laudatory, of technological progress. The “punk” aspect encompassed the postmodern rebellion against existing structures of power – capital and government – which are posited in punk philosophy not only as hopelessly intertwined but fundamentally flawed, inevitably enslaving those they propose to serve. Punk is inherently anarchist, seeking to tear down the mechanisms of domination; cyberpunk takes special interest in the high-tech aspect of these structures. But just as punk has a difficult relationship with capitalism, constantly courted and tempted by the urge to commodify and merchandise the punk aesthetic in the name of wider exposure and increased social capital (all in the name of the movement, of course), cyberpunk replicates this relationship with technology – the interface of man and machine chips away at our essential humanity, threatening to turn us into objects that can be programmed and directed rather than free and authentic individuals, but the technological marvels of the setting are indispensable in fighting the very structures that produce and control them. The tools of the oppressors can be used against them but likewise constantly threaten to co-opt those who oppose them. And most disturbingly, of course, even the anarchist subculture of resistance in cyberpunk literature is presented as violent and nihilistic, raising questions about what the world will look even if the “punks” win – is there any hope at all?

Cyberpunk can quickly drift into transhumanism, usually when the technology of the setting is fetishized rather than approached skeptically, but also when the central characters are unproblematically portrayed as agents of the structures of power rather than subversive elements in society. But pure punk characters are rare as focal points – it’s more interesting and certainly more in-genre to focus on those who were in some way caught up in the structures of power and then cast aside by them, damaged and discarded. Gibson’s Neuromancer provides excellent examples in Case, Molly Millions, and Riviera, brutalized by the powers-that-be but still used them as disposable commodities to advance the interests of the wealthy and connected. Case is a pitiable figure, arguably the most abused by the agents of power but also, in the end, least willing to reject their blandishments. Indeed, the titular AI is perhaps the only truly free character in the story, exerting its autonomous will on the world, and reaching even beyond.

The original cyberpunk roleplaying game, called quite simply Cyberpunk, followed the style of that era of games in providing little guidance to new players in how to create characters while assuming a knowledge of the relevant genre – the fact that players could take the role of Corps and Cops was not a mistake, as it was likely assumed that these characters would, ultimately, embody the ambiguous relationships to power of their literary counterparts, rather than being uncritical servants of the authorities. The game fittingly portrayed corporations as sinister and government as largely ineffective, but the most telling design feature was the inclusion of rules for “cyberpsychosis,” a gradual disintegration of mental faculties brought on by excessive use of cyber-enhancements. This mechanic “game-i-fied” the postmodern skepticism about the liberatory power of technology and fears about loss of autonomy when the human – the free and authentic person – becomes continuous with the thing, the servile commodities produced by those structures of power.

Other “cyberpunk” games followed, missing the point to greater and lesser degree, until Shadowrun, which wedded fantasy elements to the setting. The inclusion of elves, dwarves, and other magical things might seem to dilute the point of cyberpunk as a genre, but the history of the setting makes the additions apt. Because of the precise way in which Shadowrun integrated fantasy with science fiction, the core conceits of the cyberpunk genre may well have found one of their best expressions to date.

The return of magic in the Sixth World, as the setting is called, provided occasion for the Native American people of North America to rise up, using their traditional spiritual practices – now terrifyingly efficacious – to destroy the United States. As acts of resistance by oppressed outsiders goes, this one is impressive, an apotheosis of the “punk” element of cyberpunk. And the resistance is non-technological, but rather magical – a non-technological resistance only being possible in a setting like Shadowrun’s, despite other works like Neuromancer playing with the idea of “urban primitivism” before this. The triumph of the Native American Nations in the Sixth World is a triumph over all three elements of Enlightenment culture – science, capitalism, and liberal democracy – given the self-proclaimed role of the United States as their standard-bearer in the modern world. True, this decisive defeat does not recapitulate the angst brought over into cyberpunk literature from the noir genre, but the triumph of the indigenous peoples is not the end of the story.

In the Shadowrun setting, major cyberpunk tropes are preserved – the government is corrupt where it is not ineffective, and true power mostly lays with the corporations. “Mostly” is an important caveat there, however – other power blocs exist, such as dragons, the Native American Nations, and the nations of the elves, quite aside from such mysterious antagonists as insect shamans and other foul creatures. Again, this might seem to dilute the essential conflicts of the cyberpunk genre, but Shadowrun envisions those conflicts in a different way, the clue to which is found in the dissolution of the United States in the setting’s backstory. Rather than pitting inchoate punk anarchism against rampant capitalism, rather than pitting urban primitivism and the struggle for authenticity against the insidious creep of technology, it quite literally pits the pre-modern against the modern – mysticism and tradition against the values of the Enlightenment. The outcome of the struggle is no longer pre-ordained, so the sense of futility of classic cyberpunk is lost, but a different sense of doom has taken its place: between the modern and the archaic, there may be no good choice.

Classic cyberpunk is skeptical toward the machinery of democracy and other modern accoutrement, but presents no alternative except anarchy (in this, one might imagine that blighted dystopias like Mad Max are a sort of cyberpunk, but that’s another essay). Shadowrun presents a different choice – rolling back the clock on the Enlightenment is now perhaps a realistic possibility, but one that carries dangers of its own. And it is a choice that must be made. Corporate rapaciousness threatens the natural spaces that embody the magical Essence of the Earth, just as cyber-enhancements threaten the individual character’s Essence, with the end result of too much reliance on cyberware being, in this game, death rather than psychosis. But magical threats abound, as well, such as the insect shamans of the first major myth arc in the game, and this aside from what else might be lost in the unraveling of the modern order – ideas of democracy and equality and so on. Shadowrun pointedly presents the corporate order as practically a feudal one, with employees treated more like serfs, indentured to their lords, while the reflexive Japanophilia of the cyberpunk canon is here leveraged to a different purpose – as an alternative social model based on ancient ways, another refutation of the Enlightenment. Such pre-modern subcultures abound in the setting, but they are pre-modern, which is to say authoritarian, sexist, racist, culturally chauvanistic, and so on. Classical cyberpunk fiction critiques the modern order and offers petty acts of resistance to it; Shadowrun fragments and partially overturns it, but with the caveat that what stands to replace it probably isn’t any better.

Shadowrun, therefore, while an offshoot of the traditional cyberpunk concept, is undoubtedly faithful to the core element of the genre, the critique of the modern. It dissolves the tension of fruitless struggle against it, but replaces it with a diabolical choice. Mind you, as with cyberpunk literature, this can easily fall into transhumanism; the setting-specific counterpart misstep is the glorification of the oppositional pre-modern traditions that now hold a place of honor in the world. The true cyberpunk essence of Shadowrun is best expressed in emphasizing both the intrusive, dehumanizing elements of technocracy as well as the de-individuating aspects of traditional culture paired with the cosmic horror of the magical world.

#ttrpg stuff #shadowrun #literary theory

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tres-leeches · 3 years ago

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Thoughts on Scarlet Nexus

Game's pretty good, but to have some semblance of structure I guess I'll start with what I don't like. A minor gripe I have is that the game clearly isn't really optimized for next gen systems and it debuted at Microsofts series x stream. It looks nice and runs well, but it takes like 5 seconds to save and pop in is everywhere in the city areas. Textures can get pretty gnarly up close too. There are also weird invisible walls in some spots where you could easily jump over a fence or whatever and the game will make you go through the opening.

I'm just gonna go ahead and separate combat. The combat I enjoy for the most part, but it isn't quite there in some ways. The dodge could use some work and some enemy hit boxes aren't clear. I get they don't want the main character to be so powerful that he doesn't have to use his allies, but even with all the combo upgrades it still doesn't really have enough variety. The deepest it goes is interrupting your light combo with a heavy so that you can do another of the same light combo. I really like what they did with the party where you can access damn near everyone's powers all the time so you don't have to constantly swap out party members. I think it makes the combat way more interesting. Controlling 8 different powers is surprisingly intuitive despite it not looking that way when you see the controls. I do like the psychokinesis ability despite it feeling a tad on the weaker side even with some of the more powerful moves. The brain field thing was fine but I found it so uncontrollable that it'd be more liable to get me killed than help me especially on the human bosses. On that note the human bosses aren't super great in my opinion. Instead of them just tanking a million hits like the monsters they dodge your attacks. Which is fine on paper, but I found in most of those fights that it boiled down to me waiting for an opening, getting 2 or 3 hits in, then running around waiting for that again. I guess on a note tangential to combat the enemy variety in the game isn't bad, but they don't rotate them much. There are fights near the end of the game where it will spawn like 4 waves of nearly identical enemies when they have others they could choose from. And some of the enemies can and will blast you for most of your health from off screen and sometimes they're the only enemies in the room so you can't just focus it down. The enemies also have really bad names. Overall though combat is fun, which is good, cause the other half of the game is less good.

The story in this game is presented a in very nice looking clean visual novel style. It's mostly fancy borders and sliding portraits that hide the fact you're just staring at still images, but it works. And the proper cutscenes look very good and are animated super well. The characters are pretty likeable for the most part and none of them are throwaway losers. The only character I didn't like was generic higher than mighty tsundere dude who just acts like a dick most of the time with minimal display of his other traits. Unfortunately the story these characters are in is not good enough for it taking up probably half of the game time. It starts pretty interesting with government conspiracies and revolutions, but pretty quickly becomes a fairly generic anime save the world escalation. Not to say the world is generic cause it's pretty cool with how it's presented and some of the visuals. There are several cases where something will happen or someone will gain an ability from out of nowhere and if they explain it at all it's just handwaving it away. There's also this strange disconnect where for a large portion of the game you are enemies with half of the cast, yet you can still hang out with them and the game will acknowledge that it's weird but your character will just immediately act like everything is fine. I wouldn't mind the story being just fine if it didn't frequently sit you down for long periods of time and shove it in your face. It feels like they were going for the method of just having cool shit happen and relying on the coolness to distract from it making no sense except the things that are happening aren't cool enough.

Side tidbit the side quests seem mostly useless. Granted I didn't do many of them but the reason I didn't was cause all the early game ones were just go get this item kill this enemy in this way type stuff. Even though I basically skipped all of them I had the best weapons and materials enough for basically whatever I wanted.

Despite all my bitching I still liked the game and I hope they make another one so they can iron out some of these issues and make it an even better game.

#scarlet nexus

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 years ago

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 18, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

The Trump administration is winding down as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris prepare to take office on Wednesday.

Trump will leave office with an approval rating of 34%, dismal by any measure. He is the first president since Gallup began polling never to break 50% approval. After the attack on the Capitol on January 6, the House of Representatives impeached him for a second time, and a majority of Americans think he should have been removed from office.

In the last days of his term, the area of Washington, D.C., around our government buildings has been locked down to guard against further terrorism. Our tradition of a peaceful transition of power, established in 1800, has been broken. There is a 7-foot black fence around the Capitol and 15,000 National Guard soldiers on duty in a bitterly cold Washington January. There are checkpoints and road closures near the center of the city, and 10,000 more troops are authorized if necessary. Another 4,000 are on duty in their states, protecting key buildings and infrastructure sites.

In the past two days, there have been more indications that members of the Trump administration were behind the January 6 coup attempt. Yesterday, Richard Lardner and Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press broke the story that, far from being a grassroots rally, the event of January 6 that led to the storming of the Capitol was organized and staffed by members of Trump’s presidential campaign team. These staffers have since tried to distance themselves from it, deleting their social media accounts and refusing to answer questions from reporters.

A number of the arrested insurrectionists have claimed that they were storming the Capitol because the president told them to. According to lawyers Teri Kanefield and Mark Reichel, writing in the Washington Post, this is known as the “public authority” defense, meaning that if someone in authority tells you it’s okay to break a law, that advice is a defense when you are arrested. It doesn’t mean you won’t be punished, but it is a defense. It also means that the person offering you that instruction is more likely to be prosecuted.

The second impeachment, popular outcry, and continuing stories about the likely involvement of administration figures in the coup attempt seem to have trimmed Trump’s wings in his last days in office. He is issuing orders that Biden vows to overturn, and contemplating pardons (stories say those around him are selling access to him to advocate for those pardons), but otherwise today was quiet.

He has tried to install a loyalist as the top lawyer at the National Security Agency, either to burrow him in or to get the green light for dumping NSA documents before he leaves office; Biden’s team will fight what is clearly an attempt to politicize the position. Tonight, Census Director Steven Dillingham resigned after whistleblowers alleged that he and other political appointees were putting pressure on department staffers to issue a hasty and unresearched report on undocumented immigrants.

According to news reports, Trump is planning to leave Washington on the morning of January 20 and should be at his Florida club Mar-a-Lago by the time Biden and Harris are sworn in. The last president to miss a successor’s inauguration was Andrew Johnson, who in 1869 refused to attend Ulysses S. Grant’s swearing-in, and instead spent the morning signing last-minute bills to put in place before Grant took office.

There is a lot of chatter tonight about the release today of the 1776 Report guidelines on American history. This is the administration’s reply to the 1619 Project from the New York Times, which focused on America’s history of racism. As historian Torsten Kathke noted on Twitter, none of the people involved in compiling today’s 41-page document are actually historians. They are political scientists and Republican operatives who have produced a full-throated attack on progressives in American history as well as a whitewashed celebration of the U.S.A. Made up of astonishingly bad history, this document will not stand as anything other than an artifact of Trump’s hatred of today’s progressives and his desperate attempt to wrench American history into the mythology he and his supporters promote so fervently.

But aside from the bad history, the report is a fascinating window into the mindset of this administration and its supporters. In it, the United States of America has been pretty gosh darned wonderful since the beginning, and has remained curiously static. “[T]he American people have ever pursued freedom and justice,” it reads, and while “neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent,” “no nation… has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them.”

America seems to have sprung up in 1776 in a form that was fine and finished. But, according to the document’s authors, trouble began in the 1890s, when “progressives” demanded that the Constitution “should constantly evolve to secure evolving rights.” It was at that moment the teaching of history took a dark turn.

The view that America was born whole, has stayed the same, and is simply a prize worth possessing reminds me of so much of the world of Trump and the people around him, characterized by acquisition: buildings, planes, yachts, clothing, bank accounts. Trump and his people seem to see the world as a zero-sum game in which the winners have the most stuff, and America is just one more thing to possess.

But there is a big difference in this world between having and doing.

America has never fully embodied equality, liberty, and justice. What it has always had was a dream of justice and equality before the law. The 1776 Report authors are right to note that was an astonishing dream in 1776, and it made this country a beacon of radical hope. It was enough to inspire people from all walks of life to try to make that dream a reality. They didn’t have an ideal America; they worked to make one.

The hard work of doing is rarely the stuff of heroic biographies of leading men. It is the story of ordinary Americans who were finally pushed far enough that they put themselves on the line for this nation’s principles.

It is the story, for example, of abolitionist newspaperman Elijah P. Lovejoy, murdered by a pro-slavery mob in 1837, and the U.S. soldiers who twenty-four years later fought to protect the government against a pro-slavery insurrection designed to destroy it. It is the story of Lakota leader Red Cloud, who negotiated with hostile government leaders on behalf of his people, and of his contemporary Booker T. Washington, who tried to find a way for Black people to rise in the heart of the South in a time of widespread lynching. It is the story of Nebraska politician William Jennings Bryan, who gave voice to suffering farmers and workers in the 1890s, and of Frances Perkins, who carried his ideas forward as FDR’s Secretary of Labor and brought us Social Security. It is the story of the American G.I.s, from all races, ethnicities, genders, and walks of life who fought in WWII. It is the story of labor organizer Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the National Farmworkers Association, and Fannie Lou Hamer, who faced down men bent on murdering her and became an advocate for Black voting. It is the story of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who 60 years ago this week warned us against the “military-industrial complex.”

And it is, of course, the story of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose life we celebrate today. King challenged white politicians to take on poverty as well as racism to make the promise of America come true for all of us. “Some forty million of our brothers and sisters are poverty stricken, unable to gain the basic necessities of life,” he reminded white leaders in May 1967. “And so often we allow them to become invisible because our society’s so affluent that we don’t see the poor. Some of them are Mexican Americans. Some of them are Indians. Some are Puerto Ricans. Some are Appalachian whites. The vast majority are Negroes in proportion to their size in the population…. Now there is nothing new about poverty. It’s been with us for years and centuries. What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will….” Just eleven months later, a white supremacist murdered Dr. King.

These people did not have a perfect nation, they worked to build one. They embraced America so fully they tried to bring its principles to life, sometimes at the cost of their own. Rather than simply trying to own America, the doers put skin in the game.

Today, the Trump administration issued the 1776 Report that presented the United States of America as a prize to be possessed. And yet, the country is demonstrably still in the process of being created: tonight, there are 15,000 soldiers in the cold in Washington, D.C., defending the seat of our government against insurgents.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#quotes #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #history #January 6 2021 #insurrection #corrupt GOP #criminal GOP #worst President in History

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yourcoolfriendwithallthecandy · 4 years ago

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Why So Jaded? Chapter 2

And here we go, part 2. In case you missed it. Part 1 AO3 FFN

Chapter 2

A decade can be a long time.

That much time can change a person, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse and sometimes it just makes you grow up, mature you and give you perspective.

A decade ago, Bartholomew Maximillian Pine aka Buddy Pine- had built an empire fueled by his hatred and resentment for Supers and more importantly Mr. Incredible. He had become successful, powerful, on a scale beyond imagination. His creations helped topple governments, weaponize vast armies and made him more money then he could ever hope to spend in a thousand lifetimes. And with Mirage by his side, he had it all at the relatively young age age of 21.

A decade ago, Violet Parr was coming to terms with her powers, was coming into her own and finding her footing in life. She was learning to bear the load that all Supers carry.

But a decade can be a long time.

In a decade, you can see the empire you built be turned against you in a flash before it's dismantled into pieces that can never be put back together again and the people who you thought you could trust turn on you then leave you and realize their own agendas before you found yourself trying to start over and rebuild with some of the pieces you had managed to scrape together. No small feat and one made harder by extensive injuries, in not just a physical sense, but a mental and emotional and physiological sense as you attempt to rebuild yourself just as much as you rebuild your empire. Letting go of old grudges and hate in an effort to accept change and the present in order to have a future. And that is where Buddy Pine had currently found himself.

And a decade can be a long time.

In a decade you can see things that make you question yourself, your morals, your loyalties, your career and sense of right and wrong. Make you resent the burden placed on you by your parents, by your siblings and peers, your superiors, by everyone around you, and worse, make you resent the very ones who put that burden there. You got to see first hand how the world was rarely black and white and everything was a shade of gray and how even when you want to do the right thing and try to do the right thing, no good deed goes unpunished. You're struck and reminded over and over again by how profoundly fickle it all was. And how you can rise to popularity one moment and fall the next, like the waves of the sea, rising and falling and rising again as cycles began anew and how even the most altruistic super has their price. And more importantly, what yours was. You learned who your true friends were, as well as your enemies. And most importantly that the only one you could truly count on was yourself when you get pushed past your breaking point several times over and who you needed to pull you back from the edge over and over again. You become jaded and disillusioned yet worldly and discerning from your experiences and recognize patterns and cycles remarkably well. When you see enough shit go down and get covered up and how when people are wealthy and powerful enough, or hell, even talented, famous or important enough they can get away with literal murder if not atrocities that would make God himself shudder. You learn that justice was a joke but vengeance was attainable if not valid and very understandable, if not sympathetically so. Which can sadly- make you even more valuable and sought after and you become the best at what you do, even when you had no intention of being so. Until you realized you didn't have to play by anyone's rules except your own, in fact, you didn't have to play their little game at all and sometimes the smartest thing was to walk away when you had had enough and your sense of self preservation was the biggest instinct you cultivated in yourself and was sometimes the only thing that kept you alive.

That's where Violet found herself now. Not necessarily at a crossroads, but simply a spot on a map. She had been pulled back into this Super world a little over a year ago but it was supposed to be her last job. It was supposed to be an easy one, a babysitter post for a genius, billionaire playboy that had taken Buddy's place in the weaponized technology field. Only the big difference was Buddy did this all on his own, while her current employer had bought some of the pieces of Buddy's empire and was very much at the powers that be- beckon call and he was a master at catering to all of them so that he had no governmental resistance or interference world wide. So that the only ones in his way was his competition in his various markets from technology, science, medicine and most lucratively- weapons and while his ego was huge, it wasn't as haughty as Buddy's had been and if Violet had placed a bet, she would say he was a low grade Super himself, only his power was the charm and disarm anyone and gain their trust and help them feel safe so they turned vulnerable and honest and even she was not completely immune to him and his powers. It's how he learned who her true identity was and was able to get to know the real her as well as he did, or more importantly, as well as he thought he did. But for every take, there is a give because she in turn, got to learn more about him than anyone else did and thus, bred their closeness that they both got to enjoy and Phillip had sworn on his life and the lives of his family, that he would never betray her as long as she never betrayed him.

Phillip Edward Sebastian the Fifth was a European Aristobrat who had turned his family's modest fortune but grand history to his absolute advantage and with smart investing and playing the stock market, he had used that modest fortune to turn it into unimaginable wealth and power and was now on the cutting edge of all things weapons, electronics, medicine and far beyond and he had asked for Violet in particular because of her history with espionage, corporate and otherwise and the like. He was willing to pay her 15 times more for her services as his handler than he had offered anyone else and in just the short year she had been working with him, she had risen through the ranks, and was now not just as his right hand woman and personal assistant and she was a one woman security detail who he trusted with his life, his privacy, his confidence and confidentiality because of her skillset and ability. And once her own bank accounts swelled to the point that she used her former mentor's own financial staff to make sure that even in the worst case scenarios, her safety nets had safety nets and she had back up plans for her back up plans and contingency plans for her contingency plans several layers deep and learned to buy stocks in what he bought and sold what he sold on her own since he never hid that information from her and through that alone, she was one of the more independently wealthy Superheroes and she ensured that not just herself but her family would be safe and taken care of, which, in the grand scheme of things, was all she ever wanted and cared about. So she was happy and content, for now. That's why Violet could easily retire after this job. Plus she still collected her super hero paycheck. She wasn't the only one getting two paychecks for the same work, if not multiple checks.

And Phillip had always been the ideal employer, sure he had his own trust issues and paranoia, not to mention, his own daredevil antics and recklessness. But he respected her boundaries because she respected his and their relationship worked as beautifully and seamlessly as it did because they respected each other and Phillip treated her better than he treated everyone else because he knew that Violet, ultimately- didn't want or need him or his money or power and didn't ask too many questions because she didn't need to know the answers and kept her personal life very separated from her work life and didn't judge and kept her opinions to herself as closely as she kept her head and her wits. Which were all things he respected, admired and even adored and their relationship even blossomed enough to include certain "benefits" and Violet was the only one who could use Phillip as her personal fuck toy without the hassle and mess of a committed, monogamous romantic relationship and that kind of emotional entanglements even though Phillip still held out hope that at the end of her "servitude" she would stay with him because he had grown to rely so much on her and it would take a team of a hundred people to do what she did for him and do it as flawlessly as she did.

Before this job, Violet had disappeared in the far east- Hong Kong specifically, with a large city of over seven million, it was easy to disappear into but easy enough to spot agents from a mile away. She figured her superiors spent at least a million dollars trying to find her and once they did, they made her an offer she couldn't refuse and found, and named, and gave- her price, as their most highly sought after and paid agent. She was 24 now and would retire in just two more years at the age of 26 into a very comfortable life as a multimillionaire. But even she had to admit, the urge to do Super work had been getting to her while she had disappeared before The Agency had tracked her down since she had been 'in the wind' for over a year after a particularly brutal assignment gone to shit. But saving people and being a hero, even an invisible one, was an itch that most Supers, even when under ban, was impossible not to scratch. Her father was living proof of that. But she had learned from her parent's mistakes. She had learned to be careful. But being careful and playing it safe, while inherently easy for her, was getting mundane. She had taken up a few hobbies, learned a few languages along with some invaluable skills so that she could, in theory, go anywhere and support herself and blend in with any crowd and she was lucky that while she was in Phillip’s employment, she could still do a few hero jobs of her choice on the side and Phillip’s technology had made those jobs a breeze. But she was smart enough to not become dependent on any of the technology provided to her, either by The Agency or Phillip.

Invisigirl tapped on a screen as she flew her secret spy plane back to Spain to contact her employer, Mr. Phillip Sebastian.

"Do you have a report Vi?" Phillip asked.

"Yes, Mr. Pine himself has taken the nanochip, just like you predicted and is on multiple cameras doing so, he took both baits so I'm now en-route to you." Violet answered as she took off her mask and tied her hair up, revealing flawless makeup under the mask as her lipstick changed from an ultra violet to match her suit to a soft dusty rose on her pouty lips.

"What are the chances that he will follow?" Phillip furthered.

"At this point, medium to high." Violet estimated with a shrug as the plane achieved the proper altitude for a transatlantic flight.

"Excellent. Well we have him dead to rights, so he's as good as ours anyway." Phillip grinned victoriously as he rewatched the feed.

"So hopefully that objective can be fulfilled sooner than later," Violet assumed.

"We will talk about that when you get back, see you in a few hours." He placated.

"Understood," Violet said as she closed the channel since the plane was on auto pilot. She wanted to get changed into civilian attire and hopefully get a chance to relax and possibly take a nap before she would have to play babysitter again as she popped a few pills of very high level painkillers that would make Oxycodone look like children's Tylenol.

Meanwhile Buddy had made his escape and had arrived back at his compound, a different island this time since the 'authorities' literally blew up the last one. But while Buddy was getting a bit desperate, he wasn't stupid. He installed the nanochip into an ordinary laptop that wasn't connected in any way to the internet in case there was some kind of signal embedded. Fifteen seconds later he found himself staring at a melting piece of trash on fire before he put the fire out.

"And that's why we don't just hook things up into the system." He muttered aloud as he retrieved the other nano chip, the one that was on the left, he had taken both, just in case she was leading him astray. He picked up the dead computer with thick work gloves and simply dumped it into the trash and retrieved another, turning it on and repeating the process. This time, it worked perfectly.

"Well, it appears you didn't steer me wrong, this time," he mused as he retrieved the nanochip and put it into his system. Since the 'incident' aka him almost being completely shredded by a jet engine, his ability to create new technology had been hindered greatly. But he could reverse engineer anything and make it better, and that was his intention now. Once he had all the specs down it would be difficult to put the nanochip back along with another dummy one but not impossible.

Except when he came back a week later, it was a trap. The moment he opened that safe, there were more guards on him than he could count coming almost out of nowhere. He was immediately detained in a holding cell in the basement of the building and stripped of all his gear but thankfully they still let him keep his original clothes on.

Buddy wondered who would be coming, would it be the local police? The FBI? The CIA? He ended up waiting a few days when Phillip Sebastian came in himself.

"Good morning Mr. Bartholomew Maximillian Pine, I understand that you like to go by "Buddy" less formal." Phillip greeted formally with a smug smirk on his handsome face.

"Good morning Mr. Sebastian," Buddy mirrored warily as he looked down to see the hairs on his arm raise as if the static electricity in the room was getting charged as he wondered if Invisigirl was with Phillip, in fact he would bet on it as he glanced at the space around Phillip to see if he could see any distortions and he couldn't see any but he could sense her the way he could sense Mirage in the past, the way she had taught him to anyway, and realized Invisigirl was so close to him, he could reach out and touch her if he tried but he got the sense she had an invisible weapon targeted at his head and knew that if he attempted to, he'd be dead by the time he made contact with her. His heart still stung at Mirage's betrayal which had hurt him the worst and when he was seen how she married some other billionaire playboy, it had dumped his ass into one of the worst depressions of his life and almost completely broke him, but the lessons she taught him were invaluable and he was finding himself grateful for them right in this moment.

"Mr. Pine, you are either really smart or really stupid, you had the nanochip, why didn't you just keep it? Why risk putting it back?" Phillip inquired curiously.

"I need a lawyer," Buddy answered firmly.

"Why? You're not under arrest. The authorities haven't been called, however if you don't cooperate with me I will be forced to contact them but for now, let's leave them out of this." Phillip said dismissively.

"What do you want?" Buddy asked wearily.

"I want you to work for me, not against me." Philip answered simply.

"I refuse to work for anyone but myself." Buddy defied.

"Are you sure you don't want to reconsider? You would have your own lab and assistants and an unlimited budget, you could set your own hours and have some say so in your own salary and have access to all the compounds and technology you could ever dream of." Phillip proposed. "You would even earn a high percentage of all sales of whatever you create in collaboration with SEB Enterprises, you'll even get press for IRize and all your other little corporations, shells or no and more opportunities for your collaboration with me and my company and all of my associates and other collaborators, of which we share a surprising amount of them." Phillip generously offered.

"So what's the catch?" Buddy asked with a subtle tilt of his head in Invisigirl's direction and just barely registered the feel of his hair brush up against something. She was right next to him and his gut feeling told him she had a weapon was pointed at his head as he felt her withdraw just a little to keep from getting too close.

"You will have to work for me for a minimum of 3 years. You will stay on campus at all times unless accompanied by a security detail and you will be monitored at all times in all things." Phillip informed him solemnly. "So it's either this or some high security super prison for 20-life. Because the evidence against you is pretty damning." Phillip specified.

"Can you give me some time to think it over?" Buddy inquired.

"Of course, take all the time you need, simply knock on the door when you've made a decision." Phillip replied as he got up and left the room as Buddy watched the hairs on his forearms lay back down before another meal was delivered to him, this time it was breakfast. At least Phillip knew how to treat a guest. Even a detained one, because Buddy wasn't in shackles and was being fed decent food at least and his little one room cell, while bare, was surprisingly comfortable.

Three hours later Buddy knocked on the door and a few minutes later Phillip came in, ready to hear his answer.

"I'll do it, however I have a few conditions of my own." Buddy started and was pleased to see Phillip nod.

"I want everything in writing, I want my criminal activity erased." Buddy began.

"Of course, my lawyers are writing our contract up as we speak and any and all evidence against you and IRise will be destroyed and dissolved within the hour. Anything else?" Phillip reassured him.

"I will only work for you for two years, no more," Buddy specified.

"Five years then because you want to negotiate the time frame. Or that 20-life in a super max prison." Phillip countered.

"Ok fine, three years it is." Buddy huffed.

"Agreed." Phillip said as he held out his hand for a handshake. Buddy took it and shook firmly as he could have sworn he heard a huff nearby. The two left the room and walked to an elevator where a secretary was waiting for them. Her hair up in a bun and her gray business jacket accentuated her tulip skirt with patterned hose and killer heels along with a pair of glasses that helped her see things most eyes could not as she used her stylus like a pen.

"Everything is ready Mr. Sebastian, the notary is already in conference room 12A." She informed him as she continued to work on an electronic pad diligently.

"Excellent, thank you Ms. Parr," Phillip replied in thanks before turning to Buddy. "Mr. Pine, I believe you already know my colleague and associate Miss Violet Parr." Phillip gestured before getting on the elevator that opened once they approached.

Buddy had to do a double take, he hadn't recognized her, she was standing right in front of him and she might as well have been invisible at first. However, now that he really looked at her and took notice, she was stunning. Like just...knock out gorgeous, should have been a model herself kind of beautiful. Even she could effortlessly rock the sexy assistant look but now that he saw her, he couldn't quite make himself look away. She was gorgeous even with glasses and just as breathtaking out of her suit as she had been in it and most likely, just as lethal. And just like that, those butterflies were back in his stomach, fluttering away.

"Yes, we are already too well acquainted," Violet answered as she stepped on the elevator herself, standing on one side of Phillip, using him like a shield between her and Buddy as she continued to work on her tablet and actively ignored him.

"Well I don't know about that," Buddy answered with a smirk before he could feel static electricity instantly build within the elevator as the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck rose again. Ha, he got her tell.

"Easy," Phillip warned Violet, his tone surprisingly gentle. Violet exhaled in a huff and Buddy felt static electricity lull, the rest of the ride was in silence, the only sound, their breathing and the dinging of the elevator. Buddy noticed her breathing was noticeably huffy and almost labored while Phillip's was calm and even until they reached the twelfth floor before Violet was the first to cross the threshold before the doors fully opened, walking quickly while Phillip walked in tandem with Buddy as Phillip subtly studied Buddy's reactions to Violet.

Violet led the way to the conference room, she tapped her ID card against a reader and the door opened, revealing a notary and three lawyers, one of them being Buddy’s. All sitting at the table in the middle of the room with stacks of paperwork around them as Buddy was allowed to have some private council with his own lawyer who basically confirmed that it was either this or super max prison before they sat down to negotiate more terms of the contract.

Buddy wasn't an idiot, he read each and every single line on those contracts before signing them.

And it took four hours, a bottle of scotch, lunch and a whole variety of snack and dessert trays.

Violet looked like she wanted to die of boredom despite playing a game on her tablet for most of it and couldn't get out of there fast enough when it was all over, signed and notarized by everyone. Another assistant came to escort Buddy to his new 'apartment' which had already been filled with his things that were taken from his new compound while Phillip and Violet retreated to Phillips office.

"Well I am so glad that didn't take too long," Violet drawled sarcastically as she crashed on the comfy couch in his office after kicking her heels off. Phillip chuckled as he tossed her a bottle of water from his mini fridge in his desk and smiled when she caught it with ease.

"He's still smart, he wanted to make sure I wasn't taking him for a complete fool," Phillip countered as he took a long pull from his own water bottle as he idly watched her stretch and relax as she reclined on his couch in a very unladylike pose, with her feet up on the arm of the couch. But he loved the fact that she felt so comfortable around him and could just be herself rather than the super secret agent she felt she had to play with him. She could just be when she was alone with him and he liked it that way. No pretenses or anything like that.

"Do you think he'll honor the contract? Or do you think he'll run the first chance he gets?" Violet inquired.

"Oh I think as long as you're around, he'll stay right here. He looked at you at least a dozen times an hour, every move you made, he tried to catch." Phillip began as he glanced at Violet who had rolled her eyes in annoyance. "Speaking of which, I have a new assignment for you, I want you to be the liaison between him and I until the end of your contract." Phillip proposed.

"Hell no," Violet immediately spat as she gave him a dirty glare.

"Oh come on, all that means is you see him once a day for only a few minutes all the days we're stateside. Make sure he has everything he needs to keep him focused and relay messages back and forth," Phillip specified.

"That's what email is for." Violet retorted.

"But email is so impersonal," Phillip playfully argued in a mock complaint.

"That's exactly it, I don't want to have to deal with him any more than I absolutely have to. He did try to kill me as a child. What kind of monster purposefully kills kids? I'll tell you. Him. He's that monster. He tried to kill me, my family and kidnap Jack..," She began to go into a seething rant.

"And take over the world, yeah I know, I was there- but, that was a lifetime ago, clearly everyone involved has changed. I mean you saw him, the man is just one failed attempt away from completely imploding. And the fact that he was desperate enough to steal from me himself says a lot." He reminded her, keeping her from going into her full blown rant because he didn't want to rearrange his office...again.

"I still don't understand why he would stoop that low," Violet admitted as she thought that over again.

"I think he lost a spark ," Phillip conjectured. Violet raised a curious brow at his choice of words. "Writers and artists have muses, engineers have sparks." Phillip explained as he came over and sat on the couch with her before he nestled her head into his lap so she could look up at him.

"But if he's lost his spark, he's no good to you, it's been a decade, surely if he was going to get his 'spark ' back, don't you think he would have gotten it back by now?" Violet questioned.

"He's searching for it, pretty hard, I've been keeping him under surveillance for the last several years once he was recognized by my software. A man can only tinker so long." Phillip soothed as he began to pet her head to calm her down further.

"So he's either going to find it with you or die trying," Violet guessed.

"Exactly, besides, I know your past with him makes this especially hard and I am so proud of you for doing your best to put that aside and try to be professional and not kill him where he stands right now. But it's you who will have the last word in the matter. It's you who will get to decide if he lives or dies after his contract is up and inherit everything he has when we're done with him. Why do you think that contract included you as his heir apparent? Because once he dies, you and your family will get due recompense for everything he's done, he owes you and your family that much at least. You can put your big girl panties on and suck it up for two years. Then you get to spend that third year devising all the ways you want to torture him to death if you still want him dead after." Phillip soothed her as he started to pet her head, letting his own super ability lull her into a peaceful state, which worked extra strongly when he was able to touch her as she rolled over and faced him and took a deep, cleansing breath and mulled it over as she simply closed her eyes and soaked up this attention from him before she seemed to come to her own decision.

"You know, if I didn't know any better I would think you were an evil mastermind," Violet teased with a smug grin as she opened her eyes and tilted her head to look up at him.

"Hey now. Keep it to yourself, Edna hasn't finished my super villain suit yet," Phillip countered teasingly, causing Violet to glare at him, unimpressed by that dig. "I'm kidding, I'm kidding," Phillip placated with his hands up in defeat.

"You better be, ass," Violet grumbled.

"So will you take the job or not?" Phillip asked.

"You're going to have to up my salary again, make it worth my while." Violet insisted.

"I'll match his salary 200% as your bonus salary as long as both of you are in my employment- for the "suffering" of having to deal with him and be our liaison. And to really sweeten it, how about….oh, how about I give you a percentage of whatever he touches." Phillip offered.

"Twenty percent," Violet started.

"Ouch, no, I'm thinking 10 at the most," Phillip frowned.

"Fine, fifteen, same as Mr. Pine's percentage." Violet rebutted firmly.

"Deal," Phillip agreed. "And you start now," Phillip stipulated as he offered his hand for a shake and by now Violet knew that his handshake was as good as any contract, even one written in blood before he leaned down and kissed her sweetly.

"Fine," Violet caved before gave his gut a light playful punch that was barely a tap which made him recoil and hold his gut like she had really sucker punched him as his face scrunched up in pain which caused her to laugh which in turn made him beam a proud smile at her.

"And I want it in writing by the time I get back." Violet insisted.

"Of course," He nodded in agreement.

"And you still owe me dinner because lunch sucked." Violet reminded him as she slipped back into her heels before going down to a different lab and got the appropriate hardware for Buddy and made her way to Buddy's floor, using her key card to get to the floor, since his floor wasn’t shown on the elevator and she had to press two floors and press her keycard to the reader to get to it. She thought it was ridiculous that he would have more than a bed and a lab let alone an entire floor full of equipment and an apartment that rivaled most penthouses but Phillip wanted to give Buddy every opportunity to succeed by making sure he stayed comfortable.

She came into the lab to see him already at work. She knocked on a countertop to make her presence known so as not to startle him.

"How come you couldn't do that before?" Buddy asked wryly as he looked over at her as he was still putting things away in the lab section of the floor.

"Because you weren't supposed to know I was there. We have a few details we need to discus Mr. Pine." Violet began as she watched him pause and turn to face her to give her his complete attention before he started walking towards her and joined her at the island.

"First, you are never to address me as anything other than Ms. Parr and you will always conduct yourself in the utmost professional manner when dealing with me or any other employee, partner or associate of SEB Industries. I am your liaison to Mr. Sebastian himself so if there anything in particular that you need regarding your living and your work you can tell me. These are yours, your phone has been cloned into this before it was put to sleep, you can retrieve it once your contract is up." Violet stated as she held up the phone and the tablet before putting them down on the counter and sliding them towards him. "My number is under speed dial one and is only supposed to be used in emergencies and for vital business needs and inquires during reasonable business hours. And I swear to God if I get any flirtation from you or heaven forbid dick pics, I will personally cut your dick off and shove it down your throat and watch you choke on it before I throw your body into another jet engine turbine and feed your remains to the rats in the subway and then inherit everything you have and sell it off at auction to the highest bidder. Any information mining or manipulations by you will be met with the same treatment. Is that understood?" Violet specified as her gaze bored through him with a look that if it could kill, he would have been dead already.

"Yes Ma'am." Buddy nodded with a gulp.

"Now, while at SEB Industries we suggest little to no contact with the outside world other than of course the contact with various associates and colleagues to complete projects. However SEB does understand that there are certain 'needs' that only the outside world can satisfy." Violet explained as she cleared her throat and fought not to shudder and gag when she said 'needs'. "And those will be handled by the appropriate liaison which is not me. And that proper liaison is Leslie, she's on speed dial 2 who will also take care of anything outside of the normal business hours. Now, is there anything in particular you need or want at this time? Perhaps dinner?" She offered as she noticed the time.

"Dinner sounds great, as long as you will eat it with me," Buddy answered hopefully but she narrowed her eyes as he felt the static electricity build up again for a moment before she simply took a deep breath.

"Unfortunately I have prior engagements, but you do have access to a full kitchen in the apartment side of this floor that should be well stocked, and if it is lacking feel free to create a grocery list and I will have an assistant fulfill it. We also allow take out to be delivered although anything you receive will be subjected to inspection and scans. But there is a drawer next to your fridge full of menus of all the restaurants who deliver here or you could order something online. Do you understand the terms I have dictated?" She explained as explicitly as she could and as calmly and as professionally as she could because she had to swallow all the anger and rage she felt towards him down for now because it was her job. But if he dared cross the line, she had no qualms about ending him where he stood.

"Yes," Buddy confirmed with a nod.

"Do you have any questions?" Violet obligatorily asked.

"Are you free for dinner tomorrow?" Buddy asked before he saw her slip her metaphoric mask on more tightly.

"No. Good day Mr. Pine, good luck with your work," Violet coldly replied before turning and leaving her heels clicking in her wake.

Buddy smirked and went back to work. His own plan was working well.

#Why So Jaded #Why So Jaded Chapter 2 #Synlet #Buddy Pine #Violet Parr #Corporate espionage AU #Modern AU #Bartholomew Pine

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confettipizza · 4 years ago

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Lunar Recap

How it started. How it’s going. How it ended for the last lunar cycle of 2020.

This lunar cycle began with the New Moon on Jan. 12, 2021 @ 11:01 PM CT (Jan. 13 @ 05:01 UTC). It was the 13th Moon of 2020 according to the lunar calendar. And it ended Feb. 11, 2021, just before the 1st Moon of 2021! Happy Lunar New Year 2021, Year of the Ox!

South Korean Court Orders Japan to Compensate Women Forced into Sex Slavery

Colorado AG Opens Grand Jury Probe of Police Killing of Elijah McClain

Guantánamo Bay Prison Starts 20th Year of Indefinite Detentions

Pfizer to Boost COVID-19 Vaccine Output as WHO Warns of Vaccination Inequality

Lawmakers Catch COVID-19 After Sheltering in Room Where GOP Reps Refused Masks

FBI Warns of “Armed Protests” in All 50 States and at Biden’s Inauguration

Tomorrow is Sun conjunct Pluto. Something that’s been lurking in the shadows bout to jump out. Might be pretty big, but there’s also the individual personal experience of this event and might feel more like an early Full Moon for you.

House to Impeach Trump as GOP Shows Signs of Backing Removal

Well this is dumb. Sun conjunct Pluto?

The $3,000-a-month toilet for the Ivanka Trump/Jared Kushner Secret Service detail

I also remembered/realized how much I really love Anna Sui designs since I was a kid which is pretty random to pop up on my radar, but this woman gets that all I want is sparkly heart shaped objects in lacquered black and flowy hippie dresses

Trump Tells Aides Not to Pay Giuliani’s Legal Fees as Bid to Overturn Election Fails

All I know is talking about dreams and discussing them with others makes you feel better. The tarot angle is there to shed some light on what the dream is actually telling you.

Joe Biden Unveils $1.9 Trillion Coronavirus and Economic Relief Package

ICE’s Acting Director Resigns After Two Weeks on Job

Found out today the woman at the car mechanic I've been faithfully taking my car to for the past two years can speak to the dead and had some messages for me from my dad who passed in October-

Intuitive guided tarot card pull.

Waxing crescent into Aries Monday, January 18, 2021 at 1:06 AM CT Today’s Astro x Tarot forecast valid for the next 24 hours: Feelings are flaring up for you to make a statement, a very zippy move or a quick decision about someone or something.

So long as you remain flexible and agile, whatever you choose to do with them will work to your advantage. If you decide not to impose hyper-agility into your decision making rn, then kudos to you! You’ve gained practice points in self-control experience.

More Than 760,000 Pounds of Hot Pockets Recalled

‘I Answered the Call of My President’: Rioters Say Trump Urged Them On

Raphael Warnock and the Legacy of Racial Tyranny

The Extraordinary Courage of Aleksei Navalny

Whoa, I was like a cycle early on celebrating the lunar new year! I’ve been a month into the future for a week now. My bad! I apologize for any confusion.

I was thinking that the soul's law of attraction is probably pretty unstoppable even concerning partners, so like, if someone didn't love you back then it's not some mistake or human misunderstanding that you or they need to fix.

To find one's soulmate looks something like 2 souls flying towards each other from opposite ends of the galaxy to join their physical selves together in a collision force so brutal you're stuck like that and if that's not what yours looks like then maybe that ain't your soulmate?

All the men going to jail for their poop smearing Capitol rioting have online dating profiles and that’s reason no. 2 I do not date online! Reason no. 1 is ain’t nobody cute on there.

The Witch’s Myth: The true story of the crane husband

Where are your witch stars, Circe and Hekate, located? Their location can explain your relationship to witchcraft. Circe is in my 1st house influencing my outer appearances and Hekate is conjunct Jupiter influencing my domestic style and home to be distinctively witchy.

Sun into Aquarius Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 2:33 PM CT Here is your Sun into Aquarius forecast effective for the next several weeks of Aquarius season.

Down to earth and grounded is our most qualified position to receive everything we need and use everything we receive. This is the reality of ourselves, the human condition.

We love reality based reality.

Get ready for reality-grounded White House press briefings

Why do people believe the lies they’re fed? Because those lies are designed to be more palatable than reality. Lies offer a quick easy patch, but what you’ve gotta ask yourself is are those lies actually designed to support the flow of all things into your life?

~* First Quarter Jan. 20 3:02 PM CT (21:02 UTC) *~

Biden and Harris Attend Memorial to Honor 400,000+ COVID-19 Victims in U.S. on Eve of Inauguration

Steve Bannon Among Final Trump Pardons and Commutations

Trump Admin Declares Multiculturalism Is “Not Who America Is” as WH Releases Racist, Revisionist Report

4,000+ Columbia Students Back Largest-Ever Tuition Strike

Today, whatever you’re doing or are wishing to become will be to the benefit of this unifying, love-aligned uprising.

Joe Biden Sworn In as 46th President of the United States, Ending Trump Era

Good inauguration Astro climate this morning feels like. #BidenHarrisInauguration

“What has shaken the U.S. population so badly, this assault on the Capitol yesterday, is really nothing by comparison to what U.S. operations have done in Latin America, in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East, to other democratic movements and elected governments over the years.”

Progress towards wholeness can’t be made until we own up to the roles we’ve played in the past.

Read the full text of Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem ‘The Hill We Climb’

When did politics get so vibrant and fashionably uplifting? Please and thank you! #Inauguration2021

The two of wands says to review your options, do your research, crunch the numbers, imagine the outcomes, but there’s no need to force making a choice if you don’t have to. Buy yourself some time and let the plans for a resolution find you, not the other way around.

Donald Trump Leaves Office and Washington, D.C., Threatens “We Will Be Back”

Watchdogs Demand Transparency as Corporations Pour Millions into Biden-Harris Inauguration

Senate Dems File Ethics Complaint Against Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley over Jan. 6 Insurrection

Federal Forces Arrest Ex-Marine for Beating Officer with a Hockey Stick During Capitol Riots

It’s Friday and it just feels good to be alive, a socialist and calling Bernie Sanders cute on Inauguration Day week! What a difference a pandemic makes.

Instacart Lays Off 2,000 Workers, Including Group Who Started Company’s First Union

Mars square Jupiter January 23, 2021 @ 1:49 AM CT (7:49 GMT) Someone wants you to know that you are ready to conquer your perceived limits to arrive at expansion in your thoughts, feelings, emotions and understanding today.

Waxing gibbous into Cancer January 25, 2021 @ 12:51 PM CT (18:51 GMT) It’s a supportive Moon for dreaming for mental health and well being. Begin a dream journal or review your latest dreams, reflecting on them for a few minutes today.

You are opening yourself up to an emotional practice that includes care for yourself in ways no one else (besides you and your connection to the Moon) can provide.

And too my Tarot Dream Readings are open if you would like guidance or support on a particular dream. See my pinned tweet for how it works.

When one’s soul is allowed to lead one’s life, working in the dark shadows, the invisible silence, the soul’s manifesting results are way more lasting and way more powerful than egocentric anything.

Good morning, self! A reminder my ego has never done a thing for me my soul can’t do better.

National Guard Deployment at U.S. Capitol Becomes COVID-19 Superspreader Event

Russia Violently Cracks Down on Protesters Calling for Release of Alexei Navalny

Trump Plotted to Oust Acting AG, Use DOJ to Force Georgia to Overturn Election Results

Hunts Point Market Workers in the Bronx Win Wage Increase After Week-Long Strike

This mourning brooch is a mindful way to mark the death of a loved one while paying tribute to the impact it has had on you. Bring back this Victorian trend!

Veteran Talk Show Host Larry King Dies After Hospitalization for COVID-19

Hank Aaron, Who Overcame Racist Barriers to Become Home Run Record-Holder, Dies at 86

We don’t give our bodies or our intuition enough attention and nourishment a lot of the time, so today’s the day we practice finding and sitting quietly with our inner voice.

~* Full Moon Jan. 28 1:17 PM CT (19:17 UTC) *~

House Delivers Article of Impeachment to Senate, Triggering Trump’s Second Trial

Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani for Lying About 2020 Election

President Biden Increases U.S. Vaccination Goal to 150 Million Shots in 100 Days

President Biden Reverses Trump’s Transgender Military Service Ban

Biden Restores Plan to Feature Abolitionist Harriet Tubman on $20 Bill

Value is further added the more you mint your words with a most whole and complete love. Love is the greatest asset we can let appreciate in our lifetimes.

This Full Moon tomorrow sends a flash point that reminds you to circulate this wealth because it’s the greatest emotional gift we can bestow upon our loved ones, family, friends, neighbors, elders, members of our community, etc.

Venus conjunct Pluto in Capricorn January 28, 2021 @ 10:18 AM CT (16:18 GMT) Going through your day today uncovers a forgotten desire or creative goal. You find yourself asking something like: Remember when I wanted to become a pastry chef?

Although you decided to pursue a different course, take a moment to focus on and honor this memory when it arrives and then release it. What did you become instead and why?

45 Senate Republicans Back Dismissal of Trump Impeachment Trial

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Supported Violence Against Pelosi and Others in 2018 Facebook Posts

Taking the time to recognize and honor your past desires gives the respect these memories deserve and it integrates them into the whole wider scene of the individual, both shadow and light on your path builds confidence in your steps, confidence in yourself.

You are who you are for a reason.

Had no idea how literal this grassroots King of Pentacles card was gonna materialize today, but here it is folks! When a subreddit takes down a hedge fund!

Leader of Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, Was a Government Informer

U.S. Freezes Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia, Reviews Deal with UAE Made Under Trump Admin

Poland Enacts Near-Total Ban on Abortions, Triggering More Protests

Honduras Locks In Total Ban on Abortions, Attacks Marriage Equality

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Confronts Parkland Survivor David Hogg in Newly Resurfaced Video

The stock market this morning: Sh*t! Normal working class people read the market and figured out the game! Time to change the rules again. Let’s write it in ancient Babylonian hieroglyphs this time. They’ll never figure that sh*t out.

A message crucial to promote the awareness of your personal role in the collective will become evident over the next three weeks. You will come to ask yourself, What am I doing with my life?

If you aren’t familiar or comfortable with seeking your inner journey, then the greatest clue I can offer you at the start is to become open to the invisible world within you. How you learn to relate to it is completely personal and uniquely your own

Speaking in more concrete terms the next few weeks may manifest a life event for you where you must apply both logic and feeling in order to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion concerning an interpersonal relationship or the question what am I doing with my life?

This Mercury retrograde should be a cinch, but during it don’t buy tech if you don’t have to. And remember to triple check communication before hitting send. If you arrive at conflict be quick to apologize and say no more until tomorrow

President Biden Expands Affordable Care Act Enrollment Amid COVID-19 Pandemic

House Speaker Blasts GOP for Assigning Racist Conspiracy Theorist to House Education Committee

Lawmakers Demand Probe into Trading App Robinhood After It Blocked Stock Sales That Hurt Hedge Funds

Pioneering African American Actor Cicely Tyson, Winner of Two Emmys, Dies at 96

Sun in Aquarius square Mars in Taurus February 1, 2021 @ 4:33 AM CT (10:33 GMT) The warrior’s edge has melted away and now you can take the scenic route through a field of wildflowers and mushrooms instead of blasting your way through a hillside of obstacles.

This energy catalyzes a scene that supports growth through varied experiences and it encourages everyone to seek their own way to resolutions, conclusions and understandings that are uniquely their own. Searching out your own way illuminates a strategic aspect of your purpose.

Happy Venus in Aquarius! The idea to refresh your wardrobe, hairstyle or redecorating by public opinion can be too hard to ignore under this influence. Your personal style will be influenced by the collective for the duration.

Burmese Military Stage Coup, Detain Aung San Suu Kyi

FBI Uncovers Evidence Jan. 6 Attack Was Premeditated as More Far-Right Rioters Face Charges

Trump Faces More Businesses-Related Woes as His Legal Team Departs a Week Before Impeachment Trial

It’s only the 21st day of the lunar cycle and already we’ve gone from the end of a rotten presidential era to the people’s revolution of the stock market, ok? And this moon ain’t even finished yet!

~* Last Quarter Feb. 4 11:38 AM CT (17:38 UTC) *~

U.S. Tops 26 Million COVID-19 Vaccine Shots, Surpassing Confirmed Coronavirus Cases

Moon Last Quarter in Scorpio February 4, 2021 @ 11:38 AM CT (17:38 UTC) A time for Descending, settling, closure, receiving compliments for doing a good job. Prime time for tying of loose ends and wrapping up unfinished business.

Democrats Say Trump “Singularly Responsible” for Jan. 6 Insurrection in Impeachment Brief

With consciousness humans are able to transcend the unconscious and reconfigure our relationship to it.

Though we can transcend the unconscious through viewing ourselves objectively, we are still apart of the the unconscious. Those rules still apply to us even as we contemplate their logic.

Jeff Bezos Steps Down as Amazon CEO After Amassing Huge Personal Fortune

Amazon to Pay Contract Drivers $61.7 Million After FTC Probe Finds It Stole Tips to Pay Wages

Republican Leader Won’t Punish Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene over Racist and Violent Rhetoric

Prosecutors Seek Rearrest of Kyle Rittenhouse, Wisconsin Teen Charged with Killing 2 Protesters

Sometimes the right thing to do is protect your one actual valuable thing not by defending it, but closing up all the channels the valuable thing is being attacked from the outside. Sometimes you just gotta block, delete or remove your account and move on with/to what's good.

What if we wake up one day and COVID has disappeared, like poof! It vanished into thin air? Maybe it’s the moon opposed to Uranus that’s got me wishing wild problem solvers would pop up overnight.

Poll Reveals 25% of U.S. Adults Plan to Gather at Super Bowl Watch Parties

VP Harris Casts Tie-Breaking Vote to Move Ahead with Democratic COVID Relief Bill

House Removes Marjorie Taylor Greene from Committees over Violent, Bigoted Rhetoric

Smartmatic Sues Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell for Election-Related Lies

I unfollowed some lawmakers this morning after feeling second hand anxiety over the handling of their interpersonal conflicts. Realized they were me on IG two years ago and I’ve moved on since. Can relate, but don’t wanna relive, thanks!

I just want to let y’all know that I’m coping w insufficient candle syndrome & will be studying the art & science of candle making to save myself potentially hundreds of thousands of $$ by making my own delicious smelling coconut wax babies in diy terra cotta flower pots.

Wyoming GOP Censures Rep. Liz Cheney for Backing Trump’s Impeachment

Mass Protests Continue in Burma Opposing Military Coup, Removal of Aung San Suu Kyi

You may tell others like it is today, but hopefully this inspires you to check in with yourself and be honest/come clean about something you've been overlooking.

Indian Farmworkers Blockade Roads as Mass Protests Show No Sign of Slowing Down

Black Sheriff’s Deputy in Louisiana Dies by Suicide After Condemning Police Violence and Racism

Amazon Workers in Alabama Begin Historic Vote on Unionization

Second Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump Opens in the Senate

Georgia’s Secretary of State to Probe Trump’s Efforts to Overturn 2020 Election

Mercury square Mars February 10, 2021 @ 6:14 AM CT (12:14 UTC) Still talking about talking, it’s also Dark Moon time to shape or let a habit form. This practice can come from breaking free of outdated relationships with yourself or with others in order to spur growth.

Dreamed Jungkook was correcting my pronunciation of Korean last night. I’m sorry! I’ll try harder to take this lesson seriously

Senate Votes to Proceed with Impeachment as Managers Present Harrowing Video of Jan. 6 Insurrection

Gov’t to Send Vaccines to Community Health Centers as U.S. Continues Ramping Up Vaccinations

WHO Team Confirms COVID-19 of Animal Origin; Ghana Shuts Parliament After Outbreak Infects Lawmakers

Journalists Decry Raid on Progressive Indian News Site NewsClick

U.S. to Pursue Extradition of Julian Assange as Press Freedom Groups Warn of Dangerous Precede

Fossil Fuel Pollution Causes One in Five Global Deaths

Four Louisiana Officers Arrested over Police Brutality Cases and Other Misconduct

Two NYT Journalists Exit Paper Following Revelations of Improper Conduct

Venus conjunct Jupiter February 11, 2021 @ 8:59 AM CT (14:59 UTC) Receive the overflow of creativity into your life. Welcome it even if you aren’t sure what to do with it. Write down project ideas if you don’t have the energy to start on them now. You can work on them later.

I'm cool with double masking, but a lot of folks still aren't even doing the one :|

“The Inciter-in-Chief”: Democrats Accuse Trump of Being “Singularly Responsible” for Insurrection

U.S. COVID Death Toll Tops 471,000; Half of All Deaths Occurred Since Nov. 1

Saudi Women’s Rights Activist Loujain al-Hathloul Released After 1,001 Days in Prison

Biden Administration to Continue Trump-Era Policy of Turning Away Asylum Seekers at Southern Border

Sen. Bernie Sanders Grills Neera Tanden, Biden’s Pick to Head OMB

Sen. Bernie Sanders: “According to The Washington Post, since 2014, the Center for American Progress has received roughly $5.5 million from Walmart, a company that pays its workers starvation wages; $900,000 from the Bank of America; $550,000 from JPMorgan Chase; $550,000 from Amazon; $200,000 from Wells Fargo; $800,000 from Facebook; and up to $1.4 million from Google. In other words, CAP has received money from some of the most powerful special interests in our country. How will your relationship with those very powerful special interests impact your decision-making if you are appointed to be the head of OMB?”

Neera Tanden: “Senator, I thank you for that question. It will have zero impact on my — on my decision-making.”

#lunar #news #headlines #tweets

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absolute-immunities · 5 years ago

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Are vulgarity and snobbishness two aspects of the same thing? I read this somewhere but they didn’t make it clear what that something is! This somehow relates to saying that a potential danger for commercial art is to end up as a prostitute, and conversely for non-commercial art to end up as an old maid. Maybe the key takeaway was that commercial art has higher communicability so it’s more effective/important.

I think you can see them that way.

Construct a line between points A and B. That line is taste. Point A is the lowest possible taste. Point B is the highest. Then bisect the line at point C. That’s the center of your taste. Construct a circle around point C, which intersects the segment AC at point A’ and the segment CB at point B’. That circle describes the scope of your taste. Those intersections describe its limits.

Anything in the segment A’B’ is in acceptable taste. Anything in the segment AA’ is unacceptably low taste. It’s vulgar. Anything in the segment B’B is unacceptably high taste. It’s snobbish. There you go: vulgarity and snobbishness are two aspects of the same thing, the AA’ and B’B of AB.

That’s how it used to work, at least. It doesn’t work that way anymore.

People don’t see AB anymore. They don’t see taste. They can’t place any particular work on AB, say whether it’s high or low. So they can’t define their own taste in those terms, or define its limits. We can describe what’s acceptable, but we don’t define it in AB. We don’t talk about taste.

We define AB in individual terms now, because taste is plural now. We know our ABs don’t match, because we don’t have a common standard. We have own own taste. Other people have different taste. We used to call that relativism, but even that seems strange now. AA’ and B’B aren’t vulgar or snobbish. They're just different.

You could make a casual periodization of these changing standards of taste. Things were formal in the 1950s, informal in the 1960s. You could make it generational. But I think there’s something happening beneath that change, something bigger than the evenemental.

There’s something structural happening.

Take a standard AB, much like our AB. Each point on AB describes a bundle of practices, possessions, and ascribed characteristics. (Taste is a practice.) You have your own bundle. You do some things, own some things, are some things. That bundle defines where you place. That’s C.

C is your place in the hierarchy AB. There are people above you, AA’, there are people below you, B’B, and there are your people, A’B’. The people above you are snobs. (They have power over you.) The people below you are slobs. (You have power over them.) Your people are the good people. (You don’t have power over one another, but you have to stick together.)

Taste is one aspect of that broader AB. It’s not that important in defining your place. You don’t move from C to C’ by learning ancient Greek or chamber music. You move by doubling your income. You move by getting hired by a higher-status firm.

Classically, taste served two roles here: It legitimates the hierarchy AB by appealing to some standard. (AA’ are better than we are, B’B are worse.) It also signals likeness, which helps people sort themselves and one another. It can help you tell whether someone is B’B, A’B’, or AA’. And it helps them tell the same things about you.

Here’s where social change comes in to undermine taste as a means of social distinction.

First, mass culture undermined the legitimation function. Once upon a time, taste was legible. You knew what burghers and paupers watched and read. Radio, television, and the privatization of public space made taste increasingly invisible. People don’t go out, so they don’t know.

Second, mass education undermined the signaling function. Once upon a time, taste helped identify the educated and connected. You could tell the quality of someone’s background by their taste. Then education progressively undermined that link. Education became specialized, rather than general. Engineers don’t need Greek. They just need math.

Those transformations predate the 1960s, but the changes of the 1960s were downstream of a burst of changes in mass culture (commercial television) and mass education (the enormous expansion of higher education in Western Europe and the United States).

The United Kingdom is the exception that proves the rule: Britain didn’t have commercial television as early as the United States, and didn’t expand higher education as early as the United States and Western Europe, so social change was delayed.

Here’s Tony Judt, Postwar (Penguin, 2005):

Rather than open these new universities to a mass constituency, British educational planners chose to integrate them into the older, elite system. British universities thus preserved their right to select or refuse students at the point of admission: only candidates who performed above a certain level in national high school-leaving exams could hope to gain entry to university and each university was free to offer places to whomsoever it wished—and to admit only as many students as it could handle. Students in the UK remained something of a privileged minority (no more than 6 percent of their age group in 1968) and the long-term implications were unquestionably socially regressive. But for the fortunate few, the system worked very smoothly—and insulated them from almost all the problems faced by their peers elsewhere in Europe.

For on the Continent, higher education moved in a very different direction. In the majority of Western European states there had never been any impediment to movement from secondary to higher education: if you took and passed the national school-leaving exams you were automatically entitled to attend university. Until the end of the 1950s this had posed no difficulties: the numbers involved were small and universities had no cause to fear being overwhelmed with students. In any case, academic study in most continental universities was by ancient convention more than a little detached and unstructured. Haughty and unapproachable professors offered formal lectures to halls full of anonymous students who felt little pressure to complete their degrees by a deadline, and for whom being a student was as much a social rite of passage as a means to an education.

Rather than construct new universities, most central planners in Europe simply decreed the expansion of existing ones. At the same time they imposed no additional impediments or system of pre-selection. On the contrary, and for the best of reasons, they frequently set about removing those that remained—in 1965 the Italian Ministry of Education abolished all university entrance examinations and fixed subject quotas. Higher education, once a privilege, would now be a right. The result was catastrophic. By 1968 the University of Bari, for example, which traditionally enrolled about 5,000 people, was trying to cope with a student body in excess of 30,000. The University of Naples in the same year had 50,000 students, the University of Rome 60,000. Those three universities alone were enrolling between them more than the total student population of Italy a mere eighteen years earlier; many of their students would never graduate.

By the end of the 1960s, one young person in seven in Italy was attending university (compared to one in twenty ten years before). In Belgium the figure was one in six. In West Germany, where there had been 108,000 students in 1950, and where the traditional universities were already beginning to suffer from overcrowding, there were nearly 400,000 by the end of the Sixties. In France, by 1967, there were as many university students as there had been lycéens in 1956. All over Europe there were vastly more students than ever before—and the quality of their academic experience was deteriorating fast. Everything was crowded—the libraries, the dormitories, the lecture halls, the refectories—and in distinctly poor condition (even, indeed especially, if it was new). Post-war government spending on education, which had everywhere risen very steeply, had concentrated upon the provision of primary and secondary schools, equipment and teachers. This was surely the right choice, and in any case one dictated by electoral politics. But it carried a price.

Judt is a snob, but these were some changes that made the 1960s: millions of young Americans and Western Europeans attending college and the significance of college education changed.

We remember the 1960s because they happened suddenly and dramatically. But if you take the long view, you can see those changes between the 1800s and the 1830s, or the 1830s and the 1860s, as print culture, public entertainment, and education undermined the legitimation and signaling functions of taste.

That’s why taste matters less now. Culture is even more individuated and private than it was in the 1960s. Education is even more specialized. Legitimation and signaling come from other sources now. And so there’s not much left that’s too vulgar or too snobbish. It’s just different.

But you can imagine a useful variation on that first model.

Imagine that AB actually defines etiquette or formality, rather than taste. You could use the same words: AA’ is vulgar, B’B is snobbish, and A’B’ is acceptable. That’s closer to Western life. And it defines our hierarchy AB better than taste.

#Anonymous

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mentornationpodcast · 4 years ago

Text

2020 in America: One big “SAW” movie being orchestrated by a “mastermind?”

I am John Abbas. I am the host of the Mentor Nation Podcast where we bring world class leaders, entrepreneurs, and people doing interesting things and we get them to mentor you by sharing their journeys, their stories, and their best advice. Think of it like having a personal mentor every week who is there to give you a tip, a kick or an aha moment so that you are more equipped in your success journey.

The year was 2001. Leigh Whannell (Director of Upgrade, The Invisible Man) and James Wan (director of Aqua man) were in their early 20s in film school. Little did they know that their simple idea for a scary movie would turn into a global franchise doing a BILLION DOLLARS in revenue and would lead to 7 sequels and counting?

They would go on to change the Horror/Thriller genre forever with a concept that in my opinion is more frightening than any Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers movie will ever be. There is just something about a horror movie based on things that could “actually happen” that scares me to death.

The entire movie was shot by these young ambitious kids in 18 days with an ultra-modest budget compared to any movie released today.

The film I am referring to is “SAW.”

A Horror/Thriller that took the country by storm, many people wondered just “HOW” this film shot by young students with little money and very little life experience could capture the attention and interest of the whole world.

I believe the answer is in the plot and how it relates to us all on a very deep and dark level.

The premise: An evil genius mastermind nicknamed Jigsaw, kidnaps a group of people, locks them in a dungeon, sets up a labyrinth of riddles and clues, puts them in an unimaginable situation where they have to make near impossible decisions forcing their true character to come out, and then they have to do unbelievable things to escape or they will die.

When I watched the film, I found my own emotions and thoughts stirring. I found myself wondering. “Holy Crap, What would I actually do or what kind of person could I truly become given a situation of that magnitude?”

What would I do if I had to kill a complete stranger in cold blood or else my own family would die? Would I be able to live with myself in either situation?

Would I saw through my own leg with a hacksaw risking shock and bleeding to death in order to escape being chained up in a dungeon where I would die a slow and agonizing death?

What truly interested me however, was watching how simple it was for jigsaw to create a set of circumstances that caused seemingly good people to do evil things that you would NEVER think they were capable of.

STAY WITH ME, You see,

One thing that I actually believe, is that there is a delicate balance to many of our lives, and as long as our environment is predictable and manageable, most of us are good, and we go about doing what we need to do each day with very few issues.

A very wise mentor of mine once told me. “Most people are good when things are good. If you want to see someone’s true character, watch how they are when everything in their life is falling apart.”

So what in the hell does this movie have to do with the current events in America?

Well, let’s look at what’s going on right now. It kind of looks like a plot straight out of SAW.

For the last decade things have been pretty good. The economy has been flourishing, and for the most part there haven’t been any world changing events other than the occasional natural disaster or the 24/7 coverage of Donald Trump. People have been generally good to each other, working together, and living their life.

Then 2020 hits. The coronavirus becomes the single greatest GLOBAL event that derails life as we know it in the blink of an eye. Months later, just when we think we are getting a handle on it, the George Floyd murder happens, leading to social and political unrest everywhere. There is a big divide now happening in a country where we are all supposed to be on the same team regardless of sex, race, or religion. Differences of opinion between friends are turning into severed relationships full of animosity. Distrust of our government, politicians, and the people who are here to protect us are higher than I have ever seen in my 37 years of life.

A simple post, pic, or video leads to huge arguments, threats, and sometimes, even worse.

Protests are turning violent, monuments are being destroyed, and now people everywhere are walking on eggshells scared to offend someone with an opinion.

People are going to war with each other over masks, race, politics, beliefs, etc. Even the smallest thing seems to push some people over the edge.

Doesn’t it seem like people are turning against each other, and the true nature of many are coming out front and canter for everyone to see?

Could there be an “evil genius mastermind(s)” or “Jigsaw(s)” out there taking these events and using them as a catalyst to have the people in our country turn on each other?

Even if something like this were possible. Why, would anyone want this to happen? Who would want this to happen?

One possible candidate is another country.

If you are reading this and you live in America, I want you to think about something.

The U.S. has had the largest economy on earth since at least the 1920s

The U.S. is regularly and rightly so called the “Land of the free” and the “Land of Opportunity.”

There are many other things the U.S. leads the world in but here’s my point. When you are the top dog at something, especially the top dog at something as important as the economy, influence, and money, you better believe others will be gunning for you and trying to overtake you, often by any means possible.

There’s an old saying that goes something like, “The higher you climb the pole, the bigger the target on your back” or “the more your ass is exposed” and I believe there is a lot of truth to this.

Imagine for a second that this were true. To beat the U.S. if you are another country. You can’t just do it face to face. David didn’t fight Goliath in bare knuckled hand to hand combat. The U.S. is full of smart people, the defence/military budget is 100 times larger than any other country, and has been for decades. The only way to win if someone wanted to, would have to be “very strategically.”

If you’ve ever watched the movie “War of the Worlds,” the story is that Aliens that have been living under the ground for thousands of years come up and start killing everyone by the millions. No weapon, missile, or gun can even scratch them, let alone kill them. Just when it seems humanity is about to be wiped out for good and nothing will work. The aliens start dying out. We find that it wasn’t a weapon that did the job, but a virus. A virus harmless to humans, as we have evolved and developed immunity over the centuries, but deadly to them. A microscopic virus caused the Aliens bodies to attack itself leading to their death. Isn’t that fascinating: The Aliens perished, not from an exterior attack, but rather from within.

Another issue that we are dealing with in the U.S. is the fact we are a relatively new country in terms of history and others know this. We don’t have thousands of years of history and tradition that we have built upon. As with most cultures in their early days, ours too was built on conquest, treachery, oppression, and often times brutal savagery. This is not a new concept unique to the U.S.

The difference with the U.S. from other countries however, is that we are much more fragile and so “new,” that many of the wounds of the past still feel fresh to people since our country as a whole only dates back a few hundred years.

Why is all of this important?

Well, because in my fictional world, these events would make a perfect recipe for an outside country with the ambition to be the largest economy or power in the world to get there, not by conquering us, but rather by having us conquer and destroy ourselves from within. Not to mention it’s much easier to do this than one would think. Given an “event” or “some events” happen that can be used as a catalyst. (AKA Coronavirus, George Floyd, Donald Trump and election time.)

Unlike Jigsaw, who had to create extremely elaborate environments that needed to be well thought out, planned, and executed perfectly with zero room for error, all someone or some group would need to do here is feed the fire that has already started with more fuel.

What’s the fuel? False Harmful Information.

How do you feed the fire? Spreading False Harmful Information Quickly.

Posting false negativity on social media where uninformed people will see it, believe it, and become angry based on misinformation.

Feeding the anger by sharing anything and as much as possible that which is relevant to the core of the anger.

I can’t tell you how many so called “facts,” I read, posts I see, and articles I watch that when I just dig a little deeper and do some research, I realize are so totally and completely wrong. But by then it doesn’t matter. The damage has been done. I look at the comments and see that most people are believing it and it has been shared 57,000 times already.

We all know people who get emotional and share things, regardless of whether it is true or not. But have you ever thought or asked yourself. Who first posted it? Where did it originate? What was that person/person’s intention?

Think about how dangerous that could become.

With social media being global, think about how EASY it would be for ANYONE, ANYWHERE in the world to create content designed to turn people against each other.

My point is to compare the ACTUAL events of what is going on in the US to the premise of the movie “SAW.”

What if Jigsaw was another country or countries, and what if the intended target is the entire United States?

I AM NOT SAYING THIS IS THE CASE, OR THIS IS WHAT’S HAPPENING. MAYBE IT’S NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY, BUT RATHER JUST ANGRY PEOPLE SPREAD OUT ALL OVER THAT ARE FULL OF HATE, AND GET JOY IN PEOPLE DESTROYING EACH OTHER.

There could be thousands of “JIGSAW’S out there who are just stirring up things for their own personal enjoyment.

Is it actually happening? Maybe.

Should we at least consider the fact that it IS happening? I think so.

Are the issues going on real? Of course they are.

The problem is not that these issues aren’t real, but why they are turning into something a thousand times bigger. I think one of the main reason these issues are getting out of hand and turning violent, angry, and dangerous, is because of the sinister acts of bad people who want to take a bad situation, and make it infinitely worse.

To add insult to injury. If it’s true and it is happening, it would be almost impossible to know who is doing it, who started it vs. who is exacerbating it, and where they are doing it from.

It’s kind of like “Jigsaw” is also “The Invisible Man.”

AGAIN, AND PLEASE HEAR ME,

I am not saying all of this is happening, and I am not someone who believes in the million conspiracies out there.

What I want you to think about is. How realistic it “could” be that outside influences are taking the events of 2020 and using them to destroy a country from within. Kind of interesting when you think about it.

Have you ever watched an episode of Law and Order or CSI and thought to yourself. Wow that was freaking clever! I wonder if these shows give anyone ideas in real life.

If you do, then it isn’t too farfetched of a thought to wonder if “SAW” is really happening, only to a much larger scale.

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