#which would wipe louis from the narrative

[larrylimericks]

14Aug23

Ten years! The betrothed, we wish well. From the record, someone’s been expelled. Not the swinger of purse — No, in fact, the reverse: It’s Louis who’s now been Danielled.

[semehere]

Armand wants absolute control, to the point of paranoia, which is precisely his downfall. 

We are presented with two puzzles regarding Armand’s decisions, because logically, they are unnecessary: 1/ his killing of Claudia (indirectly or directly), and 2/ his memory wiping Louis in San Francisco. Armand doesn't have to torture Daniel over Louis' faintest interest, nor does he have to eliminate Claudia and Lestat from Louis' life through the orchestration of the trial, nor is he forced to wipe Louis’ memory in San Francisco. These actions ironically had the unintended effect of causing a rift between him and Louis. Here I want to argue that Armand took drastic, unnecessary, even risky action out of paranoia and his deep need for control.

1/ The part where Armand wiped Louis' memory of the San Francisco night - let's assume that he wiped Louis' mind without his consent. (This is up for debate - the show so far leaves enough ambiguity for it to go either way.) But why? Armand already won the fight. Louis apologized to him repeatedly, renewed his vow to Armand, and rejected Lestat by begging Armand not to call Lestat. That makes Armand’s memory wipe so puzzling at first to me, since I think there would be no need for such a drastic measure. 

My best explanation is down to Armand’s personality - he doesn’t want even a slightest crack in the relationship, when what he wants is perfection. He doesn’t want Louis to remember the hurtful things they spoke to one another, and definitely doesn’t want Louis to remember that Armand’s words pushed him to go out to the sun. He doesn’t want Louis to recall all the cruel behaviors he exhibited while Louis was incapacitated in the bed - torturing Daniel, taunting Louis, calling Lestat. Armand was also extremely jealous of Louis’ slightest attention to Daniel, so that he also wiped that part where Louis begged for him to spare Daniel’s life. Those are why he wiped Louis’ memory.

2/ Another way Armand exhibits his paranoia is through the trial. The narrative shows us there is no need for him to kill Claudia to “unburden” Louis of her. Claudia was gone, off with Madeline, and had to be away from Paris out of necessity, effectively removing herself from Louis’ life. Armand, again, does not have to eliminate Claudia, especially if he doesn’t care about maintaining power in his coven and coming off as weak and ineffectual as coven maitre.

Yet Armand feels threatened by Claudia nonetheless, because she is competing for Louis’ love and attention. It definitely doesn’t help that Louis’ slit his wrist and let himself bleed out on the couch the night he turned Madeline because Claudia left him. (recalling the moment he contemplated sitting on the bench waiting for sunrise in S1) Louis can get suicidal and depressive over Claudia, but so will he if Claudia is put to death over the trial. 

The trial serves a dual purpose - to eliminate Claudia (through death) and Lestat (through betrayal) from Louis’ life. It’s killing two birds with one stone because Lestat caused Claudia’s death by showing up at all, and then testifying against them. I think there is no world in which Louis would return to Lestat, if he ever loved Claudia at all. That makes Armand’s cowardice for inaction come off as a much better alternative.

Armand’s decision is not so much out of physical, circumstantial necessity but out of a psychological, internal necessity. Armand doesn't just want control, he wants complete control, absolute annihilation of the opposition to his goals and wants, which ironically will forever prevent him from ever achieving his desires.

[noirve]

armand intending to kill louis after all and actively orchestrating his death in the trial is not my favorite choice narratively but it does hilariously reframe his entire character and motivations. like he just seems like a complete psychopath now, flailing his way through life and making detached decisions based on random opportunities. he chooses the coven over louis out of loyalty and because of doubt about their relationship, essentially betraying the person he claims to "want more than anything in the world", then when said person doesn't actually die as planned, he suddenly decides that he can save his life after all so he helps louis escape, THEN he sees the opportunity to get back in louis's good graces by pretending he is the one who saved him, decides NOT to warn the coven about the impending attack, despite having been ready to kill the man he loves for them like a WEEK AGO, resulting in the entire coven being murdered. and then he stays with louis for 77 years, while fully aware that louis is only with him to spite lestat. like his switch from "i’ll orchestrate louis's death to remain a part of the coven" to "actually fuck the coven, i'm going to be with louis" in such a short time span is.... unhinged, to say the least. did he secretly want the coven destroyed and is that why he did not inform them?? did he make a last-minute decision that it was better this way because the coven being wiped out would mean no live witnesses of his role in the trial which would give him a shot at fixing his relationship with louis? but then why go through all the bother of picking the coven over louis and setting up the trial which would see him executed in the first place? was he just like hmmmm louis wants to go on a suicidal killing spree so... let's just see what happens!! whoever comes out alive i guess i'll pick :) like do you care about anything actually???

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

Would you mind sharing what you found unsatisfying about iwtv's take on memory?

I mean I’m a huge AMC Interview With The Vampire hater, I think it’s poorly paced, poorly written (the misogyny…), has zero real thematic coherence, and actively works to dupe its audience into respecting it with like a string of soapy surface level entertaining stuff happening and dressing it all up to sound much smarter than it is. I will be seated for season three

But my plethora of issues with the show notwithstanding, focusing on the memory thing, I feel it is employed most often to strip Louis of agency and sideline him in his own narrative. On top of that, I feel like it just doesn’t really go anywhere.

IWTV is about collecting the closest to objective record of events as possible. As the series progresses, it becomes clear that this is the way Louis is trying to take some agency back for himself against Armand. This could be really poignant and interesting, but in practice it turns more into a narrative game of team Lestat vs team Armand with Louis himself as collateral— which is strongly exacerbated by how Daniel (and other characters) mock him for being in abusive relationships.

A standout example of this is from season one, when it comes to Louis’ involvement in Lestat’s death, and how his misremembering is treated like a gotcha.

In the book, Louis chooses not to involve himself, which is why Claudia is forced to carry it out herself. Once Louis does learn, he has the choice to save Lestat or side with Claudia. So when he grudgingly sides with Claudia, the entire plot is shaped by it. At a surface level, Louis reads like a rather passive character, but he has a lot of narrative agency. Nothing would turn out the way it does without his choices, even if that choice is frequently one of inaction, or simply an internal, emotional one.

In the show he’s nominally very involved in Lestat’s death, but we keep being told he doesn’t have the stomach for it. That he’s too weak to go through with it and not idk drown in Lestat or whatever— which again, is something the narrative framing belittles. Then it’s revealed that Claudia hid the real plan from him and poisoned Lestat separately. She was the only architect of his death all along because she knew Louis could not be trusted.

Then the misremembering comes in: Louis supposedly delivers the final killing blow— but suddenly it is uncovered that he was actually letting the poison drain out of Lestat’s body. And that he actually refused to burn the corpse to give him a chance to recover. This information isn’t actually centered on Louis and his feelings though, Daniel has to be there to call bullshit on Louis’ (implicitly Armand’s) version of events. And then season two even goes so far to confirm that Lestat couldn’t have died by fire anyway, because he has the blood of Akasha. Saving him from the incinerator didn’t even change anything!

So Louis was only superficially more enmeshed in the events shaping the plot, to then be separated from it entirely. Meanwhile there’s very little narrative interest in what it actually means to him, to have believed and felt a certain way about a very pivotal moment in his history, and to have had that entirely upended. Louis’ experiences and interiority, what he is going through beyond searching for a narratively defined as impossible objective truth, don’t actually matter to the narrative.

Another example is how the show frames Louis’ recollection of the physical violence in his relationship with Lestat. In season one we get to see this really OTT physical abuse (side note: I do get the sense that the show can’t really grasp abuse that isn’t so in-your-face. There’s a supposed dichotomy next to Armand’s memory wiping and manipulation but even that is taken to such an unnuanced extreme.)

It’s really gruesome, and the show seems to really enjoy showing Louis as physically fucked up as possible every chance it gets. Then season two has Louis unearth forgotten memories about how the fight actually began because Louis attacked first. How he was the aggressor all along and Lestat never even wanted to fight.

First of all, I just loathe that framing, that actually Louis just imagined being abused— even if it’s because Armand put those memories in his mind. But also the take away is that… Lestat’s not that bad actually? I guess? Especially paired with the reveal that he actually saved Louis (but … chose to let Claudia die… but we don’t care about this I guess…)

Louis remembering things incorrectly is mostly just a vehicle for a plot twist, and also often a means to just undermine him. That’s not a cogent theme! That’s not memory being a monster.

Like where is the exploration of there being nothing left of Claudia but what Louis, and her killers, remembers of her? Nowhere because the show hates her and all women. Where is any sort of conclusion about what Daniel may or may not remember after S2 Ep5? There was room for really interesting shifts in dynamic and perspective after that… where is it? They basically return to the status quo the very next episode.

What does “memory is a monster” even fucking mean in this show? Is it that it is consuming? That these characters cannot escape their pasts that have defined them? Is it that they can never be certain of their memories, even though that is really the only lens through which they can contextualize the world/their relationships/their lives beyond it?

They don’t go anywhere with any of their choices! It drives me insane! Instead they just keep repeating a single goddamn line because it sounds smart and people go nuts for it because idk vampire yaoi. It pisses me off!

[nalyra-dreaming]

Hi there! First of all, thank you very-very much for giving us polite and insightful answers all the time. It's always great to have people like you in the fandom :) Sooo this is yet another question from a confused fan who didn't read the books :D I know that Louis will encounter weakened Lestat in Paris at some point. But in the show we see Louis being very insistent on telling Daniel that Lestat is dead...does it mean that he&Armand originally had no intention to tell Daniel about the encounter? And what could be the specific reason for this?

Hey nonny!

Awww thank you, glad you like my ramblings :))) 💕

Hope I make sense *laughs*

I think that Louis had indeed not meant to tell Daniel much about Paris. It's in episode 6 as well, when he repeats the "we wanted to kill Lestat" to make sure Daniel has heard (only Daniel was asleep then). And then continues to detail their clever little plan in episode 7.

I think... I've just said it in the other ask re Loumand, too, but I think it all, the whole interview, boils down to the episode 1 comment "truth and reconciliation". Only he is spinning a tale for Daniel of their past as he wishes to remember some things (or Armand helps him stomach some things a bit better) while actually trying to provide the stage for Armand and Daniel to hook up again. Obviously this would mean the Devil's Minion happened to a large part already, and I personally think that is likely. Only Armand decided differently back then, for whatever reason, and wiped Daniel's memory. And Louis is trying to fix that, by making Daniel remember the truth. And then reconcile him with Armand.

Lestat... Lestat, his "death" and everything pertaining to him is much too personal for Louis. Too painful. He would have preferred not to go there I think (of course Daniel will now force him to, and, despite the fact that Louis so cleverly made Daniel delete the old interview... I bet Daniel has his iCloud and/or TimeMachine properly set up.^^ He will tear the narrative apart^^)

Also, the whole scene with Lestat and Claudia in Paris... will force some of Armand's actions into focus (The little Frankenstein moment and the tower comes to mind, which will in turn make Daniel question the narrative again). And I bet that was something Louis actually hadn't wanted to do, because reconciling with someone who did that? Not the best premises. :))

All in all it's a multi-layered game Louis is playing, imho. Some of Armand's reactions were too... honest, to be "in" on everything. He was surprised by some of the things Louis did and said. I bet Louis told him that he wanted to redo the interview and Armand reluctantly went along with it, and the little play (eternity can be dull). But I also bet he didn't really know of Louis trying to reconcile him with Daniel.

Also, if Lestat "were dead" in the tale Louis is telling... Daniel would be forced to concentrate on other things - and lets be real, Lestat is too interesting a character to just lose sight of for a journalist like Daniel, so in order to make Daniel lose interest in Lestat... he would need to be dead.

[advancetoclassesandmaterials]

Okay, I Locked My Table of Contents - What Am I Able To Do With It Locked?

Scenario: The attorney wants to manually manipulate the Table of Contents. We did explain that if they were to just edit the various headings within the document, when they re-run the TOC, everything will update. If they edit the field code of the Table of Contents and type things in and change words that are already present, as soon as the TOC is regenerated, it will wipe out any of the manual manipulation. The attorney said I don’t have the time to learn any generation of a Table of Contents and said that they certainly do not want their manual changes wiped out.

The question now becomes how can we take care of this situation?

The first thing we did was to lock the TOC by placing the cursor on the TOC field code and using Control F11. That locks the field and prevents the system from updating the Table of Contents. To prove that it is locked, right click on the field and “Update” should be grayed out. If you have to unlock the field use Control Shift F11.

What can the attorney do with it locked?

The TOC can be manually edited and those direct edits will save as plain text. The page number links will still work meaning “Control Click” to jump to a page will still be active. Also, if the attorney saves the file to a PDF, the Page Number links will be active.

So we see that locking the field stills leaves us with the ability to operate. Sometimes we have to accommodate even if it is not the best way to go about a procedure.

Others might say, why don’t you just strip the field code off altogether? They are referring to Control Shift F9. That would take away my hyperlinks as well as the ability to have the links active when saved as a PDF.

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[caralara]

Why this Babygate situation is so different than before (but the same, too) and why it’s leading to The End

I don’t think I can count the number of anons in my inbox telling me to stop believing babygate will end soon because “the fandom has hoped before again and again and it never ended, we’ve been through this so many times” and of course it’s always accompanied by an “it’s for your own good sweetheart I just don’t want you to get disappointed and hurt” and yes yes yes thanks for the concern but I don’t take this lightly, you know? 

My optimism isn’t based purely on a gut feeling, and it’s not just based on Louis mentioning Freddie every now and again or him wearing one or two funny shirts. Nope. I looked at the big picture, the time frame from when Babygate began in 2014 (yes 2014) until now and looked at everything I could get my hands on and had a few thoughts about the why and how, so let me walk you through it, just so you can stop filling my inbox with concerned messages <3

First of all - if you’re new here go read my Xarry post to get some background info on why I think babygate even happened in the first place and why Louis went along with it more or less willingly, at least to some degree.

TL;DR: to make it possible for Harry to come out as bi (regardless of his true sexuality), Louis had to appear Super Straight™ in order to not out Larry in the process, and Harry had to sort of stunt with a man that wasn’t Louis - and how do you do that? Babygate & Xarry.

Ok, let’s dive right in. 

The Set-Up and Execution

Seeing as it seems they had Briana’s social media wiped clean by approximately end of 2014, the plan must have been in place by then already. This is just to illustrate that these sort of things are planned way ahead into the future - this is about 1.5 years before the baby was even born. 

In my opinion, it is debatable if it was ever clearly communicated to Louis or even planned to go through with the entire pregnancy and have the baby born from the beginning. I personally believe that from Briana’s side, they were more than happy to be along for the ride and stay in the spotlight for as long as possible, and management might have suggested something like that to them quite early on, as the Briana Tomlinson and baby Tomlinson URLs had been around at a very early point in the time line already - however, once it was clear that a baby would be born, and paraded as his child, as they saw that even the pregnancy news did very little to convince people that Louis was A Heterosexual, they seemed to push for the full blown execution of the baby-having-business.

Even though Louis managed to sabotage any narrative of a “Happy Couple Expecting a Baby” by calling the paps to Glastonbury where he was holding hands with Tamara Bell, management kept pushing the narrative of Louis and Briana getting back/staying together non-stop (which made it all so messy and confusing to the gp and fandom) and even engagement rumours were seeded.

This culminated in OTRA Belfast being cancelled on 20 October 2015, where Louis did babygate interviews all day long and that “Baby [Boy/Girl] Tomlinson Is Born” was accidentally published early - I believe, this is where Louis found out for sure they were after all planning to go through with the whole birth and him being a father, and not limiting the stunt to a “pregnancy,” and he & Harry and the other boys put their foot down and walked out. He went on and leaked Home that night, and almost exactly a month later he had Danielle Campbell as his new girlfriend introduced - I believe he sought out a beard / PR girlfriend as insurance to not get dragged further into any marriage/relationship stunts with Briana (also the reason why they worked and looked so well together, she was the only beard he ever chose for himself instead of management - and she meant autonomy, something positive, to him).

But can you see how he’s working the chess board, how he’s sacrificing one thing to gain another? How he’s creative and finding solutions to these situations, to get the best possible outcome for Harry and himself from these dilemmas? How he’s utilising what he learned from being in the middle of the storm of the music industry? All the tricks and hacks? How he - even back then - used clothes and double meanings to signal (The Future Is Now shirt, the only shirt ever he re-wore (two days in a row!) on stage - precisely the two shows he called the baby doll thrown on stage a fake baby, and the other one when Harry put the balloon under his shirt during Little White Lies on the day exactly three weeks before the One Conception article?). How he’d learned to manipulate the media? Instrumentalising that horrible “fan” phone call where a deranged person is threatening a literal baby (regardless whether you think it’s real or fake), he highly publicised it at precisely the perfect moment, exactly 6 months after we got the first real pap photos of Freddie - coincidentally also the limit to employ infant actors per year in California, he uses the phone call to plead for privacy, after a bazillion planned pap walks, and making the fandom self police and create a taboo about the topic babygate so they’d quiet down, that it wouldn’t get talked about, questioned and brought up as much anymore and he could put it to sleep for now (-- worked really well, didn’t it? /s).

He knows fandom dynamics, he knows what we talk about, he knows what the different sub bubbles of the fandom like antis, solos, twarries and larries need and he also knows he can trust us, larries, to have his back throughout all of that, picking up on his signalling and sticking around for his true self.

The Quiet Years

By now we’re in late 2016. Louis is an established dad, he’s throughout has signalled he’s not happy with the stunt but he is going along with it - he’s signalled with clothes, with songs recommended (like the Devlin Album or Daddy Cool), he’s referenced FRIENDS with the Sunglass Hut, follows people with paternity scandals on social media, and he’s flatout leaked and protested. 

print!Louis has explicitly not taken a paternity test, and he’s taken Briana to court approximately 28 times over custody, while he actually has never done that, and he’s paying less than $6k in child support each month as a multi millionaire.

So why did he not end it then?

First of all. Jay passed in December that year, may she forever rest in peace. I don’t even want to think about it too much, I will never be able to fathom the pain of this loss. And he still went through with his first single.

I think it is important to remember why he even agreed to do it in the first place: it was to make a coming out possible for Harry, without outing Larry in the process. By now, there’s such a gigantic heap of lies by and about a lot of important people connected to a Larry coming out accumulated, it would already be incredibly difficult to manage a coming out on it’s own - and now make it a move that won’t destroy both their careers: I don’t think the world / industry was ready for that in 2017 (or is today, if I am being honest). So. We always have to consider what Harry is doing and how gay Harry is, to see if an end is possible for babygate. So obviously, Harry didn’t come out as bi, and I believe it had to do with him signing with Jeff and Jeff doing a 180° turn, pouring honey into his ears to delay a coming out until he’s established as a solo artist, turning up the Hendall heat almost immediately. And we all know, that Harry trust(ed) Jeff, so there was no coming out at that point (they told me that the end is near, always running from the bullets, we never knew we were here before...)

So. In January, Douis break up and Louis gets back with Eleanor, and jets off to Jamaica, where Harry is also spotted. 

Harry kicks off his solo career with his first solo performance in May 2017, while Louis dives back into work, announcing Back To You for July 2017 and deals with his grief on top of that. And guess what gets dusted off for promo season? Yep, suddenly Louis remembers he has a son. It is funny, just a little bit, that every single tweet, insta post and interview mention about Freddie is always in close proximity to a release. I made a fancy google calendar to visualise it, and it is so clear - usually he mentions him about 6 weeks before something gets announced, and then during promo for the Announced Thing. Like for Just Like You which gets released in October 2017, and then the same for Miss You early December 2017. Louis keeps signalling, with the Billie Jean shirt and the Just Like You music video, while Harry gets a big scary demon bee tattooed and sings Kiwi thrice on the three year anniversary of the One Conception Article.

The entirety of 2018, Freddie is basically non-existent - Louis also isn’t putting anything out. He’s in the studio a lot, and besides the recycled and rerecycled Carbon Copy Article that periodically gets published every two months, there’s nothing in that year. 

Then, first Freddie postings happen again beginning of 2019, and guess what - Louis announces the release of Two Of Us. For the promo interviews, Freddie gets dusted off again. Louis releases the TOU music video the day before International Day Against Homophobia.

So why did he not end it and ride the publicity wave for Walls? I think there are a few different reasons why not. For starters, Harry released Fine Line, a very very gender and queer album around the same time. I don’t think Louis wanted to overshadow it with Babygate stuff. Secondly - maybe Louis wanted to see if he could pull off Walls without having to use the promo from a scandal, to prove to himself he could make it as a solo artist, too. I also think the push pull behind the scenes with Syco was coming to a head at that time. Shitty promo, no faith in him as an artist, and their past... Focus on one fight at a time - free himself from the people who were responsible for that horrible closet in the first place, then get rid of the collateral damage. And finally: the End needs proper preparation to be pulled off with minimal damage to Louis’ career and his loved ones. It is a huge pile of lies, and he needs to be disentangled from it with a delicate plan and patience. With all the factors behind the scenes being unsure, it is difficult to create a plan that will need at least a year to be executed if you don’t know who will be on your team next month.

The End - Attempt #1

I believe with the release of Walls, they started to execute the plan to end it after LTWT and to use the scandal to push visibility for LT2. They had announced the tour end of October 2019, and Walls was released 31 January 2020 like a lil birthday present for H - and that’s where they started the groundwork for Babygate to end: an album sporting a handwritten note, dedicating it to his littleladfreddie, missing any and all songs about fatherhood, or the joy and struggles of having a child. 

Why? Because in order to End It, they have to make the fandom and gp think he’s the most devoted Daddy of all times, so that when the news hit that he turns out to not be the father after all, having taken that way overdue DNA paternity test, everyone will believe him that he really believed he was the dad to littleladfreddie and that he’s actually a victim of the scammer Briana.

They make the groundwork for that, too, in May 2020 - two months after having to push LTWT back to August because of Covid. There’s several articles of Briana dating Brody Jenner (of the Kardashian Jenner clan, yes) purely to get her back into the limelight, to make her interesting for the public, for it to make sense why it has to be in the papers what she’s doing. Between May and September there’s at least (!!) 22 articles about Briana dating Brody, to then have a BUA and immediately, and then, three weeks later, in October, we get Boobiegate - painting an image of scammer!Briana, with a sugar daddy literally telling Louis in an open letter that he hopes she didn’t scam him, too. Oof, what a story!

So why did it not end then? Why did it go quiet for the entirety of the first half of 2021?

Covid. Louis had to push back his tour, again - this time to 2022. It pretty much coincides exactly with the first article coming out about Briana and Brody - this part of the plan was already in motion. And remember, Louis is playing the long game. Making it googleable that Briana is a scammer, it’s not a bad thing if it’s already longer ago than just one promo cycle - makes it look more organic. Boobiegate was important groundwork - but not actually a sign it would end within a couple of months of it. So they pulled it off, the whole boobiegate thing unravels until the end of November, and then it goes very, very quiet. They pushed back the tour by a whole 10 months, so until then - sit and wait. We have almost zero activity from Louis between January and June 2021 - except for some Euros and studio content.

The End - Attempt #2

The next attempt gets kicked off with a “Briana topless article” in June, the day after we get Louis and Freddie at an empty arcade, super recognisable and Louis in full on babygate gear and a two days later Briana refollows Louis on instagram. The fandom goes wild - aww daddy content, especially after Louis poses with little Louies for photos!

September it picks up again: Louis starts to heavily signal with clothes (in the afhf, Obituary, Beatles, sunglasses,...) and then is seen in LA, assumendly seeing Freddie. 

October, Louis gets seen clubbing with Annas (key player during babygate seeding in 2015) wearing his H shirt.

November, we get the Bentley push: facetime where he calls over Freddie to talk to Bentley. The mum herself describes how Louis took a week to find the best time slot to call - in the mean time he flew to LA and honestly, he’s so great, he loves his fans so much that he takes out time from his precious son-daddy visit to call a fan up! so thoughtful. He then gets spotted in LA with Freddie, again in full babygate gear (grateful dead “steal your face” shirt and bbg sunglasses!) and Daisy posts a photo of Louis with Freddie.

December: Louis likes babyphotos of friends, and poses with other friend and their baby while wearing a Lacoste crewneck with a huge alligator on it (baby-gator anyone?). Then: christmas and birthday with a 10 £ cake from m&s, and a Freddie within the Tomlinsons who sticks out like a sore thumb. we accidentally get an instagram video of Louis telling Freddie he looks just like him (carbon copy steal your face gasp) with his lips etc. Freddie poses with a surf board Louis gifted him that’s called DNA. Louis wears Beatles again.

January 2022: Louis congratulates his 6 year old son in a tweet. at half nine pm. but freddie goes to bed at 7 doesnt he louis and Daisy posts carbon copy post of Louis and Freddie

February 2022: Louis sees an opportunity and takes it: has the tourbus stop for a little Louie hislittleladfreddie’s age, and in front of hundreds of phones filming him, he tells him he’s got a son just like him (cue aaaaw daddy Louis)

March 2022: Louis gives Freddie a shout out during his LA show, no one gets it, so he does it again. before all of this, he tells Charlie where to film (we’ll get it in the documentary to make it real y’all) he’s spotted on a daddy son day out at Santa Monica pier

Throughout the rest of tour, the intensity and frequency of signalling through clothes get more and more, Louis wears beatles, bbg sunglasses, and: starts wearing chequers and following F1 accounts, joining F1 & DNA spaces on Twitter ensuing in the Chequered Flag Theory, signals with playlists and likes and follows and more while posing with as many 6 year old kids as possible, specifically requesting to be photographed next to them. He starts signalling about September.

June: his new merch is influenced by Dalí, who’s latest publicity came from a postmortem dna test proving the child claimed to be his wasn’t his after all.

He wears Lacoste and Palace (=Queen=Freddie Reign) and chequers almost non stop.

July: Louis messages Bentley’s mum on Twitter (after her proving to share absolutely everything for clicks and engagement) to tell her he loves his son

August: his new Album is announced: Faith In The Future. Reminds a lot of the Future Is Now shirt. Louis (and Harry!) use a lot of 7s. As in 7 years are enough?

September: LT2 Promo starts. There’s an onslaught of melittleladfreddie, see this post.

Conclusion

So. Here we are. I just wanted to explain how this time it’s different, by explaining the reasons and context of bbg related things happening in the past. that the things that are usually being called on to prove “he talked about freddie before” or “there were patterns before” are true, but they were in a different context.

so on the one hand, you’re right - we’ve sort of been here before, in 2019/2020 when they initially wanted to end it, but no one could predict covid would happen, so they had to adjust their plans. and it’s the same for this now: I am absolutely sure it will end. and if it doesn’t, it means there’s a reason they had to change plans again. remember, they have to consider Harry as well. and something shit like covid can always happen, as we’ve learned. doesn’t make freddie any more related to him though. I think this is truly the first opportunity for him to safely end it. 

sorry this got so long, but honestly, it IS complicated and complex and i simplified it A LOT. if you have specific questions, feel free to inbox me!

To the end, my friends - Faith In The Future!

[patriotsnet]

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-republicans-riot-after-obama-was-elected/

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

Undocumented Kids Are Saved By Obamas Executive Order Daca Which Would Put A Halt To Deportation For Those Whod Entered The Country Before Age 16 And Yet In A Bid To Get The Gop To Come Over To His Side On Immigration Reform The President Has Also Deported A Record 15 Million People In His First Term

A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo

When Belsy Garcia saw her mother’s number appear on her iPhone on the afternoon of June 15, she felt what she calls the “uncomfortable fluttering” sensation in her chest. She knew that daytime calls signaled an emergency. The worst one had come the previous year, when her sister told her ICE agents had placed their father in federal custody.

Garcia was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when her father was marched out of her childhood home. As an undocumented immigrant — like both of her parents, who are from Guatemala — she couldn’t qualify for loans. She financed her ­education through scholarships and a stipend she earned as a residential assistant. Now she wondered if her mother was calling to say her father had been deported, which might force her to leave school to become the family’s breadwinner.

But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”

Onscreen, President Obama was announcing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children could apply for Social Security numbers and work permits. Garcia qualified: Her parents had brought her to this country when she was 7 years old. DACA transformed her into a premed student who could actually become a doctor. “It was like this weight was lifted,” she says. “All of that hard work was going to pay off.”

In The Next Hundred Days Our Bipartisan Outreach Will Be So Successful That Even John Boehner Will Consider Becoming A Democrat After All We Have A Lot In Common He Is A Person Of Color Although Not A Color That Appears In The Natural World Whats Up John Barack Obama White House Correspondents Dinner

And Then There Were Three

The first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court did so in 1880. It would take another 101 years for a woman to sit on that bench rather than stand before it. Even then, progress was fitful. Over the 12 years that Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg served together, their identities evidently merged; lawyers regularly addressed Ginsburg as “Justice O’Connor.” When O’Connor retired in 2006, she left the faux Justice O’Connor feeling lonely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of something far more alarming: What the public saw on entering the court were “eight men of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side.” They might well represent the most eminent legal minds in America. But there was something antiquated, practically mutton-choppy, about that portrait.

How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.

Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Ladenraiding His Secret Compound In Abbottabad Pakistan While Obama And His Top Advisers Watch A Live Feed Of The Mission From The White House Situation Room The Picture Of The Assembled Becomes The Last Supper Of The Obama Era

Poop Feminism

For me, it’s one moment. All the bridesmaids have come to the fancy bridal shop to see Maya Rudolph try on wedding dresses. This should be a familiar scene: The bride emerges from the changing room and … This is the dress! The friends clap. The mother cries. Everyone is a princess. Go ahead and twirl!

But when the bride emerges in Bridesmaids, almost all of her friends have started to feel sick. Sweat coats their skin. Red splotches creep over their faces. They try to “ooh” and “aah,” but it’s already too late. It starts with a gag from Melissa McCarthy, followed by another gag. Then a gag that comes simultaneously with a tiny wet fart. It’s the smallness of the fart that’s important here. It’s the kind of fart that slips out — a fart that could be excused away, a brief, incongruous accident. Women don’t fart in wedding movies, and women certainly don’t fart at the exact moment that the bride comes out in her dress. This can’t be happening. ­Melissa McCarthy blames the fart on the tightness of her dress. We breathe a sigh of relief.

Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?

The camera cuts. We are above now. We look down from a safe perch as the release we have been anticipating and dreading begins. It is horribly, earth-­shatteringly gross. A woman has just pooped in a sink. The revolution has begun.

The Government Acquires A 61 Percent Stake In Gm And Loans The Company $50 Billion The Auto Bailout Will Eventually Be Heralded As A Great Success Adding More Than 250000 Manufacturing Jobs To The Economy

The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted

“The president was very clear with us that he only wanted to do stuff that would fundamentally change the way they did business. And that’s what we did. There were enormous changes. For example, General Motors had something like 300 different job classifications that the union had. If you were assigned to put the windshield wipers on, you couldn’t put tires on. And we wiped all that stuff out. We basically gave back management the freedom to manage, to hire, to fire. People stopped getting paid even when they were on layoff. We reduced the number of car plants so that there wasn’t so much overcapacity. So now, when you have 16 million cars sold , they’re making a fortune.”

Black Lives Matter Activists Are Arrested In Baton Rouge Louisianaprotesting The Murder Of Alton Sterling; More Than 100 People Are Detained In St Paul Minnesota Protesting The Murder Of Philando Castile

What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?

Melissa Dahl: The Fitbit was introduced at a tech conference eight years ago. It’s kind of incredible to realize that, before then, this idea of the “quantified self” didn’t really exist in the mainstream.

Jesse Singal: I feel like it’s the intersection of all these different trends: Everyone plays video games these days. You got smartphones everywhere. And people are realizing that solutions to the big problems that lead to sleeplessness and anxiety and bad eating — unemployment and income inequality and yada yada yada — aren’t gonna get solved anytime soon.

MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.

Cari Romm: It feels like productive stress, though. I’m talking as a recovered Fitbit obsessive, but it does make you look at Fitbit-less people like, “You mean you don’t care how many steps you took today?”

MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.

JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-­inducing sleep app could help, though?

MD: There’s some aspect to the tracking idea that really does work. I mean, it’s just a higher-tech version of a food journal or sleep journal, right? Ben Franklin 300 years ago was tracking his 13 “personal virtues” in his diary.

JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?

Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later

On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings

In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.

Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident

“I Know I Let Everybody Down”

“Before the debate, David Plouffe and I went in to talk to him and give him a pep talk and he said, ‘Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,’ which is not what you want to hear from your candidate right before the debate. We knew within ten minutes that it was going to be a ­debacle. We had armed him with a joke — it was his 20th anniversary, and he addressed Michelle — and it turns out Romney was expecting just such a line and had a really great comeback. And Romney was excellent — just free and easy and clearly well prepared and showed personality that people hadn’t seen before. Obama looked like he was at a press conference.

We had a meeting at the White House and he said, ‘I know I let everybody down and that’s on me, and I’m not going to let that happen again,’ and that was his attitude. We always had debate camps before, where we’d re-create in hotel ballrooms what the set would look like, and all of the conditions of the real debate. When we went down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the next debate camp, he seemed really eager to engage in the prep. We had a decent first night. That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. It was like he’d taken a step back.

Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy

Plan B

“I’m talking to Rahm and Jim Messina and saying, ‘Okay, explain to me how this happened.’ It was at that point that I learned that our candidate, Martha Coakley, had asked rhetorically, ‘What should I do, stand in front of Fenway and shake hands with voters?’ And we figured that wasn’t a good bellwether of how things might go.

This might have been a day or two before the election, but the point is: There is no doubt that we did not stay on top of that the way we needed to. This underscored a failing in my first year, which was the sort of perverse faith in good policy leading to good politics. I’ll cut myself some slack — we had a lot to do, and every day we were thinking, Are the banks going to collapse? Is the auto industry going to collapse? Will layoffs accelerate? We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year, and the loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president or elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate your ideas. But it happened, and the question then was, ‘What’s next?’

Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry

The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out

After decades of chilly backlash, we find ourselves, these past eight years, in an age of feminist resurgence, with feminist websites and publications and filmmakers and T-shirts and pop singers and male celebrities and best-selling authors and women’s soccer teams. Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: furious clashes over the direction and quality of the discourse, especially as the movement has become increasingly trendy, shiny, and celebrity-backed.

Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. It was the furor over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who gave a viral 2010 TED Talk about women in the workplace who “leave before they leave” — who alter their professional strategy to accommodate a future they assume will be compromised by parenthood — which led to the publication of her 2013 feminist business manifesto, Lean In.

It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions

“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”

“I was given an enormous degree of latitude. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have. There’s only one exception to that, and it was on marriage equality, in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case in 2013. We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. But we didn’t have to do it . And because it was a discretionary judgment, and it was such a consequential step, that was the one matter where I really sought out the president’s personal guidance. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake. He was incredibly impressive.

A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi

A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways

“The president of the United States and the Speaker of the House, the two most powerful elected officials in Washington, decided in a conversation that they both had to try to make something happen. Maybe it would be the way it worked in a West Wing episode in a world that doesn’t work like a West Wing episode. That’s how it started — two individuals saying we’re going to try. I think they both shared a belief in the art of the possible, and they both did not think compromise was a dirty word.

When our cover was blown — a Wall Street Journal editorial came out saying that Boehner and Obama were working on this and attacking the whole premise — that was devastating. It resulted in Cantor being a part of the talks. Cantor and Boehner came in, and I think it was a weekend private session with the president in the Oval Office, and they were talking about the numbers. At one point Cantor said, ‘Listen, it’s not just the numbers. There’s concern that this will help you politically. Paul Ryan said if we do this deal, it will guarantee your reelection. If we agree with Barack Obama on spending and taxes, that takes away one of our big weapons.’ There were so many obstacles, some of them substantive — how much revenue, and what about the entitlements? — but there was also this overlay of ‘This is going to help Obama.’

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank

MJ=JC?

Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.

Nate Jones: He was an A-lister with an indisputable body of work; he was 50 years old, his hits were the right age — old enough that every generation knew them, but not too old that they weren’t relevant anymore.

LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.

NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.

LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.

Frank Guan: In a lot of ways, the culture prefers the death of artists to their continuing to live. Once an artist gets launched into the stratosphere, there’s no way to come down, and that permanence becomes monotonous. They run out of timely or groundbreaking material and the audience starts tuning out. At some point, their fame eclipses their art, and then the only way to get the general audience to appreciate them anew is for them to die.

LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt

A Rare Moment of Unity

“I was doing intensive rehabilitation in Houston at the time but was following the debate closely, and I was pretty disappointed at what was happening in Washington. I’d seen the debate grow so bitter and divisive and so full of partisan rancor. And I was worried our country was hurtling toward a disastrous, self-inflicted economic crisis. That morning, when it became clear the vote was going to be close, my husband, Mark, and I knew we needed to get to Washington quickly. I went straight from my rehabilitation appointment to the airport, and Mark was at our house in Houston packing our bags so he could meet us at the plane.

That night, I remember seeing the Capitol for the first time since I was injured and feeling so grateful to be at work. I will never forget the reception I received on the floor of the House from my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats. And then, like I had so many times before, I voted.

I worked so hard to get my speech back, and honestly, talking to people who share my determination helped me find my words again. I’ve been to Alaska, Maine, and everywhere in between. Best of all, I got back on my bike. Riding my bike once seemed like such a huge challenge. It seemed impossible.”

Miley Cyrus Twerks At The Mtv Vmassetting Off A Controversy About Cultural Appropriation That Soon Ensnares Seemingly Every White Pop Star On The Planet

• Karlie Kloss wears a Native American headdress and fringed bra at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

• Justin Timberlake is accused of appropriating black music when he tells a black critic “We are the same” after praising Jesse Williams’s BET Humanitarian Award speech about race and police brutality.

• DJ Khaled gets lost on Jet Ski, snaps the whole time.

• Two UW-Madison students snap their meet-cute as the entire student body cheers them on.

• Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers films and mocks an anonymous woman in the gym shower.

• A Massachusetts teen records the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim.

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs

Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.

Eric Cantors Stunning Primary Loss Suggests No Politician Is Safe From The Rage Of The Tea Party Not Even The Tea Partys Canniest Political Leader

From Party’s Future to Also-Ran in a Single Day

On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future. While his GOP-primary opponent, David Brat, visited polling places in and around Richmond, Virginia, Cantor spent his morning 90 miles away at a Capitol Hill Starbucks. He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House.

The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, he’d rallied waffling House Republicans to stand in lockstep opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he’d helped elect 87 new Republican members, giving the GOP a House majority and making Cantor the House majority leader. He became the champion of these freshmen members, stoking their radicalism during the debt-ceiling fight and working to undermine Obama and John Boehner’s attempt to strike a “grand bargain.” His alliance with the ascendant tea party was strategic — it gave him leverage not only over Obama but over other Republicans who might also have had aspirations of becoming Speaker. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.

In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit

They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.

Twenty-two million new jobs were added.

Unemployment dropped below 4%.

The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.

The budget deficit was eliminated.

There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession

You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.

Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.

In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity

Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:

The budget surplus immediately disappeared.

The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.

Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.

The poverty rate began climbing again.

We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.

In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Apple Announces That It Has Sold 100 Million Iphoneswithin A Few Months It Will Overtake Exxonmobil As The Most Valuable Company In The World

Earthlings Gain a New Appendage

What if we had the singularity and nobody noticed? In 2007, Barack Obama had been on the trail for weeks, using a BlackBerry like all the cool campaigners, when the new thing went on sale and throngs lined up for it. The new thing had a silly name: iPhone. The iPhone was a phone the way the Trojan horse was a horse.

Now it’s the gizmo without which a person feels incomplete. It’s a light in the darkness, a camera, geolocator, hidden mic, complete ­Shakespeare, stopwatch, sleep aid, heart monitor, podcaster, aircraft spotter, traffic tracker, all-around reality augmenter, and increasingly a pal. At the Rio Olympics you could see people, having flown thousands of miles to be in the arena with the athletes, watching the action through their smartphones. As though they needed the mediating lens to make it real.

This device, this gadget — a billion have been made and we scarcely know what to call it. For his 2010 novel of the near future, , Gary Shteyngart made up a word, “äppärät.” “My äppärät buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury.” Future then, present now. His äppäräti were worn around the neck on pendants. Ours are in our pockets when they aren’t in our hands, but they also sprout earbuds, morph into wristwatches and eyeglasses. Contact lenses have been rumored; implants are only a matter of time.

Let’s face it, we’ve grown a new organ.

Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism

In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.

Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.

An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.

Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.

In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.

Game Of Thrones Arrives On Televisionwith An Assemblage Of Dragons Torture Nudity Incest And Despair A Show The Whole Family Can Enjoy

Explaining Kale

ADAM PLATT: Many things in Foodlandia, these days, have a political element to them, and if you want to emblazon a flag to be carried into battle, you could do worse than a bristly, semi-digestible bunch of locally grown kale.

ALAN SYTSMA: To eat kale is to announce you’re a person who cares about the matters of the day.

AP: The idea of kale is much more powerful than kale itself. In short order it went from being discovered, to appreciated, to being something that was parodied. Frankly, I’m all for the parody.

AS: The same thing happened to pork. Remember bacon peanut brittle? Bacon-fat cocktails? There’s bacon dental floss.

AP: Ahhh, bacon versus kale. The two great, competing forces of our time.

AS: Do you think one gave way to the other?

AP: What we’re really talking about is artisanal bacon, and the more sophisticated-sounding pork belly, made from pigs that were lovingly reared at upstate farms and fed diets of pristine little acorns. Bacon is the great symbol in the comfort-food, farm-fresh-dining movement, a kind of merry, unbridled pulchritude. Kale is the righteous yin to pork’s fatty, non-vegan yang.

AS: But pork has an advantage: People like the way it tastes.

AP: That’s a huge advantage, one that will hopefully see it through to victory.

[iobjectfa20]

This painting is entitled Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps, painted in 2005 by American painter Kehinde Wiley. It comes from Wiley’s A New Republic exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum. This is possibly my favorite piece from the exhibition, though it’s a tough choice because they are all beautiful paintings. In this exhibition, Wiley reimagines famous master portraits, particularly those of famous subjects such as Napoleon, recasting the subjects as modern black models — many of which are strangers to him that he approached randomly on the street. This particular painting is a reimagining of Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques Louis-David, dated 1805.

How & Why I Chose This Piece

A friend of mine attending art school told me about this exhibition and I was incredibly excited to look into it. I found that the paintings were beautiful and profound, and decided I needed to share them as my contribution to the I Object! exhibit. As stated before, this painting was my favorite. As an English major, I often find myself studying, praising, contradicting, or otherwise discussing the many “greats” in the world of literature. Every professor and student in the English department can surely provide their personal perspectives on Hemmingway, Twain, Atwood, Shakespeare, and the many other literary “greats” of history. While the department at Simmons has recently opened up its English major requirements to be more flexible and allow for broader and more diverse subject matter in classes, we still in many ways glorify and champion the old “masters”. We forgive the misogyny of Charles Dickens because we love so much his tale of two cities, and we push Ezra Pound’s antisemitism out of mind so that we can enjoy his verse.

In speaking with my friend that attends art school, I find many similarities between our disciplines, particularly in this area. The art world has its own greats, and its own masterpieces which should be looked upon by every person who ever wishes to consider themself an artist in order to fully understand and appreciate art. I know someone who quit art school because her professor told her she could never be an artist. His reason? She didn’t understand Pollock. 

It is my opinion that the “masters”, in literature and in art, are not uncriticizable, and neither are their masterpieces. While Wiley’s paintings within the A New Republic exhibition depict famous paintings that I’m sure many art students would recognize, his reimagining of Napoleon Crossing the Alps stunned me; I recognized it instantly. I chose it for the recognition I felt when I saw it, and the joy it brought me upon seeing it. Napoleon Crossing the Alps has always been little more than a painting for me, albeit a famous one. This redirection of a painting that I knew, but had no particular fondness for, amazed me. I liked it better than the original. The original, a masterpiece of the 19th century, something I’ve seen a thousand times, something that would cost an inconceivable amount of money to purchase, has never impressed more than a tiny footprint in my memory. When I looked at Wiley’s piece, though, I knew it was better. Somehow, it felt that the subject was more important than Napoleon, represented more than Napoleon, and was driving a more important moment in history than Napoleon. I wanted to explore why I felt that way, and to discuss it here; especially in case someone else shared my feeling.

This Piece in the Context of Global Resistance / Rejection

While there is certainly lots of merit to objecting to mainstream narratives of classic art and reimagining pieces in a context that rejects oppressive norms, I think there is immeasurable worth in recognizing and appreciating the pieces that exist for the express purpose of resistance — the pieces whose defiance is instantly recognizable, and undeniable. Wiley’s works (especially this piece, in my opinion, though they do all work together to convey a message through the exhibition as a whole) are boldly and proudly defiant, and I think that that is well worth celebrating, so here I will do so. 

Firstly, I think that it is important to explore the foundations of this painting, which come from Napoleon Crossing the Alps. In the original painting, Napoleon is situated in the same manner as the man in Wiley’s portrait. His face is calm amidst the context of war, and his arm is raised in such a way that seems to be leading the viewer more so than the troops behind him. His hand is ungloved, which can symbolize transparency, or even an intention towards peace rather than violence. He sits atop the same white horse as the man in Wiley’s portrait; it was common for royalty to be portrayed in equestrian portraits. He appears confident, powerful, brave, and wealthy. Transferring these qualities onto the figure of a black man, especially in this case, a regular black man (that is, not someone who is rich and famous, but simply a man that Wiley approached on the street) is an incredibly bold and revolutionary choice that highlights the strength, determination, and power of black men. For David to paint Napoleon with these qualities could be interpreted as propagandist or pandering (especially since Napoleon never actually led his troops over the alps, but rather took a safer route following several days behind them.) However, the same posturing to portray a man who the viewer is not acquainted with, but now feels like they are, is a revolutionary choice.

When analyzing Wiley’s work, I think some of the most interesting things to note are the deliberate changes that Wiley made from David’s original Napoleon Crossing the Alps. It is glaringly obvious, for example, that the background has changed: the original painting portrays Bonaparte against a dull mountainous background, whilst Wiley’s piece is set against a bold pattern that resembles an expensive French fabric. The painting is bordered by an ostentatious golden frame. These details appear to be somewhat humorous choices on Wiley’s part; in a way he is parodying the imperiousness of the original painting, or paintings like it that similarly glorified monarchical figures. Wiley also included tiny images of sperm throughout the background of the painting — a subtle humorous commentary on the hypermasculinity of equestrian portraiture and famous portraits depicting men, particularly those involved in battle and/or positions of power.

Furthermore, Wiley changed the dress of the subject in this portrait from Napoleon’s royal, old-fashioned garb. The man in Wiley’s portrait is wearing Timberland boots, a camouflage outfit, and a bandana, which present a modern perspective on the militaristic theme of the original portrait. Napoleon’s royal blue coat can also be seen peeking out from under the man’s camouflage shirt, and he maintains Napoleon’s golden cloak. The man’s dress demonstrates simultaneously that he is a regular, modern black man, and also that he is greatly powerful. It is also notable that, while David’s painting contains the names Hannibal and Charlemagne as well as Bonaparte (Hannibal and Charlemagne were both generals who led troops over the alps, thus placing Bonaparte’s name amongst theirs demonstrated that he deserved recognition alongside these men) Wiley includes the name “Williams” amongst these names. Though we have no way of knowing who Williams is, it is a common last name of black Americans, as many names were wiped from history with slavery and enslaved people took on the surnames of their enslavers. It can be inferred that the man in the portrait’s surname is likely Williams, or that Williams is a name that Wiley feels is representative of him. Like Bonaparte, the man in the portrait never led troops over the alps. However, Wiley has likely found him deserving regardless of being placed amongst men who have done legendary things — powerful men that are leaders and changemakers.

This painting definitely made me consider Fanon’s philosophies on violence and decolonization. I found the painting to be something that honors Fanon. The original painting comes from a violent piece of history, and it glorifies one of history’s most famous conquerors of nations on his way towards more colonization. Wiley’s reimagining of the original portrait feels like it is symbolic of the undoing of the original. Wiley’s piece is not without violence — the man in the portrait still rides a warhorse, wears garments associated with war, and gestures as though he is leading troops — however, I believe that the violence of this portrait is a representation of justified, anti-colonialist violence, as Fanon describes. Napoleon has been ripped out of his own portrait and replaced. His clothes have been taken from him and now dress a man whose ancestors were likely ripped from their homes and dragged elsewhere, while the remainder of his ancestral home was colonized by European imperialists in no way unlike Napoleon. The portrait’s humorous subtleties make a mockery of the many royal portraits that precede it. It is an unabashed reversal of colonialism as Fanon describes; it demonstrates what it looks like when “the last become the first.”

When I look at the man in the portrait’s face and manner, I can’t help but think of Fanon. Though Napoleon has the same stature in the original portrait, Napoleon Crossing the Alps sits unfeelingly with me, while Wiley’s piece strikes me like few other paintings could. The man in the portrait, whom I do not know, as he is not famous or someone I’ve learned about in history in class, is looking directly at me, and he is gesturing that I move onwards. It feels as though he is demonstrating the ways in which power must be inverted and destroyed, as though it is my turn to push some entitled white man off his horse, climb on, and join Wiley and Williams on their journey across the alps and towards decolonization.

-Steph P.

[noxstellacaelum]

Filtering Female Characters Through the Male Gaze

Female characters filtered through the male gaze:  A (way) too long post about why we need a more diverse and inclusive approach to staffing showrunners, writers, directors, crew – heck, all roles -- in TV and movies.  

Yes, I know I am not the first person here on this.  

And note that while I have included a few tags b/c I talk about my frustration with Shadowhunters, Veronica Mars, the Irishman, Richard Jewell, and a few other recent shows/movies, I don’t get to this stuff until the very end,  I appreciate that fans may not want to wade through the entire essay, which (again), is a bit of personal catharsis.

I recently had a random one-off exchange with a TV writer on twitter.  The writer said that she had enjoyed the movie Bombshell much more than its Rotten Tomatoes rating would have suggested.  She wondered if the disconnect between her experience/perception of the movie and that of mainstream reviewers might have been shaped by gender: Specifically, she observed that Bombshell is a movie about women, but most reviewers are male.  

I have complicated feelings about Bombshell.  On one hand, yes, there was and is a toxic culture at Fox News.  Yes, Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly were victims of that toxic culture.  But no, these women were not mere bystanders:  They traded in the racism, misogyny, and xenophobia (for starters) that still characterize Fox News today.  Why should these wealthy, privileged white women – both of whom spent many years as willing foot soldiers in the Fox News army -- get a glossy, Hollywood-approved redemption/vindication arc?  On the other hand, I am glad that the movie makers made a film about sexual harassment, and that the movie presented Kelly, in particular, as an at least somewhat complicated character.  This would not be the first time that a movie about women – especially complicated, and not always likeable women – has proven to be polarizing.

My ambivalence about Bombshell notwithstanding, the writer with whom I exchanged tweets is (not surprisingly, since she is in the industry and I am not) on to something when it comes to gender, character development and critical reception. It’s not just that Bombshell was about women, but reviewed largely by men; it’s that stories about female characters (real or fictional) often are filtered through the male gaze in Hollywood:  On many projects – even those focused on female characters – creators/ head writers are male, directors are male, showrunners are male, and producers are male.  This matters, because preferencing the male gaze impacts what stories about women get told, who gets to tell them, and how these stories are received inside and outside Hollywood.  

First, though, the caveats. I do not mean to suggest that men can never tell great stories about women.  Of course they can.   I also don’t mean to suggest that being female exempts creators, writers, directors, showrunners, etc. from sexism or misogyny (or any other forms of bigotry, as my discussion of Bombshell suggests).   There are plenty of women who prop up the patriarchy.  Rebecca Traister’s work speaks to this issue, as does the work of Cornell philosopher Kate Manne.  There is an important literature on the concept of misogynoir (misogyny directed at black women, involving both gender and race), a term coined by black queer feminist Moya Bailey, as well.  Intersectionality matters in understanding what stories are told, who gets to speak, and how stories are received in and outside Hollywood.  I also don’t mean to suggest that there are no powerful women in Hollywood.   Shonda Rhimes; Ava DuVernay, Reese Witherspoon (increasingly, given her role as a producer of projects like Big Little Lies), Greta Gerwig’s work in Lady Bird and Little Women, and others come to mind.  As I am not in the entertainment industry, I am sure others could put together a far more complete and accurate list of female Hollywood power brokers.  And, finally, I appreciate that Hollywood is a business, and people fund and make movies that they think their target audiences want to see.  So long as young, male viewers are a coveted demographic, we are going to see projects with women who appeal to this demographic onscreen.

Given these caveats, why do I think that the filtering of female characters through the male gaze is an issue? For me, it has to do with a project’s “center of gravity” -- that place, at the core of the project’s storytelling, where the characters’ agency and autonomy comes from.  It’s where I look to understand the characters’ choices and their narrative arcs.  When a character’s center of gravity is missing or unstable or unreliable, the character’s choices don’t make sense, and their narrative arc lacks emotional logic. Center of gravity is not about whether a character is likeable.  It’s about whether a character – and the project’s overall storytelling and narrative voice – make sense.  

When female characters are filtered through a male gaze, a project’s center of gravity can shift, even if unintentionally, away from the characters’ agency and point of view:  So, instead of charting her own course through a story, a female character starts to become defined by her proximity to other characters and stories.  She becomes half of a “ship” . . . or a driver of other characters’ growth (often through victimization, suffering, or self-sacrifice) . . . or mostly an object of sexual desire (whether requited or not).   Eventually, she can lose her voice entirely.  When that happens, instead of a “living, breathing” (yes, fictional, I know) character, we are left with a mirror/ mouthpiece who advances the plot, and the stories, of everyone else.

What are some recent examples of this? The two that I have mentioned recently here are Shadowhunters and Veronica Mars S4.  

- With SHTV, I will always wonder what might have been if the show – which is based on books written by a woman, intentionally as a “girl power” story – had female showrunners. Would an empowered female showrunner have left Clary, THE PROTAGONIST OF A 6 BOOK SERIES – alone on an NYC street in a skimpy party dress, in November, with no money, no ID, no mother, no father figure and no love of her life, stripped of her memories, her magic, and chosen vocation, as punishment, after she saved the world?  Would a female showrunner have sidelined Clary’s love Jace, and left him grieving and suicidal, while his family lived their best lives and told him to move on?  Would a female showrunner have said, in press coverage of the series finale, that the future of the Clary and Jace characters was a matter for fan fiction?  After spending precious time in the series finale wrapping up narrative arcs for non-canon and/or ancillary characters.  And to my twitter correspondent’s point, I guess I am not surprised that mainstream entertainment media outlets didn’t call out the showrunners’ mistreatment of Clary, and by extension, Jace, and the obliteration of their narrative arcs -- and yes, I am looking at you, Andy Swift of TV line (who called the above-mentioned memory wipe “actually perfect”).

- Likewise, with Veronica Mars, would a more diverse and inclusive writers room have made S4 Veronica less insightful and less competent than her high school self, or quite so riven with self-loathing, or quite so careless and cruel with the people in her life who love her?  Would a more inclusive creative team have made S4 Veronica less aware of the class and race dynamics of Neptune, yet more casually racist, in her mid-30s, than she was in high school?

- There are so many other examples from 2019.  Clint Eastwood falsely suggesting that a female reporter (who is now deceased and thus unable to defend herself) traded sex for tips from an FBI agent in Richard Jewell. Game of Thrones treatment/resolution of the Ceresi and Daenerys characters – where to even start.  Martin Scorsese’s decision to give Oscar winner Anna Paquin’s character a total of 7 lines in the 3-plus hour movie the Irishman.

- And, in real life, I wonder whether a Hollywood that empowered and supported female creators would make sure that people like Mira Sorvino and Annabella Sciorra got a bunch of work while also making sure that Harvey Weinstein never again is in a position of power or influence.   Same with female comics targeted by Louis C.K. Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose … the list is long, and Kate Manne’s work on what she calls “himpathy” is useful here.

To be clear, I am not saying that stories involving “ships” of whatever flavor, stories of suffering and self-sacrifice, and stories of finding (or losing) intimate relationships are “bad” or “wrong” or inherently exploitive of female characters.  I don’t think that at all.  I also don’t think that female characters have to be perfectly well-adjusted, virtuous, or free from bias, or that they should never be make bad choices or mistakes.  I want female characters who are flawed, nuanced.  I don’t mind lives that are messy, or romantic entanglements that are complicated.  Finally, I don’t think that that faulty, reductive, or unfair portrayals of female characters is a new thing.  Mary Magdalene was almost certainly not a prostitute, after all.  And classicist Emily Wilson – the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English – has brought a hugely important perspective (including an awareness of how gender matters in translation) and voice to the translation and study of canonical characters and works.

At the end of the day, I just want female characters to be able to speak with their own voices, from their perspectives.  I want them to have their own, chosen, narrative arcs.  I want them to speak, act, see, and feel as autonomous individuals, with agency, and not just in reference to others.  And, I think that more a more diverse and inclusive approach to staffing writers rooms and in choosing show runners, directors, and key positions in storytelling would help.  

[faithfulnews]

Upstairs into the Plague

I was driving into work this morning and I hit the traffic jam. Every morning at about 6:30 am the traffic begins to back up on the highway leading into my medical center. It’s the morning shift — hundreds of nurses and clerks and aides and orderlies and housekeepers bleary-eyed and guzzling Starbucks and they wait to enter the parking garage and begin their (usually 12 hour) shift. I avoid the crush and go in the back way. It’s a bit of a walk but I need the exercise. 

When I got into the office, our team was waiting to make rounds. Several of them were on call overnight — they spent the night in the ER, seeing neurosurgery patients, amidst the crush of humanity with fevers and coughs. I’m lucky — I’m the professor, and I mostly go to the operating room — where it’s sterile and everyone wears masks. My team in the ER doesn’t have that luxury. They don’t complain. 

I worry about them. For their health, of course, but also because we really need them. Most of the neurosurgery emergency care for our very large county is provided by our department, and if our people get sick, a couple of million people will have difficulty getting care. We’re trying very hard to stay healthy in this COVID-19 pandemic, and to keep working and keep informed. 

Treat Coronavirus with Darwinian Theory?

The media is full of talking heads and experts. They’re mostly doing their best, but the ideologues and grifters are all too plentiful.  To wit, we get lots of “reminders” about the importance of evolutionary science and Darwin in the management of the coronavirus pandemic. 

“Geneticist Spencer Wells on COVID-19 as ‘Evolution in Action’”

“Biology | Basic evolution knowledge could have helped China control coronavirus”

“Evolution of an outbreak”

“Coronavirus — we need to learn from Darwin”

There’s no doubt that COVID-19 evolved: populations of viruses change with time. Of course, we know that from epidemiology and virology and simple observation. Darwin’s theory has little to do with epidemiology. Darwin proposed that all biological adaptation and speciation arose from wholly unintelligent processes. Given the ubiquitous evidence for intelligence in nature, this atheist biology was a tough sell without a mechanism by which the stunning tapestry of information-bearing life came about. In an epiphany, Darwin hit upon the explanation for life — survivors survived! Atheists at last were intellectually satisfied.

Darwin’s actual impact on epidemiology is minimal — his theory (published in 1859) mainly served to distract scientists and doctors from the real science on infectious disease that emerged from the work of Girolamo Fracastoro (16th-century physician who proposed that infections were caused by microorganisms), Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (17th century — discovered microorganisms), Thomas Sydenham (studied London epidemics in the 17th century), Edward Jenner (first smallpox vaccine — 1757)), Ignaz Semmelweis (discovered in 1847 that antisepsis prevented post-partum infections), John Snow (stopped cholera epidemic in London, 1854), Louis Pasteur (germ theory of disease), Joseph Lister (antiseptic surgery), Robert Koch (modern bacteriology), Paul Ehrlich (Nobel laureate who cured syphilis), Alexander Flemming (penicillin), Jonas Salk (polio vaccine), to name just a few. 

Fascinated by Barnacles

Darwin, who was mathematically illiterate and fascinated by barnacles, flunked out of medical school, married his (wealthy) first cousin, wrote a book on the origin of species by natural selection in which he provided no evidence for the origin of species by natural selection, and worked sporadically, mostly from bed. He would have required remedial training to get a job cleaning Pasteur’s test tubes. Yet his contribution to atheism, unlike his contribution to science, was epochal. 

A “Narrative Gloss”

Epidemiology, to which Darwinism is a “narrative gloss,” is an old and vigorous science. But there’s more to the amelioration of epidemics than superb science. The most important advance in preventing epidemics — probably more important than vaccinations and the gamut of 21st-century high-tech science — is low-tech public sanitation. There is probably nothing (except for food and water and blankets) that has saved more lives from epidemics than enforcement of the principle that drinking water and sewage water must not be the same water. And low-tech medical care is indispensable as well. Historian Rodney Stark points out that survival in epidemics is often more the consequence of ordinary courageous people who stick around and do their jobs than it is of sophisticated medical technology. This was the reason that Christian communities in antiquity had much higher survival rates than pagan communities during epidemics. Christians would stick around — at risk to themselves — and would not flee and abandon plague victims to die of starvation or exposure. The most effective medical care in a plague is someone who gives a damn. 

Of course many modern scientists are doing good vital work in this pandemic. Kudos to the virologists and epidemiologists and critical care specialists who are working hard to save lives. We need to understand virology and develop anti-viral medications and develop strategies to “flatten the curve” of the pandemic. But to those politicians and science grifters who would use this catastrophe for partisanship or ideology, give it a break. Spin and evolutionary tautologies are just a pandemic of an intellectual sort. 

Running Toward Danger

What we need right now is captured in an image from 9-11 — this coronavirus pandemic reminds me of that time. It’s a picture of a fireman in Tower 1 running up stairs, when everybody was running down. You could see in his face that he knew what he was facing. He had no illusions. There are people who run towards things like that. 

Every night, when most of us have put away our favorite novel and switched off our remote classroom link on our university-bought computer and done our last wipe with Purell before bed, the midnight-shift stock boys at Shop Rite will begin restocking the shelves with toilet paper and food, working through the night in aisles trodden by thousands of panicked (and a few febrile) shoppers. In the hospital the housekeepers on the 11-7 shift will clean patients’ rooms, scrubbing walls and toilets that the rest of us wouldn’t touch without a hazmat suit. And the nurses on the night shift will wipe the mucous and hold the hand of someone’s grandmother who is gasping for breath in the ICU. 

Every stock boy or housekeeper or nurse is doing more to fight this pandemic than all the politicians and talking-head science grifters and tenure-track professors in the department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. And more than all the neurosurgery professors, too. 

So say a prayer, whether evolutionary biologists like it or not. Pray for the stock boys and the housekeepers and the nurses. Pray for the people on the front line — the people waiting in line at the hospital parking garage at 6:30 am. 

Pray for the people running into this plague when everyone else is running away.  

Photo credit: David Mark via Pixabay.

The post Upstairs into the Plague appeared first on Evolution News.

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[roadsiderose]

Huckleberry Finn and the Missing Prince

I read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when I was a kid, and I think I liked this book more than the one on Tom Sawyer. I chuckled reading this theory for the first time, it brought back memories of the book. 

This post was originally posted on the reddit forums by /u/wren42. I scour the forums for posts like these, that show the literary or historical significance of plotlines, characters. Here it is...

Introduction

A while back there was a post about our favorite subtle allusions in ASOIAF, and I mentioned Huck Finn. A few posters were curious to see a longer writeup of the parallels -- so here it is. =)

The chapters detailing Aegon’s travels on the Rhoyne have often been noted by astute readers as containing references to another famous river trip - Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

There are obvious parallels in narrative and the imagery GRRM chooses: Young GrifFinn wears an iconic straw hat and travels down a river on a barge having adventures.

If these similarities weren’t blatant enough, GRRM drops this bit in ADWD:

The Upper Rhoyne was full of snags and Sawyers, any one of which could rip out the Shy Maid's hull. Griff did not want to hear it. What he wanted was Volantis.

A sawyer is an unusual and archaic word -- “a fallen tree stuck on the bottom of a river, where it constitutes a danger to boating” -- it’s also of course the name of Huck Finn’s partner in crime Tom Sawyer.

Most people assume the connections stop here, and that these cheeky winks are just a cute cosmetic reference, like the Wheel of Time or Harry Potter easter eggs.

However, when you dig deeper into Huck Finn, you can find connections to a popular tinfoil subplot:

**I believe Young Griff’s similarity to Huck Finn is actually an intentional subtextual clue to his Blackfyre lineage. **

The story of Huck Finn contains thematic and narrative elements that GRRM may have purposefully drawn from in crafting the Blackfyre subplot. George is known to do this - he draws heavily from English and French history as well has various mythologies both for world-building inspiration and specific plot points. I believe that GRRM included the Huck Finn references because he was amused by the cleverness of the thematic parallels with the Blackfyre story.

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" isn’t just the story of a kid floating down a river -- it features mistaken identities, blood feuds between two aristocratic houses and the extermination of the male bloodline of one, and a pair of con artists who falsely pretend to be royalty "the duke and the king" and put on a mummers show to scam money. These themes are reflected as in a dark mirror in GRRMs secret fAegon Blackfyre subplot.

The False Nephew

The core conceit of the blackfyre conspiracy theory is that fAegon is not the long lost son of Rhaegar, but in fact a descendant of the bastard Blackfyre line, found by Varys or the Golden Company(depending who you ask), and put forward as a pretender in order to hijack the throne.

So how is Finn similar to fAegon?

Both Young Griff and Finn falsely pretend to be the Nephew of an influential family to cheat them.

Huck Finn’s plot is rife with cases of mistaken identity, disguises, con-men, and pretenders. However the most notable is his identity swap with the infamous Tom Sawyer. Near the climax of the story Finn arrives in a distant town and insinuates himself into a wealthy family by pretending to be the Nephew of Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps. He uses this position to help effect the escape of his friend Jim from slavery.

Why does this matter?

The true Aegon would be Daenerys’ nephew -- but Young GrifFinn isn’t truly her nephew, he’s a fake. The mistaken identity in Huck Finn is paralleled in fAegon’s false claim and attempt to steal the throne from Danny.

And this isn’t the only such clue -- Huck Finn features other cons and pretenders, even some who claim, laughably, to be nobility.

Noble Pretenders and Stolen Inheritance

In Huck Finn two con artists “The Duke and the King” pretend to be royalty and perform various stunts to rob people.

They introduce themselves as the long-lost heirs of noble houses, one to the Duke of Bridgewater, the other as the Lost Dauphin, the King of France Louis XVII.

Louis XVII’s actual history is of keen interest here, and with it we start to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

History of the Lost Dauphin

During the French Revolution, where the long standing dynastic monarchy was overthrown, Louis XVI was imprisoned and executed. Louis XVII was actually the second son of the king, but his elder brother had died leaving him as heir apparent.

Little Louis-Charles was technically recognized as King by the nobles but never ruled and was kept imprisoned by the new Republic government. This is where the conspiracy theories start to spring up.

Immediately after his father’s death, plots were hatched to free Louis-Charles from confinement, but these came to nothing at the time, and eventually he died of illness in captivity under mysterious circumstances -- it being suspected that his doctor was murdered by poison. However, popular theories abounded in the day and for many years afterward of conspiracies to smuggle the child out of confinement in the Temple tower. They proposed that the autopsy and burial records had been falsified, and that in fact the boy had lived and been spirited away.

Rumours abound and when the monarchy was restored some 20 years later, hundreds of claimants pretending to be the “Lost Dauphin” came forward to attempt to take the throne.

GRRM The Histrogrifter

This is perhaps one of the most famous stories of a lost prince in European history, and GRRM would certainly have studied it in preparing his narrative around the Targaryen Restoration. It’s well established that he based the history of westeros on English and French history and this plot could not have been overlooked.

Thus, the appearance of a Dauphin pretender in Huck Finn can be taken as something GRRM would have noted, given he’s included references to Huck in fAegon’s chapters. Here is an obviously false claimant pretending to be the long-lost heir of a royal bloodline whose throne is about to be restored - a juicy intrigue to parallel in his own story!

And indeed, in fAegon we have an heir presumed dead after a revolution, only to supposedly have been spirited away by Varys during the sack of King’s Landing, and appearing later as a false claimant when the original line is restored. The similarity to Louis Charles is stunning.

Scammers, Swindlers, and Mummers

The antics of the “Duke and the King” provide the basis for other allusions in ASOIAF as well.

Later in the story the group arrives in the town of the primary target -- a recently deceased nobleman who has left a large inheritance to his daughters. The “Duke” pretends to be the missing heir of this nobleman to swindle the Heiresses of their fortune -- again paralleled by fAegon’s royal pretensions attempting to steal the Iron Throne from Daenerys. But of course, the Duke, like fAegon, is a fraud.

The two con-men engage in a variety of schemes, one of which involves putting on a play -- or mummer’s farce, if you will -- entitled “The Royal Nonesuch” -- ie a play about false royalty. The play is a bawdy flop and complete ripoff of the town’s populace, and they eventually have to flee for their lives or risk being hung.

These themes are also hinted at in the Duke and King’s theatrical fumbles -- in addition to the “Royal Nonesesuch” the pair practices scenes from Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, and Macbeth, the former of course being the archetypal tale of feuding families (which we will revisit shortly), while the later two are again stories about wars to usurp a throne.

These theatrical elements have been worked into AOSIAF via references to fAegon as the “Mummer’s Dragon”, and parallels in his story to those of Richard and Macbeth. It has been theorized that, just as the townspeople turn on the Duke and Dauphin when they learn the truth, the people of Westeros will turn on fAegon when his false identity is revealed.

Family Feud and the Extermination of a Male Bloodline

So we’ve established the falseness of fAegon’s claim, but how do we get to the Blackfyres, specifically?

The answer comes from another conflict Huck stumbles upon during his adventures.

The Blackfyres were a branch house of the Targaryen dynasty, started from a bastard line. After the wars that settled the legitimacy of their claim, they retreated into the east, and ultimately the male bloodline was believed to have been wiped out. Did GRRM draw inspiration from Huck Finn for this part of the story as well?

Huck Finn’s parallel to the Targaryens and Blackfyres comes in the form of the conflict between the Shephersons and Grangerfords. These two bitter rival families are engaged in a 30 year blood feud, and Huck quickly becomes entangled in their war. Notably, the Grangerfords have a son Huck’s age who he befriends, and is then shocked to see gunned down in a firefight. Like the Blackfyres, the males of the Grangerford family are wiped out, ending the feud. This section can also be seen as an additional reference to Romeo and Juliet, as the final confrontation is kicked off by a forbidden tryst between children from opposing families.

If GRRM is drawing on Huck as a model for fAegon, then this conflict should play a prominent role in his story. fAegon should be not just a royal pretender, but a pretender tangled up in a long standing blood feud between two aristocratic families -- the Blackfyres and Targaryens.

One other subtle hint in Huck Finn supports the idea that fAegon is from a bastard royal line.

During their elaborate plot to break Jim out of captivity, Huck and Tom form a secret nation, complete with a royal coat-of-arms. Among the many superfluous and conflicting components of the crest, Tom insists they include a "bar sinister" -- the mark of a bastard line.

Finn and the Future

So we’ve established a strong connection between Huck Finn’s narrative and the Blackfyre subplot in ASOIAF -- but what might these parallels say about the future of fAegon’s story?

At least two plotlines from Huck Finn appear to be relevant here.

The ending of Huck Finn centers on the plot to free Jim from slavery out from under Tom’s Aunt Sally (which, you recall, parallels Danny as fAegons ‘aunt’). Tom hatches an absurdly complicated plan based on his ideas from romantic adventure stories.

This romanticism is reflected in Young Griff’s naivete and impulsiveness, traits that will likely lead to his downfall. In wanting to live out his romanticized vision of a great Conquering King, fAegon will be led to make unrealistic and foolish decisions. fAegon’s ultimate fate will likely be failure and defeat, brought on by his own naivete. Like Tom and Huck, he will act based on how he imagines a romanticized story would go, rather than on the practicalities of the situation, and in the end will be betrayed by the cold hard reality.

The second portion of Huck Finn that may become relevant is the fate of the Duke and King when their frauds are discovered. In the case of the “Royal Nonesuch”, they are run out of town at risk to their lives when the people discover they’ve been swindled.

It’s quite possible that fAegon’s claim will be delegitimized in some way, and the people of Westeros will turn against him. Where they first hailed him as a hero, once his true identity is discovered they will resent being duped and rise up against his claim.

How might this happen?

As a final spurious bit of tinfoil- in attempting to identify the true identity of the Duke after trying to steal the girls’ inheritance, the town is forced to exhume the dead brother’s body for evidence. While we can’t say for certain this detail would have any bearing on GRRM’s plot, it could perhaps be read as a hint about the identity of some trueborn heir in a certain crypt…

Were several claimants to all argue for their legitimacy, it would be a beautiful and subtle allusion on GRRMs part to mimic Huck Finn again in the conclusion of fAegon’s arc, and have Jon emerge as the true heir as a result of evidence exhumed from the Crypts of winterfell.

Thanks for your attention, I hope you enjoyed this little literary float trip. =)

[nalyra-dreaming]

How does rock star Lestat fit in with the possible Merrick timeline of the show?

Hey nonny! Well... when they played "Come to me" in Dubai Daniel's reaction to that was quite interesting.

He said: "That's his voice?"

Now, obviously, it could have been the amazement of hearing Lestat's voice for the first time, or the sheer fact that there was any recording, but... it seemed a bit off.

What if the Rockstar era has already happened and Daniel has been around. What if he has been interviewing Lestat even? What if he recognized his voice but couldn't yet remember why? What if there are recordings of interviews and music videos etc? Could even be on his Mac there :))) It's an interesting thing to ponder, because it carries implications for the Devil's Minion story line, too. In the books, Armand eventually turns Daniel because of the threat Akasha poses. Which is a direct consequence of Lestat's little career.

Now Armand obviously decided differently, here. Imho, that doesn't necessarily mean that QotD has not happened yet.

It could be the explanation though why Daniel doesn't remember.

Why Armand wiped Daniel's memories.

Tbh, I'm massively looking forward to Daniel regaining his memories.

I think they did a brilliant job interweaving the backstory and modern story, because both carry so much weight for the complete narrative.

Daniel's memories are the key to our knowledge of where in the books we are - combined with Louis' state of mind.

Now, not everything in the books needs to have happened already.

But with the way Armand was obsessed with Daniel for years... something must have happened to prompt him to let him go again. (Oh, come to think of it - I would absolutely ADORE Queen of the Damned from Daniel's and Armand's POV?!?? Like, twisting the "interview" around??? With Lestat and Louis there (later on) you have all the really important POVs right there. They could have a big discussion, with some bitching and rewritten and retold scenes, too.^^ I'd love that.)

[fantroll-purgatory]

I hope TR is ok! Of all the things i expected as an intro that was the most concerning :[ Anyway with that out of the way, I’ve decided to rope this guy in lieu of Lutifi’s revision.

I’m doing okay-ish! I was dealing with repetitive stress injuries in both wrists and those are moooostly on the way out but now I have sprained my ankle because I am a comic relief character in a cartoon lmao.

World: Alternia

Name: Haneul: meaning “heaven/sky” in Korean. and Caeles surprisingly having no meaning when I looked it up but it it could be a variation of Caelestis, a late latin term which meant “of the sky, heavenly”.

Hmmmm. I find it really, really interesting that you have a sky-themed Blood player. Especially when so many other aspects of his character have to do with limiting freedoms.

If I may suggest a potential alternate name, perhaps Haneul Catena, the last name meaning “chain?”

Age: Possibly around 6-7 sweeps

Theme/Story: Originally, he had no real theme until I sent in Serena, the purple blooded mafia boss. That is when he became her brawn, getting things done that Serena herself can’t do. Then with Lutifi’s revamp, this gave him the perfect opportunity to act as a co-regent for Lutifi when he is out and about with his surfing. So now he is an agent for Serena as well as a consultant for ruling with Lutifi like how Louis XIII of France heavily relied on Cardinal Richelieu. In light of this co-regency, Haneul has also thwarted several assassination attempts on Lutifi during his surfing competitions. Later in his session, he would eventually snap and cause a bloodbath nearly wiping out the entire session, destroying the bonds of all the players. Yet the Seer of Time survives and goes back and warns the past Seer about that timeline.

I am curious: what does the Seer of Time do differently to ensure he doesn’t cause a TPK?

Goals: Mostly a check if everything fits together narratively and such. If a re-design is needed, then sure design away!

Specibus: I would go with Hookkind, like roadhog’s hook

Fetch Modus: Prison: Basically when you capchalogue something it is closed off by bars. To retrieve the item, you must captchalogue another item. Below the area labelled “Required”, either the item’s name is written or the item is pictured. When nothing appears, you have to give it money, which is why this modus is a complete ass sometimes.

Nice! So it’s a bribery system, almost? Perhaps you could have particular important items set “bail,” meaning they can leave if they provide the requested item and will give them back to you when the important item is recaptchalogued.

Blood: Violet, It was a bit brighter at one point, then I changed it to be closer to cannon.

Given the strong themes of imprisonment/freedom binaries I may possibly suggest making him teal.

Symbol: A bit swirly compared to the other violet signs…

Handle: thonicAcidaemia

Quirk: ᔕ SurroundS hiS SentenceS with theSe weird S thingS ᔕ

Ehhhh as far as I can tell that’s just a letter from the Canadian aboriginal alphabet and doesn’t seem to contribute to any kind of theme. How about he:

§ Open§ up hi§ §entence§ with §ection §symbols?

It’s frequently used to reference sections in legal code and T B H at this point I am very strongly advocating that you make him a tealblood.

Lusus: Possibly a Sea Snail of some kind

If you wanna keep him violet I’m not sure a snail would be appropriate unless he is very very slow. Given his need to be adaptable in situations, may I suggest maybe a ligerfish, with the spines of a lionfish and the teeth of a tigerfish? Beautiful, ethereal, fulla teef.

If you make him teal, I would suggest a flying squirrel! It works nicely with his dual grounding/freedom themes.

Interests: He keeps most of them a secret but has a soft spot for the equivalent of extreme sports are on Alternia. Every now and then he likes to build model hives but they always end up as if a hurricane swept through them due to his short temper outside of his work.

Personality: A Rough ‘n Tumble sort of guy. He mostly keeps a stoic “don’t give a fuck” sort of facade during his odd jobs.

Dream Planet:  Derse; Honestly i’m not certain on the whole dichotomy on how the sways work.

If you’re looking for a guide, CD wrote an excellent one right here, but based on what you’ve given me I’m unsure, and I think it’s up to you! Does he resent having to babysit Lutifi, or is he delighted to have purchase on this kind of power? I think the latter would be a Dersite and the former a Prospitan.

Title: Bard of Blood

I agree that he’s a Blood player, but given what you’ve written in the bio I have no way of determining if he’s a Bard. If he invites destruction through bonds, is it because he enables poor ruling decisions through his friendship with Lutifi? Is it because he uses people’s bonds against them to rip his session apart?

Land: Land of Sulfur and Brimstone: Now that I look at this, it sounds like Hell II: Electric Bugaloo

I like it! I would kinda love it if you had a gag where he walks around his land with a clothespin on his nose.

So here’s a redesign for if you re-spec him to teal! If you wanna keep him violet I still gave design notes you could incorporate.

Horns - gave ‘em a little S-curve!

Hair - Hair in Alternia is rarely as neat as the one on the left, so I sprited it messier

Face - the face was looking a little ripped from canon sprites so I wanted to edit all of it to look more unique. Also I added teef because I like them.

Coat - I removed the hood because it looked awkward and didn’t really seem to add to the flow of his design?

Symbol - I just used the section symbol on its side since it already looked similar to the symbol you sprites

Shorts - Equius’s shorts, to show off the…

Boots - which are adapted from fan-troll, which I meanly wanted to use to again contrast the flowiness of the cloak to the groundedness of the shoe.

That’s about it! Thanks for your patience with the review.

-TR

[imaginingmarvelandeverything]

English Assignment

Request: Can you do a imagine where the reader is a huge nerd and she’s Billy's partner on a English project and well the both of them are at his place working she goes to his out to his car to grab a book she left in the backseat, passing his drunk dad on his way out of the house, and comes back to his room to see him crying and she knows because she’s been there (abused) and its just fluff of her comforting him and he wraps his arms around her frame holding on desperately and into cries her chest

Pairing: Billy Hargrove x Reader

Warnings: Abuse, swearing, Billy’s asshole dad

Word Count: 1291

A/N: If anyone ever needs to talk please feel free to message me about anything. Thank you for the request. I have quite a few lined up to write over the next few days. Requests are open.

Prompt List

Masterlist

English Literature was possibly Y/N’s favourite subject. She loved to read and write and was enthralled by the words which flowed on the page. Currently they were study Robert Louis Stevenson’s: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. While it wasn’t one of her favourite books, Y/N loved the writing style and the narrative. Most of the class would disagree with her and would often call it boring or stupid. The only part of English that Y/N hated were the paired assignments. Teachers had a habit of pairing high achieving students with the kids who needed their grade to be pulled up somehow. While most of these kids were actually far from being dumb, they just lacked the motivation.

“Y/N L/N, you will be paired with Billy Hargrove.” The teacher read out and Y/N sighed.

She had never actually spoken to the newish boy but had heard all the gossip about him around school. A few girls at the back let out annoyed sighs as the teacher finished reading from the list and people began to get up to leave. Y/N took her time packing away; she was in no hurry to get to lunch.

“Hey.” Y/N looked up to find the source of the voice was her new English partner.

“Hey.” She replied as she finished packing away her books.

“I was wondering when you wanted to work on the project?” Billy asked with a small smile as he followed her out of the classroom. His voice was softer than the times she had heard him talking.

“Whenever is fine for you.” Y/N said with a small smile lifting the corners of her lips.

“You free tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, meet me outside after school and we can go to my place.” He smiled at her before walking off to meet his friends.

When the bell signalled the end of the day Y/N began to get really nervous. She packed up her biology books as quickly as she could and then made her way outside. Billy was already leaning up against the side of his Camaro with a cigarette between his lips. He dropped it, crushed it under the heel of his shoe and smiled as he saw her.

“Hey.” Y/N said as she walked over to him.

“Hey.” He smiled wider as he opened the door for her. She climbed in and he shut it for her. That was when Y/N noticed the younger redhead sat in the back.

“You must be Billy’s sister, I’m Y/N.”

“Step-sister. I’m Max.” The girl smiled. Billy climbed into the car and set off. “So, are you two...?” Max trailed off.

“Working on an English assignment.” Billy quickly shot back as Y/N started blushing. He shot a look over at her and smiled slightly as he put the radio on.

The rest of the drive was silent and they quickly reached the house. Y/N climbed out of the car and held the seat down for Max to climb out. The girl thanked her before quickly running inside the house. Y/N grabbed her backpack. She followed Billy up to the house and thanked him as he held the door open.

He showed her to his room. “You want anything to eat or drink?”

“Water please.” She smiled.

He left to get it and she surveyed his room. It was messy but not as much as she would have expected. There was a full ash tray on one of his sides and cologne and hair products on another. She perched herself on the edge of the bed before pulling out the assignment and her copy of Jekyll and Hyde.

“Here you go, sweetheart.” Billy said handing her the water as he came back into the room. The front door opened and then slammed shut and Y/N looked at him questionably. “It’s just my dad.”

They quickly set off working and Y/N was surprised with how much Billy actually contributed. They were making good progress but also talking about themselves in between. It actually turned out that the pair had quite a lot in common. Mainly their movie and music taste but they were becoming quick friends.

“Shit.” Y/N muttered looking through her bag.

“What?” Billy asked looking up at her from his position laying on the bed.

“I think my folder might have fallen out in your car.” Y/N explained.

“Here.” Billy smiled and threw her his keys. “Go look, I’ll finish this bit.”

She smiled back at him before quickly leaving to go to the car. She didn’t notice Billy’s dad sat in the living room as she walked past. The man quickly got to his feet and stumbled into his son’s room.

“You bringing your whores here now?” Neil Hargrove asked as his son shot of the bed.

“We’re doing an English assignment, sir.” Billy said.

In a flash Billy was pinned against his shelves; his father’s hands on his denim jackets sides. “You think I’m stupid.”

“Of course not.” Billy said before a fist connected with his cheek.

“Of course not, what?” Neil spat.

“Sir.” Billy muttered.

“That’s better.” Neil said before dropping Billy to the floor. Billy curled into himself.

Y/N passed Neil Hargrove in the hall and muttered a quick greeting that the man didn’t return. She walked into Billy’s room and dropped her folder to the floor as she saw Billy on the floor.

“Billy?” She muttered in shock.

“Shut the door and lock it.” Billy chocked out.

She did as he said before kneeling down in front of him on the floor. “Did... Did your dad...?” She stumbled over her words as she looked at the boy she had been laughing with minutes before, now crumbling on the floor.

Billy merely nodded. Like always the tears were beginning to run down his cheeks. Y/N moved closer to him and reached out her arms. He folded into her and buried his head in her chest; both his arms wrapped around her waist. She slid one arm around his back and threaded the other through his hair. She could feel his tears starting to dampen her shirt. She lost track of just how long they sat on the floor before he pulled away shakily.

“You should tell someone.” Y/N whispered.

“Like who? Who would actually care?” Billy chuckled humorously and brokenly.

“I would.” She murmured and his eyes shot up to meet hers. “You could tell Hopper.”

“I couldn’t.” He muttered before standing up and pulling her up with him. He started grabbing everything they had been using. “Let’s go someplace else.” He wiped a hand over his face as she helped him start to pick up books.

At the beginning of today, Billy Hargrove had been a stranger. Now she was determined to help him out of this living hell. 

[patriotsnet]

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-republicans-riot-after-obama-was-elected/

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

Undocumented Kids Are Saved By Obamas Executive Order Daca Which Would Put A Halt To Deportation For Those Whod Entered The Country Before Age 16 And Yet In A Bid To Get The Gop To Come Over To His Side On Immigration Reform The President Has Also Deported A Record 15 Million People In His First Term

A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo

When Belsy Garcia saw her mother’s number appear on her iPhone on the afternoon of June 15, she felt what she calls the “uncomfortable fluttering” sensation in her chest. She knew that daytime calls signaled an emergency. The worst one had come the previous year, when her sister told her ICE agents had placed their father in federal custody.

Garcia was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when her father was marched out of her childhood home. As an undocumented immigrant — like both of her parents, who are from Guatemala — she couldn’t qualify for loans. She financed her ­education through scholarships and a stipend she earned as a residential assistant. Now she wondered if her mother was calling to say her father had been deported, which might force her to leave school to become the family’s breadwinner.

But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”

Onscreen, President Obama was announcing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children could apply for Social Security numbers and work permits. Garcia qualified: Her parents had brought her to this country when she was 7 years old. DACA transformed her into a premed student who could actually become a doctor. “It was like this weight was lifted,” she says. “All of that hard work was going to pay off.”

In The Next Hundred Days Our Bipartisan Outreach Will Be So Successful That Even John Boehner Will Consider Becoming A Democrat After All We Have A Lot In Common He Is A Person Of Color Although Not A Color That Appears In The Natural World Whats Up John Barack Obama White House Correspondents Dinner

And Then There Were Three

The first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court did so in 1880. It would take another 101 years for a woman to sit on that bench rather than stand before it. Even then, progress was fitful. Over the 12 years that Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg served together, their identities evidently merged; lawyers regularly addressed Ginsburg as “Justice O’Connor.” When O’Connor retired in 2006, she left the faux Justice O’Connor feeling lonely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of something far more alarming: What the public saw on entering the court were “eight men of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side.” They might well represent the most eminent legal minds in America. But there was something antiquated, practically mutton-choppy, about that portrait.

How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.

Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Ladenraiding His Secret Compound In Abbottabad Pakistan While Obama And His Top Advisers Watch A Live Feed Of The Mission From The White House Situation Room The Picture Of The Assembled Becomes The Last Supper Of The Obama Era

Poop Feminism

For me, it’s one moment. All the bridesmaids have come to the fancy bridal shop to see Maya Rudolph try on wedding dresses. This should be a familiar scene: The bride emerges from the changing room and … This is the dress! The friends clap. The mother cries. Everyone is a princess. Go ahead and twirl!

But when the bride emerges in Bridesmaids, almost all of her friends have started to feel sick. Sweat coats their skin. Red splotches creep over their faces. They try to “ooh” and “aah,” but it’s already too late. It starts with a gag from Melissa McCarthy, followed by another gag. Then a gag that comes simultaneously with a tiny wet fart. It’s the smallness of the fart that’s important here. It’s the kind of fart that slips out — a fart that could be excused away, a brief, incongruous accident. Women don’t fart in wedding movies, and women certainly don’t fart at the exact moment that the bride comes out in her dress. This can’t be happening. ­Melissa McCarthy blames the fart on the tightness of her dress. We breathe a sigh of relief.

Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?

The camera cuts. We are above now. We look down from a safe perch as the release we have been anticipating and dreading begins. It is horribly, earth-­shatteringly gross. A woman has just pooped in a sink. The revolution has begun.

The Government Acquires A 61 Percent Stake In Gm And Loans The Company $50 Billion The Auto Bailout Will Eventually Be Heralded As A Great Success Adding More Than 250000 Manufacturing Jobs To The Economy

The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted

“The president was very clear with us that he only wanted to do stuff that would fundamentally change the way they did business. And that’s what we did. There were enormous changes. For example, General Motors had something like 300 different job classifications that the union had. If you were assigned to put the windshield wipers on, you couldn’t put tires on. And we wiped all that stuff out. We basically gave back management the freedom to manage, to hire, to fire. People stopped getting paid even when they were on layoff. We reduced the number of car plants so that there wasn’t so much overcapacity. So now, when you have 16 million cars sold , they’re making a fortune.”

Black Lives Matter Activists Are Arrested In Baton Rouge Louisianaprotesting The Murder Of Alton Sterling; More Than 100 People Are Detained In St Paul Minnesota Protesting The Murder Of Philando Castile

What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?

Melissa Dahl: The Fitbit was introduced at a tech conference eight years ago. It’s kind of incredible to realize that, before then, this idea of the “quantified self” didn’t really exist in the mainstream.

Jesse Singal: I feel like it’s the intersection of all these different trends: Everyone plays video games these days. You got smartphones everywhere. And people are realizing that solutions to the big problems that lead to sleeplessness and anxiety and bad eating — unemployment and income inequality and yada yada yada — aren’t gonna get solved anytime soon.

MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.

Cari Romm: It feels like productive stress, though. I’m talking as a recovered Fitbit obsessive, but it does make you look at Fitbit-less people like, “You mean you don’t care how many steps you took today?”

MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.

JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-­inducing sleep app could help, though?

MD: There’s some aspect to the tracking idea that really does work. I mean, it’s just a higher-tech version of a food journal or sleep journal, right? Ben Franklin 300 years ago was tracking his 13 “personal virtues” in his diary.

JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?

Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later

On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings

In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.

Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident

“I Know I Let Everybody Down”

“Before the debate, David Plouffe and I went in to talk to him and give him a pep talk and he said, ‘Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,’ which is not what you want to hear from your candidate right before the debate. We knew within ten minutes that it was going to be a ­debacle. We had armed him with a joke — it was his 20th anniversary, and he addressed Michelle — and it turns out Romney was expecting just such a line and had a really great comeback. And Romney was excellent — just free and easy and clearly well prepared and showed personality that people hadn’t seen before. Obama looked like he was at a press conference.

We had a meeting at the White House and he said, ‘I know I let everybody down and that’s on me, and I’m not going to let that happen again,’ and that was his attitude. We always had debate camps before, where we’d re-create in hotel ballrooms what the set would look like, and all of the conditions of the real debate. When we went down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the next debate camp, he seemed really eager to engage in the prep. We had a decent first night. That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. It was like he’d taken a step back.

Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy

Plan B

“I’m talking to Rahm and Jim Messina and saying, ‘Okay, explain to me how this happened.’ It was at that point that I learned that our candidate, Martha Coakley, had asked rhetorically, ‘What should I do, stand in front of Fenway and shake hands with voters?’ And we figured that wasn’t a good bellwether of how things might go.

This might have been a day or two before the election, but the point is: There is no doubt that we did not stay on top of that the way we needed to. This underscored a failing in my first year, which was the sort of perverse faith in good policy leading to good politics. I’ll cut myself some slack — we had a lot to do, and every day we were thinking, Are the banks going to collapse? Is the auto industry going to collapse? Will layoffs accelerate? We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year, and the loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president or elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate your ideas. But it happened, and the question then was, ‘What’s next?’

Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry

The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out

After decades of chilly backlash, we find ourselves, these past eight years, in an age of feminist resurgence, with feminist websites and publications and filmmakers and T-shirts and pop singers and male celebrities and best-selling authors and women’s soccer teams. Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: furious clashes over the direction and quality of the discourse, especially as the movement has become increasingly trendy, shiny, and celebrity-backed.

Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. It was the furor over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who gave a viral 2010 TED Talk about women in the workplace who “leave before they leave” — who alter their professional strategy to accommodate a future they assume will be compromised by parenthood — which led to the publication of her 2013 feminist business manifesto, Lean In.

It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions

“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”

“I was given an enormous degree of latitude. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have. There’s only one exception to that, and it was on marriage equality, in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case in 2013. We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. But we didn’t have to do it . And because it was a discretionary judgment, and it was such a consequential step, that was the one matter where I really sought out the president’s personal guidance. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake. He was incredibly impressive.

A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi

A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways

“The president of the United States and the Speaker of the House, the two most powerful elected officials in Washington, decided in a conversation that they both had to try to make something happen. Maybe it would be the way it worked in a West Wing episode in a world that doesn’t work like a West Wing episode. That’s how it started — two individuals saying we’re going to try. I think they both shared a belief in the art of the possible, and they both did not think compromise was a dirty word.

When our cover was blown — a Wall Street Journal editorial came out saying that Boehner and Obama were working on this and attacking the whole premise — that was devastating. It resulted in Cantor being a part of the talks. Cantor and Boehner came in, and I think it was a weekend private session with the president in the Oval Office, and they were talking about the numbers. At one point Cantor said, ‘Listen, it’s not just the numbers. There’s concern that this will help you politically. Paul Ryan said if we do this deal, it will guarantee your reelection. If we agree with Barack Obama on spending and taxes, that takes away one of our big weapons.’ There were so many obstacles, some of them substantive — how much revenue, and what about the entitlements? — but there was also this overlay of ‘This is going to help Obama.’

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank

MJ=JC?

Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.

Nate Jones: He was an A-lister with an indisputable body of work; he was 50 years old, his hits were the right age — old enough that every generation knew them, but not too old that they weren’t relevant anymore.

LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.

NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.

LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.

Frank Guan: In a lot of ways, the culture prefers the death of artists to their continuing to live. Once an artist gets launched into the stratosphere, there’s no way to come down, and that permanence becomes monotonous. They run out of timely or groundbreaking material and the audience starts tuning out. At some point, their fame eclipses their art, and then the only way to get the general audience to appreciate them anew is for them to die.

LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt

A Rare Moment of Unity

“I was doing intensive rehabilitation in Houston at the time but was following the debate closely, and I was pretty disappointed at what was happening in Washington. I’d seen the debate grow so bitter and divisive and so full of partisan rancor. And I was worried our country was hurtling toward a disastrous, self-inflicted economic crisis. That morning, when it became clear the vote was going to be close, my husband, Mark, and I knew we needed to get to Washington quickly. I went straight from my rehabilitation appointment to the airport, and Mark was at our house in Houston packing our bags so he could meet us at the plane.

That night, I remember seeing the Capitol for the first time since I was injured and feeling so grateful to be at work. I will never forget the reception I received on the floor of the House from my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats. And then, like I had so many times before, I voted.

I worked so hard to get my speech back, and honestly, talking to people who share my determination helped me find my words again. I’ve been to Alaska, Maine, and everywhere in between. Best of all, I got back on my bike. Riding my bike once seemed like such a huge challenge. It seemed impossible.”

Miley Cyrus Twerks At The Mtv Vmassetting Off A Controversy About Cultural Appropriation That Soon Ensnares Seemingly Every White Pop Star On The Planet

• Karlie Kloss wears a Native American headdress and fringed bra at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

• Justin Timberlake is accused of appropriating black music when he tells a black critic “We are the same” after praising Jesse Williams’s BET Humanitarian Award speech about race and police brutality.

• DJ Khaled gets lost on Jet Ski, snaps the whole time.

• Two UW-Madison students snap their meet-cute as the entire student body cheers them on.

• Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers films and mocks an anonymous woman in the gym shower.

• A Massachusetts teen records the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim.

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs

Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.

Eric Cantors Stunning Primary Loss Suggests No Politician Is Safe From The Rage Of The Tea Party Not Even The Tea Partys Canniest Political Leader

From Party’s Future to Also-Ran in a Single Day

On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future. While his GOP-primary opponent, David Brat, visited polling places in and around Richmond, Virginia, Cantor spent his morning 90 miles away at a Capitol Hill Starbucks. He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House.

The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, he’d rallied waffling House Republicans to stand in lockstep opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he’d helped elect 87 new Republican members, giving the GOP a House majority and making Cantor the House majority leader. He became the champion of these freshmen members, stoking their radicalism during the debt-ceiling fight and working to undermine Obama and John Boehner’s attempt to strike a “grand bargain.” His alliance with the ascendant tea party was strategic — it gave him leverage not only over Obama but over other Republicans who might also have had aspirations of becoming Speaker. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.

In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit

They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.

Twenty-two million new jobs were added.

Unemployment dropped below 4%.

The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.

The budget deficit was eliminated.

There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession

You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.

Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.

In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity

Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:

The budget surplus immediately disappeared.

The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.

Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.

The poverty rate began climbing again.

We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.

In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Apple Announces That It Has Sold 100 Million Iphoneswithin A Few Months It Will Overtake Exxonmobil As The Most Valuable Company In The World

Earthlings Gain a New Appendage

What if we had the singularity and nobody noticed? In 2007, Barack Obama had been on the trail for weeks, using a BlackBerry like all the cool campaigners, when the new thing went on sale and throngs lined up for it. The new thing had a silly name: iPhone. The iPhone was a phone the way the Trojan horse was a horse.

Now it’s the gizmo without which a person feels incomplete. It’s a light in the darkness, a camera, geolocator, hidden mic, complete ­Shakespeare, stopwatch, sleep aid, heart monitor, podcaster, aircraft spotter, traffic tracker, all-around reality augmenter, and increasingly a pal. At the Rio Olympics you could see people, having flown thousands of miles to be in the arena with the athletes, watching the action through their smartphones. As though they needed the mediating lens to make it real.

This device, this gadget — a billion have been made and we scarcely know what to call it. For his 2010 novel of the near future, , Gary Shteyngart made up a word, “äppärät.” “My äppärät buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury.” Future then, present now. His äppäräti were worn around the neck on pendants. Ours are in our pockets when they aren’t in our hands, but they also sprout earbuds, morph into wristwatches and eyeglasses. Contact lenses have been rumored; implants are only a matter of time.

Let’s face it, we’ve grown a new organ.

Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism

In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.

Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.

An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.

Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.

In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.

Game Of Thrones Arrives On Televisionwith An Assemblage Of Dragons Torture Nudity Incest And Despair A Show The Whole Family Can Enjoy

Explaining Kale

ADAM PLATT: Many things in Foodlandia, these days, have a political element to them, and if you want to emblazon a flag to be carried into battle, you could do worse than a bristly, semi-digestible bunch of locally grown kale.

ALAN SYTSMA: To eat kale is to announce you’re a person who cares about the matters of the day.

AP: The idea of kale is much more powerful than kale itself. In short order it went from being discovered, to appreciated, to being something that was parodied. Frankly, I’m all for the parody.

AS: The same thing happened to pork. Remember bacon peanut brittle? Bacon-fat cocktails? There’s bacon dental floss.

AP: Ahhh, bacon versus kale. The two great, competing forces of our time.

AS: Do you think one gave way to the other?

AP: What we’re really talking about is artisanal bacon, and the more sophisticated-sounding pork belly, made from pigs that were lovingly reared at upstate farms and fed diets of pristine little acorns. Bacon is the great symbol in the comfort-food, farm-fresh-dining movement, a kind of merry, unbridled pulchritude. Kale is the righteous yin to pork’s fatty, non-vegan yang.

AS: But pork has an advantage: People like the way it tastes.

AP: That’s a huge advantage, one that will hopefully see it through to victory.