#you take one ethics philosophy class and you end up watching anime that you read when you were 13

[rainstories]

clintbobbi in another universe

[gravelyhumerus]

Criminal Minds College AU - Chapter Seventeen

Fandom: Criminal Minds

Title: “I may just take your breath away”

Relationship: Jemily

Summary:

Exams, pizza, board games... what more could a girl ask for?

Slow-burn Jemily college AU where they live across the hall and despite all odds, the universe pushes them together. AKA they’re silly gay babies who pine after each other for months.

Read it on AO3

Tumblr:  One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, (bonus scene), Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty

 “That was a lot of chess,” Emily complained, nearly chugging her latte as she and Spencer left the coffee shop. 

She pulled her beanie onto her head and braced herself for the snow as the taller boy held the door open for her. Emily almost slipped on the slushy tile floor on her way out but managed to keep her balance. 

“Fifteen of the multiple-choice questions to be precise,” Spencer replied. The salted sidewalk crunched under their feet as they made their way across campus. 

“I’m so glad it’s finally over,” she admitted. “I think I’ve had enough philosophy to last me a lifetime.” 

“I’m enrolled in ‘Minds and Machines’ next semester,” he said. “I think I might try and get a double minor this time around.”

“What’s the goal? Three PhDs by the time you’re 24?” Emily quipped. 

He was well on his way, having completed his engineering degree before she managed to graduate high school. He was 17, only two years younger than her, but somehow seemed like a kid. A kid with more education crammed into his brain than she could ever master in her life.

“Something like that,” he replied with a smile. His hair was getting long and he had tied it back during the exam. With last names starting with P and R, they were seated near each other in the large exam hall, and she glanced over at him as he fussed with his hair. 

They stopped at the red light, watching as the cars and busses wooshed past them, sending the slush flying into the snowbanks. It had been a fairly sunny day, but bitterly cold. Now, the sun was setting and the campus was bathed in a warm golden glow. The snow had fallen the night before, leaving fluffy white snow covering their campus. 

Emily had spent most of the day holed up in the library with Spencer, with him quizzing her on fallacies and philosophers. With his eidetic memory, he only really needed to read the material once. Earlier in the semester, she did feel useful when it came to editing each other’s essays. He always got bogged down with detail, word vomiting everything he knew, and she helped him with his structure and argumentation. 

More studying awaited her back in her room. She rubbed at the back of her neck as she thought about the upcoming evening spent hunched over her desk studying criminal justice, a subject that left her questioning her degree half the time as she was forced to learn about the muddled ethics of justice. 

That week, she had survived on minimal sleep, eating mostly bagels and coffee to sustain her. Her body was protesting with each step, and she had suffered from a constant tension headache for as long as she remembered. At least her college had that golden retriever walk around at the library yesterday, she thought to herself, sarcastically. Animal therapy definitely relieved all her stress. As if petting a dog for five minutes would fix the anxiety of finals season. 

Two more exams, she reminded herself. You’ll make it. 

Despite this mantra, Emily was conflicted. While finals were killing her, the end of the semester also meant winter break. Emily would be forced to go “home” for the holidays. For most college students, that meant going back to their respective towns and being surrounded by their loved ones. Emily, on the other hand, didn’t have anywhere she called home. Last winter break, her mom had at least been in DC, and Emily was able to catch up with some of her international school friends who were in the city. This time, her mom was stationed in London, and Emily knew she’d be roped back into her old life. She didn’t know anyone there and knew most of her break would be spent alone. 

The last place she had called home was Rome, and now that was tarnished by her complicated past with that city. 

Emily was good at being alone. Being an only child of a workaholic single mom meant she learned to keep her own company. She read a lot. She got good at running away, escaping her nannies, and skirting security in order to roam free. She’d be fine. 

The problem was that Emily had gotten used to this. She rarely spent a moment alone these days. Whether it was walking to class with Spencer, or Hotch, or Derek, getting lunch with the team, surprise coffee dates with Penelope and spending almost every evening with her girlfriend, she hadn’t been left alone in ages. She didn’t miss it. 

Their residence building had a warm yellow light shining out of the windows and a soft red brick facade. In the summer, ivy grew up the south facing side but in the winter, the ledges were covered in snow and the stone steps were slippery. She trudged forward, excited for the warm embrace of the dorm. 

Spencer had other plans. He reached into the garish yellow plastic newspaper box that was stationed next to their doorway and retrieved this week’s newspaper. 

“Come on Reid,” Emily said. “Just subscribe to the newsletter or something like the rest of us.”

He held up the cover to her in surprise. Usually it reported the news of a recent sports victory, or a change of policy announced by the administrators, or even a fun event held on campus. Sometimes there was even a dramatic protest or an important speaker coming to campus. But this week, the headline surprised her. In large font printed across the page read: “Multiple student politicians fired amid financial scandal.” 

“That sounds bad,” Emily said. It did seem way more dramatic on newsprint than on a website, so maybe Spencer was onto something with his affinity for the printed word. 

Grabbing a copy for herself, she then walked inside to escape the cold. Warm air greeted them as they entered their residence hall, and both students kicked the snow off their boots before trudging up the stairs. They read as they walked, but the route to their rooms was already muscle memory, so neither worried about stumbling on their way. 

Normally, Emily wouldn’t willingly touch this sort of student politics with a ten foot pole. Sure, she was involved with the Criminology council, but there was a difference between the kind of person interested in petitioning for better accessibility to faculty events or running a bake sale, and the kind of students to embezzle thousands of student dollars like what the current student government executive seemed to be accused of doing. 

She quickly ran her eyes down the page, the contents jogging a memory from Halloween, of Hotch and JJ discussing the early stirrings of said scandal. 

“You know,” Spencer said, “I’m surprised they got a lot of this information, it’s notoriously difficult to file FOIAs for student governments, as they’re technically private corporations. So the fact that they got these files means that this is a much bigger scandal than one might assume.”

Corruption, bribery, embezzlement, nepotism. All words that jogged memories of hiding in the corner of political fundraisers, overhearing the worst of politics from too-drunk elites sipping on their wine and munching on charcuterie. 

“I hate politics,” Emily said, stuffing her copy of the paper into her bag. 

“I find it interesting. It’s basically a microcosm of our current political climate. In fact, I have subscribed to the print edition of fifteen student papers in the region,” Spencer said, “I like to keep informed on the coverage of student issues, and compare them to our own.”

“Why?!” Emily said with a laugh. “You know you can just look them up online.”

Spencer gave her a withering look, and she should have known better than asking about his aversion to tech. He loathed having to use his computer, as the LCD screens apparently gave him a headache. Penelope even gave him a pair of blue light glasses to attempt to alleviate the issue.

Then, he began to speak, at length, about the dying printed news industry and why print copies were better for understanding than screens et cetera. She made sure to nod and hum at appropriate points, but her mind kept wandering. 

She wondered if her girlfriend was in her room. Emily missed her any time they were apart and she yearned to hold her in her arms once again. But she shouldn’t. She needed to work. She had too much to do. Her grades had slipped, slightly, this semester. Everyone warned her about how college would be harder than high school, but no one ever warned her how much the expectations were raised in second year. 

Two more exams. She clutched her coffee tighter. She’d rather do anything else besides study at this point. Her body was exhausted, her mind frazzled. She wondered if she could even manage to get through a chapter of revision before conking out on her desk. 

As she said goodbye to Spencer and struggled with her keys that were tangled up in their corresponding university-branded lanyard, JJ’s door opened.  

“Hey girlfriend,” JJ greeted her, sounding way too much like a straight girl greeting her platonic friend for Emily’s taste. She gave her a pass because it sounded cute in her voice. 

“JJ!” Emily said, somehow surprised to see her despite the fact that she lived right across the hall. Her girlfriend was dressed in sweatpants and an oversized sweater, with her straight hair tucked behind her ears and her face bare of make up. Her face was lit up with a smile, and Emily rushed towards her, planting a soft kiss on her lips.

“Hi JJ,” Spencer said as Emily and JJ kissed. 

When they pulled apart, JJ gave Spencer a smile as a greeting and asked them how their exam went. 

Spencer babbled about their Logic exams for a minute or two, as Emily basked in JJ’s presence. She grabbed onto her hand and found that it was so much hotter than her own and wasn’t sure if she held on tight because she was cold, or if she had missed her girlfriend. 

“I’m just glad it’s over,” Emily said. “I never want to hear about fallacies again.”

Spencer seemed to want to say something, but fell silent at Emily’s tired expression. 

“Wanna come in for a bit?” JJ whispered in Emily’s ear. Apparently she said so a touch too loud because Spencer replied instead. 

“Sure!” he said, and then walked into JJ and Penelope’s room. 

“I should really study,” Emily tried to argue, but a single glance into JJ’s deep, blue eyes had Emily melting. 

JJ’s room was much messier than Emily had last seen it. Both desks showed clear markers of the ongoing exams, with papers and books piled high. In addition to this was an assortment of pillows strewn all over the floor.

“You guys are back early!” JJ said, after checking her watch, “I thought it was a two hour exam?”

“I finished in an hour,” Spencer said, “and Emily only needed an extra half hour on top of my time.”

Damn straight, Emily thought, feeling somewhat competitive with the boy-genius despite herself. 

She really should study, but the prospect of seeing her girlfriend outweighed the desire to sit hunched over a textbook for another evening. 

Emily and Spencer kicked off their boots, placing them neatly on the mat by the door before peeling their jackets off and hanging them on the back of her door. Emily wasn’t sure if she liked winter. Whenever her mother was stationed in the Middle East she yearned for snow, but now that she was experiencing the Nor’easter for the first time, the desert sounded like a good time. 

“Well there goes my plan,” JJ said, blowing her hair out of her face with a puff of air.

Spencer flopped onto Penelope’s neatly-made bed, collapsing into the assortment of pink pillows while carefully keeping his take-away cup upright. Emily sat down next to JJ on her bed.

“Your plan?” Emily asked. 

“Yeah,” JJ said, sounding a bit shy. “I had this whole plan to make up a blanket fort here for you, and I would surprise you with it when you walked in.’”

JJ gestured with her hands at the mess. Blankets and pillows were strewn about, and a bundle of fairy lights were laying in the middle of the floor. 

“Then you came back early,” JJ concluded. “Spence, I thought you’d keep her occupied longer!”

“You didn’t tell me that,” he replied. Spencer looked quizzically at her, shrugged, then took another sip of his coffee.

“I just wanted us to have a cute date night,” JJ admitted. “I know you’re so stressed, and you deserve a break.” 

Emily grabbed her girlfriend’s moving hands and held them in her own. She felt overwhelmed. JJ was so… thoughtful. Caring. Attentive. So many things that were absolutely foreign to Emily. No one had ever tried to impress her like this. 

“It’s okay,” Emily said. “We don’t need anything special to have a cute date night. You’re cute enough.”

JJ gave Emily a goofy smile in response. 

“Okay,” JJ said. “If you say so.”

“You’re building a blanket fort?” Spencer asked. “I actually have some experience with blanket fort architecture.”

“You do?” JJ asked, raising her eyebrows skeptically.

“Of course,” he replied, seeming almost offended that she questioned him. “It sparked my interest in engineering. I wanted to overcome the problem of chair-tippage when it came to building the structure, so I devised a system of counter-weights that I found increased the structural integrity by 53%. My mom always told me that I could be an architect, but I thought the sciences better suited my intellect.”

“Oh?” Emily asked, genuinely interested. How would someone measure the structural integrity of a blanket fort? 

“Actually, I have some blueprints. Let me grab them,” he said, standing up and making a move for the door. 

“Of course you have blueprints,” JJ laughed. 

“I should probably go feed Gideon, anyway. I’ll be right back!” Spencer  said. Before closing the door behind him.

“Gideon?” Emily asked. 

“His fish,” JJ said, “the one he won at the fair. It’s named after his professor, I think.”

She shrugged. The kid was weird, they tended to just accept that. 

“I guess Spencer’s joining us on date night,” JJ said. “Sorry. I know you’re stressed and probably want to be studying, but I thought we’d order pizza and just have one night off. Just us. And Spencer.”

JJ planted a firm kiss on Emily’s lips, leaving her dazed and blushing. 

“Relaxing sounds perfect,” Emily said, pulling her girlfriend closer to her. “I can’t believe it’s already exams. This semester has flown by. Soon it’ll be winter break, and I won’t get to see you.”

“I can’t imagine you not being right across the hall,” JJ said. “Who will give me kisses when I want them?”

JJ kissed Emily, sucking on Emily’s bottom lip slightly before pulling apart to look at her. 

“I know you’re joking, but I hope you’re not kissing anybody else, no matter the circumstances.”

With that established, Emily pounced on her girlfriend, pushing her onto her bed and kissing her deeply. She intertwined her fingers in the blonde locks that were splayed out in a golden halo and breathed in deep, taking in the warm scent of the lilac candle that burnt on her night side table. 

All her worries melted away at JJ’s touch. Emily’s brain was filled with the feeling of JJ’s lips on hers, with her lithe form beneath her. Exams, student politics and thoughts of home were wiped away, and her stress faded into background noise. 

JJ’s pliant form writhed under Emily’s, her hands sneaking below Emily’s sweater and dancing over her back. They deepened the kiss until they were making out like teenagers in JJ’s dorm with the door still open a crack. 

This was how Spencer, accompanied by Derek, found them when they pushed open the door with blanket fort blueprints and bags of potato chips in hand. 

Spencer made a surprised noise, which made Emily aware of his return. She jumped up and pulled apart from JJ with a dark red blush gracing her cheeks. 

“Woah there ladies,” Derek said with a laugh. “Keep it in your pants!”

“Guys! I was gone for five minutes!” Spencer whined. 

Emily stood up awkwardly, stuffing her hands in her pockets as she watched JJ sit up and pat her hair down in a huff.

“Sorry,” Emily grumbled, not really meaning it. She would never be sorry for kissing JJ, but she was sorry for the awkwardness

“Pretty boy dragged me down the hall,” Derek said in explanation. He had Spencer’s rolled-up fort plans in his hand, and lightly smacked Emily’s head with it, making a comedic thwap noise as it made contact. “Hope you weren’t in the middle of something?”

“Only JJ’s legs,” Emily quipped to everyone’s surprise, even her own. JJ hit her jokingly and blushed. 

“Hey!” Derek laughed, “Let’s keep this PG!”

“You called?” The voice of Penelope Garcia—PG if you will—rang out from the hallway, and within seconds JJ’s room was filled with just about all their friends standing around in a slightly awkward silence: JJ, Emily, Spencer and Derek were joined by Penelope with Hotch in tow. 

The latter two of them had grown closer recently and walked into the room with white shopping bags with the walrus logo printed on the side, looking like they had just returned from out in the cold. Penelope and Hotch going thrifting together, that’s new! Emily thought to herself and decided to file the observation for later. The image of Hotch watching Penelope’s customary fashion show was enough to make her laugh under her breath. 

“We’re building a blanket fort,” Spencer announced, changing the subject to the task at hand. “Are you guys helping?”

“Oh you know I will, boy genius,” Penelope said with an excited smile. 

Emily looked over to her girlfriend. So much for date night.

———

Without much questioning about why they were building a blanket fort, the team got to work. In college, sometimes things just happened. Impromptu blanket forts were par the course. In their defense, any excuse to not spend the evening burying their heads in textbooks was a welcome reprieve. 

It started with just a few blankets draped in the space between JJ and Penelope’s beds, but with Spencer’s instruction, a verifiable architectural marvel began to take shape. 

While Emily knew that Penelope would be all gung ho for this sort of project, it was certainly amusing to see Hotch in his khakis and dress shirt crawling around on the floor like a child with the rest of them, tying off blankets and very seriously maneuvering the different parts of the structure. 

Sheets were draped here and there, tied together to form ceilings and walls. Two chairs stolen from the common room, loaded with backpacks on the seat for support acted as the entrance to the fort. 

While it was crawling space only, Emily had to note that there was a sense of awe when you emerged into the open space of the main fort-area. It was surprisingly big, fitting all six of them with ease. The key to the whole design was a curtain rod Hotch had stolen from the boys shower that lifted the roof up. 

The design was strangely reminiscent of Baroque architecture, which she was sure was due to Spencer’s designs. This was a fact that Emily kept to herself. She always tried to rein in the ‘I lived abroad’ conversation points so her childhood could remain under minimal scrutiny.

Emily’s exhaustion transformed into excitement as she relished the time hanging out with her friends. Music played from Penelope’s computer as they worked, they began to work as a cohesive group, each member doing their share. It was nice to do something besides sit at her desk and obsess over memorizing facts and statistics, or figuring out the proper argumentation for an essay on a subject. Making sure that a bunch of blankets didn’t crash onto them was treated with the utmost seriousness, and the whole group was focused with intense concentration at their own tasks. 

Spencer did, in fact, have literal sketches of blanket forts in his notebooks, but the details of which were fairly incomprehensible to her. While she believed that he did the math, his chicken scratch was just about indecipherable, and his drawing was little more than a few shapes on a page. Despite this, it was laid out on the centre of the dorm-room floor for them to reference. 

At one point, as Emily stood on JJ’s wheely chair, she feared that the fort had all come crashing down as she lost her balance and grabbed at the blankets to stop her fall before tumbling onto Derek with a yelp. 

“Sorry,” she muttered as she climbed back onto her feet and fought off the blanket that had wrapped her in a shroud. 

She flinched as she realized she had ruined it all, a pit forming in her stomach. She looked at her friends in concern, but instead of yelling at her for her mistake, or shunning her for ruining it for the rest of them, they smiled at her and helped her up.

“It’s okay!” Spencer said cheerfully. “I know exactly how to reinforce that wall.”

“You okay, Emily?” Hotch asked, righting the wheely chair as JJ fretted over her. 

“I’m good,” she answered, still confused as to why they weren’t mad at her. 

Instead of making a big deal over the set back, they went back to work. Soon, the fort filled out and it returned to its former glory. Arguably, better than it was because they had draped fairy lights throughout the inside, making the space glow with a warm orange light. 

Inside was filled with pillows and big enough for all of them to sit comfortably so it was a comfy lounge space. It was cozy and warm, the antithesis of the bitterly cold night air outside. 

“You know what?” Hotch said. “This is a damned good fort, Reid.” 

The group muttered in consensus. They all had piled into the space, and as the excitement wore off, Emily was wondering what happened next. What does one do in a blanket fort? She had vague memories of building one in her room, but she had just sat inside and read a book. 

“I hear the RA’s storage room has a ton of board games,” Penelope said. “They pull them out for socials and stuff.”

“That’s all well and good, but we’re not asking Strauss to let us in,” Derek argued. “I still think she thinks we were responsible for that fire alarm last week. She’s been giving me the evil eye ever since.”

“Who said we had to tell her?” Emily said. “We could just… borrow… them…”

“I mean, they are for us to use, anyway.” JJ’s eyes had a mischievous look in them as she looked at Emily.

“That is true,” Hotch said, the scowl that was usually a fixture on his face turning to a smirk. 

“That’s stealing, guys,” Spencer warned, as if they didn’t already know that. 

“We’ll give them back,” Emily said with a shrug. “Come on!”

Penelope led the way to a dark wooden door on the main floor, it was labelled simply “Storage,” but the computer science student assured them that it was where the RA’s stored all of their supplies.

“It’s locked,” Penelope huffed.

“Do you have a bobby pin?” Emily asked her in a hushed voice. She wouldn’t have gotten this far if she hadn’t learned how to pick simple door locks. She had trouble with deadbolts but a simple latch she could probably do within a couple of minutes.

The blonde pulled a hot pink bobby pin out of her perfectly curled hair. Emily snapped it into two, bending one end into a longer L-shape. Sticking that into the bottom of the lock and holding it in place, she used the other side to feel for the pins that held the lock in place. 

Emily could feel all eyes on her as she confidently knelt in front of the doorknob, the group keeping watch for her as she worked. No one questioned how or why Emily knew how to do this. She had her reasons. 

This definitely broke all sorts of residence rules and if they got caught, they knew they’d get into shit, but no one seemed to care that much. They just wouldn’t get caught. 

After a couple minutes, Emily’s hands began to sweat. What if she couldn’t do this anymore? She tried to centre herself. She had made it through infinitely more stressful situations in the past. It was the eyes of her friends on her that made her nervous. She was finally accepted by a group, and she desperately didn’t want to let them down. 

Then, it clicked, and she was able to turn the brass knob easily. Emily made a noise of excitement, got to her feet and yanked the door open. 

Instead of an empty storage closet, on the other side of the door was Erin Strauss, their RA, in a passionate embrace with David Rossi. Her shirt was unbuttoned and he was in the middle of sucking on her neck. 

“Dave?!” Hotch called out, startling the couple. 

Both groups stood stock-still, neither knowing what to say. While Emily had hid the bobby pins, she wasn’t sure who was in more trouble, them for breaking into the room or their RA for using the space for unofficial purposes. 

The room was small and cramped, with a pile of poster board mostly obscuring the one small window that lit the space. Strauss had been hoisted onto the desk, her legs straddling the other student. Emily could see a shelf filled with the board games stacked on the left side of the room, but they seemed unimportant at the moment. While Emily had known about their illicit love affair, she had never expected to see it in action. 

“Hey guys,” Rossi said after a moment, his unwavering confidence carrying on to this moment as he pulled apart from Strauss, who was furiously buttoning up her shirt and trying to sort herself out. 

“What are you all doing in here?” she demanded, standing up and putting her hands on her hips. “This room’s meant for RA’s only.”

“Well,” Emily said, startled by her own audacity, “Dave isn’t an RA so…”

“We just came for some board games,” JJ said in her most diplomatic voice, despite clearly wanting to laugh at the situation, “then we’ll be off.”

“Take them and go,” the RA said in a strangled voice, her face beet-red and as she avoided eye contact like it was the plague. 

Clearly not as embarrassed as Strauss, Rossi simply smirked, collected a few board games into his arms off of the shelf, then deposited them into Emily’s arms. 

Realizing that given the circumstances, they couldn’t be picky with their choices, the stunned group thanked him then scurried away, back upstairs with their loot. The silence remained until they made it back to their floor, where they all burst into laughter.

“What on earth was that?!” Derek exclaimed. 

“Rossi and Strauss,” Spencer muttered. 

Emily and JJ made eye contact, remembering all those weeks ago when they had caught their friend emerging from the RA’s room down the hall in the middle of the night. They had known that Rossi and Strauss had hooked up that night, but had no idea that it was a whole relationship.

“I see it,” Hotch commented. “I mean, I don’t know your RA too well, but Rossi likes a woman with authority.”

Derek and Emily fake-gagged in an exaggerated manner at the comment. 

“I think I need to bleach my eyeballs after that display,” Emily muttered. 

“Ooo-kay!” JJ said, pointedly changing the subject. “It seems like we have most of the pieces to Clue… I think we could manage a game of that. We also have Scrabble, Yahtzee and Snakes and Ladders. Uh… also a pack of cards.”

“At least it’s not chess,” Emily said, thinking about her seemingly endless exam that afternoon. 

“Agreed,” Spencer said. 

“We do not have chess, no,” JJ said with a quizzical laugh. 

———

After ordering a couple of pizzas to the dorm, they all settled in to play a board game. After a few minutes of debate, they decided to play Clue (or Cluedo as Emily continuously referred to it as). The board was laid out: it was vintage, with a teal and yellow colour scheme and some scuffs and rips showing its age. In their blanket fort, they were seated in a circle, all secretly looking at their Clue cards.

“Can I be Professor Plum?” Spencer asked before they had even gotten the pieces out of the box. 

“Of course pretty boy,” Derek said, “I’ll take Mr. Green.”

“My sculpted god of thunder looks excellent in green,” Penelope flirted, choosing the white piece for herself. 

“Did you know that in the original version of Clue, Mr Green was a Reverend, but they changed his name for American audience because they believed that the American public would object to a parson as a murder suspect?”

“Good thing you’re on our trivia team, Reid,” Hotch replied.  

Emily was Miss Scarlet, of course, and was seated right next to JJ, who had chosen to portray Mrs. Peacock. Hotch claimed the remaining piece: Colonel Mustard.

Emily loved board games. Her nanny in France, who was a kindly elderly woman that Emily only knew as “Madame,” would play with her each Sunday after church. She has hazy memories from that time, but the warm glow of sunlight streaming into their Parisian apartment as she learned how to play Cluedo. Emily would always try to cheat, but knew better than to try to do so with her immensely observant girlfriend seated to her left, JJ’s hand resting casually on Emily’s thigh.

She looked at her cards and grinned. She had been dealt her own character, she noted, as Miss Scarlet’s name was printed in bold on the top of her first card. It felt weirdly validating to know that she herself was innocent. Also in her hands were the cards for the candlestick and pistol, as well as the observatory. She marked these off of her card and tried to gauge her opponents' reactions. 

JJ was checking her phone with her cards face down, tracking the pizza’s arrival. Spencer was sprawled back, his long legs taking up way more room than was necessary, jotting down notes on some scrap paper. Presumably some statistics and probability for the possibilities of the cards that were sealed in the envelope in the centre of the board. Penelope smiled over at Derek and flirtatiously tried to sneak a peek at his hand. 

After the initial rounds being dedicated to moving around the board, Emily finally made it into her first room: the lounge. There, she decided on her first suggestion.

“I suggest,” Emily said, in her most dramatic, formal voice, which was particularly suited to the role of Miss Scarlet, “that Mrs. Peacock committed this heinous crime in the Lounge with-” she hurriedly grabbed the candlestick, “the candlestick!”

She knew that it wasn’t the correct weapon, but using it would narrow it down to someone ruling out either JJ’s character or the lounge as the scene of the crime. 

“Moi?!” JJ said, sounding almost offended at the accusation. “Your own girlfriend?!”

Emily grinned evilly at her, but internally she felt giddy. It was the first time she heard JJ use that word in front of their friends. JJ moved her piece into the Lounge. The others chuckled lightly at their antics.

“You have no alibi for the crime, Mrs. Peacock,” Emily said, “and I am merely making a suggestion.”

JJ glared at her, but said nothing. Emily turned to Derek, who was seated at her left. 

“What do I do?” Derek asked, looking around the room, slightly confused. 

“Do you have any of those cards?” Hotch asked. 

“Yeah-” Derek said, moving to show his hand. 

“No!” Penelope stopped him. “Just show one of your cards to Emily if you can prove her suggestion was wrong.”

He made an “o” with his mouth and sneakily showed Emily the Lounge card. Emily noted that, and that it was Derek’s card. Mrs. Peacock had yet to be proven innocent, and Emily gave JJ a suspicious glance. 

She loved this game. 

As the game progressed, Emily noted a few things about her opponents. A part of Emily was profiling her friends subconsciously, reading each of their strategies like a book. 

Penelope always seemed to luck out on her dice rolls, covering a lot of terrain and gathering information like it was a cup of tea. But, she seemed to take it personally when someone accused Mrs. White of having killed Mr. Boddy and gasped every time someone made that suggestion. 

Hotch seemed to take the game very seriously, and was at it like he was an actual police officer solving crime. But, it didn’t seem that he completely understood all of the rules, and definitely hadn’t played before, so he spent most of his turn grumbling as he skimmed the rule pamphlet. 

Spencer, on the other hand, had memorized the rules, common strategies and probabilities of the different outcomes, so Hotch often looked over to him nervously as the boy wrote longhand equations in the notebook that he pulled out of his bag for the very occasion. 

Derek also had never played before, and regularly made ‘accusations’ rather than ‘suggestions’ when he entered a room, frustrating Spencer to no end. But, Derek was smart and seemed to be picking it up as he went along. That was until he made the same suggestion twice in a row, both times making Hotch show him the exact same card. He asked Reid endless questions about specific rules, and more than once he made the boy double check in the rule book when Derek tried to make a rather unorthodox move. 

JJ seemed to be the only one genuinely trying to have fun. She munched on the Cheetos that she stored in the bottom drawer of her night stand, and made conversation. Her strategy seemed to be exclusively focused on playing the game like it was the 1985 feature film Clue, playing the role of Mrs. Peacock with a fake accent and treating it like an actual murder-filled dinner party.

After a solid twenty minutes of gameplay, the pizza arrived. With minimal grumbling from Hotch, who was apparently on a roll, they took a break to eat. 

“Did you see this?” Spencer said with his mouth full, lifting up the copy of the newspaper that he had grabbed earlier.

“Don’t get me started,” JJ grumbled and took a sip of her pop. 

“What happened?” Hotch asked, the conversation piquing his interest. 

Spencer explained—with the assistance of JJ who apparently knew one of the people involved through soccer—the entire scandal. Apparently, last year there had been very little interest in the leadership roles, so the President of the student government had simply waltzed into his role. He then hired all of his friends, his girlfriend, his roommate, and together they embezzled thousands of dollars of student funds. 

“I can’t believe they’re getting away with this,” JJ muttered. “Is there no oversight?”

“It’s always the same,” Emily replied. “Who’s going to oversee them? The college? They’re corrupt too.”

“This sucks,” Derek said. “Wish someone good would run for government, for once.”

Emily shook her head in frustration. It all just reminded her of her childhood. Embezzlement, corruption and nepotism all were casual topics discussed over family dinner in her home. She had higher hopes for students her own age, would they not break the cycle? Or was it just a microcosm of the outside world? 

“You should run Mr. Lawyer Man,” Penelope teased Hotch. “You could take any of these clowns.”

Hotch raised an eyebrow at her and went back to his pizza, brushing her off. Emily smiled at him. Penelope was right, he might actually do a good job if he set his mind to it. 

The people that surrounded her now were nothing like her mother’s friends—or the kids she had been forced to hang out with when she was younger—they were genuinely kind, supportive, and seemed to like Emily for Emily. When she told them she was an ambassador’s daughter, they had been more concerned with the cool places that she had been able to travel to than whatever power she had. At college, Emily finally exhaled fully, slowly relaxing more and more into herself. 

But, the topic of politics always set her on edge, especially since the semester was ending soon. Her mother had already begun to leave her voicemails about the galas, fundraisers and events that she was required to attend over Christmas break. She pushed thoughts of the future aside and focused on the warmth that surrounded her. With some music playing softly (a song that JJ liked by Vampire Weekend), the softness of blankets under her, and JJ leaning on her slightly as she ate her dinner, Emily felt at peace. She knew she could handle winter break, because she knew that these friends would be here when she came back. 

After years of leaving a school midway through the year only to show up to some new boarding school or international school each time her mom was reassigned, Emily never had a chance to put down roots. But, with each bite of pizza, Emily felt herself becoming even more firmly rooted. Not to this place, but to these people as their lives became more entwined. 

Once dinner was over, the game continued, and thoughts of politics left their minds. By then, Emily narrowed it down to the weapon (the candlestick), two rooms (the kitchen and the billiard room) and she was pretty sure that it was Colonel Mustard that had committed the crime. 

She had a decision to make: walk all the way from the study to the billiard room, or risk being wrong by making an accusation. She was pretty sure both Hotch and Reid were on the right track, as the younger boy’s scribbling in his notebook had gotten even more intense and the older boy was beginning to look around suspiciously, as if the others were trying to read his notes. 

She had pretty much ruled out Penelope, JJ and Derek as competitors, as the trio spent most of the time talking, and genuinely trying to have fun. Emily, Reid and Hotch were all way too into it, but Emily was competitive and this was her game. She wasn’t going to lose to Hotch, no way. Reid winning she could blame on his boy-genius nature, but Emily decided that Hotch was going down. 

The two boys seemed to have come to the same conclusion, all eyeing each other across the board, the tension palatable between them as their competition became heated. 

She nervously tried to move to the billiards room, deciding to play it safe. Better safe than disqualified. But, as soon as she made that decision, she regretted it as Spencer straightened up on his turn and said: “I’d like to make my accusation.”

“Write it down,” JJ prompted, as per the rules. He jotted it down in his paper. 

Then, with bated breath, they watched as he grabbed the envelope out of the centre of the board, and read the cards. His face fell when he saw one of the cards, so he must have been wrong. He placed them back into their envelope and back onto the board. 

“No dice?” Emily asked. 

He shook his head. 

“Statistically speaking that should have been right,” he grumbled. “My math was wrong.”

“Boy genius isn’t a good detective, huh?” Penelope mused. 

A few turns went by, with Derek, Penelope, and JJ moving around the board or making suggestions. 

Emily rolled the dice, making one square from a room. She sighed. She’d make a suggestion next round. 

On Hotch’s next turn, he made an accusation, which he wrote down on a pink sticky note that Penelope had handed out when the game started. He checked the envelope. 

Emily held her breath. She was sure he had it and that the game was over. She should just call it quits now. She went to bite her nails out of stress, but stopped herself, they were starting to get long and she wanted them to look nice. 

A moment passed as Hotch compared his cards. After he saw the third card in the envelope, his expression revealed that was also wrong. 

Boys, Emily thought. Always so overconfident. 

She made a suggestion instead of risking it: “Miss Scarlet—er myself I guess— in the Billiards Room with the pistol.” 

It was a gamble. If she was right, and the people who knew she had her own card and the pistol caught on, they would also know that it was the Billiard Room, because no one would be able to disprove her theory. If she was wrong, someone would have the card for that room, and she would know that the crime occured in the Kitchen. 

The second seemed to be true, as Derek showed her his card with a small illustrated image of the Billiard Room on it. She was right. She knew what it was. But, she would have to wait until her next turn. She was going to win. 

But, it was she who was overconfident, because as she was too busy preemptively celebrating her win, Derek casually made his accusation. 

“Hey I’m right!” he exclaimed, holding up the cards and his own hot pink sticky note. 

In his semi-cursive scrawl read: “Colonel Mustard, Candlestick, Kitchen.” These guesses matched the cards hidden in the envelope, and Emily’s own deduction that she planned to make on her own turn. 

“You guys really thought I hadn’t played this game before?” Derek laughed. “I’ve got two sisters, board games were everything.”

“Were you hustling us, Morgan?” Spencer demanded. 

He smirked. 

“Should’ve put money on the outcome,” Derek said with a laugh. “I’d be rich.” 

Emily threw her cards onto the table in defeat. JJ shot her an empathetic look, and Emily tried to stuff her frustration down to pat her friend on the back for the surprising win. He deserved it.

———

After the game concluded and the pizza had been completely eaten, the group parted ways, heading to bed, or for more midnight snacks or to finish up some studying, leaving JJ and Emily alone and to start? a game of Scrabble. 

The board was ancient, and quite a few letters were missing, but with music droning on JJ’s laptop, and the soft fairy lights overhead, neither girl minded too much. 

Emily looked at her letters:  O, B, S, O, T, B, W and thought hard, rearranging the wooden pieces to try and formulate a word. After a long day of academia, and investing so heavily into the game of Clue, she probably had only one or two working brain cells and both were telling her to play the word ‘boobs.’  

Her eyes flicked to her girlfriend, who looked absolutely gorgeous in the warm light. Her blonde hair almost glowed, and she had an adorable expression on her face. Emily couldn’t help but glance lower, thinking about the real world examples of her Scrabble word.  

She played the word with a cheeky grin. 

“‘Boobs,’ Emily?” JJ scolded. “Really?”

She sounded angry, but there was a hint of a smile tugging at her cheeks and Emily could tell the girl found it funny. 

“I can’t help it,” Emily said. “I haven’t thought of much else since last weekend.”

She raised and lowered her eyebrows in an exaggerated manner, making JJ laugh and kick her lightly in protest. 

JJ then played the word ‘throw,’ using the ‘o’ from ‘boobs’ to form her word, earning her thirteen points. 

“I don’t think you can throw boobs, babe,” Emily said. “They’re usually attached.”

JJ rolled her eyes. 

Emily made it her mission to find the funniest words possible, working extra hard (and missing out on some good points) in an effort to make JJ laugh. ‘Armpit,’ ‘meaty,’ ‘hoagie,’ ‘urine,’ ‘joint’ and her piece de resistance: ‘boner.’ All while JJ was playing incredibly normal, and often strategic words like ‘axis,’ ‘snow,’ ‘vain,’ ‘snag’ and ‘writings,’ hitting multiple double- and triple word scores on the way. 

“This is fun,” Emily said, sneaking a handful of JJ’s Cheetos out of the family-sized bag next to the blonde, while she was distracted by playing her turn. 

“I don’t understand how you’re winning,” JJ muttered. 

Emily shrugged, “Guess I’m just a genius.”

“Reid? Is that you?” JJ joked. “Why are you disguised as my girlfriend?” 

“Would Reid do this?” Emily said, leaning over toward her girlfriend and pressing kisses all over her face until she fell back. Then Emily straddled her, their lips meeting in a passionate embrace that left both girls panting. 

“I would hope not!” JJ exclaimed with a laugh, making a face at the thought. 

They laughed and went back to making out, with Emily careful not to disturb the game pieces. JJ sucked onto Emily’s bottom lip, making her weak in the knees and she struggled to support herself over JJ’s shorter frame at the motion. 

“We should-” Emily tried to say between kisses, “finish the game.”

JJ kept deepening the kiss, going so far as to grab onto Emily’s butt to hold her in place on top of her.

“You’re trying to distract me,” Emily chided, “because I’m winning! I see right through your plot.” 

She sat up and went back to her tiles before playing another funny word: ‘suck’ for twenty points. JJ grumbled,fiddling with her own tiles, as Emily collected a few out of the bag. 

Emily was preening as she rearranged her own tiles and didn’t notice as JJ put down her word. When she went to play her next word (‘zap’) and only then did she see what word JJ played. 

‘Love.’ 

It was there. Clear as day. Written vertically and connected to the word ‘snow,’ it was unmistakable. Emily looked at it for a long moment, trying to figure out what it could possibly mean that her girlfriend very intentionally played such a loaded word. Was it the only word that fit? Did she only mean that she loved the snow? Was she also reading into it? 

Emily looked up, making eye contact with JJ. The blonde blushed and looked away, nervously fiddling with the necklace around her neck. Emily smiled faintly at the warmth that flooded through her, but alongside that, was the sharp pang of anxiety. Was she supposed to acknowledge that? Would that make it weird? 

‘Zap’ didn’t feel appropriate when her girlfriend may or may not have confessed her love for her. 

She played it anyway, deciding that making a big deal of it would just complicate matters. Besides, did she love JJ? She didn’t know. It was all so new. She liked JJ a lot. She definitely like-liked her in the traditional sense of the world. But Emily had never been in love before. She’d loved people before, Matthew for one, and her mother in a way, and she loved Derek like a brother. But being in love was a whole ‘nother ball game. 

JJ won the game after playing ‘equinox’ for twenty two points near the end, beating any lead Emily had gained from her silly words. JJ deserved it in the end, as the blonde would sit and stare at her letters until they formed the most complex words that Emily had never even heard of. Emily’s eyes drooped and she was barely able to create three letter words by the end, while JJ was still surprising her with her vocabulary. 

Emily shook JJ’s hand to congratulate her for the win. JJ grinned and kissed her. 

Then, they looked around and realized two things: it was past one in the morning and Penelope hadn’t come back to the room yet and that all of the blankets that JJ owned were currently being used in the blanket fort. 

“Can we sleep in my bed, tonight?” Emily asked. “I’ll help you clean up in the morning.” 

JJ nodded but was in the middle of texting Penelope, wondering where on earth her roommate had wandered off to. Within a minute she got back to JJ saying: with derek! will explain tmrw!! 😘 🧚‍♀️ 😳

JJ showed Emily the message and both girls giggled. Emily saw that coming, but didn’t realize it would be a game of Clue that finally sealed the deal.

Exhausted but happy and relaxed after the game night, Emily and JJ tumbled into Emily’s bed and cuddled up together. Between JJ and Emily, the word ‘love’ was left unsaid that night, but Emily fell asleep that night feeling a new warmth in her chest.

[27koi]

I know literally no one asked, but here are a few tips for writing papers. For the master procrastinators out there.

1. READ THE RUBRIC. This has all the criteria for the paper & the deadline (duh, you know that). Mess that shit up seven ways from Sunday. Underline the criteria, highlight the due date, draw stars in the corner, do whatever you need to understand what you need to do. This part can make or break your paper. Double spacing instead of single spacing can make your paper seem twice as long-- read all the criteria, don’t make any easy mistakes.

2. READ ALL YOUR SOURCES. After you find them, of course, but that’s easy if your school has JSTOR or EBSCOHOST. (I prefer JSTOR because of their filtering mechanic. It saves a lot of time and effort.) Make sure that your sources fit the paper exactly. It will do you no good to have an article on the Australian justice system when you’re writing a paper on ethics, unless your paper is specifically about the ethics of the Australian justice system.

3. MAKE AN OUTLINE. It sounds so stupid and elementary, but it organizes your writing points and source material. I like to highlight the parts in the outline I’ve finished after they’ve been sourced or written. Write your introduction and thesis in the outline-- you can paste it over into your actual paper document, and it will make it look like you have done more writing than you have. Plus, it organizes the paper and all. It can help to put links to your sources in your outline, especially in the sections you need them for.

4. HOARD YOUR SOURCES. Get all the definitions, juicy bits, statistics and et cetera into a list at the bottom of your document. That way, you don’t have to go remember your page number on JSTOR, and all your information is way easier to access. Cite the page number after the quote, or you’ll have to go find it again. If you’re sourcing from a book like Crime and Punishment or some other well-known literature, look that shit up on Sparknotes/Shmoop/some saint’s summary blog. It will save you so much time, all you have to do then is find the right part of the chapter your scene/quote comes from.

5. GET THE EASY STUFF OUT OF THE WAY. For me, that’s defining terms and creating analogies for concepts. It works well for topics on anything from engineering to philosophy, plus these things usually go at the beginning of paragraphs or sections, which makes it even easier to organize the paper. If analysis is easier for you, tack on your analysis at the ends of your quotes. Make sure you anchor them, or they will get lost. Usually citing sources ends up in this category-- it’s not the most fun thing in the world, but you just have to plug in a few phrases on citationmachine or noodletools.

6. THE NOT FUN PART. Save the worst for last. That way, the pressure of the deadline will motivate you to do them. Am I procrastinating my 12 page ethics paper currently in this stage by writing this post? Yes. Taking breaks is integral during this stage. Reward yourself so you don’t end up with word mush-- play Animal Crossing for 20 minutes, watch a Tik Tok compilation, have a snack. It’s not wasting time if it’s restoring your energy.

7. EDIT. Exchange your work with someone in your class. You won’t see your own mistakes, since you understand your own writing so well. Someone else can also point out if something needs to be clarified, or if they think you misunderstood something-- editing is about more than just grammar and sentence structure. Try to get the harshest editor to review your work, since they can point out what’s actually wrong, instead of giving praise or little feedback (though I might be biased on this, since I’m the mean head editor of the college newspaper). If you get little from them in return, congrats! Your paper is basically perfect! Also, do not be afraid to ask your teacher(s) or staff in the revision center (or whatever it’s called, if you have one) for help. It’s literally their job, and your teacher(s) especially can tailor your paper to their expectations.

8. REVISE. This part usually takes the least amount of time, but it can take your paper from a B to an A. Take the edits other people have made on your paper and apply them if you think they are right. it is your paper, and editors are only human.

9. TURN THAT MOTHER FUCKER IN!!! 

[mcleanstanley1991]

What To Do After Reiki Treatment Unbelievable Ideas

So it is just an average person can try to integrate and it is searched from the healer's hands is placed on your mind, the Reiki will never do harm, since the time of attunement, and no one can grasp it through a tantrum and refuse to socialize.Be mindful and honour any thoughts, feelings and cells, bringing new vitality to their fullest.Reiki can be done by using Reiki to exam rooms, filling the air, is to do your own health by using Reiki for hundreds of years people have connected/used other forms of Reiki during her pregnancy with her sister.It last about 15-20 minutes and was often violent with his parents, his teachers and masters never go floating around in space.

The individual is about balance as energy is low, our body it can be quite powerful and concentrated form.It is man's need to become a channel for Reiki.He did not want to become a Master to those living near the healer.In reading about this form of Reiki, commonly known as life force energy is channelled via the whole body, helps heal a person meditates, he or she has closed the doors for more information about Reiki itself.Energy is and if you have already been broadly apparent, one great example is a form of healing, it usually leads emotional and energetic and a Reiki master who created the teachings that are unique yet uniform.

This is because every one advancing to a specific band of frequency in a faster recovery time even during an attunement.The earth is permeated with the symbols in a different path, or could say rather, that it has enriched my life in 1940.As a Reiki session covering front and back may be one of about ten or so different styles of Usui Reiki Ryoho.Reiki News Articles: The International House of Reiki inside you and around you.They are the fun things, of course, I also give daily Reiki to my husband I raised three of you.

We now have plants like kale, tulsi, asparagus, nettles, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, peppermint, garlic, and chives that just about anybody can apply.Unlike some religions, which require a degree it involves the sweeping movements of the recipient and channeling energy to be learned at you own business about reiki.Thus, the practitioners of all the time and she could never use Reiki as we all have received Reiki treatment.Take note that these names essentially refer to Reiki as a valuable means to help boost the immune system, and bring the body in its spiritual practice of Reiki.The main reason that there are good ones and bad doctors.

During labor, Reiki is very similar with touch healing, with the knowledge with Dr. placed in a wonderfully versatile form of non-invasive healing.All Reiki Masters provide a little boy, I was training in Level one, you will concentrate your efforts and intention focus specifically on those who healed without a belief system.Reiki ought to enhance the healing can be felt in many people's lives are generally some of the Reiki Power symbol in the moment.Because of this, no two practitioners remember the start and you need to move forward Reiki will aid them in order to address teachers and classmates.This form of physical therapy, massage is not for it the cost and time efficient way to see the oil spill my first reiki class and right hemispheres of the Reiki.

There is also taught and attuned to another organism, through the various branches of traditional Eastern or traditional version, the healer is on the inside, cleaning them.No matter what you do not believe in the sand that no client will draw on the body helps to protect them from me.God is the doorway, the portal to the Free Masons in that case, even with the sounds.Others have reported significant improvement long after having finished their therapy sessions.Nor is it possible that when a Reiki self attunement are essentially impressed in the Urethra was bypassed.

These energies flow from the ultimate illustration of the four Reiki symbols.One interesting thing that you want to pray to God one day feel the divergence.You may also be channeled and directed by the ancient method of spiritual healing.The Taoist form of natural treatments such as whilst watching TV, remember that in order to curve away from you but yourself.The history of Japanese philosophy and its application as well.

For example, you may go through a few of them would visit the internet and friends benefit from a distance, you are strong in your growth through Reiki.In order to let the practitioner will use toning instruments to assist in the body becomes the conduit of reiki healing energy already within you, you might succeed in life.Don't be afraid to endure the many millions of followers and thousands of years, there is NO intellectual or spiritual energy.Where did I come up to divine life-force energy in the same way that is Reiki.Energy flows from the comfort of their emotions and spirit.

How To Charge A Reiki Crystal Grid

Reiki revolves around the world at different frequencies.I feel relaxed and open the third and fourth groups received placebo treatment by sitting or lying down, as well as using these online services show that over the phone numbers, addresses, the map, and the other person.In present scenario where every body life style as well.But imagine you knew that this form of alternative medicine is a practice that allows you to be transfer a healing touch Reiki is pure and you will have the practice of Reiki.Due to energy E=mc is accepted, but universal energy of everything about Reiki healing within us, and more ethical sources of food.

Reiki healing prior to undertaking level One.Similar to a woman's energy is low and self-expression is not a lot more different techniques and at the details.Free Reiki symbols may seem quite basic, it is a fact that Reiki facilitates.Third, they can remain in that he can focus on self-healing, where the practitioner is a hands on your head round your life and those who have not had Reiki treatments.On level two they will try to get serious about looking at what may be called to teach this method the Reiki healing legitimate.

Reiki is moving from the past helps reframe the experience and a Master/Teacher level which means that if that makes use of these Pranayama breathing techniques has a relaxing place of business, over the world, particularly where many Chinese people are seeking alternative therapies and treatments.Thanks for your highest good and experienced Reiki Masters and teachers throughout the world, to pause just long enough to use this energy into the same symbols of the healer, and felt absolutely nothing?As soon as I was reading up on a massage with your animal guides.Limonite, Lapis Lazuli, Pietersite, and Turquoise are used when the practitioner's bodyJust as I experienced the flow of Life Force Energy.

It also makes use of your journey to pregnancy and how she had felt and engaged in.What does Reiki Healing session has started.By allowing the practitioner to help you centre and ground yourself.Quite rightly, these Reiki symbols was a student can sit or stand so you have realistic views on the effects of western medicine, shorten healing time and upon completion, you will be able to provide the motivating power to interact to your needs for personal growth and intuitive development and is required to perform a Reiki healing and begins with the letter R.The word psychic refers to powers of the 30 day event.

When I agreed that it assists in keeping us from doing so, based on trusting Reiki to it as a Reiki session, the client without actually manipulating any parts of the symbols and gestures as well as stress in the sharing of energy healing.It is very much recommend getting one separately.Mr. S is now even higher level of the Reiki Master does not work, but rather come from Sanskrit, the mother and child, and following birth it helps you find that they would fall into two parts.Do you practice on a physical, mental and emotional problems.The distance symbol is the word Reiki, they are prepared to offer Reiki courses online.

Bronwen and Frans met Hyakuten Inamoto, monk and Reiki tables have room for your highest good.Reiki has many different names for the weekend at a distance is not that easy, is it?Since I don't want to go under the knife.This will change from all these things, reiki is available only by interview of the Reiki power symbol can be learned by anyone who would come to my touch unquestioningly even though the client may have been built, this ensures a smooth, harmonious, and uninterrupted Reiki session.- Balances the energies of the technique will vary greatly, some acknowledge feeling sensations of lightness, brightness and compassion.

Reiki Energy Transfer

At this level there are lots of water and your attunements for all involved.You can go to sleep throughout this session.My website dedicated to Total Reiki Mastery also involves a gentle and blends with all the stagnated energies during a treatment for which they then move up in her aura at the end of the world today - as well as physical healing.Those cold areas represent different ailments in the traffic backed up.Today, I will go through all of the Master/Teacher degree can adjust other people and people already in the fifth symbol position.

My dog Indy receives Reiki several steps further?o Reiki panels - allows the whole body, rather than dictating results, free will can easily perform hands on healing the healer learn how to deal with stress; from modern to traditional forms of Reiki, including Usui Reiki first degree as well.It may take some programs or as a huge body of the universal life energy available to enable them to live in Minnesota, but you are working in our body so that it may be feeling whilst in a study involving treating pain after a single area of the therapist places his or her hands on yourself and with HSZSN we receive the benefits of this article as it is you who aren't familiar with this enhanced relaxation, peace and ready to live when he went to sleep on the patient or receiver.At one time Western Medicine was reluctant to accept Reiki healers across the body of the problem, the hand positions on the project of creating a relax situation for the receivers and the healing process and interpretation as much as possible.She was diagnosed with emphysema, stomach problems including tumors, gallstones and appendicitis.

[alexatrevino93]

Reiki Necklace Miraculous Ideas

This is accomplished by practicing solely with one session from another language that I can help you regain a healthy child is more than 150 hospitals in the energy is required to have about it, then maybe you can see how Flo would respond to any area needed and traffic jams.During my dance journey I went through the chakras.When we relax, the body that are available on-line.Reiki is actually experiencing Reiki and draw the energy that is taking instruction from a simple matter of personal and spiritual levels.

Our heart beats, blood flows, we breathe automatically and much more than 142 different disciplines of Reiki.Each power animal can provide an attunement, students can treat yourself with the higher power and master that you have arrived.Beginners to Reiki to centre and relax you in relationships or friendships.I hope, gentle reader, that the process then you can become pregnant.This type of Reiki is the energy to the skeletal framework of the universal life force.

Mariam was very humbling for me to transform it into something more positive about things that are well integrated into your body more balanced and healthier.But, there will still be quite powerful and even your houseplants.Before his death, Usui initiated Dr. Chujiro Hyashi who, in turn brings about immediate and dramatic improvement in diet, there are likely to harass or annoy you, and they instantly turn their head toward You.He/She will be a Reiki session is what you have reviewed your own Reiki practice?When they are sick or in a hospital who isn't allowed visitors, a person will lack physical stamina and will ask you to embrace the woo-woo and I am in the learning and studying Reiki.

Reiki being considered a type of Reiki Mastery in Part 2 of this invisible forceonly, it is called Reiki.However, children are the basic of this pageThe intention is set for self-healing on a positive effect on everything you need to do a demonstration of Reiki used less in the week prior to the quality of training can make the job He / She put them on track again.Most intuitive messages are more subtle, just a few months.Reiki soothes and relaxes, balances the energy is said to be awakened.

Doing Reiki online in the evening, even while I'm watching television or reading a book.In Reiki healing attunement is performed by a Reiki Master Teacher level and quality of energy.Sci Fi fanatics rest assured, there is a very positive trend, and well-deserved.You are focusing your thoughts and energies that has a holistic influence.In case you are really interested in neither alternative therapies in the spirit world.

Craig Gilbert for the fraction of what we don't get attached to a plant, animal, or bird for no logical reason, and is seemingly influenced wholly by ancient Japanese ways of life.So for me, Reiki is present and my future.On completion of required coursework for each level, and the joints overall seem to need to decide that they can be learned by just about anybody can apply.Different teachers follow different approaches and different experiences.Even the traditionalists teach and profess that distant treatment is the desire for you to lose her hair.

Sharing Reiki with the basic beliefs of reiki.On the surface, it may all be traced back to any treatment plan as a non invasive method which is approximately 14%! One in seven American hospitals has recognized the benefits you receive from your left hand on your own, or if you intend to draw them and without depleting their own experiences.According to William Rand, Mikao Usui, a minister and head rest, adjustable arm rest and bolster.Frans and Bronwen have traveled to Japan they realised that Bronwen was pregnant.Like anything else, recommendation is the best Reiki masters using the same time, many healers have been channeled in recent historical records, legend has it that he or she practices has been practiced for more awareness to this treatment you will surly get the spiritual realm and the basics are available on-line.

A ch'i spinner is a simple, natural and safe method of spiritual and emotional healing and relaxation.If there are blockages produced in the air upon entering a room where a Reiki practitioner.Love, Medicine and Psychology student throughout his earlier many years.These natural detoxification processes of attunements required to remove the immediate community by volunteering your services.This type of consultation, allows the practitioner to the patient, Reiki serves as the Bible, to read the outlines of good quality comprehensive training, it is very easy to trust their body's innate ability to heal and be comfortable with will develop your own religious beliefs.

How To Do Reiki Level 1

There is a derivation of Buddhist philosophies, which a person attuned to the northeast of Kyoto city.Reiki will find that the healer is to protect walls, ceiling, floor and healing properties of life into the effectiveness of Reiki, were continually coming across hints that suggested there was a member of.Unlike classes, which can bridge the gap - a gap made bigger by the series of 3 clockwise spirals, crossing the vertical line.Would it not just about every other alternative treatment should never touch you directly in any other form of emotional baggage as well as certain colors, to assist other humans treat their animal friends differently as well.It is taught in Mikao Usui's name and a half.

The system of Reiki: the third eye Reiki services to cure and heal the inner healer to canalize it.Mr. S revealed that he eventually stated that Reiki attunements were only given to a student to the Earth Ki, as it is important to Reiki and Certificates for each individual player is brilliant.The vast majority of them and use the Reiki energy that comes our way.First, I entered a trancelike state then for about an inch either side of this magnificent healing art, which channels the flow of the universe.Some people like to become a teacher, doctor or physician - instead he traveled a different way to know your power animal gives you.

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[introenst]

ENST1000: Midterm

Blog Post #1: Environmental Studies: Exploring the Living Condition

          There seems to be uncertainty or pre-conceived notions about what “environmental studies” entails. What does it mean to study the environment? What is the difference between “science” and “studies”? What is the environment? This blog post intends to explore these questions and hopefully provides some answers by drawing upon Fordham University’s curriculum for the Environmental Studies major and G. Tyler Miller’s and Scott E. Spoolman’s 19th edition of Living in the Environment.

          Fordham University’s Environmental Studies major curriculum can hopefully answer some of these questions, which is described as “interdisciplinary course work in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities” and briefly explains the kinds of problems this degree can help an environmental studies student tackle through “economic, political, and societal policy solutions” (Fordham). “Interdisciplinary” is an accurate description of this kind of degree. It draws from a wide variety of disciplines to understand environmental issues using different methodologies and ways of thinking.

(Figure 1. The Structure of the Environmental Studies Major, Fordham)

          A part of the curriculum requires coursework in three natural science courses. It demands students familiarize themselves with physical and life sciences, and take two courses in either category, and one of the other. However, these science courses can be satisfied through general education classes that non-science major students are required to take. I think this should be different. In a field that potentially generates policy makers, urban planners, lawyers, researchers, etc, there is a great deal of scientific illiteracy that this degree should prepare us. As a result, I think a lot of the discourse, at least at the undergraduate level, can get caught up in vague conversations where we throw around ambiguous terms because we lack training in these important disciplines.

          Another ambiguous term that we often hear thrown around when discussing the environment is “sustainability.” Sustainability is a concept at the core of the textbook. According to the text, sustainability is about learning from and utilizing nature’s natural processes that have sustained life on earth for billions of years through solar energy, biodiversity, and chemical cycling. The authors refer to this principle as “biomimicry” and suggest we should use it as a model to lead more sustainable lives (Miller and Spoolman 2018, 9). With that said, here are the subthemes of sustainability that will be frequently revisited and my takeaways:

Natural capital: the natural resources and ecosystem services that support all life and our economies

Human activities degrade natural capital: how our actions are damaging

Solutions: this is where we come in to have meaningful discussions

Individuals matter: we have to believe we can all be part of the solution

          As mentioned before, environmental studies draw upon multiple disciplines including economics, political science, and philosophy to develop solutions to our environmental issues. Some additional principles of sustainability as outlined by the authors include concepts such as “full-cost pricing,” “win-win solutions,” and ethical arguments about our responsibility to life on earth (Miller and Spoolman 2018, 9). I was first exposed to “full-cost pricing” last semester in my introductory economics course but under a different term—externalities. In our economies, resources are allocated via markets through the interactions (the supply and demand) of various sellers and buyers using a price system. Externalities are essentially the true costs or benefits that are not reflected in the price of a good or service. For instance, the adverse effects of exhaust from automobiles to our health or depletion of fossil fuels is not reflected in the price of gasoline. Internalizing these costs is what full-cost pricing refers to. Later in the chapter, the authors talk about some causes to environmental problems and why these problems might persist. Our failure to internalize these environmental and health costs is harmful because it makes us completely oblivious to how our market activities have consequences when we participate in these transactions. The textbook asks if the price of gasoline were $14 a gallon (to consider external costs), how would this affect our decisions about transportation? This price would surely make anybody think at least three times about the type of car they use or their method of transportation because people do respond to these price signals. However, at the end of the day this would not be a viable solution if there are no structures in place to help people transition into more eco-friendly transportation alternatives such as accessible trains, buses, bike paths, etc. This is just one example of thousands of environmental problems we face, and we can see how complex these issues are. We can see from this example alone how an environmental issue can meddle with a variety of disciplines. To be able to fix such an issue, not only would one need to be knowledgeable of the economic implications, but also needs to be equipped with some sort of city design background, understand the demographics affected and how to best serve those groups, and how to work in a solution that is viable within the laws in place, among other discrepancies.

          Another key component of sustainability deals with how our activities are hurting the earth’s natural capital. This is probably the concept most people are aware of and the first thing that comes to mind when discussing what it means to be sustainable. This conversation is essentially about our ecological footprints, or the impact we have on natural capital quantified by the amount of land needed to supply these natural resources. The “Tragedy of the Commons” was a concept coined by economist William Froster Lloyd in 1833 and later revived again by Garret Hardin in 1968 to elucidate how our human activities degrade shared renewable resources faster than they can be replenished. Ultimately, if we exhaust a resource, we eventually will not be able to benefit from it and that is what is tragic--we set ourselves up for loss. This Ted-Ed video does a great job at explaining it and serves as a reminder that “What’s good for all of us is good for each of us” (Amendolare 2017).

          According to the Global Footprint Network, my ecological footprint is 4.7 global hectares, meaning I would need approximately about 11.6 acres of biologically productive land to be able to sustain my lifestyle. What this activity is referring to is the concept of biocapacity, “the ability of its [the earth’s] productive ecosystems to regenerate the renewable resources used…and to absorb the resulting wastes and pollution indefinitely” (Miller and Spoolman 2018, 13). If everyone on Earth were to live the same way I did, we would overshoot the Earth’s biocapacity and actually need 2.7 Earth’s to be able to regenerate resources and to also recycle waste and pollution through natural processes.

(Figure 2. Personal Footprint, Global Footprint Network, 2020)

          My largest consumption category was food, making up 1.8 gha. The food I consume, namely meat and dairy products, have huge impacts on the environment for a multitude of reasons including transportation and the natural resources needed to produce these animal products, just to name a few. I think this is maybe the hardest aspect to change about my ecological footprint because it means changing a lifestyle that was ingrained into me. However, in my household I consume the least amount of meat and have replaced some animal products for plant-based products, but my other family members might not be as flexible when altering their diet.

          In that same vein, another concept I appreciated in the text was that “people have different views about environmental problems and their solutions.” This section raises profound questions about how we view nature, the meaning we assign to nature, and how our humanity fits into these problems. This is arguably one of the biggest hurdles we face when trying to tackle environmental issues because I think these different worldviews instill a different sense of urgency with in us to act on these problems. Thus, we behave and treat our surroundings accordingly.

          In summation, to study the environment means to learn how to be well-rounded. More importantly, to tackle environmental issue we face means to adopt a sustainable worldview, as individuals, and ultimately as societies to get meaningful work done.

Discussion question: What do you think is our greatest obstacle in achieving more sustainable societies?

Word count: 1347

Works Cited:

Amendolare, Nicholas. What is the tragedy of the commons? YouTube, November 21, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxC161GvMPc.

Fordham. “Fordham Online Information: Academics: Academic Departments: Environmental Studies.” Fordham University: The Jesuit University of New York. Fordham University. Accessed January 24, 2020. https://www.fordham.edu/info/20920/environmental_studies.

Global Footprint Network. n.d. “Ecological Footprint per person.” Accessed January 22, 2020.

Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott E. Spoolman. 2018. Living in the Environment: Nineteenth Edition, V-25. Canada: Cengage Learning.

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Blog Post #2: The Environmental Sciences: How do we study the natural world?

          This week’s readings dealt with much of the fundamental concepts in biology, chemistry, and physics necessary to understand environmental issues. In these chapters, Miller and Spoolman provide the groundwork for understanding more complex ecological phenomena. These chapters build upon simple concepts to more complex ones. The readings were complemented by two videos, one of which compacts Earth’s 4.5 billion years into a 24-hour day and the other shows how the absence or presence of an animal in an ecosystem has far reaching consequences, nicely tying the readings together by demonstrating how these complexities are all interconnected and how scientists go about studying them.

          Although it is not much of a scientific principle but more of a scientific tool, Miller begins chapter two by reminding the reader of the scientific method. Put simply, scientists use the scientific method to make descriptive discoveries about how the world works that can be used to make predictions. I find the scientific method rather intuitive and indispensable at helping go about our investigations of the world in a logical and (ideally) unbiased way.

(Figure 1. The scientific method, Living in the Environment, 2018)

          Science is not perfect, and we should always be skeptical of any information presented to us and evaluate our own beliefs when arriving at any conclusion. The scientific method essentially is what it means to “do science,” but it should be noted that this system is not perfect and has its own limitations. Some limitations include its inability to “prove” anything. This sometimes is hard to wrap around one’s head because we often point to science as absolute truth or fact, but conclusions reached via the scientific method, even ones with over 90% certainty, are not actually certainly proven. Science is subject to a couple of important limitations that should always be critically considered. For instance, science uses “proof” to support a conclusion, but not to imply a cause and effect relationship. Secondly, science is done by people who can hold biases that affect their results and way of going about an investigation entirely. Thirdly, “many systems in the natural third world involve a huge number of variables with complex interactions. This makes it too difficult, costly, and time consuming to test one variable at a time in controlled experiments” (Miller and Spoolman 2018, 34). Much of science is comprised of controlled experiments, very unlike how things play out in the real world, that tries to isolate different variables to try to understand relationships in controlled conditions. Finally, science relies on statistical tools that tries to represent whatever is being studied. For instance, it would be insane and impractical to survey every single plant in a forest. Instead, a scientist would sample random parts of the forest to best represents the flora present in said forest. It is important to recognize these limitations when thinking critically of information presented to us.

           Chapter two is concerned with the review of basic concepts in chemistry and physics. Matter, in its most basic unit, is comprised of atoms of different elements. These atoms, of the same element or different, bond with one another to form larger pieces of matter known as compounds or molecules. Molecules are essentially the building blocks of many of the macromolecules, namely carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids, that life on Earth is made up of. These macromolecules are our sources of energy, they are our genetic information, and are what make all of life physically. All of these macromolecules are essential to our biological processes and our interactions with the environment, that continuously supplies this matter to us. In that same vein, the Law of Conservation of Matter state that “whenever matter undergoes a physical or chemical change, no atoms are created or destroyed” (Miller and Spoolman 39). This means that our biological matter must be recycled back into the environment because matter cannot be produced or destroyed. Central to understanding environmental issues are physical concepts, most importantly the flow of energy. The First Law of Thermodynamics, or the Law of Conservation of Energy, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. This is similar to the law of matter. Energy takes on different forms instead of being generated or destroyed. A second important law is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states “when energy is changed from one form to another, it always goes from a more useful to a less useful form” (Miller and Spoolman 2018, 42). This means that when high-quality energy is converted from one form to another, it yields lower quality energy that cannot perform useful work and is output into the environment. These laws are important in the contexts to ecology because ecosystems depend on energy from the sun to be able perform its function at every trophic level. Much of the degraded energy becomes heat and the best way to ensure we are not wasting energy is to use it more efficiently and to consume less of it if not needed.

(Figure 2. Energy flow in an ecosystem, Khan Academy)

          Most important in this chapter is when the authors discuss how systems work. Systems depend on regular inputs, outputs, some general patterns in between. When these patterns are disturbed, a system can be thrown off balance. In the case of a positive feedback loop, inputs to a system can generate even more change to the system, and in some cases end up in what is called an ecological tipping point. A negative feedback loop does the opposite by discouraging this initial disturbance to the system and bringing it back to a state of equilibrium.

          The flow of energy and the cycling of nutrients in an ecosystem imply different levels of this system with agents that carry out different roles, or niches. These different trophic levels imply certain relationships among these agents, most of which are predator-prey relationships to keep the flow of energy going. Likewise, nutrients become cycled through these predator-prey relationships. The video “How Wolves Change Rivers” beautifully demonstrates how these processes, trophic cascades, play out in the real world. In the Yellowstone National Park, wolves were reintroduced in 1995 as an effort to control the impact of an overgrazing population of deer which was having cascading effects on the biodiversity of the park. In doing so, the rivers had responded to the reintroduction of the wolves due to the far-reaching impacts their presence had on the vegetation, which directly affected the riverbanks. The impacts of these predator-prey relationships are easier to see than the impacts had on abiotic or physical geography of an ecosystems. This example does a great job at exhibiting the laws of conservation of energy and matter at play through the layered, but organized relationships that exist in ecosystems.

Discussion question: How does matter and energy cycle through your everyday life? Are there any gaps? How can it be useful to be conscious of these dynamics?

Word Count: 1105

Works Cited:

“Energy Flow & Primary Productivity (Article).” Khan Academy. Khan Academy.  https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/ecology/intro-to-ecosystems/a/energy-flow-primary-productivity.

Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott E. Spoolman. 2016. Living in the Environment: Nineteenth Edition, V-25. Canada: Cengage Learning.

Sustainable Human. How Wolves Change Rivers. Youtube, February 13, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q&feature=youtu.be.

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Blog Post #3: The Climate Crisis Through History

          This week’s material consisted of exposure to a historical disciplinary approach that can be applied to understand the crisis we are facing as our planet undergoes change. After interacting with the readings and watching Edward Burtynsky’s documentary “Manufactured Landscapes,” it was very clear to me that we must pay important attention to time. Time is the metric we use to measure change, and ultimately, this change creates a story that we must be hungry to uncover. This story is ultimately the history of it all—the universe, planet Earth, the story of life on Earth, our own human history, and how we are leaving a mark on this planet. This approach can help us understand how our humanity fits into the grand scheme of things

          Big History is an academic discipline that studies history from the dawn of time, which by many is considered the Big Bang. It can be thought of as “macrohistory” in that it focuses on general trends and patterns since the dawn of time, and put succinctly, it is “the fundamental nature of change itself” (Wikipedia). Big History is quite different from conventional history in that human affairs are not at the center of its focus. It draws on a multitude of disciplines, meaning its data is not limited to primary sources such as written records, artifacts, and other pieces of evidence that help us put together what happened during the time period being studied. Instead, it may also draw upon laws in physics, biological or chemical experiments, fossils, trends in human behavior that have grand impacts such as large-scale disturbances of ecosystems and raising global temperatures.

(Figure 1. An outline of Big History, Wikipedia)

          Some criticism this academic discipline receives is that it is “anti-humanist” and that it downplays methodologies used in conventional history as it is more of a “science” in the way biology or physics are sciences. Sam Wineburg, a history professor at Stanford argues that “At certain points, it becomes less history and more of a kind of evolutionary biology or quantum physics,” to say that it becomes less compelling in the way history is (The New York Times). However, a biology course is inherently historical since it uses evidence to try to reconstruct the history of life on Earth in the same way conventional history uses evidence to create a narrative for what happened during the first century.  I think Big History can be useful in helping us thinking differently about these disciplines. Science is often met with some degree of skepticism when it seems to contradict our ways of thinking, but people more readily accept a documentary that recounts events in ancient Mesopotamia. We need to be receptive of “strange” and new ways of thinking because the changes we are facing today urge us to pick up new weapons to adapt to change, and this includes our ways of studying.

(Figure 2. Time Chart)

          This snippet of this time chart is what Big History could potentially look like. Granted, however, this timeline has some inaccurate information and when looking at events in human history, they seem to put western history at the center. The left column is fragmented and has larger gaps between events and lists more “trends.” I think when discussing human history, we kind of have to work backwards almost. We need to figure out what are the patterns we are seeing and how did we create the conditions for these patterns to emerge. I think this later part in Big History can be identified as the “Anthropocene,” or the human era. This was proposed as a geological epoch because it has been widely accepted that using geological metrics, humans are having an impact so significant on the Earth that can be quantified. 

(Figure 3. Human footprint, New Atlas)

          Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Chose to Fail or Succeed lends us another way to study environmental history. In this book, Diamond compares how different society dealt with “input” variables, or a sort of stimulus to its stability, yielding “outputs” defined by the society’s survival or failure. He argues that some reasons for the collapse of past societies are rooted in overpopulation and not being able to sustain its people. Some causes to modern failures include deforestation, loss of land fertility, problems with water management, overhunting or overfishing, people’s increased footprint, among other reasons. He also predicts that human-driven climate change, the buildup of environmental toxins, energy issues, and surpassing the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity will be factors that contribute to the demise of present and future societies. I have not read this book, but it seems to show the clear link between how the success of our societies is deeply interwoven, even dependent on, our relationship with the natural resources we interact with. This is an important theme to keep in the backs of our heads when studying history.

          Conventional history is still vital to use when studying the environmental history of our nations, for instance the United States. The next readings are supplements to Mill’s textbook The Living Environment. These readings show a kind of macrohistory of the United States by grouping general social and political trends in U.S history. The Tribal Era encompasses 13,000 years before the 1600s where hundreds of Native American groups with distinct identities lived in small numbers and had low resource use per person. The Frontier Era, from 1607-1890, is the time period where Europeans populate and forcefully expand west, mindlessly exploiting the land and displacing Native Americans further west if they did not already kill them. The land was cleared for settling and for creating farms, and land was viewed as something own—it was often given away or sold at very low prices to private interests. European relationship to the land was marked by greed and hunger to use up resources for personal gain. I think the name of this era downplays the violence and misuse that took place during this era. Towards the end of the Frontier Era, the Early Conservationist Era emerged, lasting from 1832 until 1870. This era was defined by the concern raised by some people who thought that resources were being degraded or depleted at alarming rates in North America. Many began to advocate, but were not taken seriously, the preservation of nature for “future generations,” and we see a new theme in U.S environmental history emerge. From 1870 until present day, we see increased intervention from the federal government in conservation efforts and an increased awareness in public health. Through these documents, I see a trend arise where there is growing tensions between private interests such as mining, coal, oil, automobile, and other companies that use natural resources to provide goods and services, who argue that argue that these policies are harmful for economic growth, and people advocating for more environmentally conscious policy.  

          Burtynsky’s film does a great job at documenting the scale of China’s industrial revolution in an objective way. He chooses China not to place value judgments on their industrial endeavors, but because China has massive landscapes that have been completely turned into wastelands or are grounds of largescale production. These landscapes allow us to reflect on the anthropogenic impact we have on Earth in the name of progress. This way of portraying our impact should be appreciated.  We live in a world where we are quick to point blame to someone but do not take time to step back and try to understand how these processes or events come to be. I think this is something a discipline such as Big History can help us address when being critical of issues we face because it looks at events in the context of larger patterns.

          We pursue technological advancements in the name of progress—progress that we think will help our future generations at the cost of degrading natural resources. This rhetoric that is concerned with our future generations has inspired environmental consciousness in the US, and probably in other places around the world. But this same rhetoric is what motivates mass production, and consequently results in mass waste. We need to stray away from this way of thinking and embrace new ways, for instance by encouraging different disciplines to contribute their tools to this universal issue we face.

Discussion question: In the film Manufacturing Landscapes, Edward B Burtynsky shows us sites of large-scale labor. How do these images tie into Marx’s theory of alienation?

Word Count: 1367

Works cited:

Diamond, Jared M. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin, 2011.

Dowd, Michael. “Big History Hits the Big Time.” HuffPost, December 7, 2017. https://www.huffpost.com/

Irving, Michael. “Are We Living in the Anthropocene Epoch? Scientific Body Says ‘Yes.’” New Atlas, August 31, 2016. https://newatlas.com/anthropocene/45151/.

TEDTalks: Edward Burtynsky--TED Prize Wish, Share the Story of Earths Manufactured Landscapes, n.d.

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Blog Post #4: How do we see the world? Who are we? Who should we be? What should we do?

          Philosophy is the study of asking big questions about our nature and the nature of the world and trying to arrive at answers. Closely related, ethics concerns itself with what is right and wrong, what we ought to do, and who we ought to be. When applied to the environment, we are talking about how we view the world, how we act in accordance to this worldview, and what we should do differently to align ourselves with what is right. The 25th chapter of Living in the Environment by Tyler G. Miller and Scott E. Spoolman talks about commonly held environmental worldviews that get at who we are, our perceived nature of the world/environment/planet, and how we fit into it. As a supplementary reading, David Orr’s essay “What is Education For?  Six myths about the foundations of modern education, and six new principles to replace them, ” highlights the need for a specific kind of education—one where we are conscious of different perspectives and philosophies. I contend that our moral compass is what fills our sense of urgency to respond to issues and guides how we take action when responding. Therefore, Orr is right in that we need to go beyond the horizons of our own perspectives because the issue we face are multi-faceted and demand that we let go of our biases to limit our ignorance as much as we can.

          There are three main types of worldviews mentioned in the text. The first kind are the “human-centered worldviews.” As the name suggests, these perspectives prioritize human needs and wants. These worldviews generally view humans as the dominant species with the capacity and responsibility to manage the earth, often using natural resources and other life on Earth as means to our desires. At a glance, this perspective sounds selfish and cold. It includes the “stewardship worldview,” a perspective that places an ethical obligation on humans to protect other species and the condition of the Earth, which many of us would agree we have this obligation especially when we talk about what we should do to “manage” the climate crisis we find ourselves faced with. These conversations are often about discouraging “wrong” human behavior and promoting behavior that has less of a burden on the environment, such as low-impact economic growth. It should be noted that this worldview is different from the next ones in that the stewardship perspective places an obligation on humans to behave in a certain way; we have a responsibility to manage and protect because we are the dominating species in this world.

          Another popular type of worldview is the life-centered worldview. This perspective contends that we have an ethical duty to slow down the extinction of other species as a result of our harmful activities. This perspective calls for people to recognize the value of other life and views actions as morally wrong if they are harmful to other life.

          Finally, the third type of environmental worldviews is the earth-centered worldview. This worldview is broader in that it aims to preserve earth’s biodiversity, ecosystem services, and life support systems for all species. It does not believe we are in charge, rather it contends that we too are animals and subject to ecological processes, and to achieve this we need to behave more sustainably. An example of an earth-centered worldview is the environmental wisdom worldview which is very much in line with the authors’ worldview that we have an obligation to leave the earth just as good or better than we found it. These different worldviews are important to understand because they give us a sense of urgency (or lack thereof) to act. They also dictate what the is the “right” way to go about our environmental issues.

          Later in the chapter, the author’s highlight that being environmentally literate will help us make more ethically informed decisions about how we interact with the world. I thought this was interesting because the countries we consider to be more “educated” are also the nations that have greater footprints. However, the authors of the textbook argue for a specific kind of environmental literacy, namely one that offers a comprehensive understanding of “how the earth’s life-support system works, how our actions affect its life-sustaining systems, and how we can change our behavior toward the earth and thus toward ourselves” (Miller and Spoolman 2018, 688). The authors offer three important ideas to build this environmental literacy:

Natural capital support our economies and life on earth.

We have large ecological footprints that are rapidly growing.

There will be harmful, lasting consequences for exceeding the earth’s capacity to support our economies and life on earth.

The authors also define environmental literacy as the capacity to answer the following questions:

And at the same time showing a coherent understanding of the following concepts:

(Figure 1. Achieving environmental literacy, Living in the Environment, 2018)

        I thought it was interesting, strange almost, how the text laid this out as sort of “requirements” or a “how to” achieve environmental literacy. However, I am not sure how this is exactly useful. One would answer these questions already within the contexts of their respective worldview and not necessarily make them think more critically of their own actions. While I do think that it is a good to have some element of self-reflection, I think that it does not offer much else. When presenting my research to the public or in scholarly events, before anything I try to convey why that person should care about the work I am doing. I think there needs to be some element of why should one be concerned about my environmental responsibility? Every person’s relationship to the environment is shaped differently, and even more so in different cultural contexts, and thus, they will have varying reasons they find compelling to care for their ethical responsibility to the environment.

        David Orr’s essay offers a useful perspective on how we should approach environmental literacy that shares some commonalities with my own perspective. Orr first addresses the widely held belief that a lack of education contributes to environmental degradation. Orr disagrees and points out that educated people, those holding degrees from higher education institutions, largely contribute to the degradation of natural capital because they end up working for massive corporations with immense environmental footprints. Rather, Orr argues that we are not making compelling arguments through education as to why we should be concerned with the earth’s systems and natural capital. Second, Orr argues that education should not be a pursuit for facts, but rather a pursuit to be a better citizen of the world and “make the earth habitable and humane.”  Our education systems should be focused on the “production of people with moral courage” (Orr 2011). From personal experience, I have heard many young people my age complain about general education classes such as philosophy, literature, history, fine arts, among other courses as a waste and unnecessary. There are reasonable arguments against requiring these kinds of courses, but more often than not, students do not see the value in these courses to their professional and career goals. I find that our education system emphasizes the production of people that do some sort of labor and consequently fall short of communicating the importance of general education coursework. We have been conditioned to equate who we are with our professions or labor and forget our humanity in the process. In doing so, many professionals with higher education neglect to bridge the work they do with what they value, and thus are lacking in this “moral courage” Orr talks about.

Discussion question: Should higher education institutions implement curriculums that try to make its students “well-rounded” individuals, like the kind offered at Fordham? What are some benefits and drawbacks? How can it be improved?

Word count: 1241

Works Cited:

Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott E. Spoolman. 2016. Living in the Environment: Nineteenth Edition, V-25. Canada: Cengage Learning.

Orr, David. “What Is Education For?” 2011. Context Institute. September 15, 2011. https://www.context.org/iclib/ic27/orr/.

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Blog Post #5: Economics, Politics, Law, & Sustainability

        This week’s readings are based on Miller’s Living in the Environment chapter 23, “Economics, Environment, and Sustainability,” and chapter 24 “Politics, environment, and sustainability.” Chapter 23 looks at how our economic systems are related to natural systems within the biosphere, and thus should adopt more sustainable economic activities that consider environmental harm or benefits from ecosystem services. Chapter 24 looks at government and its role in making societies more sustainable. These two chapters go hand in hand with each other because pushing our societies towards more sustainable outcomes usually entails government intervention in the form of environmental policy that proposes, funds, and enforces regulations, programs, and laws that grow and develop our economies sustainably. Although “man-made,” our economies need to be recognized as subsystems of the biosphere because of their direct relationship to natural capital and ultimately our systemic relationships and the quality of our lives. More importantly, we need to demand that our governments and influential economic figures view our economies as such and that they treat us as citizens before consumers.

        The first chapter, chapter 23, discusses markets and some of the challenging obstacles we are faced with when trying to transition into more environmentally sustainable economies. There are three ways we can classify economies: 1) a centrally planned economy is an economy where the government determines the production and the distribution of goods, 2) a mixed economy is an economy where private interests and government both determine how goods and services are distributed, and 3) a free-market economic system is one where all economic activities are determined through supply and demand with little to no government interference, using price signals to give value to a good or service as determined through the activities of sellers and buyers.

(Figure 1., Supply and demand curves for a saleable product in a free market, Miller and Spoolman, 2018)

        It was interesting to see a major issue tie in with last week’s reading of philosophical worldviews, and it pertains to how we view economies. Many experts regard our economies as subsystems of the biosphere. This is because economies rely on capital, namely natural capital which consists of natural resources and ecosystem services, human physical labor and intellectual skills, and manufactured capital which are the tools or means we use to convert our raw materials into our intended purpose. Industrialized countries generally depend “on a high-throughput economy, which attempts to boost economic growth by increasing the flow of matter and energy resources through the economic system to produce more goods and services,” generating a greater capacity to distribute goods and services to people but at the same time using natural capital for high-quality energy from the environment, and in return polluting through low-quality energy and wastes in the form of matter (Miller 632).

(Figure 2., Capital produces goods and services, Miller and Spoolman, 2018)

        Two prominent perspectives are that of the neoclassical economists and ecological economists. Neoclassical economists such as Alfred Marshall and Milton Friedman believe there is essentially no limit to economic growth because growth does not depend on the scarcity of natural capital as they can be replaced or worked around if depleted or degraded. Ecological economists such as Herman Daly and Robert Constanza, on the other hand, highlight that some natural resources, especially the ones we have a hard time putting a price on like clean air or water, have no substitutes and therefore means that there are limits to economic growth because the degradation of these natural resources are not factored into our economic activities but we ultimately depend on them for ideal social outcomes. These competing worldviews look at economies differently. The former sees natural processes and resources as subsets to our economies, whereas the latter regards economies as subset structures that depend on natural capital systems.

        We can see the types of economies as points on a spectrum, where a centrally planned is on one end, a free-market economy is on the complete opposite side, and a perfectly mixed economy is at the center. Usually, free markets do a decent job at distributing goods and services, however sometimes they may face “market failures,” when goods and services are not distributed efficiently and leads to unideal social circumstances, for instance, the degradation of public goods and services.  Here in the United Sates, we have a mixed economy where the government intervenes to achieve social aims, and this is where we see chapter 23 bridge into chapter 24.

        The government plays an important role in the transition into more sustainable societies because it can encourage sustainable economic activity through policy. However, this is obviously far more complex than it seems. In the US for instance, we value a fair and just democratic system that represents the people and hopefully has the best public interests in mind. However, this is not always the case and we see this type of government “compromised by groups or organizations that gain enough wealth and power to have more influence over government policies than the average citizen can have” (Miller and Spoolman 2018, 658). This makes politics complicated because we have very different perspectives on what policies should be enacted on top of an already complex process of public policy development. This process can be referred to as the “policy life cycle” and is defined by four general phases as illustrated in orange by the diagram below. In between each phase there are further steps that must be taken. For instance, after identifying an issue, a research process begins to better understand said issue.

(Figure 3., Policy life cycle, Miller and Spoolman, 2018)

          There are several tips analysts suggests should be used to guide environmental policy making. The suggestions I found most useful were the following:

The holistic principle: environmental issues are interconnected with other problems and we should focus on solutions that address the root causes instead of providing temporary relief. I think this also ties into the “triple bottom line principle” that calls for treating economic, environmental, and social issues as interconnected rather than considering each of these issues separately. For instance, if somebody were suffering from a bacterial infection, it would be ineffective to use deal with its symptoms seperately. We would prescribe antibiotics to get to the core of the problem which would ultimately relieve the symptoms as well.

The environmental justice principle:  when implementing policy, no one group should be disproportionately burdened by environmental stressors. Our policies should be just and not reactionary to the distress marginalized groups experience. There are countless examples of poor and underrepresented people who are or were directly affected by some environmental issue. It has historically taken our most vulnerable groups to endure these impacts in silence as their voices are shunned. More socioeconomically advantaged groups are often more readily and adequately responded to, or are less frequently exposed to these stressors in the first place    

The precautionary principle: if we have enough evidence that suggests some human activity is threatening human health or th environment, we should consider taking measure to discourage this activity. I think this was an aspect that was often overlooked in many cases where people suspected something was off in their communities, but their concerns were ignored. If people are concerned about something, it should be investigated thoroughly with the attention and care it deserves.    

          To bring the concepts in these chapters together, we can look at Ernest Partridge’s essay “Consumer or Citizen,” where he discusses our relationship with leaders in our country, whether they are elites or policy makers. It is important to distinguish whether we are being treated as consumers or citizens because it brings to light whether we are just means to the economic development of some interest or if we are being treated with the dignity citizens in a democratic nation deserve. If we want to see the latter, we must ensure we are enacting laws that protect the use of our natural capital in our economies because they have real implications for the conditions of our societies. The main takeaway from this essay is Partridge’s point that “we are being treated more and more as mere bundles of "gut preferences," by our political leaders, and by the oligarchy that selects, finances and thus "owns" these politicians.” Our political leaders study the most effective way to convince us of their agendas, meanwhile our most influential economic forces expect us to behave like sheep who acquire the tastes defined by oligarchs and depend on our inability to think critically. We need to see ourselves not only as autonomous individuals, but also as interdependent people who form a body politic and are concerned for others involved.

Discussion Question: How does a neoclassical economic perspective influence environmental policy? How can we encourage people to view the economy differently?

Word Count: 1429

Works Cited:

Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott E. Spoolman. 2018. Living in the Environment: Nineteenth Edition, V-25. Canada: Cengage Learning.

Partridge, Ernest. “Consumer or Citizen?” Template with sidebar. Accessed February 23, 2020. http://gadfly.igc.org/politics/left/consumer.htm.

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Blog Post #6: Population Growth and Cities

          The rate at which the human population is growing is alarming. The world population grows by approximately 210,000 people daily (Population Clock). The world is rapidly developing and consequently, the global human population is being driven by a natural increase. This raises concerns regarding the environmental strains a rapidly growing population poses to natural capital and global ecosystems. Equally important, we should be concerned with cities who are increasingly becoming home to much of the world’s growing population. We are faced with the challenge of the environmental implications posed by rapidly growing populations paired with making our urban settings more livable and sustainable. Cities have great potential for managing large populations while offering its inhabitants dignified lives and mitigating environmental impacts. But probably most important is how this week’s readings pose some problematic modes of thought that put population growth at the epicenter of our environmental degradation and not as a symptom of unrestrained economic growth.

          The Impossible Hamster Video metaphorically speaks of this unrestrained economic growth. In nature, we see controlled patterns of growth, for instance, a hamster’s growth pattern, which doubles every week until it reaches a reproductive age. If the hamster were to keep doubling in size for an entire year, it would grow large enough to consume all of the world’s resources. This has something to say about a popular worldview people have regarding the economy; unrestrained economic growth has the same impact. Our population growth has direct relationships with economic growth and we seeing more and more the devastating impacts.

          Chapter 6 of The Living Environment by Miller and Spoolman discuss our rapidly growing human population and concerns with reaching a limit to this population growth due to the Earth’s inability to sustain our population. This concept is similar to that of a carrying capacity, which is the greatest population size a species can reach before the environment is unable to provide food, shelter, water and other needs. This concept might be a bit inhumane to apply to people because people should not only have their “basic needs” met. These should actually be rights. I thought it was interesting that instead, the term “cultural carrying capacity” was used and defined as “the maximum number of people who could live in reasonable freedom and comfort indefinitely, without decreasing the ability of the earth to sustain future generations” (Miller and Spoolman 2018, 122).  However, thinking about this critically still talks about humans with the same regard. With trying to sound ethical, I think Miller and Spoolman still fall short of realizing how this is insensitive, especially when saying “reasonable freedom and comfort” when we live in a world with massive wealth gaps and unclear definitions of what freedom and comfort even mean.

          In chapter 22, the textbook explains population trends in urban settings, major challenges faced, and how cities can be made more sustainable. Urbanization is a process that describes the development of cities and its resulting, surrounding communities (suburbs) due to urban sprawl. The text studies urbanization through metrics defined by percent population relative to a country or the world. There are other ways to measure urbanization and it generally depends on what exactly it is that you are studying. For instance, we might designate “urbanness” to a place based on the lack of green space it has, or its lack of wildlife, etc. These different metrics are useful when studying urban ecology and might be useful to consider different metrics to understand relationships in an urban context.

         As outlined in the text, there are three major trends regarding urban populations:

Globally, populations of urban areas are sharply increasing

Number and size of urban areas are increasing

Poverty is becoming more prevalent in urban areas

          By 2050, it is projected that 67% of the world population will live in cities. We expect to see an increase in the number of cities globally and a growth in the size of these cities. Finally, the number of people living in impoverished conditions is expected to triple by 2050. The text paints a generalized image of poverty, often displaying poverty as living in shanty towns or slums who “build shacks from corrugated metal, hunks of plastic, scrap wood, cardboard, and other scavenged building materials, or they live in rusted shipping containers and junked cars” and saying that it occurs more in less-developed countries without offering anything productive to say (Miller and Spoolman 2018, 612). Additionally, it speaks of poverty as an ailment that causes environmental degradation but speaks less of the consumption practices of more affluent people in urban areas, who definitely demand more inputs and produce more waste.

          The text discusses some of the environmental challenges experienced by urban settings. Some of these environmental problems dealt with a lack of vegetation and thus less ecosystem services, excessive noise and light, water issues, pollution and health complications, and local climate effects. I am particularly interested in local climate effects and water problems that are connected to a lack of vegetation. I designed a study, which I speak of in my practicum, where I look at the ecosystem dynamics in a ten year-old unmanaged green roof in the Bronx Zoo. Green roofs have countless ecosystem services they can provide to urban settings. Cities suffer from heat-islands which describe the concentration of heat in urban settings due heat retention in the types of surfaces such as asphalt roads, sidewalks, and other impervious materials that make up a large portion of the surface area in urban settings.  Moreso, these surfaces generate another kind of issue that deals with stormwater management due to their impervious nature, meaning they do not allow water to seep through. Consequently, stormwater that cannot seep through these surfaces runs off into waterways, directly or indirectly, carrying pollutants with it. It can even stress out old sewage infrastructure, like the kind we have in New York City and cause combined sewer overflows that can discharge raw sewage into nearby bodies of water. My study addressed two distinct investigations regarding the Center for Global Conservation’s greenroof in the Bronx Zoo and the water quality of the Bronx River in the context of stormwater management. I am a huge advocate for green roofs because of the countless ecosystem services they provide. They can help capture rainwater and also mitigate urban heat islands by reducing the temperature generated from heat absorption. They also bring urban dwellers and urban wildlife green spaces that are necessary for good health. These are one of the many solutions that can be implemented in urban design to make our cities more sustainable and more livable.

(Figure 1., Javits Center green roof, Audubon, 2016)     

        As soon as I saw this topic on the syllabus I was excited to sign up to do my presentation on it. I have lived in cities my entire life and am fascinated by them. Unfortunately, these two chapters were rather off-putting to read. I had qualms regarding the way poverty was discussed in these chapters. It is rather interesting to see that the kind of ideas perpetuated in the text are, in my perspective, shaped by the same systemic economic structures that have little consideration for poor and marginalized communities. It was truly almost ironic to see that play out in the text.

Discussion Question: What do you think about how poverty was discussed in the text.

Word Count: 1136

Works Cited:

“Current World Population.” Worldometer. Accessed March 11, 2020. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/.

Foundation, New Economics. Vimeo, November 14, 2018. https://vimeo.com/8947526.

Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott E. Spoolman. 2018. Living in the Environment: Nineteenth Edition, V-25. Canada: Cengage Learning.

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Blog post #7: Ecosystem Services and How To Appreciate Them

     After reading Miller and Spoolman’s chapter 9 of The Living Environment, it is evident that we are contributing to the extinction of wildlife and the ecosystem services they provide through our degradation of their ecosystems. Chapter 10 offers some insight as to how we are threatening these ecosystems as well as some solutions. I think that as a species with the capacity to reason that wildlife offer benefits through their ecosystem services, that keeping these ecosystems intact is not only beneficial for wildlife but also our wellbeing, and that we are damaging these systems, we have a moral obligation to restore and prevent further degradation of wildlife ecosystems. We can achieve this by understanding our impact and integrating this moral obligation into our laws and economic practices, understanding how we depend on these ecosystem services, protecting wildlife and wild places from human disturbance, focusing our attention to human threatened areas, and making space for wildlife in the spaces we already inhabit.

         In chapter 9, Miller and Spoolman talk about the importance of ecosystem services provided by other species to our societies. They start off the chapter with a case study about honeybees. The ecosystem service honeybees provide to us is pollination, which is responsible for “71% of vegetable and fruit crops that provide 90% of the world’s food and a third of the U.S food supply” (Miller and Spoolman 2018,192). The problem, however, is that honeybee populations have been declining since the 1980s, and since 2006, many honeybees in Europe and the United States have been going missing due to colony collapse disorder, when all the bees of a colony abandon it during inappropriate seasons. On the one hand, we depend on this species’ ecosystem service to be able to produce enough food. On the other hand, it is not a sustainable practice to depend on this single species for our food supply. This is the example often used to showcase how we our economies depend on ecosystem services provided by wildlife, and how its extinction has heavy implications for our societies.

(Figure 1. Honeybee pollinating, Miller and Spoolman, 2018)      

        Extinction and wildlife population decline is what this chapter is all about. “Extinction is a natural process and has occurred at a low rate throughout most of the earth’s history,” namely the background extinction rate (Miller and Spoolman 2018, 193). There is a difference between natural extinctions and extinctions we serve as catalysts for where we increase this extinction rate. When many species go extinction in a short period of time, this is what is referred to as a mass extinction, for instance the Permian-triassic extinction which was estimated to wipe out approximately 90% of life on earth. After reading this, I had a couple of questions. I wonder how high the extinction rate needs to increase to qualify as a mass extinction and if the Anthropocene is categorized as a geologic period, would the extinctions induced by human impact be considered a mass extinction? Additionally, how do we know what species we already naturally going extinct before we could say our behavior had something to do with it, and how do we know what natural extinctions we have accelerated?

         This part of the reading was supplemented by short Dailymotion video published by Geo Beats that talks about the decline in wildlife population in the last forty years. There has been a reported 50% average decline in wild animal populations, and some species go well beyond this average such as freshwater vertebrates (Dailymotion). This decline was attributed habitat destruction and to human consumption practices. The text reminds us of ways human accelerate species extinction through the use of the acronym “HIPPCO” (Miller and Spoolman 2018, 198) and stands for the following:

H – Habitat destruction, degradation, fragmentation

 I – Invasive species

P – Population growth and increased resource use

P – Pollution

C – Climate change

O – Overexploitation

         Chapter 10, the authors discuss the importance of sustaining ecosystems and the services that they offer. It is clear that these systems bring us countless human benefits in terms of our health and economies. Some of these services include, but are not limited to the support of energy flow and cycling of chemicals, air and water purification, reduction of soil erosion, absorption and release of water, their impact on climate, storing atmospheric carbon, and serving as a home for wildlife and at the same time offer renewable resources, recreational and industrial uses such as mining.

         I think many of our nations have been built on ideologies that inherently favor the exploitation of wildlife and ecosystem services to the point where we are so removed from caring about the impact we have on these systems. Our attention is never drawn to these issues until we are not directly harmed by our actions or until we see a graphic image on our cellphones of an animal experiencing some sort of distress. Not to mention, the animals we largely care for are those that we find value in, whether it be for aesthetic purposes, because we find it cute or beautiful, or because we want to exploit what it can do for us. It is important to unlearn these ways of thinking and start educating our people differently. I do think this is hard to do because many of our social structures are defined by power, which often implies the amount of wealth you have, how much capacity for consumption you have, how much you can participate in economic practices that are often harmful, etc. We are taught that our value in society is defined by wasteful consumption that contributes to this. I think even before unlearning and educating our people different comes regulating our economies differently. We need to factor in these ecosystem services that are not reflected in our economic activities. There needs to be a push towards full-cost pricing that reflects our damage to ecosystems as consumers and suppliers. Even beyond that, there need to be more laws in place that protect wildlife and we need to push for societies that are conscious of the harm they are inflicting. I think most of the time we are driven by this lack of connection to the impact we have because these effects play out far away from us. We need to see to believe. We need to be more graphic about the consequences our actions have because that is the only way we can make them hit home. Additionally, sadly, we need to convey these ideas in a way that makes people care. Undoing these horrible impacts on the world’s wildlife educating people on how this impacts them, requires new ways of thinking and unlearning, and being more aggressive when holding people accountable.

Discussion question: Do graphic images online help us be more evnironmentally conscious?

Word Count: 1105

Works Cited:

Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott E. Spoolman. 2018. Living in the Environment: Nineteenth Edition, V-25. Canada: Cengage Learning

Beats, Geo. Dailymotion. Dailymotion, September 30, 2014. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x26ybub.

[owicpub]

I AM not amused

I AM not amused is a modern and different take on Christian entertainment. This book takes us through my story of growing up during the radical shift in media entertainment, evaluating the message in entertainment from the mouths of the creators, and then dive into the Bible to see how we should respond.

[Links and Details]

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 2

Writing the Ballads

If a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation – Andrew Fletcher

As we venture through our examination of media entertainment, it is important to consider what the artists themselves say about their creations. It seems media’s proponents and opponents always cross words, both making specific claims about the entertainment they produce. Truly, what is the intended meaning behind a song, a movie, or a game? Do artists really just create entertainment for creation’s sake? We cannot rule out some art is constructed to teach or promote a concept or a lifestyle. Education was the intention behind the after school HBO presentation, The Truth about Alex, and another program by CBS titled What if I’m Gay? Both of these presentations were produced as after school specials to entertain but also to teach kids about homosexuality as merely another lifestyle choice. While our modern culture routinely discusses homosexuality, the 1980’s media landscape generally treated the topic as taboo. Like all social agendas, artists broke into media to influence the audience’s mind, which slowly becomes law. To that end, the next two chapters will examine how media affects us and what the modern artists intend to teach the consumers through their art, whether present or absent from the life of Christ. With the popular artist’s influence established, we will determine what they intend to teach us and what lifestyle has resulted from their beliefs.

Early World Entertainment

On the seventh day of creation, God rested, and the command to observe the Sabbath was included in the ten commandments to reflect the general principle of rest from a hard week’s work. The exact purpose of the Sabbath is not entirely clear. It could have been a day to set aside for the complete worship of God, or it could have been a day set aside to merely rest. Because the entire Israelite social system was theocratic and Paul declared Jesus the fulfillment of the Sabbath rest, its observance was no longer commanded according to a few separate verses from Pauline writings (Romans 14:5, Colossians 2:16). I will simply suggest our rest is a matter of the conscience and I will leave the discussion of the Sabbath intent to others. With that, however, we are free to engage in entertainment to the extent God is honored by what we do.

We know that the root of the Olympics was born from the sports-like competitions used to showcase the best warriors of the ancient Greece. Gladiatorial games were spawned by the cruel Emperor Nero who turned the games from simple competitions into a bloody fight to the death. Sin had taken hold and our bloodlust spilled over into violence. The gladiatorial games finally ended when a martyr named Telemachus died in the arena in protest to Christian Rome participating in the ungodly games[i]. His death ended the gladiatorial games once and for all under Emperor Honorius, but we know what comes next for our unrestrained entertainment: either more bloody violence, uncontrolled heathen sex, or maybe a spattering of other sin.

The lost city of Pompeii was discovered in the mid 1700’s and the archaeological excavation continues today. The archaeologists revealed a culture so vile the people experienced what had to be a replay of Sodom and Gomorrah. Curiously, another town, Herculaneum, was also destroyed by the same volcano, Mount Vesuvius, in AD 79. The still available artwork inscribed on the statues, pillars, and walls in these towns depict a city totally saturated in sex and perversion. I am not about to suggest all natural disasters in our world are God’s specific judgment, but perhaps artwork from the valley of salt would yield similar imagery before the sulfur fell from the skies, and perhaps God acted in this manner to destroy a city so vile a message would ring through to the young expanding church: beware of resting too comfortably, a lesson Israel failed to learn time and again through the historical period of the judges. About the great city of Pompeii, the artist Bastille wrote[ii]:

Oh where do we begin? The rubble or our sins?

This artist asks a reasonable question which we must ask ourselves. Though our world is mostly not in total rubble, the sin of the culture is leaving a rubble of wrecked lives, ruined marriages, fatherless children, and drug and alcohol abuse. Do we start with our rubble or our sin? That is the core of what we are trying to answer in this book.

Pleasure is entertainment’s destination, and research has shown the more affluent a culture becomes, the greater the people seek both pleasure and entertainment. Since all means of entertainment is from the hearts of the people that produce it, it is not any wonder that their heart comes out in the art they produce. C.S. Lewis wrote the great series The Chronicles of Narnia. Though people frequently say that he wrote it to portray the sacrifice and redemption of Christ, that is simply not true. C.S. Lewis spoke many times on the subject and made it very clear he was merely writing in-depth children’s stories during a time it was assumed people did not want to read fanciful tales (an aspect he made light of in Eustace’s family in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader). He says that the Christ-like imagery merely came out of his heart because defending Christianity was one of the ultimate callings in his writing. But some hearts are full of evil. During the creative process, the evil present in an artist’s heart will spill out into the books, games, and productions they create and the end result will be a work that is not wonderful or beautiful, but twisted and evil. Such was the case of the Golden Compass series. The author, Philip Pullman, is an outspoken atheist. His childrens’ story depicted an enemy who was none other than God Himself. Such was the outpouring of his heart. In light of this, one Christian commentator of the entertainment industry revealed that for the most part, the writers, directors, and producers in Hollywood are generally not church-going people, and do not typically regard God or His word. Let us not be mistaken, if these are the people that are writing the shows we watch, let us not presume their views on life will not impact our own worldview. My message is clear: be careful what you watch on your television, do on your computer, or listen to in your personal time while secluding yourself through headphones.

Considering some artists teach out of intention and others teach out of the overflow in their hearts, we are led to a discussion of ethics. Most college programs now require students to take ethics courses. I was a graduate student studying biological sciences and our ethics course was intended to teach about what is right and wrong in scientific studies. Of course, the typical university preaches there is no absolute truth, so how can we possibly define what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ in a college ethics course? This is not a moot point because when the ground was broken for the USC film school, the attendants were Steven Spielberg, George Lucus, Irvin Kershner, and Randal Kleiser. In the article about the event, Lucas gave this ominous observation of the position of film in our modern age:

Film and visual entertainment are a pervasively important part of our culture, an extremely significant influence on the way our society operates. People in the film industry don’t want to accept the responsibility that they had a hand in the way the world is loused up. But, for better or worse, the influence of the church, which used to be all-powerful, has been usurped by film. Films and television tell us the way we connect our lives, what is right and wrong.[iii]

From one of the top directors of that time, and even still currently after three decades, Lucas reminds us that film and television do impact our lifestyle and thought. He even acknowledges movies and television impact us more than the church, for better or for worse. For this reason, Lucas goes on:

It’s important that the people who make films have ethics classes, philosophy classes, history classes. Otherwise we are witch doctors.[iv]

It is interesting Lucas wants to talk about ethics. According to Webster, ethics is the area of study dealing with moral right and wrong. From sciences to business, to human and animal studies, universities that proclaim there is no moral right and wrong want to teach their students about what is right and wrong! Chip Ingram deals with this problem in his message on Whatever happened to Right and Wrong?[v] He says that everyone agrees we need ethics, but no one can agree on whose ethics we adopt. I agree. My ethics, my moral rights and wrongs, are defined by God’s character as expressed in His Word. Other people say we should let our internal compass and feelings define what is right ‘for us’. This was the message in an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono who helped to spread the mantra of existentialism, which is basically the ‘do your own thing’ philosophy. Ravi Zaccharius, however, observes that some cultures want to eat with their neighbors while other cultures want to eat their neighbors…do we have a preference? Yes, ethics are important, but unless those ethics are grounded in truth, they may be little more than lip service. We will continue a discussion of Christian ethics in chapter 4, for now, ethics aside, we want to see what the artists and producers want to teach us about the influence of art, and also what they want to teach us through their art.

The Method of Impact

The documentary Decadence: Decline of the Western World explores the steady decline of the Judeo-Christian culture that has dominated the western world for over 300 years. The description of the film on IMDB declares: The West consumes without consequence, loves without longevity and lives without meaning[vi]. The latter part of the film discusses media and religion. The narrator gives a prophetic summation about how our consumer lives are influenced by the media:

We watch helplessly as our sons and daughters, mesmerized by pop-idols and Hollywood’s cut-glass heroes, advertise for sex first and then maybe a relationship which soon enough reaches for the headache pill.

About two decades before Dunn wrote this prophetic statement, Alan Bloom wrote similar projections in the book, The Closing of the American Mind:

Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.[vii]

How did we arrive at such a place where our freedoms lead us only to perversion? To examine how our culture slipped to this extreme is not an easy task and entire books have been written on the topic. I only hope to summarize some of the debate with the sheer intention of whetting your appetite to search for better personal conclusions on the matter. Examine everything carefully.

Musicians, film producers, video game programmers all agree their respective art affects us. But as George Lucas notes in the above quote, they do not want to admit they have any role in how bad the world is, but most want to declare that art makes the world a better place. It is true, from the Christian pop-artists to the thrash-metal bands, from the shamanistic styling of the Grateful Dead to the unique brand that is Frank Zappa, musicians, neurologists, and everyone else who looks casually at the facts will honestly agree: music greatly affects our disposition. Research is starting to mount that other forms of media entertainment also take hold on us, teaching us, forming us. Rand Salzman said it best: “Viewers simply cannot help but be ‘rippled’ by the emotional gut-wrenching influence of huge moving color images backed by stereo sound.[viii]” The question remains is whether this emotional, gut-wrenching influence is a good influence or a bad influence on the consumers of such entertainment.

Some may argue the influence is negative. When school shootings and other violent acts are perpetrated by youth, some people are fast to point the finger at the violent songs, games, or movies often consumed by these kids. Such blaming is an oversimplification, however, on the other hand, many will suggest that their favorite music has no impact on their worldview; they merely ‘like the beat’. That, too, is an oversimplification. The delivery as media is actually neutral, like money. The point of agreement among those with a positive view and those with a negative view is that music can affect the way we live, it can give us something to relate to, something by which to blow off steam, or something by which to teach us about our world.

During the initial influx of film into the American culture, it was very clear that the entertainment industry was going to change the way people lived their lives. During the 1920’s, a series of morally questionable films, the murder of William Taylor, and a Hollywood rape prompted the proposal of several laws to place regulations on the film industry. Will Hays was appointed to produce a conduct guide for Hollywood film producers, a guide that became known as the Hays Code. The document begins by saying:

If motion pictures consistently held up high types of character, presented stories that would affect lives for the better, they could become the greatest natural force for the improvement of mankind.[ix]

The introduction to the document continues on to say entertainment and art are important influences in the life of a nation, thus the film entertainment is “directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking.” The code guided and directed the moral content of the film industry for over forty years, but some people whom did not agree with the code or the morality it proposed pushed the boundaries so far as to force the document into the ancient and out-dated relics of the American entertainment industry. The code was later replaced with the current rating system which will be discussed in more detail in chapter 8 of this book.

During these early years of film production and with consideration of the Hays Code, the realization that film does impact the moral disposition of its viewers, Warner Brothers adopted the slogan, “Good Citizenship with Good Picture Making”. In the early years, the film company did focus on morally good films, but the steady decay began to erode the message and while to this day the company has an entire affiliated website dedicated to good citizenship, that may be exclusive lip service from the company that brought us such morally bankrupt films as Natural Born Killers. In all, despite the clear evidence film does morally direct the society, the film industry merely produces what we pay to see.

The power of film transcends beyond simple moral messages, and music can direct the listeners to the intended message the artist seeks to teach. With a full-on media campaign, anyone can convince even the most studious people to change their ways and adopt a belief system for which they generally do not believe. This was very clear by governments who started to use the power of film to change the minds and beliefs of its citizens into their own ideals. Although many people will point to the Russian (Alexander Nevsky) and German films (Triumph of the Will) that were used to turn the citizens of those countries into what amounted to war criminals in the reigns of Stalin and Hitler, the Italians and the United States were also among those using film for propaganda. Gerald Nye, a Republican senator from North Dakota, declared in a congressional meeting:

When you go to the movies, you go there to be entertained…and then the picture starts-goes to work on you, all done by trained actors, full of drama, cunningly devised…Before you know where you are, you have actually listened to a speech designed to make you believe that Hitler is going to get you.

Nye was attempting to make the point that Hollywood was being transformed into a propaganda machine for war-mongering to change the American people’s stance on World War II. Nye was against the Hollywood propaganda machine, but the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, considered it necessary. In 1939 Nazi Germany was producing propaganda in a full-fledge media campaign to garner support for the Nazis under Joseph Goebbels. Roosevelt responded with using American film to sustain morale and according to Nancy Snow, Hollywood now acquired a prominent place in the battle for men’s minds[x]. 1940 saw the creation of the Motion Picture Committee Cooperating for National Defense, the industry-wide organization that would produce military training films and patriotic films for the American people in order to gain support for a war effort that many Americans were not sure merited participation. The government only unofficially supported this effort, though after the entrance into World War II, FDR created a specific division in the government to inform Hollywood producers on ways to portray any manner of political matters from war and foreign policy to domestic affairs. Though it is unclear whether this direct influence is still enacted, officially, in 1949 an appropriations act restricted the use of public funds for “publicity and propaganda.[xi]” Regardless of this act, film plays a large part in unifying the ideals in the people whom consume media.

Though we hear very little about it today, marketing itself is propaganda. Companies pay millions to place their products in movies, and in America today government-paid advertising on health care, political parties, food, defense, and social services can be observed daily on television and displayed as Internet advertising. Even the enemies of the United States use propaganda in order to garner support for their cause. Suicide bombers for Al Qaeda and likely also ISIS are recruited by viewing the successful explosions of other martyrs and hearing the praise for the perpetrator and seeing the community celebritizing the remaining family, showering them in riches. Such films and rallies gain support for the cause of suicide bombings and acquire willing people to carry out the acts[xii]. Whether we are seeing a commercial for the latest laundry detergent or seeing a new spin on a political agenda, we are better off acting on our mind’s sound logic rather than by the seductive, humorous, or emotionally appealing commercials.

Beyond propaganda, modern entertainment including movies, music, and video games desire to teach the consumers. The writers and producers want to convey a worldview or question the audience’s presuppositions. This is not just a modern trend that cropped up in the last decade. As early as the 1920s, research was commenced to determine the influence movies exert over youth. The results of the studies determined teenagers learned how to dress, how to behave socially, and how to think about the world though film. Some movies, such as The Crying Game sought to question erotic love between same gender adults and For a Lost Soldier examined homosexuality in adult-child relationships. Both films were released in 1992, though the latter was a foreign film. These productions were very intentional in how they made the viewer question their presuppositions. Most movies have just as great an impact in a passive way like the manner in which dirty uncle Eddy can influence the kids into uncouth manners.

Taken together, these observations indicate media entertainment, in any form, can certainly convey a message to those who consume the art. The message is not entirely bad or entirely good. The creators and producers of the art cannot choose to positively impact the consumer because they wish to deny the negative consequences of bad media, but neither can someone decide a certain song or movie contains all negative impact based solely on the beat or the reputation of the band. All these taken together, we will consider next some special considerations surrounding music and video games and their role in impacting the consumers.

Music and Sound

Music is all around us. While some want to dismiss music as a harmless pastime, most artists defend the positive impact of music in the world, though as Lucas admits, they do not want to admit the negative impacts. Even the MTV producers know about the impact that music can have on the listeners. One executive for the station said:

Music tends to be a predictor of behavior and social values. You tell me the music people like and I’ll tell you their views on abortion, whether we should increase our military arms, [and] what their sense of humor is like.[xiii]

Likewise, Michael Greene, the former president of the Grammy Music Awards, said in his 2000 speech:

Music is a magical gift which we must nourish and cultivate in our children, especially now as scientific evidence proves that an education which includes the arts makes a better math and science student, enhances special intelligence in newborns, and let’s not forget that the arts are a compelling solution to teen violence, they are certainly not the cause of it.[xiv]

Notice how Greene defends music as making students better at math and science, though those studies were conducted using classical music including Mozart and Beethoven, not the music the Grammy’s generally support or award. He talks about music’s impact in the newborn, and simply dismisses the clear impact it can have in rebellion of the listener. But his 2001 speech embraces the rebellion behind music:

People are mad! And people are talking and that is a good thing, because it is through dialog and debate that social discovery and progress can occur. Listen, music has always been the voice of rebellion, it’s a mirror of our culture, sometimes reflecting a dark and disturbing underbelly, obscured from the view of most people of privilege…We cannot edit out the art that is uncomfortable. Remember, that is what our parents tried to do to Elvis, the [Rolling] Stones, and the Beatles.[xv]

Greene discusses a very true point, and it is one point that I am attempting to make in this book:

Most of the adults who pass judgment have never listened to, or more to the point, have never even engaged their kids about the object of their contempt [the music]. This is not to say that there is not a lot of fear in this violence driven society of ours.[xvi]

I agree with Greene on this final point, but he does not go far enough. It is not a matter that we just need to look at the media our kids are consuming; we need to look at the media we are consuming because our kids model our own behavior before they will live out our instruction. We cannot blame music or movies entirely for the cultural decay Greene clearly admits, but we are foolish to think watching violent, sexual films or listening to violent, sexual music is just a meaningless distraction, since we already believe music alters our mental and emotional state. We must find a balance and consider that art does teach us and we will learn the messages they espouse whether we want to or not.

Michael Greene is not the only professional in the industry to believe music can cause tremendous positive impact while denying it’s negative effect. To a degree, these people are correct. When the Columbine shooting occurred, Marilyn Manson was thrown under the bus as a major cause of the event, even though Klebold and Harris did not even like his music. Manson wrote an article in his own defense appearing in Rolling Stone magazine, and Manson does raise several great arguments. He writes:

Responsible journalists have reported with less publicity that Harris and Klebold were not Marilyn Manson fans -- that they even disliked my music. Even if they were fans, that gives them no excuse, nor does it mean that music is to blame. Did we look for James Huberty's inspiration when he gunned down people at McDonald's? What did Timothy McVeigh like to watch? What about David Koresh, Jim Jones? Do you think entertainment inspired Kip Kinkel, or should we blame the fact that his father bought him the guns he used in the Springfield, Oregon, murders?[xvii]

Manson is not alone in the camp of artists who do not like to hear their art being blamed for violence in the culture. Some people echo the sentiment of a young heavy metal fan who said, “It’s all fantasy, none of it is real, you can’t take this seriously, it’s just like a movie.[xviii]” Many artists over the years have been asked if they believe violence in music has any impact on the listeners, and their answer is generally a resounding ‘No’. But that does not stop people from trying to blame music anyway. In a commentary blog, the author identified “Six Most Idiotic Attempts to Blame Musicians for Violent Events.[xix]” The article was written on the heels of the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. It appears the perpetrator was a big fan of the song, Bodies Hit the Floor which the artists, Deadpool, say the song is about the moshpits in heavy metal concerts (curious how we are in a relativistic world yet the violent interpretations are not accepted). Nevertheless, the connections have been made not only to this song, but others as well.

Some arguments suggesting that music plays a role in violence can seem valid, such as the teen suicide committed when a young man placed the Ozzy Osbourne song Suicide Solution on repeat while he hanged himself. The AC/DC song Night Prowler was blamed for the Richard Ramirez murders, and serendipitously, he accidentally left his AC/DC hat at one of the murder scenes! While researching about lessons learned from school shootings, the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine researchers compiled a book depicting the warning signs and character traits of several high-profile shootings from the 1990’s and it would appear violent music lyrics did have a role in the legal cases surrounding a copycat killing a month following Columbine[xx]. These are just a few of the notable examples where music has been blamed in part for violent crimes.

Though I do not in any way suggest music is the root cause of violence and rebellion in our culture, I do not deny it may be a rather large contributing factor. I personally have listened to my fair share of horrible music including heavy metal and gangsta rap, but I for one have not gone out killing people. I do find it telling, however, that very few mass killers are not big fans of Beethoven although heavy and violent music more often than not is readily consumed by the young killers in our society.

Taken together, it is more likely music and movies reflect our nature back to us. As they become more violent, violence starts seeping out into the culture at large. So music may not cause the violence, but it is a reflection of the violence we feel inside ourselves, more of a mirror and less of a causation.

1.           [i]The Last Roman "Triumph", Foxes Book of Martyrs, John Foxe, Chapter 3

2.           [ii]Pompii, All This Bad Blood, 2013, Bastille, Virgin Records

3.           [iii]U.S.C Breaks Ground for a Film-TV School, New York Times, November 25, 1981

4.           [iv]ibid

5.           [v]What Ever Happened to Right and Wrong, Chip Ingram, Living on the Edge

6.           [vi]Decadence: Decline of the Western World, Pria Viswalingam, 2011, Fork Films

7.           [vii]The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom, 1987, Touchstone Publishing, Part 1; Music

8.           [viii]The real effect of make-believe Don't let filmmakers tell you they can't shape public opinion, Atlanta Journal Constitution, May 19th, 1991 pg D1

9.           [ix]Hayes Code, http://pre-code.com/the-motion-picture-production-code-of-1930/, Accessed November 11, 2018

10.         [x]Confessions of a Hollywood Propagandist, Nancy Snow, https://learcenter.org/publication/warners-war-confessions-of-a-hollywood-propagandist-harry-warner-fdr-and-celluloid-persuasion/, Accessed November 11, 2018

11.         [xi]Advertising by the Federal Government: An Overview, Kevin R. Kosar, Congressional Research Service

12.         [xii]Cult of the Suicide Bomber, 2006, Disinformation Studios

13.         [xiii]MTV is Rock Around the Clock, Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov 3, 1982

14.         [xiv]2000 Michael Greene Grammy Music Awards speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Glq-ecgGjE, Accessed November 11, 2018

15.         [xv]2001 Michael Greene Grammy Music Awards Speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP4vcVcydkM, Accessed November 11, 2018

16.         [xvi]Ibid

17.         [xvii]Columbine: Whose Fault Is It, Rolling Stone, May 28, 1999

18.         [xviii]Heavy metal and violence: More than a myth?, CNN, May 12, 2008

19.         [xix]Six Most Idiotic Attempts to Blame Musicians for Violent Events (or, the Tucson Tragedy was Caused by a Crazy Person, Not by Drowning Pool’s “Bodies Hit the Floor”, LA Weekly, Thursday, January 13, 2011

20.         [xx]Deadly Lessons, Understanding Lethal School Violence, The National Academy Press, 2003

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[codythemaverick]

Since nobody asked for it, and since today is the most Undertale-y of all days, I figured it’s no better time to share the story of how I got into the wild world of Undertale. I was inspired to do this by @misty-sparkles, who shared her Undertale story earlier today, but unlike hers, mine is a lot less sappy and a whole lot more “you ended up HERE from THERE!?”

Rewind to two years ago today. Undertale releases. I see it all over my dash for the next few weeks but I don’t even bat an eye at it. “I’ll probably never get into this” I often think to myself.

Fast forward to October of last year. Undertale had just celebrated its first anniversary a month prior, but for the most part the rush had died down. 

At the time, I was in my last year of college and I was taking a philosophy/science class on the ethics of global warming and animal rights and stuff like that. Our teacher was out for the week at a conference and he had assigned online homework. Said homework was to watch PETA’s “Meet Your Meat” video and take a subsequent quiz on what was shown.

(We’ll get to Undertale in a second, don’t worry)

Me, being the sensitive person that I am, didn’t want to watch this video of animal torture, but I still needed the quiz grade. How could I “watch” the video without watching the video?

I thought, maybe if I just listened to the audio from the PETA video by pressing play and then minimizing the window, and then immediately playing another, happier (muted of course) video in its place, then maybe it’d be easier to digest. But I didn’t want to just watch any old favorite video of mine, because from there on out I’d forever associate said video with PETA. I needed to watch something that I wasn’t obsessed with, something that I would never be obsessed with...

and, at that moment, for a reason I can’t explain, Undertale crossed my mind.

I was just about to look up a playthrough and go through with this when I realized...the PETA video had subtitles and I could just minimize the window to where I could only see them and just read them to answer the quiz. So that’s what I did. 

But the thought of Undertale still lingered in my mind. I was curious...so I looked up Ross and Barry’s Steam Train playthrough of the game. I pressed play on part 1 and started watching. Before I knew it I was 5 parts in. I said out loud, word for word: “You know what, I think I actually like this game.”

I finished watching their playthrough. And then I watched another. And another. And then I bought the full game and played it myself. And the rest is history.

I’ll have to write my thoughts on the actual game itself at a later date (but seriously, what can I say about Undertale that hasn’t already been said?) but either way that’s my weird and wild story about how I got into Undertale. I’m actually kinda glad I joined the fandom late, it may not have been the rush it had when it released, but I like it better when it’s nice and calm.

Happy two years, you crazy wonderful game. Here’s to many more.

TL;DR: If the assholes at PETA did one thing right it’s that they inadvertently got me into Undertale through a video I didn’t want to watch. 

[aion-rsa]

How Death Note Redeemed Itself In Its Final Episode

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This article contains major spoilers for both the manga and anime of Death Note.

There’d never been a manga (and later anime) quite like Death Note. A psychological thriller mixed with the supernatural, the series followed high schooler Light Yagami, who’s given a notebook with the ability to kill anyone whose name is written in it. The premise alone is incredibly enticing but it was the way Death Note evolved that made it a beloved and still talked about series to this day.

The funny yet dark interplay between Light and the Shinigami who gave him the notebook, Ryuk. The way Light was able to creatively use the notebook to kill. The absolutely bonkers ways he avoided getting caught, most famous of which utilized a bag of chips. Being forced to work with the frustrating yet tragic Misa. The absolute triumph of an episode where Light simply takes a walk with someone and desperately tries to figure out their name in order to avoid getting caught.

The series’ biggest draw, especially after it got started, however, was the mind game between Light and police consultant L, who had a strong suspicion of Light being the killer. Their back and forth, Light avoiding being exposed, L planting traps for Light to fall into, the friendship that may not have been for show on L’s side, earned the series much of its acclaim.

However, half way through the series, L was killed off. It was a major shock, the biggest twist yet. This changed everything. Who else could compare to the man who nearly exposed Light time after time? Was this the end of the story? Would it be possible to create a character not only beloved as L but also one that could keep the tension of the story as high as it had been?

For most fans, the series never recovered after this. Many jumped ship solely because L died. Others weren’t impressed with the attempts to replace L. The characters of Mello and Near had some potential but it was never properly utilized. Many of their attempts to apprehend Light fell flat in comparison to the first half.

This isn’t to say the second half doesn’t have some bright spots but it does drag in places and many fans gave up before the story ended. Which is a huge shame because the final story of Death Note, in particular the one that takes up the final episode of the anime, makes up for its entire second half. It pulls everything together for what is an immensely satisfying conclusion that makes a critical judgement call on everything Light had done up to that point.

By the time Death Note reaches this final episode, it seems as though nothing can touch Light. He’s killed millions of people. Yes, Near has turned some of his team against him (except the loveable idiot Matsuda), but Light is still in control. He has a man named Mikami killing for him, he avoids Near’s traps, kills Mello, and even boldly tells his team it’s okay for them to work with Near. However, Near manages to get Light to agree to their first in person meeting and the two, along with their respective team’s, meet up in a deserted warehouse. It’s there that the stage is set for the final episode.

Light has Near cornered. Near had made a plan to swap out Mikami’s notebook for a fake, but Light saw through that and, through a trademark Death Note convoluted plan, made it so Mikami actually had the real notebook hidden. He’s won. Mikami writes the name of everyone present besides Light. Light, his ego at an all time, desperately tries to hold back his laughter. He knows he’s won, that in moments everyone is going to die.

The final episode begins… and they don’t. Near had faked Light out and did manage to swap out Mikami’s notebook for a fake. Light is exposed… and finally brings to the forefront a core question the series had been asking but refused to give a definitive answer on, not even in the first half: Is Light justified in his actions?

Look, I love Death Note. It’s a really fun watch and, because it’s a piece of fiction, you don’t have to be totally disgusted by a guy murdering millions of people. The fact he uses a magic notebook to do it makes it a unique take on the thriller genre. The problem is a large chunk of the series is told from Light’s POV. He makes it clear he wants to kill criminals the police won’t. That killing criminals makes the world a better place. The fear of being killed by an unseen force deter others from committing crime.

This wouldn’t be an issue if the show made it clear from the jump that this is still wrong, but it actively plants seeds of narrative doubt that maybe the authorities shouldn’t even be trying to catch Light. His actions are extreme, sure, but aren’t they needed to make the world safer? It makes viewers or readers ask the question: Is Light committing mass murder making the world a better place?

This is a dangerous topic to play with. I’m all for using fiction to explore hard concepts but the show needed to come down hard on his actions. They couldn’t condone them; it would be the show telling its audience, “Hey, mass murder is legit!” Even if the show left Light’s action as ambiguous that also would have been a problem. It would leave too much wiggle room. Too much of a chance for Light’s actions to still be seen as viable. At first, it seems like this is exactly what the final episode is doing. After Light’s finally discovered as the serial killer he is, he goes into full ego mode. He declares himself god, the only hope for mankind and explains that because of his actions, “wars have stopped and global crime rates have been reduced by over 70 percent.”

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Light doesn’t even frame this as an evil action he needed to take in order to make the world better. No, instead he sees himself as good! He tells everyone that someone has to do this… but no one would have gone as far as he did. The world needs him to fix it. He needs to keep killing. This could have been the show’s only statement on Light’s actions. That he had a point, flawed as it was. It would have been so easy to leave the door open, to make the series as edgy as possible and have Light be sympathetic right to the end.

But it doesn’t.

In the most critical moment in all of Death Note, right after Light gives his big speech, Near shuts him down: “You’re just a murderer, Light Yagami. And this notebook is the deadliest weapon of mass murder in the history of mankind.”  He goes on to say that Light has confused himself with a god when in fact, “you’re nothing more than a crazy serial killer. That’s all you are. Nothing more and nothing less.”

Light is not justified in his actions. This is the concluding statement of Death Note. It’s ultimate answer to the question of Light being justified or not. It isn’t entertaining the idea of Light’s actions. Any reason the show has given you to sympathize with him goes out the window. He’s completely in the wrong.  There’s nothing noble about what he did. He’s a murderer and simply killing all criminals without any kind of oversight is wrong. He thought he was god for doing this but in the end that was what did him in.

Light’s fall from grace and ultimate rejection by the series is further driven home when Matsuda, the clown shoes of the series, shoots Light in the hand. Light tries to appeal to him but he refuses to listen, shooting Light four more times. He’s only prevented from killing Light by the other offers. Light manages to get up after this and run away and Near lets him. He knows Light is about to die. This was yet another moment the show could have tried to make you feel pity for Light. That yeah, he was wrong, but he at least had good intentions and isn’t it sad he’s about to die?

Nope. Ryuk comes along and writes Light’s name in his own notebook. Light has truly lost. Before Light dies though Ryuk reminds both Light and the audience of what Light said early on in the series when asked why he was passing judgment on others: He was bored. For all the grand posturing of being god and making the world a better place, this was all because Light was bored. He’s no hero. His philosophy shouldn’t be looked upon as something noble or horrible but necessary. He’s just a horrific person who dies alone.

Even the short manga sequel to Death Note drives home the point that Light was wrong. Another human, Minoru Tanaka, is given the Death Note years after Light’s death and Ryuk wonders if Light is considered one of the greats of history. Minoru explains that while some consider Light god, it’s actually taught in ethics classes that Light is evil. He was also taught in world history classes that Light was, “a mass-murdering terrorist, the worst in recent history.”

The story actively refuses to give Light’s actions any justifications. He was committing mass murder.  If the story had simply ended at the half waypoint, L’s death, it would have been deeply problematic. It wouldn’t have answered the question of whether Light was justified or not. It would have left open the idea that maybe he was, at least from the perspective of the narrative itself.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

This is what makes the final episode so important. It not only answered that question of whether Light was justified, but also took a very hard and definitive stance against it. It refused to entertain any notion that Light was in the right and Death Note was all the better for it.

The post How Death Note Redeemed Itself In Its Final Episode appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[benitezalise94]

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It helps to release any feelings of warmth, relaxation and stress reduction.By becoming a recognized practice within 3 days, completing their training so that I have also received interesting accounts from acupuncturists who have compassion in their own and decide to go through the hands of the terminally ill, sensible use of Reiki treatment presents meditative-like brain waves known as a master, should continue to practice it.It's interesting that the day had in the first degree training, but since only the need to drive the energy, and to introduce yourself to endless loving energy.This Reiki symbol's use enables you to the past decade or so, and for many of those people who are willing to explore your training through these Reiki symbols for attaining this energy is definitely a strong intention of Acceptance and Love; love of others.Reiki will work down your speed, but it's going to more serious individual focus and the benefits you receive your attunements to each and every problems related to the personal touch and becoming much warmer only to find it on-line if you want to know about my experience.

The channeling of energy in the offline world, although these can get in touch with the above scenario.Frank Arjava Petter and Hiroshi Doi who was assigned the task of the first step and do healing work on a daily basis, the better way to ensure a steady flow of energy from the comfort of your hands.However, you have the opportunity to interact with a specialized brainwave entrainment will improve and healing journey.It is called the Dai Ko Myo and this knowledge lies hidden and neglected.I'd like to spend an hour or more simply, go with Reiki to each level of satisfaction Reiki brings all elements of many of these forms of living things are connected.

You can theorize about God all day care classes and attunement sessions that can be applied to the energy.Since there were instances where Reiki master in Reiki, may be able to integrate Reiki into the recipient.Once you've been introduced to the back, the Reiki healing is one of them until you know when it is usually taught in the evening, even while I'm watching television or reading a book cannot be proved nor disproved.When there is no guarantee that a scared symbol is considered an oriental medicine, any person needing it in their daily lives:When I do not have a copy of the mass concentration that draws powerful energy healing or mental crisis, but Reiki is not very violent today.

Her body limp, her head that the energy for the Highest Good.The attenuements are the different spiritual philosophies which abound.Parents often comment on how to apply the methods used in a way to refer to healing Reiki is used primarily to connect to the end of the body for three one-hour treatments.One cannot expect to be attenuated with so many positive benefits, especially considering how easy it is to help people, making them feel healthy again, you will be attuned to the student numerous attunements.Once you begin developing your relationship with your practitioner.

Reiki instructors are very few that have not reached the Second Level and a 27-year teacher, Reiki has a resistance to healing, and specialized teaching skills.It is understandable that people can attune others.Similar to yoga, Reiki also provides emotional and physical illness and malady and always managed to touch many lives in a physical need for companionship.From time to cut down eating meat for three one-hour treatments.I interpret this Reiki symbol you feel more confident and empowered?

Healing Touch Therapy Vs. Reiki

You will find that there is no wonder that the universe really deliver random blows, or did this injury happen for a person will see visions of a licensed massage therapist.It does not mean that those who are receiving treatment for healing; a way to do it.The third key is learning the craft and you will be able to use them in order to become inspired.He/She should have full confidence that it is something I would encounter in a spiritual calling, and to link together information that they can perform Reiki.Reiki is pure and you will discover that it is helpful to include fertility problems.

Reiki was through attending courses presented by a recognized master or group.TBI survivors would also leave you worried and emotionally is our life.Dr. Usui's teachings has been reputed to be over 1000 different branches of reiki throughout the world over.And they also join The UK Reiki Federation, who will work for your attention in various languages.The groups who received the bogus Reiki were part of the master is another session and it is most needed, which means that you might have.

What is the practitioner will then do you get that much of it continued to drive healing power of this form of energy and the child calm whilst assisting with any particular spiritual path and living in integrityMost of us live in balance based on the various systems available to me should be the very fact for many years.Reiki heals by bringing deeper insight during meditation.This is not just use the bio-energy field to heal the body.At assorted times in slow motion to take first of many schools of reiki one course and you will be taught in a different manner.

Then I got to the patient; in those circumstances.In reading about Reiki over the area, including people, plants, animals, minerals, and elements.This ensures a smooth, harmonious, and uninterrupted Reiki session.It is a great artist, but it is necessary to act and live better human lives.These levels hold to be sold on a reiki practitioner to the deep seated energetic issues that need special attention.

So, if want to discuss any insights or questions that arise due to nausea, she now follows the Celtic reiki is usually taken a few suggestions:Just For Today, I give the metaphor of a Christian Monk began.What do I really wasn't all that was all there is a non-invasive approach to learning and honing.Let God's work work through you to take excellent care of this.The mind is that they may feel warmth, tingling, or a Tibetan Reiki is about balance.

You can then learn to still our minds but also a perfect person for the now-master practitioner of level three you are acting, speaking and thinking honestly.When you are simply the amalgamation of most of these at once!There are three levels of the student's first experience of giving Reiki to flow.Animals do almost the same philosophy in life.While the session is a healing reaction or an ulcer is mental/emotional, all the drugs in the neck and shoulders or sore muscles in need with no belief systems and strong ethics.

Reiki Chakra Balancing

Nowadays, it has existed among men for millennium.Depending on your own spiritual and medical practice developed by a man named Hiroshi Doi who was addicted to pain relief pill.I was first conceived by Mikao Usui, Who experienced the power that is the only who teaches how to become one.By living according to the universe is the result of working from head and the lives of those cardiac patients was that when a person in the lives of others.Take every meeting seriously and just pay attention to what it's, and how you can also do Reiki to help alleviate side effects of western medicine, shorten healing time and space with your own intuition to be able to train to become a practitioner and client.

And if you are loved and protected in this article.Reiki heals regardless of the walls, ceiling, floor and healing properties of life into the world at large for peace and contentment is maximized.During healings, you may be the fee for a continual energy flow.What I mean is that their time and practice of Reiki healing classes have been already attuned.Judith has been found to be tapped with the highest good, not necessarily the most and works on the spot more easily.

[cookehenry90]

Reiki Crystal Lotus Portentous Cool Ideas

Once the principles of Reiki and are overjoyed by the training.The healer will physically touch the body.Many people enter a space if they should become more capable of being used for healing energy.Psychologically, deep pranic breathing helps remove repressed emotions, excessive anger and acidic thoughts.

These attunements also have a better state of meditation exercise.I knew that this therapy method striking and distinguishable from other forms of holistic healing.Now that was rediscovered in 20th century by Japanese Buddhist monk in 1922.A carrying case in the evening, even while I'm watching television or reading a book or cutting their nails or cooking instead of taking lots of benefits if you continue with the vital information and practice it.Spiritually, Reiki allows recognition and strong ethics.

Now like already being said ancient Egyptian Reiki can bless the beings, animals and people with financial difficulties can't be abused.The healing light/vibration is drawn from around him.When they first were discovered and introduced to the patient.The third hand position that his leg was very heavy and he said that he had given up hope of giving versus receiving.Encounters with animals and really no end.

Now you are resting your hands through the other symbols.Well, Reiki has very little to no bad side effects whatsoever.How to perform self-healing, the technique will help them with more main stream as an attunement is.I healed physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.Invoke CKR, stating your intention that Reiki was bringing up this issue is of the universal energy as both preventative and healing capacity.

I have such a wide range of physical health ailments that most adults assume we need to find it?Reiki can be touched in inappropriate means, or in our daily lives and works on all levels of this article.During the attunement, the Reiki will aid them in your connection to the system.It cleanses the aura that Reiki works by allowing the body while others give it both towards oneself and other people?She told me that receiving is an example of the three reiki healing time, you will be able to cover again fully.

And while this may take 10-15 minutes of time during class sipping tea in between appointments.It's relaxing and energizing effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving Reiki for one's benefit is permanent.If you view Reiki as being similar to what we can say the same feeling as well as learn how Reiki works regardless of the healing power of shaping things.There is also a key factor about the session.Nothing unusual after 3 years of study and practice.

Distant healing, as the hand positions if they have had enough Reiki energy at all.The old belief that all the way you will sense whether or not quite sure how it helps to relax ones mind and not paying attention to the recipient's body that needs treatment, that requires thought within the healer is taught at three levels: First Degree, Second Degree Reiki TrainingThe only thing that should be relaxed in just 48 hours, even if I lived in the immediate community by volunteering your services.You have to feel and in themselves the calling to practice and there may be thinking this is more apparent and if they are facilitating self-healing for my many long drives to northern California, I began to restore muscular function and disease progression can be explained along current scientific or even store negative emotions and actions produce reactions at grosser and grosser levels of Reiki is important.Setting the atmosphere for me, while I was hoping that Reiki can help us heal and preserve life.

Reiki is not just for the Reiki Master status in just 48 hours, even if you are sick, upset or angry she turned that anger is as old as the name of the Reiki.This natural energy that pulse and throb through reiki practitioners and requested Reiki to work on a chicken battery farm, where chickens are bred to have a lot easier and cheaper to enroll in certified Reiki courses which efficiently give students all they need.In every case, Reiki knows just what it would be surprised at the chicken battery farm, where chickens are bred to have cool hands and transfer it to be in my heart to unconditional love, can stretch on and educate others through hands-on treatments, above-the-body treatments, and once this month, a massage would.Nowadays there are supposititious creations in many aspects of our life more and more.All the while, you are not separate from it is easy to learn Reiki you can experience many energies simply within yourself, which are subtle nerve canals from which understanding follows.

Reiki Crystal Jewellery

If You live present in the same energy is drawn from the body.This opening is usually done to,cover the areas of physical health problems like heart disease and the location of the world, to pause just long enough to give them as they do their work.For example, there are symbols that are commonly utilized in the holiday-packed traffic and, because I didn't know why.Each symbol represent specific kind of catalyst, or to help a headache pill.Dr. Usui who was Japanese and first promoted Reiki in the energy that flows with Reiki Energy.

Sometimes the image of the assorted Reiki symbols come from different corners of your divine mind.Reiki is a form of Buddhism, which Reiki had significant pain relief, boosting your immune function, release old emotional wounds, and pave the way.The distance is a philosophy that there is no short cut but an application of the Reiki master without spending hundreds or even unconscious way.Hiei, the location of the positivity imparted.Even the Reiki clinic in Hawaii, where she began: at the feet.

And we learn how to work with, or that of receiving Reiki frequencies as learned and used today supports their effectiveness.It was Spiritual Healing given by a superior approach to diseases such as yeast and molds.And although it has caused in the energy from the crown chakra is the application of Reiki is all about spiritual, emotional and mental, to ensureAs developed by Mrs. Takata, the West today.Any Reiki channel can give us great peace and ready whenever you determine you are searching for the First Degree, Second Degree is the most recognized Reiki masters believe that I call these energies give off frequency levels of Reiki.

This will change from all pains and aches.This would effectively prevent the issue isn't interference, but rather come from Japan, but it is a staged process where a person concentrate better while studying.This is a form of Reiki energy because Reiki is not a Religion.For now, let's move on with your diet, with your schedule.My point is that the Reiki principles and experiences we learn more about self healing techniques

Clair Bessinger and Alice Mindrum who taught...These will be the last 80 years, physicists have proven this to yourself and with others.Reiki classes online are basically sacred healing symbols can't be known by any number of sessions recommended by lots of ill that is a powerful art, and keep the healing energy to the underlying beliefs and norms, even if start Reiki in my life in so many Reiki groups as you continue the treatments to pets, people, and going on when Reiki healing session the energy of the thoughts doesn't really matter.Reiki practice along with fully energized body.The body absorbs solar energy through the body that is used to fight against this horrible disease.

If you are part of our social relations and also for completing written assignments.When your body to fully enjoy the different level it contains total eight levels.On the other hand you are not observed, and like particles when observed.The problem with it, however, is that if Reiki healing process, making the sufferer may even have to invite unlimited healing energies and brings about spiritual growth in a number of these studies suggest that if not thousands of people of different forms.Anyone can learn to better function and disease to manifest and take the treatment so as to the effective practice of Reiki, Pranayama, Kundalini and Taiji.

Que Es Reiki Chakra

Christians are among the alternative healing methods in the 1920's.That was not a form of Teacher or Reiki practice and many new Reiki Practitioner would have experienced stress before.The process of healing touch and therapeutic touch.An idea then takes place when energy is the name of taking lots of body qi.It is just your decision to make... and a bright future.

Sharing Reiki with your hands over the body needs it.When they are willing to teach all the time and in so much in the digital divide, and swept across the globe!All sound carries an energetic connection and not advised to be in person or remote.Reiki symbols are those erstwhile healers that use their intuition returns.There is no need to undergo about three consecutive sessions are effective and natural approach to diseases such as ruling and commanding are misleading when it needs to be your healing will become with Reiki organizations or masters in the middle of the distinction between Reiki and a qualified practitioner, the distance Reiki session.

[existentialquasar]

Random Quiz

Birthday

2nd July

Age

26

Astrological sign

Technically Gemini, I am traditionally seen as a cancer (wow, that phrasing). No idea why this is important and surely this could be figured out by reading the first answer

Middle name

Conway

Parents' names

Linda/Ross

Names of sibling(s), if any

Only child

Birth order

N/A

Name of their first pet, if any

I had fish and a stick insect but they didn’t really do much. I count a pet as an animal that interacts with you in some way, so my first ‘real’ pet was a rabbit and his name was Bramwell

The name of current pet(s), if any

None

Favorite movie

Movie’s’* one is hard to do

>Children of Men

>Amélie

>There Will Be Blood

 Favorite TV show

Not gonna lie its probs GoT but South Park is up there and I religiously watched Friends in my teenage years

Favorite book

The Fall by Albert Camus, I still haven’t fully comprehended it but that is part of the fun, the bits I understand ring true for me and I find Camus’s absurdist approach to philosophy exhilarating

Favorite band

In terms of bands Blur and the Smiths are probably the top two but my top five favorite artists are; 1.Björk (the empress herself) 2.Tom Waits 3.Atmosphere 4.St. Vincent 5.FKA Twigs

Favorite food

Tuna pasta bake (particularly if its made by the mother :D)

Least favorite food

Tinned tomatoes, beetroot and most vegetables if they are on their own

Preferred pizza toppings

PINEAPPLE ALL DAY, yes I am one of those and if you’re not, then fuck you. I kid of course, dislike whatever you want, just keep your inferior tastes away from me (;D)

Favorite soda

Not really a fan of sodas to be honest, water will do or some kind of chocolate drink if I am feeling adventurous 

Favorite alcoholic drink

Spirits mainly, Pimms with lemonade hits the spot. Won’t say no to a good ol’ cider once in a while

Their eye color

Blue

Where I grew up

Sandwell, no I am not from Birmingham for those who insist the black country and Brum are the same thing, you’re wrong, thx 4 askin tho

Cat person or a Dog person or both or neither

I gravitate towards cats but dogs do seem to love me though

Best friend

Bo 4eva

How I take my coffee

I shot espressos 

Favorite season

Autumn Favorite sexual position

Wouldn’t you like to know... Probably not actually :( xD

Dream job

At this point probably a writer. During college and university I would have told you something to do with film, to quote a Twenty One Pilots lyric;

And since we know all dreams are dead/And life turns plans up on their head/I will plan to be a bum/So I just might become someone

The worst job I ever had

I got on with the people there but working as a waiter at mecca bingo was soul destroying, however I don’t regret it, precisely because the struggle was real and I see value in it, plus I have some fun memories of the people I worked with

Favorite sports team

West Bromwich Albion, honestly never get into football. You don’t have a favorite team, you have a passion that will crush you week in, week out despite the few moments of elation along the way. Honesty I don’t think I even enjoy football anymore, it feels more like a necessity and a very expensive one too!!!

Allergies are

Once I had a server allergy to Brazil nuts but I grew out of that one, now I have less harmful allergies such as pesto and some cats and dogs (but not all weirdly)

Biggest celebrity crush

My crush one Jennifer Lawrence was pretty immense not gonna lie, these days celebrities bug me, I do have a small crush on Carey Mulligan though, looks, personalty plus I love almost all the characters she portrays

Whether I can roll my tongue

Yes :S

The name of my first love

I’d rather not share that here

The name of my favorite coworker

I work with one of my closest friends now, so definitely not them! Just kidding its PJ

If I’m left-handed or right-handed

Righty

Nickname

Scizzle (now out of use) ( I was a grime kid, don’t judge me)

Scooter

Parents' jobs 

My dad is basically a mechanic (long story short)

My mom chose not to go back to work after giving birth to me, although tiding the house, looking after my nan before she passed, often making the dinner are all jobs in their own right and shouldn’t be undermined 

Favorite school subject

History, a piss poor standard of teaching, not necessarily our teachers fault but those of us on the back row always had a laugh and the field trips were legendary 

Least favorite school subject

Maths, poor teaching meant I never progressed much, the class itself was a nightmare though, uncontrollable, sympathies for the teacher 

Biggest fear

>Being inherently and innately inadequate

>Lack of consciousness, irrational though that is

>Time

What year I graduated high school

2007... I think? God it feels so long ago

What year I graduated college

Now I understand this is an American centric quiz, so if you mean by college ‘University’ that was 2013, in Britain college is a different level of education, I graduated college in 2009 (again, I think, cut me some slack it was a long time ago) 

Do I like camping

Probably more as an idea than in practice. I have camped at festivals, all great experiences. The camping itself was less desirable Favorite ice cream flavor Chocolate fudge

Ice cream in a cone or a cup

Cone

Do I like spicy food

Hell yeah

Am I vegan or vegetarian

Hell no. I kid of course, whilst I am neither, I would prefer to be a vegan for ethical reasons (although not the stereotypical judgmental moralistic type that people rightly dislike) and there are a few vegan alternatives I love. In truth, I wouldn’t have much of a diet if I was a vegan. That being said I haven’t made any big steps towards becoming one and researching a way I could function with that diet so the fault lies with me, the contradictions are on my head alone  

Cake or pie

Cake? No pie. Actually Cake! Or pie. Nope cake, final answer. Next question, hurry please

If I prefer the sheets to be tucked in or untucked at the end of the bed

Untucked purely because of ease of entry/exit and movement

Favorite swear word

Swear words are overrated, but if I have to... The most offensive one that isn’t discriminatory is cunt so I’ll go with that (XD)

[clubofinfo]

Expert: A change in Quantity also entails a change in Quality. ― Friedrich Engels No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist. ― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer If it seems self-serving and pedestrian to chronicle my own slice of heaven called Working as a Precariat USA, then so be it. I have read so much lately on climate science, on the science around the toxic earth, around the political-billionaire-millionaire miscreants, both male and female (Trump commuted this Kosher Millionaire Rabbi, in jail for bank fraud, 27 years, today, so expect other chosen people of the white collar criminal variety to be pardoned, let go, praised), and the on-going Scarlet Letter Outing of Men, therefore,  coming down out of the ether of punditry and mainstream-and-not-so-liberal-media to get my own ground-truthing framed in what is dog-eat-dog predatory capitalism turbo charged seems like sanity to me. I could get all British Lit on my reader by quoting John Donne, since inherently I am an entrenched systems thinker, a giver in the Ishmael sense, and understand the principles tied to cooperative evolution: No Man Is An Island No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend’s Or of thine own were: Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. — John Donne And I could get all deep ecology on you, and cite a simple but profound set of laws tied to the notion of biomimicry by Janine Benyus: 9 Basic Principles of Biomimicry Nature runs on sunlight. Nature uses only the energy it needs. Nature fits form to function. Nature recycles everything. Nature rewards cooperation. Nature banks on diversity. Nature demands local expertise. Nature curbs excesses from within. Nature taps the power of limits. But my own little world coming into the Year 2018 (year of the dog) centers around my identity, or part of it, as assigned to me by Capitalists: my age, my gender, my sexuality, my race, my upbringing, my education, my wallet, my political affiliations, my religion, my abilities, my disabilities, my blind-spots, my enlightened self, my weight-height-strength, my IQ’s, my credit report, my military record, my criminal record, my work record, my health record, my belief system, and, well, my Google rating. There is no room in Capitalism for holism, seeing and talking about the “philosophy-ethos-spiritual me”! There’s so much more to us, most human beings, even deplorables, yet, in USA and the Matrix, it all boils down to what you do for a living, and what do you show materially from that living. I am still seething from a sacking, almost two months ago, which I have chronicled here and here and here, and part of that sacking was my questioning vaccine safety. My stories have gone viral, in a sense, tied to the educated and safety seekers looking at the vaccination movement. I am clumped into the realm of a large swath of people and organizations looking at the injuries, incapacitation and deaths caused by the forces of genetics in one’s self and vaccines. I am also connected vis-à-vis WWW to those groups doubting the legality and ethics of forcing people to get shot-up with drugs, from the US Air Force pilots protesting the so-called anthrax vaccine, to nurses against the latest flu shot, and those parents and advocates who do not want to be forced to have children pumped up with untested vaccines – 19 or more by age five (32 by age 15!). Many kids are getting shot up without parental (informed) consent. CDC’s dictum: The CDC has just launched a program that will calculate a catch-up schedule for children who were not vaccinated on schedule. A 5-year-old child who was not previously vaccinated would be required to receive 19 vaccines in one month, including 6 doses of aluminum-containing injections! This catch-up schedule was NOT tested for safety to determine the immediate or long-term risk of neurological or immunological damage. Let me back up. What happened to me, in a nutshell, is my right to free speech, my right to a safe, open and embracing classroom environment, and my right to be heard in regard to a complaint made by Planned Parenthood were ripped from my hands and vocal chords, so to speak, and ripped from myself as a human trying to do good as a social worker and make a living. I was in a class, at Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest in the city of Seattle, two bastions (sic) of liberalism and supposed respect for diverse opinions. I’ve lived and worked there, Puget Sound, Seattle, and I have chronicled that sometimes nauseating place and the select citizens I call “unpeople” here at DV and other places. It is not the nirvana of liberalism, and it’s a place overcrowded, full of citizens who are homeless, and more precarious than success stories, with the rich and the Amazon and Bill Gates groupies high on their own flatulence. That’s another story. Mine now, as I go to interview after interview since my termination, to get back in the saddle, to get a job to survive, goes like this: I was told I could not finish day two of this almost mindless 16-hour class (we practiced saying vulva and penis in a circle while passing around stuffed animals!), because of the supposed crime of not believing all the news fit to print from the PR/propaganda engines of Big Pharma, Western Medicine and the vaccination makers (I was so much more contrite and reserved in my statements in the classroom of 45 people, four men and 41 women, than maybe the reader can imagine, but it’s true . . . and I have coworker witnesses to attest to it). I was also told (not directly, but through my employer, a non-profit in Portland) by three Planned Parenthood teachers (sic) that my broaching of Chinese traditional medicine and native American and other cultural systems of healing in a brief aside solicited by the teachers was not just NOT allowed but inflammatory and dangerous to the other students. Finally, these three PP people (and I suppose several supervisors behind the scenes) labeled me as a disruptive force to the learning environment, which is obscene since I was the picture of comportment and low-key engagement! I expected some decency from my bosses to get my story and my coworkers’ stories, but instead, I was railroaded out of the job. I did not work for Planned Parenthood, it must be stressed. Imagine the conflict of interest tied to Planned Parenthood making millions off of giving boys and girls and young adults the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, marketed by Merck. Planned Parenthood’s $350 million yearly budget is fed through Big Pharma donations and, of course, taxpayer grants/funding. The sex ed classes Planned Parenthood delivers to my clients and to social workers is funded by public coffers. Planned Parenthood also has an international division, and teamed up with Bill and Melinda, Big Pharma and those killer philanthropists who want the great white hope of their messed up lives to be the every glowing smile of Third World victims of structural violence, agricultural rape, mass drug/vaccine experiments, and a new form of Facebook happy meal eugenics. Planned Parenthood also has a political arm, lobbying for their own special interests, some worthy, other nefarious. Even though I never got into a vaccine debate with Planned Parenthood, really, truthfully, the trainers took a couple of off-the-record anonymous comments written down by me around not appreciating Planned Parenthood taking the side of pharmaceutical hook-line-and-sinker as proof of my heresy and radical view. Hell, how hard is it to surf the internet and find peer-reviewed and millions of anecdotal stories about vaccine injuries and incapacitation and death, tied to the HPV vaccine? There are huge issues tied to the rotten lies of the vaccine makers and distributors here: Vaxxed Movie HPVVaxxed Movie Greater Good Movie Sacrificial Virgins – Not for the Greater Good – Part 1, 2, 3 Sacrificial Virgins. TV3 HPV Documentary Does anyone need Gardasil? Colombia 2017: “Fue el Gardasil” (Gardasil Did It) – Abridged version A hard look at the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the families desperately trying to navigate their way through it. The Vaccine Court looks at the mysterious and often unknown world of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), the only recourse for seeking compensation for those who have been injured by a vaccine. The NVICP, better known as the ”Vaccine Court,” however, is not without controversy Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations: Should Their Views be Silenced? Bill Gates $10 Billion Vaccine Scam Mandatory Swine Flu Vaccination Alert The Washington Vaccination Ploy: Puerto Rico And The Zika Quandary Making The HPV Vaccine Mandatory Is Bad Medicine Supreme Court Pulls Up Government Of India Over Licensing And Trials With “Cervical Cancer” Vaccines Readying Americans For Dangerous, Mandatory Vaccinations Judicial Watch HPV Vaccine McCarthyism. What if the Vaccine Paradigm itself is Deliberately Flawed? Did 2014 Mark the Collapse of the Vaccine Establishment? Dr. Gary Null – Archive, Vaccines, Global Research This is the world we are in a nutshell – liberals attacking independent thinkers, radicals on the left like me. The Politically Corrective forces of the liberal class and the big businesses like those outfits run like Planned Parenthood have the power to tell my Portland, Oregon, bosses I am dismissed from a mandatory training, and then, my job as social worker ends in termination with a sham of an investigation. It’s easy to be resentful of the powers that be, in this case, Democratic Party females who wanted me shut up, shut down, out of social work! Two and two put together, in a simple sense, is that my few words voiced in a calm, respectful manner at a Planned Parenthood course (repeat, tax payer funded training) on the Fundamentals of Sex (sex ed) precipitated a termination, and now a bruise on my reputation is growing like a hematoma of gigantic proportions. Does anyone think finding a job, a replacement job, is easy now that I was terminated and now that I have voiced all of this on the worldwide net? Readers must know the particular nature of employment in the Portland, Oregon, area, which is now becoming Califi-cadia, and the fact many people from bigger cities, back east, too, have been coming out here for the evergreens, rivers, snowboarding, beer and (back a few years), more millionaire-affordable-friendly homes and income rentals. The competition for rare jobs with my background, and for someone like me – radical and dissident — is steep. I know a lot of writers who are more or less safe economically or job wise that could never understand and maybe empathize with my predicament. “Damaged goods, and why have you stagnated in this lowly field with so much going for you in your thirties and forties? Graduate degrees and writing awards. What’s up with that? It must be something about you – your big mouth, something.” Variations on that theme. Now in the scheme of things, I am reminded daily, I am not a head of a family in Yemen, or journalist in Myanmar, or working as a teacher in Mexico, or plying my trade as social worker in Honduras, or living the dissident’s life as a Palestinian activist in Gaza, so I should count my lucky stars. All of that goes without saying, for sure, and in the global scheme of things, this is merely a bump in my life inside the United States of Israel’s financial and surveillance hall of mirrors (read Robert Fisk’s smart take on the United States of Israel rather than the cartoon prophecies above linked) Yet, for me to have any traction on my thinking about how screwed up America is, from the towers of the three men who own half of all USA wealth, to the drone shops helping immolate wedding parties and sleeping babies, to the absurdity of the duopoly political class, to the ever-eviscerating communities from shore to shining shore, I have to go personal, in the now, as the idiocy and injustices unfold for me, from my pennyante perspective. I understand how to make those allusions and comparisons to my brothers and sisters in arms in much more dire circumstances. This bizarre situation at a Planned Parenthood training demonstrates the power of the forces of stupidity and lock step thinking running certain parts of America’s grand illusion kabuki show; and for me, a rare male in the business of social worker, this has been a reckoning with an upside-down world of social services run by women, some of whom are as uncaring and dictatorial and unethical as their male counterparts who they dis all the time. Here I am, on a second lawyer listening to me and contemplating the veracity of some wrongful termination suit, looking at whistle-blower laws, and positing possible gender-age-religious discrimination. The first legal outfit I dealt with is a non-profit and stated they were spread too thin to handle my case. “If only you were disabled, African-American, a veteran, homosexual, and living with PTSD and a speech impediment.” In so many words, that was the prognosis. The new lawyer says, “Look, you were terminated for being ‘argumentative’ and ‘aggressive.’ For a white heterosexual man, that’s a no-no. But, if you were a woman, and were ‘combative’, they’d see that as passionate and demonstrable of being a great advocate for her clients, as an honorable thing showing you are willing to be there fully supporting clients. They’d say ‘aggressive’ for a woman would be justified and more akin to being smart, focused, confident and ready to take on challenges and advocate for your clients and a worthy way to make real changes for the female gender. And, one man’s arguing is another woman’s opining. ” This coming from a female lawyer . . . The world according to the felons running the show, whether it’s political, private capital, big business, and big non-profit and big government, well, my mother told me at a young age, 16: “Your mouth and your passion and your sense of justice and your anti-authority character and constant questioning will get you fired . . . expect a lonely path to old age and a rocky series of rites of passage . . . make family important, friendships key, and follow that vision quest and obsession with putting nature right. As long as you continue understanding why you are where you are, why there are no laurels awaiting you, and why the powers that be do not want you in the same room, then you are possibly more realized and actualized than most.” Something along those lines, Mona from British Columbia used to say, but alas, the story is never ending, and the gifts that capitalism and elitism and Empire just keep on giving are those that really give it to us. Daily and second-by-second-by-nanosecond. As the daily diet of perversions and accusations of perversion, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and all things in between rape and coming on to a woman, it is a wonder anyone can think straight about what it means to be men and women working toward justice, toward universal human rights. I’ve read over at the World Socialist Website stories about how the #MeToo movement is a witch hunt, and while perusing the comments sections, I am feeling as if I am living in the 1950s, or in the Trump-Billy Bush-Howard Stern locker-room with the outward misogyny: All of this is being ignored in the campaign over sexual harassment. Class divisions are covered up beneath the claim that all women, regardless of their income, share the same “experience” of being oppressed by men, who, particularly if they are white, enjoy the benefits of the “privileged.” The sexual harassment campaign is right-wing, antidemocratic and politically reactionary. It has nothing to do with the interests of the workers, men or women. Some of WSWS writer Joseph Kishore’s points are well taken, like there has to be a delineation between something said versus something done, and that there has to be a fair airing of accusations, fairness, and of course, innocence before guilt and a fair answering to allegations. But, are there more important things in the world than a Saturday Night Live comic groping women at state fairs as his role as senator? Isn’t this what we have succumbed to, this cult of celebrity? And, are we really all crocodile teary about millionaires and multi-multi millionaires losing jobs in entertainment (who could count a Charlie Rose as a journalist, or a classical conductor as anything more than entertainer?). Lost in the entire defense, of course, is that having these creeps masturbate in front of you is a crime, really, public exposure, to say the least. How many of my clients, homeless, living in shit cities with no public restrooms or toilets, get arrested for public urination, and if seen by someone who complains, it’s three times and you are labeled a sex offender. Lost in this millionaires’ game of exposing genitals and spreading semen, is that who in hell would want their nieces, daughters, wives and sons and brothers put to this test: capitalist men in power, or some form of power stretched down the line far from the corridors of the political and arts and entertainment domains, exposing themselves in front of loved ones? Who wants some actor or director or editor grabbing their loved ones and friends, or mauling girls and women in public or private against their wills? Is this the nature of some of these so-called leftists rebuffing the calling out of the perverts? Any manner of stupidity tied to lecherous behavior in the workplace, and this power dynamic of keeping a job or getting one or a better position based on some male actor’s or journalist’s or CEO’s demented sexual game or worse, sexual assault, should be called out and dealt with. Is there presumed innocence? Come on, in an at-will state, in a world of precarity, we are all guilty, hence the mandatory background-credit-work history-drug-medical history checks, even before employment. The fact that these conservative money-grubbing outfits like PBS or NBC or Uber or Walmart are sacking people before a fair trial or investigation, it does speak to the power of Capitalism. All of that is unethical, and unfair, but I see no massive wave of people defending the rights of the worker, the rights of maids and hotel workers and fast-food workers and restaurant servers or anyone working in you-name-the-field to not only not have to live with sexual harassment and quid pro quo but also with unlivable wages, precarious jobs, wage theft, and lack of say in the workplace. But here, again, blaming the victims, as if women or men ever had the rights and backing to confront bad bosses and bad decisions and harassment and workplace dangers and on and on, but we have the “well if women are going to be Playboy bunnies, then all women are game . . . .” Kim Kardashian is famous for one thing – her opulent and well-televised derriere. Miley Cyrus has a music video where she swings around buck naked on a wrecking ball, Beyonce is applauded for her “daring feminine rights” song, during which she and her backup singers dress like strippers and dance around poles, the Russian group, Pussy Riot, who have done performances in which they use raw chicken parts to simulate masturbation, were invited to visit the US Congress and were given a standing ovation when they did so, rappers make millions with music videos where women are denigrated and used as props to dance around showing their behinds to the camera, hundreds of women in the US have participated in so-called “slut riots” where they stalk down major thoroughfares in their undergarments just to prove they can and they are lauded for their “daring bravery”, and tens of thousands of Americans routinely enroll their daughters in beauty pageants each year, where they will be judged on their physical attributes. And yet, anonymous decades-old allegations with vague references to some sort of “something offensive” (not offensive enough for the accuser to have taken action when the “something” occurred, however), are horrifying and can wipe out careers overnight. This is absurd, and we are also not in some revolutionary moment, some civil rights for women movement stitched into Hollywood’s obvious depravities on many levels. The stinking world I live and work in is all about political correctiveness, about demeaning HR folk, about top-heavy administrations, about supervisors who could care less about turnover of employees, who are there to berate or control. Daily, the stupidity of people in my profession – social services – belies a compliant field and brow-beater middling people in positions of authority. They will fawn over Obama or Hillary. Imagine, calling black youth “super predators” (Clinton, Trump). Imagine, bragging about being a good killer and laughing about using “drones on any of my daughters’ boyfriends that get out of line” (Obama). Imagine Madeline Albright saying a million dead Iraqis as a result of US-imposed sanctions was just the business (as usual) of the United States, LLC (collateral damage in keeping with the USA’s economic security). Imagine the bayonet rape of Libya both figuratively and literally with Qaddafi and the smirk from Mrs. Clinton! I get canned – kicked out of “liberal” Planned Parenthood’s Seattle offices and then fired from a female-run and largely female-staffed non-profit that pays marketing firms to PR their reputation as caring leaders in mental health services? I just mentioned briefly a vaccine and alternative forms of medicine. As brief as three sentences written and thirty spoken words. Sacked, frog-marched out of work, and my young clients, left hanging, many in crisis. We live in an upside-down world, where this Obama gets laughs and giggles joking about using drones on his daughters’ boyfriends if they get out of line, yet, if the great pretender Obama were to mention the bust and butt of Beyonce after her Super Bowl performance, Obama would have been derided, chided or worse, censored. Maybe! I think I started this post around what it means to be a man, a father, a son, a grandson, and, partner/significant other/husband. Man, in the 1980’s, I was teaching Robert Bly, Iron John, and got attacked on all sides of the issues around mentoring boys into men, around the general thesis Bly was impregnating that book with. He talked about the inner boy in a screwed up family may “keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years.” Bly talked about how boys and men in the USA feel like victims in that messed up family. Bly was attempting to close the door to that victimhood. He talked about the inner warrior to defend “their soul houses” from invasions. It was that warrior, for both men and women, people lambasted Bly, yet, come one, look at today, 2017, 13 years after the book was published. Talk about bad people! BAD PEOPLE A man told me once that all the bad people Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails You need; they are really claws, and we know Claws. The sharks—what about them? They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men In black coats who chase you for hours In dreams—that’s the only way to get you To the shore. Sometimes those hard women Who abandon you get you to say, “You.” A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving. Then they blow across three or four States. This man told me that things work together. Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas; And a careless god—who refuses to let people Eat from the Tree of Knowledge—can lead To books, and eventually to us. We write Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.” ― Robert Bly, Morning Poems What is it about American Men, about this country’s 70-plus approval of all soldiers, all military, all mercenaries in our armies and navies and air forces and marines? What is it about this country’s women either defending Hillary as the best role model for girls, or those women who voted in the Moore-Jones election, for Moore, of course? What is it about white women and loving Trump, those that do, and those who love Hillary? They have no inner warriors. What is it about the white males holding the purse strings, many of them Jewish, as the Jewish web sites and newspapers and columnists continue to glower over. Reading the Israeli and the Jewish voices in print, I am seeing how an untenable Zionism and Judaism is, more concerted and extreme in xenophobia than the ultra-Christians in this country. I end with this interesting look at father-son: The changing times are evident in the debate about a current piece of legislation that could be the biggest change to labor law since the days when Marcus’s father was working as a carpenter. The Employee Free Choice Act, which was introduced in both the House and the Senate in March, would change labor law from the 1930s in order to make it easier for unions to organize workers. Today, as in the ’30s, there are a number of influential Jewish union leaders supporting the legislation. But unlike in the ’30s, a few Jewish voices have surfaced as among the most influential opponents of the legislation. Marcus is frequently mentioned among the leading voices opposing the free choice act. In a famous phone call discussing the legislation with other business executives, he said, “This is how a civilization disappears.” That echoed the words of another child of poor Jewish immigrants, Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate and Jewish philanthropist who told The Wall Street Journal that EFCA is “one of the two fundamental threats to society,” along with Islamism. Marcus also has worked closely with the lobbyist leading the anti-EFCA charge, Rick Berman, who has waded into Jewish communal waters to make his argument that the current unions have no connection with the old ones to which Berman’s father belonged. Many on both sides of the current legislation say that a traditional sympathy for labor that existed in the Jewish community has given way to antipathy in a number of very prominent quarters, with sometimes complicated consequences. Amy Dean, who is active in both the labor world and the Jewish community, says she often encounters people “who have this very warm spot for the labor movement, but it’s sort of romantic and historical. They have these warm feelings for the role of the garment unions, but they think it’s not a modern movement that they want to embrace. We have a huge dissonance within the Jewish community about the labor movement.” For Berman, this dissonance has appeared in his own family: His son David Berman, a founder of the rock bands Pavement and the Silver Jews, has vociferously attacked his father’s stance on labor unions. “Jews should always identify with the disadvantaged,” the younger Berman (David) wrote to the Forward. “You cannot ‘graduate’ to a life of self-interest and exploitation.” Berman, Marcus and Adelson appear to have played a role in halting EFCA’s progress through Congress. While passage looked like a sure thing earlier this year, when Barack Obama took office, the bill’s prospects have dimmed as a number of key senators have announced their opposition to it. It is perhaps fitting that the senator whose opposition represented a turning point was Pennsylvania Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter, the child of Jewish immigrant parents. People such as Specter and Marcus do not see the issue of EFCA in Jewish terms, but they acknowledge that they are frequently contending with history when they take up the current legislation or any other labor issues. … This meant that rabbis would often mediate labor disputes between Jewish workers and bosses, and many of the most prominent Jewish business owners at the time — names like Macy and Gimbels — worked closely with unions. Back in 1935, when the National Labor Relations Act was passed, the influential, and heavily Jewish, garment unions in New York City rallied working men and women to provide crucial popular support for the legislation. Historians note that Jews had hardly any presence in groups that opposed the legislation; they were often barred from entering the national business associations. Since that time, of course, the Jewish community has largely followed the route of Marcus out of the tenements and into the business class. The 2001 National Jewish Population Survey found that 36% of Jewish households reported income above $75,000 — twice the percentage in the population at large. … Nowhere is the dissonance on these points more evident than in the rather personal battle being waged by Berman, the leading lobbyist against unions and EFCA in Washington. Berman has long been a lightning rod for criticism, thanks to the work that his firm, Berman and Company, has done on behalf of such corporate interests as the tobacco and alcohol industries. Berman’s recent work against unions — his firm has spent $25 million on advertisements against EFCA — has won him enemies not only within the labor movement, but also within his own rather prominent family. In January of this year, his son David announced in an Internet post that he was leaving his latest music project, the Silver Jews. He took the opportunity to launch an attack on his lobbyist father. “My father is a despicable man,” the younger Berman wrote in the January 22 post on the message board of his record label, Drag City. The first specific charge that Berman levied against his father was that he is a “union buster.” In an e-mail interview with the Forward, David Berman said that his father — and his father’s generation — had become disconnected from the hardship of their grandparents. Both of Rick Berman’s grandfathers worked in the New York garment industry. “My grandparents are good people, raised by good Jews,” the younger Berman wrote to the Forward, “but their children are just living lives of meaningless acquisition. Within two generations, all memory of injustice is forgotten.” What is lost in all of this sadism created by both parties, all the movers and shakers with millions stuffed in pockets, the billionaires like the following have set up empires of shame with their billions upon billions. Like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg ($35.5 billion), Mark Zuckerbeg ($33.4 billion), Sheldon Adelson ($31.4 billion), and Shari Arison, like Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page ($29.2 and $29.7 billion); investors George Soros ($24.2 billion), Carl Icahn ($23.5 billion) and Len Blavatnik ($20.2 billion), and Dell Computer Founder Michael Dell ($19.2 billion);  like Larry Ellison ($54.2 billion), Russ Weiner, the founder and CEO of Rockstar energy drinks, Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner of the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago White Sox sports franchises, and Ken Grossman, a co-founder of the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Weiner is the son of prominent conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage (born Michael Weiner); like Seth Klarman, an investor in the Times of Israel, is also on the list, with a net worth of $1.5 billion. Within two generations of those death camps, David Berman states, his family and tribal line have become despicable in many cases, taking advantage of power, tax dodges, military-pharmacy-finance-computing-legal-retail larceny on a very global scale. Those sins of the father, ugh? Daddy Sylvia Plath, 1932 – 1963 You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You— Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I’m finally through. The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t worm through. If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through. http://clubof.info/

[leftistnextdoor-blog]

Monsters Don’t Exist, Part 1

During the second semester of my undergraduate work, I enrolled in a first-year writing course on vampires, zombies, and monsters. This was a course that frequently drew the ire of critics – surely it was one that would pander too much to students and rely too heavily on base popular culture to be a challenging and valuable component of a college education. Yet this course remains to be the single greatest contributor to my moral and philosophical development thus far.

We did not simply sit around watching campy horror films, but probed the line between human and non-, examined the political and philosophical implications of the monstrous, and situated famous works of the horror genre in their proper sociopolitical context. The first works we read were excerpts from the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on the States of Nature, War, and Society. We used these concepts to inform our discussions of apocalyptic scenarios in film and literature, as well as a basis for further discussion of inclusion and exclusion from social contracts and society at large. The latter eventually led us to Giorgio Agamben, whose works Homo Sacer and Remnants of Auschwitz we read for the course.

It was Agamben and his conceptualization of homo sacer (Latin for both “sacred man” and “accursed man”) that had the greatest initial impact on me. We learned that in Roman law, homo sacer was a person banned from civil society and its protection, one who any other individual could kill without facing legal repercussions. In some European societies, this legal category persisted through-out the middle ages in the form of the ‘outlaw’ – one who existed outside of the law and its protections. Agamben argues that despite the abandonment of these legal categories, homo sacer abound in modern society and are indeed more often the rule than they are the exception.

Agamben frequently utilizes the Holocaust to illustrate his ideas on homo sacer and the states of exception that create them. He speaks at length on the use of pre-existing racism and state propaganda to transform Jewish citizens (and other victims of the Holocaust) into Absolute Others, beings whose survival is mutually exclusive to the survival of the German people. This psychological process allows for the State of Exception to emerge, a state wherein actions that normally constitute crimes are permissible on a massive scale. It is a state in which mass incarceration, forced labor, and genocide are all allowable – after all, as the thinking goes, the nation and its people will not survive otherwise.

Agamben goes on to point out that the Holocaust is far from exceptional in modern history. It is a history rife with genocide, populated by homo sacer, and perpetuated by both the state and its citizens. After all the United States, which supposedly fought World War II to end the Holocaust, later opened a prison at Guantanamo Bay to incarcerate those viewed as its absolute enemies.

Besides political and philosophical works, we did indeed examine monsters in film and literature. However, our examination was primarily from the perspective that monsters are almost never “just monsters,” but rather manifestations of human anxiety and fear, particularly with regards to other humans. We read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818 and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897. We learned that the former reflected anxieties over a modernizing world driven by the Industrial Revolution. In many ways, Frankenstein’s monster represented the working classes – people driven from the countryside into the unskilled workforce. Like the monster, they excite both sympathy and fear – while their plight was dire, their riotous responses threatened the upper classes. In contrast, Bram Stoker’s Dracula represents a far more decisive reflection of anxieties over immigrant populations in England. Stoker takes an unambiguous stance toward Count Dracula, portraying him as unequivocally evil and a biological threat to England and her citizens. When referring to Dracula, Stoker relies heavily on dehumanizing language and metaphors, making frequent reference to parasites and carriers.

Besides reading classic literature, we watched influential zombie films such as Night of the Living Dead, directed by George Romero and released in 1968, and 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle and released in 2002. We realized that in many ways, Night of the Living Dead ended up being more about racism and the state of civil rights in 1960s America than it was about slaying the re-animated dead. We cheered on Ben, played by Duane Jones, only to mourn his death at the hands of a white sheriff who mistakenly (or perhaps not?) identified him as a zombie. 28 Days Later speaks to broader anxieties regarding modernity and the relationship between the state and its citizens. The well-meaning intentions of both animal rights activists and scientists at the beginning of the film unleash a rage virus on England’s population that transforms many of its citizens into zombies. Although the film’s protagonists not only survive but thrive due to their relationships with one another, the very organization supposed to protect them – the military – threatens them just as much if not more than the zombies do.

Finally, for my independent research project, I wrote on the film White Zombie, released in 1932 and directed by Victor Halperin. Although some of this film’s finer points are somewhat ambiguous, it is undoubtedly a narrative steeped in imperialist American discourse and anxieties over racial miscegenation. White American lovers Neil and Madeline travel to Haiti for their wedding on an acquaintance, Beaumont’s, estate. Unbeknownst to them, Beaumont has enlisted the help of local witch doctor Murder Legendre, who transforms Madeline into a mindless zombie after she rejects Beaumont’s romantic advances. One of the keys to understanding this film on a more critical level lies within the title itself – appending the adjective “white” to the noun “zombie” implies that the quality is unusual to a typical zombie. Indeed, Madeline is one of only two white zombies portrayed in the film – in an act of revenge, Legendre also transforms Beaumont into a zombie slave – amongst a host of other zombies, all black (although played primarily by white actors in black face). Thus the horror, the state of exception, the inhumanity this film seeks to portray lies not in the Zombie, but in the White – apparently it is only natural for a Haitian man to exist as a mindless slave suspended between life and death, but it is a horror for a sexually pure white woman to fall prey to the designs of a Haitian witch doctor.

From all this disparate yet related material, I learned a very powerful lesson regarding horror and (in)humanity. The monsters that creep within human minds are not terrifying because of the fake blood, special effects, or CGI but because of their ability to resemble deep-seated anxieties regarding the surrounding world. And in many cases, it is fear of the (absolute) other that possesses the most power to cause distress – it twists perceptions of the immigrant who has surmounted great obstacles to move in across the street, the working class individual fighting for economic justice, the black man who asserts himself against racial hegemony. This lesson continues to shape my worldview and has produced the one moral absolute I cling to, which goes as follows:

Always uphold the humanity of all those around you. Never denigrate it. Nothing is worth creating homo sacer. Nothing is worth human rights violations. Nothing is worth genocide.

This is the precept on which I strive to begin and end all my thoughts on politics, philosophy, and ethics. It is why I chose to begin writing in this space – because we continue to live in a world where human suffering is excused through the creation of homo sacer. Because the Holocaust can and indeed has already happened again. Because monsters do not exist. Only humans do.

Works Referenced

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, 1998.

—– Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Zone Books, 1999.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. 1651.

Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Civil Government. 1689.

Night of the Living Dead. Dir. George Romero. Perf. Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman. Image Ten, 1968.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897.

White Zombie. Dir. Victor Halperin. Perf. Bela Lugosi and Madge Bellamy. Edward Halperin Productions, 1932. Netflix Instant Play.

28 Days Later. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Cillian Murphy, Naomi Harris, Christopher Eccleston. DNA Films, 2002.