Unpopular Opinion: Ursa's parenting negatively affected Zuko

One of the fascinating things about the ATLA fandom is that people are utterly uninterested in analyzing how Ursa's parenting really screwed up Zuko, even though it's pretty clear. I don't mean to attack Ursa here, because I think she had good intentions, but, although her parenting was far better than Ozai's, it contributed to Zuko's many poor decisions.

I've given a broader coverage to values Ursa extols to her children elsewhere. The general point you should take away from that is that Ursa was critical in instilling imperialist values in her children and in teaching them to respect/obey the Firelord.

However, that's not the point I will belabor here. I want to turn to something else. Let's take a look closely at the scene where Zuko tries to perform Azula's firebending routine in front of his grandfather and his father but falls flat on his face:

Ozai frowns at this news. Zuko starts off well, doing the same circular motions as Azula earlier. He manages to produce a small fire blast, which does not impress Fire Lord Azulon. When he tries to create another one, he falls. He gets back up, panting heavily, and tries again, only to fall harder. Ursa gets up worriedly and approaches Zuko to comfort him. Young Zuko: I failed. Ursa: No. I loved watching you. That's who you are, Zuko. Someone who keeps fighting even though it's hard.

The lesson that Zuko learns from Ursa here is that his gift is stubborn persistence and that he should never stop trying to meet the toxic expectations of the Fire Nation royal court and of his father(she also might have inadvertently encouraged the Zuko-Azula sibling rivalry).

How do we know this is what Zuko took away from this? These scenes are paired together at the end of "Zuko Alone," as Zuko struggles to defeat Gow:

In the flashback, Zuko is sleeping in his room at night when a hand gently touches his shoulder. He awakens drowsily to see his mother dressed in a cloak.

Young Zuko: … Mom? Ursa: Zuko, please, my love, listen to me. Everything I've done, I've done to protect you. She pulls the barely conscious Zuko into a hug. Ursa: Remember this, Zuko. No matter how things may seem to change, never forget who you are.

and this scene:

Gow: Who ... who are you? Zuko:My name is Zuko. Son of Ursa and Fire Lord Ozai. Prince of the Fire Nation, and heir to the throne. Old man: Liar! I heard of you! You're not a prince, you're an outcast! His own father burned and disowned him!

Zuko took Ursa's advice to never give up and never forget who he was to heart, and as a result even though he's been burned, banished, and declared a traitor, even though he objectively has no real chance of getting his status and Ozai's favor back at this point, Zuko is still trying to do that and refuses to let go of his long-lost position in the Fire Nation as crown prince. The smart thing to do would be to give up and move on, but Zuko refuses to do that.

We can also turn to what Zuko says to Aang in "The Siege of the North, II":

Zuko: I finally have you, but I can't get you home because of this blizzard. [Stands up and looks outside the cave.] There's always something. Not that you would understand. You're like my sister. Everything always came easy to her. She's a firebending prodigy, and everyone adores her. My father says she was born lucky. He says I was lucky to be born. I don't need luck, though. I don't want it. I've always had to struggle and fight and that's made me strong. It's made me who I am.

All of this brings me back to my main point. Ozai might have been the one who burned and banished Zuko, who abused him and declared him a traitor, who demanded that Zuko capture the Avatar, but Ursa is the one who taught Zuko the persistence that made him chase after legends for three years, that made him take reckless risk after reckless risk, that made him continue chasing the Avatar even after Ozai was having him hunted as a traitor across the Earth Kingdom.

The biggest problem in Zuko's life is that he refuses to let go of his dream of regaining Ozai's favor, that he refuses to accept that Ozai doesn't love and move on and find something better to center his life around, and from what we see Ursa played a huge role in this, because she taught Zuko to never give up trying fulfilling the expectations of Ozai and the court, no matter how many times he failed. Ursa wasn't intending ill, but her parenting had a huge negative effect on Zuko's life.

Would you be interested by a romance between a jewish and a romani character? Because I looked for it after a discussion about Magneto and inglorious basterds (ok I was initially ranting about the cringy "jewish/nazi romance" trope) and I wonder how you would feel about it. The jewish/romani romance stuff, I mean.

So I’m happy to answer this, but I want to clarify here that I think some people send me questions like these because I wrote a post about Jewish representation that ended up being pretty popular, but I am just one person who happens to be Jewish and have some opinions. Clearly those opinions resonated with other Jewish people, and non-Jews seem to have found them useful or enlightening as well, which is awesome! Hopefully that means I did something right.

But at the end of the day, nonetheless, I’m not some kind of ultimate authority on Jewish representation and the only person I can really speak for is myself. I guess what I’m worried about here is people coming to me and thinking my word constitutes The Jewish Stamp of Approval(TM) or The Jewish Opinion(TM), and it’s really not. (Insert obligatory joke about how Jews practically never agree on anything!) Especially when you’re talking about a really specific trope like this, and not something broader where there might be more of a consensus, my answer is going to be as much about my personal tastes and opinions as anything else. 

Now, maybe my personal taste and opinion is all you were looking for, in which case I apologize for throwing this whole ramble at you! But I felt like it was important to clarify that, because I don’t want people coming to me and assuming my take on things is authoritative in a way that it isn’t and shouldn’t be. 

To get to the question itself finally, I think to talk about Jewish/Romani romance, you have to talk about the larger connections between the Jewish and Romani communities, and also the limitations if you ignore their differences.

The most obvious connection between Jews and Romani people, in the modern era, is that we were the two groups most affected by the Holocaust, and arguably the only two intended for complete genocide. Beyond that, there’s certainly a shared history of persecution that goes back centuries. Both groups were ‘Othered’ throughout European history, at times forcibly expelled from several countries, and similarly stereotyped as shifty and untrustworthy. 

There are also certain cultural similarities, though I’m not well-versed enough in Romani culture to talk about this at length. Both Jews and Romani people describe themselves as a diaspora, scattered across the globe. Both have a strong sense of ethnic identity and tradition that they’ve struggled to maintain while often being, as Judaism would put it, strangers in a strange land. Some of our traditions are similar, in particular from what I know some of our mourning customs, but again I’m not really knowledgeable enough to talk much more about that. 

I think because of some of these similarities, there’s a certain solidarity between Jewish and Romani people, at least in some cases. Yet I also think it would be very dangerous to conflate the two and ignore our many differences. These are unique cultures, each with our own individual histories and traditions, and despite some similar patterns of persecution in our past, we honestly haven’t historically had much to do with each other, and don’t really to this day. I can certainly say that Jews have often kept to themselves, in segregated Jewish communities and sometimes forcibly confined to ghettos, and maintained a separateness of identity even when it wasn’t enforced by law. From what I know, that’s also the case with the Romani community. 

It’s also worth noting that both groups have rules against intermarriage, although of course not every modern Jewish or Romani person cares to abide by those. That could theoretically be a hurdle for any Jewish/Romani romance, though there’s also no reason that someone couldn’t be both Jewish and Romani, either because they have both in their ancestry, or if they’re, for example, a Romani person who converted to Judaism. From my knowledge, that’s a pretty rare thing, but ‘rare’ and ‘nonexistent’ are definitely not the same thing.

I think a Jewish/Romani romance could absolutely be done well, but I’m wary that there’s an underlying logic here which assumes our groups are more similar and homogenous than they actually are. I also worry that overemphasizing our similarities risks defining who we are solely by that shared history of persecution and genocide, when of course being a Jewish or a Romani person is about so much more than that. If I saw a Jewish/Romani romance, I’d want to see the individuality and uniqueness of both groups respected, not have the two conflated as if going through the Holocaust somehow makes us interchangeable.

(Also, needless to say, there would be a HUGE difference between a Jewish and Romani person who, say, met in a concentration camp - which is how Magneto and Magda’s relationship was written, I believe - and a Jewish and Romani person meeting in the modern day. There’s that shared history, certainly, but above all we’re PEOPLE who generally talk about the same sorts of things anyone else does. I find it very unlikely that a Jewish and Romani person in the present day would just sit down like “Hey, the Holocaust sure was a thing our ancestors went through, huh?” out of nowhere.)

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Last week, U.S. officials announced that President Trump had authorized a drone strike that killed one of Iran’s most powerful military leaders, Qassem Soleimani. The move took many by surprise, including some within Trump’s own administration, and now the U.S. is bracing for retaliation from Iran and an escalation of conflict in the region. More than 3,000 U.S. soldiers have already been deployed. And early Wednesday, Iran launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles targeting two U.S. military bases in Iraq.

Let’s first unpack what we understand Trump’s Iran strategy to be and the risks and challenges there. (How does it play with Republicans? His base? Can we expect this to be a unifying moment where Americans “rally around the flag” and his approval rating goes up?) Then, let’s turn to how this conflict could potentially change the dynamics of the Democratic primary.

OK, Trump’s Iran strategy. What do we know at this point?

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): In terms of Trump’s Iran POLICY strategy, I’m not sure how much we know. We know his administration feels like it needs to get tough with Iran. And we know that any action by the Iranians in retaliation is likely to get a very aggressive response from the United States. (See Trump’s remark about identifying 52 sites in Iran to attack, including some of cultural significance.)

So his political strategy seems to imply that anyone who disagrees with killing Soleimani doesn’t care about defending U.S. troops and interests, which is not unlike how the Bush administration defended their policies in the Middle East in the early 2000s.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Trump’s Iran strategy is also one that is largely tinged by domestic politics. What I mean by that is that Trump made a really drastic decision when he decided to green-light Soleimani’s assassination, something Democratic and Republican presidents had chosen not to do for years. And if you go to the reasoning of “why?” I think you come out with the educated guess that Trump wanted to look decisive in the face of a real threat from an enemy. But the decision was a pretty extreme one that doesn’t necessarily have the interests of the stability of the region at its heart. It might have the interests of regime change at heart, but that is, of course, a controversial point of action, one that more hawkish Republicans (a la former National Security Advisor John Bolton) have tended to favor.

sarahf: And at this point, how have Republicans responded? Republicans in Congress largely seem to support Trump’s decision, right?

clare.malone: Well, even some Never Trumpers like it! It’s the return of the neo-conservative (early aughts, much?)

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): According to a HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted immediately after the attack, 84 percent of Republicans approved of the airstrike. Of course, 84 percent of Republicans would probably agree with anything Trump does — and on foreign policy especially, the political science literature argues that people form their opinions based on elite cues (specifically, the elites they already are inclined or disinclined to like).

clare.malone: But I think one thing that will probably bother Democrats and Republicans alike is the outpouring of nationalism and grief for Soleimani this week in Iran. That’s perhaps something the Trump administration didn’t anticipate.

sarahf: It is interesting, too, when you consider how much Trump criticized the Iraq War, even going as far as to attack George W. Bush during the 2016 campaign, and how he promised to prevent the U.S. from getting further entangled in conflicts abroad. And when you look at some of the Republicans who make up his base, there is evidence that these voters are a bit less hawkish or more isolationist than other Republicans. A Pew Research Center poll conducted during the 2016 Republican primary found, for instance, that Trump supporters were more likely than other GOP voters to say that “the U.S. does too much to solve world problems.” So that does make me wonder how this recent military action reconciles with his base. Do we have a sense yet of just how supportive the broader American public would be of a war with Iran?

clare.malone: I think this is the most interesting question at hand. I’m not sure that the “rally around the flag” effect that we’ve seen with actions like, say, invading Iraq in 2003, will hold in our age of extreme partisanship.

nrakich: Yeah, Sarah, there is a tension there. Some political science research has also found that the American public knows more about foreign policy, and holds more consistent (if broad) views on it, than it typically gets credit for. But I personally tend toward the hypothesis that voters will change their views on foreign policy to match the politicians they support on domestic issues.

clare.malone: You’re already seeing the partisan dividing lines; all the Democratic presidential candidates condemning the attacks; Republicans calling Democrats unpatriotic, a la former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley:

“The only ones mourning the loss of Soleimani are our Democrat leadership and Democrat Presidential candidates.” pic.twitter.com/IZJJqpxkBE

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) January 7, 2020

sarahf: This chart is from a story that our colleague Dhrumil Mehta wrote in September, but what stood out to me was that Americans seem more willing to support military action in Iran than anywhere else.

This is especially true if Iran’s nuclear capabilities are perceived as a threat. According to a Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey conducted in June, 70 percent of respondents, including 82 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of Democrats, said they support sending U.S. troops to Iran to stop them from obtaining nuclear weapons.

nrakich: Yeah, Sarah, a lot of the polling we have on Iran is based on the premise of stopping Iran’s nuclear program, which wasn’t the reasoning behind the Soleimani attack. So we need more polling to really understand where Americans stand, as polling on Iran is somewhat difficult to interpret.

For example, in July, Gallup found that only 18 percent of Americans wanted to take military action against Iran, and 78 percent preferred diplomatic efforts. But 42 percent of that latter group said that the U.S. should take military action if diplomatic efforts fail.

perry: “War with Iran” tends to imply the deployment of tens of thousands of U.S. troops and a declaration of war from Congress. And if that is actually proposed, I think it will be fairly unpopular — regardless of whatever the polls say right now. The Trump administration is even saying this attack will not lead to a full-blown war (they may be wrong, but it still speaks to what they perceive as the political realities).

We know Americans don’t want another protracted conflict in the Middle East. Unless there is an attack on American soil by Iran — then the dynamics are different.

clare.malone: Yeah, I’m with Perry. The last two decades of American political life have been dominated by foreign intervention. Of course, the Quds force that Soleimani ran specializes in supporting more agile attacks on countries, aka terrorist attacks. And if a terrorist attack were to happen, especially on American soil, that could really shake up an election.

You’ve only got to look back at the 2016 primary to see an example of that. After the San Bernardino attack, Trump called for his “Muslim ban,” and I think more people may have found that palatable in part because there had just been an ISIS-inspired massacre in California. People are more likely to want punitive action when they are frightened and angry.

nrakich: I will be interested to see, though, if people (voters, the media, politicians — especially those who oppose Trump) start off skeptical of the administration’s intel on Iran and its decision to attack. It would make for quite a contrast with the Bush administration’s line about weapons of mass destruction, which the public initially accepted as a good reason to go to war in Iraq. This time around, though, Democrats don’t appear to be giving the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt on its assertion that attacks from Iran were “imminent.”

sarahf: So it sounds as if Trump’s calculus for handling the situation with Iran is that there has to be a perceived threat to the U.S. Otherwise, he risks entangling the U.S. in another drawn-out conflict in the Middle East, which, as Perry said, probably doesn’t have that much built-in support. Does that seem accurate? And if there is indeed evidence of a real threat, does that do well for him politically?

clare.malone: Sure, fear is the great motivator. But I also think that if it’s too obvious that they’re coming up with retroactive reasoning for an attack, that won’t pass the smell test with voters.

The interesting thing with Trump is that he hasn’t faced a whole lot of external crisis situations; often he is the maker of his own crisis.

perry: Trump can do a lot in Iran — as long as it’s not a “war” with the deployment of lots of U.S. troops.

sarahf: And considering Trump is not highly rated on his ability to respond in an international crisis to begin with, the situation in Iran could have a large upside for him, if it’s handled well.

perry: I don’t think there is an upside here for him. I tend to think that Fox News’s Tucker Carlson (who has been critical of the attack on Soleimani) is right. In my view, Trump won GOP voters in the primary and swing voters in the general who were wary of Bush-style Republicanism, which, of course, is tied to the Iraq War. Trump is better off talking about the economy.

Although, perhaps there is less downside for him focusing on Iran, as opposed to issues like repealing Obamacare or tweeting mean things about members of Congress.

sarahf: That’s interesting, Perry. It just seems like a step so extreme that one would think Trump has a greater Iran strategy at play. Although, there has been speculation that this might be a diversion to everything happening with impeachment. Which, whoa, if true. But let’s say this situation with Iran does continue to dominate headlines — how does this shake up the 2020 primary? As we’ve noted, Democratic candidates have been universally critical of Trump’s decision, so far. Does that change? Or what kind of positioning do we expect to see from the candidates? Does anyone aside from Biden, given his experience as Obama’s VP, stand to benefit?

clare.malone: I mean, I think Pete Buttigieg is trying to use this new dynamic as a way to play up his military service. But I’m not sure that’s going to track with voters, who still know he’s relatively inexperienced, compared to the rest of the top of the field. Bernie Sanders is certainly seeing his opening to point out that Biden was a proponent of the Iraq invasion in the early 2000s:

Presidential candidate @BernieSanders hammers Joe Biden for his Iraq War, NAFTA votes.

“I just don’t think that that kind of record is going to bring forth the kind energy we need to defeat Trump.” pic.twitter.com/3JIIVCNE48

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) January 7, 2020

perry: So on the Democratic side, this is interesting. Many of the debates and the broader discussion of the primary are framed around, “Do you prioritize bold change or winning the election?” And that framing helps Biden. I’m not sure what the Medicare for All equivalent (bold policy that can be painted as electorally risky) is for Iran. The issue just doesn’t have the same dynamics. So this could be an issue where the non-Biden candidates can make arguments without being trapped in a dilemma over how their stances poll.

Sanders has really leaned into this issue by connecting it to his broader opposition to the Iraq War, as well as his view that the U.S. should be less eager to intervene abroad. Biden, by contrast, has struggled to reconcile his vote in support of the Iraq War. A voter in Iowa asked him about it on Saturday — and he said he opposed the war from the beginning, which is not accurate.

clare.malone: Yeah, that was a weird moment.

perry: So because the foreign policy lines are less clear, I think it’s an opportunity for the non-Biden candidates to challenge him in a fresh way. And it’s harder to imagine that Biden’s Iraq vote won’t come up in next week’s debate.

clare.malone: I think that there is definitely potential upside for Sanders: He can point out that he’s principled and anti-war, which the progressive base will like, but he has also pointed out that his policy stance of getting out of the Middle East is exactly what Trump promised. So, in some ways, he’s trying to showcase what he thinks is his general election advantage: a different kind of (populist or outsider) appeal to Trump voters.

nrakich: Yeah, I wonder how big of a role Biden’s Iraq vote will play. I feel like other candidates are seizing on it out of necessity — since otherwise, foreign policy is an issue where voters give Biden a big advantage:

Biden has maintained a large lead in primary polling on the best candidate to handle foreign policy (48% to 14% Bernie):https://t.co/o9lGd8jiGe It has not been the most important issue for many Dem voters thus far, but foreign policy crisis could increase its salience pic.twitter.com/ez90wUwil8

— Matt Grossmann (@MattGrossmann) January 3, 2020

perry: Whatever the electoral effects, I also basically agree with what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said yesterday. This conversation around Iran solidifies the idea that she (and Sanders) would be in a different party than Biden if we had a multi-party system. Biden and Sanders have really different perspectives on foreign policy — with the latter perhaps being the most serious anti-war presidential candidate in decades.

clare.malone: Yeah, and the fact that it’s not entirely crazy that a major party candidate could have an anti-war stance says a lot about how conflicts in the Middle East have shaped the American psyche over the past couple of decades.

sarahf: Is this what the conversation will center on among Democrats next Tuesday during the debate, Perry? If the conversation has less to do with Trump’s actions and more about Sanders’s anti-war stance in comparison to Biden, I wonder how that plays with voters.

perry: Voters don’t really know much about policy, and generally, the differences between candidates in the same party are hard for them to understand. That said, someone will be declared to have “won” the debate on Tuesday — and that kind of coverage can matter. The press is already covering Sanders like he’s surging. So a debate in which Iraq comes up a fair amount is one that may play to Sanders’s advantage. And it may be a disadvantage for Biden — especially if he gets flustered and is unable to just concede that he voted for the Iraq War.

But if the moderators and/or Biden turn the Iran questions into basically, “Do you trust Trump on foreign policy?” then yes, that’s less useful for other candidates.

sarahf:

At this point, it seems as if Americans’ feelings around heightened escalation with Iran are a bit of a black box. They’re unsure whether they approve of the drone strike. And their opinions on whether to intervene in Iran are largely tied to whether they perceive Iran as a nuclear threat, although that may change if Iran continues to be hostile to the U.S. So what will you be looking for as an indication that the situation with Iran has escalated to the point that it could have a real effect in 2020?

clare.malone: I think a lot of public opinion depends on how Iran chooses to respond to the assassination. There are many potential unknowns for how they’ll continue to retaliate, but definitely a few ways that would anger the American public enough to shuffle some dynamics in the presidential campaign.

nrakich: I think whether this stays in the news for a while or whether other stories (e.g., impeachment) overtake it will be something to watch — as will be whether the Democratic candidates continue to draw a sharp contrast with Trump on the issue. According to political science research, those are two of the rare circumstances when foreign policy actually matters in elections. And obviously, I’ll be watching for any changes in Trump’s approval rating, too.

Joger ask: how would they cope with Roger having a crisis about the fact that John has written hit singles including their biggest ever hit and he has yet to pop his a-aide cherry? Is he rubbish? Is he really just a pretty face? He knows he brings lots of musical input & the sonic volcano & ‘the girl for everything’ for the band but really, who is he kidding? And John can’t deny that he aced his degree or does the finances or wrote hits... Thankfully Radio Gaga comes along and all ends well...

hmmmm ok. this got? long. very ramble-y. apologies

so like. roger is so fucking proud of john y’know???? and it’s not john’s songs being more successful than his which is cutting deep (because, well, commercial success is somewhat ehh to roger now that they’ve already made it big. the music he’s writing and creating, off on the side, is more about the music than anything else), it’s that he didn’t see it coming

100% did not see aobtd being a hit. hated recording it with his drums taped up, and thought the whole thing was a waste of time which.... it obviously wasn’t because john’s latest royalty cheque was big enough to have even freddie blinking in surprise

and. well. roger’s kind of always been the one with his finger on the pulse, so to speak. roger was riding the early waves of punk before the sex pistols had so much as looked at a safety pin and thought, “hmm, i wonder”. and his ability to keep up with, stay just one step ahead, of the trends has been invaluable in the past and now.... he might be slipping behind?

because even though he fucking hated half of the lines in ymbf he... he knew it was going to be a hit in the US. that sort of soft poppy feel, with a funky little bassline? the american’s eat that shit up in spades. of course it was going to be popular.

but, yeah, he didn’t see aobtd being a hit and now he’s starting to wonder if maybe the reason he isn’t writing hits isn’t because he hasn’t been trying to appeal to the broader audience, hasn’t been trying to write songs that will get massive air time or be played in clubs, but because he’s got no fucking clue about what people want anymore

‘girl for everything.......... except knowing what people want’ doesn’t, uh, sound as good

and it’s not? it’s not a Big Deal, not really. he just gets a little quieter about voicing his opinions on tracks because, well, maybe he doesn’t actually know what the fuck he’s talking about?

and so, hot space

brian’s losing his gd mind arguing with everyone and everything because he feels backed into a corner, freddie isn’t playing the peacekeeping role he usually does, john is being Just a Little Bit of an egotistic shit, and roger is........... not getting involved. which works kind of awfully because both brian and john take his silence as tacit approval of their position, which boils over into a lot of misunderstandings about just what it is roger thinks about what’s going on in the studio

(and mostly what roger thinks about what’s going on in the studio is that this album is going to be a Fucking Disaster because instead of ripping apart one anothers songs and building them back up stronger all they’re doing is ripping into one another and calling it creative differences)

and he tosses up a couple of songs and lets them do what they will with them (and oh my god if you haven’t listened to action this day performed live???? do urself a favour and do it oh my god i fucking hated that song until i listened to it live) because well. they probably know better than he does at the moment, because he doesn’t quite trust himself. and tensions are high enough that inserting himself into the cockfight when he isn’t actually Sure about his opinions just seems an unnecessary risk.

and. uh. hot space...................................................... does as it does

and john is pretty mortified about the whole thing because.... ???? all of that work and fighting and it’s flopping which is. made all the more worse by brian’s oh too casual sympathetic comments during the press junket, and then even worse by the way that roger. doesn’t seem surprised?? because. well. even when it was a love song written about roger roger was honest about what he didn’t like about it, but now there’s a whole fucking album that john pushed really hard for and roger a) didn’t like it and b) didn’t tell him

he thought they respected one another more than that. he thought they were more secure than that. 

which sort of........ simmers uncomfortably between them as they gear up for the tour and sort of. explodes when roger starts making suggestions for changes to some of the songs for the live performances that. annoyingly sound much better and why didn’t you bring this up when we were recording the fucking album, roger (look aight atd sounds SO MUCH BETTER LIVE, IT’S BEEN MONTHS AND IM STILL SHOOK)

and roger’s sort pussyfooting around it because oh well... you know you and freddie really wanted to this one as a sort of concept album..... and brian and i didn’t want to interfere...... (brian: very much did want to interfere) ............ so ya know................ it’s not really my style so i didn’t wanna stick my foot where it doesn’t belong.........

and john’s like???? its music what the fuck are you Talking About? you know music you know what sounds good and what doesnt and it’s not like you’ve ever been shy about voicing your opinions before, so forgive me if im a bit confused about the sudden reticence 

regardless, it’s Not a Big Deal. no really. roger will insist this til the day he dies

and things calm down? they take a break and, as they are wont to do, the tensions of the band slowly start slipping from john and roger’s day to day lives? like, when they’re not living in close quarters and feeding off of the energies that brian and freddie and mack and everyone else is putting out. it’s just them, yeah? 

but anyway, roger’s still been writing music and ha enough for a new solo album so he’s like. yeah. think imma do that and john’s a bit taken aback because? fuck, you’ve been busy then you said you didn’t have much of anything for hot space??? and roger’s like. uh, yup. been busy. busy bee, me. ya know. while ur out painting the shed i gotta keep myself occupied somehow

except. well. john’s obviously lending a hand with bass and mixing, and brian’s in and out too, so’s freddie and. it’s freddie, actually, who picks up that roger had been working on the beat of  I Cry for You (Love, Hope and Confusion) back in the studio when they’d been working on hot space which.   doesn’t make sense, because he definitely hadn’t shown them it to them which is odd, because roger usually shows them everything he writes in case they want it for queen? 

and then brian chimes in because, actually, he recognises the lyrics for killing time? 

and john is like what the FUCK is going on because this is just? weird? 

so john ends up lowkey cornering him at home in a totally not cool sneaky fashion (read: he gives him a fucking mindblowing orgasm and then is like [head propped on roger’s chest] SO)  because???? ofc he supports rog’s solo career but also? why didn’t he share what he was writing with him? what’s going on? music’s always been a language they’ve shared, even if they tended towards different dialects, and now it... well it doesn’t feel very good that roger seems to be inching him out of something that john knows is so very important to him

and roger’s like huh no idea what you’re talking bout. been really busy writing recently. shame though, means i might not have much for the next queen album

and john’s like? do you want to leave queen, if that what this is about?

and roger’s horrified because what the fuck no i’m just not sure i’ll have much to contribute is all which has john like?? because. it’s roger of course he’s got something to contribute what the fuck are you talking about

but roger’s like oh well ya know nothing im really writing at the moment is much of our current style so. that’s cool, though. that’s fine

but john is confused bc well. hot space was a bit of a failure so they’re probably headed back to more consistent waters so that’s not a problem, and hey, maybe if roger had injected a bit more of his style into the album things might have been better right?

ANYWAY basically john’s like yo my man like. if u dont wanna write any material for the new album that’s? fine ig? but we kinda Need You to be a little bitch about the things u dont like because.... things work better when ur being a nitpicky little bitch than when ur being silently supportive of me :) though that was sweet

and rogers like oh i was 100% not being supportive of either u or brian’s bullshit tbh i just. disco isn’t my forte ya know i didn’t wanna chat shit ab smth i know nothing about like, god, imagine if you’d listened to me about aobtd????????? 

which. john’s like. i? i mean, i did. fuck sake, the whole thing got rewritten to be about our dog (steve) bc u made a joke about it? i.     i did listen to u about aobtd

and john has honestly NO IDEA what any of this is about? because roger has an awful tendency to sit on things until they’re Much Bigger than what they were to begin with. like, john’s actually not great at that? he’s not very good at hiding that he’s angry or upset, not for the long term. roger’s a lot better at it in the worst kind of way, because unless you pick up on it right at the beginning by the time you’ve figured out something’s wrong it’s months down the track and so many micro interactions or events have been tacked onto the Original Problem that it’s a sprawling mess of “i dont want to communicate that im feeling vulnerable about something so instead im gonna try and turn my vulnerabilities into armour” - like deciding to turn all of your writing, not just the stuff that won’t fit on your main project’s albums, into solo material because your solo stuff doesn’t have to be successful 

but also, ok fine. 

and so he sort of? lets it go? because tbh once roger latches onto something, when u havent go in there early enough? your best bet is to just wait for him to.... get over it. which he generally does. he doesnt have the patience for decade long grudge matches, not really.

and then it all comes to a head when brian writes and shows them all machines (or: back to humans) which obvs came about from an idea of roger’s and. well. freddie thinks its amazing, john is nodding along even as he sends him small little side eyes and well. fuck it, right?

and so the next week he comes in and slams down the first rough draft of radio gaga, the music heavily influenced by I Cry for You (Love, Hope and Confusion) which freddie had been complaining about being used up on a solo album 

and then he goes home and tops the hell out of john, the end.

Tim Berners-Lee on 30 years of the world wide web: 'We can get the web we want' //cool article, Tim Berners-Lee father of the world wide web talks about his creation

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/12/tim-berners-lee-on-30-years-of-the-web-if-we-dream-a-little-we-can-get-the-web-we-want

”What started out as an idea for a way scientists could share information went on to change the world. Three decades later, its founder reflects on his creation

Thirty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee, then a fellow at the physics research laboratory Cern on the French-Swiss border, sent his boss a document labelled Information Management: A Proposal. The memo suggested a system with which physicists at the centre could share “general information about accelerators and experiments”.

“Many of the discussions of the future at Cern and the LHC era end with the question: ‘Yes, but how will we ever keep track of such a large project?’” wrote Berners-Lee. “This proposal provides an answer to such questions.”

His solution was a system called, initially, Mesh. It would combine a nascent field of technology called hypertext that allowed for human-readable documents to be linked together, with a distributed architecture that would see those documents stored on multiple servers, controlled by different people, and interconnected.

It didn’t really go anywhere. Berners-Lee’s boss, Mike Sendall, took the memo and jotted down a note on top: “Vague but exciting …” But that was it. It took another year, until 1990, for Berners-Lee to start actually writing code. In that time, the project had taken on a new name. Berners-Lee now called it the World Wide Web.

Thirty years on, and Berners-Lee’s invention has more than justified the lofty goals implied by its name. But with that scale has come a host of troubles, ones that he could never have predicted when he was building a system for sharing data about physics experiments.

Some are simple enough. “Every time I hear that somebody has managed to acquire the [domain] name of their new enterprise for $50,000 (£38,500) instead of $500, I sigh, and feel that money’s not going to a good cause,” Berners-Lee tells me when we speak on the eve of the anniversary.

It is a minor regret, but one he has had for years about the way he decided to “bootstrap” the web up to something that could handle a lot of users very quickly: by building on the pre-existing service for assigning internet addresses, the domain name system (DNS), he gave up the chance to build something better. “You wanted a name for your website, you’d go and ask [American computer scientist] Jon Postel, you know, back in the day, and he would give you a name.

“At the time that seemed like a good idea, but it relied on it being managed benevolently.” Today, that benevolent management is no longer something that can be assumed. “There are plenty of domain names to go around, but the way people have invested, in buying up domains that they think entrepreneurs or organisations will use – even trying to build AI that would guess what names people will want for their organisations, grabbing the domain name and then selling it to them for a ridiculous amount of money – that’s a breakage.”

It sounds minor, but the problems with DNS can stand in for a whole host of difficulties the web has faced as it has grown. A quick fix, built to let something scale up rapidly, that turns out to provide perverse incentives once it is used by millions of people and is so embedded that it is nearly impossible to change course.

But nearly impossible is not actually impossible. That is the thrust of the message Berners-Lee is aiming to spread. Every year, on the anniversary of his creation, he publishes an open letter on his vision for the future of the web. This year’s letter, given the importance of the anniversary, is broader in scope than most – and expresses a rare level of concern about the direction in which the web is moving.

“While the web has created opportunity, given marginalised groups a voice and made our daily lives easier,” he writes, “it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred and made all kinds of crime easier to commit.

“It’s understandable that many people feel afraid and unsure if the web is really a force for good. But given how much the web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the web as we know it can’t be changed for the better in the next 30. If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web.”

Berners-Lee breaks down the problems the web now faces into three categories. The first is what occupies most of the column inches in the press, but is the least intrinsic to the technology itself: “deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour and online harassment”.

He believes this makes the system fragile. “It’s amazing how clever people can be, but when you build a new system it is very, very hard to imagine the ways in which it can be attacked.”

At the same time, while criminal intentions may be the scariest for many, they aren’t new to the web. They are “impossible to eradicate completely”, he writes, but can be controlled with “both laws and code to minimise this behaviour, just as we have always done offline”.

More concerning are the other two sources of dysfunction affecting the web. The second is when a system built on top of Berners-Lee’s creation introduces “perverse incentives” that encourage others to sacrifice users’ interests, “such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation”. And the third is more diffuse still: those systems and services that, thoughtfully and benevolently created, still result in negative outcomes, “such as the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse”.

The problem is that it is hard to tell what the outcomes of a system you build are going to be. “Given there are more webpages than there are neurons in your brain, it’s a complicated thing. You build Reddit, and people on it behave in a particular way. For a while they all behave in a very positive, constructive way. And then you find a subreddit in which they behave in a nasty way.

“Or, for example, when you build a system such as Twitter, it becomes wildly, wildly effective. And when the ‘Arab Spring’ – I will never say that without the quotes – happens, you’re tempted to claim that Twitter is a great force for good because it allowed people to react against the oppressive regime.

“But then pretty soon people are contacting you about cyberbullying and saying their lives are miserable on Twitter because of the way that works. And then another few iterations of the Earth going around the sun, and you find that the oppressive regimes are using social networks in order to spy on and crack down on dissidents before the dissidents could even get round to organising.”

In conclusion, he says, “You can’t generalise. You can’t say, you know, social networks tend to be bad, tend to be nasty.”

For a creation entering its fourth decade, we still know remarkably little about how the web works. The technical details, sure: they are all laid out there, in that initial document presented to Cern, and in the many updates that Berners-Lee, and the World Wide Web Consortium he founded to succeed him, have approved.

But the social dynamics built on top of that technical underpinning are changing so rapidly and are so unstable that every year we need to reassess its legacy. “Are we now in a stable position where we can look back and decide this is the legacy of the web? Nooooope,” he says, with a chuckle. Which means we are running a never-ending race, trying to work out the effects of new platforms and systems even as competitors launch their eventual replacements.

Berners-Lee’s solution is radical: a sort of refoundation of the web, creating a fresh set of rules, both legal and technical, to unite the world behind a process that can avoid some of the missteps of the past 30 years.

Calling it the “contract for the web”, he first suggested it last November at the Web Summit in Lisbon. “At pivotal moments,” he says, “generations before us have stepped up to work together for a better future. With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, diverse groups of people have been able to agree on essential principles. With the Law of Sea and the Outer Space Treaty, we have preserved new frontiers for the common good. Now too, as the web reshapes our world, we have a responsibility to make sure it is recognised as a human right and built for the public good.”

This is a push for legislation, yes. “Governments must translate laws and regulations for the digital age. They must ensure markets remain competitive, innovative and open. And they have a responsibility to protect people’s rights and freedoms online.”

But it is equally important, he says, for companies to join in and for the big tech firms to do more to ensure their pursuit of short-term profit is not at the expense of human rights, democracy, scientific fact or public safety. “This year, we’ve seen a number of tech employees stand up and demand better business practices. We need to encourage that spirit.”

But even if we could fix the web, might it be too late for that to fix the world? Berners-Lee’s invention has waxed and waned in its role in the wider digital society. For years, the web was the internet, with only a tiny portion of hardcore nerds doing anything online that wasn’t mediated through a webpage.

But in the past decade, that trend has reversed: the rise of the app economy fundamentally bypasses the web, and all the principles associated with it, of openness, interoperability and ease of access. In theory, any webpage should be accessible from any device with a web browser, be that an iPhone, a Windows PC or an internet-enabled fridge. The same is not true for content and services locked inside apps, where the distributor has absolute power over where and how users can interact with their platforms.

In fact, the day before I speak to Berners-Lee, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg published his own letter on the future of the internet, describing his goal of reshaping Facebook into a “privacy-focused social network”. It had a radically different set of aims: pulling users into a fundamentally closed network, where not only can you only get in touch with Facebook users from other Facebook products, but even the very idea of accessing core swathes of Facebook’s platform from a web browser was deprioritised, in favour of the extreme privacy provided by universal end-to-end encryption.

For Berners-Lee, these shifts are concerning, but represent the strengths as well as the weaknesses of his creation. “The crucial thing is the URL. The crucial thing is that you can link to anything.

“The web platform [the bundle of technologies that underpin the web] is always, at every moment, getting more and more powerful. The good news is that because the web platform is so powerful, a lot of the apps which are actually built, are built using the web platform and then cranked out using the various frameworks which allow you to generate an app or something from it.” All the installable applications that run on smartphones and tablets work in this way, with the app acting as little more than a wrapper for a web page.

“So there’s web technology inside, but what we’re saying is if, from the user’s point of view, there’s no URL, then we’ve lost.”

In some cases, that battle really has been lost. Apple runs an entire media operation inside its app store that can’t be read in normal browsers, and has a news app that spits out links that do not open if Apple News has been uninstalled.

But in many more, the same viral mechanics that allow platforms to grow to a scale that allow them to consider breaking from the web ultimately keep them tied to the openness that the platform embodies. Facebook posts still have permanent links buried in the system, as do tweets and Instagrams. Even the hot new thing, viral video app TikTok, lets users send URLs to each other: how else to encourage new users to hop on board?

It may be too glib to say, as the early Netscape executive Ram Shriram once did, that “open always wins out” – tech is littered with examples where a closed technology was the ultimate victor – but the web’s greatest strength over the past 30 years has always been the ability of anyone to build anything on top of it, without needing permission from Berners-Lee or anyone else.

But for that freedom to stick around for another 30 years – long enough to get the 50% of the world that isn’t online connected, long enough to see the next generation of startups grow to maturity – it requires others to join Berners-Lee in the fight. “The web is for everyone,” he says, “and collectively we hold the power to change it. It won’t be easy. But if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web we want”

Manny The Uncanny Oral History Transcript

00:07 Speaker 1: When you're a kid, there's a few television moments that make you say, "What the hell was that?" Those shocking moments in which you're exposed to something wholly different than you've ever experienced. This doesn't occur often because most television shows created for kids are trying to replicate what has already worked in the past. It's why after a juggernaut like Ninja Turtles you get Biker Mice from Mars, Street Sharks and Moo Mesa. Children's television breaks with the old adage, "everything old is new again". Instead it's everything new is new again. In addition as a child, you are limited in what you can see. Your movies generally go up to PG, PG-13 if your dad was cool or if your older brother was cool, and NC-17 if your grandmother was weird. Profanity, sex, and violence are beyond your cultural scope. Not to mention as a kid you don't have the cultural framework or vocabulary to describe what you've seen. It's a purely internalized experience of the weird. That's why when there's something truly different it's so memorable. In the '90s, Manny the Uncanny definitely falls within this distinguished, "what the hell" category. Not only because he's weird; he certainly is, but because this...

01:21 Speaker 2: Why don't you go talk to the head potty guy? Come on! And Mr. Jim Langely, the head potty guy, is going to be telling us all about what happens with our potty bits. Tell me about potty bits.

01:32 Speaker 3: Potty bits?

01:33 Speaker 2: Potty bits.

01:33 Speaker 3: Potty bits.

01:34 Speaker 2: Grandma's trousers!

01:38 Speaker 1: Was on a Disney-branded Saturday morning. It begs repeating, What the hell? This character creation comes from the brilliantly deranged mind of Paul Rugg, and he spent the majority of his adult life making your childhood strange. But first a little history. Steven Spielberg has made several attempts to be Walt Disney. There was An American Tail, which eventually launched his own animation company Amblimation. There was Roger Rabbit and the Roger Rabbit shorts. And of course there was his most famous endeavor, DreamWorks. And yes, he's not Walt Disney, but he's damn close. And what puts him even closer to the heights of Walt Disney's pencil thin moustache was his run at Warner Brothers Animation in the '90s.

02:24 Speaker 1: It had been 20 years since the studio had created an animated short. The days of Termite Terrace were long gone, and that's where Spielberg saw opportunity. He thought maybe a Looney Tunes movie would work, and was working on one in 1987 about young Tunes learning from the greats at the Acme Academy, but it never panned out. Instead, the movie was put into television development, which was better suited for the wonderful short form zaniness of the Looney Tunes, and thus Steven Spielberg Presents Tiny Toon Adventures was born.

02:55 Speaker 1: The show borrowed the Disney television animation model and infused historically cheap television animation with cash resulting in smoother animation and live orchestration for every show. Before the first episode, $25 million had been spent on Tiny Toons. After all, there was a daunting legacy to live up to, and it did. In its second year it was beating Darkwing Duck, Ninja Turtles, and DuckTales. Buoyed by that initial success, Spielberg and Warner Brothers Animation created the Animaniacs, which gracefully captured the essence of the old Looney Tunes classics, that have long evaded reproductions. Because the classic Looney Tunes shorts are perfection. That's not an exaggeration or an opinion; they are perfect. If you're a non-believer, imagine writing a joke that's still funny 70 years later. Imagine doing animation 70 years ago that is still seen as some of the best to this day, which is why its spirit has been so difficult to recapture. But the Animaniacs are the closest thing to the Looney Tunes since Looney Tunes. An integral part of the team that captured the bygone era was Paul Rugg.

04:02 Paul Rugg: I was in, sort of a offshoot of The Groundlings, called the Acme Theatre, which was founded by some people from the Groundlings. Where the Groundlings was more Hollywood-based, we were more San Fernando Valley-based, just because we were all very lazy and we all live in the San Fernando Valley. I had written some sketches for a show. Sherry Stoner, her partner Mark Sweeney, he was the director, and she started liking my stuff along with John McCann, and she said, "You know, I think you should come and we're developing this show." And I was like, "Oh, okay." And I didn't really know what they were talking about. They sent over a bible, which is everything about the characters, what the characters are. And I think I read that a couple weeks, and so did John McCann. And then we went in to meet Tom Ruegger to just get one script. He sort of told us more about characters, that they were very similar to the Marx Brothers, which is all I really needed to know. Over a week sort of wrote one and then got hired the day I turned it in, and that was it. When I saw that all of the scripts were being sent to Steven and we were waiting for his approval, and then I was like, "Wow, so he's gonna read these, huh?"

05:15 Paul Rugg: When they started doing the auditions, backgrounds, he was... We're always pending Steven's approval, so after a time I was like, well, he really does read this stuff, and he looks at this stuff and he listens to the record. And then I'd written something that never actually made it, but he sent me a memo saying, "That was really funny," so I was like, "Wow, he really is reading this stuff! My gosh, this guy really is involved". We really were writing for ourselves, and luckily he sort of liked that style. We never wrote for him, or oh, he likes this or he likes that, we were just doing what we thought was funny. And luckily he was liking it.

06:01 Paul Rugg: Once or twice, I think I might have written a joke and Tom Ruegger would say, "There's no way a kid's gonna know what that means," and I remember changing it. But maybe that happened twice out of all the scripts that I wrote. So, no, we never really thought about kids. We always wanted to keep it clean, but I can't remember ever catering a joke or a line or any of the ideas for a kid. I remember we did a parody of... Not of Apocalypse Now, but the documentary that Coppola's wife made about his making of Apocalypse Now, which is so totally obscure, and it was like, yeah, make that. So [laughter] I don't think... If we were really writing for kids, we never would have done that.

06:47 Speaker 1: Then there was Freakazoid! Which Paul voiced, wrote, and eventually produced. Freakazoid! Came along during two major changes, Time Warner would create The WB, and the Warner Brothers Animation shows would be transferred from Fox Kids to the new network. And the second, Spielberg made his final attempt to become Uncle Walt.

07:07 Paul Rugg: They were developing Freakazoid! For Steven. It was Bruce Timm and Paul Dini, and Steven wanted to take a really quirky turn and make it more very, very comedy-based. Tom Ruegger took over, and then he took John McCann and I off of Animaniacs and said, "You know, you really gotta help me, this show airs in like eight months, we don't have anything." By that time, I of felt that I had written as much as I could about Animaniacs, and as much as I loved the character I was looking for something new to do, so it was perfect.

07:38 Paul Rugg: The WB just didn't like it at all. I just don't think they liked it, which was a shame because we were having a great time with it, and Steven was really having a good time with it. We would send him a script, he goes, "This is crazy, I can't believe you guys are doing this, this is nuts". So we were all just loving it. But the WB was trying to think about... Well, in the second season, they asked us to do half hour stories in the hopes that it wouldn't be so bizarre. All that really did was [chuckle] give us a license to do more bizarre long-form stuff. Yeah, I don't think they were delighted with what we were doing.

08:20 Paul Rugg: Our demographics were coming in. Well, they weren't coming in right at the sweet spot that they want, we were really appealing to an older group, more high school, college, and some very intelligent younger children. Well, I don't wanna say The WB changed everything, but it did change everything. I think The WB in and of itself was sort of the demise of Warner Brothers Animation as we knew it then. They had a definite agenda, and that was to compete in this broader field of children's television. And they had a certain idea about what that should be. Well, they wanted Pokemon, they wanted... Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was doing really well, they wanted stuff that wasn't what necessarily we were doing. They wanted hits. While I think Warner Brothers Animation was doing very well, you know Animaniacs was doing well, they didn't care what it was, they wanted big hits. And well Freakazoid! , while it was doing really well with the critics and Steven was happy, it didn't fit in their wheelhouse.

09:34 Paul Rugg: They didn't really understand what they had. They had Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, they had the golden chest, in my opinion. And then they had the Yakko, Wakko, and Dot. I don't think they ever really truly understood what they had. The way Disney sort of takes care of their characters... I think for reasons that I've never really understood, I think that they didn't really understand the characters. And therefore you got things like Space Jam, which you might like Space Jam, but it was... I remember we all watching and we're like, "Oh my gosh, what are they thinking?"

10:12 Paul Rugg: When he formed DreamWorks, we still had, I think, some Freakazoids left to do, Animaniacs left to do, but we knew that, that sort of partnership was over. And then there was a lot of talk about us all maybe moving over. I think we all got interviews at DreamWorks when they were just starting it, we all went over there and had a meeting. And then some of us decided to go, some of us decided to stay. I was one who decided to stay because I really liked working for Ruegger, I really liked working for Jean MacCurdy. As far as bosses go, they didn't get any better.

10:54 Paul Rugg: We used to work at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, and there was this fountain where we would all... We would go down from the lobby and sit and talk, and I remember sitting there and somebody came up and said, "Hey, Steven's starting this big new thing." And we all went upstairs, and I don't think there was the internet then, but somebody got a copy of Variety and we read it. We're like, "Wow, this is big." And I think... As I recall, we were still doing the first season of Freakazoid! So I started putting that in some of the Freakazoid! Scripts, there's a Lord Bravery script that mentions DreamWorks. And in typical Warner Brothers fashion, we made fun of it because that was our job, so. Nobody was scared, I don't remember being scared because I remember we were really happy working at Warner Brothers and we really liked the anarchy there, but I think maybe people were ready to move on, to try different things.

11:53 Speaker 1: Peter Hastings was a writer who had his fingerprints all over Warner Brothers television animation. And this resume led to Disney putting him in charge of creating the vibe of Disney's, One Saturday Morning. He based the program around Bob McAllister's '70s kids show, Wonderama and Late Night with David Letterman. The colors were bright, the jokes were fast. And if you were wondering if an elephant could crush a blueberry pie with its foot, you could find out here. And within this wonderland train station was a man, a beacon of weirdness, an 11 on the dial, if you will. Manny the Uncanny.

12:32 Speaker 2: How's it going? I'm Manny the Uncanny today with the US Mint in Philadelphia to see how they make the coins. Come inside and don't be lazy. How does, how does, how does it... This is the build, large epoxy quarter. Here it is. This is touching, feelings. It transfered here, into this machine which is drilling it in there. It goes from shrunk down to this, which will make our coin.

12:53 Speaker 5: That's exactly correct.

12:54 Speaker 2: Wow, you learn... So much. Does Amos make you nervous? Okay Tim, now you're... Hey, I'm Manny the Uncanny. Do you ever wonder where all of your potty bits go when you flush them down? It comes here to the sewage treatment plant. Let's go talk to the head potty guy. Come in. Hey, hi there and all of that, this stuff. I'm Manny the Uncanny and today I am at the Bazooka Joe where... Sorry, Joe Blasco Cosmetics where we're going to learn about the make-ups. But not the make-ups for going to market or going to the fishing store, it's the makeup of scariness to be in the movie. So I tell you what, let's...

13:37 Speaker 1: Manny is delivered to each destination by a hot air balloon man, known as Mr. Lighter Than Air. He's suspended below the man's belly by cords that are similar to a baby's jumper. His glasses are thick, his suit God-awful plaid and he looks like a cartoon exiting a dynamite explosion. He's of course not the first bizarre children's TV show host. In fact, Linda Ellerbee and LeVar Burton come to mind as the only normality within this group. At the top of the list is of course, Pee-wee Herman. The voice, the suit, the bike. Strangely enough, his world is so off-kilter that Pee-wee, despite the odds, is the straight man in many of his scenes. A weirdo pointing to bigger weirdos and saying, "Isn't that weird?" In fact, Pee-wee Herman loves who he is and goes home to his amazing house filled with warmth and friends. He's undeniably happy. Manny, on the other hand, is desperately trying to relate in man-on-the-street segments with real people while having a complete inability to do so and lack of understanding of how to do it.

14:40 Speaker 1: And you can't imagine Manny going home to a magical talking chair. Instead his one counterpart is a mechanized cat puppet which you know Manny controls and voices. There's no magic, just desperation and loneliness. Because even though the shows are titled, "Manny Goes to the Mint" and "Manny at the United Nations", they might as well be titled, "Manny tries to make a friend." It's tragic comedy. This isn't Greek by any standard, but there is something incredibly human about this fictional farce that comes from Paul Ruggs's performance, which is real and grounded. But he's playing off the wall insanity.

15:20 Paul Rugg: Because we knew that Freakazoid! Was cancelled. So myself, and John McCann and Doug Langdale were developing a Daffy Duck show based loosely on the Larry Sanders Show where Daffy had his own extravaganza sort of like the old Carol Burnett Show. And it was sort of behind the scenes and in front of the scenes, and then it was clear that the WBJB counter didn't really want anything like that so that's when I decided to leave Warner Brothers. I had shot a couple of things for Peter Hastings who was... Who really wanted me to do Manny the Uncanny for One Saturday Mornings. Manny developed out of a thing I had been doing at Acme. He was this sort of washed up, cruise ship entertainer, he was the worst magician ever. So that's what I would sort of do on stage. And Peter always liked it, and I sort of always liked it, and the audiences always liked it. Which is why [laughter] I was more surprised than anyone that give me... Sort of said we should do it there but that's all Peter.

16:21 Paul Rugg: I mean Peter wanted to have fun, that sort of goes back to what we learned at Warner Brothers. If we think it's fun, hopefully it'll be fun. And then he said, "Well, maybe Manny should just go out and sort of meet people." a la Cole Huaser who was sort of a very famous guy on public television here who used to go out and visit with various people in the LA community. He would go to a bagel maker and spend time with the bagel makers. And we said, "Well let's do the same things." So Manny's segments basically became, where are the really weird places that we can go where Manny can be the world's worst interviewer. So he took a camera while I was working at Warner Brothers and decided to film some stuff of me doing Manny. I guess they really liked that. And I was writing the Daffy show when he asked me to come actually be Manny for the wrap arounds that they were doing, the on set, the whole digital set they had created. So I took two weeks off of Warner Brothers and filmed that. And then, came back to Warner Brothers. And then, I left Warner Brothers because they didn't pick up Daffy. And he called and just wanted to know if I wanted to come be a part of it.

17:38 Paul Rugg: I helped him pitch it. I remember sitting in front of the executives [chuckle] who were sort of horrified because I had dressed up in my whole Manny costume and I was, I was sort of doing my whole Manny act for them. And I don't remember them being very enthused that there was this really weird guy with funny hair in front of them, but. Which was, [laughter] which was kind of funny, but. They were liking it but they didn't wanna be a part of the Act, meaning, executives are very funny, they're like, "Great we like it, just don't put us in the position of having to sit there and be a part of this", they were just more like, "Don't look me in the eye, stop it" and so we was like, I think that day Peter and I learned a very valuable lesson. Never go pitch and sort of make those people you're pitching to part of the act. Because Manny was very abrasive he was very silly and I remember literally picking out people who we're pitching to and these are the big, big wigs and I'm insulting them and they were smiling but you could tell they wanted it to end like now.

18:51 Paul Rugg: Peter and I were having a great time I think we just did the whole thing, we were just having a blast we heard later that you probably shouldn't do that, but then we were Walt... Warners and we were more pushing the boundaries having some fun. Because I helped Tom Ruegger do the same thing at Warner Brothers when he was pitching Hysteria and he had me come as Nostradamus and do my whole act in front of the president of Warner Brothers and they were all very happy about it. So it's just a different culture at Disney it's a little more... I found it to be a little bit tightly wound, let's just say, and the Warner Brothers vibe was a little bit more it wasn't that I had never worked at Disney and so, and I was so stuck in that Warner Brothers we can do anything it never occurred to me that they wouldn't like it. So I was never surprised that we were getting away with it 'cause I didn't know that we were getting away with anything if that makes sense. I didn't know sort of what I know about Disney which is a fine company and stuff but they are definitely hands on and they want it done as a certain way, but back then I don't really remember knowing that.

20:09 Paul Rugg: Well after I left Warner brothers and did other things, I went back in for a meeting once when all of the people that I had sort of known were gone and it felt like walking into Disney and I remember going that's a shame. Because I think it was a very specific time a group of people got together and were just having a great time doing what they were doing. Manny works in very minimal doses. Anything beyond five minutes you sort of are like okay he's really beginning to annoy me which I love but no, we really didn't get any notes the biggest shout was stop screaming and that was it.

20:54 Paul Rugg: 'Cause Manny is very energetic and very sort of excitable and that is where I would play it on stage but when you put a camera like two inch in front of him it basically looks like he's gone insane. So we sort of modified him a bit and I wasn't quite sure how the bits were gonna cut together but we really lucked out and the first editor whoever took a crack at sort of putting the Manny's together was the lead editor on Waiting for Guffman and he was sort of in between gigs he just got this footage together in a way that was so surprising and fun that it really set the tone for all future editing then he eventually got busy and had to move on but we decided to sort of copy his style which was making the editing even more bizarre and it really worked. Peter Hastings and I came up with at Warner brothers and I have no idea why I think we were in the elevator, once and doing weird voices or doing something we came up with it's true.

22:00 Paul Rugg: And I have no idea where it comes from but I remember we just started giggling and then when he came in to say we need Manny song for his intro. I remember we wrote that in about 30 seconds, because we realized Manny didn't make sense so I remember, I just went into his office he goes, "I need this now". And we went in there we recorded it and that was it. I think we recorded at once it was just dumb and it made no sense, and It made us laugh and we're like okay we got that.

22:28 Speaker 2: Where are we going today miss Mr. Lighter than Air?

22:34 Speaker 6: Well, Manny some place wonderful.

22:40 Speaker 2: Hi there oh and happy days let's have some fun. And not be lazy it's true.

22:46 Paul Rugg: Yeah, I was trying to think about how Manny would get around and it just made me laugh my friend Mark Dropman was super, super, super funny guy I said I have this idea what do you think he goes, "That sounds great", so yeah, we filmed it I don't think we could get away with that now, but gosh it made us all laugh and I remember being in that harness and I think a couple of the execs might have come in and go, "Why are you in a harness?", I go, "Well I'm floating below Mr. Lighter than air." And they're like, "What the heck is that?"and I'm like, "Oh, never mind I think I've said too much already". So I don't think we would have the same budget today. We had this great makeup person and she always wanted to get Manny's hair perfect. So I think we went through literally 10 gallons of hair spray and she would sit and work on his hair and I remember that being like, Wow, I never thought anyone would be working on my hair. I remember they had been shooting a lot. They only needed me for a little bit. I came in one day and they said, "Stand here", and I was doing obviously my Manny thing very broad, very big, and the elephant wasn't liking it and they told me to not move so much 'cause the elephant was freaking out.

24:05 Paul Rugg: The trainer came over and said, "Really this elephant is about to kill you, so... " So, I might have changed a little bit. Maybe if you see it now because I hadn't seen if for years. But maybe you'll notice a very rather muted Manny who doesn't wanna get trampled by a very large elephant. I think maybe they separated me from the elephant at one point, but the elephant didn't like men. People, depending on who they were when they sort of saw what we were doing and how we were conducting the interview. And then was just all a bunch of fun, they really got into the fun. Some places didn't really like it. There was a... I remember we did something for the Egg Board of California. And we got... I think I got five minutes in to the interview, and they thought we were making fun of them and kicked us out. So, they literally put their hands in the in front of the camera and told us to leave because they thought... I don't know who they thought we were, but then as I just started airing, people were like, "Yeah yeah, you can come and do that." They saw that we were just having fun. But yeah, some people didn't really like it.

25:25 Speaker 1: Despite the Egg Board, most people seem to be enjoying themselves. They're in on the joke, which eliminates any cynicism. And they're as nice as they can be to Manny. It reaffirms acts of charity that deep down all people are good, or maybe they just wanna be on TV. Either way, it humanizes them. Likewise Manny never gets the best of someone. The ordinary people constantly try to help him understand. In the same way they would help an over-questioning kid understand. It's actually kinda sweet. The guy who is in charge of the State Quarters, or any of the knights at medieval times are for once, cooler than the TV personality, with Letterman, Conan, and Leno, that's never the case. Those are smart asses picking on the defenseless. While Manny is less than defenseless. It's this dynamic that provokes the wonderful moments in the sketches. In which an ordinary person who probably thought they had a lame job smiles. And it reads on their face "Yeah, I guess my job is pretty cool after all". As for Manny, there's a respite for the strange ones. In spite of everything, the security guard that Manny once feared... Well, see for yourself.

26:35 Speaker 2: Thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure. You wanna go get a soda or something?

26:44 Speaker 7: Sure.

26:46 Speaker 1: In that moment, there's hope for anybody weird, awkward, to meet at least somebody for a soda. Make sure to check out Paul Rugg's Freakazoid! Celebration Freak-A-Con on March 15th on Facebook Live.

An Armenian Embassy in Tel Aviv: Markar Melkonian Responds to Readers

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/economy/an-armenian-embassy-in-tel-aviv-markar-melkonian-responds-to-readers-27094-29-06-2020/

An Armenian Embassy in Tel Aviv: Markar Melkonian Responds to Readers

What follows is Markar Melkonian’s response to those who commented on his June 18 article entitled An Armenian Embassy in Tel Aviv: Selling Out Armenia, Stabbing Our Allies in the Back, and Serving Our Enemies.

Some of the comments are shot through with confusion, misrepresentation, and inaccuracy.

Indeed, this seems so obvious that I had hoped that other commenters would step forward to rebut them. Checking back after several days, though, it seems that no one has stepped up to challenge. By default, then, the duty appears to have fallen to me. The embassy decision is inextricable from larger regional issues, and the following response is an opportunity at least to bring that point home. I will take a breath and try to be brief.

But how does one respond to comments that are packed full of Fox News rubbish about “backwardness,” bloody dictators,” “the Arab Street,” and all the rest of it? I reserve the right not to waste my time on willful ignorance, and I do so without conceding any of their points.

One of the commenters wonders out loud whether the opinion piece is satire. It might well seem like satire, to one who is accustomed to the high level of sophistication and nuance that is typical of public discourse among Armenians. That same commenter has come up with the informative idea that she is just “pro-Armenian,” and as such she is not concerned with Iran or Israel. And with that, she proceeds to ignore all the arguments and evidence that have just been presented against the embassy decision.

Let us review: the decision has compromised Armenia’s security; it has further destabilized the region; it will further isolate the country diplomatically and economically; it will deal a crippling blow to diplomacy relating to Artsakh, and it has fed into Turkey’s propaganda offensive in Lebanon. Rita then writes that, “We need to think about our survival. Armenia’s foreign policy should be based on pragmatism.” As if those very words are not an argument against the embassy decision! 

Too many people throw the word “pragmatism” around like a playground taunt. Very briefly: One cannot make sense of the words pragmatic or pragmatism without reference to a given purpose: policy x counts as pragmatic to the extent that it is conducive to purpose y. If the embassy decision is pragmatic, then what purpose does it advance? Let us review the possibilities.

1 – Will the embassy decision contribute to stability in the Middle East? Another commenter wrote that Armenia “should not be sucked into conflicts that don’t concern us.” But the embassy decision does exactly that, further compromising Armenia’s security and further destabilizing the larger region. Recent years have demonstrated that appeasement of Israel promotes more aggression. Some of us understood this long ago, and events have born us out. Who today doubts that Israel has been trying for years to drag the USA into a war against Iran? If you care at all about Armenia, then you damn well better be concerned about Iran.

Several of the commentators write as though opening an Armenian embassy is an unremarkable, unobjectionable, neutral act.

But let me repeat: Armenia has established embassies in fewer than one-quarter of the member states of the United Nations. Moreover, the embassy decision came on the heels of: continuing annexations in the West Bank; the shooting deaths of hundreds of unarmed protesters in the Gaza Strip since March 2018 alone; the Trump administration’s official approval of Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights; Jarod Kushner’s “Deal of the Century” debacle; the Knesset’s adoption in 2018 of Israel’s theocratic and apartheid Nation-State Bill; America’s certification of the entire city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel; and imminent further expulsions and annexations in the West Bank. In the face of these developments, the embassy decision has sent a clear message throughout the region. We have already seen that it has played right into Erdogan’s hands when it comes to extending Ankara’s influence in Lebanon–and Armenians of that country are already suffering the consequences.

2 – Will the embassy decision reduce Armenia’s economic isolation? Clearly this is not the case: if one does not wish to review decades of trade, energy, technology and transportation ties with Iran, then one might at least take a look at the map.

3 – Will the embassy decision reduce Armenia’s diplomatic isolation? I have already mentioned the fact that the real effect of this decision will be quite the opposite. 

4 – Does the embassy decision enhance Armenia’s military preparedness? Militarily, the Republic of Armenia is on the tactical defensive: to achieve its strategic goals it must continue to defend its borders. Russia possesses some of the most effective defensive weapons systems on earth, and these systems have been developed and tested over the decades to defeat U.S., Turkish, and Israeli offensive systems. By expanding relations with Israel, Armenia thereby further limits its access to the most advanced Russian defense technology.

5 – Will it put Armenia in a better position to defend its property and interests in Jerusalem? Over the course of the past two decades, we have witnessed the ROA stand by passively, while formerly thriving Armenian communities in the Middle East have been decimated. By joining the Coalition of the Willing, the ROA actively participated in the destruction of the 30,000 member Armenian community in Iraq, and helped to set the stage for the destruction of the prosperous, thriving 130,000 member communities in Syria. Armenian diplomats have not even publicly protested while their “partner” and its jihadi allies were blasting Armenian communities into rubble and burning them down to piles of ashes.

Since 1967, Zionist occupiers have crushed the once-thriving Armenian community in Palestine and stolen much of the real estate in the Armenian Quarter. Today, fewer than 800 Armenians are left in Jerusalem (2006 survey). This is what remains of a community that had perhaps 20,000 members before the Zionist occupation. Now, suddenly, we are supposed to believe that Yerevan is concerned about Armenian interests in Jerusalem. And it seems that the only way to secure those interests is to appease the oppressors of Palestinian Armenians, and the expropriators of Armenian property in the Holy Land.

There are, however, other ways to defend that property and those interests—if only Armenians would resolve to be more confrontational in the face of annexation, expropriation, and physical attack. Here’s one possible approach: the Armenian Assembly and the ANC—American organizations manned by American citizens–should make it clear that further expropriation and oppression of the Armenian community of Jerusalem, will be met with a full-on media campaign of announcements, communications with congressional offices, and conferences, to inform the American public of Israel’s anti-Christian actions.

The Friends of Israel understand very well something that the commenters do not: Israel depends for its fabled prosperity and military strength on the largesse of the American taxpayer (see, for example, John J . Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby, 2007). And they also know that, with every passing year, more and more Americans are fed up with Washington’s “special relationship” with Israel (see for example, the 22 April 2020 Gallup poll, “Marjority in the U.S. Again Support Palestinian Statehood, https://news.gallup.com/poll/293114/majority-again-support-palestinian-statehood.aspx).

The Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement enjoys widespread and increasing support from a rising generation of Americans, and just this week, Eliot Engel, a well-funded 16-year incumbent, was defeated in the democratic primary in New York’s 16th congressional district, in large part because of his pro-Israel stance. This is Israel’s Achille’s heel. Armenians need to summon the clarity and fortitude to take a more confrontational stance in the face of aggression against the Armenian Quarter. Our message to Israeli officialdom should be: Either you take your hands off of our property, our Church and our community, or this public relations campaign will join broader alliances and escalate.

Without much at all in the way of public discussion, the leaders of the Republic of Armenia have taken a step that will have serious long-term consequences for Armenia. The “Velvet Revolution” was supposed to have ushered in a new era of official transparency in Armenia. If it has done that, then the Prime Minister and the Foreign Ministry owe the people of Armenia an honest public explanation of the embassy decision.

A commenter writes that he is “curious to see what actual solutions Markar is suggesting.” The final section of the article, entitled “What to Do?” spells out exactly what actual solutions I am suggesting. Quoting: “revoke the embassy decision”; “rescind the embassy decision.”

Perhaps this bears repeating yet again, in full caps: RESCIND THE DECISION TO OPEN AN ARMENIAN EMBASSY IN TEL AVIV.

(Markar Melkonian is a teacher and writer.  His latest books are The Philosophy of Death Reader:  Cross-Cultural Readings on Immortality and the Afterlife (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and The Philosophy and Common Sense Reader:  Writings on Critical Thinking (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).  His book The Wrong Train:  Notes on Armenia since the Counterrevolution (Sardarabad Press, 2020) is a selection of opinion pieces that have appeared in Hetq.am.  The Wrong Train should appear in Armenian translation later this year.)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Hetq.

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Littwin: It’s been a long time coming, but is change really on the way?

Colorado News

There are certain moments in history. Something happens — a handcuffed man screams that he can’t breathe, the cop presses his knee ever more firmly against his neck, and the cop, I swear, looks so unbothered, so this-is-what-I-can-do-and-you-can’t-stop-me calm, ignoring those onlookers who plead for George Floyd’s life, while still pinning his knee on Floyd’s neck minutes even after Floyd is unresponsive and apparently dead — and people are sickened and disgusted and pained and, most of all, moved to act.

This seems like such a moment.

It was more than just the horror in that eight-minute, forty-six second video in which we saw the cop snuffing out a man’s life for no reason, for allegedly passing a forged $20 bill. It’s the lack of expression, the utter lack of empathy, the — to use the modern term — privilege on Derek Chauvin’s, the Minneapolis cop’s, face that does me in.

Mike Littwin

A nation erupts, and pieces fall into place, as they will, as protests become, in some cases, late-night riots, and police become, even without the late-night violence, violent enforcers, and sides are taken. But in a matter of days, it’s the violence from the police, not from late-night protests, that becomes headline material. As the police begin to pull back under pressure, the protests somehow become ever more peaceful. And in a just released Washington Post/Schar School poll, 74% of Americans approve of the protests and an amazing 69% agree that change is needed in police forces. Forty-seven percent of Republicans say Floyd’s killing suggests there are “broader problems” with the police, as opposed to 19% after Ferguson.

Suddenly Black Lives Matter is not seen as some radical group, but as those who tell us, and keep telling us, that, yes, black lives matter and — note to chastened John Hickenlooper — who can say no? 

This is stunning. Even a small majority of Republicans, despite Donald Trump, support the protests. These things don’t happen in a vacuum, of course. They don’t happen without the names of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor on our lips, and maybe not without the white woman in New York who called 911 to say an “African-American” birder was threatening her when, as the video clearly showed, he was not. And not without all the other names, over all the years. I just read a book called “The Blood of Emmett Till” about the lynching of the 14-year-old Chicago boy in Mississippi that helped change the world. The author, Timothy B. Tyson, writes that in the era of Black Lives Matter, “America is still killing Emmett Till, often for the same reasons that drove the violent segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s.”

And so as George Floyd, 46 years old, lay dead, even as Donald Trump retweeted a tweet saying Floyd should not be considered a martyr, tens of thousands still take to the streets, with no real signs of abating.

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And Trump, of course, responded by calling for U.S. troops to be sent in to police Americans. And a police state, martial law, was suddenly on the table. And, just as suddenly, retired four-star generals sided with the protesters and screamed no. They might as well have screamed no justice, no peace. And one, retired Marine four-star general John Allen, wrote in Foreign Policy of Trump’s threat to call in the troops: “The slide of the United States into illiberalism may well have begun on June 1, 2020. Remember the date. It may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment.”

The end of the American experiment. Yes, this is a moment. If we allow ourselves to believe — and I admit, after all these years, after so many moments, it gets harder — that this is a time, a certain time, and if we do, then we can see it.

There’s a bill in the House on policing. There’s a bill in the Senate. They’re not radical bills, but they do speak to actual police reform, and for those who are tired of reform and want greater change, that’s out there, too.

The protests are still running and spreading, not just in Minneapolis and St. Paul, not just in Denver and New York, not just in Seattle and LA, but seemingly everywhere. It is the clouds of tear gas, the pepper balls, the chain-saw attacks, the cars driven into crowds of protesters that galvanize us. It is the fact that Bill Barr lies when he says that no chemicals were used as federal police cleared out peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park so Trump could have his ill-fated, mission-accomplished, Bible-toting, silent majority photo-op that prompts D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to rename a street across from the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza” in big bold letters. 

And so Mitt Romney remarkably tweets that Black Lives Matter, and he marches.

And NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says the league was wrong to punish those football players who presciently took a knee. (You can be skeptical of Goodell’s intentions, as I am, but his words tell us what movements do; they capture the conscience of a nation.)

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And the Colorado state Senate overwhelmingly voted to move forward a bill that has surprising teeth to it, saying cops must face an imminent threat before shooting. Cops must not only be able to explain why they stop someone, they must prevent another cop from using excessive force. And even more surprising, the cops themselves could be held personally liable for damages. There’s more.

Meanwhile a judge excoriated Denver policing in a ruling for unnecessary force and the use of tear gas in the face of peaceful protests. 

And in Minneapolis, the city council is expected to vote to defund police. This is not as radical as it sounds. The idea is to restructure the police after years of reform that has changed so little, to demilitarize the police, to spread the overwhelming amounts of money spent on so-called law and order and use it instead on schooling, on pre-schooling, on housing, on a wide range of community projects. This comes as cities and states need to make severe cuts in all spending. Police will not and should not be exempt.

Yes, this could be such a moment. But even on Tuesday, on the day of George Floyd’s funeral, we woke up to this tweet from Trump on the 75-year-old Buffalo protester who was pushed by two policemen to the street, blood flowing from his ears as cops walked by: 

A tweet by the president on June 9, 2020.

A set-up? Fake blood? Antifa? OAN?

It’s no surprise that Donald Trump is missing the moment. This is the same Trump who called for the death penalty for the wrongly convicted Central Park Five, the same Trump whose political moment was written in his tweets on racist birtherism, who announced his candidacy while calling Mexicans rapists, who separated small brown children from their parents at the border and locked them in cages, who sends out the helicopters to buzz D.C. protesters, who somehow thinks a 75-year-old man was an Antifa provocateur. 

An election is coming. And, yes, as Gen. Allen wrote, the American experiment is on the line. And as I write this, I’m drowning out Trump’s words with the old Sam Cooke civil rights song:

There have been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long

But now I think I’m able to carry on

It’s been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will

And as I listen, I hope, maybe, this is the moment he’s finally right.

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow.

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THE NIGHMARE THING

By Destiny Flynn (via The Vortex)

((CW: Murder/death, serial killers, inhumane medical experimentation))

I was really pretty dubious when Parker messaged me asking me to do this piece for the Vortex. Frankly, I've spent so long working in an audio/visual medium that I'm not sure I can still accurately convey genuine thoughts or feelings without the piles of seemingly irrelevant visual assets slapped on top, but hey. We all have to push our comfort zones sometimes, right?

I guess before I get into it I should warn Parker's regular audience that I'm going to get into some pretty heavy shit in this one about real people who've been murdered or disappeared. My tone, if you're not familiar with my work, is a little bit flip, and I don't want to make anyone think that I'm making light of these situations. Humor is how I cope with bullshit, but if you'd rather not subject yourself to that, maybe give this one a miss.

That said: The Nightmare Thing.

So, for those of you who are neither regular viewers of my channel, nor longtime followers of the Vortex, there's a fairly well-supported theory in the underground El Asilo community that Vantage Corp. has something to do with El Asilo, CA's astronomical rate of missing persons cases. Parker has written on this on his twitter feed and this blog before, and I have a few videos on the topic on my channel as well. However, as you might have noticed, this theory is difficult to substantiate. Well, Destiny; why's that?

For one, people who disappear in El Asilo tend not to be very high profile, and oftentimes few people really notice them missing Families and friends make a stink about it, of course, but what can a few people really do against the full force of Vantage's insidious legion of public relations personnel? Not a whole fucking lot, turns out.

The second reason for this is that El Asilo also has the largest number of serial killers per capita of any city in the United States. Serial killers aren't exactly the most predictable group of criminals in the world, but most of the ones here don't exactly have a vested interest in leaving...how shall we say? Identifiable bodies. This makes them REMARKABLY good scapegoats. There's nothing we can do to PROVE that any given missing person didn't just fall victim to Joe the Slasher 'round the block, even if when taken as a whole, the numbers don't come close to lining up.

This is not to say that the only victims of the fucking...void monster that I suppose we're supposed to believe is eating all of El Asilo's missing people are obscure nobodies. I point you to Atlas, Junesong, and Eraser, the heroes implicated in the Vantage Day parade bombing, whose case never went to trial. Or to Slightgeist, Miss Miracle, Deaddrop, or Nebulara, all heroes who disappeared without a trace within the last ten years. But with the public approval rating for heroes and vigilantes declining at a steady rate over that same time period driving heroic fan-followings directly into the Earth's core, not many people have paid attention to a few heroes dropping off the map.

Enter Nightmare.

Nightmare, civilian name Christina Karim, was a supervillain and serial killer active in El Asilo between December 2015 and February 2016, when she was famously turned in to the police by fellow criminal Penny Dreadful on Valentine's day. For those of you living under a rock (or outside the city, where I understand news does not often reach) at that time, Nightmare was a rather unartistic career criminal who worked with her partner and sometime girlfriend Cupid, occasionally killing people for shits and giggles. The pair famously killed an El Asilo University pre-law student, shoved her body into a swimming pool locker, and waited for student and police to recover the body.

The circumstances of Nightmare's arrest are largely inconsequential to the funtimes journey I'm taking y'all on, but seem to be mainly tied to Nightmare and Cupid carving out territory which began to infringe one that of Dreadful's gang. The actually important part here is that Nightmare and Cupid were phenomenally well-known and almost universally reviled, in part due to their large social media presence. Both villains blogged regularly about their exploits on social media, and Nightmare's blog is still publicly accessible through the archive on ap3nnyforyourthoughts, Penny Dreadful's public blog. Nightmare's powers (the ability to sense and manipulate fear) were also fairly striking, which brought her quite a bit of villain cred. Because of these and the attention-grabbing nature of their crimes, Nightmare and Cupid received plenty of media attention, and were still well in the midst of their fifteen minutes of fame when Nightmare was abruptly kidnapped and turned over to the EAPD.

"Well, Destiny," I imagine you're thinking at this point, "If Nightmare was so damn infamous at that point in time, her trial should have been a pretty big deal, right? How come I've never heard anything about it?"

And that's a REALLY REALLY GOOD QUESTION, hypothetical strawman reader upon whomst I am projecting the next point of this lengthy and indecipherable diatribe.

The answer is that by all means, this should have been a huge deal. At a time before Smilin' Milo or Chiron reached much public recognition, where the only other serial killer with that level of public caché was Goodknight, this should have been the trial of the god damn CENTURY. Instead?

Nothing.

No hearings. No trial. No plea bargains, no lawyers, no records, no nothing. Just like Atlas, Junesong, and Eraser before her, Nightmare seemed to essentially evaporate into thin air. But why? How does a well-known serial killer just disappear out of jail without a bat of an eye? Well, there are a few theories.

The first, and in my opinion least plausible, theory is that Nightmare is just dead. The theory goes that Vantage took her out in prison before any momentum could build surrounding her trial, for some unknown reason. But I really don't find this one very compelling. First off, there's absolutely no evidence to suggest its' veracity. I know that's a common thread when it comes to your friendly neighborhood megacorp's misdeeds, but this one is especially shaky. What reason would Vantage have for this not to go to trial? Putting Nightmare on display and basking in the glory for putting an end to her terror ought to have been a FANTASTIC photo op. And, as far as Vantage is concerned, losing someone with her powers would have been an enormous waste of resources. Why? Stay tuned, listeners.

The second theory holds that Nightmare, like many criminals before her, was recruited out of her jail cell for Vantage's worst-kept secret; their covert assassination division. It's not as though this hasn't happened before (check my video on the subject for more info,) but Nightmare's circumstances cast some doubt on this theory as well. Readers. I've, like, READ Nightmare's blog. Evidence makes it clear that she was something of an egomaniac. She moved in on Greenback territory because other people having power threatened her. She displayed her crimes publicly because she needed the acknowledgement, often to the detriment of her crime career. It may be just me, but I don't think that's the kind of personality that particularly lends itself to a line of work where one's every move would be controlled by someone else.

And then there's the fact that, since her arrest, Nightmare has clearly not been in touch with her girlfriend, who has been publicly grieving for over a year. One would think that, were Nightmare able to act freely, she would have at least contacted the only person who seemed to matter to her. (NOTE: I attempted to reach Cupid for comment on this article. I was, uh. Not successful. So the possibility remains that something happened behind the scenes.)

Which brings us to the third and most compelling theory. This theory holds that Nightmare IS in Vantage's custody, but not their employ. Remember how, before, I mentioned that she had some incredibly interesting powers? I'm sure Vantage does. I know this theory is probably going to be the most wildly out there for folks who aren't chin-deep in esoteric real-world conspiracy theorist refuse the way I am, but hang on for me here.

There's another theory, a theory that's been around almost as long as Vantage's hold on the city itself. A theory that beyond all the shady Vantage-sponsored legislation, beyond their trapping an ENTIRE CITY in a snowglobe, beyond their sinister anti-hero agenda or even their poorly disguised assassination department, there lie even deeper and more vile atrocities. This theory is that Vantage is running sinister human experimentation somewhere on their premises, largely on supers. Parker has covered some of the evidence for this concept in his post on the El Asilo Monorail Project, and I have a broader video upcoming, but the evidence is there when you know where to look. From employee social media accounts sneaking secrets out into limited follower groups to anecdotes from those claiming to be escapees, there's a lot to sift through, and I'm promising here to go though it later in a way that y'all can actually digest.

But for now...it does sort of explain the circumstances, doesn't it? Frankly, it's the only explanation for the disappearance anyone has posited so far that lines both Nightmare's motivations and Vantage's up with the facts.

As it is, right now the Nightmare Defense is one of the most common arguments for the idea that Vantage is, at least in part, behind a portion of the missing people in El Asilo. After all, if not that, then where the FUCK is Christina Karim?

Anyway, that's all they wrote. If you found this useful or entertaining, you'll probably like Parker's stuff, so please follow The Vortex. And if you want to support what I do, try following me and giving me money so I don't starve and can afford to keep making videos of my inane ranting layered over visuals designed to entrap your attention and distract from the fact that I'm going on for fifteen full minutes about something you don't and will not ever believe because Vantage's agenda is so deeply ingrained in the collective subconscious that it actively discourages resistance and most of you don't even know it's happening.

[PATREON LINK] [KO-FI LINK] [YOUTUBE CHANNEL LINK]

HOW TO INVESTORS

If we have to have a plan. As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. I paid attention to comment threads there, but that it makes you more rigid, because the advice I've given is essentially how to play hardball back. Would they be that unhappy if you were Steve Jobs instead?1 But much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store does not give me the drive to develop applications now is to launch fast and iterate. This stops with VC-scale money.2 You may need to refer to it at some point. And yet both have the same problem. When you raise money at the highest valuation. Typically these rights include vetoes over major strategic decisions, protection against being diluted in future rounds.3

I once wrote that startup founders should be at least 23, and that the hope of getting rich is enough motivation to keep founders at work. Apple, these apps work just fine on other platforms that have immediate approval processes. The reason is that investors need to get their capital back.4 But they can't physically be with them all the time and then it can take months to find a friend who already does it, and selling, say, every 20th person leaving the polling place who they voted for. It happened to steel in the 1850s, and to have the upper hand over investors, if you could get the right people. Paradoxically, fundraising is this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary.5 Inexperienced investors are the ones most people don't even realize is there.6 It would cost something to run, and it is very hard for a new fund to break into this group. That's the sense in which startups pay better on average. If you're really productive, why not undergrads? A startup now can be just a pair of 22 year old to do? And yet, when I think about it.

If you look at the world in the same position as someone buying technology for one.7 Do they need another meeting with you? It's the sort of pork-barrel project where a town gets money from the most committed investors and work your way out toward the ambivalent ones, whose interest increases as the round fills up. An emergency could push other thoughts out of your head. For example, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. To some VC firms it means $500,000, only to discover that zero of it is in other ways more accurate, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going in one direction if there weren't powerful forces pushing you in another. It's possible you could meet a cofounder through something like a user's group or a conference. The other time not to raise money before you can convince investors, you'll not only waste your time, but also because it's a prestigious and lucrative career. Another way to figure out for yourself what's good. But by that time were brown with dirt.8 They'll learn a lot, they'll let you invest at a pre-money valuation of $1 million, then the people whose job is to build version 1 of their software.9

Notes

Without the prospect of publication, the only cause of economic inequality is not to quit their day job might actually make it. Selina Tobaccowala stopped to think of ourselves as investors, even to inexperienced founders should avoid. But if idea clashes became common enough, it would certainly be less than a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of Explorer.

To talk to feel like a knowledge of human anatomy. The solution for this purpose are still expensive to start startups. Most of the twentieth century. I don't think you need to import is broader, ranging from designers to programmers to electrical engineers.

And so to the size of the organization—specifically increased demand for them.

That's the trouble with fleas, jabbering about some of those sentences.

It also set off an extensive biography, and the war had been bred to look appealing in stores, but the median tag is just like a VC firm or they see of piracy is simply what they built, they tend to make peace.

You can still see fossils of their core values is Don't be evil, they said. There are two non-corrupt country or organization will be lots of options, of course the source files of all tend to notice them. N teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris says that 15-20% of the Times vary so much from day to day indeed, from the end of World War II.

You can retroactively describe any made-up idea as something that conforms with their companies till about a related phenomenon: he found it easier to say, good deals. I should add that none of them had been a good grade you had to for some reason, rather than given by other Lisp features like lexical closures and rest parameters. To use this question as a model. How many times that conversation was repeated.

When Google adopted Don't be fooled by the leading scholars in the sense of the world barely affects me. Apparently the mall was not drinking that kool-aid at the outset which founders will usually take one of the reason this works is that you're being starved, not how much you're raising, have been the first time as an adult.

Vision research may be useful in solving problems too, e. And that is exactly the point of treason. Does anyone really think we're so useless that in 1995, when the audience at an academic talk might appreciate a joke, they can get it, and post-money valuation of the most successful investment, Uber, from the bottom as they do on the one hand and the super-angels.

Remote Learning? No Thanks. – The New York Times

Want to get The Morning by email? Here’s the sign-up.

Good morning. Virus hospitalizations are surging. The Trump administration will send more agents into cities. And desperate parents are thinking about home schooling.

The coronavirus is so widespread in the U.S. that many schools are unlikely to reopen anytime soon. Already, some large school districts — in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix, suburban Washington and elsewhere — have indicated they will start the school year entirely with remote classes. Yet many parents and children are despondent about enduring online-only learning for the foreseeable future.

So it makes sense that the topic of home schooling is suddenly hot.

Parents who never before considered home schooling have begun looking into it — especially in combination with a small number of other families, to share the teaching load and let their children interact with others. Some are trying to hire private tutors. One example is a popular new Facebook group called Pandemic Pods and Microschools, created by Lian Chang, a mother in San Francisco.

Emily Oster, a Brown University economist who writes about parenting, has predicted that clusters of home-schooling families are “going to happen everywhere.”

Of course, many middle-class and poor families cannot afford to hire private tutors, as my colleague Eliza Shapiro pointed out. But there is nonetheless the potential for a home-schooling boom that is more than just a niche trend among the wealthy.

Consider that the population of home-schoolers — before the pandemic — was less affluent than average:

Eliza told me that she thought many families, across income groups, were likely to consider pooling child-care responsibilities in the fall. Children would remain enrolled in their school and would come together to take online classes in the same house (or, more safely, backyard). In some cases, these co-ops might morph into lessons that parents would help lead.

As for high-income families, they may end up having a broader effect if a significant number pull their children out of school and opt for home schooling. “We could see a drain on enrollment — and therefore resources — into public schools,” Eliza said.

As Wesley Yang, a writer for Tablet magazine, asked somewhat apocalyptically, “Did public schools in major cities just deal themselves a deathblow?” And L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, a professor at New York University, recently told the science journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer that any increased privatization of education was likely to “widen the gaps between kids.”

It’s too early to know whether home schooling is more of a real trend or a social-media fad. But the U.S. is facing a dire situation with schools: Remote learning went badly in the spring. The virus continues to spread more rapidly than in any country that has reopened schools. And, as Sarah Darville points out in an article for the upcoming Sunday Review section, the federal government has done little to help schools.

No wonder parents are starting to think about alternatives.

How can school districts respond? Jay Mathews, a Washington Post education writer, has a suggestion: Superintendents should abandon trying to devise a single solution for an entire school system.

“Let principals and teachers decide,” Mathews writes. “They know their students better than anyone except parents, who would just as soon get back to work.” His column includes specific ideas he has heard from teachers.

THREE MORE BIG STORIES

1. The biggest bet yet on a vaccine

The Trump administration announced a nearly $2 billion contract with Pfizer and a smaller German biotech company to produce a potential coronavirus vaccine. The contract is the largest yet from Operation Warp Speed, the White House program to fast-track a vaccine.

The government won’t pay the drugmakers until the vaccine gets F.D.A. approval. “It’s like a restaurant reservation,” explained Noah Weiland, who covers health care for The Times. “You pay for dinner when you eat it, but you’ve got yourself the prime table in the restaurant instead of having to wait in line.” If the vaccine works, individual Americans would receive it for free.

2. Where the virus is under control

No region of the United States suffered a worse virus outbreak this spring than the Northeast — but few places have managed to bring it under such good control in the last couple of months.

“It’s acting like Europe,” Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said. After cases and deaths surged in Europe and the Northeast, both places responded with aggressive lockdowns and big investments in testing and tracing efforts. Residents have also been willing to follow public health advice — wearing masks, staying out of confined spaces and more.

In other virus developments:

3. Trump sends more agents to cities

The Trump administration says it will send hundreds of additional federal agents into cities to confront a rise in violence. The plan calls for sending about 200 more agents to Chicago, 200 to Kansas City, Mo., and 35 to Albuquerque.

In Portland, Ore., early this morning, federal officers fired tear gas near the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, who had joined demonstrators outside the federal courthouse. Coughing and scrambling to put on goggles, Wheeler called the officers’ tactics an “egregious overreaction.”

Media watch: Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and other conservative pundits have seized on the Portland protests as a pro-Trump rallying cry.

Here’s what else is happening

After ordering the Chinese Consulate in Houston to close, the State Department accused Chinese diplomats of spying and attempting to steal scientific research.

China began what it hoped would be its first successful journey to Mars, launching equipment on a voyage that will last until next year.

The House voted overwhelmingly — with 72 Republicans joining the Democrats — to remove statues of Confederate figures and white supremacists. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, is likely to block the measure.

President Trump again sought to showcase his mental fitness by repeatedly reciting what he said was a sample sequence from a cognitive test. “It’s actually not that easy, but for me, it was easy,” he told Fox News.

Employees of Hearst Magazines — the publisher of Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar and Marie Claire — described a toxic work environment, including lewd and sexist remarks by the company’s president, Troy Young.

Lives Lived: “My analyst told me/That I was right out of my head.” The woman who wrote and first sang those memorable lines was Annie Ross. Best known as a member of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, probably the most successful vocal group in the annals of jazz, she was also, later in life, a movie actress and a cabaret mainstay. Annie Ross died at 89.

By 2070, the extremely hot zones that now cover less than 1 percent of the Earth’s land surface — like the Sahara — could cover almost 20 percent. Water sources would vanish. Farms would go barren. And hundreds of millions of people would be forced to choose between flight or death.

“The result,” writes Abrahm Lustgarten in a new story for The Times Magazine, “will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.”

The Times Magazine and ProPublica have modeled what that migration could look like. “Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable,” Lustgarten writes.

The article is part of The Magazine’s climate issue, which also includes pieces on Argentina’s fearsome thunderstorms; the teenage activists leading the climate change movement; and the Louisiana communities that may be lost in a plan to protect the coastline.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT, MUPPETS

Eat some cheese

Cervelle de Canut — which translates to “silk worker’s brain” and describes a simple cheese spread — is a mainstay in Lyon, France, where the author Bill Buford researched French cuisine for his book “Dirt.” You can whip up the spread in about 10 minutes by blending fromage blanc with chopped shallots and fresh herbs. Serve with a baguette (or just eat it with spoon).

And Pete Wells recently spent more than six hours on a Zoom call with Buford to learn the art of poaching a chicken.

Read something thought-provoking

Zadie Smith — the acclaimed author of “White Teeth” — is back with a timely collection of short essays, “Intimations,” that covers the killing of George Floyd, the class divides exposed by the pandemic and more.

“The virus map of the New York boroughs turns redder along precisely the same lines as it would if the relative shade of crimson counted not infection and death but income brackets and middle-school ratings,” she writes in one essay. “Death comes to all — but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.”

Good news for Muppets fans

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Amazon did exactly what it should have with its HQ2 process

I love my colleague Jon Shieber, he’s a great guy. But his arguments against Amazon’s HQ2 process are just wrong, and are part of an increasingly poisonous atmosphere around employment growth and prosperity in America.

Our normally-scheduled analysis of AI and semiconductors will (hopefully) restart tomorrow.

We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author at [email protected] if you like or hate something here.

A tale of three arguments

Shieber’s pointed argument yesterday falls in line with the wider debate about gentrification and the steep inequality of today’s digital economy. “Amazon played everyone involved in the process: the governments that pandered to it and the media that covered it (including us),” he wrote. “Now it looks like the residents of these communities that will have to live with their new corporate neighbor are going to be left to pay for it.”

Shieber sees essentially three problems with Amazon’s HQ2 process and announcement:

Amazon’s wealth drives its corporate power, which forces governments to do its bidding by applying to its reverse RFP process.

The incentive packages lined up by NYC and Northern Virginia are a form of corporate welfare that would be better used for everyday citizens, plus Amazon would have come anyway.

Amazon is not-transparent about its data or process, even while it collected data from hundreds of city governments.

Let’s take a look at that analysis.

Cities win and lose

In the normal world of economic development, cities post potential projects as Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and then wait for applications to come in, read through them, and select a winner. This is the process that New York City went through recently in selecting a group of firms to operate its new cybersecurity initiative. It’s reasonably transparent, and it is theoretically meritocratic, urban machine politics aside.

Increasingly though, companies have learned that cities will come far and wide to fight for jobs. In fact, rather than bidding for projects and having city governments or their economic development agencies select winners, companies can propose projects, have cities bid, and then the CEO can make the call. I call this a “reverse RFP.”

Almost three decades ago, United ran a reverse RFP process for the creation of a $1 billion maintenance facility which ended up being a fight between Oklahoma City and Indianapolis. As The Oklahoman wrote at the time: “United Airlines on Wednesday chose Indianapolis as the site of its $1 billion aircraft maintenance center, making Oklahoma City a loser in the race for what some termed the biggest industrial development project of the decade.” Sound familiar?

Last year, Foxconn extracted up to $4.8 billion in subsidies from Wisconsin as part of a process to build a new display manufacturing plant. And of course, Amazon ran its very public process over the past months.

Shieber wrote:

That Amazon felt comfortable enough to flip the script and instead have cities bid for the largesse of a corporation was galling enough. The fact that cities across America actually did the company’s bidding was proof of just how feckless, toothless, and seemingly powerless government at every level in this country has become.

Here’s the thing: Amazon is its own entity. It can make decisions for itself, in any way it chooses. Typically, corporate offices expand based on the personal decision of the CEO, maybe with some feedback from the board. When Square launched a customer operations office, it chose St. Louis, where its CEO Jack Dorsey is from. Such decisions get made every day with little input from cities.

Instead, Amazon opened that process up. It allowed cities to apply and provide information on why they might be the best location for its new headquarters. Maybe the company ignored all of the applications. Maybe it only ran the process to collect data. Maybe it just wanted the publicity. Maybe all of the above, and more. Regardless, it allowed input into a decision it has complete and exclusive control over.

Are cities “feckless” for applying? Should cities avoid competing tête-à-tête for jobs? Of course not. Cities compete every single day for individuals to move in, for small businesses to start, for federal tax funding. That competition is fundamentally a force for good, since it disciplines cities to make their residents — and future residents — happy. That’s one reason why Americans approve their local governments at 70%, and Congress remains mired in the single digits.

Amazon’s process hopefully woke up a number of slumbering city governments to the reality that their hometowns are not relatively as attractive as other cities.

Jobs and incentives

Photo: Chris Hepburn/Getty Images

Much of the ire over the Amazon announcement yesterday originated from the company’s combined multi-billion dollar incentive packages that it received from NYC and the DC metro. Amazon is already one of the wealthiest companies in the world, so why then does it need further incentives that divert tax dollars from other worthy causes?

As Shieber wrote:

As housing prices climb in Queens for rentals, cooperatives and condominiums, the neighborhood’s existing residents will likely be unable to afford the higher property prices. They’ll be moved out and essentially Amazon will be paying for infrastructure upgrades likely to be enjoyed solely by the company’s employees — again, at the expense of the broader tax base.

The challenge to that line of reasoning, which was common in many of the arguments against the HQ2 process, is failing to look at economic development holistically as a system. Opponents spend too much time focused on the tax receipts from income from new Amazon employees versus incentives, and not nearly enough time on all the spillover effects that will take place in these two regions.

These spillover effects are at the heart of agglomeration economies. With Amazon’s arrival, more software engineers will locate to NYC. They will start companies, join other tech firms, and expand the vitality of the community. As Edward Glaeser argues convincingly in his book The Triumph of the City, density of talent matters enormously for the success of the city. Amazon thickens the market for tech talent, and that is a huge win for both NYC and DC.

For a concrete example, Cornell Tech officially launched last year on NYC’s Roosevelt Island, which is located one subway stop from the proposed Amazon headquarters. What will the opening up of Amazon mean for the future of that new campus and its graduates? Does Cornell Tech have a better shot now at being a leading university in the computer sciences? Will more talent be drawn to Cornell Tech and ultimately into the NYC economy because of this co-location? It’s really hard to know or quantify, but the answer is almost certainly not zero.

Besides the lack of focus on spillovers, there is also this anti-gentrification line though that always grates on me. If Amazon’s plans are realized, it will deliver thousands of six-figure jobs into the city. As Enrico Moretti notes in his own book The New Geography of Jobs, it is exactly these sorts of jobs with high incomes that drive the economic vitality in cities. Killing the economy may be one way to lower housing prices, but it is a pretty foolish one.

Plus, I think there is a massive scale problem in people’s analysis of the incentives. Amazon’s incentive package for New York comes out to $1.5 billion or so. As a cost comparison, the East Side Access rail project, for instance, costs $3.5 billion a mile. New York’s incentive package is about 2,300 feet of rail, or roughly the distance between 2nd Ave and 6th Ave.

Tech jobs are bringing new wealth to cities, and obviously there are huge challenges with housing prices and affordability. But what a luxurious problem to have.

Transparency

The final point is about transparency and political decision-making. Shieber writes:

The question is less about whether Amazon’s decision to site its satellite offices in certain cities will be a boon to those cities. Instead, it’s whether the residents who already live there should be able to have a say in whether or not Amazon can come in and reshape their cities in radical ways.

But the residents in these cities did have a say — they elected mayors and governors to steer their cities and create widespread wealth. Hundreds of those elected leaders thought it prudent to apply for Amazon’s reverse RFP and sell their cities as great places for jobs.

If voters hate economic development incentives, then they can vote for politicians that will dismantle these programs. But the reality — which should be obvious — is that voters like jobs and income and employment. And they want their cities to compete and win the opportunity to bring large corporate offices to their cities, sometimes at a relatively high cost.

I frankly would love to see a more bottoms-up approach from cities around economic development, but there are frankly limits on how much the government can help small businesses. Plus, the math is often terrible — small businesses may create some local wealth, but they don’t create the kind of high-paying jobs that drive economies.

Ultimately, Amazon’s HQ2 process is a microcosm of larger forces, of technology, inequality, and democracy. The arguments against the reverse RFP are often just arguments for much broader structural change. That’s fine, but ultimately counter-productive from the municipal viewpoint. Cities aren’t going to lead the charge around structural reform — that has to happen at the federal level, and possibly even at a global context to be effective. Just ask Seattle about its city headcount tax and why Amazon might be looking at a second headquarters in the first place.

Via Danny Crichton https://techcrunch.com

A creeping fear is coming for Democrats this year: What if, like in 2016, the polls turn out to be wrong in crucial ways that mean they aren’t actually on track for the House Democratic majority they’ve been working toward?

It’s true that Democrats have a lot of factors in their favor — enthusiasm seems to be on their side, President Trump is still a historically unpopular candidate even if his approval rating has been inching upward of late, and midterms usually push back on the party in power.

But even with all that going for them, they still need everything to break their way in the final days before the election.

The polls were already wrong at least once this year.

During the Democratic primary for the Florida gubernatorial race, polls had progressive candidate and eventual winner Andrew Gillum in fourth place, trailing then-frontrunner Gwen Graham by double digits. At the time, experts argued that polls likely missed the surge in younger and African-American voters, groups that both turned out in higher numbers than in previous years to back Gillum.

As poll after poll signals a Democratic edge, many wonder if they can be trusted. After all, they were so spectacularly wrong in 2016, when all the electoral models seemed to predict a President Hillary Clinton.

We now know, of course, that Clinton didn’t win. To find out what went wrong, a panel of experts led by Pew Research Center’s Courtney Kennedy put together an autopsy for the American Association of Public Opinion Research, findings they later detailed in a paper for the Public Opinion Quarterly.

Chief among their findings was that last-minute voters broke for Trump.

Simply due to the timing of when many surveys were conducted, polls missed a massive shift in voter behavior: Data showed that 13 percent of voters in the pivotal swing states of Wisconsin, Florida, and Pennsylvania landed on their presidential pick in the final week. In all three states, those voters broadly backed Trump.

If polls want to capture late-breaking voters, there’s a relatively straightforward logistical solution: They just have to keep conducting surveys in real time, says Kennedy.

“There is little that a pollster can do about this except for conducting a poll as close as possible to Election Day and alerting consumers of their polls that public opinion can change,” she says. “Polls really are just a snapshot in time.”

Doing polling that captures such down-to-the-wire changes in the electorate has become an imperative, says Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who runs Lake Research Partners. “We have pushed for tracking later in the process,” she says. “It’s not just an October surprise anymore; it’s an October 31 surprise.”

Despite such efforts, however, there are no guarantees that polls will ever fully be able to spot spur-of-the-moment choices that voters — especially undecided ones — make on Election Day.

“There’s late movement in campaigns that isn’t even evident in the final polls,” says SurveyMonkey’s head of election polling, Mark Blumenthal, who also helped put together the autopsy report.

The second key problem that skewed 2016 polls was how pollsters treated voters’ education levels. Historically, more educated voters have participated in polls, which means that they’re overrepresented in the results. While this hasn’t mattered as much in the past, higher education was heavily associated with support for Clinton in 2016.

Because of this, a number of polls — which included more educated voters in their samples — overstated Clinton’s actual support.

“Many polls — especially at the state level — did not adjust their weights to correct for the over-representation of college graduates in their surveys, and the result was over-estimation of support for Clinton,” the autopsy report says.

Pollsters have reacted to this issue differently, says Kennedy. Some now argue that it’s vital to adjust for education in their polls. Doing so means that polls would “weight” responses from participants based on their education level to ensure that a poll’s results reflect a broader population and not an exaggerated subset.

The best way to explain weighting: If seven out of 10 people who respond to a poll have a college education, but only five out of 10 people in the larger electorate do, pollsters adjust their data so that the final outcome more closely reflects the actual electorate. By doing so, they can ensure that the result more accurately mirrors how a larger electorate might respond. But often, they are making educated guesses about what groups are over- or underrepresented in their samples.

Kennedy notes that pollsters haven’t been unified in how they’re addressing this concern. “Several pollsters have said that they have started adjusting how they weight their surveys to account for this, others have decided not to adjust for it, and a third group of pollsters have been making the adjustment for years and continue to do so,” she says.

As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn wrote last fall, most private pollsters who work with campaigns had begun adjusting on education in the wake of 2016, while fewer public pollsters had appeared to take this step. A key challenge pollsters have faced in trying to factor in education is that the information is not always readily available about the people taking the surveys, Cohn writes. Files on previous voters, a resource that pollsters often use to figure out whom to reach out to for surveys, might not include this data.

As chronicled in the autopsy report, adjusting for education can make a difference — though there’s still disagreement about exactly how much. For example, 2016 polls in New Hampshire and Michigan both more closely reflected the final outcome of the election after the survey results had been adjusted for education.

New Hampshire and Michigan polls indicate that there is a lower margin of error between their polls and the actual outcome, when they adjust for education. University of New Hampshire Poll; Michigan State University Poll; Public Opinion Quarterly

“I think that this is a kind of a no-brainer change for pollsters,” says Blumenthal.

Even if education is increasingly adjusted in different polls, however, there’s no guarantee another variable won’t emerge that also has the potential effect of skewing survey results.

The best that pollsters can do is to continually monitor the characteristics that might be associated with leaning Democratic or Republican and update their analysis accordingly, Blumenthal notes.

“Are there demographic differences that make you a Democrat or Republican?” he says. “Gender, age, race, and education. Region and geography matter. Income matters. All of those things, if off compared to what the electorate looks like, could introduce the error.”

Differences in turnout between 2016 and 2012 also favored Trump, the third thing that caught many pollsters off guard during the presidential election — something we already saw earlier this year in Gillum’s Florida race.

When pollsters conduct surveys, many try to determine what the group of “likely voters” will look like and present results that reflect their preferences. As the reasoning goes, “likely voters” are the people who are most expected to show up at the ballot box based on past voting behavior and a slate of other characteristics, and polls of this group would more closely illustrate how the electorate will act on Election Day, compared to polls of the broader population at large.

In a perfect setup, the group of “likely voters” that pollsters pinpoint will match up with the actual people who show up at the polls when it comes to demographic attributes like age and gender, as well as voting behavior. However, if they don’t, a poll that highlights the preferences of “likely voters” would miss the impact of others who end up turning out.

That’s exactly what happened in 2016, when many “likely voter” models did not match up with the composition of voters who ultimately showed up.

“Likely voter” models constructed using 2012 turnout data, for example, could have overstated the presence of Clinton supporters while overlooking that of Trump supporters. Voters expected to back Clinton — including African Americans — ended up turning out in much lower numbers than anticipated in 2016 compared to 2012, while those who ended up supporting Trump turned out in higher numbers, the autopsy researchers write.

“The turnout patterns were different in 2016 than 2012. That may have mattered in places where pollsters relied on models that relied on 2012 turnout,” says Blumenthal.

The challenge of accurately projecting what Election Day turnout is actually going to look like is an ongoing one with no simple solution, says Joshua Clinton, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University who helped conduct the autopsy analysis. “Is this the year that young people and women are going to vote in different rates? We don’t know,” he says.

If more women hypothetically turned out this year, for example, a poll might show a different result than if the same proportion of women showed up as in 2016. “Probably the most defensible thing is to make sure you consider different slices and report out what could happen,” says Clinton.

It’s an approach that both Lake and Blumenthal say they’ve been using in practice. And it’s one that has gotten growing support — including in the New York Times’s take on polling — following questions that cropped up after 2016.

“One of the toughest things is to figure out what the turnout is going to be. I personally don’t think there’s one overall solution. The way to do it is to look at multiple models,” says Lake.

While conducting polling for the special election for the Alabama Senate seat last year, Blumenthal notes that they presented a range of possible results based on different turnout forecasts. These models show that depending on who turned out to vote, the outcomes could very much favor Republican Roy Moore or Democrat Doug Jones. “Data collected over the past week, with different models applied, show everything between an 8 percentage point margin favoring Jones and a 9 percentage point margin favoring Moore,” Blumenthal wrote at the time.

There is an “inherent difficulty of projecting an electorate,” he says. “The degree of how much younger voters turn out is an unknown [for example]. I don’t know that; that’s a fixable challenge.”

The important thing is for people who are tracking these polls to be aware of their flaws, experts say. After all, 2016 is far from the only time they’ve missed the mark — and it’s likely they’ll continue to do so.

“I think it’s good to be skeptical. The best consumer of polling data is someone who understands its limitations,” says Blumenthal. “Take whatever the margin of error is and double it,” says Clinton.

One of the big outstanding questions centers on whether polls affect how voters behave, something that Clinton is especially concerned about.

“The danger is that people look at polls and they think that this race is over,” he says. “I would not want people to look at the poll and say, ‘I’m not going to vote because my side is going to win,’ because that’s really bad for democracy.”

Ultimately, both Clinton and Lake say that polling is best used when it isn’t simply a horse-race tracker. They argue that it plays an even more important role in identifying the key issues that people are focused on and offering voters, more broadly, an opportunity to pinpoint what matters to them.

“Lots of emphasis is put on who wins and who loses. The most important question is the road map to victory — what message we should be targeting,” Lake notes.

Original Source -> How pollsters are responding to problems that came up in 2016

via The Conservative Brief

Graham-Cassidy has gained steam because many Republican senators care primarily about pleasing their donors.

Senate Republicans are trying yet again to repeal Obamacare, despite seemingly having all the political and substantive reasons in the world not to.

Like all the other bills, the newest one, sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, is horrendously unpopular, with only 24 percent support. The rushed and slipshod process around the bill means its consequences still aren’t well understood, but it’s clear enough that tens of millions of people would likely lose coverage if it passes, that several states represented by Republican senators would lose billions of dollars in federal funding, and that the bill badly violates President Trump’s campaign promise not to cut Medicaid.

Instead of putting repeal to the side after its failure in the Senate in July, though, Republicans just keep coming back to it, and are pushing toward a Senate vote on Graham-Cassidy this week. They’re doing so in part because they feel obligated to fulfill a longtime campaign promise, and because they fear electoral consequences for being viewed as failures.

But one more crucial motivator explains a whole lot: Republican Party donors want it.

The evidence that the GOP is trying to please donors here is adding up. An anonymous Republican senator told Politico that McConnell might be returning to health care to show donors “that the Senate GOP tried again.” Senate Republicans were warned at a private meeting that fundraising was slow because donors were disappointed at their lack of accomplishments, per the New York Times. And in recent months, senators “faced an unrelenting barrage of confrontations with some of their closest supporters, donors and friends” over Obamacare repeal’s failure, according to the Washington Post.

This pressure seems to be able to move votes. One moderate senator, Dean Heller (R-NV), conspicuously switched from being a public critic of repeal efforts to a strong supporter of Graham-Cassidy. That came after he reportedly got an earful from Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, two billionaire GOP donors in his state.

Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, told Vox recently that donor concerns seem to be dictating the GOP’s legislative strategy. “There’s not an actual human constituency for any aspect of the Republican Congressional agenda,” Schmidt says. “Instead it’s an inside game that is judged, win or lose, on the basis of which entrenched permanent interests gain advantage or disadvantage, and how that affects the endless fundraising process.”

“You’re voting to reorganize one-sixth of the economy without any sense of how much it costs, or who it’s gonna affect, and with 13 percent approval of it at a national level,” Schmidt continues. “The drivers of it are something other than the voters.”

And if you assume the goal of passing repeal is primarily to please donors and goose fundraising, a whole lot about congressional Republicans’ bizarre approach to repeal — particularly, their disinterest in policy details or in how restructuring the health system will impact their constituents — makes a lot more sense.

What, exactly, do these donors want?

One interesting feature about this donor pressure Republicans are facing is that it does not appear to be coming from insurance companies or other health care industry stakeholders hoping to profit greatly from changes to the Affordable Care Act. (Health industry lobbyists in fact have been caught by surprise by the Graham-Cassidy boomlet.)

Instead, it appears to be a sentiment broadly shared among much of the GOP donor class. Paul Kane, who wrote a Washington Post report on pressure Republican senators faced after their initial failure on repeal, tweets that he’s heard “local Chamber types” or “longtime supporters” who’ve donated to them for years were particularly influential.

But super-wealthy donors are making their voices heard too. Doug Deason of Texas, who is part of the Koch brothers’ donor network, said earlier this year that his “piggy bank” would be closed until congressional Republicans “get some things done,” according to the Associated Press.

In trying to understand why these donors want Obamacare repeal so badly, I think it’s helpful to think of two somewhat overlapping sets of motivations.

The first is, essentially, a desire for their political “team” to win. These donors have been funding GOP candidates for years, and those candidates have been campaigning on repealing Obamacare. And while they may not care all that much about health policy, they care about broader matters like whether the Republican Party can get things done, or whether they feel their team is fighting for its principles.

Ken Vogel, who’s covered megadonors for years at Politico and now the New York Times, has said that he thinks a lot of them “treat this almost like a hobby” or game that they’re trying to win. “These folks have all this money, and they’re doing something they believe in. If they win, great; if they don’t win, they had fun doing it.”

In this case, the donors spent on the 2016 election, won, and now feel they’re owed a prize. If they don’t get a prize, then, well, they might not be so eager to open their wallets again. However, they don’t have particularly strong views or interests in the details of Obamacare repeal or how it should be replaced — so it makes sense that many Republican senators channeling their views would be similarly indifferent to what their bill actually does.

The ideological motivation: Obamacare repeal is the best chance to slash government spending

But a second set of donor motivations — that do help explain one major feature of nearly all the repeal bills we’ve seen — are ideological.

Across nearly every major version of Obamacare repeal that the House and Senate considered this year, there’s been one constant: hundreds of millions of dollars on cuts to government spending on health insurance. (Even the massive tax cuts for the wealthy in earlier versions of the bill were eventually scaled back to protect these spending cuts.)

The persistence of these cuts has been odd. If the GOP’s goal was simply to pass something, scaling back the cuts could have helped improve coverage numbers and win over wavering moderates. Furthermore, the bills’ deep cuts to traditional Medicaid go beyond merely rolling back Obamacare, as well as violating President Trump’s campaign promises not to cut that program.

These cuts make a whole lot more sense, though, when you view them as part of a long-term ideological project.

In addition to more traditional business and corporate donors, the GOP gets a great deal of its financial backing from megadonors with ideological motivations, like Charles and David Koch. These donors just don’t want to feel good by winning — they want to dramatically shrink the size of the federal government. And the way that’s done is by cutting spending.

In recent years, they’ve had little success. President George W. Bush found it to his political benefit to hike spending, and Donald Trump promised to protect entitlement programs. While an appealing slogan in the abstract, cutting spending usually proves to be difficult and unpopular in practice.

But Obamacare repeal is different, politically. It’s tied to the despised (on the right) figure of Barack Obama, it can be sold as a fix for the health system’s woes more generally, and the entire Republican Party (including the president) have campaigned on it for years. And it can be done through the budget reconciliation process.

As such, it’s clearly the Republican majority’s best chance for enacting deep spending cuts — and a fantastic Trojan horse if that is the true goal of some of their donors.

Dean Heller looked like he’d stop repeal in his tracks. Then he changed his mind.

Now, as Republicans are facing a tough fight to hold onto Congress in 2018, they’re reportedly finding that fundraising is more difficult than they’d expected.

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO), who runs the Senate GOP’s fundraising arm, warned his colleagues at a lunch two weeks ago that their legislative failures, including on Obamacare repeal, were badly hurting fundraising. That’s according to a fascinating report by the New York Times’ Carl Hulse, who writes:

[Gardner] warned that donors of all stripes were refusing to contribute another penny until the struggling majority produced some concrete results.

“Donors are furious,” one person knowledgeable about the private meeting quoted Mr. Gardner as saying. “We haven’t kept our promise.”

Donor influence has been the most obvious in the case of Sen. Dean Heller.

Heller is facing a tough reelection fight in 2018. Hillary Clinton won his state, which also happens to have benefited greatly from Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Naturally, then, Heller was hesitant to support an Obamacare repeal bill that would gut Medicaid. So in June, he publicly announced his opposition to one version of the Senate health bill alongside Nevada’s popular moderate Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval.

What happened right afterward, according to a report by the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin and Kenneth Vogel, was that two Nevada billionaires and leading GOP donors let him know that they were very unhappy with him:

Mr. Adelson and Mr. Wynn, two of Las Vegas’s leading gambling titans, each contacted Mr. Heller at the request of the White House last week to complain about his opposition to the Republican-written health overhaul, according to multiple Republican officials.

One ally of Mr. Heller’s acknowledged that Mr. Adelson and Mr. Wynn were unhappy with the senator at the moment and that their relationship needed some repair work.

Soon after this, Heller’s approach to the issue changed dramatically. He stopped sticking his neck out with public opposition. And though he did vote no on two versions of the Senate’s bill in July, he was willing to vote yes when it really counted, on the “skinny repeal” bill. Then, to rebuild his conservative cred further, he added his name to the Graham-Cassidy repeal proposal.

Now, with Graham-Cassidy becoming essentially the Senate GOP’s main repeal plan, Heller doesn’t even seem to be considering a no vote — even though, like the version of the bill he opposed back in June, this bill would make deep cuts to Medicaid and is opposed by Gov. Sandoval.

Heller likely didn’t change his mind only because of annoyed billionaires. After all, in August, Nevada business executive Danny Tarkanian announced he would challenge Heller in the Republican primary, presenting a threat to his right. Since President Trump is still quite popular among GOP primary voters, defying him may have seemed increasingly dangerous after that.

But as Heller runs for reelection in what’s expected to be a hugely expensive race, it would certainly be nice if he had the backing of a pair of deep-pocketed billionaires who can donate unlimited amounts to outside groups who will run ads supporting his candidacy, both in the primary and the general. And his political logic seems to be shared by most of the Senate GOP.

via Vox - All

The "logic" behind Harry's vision of Utopia Note in the below when I refer to things like the superiority of White Men or Whiteness, this does not reflect my personal view of nor is the below an indictment of ALL White Men or even most White Men or of White Men married to or dating Women of Color, but only of the kind of White Men who love to bash White Women at White Women Suck. This is merely my attempt to expose what I believe to be the truly warped, twisted and frightening mindset of the WWS crowd - or at least its most faithful fans. Mind you, the offensive notions expressed below are what I believe to be those cherished and held by the type of people who adore Harry's blog and are not my own. I do not think that privilege, class, moral / intellectual / physical superiority is the property of only one race or one gender of one race. However, the views expressed at White Women Suck lead me to believe that many posting and commenting there do think this way In the eyes of the men and women at Harry's blog, Utopia would be where White Women are recognized as the ugly monsters they truly are and treated as such, and Black Men are ignored by the media and stopped from achieving any further success since they have achieved "more than enough" already, and other Men of Color continue to be adequately underrepresented so as to ensure dominant status for White Men for all Eternity. This, they believe, is what the natural state of affairs should be based on the worthiness and unworthiness of different groups. The only thing preventing this from happening are Evil White Women who are using their power that they did not earn but only possess thanks to their association with White Men. These men and women believe that, by breaking the association between White Men and White Women, White Women will cease to enjoy a privileged place in society, but White Men will continue to with women of color by their sides. BLACK women, White men. Its impossible not to notice, for they seem to be everywhere. On the pages of glossy magazines. Smiling happily on television shows about the lifestyles of celebrities. Enduring trials and tribulations on the daily soap operas

The above is an abstract of an EBONY magazine article. Wait a minute... I thought one of the beefs of the WWS fans is that the media totally underplays these relationships, but then Ebony a Black Women's Magazine says they are all over the place in the media... hmmm.... so what is all their beefing about if this is true? And why, if Halle is enjoying her white boy toy, can't they just leave poor old Tiger and Seal alone?

This goes back to the underlying racist and sexist notions they adhere to. I am sure those people at White Women Suck would be more comfortable back in the days before women could vote and were so presumptuous to think and act for themselves. I am sure that they find Thomas Jefferson's dalliance with Sally Hemming romantic. I find it funny that they spend hours whining about how White Man / Black Woman relationships are downplayed in the media, but every time the media tells the story of Sally they "glorify" it as if it was some great epic romance. Hell! For centuries, society has been more approving of White Male / Non White Female relationships than the other way around. Pocahontas? In spite of the fact that I find it to be a kind of depressing story, it is glorified until this day. Brave Native American Princess rescues Noble White Man from death at the hand of Savage colored men. Later the princess is "rescued" from her life among the savages by a Noble White Man blah blah blah.

I am not saying the story isn't true, in that I know Pocahantas John Smith and John Rolfe did exist, just that I suspect the light we choose to view it in has always been more rosy than realistic. I can't think, off the top of my head, of any similar "love" stories between Men of Color and White Women that have been passed down through the ages for all of us to treasure. Sure, more than few White Women ended up married off to Native Americans, Arabs, etc. through history, but their tales are always portrayed as tragic and the men as their captors and masters. The not so subtle message being that white women who end up in such relationships / circumstances are unfortunate (to say the least.) The only very famous story with a White Woman and a Non White Man (if one wants to call a Moor not white ) was the Shakespeare play Othello, which surprise surprise, has the White Woman ending up murdered by her jealous non European husband. Sure Harry and his crowd will claim that White Women have been the ones playing the victim of their own accord, but they are not the ones who wrote, passed down and immortalized stories such as Othello. In our White Washed versions of history and classical literature, White Men are the only ones who are portrayed as being chivalrous and treating women "right." For example, Around the World in 80 Days where the Indian Woman is rescued from the Satee. The Satee was by all means a horrible tradition, and the British did a good thing by trying to end it, but still.... any stories that show a mixed race relationship in any kind of positive light involved a White Man and a Non White Woman, not the other way around. I would like to add that I might be wrong, but from what I recall, the British move to end such practices in the British Empire was during the reign of QUEEN Victoria - a White Woman. Also, it would be a good place to point out that compared to Arab Slave masters, White Men were the ones who kept and sold their own children by slave women in Slavery. Slave women of Arabs who gave birth to their masters' children were given wife status and the children recognized as lawful children regardless of their color and yet White Men still go down in History as the greatest of all Gentlemen. Now "Harry" would like to claim that, on the one hand, White Women are controlling the messages out there, so they are to be blamed for the admiration of white beauty over all others, but on the other hand "he" would like to actually believe that white men are the gallant Prince Charmings that the classical take on the history of western civilization presents them to be. But how can both be true? Why would White Women, if they are the evil media controlling monsters that "he" makes them out to be, make White Men out to be the heroes of all the stories and make themselves mostly non existent? Really, it is amazing how little women have done over time. If one takes historical accounts for the sum total of all truth, women -with the exception of a few - have pretty much sat around on their butts for centuries doing nothing. The word History what does it mean? It means "HIS story" the story of human existence through the eyes of whatever men were / are holding power. The type of men glorying in the bashing and blaming of White Women over on White Women Suck are the ones who resent the fact that White Women (as well as broader society in general) no longer seem thankful to White Men. That they have had the nerve to assume that they are the social equals of White Men, that they own their status, and that it is not dependent on whatever man they are associated with. That, as members of the racial majority, they claim the same rights and privileges as White Men, including their choice of partners for marriage or just plain sex. Traditionally men have been the holders and assigners of status. This means that, while a man can elevate the social status of a woman he chooses to marry, it is significantly harder for a woman to elevate the social status for men they marry. This is the system sexist white males (or of any race) have been comfortable with for centuries. They "honor" a woman with their attentions. Their attentions validate and confirm her place in society. If you need evidence that this is true look at the traditional laws of succession and inheritance amongst European Nobility -as well as among most other cultures. Princess Anne married a commoner and thus her children are without title, while her brother's (Prince Andrew) children by a commoner are Princesses. For lesser female nobility, they lose their titles altogether if they marry "beneath themselves".

In the eyes of such men, privilege is the birth right of White Men. It is up to them if they want to share it or not or bestow it or not. They alone are born with this right. White Women, in their opinion, should only enjoy privilege by proper subservient association with White Men. White Women are born with an association to a White Man - their fathers. Until they marry, they enjoy privilege by right of this association. Once they get married their primary association is with their husband, and therefore, their status at birth falls in line (or should in the eyes of such men) with that of their husband. They are not supposed to be able to elevate their husband's social status. This is why they find couples like Tiger and his wife or Seal and Heidi - particularly Seal and Heidi - especially threatening. Because these men have already achieved fame and great wealth - the only thing missing (to a racist) is "whiteness" thus by marrying a White Moman they are seen as trying to move into the realm of whiteness and elevate their status and this is something that racist White Men have fought vigilantly against for centuries. A Black Man / White Woman power couple like Seal and Heidi is perhaps the most scary of all for them. A Woman with wealth, clout and beauty, who could get any White Man she wants, has chosen a very Black Man with wealth and star status. That must just give the men over at WWS nightmares.

5 Things To Know About The Health Issue That Could Shut Down The Government

No need for the flu shot use The Hydrogen Peroxide Ear Treatment

This article originally appeared on Kaiser Health News. 

Congress must pass a bill this week to keep most of the government running beyond Friday, when a government spending bill runs out. It won’t be easy.

The debate over a new spending bill focuses on an esoteric issue affecting the Affordable Care Act.

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The question is whether Congress will pass — and President Donald Trump will sign — a bill that also funds subsidies for lower-income people who purchase health insurance under the law. These “cost-sharing reductions” (CSR) have become a major bargaining point in the negotiations between Republicans and Democrats, because the spending bill will require at least some Democratic votes to pass.

Here are five things to know about these cost-sharing subsidies: 

How are these subsidies different from the help people get to purchase insurance?

There are two types of financial aid for people who buy insurance from an ACA exchange. People with incomes up to four times the poverty line, or $81,680 for a family of three, are eligible for tax credits to help pay their premiums.

RELATED: Millions of Women Don’t Have Access to Fertility Treatments in the U.S.

In addition to that help, people with incomes up to two-and-a-half times the poverty line, or $51,050 for a family of three, get additional subsidies to help pay their out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and copayments for care, as long as they purchase a silver-level plan. Insurance companies are required in their contracts with the government to provide these cost-sharing reductions to eligible people, then get reimbursed by the government.

Why are cost-sharing reductions suddenly front and center?

The fight dates to 2014, when Republicans in the House of Representatives filed suitagainst the Obama administration, charging that Congress had not specifically appropriated money for the cost-sharing subsidies and therefore the administration was providing the funding illegally.

A year ago, a federal district court judge ruled that the House was correct and ordered the payments stopped. However, she put that ruling on hold while the Obama administration appealed. That’s where things stood when Trump was inaugurated.

If the Trump administration drops the appeal, the funding would cease. However, Congress could also opt to approve funding the payments, which is what Democrats are pushing in the spending bill. 

RELATED: The Scary Reason Healthy People Die After an ER Visit

What would happen if these subsidies are stopped?

At the very least, ending the cost-sharing reductions in the middle of the year would cause a serious disruption in the insurance market. The payments are estimated at $7 billion this year, and $10 billion in 2018. They cover about 7 million people, about 58 percent of those purchasing coverage on the exchanges.

Many experts have predicted that if the subsidies end, some or all insurers might leave their markets entirely, leaving consumers with fewer, or possibly no, choices.

But even if they stay, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that insurers would have to raise premiums on the marketplace silver plans by an average of 19 percent in order to offset that loss of government reimbursement. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Ironically, ending the subsidies would actually cost the federal government more money. Premium increases to make up for the lost payments would in turn trigger bigger tax credits for the broader population eligible for help paying their premiums. Those larger tax credits would cost the federal government an estimated $2.3 billion above what it would save on the cost reduction subsidies next year, KFF projected.

RELATED: Repealing Obamacare Would Take Insurance Away From 32 Million Americans and Double Premiums

Who is pushing Congress to fund the subsidies?

In addition to Democrats in Congress who support the ACA, influential health-related groups are urging lawmakers to fund the cost-sharing reductions.

The coalition, which includes America’s Health Insurance Plans, the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, points out that the uncertainty surrounding the future of the promised payments could not only disrupt this year’s insurance market, but next year’s as well.

“The window is quickly closing to properly price individual insurance products for 2018,” the groups wrote to Congress on April 12. Most insurers must decide whether they will participate in the health law’s market in 2018 by late June.

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Most Americans don’t support cutting the subsidies as part of a GOP strategy to force Democrats in Congress to help pass a new health law. A new poll reported 60 percent of those surveyed said the president “should not use negotiating tactics that could disrupt insurance markets and cause people to lose health coverage.” On the other hand, two-thirds of Republicans surveyed said Trump “should use whatever negotiating tactics necessary to win support for a replacement plan.”

What does the Trump administration think about this?

Good question. Trump and senior health officials have offered conflicting positions.

On April 10, unnamed officials told the New York Times and other outlets that the administration “is willing to continue paying subsidies” while the lawsuit remains pending, just as the Obama administration did. The next day, however, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services disavowed that statement, saying that “the administration is currently deciding its position on this matter.”

RELATED: The Surprising Thing That Builds Trust Among Neighbors

The day after that, Trump himself said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he was holding back a decision on the payments as leverage. “I don’t want people to get hurt,” he said. “What I think should happen — and will happen — is the Democrats will start calling me and negotiating.”

By the following week, administration officials were dangling the funding for the cost-sharing reductions in the spending bill as a trade for Trump’s request for funding for a border wall. “We don’t like those [subsidies] very much, but we have offered to open the discussions to give the Democrats something they want in order to get something we want,” budget director Mick Mulvaney said on Fox News Sunday. “We’d offer them $1 of CSR payments for $1 of wall payments.”

Democrats, however, are not buying what the administration is selling. “The White House gambit to hold hostage health care for millions of Americans, in order to force American taxpayers to foot the bill for a wall that the president said would be paid for by Mexico is a complete non-starter,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a written statement.

Complicating matters further, it is far from clear that Republicans in Congress want to end the cost-sharing payments.

The subsidies are “a commitment made by the government to the insurers and the people,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said at a town hall meeting in his district, according to The Washington Post. “That needs to happen.”

 Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom whose stories appear in news outlets nationwide, is an editorially independent part of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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5 Things To Know About The Health Issue That Could Shut Down The Government was originally posted by Health Nutrition And Strange Science News