But here’s the daunting question. How would Terry feel if John died?

He'd die too.

Maybe not right away and maybe not in the literal sense, but yes.

And not to be super melodramatic, or anything, regardless if it is an immediate, literal death, or a drawn out one, submerged in alcohol, drugs, an overall mental aimlessness and unraveling, the deliberate destruction of the self and a shattering of the psyche, the outcome would've been very much the same; John would've represented the last person Terry actually loves in his own messed up away or feels innate attachment to for almost as long as he himself was alive --- imagine the gravitas of that alone. John Kreese would've been the last person connecting him to who he was. Who he is. Who he lost. Who he found. Who he was forced to become. To all the memories. All the trauma. All he wanted to bury. All he subsequently became. All his various transformations. All the intricacies, complications, the camaraderie, the bitterness, the sweetness, the toxicity, the scheming, the history, the pain, the tragedy, the codependency, the loyalty, the madness, the fuck ups, the everything. Anyone who doesn't think Terry and John are intricately linked and tied together in the messiest of ways like no other set of characters in the Miyagiverse even when falling out is just downright, well...wrong? John would've been the last person who understood him whole, along with the good, the bad and the ugly, ranging from what we presume are Terry's late teen years, to his mature years. That's over fifty years of context and connection.

Who would even come close to that?

And yes, I think if John died, Terry would've taken it immensely badly, the same way he took Ponytail's death badly too, especially in the context of him being an old man, now, in the present, with no other relations that are quite so close to him, even if it is someone he put in jail. He recalls all the times John pretended to have died and Terry played along with it joyfully and now, it actually happened and it is the most harrowing, perturbing blow to him. John dared to die? Did he allow John to die? He figures, at least in the thirty something years John was...away...Terry could sit there in the belief this was the best thing that ever happened to him, all while knowing John was still alive. Doing his own thing. Not wishing to be in touch --- but, at least still alive, yes. But, now, John's no more and there's a sense of terrible finality and the lack of absolute control over the act of death itself. Can imagine Terry becoming a reclusive tycoon type, antisocial and deeply unpleasant to deal with, loathing the authority someone's demise still has over him and that is capable of halting him in his track and driving him to be this volatile, but also sending him into a frenzy of grief. That, or he's the creepy old man down Malibu beach you don't want to encounter out on the pier dusk, accompanied by his Whisky bottle. Maybe he haunts his old Beverly Hills mansion. Regardless, there's promises to keep, even now, and one of those promises if 'For whatever you need, all your life.'

Terry almost wants to be angry at John, even from beyond the grave, that even in death, Terry feels he owes him, because he wants that feeling of fucking guilt to go away so he can be free of his influence, but at the same time, Terry feels no less happy now that he's literally liberated of John Kreese in the literal sense, because that's the best friend Terry's ever had, and if Terry himself doesn't die as a closure of a literal era, or simply disappears to somewhere, then what dies is his sense of personhood.

dave strider dating headcanons

1k words, spoiler free

warnings: some swearing, mentions of brief fears (spiders, heights, loud noises), some swearing

pairing: dave strider x gn reader, optional brief skirt wearing

a/n: I am still in act 4 of homestuck so pls !! no spoilers !! take my interpretation of the characters with a grain of salt !! 

also  why is there no homestuck x reader fics?????? Am I looking in the wrong place????? Why are there barely 80 dave x reader fics on ao3 and almost none on tumblr??????? Did homestuck’s popularity just miss the x reader fic train???????? if so I fully intend to fix that (this is the first two or so pages of my dave dating hcs doc, I’m on page five and show no signs of stopping)

also since I’m still in act 4 right now I’m only writing for Dave, probably Jade, John, and Rose (maybe some of the trolls but it’ll be on a case by case basis until I feel like I know them well enough to write for them)

aged up to 18+ for moderate sex jokes lol

=>

Someone told me once that they think Dave is the only character they know of who can match my feral chaotic energy

And honestly I have to agree

Dave is a very strategically feral, chaotic person

You know that thing where 

Wait I’ll see if I can link it here

I can’t find the post but 

I forget what it said verbatim

But basically that if you want to take the piss out of someone who has an Intellectual Superiority Complex you just need to act brazenly confident and sure about something you know is incorrect and as long as you don’t let on that you’re joking they’ll argue with you endlessly and it’s fucking hysterical

Dave does that

All the time

He will deadass argue with the Smart Kid in his class that the moon is fake for hours

He’ll argue endlessly that Terry Crews, Kevin Hart, and Kevin James are the same person shifting forms with randos online

He does that thing where he one ups conspiracies with more outlandish conspiracies

“The moon landing is fake”

“Uh, bro, you still believe in the moon?”

You got a truly delightful video once of him arguing with a smart kid in class about one of those ridiculous topics

Like glinda being a princess

He leans forward, tilts his glasses, and says in the most confident self assured voice

“Okay- riddle me this, bro,” 

He points to the guy

“If pee isn’t stored in the balls, where do you hold it? In your hands?”

The entire class erupts into screaming laughs

The teacher enters to the guy getting up in Dave’s face screaming about sperm and piss

Both of them got a detention

If you can match his irony and sense of humor beat for beat

His brain goes into in love overdrive

You basically never “break character” and it’s fucking immaculate

He didn’t know you could vibe so well with someone

Every bad joke you make

Every meme reference

Every act of idiocy for the sake of the joke

He falls harder

It’s kind of scary for him at first

Having these raw genuine feelings so close to him

He covers with humor as usual

But part of him is freaking out a little

It’s sort of like finding a possum in your house

And then you realize there’s more possums hidden around

Then you run into the bathroom, look in your closet, check the pantry

There are possums everywhere

They don’t seem mean

They’re actually kind of cute

But what the fuck

Aren’t possums usually supposed to stay outside?????

So yeah when he falls he falls hard

I might do Dave crushing on you hcs too

One of his favorite ways to spend time with you is just chilling together doing separate activities and periodically updating each other

He’ll be working on some sick beats 

You’ll be sitting on his bed doing something you love

Drawing, bullet journaling, blogging, editing videos

Whatever your thing is

It genuinely makes him feel so close to you to just

Be near you

He has this sort of deep quiet admiration for you

For a while he genuinely has no idea how to connect the two aspects of his feelings for you and how he’s used to expressing himself 

He feels like he can’t tell you how much he likes you cause like

That’s not swaggy bro

So a lot of his affection is in little ways

He knows all of your favorite snacks and drinks

Favorite candies and gum 

He will protect you from anything you’re afraid of

Spiders? Gets rid of them so fast you literally didn’t know it was there

Loud noises? Has you listen to his latest mixtape when you’re going through somewhere noisy

If you have any mental health problems or we you bet your ass he will do so much research on how to support a friend with [insert thing]

Picks up on a lot of your cues and mannerisms quickly

Knows exactly when to give you his jacket, when to show you the perfect meme, when to take a study break

When to just pull you into a random dance party

He really likes dancing badly with you

Just failing around and spinning you around

If you like to wear skirts he likes the way your skirt flows when he twirls you

It looks so flowy

Like water or something

His favorite part is after you’ve been dancing for a while

When the song ends or when you get tired

How you’ll both kind of slow down and laugh and catch your breath

You’re still holding his hand

And you’re standing really close to him

He thinks you’ve never looked more beautiful

He never wears his sunglasses when you dance

He claims it’s because he doesn’t want them to fly off

But it’s really bc he doesn’t want anything getting in the way of watching you laugh and smile so much

Oof he’s got it bad for you

Mickey and Ian - communication, sex, and relationship styles, post 11x07

Here’s my take on how Ian and Mickey relate to sexuality and relationship styles, thinking mainly about 11x07, but also looking more broadly at the series and including HoS. If you’re not interested in incorporating 11x07 in your version of canon, ignore this! I enjoyed 11x07 but I understand people have different ways of seeing Ian and Mickey’s relationship. I’m also doing the classic meta thing of taking seriously exaggerated/comic/contradictory elements in the show because that’s how I roll. 

Super long post under cut. 

I’ve been reading Sexuality: A Graphic Guide by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele which is where a lot of the following ideas and terminology come from. I’ve also been looking at Meg-John Barker’s free relationship zine on their website rewritingtherules.com. I highly recommend their work, including the podcast they have with Justin Hancock, The Meg-John and Justin podcast (although MJ has left now and it’s called Culture, Sex, Relationships, but you can check out the backlog!) 

They think about sex and relationship styles using various models including monogamy/polyamory, allosexuality/asexuality, romance/aromance etc. They look at these different facets of sexuality/relationship styles as complicated continua rather than binaries which shift over time. They also write about sexuality on an action/identity spectrum, communication strategies around relationships styles, and the windows into relationships. Here, I’m looking at all of these things thinking about Ian and Mickey’s relationship and as individuals within the relationship. 

The monogamy/polyamory continuum

I’ve seen a bit of debate about how to label Mickey and Ian’s relationship on the monogamy/polyamory spectrum and I think it’s a pretty complex question especially considering those labels mean different things to different people and that relationships shift a lot over time. While labels like these can be useful, they can also be rigid and restrictive in their own ways. 

Some terms that come close-ish to what they say they’ve decided in 11x07 are monoamorous and polysexual, considering they aren’t at all interested in romantic connections outside of each other but are up for sex (in a broad sense) with other people. But these terms don’t account for the agreement that they’re only exploring sex with other people when they’re together. 

As people have pointed out, some of the boundary setting around exactly how they’re involving other people in the relationship is left off-screen, and also they’re not necessarily going to form identities around how they act in one episode. I’ve also seen people suggest reading their relationship style as monagamish and/or that what they do with other people is part of kink/play. I think these make sense in different ways and that in 11x07 Ian and Mickey definitely focus more on what they do (action) rather than who they are (identity) in regards to monogamy/polyamory. 

In 11x01, Ian’s focus is more on identity. He sets up a binary choice between being monagamous or not in their relationship. 11x07 indicates they’ve moved through off-screen discussion into a much more personalised arrangement with more focus on actions allowing for flexibility over time. In 11x07, we see them agree on rules: sex in a broad sense is allowed outside of the primary partnership, love isn’t. They keep negotiations ongoing (e.g. in the bedroom, in the furniture store), and there is an indication that these rules could change over time. 

I’d love to read/explore more about the ways in which this approach has changed over the course of the whole show. At the start of their relationship, definitely prior to s4, they have much more implicit rules about who they can have sex with, and those implicit rules become problematic in s5, when they realise they’re not completely on the same page regarding them. They bring up clashing ideas around the rules when Mickey’s leaving prison in s10 too. In s11, their relationship becomes more intentional, with these rules stated aloud rather than assumed. 

The action/identity continuum in regards to gay sexuality 

On a slight tangent, I think there’s a comparison to be made here to how they relate to sexuality (specifically gender of attraction) and the idea of gay identity, which seems to develop in the other direction. For Mickey especially, for a long time having sex with men was something he did rather than something he was, and that’s gradually somewhat shifted over the course of the show. There’s so much more that can be explored here, for instance, about how the action-based approach is much more acceptable within the hyper-masculine environment he was raised. Terry also approaches it this way when talking about prison sex, for example. According to this very oppressive social script, having sex with men in certain circumstances can be OK but claiming that as part of who you are is absolutely not. 

But I also want to stress, I don’t think either approach to gay sexuality, looking at it through actions or through identity, is inherently better or worse. These different lenses on sexuality also intersect with class and levels of education. As explored in Sexuality: A Graphic Guide, the identity approach is also relatively a very modern way of seeing sexuality (late 20th century). Gender of attraction is also only one facet of sexuality (which includes amount of sex you want, type of sex, sexual roles etc.) but its now often regarded as the only or most important facet of sexuality. The identity-based approach is much more acceptable within the more aspirational/middle class settings they interact with in s10 and s11. In these seasons, Mickey and to a lesser extent Ian aren’t completely willing to accept it wholesale. I like how, for example, even well after “coming out”, Mickey often still approaches sexuality through actions rather than identity, e.g. his response to the woman at the flower shop asking if he’s a homosexual: “He is, I just like having another man’s dick up my ass.”

However, I also think it’s cool/interesting how Ian and Mickey both move towards and embrace various parts of mainstream gay identity in s11 too, and a large part of that involves combatting the sexism, femmephobia, and hypermasculinity with which they were raised, e.g. of course, singing and dancing to Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande in the bathroom.  

You could also look at the different ideas about the origins of their gay sexuality in HoS through this lens. Mickey goes for a psychological/behavioural approach (based in like early 20th century sexological theories); Ian goes for a born-this-way, biological/genetic approach (popularised in the 1980s as part of gay pride movements). 

Mickey’s approach is very old school (definitely a way of thinking that reflects his upbringing), which assumes straight is the norm from which gay deviates, to do with Freudian theory/the idea of homosexuality as pathology. He doesn’t, for example, seek to use the same model (Fiona’s bad relationship history) to explain why Lip is straight. Ian’s approach (”not because I was born this way?”) reflects his investment in the intractability of sexuality related to his strict opposition to conversion therapy models and the idea of being gay as a choice. It also reflects the way he reacts negatively/disbelievingly to Debbie’s more flexible sexuality (in s8?). While obviously it’s fucked up/impossible to force people to change their sexuality and it’s perfectly reasonable for him to define the origins of his own sexuality however he wants, this approach risks excluding more fluid experiences of sexuality. 

Again, Mickey’s approach is more behavioural/action oriented and Ian’s is more identity oriented. They both seem pretty willing to shift their ideas around this though (especially Mickey, who potentially is just regurgitating old stuff he’s heard without thinking). The concluding thought is that Ian is gay because he likes Mickey’s d, lol. 

Individual differences on sex and relationship continua

I really like the detail that Ian doesn't want to have sex and be friends with anyone else aside from Mickey. In 11x07, he doesn't want to make friends with the guys in the locker room although he's down for repeat sexual experiences which suggests he thinks he forms romantic attachment through a combination of both sex and friendship. It seems like it's important to him in his negotiation with Mickey that they don't form romantic attachments outside of their own relationship.

This relates back to the 87% thing in HoS where Ian says he tends to get at least slightly attached to everyone he has sex with and Mickey has 87% of his heart. Mickey doesn’t like the 87% thing at all but I reckon it outlines a really interesting difference between the two characters in regards to relationship styles. It indicates that Ian is comfortable with a slightly less mononormative way of doing nurturance/care than Mickey, while Mickey seems to initiate more of the polysexuality than Ian in 11x07. (Although of course, we don’t see how Ian would react if Mickey were to tell him he’s got 87% of his heart! -- but this is a very difficult to imagine scenario).

Sex is a big part of their relationship for both of them. Both Ian and Mickey seem pretty allosexual (e.g. they feel sexual attraction for other people generally), but Mickey is possibly even more so than Ian. Mickey also maybe falls on the aromantic/grayromantic spectrum (once again, the labels can be really useful but I don’t want to be too prescriptive/rigid). Ian seems to be more alloromantic, with a capacity to experience romantic attraction to a whole bunch of people. For him, sex and romance seem to be more interconnected in all cases although he can definitely separate the two (especially when thinking about transactional sex etc).

But I think it's more complex than that. For instance, Mickey reserves certain sexual acts for just between him and Ian and its clear that they have both intimacy and exploration in their sex life. From the outset, Ian and Mickey’s relationship involves exploration and excitement with sex, and provides a freedom to explore their sexualities in regards to sexual roles and kink. It’s clear that Mickey values the safe space Ian specifically gives him in this regard from very early on in their relationship. There’s a parallel here with the bathroom Gaga/Grande scene where Ian’s instinct isn’t to tease or make fun of Mickey but support him embracing more stereotypical gay behaviours and/or more fluid gender roles to the ones he’s grown up with outside of sex too.

Also it might be useful to complicate the idea of romance itself which is a really difficult idea to pin down and which seems to mean different things for both of them. I love the stress on friendship in 11x07. Friendship and also family connection play such key parts in their relationship with one another and the way in which they are attached, arguably even more so than traditional models romance. Both HoS and the Hopper painting discussion are interesting to think about in regards to the ways Ian and Mickey think about the concept of romance differently and the ways it intersects with or differs from their ideas around friendship/family. I like how Mickey’s willing to see getting a coffee together as romantic in a positive way for instance after Ian explains that it’s about togetherness in hard times. While maybe Mickey sees Ian’s suggestion of having a bath together as awkward/weird because he views it more as trying to live up to a social script of what is “romantic”.

Communication strategies around relationship styles

In s11, Ian and Mickey’s relationship is very entwined, and, in comparison to Tami and Lip, for instance, they disclose a lot to each other. Ian asks that they tell each other everything, and although Mickey is more resistant to that initially, he becomes much more forthcoming with his feelings in s11 (around Terry, around moving to the West Side, around becoming a parent). 

While I appreciate Ian’s role in initiating more communication between the two of them, I felt sorry for Mickey in their initial discussion in 11x01 in re “monogamous or not”. The turning over the paper method is a pretty binary way to open up a discussion about a very charged and complicated thing. 

They do seem to complement each other in this regard though with Ian generally more keen to initiate conversation but also getting more trapped into binaries, narratives of normativity and should-stories. While Mickey totally still projects an image that is informed by local expectations around masculinity and white supremacy, he’s also a rule-breaker in many ways and doesn’t have the same desire to conform to what society perceives to be “normal” (thanks HoS), especially behind closed doors and within his relationship with Ian (“liking what I like don’t make me a bitch”).  @fiona-fififi had a really good point in the tags a while back about how Mickey’s investment in their wedding and its success might have spurred Ian on further to embrace more normative ways of doing relationships. This is super interesting, and also makes me think just about how being married itself prompts Ian to think about taking a more active role in pushing the relationship further up the relationship escalator and in pushing for more communication around these steps in general. 

There’s also something to be said about pressurising each other in 11x07, especially when they jokingly(?) threaten each other with sex with other men if both of them aren’t around. I doubt they were making these suggestions seriously but it definitely doesn’t strike me as the most consensual method of communication. But there’s parallels here with generally using sex as a bargaining chip earlier on in the season. Ian seems to do that after having exhausted his attempts at trying to have conversations around money/monogamy etc, as a tried and tested way of getting Mickey to engage with him. And it definitely reflects using sex with each other and sex/relationships with other people (e.g. s3 Angie/Ned, s10 Byron/Cole) as modes of communication in earlier seasons. It kind of makes sense that they still have these habits in s11 even if they are no longer the primary mode of communication. 

Ian and Mickey relied so much on implicit communication in the early seasons and they have highly developed nonverbal ways of communicating. I don’t want to say that either verbal or nonverbal ways of communicating are inherently better than the other. They seem to understand each other on a deep level, which is really cool, but people have pointed out can make them think they don’t need to verbally communicate when they do, because they assume that they’ll understand one another and be on the same page. It’s super interesting to see them maintain that deep connection and continue to use nonverbal cues while also adopting more explicit and intentional communication styles in s10 and s11. 

The windows of their relationship

The fandom is always bringing up how Ian and Mickey leave the doors open when they bang, lol, and also making fun of how much Ian overshares. I think this is v fair but it also strikes me as pretty healthy that he wants people to see into his and Mickey’s relationship, especially in his discussions with Lip. But Ian’s got plenty of people around him who can see and help when things get tough. 

In s11, it’s great to see Mickey get closer to the Gallagher family and see various members defending him or taking his side in arguments, but he definitely does have less of an on-screen support system than Ian. (I wish that they had developed his and Sandy’s relationship in s11). I think the aftermath of the City Hall incident in s10 really reveals this particular imbalance in their relationship. On one level, Mickey moves in with Byron as a reaction to being hurt and even maybe a strategy of revenge/manipulation, on another, he doesn’t really have anywhere to go aside from the Gallagher house when/if he needs to get away from Ian. Also, the way he retreats back to the Gallagher house when he can’t deal with the Westside is an interesting development of this in s11. 

Ian’s need to share stuff about their relationship is kind of exciting considering his history of being unforthcoming about his relationships (and his history of being in a lot of secret relationships), as well as how difficult he found it to talk about Mickey while Mickey was away. But there is a different problem with ongoing talk around privacy and boundaries here too (Mickey doesn’t want Ian to chat about how he’s not into rimming!). Although to be fair, Mickey also chats about a lot of explicit sex stuff with strangers. 

Although they do ultimately decide against pursuing the pretty inorganic way of making friends in 11x07, Ian’s desire to make gay friends who he can talk to about relationship stuff makes sense in terms of the way he has been pushing for a more intentional relationship with more communication and more explicit discussion and compromise this season (and last season too). It also intersects with an idea of him/both of them going further to embrace gay sexuality as an identity. 

It’s interesting that Mickey’s the one to initiate this decision through ribbing Ian about his relationship with Lip. Why’s Mickey doing that? Is it just to be a little shit or is he also trying (subconsciously?) to activate Ian in some direction? (And also, maybe there’s a parallel there to getting their apartment in the west side, where Mickey’s the one inadvertently introducing Ian to the idea by pushing for them to go play in the pool). 

-----------

There’s a lot here which is just scratching the surface of thinking about Ian and Mickey’s relationship in the context of these different sexuality and relationship continua. For e.g. it would be really interesting to think more about this stuff in terms of shifting sex roles and kink exploration. Of course it’s all up for interpretation and I am sure I am highlighting areas that I’m personally interested in and inadvertently projecting myself/my own preferences and styles into this discussion. Very down for disagreements and discussions if other people are interested and manage to read all of this, lol. 

Riverside County social workers knowingly placed a violent and sexually deviant boy into five foster homes over a six-year period without informing any of the foster parents of his background, enabling him to rape at least five boys, a federal lawsuit alleges.

More than a half-dozen social workers and their supervisors were involved in placing David Stephen Jakubowski into foster homes across the Inland Empire from January 2009 through January 2015. They worked with foster family agencies, but failed to inform the agencies as well as the foster parents that Jakubowski had a proclivity for sexually inappropriate conduct with young boys since the age of 9, according to the suit.

“They had reason to know of his deviant behaviors and propensities, and they just kept moving him around without telling anybody,” said attorney Shawn McMillan, who filed the lawsuit on July 21 in U.S. District Court in Riverside on behalf of two of Jakubowski’s victims.

Twice, law enforcement intervened. And twice, Jakubowski was convicted of child rape, once as a juvenile and once as an adult. And yet he is scheduled to be released from custody within weeks, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

McMillan represents biological brothers raped by Jakubowski in their Hemet home in 2013. He previously represented another victim who was raped in 2015 at another foster home and settled his lawsuit against the county for millions of dollars.

Officials at Riverside County DPSS declined to comment.

“While we cannot comment on the specifics of this case due to client privacy, our social workers are dedicated to best practices and are committed to ensuring that foster parents understand the needs and background surrounding each child,” said Gene Kennedy, a spokesman for the agency. “Protecting children is our top priority. We are saddened whenever a child suffers abuse or neglect.”

Early signs

The alarms on Jakubowski first started sounding in 2007, when, according to the lawsuit, he was caught performing oral sex on another boy at his apartment complex. His mother began keeping him away from other boys and informed his school to do the same. That information was later shared with Riverside County social workers and documented in Jakubowski’s case file with the county, according to the lawsuit.

Jakubowski entered his first foster home in January 2009 and his second in April that year. In November 2010, at the suggestion of a social worker at Valley Oaks Foster Family Agency in Hemet, Riverside County social workers placed Jakubowski into the Hemet home of an unlicensed and uncertified foster mother who was willing to take him in, according to the lawsuit.

Five other children — four boys and one girl — resided at the home, and social workers provided the foster mother with a “Statement of Dangerous Propensities” regarding Jakubowski. But they did not disclose his history of sexually deviant behavior, especially with younger boys, the lawsuit alleges.

According to Riverside County’s policy, social workers are to share with caregivers “information about any known or suspected dangerous behavior of the child.” And not only is it county policy, such disclosure is required under state and federal law.

Beginning in 2011 or 2012, Jakubowski repeatedly sexually assaulted and/or raped his four foster brothers, locking them in the bedroom, placing a mattress against the door so they couldn’t escape, and sexually assaulting them, according to the lawsuit. He punched and kicked them and held them down if they tried to get away, and threatened to stab or assault them if they told anyone, according to the lawsuit.

First criminal case

When one of the victims reported the abuse to his mother in January 2013, the mother reported it to the county, and the Riverside County sheriff’s Hemet station was called to investigate. However, social workers Kristen Preston and Michael Huser didn’t believe the children and thought they concocted the story, according to the lawsuit.

During the criminal investigation, Preston and her supervisor, Carrie Mosiello, remained adamant that the victims could be lying, and went on record saying that in Juvenile Court, according to the lawsuit.

Preston’s and Mosiello’s instincts, however, could not have been more misguided, because Jakubowski admitted his crimes to the investigating sheriff’s sergeant in a March 2013 interview.

“David was remarkably honest with me. He admitted to me that he sexually assaulted and molested his four foster brothers,” McNish said in a declaration filed in connection with the litigation. He said Jakubowski also acknowledged using a mattress to block the bedroom door when he raped his four foster brothers or forced them to orally copulate him, he said.

“David chose to sexually assault his younger foster brothers — as opposed to his foster sister — because it was easier for David to convince his younger foster brothers to do it,” McNish said in his declaration.

The most chilling part of his interview with Jakubowski, McNish said, came toward the end of it.

“When I asked David if he were left alone with another unsuspecting young boy, would he sexually assault that child, he coolly answered, ‘yes,’ ” McNish said in his declaration.

Jakubowski, who was 15 at the time, pleaded guilty in April 2013 to five felony counts of child rape. A judge declared him a ward of the court, and Jacubowski was transferred from Southwest Juvenile Hall in Murrieta to Trinity Youth Services in Apple Valley, a residential youth treatment facility, according to the lawsuit.

Jakubowski spent less than two years in custody for raping four boys, but it was not clear why he was released from custody so soon. And as he told McNish in 2013, it wasn’t long before he would prey on another boy.

A new home, a new victim

In January 2015, Riverside County social workers — working with A Coming of Age Foster Family Agency in Riverside — placed Jakubowski, then 16, into the foster home of Lisa Castro. As before, the county social workers did not inform staff at A Coming of Age nor Castro of Jakubowski’s extensive history of sexually inappropriate behavior with younger boys, or his conviction for child rape at his prior foster home in Hemet, according to the lawsuit.

About eight months later, in September 2015, Jakubowski raped a boy who had been placed in Castro’s home a month prior. That boy was moved to Castro’s home because he had been sexually abused at his former foster home, according to the lawsuit.

Jakubowski subsequently was charged in that case and convicted in adult court of two counts of child rape. He was sentenced in March 2016 to 10 years in prison, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office.

McMillan also represented Jakubowski’s 2015 victim in a separate lawsuit, filed in 2016, which he said the county settled in November 2019 for $2.9 million.

In a written declaration, Castro said social worker Sonya Fowler provided her a Statement of Dangerous Propensities and case plan summary for Jakubowski when he was placed in her home in January 2015, but those documents did not disclose his history of sexually deviant behavior with young boys, nor his prior conviction.

She said it was not until Jakubowski was arrested and booked into juvenile hall that she learned from social worker Tamar Lawson of his prior conviction for child rape.

“I was shocked, extremely upset, and disappointed,” Castro said in her declaration. “This was the first time that anyone had ever revealed the pertinent details regarding David’s conviction and prior sexual assaults involving younger boys. If I had known about David’s prior convictions and history of sexually molesting young boys, I never would have accepted his placement into my home.”

Castro could not be reached for comment.

Jakubowski, listed as a high-risk sex offender on the Megan’s Law database, is serving his sentence at Valley State Prison in Chowchilla. Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said he is scheduled to be released from custody in early September.

Asked why he was being released five years early, Thornton said Jakubowski earned more than a year of credit for time served before he was sentenced, credits while awaiting sentencing, and credits for participating in work and education programs in prison.

How could it happen?

Alandria Saifer, a San Diego-based industrial and organizational psychologist specializing in workplace culture, said such communication breakdowns or lapses in judgment in the child protective services system could be attributed to a combination of factors.

For example, the corporate culture of the system involves a lot of moving parts — supervisors, social workers, caregivers, foster family agencies and heavy caseloads. This often can result in communication breakdowns and children falling through the cracks.

Social workers also often experience a psychological phenomenon called cognitive dissonance, in which they reconcile their actions for the greatest good of the child they are placing with a caregiver, despite potential negative outcomes. It can give an appearance of common sense and caution flying out the window.

“They can rationalize any decision they make because they are protecting the child, even if that means they are putting other children in danger,” Saifer said. “It’s not a conscious, malicious decision. It’s a separation of the information. Their initial plan is to get them intro a foster home, in the system where the child is being taken care of.”

Saifer, however, can’t think of a legitimate reason why social workers would fail to inform foster parents of Jakubowski’s history of sexual deviance, or his prior conviction for raping four boys, especially if that information were in his CPS case file.

“I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t tell the foster parents,” she said. “That throws me.”

Related Articles

Pasadena man arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting 15-year-old Corona girl

-on August 15, 2021 at 12:10AM by Joe Nelson

How The Next Batman Sets Up a New Saga for the Dark Knight

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Despite Bruce Wayne’s enduring 80-year run as the Batman, he isn’t the only character who has donned the cape and cowl. Jean-Paul Valley most famously took over as Batman in 1993’s “Knightfall,” while Dick Grayson succeeded his mentor during Grant Morrison’s time writing the character in the 2000s. Young Terry McGinnis was recruited by a retired Bruce in the Batman Beyond animated series. And Damian Wayne, Tim Drake, and Jim Gordon have also had turns as the Dark Knight.

This month’s Future State: The Next Batman miniseries introduces yet another heir to Bruce Wayne’s legacy: Tim Fox, the other son of longtime Batman ally Lucius Fox and the first Black character to wear the Batsuit, a major milestone for the superhero and DC Comics. Written by Oscar-winning screenwriter John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, The Other History of the DC Universe) and drawn by Nick Derington (Batman Universe), The Next Batman #1 makes Tim the protector of the Gotham City of the near future, a police state terrorized by militarized law enforcement and a Bane-worshiping gang of criminals.

Ever since Tim was revealed as the next Caped Crusader, some fans have wondered whether he is the right character for such a pivotal moment in the character’s history. After all, Tim has only appeared a handful of times since his introduction as Lucius’ rebellious son in the comics in 1979. Since then, he’s rarely been in the spotlight…or mentioned at all. In fact, despite being part of one of the most prominent families in the Batman mythos, it’s likely that many fans will be meeting Tim for the very first time here.

Why not Luke Fox or Duke Thomas, two much more high-profile Black characters who have worked with Batman for years and have each headlined their own solo books and stories? Both seem to be in better positions to succeed Bruce.

“Tim was the first choice,” Ridley tells a group of journalists during a roundtable in December, describing “a year of planning” that took the Next Batman from DC’s scrapped 5G relaunch to the more contained Future State event that bridges the gap between the multiverse-altering events of Dark Nights: Death Metal and a new era for DC called Infinite Frontier, which begins in March. “Whether it was 5G, whether it was Future State, there was a real commitment to have Batman be represented as a person of color.”

While Tim’s relative obscurity and skin color are likely to spark important conversations about the Caped Crusader, Ridley says that the goal of The Next Batman itself isn’t to do something radically different with the Dark Knight but to tell stories that feel fundamental to the character while fleshing out the reasons why Tim has returned to Gotham to become a crime-fighter and what that means for his family.

“I think the great thing about The Next Batman is it’s not being opposite Bruce Wayne, or different from Bruce Wayne, or denying Bruce Wayne, it’s embracing all those things that have made Bruce and Batman one of the most enduring characters in literature, and saying, ‘Okay, what’s next for that lineage?’ It’s not different Batman, it’s not anti-Batman, it’s next. And next is building on the past and really making it urgent and durable in the moment and for tomorrow.”

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

According to Ridley, one of the reasons Tim was chosen to headline The Next Batman was that much of his story was yet to be explored, providing an excellent blank slate for a new take on Batman.

“To a degree, Batman has had folks out there that he’s personally trained. Folks out there that wanted that. The mantle, the cowl. Folks who needed to step in on occasion. And the thing that’s always a differentiator is why? What is that narrative? What did they want? What drove them to it?

“There are a lot of folks out there, a lot of the characters out there that could have been Batman, but for me I think their motivations were not hyper clear. And I didn’t want to force change to either the detriment of stories that came before, or having to overly modify what was going to come. And Tim just allowed for a really particular narrative which we believe is going to allow for a very particular incarnation of his Batman.”

Despite taking place in a “possible near future” not necessarily tied to the primary DC continuity as it currently is, the first two issues of The Next Batman are reminiscent of classic Batman yarns. In the first issue, Tim must prevent two orphaned brothers from going down a dark path from which they can’t return, while the second story allows Tim to show off his detective skills, all while evading the militarized police force that is hunting him around the city. The stories do feel pretty “fundamental,” down to the colorful palette of blues and yellows used by colorist Tamra Bonvillain that nods to the Dark Knight’s earliest Golden Age appearances. Even the Batsuit of the future remains largely unchanged.

But when it comes to a new character taking on the role of Batman, one of the big questions creators have to ask themselves is what separates the new incumbent from Bruce Wayne? After all, you don’t just want to repeat the same exact story but with a different character.

“For me the biggest difference really is family. I mean, everything about Bruce was driven by the loss of his family. And on the page, never really being able to attach himself to people,” Ridley says. “Tim has his family. And that family is always there. And he, too, is driven by family, but in a very different way. And he’s going to have to reconcile much of that in real time.”

Indeed, Tim’s estrangement from his family heavily informs the book. His attempts to reconnect with them after his long absence from Gotham are met with hostility from Luke, who refers to Tim as the “the Fox family screw up.” And that disconnect extends to his mother Tanya too, who is a major proponent of the heavily-armored police working to keep the Gotham City streets “mask-free” after her daughter Tam lands in the hospital due to a mask-related incident (it’s unclear what exactly happened to her). It’s an interesting dynamic that not only sets Tim’s story apart from Bruce’s but also allows Ridley to flesh out each member of the Fox family beyond their connection to Lucius.

“They’ve been incredibly integrated into the Batman, the Bat universe, certainly with Lucius. The character goes from the page to the screen, they become indelible. And what he represents as a friend, as a partner, as a father figure for Bruce, as a character that the world sees, as a remarkable man who has the capacity to run one of the largest companies in America. That’s pretty remarkable in and of itself, but Luke has risen to a particular level on the page, and he hasn’t gone beyond that yet. Tanya, she never stated what her job was, what her role was. Same with the sisters, and certainly with Tim.”

While one of Ridley’s key goals with The Next Batman is to present a complex, fully fleshed-out Black family at the center of the Batman universe, he also tackles issues of policing in the book. Although Ridley began planning The Next Batman months before George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers and the globe-spanning Black Lives Matter protests that followed, the book could be construed as a direct response to those events. The writer is keenly aware that some readers will feel the book is too “political.”

“Unfortunately for me, just as for pretty much every Black person in America, this moment that we’re going through right now, it’s hyper realized, it’s very raw, and while the wider culture, certainly the prevailing culture, is very aware of it, this isn’t new for us,” Ridley says. “I know going into it, having a young Black man who is going to be an extension of law enforcement, in this world you don’t have the hyper realizing of that. There are going to be people who just recognize, ‘Okay, the storytelling has the capacity to be very politicized.'”

But Ridley points out that many of the things he’s talking about in The Next Batman have long been a part of stories set in Gotham — they’re just not often explored from the perspectives of non-white characters.

“I know what Batman represents just in terms of individuals who want to just have a good read. But I know that Batman is always dealing with crime, dealing with impoverished areas, dealing with street level crime, dealing with systemic crime. It’s always been there. But yes, you make that character Black, you talk about a militarized police force, you talk about policing, and it becomes more political.”

The Next Batman has a lot of ground to cover for a four-issue miniseries, both in terms of fleshing out its characters and this new version of Gotham as well as the bigger themes. Are four issues really enough to re-introduce Tim to readers, tell a multi-character story about the Fox family, and tackle criminal justice in Gotham City? After reading the first two issues, which largely focus on world-building with some character work mixed in, I’m not sure such a short miniseries is really enough space.

Fortunately, The Next Batman is designed to be the start of a Bat saga for Tim, not the beginning, middle, and end. And that story will unfold across several books releasing this year.

“I can say that there has been a long term plan for what’s going to happen. And certainly, in the early phases of the storytelling it’s going to be very much within a hyper-specific Bat universe,” Ridley says, explaining that Tim’s story is designed to be both cohesive with the rest of the Batman books, including the flagship currently written by James Tynion IV, as well as a unique corner of the mythos. Tim’s already been mentioned in Tynion’s run, with an appearance teased for some point in the future.

After the four-part miniseries, Tim Fox will next be seen in Batman: Black and White #3 in a story penned by Ridley and drawn by Olivier Copiel. This short tale will introduce Tim’s own sidekick. “She’s not exactly Robin!” teases the solicitation. The issue is out on Feb. 23.

Where is this story ultimately headed? Will Tim eventually star in his own solo book or event series? Ridley isn’t saying just yet.

“There are other very specific plans that have been created that are going to be implemented [to] make Tim very much his own individual, his own character, and have his own emotional velocity to his storytelling.”

Whatever may be in store for Tim and his family, it’s not lost on Ridley that he now has the keys to one of the most important sandboxes in comics, and that the stories he tells could have long-lasting effects on the Caped Crusader’s world. While Ridley’s journey with the Batman is still in its opening act, he already has some thoughts on what legacy he hopes this story will leave behind.

“The legacy would be to leave a wholly rendered family, and that any of these characters can move on and inhabit other spaces in the DC universe. Whether they’re heroes, whether they’re just prominent characters that can be in legal professions, business, finance. If 15 years from now every one of the characters within the Fox family was a strong, durable, well-known, well understood individual character, that when they showed up they had history, and a history with specific narrative events, to me, that is the legacy that I would love to leave.”

Future State: The Next Batman #1 is out on Jan. 5.

The post How The Next Batman Sets Up a New Saga for the Dark Knight appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2LnAOET

People operating within the field of psychological state tell the United States of America concerning. The books that affected a chord with them.

Several consultants from the psychological state field can tell you awareness. And data is essential to learning concerning psychological state be it your own or to assist somebody else. Typically notwithstanding we all know the factual details, the key lies in learning the nuances. And what alternative approach than to scan a lot of books.

Books area units usually the most effective approach. Within which we have a tendency to learn a lot of concerning ourselves. And also the world around United States of America. Thus this World psychological state Day.

We have a tendency to reached intent on consultants to crowdsource. An inventory of books to assist the United States of America to learn a lot of, and acquire. A peek into alternative people’s experiences and journeys.

As a result of typically, reading concerning alternative people’s experiences is cathartic. These books affect the spread of topics just like the therapeutic area. A person’s relationship to their diagnosing of cancer, people’s emotional struggle, and far a lot of.

More than something, these books speak of vulnerability may be a key to our journey towards healing.

Here’s what they suggested:

1. The Examined Life: How We Have a Tendency to Lose and Notice Ourselves By Author Polish Monetary Unit

The depth of labor we have a tendency to do as therapists are elucidated fantastically. By the author in his narratives of the therapeutic area. He touches his own quality still as his clients and opens a window.

Into what psychotherapy extremely is and what it involves showing. The United States of America what profound, humane, and safe expertise it extremely is.

— Rhea Gandhi, clinical {psychologist, therapist, healer} and counselor

2. It’s Not Okay to Feel Blue Sacred Folks Open Up Concerning Their Psychological State By Scarlett Botanist

There is one thing thus powerful concerning seeing yourself mirrored back. On the pages, you’re reading, and once that reflection is of pain, sadness, discomfort. It’s even a lot of this once reading this book late last year.

The things and also the contexts of the authors were terribly totally different from mine. But the pain, the overwhelming emotions, the struggles, the journey to healing were all reflective. Of my very own journey back to Pine Tree State.

I favorite this assortment of stories such a lot I needed. To share my expertise of pain being seen that I talented this book, not once, but thrice.

— Bhairavi Prakash, scientist

3. Lost Connections By Johann Hari

This book speaks of the 9 social group and environmental causes that result in depression and anxiety. Since we have a tendency to area unit getting down to discuss psychological state. In our country a lot of seriously, it’s necessary to speak concerning the general causes of a similar.

Inequality, instability (political/economic), and economic condition area unit huge reasons for psychological state problems. And that they are available in the approach of obtaining care still. Hari himself takes medication and says that it’s useful.

However, the image is incomplete. While not talking of alternative factors like abuse, job loss, lack of that means then on. I believe the straight forward language extremely helps. After you get diagnosed, you’re feeling one thing is wrong with you if you’ll not cope.

This book helps you to challenge that concept. It causes you to feel that you just exist during a sure context, and not during a vacuum. Which things happening around you, and to you, area unit imagined having an effect on you. The less blaming stance of this approach makes individual and collective solutions potential.

— Sadaf Vidha, therapist

4. When Breath Becomes Air By Paul Kalanithi

Paul, an operating surgeon, when having finished hard coaching and residency, reached. At the top of his medical career at the age of thirty-five, is diagnosed.

With stage-4 carcinoma, It’s within the face of death. That we actually learn to measure. This book takes the United States of America through the life journey of a rare individual.

I love this book for 2 reasons, on top of several others. It’s one of all the foremost rare and humane writings that we’ve got received. It’s raw, real, human, moving, and grievous all at a similar time. It extremely causes you to replicate in your life.

And still, what will it mean to measure within the face of death. It holds and contains the readers and conjointly challenges them to deeply investigate. However, we elect to pay for our living days.

The second reason why this book is thus near to my heart is that it’s a bit of someone’s life. It’s their story, their journey, and also the folks they meet thereon journey. It’s a narrative that actually attracts on the humanity of each the Doctors and also the patients.

The book humanizes a relationship that’s bedded, complex, and especially supported.

Love, trust, respect, temperament, and readiness to figure with one another. As a therapist that holds a nice price to Pine Tree State.

When there’s no place for the surgical knife. The words area unit the surgeon’s sole tool want. We’d like words to survive and that we need words to measure through and live by. This narrative, provides the United States of America with these words, words that keep the United States of America moving.

— Shaina Vasundhara Bhatia, clinical {psychologist, therapist, healer} and subject matter psychologist

In the times of uncertainty, we’re living in. Wherever we’re faced with the truth of death all around. The United States of America, reading Paul Kalanithi will solely be thought. About a present. after I scan this book back in 2016, not solely. Did I notice his writing poetic and virtually lyrical, I found myself puzzling over what it meant to be alive.

— Bhairavi Prakash, scientist

5. Dark Circles By Udhyan Mukherjee

As a psychological state skilled, this book. To me was one of the foremost honest and raw portrayals of the psychological state in an Indian context. The author doesn’t retreat from unpacking difficult family dynamics and genetic trauma.

Each of that area unit key parts for a psychological state. This will be a dark narrative with unfussy prose that allows the plot and thus the characters to shine. Enjoy, the protagonist, is complicated and really relatable. His voice stays with you long once you’ve finished the book. The author faucets into a psychological state.

While not creating it focus however maintains its connection and doesn’t over-simplify or complicate it. Therefore creating it a practical portrayal. This book might be a pleasant browse to browse once you area unit. Within the mood for one thing dark and raw.

See More: Terry Goodkind, Blockbuster Dream Creator Behind ‘The arm Of Truth, Dead At 72

6. Perhaps You Need to Seek advice From Somebody By Lori Gottlieb

The book parades concerning the lifetime of a consultant and her journey seeking psychological state help. The book tackles the stigma encompassing psychological state and normalizes. The narrative that even psychological state professionals will invite psychological state support.

Thus, creating this book not solely a superb browse however a choice to act. The book is full of humor, knowledge, and honesty. It’s superb because of gain a much better understanding of the psychological state and what speak medical care seems like.

The author keeps the prose easy and thus the numerous characters keep the reader engaged and invested until the tip. This book is AN “every mood” reasonably browse that’s why I extremely suggest it.

— Tanya Vasunia, scientist

7. Daring Greatly: However, The Spirit to Be Vulnerable Transforms By Brené Brown

Imagine an area full of young budding psychologists sitting during a very circle. And discussing their most vulnerable life moments. That’s however I want to be 1st introduced to Daring Greatly. A book that aimed to seem at vulnerability and spirit. To be seen because of an equivalent aspect of the coin.

Brown uses twelve years of study and personal life anecdotes to introduce. The reader to ideas of shame, vulnerability, and thus the insufficiency mind-set. She challenges the notion of vulnerability as a ‘dirty’ feeling and takes a troublesome check out. What makes the US afraid to be vulnerable in our lives as folks, teachers, colleagues, and partners.

Vulnerability is a risk, emotional exposure, and uncertainty. It’s conjointly sincere gaga and authentic living. per Brown, vulnerability seems like truth and seems like spirit. Truth and spirit aren’t continuously snug, however, they’re ne’er weakness.

Whenever unsure or afraid, I cue myself of her mantra. That spirit means to contact and permitting myself to be seen. And this temperament to point up makes the US ever braver whenever.

Brown’s quick-witted humor, a healthy dose of harry potter references, John Gottman and Rubin’s happiness project- This book extremely has it all!

— Ila Kulshrestha, authority psychotherapist

Mark Ruffalo plays complex characters who stir things up on-screen, and his ability to do it--and do it well--is heating up his career  'I'm Like a Catalyst'

Newsweek - August 10, 2004

Author/Byline: Jennifer Barrett Ozols

Mark Ruffalo is making up for lost time. Four years ago--after more than a decade of bit parts and low-paying theatrical roles--Ruffalo finally had a breakthrough, playing Terry Prescott, a wayward drifter who comes home to stay with his straight-laced sister in "You Can Count on Me." The movie earned two Academy Award nominations and Ruffalo was hailed as a rising star. But just as things seemed to be looking up for him--with scripts piling up on his doorstep and he and his new wife, actress Sunrise Coigney, celebrating the birth of their son--Ruffalo was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The surgery and slow recovery left him out of commission for nearly a year. When he re-embarked on his film career, he did so with a vengeance. In the past two years, Ruffalo, now 36, has been in seven major movies, in roles ranging from a mustachioed, tough-talking homicide detective in "In the Cut" to an endearing boy-next-door type in "13 Going on 30." This weekend, he'll be appearing in two movies simultaneously. In Michael Mann's "Collateral," which shot to number one in the Box Office when it opened last weekend, he stars as a police detective trying to chase down Tom Cruise, who plays a contract killer. In John Curran's "We Don't Live Here Anymore," which opens Friday, he plays an unfaithful husband struggling to determine if his marriage is worth saving. NEWSWEEK's Jennifer Barrett Ozols spoke with Ruffalo at his hotel suite in New York about his unusual career path and where it might take him next. Excerpts: NEWSWEEK: I understand you were the first lead to sign on to "We Don't Live Here Anymore." What drew you to the role? Mark Ruffalo: I read the material and I thought, wow, this is difficult; and I was very impressed by the writing. I hadn't seen such an honest portrayal of marriage. But I was really reticent to take it on actually because it was such difficult material and I thought it needed a really special director to handle it--someone who really knew this sort of world well and respected relationships and had a strong, mature vision. And I couldn't really think of anybody who would be able to do it.

Ooh. That's not saying much for Hollywood directors.

[ laughs ] Well, I mean, I thought that they're just not making this type of movie--at least, not here [in America]. But then I saw John [Curran's] movie, "Praise," and I thought, this guy is really something else. And we met and I saw how much passion he had about the material and his point of view about it and I just immediately jumped on board.

You said earlier you don't usually see marriage portrayed this honestly. Isn't that a little cynical? Your character cheats on his spouse with his best friend's wife.

It's just that anyone who has been in a long relationship has come up against difficult situations and I just thought you don't see that in cinema, or anywhere in pop culture, where it's quite this honest. It's obviously a marriage in crisis, but these people have been together for 10 years. He'd never cheated on her [before] in that time and they had children happily and were married happily. It's something of a cautionary tale about where marriage can end up if you're not communicating and you're not taking care of your dreams and the other person's aspirations. We are sort of spoon-fed this sort of idyllic--or just totally criminalized--idea of marriage. We rarely get to see something so honestly portrayed in a way that makes us appreciate the marriages we have. Or, even for people who aren't married, to sort of understand the difficulties of it and how important the mantel, the tradition, that you have been passed is. It comes from my deep respect of marriage that I wanted to do this film.

Do you know people who are in this situation? Have you met people like your character, Jack?

Well, in the past few years, I've had friends who have been married for 15 or 20 years, or less--and, three couples in particular have all sort of blown up. And they all have kids and I loved all of them dearly, and they are all right and they are all wrong. When you see the statistics, 50 percent of marriages are ending in divorce. And something like 75 percent of men will cheat--or have cheated--on their wives.

Really? That's comforting to hear as someone who just got married a month ago.

Well, 45 percent of woman will cheat--or have cheated--on their husbands.... [Adultery] is just topical, it's something that's going on around us. Marriage is such a big institution. It's really part of our culture in a big way. It's even connected to the American Dream.

The wife, the kids, the white picket fence.

Yeah, and it isn't really like that. It takes work. There's a lot of beautiful, joyous moments, but the great thing about marriage is that it is a really fertile place for people to grow. The only way to grow is by exposing yourself and your foibles, and it just happens naturally. Unfortunately, the people that you love get to see not always the best version of you. But by sort of exposing some of those things to the light of day, you have some growth. That's what I hope anyway. [ laughs ]

I think that's what we all hope when we get married.

But it's hard to keep it up. Or they just stop telling the truth or stop communicating. I mean you have to say things to somebody that you never wanted to say to another human being about desires and other things. But once you say it, it's freeing. It's amazing. And you remember why you fell in love. I think that's where Jack ends up towards the end of the movie. He's unconscious and then it all comes out. His whole life unfolds, and he says, this is my life, this is where I belong.

You've said in the past that you dread being compared to the characters you play sometimes. Have you had a hard time trying to keep from being stereotyped as the character you played in "You Can Count on Me"?

Yeah, I keep looking to break it up and keep the balls in the air, so to speak, before someone pegs me, pigeonholes me, boxes me up and puts a nice label on me, sells me to the mass public. [ laughs ]

You've got the whole industry figured out.

I loathe that though, I loathe it. I loathe the idea of somebody somehow putting boundaries on me as an artist. It just angers me. If I had to play Terry Prescott [from "You Can Count On Me"] in every part that I did, I would become cynical and bored and I'd have a really horrible personal life and do really outrageous things in public.

Because you're trying to show your creativity somewhere else? As in, if you can't do this on screen, might as well do it in public?

I think that's what people end up doing. But for me, I live a really bourgeois life and I live things out on screen.

That's much safer.

Exactly, it's like role playing.

Are there many roles you've turned down because they didn't feel right for you?

Yeah, the roles just have to speak to me in some way. I have to be turned onto it or be intrigued or challenged by the material. Or think it'd be fun to do. I've turned quite a few down--some big stuff, some small stuff.

Have you ever regretted it?

No, never. You can never be hurt by what you didn't do.

But when you were diagnosed with a brain tumor a few years ago, you were just breaking out in the business, and then you were out of commission there for about a year after the surgery. How did that change your perspective on you life and career?

It made me live more fully; though you're always afraid you're going to forget that experience. But it made me want to live more authentically and appreciate what I have-- my very, very good fortune to be doing what I do. And it made me a little less fearless about my acting and what I am capable of.

Did you feel like fear was holding you back in your career before?

Not so much, but it was constant worry about each part. How is this going to add up in my career? Will this movie do all right? And all these career questions. And now I'm just like, screw that. I don't care. I'm going to do some things that aren't very good. I'm going to do some things that are well liked. Some things that are more provocative. And come what may. As long as the work is good and the material I choose means something to me, I don't think I can go wrong.

You said you started living more authentically too. What do you mean by that--what changes did you make?

Just in my personal dealings, my relationships and not being afraid of saying how I feel or what I want, being true to myself. It's being able to look down into myself and know what I want and being able to state that. That's something I didn't really know very much about before.

That's a pretty powerful thing to be able to do. Some people never do that.

I think what happens is you start that way and then you get it knocked out of you. Like I see my kid and there's no doubt about what he's feeling. There's no sugarcoating or doing something for social reasons. He doesn't care about being accepted, or looking cool. And it is really refreshing to see that.

How old is your son?

He's three.

Just wait.

No, I know. I think part of the game is that to survive you have to be conditioned that way. It's sad.

What role has been the most difficult for you?

"In the Cut" was really hard to do. It was so different from me and it was just kind of challenging and scary. Michael Mann's 'Collateral' was difficult. He is so intense and he's the kind of director where you're going to have an experience with it when you're working with him.

In "Collateral," you play a good guy going after Tom Cruise, who--for once--plays a really bad guy. How was that?

Well, my guy--you think he might be a bad guy. Then you realize he is actually the good guy and Tom Cruise is the bad guy. Initially you think Tom Cruise could be a nice guy.

That's a real role reversal.

Yeah, it was cool to be part of something that's sort of historic.

Historic, huh?

It is-- a little. Tom's never done anything like that. And, "In the Cut" had that same kind of thing too [with Meg Ryan]. When an actor is going to do something they've never done before, they bring in Mark Ruffalo to co star. [ laughs ]

You know, that's not a bad niche to have.

It's a great niche.

You'll never be bored.

I'm like a catalyst.

What are you doing next? I understand you're in a new movie that looks at the young lovers from "The Graduate" after they've grown up.

Actually, it's nothing like "The Graduate," it's just starting off there. I play Jennifer Aniston's fiance--very nice, staid, straight-laced lawyer. As nice as he can be as a lawyer. It's a sweet movie. And I think I'm going to be doing "All the King's Men" with Sean Penn. I'm really excited about that. He's one of my heroes. He's amazing.

Is there anything you really want to do that you haven't had a chance to do yet?

I'm trying to direct a film that I've been putting together since 1999. It's called "Running with Delicious." You know, like "Running with the Devil"?

Right, I get it. It's just an unusual title.

[pause] It's not a porno! [ laughs ]

What's it about?

It's kind of a satire on pop culture. And it's slowly coming together, it's been lurching into existence. I'd like to do more of that, directing.

A Dog's Way Home

What makes a “dog movie” good? Even as one of those overenthusiastic canine devotees who will often claim she prefers dogs to people (well, I do), I don’t quite have an answer to this question. But I like my movie dogs best when they resemble the way I perceive my four-legged pals in real life: selfless, friendly and fun-loving creatures that live in the moment, would do anything for chicken and think of everything as a game. I cringe when films sell dogs short by adorning them with human-like traits, just to pull the heartstrings of our kind. 

So on paper, Charles Martin Smith’s talking dog movie “A Dog’s Way Home”, where a canine takes an utterly implausible two-year/400-mile journey to reunite with the human who saved him from the streets, is my basic nightmare. But after all, I am not made of stone, am I? What dog parent wouldn’t like to believe our lost dogs would eventually find us at all costs, no matter what? And who among us hasn’t interpreted a dog’s thoughts, elaborated on them and even spoken them out loud? I can’t be the only weirdo here and I won’t be the last one to cry during this film’s end credits.

Even then and despite Bryce Dallas Howard’s sweetly soothing voice as Bella (played by the adorable Shelby), I maintain that “A Dog’s Way Home” would have been a lot more affecting and provocative (without losing any of its charming family friendliness) had Bella not been granted a screen voice. Leaving that aside, Smith’s film is still one you can’t help but root for, as the screenwriters Cathryn Michon and W. Bruce Cameron (also the author and scribe of the trilogy that includes “A Dog’s Purpose” and “A Dog’s Journey”) lovingly braid in numerous humanist themes into their tale at every turn. 

A stray mutt raised by a cat (which she calls ‘Mother Cat’) in the suburbs of Denver after her mom gets taken away, Bella falls into the hands of Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King) and Olivia (Alexandra Shipp); two kindly med school students who also volunteer for animals in need. Also in the mix is Lucas’ depressed war veteran mother Terri (Ashley Judd), the pet-hating real estate mogul Gunter (Brian Markinson) and antiquated city laws enforced by officer Chuck (John Cassini), that prohibit certain mutts and ignorantly think of “pit bulls” as two dirty words. To save Bella from a most heartbreaking fate (don’t get me started on pit bull euthanasia rates), Lucas, Olivia and Terri find her a temporary home in New Mexico, from which Bella escapes to make her way back to her own humans. It’s a perilous road decked with near-fatal hazards for sure, but also with mostly well-meaning humans and a baby cougar whom Bella calls ‘Big Kitten’—brought to life by what could contend for the year’s worst CGI. But who cares when she proves to be such a loyal and reliable road buddy in the mountains of Colorado? 

This may all sound too shameless and syrupy, but to its credit, “A Dog’s Way Home” scratches the surface of something I, as a pit bull obsessive, have never seen a “dog movie” do. Not only does this film attempt to explain the illogical broadness of the term “pit bull” (it’s basically as generic as labeling a canine as “a hound dog”) and the false fear these animals are routinely subjected and fall victim to, it also hints at this irrationality’s faint connection to racism. This is an idea articulated and explained in various essays like Tom Junod’s “The State of The American Dog” and Yasmin Nair’s “Racism and The American Pit Bull”, which also cites Bronwyn Dickey’s book Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon. “This is basically racism for dogs” says Olivia, admittedly oversimplifying an utterly complex concept to baffling effect. But the writers and filmmakers deserve some praise for considering what often gets ignored when we talk about how the society gut-wrenchingly mistreats pit bulls.

That being said (and as lovable as Shelby is), I wish the dog cast as Bella looked a bit more like a classic American Pit Bull Terrier to really bring home the filmmakers’ point—the “she doesn’t even look like a pit” line spoken later in the film almost defeats the purpose of good intentions. I also wish the gay couple that Bella crosses paths with (a detail all too rare in hetero-normative mainstream family films) were allowed a bit more natural intimacy that a straight couple would have been free to display. But between its belief in cross-species friendship, unmistakable anti-hunting/environmentalist message and overall progressive tone, “A Dog’s Way Home” is a good dog movie with its heart in the right place, just like any nameless canine regardless of its breed.

from All Content http://bit.ly/2FpOlH3

Top 10 Books

1. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

A National Book Award Finalist:

This 'wonderfully descriptive' novel from an author with a 'tremendous imagination' tells the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias have bred their own exhibit of human oddities. (The New York Times Book Review)

The Binewskis arex a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan, Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins, albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family's most precious - and dangerous - asset.

As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the US, inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene.

Family values will never be the same.

Praise for Geek Love

'If Flannery O'Connor had consumed vast quantities of LSD, she might have written like this' Literary Review

'The most romantic novel about love and family I have read. It made me ashamed to be so utterly normal' Terry Gilliam

'I felt electrocuted when I read that first page with Crystal Lil and her freak brood. I stood there in the bookstore and my jaw came unhinged. No book I've read, before or since, has given me that specific jolt' Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia

2. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor

ONE OF THE GREATEST AMERICAN SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS In 1955, with this short story collection, Flannery O'Connor firmly laid claim to her place as one of the most original and provocative writers of her generation. Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition that would become synonymous with her name, these stories show O'Connor's unique, grotesque view of life-- infused with religious symbolism, haunted by apocalyptic possibility, sustained by the tragic comedy of human behavior, confronted by the necessity of salvation. With these classic stories-- including "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," "Good Country People," "The Displaced Person," and seven other acclaimed tales-- O'Connor earned a permanent place in the hearts of American readers. "Much savagery, compassion, farce, art, and truth have gone into these stories. O'Connor's characters are wholeheartedly horrible, and almost better than life. I find it hard to think of a funnier or more frightening writer." -- Robert Lowell "In these stories the rural South is, for the first time, viewed by a writer who orthodoxy matches her talent. The results are revolutionary." -- The New York Times Book Review Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was born in Savannah, Georgia. She earned her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa, but lived most of her life in the South, where she became an anomaly among post-World War II authors-- a Roman Catholic woman whose stated purpose was to reveal the mystery of God's grace in everyday life. Her work-- novels, short stories, letters, and criticism-- received a number of awards, including the National Book Award.

3. The Power of Now

To make the journey into the Now we will need to leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego, behind. From the very first page of Eckhart Tolle's extraordinary book, we move rapidly into a significantly higher altitude where we breathe a lighter air. We become connected to the indestructible essence of our Being, “The eternal, ever present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.” Although the journey is challenging, Eckhart Tolle uses simple language and an easy question and answer format to guide us.

A word of mouth phenomenon since its first publication, The Power of Now is one of those rare books with the power to create an experience in readers, one that can radically change their lives for the better.

4. Mindset

“A good book is one whose advice you believe. A great book is one whose advice you follow. This is a book that can change your life, as its ideas have changed mine.”—Robert J. Sternberg, co-author of Teaching for Wisdom, Intelligence, Creativity, and Success

“An essential read for parents, teachers [and] coaches . . . as well as for those who would like to increase their own feelings of success and fulfillment.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Everyone should read this book.”—Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick

“One of the most influential books ever about motivation.”—Po Bronson, author of NurtureShock

5. How to Read a person like a book

Imagine meeting someone for the first time and within minutes―without a word being said―having the ability to tell what that person is thinking. Magic? Not quite. Whether people are aware of it or not, their body movements clearly express their attitudes and motives, communicating key information that is invaluable in a range of situations.

How to Read a Person Like a Book is designed to teach you how to interpret and reply to the nonverbal signals of business associates, friends, loved ones, and even strangers. Best-selling authors Gerard Nierenberg, Henry Calero, and Gabriel Grayson have collaborated to put their working knowledge of body language into this practical guide to recognizing and understanding body movements. In this book, you will find the authors’ proven techniques for gaining control of negotiations, detecting lies, and even recognizing signs of sexual attraction.

Whether in an office, on a date, or on a family outing, the simple technique of reading body language is a unique skill that offers real and important benefits.

6. How to Win Friends and Influencear People

'How to win friends and influence people’ is a self-help book which is the pioneer of this genre. Written by Dale Carnegie and published in 1936, it has sold over 30 million copies. It has been edited and re-printed several times. This is the 2004 edition of this book. It was on the Time magazine’s 100 most influential books list in 2011. This book is a guide in improving a person's aura in the world. It is about changing how the world views and treats you by changing your own behaviour. That means that if you change the kind of energy that you emit, what comes back to you is also different. This is one of the most influential business and communication skills guide. This book teaches you how to market yourself and generate more clients. This book has been acclaimed by many known figures around the world. This book tries to get you out of a mental hell and provides you with ambition and goals. It enables you to be friendlier and seem a positive person to others, it helps you become a popular person who is liked by the majority and in business terms, it enables you to win new clients. it increases your earning power by helping you use your potential to the fullest and it helps you to become a better public speaker and to be liked by mass audience. If you read the book carefully and follow majority of the tips, you can learn to be friendlier and more presentable as a person. You can become a person who emits the positivity that is inside the heart. You can become a person people trust and want to be associated with. As long as you have good friends and good business associations, you will probably stay strong in personal as well as professional life.

7. The Far Field

Winner of the JCB Prize for Literature 2019. Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019. Shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award (Fiction) 2019. In the wake of her mother's death, Shalini, a privileged, naive and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote village in Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to track him down. But as soon as Shalini arrives, she is confronted with the region's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. As life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could have dangerous repercussions for the people she has come to love. With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay gives a potent critique of Indian politics and class prejudice through the lens of a guileless outsider, while also offering up a profound meditation on grief, guilt and the limits of compassion.

8. The Psychology Book

How does memory work? Who is the "distractor" in your family? What was the "car crash" experiment?

This book is your visual guide to the complex and fascinating world of human behaviour. Discover how we learn, become emotionally bonded with others, and develop coping mechanisms to deal with adversity, or conform in a group. Get to know key thinkers, from Freud and Jung to Elizabeth Loftus and Melanie Klein, and follow charts and timelines to make sense of it all and see how one theory influenced another.

With pithy explanations of different schools of psychology including psychotherapy, cognitive psychology and behaviourism, this is an ideal reference whether you're a student, or a general reader. It's your authoritative guide to over 100 key ideas, theories, and conditions, including the collective unconscious, the "selfish" gene, false memory, psychiatric disorders, and autism.

If you're fascinated by the human mind, The Psychology Book is both an invaluable reference and illuminating read.

9. Mans Search For Meaning

16 MILLION COPIES SOLD

'A book to read, to cherish, to debate, and one that will ultimately keep the memories of the victims alive' John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that both he and others in Auschwitz coped (or didn't) with the experience. He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest - and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. The sort of person the concentration camp prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not of camp influences alone. Frankl came to believe man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. This outstanding work offers us all a way to transcend suffering and find significance in the art of living.

10. The Power of Subconsious Mind

The book was first published in 1963, but till date it has not gone out of print. The author, with a lifetime of experience as a church preacher, had done extensive research on how the mind can be healed, which has been dealt with in detail in the first few chapters. The techniques are simple and results come quickly. You can improve your relationships, your finances, your physical well-being. Structured in twenty chapters, each one spells out instructions that one needs to follow in order to be content and successful in life. For people who are interested in finding out about the basics of the human mind and want to explore the subconscious, this book is a must read. Inspiring examples throughout this book attest to the effectiveness of his methods.

Top writers choose their perfect crime

New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/top-writers-choose-their-perfect-crime/

Top writers choose their perfect crime

Crime fiction is now the UKs bestselling genre. So which crime novels should everyone read? We asked the writers who know …

On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill Val McDermid

This is the perfect crime novel. Its beautifully written elegiac, emotionally intelligent, evocative of the landscape and history that holds its characters in thrall and its clever plotting delivers a genuine shock. Theres intellectual satisfaction in working out a plot involving disappearing children, whose counterpoint is Mahlers Kindertotenlieder. Theres darkness and light, fear and relief. And then theres the cross-grained pairing of Dalziel and Pascoe. Everything about this book is spot on.

Although Hills roots were firmly in the traditional English detective novel, he brought to it an ambivalence and ambiguity that allowed him to display the complexities of contemporary life. He created characters who changed and developed in response to their experiences. I urge you to read this with a glass of Andy Dalziels favourite Highland Park whisky.

Insidious Intent by Val McDermid is published by Sphere.

The Damned and the Destroyed by Kenneth Orvis Lee Child

My formative reading was before the internet, before fanzines, before also-boughts, so for me the best ever is inevitably influenced by the gloriously chanced-upon lucky finds, the greatest of which was a 60 cent Belmont US paperback, bought in an import record shop on a back street in Birmingham in 1969. It had a lurid purple cover, and an irresistible strapline: She was beautiful, young, blonde, and a junkie I had to help her! It turned out to be Canadian, set in Montreal. The hero was a solid stiff named Maxwell Dent. The villain was a dealer named The Back Man. The blonde had an older sister. Dents sidekicks were jazz pianists. The story was patient, suspenseful, educational and utterly superb. In many ways its the target I still aim at.

The Midnight Line by Lee Child is published by Bantam.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens Ian Rankin

Does this count as a crime novel? I think so. Dickens presents us with a mazey mystery, a shocking murder, a charismatic police detective, a slippery lawyer and a plethora of other memorable characters many of whom are suspects. The story has pace and humour, is bitingly satirical about the English legal process, and also touches on large moral and political themes. As in all great crime novels, the central mystery is a driver for a broad and deep investigation of society and culture. And theres a vibrant sense of place, too in this case, London, a city built on secret connections, a location Dickens knows right down to its dark, beating heart.

Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin is published by Orion. Siege Mentality by Chris Brookmyre is published by Little, Brown.

The Hollow by Agatha Christie Sophie Hannah

This is my current favourite, in its own way just as good as Murder on the Orient Express. As well as being a perfectly constructed mystery, its a gripping, acutely observed story about a group of people, their ambitions, loves and regrets. The characters are vividly alive, even the more minor ones, and the pace is expertly handled. The outdoor swimming pool scene in which Poirot discovers the murder is, I think, the most memorable discovery-of-the-body scene in all of crime fiction. Interestingly, Christie is said to have believed that the novel would have been better without Poirot. His presence here is handled differently he feels at one remove from the action for much of the time but it works brilliantly, since he is the stranger who must decipher the baffling goings on in the Angkatell family. The murderers reaction to being confronted by Poirot is pure genius. It would have been so easy to give that character, once exposed, the most obvious motivation, but the contents of this killers mind turn out to be much more interesting

Did You See Melody by Sophie Hannah is published by Hodder.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier SJ Watson

SJ Watsno

I first came to Rebecca, published in 1938, with one of the most recognisable first lines in literature, not knowing exactly what to expect. That it was a classic I was in no doubt, but a classic what? I suspected a drama, possibly a romance, a book heavy on character but light on plot and one Id read and then forget. How wrong I was.

It is a dark, brooding psychological thriller, hauntingly beautiful, literature yes, but with a killer plot. I loved everything about it. The way Du Maurier slowly twists the screw until we have no idea who to trust, the fact that the title character never appears and exists only as an absence at the heart of the book, the fact that the narrator herself is unnamed throughout. But, more importantly, this thriller is an exploration of power, of the men who have it and the women who dont, and the secrets told to preserve it.

Second Life by SJ Watson is published by Black Swan.

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane James Lee Burke

To my mind this is the best crime novel written in the English language. Lehane describes horrible events with poetic lines that somehow heal the injury that his subject matter involves, not unlike Shakespeare or the creators of the King James Old Testament. Thats not a hyper-bolic statement. His use of metaphysical imagery is obviously influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Mystic River is one for the ages.

Robicheaux by James Lee Burke is published by Orion.

The Expendable Man by Dorothy B Hughes Sara Paretsky

Author Sara Paretsky for Arts. Photo by Linda Nylind. 15/7/2015.

Today, Hughes is remembered for In a Lonely Place (1947) Bogart starred in the 1950 film version. My personal favourite is The Expendable Man (1963). Hughes lived in New Mexico and her love of its bleak landscape comes through in carefully painted details. She knows how to use the land sparingly, so it creates mood. The narrative shifts from the sandscape to the doctor, who reluctantly picks up a teen hitchhiker. When shes found dead a day later, hes the chief suspect, and the secrets we know hes harbouring from the first page are slowly revealed.

Hughess novels crackle with menace. Like a Bauhaus devotee, she understood that in creating suspense, less is more. Insinuation, not graphic detail, gives her books an edge of true terror. Shes the master we all could learn from.

Fallout by Sara Paretsky is published by Hodder.

Killing Floor by Lee Child Dreda Say Mitchell

What is it about any particular novel that means youre so engrossed that you miss your bus stop or stay up way past your bedtime? A spare, concise style that doesnt waste a word. A striking lead character who manages to be both traditional and original. A plot thats put together like a Swiss watch. Childs debut has all these things, but like all great crime novels it has the x-factor.

In the case of Killing Floor that factor is a righteous anger, rooted in personal experience, that makes the book shake in your hands. Its the story of a military policeman who loses his job and gets kicked to the kerb. Jack Reacher becomes a Clint Eastwood-style loner who rides into town and makes it his business to dish out justice and protect the underdog, but without the usual props of cynicism or alcohol. We can all identify with that anger and with that thirst for justice. We dont see much of the latter in real life. At least in Killing Floor we do.

Blood Daughter by Dreda Say Mitchell is published by Hodder.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler Benjamin Black (John Banville)

The Long Goodbye is not the most polished, and certainly not the most convincingly plotted, of Chandlers novels, but it is the most heartfelt. This may seem an odd epithet to apply to one of the great practitioners of hard-boiled crime fiction. The fact is, Chandler was not hard-boiled at all, but a late romantic artist exquisitely attuned to the bittersweet melancholy of post-Depression America. His closest literary cousin is F Scott Fitzgerald.

Philip Marlowes love and surely it is nothing less than love for the disreputable Terry Lennox is the core of the book, the rhapsodic theme that transcends and redeems the creaky storyline and the somewhat cliched characterisation. And if Lennox is a variant of Jay Gatsby, and Marlowe a stand in for Nick Carraway, Fitzgeralds self-effacing but ever-present narrator, then Roger Wade, the drink-soaked churner-out of potboilers that he despises, is an all too recognisable portrait of Chandler himself, and a vengefully caricatured one at that. However, be assured that any pot The Long Goodbye might boil is fashioned from hammered bronze.

Prague Nights by Benjamin Black is published by Viking.

Love in Amsterdam by Nicolas Freeling Ann Cleeves

Although Nicolas Freeling wrote in English he was a European by choice an itinerant chef who roamed between postwar France, Belgium and Holland, and who instilled in me a passion for crime set in foreign places. He detested the rules of the traditional British detective novel: stories in which plot seemed to be paramount. Love in Amsterdam (1962) is Freelings first novel and it breaks those rules both in terms of structure and of theme.

It is a tale of sexual obsession and much of the book is a conversation between the suspect, Martin, whos been accused of killing his former lover, and the cop. Van der Valk, Freelings detective, is a rule-breaker too, curious and compassionate, and although we see his investigative skills in later books, here his interrogation is almost that of a psychologist, teasing the truth from Martin, forcing him to confront his destructive relationship with the victim.

The Seagullby Ann Cleeves is published by Pan.

Laidlaw by William McIlvanney Chris Brookmyre

I first read Laidlaw in 1990, shortly after moving to London, when I was aching for something with the flavour of home, and what a gamey, pungent flavour McIlvanneys novel served up. A sense of place is crucial to crime fiction, and Laidlaw brought Glasgow to life more viscerally than any book I had read before: the good and the bad, the language and the humour, the violence and the drinking.

Laidlaws turf is a male hierarchy ruled by unwritten codes of honour, a milieu of pubs and hard men rendered so convincingly by McIlvanneys taut prose. His face looked like an argument you couldnt win, he writes of one character, encapsulating not only the mans appearance but his entire biography in a mere nine words.

This book made me realise that pacey, streetwise thrillers didnt have to be American: we had mean streets enough of our own. It emboldened me to write about the places I knew and in my own accent.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Laura Lippman

Im going to claim Lolita for crime fiction, something I never used to do. But it has kidnapping, murder and its important to use this term rape. It also has multiple allusions to Edgar Allan Poe and even hides an important clue well, not exactly in plain sight, but in the text of, yes, a purloined letter. And now we know, thanks to the dogged scholarship of Sarah Weinman, that it was based on a real case in the United States. (Weinmans book, The Real Lolita, will be published later this year.)

Dorothy Parker meant well when she said Lolita was a book about love, but, no its about the rape of a child by a solipsistic paedophile who rationalises his actions, another crime that is too often hidden in plain sight. Some think that calling Lolita a crime novel cheapens it, but I think it elevates the book, reminds us of the pedestrian ugliness that is always there, thrumming beneath the beautiful language.

Sunburn by Laura Lippman is published by Faber.

The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald Donna Leon

Ross Macdonald, an American who wrote in the 60s and 70s, has enchanted me since then with the beauty of his writing and the decency of his protagonist, Lew Archer. I envy him his prose: easy, elegant, at times poetically beautiful. I also admire the absence of violence in the novels, for he usually follows Aristotles admonition that gore be kept out of the view of the audience. When Archer discovers the various wicked things one person has done to another, he does not linger in describing it but makes it clear how his protagonist mourns not only the loss of human life but also the loss of humanity that leads to it.

Macdonalds plotting is elegant: often, as Archer searches for the motive for todays crime, he unearths a past injustice that has returned to haunt the present and provoke its violence. His sympathy for the victims is endless, as is his empathy for some of the killers.

The Temptation of Forgiveness by Donna Leon is published by William Heinemann.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins Nicci French

http://www.theguardian.com/us

The Batman Movie Gets DC TV Spinoff on HBO Max

https://ift.tt/3iRPSqz

HBO Max just announced another big entry in their DC TV sweepstakes with an untitled series set in the world that we’ll start to explore in Matt Reeves’ upcoming The Batman movie. The series is intended to launch a shared Batman universe that will operate between both TV and movies. The series will be written by Boardwalk Empire creator Terrence Winter, with Reeves, Winter, and Dylan Clark serving as executive producers.

This is now the third confirmed live action DC series confirmed for HBO Max. Geoff Johns and Greg Berlanti are developing a Green Lantern Corps show for the network, and an Adam Strange-themed anthology called Strange Adventures is also in the works. More announcements are likely coming soon.

Here’s the official synopsis for the untitled Batman series:

“The groundbreaking television series to be written by Winter is set in the world Reeves is creating for The Batman feature film and will build upon the motion picture’s examination of the anatomy of corruption in Gotham City, ultimately launching a new Batman universe across multiple platforms. The series provides an unprecedented opportunity to extend the world established in the movie and further explore the myriad of compelling and complex characters of Gotham. “

A series that examines “the anatomy of corruption in Gotham City” sounds an awful lot like what many of us had hoped Fox’s Gotham TV series would have been: a show focusing on the organized crime, political corruption, and deep rot within the Gotham City police department, rather than “just” a Batman prequel.

The expansive cast list for The Batman includes plenty of villains and mob bosses, which among other things, has made fans speculate that the movie is based in part on Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Batman: The Long Halloween, a series which itself took inspiration from the corruption depicted in Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One.

Does this mean big screen Jim Gordon (and HBO drama vet) Jeffrey Wright could reprise his role for the small screen? What about John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone? Colin Farrell’s Penguin apparently is only in the film briefly, does that mean he could have a larger role on the TV series? We can certainly hope!

It also would appear to confirm Warner Bros.’ desire to keep The Batman portions of their live action universe separate from their ongoing DCEU efforts, although those will continue to have a Bat-presence of their own.

“This is an amazing opportunity, not only to expand the vision of the world I am creating in the film, but to explore it in the kind of depth and detail that only a longform format can afford — and getting to work with the incredibly talented Terence Winter, who has written so insightfully and powerfully about worlds of crime and corruption, is an absolute dream,” Reeves said in a statement.

“We are so fortunate to have such great partners in Matt, Dylan, and Terry and unprecedented access to a wealth of IP from our partners at Warner Bros. and DC,” said Sarah Aubrey, head of original content, HBO Max.

Read more

TV

New Batwoman Revealed: Javicia Leslie is Ryan Wilder

By Mike Cecchini

“Our collaboration with Warner Bros. and DC allows us to elaborate and grow fan connections across these powerful brands for years to come.  This is Batman as most audiences have never seen before and we know fans will want to spend more time in this new world inspired by the film,” added Kevin Reilly, chief content officer, HBO Max, president TNT, TBS, and TruTV.

Daniel Pipski (From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series), Adam Kassan (Tales from the Loop), and Rafi Crohn (Tales from the Loop) will co-executive produce.

The Batman is scheduled to open in Oct. 1, 2021, so the earliest we’ll see this untitled Gotham TV series on HBO Max is likely to be 2022.

The post The Batman Movie Gets DC TV Spinoff on HBO Max appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3iOKd4B

Pipeline opponents, proponents see parallels in Coastal GasLink and Trans Mountain fights

CALGARY — British Columbia Premier John Horgan is trying to downplay comparisons between this week’s protests against the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline, which he supports, and the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain oil pipelines, which he has opposed.

“What’s relevant is the issue before us. In this case, it’s a natural gas pipeline that has support from 20 of the 20 bands along the pipeline, including the hereditary leadership,” Horgan told a news conference in Victoria on Wednesday.

“I’m firmly of the view that this project, the LNG project in Kitimat, will benefit the region and everyone in it,” he said.

RCMP arrest 14 people in northern B.C. over anti-LNG pipeline protest

NEB agrees to hear jurisdictional challenge over key LNG Canada pipeline

LNG Canada, nation’s biggest private-sector project yet, wins go-ahead

Horgan made the comments following protests Tuesday and Wednesday sparked by the RCMP removing a blockade put in place by Indigenous protestors who oppose the Coastal GasLink project, which would connect B.C.’s gas fields with the $40-billion LNG Canada project in Kitimat, B.C.

He said comparisons to past protests against resource projects including the War in the Woods, and campaigns against the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipelines were not directly analogous to opposition to this week’s events — though many both in favour of the project and opposed see a direct parallel.

“This is the same fight as the fight to stop Trans Mountain’s disastrous diluted bitumen pipeline and tanker project. The risks are too great — we can not and will not allow them to destroy our way of life. No means no,” Tsleil-Waututh First Nation member Will George said in a release, distributed by Protect the Inlet.

Those in favour of the gas pipeline also see a direct comparison, and believe the current B.C. government has fostered some of the opposition.

“If you go back to when the NDP government was in opposition, they opposed everything,” Independent Contractors Association of B.C. president Chris Gardner said.

“The position they now find themselves in is that everyone they were allied with are very disappointed and continue to oppose the projects,” Gardner said.

RCMP roadblocks remained in place for a third day around the territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, where 14 people were arrested on Monday after the Mounties forcibly took apart a first gate blocking access to an area where Coastal GasLink wants to build a natural gas pipeline.

“We took legal action as a last resort and only after six years of unsuccessful efforts to find a mutual solution. We remain committed to keeping the lines of communication open,” Coastal GasLink president Rick Gateman said in an open letter to B.C. residents.

“Our only goal was and is to access the bridge and public road so our teams can travel to our pipeline right of way one kilometre away from the camp. Construction and pre-construction will not impact the camp,” he said.

TransCanada spokesperson Terry Cunha said in an email contractors were able to pass the second of two blockades thanks to RCMP assistance on Tuesday but had to continue dismantling additional barriers.

“After gaining safe access to the second blockade, our contractors focused their attention on safely and respectfully beginning the removal of road obstructions built over the past several weeks,” Cunha said.

A vocal counter protest in support of the Transcanada Coastal GasLink pipeline took place in downtown Calgary on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the arrest of the 14 people was “not an ideal situation” and that, while the situation is currently tense, he would seek to “reduce the temperature a little bit.”

In an interview with CBC News, Trudeau said, “there are a number of people and communities who are supportive, there are a number of folks who disagree with it.”

The arrests set off a string of protests in major Canadian cities, but Horgan said those protests “were not uniformly focused” on issues of First Nations land rights in northern B.C., which he said is at the heart of the disagreement this week.

A group of hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs in the region oppose the pipeline, while elected chiefs and councillors along the pipeline route have signed benefits agreements and support the project.

“LNG Canada and Coastal Gaslink have met our standards,” Haisla First Nation Chief Councillor Crystal Smith said in an open letter on Wednesday, adding the projects have already allowed the band to roll out new programs for its people.

“We urge you to think strongly about how your opposition to LNG developments is causing harm to our people and our wellbeing. Opposition does nothing towards empowering our Nation, but rather dismisses our Rights and Title and works towards separating our people from real benefits,” she said.

Horgan said these divisions highlight “the challenges that investors have, the challenges that governments have, that First Nations have” in B.C.

To complicate matters, there is no clear constitutional answer as to whether elected councils or hereditary chiefs should be consulted on resources projects, though many companies choose to consult with both.

“These all raise additional layers of legal complexity and uncertainty because the questions haven’t been resolved,” said University of Saskatchewan law professor Dwight Newman, who is also the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Rights in Constitutional and International Law.

Newman said the issues are especially complex in B.C. because, unlike the Prairie provinces and Ontario, most of the Indigenous groups in the province have not signed treaties with the provincial government.

A pipeline sign is pictured as indigenous leaders, Coast Salish Water Protectors and others demonstrate against the expansion of Texas-based Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline.

Executives within the energy sector and political observers in B.C. believe the same approaches used to delay oil pipelines such as the Trans Mountain expansion project, which, like Coastal GasLink, had the support of most First Nations along the route, are now being applied to natural gas pipelines.

“I think there is an attempt to map the characteristics of the oilsands campaign onto this campaign,” said Stewart Muir, of pro-industry advocacy group Resource Works in Victoria.

He added that pipeline opponents have been emboldened by successfully blocking or delaying oil pipelines and, “They’re not looking to retire having opposed oil pipelines.”

Natural gas pipelines have been challenged in the northeastern United States, where protestors have opposed “fracked gas” pipeline projects including the Mountain Valley pipeline, Constitution pipeline, North East Direct pipeline and others.

“What we’ve seen in the U.S. is the resistance has moved from very high profile protests to a much more organized challenge within the courts,” RS Energy director Jen Snyder said, adding that in the case of the Mountain Valley pipeline, delays caused costs to escalate by 60 per cent.

With a file from Canadian Press

• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: geoffreymorgan

Pipeline opponents, proponents see parallels in Coastal GasLink and Trans Mountain fights published first on https://worldwideinvestforum.tumblr.com/

Pipeline opponents, proponents see parallels in Coastal GasLink and Trans Mountain fights

CALGARY — British Columbia Premier John Horgan is trying to downplay comparisons between this week’s protests against the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline, which he supports, and the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain oil pipelines, which he has opposed.

“What’s relevant is the issue before us. In this case, it’s a natural gas pipeline that has support from 20 of the 20 bands along the pipeline, including the hereditary leadership,” Horgan told a news conference in Victoria on Wednesday.

“I’m firmly of the view that this project, the LNG project in Kitimat, will benefit the region and everyone in it,” he said.

RCMP arrest 14 people in northern B.C. over anti-LNG pipeline protest

NEB agrees to hear jurisdictional challenge over key LNG Canada pipeline

LNG Canada, nation’s biggest private-sector project yet, wins go-ahead

Horgan made the comments following protests Tuesday and Wednesday sparked by the RCMP removing a blockade put in place by Indigenous protestors who oppose the Coastal GasLink project, which would connect B.C.’s gas fields with the $40-billion LNG Canada project in Kitimat, B.C.

He said comparisons to past protests against resource projects including the War in the Woods, and campaigns against the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipelines were not directly analogous to opposition to this week’s events — though many both in favour of the project and opposed see a direct parallel.

“This is the same fight as the fight to stop Trans Mountain’s disastrous diluted bitumen pipeline and tanker project. The risks are too great — we can not and will not allow them to destroy our way of life. No means no,” Tsleil-Waututh First Nation member Will George said in a release, distributed by Protect the Inlet.

Those in favour of the gas pipeline also see a direct comparison, and believe the current B.C. government has fostered some of the opposition.

“If you go back to when the NDP government was in opposition, they opposed everything,” Independent Contractors Association of B.C. president Chris Gardner said.

“The position they now find themselves in is that everyone they were allied with are very disappointed and continue to oppose the projects,” Gardner said.

RCMP roadblocks remained in place for a third day around the territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, where 14 people were arrested on Monday after the Mounties forcibly took apart a first gate blocking access to an area where Coastal GasLink wants to build a natural gas pipeline.

“We took legal action as a last resort and only after six years of unsuccessful efforts to find a mutual solution. We remain committed to keeping the lines of communication open,” Coastal GasLink president Rick Gateman said in an open letter to B.C. residents.

“Our only goal was and is to access the bridge and public road so our teams can travel to our pipeline right of way one kilometre away from the camp. Construction and pre-construction will not impact the camp,” he said.

TransCanada spokesperson Terry Cunha said in an email contractors were able to pass the second of two blockades thanks to RCMP assistance on Tuesday but had to continue dismantling additional barriers.

“After gaining safe access to the second blockade, our contractors focused their attention on safely and respectfully beginning the removal of road obstructions built over the past several weeks,” Cunha said.

A vocal counter protest in support of the Transcanada Coastal GasLink pipeline took place in downtown Calgary on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the arrest of the 14 people was “not an ideal situation” and that, while the situation is currently tense, he would seek to “reduce the temperature a little bit.”

In an interview with CBC News, Trudeau said, “there are a number of people and communities who are supportive, there are a number of folks who disagree with it.”

The arrests set off a string of protests in major Canadian cities, but Horgan said those protests “were not uniformly focused” on issues of First Nations land rights in northern B.C., which he said is at the heart of the disagreement this week.

A group of hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs in the region oppose the pipeline, while elected chiefs and councillors along the pipeline route have signed benefits agreements and support the project.

“LNG Canada and Coastal Gaslink have met our standards,” Haisla First Nation Chief Councillor Crystal Smith said in an open letter on Wednesday, adding the projects have already allowed the band to roll out new programs for its people.

“We urge you to think strongly about how your opposition to LNG developments is causing harm to our people and our wellbeing. Opposition does nothing towards empowering our Nation, but rather dismisses our Rights and Title and works towards separating our people from real benefits,” she said.

Horgan said these divisions highlight “the challenges that investors have, the challenges that governments have, that First Nations have” in B.C.

To complicate matters, there is no clear constitutional answer as to whether elected councils or hereditary chiefs should be consulted on resources projects, though many companies choose to consult with both.

“These all raise additional layers of legal complexity and uncertainty because the questions haven’t been resolved,” said University of Saskatchewan law professor Dwight Newman, who is also the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Rights in Constitutional and International Law.

Newman said the issues are especially complex in B.C. because, unlike the Prairie provinces and Ontario, most of the Indigenous groups in the province have not signed treaties with the provincial government.

A pipeline sign is pictured as indigenous leaders, Coast Salish Water Protectors and others demonstrate against the expansion of Texas-based Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline.

Executives within the energy sector and political observers in B.C. believe the same approaches used to delay oil pipelines such as the Trans Mountain expansion project, which, like Coastal GasLink, had the support of most First Nations along the route, are now being applied to natural gas pipelines.

“I think there is an attempt to map the characteristics of the oilsands campaign onto this campaign,” said Stewart Muir, of pro-industry advocacy group Resource Works in Victoria.

He added that pipeline opponents have been emboldened by successfully blocking or delaying oil pipelines and, “They’re not looking to retire having opposed oil pipelines.”

Natural gas pipelines have been challenged in the northeastern United States, where protestors have opposed “fracked gas” pipeline projects including the Mountain Valley pipeline, Constitution pipeline, North East Direct pipeline and others.

“What we’ve seen in the U.S. is the resistance has moved from very high profile protests to a much more organized challenge within the courts,” RS Energy director Jen Snyder said, adding that in the case of the Mountain Valley pipeline, delays caused costs to escalate by 60 per cent.

With a file from Canadian Press

• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: geoffreymorgan

from Financial Post http://bit.ly/2RN6CVD via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

wrestling with eden

some first thoughts about trying to grow vegetables this summer. seedling photos taken from march 18th to 25th.

I have too often fantasized about withdrawing into some solitary rural utopia to live off vegetables planted with my own two hands — fingers cloaked with the damp scent of decay, gentle bird song, and the quiet promise of new life. I’ve probably had this fantasy at least as far back as when I first read “Jayber Crow”, a novel by Wendell Berry in which the protagonist abandons the path of a seminarian to return to a quiet rural town called Port William where he grew up as an orphan. He lives simply as a barber and plants his own vegetables in his backyard. For some reason, both back then and still now, something was really quite appealing about this. Granted Wendell Berry’s poetic prose is hardly what I would call resistible, more often, extremely gorgeous. He feels like one of the last great literary Romanticists, and so the idea of “returning” is thematic to his work, even if it is to a place characterized by painful imperfection and finitude. I suppose Berry’s insistence is that this proverbial ‘old home’ even with all its shortcomings has its own sort of abundance, and that modernity’s ideas of progress and abstract economic growth can so frequently fall very short, even precipitating a type of gratuitous scorn for ‘neo-Luddite’ simplicity, physical labour, or the soiling of one’s hands.

I: Returning to Where?

This theme of “returning” (e.g. to the labour of growing food) surfaces as a rather common literary theme, from Voltaire’s Candide to Huxley’s Brave New World. Yet I’m also aware of the great shortcomings of the Romanticist notion of “returning”. I think one of the best twists to this literary trope was in Margaret Atwood’s magnificent novel “Alias Grace” (one of my favourites) where Dr. Simon Jordan during his time in Kingston interviewing Grace Marks tries to start a vegetable garden of his own, very unsuccessfully. Admittedly, I will be attempting to undertake a similar quest this summer, and I (only half-jokingly) anticipate the same sort of fate for myself.

Atwood has a lot of fun with this image of a desperately failing gardening endeavour, poking fun at Dr. Jordan bringing vegetables bought from the market each day to his sessions with Grace (as Grace proverbially rolls her eyes each time) and also describing the dirt underneath Dr. Jordan’s fingernails, seemingly symbolic of the deprivation characteristic of his time in Kingston and how consumed and exhausted he becomes with his case. In my reading of it, Dr. Jordon’s lack of success with his garden seems emblematic of his own sexual frustration — the lack of the garden’s fertility paralleling his own sexual life under pressure from his mother. In other words, this Eden we yearn to return to does not exist in the way we imagine it does, or if it does, it’s often full of failure and disappointment. Like Marks it is something we feel obligated to nurture and protect (in our imagination), yet its jouissance remains unattainable. The image of a failing garden also seems emblematic of Dr. Jordan’s growing disillusionment with finding innocence where he once thought it could be. Atwood’s reminder is that the bucolic ‘paradise lost’ we want to reclaim is fictive construction all the way down. Caddy smelled like trees and it’s comforting, but in reality, we were always in the midst of the sound and the fury, and life is more complex and messy than we can often imagine.

In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway wrote that “the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection…” As a first-year student reading Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”, I became deeply absorbed with the book of Ecclesiastes, and it’s proposal that Haraway’s cyborg cannot quite recognize, an interesting exegetical elaboration on Genesis 3. The claim goes:

“for in respect of the fate of man and the fate of beast, they have one and the same fate: as the one dies so dies the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to noth­ing. Both go to the same place; both came from dust and both return to dust.” (Ecclesiastes 3:20, JPS)

And I admit I have often had this fantasy of returning to soil. Ecclesiastes like Genesis is surprisingly materialist in this respect. Mary Oliver elaborates quite beautifully on this Epicurean theme, saying:

“everything’s a little energy. You go back and you’re these little bits of energy and pretty soon you’re something else. Now that’s a continuance. It’s not the one we think of when we’re talking about the golden streets and the angels with how many wings and whatever, the hierarchy of angels… But it’s something quite wonderful. The world is pretty much — everything is mortal. It dies. But its parts don’t die. Its parts become something else. And we know that when we bury a dog in the garden. And with a rose bush on top of it. We know that there is replenishment. And that’s pretty amazing… And what more there might be, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure pretty confident of that one.”

II: Speaking of Death

Wendell Berry so often talks about death like this; for example, in The Unsettling of America, he quotes Sir Albert Howard talking about “the Wheel of Life (as he called it, borrowing the term from religion), by which 'Death supersedes life and life rises again from what is dead and decayed.’” Part of the consequences of our alienation from directly nurturing our own food is that we have grown so distant from the cycles of death and growth that such practices necessarily entail and guide our attention towards. I suspect that is in part where the Freudian diagnosis for modernity’s denial or repression of death comes from. Terry Eagleton, in a talk at the London Review Bookshop, mentioned that:

“For most of history, societies – pre-modern, tribal societies – have always believed that somehow an acknowledgement of death in some ritual kind of way is the condition for living well. Modernity tends to repress death; it can’t do anything with it. If you are seized by the ideology of progress, then it’s hard to fit death in at all. It’s embarrassing and it’s certainly not definitive (as it is for some pre-modern thought) of what life is actually about.”

Eagleton as a Catholic Marxist recognizes resurrection's centrality to the Christian tradition, and as John Polkinghorne has astutely pointed out, a proper acknowledgement of death’s finality and gravity is prerequisite for resurrection to mean anything at all, hence the distinction between Christian resurrection and Plato’s ‘survival of the soul’ (which so commonly passes for Christian eschatology).

Our alienation from death’s ubiquity is something I also sense as related to our unconscious fear of death, exhibited by euphemisms like ‘passed away’, the countless commercial products offering us body parts that appear younger (and farther from death), and especially in the enormous amounts of expenditure poured into military and carceral institutions, which promise to keep death at bay, and give some illusion of control.

III: Self-Sufficiency and Control

Contemporary vegetable gardening can often be framed in terms of these illusions of control and radical self-sufficiency. I think Wendell Berry is someone who’s very attentive to the ‘giveness’ and grace that unfolds quietly around him as a farmer, and growing food for a living allows him to see that there’s nothing to congratulate himself over with respect to this earthy practice. Also, that he is in no position to treat plants and the soil in any manner he wishes, with chemical byproducts from militaristic research. In the beautiful film “Look and See” Berry says:

“The world is in fact full of free things that are delightful. Flowers. The world is also full of people who would rather pay for something to kill the dandelions than to appreciate the dandelions. Well, I’m a dandelion man myself.”

It’s alarming to see the ideology behind the preemptive strikes of American militarism filter their way down into how North Americans engage in gardening or the pervasive ubiquity of hand-sanitizer dispensers. And how laughable it is when we use the language of “invasive species”, when we are of course the most destructive “invasive species” we know of. Ironically, even the U.S. Army in its "The Complete Guide to Edible Wild Plants" recognizes that all parts of the dandelion plant are edible. Euell Gibbons' "Stalking the Wild Asparagus" gives some good tips for when best to pick them. The Berkeley Open Source Food project is also a great place to learn more about feral foraging.

Anyways, I think Donna Haraway’s elaborations on Eden in “Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science” help expose the extent to which self-sufficiency narratives are constructed and crafted, especially in her chapter on Jane Goodall in a National Geographic documentary being filmed by her husband:

“[The National Geographic film] Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees (1965)… is a first contact narrative, recognizable within science fiction conventions… it is a story of the self-sufficiency… of a young single white woman in nature… The narrative of first contacts proceeds in several stages… Goodall, constructed as rigorously alone and undergoing hardships and dangers, first is shown spotting the elusive chimpanzees only by signs of their passage—a tuft of hair on a bush. She descends toward where she spotted the animals, but “the wild chimpanzees flee the pale-skinned stranger invading their domain.” No cameras are visible; no clue has been given so far how Goodall herself has been made visible…

Day ends, with Goodall on the mountain top. “Here Jane will spend the night, high above the African forest.” Goodall’s voice confirms, “…[I] enjoyed those nights in the mountains with no human companionship. …There is only one jarring note in the scene of the female representative of man alone in the Garden—she eats a spare dinner of pork and beans from a tinned can. The odd sign evokes the history of the transformation of systems of production and of daily habits in the mid-nineteenth century, when large-scale canning in the U. S. got a huge boost from demand created during the Civil War (Boorstin 1974: 309–22). The tin can on Jane’s mountain top preserves pork, beans, and the social relations of industrial capitalism enabling the colonial “penetration” and division of Africa.”

As I try growing vegetables in my backyard this summer I also recognize the risks of getting a little too carried away with the fictive mythos of self-sufficiency. At the same time I’m deeply shaped by the story of Exodus, with its story of manna in the desert serving as a counter narrative to self-sufficiency. Gardening can be both a reminder of how dependent we are on things beyond ourselves, or it can yield a false impression of self-sufficiency. One view accounts for the variety of species we have co-evolved alongside for millions of years and the planetary systems that make our lives possible, the other does not quite register this reality. In some sense growing food does feel like an exodus of sorts from the type of capitalist commodification of food. Like Kool AD once rapped: “Some don't eat enough, food should be free, what up? It used to be, when it was growing on the trees and stuff.”

Yet that “used to be” is also in some sense a fictive construction, though one that serves a purpose I think to be somewhat worthwhile. It really doesn’t take long though to realize there is no adequately or satisfactorily untangling myself from the inevitable contradictions of capitalism. I’m firmly implicated in it. Beyond the plastic gardening pots I bought from Dollarama, there are many other contradictions lurking less obviously out of view, like Jane Goodall’s camera-wielding husband and the long commodity chains and imperialistic military history buttressing her can of beans.

IV: Sphagnum Peat Moss

Starting seedlings for this summer vegetable garden, I shelled out a couple dollars for some dehydrated sphagnum peat moss pellets. Needless to say, I had almost no idea what peat moss really was when I purchased it, and how it was ‘harvested’, or rather ‘mined’. Having read somewhere that normal soil from by backyard e.g. was not ideal for getting seeds started (as they often have pathogens and seeds of other plants mixed in) I set about trying to find some starter soil at the closest big box retailer near my home. Jiffy peat pellets were all I could find. Only in the process of writing this did I gain a better sense of what sphagnum peat moss really is.

Sphagnum moss is in fact a moss (a rootless plant) as the name suggests that grows in wetland bogs. When sphagnum moss dies it is honoured with a new name: “peat.” (As Jesus once said: “I tell you, you are Peat, and on this bog I will build my garden, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it!”) Yet ironically, it’s dead vegetation from the very realm of Hades we are talking about here. This peat accumulates in layers submerged in wetlands. Peat pellets then are basically dehydrated moss corpses that provide a good substrate to start seeds on. Maybe they are emblematic of capitalism’s capacity to commodify the cycles of death and life, alienate these cycles from their contexts, and then render their underlying ubiquity invisible to human attention that is so conditioned by modern processes of production and consumption. Or maybe just invisible to people as clueless as myself.

Peat harvesting if done irresponsibly can contribute to the disappearance of wetlands, which is also well underway by worldwide wetland draining for agricultural or urban development. Peatlands are important carbon sinks, but become large sources of carbon emissions once drained, as they release all that carbon back into the atmosphere. They are also important treasure troves for historians and scientists trying to learn more about our past. Because of their acidity and anaerobic conditions, peatlands are very good at preserving the remnants of organic life. “Koelbjerg Man” is the oldest human bog body (‘mummy’) that has been found, dating back to ~8000 BCE.

The peat pellets I’ve started some seedlings on were harvested in Canada, probably somewhere in Quebec or New Brunswick, where most of the country’s peat harvesting is concentrated. There is a report put out by the Government of Canada that claims peat accumulates in Canada 60 times faster than the rate at which it is being harvested. And peat harvesting in Canada is subject to regulatory oversight ensuring measures for peatland restoration after harvesting takes place. The report also claims peat harvesting accounts for only around 0.02% of wetland loss compared to agriculture’s 85%. However, it’s difficult to get a sense of how benign peat harvesting is from a government that has such a vested economic interest in ensuring as much of its land remains as productive as possible. What I do know is Tim Moore, a professor at McGill, did explicitly identify peat harvesting as one of the threats to wetlands. It’s proportional contribution was not mentioned. There’s also a 2009 paper by Winkler and DeWitt at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who identify US peat-mining impacts to include:

“1) toxic-metal release from peat,

2) eutrophication of surface waters,

3) increased runoff (including flooding and impacts on fisheries),

4) release of organic pollutants,

5) changes of salt and freshwater systems,

6) changes in ground-water supply, and

7) air pollution and fires.”

So however marginal the impacts of peat harvesting/mining are, I still find the little seedlings sprouting by my window implicated in this strange situation. It’s certainly not an innocent Eden I’m ‘returning’ to, yet I haven’t quite escaped Eden either. Unable to escape the gravitational pull of that primordial Garden, this story of summer vegetable gardening also begins with the theme of death.

V: In the Beginning / Death

In “Genesis and Apocalypse”, Altizer’s thermodynamically inflected theology speaks of: 

“the beginning of a full and final actuality, an actuality which is perishing itself, and a perishing which we know as history. For the advent of history is the advent of death… Thus the beginning of history is the beginning of fall, a fall from a consciousness that is closed to the full actuality of perishing and death, and a fall from an original or primordial state or condition that is an undifferentiated condition and therefore an original state of serenity and silence. That fall is the inauguration of the revelation of I AM…

…with the closure of the cycle of eternal return, ending becomes manifest and real as an irrevocable perishing, a death… The advent of irrevocable death is… the advent of a final actuality, an actuality inseparable from unique and irreversible events, and an actuality bestowing upon life itself the finality of an inescapable and irrevocable death. Consequently, the finalities of life and death are now inseparable, as the advent of irrevocable death bestows upon life itself a new finality…

Only the final ending of eternal recurrence or eternal return makes possible a once and for all and irreversible beginning, an actual beginning which is absolutely new, and is absolutely new only by way of the absolute ending of an eternity which is eternally the same. Consequently, God is the self-emptying or the self-negation of that eternity, a self-negation which is a once and for all and irreversible event, and therefore is the actual event of death.”

Altizer suggests that if we imagine God within the domain of eternity, ‘outside time’, unchanging, then Creation for God is a type of death, or the beginning of a death. It is the death of primordial eternity that allows temporal history to burst forth. Soil and peat both allude to this untidy paradox intermingling death and new life together. Many modern peat bogs formed around 12000 years ago after the glacial retreat of the last ice age, around when agriculture was beginning to emerge. A tiny and silent eternity, broken, in the act of harvesting, all for some superfluous seedlings to begin the irreversible process of sprouting.

Sphagnum peat moss, apart from being biologically dead, also alludes to the threat of a much larger and menacing death. As peat becomes a quickly disappearing carbon sink across various global ecosystems, these little seedlings sitting by my window cannot help but allude to the menacing global warming apocalypse very vivid in 21st century imagination. The Edenic resonance is stark: “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Jack Miles, in his book “God: A Biography”, suggests:

“When the serpent tells the woman that, contrary to what the Lord God said, she will not die if she eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the serpent is telling the truth. She and the man do not die when they break the Lord God’s command; certainly, they do not die, as the Lord God had warned, ‘as soon as you eat of it.’”

Yet it’s far less certain the prophetic warnings of climate change are full of empty threats. Death is impending. Peat is one of many carbon troves being mined and released into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. Ta-Nehisi Coates yields a prophetic warning that connects the historical plunder of colonized peoples with the contemporary plunder of the earth:

“Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.”

VI: Vulnerability and Interdependence

What this looming threat of death instills if anything, is a particular realization of fragility and vulnerability, both in ourselves and those around us. If the crucifixion is to mean anything to the Christian imagination, it must recognize God in the middle of this fragility and vulnerability also. If loving God and loving others are one and the same great command, it must recognize this fragility as reality, and therefore also the urgent need to care and protect. And this fragility and vulnerability in both others and God, must also lend itself to a realization of a vulnerability in one’s own self, and an understanding that being ‘self-made’ is an implausible narrative that, like bad soil, holds no water.

This complex interdependency however implicates all of us, even in getting a vegetable garden started I now realize. Is self-sufficiency plausible, I ask myself, when I did not make the laptop I’m typing this on, or when I did nothing to pump the water for my plants all the way from Lake Ontario, to say nothing of cleaning this water or constructing the infrastructure to get it past my doorstep. Did I carefully tend and select cherry tomatoes year after year like Alan Chadwick, or start a corporation to commodify such a plant and sell it in a local hardware chain store? Before making a delicious salsa verde, did I gather seeds last season from beautiful little Tomatillo fruits to return to the Port Credit seed library?

What I think the Port Credit seed library is so beautiful at reminding me of is that planting and growing things is a community affair. Seeds imply people who came before me, and my dependence on them. A seed library suggests that this dependence does not require capitalist commodification. There is an alternative mode of being and relating in this world. Maybe someone will tell me the better alternative to sphagnum peat moss to get my seedlings started next year. But seriously though, if Dr. Simon Jordan’s gardening fate is my own, there will be a few less seed packs at the Port Credit seed library next year. For that I will be deeply sorry, but it will also be something to laugh about. After all, I’m a long ways away from untangling my own eating habits from capitalist commodification. There is maybe no innocent utopia to return to here. I don’t know what to do with myself most days. I suppose though that these seedlings have germinated some thoughts in my own head, thoughts that would not have otherwise made their way there. That’s an ancient and old miracle about plants. I like to think there’s something to having conversations with plants and there’s something to the Amazonian Cofan notion that plants can sing and speak to us. I will finish with this lovely excerpt from a Wade Davis talk:

“the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally because they're denatured by an enzyme found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase. They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction with some other chemical that denatures the MAO. Now, the fascinating things are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question. How, in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants, do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants that when combined in this way, created a kind of biochemical version of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts?

Well, we use that great euphemism, "trial and error," which is exposed to be meaningless. But you ask the Indians, and they say, "The plants talk to us."

Well, what does that mean? This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca, all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest, all of which are referable to our eye as one species. And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy and they say, "I thought you knew something about plants. I mean, don't you know anything?" And I said, "No." Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key. Now, that's not going to get you a Ph.D. at Harvard, but it's a lot more interesting than counting stamens.”

LPO 2018: Perks of Legal Process Outsourcing to the Philippines

Outsourced legal services - Challenges for medium-sized monetary service providers. LPO service suppliers have in-home attorneys who advise and assist in reducing the expenditure that's incurred while reviewing authorized documents. The outsourcing of e-discovery companies also helps firms avoid enlisting the companies of attorneys who overcharge,” says Amrita. Control: How comfy are you working with individuals that aren't your staff? When you're a micro-supervisor, then digital assistants aren't for you. If you anticipate employees to learn your thoughts, you then will not succeed with digital assistants. John Terry: Sure, well we've got clients in Europe, America, and even out of India. Inner Governance Approach: The work outsourced to India is topic to stringent accuracy checksfor willpower of high quality of work at multiple levels. Evaluations and assessments of an associate's efficiency stays unbiased and relies on meritocracy, which in turn imbibes a constructive impression on the associates and adds momentum to their quest for offering customary work product. Vigorous competitors <a href="https://youtu.be/4xoa8cGeYs#LegalOutsource">Legal Outsource</a> among the many teams and throughout LPOs to carry out better inculcates a passion to pursue target completion which is once more a calculated basis for measuring efficiency. Data Processing in E-Discovery: A large US law agency makes use of Jotwani Associates for Litigation E-Discovery. It ftp's 25-50 GB data regularly on Jotwani Associates maintained servers. Jotwani Associates team makes use of modern E-Discovery instruments comparable to Clearwell, CaseLogitix, Concordance for processing knowledge - DeNist, Dedupe, Search, Covert and Produce. The produced data will be reviewed anyplace on the planet through the use of cloud providers. Hope LPO suppliers learn this. I extremely suggest Castillos Paralegal. Fast, professional and courteous! Very punctual and responsive, issues that i really appreciate when your time is important So I charge them 5++ Stars. Join below to receive our month-to-month newsletter containing recommendations on varied ways a contract paralegal can provide experienced, value-efficient help to your regulation agency or corporate legal division.|Digital Authorized Assistant provides you with comprehensive authorized and administrative assistant providers important to the efficient operation of your successful enterprise. The hot button is to outsource, but to have the ability to handle and monitor the progress of your outsourced work. Many service suppliers have procedures in place that guarantee the very best ranges of consumer confidentiality and skilled delivery. These will also enable actual-time workflow supply, enabling executives to watch the standard of their providers for a fraction of the standard time. View our full checklist of providers and converse with a licensed paralegal to see if your case is fit for our workforce. Damien Carrick: That is actually interesting. So the US attorneys may realise that they need one thing achieved, or a solution to a question late within the afternoon, however they will not need to work into the night time, they will just e mail the task to India and get an answer by the following morning, American time. One of the benefits of outsourcing include the choice to pick out services that operate in areas with lower wages. LPO was an advanced attributable to many unfavourable experiences that corporations <a href="https://youtu.be/4xoa8cGeYs#LegalOutsource">Legal Outsource</a> had with offshore companies. Things have taken a more positive flip right this moment with advances in communication and connectivity making collaborations between legal firms, legal departments, and LPO suppliers simpler and safer. Prices are diminished by means of operating in a location with lower wages, and thru leveraging economies of scale by de-skilling and automating commoditised work, or making use of process management whereby a foreign-qualified lawyer or paralegal can perform routine tasks that will traditionally have been given to an affiliate for the next charge-out rate. Another con is the virtual assistant might not have a authorized background and I might solely really feel snug giving them basic administrative duties. If you happen to're prepared to spend important cash and want a really top-notch part-time Executive Assistant, then check out EA Assist Many attorneys would recognize this service, and it prices nothing to inquire. It takes time to build relationships with purchasers who will help build your authorized brand. And no consumer relationship is the same as the next. Some cases are simple, and some are considerably extra complex.|QuisLex is an award-profitable authorized providers provider that focuses on delivering the advantages of operational excellence, course of rigor, and measurable quality to giant-scale, complicated legal work. Chapman: KIM is expertise that helps professionals do their jobs better. What you're seeing is an increase in digital assistants. Siri, Uber - these are virtual assistants. What's fascinating about this pattern is it starts placing power in the palms of the customer. Authorized Course of Outsourcing (LPO) describes the observe of a corporation or law firm acquiring authorized assist services from one other agency or service provider. Arch World Options is an outsourcing BPO companies firm focusing on data entry and net mining. Bassli: In terms of India particularly, there was a little bit of a learning curve that happened on each side, from the provider and from us as a customer. The LPO providers in India have matured their business model, they've matured their talent set they usually've matured their degree of buyer engagement. Even things like writing model and communication style have become extra refined. If an lawyer is aware <a href="https://youtu.be/6vXO3rtFOM#LPOPhilippines">LPO Philippines</a> of that they are going to be outsourcing sure duties, the retainer settlement ought to state how the costs might be allocated. Outsourcing certain administrative features may be beneficial to most small firms or solo practitioners. It's less clear whether outsourcing substantive authorized work, both domestically or offshore, shall be beneficial to the small agency. The economics argue for it, however the logistics, the challenges and the risks make outsourcing more challenging. And outsourcing offshore adds a layer of complexity most small companies is not going to or cannot tolerate.

https://www.facebook.com/163090657590893/posts/214166242483334 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1913675655537570/permalink/1989934611245007 https://www.facebook.com/144409502871097/posts/161960531115994 https://www.facebook.com/163090657590893/posts/214167432483215 https://www.facebook.com/144409502871097/posts/161961257782588

New world news from Time: ‘North Korea Is the Biggest Threat to All Humankind.’ U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad Talks to TIME

Tucked between northeastern Beijing’s third and fourth ring-roads, the U.S. Embassy in China is a squat complex of silver-gray buildings, with the ambassador’s office on the fourth floor. Inside, besides the requisite star-spangled banners, grinning photos and auspicious Chinese calligraphy, the new occupant has placed what looks like an incongruous addition on a low shelf behind the desk: a model of a yellow-green John Deere tractor.

“They have five factories here,” U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad tells TIME in an exclusive interview, his first since arriving in Beijing in July. “But I had to sell all my John Deere stock when I was appointed ambassador because they do business in China.”

And yet a tractor is, in many ways, a fitting symbol of Branstad’s heritage as the former Governor of Iowa — America’s second most productive agricultural state after California — as well as the deep economic and cultural links he’s built with China since his first visit here in 1984. Some $1.4 billion of Iowa’s total $2.3 billion agricultural exports in 2015 went to China — mainly soybean and pork — and U.S. President Donald Trump has tasked Branstad with helping to boost the trade relationship on a national scale, hopefully eating into the $347 billion trade deficit that Trump claims costs American jobs. (Though most economists disagree.)

But besides trade, Branstad’s new portfolio includes easing the myriad frictions between the world’s established superpower and its presumptive one. Washington and Beijing clash on human-rights, censorship, territorial claims in the South China Sea, intellectual property theft, cyber-espionage and much more. Top of the agenda is how to rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. On the morning Branstad sat down with TIME on a white leather sofa, briefing folder open on his lap, Kim Jong Un fired another ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan — one experts say soared ten times higher than the International Space Station and could potentially have reached anywhere in the continental United States.

“North Korea is the biggest threat to all of humankind as far as I’m concerned today,” says Branstad. “And I think the cooperation and collaboration with China has improved dramatically since I’ve been here.”

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that on Apr. 29, 1985, Branstad met a young Chinese official from Hebei province leading a five-strong agricultural delegation to Iowa. “His business card said ‘Feed Association of Shijiazhuang,’” Branstad recalls. That official’s name was Xi Jinping, and today he boasts several more impressive titles, including President of China. The two men stuck up an easy rapport that continued as Xi ascended the slippery ziggurat of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). When Branstad received Trump’s nomination for ambassador, Chinese officials described the mustachioed 71-year-old as an “old friend of China,” a big compliment in Beijing-speak.

“I’m in a unique situation in that I’m an old friend of Xi Jinping and a loyal supporter of the [U.S.] president,” Branstad explains. “And this is probably the most important relationship in the world — between China and the United States.”

Xi and Branstad connected again in 2011, when, in his second stint as Iowa governor after an 11-year hiatus from public life, Branstad made another trade mission to Hebei province. “Normally I visit the party secretary or the governor of Hebei,” says Branstad. This time, however, “I get to meet with the Vice-President Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People.”

Xi spent 45 minutes reminiscing about his time in Iowa in 1985 (“as governor I only gave people half-an-hour,” grins Branstad) — reeling off the names of all the people he’d met and places visited. “He went to a birthday party, he visited farms and factories, he went to the president of the corn growers, he went to a turkey farm, he went to the Monsanto plant,” says Branstad. “He said that when he thinks of America he thinks of the wonderful people he met in Iowa and he calls us ‘old friends.’”

Following that visit, Branstad decided to invite Xi for a reunion in the Hawkeye State the next year. Within months plans were well underway, allowing Xi to reconnect with the Dvorchak family, with whom he stayed in Muscatine in 1985 — even posing for informal photos around a roaring fireplace. It’s a cozy scene that is difficult to reconcile with a man who at October’s 19th CCP Congress was apotheosized alongside Mao Zedong as one of modern China’s greatest leaders.

“Long-term friendships and relationships are really important in this culture,” says Branstad. “But now I have to deliver the message on things that we are not happy with. And yet I think I have some credibility because of that long-term relationship.”

Trump painted China as America’s nemesis during his volcanic campaign, blaming its export-driven economy for stealing American jobs, as well as predatory trade practices such as currency manipulation. As Branstad went through the ambassadorial confirmation process, Trump even questioned Chinese sovereignty over self-governing Taiwan — a bold affront to Beijing, which regards the island of 23 million as its own.

Since then, though, Trump has dialed down his antagonism, welcomed Xi to his Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago in April, and then enjoyed a gilded “state visit-plus” to Beijing earlier this month. Trump was treated to unprecedented honors, such as dining in the Forbidden City — home of China’s emperors. But the subsequent joint press conference featured no questions (in contrast to Barack Obama’s team insisting on some during his last visit, in a pointed reminder to their authoritarian hosts on the merits of a free press). In fact, TIME and several other foreign media were denied access altogether. Critics said China was being given a free pass for its worsening record on human-rights and free speech. Jorge Guajardo, Mexico’s ambassador to China from 2007 to 2013, told Quartz that China played Trump “like a fiddle.”

For Branstad, however, there is no letting up on subjects that are “part of American DNA.” He says: “We are bringing up human-rights issues all the time. Unfortunately, China is an authoritarian system, it’s a one-party communist-ruled country. We are a democratic country with a free-market system.”

Branstad says he had “many meetings” with Chinese officials regarding imprisoned democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo, and managed to allow him to be visited by American and German doctors. Liu died in detention, unable to seek treatment for cancer abroad that medical experts said could have saved his life. Today, Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, remains under virtual house arrest. She has never been charged with a crime yet is unable to leave the country despite repeatedly expressing her desire to do so.

“We’re still trying to see that his wife is free to travel,” says Branstad. “But we find that the best and most effective way to try and get action here is not to shame them publicly but to meet with them privately.”

That’s also how Branstad hopes to make progress on North Korea and he has enlisted the help of Sheena Greitens, an East Asia expert at the University of Missouri. She put together a group to coach the new Ambassador about the Koreas, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and other regional issues. China has also signed up to two new U.N. Security Council Resolutions since Branstad took the job, and he believes Chinese support for its historic ally is wavering. “I think the attitude has changed here,” he says. For one thing, he adds, the timing of North Korean nuclear and missile tests at politically sensitive moments for Beijing show they “are as much against Xi Jinping and China as they are against the United States.”

Whether China will turn off the half a million barrels of oil it sends to North Korea each year is another question. For Xi, squeezing the Kim regime to the brink of collapse would risk open conflict with an irascible nuclear power, as well as a torrent of refugees pouring across their shared border, and the strategic headache of a united Korean peninsular ruled from Seoul, possibly putting American troops on his doorstep. Still, “China has taken steps much further than a lot of people thought they ever would on the sanctions,” says Branstad. “Obviously the big thing is oil — that’s probably the biggest thing that could make a difference.” And if the situation doesn’t improve? “Military action is a last resort, but that is an option as well,” he says.

That would, of course, mean missiles falling less than 500 miles from Beijing, where Branstad has not only been joined by his wife, but also their daughter and her husband — who both work at an international school — as well his two young grandchildren. The family is heading back to Iowa for Christmas, but held Thanksgiving in the sprawling Chinese capital, where Branstad says all are thriving despite an oppressive regimen of choking pollution, whirring air purifiers and freezing temperatures. His daughter’s family has even purchased an electric buggy to weave through the city’s traffic like savvy locals. “They are young,” says Brandstad of his grandchildren, “but this is a great time to learn Mandarin, just like the president’s granddaughter. We’re hopeful that they’ll be fluent before it’s over.”

December 01, 2017 at 01:35PM ClusterAssets Inc.,