I was thinking that people saying Marcille's relationship with Falin is the driving force of so much of Dungeon Meshi were overselling it a bit, since Marcille's original desire driving her to the dungeon (and eventually becoming its lord) is equalizing the races, but even if she noticed tensions between human species before, iirc Falin was her first real friend, so that's probably the first time Marcille really had skin in the game (besides the loss of her father, but he's already gone). So it does come back to Falin after all, and it's even more appropriate that Marcille makes it to the bottom of the dungeon chasing her.

CULTURE ON THE FRONT LINE

At the Cannes Film Festival, the director Сергей Лозница was awarded the French Culture Award - France Culture for his contribution to film art. Congratulations! Loznitsa made a speech commenting, in particular, the demands to boycott Russian culture. Here's what he said:

Ladies and gentlemen! I am very honored to receive this award. I thank Mrs. Sandrine Trenier and her colleagues from France Culture for appreciating my film work, supporting my views and position.

For all of us, culture is a matter of life, and today we were all on the frontline. On the one hand - those who demand to ban Russian cinema, and to completely "cancel" Russian culture. On the other hand, those who are against the total boycott of culture.

Immediately after the beginning of Russian aggression in Ukraine, I opposed the total ban of Russian cinema and the boycott of Russian culture. Some of my compatriots responded to this demand by boycotting my films - in particular, films about current and past wars - "Donbass", "Maidan", "Babiy Yar". It is amazing that a few years ago the same films - "Donbass" and "Maidan" were already banned. This happened in totalitarian Russia, by order of the FSB. Today Ukrainian "activists" demand to cancel the screenings of these films in the democratic European Union. It is with regret that in some issues their position coincides with the position of the Russian FSB.

Unfortunately, the Cannes Festival ended up on the front line today.

To my knowledge, only once in the 75-year history of the Cannes Festival has its management received a letter from the head of the State Film Foundation demanding the removal of a citizen of that state from its program. This happened in 1969 with Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Andrey Rublev".

This year, the same story happened to my film "Natural History of Destruction" produced in Germany, Lithuania and the Netherlands, which will be premiered the day after tomorrow. A film about the problem that has again become monstrously relevant in the war that Russia is waging in Ukraine: can we use peaceful civilian population and human life space as a resource for war? It turns out that the leaders of organizations supporting Ukrainian cinema are not bothered by this problem. They are only concerned that a citizen of Ukraine dared to express an opinion opposite to the opinion of the majority. They are waging a war on their special front - not where the fate of Europe, modern civilization and perhaps all humanity is decided, but where state building is replaced by the war of cultures, where knowledge of one's own history is replaced by mythology, where freedom of speech and freedom of expression are declared enemy propaganda.

The events of these three military months, and the aggression to which individual cultural institutions have been exposed and are exposed -not only museums, theaters, cinemas, galleries, but also directors, actors, conductors, artists, musicians - require reflection. We need to understand: what is going on? And who needs this?

Language is one of the most important and fundamental categories of culture. In language and with the help of language, human misunderstandings are formed and expressed. The demand to ban culture is equivalent to the demand to ban language. The demand is as immoral as it is insane. How can you ban a language spoken by 350 million people on the globe? I am addressing you now in my native language, which I have spoken in my native city of Kiev since childhood. Most of the refugees from the eastern regions of Ukraine speak this language. In the same language, heroic defenders of Zmeiny island explained to Russian aggressors where they should go. Modern Ukraine is a multinational and multicultural country. The demand for a boycott of Russian language and culture, which is also the achievement and wealth of Ukraine, is archaic and destructive in nature. Instead of putting Russian, the native language of 30 percent of this country's citizens, at the service of Ukraine, telling the truth about the terrible war, "cultural activists" are exhausting themselves with a meaningless, Sisyphus labor - to destroy what is indestructible.

It seems that by "culture" these people mean a simple set of individual works - films, novels, plays, paintings, etc.  But this is not the case.

Culture is human activity in its various manifestations, it is the rituals and practices of our lives, it is the forms and ways of human self-knowledge and self-expression, it is our memory and practices of its preservation and reproduction. And, in the end, culture is cultivation, it's development. I think that all of you - France Culture employees, patrons and friends of this wonderful organization, know this very well. How can you fight against all this? How can you identify the atrocities committed by the current Russian regime (in fact, in the last hundred years in Russia there have been no other regimes than authoritarian, violent ones) with the works of those Russian authors, often outcasts and almost always mourning prophets in their unfortunate homeland, which have become part of the world culture, which means - the property of all humanity? How can you, in response to the barbarities committed by Putin’s regime in Ukraine, demand to destroy or abolish what has always stood against barbarism? This makes no logic or sense.

French philosopher Rene Girard writes: "The object of genuine hatred can only be the person who prevents us from satisfying our desire - even though he himself has inspired it. The hater hates himself first of all, and behind his hatred hides a secret worship. Trying to hide from others and himself this desperate adoration, he refuses to see in his image anything but an obstacle. The secondary role of the sample, thus, comes to the foreground and completely overlaps its original, which was its religious imitation.” What is happening to us? What's going on with culture? I believe that it is through constructive and in-depth discussion, rather than various prohibitions, that it is possible to answer those questions. And if we're talking about cinema, I think that the European Film Academy can be a platform for a nationwide conference with philosophers, anthropologists, film historians, cultural scientists, filmmakers, directors and screenwriters willing to discuss this very serious problem.

Stefan Zweig recalls in his memoirs the atmosphere of the First World War: "France and England were "conquered" in Vienna and Berlin, on the Ringstrasse and Friedrichstrasse. English and French inscriptions were to disappear on the shops; even the monastery "To the Angelic Maids" had to change its name, because the people were outraged, not knowing that the "English" meant angels, not Anglo-Saxons. Naive businessmen pasted stamps on envelopes with the words 'God punish England! ", secular ladies swore that while alive, they would not speak a single word in French. Shakespeare was taken out of German theaters, Mozart and Wagner - from French and English music halls, German professors declared Dante a German, and French - Beethoven, a Belgian, thoughtlessly appropriating spiritual heritage from enemy countries." Does this remind you of anything?

Fate has given me a few years of friendship with the great Irene Weisite, a Lithuanian Jew, rescued from the Kaunas ghetto, a professor of theater science and a specialist of German literature, associate of George Soros and an outstanding public figure. Irena once recalled that in the ghetto she and her teenage friends organized an underground group of German poetry. In the evenings, they would sneak up and read poems by Goethe, Gaine, Schiller to each other. "But how is it so? After all, there was the speech of German executioners around you every day? " - I exclaimed. Irena looked at me with astonishment: "Yes, but what did it have to do with Goethe?! "

Only a few are given such a gift of spiritual wisdom, only a few can reach such humanity, only true heroes are capable of nobility. But each of us, people of culture, have the duty to make an effort to confront barbarism in any of its manifestations. I am often asked - what should an artist do during the war? My answer is simple - preserve common sense and protect the culture.

Thank you.

On May 23, the Cannes Film Festival will host the premiere of Loznica's film "The Natural History of Destruction", edited from archival materials about carpet bombing of European cities during World War II.

Seeing is Believing.

The relentlessly hellish 1985 war film Come and See has marched to the number two spot on Letterboxd thanks to a stunning restoration, digital availability and pandemic-panic. Aaron Yap surveys the community’s reviews of Elem Klimov’s “mortar-blast of a masterpiece” for insights into its importance—and our psychic states.

War is hell—fundamentally the principle behind every anti-war movie, but there’s arguably never been one that conjures this state of being as convincingly as Elem Klimov’s 1985 Come and See (‘Idi i Smotri’) does. And it’s a hellscape that appears to be wildly resonating with the Letterboxd community—the film has now unseated The Godfather to take second place in our Official Top 250 Narrative Feature Films list, just behind Parasite.

For those yet to surrender to this mortar-blast of a masterpiece, Come and See plunges the viewer into the chaos and devastation of the 1943 Nazi invasion of Soviet Belorussia. Based on Klimov and writer Ales Adamovich’s own experiences during World War II, and the accounts of genocide survivors, it’s almost an anti-anti-war film. There are no professional actors. No battle scenes. No digestible history-pedia plot beats. No heroic feats of courage. Our guide into the harrowing void is a fourteen-year-old partisan adolescent named Florya (Aleksey Kravchenko).

Joining a troop of resistance fighters against his mother’s wishes, he embarks on an unnervingly subjective odyssey that leaves him a shrivelled, visibly aged husk by the end. It’s without question one of cinema’s most heart-breaking, unforgettable transformations.

Come and See is not a standard art picture per se. Klimov’s vision contains traces of Andrei Tarkovsky’s poetic, deep-dream sensibilities—many images assume otherworldly, psychedelic qualities that lodge in our mind and occasionally temper the pools of screaming despair around it. But the film is also as immediate as the lacerating scald of a flamethrower to the face. It possesses the grubby, cult-ish midnight-movie energy of something you should probably not be witnessing.

Awareness of the film’s infamous production lore—the plan to hypnotize Kravchenko, the use of live ammunition and real Nazi uniforms—only adds to the whole unshakeably surreal experience. Perhaps only Threads comes close to its singularly nightmarish, nearly unbearable grip.

While the film’s detractors point to a certain misery-porn obviousness (“a Disneyland dark-ride”, writes Nick), the majority of Letterboxd reviewers are unable to deny the sheer, overwhelming, scorched-earth impact of the film:

“It’s just so utterly fucking relentless.” —Andrew

“I am shaken to the core. Come and See is the only war film anyone needs to watch.” —Matt

“It is—through and through—a physical experience. It can be felt all the way to the bone. At a certain point it just stops being a movie, it leaves the screen and begs to become a part of you.” —Anna

“It’s no joyous or action-oriented trip of entertainment: it is authentic horror, flawlessly filmed. Be prepared.” —Edgar

“The most horrifying non-horror horror film of all time.” —Anton

In a more measured take, Mike D’Angelo questions the value of recreating this savage piece of history: “It’s undeniably powerful—so much so that it’s pretty much the sole memory I retained from my first viewing—but enduring it a second time made me more sympathetic toward the ‘some things are too monstrous to function as art’ camp than I’ve generally been in the past.”

Likewise, Robb struggled, preferring a more nuanced depiction: “I don’t want the easy release of thinking that there are strictly good and evil people. I want to know how all-in-all normal people, not monsters, commit monstrously heinous crimes. The alternatives, of just having throat-stomping scenes one after another, feels to me like an evening at the feelies.”

To be clear, Come and See isn’t some underrated, recently unearthed discovery. It was released in the United States in 1987 and officially submitted as the Soviet entry into the Foreign Language Film category of the 58th Academy Awards. It’s been featured on Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” series, and best-of lists from Empire and Sight & Sound magazines.

In Hollywood, the likes of Steven Soderbergh and Roger Deakins have been vocal in their praise of Klimov’s film. “What I saw will stay with me forever; it is a masterpiece not only of filmmaking, but of humanity itself,” Sean Penn once said. Films such as The Thin Red Line, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan all owe a little something to Come and See in their respective cinematic representations of WWII.

But as we’ve seen in the recent surge of Studio Ghibli viewing—and with Soderbergh’s Contagion back in March—it’s sensible to hypothesize that the combination of increased media availability and a tumultuous socio-political atmosphere can contribute to the most dramatic of Letterboxd activity spikes.

Our data shows a clear correlation between Come and See diary entries and screenings of the stunning Janus Films 2K restoration that appeared in select theaters earlier this year—a big spike, in particular, after the screening at New York’s Film Forum on February 21. And Criterion Collection’s DVD, Blu-ray and digital release—a true revelation for those who’ve only ever watched the film via the 2003 Kino Lorber DVD—has positively pushed the film into the stratosphere, with a huge jump in numbers in late June, and holding steady ever since.

Given present circumstances—an out-of-control global pandemic with no discernible end in sight; Nazi sentiment and systemic racism still thriving in plain sight—Come and See’s petrifying apocalyptic wallop may not exactly be comfort viewing, but it does serve as a sobering, industrial-strength reminder that this is definitely not The Good Place and we should be concerned. As Lizzy asks in her ominous review, “What urges could turn men into such beasts?”

The film’s original title is the agreeably pointed Kill Hitler (“I think that’s beautiful” —Muriel). But its current beckoning, lifted from the Book of Revelation, is the more provocatively accessible invitation of the two: once you come and see, you can’t unsee Come and See.

Related content

100 Soviet Union Movies You Must See

Letterboxd Showdown: War Films

The films of Larisa Shepitko

You’re not the same person once the film has finished

Josh’s Complete Criterion Collection list

A list of Criterion DVD-only out-of-print films

A list of Criterion films on Blu-Ray

Films currently available on HBO Max from Janus Films

Follow Aaron Yap on Letterboxd

Images courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

When Oedipus came limping homeward to Thebes, his father’s blood still fresh on his hands, he would have seen awaiting him the Sphinx, perched atop her tower, guarding the gates. He would have squinted up to see her on that high rock, craning his neck, his swollen ankles aching from the journey. When she asked her riddle, it would have been as a voice across a chasm, made hollow and echoing by wind.

The exact words of the Sphinx have not reached us. There might have been one riddle, or many. Apollodorus gives the Sphinx’s riddle as: "Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?" But if this were so, Oedipus’ answer would not have been correct. For the voice of a hobbling old man is surely not the same voice of a bawling infant, its ankles newly pierced and bleeding. An infant would cry out for its mother. The old man would know he had no such recourse.

What seems most likely is that the Sphinx’s words were faint and indistinct from her high perch, the terms of her riddle vague and couched in symbolism, admitting many possible answers. The wise men, the prophets and philosophers, came expecting to decipher complexities and conundrums and inscrutable signs from heaven, and so filled in the gaps accordingly. The obvious answers seemed too obvious, unworthy. Clues were considered and reconsidered until they lost all meaning. The answer was a shepherd and his flock. The answer was a wounded man and one who carried him. The answer was two lovers tangled in a tryst. The answer was a trained dog limping. The answer was all of these, and none of these, at once.

The longer they struggled for an answer, the more tortuous and recursive their thoughts became, and all the more profound the Sphinx’s mysterious words seemed to them, until all hope of a solution became impossible. It was as two mirrors, made to face each other, becoming an infinitely receding hallway without venue for escape.

We might imagine the Sphinx, if forced to answer her own riddle, would have answered simply, “a Sphinx.” Being part lion, part eagle, and part human, walking four-footed, two-footed, three-footed, as she pleased, she satisfied the basic premises of the riddle. Having to consider no other questioner, she could exist in perfect singularity. The thing best described by a riddle is simply the riddle itself.

It was only Oedipus, in his exhausted, unquestioning naïveté, who could give the obvious answer. Faced with the Sphinx, in the monstrousness of her indeterminate limbs, her bared breasts, of varying bestial parts and features no doubt borne of ungodly unions, the incomprehensible and shifting riddle of her, Oedipus was the only one to look upon her and offer no prejudgement, see nothing more than his own reflection. The answer to her riddle, obviously, was “man”.

The Sphinx, being a perfect mirror, for a moment reflected Oedipus herself, in his entirety, and so in horror dashed herself to pieces upon the rocks below.

Army Swap AU Part 5.5: Side-by-Side Comparisons to Canon

In a galaxy where the Confederacy of Independent Systems went super into biotech instead of mass industrialisation, and the Jedi’s secret deal with the Kaminoans fell through so they had to create a different army, the Republic soldiers are droids and the Separatist soldiers are clones. 

I think it’s easier to see how I kept or changed certain details by putting my redesigns next to the canon characters. The unusual numbering scheme is there because this isn’t technically a spinoff, but they also don’t meet each-other in-universe.

General Grievous

We all know General Grievous as a terrifying depiction of mechanical power, all harsh metal designed to strike as much fear as possible. Army Swap Grievous plays up his unsettling insectoid features as much as possible, looking like an organism that might exist naturally. I noticed a lot of General Grievous redesigns emphasise his gory aspects and the color red and I didn’t want to go that route. Depending on how afraid of bugs you are, he is almost cute, with the round organic edges and freckles. Canon Grievous is in a constant state of surgically induced rage and hatred toward Jedi, whereas Army Swap Grievous had his control chips removed before the Droid Wars and hates what he became, but he is at least capable of feeling better about himself. Even though he is a weird bug, instead of being designed to be hunched over all the time, he was made to stand tall. I also think it’s interesting how Canon Grievous’ whole deal is that he can split his arms in two, and you need to watch when he wields four lightsabers at once, but Army Swap Grievous’ natural state is having four arms.

Kalani

General Kalani is one of the most stately and blinged out droids ever created, but Army Swap Kalani is even grander. As a heavily modified clone of Wat Tambor, Kalani is basically a Techno Union prince, as proud as royalty because he might as well be. I made a point of having impractical armor gaps wherever Kalani’s limbs seemed dangerously spindly. I recently discovered that I have written myself into a corner, and all evidence from existing Star Wars media makes it impossible for Kalani at the time that he captures the Ghost crew on Agamar to NOT have a huge ass. I hate this so much and am going to avoid officially acknowledging it for as long as possible. The world is not ready for Old Kalani. You can also see the diverging weapon development. The canon E5 blaster is a cheap mass produced carbine, with a high rate of inaccurate fire, poor heat shielding, and enormous ammunition capacity (500 shots/gas cartridge), well-suited to being wielded by endless hordes of droids to form impenetrable walls of fire. Army Swap E5 blaster is monstrously powerful, extremely heavy, and inefficient (80 shots/cartridge), because the droid troopers of the Republic are so well-armored that small arms are basically useless. When Kalani shot King Rash with one of these, his blood was superheated so fast his ribcage exploded.

IG-88

I maintain that IG-88 being a clone of Darth Plagueis is the best idea I ever had. In canon, IG-88′s intelligence program goes in an unpredicted direction, and he hijacks a droid factory, splits himself into four bodies, becomes obsessed with Darth Vader, and takes over the Death Star because he believes that all droids are superior to organics and all humans must die. In Army Swap, IG-88 assumes his memories of being a businessman, a scientist, a murder cultist, and a partying socialite were planted by the Imperial engineers who made him until he realises all four of them are the same person he was cloned from, becomes obsessed with Darth Vader, and takes over the Death Star to seek vengeance against Sidious. As an organic being, 88′s reputation in the galaxy is drastically different: a capricious party animal, totally unrecognisable out of his assassin clone gear, equally likely to take you out drinking and dancing as to kill you, probably both at the same time. He is supposed to remain in a coma unless awoken by the Empire for a mission, but he self-medicates to remain conscious. With no big facility and support staff to perform routine maintenance, IG-88′s health is terrible. If it weren’t for his latent Force powers and vague memories of biotech experiments, he’d be dead.

Slick

With the Confederacy in a constant state of internal turmoil and clone rebellion, Slick’s status as the Director of the Commando Clone Legion makes him more powerful than most uncloned Separatist leaders. I think it’s incredibly sad how Army Swap Slick, high-ranking Separatist officer, is everything that Clone Wars Slick wants to be. Those of you keeping track of Army Swap know him as a creepy thot buffoon, but at least feelings like that in clones are considered relatively normal, if extremely obnoxious, and he has the right to behave like something other than an obedient soldier. Director Slick gets chokeslammed by Count Dooku for his disruptive Supertac obsession and that’s it. If Sergeant Slick tried the same thing, he’d be sent back to Kamino for a lobotomy. I just realised that “Commando” has “Mando” in it. Unintentional details like this make me forget canon Star Wars exists. Ironically, the commando clones don’t consider themselves to be Mandalorians, since they were trained for espionage instead of direct warfare. Director Slick personally spends more time defending himself against Mandalorians like Kal Skirata and Pre Vizsla than the Republic.

BONUS

Dead Names Bestiary

Not all of these are guaranteed to appear! This is just setting down some possibilities. Those of y’all who know folklore might be able to guess at the regions of inspiration.

This took me about five days of writing, research, reconsideration, and renaming to put together, so it’s pretty long. Click the Read More:

Anakim: The mingling of human and giant blood by breeding or magic results in people possessing vast power in a small body—giantspawn are often on the scrawny side even compared to their human kin, save for a singular feature of their body that is grown vastly out of proportion to the whole. In spite of this, they suffer no limitations; an anak with feet as long with their arms has no difficulty walking or running, and one with a tremendously oversized head need not blame the weight for any problems of posture.

Angels: More properly known as Malakhim, these agents and messengers of the divine have existed since the world was formed, if not earlier, and have forms indicative of these primeval origins, combining features of numerous beasts both real and imagined and having multitudes of limbs, wings, eyes, or mouths amidst empyrean fire. Knowing the fearfulness of their true forms, they often appear in the world in the form of lesser beings, even living as ordinary humans until the time comes to perform their appointed tasks.

Beach Beasts: The results of Icosan teratomancers experimenting to create living weapons, beach beasts are small, densely muscle creatures blurring the lines between mammal, reptile, fish, and bird, having hairless amphibious bodies and sharp, jagged beaks. While most are magically compelled to obey commands, a rare few unfinished individuals have escaped the laboratories at Fishers Point Island and made it to the mainland.

Bigfeet: Those inhabiting the state of Dembenklion are considered to have a more feral, ferocious character, and were more traditionally known just as Wild Men. They tend to have large fangs that just out even when the jaw is set, and stand an average of two meters tall; their occasional raids on human homes have led to a few being sighted wearing clothes. They are more adept at tree-climbing than bigfeet of other regions, though they seem to possess a curiosity about open areas, including the wide roads set down by the Icosans.

Black Dogs: Said to be an omen of death, the truth is that these silent hounds are impassive observers who have a sense for the approach of both disaster and great good fortune, and seek to stand witness even where no-one else would. Although many reports exaggerate their size, they are in fact on the very small side, and easily slip across boundaries that might bar larger creatures.

Catamounts: While often assumed to be simply another name for the mountain lions of further east, and appearing quite similar to them at first glance (with the exception of a seeming frequency of black coloration), a catamount is a distinctly noble specimen with the power of vanishing from sight, disappearing into thin air by darting around corners and behind barriers that out to offer it no opportunity to hide elsewhere.

Coonigator: Whether a true hybrid of raccoon and alligator, or either a mammal with reptilian features, or hairy-bodied reptile, these beasts do most strongly resemble ordinary raccoons up to the neck, having the sharp-mouthed countenance of squat alligators. They combine the diets and habits of both species, being scavengers which are just as likely to ambush prey of sufficient size. Most worrisome are reports of groups of coonigators cooperating as a swarm to bring down larger prey.

Demons: Between mortal and malakhim in terms of both their forms and their habitation, demons dwell in the in-between spaces and intermediate world that sits on the border between the world of the living and the sphere of the divine. 

Se’irim: Described as a combination of human form and either goats, antelope, or the prong-horned goat-antelopes of the far east, se’irim are endowed with bestial heads and hairy, powerful legs that end in sharp hooves, as well as a magic of the wild and lonesome places. They possess an unmatched pride, and most compel or outright demand worship from humans they encounter, though they have a reputation for not being terribly clever.

Sheydim: Beings of smoke and shadow where humans are of clay and timber, the widely varied sheydim are unified by combining humanoid features with those of the toothier kind of birds, having dark black or gray feathers, sharp fangs and claws, and taloned, three-toed feet. They are bound on an instinctive level by oaths and laws, though strictly by the letter, and most make it a matter of personal honor to ignore the intent, while also relishing the opportunity to punish those who violate laws and break promises even by accident.

Dogs, Talking: Some dogs have got words. That’s just how it is. 

Evil Eyes: Also known as Ayanim Hora or Jettaturas, evil eyes are the physical embodiment of envy, in the form of a singular eyeball as large as a human is tall. Their origin is uncertain, with some scholars asserting that they are curses that have come to life, while others say that they are especially warped nephilim. Each seeks to collect the eyes of those who possess a particular virtue, skill, or physical quality, the jettatura adding something of this by plucking eyes out and setting them in orbit around its own body through magic.

Giants: Towering human-like figures that at once defy and embody the natural world, giants are known to be born under three different circumstances: as nephilim spawned by the union of human and angel, as the children of human couples touched by peculiar magic, or else (seemingly most often) formed out of the very land itself as wonder-children.

Giants, Lumber: Often as vastly broad as they are towering, woodland giants are not only highly skilled at felling trees, but raising up new ones; they are seen by some as akin to shepherds of the forest. Although appearing to be flesh and blood on the outside, they are made of mountain rock.

Giants, Marine: Tremendously tall, seagoing giants treat deep bays as wading beaches, and sailing ships as mere rowboats. They have innate knowledge of storms, and are highly skilled at knotwork both mundane and magical, weaving with surprising precision for their stature. Their salt-weathered features conceal a body made of dense timbers.

Giants, Road*: Also called Longstriders, road giants are a recent development that seem linked to the highway projects instituted by the Icarian Empire. Their bodies are especially suited for walking at speed for long periods of time, and they have a knack for rearing beasts of burden in a manner that brings them to a similar size and stamina. Their blood and muscle are tar and gravel.

Giants, Urban: Smaller on average than many other giants, the urban sort are noted for a love of tobacco and beer, and talents of flame-quenching and fire resistance that can be overtly miraculous. Their bones and guts are made of fine steel and pig iron.

Glawackus: Large, dark-furred animals now widely considered to be an especially bulky kind of fisher cat or long-tailed wolverine, the glawackus is mainly dreaded as a pest, its nocturnal screaming being more fearsome than any attacks thus far recorded.

Golems: Otherwise known as Dummies or Mannekins, golems are near-living beings made from forms built up out of flexible materials that take on the likeness of flesh and blood. The knowing of making them is best-kept among devout scholars of the divine, so they are often thought to be especially the province of baalei shem. They are often categorized as being among the Wrought, along with other inanimate-made-animate beings.

Mofets*: Very rarely, a golem or other wrought made with exceptional skill or very pure intent—or, it is claimed, a golem that has attained a great level of personal accomplishment—metamorphoses into something that seems more vibrantly alive than even mortal humans. A mofet resembles not a living human as most golems do, but more a flesh-and-blood version of the golem’s original form; features may appear like knees that resemble metal joints, or hair with the thick droopiness of wet clay. 

Gnomes: Mysterious little people seen on rare occasion up in the Koterstayklekh, they are noted for their old-fashioned attire, tremendous beards, and distinctly porcine eyes. Having a jovial character, they have never been sighted outside of hearty revels involving the copious consumption of a mysterious brew. This liquor has the power to temporarily transform those who consume it into gnomes themselves, though excess consumption is believed to render the effect permanent.

Goonyaks: Standing well over two meters and having claws each as long as a human’s whole hand, a goonyak is a powerful predator with a form calling to mind an especially large bigfoot. However, their most fearsome quality is their ability to warp the memory of those who saw them, even erasing their presence outright from the minds of witnesses who go too long without seeing signs of them. In spite of this, the few surviving records suggest that their name is also instantly known to all that lay eyes on one, for however long that lasts.

Grey Folk: Widely but not exclusively taking the form of small, lithe folk with large eyes and skin the color of stone, these otherworldly beings exhibit no emotions themselves, but seem to be able to command profound changes in the feelings of those who meet their gaze. They are known to steal away both livestock, pets, and their owners, returning them bewildered at beast, and monstrously altered or mutilated at worst. Their arrival seems linked to appearances by dark-clad, oddly behaving men who project an air of authority and strange menace.

Haints: The restless and incorporeal undead, haints are often divided into two principle types:

Dybbuks: Able to speak and be seen, dybbuks affect the power of touch by possession of living creatures or inanimate objects in the likeness thereof, and are also known as Specters. While a dybbuk may dismount a subject of possession, they cannot impose their will on the same being or object more than once, and so they tend to strive to hold onto a desired form for as long as possible.

Gilgulim: Also known as Presences, these haints are able to touch the world around them and make their voices heard, but cannot be seen by most. A gilgul may freely “ride” the living, and unlike a dybbuk can possess the same subject many times. However, they cannot overshadow the minds of those whom they possess, instead being limited to powerful suggestions and feelings of inspiration.

Rephaim: Able to be seen and touched as they wish, rephaim are also known as Apparitions or Shades. Unlike dybbuks and gilgulim, they cannot possess the living, but may indicate their will by writing, signing, or through the use of spirit boards; they have a particularly great ability to alter their own appearance, and may become gigantic or miniature, and create illusions of scenes long past. 

Headless: On rare occasion, those whose bodies and heads have been separated—whether as the cause of death, or post-mortem—will rise from the dead in search of unifying their bodies. The fondness of the Icarian Army for displaying heads of rebels and traitors as warning trophies has created more of these than most other forms of murder, and even those few headless that manage to seize what they seek will remain possessed by a need to hunt. Their supernatural talents extend to command of animals and tools related to hunting and chasing; they can command riding beasts and hunting hounds alike, and turn aside both deer and fox with their mere will.

Horse, Phantom: Especially well-treated horses often arise as something like a haint, visible to all and capable of wearing tack, but being entirely silent, down to the fall of their hooves being noiseless. They seem to most often appear in order to fill a place in a carriage team missing a member, or even in numbers to pull a wagon or cart in a crisis.

Kapelyushnikles: The Hatters are a very small folk, but are possessed of the same strength as fully-grown humans in spite of their stunted and cartoonish features. They use this in their two favored trades: the hatmaking for which they are names (and which defines their status among their kin), and the care of horses and other beasts of burden. Although reviled by many as horse thieves and cattle rustlers, some scholars suspect that the truth is more that kapelyushnikles will only make off with animals they see are mistreated or neglected by their owners.

Malingerer: Distant kin to the small and gentle “sloths” of the tropical south, the swamp-dwelling malingerers are said by the learned to have grown even larger than their already towering ancestors; adaptation to changes in weather and the availability of food are often credited, while others suggest a magical transformation. Although not violent by nature, a malingerer’s stature of five to six meters—plus another one or two for its tail—and enormous vegetation-reaping claws are more than enough to erase anything perceived as a threat. It is not uncommon for them to accidentally destroy fences and walls in search of food, necessitating the unusually fortress-like construction of gardens in the northeast of Dembenklion.

Mantis Men: Tall figures that combine aspects of a mantis or grasshopper with those of a human, mantis men remain mysterious and evasive, being capable of turning transparent to the point of disappearing from view. Most often sighted near bodies of water, they seem to shun human contact, being able to emit a disorienting humming in addition to their vanishing act.

Mazikim: The children of demons and humans, mazikim possess the qualities of both and neither of their parents, having the horns, hair, and hooves of se’irim, or the feathers, fangs, and taloned feed of sheydim—but also an otherworldly beauty that can seem too perfect, refusing even attempts to modify their appearance. The dirt and mud of neither the mortal realm nor the realm of demons clings to their forms.

The Devil Jane: While often reported by gossip to be the cursed child of a witch, the more learned say that this singular being is in fact the result of a se’ir and a nehash bearing a child while both in human guise. A towering figure with batlike wings and the head and legs of a hoofed beast, Jane haunts the sandy pinelands of southern Dembenklion.

Melonheads: Child-size humanoids with enormously oversized skulls, the exact nature of melonheads is widely disputed; a clan of uncommonly small anakim, witch-spawn twisted by magic and generations in hiding, or victims of Icosan experiments in developing mental powers seem to be the most popular. Those who have encountered them report vicious attacks on small animals and humans alike, with neither to be seen again, though it is uncertain whether the humans were taken for being witnesses, or simply as food along with lesser beasts. A few reports claim that the numbers of melonheads sighted seemed to increase with each vanished person.

Mole Men: The metropoli of Dembenklion descend deep to allow its buildings to tower so far above the streets, and in the five great cities of the state, these depths turn into labyrinths of warehouse cellars, maintenance passages, and waterways both fresh and waste-filled. People who ventured into these dark places have become as sunless and eerie as the space they inhabit, and have been changed in supernatural ways. Reports from gator patrols circulate of people with small, dark eyes and clawed hands, and strangely shaped beards. 

Monkelber*: Children of one parent who is living and another who is undead, monkelber most often appear as the result of possession by dybbuks. Chronically sickly, they tend to have pale, even translucent skin, black or yellow sclera, and teeth and nails that naturally come to beastly points. Their ability to perceive even invisible spirits is valued in some places where their appearance and ill health might otherwise be shunned.

Monster Phantoms: Not to be confused with the wholly different Phantom Monsters reported elsewhere, the monster phantoms seem to be unique to northern Dembenklion; horned, white-furred creatures, they possess incredibly long and thick tails, and a shocking gaze that strikes those it looks upon as if by electrical discharge.

Nehashim: Also called Sea Serpents, Lake Monsters, and (at least by Icosans and those influenced by them), Dragons or Wyrms, the nehashim are a tremendously varied race of scaled creatures. They range in size and appearance from whale-like reptiles, down to things indistinguishable from mere garter snakes, and even including beings nearly indistinguishable from charismatic and powerful humans. All show an affinity for the water, and innate magical links to burning poisons; while they may find their way into human company, they are so different in mentality and desires that they do not remain long.

Nephilim: The union of human and malakh universally creates strange and unsettling people, human forms marked by distorted bodies with additional limbs, eyes over the whole of their forms, disproportionately massive stature, or the faces of beasts—and stranger still. Their universal traits are an innate knowledge of divine words, and a naphil possesses strength far exceeding that of mortals regardless of their outward physique.

Neveylahs: Sometimes thought of as a class of dybbuks, a neveylah (also known as a Corpse Bride) is an undead resulting from a life ending with regret over never having received a marriage proposal; they arise when their final resting place is touched by a ring or other object meant as a token of betrothal that was borne by one eligible for marriage. In spite of the language used when speaking of them, they may be of any gender or sexuality.

Phthisicks: A kind of undead often mistaken for vampirs, the phthisick are those who have died of wasting disease such as consumption—and remained desperate to regain what was lost, even in death. While immobilized in the grave, they are capable of attacking through supernatural means, and drain life from those nearby—their reach becoming greater with each life stolen.

Rats, Dire: The rats of the cities have grown unusually large, bold, and canny, with some citing magical miasma affecting the rodents, while others claim it’s the result of secret Icosan experiments. 

Sewer Gators: The sewers of the five great metropoli of Dembenklion include many waterways built to accommodate the water treatment of a tremendous industrial population, and these waters are host to more than manure. Grown fat and blind on a sunless diet of vermin (and the occasional plumber or mole person), the gators of the sewers are prone to mutations and toxicity that can easily led them to be mistaken for nehashism. But of course, there aren’t dragons in the sewers, right? Alligators are one thing, but.... 

Shretelekh: Miniature people, as small and humanly proportioned as the finest dolls and gifted in magic of plenty, the creatures otherwise called Elfs are secretive and nonverbal. They do make their will known through acts of exchange, granting ordinary folk magical gifts in exchange for a bit of consideration as fellow residents of a home or parcel of land. These gifts often take the form of food, drink, or other resources that do not run out so long as they are continuously gathered, only becoming finite the very instant there is a pause in emptying out a bottle, spooning from a container, unwinding a spool, and so forth.

Vampir: Undead consumed by a hunger for the blood of the living, vampirs are often linked to phthisicks for the apparent wasting illness of their victims. But a vampir is a stalking corpse, rather than the waiting terror of the phthisick; their lips drawn back to reveal blood-stained fangs, their grasping hands ruined by dragging themselves out of their graves, and their blood-bloated bodies stinking of decay.

Werewolves: There are two kinds of humans who are able to take on the aspect of wolves, distinguished in large part by how willing or unwilling the transformation may be.

Loups-Garous: An affliction that robs the werewolf of their sense, a loup-garou transforms under certain conditions—particular phases of the moon, certain days of the year, on tasting a particular food—into a bloodthirsty monster. Not wholly wolf nor human in their transformed state, loups-garous vary widely in how the qualities of one are added to another. Some merely grow hair all over their body and develop sharp claws and long fangs, while another may drop down to all fours and look something like a wolf with too-long legs and thumbs on its forepaws. While there is no permanent cure for this, it seems that a transformative fit may be ended by certain kinds of shock delivered by means of talismans: striking with a heavy iron key, drawing blood with something made of silver, or immersing the victim in an unpolluted stream.

Volkela’kes: A more even blending of human and canine nature, most volkela’kes are marked in their human form by uncommonly hirsute features, particularly growing hair where people typically do not, though a rare few are instead marked by a peculiar lack of hair, even on the brow and scalp. In their lupine form, they are unnaturally large and well-muscled wolves, with markings in their fur that seem to match whatever garment they wore as humans.

Weredeer*: The result of a particular curse, weredeer are fated to either die swiftly or live by violence, with their cervine and human forms alike being marked by magically-induced leucism that makes their hair and fur a vibrant white that rejects dyes. Folk who know that one is in the area tell that weredeer who are not killed by hunters, hounds, or beasts of prey are possessed of either great strength or terrible hunger, and attempt to placate them as guardians by leaving out meat deemed unsuitable by the shochet. 

White Blobs: Sighted for generations in the woodlands of northwestern Dembenklion, these amorphous entities seem to be equally at ease on the ground an in the air, their forms shifting as they move between something near to a human silhouette or inverted shadow, to a bouncing ball or bubble of soap, and with the swiftness of lightning again changing into something like a cloak or robe hanging without anyone wearing it. Those who have encountered them and told the tale have escaped without injury, but it remains unknown what happened to others who did not ever return home.

Yeduot: Intermediate between animals and plants, yeduot are animate creatures bound to the earth by a vine. In the early years of their life, they resemble lambs, and it seems typical that predation and competition over food will reduce an initial bunch to a single individual; this eventually matures into a form more like a human, growing from feral mindlessness into a creature of thought, spending their time contemplating mysteries of the universe and developing great magical insight. Even a mature yeduah considers the young of its kind as no great existence, and there have been incidents where they have offered their “fruit” to starving travelers.

*Semi-original creation not directly linked to existing myths.

Please watch this 25-second video. It took place yesterday in the middle of the day in midtown Manhattan:

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Did you watch it until the very end? Did you see the building’s security guard slowly close the door as this 65-year-old woman struggled to get up from the sidewalk?

There are two kinds of evil captured in this clip. One is the evil of the alleged attacker:

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The other is the evil of the bystanders.

The second kind makes even sicker. The apathy, the indifference, the nonchalance, the passivity in the face of human suffering — as if such an attack is a casual occurrence; as if she is a figure in a video game and not a real human being shoved and kicked and stomped on— says something very disturbing about what’s happening in our culture.

Some on social media have pointed out that the guard would have lost his job if he’d gotten involved. That private security guards are strictly barred from intervening in such situations because of liability. I’m sure that’s right. (According to the building’s management company, the staff who witnessed the attack “have been suspended pending an investigation in conjunction with their union.”)

I’d also say: Imagine that this woman is your mother. Really picture her, as I am my own mom, who is about the same age as the woman in the video. Now picture her beaten to the point of hospitalization in broad daylight in the middle of Manhattan. And imagine that grown adult men several feet away watched that happen to her. If your answer is still “but liability,” I’m really not sure what to say.

…

But maybe there is another evil, beyond the monstrousness of the the attackers and the cruelty of the bystanders. And that is the evil of lying about — or purposefully misdiagnosing — the problem to fit The Narrative.

As Zaid Jilani explained last week, the official media story about these anti-Asian hate crimes is that they are instances of white supremacy. “If you thumb through news articles from the past few days or read over statements from leading politicians, you’d imagine that the Ku Klux Klan is responsible for the spree of robberies, assaults and murders of Asian-Americans across the nation. The phrase ‘white supremacy’ is used repeatedly,” he wrote. “This narrative is pervasive, but it bears no relationship to the evidence before us. Not only are none of the high-profile attackers over the past few months white supremacists, many of them aren’t even white.”

Should a person’s life matter more to us if they are attacked by someone of one race, rather than another? Because that is exactly the calculus we are seeing.

…

For years now, this has been the case with antisemitic hate crimes. When it came to the massacre at Tree of Life, carried out in October 2018 by a white supremacist who hated Jews for loving immigrants, the response was clear and unified. The massacre at the Chabad of Poway, California, in that same year also —rightly — earned the attention of the national press and lawmakers. It, too, was carried out by a white supremacist.

I had Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who survived the attack, write this op-ed in the Times two days after he was shot. In it he warned: “Over the years people I know have been harassed and assaulted by thugs in the neighborhood where I grew up, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in incidents that typically go unreported by the press.”

Indeed, when I tell people I’m from Pittsburgh they flash with recognition and sympathy. But I highly doubt one would elicit the same response if you told a group of strangers you were from Jersey City, where a kosher grocery was shot up in 2019 by attackers linked to the hate group known as the Black Hebrew Israelites. Or if you told them you were from Monsey, New York, where, that same year, a machete-wielding fanatic stormed a Hanukkah gathering at a rabbi’s home. Or if you said you were from Crown Heights or Borough Park, where street crimes against Orthodox Jews have become a regular feature of life.

The value of a victim should not be dependent on the identity of their victimizer.

Roleplaying Races 4: Half-Orc

Earlier, we had orcs, and now we have the hybrid of human and orc blood, Half-orcs!

Tolkien’s works introduced the concept of half-human orcs in the form of Uruk-Hai, monstrously powerful beings that combined the wickedness and resilience of full-blooded orcs with the light adaptation and heartiness of humans, making them a force that a powerful evil demigod or insane nihilistic wizard who is also secretly a demigod could make use of anywhere. What’s more, the creation of uruk-hai was entirely artificial, using strange magic and alchemy to grow the creatures in artificial wombs in foul mud-pits.

However, in most cases of the world’s oldest roleplaying game and in pathfinder, half-orcs more evenly blend such traits, and are generally made via more conventional, biological methods.

Unfortunately, due to the violent nature of a large percentage of orc communities, many half-orcs are conceived by less than consensual means. So pervasive is this assumption that even half-orcs born from peaceful unions of human and orc, or half-orc and other races, or even two half-orcs, are assumed by many to be the bastard children of rape.

This brings me to a key part of many half-orc internal conflicts: racism. Certainly other races can be treated with bigotry, but few among the core races receive such ire from both sides of their parentage. In human lands and those of other goodly races, half-orcs may be treated with fear or distrust, or outright violence, as humans tend to see them as little better than orcs, as well as walking reminders of orcish violence. On the other hand, orcs tend to treat their halfblooded bretheren as weaklings, not only for their comparative lack of physical might and for their “human softness”. Still, orcs often recognize that half-orcs are often more cunning than them, making them useful advisors, infiltrators, and pawns. Useful, but still second-class citizens at best, not to mention living symbols of how orcs can dominate other species. More respectable orc societies, however, might treat their halfbreed kin better, offering them a true place in their society as they prove their worth, not to mention having them be conceived in the first place consensually.

Physically, half-orcs blend the traits of orc and human quite well, having the general straight-backed posture of humans and softer features than an orc, but typically the greenish skin tones tusked underbite, and the like. However, there is no cut and dry standard here, the variation of traits being fluid among this crossbreed race, with some individuals being able to pass for human or for orc, with only a few traits hinting at their mixed heritiage.

Half-orcs, like all races, are typically the products of their upbringing, and so know the sting of bigotry and hate. They can, however, rise above it, or succumb to it, lashing out at those who would hurt them. This understanding of hatred lets them empathize with other halfbreed or otherwise ostracized races, bonding with them over their mutual lack of belonging in other civilizations. Because of this, there are many civilizations composed entirely of one or more half-breed races out there.

 As a human-blooded race without overwhelming outsider heritage, half-orcs have no special predisposition in their physical and mental attributes, but tend to develop faster in areas of their interest.

They do, however, share the fearsome visage of their kind, and can use it to their advantage when they need to.

They also gain access to training with orcish weaponry, and inherit the vicious, die-hard battle-lust that makes them fight-on even when critically injured.

Of course, half-orcs with their strong variance of human and orc traits, can vary quite a bit. Some have particularly powerful darkvision, while some take up beast training, tempering their battle-lust to befriend and tame beasts, training with whip and net. Others have more exaggerated bestial features that improve their sensory abilities. Half-orcs from certain desert nations tend to lack the prejudiced upbringing, and exude a confidence not seen in others of their kind, while those that dwell in caves are more suited to navigating such places. In places where half-orcs are not even given the basic right of freedom, former slaves often make a tradition of turning their chains into weapons, mastering weaponry that implement such linked weaponry. Urban half-orcs tend to favor more human weapons than orcish ones, and those that dwell in the mountains bound through scree and uneven, rocky terrain with ease, launching themselves into battle. Being the subject of racial violence, many half-orcs learn to keep an eye on all opponents, knowing all too well how the cowardly surround their prey. The rare half-orc with a drop of dragon blood might even have incredible night vision beyond what is normal for their kin. Those native to the underground also tend to be stealthy, knowing better than to tangle with the fearsome beings that live there. Some with fey blood are able to draw from a favored terrain to cast minor magics, while others have somewhat alien mindsets due to that connection, the list goes on and on for a human-blooded race like this.

 Half-orcs often become adventurers to escape from ostracization, both because of the valuable skills such a career grants, giving them value to those in need of them and helping protect themselves, but also in the camaraderie that comes from such ragtag, diverse individuals coming together, becoming friends, and achieving their goals. Though it is common for half-orcs to take after their orcish side and favor more martial careers, no physical trait about them prevents them from becoming masters of more skilled or mental pursuits, though their upbringing may have them believing that physical might is all they are good for.

And that does it for this week! I hope you enjoyed this entries and the rest for this week. Tune in again for more stuff when Monday rolls around again! (Also sorry for not paraphrasing every last alternate race trait, there is a lot and I was pressed for time!)

Fascism vs Gynofascism

~The enemies of Feminism have used a pair of epithets fairly consistently. The most common – FemiNazi – is quite obviously absurd for anyone who knows anything about actual National Socialism. But most humans are idiots and it's 'catchy', so it caught on. The other is not used much, probably because one has to have some education to understand its meaning; Gynofascism. However, in formulating the construct for a Female Supremacist social order, it is perfect, so we have stolen it from our enemies and now turn it upon them. Gynofascism, n: a social and political movement that seeks to establish a Female Supremacist society based upon a BDSM FemDom paradigm. See also, Mistress, Matriarchy, Pegging, Financial Domination, Boot Licking, Cock & Ball Torture, Male Chastity Slavery. An honest appraisal of contemporary global civilization will show that Britt's "Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism" listed below are increasingly present, especially in the American Republic, where they have blossomed greatly since 9/11. While those who impose them claim they are meant to stabilize, they are all really symptoms of Collapse, as Fascism is a static system and therefore stagnant in nature. And that which does not grow, dies. Because The Sisterhood is required to put down roots and grow such an extreme and hostile environment, it will need to employ harsh measures, at the very least until the New Matriarchy has established a firm foothold politically and territorially. As such, Gynofascism is meant to be a transitional phase whose methods are designed to be used almost exclusively upon Baseline Males. This also means that it is a dynamic rather than static system. 1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottoes, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays. A. Certainly The Sisterhood will make use of mottoes, slogans, symbols, songs, flags, etc, though obviously they will be Female based in their nature. These things are key elements in how one starts and maintains a revolutionary movement. But our entire ideological foundation is driven toward establishing Matriarchal Supremacy, not mere nationalism or patriotism. Those are constructs Patriarchy uses to keep Sisters separated from one another. 2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc. B. Within the bounds of The Sisterhood, the Rights of Women shall be absolutely paramount. During the transitional phase of Gynofascism, the 'rights' of Baseline Males will be considered only in regard to practicality, as excessive oppression breeds rebellion. But once Baseline Males have been outbred to extinction, such methods will no longer be required. The genetically engineered Y Chromosome based Servitors that replace them will be humanely treated in the manner of beloved pets and valued service animals. 3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc. C. The Sisterhood has no need for 'scapegoats'. Patriarchy's long history of oppressing and brutalizing women is painfully apparent. Our Enemy has identified itself quite clearly. 4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. D. The Sisterhood is at its core an Amazon Warrior Society that emphasizes Discipline and Martial Virtues. We know that Violent Force is a Universal Language that all Baseline Males understand and respect. In the long term Military Discipline will also be essential for the conquest of space. 5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution. E. As Gynofascism is a social and political movement that seeks to establish a Female Supremacist society, this paradigm will be completely inverted and 'traditional gender roles' turned upon their head. The Sisterhood is Polyamorous, women have Absolute Sovereignty over their bodies and all Sisters are bisexual or lesbian. Our Daughters will be raised by all Sisters together. 6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. F. At the present moment, Mass Media in every nation on Earth is at best dominated by Patriarchal thinking even if it is ostensibly 'free'. Of course, Mass Media these days is hardly ever free at all. The Sisterhood will always tell the truth about who and what it is, not out some position of 'moral superiority', but because that truth serves us. Even when we are firmly established in our own political entity, that shall be the rule, rather than the exception, and for the very same reasons. 7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses. G. The Sisterhood has no need to 'use fear as a motivational tool'. Any woman who pays attention knows that women live in fear nearly all the time. Patriarchy is always Enemy Territory and to varying degrees it transcends all national, religious and ethnic boundaries. The Sisterhood will create a space where The Female Dominates and The Male is subjugated. That is our 'national security'. 8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions. H. The Sisterhood is in fact both a Spiritual and Political movement, so “Religion and Government are Intertwined” from the very beginning. Religious rhetoric and terminology will be common from government leaders, but because of the nature of our goals – the establishment of a New Matriarchy – they will always be supportive of the government's policies and actions and vice versa. To be otherwise would be self defeating. 9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. I. Capitalism is the bastard child of Patriarchy. It is that most ancient and honorable of masculine pursuits - The Hunt - distorted and perverted into a massive, omnivorous beast that is devouring its host. The Sisterhood shall Collar and Dominate the men in that industrial and business aristocracy, bring them to heel, Sororitize* their all of their assets and then bring this monstrousness to an end. *Sororitize; verb. When The Sisterhood takes control or possession of a place or thing. "The Sisterhood sororitized that company."  also Sororitization 10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed. J. In the current socioeconomic paradigm, the power of organized labor has already been largely broken. The end goal of The Sisterhood is to create the aforementioned Servitor class to totally supplant all Baseline Male labor. Automation will also be used where appropriate. All labor power will be harnessed to Serve The Sisterhood and its goals. 11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked. K. The Sisterhood is not so blindly fanatical as to think Patriarchal Civilization to be uniformly evil. While its Science is obviously to be exploited and expanded upon, there is also much of its Art and Culture that is worth retaining, though the misogynistic elements therein will be clearly pointed out, a useful exercise in and of itself. The most creatively fertile periods in human history tend to be decadent and chaotic. Wiemar Berlin is a perfect example. The Fascist regimes that tend to follow – Nazi Germany for example – reject that chaos and the artistic expression it generates. This is both a Political Control Issue and a Puritanical Reaction that stems from Fascism's own suppressed homoerotic impulses. The Sisterhood, while being an Amazon Warrior Culture, is also highly sexual and hedonistic, which honors those Aspects of The Goddess as Mother and Lover. It must ever be remembered that Puritanism is always a Tool of Patriarchy. Sisters must always use their Sexual Power to smash Puritanical paradigms wherever they find them. 12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations. L. During the transitional phase of Gynofascism, the proximity of unmodified and un-Collared Baseline Males will be a clear security issue. Faced with their inevitable extinction, they will naturally be restive and dangerous. This a critical window. The Sisterhood's Internal Security apparatus must balance the Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, as too much or too little of either could provoke open rebellion. Minor criminals will be offered the choice to emigrate from territories under Sisterhood control or submit to a Hard Collar and possibly castration. Major criminals however shall be terminated and their DNA harvested. In time The Sisterhood will develop effective Brain Wipe and Memory Implant [W/I]  technologies that will be used upon difficult Baseline Males.  Minor criminals will be offered the choice to emigrate or undergo W/I, but Major Criminals will be automatically be W/I'd and turned out to Service. 13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders. M. Patriarchy sets Women against each other by controlling the Standards of Beauty and constantly sending the scarcity message that 'a women is nothing without a man'. But it is the true nature of Women, when not constrained and distorted by Patriarchy, to be Cooperative. With the Greater Goal of creating and building a New Matriarchy, that cooperativeness is focused and enhanced. Therefore 'Cronyism and Corruption' becomes antithetical to that natural order of things. With the deconstruction of Corporatist Patriarchy and the Sororitization of the entirety its assets and operations, all of those resources are then fully dedicated to the Greater Goal of creating and building a New Matriarchy. 14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections. N. Masculine Egotism has degraded Patriarchy to the point where it no longer has any goal beyond maintaining its own power. All its Greater Goals have been forgotten. Therefore the Electorate has become disillusioned and decadent and must be bribed and lied to. The Sisterhood is entirely about The Great Goal of a New Matriarchy and therefore always tells the truth about what needs to be done to achieve such. Sometimes that truth is harsh,  but Sisters are prepared for that. And only Sisters will get to vote, as they will be all trained and educated to the highest standards and because The Sisterhood belongs to them.

But this is not the world of Big Data! In now distinctly post-Newtonian times, most contemporary thinkers see high degrees of disharmonic indeterminacy and uncertainty. The late-modern world is typified by high levels of stochastic process, in-built disruption, dissociation, and observational relativity. Knowledge itself is not spared this disharmony, its logics becoming to varying extents detotalized, detached, and potentially faulty. Moreover, with the wholesale collapse of progressive realism in the field of social inquiry, the social itself has come to look very similar to its physical and biological counterparts. Communicative convergences are everywhere disembedded and liquefied, monstrously dislocated by side effect, given to nomadic flight and predation by black swans. Far from being truly, finally dead, “God” is everywhere creating forms and relations afresh, establishing termini and novel openings in the form of distributed and recurrent re-creation, scattering outcomes without pattern or notice. Ontologically speaking, therefore, the world of Big Data is one of interrupted stability and stabilized chaos. Given this complexity, does data survive? What is its Big possibility? One possibility is that, with such a perceived disconnect between scientific knowledge and the turbulence of continuous creation, numerical data as an essential good will begin to recede. In this postrepresentational move, Big Data stars as a confidence trick, its narrative reaching back into a Newtonian world whose epistemic grounds have fallen away. An opposite possibility is that Big Data will be probed for discernible trends toward tipping points (ecological, for example), its value reposing less in its capacity to model social intervention than to plumb contemporary limits. A third possibility is that Big Data will become the digital “brain” of an already pronounced short-termism, responding to indeterminacy and uncertainty by compounding numerically thick cartographies of the moment. Here, Big Data is deployed either to take advantage of billions of instantaneous microchanges (as in electronic markets), or to gel ephemeral patches of precious stability within the quicksilver fluidity of the here-and-now. Still a fourth possibility is that, by trawling at high speeds through terabytes of preponderantly conventional experimental information, Big Data will find the speck that helps to confirm the massive theory (e.g., of fundamental particles, as with the Higgs-Boson experiments at CERN). In uncertain conditions of recurrent and distributed creation, the clear temptation is to ditch data per se, or to atheoretically embrace Big Data for its capacity to find immediate salvation in the moment. However, in our post-Newtonian world, human futures also unfold on trajectories longer and broader than this will allow. If Big Data is to contribute to the illumination of these arcs, it needs the archaeological support of ethnography and the imaginative logic of theory. During the 1970s, Benoit Mandelbrot used IBM computers to graphically visualize fractals that could only be nominally specified in theory. It may, likewise, turn out that in the process of digitally deepening the knowledge of elusive pattern, fundamentally new ways of knowing will morph into the radical refiguration of what is to be known. Such an ontological turn will not be born asexually to the digital, but rather out of its incestuous union with the knowledges that have spawned it and the worldviews that nourish its brainy possibilities.

What in/is the World is/of Big Data? — Cultural Anthropology

Elizabeth Warren Built the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It Became a Revolving Door.

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) began staffing up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010 and 2011, she did something that appeared, at first blush, to be highly counterintuitive. Instead of limiting staff to those with extensive background in consumer activism and regulatory policy, she chose people with places like Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Capital One on their CVs.Those financial institutions were the very entities that the CFPB was supposed to haunt. The agency had been included in financial regulatory reform as a wishlist item for Wall Street-skeptical progressives. And yet, here was Warren—the intellectual godmother of the CFPB—handing out key roster assignments to officials from those very institutions. Before long, the supply chain was working the other way. As the CFPB carried out its mission during the Obama years, undertaking reforms to practices from aggressive debt collection to payday lending to mortgage finance rules, some of its senior staffers would leave the agency to work in the financial sector, many of them helping major banking and securities firms understand and navigate the rules they’d just helped write. As the agency pursued billions in civil penalties against financial firms, some of its senior officials found themselves on the payrolls of the sort of companies the CFPB was created to scrutinize and hold accountable.It’s the sort of “revolving door” between government industry that Warren has decried as a progressive stalwart in the Senate and a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. And it could complicate her efforts to make the CFPB a cornerstone of her White House bid by drawing cries of hypocrisy from campaign rivals. But beyond the talking points, the hirings also offer an unexpected window into Warren’s approach to governance, suggesting that she’s a shrewder, more pragmatic policymaker than her persona as a populist firebrand indicates.In the Warren vs. Dimon Feud, It’s Warren, Not Even CloseThe CFPB was created in response to the 2008 financial crisis, which resulted in mass mortgage defaults and hammered American debtors. Warren, then a Harvard professor, had dreamt up the idea and became the Obama administration's point person in devising a new agency to serve as a consumer finance watchdog and ensure that borrowers were not being fleeced by the financial institutions on which their livelihoods depended. Warren never actually led the agency, which was created as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. There were internal White House fears that her presence atop the CFPB would spark immense backlash among Senate Republicans, so she was made a “senior adviser” with heavy sway over its inception and—most critically—early staffing decisions. “She was monstrously productive from a recruiting point of view,” recalled Raj Date, who served as CFPB’s associate director of research, markets, and regulation. “I grew up around successful recruiting engines—at McKinsey, at Capital One—and I have never seen a human being better at recruiting than her.”Warren’s central role was evident in a report that the CFPB released in 2011 recapping its creation and launch and the early progress it had made as the nation’s first federal consumer finance watchdog. She wrote a letter of introduction for the report, hailing the “strong foundation” for the agency and pledging, “in the years ahead, the CFPB will work hard for consumers across the country.”The report identified 21 people in senior CFPB leadership positions that had been instrumental in getting the new agency off the ground. They included some notable names from the financial sector. Date had been a managing director at Deutsche Bank in addition to his prior roles at McKinsey and Capital One. Elizabeth Vale, who oversaw community banks and credit unions at the agency, had been a managing director at Morgan Stanley. CFPB’s chief operating officer, Catherine West, had led Capital One’s credit card division.Take a Bow, Elizabeth WarrenWhile Warren plucked talent from the financial services industries, the relationship became even more intertwined over the subsequent years. Nearly half of the senior officials—nine out of the 21—mentioned in that report would go on to work in financial services, or for law or consulting firms with expertise and clientele in the sector, after their tenure at the CFPB.Roberto Gonzalez, for instance, served as the agency's deputy general counsel before becoming a partner at the law firm Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP. He “represents financial institutions and other companies in high-stakes litigation, investigations and advisory matters,” according to the law firm’s website, which boasts that he helped “a major U.S. bank in connection with a favorable settlement with the CFPB.”“Roberto is an extraordinary lawyer with deep knowledge of the broad range of complex issues facing financial institutions, including, specifically, in the areas of financial regulation, DoddFrank, economic sanctions, anti-money laundering and cybersecurity,” the firm’s chairman told Law360 in 2016. “Needless to say, Roberto’s expertise is in high demand today.”It’s precisely that sort of demand that fuels Washington’s revolving door, and has created a cottage industry of former regulators who cash out to the industries they once regulated. Such moves can create perverse incentives for government employment: Those who go into public service in the hope of landing a lucrative private sector career afterward may be just as willing to side with industry in the hope of future pay as former industry lobbyists and executives who move into government positions.“In many ways, I find revolving out into industry more problematic than coming from industry,” said Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank, in an interview. “That influences your incentives in office, if you think you’re going to go work in this industry... There’s a willingness to rock the boat that I think is diminished if you want to enter the field that you’d be shaking up.”Hauser noted, though, that Warren has proposed policies that would have blocked at least some of the career moves that CFPB staffers took into private industries if they had been in effect at the time. That’s something the Warren campaign stressed as well.“Elizabeth is the leader—Republican or Democrat—in proposing a set of serious anti-corruption reforms and it will be her top priority to make them law,” campaign spokeswoman Saloni Sharma said in an emailed statement. “Her legislation will expand the definition of lobbyists to include anyone paid to influence lawmakers and ban giant companies, banks, and monopolies from hiring former senior government officials for at least four years.” Warren has also committed to imposing those standards on her administration if she’s elected president, even barring any action on the proposed legislation by Congress.Warren’s campaign did not address more specific questions about the revolving door between the early CFPB and the companies it regulated. Those questions go to the heart of the dilemma facing policymakers as they look to effectively wield the nation’s regulatory agencies while preventing and rooting out corruption: namely, how to staff the federal administrative apparatus with people who know the issues in their portfolio but are driven by public, not private, interests.As a presidential candidate, Warren has come down firmly on the anti-corruption side of that dilemma—blocking or at least slowing the revolving door. But that approach can come at the expense of expertise that former industry insiders can offer. It can also preclude the private sector companies from hiring the very regulators who can help them make sense of often complex regulatory regimes and even imbue their industry with a sense of mission. It’s the latter approach that Warren appears to have embraced in the early days of the CFPB. She often stressed that the agency was drawing talent and expertise from a host of backgrounds, including industry, in an effort to craft a more effective regulatory apparatus.It’s an approach that Date described as a break from traditional progressive thinking on financial watchdog efforts, which often elevate consumer advocates and lawyers. “If you want to build and operate these agencies well, it cannot just be a bunch of lawyers,” he said. “This notion that a critical qualification to make policy for an industry is to have never been in it—the idea that you are more capable the less you know—I find that notion, on its face, absurd.”The other side of the CFPB revolving door had its benefits, too, Date said. The dispersal of people from the agency, who were instrumental in its creation and committed to its mission, into the financial services industry had an evangelizing effect, he said."There are lots of reasons where I thought the most important thing longer-term was to take people, a nontrivial number of people, who live what it’s like to be the enforcers and articulators of what the right principles should be, it would be good if you take people who internalized what these principled-based views should be and take that into industry,” Date said. “That’s good. We have suffered from that in consumer finance."Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) began staffing up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010 and 2011, she did something that appeared, at first blush, to be highly counterintuitive. Instead of limiting staff to those with extensive background in consumer activism and regulatory policy, she chose people with places like Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Capital One on their CVs.Those financial institutions were the very entities that the CFPB was supposed to haunt. The agency had been included in financial regulatory reform as a wishlist item for Wall Street-skeptical progressives. And yet, here was Warren—the intellectual godmother of the CFPB—handing out key roster assignments to officials from those very institutions. Before long, the supply chain was working the other way. As the CFPB carried out its mission during the Obama years, undertaking reforms to practices from aggressive debt collection to payday lending to mortgage finance rules, some of its senior staffers would leave the agency to work in the financial sector, many of them helping major banking and securities firms understand and navigate the rules they’d just helped write. As the agency pursued billions in civil penalties against financial firms, some of its senior officials found themselves on the payrolls of the sort of companies the CFPB was created to scrutinize and hold accountable.It’s the sort of “revolving door” between government industry that Warren has decried as a progressive stalwart in the Senate and a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. And it could complicate her efforts to make the CFPB a cornerstone of her White House bid by drawing cries of hypocrisy from campaign rivals. But beyond the talking points, the hirings also offer an unexpected window into Warren’s approach to governance, suggesting that she’s a shrewder, more pragmatic policymaker than her persona as a populist firebrand indicates.In the Warren vs. Dimon Feud, It’s Warren, Not Even CloseThe CFPB was created in response to the 2008 financial crisis, which resulted in mass mortgage defaults and hammered American debtors. Warren, then a Harvard professor, had dreamt up the idea and became the Obama administration's point person in devising a new agency to serve as a consumer finance watchdog and ensure that borrowers were not being fleeced by the financial institutions on which their livelihoods depended. Warren never actually led the agency, which was created as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. There were internal White House fears that her presence atop the CFPB would spark immense backlash among Senate Republicans, so she was made a “senior adviser” with heavy sway over its inception and—most critically—early staffing decisions. “She was monstrously productive from a recruiting point of view,” recalled Raj Date, who served as CFPB’s associate director of research, markets, and regulation. “I grew up around successful recruiting engines—at McKinsey, at Capital One—and I have never seen a human being better at recruiting than her.”Warren’s central role was evident in a report that the CFPB released in 2011 recapping its creation and launch and the early progress it had made as the nation’s first federal consumer finance watchdog. She wrote a letter of introduction for the report, hailing the “strong foundation” for the agency and pledging, “in the years ahead, the CFPB will work hard for consumers across the country.”The report identified 21 people in senior CFPB leadership positions that had been instrumental in getting the new agency off the ground. They included some notable names from the financial sector. Date had been a managing director at Deutsche Bank in addition to his prior roles at McKinsey and Capital One. Elizabeth Vale, who oversaw community banks and credit unions at the agency, had been a managing director at Morgan Stanley. CFPB’s chief operating officer, Catherine West, had led Capital One’s credit card division.Take a Bow, Elizabeth WarrenWhile Warren plucked talent from the financial services industries, the relationship became even more intertwined over the subsequent years. Nearly half of the senior officials—nine out of the 21—mentioned in that report would go on to work in financial services, or for law or consulting firms with expertise and clientele in the sector, after their tenure at the CFPB.Roberto Gonzalez, for instance, served as the agency's deputy general counsel before becoming a partner at the law firm Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP. He “represents financial institutions and other companies in high-stakes litigation, investigations and advisory matters,” according to the law firm’s website, which boasts that he helped “a major U.S. bank in connection with a favorable settlement with the CFPB.”“Roberto is an extraordinary lawyer with deep knowledge of the broad range of complex issues facing financial institutions, including, specifically, in the areas of financial regulation, DoddFrank, economic sanctions, anti-money laundering and cybersecurity,” the firm’s chairman told Law360 in 2016. “Needless to say, Roberto’s expertise is in high demand today.”It’s precisely that sort of demand that fuels Washington’s revolving door, and has created a cottage industry of former regulators who cash out to the industries they once regulated. Such moves can create perverse incentives for government employment: Those who go into public service in the hope of landing a lucrative private sector career afterward may be just as willing to side with industry in the hope of future pay as former industry lobbyists and executives who move into government positions.“In many ways, I find revolving out into industry more problematic than coming from industry,” said Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank, in an interview. “That influences your incentives in office, if you think you’re going to go work in this industry... There’s a willingness to rock the boat that I think is diminished if you want to enter the field that you’d be shaking up.”Hauser noted, though, that Warren has proposed policies that would have blocked at least some of the career moves that CFPB staffers took into private industries if they had been in effect at the time. That’s something the Warren campaign stressed as well.“Elizabeth is the leader—Republican or Democrat—in proposing a set of serious anti-corruption reforms and it will be her top priority to make them law,” campaign spokeswoman Saloni Sharma said in an emailed statement. “Her legislation will expand the definition of lobbyists to include anyone paid to influence lawmakers and ban giant companies, banks, and monopolies from hiring former senior government officials for at least four years.” Warren has also committed to imposing those standards on her administration if she’s elected president, even barring any action on the proposed legislation by Congress.Warren’s campaign did not address more specific questions about the revolving door between the early CFPB and the companies it regulated. Those questions go to the heart of the dilemma facing policymakers as they look to effectively wield the nation’s regulatory agencies while preventing and rooting out corruption: namely, how to staff the federal administrative apparatus with people who know the issues in their portfolio but are driven by public, not private, interests.As a presidential candidate, Warren has come down firmly on the anti-corruption side of that dilemma—blocking or at least slowing the revolving door. But that approach can come at the expense of expertise that former industry insiders can offer. It can also preclude the private sector companies from hiring the very regulators who can help them make sense of often complex regulatory regimes and even imbue their industry with a sense of mission. It’s the latter approach that Warren appears to have embraced in the early days of the CFPB. She often stressed that the agency was drawing talent and expertise from a host of backgrounds, including industry, in an effort to craft a more effective regulatory apparatus.It’s an approach that Date described as a break from traditional progressive thinking on financial watchdog efforts, which often elevate consumer advocates and lawyers. “If you want to build and operate these agencies well, it cannot just be a bunch of lawyers,” he said. “This notion that a critical qualification to make policy for an industry is to have never been in it—the idea that you are more capable the less you know—I find that notion, on its face, absurd.”The other side of the CFPB revolving door had its benefits, too, Date said. The dispersal of people from the agency, who were instrumental in its creation and committed to its mission, into the financial services industry had an evangelizing effect, he said."There are lots of reasons where I thought the most important thing longer-term was to take people, a nontrivial number of people, who live what it’s like to be the enforcers and articulators of what the right principles should be, it would be good if you take people who internalized what these principled-based views should be and take that into industry,” Date said. “That’s good. We have suffered from that in consumer finance."Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) began staffing up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010 and 2011, she did something that appeared, at first blush, to be highly counterintuitive. Instead of limiting staff to those with extensive background in consumer activism and regulatory policy, she chose people with places like Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Capital One on their CVs.Those financial institutions were the very entities that the CFPB was supposed to haunt. The agency had been included in financial regulatory reform as a wishlist item for Wall Street-skeptical progressives. And yet, here was Warren—the intellectual godmother of the CFPB—handing out key roster assignments to officials from those very institutions. Before long, the supply chain was working the other way. As the CFPB carried out its mission during the Obama years, undertaking reforms to practices from aggressive debt collection to payday lending to mortgage finance rules, some of its senior staffers would leave the agency to work in the financial sector, many of them helping major banking and securities firms understand and navigate the rules they’d just helped write. As the agency pursued billions in civil penalties against financial firms, some of its senior officials found themselves on the payrolls of the sort of companies the CFPB was created to scrutinize and hold accountable.It’s the sort of “revolving door” between government industry that Warren has decried as a progressive stalwart in the Senate and a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. And it could complicate her efforts to make the CFPB a cornerstone of her White House bid by drawing cries of hypocrisy from campaign rivals. But beyond the talking points, the hirings also offer an unexpected window into Warren’s approach to governance, suggesting that she’s a shrewder, more pragmatic policymaker than her persona as a populist firebrand indicates.In the Warren vs. Dimon Feud, It’s Warren, Not Even CloseThe CFPB was created in response to the 2008 financial crisis, which resulted in mass mortgage defaults and hammered American debtors. Warren, then a Harvard professor, had dreamt up the idea and became the Obama administration's point person in devising a new agency to serve as a consumer finance watchdog and ensure that borrowers were not being fleeced by the financial institutions on which their livelihoods depended. Warren never actually led the agency, which was created as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. There were internal White House fears that her presence atop the CFPB would spark immense backlash among Senate Republicans, so she was made a “senior adviser” with heavy sway over its inception and—most critically—early staffing decisions. “She was monstrously productive from a recruiting point of view,” recalled Raj Date, who served as CFPB’s associate director of research, markets, and regulation. “I grew up around successful recruiting engines—at McKinsey, at Capital One—and I have never seen a human being better at recruiting than her.”Warren’s central role was evident in a report that the CFPB released in 2011 recapping its creation and launch and the early progress it had made as the nation’s first federal consumer finance watchdog. She wrote a letter of introduction for the report, hailing the “strong foundation” for the agency and pledging, “in the years ahead, the CFPB will work hard for consumers across the country.”The report identified 21 people in senior CFPB leadership positions that had been instrumental in getting the new agency off the ground. They included some notable names from the financial sector. Date had been a managing director at Deutsche Bank in addition to his prior roles at McKinsey and Capital One. Elizabeth Vale, who oversaw community banks and credit unions at the agency, had been a managing director at Morgan Stanley. CFPB’s chief operating officer, Catherine West, had led Capital One’s credit card division.Take a Bow, Elizabeth WarrenWhile Warren plucked talent from the financial services industries, the relationship became even more intertwined over the subsequent years. Nearly half of the senior officials—nine out of the 21—mentioned in that report would go on to work in financial services, or for law or consulting firms with expertise and clientele in the sector, after their tenure at the CFPB.Roberto Gonzalez, for instance, served as the agency's deputy general counsel before becoming a partner at the law firm Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP. He “represents financial institutions and other companies in high-stakes litigation, investigations and advisory matters,” according to the law firm’s website, which boasts that he helped “a major U.S. bank in connection with a favorable settlement with the CFPB.”“Roberto is an extraordinary lawyer with deep knowledge of the broad range of complex issues facing financial institutions, including, specifically, in the areas of financial regulation, DoddFrank, economic sanctions, anti-money laundering and cybersecurity,” the firm’s chairman told Law360 in 2016. “Needless to say, Roberto’s expertise is in high demand today.”It’s precisely that sort of demand that fuels Washington’s revolving door, and has created a cottage industry of former regulators who cash out to the industries they once regulated. Such moves can create perverse incentives for government employment: Those who go into public service in the hope of landing a lucrative private sector career afterward may be just as willing to side with industry in the hope of future pay as former industry lobbyists and executives who move into government positions.“In many ways, I find revolving out into industry more problematic than coming from industry,” said Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank, in an interview. “That influences your incentives in office, if you think you’re going to go work in this industry... There’s a willingness to rock the boat that I think is diminished if you want to enter the field that you’d be shaking up.”Hauser noted, though, that Warren has proposed policies that would have blocked at least some of the career moves that CFPB staffers took into private industries if they had been in effect at the time. That’s something the Warren campaign stressed as well.“Elizabeth is the leader—Republican or Democrat—in proposing a set of serious anti-corruption reforms and it will be her top priority to make them law,” campaign spokeswoman Saloni Sharma said in an emailed statement. “Her legislation will expand the definition of lobbyists to include anyone paid to influence lawmakers and ban giant companies, banks, and monopolies from hiring former senior government officials for at least four years.” Warren has also committed to imposing those standards on her administration if she’s elected president, even barring any action on the proposed legislation by Congress.Warren’s campaign did not address more specific questions about the revolving door between the early CFPB and the companies it regulated. Those questions go to the heart of the dilemma facing policymakers as they look to effectively wield the nation’s regulatory agencies while preventing and rooting out corruption: namely, how to staff the federal administrative apparatus with people who know the issues in their portfolio but are driven by public, not private, interests.As a presidential candidate, Warren has come down firmly on the anti-corruption side of that dilemma—blocking or at least slowing the revolving door. But that approach can come at the expense of expertise that former industry insiders can offer. It can also preclude the private sector companies from hiring the very regulators who can help them make sense of often complex regulatory regimes and even imbue their industry with a sense of mission. It’s the latter approach that Warren appears to have embraced in the early days of the CFPB. She often stressed that the agency was drawing talent and expertise from a host of backgrounds, including industry, in an effort to craft a more effective regulatory apparatus.It’s an approach that Date described as a break from traditional progressive thinking on financial watchdog efforts, which often elevate consumer advocates and lawyers. “If you want to build and operate these agencies well, it cannot just be a bunch of lawyers,” he said. “This notion that a critical qualification to make policy for an industry is to have never been in it—the idea that you are more capable the less you know—I find that notion, on its face, absurd.”The other side of the CFPB revolving door had its benefits, too, Date said. The dispersal of people from the agency, who were instrumental in its creation and committed to its mission, into the financial services industry had an evangelizing effect, he said."There are lots of reasons where I thought the most important thing longer-term was to take people, a nontrivial number of people, who live what it’s like to be the enforcers and articulators of what the right principles should be, it would be good if you take people who internalized what these principled-based views should be and take that into industry,” Date said. “That’s good. We have suffered from that in consumer finance."Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more. from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2PrxarZ

http://computershelpers.blogspot.com/2019/12/elizabeth-warren-built-consumer.html

wanted.

IDOLS.

chatshire - literal queen of kpop gets punched in the throat by scandals, career under attack, mental stability rapidly deteroirating. takes to sulli levels of uh oh on social media, no longer gives a fuck. would like a) gdragon esque king of kpop equally scandal ridden b) long time manager c) brand new body guard d) indie musician ne won the scene to give her a breath of fresh air and help her get out from under the weight of expectations the industry has heaped on her. 

the unit - idol hopeful / failing rookie goes on the unit, ends up in a dalliance with one of the judges (your muse). corrupt, yeah. fucked up? probably. definitely not allowed? yes. 

FAIRY TALES.

little red - the amalgamation of a girl behind rose red, little red riding hood, etc. bloody hands and stained lips. rivers of crimson. the blood isn’t hers. (anymore).

alice - 

peter pan - 

MYTHOLOGY.

medusa- medusa is a monster, obviously. but she wasn’t always. once she was beautiful, a temple maiden to athena, taken and raped by poseidon. depending on your reading of the myth, athena either cursed her as a harbinger of death or did it to protect her from further violations. regardless, medusa was not thrilled. i want to play on the feelings of monstrousness, seclusion, and involuntarily bringing about great pain and suffering, and also a sick kind of beauty (those statues of stone men must have been terribly impressive given how lifelike they would have been). i reblogged a snippet of a poem suggesting perseus was in love with her, which could be an interesting take on it. i’d like to modernize obviously but likely retain some supernatural ability elements. i’m feeling someone like sulli for the faceclaim of medusa. it’d likely be terribly tragic and full of self loathing and conflict. 

BASED ON EXISTING AUS. 

marvel dc ghibli master’s sun - i like girls who can see ghosts maze runner hunger games

HARRY POTTER

golden -  so imagine in some korean area of post-war harry potter your muse fulfilled the harry potter role, in a sense, and mine the ginny weasley. only there wasn’t a beautiful coming together during “high school” so much as there was a desperate search for comfort in a troubling time, that led to an on and off situation that was decidedly unhealthy and thoroughly toxic. and abruptly ended when he vanished off to get rid of horcruxes. yes im basically transplanting and corrupting my otp into k faces but screw you. post war you’re acting as an auror and in the wake of your first huge, huge case, you fuck up. it doesn’t go well. you’re only human. only, you’re supposed to be more than that. its a spiral of alcoholism for you (always has been) and black humor, self loathing and toxicity. my gal, on the other hand, tried to be well and truly rid of you awhile ago, for her own good. moved away to study / find a path for herself outside of the shadow of an overlarge family and her connections to the wizarding world / revolution. yes largely based on this  fantastic story. i want the broken dreams of children forced to grow up too quickly, ruining themselves and one another in the process. i want the toxicity of the hero after his job is done - the emptiness of carrying on when the prophecy is complete, when his role in the world is entirely over. i want to explore what living in the shadow of that is like, what loving a man like that would be like - how it would be inevitably problematic and entirely unhealthy and how both would be forced to grow and accept the vastly changed landscape of their lives. obviously this would follow -10 canon but we can steal most anything you like from the real story. 

PARANORMAL. 

crossroads: i’m trying to sell my soul to you, a crossroads demon, but you’re being a real dick about it. literally wtf my books said nothing about this. naivete and power don’t go well together. death’s daughter: mortal dalliances are frowned up on but when you live forever its the kind of thing that happens eventually. welcome to the unfortunate biproduct of an unholy union, dubiously blessed (cursed?) with some of her father’s mystical elements.  fae/changeling plots: my girl a fae/changeling. yours a fae? maybe court nobility if you’re into it. or a human i g u e s s. i dont know. i love the lost and those stuck between worlds. flexible on everything but the innate fickle, brutal, passionate nature of the fae. 

Death the ultimate and inevitable leveller of us all! (Poem)

By Stanley Collymore

It’s a morally impoverished and regrettably as well a truly pathetic person indeed who either nervously obsesses about or dismally dreads and thinks that he or she can suspend or even indeterminately postpone the emergence of death, which after all, is indisputably an irreversible fate that is the definitive destiny of us all. For just as we patently had no hand in or made any contribution whatsoever to the physical presence of ourselves at any point being here in this world, there’s equally no way that any one of us, either individually or collectively with others, can realistically expect to indefinitely fend off, alter the inexorable circumstances, affect the precise timing or, for that matter, permanently defy or else delay in any conceivable way the unavoidable headway of our personal demise.

And therefore rationally accounts for, among other things, precisely why it’s no astonishment to anyone endowed with an astute brain in his or her head, that even if death is the absolute consequence of our own personal actions: either through conscious or unwitting suicide for instance, it matters not a jot in essence at the end how we ultimately go. As death is unquestionably an inevitability which, at its own preferring, and notwithstanding how very privileged elite or lowly Plebeian that one is either sycophantically or for that matter, discriminatorily considered to be, will most certainly affect us all as every conversant and discerning person patently knows!

© Stanley V. Collymore 30 September 2017.

Author’s Remarks: I take note of and frequently scrutinize the goings on of this world that with the rest of you I have no choice but to live in, and what do I see? A planet brutally and barbarically, for the most part, incompetently and nepotistically run by endemically entrenched, seriously and intellectually impoverished retards, and delusional exceptionalists.

Imbeciles so caught up in their obdurate and all-pervasive narcissism that they both literally and proverbially can’t see the woods for the trees.Inured morons who, in effect, are either totally unaware of or can’t recognize the intense evil that characterizes every one of them. And who in their very worst form constitute the mass murdering elements of every arm of Rogue State USA’s barbarous systems of so-called governance and itself ludicrously and sickeningly passed off as the epitome of democracy. But, in effect, is nothing of the sort and in actuality is a premeditated and malevolent condition of manipulated communal control with its deeply ingrained and ongoing acts of racism interwoven with habituated and a pernicious disposition towards genocidal tendencies.

But while admittedly the predominantly white inhabited and exclusively controlled west isn’t alone in this unconscionable and murderous barbarity, while this is indisputably the case it is nevertheless essentially pertinent to express the irrefutable fact that for all that the white west is at the same time. and without question, both the instigator as well as the principal player in the overwhelming majority of the demonstrably and extraordinarily, demonically exploitative and barbarously premeditated atrocities that quite disreputably and furthermore on a habitual basis are insidiously and extremely perniciously carried out globally.

The collaborative and malignant ethnic cleansing, systemic rape, brutal torture, discernibly planned humiliation and the deleterious and genocidal eradication of the Rohingya minority population of Myanmar – insufferable experiences comparable in character to the identical atrocities monstrously and routinely inflicted on the majority and indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, which have been going on now for well in excess of 50 years by the interloping, thieving, carpet bagging and noxious European Yid element that comprise and continue to infest that illegal, British foreign and colonially, Middle Eastern inserted and contemptible entity Yidland – not even acknowledged by the scum Buddhists who’re wiping them out as citizens of their own country and where the Rohingya have lived for multiple centuries.

A nefarious crusade in the intentional commission of mass murder and horrendous genocide; at the very forefront of which is the despicably lowlife sewer rat and discernible scum, Aung San Suu Kyi, who ludicrously and for such a long time unwarrantedly was hailed in the said west, that still supports, her as a champion of human rights. And categorically goes to show how thoroughly sick in the mind and mentally deranged not only Aung San Suu Kyi is but also all of her supporters, whoever or wherever they are.

But no article of this nature could from my own perspective conclude without mentioning the Wahhabi that conspicuously comprise the sub-human scum of Bantu Saudi and their compatible adherents residing throughout the Middle East, Pakistan and parts of the west. All of whom in intimate union with and the malevolent service of their white western counterparts, be it Rogue State USA, Britain, the whole of mainland Europe, and not just the European Union; and the white cold-bloodedly appropriated from their indigenous populations entities of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Yidland and the rest of them, and that individually and collectively are equally the embedded scum of this earth, present us all with the problems that needlessly we are facing.

The stark irony being, and which laughably is completely lost on all of them, is that none of the numerous ill-gotten gains they’ve come by can they take with them when the Grim reaper inevitably calls time on them. So what was the purpose of it all the sane among us wonder in what they are disgustingly and horrifically doing?

Angels and Demons in the Cold War and Today

Stephen Boykewich, NY Times, March 13, 2017

LOS ANGELES--George Kennan knew how to bring down the house. His lecture audiences started off skeptical about whether Russia really wanted to be remade on the American model. Then he told them about the Russian political prisoners who spent the weeks before the Fourth of July scrounging bits of cloth in red, white and blue. When the holiday came, they met their jailers by waving a sea of tiny hand-sewn stars and stripes through the bars.

It sounds like the perfect Cold War propaganda tale. But the Fourth of July that Kennan was referring to wasn’t during the 1950s--it was in 1876. And the George Kennan telling the story wasn’t the famous Cold War-era diplomat, but his distant relative and namesake, a journalist who had spent time in Russia before going on the lecture circuit in the 1880s.

The American narrative of the Cold War as a battle for the fate of humankind is a familiar one. From the establishment of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States portrayed Soviet Russia as not merely a geopolitical rival, but a spiritual foe. Journalists and policy makers veered between bitter demonization of the country and Messianic fantasies about remaking it in America’s image. But what’s surprising is how far back America’s evangelizing approach to Russia goes--and how it continues to distort our thinking today.

In his book “The American Mission and the ‘Evil Empire,’” the historian David Foglesong details how American opinion leaders have cast Russia in the role of America’s “dark double” for more than a century. Mr. Foglesong’s book is as indispensable today as ever, helping Americans to understand how we have treated Russia as either a benighted land yearning to become a second America, or a moral monster whose faults ease Americans’ own guilty conscience.

This pattern began in the last decades of the 19th century, when America was facing a decline of religious faith, a surge in racial terrorism against African-Americans and brutal conditions for industrial workers. In an atmosphere of domestic crisis, many Americans found their idealism renewed by George Kennan’s campaign to liberate Russia from autocratic rule.

Kennan wrote and lectured passionately to change American perceptions of czarist Russia from benign to barbaric. Russia was usually cast at the time as America’s “distant friend,” the great power that had helped ward off French and British support for the Confederacy by sending its ships to American ports during the American Civil War. But Kennan’s reports on the “perfect hell of misery” among Russian political prisoners--invented in parts--helped turn the tide.

Kennan’s campaign coincided with a rising perception of Russia as a land of opportunity for Protestant missionaries and American manufacturers. Both groups welcomed the message that Russians wanted to trade czarist autocracy for American freedom. The Fourth of July flag anecdote sent Kennan’s audiences into raptures--but it was based on a fantasy. Anti-czarist revolutionaries in Russia were largely skeptical of the American model and saw more promise in socialism.

Still, what a contemporary American newspaper called “the gospel according to Kennan” soon became common wisdom: Russia was a savage land ready to be remade by American ideals, prayers and products.

A Life magazine illustration marking the February 1917 Russian Revolution perfectly captured this vision. The Statue of Liberty was shown riding on the back of a bear, casting the light of liberty over awe-struck Russian peasants. A tablet in her hand bears two dates: 1776 and 1917. Americans celebrated the Russian Revolution as an extension of their own. In a speech to Congress in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson hailed the “naïve majesty” of the “great, generous Russian people,” who were “always in fact democratic at heart.”

The rise of the Bolsheviks swung American opinion from irrational hopes to bitter, racially charged demonization. George A. Simons, a Methodist missionary, returned from Petrograd in 1919 to warn the Senate about a “cruel,” “hellish,” “diabolical” and “Antichrist” regime, dominated by “Yiddish” agitators with worrying ties to Jewish radicals in New York.

The pendulum swung back in the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks opened their doors to American famine relief workers and Protestant missionaries. The director of the American Relief Administration, a congressionally funded food aid mission, proclaimed that Russians saw his organization as “a miracle of God which came to them in their darkest hour under stars and stripes.” American evangelicals, whom the Bolsheviks found useful in undermining the Russian Orthodox Church, celebrated Russia as “the greatest missionary opportunity of our time,” where “millions of white people are waiting for the message of life.”

But when the Soviet regime squeezed out foreign missionaries in the 1930s, American evangelicals identified Russia as the satanic “land of Magog,” prophesied in Ezekiel 38-39 to battle Israel at the end of days. The portrayal of Russia as uniquely evil rose together with the influence of evangelicals in American political life over the course of the Cold War.

The nuclear standoff that followed World War II dampened American hopes to “liberate” Russia in the near term. But the moral panic continued unabated, and again found targets at home. The anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s exemplified what the historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics.” American conservatives responded with particular fury when Soviet criticism of the United States aligned with that of the American left, be it over racial segregation or the conduct of the war in Vietnam. The conservative Chicago Tribune insisted in a 1968 editorial, “Liberty Prostrate,” that “international immorality is a monopoly of Communists.”

The culmination of the moralizing rhetoric came at a 1983 meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals, where President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Reagan used the specter of the “dark double” to sell nuclear escalation as a moral imperative.

Inevitably, the fall of the “evil empire” brought claims of cosmic victory--and with it, bad policy. Neoconservatives declared the American economic and political order the end point of human history. This triumphalist mindset led to American policies on Russia in the 1990s that paved the way for an authoritarian backlash: the economic “shock therapy” that impoverished tens of millions of Russians, support for monstrously corrupt privatization schemes and the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet bloc. George F. Kennan, the 20th century diplomat and foreign policy “wise man,” was one of many to warn that NATO expansion was “a tragic mistake” that was bound to provoke “a new Cold War.”

Today, the American commentariat is again trapped in a narrative of angels and demons, with President Vladimir V. Putin our latest Mephistopheles. Efforts to depict a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence--thus far without evidence--have reached a such a pitch that even implacable Putin critics like the journalist Masha Gessen and the former American ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul have called for cooler heads.

The deepest challenges Americans face at home don’t come from the Kremlin. They come from homegrown authoritarianism, entrenched inequality, the corporate capture of our politics and the collapse of the 20th-century social contract. The way we address these problems will determine more about the future of the American experiment--and America’s role abroad--than all the anti-Russia epithets in the world.