1 a He praieth to God with ful assurance of faith, that he wil deliuer him from his aduersaries.
1 ! He praieth in faith, established by the worde of the promes.
2 b By declaring thy self true of promes.
3 c Thou hast infinite meanes, & all creatures are at thy commandement: therefore shew some signe, whereby I shalbe deliuered.
4 d That is, from Absolom, Ahithophel & that conspiracie.
5 e He strengtheneth his faith by the experience of Gods benefites, who did not onely preserue him in his mothers belly, but toke him thence, & euer since hathe preserued him.
7 f All the worlde wondereth at me because of my miseries, aswel thei in autoritie, as the common people, yet being assured of thy fauour I remained stedfast.
9 g Thou that didst helpe me in my youth, when I had more strength, helpe me now so muche the more in mine olde age & weakenes.
10 ! He complaineth of the crueltie of his enemies.
11 h Thus the wicked bothe blaspheme God & triumph against his Saints, as thogh he had forsaken them, if he suffer them to fall into their hands.
12 i In calling him his God, he putteth backe the false reportes of the aduersaries, that said, God had forsaken him.
15 k Because thy benefites toward me are innumberable, I can not but continually meditate & rehearse them.
16 l I wil remaine stedfast being vpholden with the power of God.
17 ! And desireth God to continue his graces towarde him.
18 m He desireth that as he hathe begonne, he wolde so continue his benefites, that his liberalitie maie haue perfite praise.
19 n Thy just performance of thy promes.
19 o His faith breaketh through all tentacions, & by this exclamation he praiseth the power of God.
20 p As he confesseth that God is the onelie autor of his deliuerance: so he acknowledgeth that these euils were sent vnto him by Gods prouidence.
22 ! Promising to be mindeful and thaneful for the same.
22 q He confesseth that his long tariance was wel recompensed, when God performed his promes.
23 r For there is no true praising of God, except it come from the heart: and therefore he promiseth to delite in nothing, but wherein God mai be glorified.


text:
Gonger 2 – Das Böse kehrt zurück ist ein deutscher Mystery-, Horror- und Thriller-Fernsehfilm, der am 25. Januar 2010 auf dem deutschen Privatsender ProSieben erstmals ausgestrahlt wurde. Anfang 2009 erschien der erste Teil mit dem Namen Gonger – Das Böse vergisst nie.

Handlung
Im Wesentlichen geht es in dem Film darum, dass der untote Eric wieder zurückkehrt und Philipps Freundin Helma grausam ermordet.

Somit wird ihm klar, dass Eric ein Gonger ist. Als Philipp, von diesem Vorfall schwer getroffen, in sein Heimatdorf zurückkehrt, trifft er auf den blanken Hass der Dorfbewohner. Zusammen mit einigen anderen, die durch Eric geliebte Personen in ihrem Leben verloren haben, zieht er in die Villa Hansen und entwickelt mit Hilfe seiner Erfahrungen und Felix' Kameras und Geräten einen Plan, um den Geist zu vernichten.

Durch Philipps Träume von den bevorstehenden Morden können alle lange Zeit überleben, doch in der Schlussphase des Films kommt es zu einem Final-Destination-ähnlichen Verkettungsmassaker. Als Eric wieder einmal zuschlägt, beschließen die vom Pfarrer aufgehetzten Dorfbewohner, die Villa zu stürmen. Nach weiteren Morden sowie dem Tod Pias und ihres Freundes während eines Kusses kommt es zum Showdown: Philipp stellt sich Eric in den Katakomben des Hauses und erfährt, dass der nicht durch ihn getötet werden kann, da er nicht der letzte lebende Hansen ist, sondern die Tochter von Helma die auch Philipps Kind und somit der letzte Erbe der Hansen ist.

Als er dann zu seiner Tochter kommt – die eigentlich von Helmas Mutter geschützt, jedoch vom besessenen Pfarrer getötet wird – und er feststellen muss, dass Eric sich seiner Tochter bemächtigt hat, bleibt ihm keine Wahl; er muss seine besessene Tochter töten.

In der letzten Szene ist Philipp in Indien, wo er in einem Kloster seine lebende Tochter einem Schamanen übergibt. Er dreht sich noch einmal zur Kamera und man sieht deutlich, dass Eric nun Besitz von Philipp ergriffen hat.

Hintergrund
Die Inszenierung brachte es im Schnitt auf nur 1,86 Millionen Zuschauer. In der werberelevanten Zielgruppe der 14- bis 49-jährigen Zuschauer schalteten 1,43 Millionen Zuschauer ein, was einem schwachen Marktanteil von 10,3 Prozent entsprach. Die unerwartet niedrigen Einschaltquoten lassen eine weitere Fortsetzung fraglich erscheinen.

Weblinks

Einzelnachweise

Filmtitel 2010
Deutscher Film
Fernsehfilm
Geisterfilm
Thriller
Horrorfilm

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
/*!
 * nodeclub - app.js
 */

/**
 * Module dependencies.
 */

var fs = require('fs');
var path = require('path');
var Loader = require('loader');
var express = require('express');
var ndir = require('ndir');
var config = require('./config').config;
var passport = require('passport');
var Models = require('./models');
var User = Models.User;
var GitHubStrategy = require('passport-github').Strategy;
var githubStrategyMiddleware = require('./middlewares/github_strategy');
var routes = require('./routes');

var maxAge = 3600000 * 24 * 30;
var staticDir = path.join(__dirname, 'public');

// assets
var assets = {};
if (config.mini_assets) {
  try {
    assets = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(path.join(__dirname, 'assets.json')));
  } catch (e) {
    console.log('You must execute `make build` before start app when mini_assets is true.');
    throw e;
  }
}

// host: http://127.0.0.1
var urlinfo = require('url').parse(config.host);
config.hostname = urlinfo.hostname || config.host;

config.upload_dir = config.upload_dir || path.join(__dirname, 'public', 'user_data', 'images');
// ensure upload dir exists
ndir.mkdir(config.upload_dir, function (err) {
  if (err) {
    throw err;
  }
});

var app = express.createServer();

// configuration in all env
app.configure(function () {
  app.set('view engine', 'html');
  app.set('views', path.join(__dirname, 'views'));
  app.register('.html', require('ejs'));
  app.use(express.bodyParser({
    uploadDir: config.upload_dir
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  app.use(express.cookieParser());
  app.use(express.session({
    secret: config.session_secret
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  app.use(passport.initialize());
  // custom middleware
  app.use(require('./controllers/sign').auth_user);
  app.use('/upload/', express.static(config.upload_dir, { maxAge: maxAge }));
  // old image url: http://host/user_data/images/xxxx
  app.use('/user_data/', express.static(path.join(__dirname, 'public', 'user_data'), { maxAge: maxAge }));
});

app.configure('development', function () {
  app.use('/public', express.static(staticDir));
  app.use(express.errorHandler({ dumpExceptions: true, showStack: true }));
});

app.configure('production', function () {
  app.use(function (req, res, next) {
    var csrf = express.csrf();
    // ignore upload image
    if (req.body && req.body.user_action === 'upload_image') {
      return next();
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    csrf(req, res, next);
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  app.use('/public', express.static(staticDir, { maxAge: maxAge }));
  app.use(express.errorHandler());
  app.set('view cache', true);
});

// set static, dynamic helpers
app.helpers({
  config: config,
  Loader: Loader,
  assets: assets
});
app.dynamicHelpers(require('./common/render_helpers'));

if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'test') {
  // plugins
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  for (var i = 0, l = plugins.length; i < l; i++) {
    var p = plugins[i];
    app.use(require('./plugins/' + p.name)(p.options));
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}

// github oauth
passport.serializeUser(function (user, done) {
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});
passport.deserializeUser(function (user, done) {
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});
passport.use(new GitHubStrategy(config.GITHUB_OAUTH, githubStrategyMiddleware));

// routes
routes(app);

if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'test') {
  app.listen(config.port);

  console.log("NodeClub listening on port %d in %s mode", config.port, app.settings.env);
  console.log("God bless love....");
  console.log("You can debug your app with http://" + config.hostname + ':' + config.port);
}

module.exports = app;

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
6 Books About best pizza durham You Should Read
This is the best pizza on the planet.
Really. This is the best pizza on the planet.
I think it's a matter of perspective. Sure, the best pizza's good, but the best pizza is better than the other pizza that I'm also eating.
As one of our employees, I have to say that I think this is the best pizza in the world. Not just the best pizza, it's the best you've ever had. I mean, it's the best damn pizza. And it was so good that I was able to eat it twice the first time I ate it, so you'll probably want to do the same. Maybe that's a good thing.
Well, I guess if youve ever eaten this delicious pizza, you might want to make it again.
The reason that this pizza is so good is because it's so good. But that's not why it's so good. Its because it's so good that you want to eat it again almost as much as you want to eat the other pizza. It's the best pizza that Ive ever had and my friends all say the same thing.
Pizza is a pizza, or a pizza dish, or a pizza-dish? There are so many different ways to describe pizza, but the two most common ones are "pizza" and "pizza dish." The former is the most common and simply means pizza, but the latter is a more specific one and is more specific in the sense of what it is. The latter is the pizza you're sitting down to eat at a restaurant.
Its a Pizza, or a pizza-dish. The latter is a more specific way to describe a pizza and is more specific in the sense that its a pizza and not the kind of pizza youre sitting down to eat at a restaurant. In the case of a restaurant, its a pizza served in a glass or ceramic serving dish and youre eating it with a slice of deli cheese.
But in the case of a pizza, its a pizza youre eating at a restaurant.
The Urban Dictionary of breaking lease in maryland
Where to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities on luc hawkins avenues school

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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text:
Blood and Porridge
Ian Smith's blog on Wordpress
About Ian Smith
Tag: Donald Trump
Don't Look Up is worth looking up
© Netflix / Hyperobject Industries
Before I start, a warning – many spoilers ahead!
Appropriately for a year that was fairly grim, the final movie I watched in 2021 was the recently released, apocalyptic sci-fi satire Don't Look Up, which tells the story of how two astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet hurtling on a course that in six months' time will bring it smashing into the earth and wiping out all life here. But their warnings about what's coming are muffled by a trivia-obsessed media, chiefly represented by fatuous talk show hosts Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry, which refuses to take them seriously. They're also thwarted by duplicitous politicians, most notably Meryl Streep as the American president, who are reluctant to take decisive action and blow the damned comet out of the sky because, it transpires, it's loaded with priceless minerals.
Don't Look Up is interesting in that while it enjoys a healthy 7.3 / 10 approval rating from users of the online film database IMDb, and an even healthier '82% liked this film' rating among Google users, the reviews by film critics have been less enthusiastic – approval ratings of 54% and 50% on the critical aggregates Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic respectively. Among those unimpressed critics were the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who called it 'laboured, self-conscious and unrelaxed', and Rolling Stone's David Fear, who described it as 'a righteous two-hour lecture masquerading as a satire'. Meanwhile, in the Independent, Louis Chilton went the whole hog and penned an article entitled WHAT GOES UP, MUST COME DOWN: WHY IT'S OKAY TO HATE 'DON'T LOOK UP'. In this, he opined, "the execution is too broad and condescending… And for a comedy, perhaps its greatest offence is that there are almost no laughs."
So Don't Look Up has received contrasting levels of appreciation from ordinary viewers and from the critics. Interestingly, one faction that's whole-heartedly praised the film has been environmental journalists and scientists. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus wrote in the Guardian that as someone "doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it's also the most accurate film about society's terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I've seen." Meanwhile, in the Guardian too, environmental journalist George Monbiot declared, "The movie is, in my view, a powerful demolition of the grotesque failures of public life. And the sector whose failures are most brutally exposed is the media… it seemed all too real. I felt as if I were watching my adult life flash past me. As the scientists in the film, trying to draw attention to the approach of a planet-killing comet, bashed their heads against the Great Wall of Denial erected by the media and sought to reach politicians with 10-second attention spans, all the anger and frustration and desperation I've felt over the years boiled over."
Well, I have to say I come down on the side of Joe Public (and the environmentalists) and not on the side of the critics who, as part of the mainstream media, were perhaps not best pleased by how the film portrayed that media. I liked Don't Look Up and, despite what Louis Chilton claimed in the Independent, enjoyed several hearty laughs during its running time. There are a few problems, which I'll talk about in a minute, but generally I'm happy to give the movie the thumbs up.
Much of what works in the movie is due to its impeccable cast. DiCaprio and Lawrence make a good double-act as the astronomers. DiCaprio is a timid character, at times a bundle of nerves, cerebral but inarticulate when he comes under pressure. Lawrence is the opposite, ready to forcibly speak her mind when she sees others obfuscating. As events unfurl, it's the bumbling DiCaprio who unwittingly becomes a media star, probably because he matches public perceptions of what scientists should be like – cuddly, eccentric Albert Einstein types. Meanwhile, the abrasive Lawrence is banished from the limelight. DiCaprio plays along with this and ingratiates himself with the media and political establishments, believing he can exert a positive influence over the people in power who are dealing with the comet. He can't, as it turns out, and while he compromises his principles his private life up-ends and he becomes estranged from his wife and children.
Perry and Blanchett are simultaneously amusing and chilling as the shallow talk-show hosts, though Blanchett is allowed a sliver of character development later when we learn she has three master's degrees, meaning that her lack of acumen onscreen is merely an audience-pleasing act. The sequence where DiCaprio and Lawrence go on their show, The Daily Rip, to break the bad news about the comet to the world, and find the hosts more interested in interviewing a pop-poppet (played by Ariane Grande, no less) about her split with her pop-poppet boyfriend, is a masterclass in cringe comedy worthy of Ricky Gervais or Armando Iannucci.
Meryl Streep, meanwhile, is majestically horrible as the president. It would have been easy to portray her as a female Trump, but she's smarter and smoother than the blustering, orange-skinned, cunning-without-being-smart property tycoon. "I say we sit tight and assess," is her initial reaction to DiCaprio and Lawrence's warnings, which she justifies with the observation, "You cannot go around saying to people that there's 100% chance that they're going to die. You know? It's just nuts!" When she's faced with a potentially explosive scandal and needs something to divert the media's attention, however, she changes her tune. She suddenly plays up the comet and amid much patriotic hoopla marshals the US's nuclear firepower in an effort to annihilate it before it reaches the earth. Her tune changes again when a major donor to her party persuades her to cancel the plan to destroy the comet, because it's a goldmine of precious metals, and proposes a different way of handling it.
The donor is a Silicon Valley billionaire played by Mark Rylance, who believes his company has the capability to send a fleet of rocket-powered robots to the comet and seed it with explosives. These will break it into small, non-cataclysmic fragments that can be retrieved and put to lucrative use when they fall to earth. Stiff, eternally smiling, generally weird, Rylance comes across as a creepy mixture of Elon Musk, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson. Incidentally, the character's fondness for having children onstage with him when he's unveiling his company's latest high-tech gadgets reminded me faintly of Jackson's disastrous performance of The Earth Song at the 1996 Brit Awards in London, when he had a crowd of child actors in tow. Rylance leaves you wondering if the character is a genius or just some arrested-development man-child who's been extraordinarily lucky. Due to his wealth, of course, the establishment believe he is a genius and happily go along with his comet-breaking scheme. You can guess how it ends.
The best performance, though, comes from Jonah Hill as the White House Chief of Staff, who also happens to be President Streep's son. If writer-director-producer Adam McKay doesn't satirise Donald Trump directly with Streep, he certainly skewers the Trump White House with Hill's character, a smug, obnoxious, entitled arse with all the characteristics of the promoted-beyond-their-abilities Trump kids (and Jared Kushner). Hill makes a meal of the role. "You're breathing weird. It's making me uncomfortable," he whines at DiCaprio when the latter gets worked up describing the mile-high tsunamis that'll crash across the planet when the comet hits. And when DiCaprio tells him the chance of this happening is '99.78 percent', he reacts, "Oh, great! So it's not 100 percent." McKay also uses the character to take a swipe at Trumpism's biggest coup, that of convincing masses of ordinary, often hard-up people to support a wealthy, right-wing elite by demonising another part of America, the part that's liberal, urban and educated. We hear Hill declare at a rally: "There's three types of American people. There are you, the working class. Us, the cool rich. And then them!"
On the minus side, I'd say Don't Look Up is about half-an-hour too long. Its unnecessary length means the satire gets a bit samey and the jokes get stretched a bit thin towards the end. Also, late on, there are jarring tonal shifts. We have solemn moments where DiCaprio tries to make peace with his loved ones and enjoy some final, life-affirming time with them, even while the gigantic tsunamis surge out from the comet's strike-point. This put me in mind of another movie about a collision of celestial bodies, Lars Von Trier's Melancholia (2011), even though for the most part it's a million miles removed from Don't Look Up in mood. However, intercut with the DiCaprio scenes are ones where the satire continues, with Streep, Rylance and a super-rich select few escaping from the earth, in suspended animation, on board a specially-prepared spaceship, which'll take them to another earth-type planet 23,000 years from now. While I enjoyed both sub-plots, having them unwind side-by-side made me feel I was watching two different films.
Also, for a movie that's about the disparagement of science, Don't Look Up could have been more scientifically accurate in places. The initial operation to completely destroy the comet involves sending an astronaut (Ron Perlman) up into space on a suicide mission. He's in a recommissioned space shuttle and shepherding a flock of rockets carrying nuclear bombs, all on a collision course with the comet. But the real space shuttle could never get beyond a low-earth orbit because it couldn't carry enough propellant to go further. How is Perlman going to reach the comet, which is still a few months away at this point? Couldn't they just launch the rockets, without the shuttle, and guide them from the ground? The 'sleeper' spaceship that appears at the end and transports a lucky few to a planet in a faraway solar system sets up a good final gag, but it troubled me too. If the elite, which includes Rylance's character, have the technology at their disposal to create a spaceship like that – officially, manned interstellar space travel and suspended animation are beyond human know-how at the moment – couldn't Rylance have put that fabulous technology to more immediate use and made a better job of his comet-breaking operation?
Although people have interpreted Don't Look Up's comet as a metaphor for climate change and society's hopeless attempts, or non-attempts, to address it, I think the film is making broader comments about the scientific community, the media, politicians and their responses to crises generally. It's not as if the politicians spend the whole film denying the existence of the comet, as some real-life ones still deny that climate change is happening. Fairly early on, it's established that, yes, the comet is heading our way (although we see instances of 'comet-deniers' among the general public later on). It's more about how self-interest and opportunism get in the way of necessary and meaningful action.
When Streep gives Rylance's daft plan to harvest the comet the go-ahead, I found myself thinking of a real-life, down-to-earth and non-American parallel. During the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain, Boris Johnson's Conservative government frequently handed out lucrative contracts for making personal protective equipment (PPE), establishing tracing programmes, setting up testing centres and so on to private companies that lacked medical experience, but were sympathetic to or connected with the Conservative party. Often, the results were disastrous. But hey, if you have access to power and can make a fast buck during a catastrophe, why not?
So actually, you don't have to look up. Just look around you instead. It's happening everywhere, this moment.
Trump-town riots
© CBS News
"It's a disgrace, there's never been anything like that. You could take third-world countries, just take a look, take third-world countries. Their elections are more honest than what we've been going through in this country. It's a disgrace."
So spoke President, now almost Ex-President, Donald Trump at a rally at Washington DC on January 6th. This was before the rally's attendees launched an assault on the US Capitol while members of Congress were meeting there to certify Joe Biden becoming the 46th president and Trump's successor.
Bravely, Trump used the pronoun 'we', which normally means 'me' as well as 'you', when he declared: "…we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue… and we're going to the Capitol…" Then, bravely, he didn't accompany his supporters when they marched off to confront and fight their way past the Capitol's police force (many of whom, as it happened, were suspiciously reluctant to do their jobs). Instead, bravely, Trump headed back to the White House where, bravely, he watched the ensuing carnage on TV.
In his speech, Trump claimed that November 2020's presidential election, when Joe Biden won 72 more electoral college seats and 7,250,000 more votes than he did, and which everybody from the Supreme Court to the Department of Justice – not to mention the judges who chucked out 60-odd lawsuits filed by Trump in protest – agreed had been held fairly, was even more fraudulent than an election held in a third-world country. Even more!
I guess I should credit Trump for using the term 'third-world countries', which is an improvement on his previous term for less-well-off parts of the planet, 'shithole countries'. I doubt, though, if he'll ever evolve to the point where he refers to them as 'developing-world countries', or even less-patronising terms like 'low-and-lower-middle-income countries', or 'the global south', or 'the Majority World'.
As somebody who's spent much time living in (what I'll call) low-and-lower-middle-income countries, I have to say I've never seen a spectacle as humiliatingly ridiculous as the one in the Capitol following Trump's rabble-rousing speech on January 6th. I've lived in North Korea under Kim Jong-Il and Libya under Colonel Ghaddafi, dictators whose perpetual self-aggrandisement led to some ludicrous sights indeed. But nothing I saw in those places compares to last week's scenes, where American politicians fled from their chambers while doors buckled, windows imploded and police and secret-service officers were pushed back by an inexorable, invading tide of white supremacists, Nazis, militiamen, crackpot conspiracists and MAGA nutjobs.
It resembled the start of a zombie-apocalypse movie – the bit where a live TV broadcast, announcing the emergency and urging calm, is interrupted by the studio staff looking into the lobby and screaming off-camera, "They're here! They're here!" Though this wasn't so much Dawn of the Dead as QAnon of the Dead.
© Sony Soho Square
And during my time in what Trump thinks of as 'shithole countries', I've never seen performers from such a theatre of the absurd as those who were centre stage in the Capitol when, temporarily, the mob occupied it. The QAnon-shaman guy with the buffalo furs and horns and the painted face, resembling the figure on the cover of the 1993 Jamiroquai album Emergency on Planet Earth after it'd spent a night sleeping in a skip. The other guy with the furs, plus glasses and a dead beaver on his head, looking like the world's shittest Davie Crockett. The guy in the bobbled 'Trump' hat who walked off with Nancy Pelosi's lectern, now under arrest and subject to a thousand jokes on social media about when he'll 'take the stand'. The guy with the Santa Claus beard and the 'Camp Auschwitz' T-shirt, whom one right-wing idiot later tried to deflect criticism from on social media by suggesting he might actually be an 'Auschwitz survivor'… Hold on, though. Someone celebrating Auschwitz in 2021? That's not absurd. That's frightening.
Indeed, after the initial absurdities broadcast on the initial news reports, there came more frightening accounts of what'd happened. A police officer died of injuries sustained while being bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher. Another officer, a black man, had to offer himself as bait and lure a racist mob away from the senate entrance, so that those inside got a few extra minutes to evacuate. (While these things were happening, other officers, clearly sympathetic to the mob's intent, were dismantling barriers to let them pass and posing for selfies with them.) Journalists were attacked. A makeshift noose was strung up outside. Masked figures roamed around carrying zip-tie handcuffs, apparently planning to take hostages.
Meanwhile, there was the jaw-dropping contemptibility of Republican politicians such as Ted Cruz, the Texan cowpat, and Josh Hawley, a man who physically and spiritually resembles Miguel Ferrer's scumbag executive in Robocop (1987). Even after the insurrection, they kept on parroting Trump's honking-mad claims about election fraud and they voted against Biden's certification. Obviously, this is because they want to secure the support of Trump's deranged base when they launch their own bids to become president in 2024. With Cruz and Hawley, it's not so much 'we the people' as 'me the people'.
I suppose I should react to this with schadenfreude. The USA has a long history of promoting revolutions and insurrections in other countries. The most notorious of many examples were the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, which the USA and its little sidekick the UK orchestrated in 1953 (and which begat the Shah of Iran, which begat the 1979 revolution, which begat the Ayatollah, which begat the Iran we know and fear today), and the 1973 coup d'état it engineered against President Salvador Allende that resulted in the murderous, fascistic rule of General Pinochet. Now it's embarrassingly fallen prey to an attempted coup of its own.
Still, all the sanctimonious blather about the USA being the mother of democracy and the shining light for other nations to follow, often propagated by Hollywood movies, does worm its way into your consciousness no matter how hard you try to resist. So although the idea of American democratic righteousness is more myth and propaganda than reality, seeing its political heart get trashed by Jamiroquai-shaman guy, beaver-on-head guy, lectern-guy, etc., was rather sad.
From twitter.com / schwarzenegger
Incidentally, if the notion that the USA is the great champion of democracy is cheesy guff, it was appropriate that a few days later Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of cinema's greatest proponents of cheesy (though enjoyable) guff, went viral in a video in which he praised American democracy. Arnie even likened its resilience to the sword of Conan the Barbarian. The sword's blade, he explained, becomes stronger the more it's tempered by punishment. (Sorry, Arnie, but I seem to remember Conan's mantra being to 'crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women'. Which doesn't sound terribly democratic to me.)
But returning to the topic of low-and-lower-middle-income countries… From 1999 to 2001 I worked in Ethiopia. When I arrived there, most Ethiopians' experience of the outside world was via an antiquated TV set kept in a wooden cabinet in the neighbourhood coffee shop or bar, which gave them access to two terrestrial channels. The channels' output seemed to consist mainly of clips of traditional Ethiopian dancing, English football matches that'd taken place three weeks earlier, and reruns of Jake and the Fatman (1987-92).
Within two years, however, satellite TV had arrived with a vengeance. Suddenly, those same people were being exposed daily to dozens, if not hundreds of channels crammed with glossy adverts and pop videos dripping with opulence – fancy cars, penthouses, jewellery, designer clothes. It was all phoney nonsense, of course. Most people in other countries didn't live like that. But how was your average Ethiopian expected to know? And how, I wondered, would this impact on the psychology of a people whose country was then, and still is today, pretty impoverished? (In 2018 its GDP per capita was ranked 167th in the world.)
As it turned out, I should have been more worried about the Americans and how they'd cope with rapid advances in communications technology and especially with the sudden arrival of social media. For now we have vast numbers of Americans taking Trump's twitter ravings as the gospel truth. Also, vast numbers of them believe the insane drivel that is the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, whereby Trump is battling a worldwide network of paedophilic, baby-eating Satanists who control everything, especially everything that's liberal.
Whoever Biden appoints as a successor to Betty DeVos, Trump's wretched Secretary of Education, will urgently need to promote 21st century skills like critical thinking and digital literacy in the nation's schools. Otherwise, thanks to social media and the Internet, the USA will collectively disappear down an extremist rabbit hole or get locked into a far-right echo chamber.
Ironically, Trump, so disdainful of 'shithole countries' in Africa and elsewhere, is probably closest in his vanity, bluster and puffed-up preposterousness to some of the infamous dictators who ruled certain African nations after the end of colonialism. I'm thinking of Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko who, while most of his subjects lived in poverty, built a palace that became known as 'the Versailles of the jungle', travelled using a fleet of costly Mercedes-Benz motor cars and hired Concorde for shopping trips to France. What Trumpian things to do. I'm also thinking of Uganda's Idi Amin, described in 1973 by his country's American ambassador as 'racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous and militaristic.' That sounds like Trump down to a T.
By the way, talk of Idi Amin makes me think of the 2006 movie The Last King of Scotland, based on the 1998 novel by Giles Fodden. In that, a hapless, vain and dim Scotsman, played by James McAvoy, cosies up to Amin, played by Forest Whittaker, at the start of the latter's career and soon gets more than he bargained for.
© DNA Films / Film4 / Fox Searchlight Pictures
Thinking of The Last King of Scotland's imaginary scenario, I'm somehow reminded of the real-life scenario here:
© Daniel Biskup / The Times / News Syndication
Anyway, America, one week has passed since the Capitol insurrection. You've got just one more week to go before Biden gets inaugurated and the Orange Blob, hopefully, is cast off into powerlessness and obscurity.
You're halfway out of Crazy Town. Hope you make it. Good luck.
So un-macho
© Library of Congress / From unsplash.com
An extremely right-wing author and essayist recently caused an uproar by saying something offensive on social media. That's hardly news these days. Anyway, impelled by morbid curiosity, I checked out said author and essayist's blog. No, I'm not going to provide a link to it because the dribbling jackanapes has already received enough free publicity. One remark on that blog caught my eye and made me think, though. It was a description of President, soon-to-be ex-President, Donald Trump as 'the alpha-male of alpha-males'.
Let me get this straight. Donald Trump is not only an alpha-male, but is the most alpha-male going? You've got to be kidding.
The last four years and, indeed, most of the past 74 years that Trump has been on the planet are peppered with instances that show him to be not so much an alpha-male as an alpha-wuss. Indeed, the past month-and-a-half since the US presidential election, when Joe Biden handed Trump his arse on a plate by massively winning both the popular vote and the electoral college, has shown him to be even more pathetic than normal.
Seeing Trump react to defeat with a display of whiny, shrieky, stamping-his-little-feet, waving-his-little-fists, chucking-his-toys-out-of-the-pram petulance doesn't make me think of some muscled, lantern-jawed, bare-chested, testosterone-oozing specimen of maleness swaggering his way through a Hollywood action movie. Rather, it makes me think of the obnoxious Violet Elizabeth Bott, the lisping little girl in Richmal Crompton's William books (1922-70) who, when anyone refused to let her have her way, would threaten: "I'll thcream and thcream and thcream till I'm thick!" Or of Veruca Salt, the monstrously spoilt little girl in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), who proved so unbearable that Willie Wonka's squirrels ended up throwing her down a garbage chute to the factory's incinerator.
Ironically, the right-wing dingbats who support Trump often lament the decline of good old-fashioned masculine values, thanks to, as they see it, assaults in recent decades by feminists, liberals, socialists, gay rights activists, trans activists, etc. In fact, if you look at the best-known embodiments of traditional masculine values, as portrayed on the cinema screen, you'll see that their hero Trump displays none of those values himself. He falls laughably short in comparison. Imagine how he'd react and behave if he were in the shoes of Hollywood's most famous macho-men during their most famous movies.
© Gordon Company / Silver Pictures / 20th Century Fox
Take Bruce Willis, for example – an actor who's well-known for his conservative leanings but who hasn't, despite scurrilous rumours, shown much enthusiasm for Trump. As Detective John McClane in Die Hard (1988), Willis attends a Christmas party being held in a skyscraper by the company that employs his estranged wife. There's an unwanted festive surprise when a gang of German terrorists show up, seize the building and hold the partygoers hostage. McClane, who blames the company for his marriage's break-up and wasn't feeling comfortable at the party, nonetheless ducks into the nearest ventilation shaft and spends the film crawling around and picking off the terrorists one by one until order has been restored. You couldn't imagine Trump selflessly doing any of that. Actually, someone of his orange bulk would manage to crawl about two inches along the ventilation shaft before getting stuck.
No, Trump, the self-proclaimed master of 'the art of the deal', would be more like the character of Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner). Ellis is a sleazy company executive who thinks he can bargain with the terrorists and get them to agree to a plan to lure McClane out of hiding. "Hey babe, I negotiate million dollar deals for breakfast!" he brags in Trumpian fashion. "I think I can handle this Eurotrash!" Too late does the hapless Ellis realise that the terrorists have been stringing him along and don't intend to honour their side of the bargain. Inevitably, their leader, Vladimir Putin… sorry, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) puts a bullet through his head.
Or take Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who's publicly dissed Trump for his appalling record on the environment. In Schwarzenegger's most famous role, as the reprogrammed-to-be-good Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Schwarzenegger realises at the movie's finale that the central processing unit in his head is the last remaining piece of technology that might enable the machines to take over the world. So, nobly, he decides he has to be destroyed for the good of humanity and asks Sarah and John Connor (Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong) to lower him into a vat of molten metal. Could you imagine Trump being so self-sacrificing? "I am NOT going in that vat of molten metal! There's no CPU in my head! That's fake news! This is the most corrupt decision in the history of my country! This never happened to Obama…!" And so on.
Probably Trump would prefer to model himself on the bad Terminator played by Schwarzenegger in the first Terminator movie (1984), since that character has traits that the Gross Orange One admires: zero empathy, total ruthlessness, no qualms about using its arsenal of heavy-duty weaponry to blow away anything that defies it. However, with Trump as the Terminator, the movie would last five minutes. The Trump-Terminator arrives in 1984 Los Angeles… Naked, it approaches a group of street-punks (including good old Bill Paxton, who exclaims, "This guy's a couple of cans short of a six-pack!")… Then the street-punks beat it to death.
© The Malpaso Company / Warner Bros
Who else? Clint Eastwood, yet another Hollywood Republican who's been muted about Trump (and in 2020 promised to support Mike Bloomberg if he became the Democrats' presidential candidate)? Eastwood built up his iconic macho persona during Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy in the 1960s. Not only was he The Man with No Name, but he was a man of few words. He'd squint, keep his jaws clamped around a cigar and unnerve his opponents with a contemptuous silence. You couldn't imagine a brash, loud gobshite like Trump, someone whose mouth is five minutes ahead of his brain, doing that.
In fact, Eastwood in his other most famous role, as Detective Harry Callaghan, aka Dirty Harry, offers advice in Magnum Force (1973) that Trump would have been wise to heed: "Man's got to know his limitations."
John Wayne? In Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966), Wayne plays a town sheriff who's loyal to and protective of his staff – Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan in the earlier film, Robert Mitchum, James Caan and Arthur Hunicutt in the later. Even when Mitchum develops a severe alcohol problem in El Dorado, Wayne puts up with his drunken bullshit and does his best to straighten the guy out. It's impossible to imagine the same of Trump, whose four-year tenure in the White House has seen a parade of cringing and crooked underlings being recruited and then, the moment they displease their master, being dumped again. The loyal-only-to-himself Trump would have pointed a finger at Mitchum and sneered, "You're fired!"
© Armada Productions / Warner Bros
Steve McQueen? McQueen's most famous role was as the prisoner of war Hilts in The Great Escape (1963), which would have earned him Trump's disgust immediately. As he once notoriously declared of John McCain, "He's a war hero because he was captured. I like heroes who weren't captured!" In fact, McQueen breaks out of the POW camp in Escape but then gets recaptured when his motorbike fails to clear a barbed wire fence on the Swiss border, which I suppose makes him a double loser in Trump's eyes.
In fact, Trump is devoid of the qualities I recognised in the masculine icons with whom I grew up: being loyal, being selfless, doing the right thing, playing fair, saying only things that are worth saying, sticking up for the underdog, being magnanimous in victory, being graceful in defeat. Then again, this is unsurprising when you see the Neanderthals who support him signalling their masculinity by gathering in mobs outside state legislative buildings, clad in combat fatigues and totting automatic rifles, to protest the implementation of safety measures against Covid-19. These would-be warriors are too wimpy to countenance wearing small pieces of cloth over their mouths and nostrils to protect their fellow citizens. Clearly, their notions of masculinity have nothing to do with the qualities I've listed above. Rather, they're all to do with intimidating, bullying and hurting people.
If that's what masculinity is about, I'll be glad to see the back of it. And I'll be especially glad to see the back of its biggest proponent, the one in the White House – who on January 20th goes from being the alpha-male to being the alpha-fail.
© Stewart Bremner
It's Biden and bye-Don
From twitter.com/chrissteinplays
Last month, despite what all the opinion polls were forecasting, I predicted gloomily that Donald Trump would probably win a second term in the American presidential election on November 3rd. My gloom was largely rooted in what I called the 'shy Trumper' hypothesis, the notion that many people were lying to the pollsters about their voting intentions because they were too embarrassed to admit they were going to vote for a scum-bucket like Trump.
I already knew what I would write about on this blog in the likely event, as I saw it, of Trump's re-election. I planned to refer to the satirical 1981 novel Hello America by the late, great J.G. Ballard, which is set in 2114 and postulates an ecologically devastated and almost uninhabited United States of America. An expedition from Europe arrives in the wasteland formerly known as the USA and discovers there, among other things, a madman claiming to be both the American president and Charles Manson. I suspected another four years of Trump, whose penchant during the Covid-19 pandemic for summoning his adoring, mask-rejecting, non-distancing supporters to mass campaign rallies suggested a deadly cult-leader on a far greater scale than Manson, would send the USA well on its way to becoming the surreal, dystopian badlands that it is in Ballard's novel.
© Granada
Well, as it turned out, the polls did severely underestimate Trump's support. At the time I write this, he's accrued more than 70,900,000 votes. Thankfully, however, Joe Biden received even more than that. He's got just over 75,400,00 votes at the moment and has crossed the 270 college-vote threshold necessary for winning the presidency in the USA's electoral college system. So Trump seems to be toast. That said, the Orange Malignancy has spent the past few days tweeting and speechifying that he actually won the election, whereas Biden cheated, and has vowed to overturn the results in the courts.
However, that's unlikely to come to much if the competence displayed so far by Trump's finest legal minds is anything to go by. At the weekend, for instance, Trump's lawyer-in-chief Rudy Giuliani and his team flew into Philadelphia intending to hold a press conference to outline their forthcoming legal challenges. Through some mind-melting balls-up, they ended up holding the conference not in the city's Four Seasons Hotel, but in the parking lot of a gardening centre called Four Seasons Total Landscaping in its outskirts. This was symbolically located between a crematorium and a porno bookstore called Fantasy Island Adult Books. Watching news footage of the conference, I almost expected the centre's manager to emerge in the middle of it, reveal himself as Borat and exclaim, "Very nice!"
Now while nobody is happier than I am to see Trump ousted from the White House, and I can fully understand why on Saturday when Biden was officially declared president-elect great numbers of people took to the streets of New York, Philadelphia, etc., and started dancing as joyously as the Munchkins did in The Wizard of Oz (1939) after Dorothy's house landed on top of the Wicked Witch of the East, I'm afraid things are still looking pretty grim for the USA's future as a democracy. The fact is that nearly half the American electorate, after four years of exposure to the vile, tangerine-skinned creature, were still willing to vote for him.
Let that sink in. Almost half of voters opted for a man who's presided over the deaths of 237,000-and-counting fellow citizens due to Covid-19 while insisting that it's just 'the flu' and it'll magically 'go away', who's speculated about how said virus could be neutralised by injecting yourself with disinfectant, who's contracted the virus himself but still insisted on holding a flurry of superspreading rallies where thousands of his supporters were jammed together in close, virus-friendly proximity. Who's displayed a complete ignorance of and disregard for science, who's trashed his country's environment, who's helped trash the environment on a global scale too through his lucre-obsessed climate denialism.
Who's bragged about grabbing women by the 'pussy', who's mocked disabled people, who's condoned violence against journalists, who's dismissed whole countries as 'shitholes' and whole nationalities as 'drug dealers, criminals, rapists'. Who's applauded the supposed fineness of white supremacists, who's instructed fascist militias to 'stand by', who's emitted a barrage of racist dog-whistles that in Biden's words are as loud 'as a foghorn'. Who's happily played along with the insane conspiracy theories of QAnon whenever he thought it might bolster his support among the extreme-right-wing, tinfoil-hat-wearing fruit-loop brigade.
Who's cosied up to authoritarian thugs like Putin, Erdogan, Mohammed Bin Salman and the familicidal Kim Jong-Un whilst insulting leaders of long-term democratic allies and showing a particular misogynistic vehemence for female ones like Angela Merkel. Who's sneered at his country's war-dead and derided former prisoners of war for the failing of getting 'captured', whilst using his family's influence to escape doing military service himself. Who's managed to wriggle out of paying any net federal income tax at all in 11 recent years, whilst in 2016 and 2017 paying the laughably meagre sum of $750 per annum, considerably less than what a citizen earning the minimum wage would pay. Who's continually boasted about his business acumen, whilst according to Forbes magazine in October 2020 owes more than a billion dollars in debt…
And so on, and so forth.
Although some commentators have claimed that the willingness of millions of Americans to vote for a character like Trump, devoid of anything resembling a shred of moral fibre, shows how badly they've been 'left behind' in this, the era of globalism, I can't say I find this argument convincing. You'd have to be extremely left behind, and in absolutely dire circumstances, to believe that Trump is your friend and saviour – when it's obvious to anyone with a quarter of a brain that he despises the poor, whatever their political creed, and is intent only on lining his own pockets and the pockets of his hideous family. I'm afraid that Trump's massive election turnout is more an indication that a great swathe of the American electorate either has zero moral compass and zero empathy for others or is as dumb as a sack of cement powder.
Into that latter category I'd put the Trump supporter who, since the election went Biden's way, has been tweeting angrily about the anomaly of five million votes being cast in Georgia despite 'Georgia' having a population of only 3.7 million. So far he's ignored the people who've pointed out to him that he's confusing Georgia the state with Georgia the country.
Unfortunately, President-Elect Biden has his work cut out if he intends to heal the nation and somehow get those millions of Trump fans on board with concepts like decency, fairness, science, working for the common good and loving thy neighbour. Meanwhile, I suspect that the Republican Party, impressed by how Trump's unrepentant-bastard approach to politics earned him 70 million votes, the second biggest tally by a presidential candidate in US history, will decide to really go for it in 2024 and field as a candidate some 21st century reincarnation of Benito Mussolini.
All in all, I'm afraid, there are still plenty of opportunities for the USA to go completely J.G.
Anyway, for now at least, I'm relieved it's over. I'm truly fed up with having the past few weeks of my life dominated by a 24/7 obsession with American politics. My partner especially will be relieved that she no longer has to listen to me mansplaining the Byzantine workings of the US electoral college: "…Pennsylvania has 20 electoral votes, so if Biden can get that, it'll carry him to the 270 threshold he needs to win, but even if Trump gets Pennsylvania in the end, he can still sneak it by winning Nevada, which has 6 votes, and Georgia, which has 16…"
And she's American.
© Ayrshire Daily News
Hope for the best, expect the worst
"Hope for the best, expect the worst," is a maxim that crops up regularly in Angela Carter's exuberant 1991 novel Wise Children. The novel's two main characters, twin sisters Dora and Nora Chance, keep repeating this to themselves so that they remain grounded and their heads stay screwed on while they negotiate the highs and lows, the euphoria and tragedy, of life during eight decades of the 20th century.
It's also a maxim I think is worth bearing in mind as we approach the American presidential election on November 3rd, little more than a fortnight away. Yes, I know the polls indicate Joe Biden has a solid and stable lead over the current, revolting incumbent of the White House. But of course four years ago Hillary Clinton was supposed to have a similarly commanding lead over the Orange Hideousness and we know what happened then.
One thing I suspect is overlooked in these polls is what is known in the UK as the Shy Tory factor. Wikipedia describes this phenomenon as "so-called 'shy Tories'… voting Conservative after telling pollsters they would not." Presumably, they lie to the pollsters because they're too embarrassed to admit they intend to vote for a chancer like Boris Johnson. As a result, "the share of the electoral vote won by the Conservative Party" is "significantly higher than the equivalent share in opinion polls."
And I imagine you'd feel embarrassed too if you admitted to a pollster that you were going to vote for a crooked, racist, narcissistic, tax-dodging, pussy-grabbing, pig-ignorant malignity like Trump who shrugs off the deaths of 220,000-and-counting American citizens from Covid-19 with the glib platitude, "It is what it is." Thus, I have a horrible suspicion that the Shy Trumper factor will confound the pollsters' predictions come November 3rd.
And that's before we consider the USA's idiotic electoral college system, which means that one vote cast in the least populous state, Wyoming, carries three-to-four times the influence of one vote cast in the most populous state, California, and Trump only has to edge it in a few crucial swing states to win. Like his hapless predecessor Clinton, Biden could very well win the popular vote and still lose.
Also, there's the sad fact that voter suppression has been rife. This has been done quietly through the gerrymandering, trimming of voter rolls and removal of polling stations by Republican administrations in various states, and noisily through Trump's attacks on the legitimacy of ballots submitted by mail. All have been designed to reduce the numbers of voters likely to vote Democrat.
Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised if voting on the day itself is disrupted by Trump-supporting fascist gangs and militias such as the Proud Boys, whom he recently instructed on TV to 'stand by'. And it's certain that in the aftermath of an election result that, ostensibly, he loses, he and his lickspittle Republican enablers will use every trick and machination in the legislative book to have votes nullified and overturned so that he manages to grasp that all-important number of 270 electoral college votes.
So with Trump back in the White House for another four years, how bad will it be? Very bad, I'd say. I expect the USA to become at least a semi-totalitarian state where announcing yourself as a dissident – a Democrat, a liberal, a Black Lives Matter or LGBTQ activist – becomes increasingly risky. Perhaps Trump's official state apparatus won't arrest or hurt you, but his unofficial army of gun-toting admirers, the white supremacists, militiamen and QAnon-obsessed conspiracy-theory fruit-loops, will take the law into their own hands and go after you themselves. And should any of his right-wing terrorist fanboys be caught in the act of snuffing out his critics, I sure Trump will bend over backwards to ensure they are treated leniently. Witness how quick he was to defend the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, the delusional 17-year-old who gunned down two protestors during anti-police demonstrations in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Leniency will also be shown to bad-apple cops and right-wing goons who rough up another group whom Trump despises, journalists working for mainstream and liberal news outlets. During the Black Lives Matter protests earlier this year, police emboldened by Trump's rhetoric were already assaulting and harassing reporters and camera crews. And not long ago, Trump expressed his delight that Ali Velshi, an anchor with MSNBC, was hit by a police rubber bullet while reporting on a protest in Minneapolis. "Wasn't it beautiful sight?" he crowed at a rally. "It's called law and order."
Elsewhere, expect a nationwide ban on abortion. I'm sure, though, that Trump's wealthy elite will be quietly allowed to purchase super-expensive drugs to combat Covid-19 that have been developed with human cells taken from aborted embryos. The Affordable Health Care Act, hated by Trump because it was an Obama initiative, will go and won't be replaced. Environmental protections, already trashed, will be trashed further. The forests on the west coast will continue to burn and the White House will react only with schadenfreude because everyone in the fire-zone votes Democrat anyway.
Science will be denigrated and ridiculed. The evangelical Christians who loyally vote for Trump, even he obviously despises them, and even though a less Christian specimen of humanity than Trump is difficult to find, will be rewarded by having science removed from school syllabi, textbooks and museums in favour of their own primitive doctrines about how the world was created and how it functions.
Hundreds of thousands more Americans will die from Covid-19 while Trump, flaunting his supposedly macho disdain for mask wearing and social distancing, will continue to blame China, the WHO and Democrat state governors. People of colour will continue to be murdered by the police, protests against these murders will continue to take place, police will continue to attack protestors, militiamen and looters will continue to take advantage of the chaos, and American cities will become ever-more dystopian.
Interviewed recently in the Observer, Martin Amis observed, "This election is going to be a referendum on the American character, not on Trump's performance." As such, it's tempting to dismiss a second Trump win as an America-only problem. If Americans are dumb and immoral enough to vote for this nightmare, then it's on them. They own it. Unfortunately, a second Trump presidency will impact hugely on the rest of the world too, via his hostility towards NATO, the EU and the Iran nuclear deal, and his disorientating mood-swings regarding China, and his penchant for being a lapdog to authoritarian dictators while insulting and belittling the leaders of long-term democracies (especially if they're women).
Of course, the biggest and most disastrous impact of four more years of Trump, who's pulled the USA out of the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, will be on the environment. His refusal to take man-made climate change seriously may well scupper any chance humanity has of lessening its worst effects. Trump doesn't care about the millions – billions? – of people who could lose not just their livelihoods but their lives as average temperatures rise, huge areas become uncultivatable and possibly uninhabitable, rainfall patterns change disastrously, coasts disappear under rising sea levels and climate refugees take to the road in vast numbers. Those are the problems of the little people, the losers, the suckers, and Trump only likes WINNERS.
I fear that already we've passed a tipping point and our species is inevitably facing catastrophe, that the damage we've wrought on our planet's climate is now embedded in the system and will lead from one devastating consequence to another. But if we haven't already reached that tipping point, it's likely that we will have by 2024 or whenever it is that Trump leaves the White House. (Though don't be surprised if by 2024 he and his minions in the US Senate and Supreme Court have re-engineered the constitution to allow him to remain in power indefinitely.) By the way, Trump's re-election will only goad the Brazilian fascist Bolsonara further in his efforts to torch the Amazon rainforest.
And yet, I believe that when future historians look back on this period and wonder how humanity managed to trigger such an ecological, political, economic and social horror show, they won't finger Trump as the main culprit for all this. No, the title of Most Villainous Human Being on the Planet in 2020 will surely be awarded to Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire has been instrumental in preparing the way for and then enabling Trump – just as it's done for climate-change denialism, Brexit and most other things that suck in the modern world. A Trump re-election will be largely due to Murdoch's Fox News, a sealed-off bubble and echo-chamber for millions of American right-wingers who only want to hear their views confirmed, never challenged.
Future historians? That's me suggesting humanity has a future, where there'll be historians. Evidence, I'm afraid, that I'm hoping for the best rather than expecting the worst.
© Reuters / Jessica Rinaldi
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I was thinking of this post when I wrote the comment over on Harvey Stanbrough's blog on cycling during the first draft. Both techniques very much require a lot of trust.
Partially because we're taught that being creative isn't a good thing. Kids come up with all kinds of wacky flights of fantasy.
There's a point where it scares the heck out of the adults. They try to be well meaning, but they have an adult filter on it. So when a kid comes up with a wild idea, it tends to get discouraged.
One time—I don't remember how old I was—I was messing around with a story. The character was pregnant. I don't recall what inspired me, but no doubt some of it was all marketing to women at that time. It was all about getting married and having kids.
But I had written part of story with "pregnant" in it. Lines of dialogue and narrative. It was kind of obvious it was a story. But my mother saw it and freaked. She didn't ask if it was a story. Instead it was a very stern, "Are you pregnant?" Yikes!
Suddenly ideas become scary things that we're not supposed to do. That we should restrain ourselves.
As an adult, I started a mystery novel. At the time, it was the only idea I had that I thought could fit a novel. I got other ones, but these either turned into genre-less short stories (which is why I think a lot of people land in literary. It's a catchall when the writer allows the idea to control the direction of the story).
And I got these "flash in the pan" ideas.
I kept notebooks to record those ideas, like everyone said to do. They were pocket notebooks I could carry around. The ideas flashed bright, and I had to write them down right now so I wouldn't forget. Some demanded to be written. RIGHT NOW.
Those always ran about a page or two and then died. Which is why I call them flash in the pan. They sounded exciting until I tried to execute them and then they weren't so exciting.
So I got stuck on the first novel, revising it so much it no longer resembled anything that I'd started with. I revised because I kept getting stuck and I didn't have any other book length ideas.
He provided the idea. We wrote the book. I felt confident enough to come up with some ideas for the next book. We were having problems by then (co-writer had fear of finishing, bad). So he shot down my ideas.
So I wound up back on my own and it was still a struggle to come up with ideas. Then I took Dean Wesley Smith's Ideas workshop. It was really eye opening. I'd been approaching ideas wrong. Looking back, I think all those flash in the pan ideas were because my creative brain did not trust me to treat the ideas right.
I was passing on things as not good enough and expecting that an idea was supposed to be the full blown story.
You're a professional cleaner and the beginning of spring is always your busiest time.
I don't get much flash in the pan ideas any more. Creative brain trusts that I'm going to write the stories. Maybe not today, but when it's time. And creative brain is really good about letting me know when it's time.
By the time way, I plan to do a future GALCOM book with one of the ideas co-writer shot down: Most Dangerous Game with a woman character. No one's really done it before, though Criminal Minds came close. Why not?
And it is fun thinking about what I'm going to do.


text:
Illinois, Iowa and Tennessee youth advance to Oratorical finals
By Cameran Richardson
Three high school orators advanced through two rounds of competition in The American Legion's 82nd National Oratorical Contest to earn a spot in the finals Sunday morning. Youth from Illinois, Iowa and Tennessee competed against 50 other orators from across the country who spoke on a 230-year-old document, the U.S. Constitution, to claim a spot on the national stage.
Caleb Maue of Homer Glen, Ill., Patrick Junker of Waukee, Iowa, and Eden Carnes of Friendsville, Tenn., will compete Sunday, April 7, at 10 a.m. ET for a chance to win first place and an $18,000 scholarship. Second and third place will earn $16,000 and $14,000, respectively.
Watch the finals live on The American Legion National Headquarters Facebook page at www.facebook.com/americanlegionhq.
The contest got underway Saturday in Indianapolis with the quarterfinals, where 53 American Legion department Oratorical youth champions were separated into nine groups to present their prepared oration on the U.S. Constitution and speak on an assigned topic discourse – a phase of the Constitution selected from Articles and Sections – in front of judges, Legion Family members and family. Maue, Junker and Carnes were among the top nine orators to advance to semifinals, where they edged out the competition to become a top three finalists.
Junker said not advancing past the quarterfinals in the 2018 National Oratorical Contest is what helped him reach the national stage this year with his speech, "The Spread of Constitutional Apathy and How to Quarantine It."
"I think that loss is what taught me how to edit my speech, how to be more confident, how to give my speech," said Junker, who is sponsored by Post 403. "I learned a lot last year, and I think I really used that to my advantage this year. I'm happy to be spreading my speech and my message on a national stage."
The focus of Junker's speech is how youth today have little to no education on the U.S. Constitution and so "they just don't care. They are not taught to care about the Constitution," Junker said. "My big thing is teaching purpose. I think our society does not teach purpose to kids anymore or to really want to learn anything. I think the Constitution is worth learning."
Carnes, a high school freshman who has done public speaking since fourth grade, didn't know what to expect with The American Legion's Oratorical Contest as she was the only competitor at her sponsoring Post 70.
"I really had no frame of reference, so I listened to the national winner (speech) last year and thought that I think I have this," Carnes said. "Obviously it was good enough because here I am. I'm really excited about it."
Her speech, "The Duties and Obligations of a Citizen Under the U.S. Constitution," takes listeners back to Aug. 18, 1920, in Nashville, Tenn., to what became known as the "War of the Roses," where supporters wore yellow roses to demonstrate their backing of women's suffrage while opponents wore red roses outside the Tennessee House of Representatives. The discussion was on the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Carnes focused her speech on Tennessee's "vital role in ratifying the amendment" that allows women the right to vote. While not old enough to vote herself, Carnes said her "opinions and political perspectives do matter. Good citizenry is not age-restrictive."
This is Maue's first American Legion National Oratorical competition, and he "did not expect" to make it all the way to the top. His speech, "The Safeguard of Our Liberties," focuses on "how American's really don't know the Constitution as well as we should, why the Constitution is so important, and what our obligations to it are," said Maue, who is sponsored by Post 1080.
Maue stated in his speech that American's "have a duty to uphold the Constitution and do what we can to elect leaders that will also uphold it. As Americans, preserving the Constitution is a way in which we can help secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
Since 1938, The American Legion's Oratorical Contest has awarded more than $3 million in scholarships to high school orators. Nearly 6,000 youth from across the nation participate in the contest at the post, district and department level. For more information, visit www.legion.org/oratorical.
Tags:Oratorical Contest
State Contests
Participate in your local American Legion Oratorical Contest to better understand the U.S. Constitution, as well as the rights and privileges of American citizenship.
Request Contest Information
Interested in participating in the Oratorical Contest? Request information to get started.
Iowa youth wins Legion Oratorical finals, $18,000 scholarship
Nine out of 53 youth orators advance to Legion's semifinals
About Oratorical Contest
State and Local Contests
Past National Champions
Volunteer to Help
2019 American Legion National Oratorical Contest - Eden Carnes - Prepared Oration
2019 American Legion National Oratorical Contest - Eden Carnes - Assigned Topic


Sinus Cavities - Do Sinus Problems Have Anything to Do With Bad Breath?
1.	Use medication to dry up the sinus cavities and prevent mucus buildup, but take care to avoid dry mouth, a possible side effect of almost all antihistamines.
2.	A lot of patients will find relief by using an irrigator to swill out the sinuses in cases where chronic problems exist.
3.	Use oxygenating oral care products to reduce the amount of postnasal drip in your throat and sinuses, and get rid of bad breath, the number one side effect of excess mucus.


text:
Anika Jackson
ANIKA JACKSON, 31
President, Jackson Land Holding Co. LLC
Biggest achievement: Undertaking a $12 million renovation of the historic Lafayette Towersas part of growing her family's property management company.
Current goal: Expanding the property portfolio and increasing the Detroit footprint.
When Anika Jackson returned home to the Detroit area in October 2014, she hoped her new position as president of Jackson Land Holding would help improve the city she loves.
Her father, Gregory Jackson, is chairman and CEO of local automotive dealership Prestige Automotive Group. He also is head of Jackson Land Holding, which is the real estate arm of his company Jackson Asset Management, and for years he'd been asking his daughter to come back, saying there was so much more he could do if he had help.
Jackson said the daily communication with her father, along with the great stories coming out of Detroit, made her realize it was time to stop just doing a job in Chicago, where she was working as a product marketing manager for AT&T, and start making a difference in her hometown.
Now she is responsible for a portfolio of commercial and residential real estate properties totaling over $25 million. These include Prestige Automotive properties, the Midtown Business Center and Lafayette Towers.
Projects like the $12 million renovation of Lafayette Towers — the iconic Mies van der Rohe-designed apartment buildings in Lafayette Park — have helped Jackson realize that ambition. The real surprise for Jackson has been how much she loves it.
"I found a new passion, one I didn't know I had," Jackson said of her new career in developing and operating real estate.
The renovations include adding a two-acre rooftop community space to the parking structure. This roof has grass and trees, a swimming pool, community lounge and bathhouse. Jackson also has upgraded heating, cooling and lighting systems to be more energy efficient: Holes were drilled 300 feet into the ground to create 64 wells for a geothermal heating and cooling system.
Complete renovations in 75 percent of the apartment units are among the other upgrades she's led. There is a waiting list for new tenants, Jackson said.
Jackson also renovated a formerly vacant, 20,000-square-foot building in Detroit's Midtown-New Center area called the Midtown Business Center. Her company spent $1.5 million to buy and redevelop the building, which now is 50 percent leased out.
She also is leading Prestige's construction of an $8 million Cadillac dealership on Van Dyke Avenue in Warren, across from the General Motors Technical Center.
Jackson said she'd like to grow her work in the city through developments for businesses in hospitality, restaurants and fashion.
"I'm very proud of our transition from automotive to a diverse business," Jackson said. "We've expanded and diversified but not sacrificed."
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of Prestige Automotive Group. This version contains the correct name.


My father died in March 2006 after suffering a major heart attack. He had spent a few days in hospital but signed himself out and returned home. We did not know at the time his prognosis was so poor but as a family we knew that things were not good after a consultant visited us at home to explain he was lucky to have left hospital.
He deteriorated that day, was confused but we still did not realize he was dying and so didn't get him back to hospital. He went to bed at about 9 p.m. with my mother and I in the room, and he was very restless. He started to see wires hanging from the ceiling and insects on the bed, all very distressing.
This was witnessed by my mother and I, and we couldn't believe it. He was calm, tranquil and quite lucid really. David was my mother's brother and good friend to Dad and he had died about 12 years before. Dad died shortly afterwards and in a quiet state, for which I am very grateful.


text:
package io.truthencode.ddo.model.feats

import io.truthencode.ddo.activation.AtWillEvent
import io.truthencode.ddo.model.classes.HeroicCharacterClass
import io.truthencode.ddo.model.classes.HeroicCharacterClass.Artificer
import io.truthencode.ddo.model.misc.DefaultCasterCoolDown
import io.truthencode.ddo.support.requisite.{FeatRequisiteImpl, GrantsToClass, RequiresAllOfClass}

/**
 * Created by adarr on 2/16/2017.
 * [[https://ddowiki.com/page/Inscribe_Artificer_Scroll Inscribe Artificer Scroll]] You are able to
 * inscribe artificer spells from scrolls into your spellbook. This action will destroy the scroll.
 */
trait InscribeArtificerScroll
  extends FeatRequisiteImpl with ActiveFeat with AtWillEvent with RequiresAllOfClass
  with GrantsToClass with DefaultCasterCoolDown {
  override def allOfClass: Seq[(HeroicCharacterClass, Int)] =
    List((Artificer, 1))
  override def grantToClass: Seq[(HeroicCharacterClass, Int)] =
    List((Artificer, 1))
}


Our cross is crafted from metal with a shiny silver finish. It features an intricate twisting of molded open rings that create a fabulous two dimensional look. The cross attaches to a metal chain and key ring, making it a useful favor that your family and friends will always keep close at hand.


text:
There's so much to say about DC Comics' RORSCHACH #6. It's a script that feels real and true to life. This creative team isn't playing by the rules anymore. They're going to tell a story that might scare us. It's not a story that's full of heroes and villains. It's a story that's dominated by humans. We come to see and even understand where even the most extreme characters are coming from.
Review: RORSCHACH #6 Shows the Raw and Beautiful Mess of Life
By Zac Owens
There's a comfort to be found in a well told story. When you know you're in the hands of a creator who knows their craft, you can relax. You know they'll hit all the right beats, you know their conclusion will be satisfying. But there's a safety in those stories too. We don't read those stories on the edge of our seats. It's only when stories go off the reservation that our hearts rise to our throats. We nervously worry, because with big risks can come big disappointments. Or big payoffs. Writer Tom King, artist Jorge Fornes, colorist Dave Stewart, and letterer Clayton Cowles' Rorschach #6 is a risky story, and it's damn beautiful.
King's script isn't full of splashy comic book mayhem. It's just a simple letter correspondence between The Kid and Rorschach. Laura, The Kid, is a 19 year old girl. She writes to Wil Myerson, an aging comic book writer who has been revealed to be this title's Rorschach, to talk to him about his work. It's easy to forget that King wrote Laura's letters. They're awkward, clunky, and full of angst. When Myerson responds, he does so in the polished tone of a professional writer.
But as the correspondence goes on, each writer begins to influence the other. Laura stumbles through heartfelt summaries of her life and Myerson philosophizes about his time on earth. But soon, Laura is philosophizing and Myerson is confessing his many disappointments in himself. It's a stunning script, full of relatable lines that feel so organic to the characters. After this issue, we can finally understand this mysterious duo. And it's hard not to see ourselves in them, despite their many misdeeds.
Fornes teaches us why these two have such a strong connection. His depictions of Laura mirror his depictions of Myerson, and vice versa. These are truly kindred spirits. When Laura talks about a time she was sitting in a church and she had a vision, Fornes leaves us with one final panel of her looking up at the vision with a smile on her face. So, when Myerson recounts a similar story, Fornes repeats this. We see Myerson as a little boy, looking up at the monster he's imagining, with a gentle smile. But the two face each other. Laura is looking off of her page into the next and Myerson faces the page that came before. It's as though Laura and Myerson are looking at each other, through the panels that are between them. These aren't two separate moments, but one that they're sharing, across space and time.
There's a kind of color coding Stewart uses in this issue. He presents scenes featuring different characters in particular hues. Laura's memories are yellow. Myerson's memories are red. The modern day scenes are often shown in a blue or purple hue. When Laura and Myerson finally meet, the scene settles into a bright orange. We see how these two are affecting each other's whole world. Myerson's outlook is being brightened by Laura, and she's beginning to understand the bloody undertones of life. And in the final page, the blank card stock between the last scene and the back cover, Stewart does something subtle but brilliant. The page looks like it's stained by blood. But it's old blood that landed unevenly. So, the page is covered in the deep reds and pale yellows of dried blood. It's one final reminder of where Laura and Myerson's story is headed.
It's through Cowles' alignment of captions on the page that so much of each letter's tone is conveyed. When Laura first writes a letter to Myerson, the captions are scattered about. She seems sheepish and maybe a little panicked. And when Myerson responds, it's just a little bit tidier. He seems to be laid back in his response, just as are eyes can almost lazily scan the page and take it all in.
When Laura responds, the captions all line up on one side of the page. It's professional, careful, and it's suddenly aware of the fact that Myerson is actually going to read it. This goes on throughout the issue. There are moments where captions overlap each other, like Laura or Myerson are itching to communicate that next line, and there are captions that have huge gaps between them, like they feel pained by the fact that they have to say goodbye. Cowles sets the roadmap for Laura and Myerson's relationship and seamlessly shows us how the two grow together.
There's so much to say about DC Comics' Rorschach #6. It's a script that feels real and true to life. This creative team isn't playing by the rules anymore. They're going to tell a story that might scare us. It's not a story that's full of heroes and villains. It's a story that's dominated by human beings, in all their dangerous glory. We come to see and even understand where even the most extreme characters are coming from. Pick up Rorschach #6, out from DC Comics, at a comic shop near you! It's a must read!
Zac Owens
A world traveler and all-around nerdy guy, Zac is a DC fan and aspiring comic book writer. When he's not writing and editing for Monkeys Fighting Robots, he's carefully fitting more books onto his already-dangerously-overstuffed bookshelf. He lives in Halifax, NS for the moment. That is, until his Green Lantern ring comes in...
There's so much to say about DC Comics' RORSCHACH #6. It's a script that feels real and true to life. This creative team isn't playing by the rules anymore. They're going to tell a story that might scare us. It's not a story that's full of heroes and villains. It's a story that's dominated by humans. We come to see and even understand where even the most extreme characters are coming from.Review: RORSCHACH #6 Shows the Raw and Beautiful Mess of Life


text:
Q: search for a value in dictionary phone_numbers = {"abbie": "(860) 123-4535", "beverly": "(901) 454-3241",
                 "james": "(212) 567-8149", "thomas": "(795) 342-9145"}

Write a function that will look up a phone number given a name. Here is a printout of one of my runs:
problem3_5("james")
(212) 567-8149

Now i write the for loop, and when I put "james" in, it prints the whole values, so I did this:
def problem3_5(name):
    for x in phone_numbers["james"]:
        print(x, end="")

But they said that the grader produced too few lines. What am I missing here?

A: Searching for a value in a dictionary is very simple. You simply need to index into with the proper key. This is not like a list or tuple where the program would probably have to search all of the data for a match. See the program below. It demonstrates how find things in a dictionary and will hopefully get you going in the right direction.
#! /usr/bin/env python3
def main():
    phone_numbers = dict(
        abbie='(860) 123-4535',
        beverly='(901) 454-3241',
        james='(212) 567-8149',
        thomas='(795) 342-9145'
    )
    name = input('Whose number do you want? ')
    number = phone_numbers[name.lower()]
    answer = 'The number of {} is {}.'.format(name.capitalize(), number)
    print(answer)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Your doctor or healthcare provider is the best source of information about what you should eat. You need food for fuel to run your body's machine, such as your heart and other organs, and your muscles that allow you to move. Your body also needs food to grow and to make repairs.
fiber - contained in whole grains (whole grain cereals and breads), and in salads, fresh vegetables, and fruits.
Protein is what your body uses to grow and make repairs. Carbohydrate and fat are what your body uses for fuel. Your body also needs vitamins and minerals and fiber (from salads, fruits, and vegetables). Your body will use protein for fuel if there is not enough carbohydrate and fat in your diet, which is what can happen if you lose weight by not eating at all. Not eating is dangerous and can cause your growth to stop and can hurt your body's development.
Foods that contain a lot of fat, like butter, cream, oils, and animal fat like bacon contain more than twice as much fuel as foods that do not, like beans, lean meat, and rice. Therefore, if you overeat foods with a lot of fat in them, you will gain more than twice as much weight as compared to foods low in fat. You can look at the labels on food to see how many grams of fat they contain.
What is "junk food"? Most of us think of junk food as foods like chips, cookies, ice cream, pizza, pop, candy... Actually junk food is any food that does not help to maintain good health. Eating a lot of junk food can be harmful to your health. Foods that are high in heavy fat (called "saturated" fat) like ice cream and animal fat, or foods high in sugar, are hard on your body. Saturated fat can deposit on the insides of your arteries and clog these arteries with a thing called "fatty plaque". Clogged arteries prevent blood from getting to your vital organs (heart, brain, kidneys) and can result in heart attacks, high blood pressure, strokes, senile mental state, and kidney failure. Clogging of the arteries is not just a disease of adults, it can start as young as three years of age. To avoid clogged arteries it helps to replace saturated fat in your diet with unsaturated fat (here is an article with some tips).
"Fast foods" like cheese-burgers, fries, chicken nuggets, pizza, and milkshakes are high in fat. If you eat a lot of fast foods, unfortunately overweight usually results.
High sugar foods like candy and pop cause tooth decay and stress the pancreas which can trigger diabetes. High sugar foods are also high in calories (fuel), and if not burned up by exercise, the sugar will be converted to fat and will result in weight gain.
So... what is healthy eating? Healthy eating is simply eating the foods your body needs for energy and for growth, and eating only limited amounts of the foods that can harm your body like junk food and saturated fat. Your body needs protein like lean meats, fish, poultry, dry-roasted nuts, beans, and skim milk for growth and repairs. It needs carbohydrates like whole grain cereals and breads, and unsaturated fat like vegetable oil, for energy. Your body also needs vitamins and fiber. Vitamins keep your body running smoothly, and fiber helps get rid of chemicals and prevent cancer. Most junk food does not contain much fiber or vitamins. Fruits (like apples) and vegetables (like carrots) contain both fiber and vitamins.
At left is a video on "Healthy Fixings", created by nursing students, that may provide some ideas for you on healthy snacks and lunches that you can fix by yourself. To see the video, click on the picture at left, or click here.
Many doctors and dietitians recommend something called the "Food Pyramid" as a way to help choose healthy foods and a "balanced" diet. The most recently published food pyramid is shown below. Generally, one approach to weight loss is to eat foods from all the major Food Pyramid groups, but reduce serving sizes a little bit. And foods at the top of the pyramid should be eaten in less amount and less frequently than foods at the bottom. It has been said that, "If you eat mainly at the top of the food pyramid, you will look like the bottom of the pyramid."


text:
Niecie - The Other Side, Review by Doug Spike
Thank you Niecie! I had a major case of the blues. It was Friday night and I was stuck in a traffic bottleneck wondering why the highway engineer would design a freeway interchange with five lanes merging into two. I did what any blues fan would do in that situation: crank up the volume! Niecie's new CD, "The Other Side" happened to be in my player. Lyrics from "God's Got This.."When I'm feeling down and all alone and having a bad day…" blasted from my speakers describing my mood perfectly. The next song, "Traffic Light" fit my attitude, too, and soon the music had my mind in a far more positive place. Thank you Niecie!
"The Other Side" is a "Best of" collection, spanning Niecie's recording career. To use Niecie's own words, the album "portrays all my styles of blues..from roots rock..saucy soul..to funkin' R & B". Niecie is a great singer. Not every singer has a good voice, but Niecie's voice is not just good, it's great! Whether loud or soft, Niecie brings pure clarity and control throughout her entire impressive range. Her vocals are absolutely beautiful on "Skin To Skin" and "Harvest For The World". She sings with demanding strength and emotion on the title track, "I Used To Have A Brain(Then I Got Married)" and Rockin' A Baby.
Niecie has been joined by some wonderful musicians throughout her career. Johnny Neel on keys and Nioshi Jackson on drums are not only featured on many songs on "The Other Side", but also produce the CD with Niecie. I am most impressed by the numerous guitar wizards who have recorded with Niecie. Chris Anderson, Adam Agati, Shaun Bayles, Larry McCray, Mike Durham, Shean Smith, Shane Theriot, and John Conley all contribute. Many, many other super talented musicians make their mark too.