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florrickandassociates · 3 years

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TGF Thoughts: 5x10-- And the violence spread.

So, that’s it for season five. I’m still trying to sort out how I feel about the season as a whole and Wackner’s arc. I’m hopeful that writing this will help me decide.

This episode has a Previously, and it’s rather conventional. I’m guessing it’s here to bookend the season, with conveying information being only a secondary objective.

Did we see Rivi scream, “You’re done, Wacko, you’re done! Canceled! Canceled!” in the last episode or is that new to this previously? I feel like I absolutely would’ve had things to say about a) Wackner being called “Wacko,” which has been RIGHT THERE this whole time, and b) the use of “Canceled,” which is a thing Rivi would never say but is VERY thematic (you know, cancel culture and also Wackner having a TV show and also this being a TV show that’s wrapping up* Wackner’s arc).

* The way things end this episode, I’d say we’re done with Wackner. The Kings have said they aren’t sure about the plan for season six, so never say never, but I think that if we see Wackner again, it will be as part of a different arc.

I went back to 5x09 and while we do see the same shots of Rivi screaming, whatever he’s saying in 5x09 is in Spanish. So either he was saying this in Spanish or the dialogue here is totally new.

I’m a little sad that I knew in advance Robert King had directed this episode, because I want to know how long it would’ve taken me to guess. I’d like to think this first shot, of Diane flopping down on her bed in a very pretty floral print dress, then Kurt flopping down in the opposite direction, would’ve given it away. We usually don’t get shots that are both striking and kinda balanced unless RK’s directing.

This also has some big season three opener vibes—the scene where Diane turns to Kurt and says, “I’m happy,” thus jinxing the entire season.

Diane and Kurt are about to go on vacation, which means, of course, that Diane and Kurt are definitely not about to go on vacation. I’ve watched 12 seasons of this show; I know all the tricks!

If I didn’t get it from the initial staging of the opening shot, the camera panning to Diane and Kurt’s suitcases and then back would’ve been another clue that RK directed. He ALWAYS has the camera in motion.

I love that Diane’s travel outfit is a dress you could wear to a fancy party and a statement necklace. Of course it is.

And if I needed evidence that RK and MK wrote this episode (which I didn’t; it is a finale so I knew they wrote it), Diane quoting Waiting for Godot is a clue there.

I really should read Waiting for Godot, shouldn’t I?

“Wow. Educated and a good lay,” Kurt responds. I know that the political stuff between Diane and Kurt can get more than a little murky, but banter like this reminds me why they stay together and why politics never drive them apart. Also, it’s really nice to see Diane and Kurt have some fun banter that isn’t about politics.

And Diane making kissing noises and asking Kurt to meet her halfway! This just feels like I’m spying on someone’s private life and I love it. Not in a voyeuristic way, since this is actually a little uncomfortably private, but in a, “ah, yes, these do feel like real people” way. This is the kind of “a little goes a long way” character moment I always want more of, and Kings episodes ALWAYS include stuff like this.

And there it is. The phone rings as Diane and Kurt are about to start out for the airport. Diane thinks the call must be for Kurt, but it’s for her. It’s a very flustered Liz, informing her that STR Laurie’s execs are on their way to the office for a surprise visit.

If the Diane/Kurt scene didn’t tell me that Robert King directed, I almost certainly would’ve gotten it from the sudden cut to Liz, walking through the hallways and doing a million things at once with a ton of background noise. No one loves chaos the way Robert King loves chaos.

This episode STRONGLY reminds me of the Wife season five finale. It is equally chaotic and also spins a ton of plates. But, mostly, the similarity I see between the two episodes is that they are both extremely fun and captivating to watch because of how much momentum they have, but everything just feels slightly hollow and not exactly focused on the thing you want to see.

(Shout out to my friend Ryan, who messaged me the 5x22 comparison before I could message it to him!)

I decided I should rewatch the first few minutes of 5x22. I am now 15 minutes into 5x22 of Wife and 2 minutes into 5x10 of Fight. Oops.

Apparently, STR Laurie planned a surprise visit because they heard RL was dysfunctional. You don’t say!

I felt like 5x09 concluded with STR Laurie being won over by Allegra and the RL team, so this is a bit of a surprising place to start the episode. But, since Diane seems surprised too, I’ll allow it.

Now Liz and Diane have 90 minutes to agree on a financial plan! Kurt’s on the phone with the airline before Diane even hangs up with Liz.

Diane is determined not to lose out on her vacation and asks Kurt to change the flight to 8:00. “Kurt, we are going on this vacation if it kills me!” is a line I would worry was foreshadowing on basically any other show.

The RL/STRL PowerPoint template is pretty ugly. They want to call 2021 their best year yet, thanks to the deal between Rivi and Plum Meadow Farms we saw last week. Even though we saw champagne and signatures, the deal isn’t done yet because Plum Meadow can back out if Rivi goes to jail.

RK also loves close-ups more than any other director on the show; I do not love close-ups.

The Plum Meadow deal is such a big deal that for the quarter, they go from $45 million to $5 million without it. They should just not say numbers. I can believe it’s big enough to take them from a modest profit to being behind projections or whatever, but I can’t believe that they have $5 million in other business and $40 million on this one deal.

It seems that Rivi was arrested. I don’t think it is ever said in this episode why. I assume the arrest relates to his behavior in Wackner’s court, since there were police officers there, and I suppose that Rivi is a big enough deal the police would actually take him to real court, but are we not going to address the weirdness of Rivi being arrested in a fake court where his employees are being tried, then taken to a real court by the same people who just an episode ago were disillusioned with real court? This seems like a plot point.

Carmen on a frantic phone call in the backseat of a car feels very 7x22.

Who is James that Carmen has in her contacts!? And why does everyone always put Liz in their contacts as “Elizabeth Reddick” when everyone calls her Liz?

Carmen calls Marissa to go argue in Vinetta’s court since she’s on Rivi duty. Carmen doesn’t take Marissa’s job in Wackner’s court seriously and then notes that this instruction is coming straight from Liz, so Marissa falls in line.

Wackner’s case of the week is about rural Illinois wanting to form its own state separate from Chicago. There’s a farmer who feels like his tax money is only going to the big city and he wants it to stay in his community.

They’ve just now added stage lighting to the set of Wackner Rules, dunno why they wouldn’t have done that earlier!

I don’t know what standing you’d have to have to bring a case about wanting to divide the state in two to court, or if this is even something a court would or should decide, but, sure, Wackner and Cord, go for it. There are no rules!

This map splitting Illinois into two new states that Cord is holding is a dumb prop because Galena, where this farmer is from, is in the same section as Chicago. Do I pause every reference to Chicago on this show and then google information to see if the writers bothered to look it up or pretend they’ve ever set foot in Chicago? You know I do.

“Secession!” the audience screams. Does the audience of Wackner Rules really want to see this?

A Good Fight Short! And it really is short: “Stop this obsession with secession and breaking up the Union. It’s boring and it’s dumb, end of song.” I feel like that’s the thesis statement for this episode, or one of them (that this episode seems to have about ten thesis statements is kind of my problem with this episode, tbh). This episode is very much about danger of things becoming too fractured—the COTW, the copycat courts, the firm drama—and I feel like the writers come around to just saying no, this is enough, we need structure and consistency.

But more on that later. MUCH more on that later.

Marissa is swearing more because “the world has required it.” She notes this to Wackner as she calls him out on the secession case. Cord barges in.

Take a look at the employee of the month poster on the back of the door at 5:39. Then at 5:40, look at what’s in the box just to the right of the center of the screen: it’s an employee of the month poster with Wackner on it! Cute easter egg. (Would Marissa definitely notice this and have questions? Yes. Is this here as a cute easter egg for eagle-eyed fans? Almost certainly.)

“Insane is just one step away from reality if you get people to believe, and you know what makes people believe? TV.” Cord explains when Marissa asks how they can possibly be litigating this case. That’s thesis statements two and three, folks. The first is that if you get people to believe, then anything is possible, which sounds like a tagline for a Disney movie but is actually super dangerous; the second is that reality TV is a way to persuade people and change opinions.

So we’ve got: (1) Factions are bad. (2) People are persuadable and the rules don’t actually matter. (3) Reality TV changes minds. Let’s see if there are more.

(Yes, these theses do kind of add up to a whole—The rules don’t matter, so if you persuade people, through reality tv, you get factions of people believing their own sets of rules and facts—but what I'm interested in tracking throughout this episode is how well the writers actually bring these theses together.)

(And this is setting aside that key themes in previous episodes, that I think many of us were looking for resolution on, included outlining the flaws with the extant “real” justice system and exploring the role of prison in the justice system. From this episode, I don’t think the writers ever intended to really tackle either of those issues. That’s fine—I'm not sure that TGF has something to say about prison abolition and I don’t want a thought experiment where the writers actually try to fix the legal system—but feels a bit disjointed. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but 5x08 and 5x09 needed to do a better, clearer job of setting up this finale. The key themes of Wackner’s arc were always present, but they needed to slowly narrow the scope so the resolution felt inevitable and clear. Instead, we spent time on things like parking spaces (when we could’ve had a real plot about how Wackner’s court gains legitimacy through violence, incarceration, and playing on people’s frustration with the real systems) and Del’s focus groups (when we could’ve instead done a plot about Wackner gaining fans who wanted to use his methods to do ill). Everything I just mentioned in the parentheticals is in the show! It’s not subtext! We see it all! We see Cord use violence and prisons to enforce Wackner’s rulings; we see the cops turn to Wackner out of frustration; we see that the people drawn to Wackner Rules and to Wackner’s court are increasingly sounding more and more like right-wing populists! I can’t be too hard on this arc because, again, all these ideas are there. I’m not coming up with them on my own!)

I’m just saying: this ending would’ve been a lot clearer and a lot more interesting had the writers focused on what I mentioned above instead of the distractions of the last two episodes.

Whew, that was a ramble. Hope you’re ready for more rambles.

On a similar note, I’d like to reiterate my problems with how the writers used Marissa after the private prison reveal. I don’t have much more to say than what I wrote last week, but it’s another example of the same problem. Marissa objecting to Wackner’s court because she notices what it’s becoming and how Cord plans to use it for political gain (two Illinoises (??) changes the Senate and the Electoral College...) always was going to be part of the endgame. Marissa only seriously objecting after the fourth or fifth line Wackner crosses feels bizarre.

Cord does NOT like that there is another court, and wants to protect Wackner’s IP. Wackner, as we saw last episode, does not feel threatened by the other court. In fact, he seems to be excited by it.

I love Liz questioning Diane’s outfit like it’s unprofessional. It’s a little low-cut and showy, but I don’t think unprofessional is the word I’d use for it.

Now they have 45 minutes to decide The Future Of The Firm and Diane wants to be considered a name partner. Oh, that debate is still raging?! Every time I think it’s done it comes back, which should probably be a sign to Diane that her options are to leave and start something new, jettison Madeline and the others, or step down. Staying on as name partner and calling it a black firm is just not an option.

“Diane, there is a split in the firm that...” Liz starts, before asking some associates to leave the room. Ha! The reveal Liz and Diane aren’t alone is a pretty fun touch.

“The Black equity partners don’t want to be in your work group,” Liz informs Diane. “Because they think they’ll be punished by this firm?” Diane asks. “No, that’s paranoia. We don’t punish here,” Liz responds. “Of course you do. My fracking client. My union client. The Black lawyers who work on those cases—they're considered traitors” Diane says. “Because those CEOs are racists,” Liz counters.

Lots going on here, and I’m not sure I understand it all. Why would the equity partners—who are partners—feel like they’re being punished by being in Diane’s work group? (And also what does a “work group” mean and why haven’t they talked about it in the past?) When Diane starts talking about the lawyers who staff her clients, she’s not talking about equity partners; she is talking about associates.

And people are giving associates shit for working on Diane’s clients whom they happen to be staffed on!? That’s sad, though believable.

“So what do we do? Only bring in clients who can pass the racial smell test?” Diane asks. I mean, actually, yes. IF the goal is to be a black firm and to have that designation mean something in moral terms rather than marketing terms, then yes.

“It’s okay if you’re a drug kingpin like Rivi, but it’s not okay if you want me as lead attorney?” Diane says. Also, yes. Diane makes good points here.

“Diane, this is not about you,” Liz counters. Um, sure, but it has to be about something, Liz. Unless you’re trying to build a firm you don’t control that makes 88% of its revenue from a drug dealer (40 million out of 45 million this quarter = 88%; I told you they shouldn’t give me numbers) but happens to have black people in charge, you have to grapple with this question. I don’t think anyone who’s fighting for the firm to be a black-led (not owned, bc STRL) business is the type of person who thinks that having a black-led firm that does all the same shit as any other firm is in itself a good thing, so you NEED to address your client list. Madeline is anti-Rivi, anti-Cord, anti-Wolfe-Coleman (the rapist guy), pro-social justice, and pro having a black led firm.

“I mean, why... why do white people personalize this?” Liz asks. “Oh, now I’m just a white person?” Diane responds. I... don’t know what to do with this! Liz is right that Diane is taking this personally; Diane is right that Liz needs to deal with the rest of the client list. But no one is saying the things that REALLY need to be said: That all their decisions are meaningless in the shadow of STRL, and that deciding to be a black led firm isn’t the end of the discussion if they haven’t decided what types of clients they want to have.

“What happened, Liz? Last year we were intent on an all-female-run law firm,” Diane starts. Oh, THIS AGAIN! Diane never learns, does she? She never seems to realize that no one she’s approached with this idea is NEARLY as in love with it as she is. She probably still wonders to herself why Alicia—who partnered with her at the end of season seven basically just because it was the easiest, most frictionless thing to do—didn't seem more committed to their firm.

“Diane, there is history here that we are trying to...” Liz says, but Diane cuts in to note that women (women like Diane Lockhart!) have history too! In fact, she’s spent “35 years fighting gender discrimination to get to this position.” “And we have spent 400 years fighting racial discrimination to try and, you know...” Liz starts, before cutting herself off to get back to the ticking clock.

Sigh. Just talk about the actual thing instead of talking around the thing, guys. Diane is obviously deserving of A name partnership, in the abstract. This is an undeniable fact. And while Diane is definitely making this about herself rather than the big picture, I don’t think Liz trying to trump Diane’s 35 year career with the history of black people is going to win her any arguments? Like, just say what you mean and say it clearly. What Liz, I think, wants to express is that Diane’s individual accomplishments aren’t the issue here and everyone thinks she’s deserving (though Liz suggested Diane was not deserving a few episodes ago, which I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now). The problem is that Diane is trying to fight a battle that’s about something much larger than herself with, “but I'm a good lawyer!”

And that’s KIND OF what Liz is saying here, if I add all her sentences up and read between the lines, but, again, why not just say it?

“Alright, now we have 43 minutes to fix race relations, gender relations. STR Laurie’s gonna fire our asses, and you know it,” Liz says. I am curious what that would look like. Wouldn’t that just mean that STRL wouldn’t control them anymore? I’m sure being fired would be bad and all, but wouldn’t it free them from the contract they wanted out of last year?

“Let’s split the firm down the middle. I hire half the lawyers, you hire the other half,” Diane suggests. What does this mean? Why are you hiring your employees? Huh?

“You hire the white associates, and I hire the black associates?” Liz confirms. This seems like a very bad idea that would make things a lot worse and open them up to lawsuits! I also still do not know what they’re even talking about. And I don’t know why Allegra isn’t a part of this conversation.

“I’m not saying it’s good. I’m just saying it’s what we’re left with. It's what we can agree on,” Diane says. I really wish I understood what “hire” meant in this context because I don’t understand why they have to split anything or why this has to be done now and I don’t understand why this would possibly be a good solution. Can you imagine the backlash when people realize all the white people report to Diane and all the black people to Liz and that people were taken off of the accounts they’ve worked on for years to accomplish this? And this must be something that the employees would know about eventually; otherwise they could just randomly assign half to Liz and half to Diane.

I’m sad Madeline isn’t in this episode because I feel like we needed to see more of her POV as well as the associate POV. I don’t really understand the divides at play within the firm or what the staff and other partners are asking for, but I suspect it isn’t this.

Hallucination Jesus is back, and at least there’s actually a point to him this time (he shows up when Jay is in Vinetta’s court and reminds Jay that Vinetta will rule based on her religious beliefs). I still dislike the hallucinations.

Jay advises Marissa, who is Jewish, to talk a lot about Jesus in her defense.

Charmaine Bingwa is really great as Carmen, and obviously she is not fluent in Spanish, but it’s so funny to me that the only time you can hear that she’s Australian is when she’s trying to say Oscar like she’s speaking Spanish.

"I know you’re hiding something when you speak English,” Rivi says to Carmen. Heh.

“Community court” is such a nice, unthreatening term for referring to Wackner and his copy cats. Thanks for that, Carmen!

It’s a smart plan to mention Jesus a lot, I guess, but Jay and Marissa both should’ve realized that Vinetta is too smart to tolerate obvious pandering. I’m a little surprised Jay doesn’t get up and argue since Marissa is, obviously, not familiar with the New Testament.

Marissa wins this round with facts and logic.

Why is the judge who was handling Rivi’s previous charge now in bond court? Make it make sense.

I like that Carmen calls out the ASA for swearing hahaha

Why... would this Matteo kid just casually mention he was holding a gun, omg.

In Vinetta’s court, you can be charged with murder and tried because... you had a gun and also there were murders at other times. Coolcoolcool no problems here.

Community courts for civil cases? Sure. That’s basically arbitration. Community courts for criminal cases? Bad, bad, bad idea.

Vinetta’s reasoning: “Those murders happened on our street, and the police haven’t convicted anyone because they don’t care. We care. This is self-defense. And how is it different from your court?” Aside from the whole imprisoning people in her basement thing, Vinetta’s not wrong. I almost brought this up last week but hesitated because I couldn’t remember the details enough to decide if I wanted to recommend it, but there’s a book I read a few years ago that seems relevant here: Ghettoside by Jill Leovy. Again, been a while so don’t take this as a wholehearted endorsement or anything, but from what I remember, the central issue at the heart of the book (it’s non-fiction) is that a poor black community (I think in LA?) doesn’t trust the police (in part) because the police don’t solve murders, and then with no way of getting justice through the court system, there’s more violence as a stand-in for justice. https://www.vox.com/2016/8/26/12631962/ghettoside-jill-leovy-black-crime

I’m not sure if that’s QUITE what Vinetta is saying but it seems similar, and it’s a decent point (though not a justification for her court). Why should she trust the system to improve her community when it’s ignored her community for years?

I like that the writers chose two very different, very understandable characters for their community courts. It’s easy to see why Wackner and Vinetta feel the need for alternative courts; it’s easy to see why others would trust them. This arc doesn’t really work unless there’s a legitimate frustration with existing systems...

Marissa calls Wackner’s court a “joke,” which she should understand by now isn’t the case. (Marissa’s smart; she knew it wasn’t a joke the second she saw David Cord get involved.)

Vinetta accuses Wackner of copying her court, which alarms Marissa. This isn’t addressed again, and I don’t know if it’s true! I could really go either way on this. On the one hand, I absolutely believe that Wackner saw/heard about it, liked it, and did it himself without thinking much of it—and if this is the case, then the ending where Vinetta gets in trouble for violating Wackner’s IP is a lot more of a gut punch. On the other hand, I don’t really feel like the seeds for this were planted. We see Wackner innovate a lot and try new things and he has an explanation for why he does everything—how much of that is Vinetta? And Vinetta clearly watches the show and likes it or she wouldn’t have recognized Marissa, so it’s a little hard for me to just believe her claim when literally all I know about her is she has a court that looks like Wackner’s and she is aware of and feels positively towards Wackner rules. Also, Wackner knows about Vinetta’s court (from Marissa) and sounded excited about it last episode. Sure, he didn’t necessarily know which one it was, exactly, but I assume if he’d copied the idea and then heard about a case involving people from the exact same community where he found the idea... his reaction would be different. So IDK. My reasons for doubting Vinetta’s claim are probably based a little too much in things I’m not meant to spend that much time paying attention to.

“I fucked up. It’s in the same court, but now it’s a murder case,” Marissa tells Diane. I do like hearing characters admit when they fucked up!

Diane hears that STRL is delayed, so she heads out to help Matteo. When she goes to change into her pantsuit, she finds that she’s grabbed Kurt’s bag by mistake. “Of course. That makes sense,” she reacts.

Diane pushes her flight to the next day, also telling Kurt, “And yes, for some reason, I took your suit instead of mine, so fuck it.” I love it when the characters feel like real people.

I am not sure why Kurt is getting to the office when Diane is leaving or why Kurt is there—to pick Diane up on the way to the airport, maybe?

Carter Schmidt walks into RL at the worst possible time, threating to blow up the Plum Meadow deal. Another 5x10 to Wife 5x22 similarity: he’s in both episodes.

Liz heads out to help Carmen with Rivi, and then STRL arrives. Oops.

Credits!

One thing about Wackner’s court that should definitely be a warning sign even though it seems noble: he ignores just about every warning sign, like this rowdy crowd screaming WE LOVE YOU WACKNER or the potential interests at play in a case about secession, because he thinks his fair judgement can overcome these obstacles. If the world worked that way, there’d be no need for his court in the first place.

Is anyone representing the State of Illinois in this trial? If not, then... how is it happening?

Dr. Goat, some dude who claims to have some hidden historical document about how Illinois is actually two states, is clearly making stuff up and yet Wackner indulges him and Cord. I feel about this the same way as I feel about the Devil’s Advocate: That Wackner would not allow this to go on for more than five seconds before calling bullshit and therefore there is no reason I should have to sit through it.

Why is some guy screaming, “No taxation without representation” like dude you absolutely have representation. But of course, I’m expecting him to be logical, and the point is that he is not.

Dr. Goat’s Latin phrases—shock!-- don’t actually translate into anything like what he said. Even though this information is verifiable by a quick google search, the crowd starts screaming “Liar!!!!” at Marissa. If only I could say this felt unrealistic.

Wackner asks Dr. Goat to bring in the document.

“You look like you’re heading to the beach,” Vinetta says to Diane, who looks like she’s heading somewhere but definitely not to the beach. Vinetta asks where Diane was headed on vacation. Diane says she’s headed to Lake Como, and unnecessarily clarifies that “It’s in Italy.” She assumes Vinetta doesn’t know that... but Vinetta does.

“So you’ve been there before?” Vinetta probes when Diane says it’s beautiful there. “Just once. We don’t get away often. We thought we’d splurge,” Diane says. Vinetta stares at her and smiles, and Diane hits her head on a basket that’s hanging in Vinetta’s kitchen. If I just write out the dialogue here, it sounds like a perfectly average conversation, but everything about this conversation is so charged: Diane is afraid to look like a wealthy white woman; Vinetta’s pleasantness is pretty clearly also a way of sizing up Diane.

Vinetta shows Diane pictures of neighborhood children and young adults killed as a consequence of gang violence. You can see she’s not trying to do anything other than help her community, even if her methods are highly questionable.

Diane argues that Matteo should be given over to the police; Vinetta disagrees: “The police haven’t arrested anyone for those murders, any of these. Since the BLM movement, they’ve pulled back from our streets. No one’s coming to help. That’s why I started this court. It’s not a joke to us.” Wait I’m sorry did Vinetta just blame lack of good detective work in black communities on... the BLM movement?!?!?! Is there any foundation to this!? Why can’t it just be that the police weren’t actually doing a good job of policing/finding justice and were being antagonistic towards the community instead of being helpful and no one trusted them?? That explanation is literally right there.

Jay suggests the Jesus strategy, again.

“It’s women! We could just move on, install men,” STRL guy says. I don’t know if he’s joking, but ugh. Also, what is RL if it has neither Diane nor Liz? A bunch of lawyers who will all promptly quit when they see their bosses get fired and a few opportunists?

Kurt is watching golf in Diane’s office, and the STRL people love it. Of course Kurt accidentally makes friends with them.

Court stuff happens. It’s not good for Rivi, and then Liz and Carmen come up with a theory: Plum Meadow is stalling the deal so they can find Rivi’s more stable second and make a deal with them instead.

Wackner giving Dr. Goat a single point on his stupid little board, for any reason related to his obviously fake totally unverified document, is dangerous. Why would you signal to a crowd that’s clearly not interested in fact that they have a point? That’s basically egging them on.

I know Wackner’s judgment is obviously not 100% sound—need I remind you of the PRIVATE PRISONS?-- but I thought it was more sound than this.

Wackner shows off his knowledge of paper and proves that Dr. Goat’s document is a fake. Why... did he just give Dr. Goat a point???

Or is he moving the point from Dr. Goat to Marissa?

Dr. Goat sounds like a fake name I would call a character in my recaps long past the point of anyone other than myself remembering the joke. (See: Mr. Elk)

“The truth is ugly. The only thing uglier is not pursuing it,” Wackner tells Marissa. How is taking on a case about very obvious falsehoods, funded by someone with a vested interest in the case, that gets people riled up, some noble pursuit of truth?

STRL and Kurt are now drinking and discussing hunting, while Diane’s arguing for Matteo in Vinetta’s living room. Vinetta is—as was always obvious, sorry Jay—far too smart to fall for this patronizing bullshit. She screams at Diane and plays back a recording (on a baby monitor) of Diane coaching Matteo to lie about his faith.

Soooooo yeah no you can’t do that, that is bad, recording conversations between lawyers and their clients is not good even if it leads to you exposing their schemes...

Then Vinetta places Diane under arrest, which obviously isn’t going to end well for Vinetta.

Liz and Carmen suggest a post-nup to Rivi to see if Isabel is planning on turning on him.

“I’m going to have to kill her,” Rivi says sadly. I don’t think Rivi will ever kill Isabel because we already did that with Bishop.

I’m going to assume that Diane chooses to stay in basement prison instead of calling one of the many, MANY, MANY people she could call to get her out/take down Vinetta because she doesn’t want the situation to be publicized or further deteriorate. That said, it’s really not clear why Diane just accepts being sentenced to basement prison with a cell phone.

Love the STRL man looking at that picture of Diane and HRC. They’ve gotten so much mileage out of that photo.

Wackner’s court has no rules, but at least since it has no rules, I can’t complain about how its rules make no sense!

What is this, debate practice?! Ugggghhhhh I can’t deal with this case for much longer.

Marissa takes a breath, then decides to pursue a strategy she knows could blow everything up.

“Then why care what Judge Wackner decides? Why should you defer to him? Why defer to anyone?” Cord says that’s the point—the people have decided to trust Wackner. “So if you don’t like this court’s decision, you’ll just start a new one?” Marissa asks. “I guess,” Cord concedes.

“So then why does this matter? This court?” “It matters only insofar as we continue to agree that it matters,” Cord says. “So if you don’t like Judge Wackner’s rulings, you can just ignore them and create a new court?”

Good point, Marissa. Good point. (Does this count as a thesis?)

“I’m guessing that I will like the way the judge decides,” Cord says. Well, that’s basically a threat.

Wackner takes a break and heads to chambers—without Marissa.

Kurt goes to visit Diane in basement jail. He’s granted a conjugal visit, which means Matteo gets moved up to the bedroom so Diane and Kurt can have some alone time.

Diane is staring at an image of Lake Como in her cell. I thought it was odd she brought a printout of her vacation destination with her, so I LOVED the line where she explains that Vinetta printed it out for her. COLD. (You know who also would’ve done this if they’d for some reason had a basement prison? Bree Van de Kamp. You know what show DID do a basement prison arc I’d rather forget? Desperate Housewives!)

I love how Diane responds to basement prison by making jokes non-stop.

“I thought the craziness would end with 2020,” Diane says. Nope.

Kurt brought alcohol; Diane brought pot gummies.

I love that Kurt has never had pot before. I was going to say that I bet Diane’s had a few experiences with recreational drugs when I remembered we had a whole damn season of Diane microdosing.

Christine and Gary’s acting and their chemistry really bring these basement prison scenes to life. The writing and directing are really sharp, but it’s the actors who make these scenes something special. You can tell Diane and Kurt love each other a lot. You can tell they’re disappointed about their vacation and exhausted by the chaos of the day. You can tell they’re in disbelief over this situation but also find it funny.

Didn’t Rivi and Isabel have an adult daughter who died of COVID a few episodes ago? Weird she isn’t mentioned in this scene. Maybe from a different marriage/relationship?

Isabel called the SA’s office because she thinks Rivi’s a threat? I think this is a power play.

Heh, Carmen saying, “Shut a black woman up!?” in disbelief in court. Love it.

Isabel instead flips her story and supports her husband and fights for his release. With no intervention from Plum Meadow, this gets the judge to free Rivi. I don’t really understand what’s happened here or why. I get the resolution, but I don’t get why Isabel called the SA or why this went away so quickly. I still don’t even get why Rivi’s been arrested.

Diane and Kurt put up Christmas lights for ambiance and talk about how they never go on vacation.

“I wanna see the pyramids on this coast!” drunk & high Kurt insists, hilariously. “I mean hemisphere. I like the Aztecs. They, they care about people.” I’m not going to transcribe the rest of the dialogue because it loses its magic when you’re not watching the scene.

After some fun banter about travel and movies, Diane changes the topic. “I should quit, shouldn’t I? That judge upstairs? She looked at me like I was the most entitled white bitch on the planet. And that’s the way they look at me at work.”

Kurt tries to say that’s not true, but Diane knows it is: “Yes they do. I’m the top Karen. And why do I care? I mean, I... I could find another firm. I could quit. I can’t impose my will on people who don’t want me.”

YES. I see a lot of debate over what the “right” thing to do is here. But I think we are long past “right” and “wrong.” At a certain point, this stops being about absolute moral truths. If Diane doesn’t have the respect of her partners and employees, that is a very real problem for the firm and for Diane. How can she continue to impose her will on a firm that doesn’t want her, all the while claiming to be an ally? (The back half of that sentence is the most important part.) Forget whether or not Diane “should” have to step down. Forget what’s “fair.” If the non-Diane leadership of RL thinks the firm should be a black firm, and the employees of RL think so too, and Diane just doubles down on her white feminism, she’s creating an even bigger problem for herself and ruining her reputation in the process.

Kurt stands up on the prison cot and warns Diane she might make a decision she’ll regret. This scene is so cute. Why can’t other shows do drug trips where the characters just act silly and have great chemistry? Why does it always have to be some profound meditation on death whenever characters get high?

“I think I like starting over. I like the chutes and ladders of life. I mean, I want the corner office, but then I wanna slip back to the beginning and fight for the corner office. I mean, I think maybe it’s better that I don’t get the top spot,” Diane says. LOVE to hear her admit this. I’m not sure I would’ve come to this conclusion on my own, and it sounds like it’s a bit more about how the writers like to write (you know, the “we love our characters to always be underdogs”) than Diane, but... you know what? I believe it. I fully believe it. Diane LOVES to fight, LOVES to feel like she’s in the right, LOVES power plays and to be making progress. She LOVES winning. The fact that she isn’t just choosing to retire right now, even though she’s past retirement age and has a great reputation, is in itself enough for me to believe that she would find it fun to repeatedly start over.

Plus, it’s a fun new direction for the show to take in season six, because they’ll get the same sense of conflict without the actual conflict. This season’s arc was firm drama and resulted in a firm name change... but it didn’t feel like a knock-off of Hitting the Fan. Diane trying to work her way back into power (I assume by becoming a better actual ally, otherwise doesn’t she just end up in the same exact situation?) should also provide conflict without being repetitive.

Hahahahahaha Kurt immediately reacting to this serious statement by being incredibly silly and horny and then Diane singing “I Touch Myself” to him, man, I love these two. I want to know the story behind this song choice.

Wackner emerges from his chambers. The score is tied. Wackner calls Cord corrupt and notes that they can’t just decide to call Downstate Illinois a new state based on his ruling. Now it’s thesis time!

“I was taken by Mr. Cord’s arguments of individualism. So much of our country has been built on people finding their own way, not being held back by bureaucracy. Yet, if we only follow individualism, that way lies chaos. And that was not the point of this court. Or at least not my point. Judgment for the defense. There will be no Downstate Illinois.”

“If we only follow individualism, that way lies chaos.” is probably the clearest of the many theses of this episode. To recap, we have:

(1) Factions are bad. (2) People are persuadable and the rules don’t actually matter. (3) Reality TV changes minds. (4) Institutions only exist when we collectively agree they exist (5) Individualism = chaos.

But let’s put a pin in this for now and let the chaos of individualism play out.

The crowd does not like Wackner’s decision, and decides that an appropriate way to express their displeasure is to make anti-Semitic remarks towards Marissa and then start throwing chairs. What nice people.

As the crowd goes totally 1/6 on Wackner’s court (thanks for pointing this out to me, Ryan—I cannot believe I didn’t make the connection myself!), the door slamming into the desk finally pays off since Marissa and Wackner are able to use it to keep the crowd from reaching them.

They immediately turn to the police, or they would, if they could get service. I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that as soon as things get bad, they want to involve the existing system.

Wackner Rules is, somehow, still taping in the midst of all the chaos. I don’t know if I think they’d air this, but someone certainly would. (I wonder if any of the cameras we see in these scenes are actually the cameras filming the other angles of the riot.)

Cord shakes his head and walks out, unharmed.

“You think they’ll kill us?” “I think they might,” Marissa and Wackner fret.

“My dad said the whole world would be a better place if everybody realized they were in the minority. ‘No matter where you are,’ he said, ‘Make sure you keep an eye on the exits, and make sure you’re closer to the exit than the Cossacks are to the entrance.’” Marissa says. Love Eli Gold coming through with thesis number 6 (and maybe thesis number 7).

“Your dad sounds a little paranoid,” Wackner says, correctly. Remember how I mentioned I accidentally wound up watching 5x22? Eli calls Alicia and responds to her hello with, “DISASTER!!!!” I miss him.

“He was, but he wasn’t wrong. He said, ‘Stay away from parades. They’re cute until they’re not. And don’t trust any pope who was Hitler Youth.” “What’s that law called?” “Godwin’s Law. My dad said anybody who argued for Godwin’s Law has never been near an actual crowd. Crowds love you, they hug you. Then they grab a gun and try to kill you.”

“Why? Why do they do that?” “I don’t know. Hate is fun. It’s clear-cut.”

I really like all of this. It is a little preachy, but it isn’t wrong and it’s self-aware. And, more importantly, it’s in character. I absolutely believe that Marissa would tell lots of stories about Eli in a moment of extreme stress. It’s nostalgic, probably comforting, and it also helps her feel like she’s on the right side with the right arguments. So, even backed into a corner, she’s still a winner: she has theory on her side.

Wackner speaks a foreign language (I do not know what language but I wish I did) and says, “A guy could get killed doing this,” which makes him and Marissa laugh as things crash around them.

Idk about you all, but I couldn’t really get myself to actually worry about their safety during this scene. Maybe Wackner’s, just a little, but I got the sense we were supposed to focus more on the chaos and destruction and monologuing than on the actual danger. That’s not to say the stakes didn’t feel high, but rather to say that this didn’t feel like an action sequence where you don’t know what’s going to happen next. The point was to watch the court fall and think about why it fell, not to worry about if Marissa would live.

Diane and Kurt are woken up by sirens and loud noises. The cops arrive and are shocked to find professionally dressed white people in a basement cell. They let Diane and Kurt out with compassion, but scream, “don’t you fucking move” to the people on the floor.

“It’s okay, they didn’t do anything,” Diane says. This is, as I theorized earlier, probably why Diane just sits there until her punishment blows over instead of escalating things.

If the cops weren’t there to free Diane, why were they there? Why, because they like David Cord and David Cord has gotten Chicago PD officers to protect Wackner’s IP.

If I had to say one thing in favor of Vinetta being the originator of the community court idea, it would be that it’s SUCH a gut punch to watch Diane and Kurt walk away from their bizarre little adventure as Vinetta gets arrested in the background, and it hits ten times as hard if Vinetta’s only being charged because some white guy is claiming IP that’s actually hers.

(I think Vinetta is probably, at this point, actually being arrested for imprisoning people illegally, but, still.)

“Pfft. Some judge,” one of the cops who adores Wackner says of Vinetta. Racist much?

Marissa and Wackner emerge from the backroom. “I think I better get back to work,” she says, meaning her RL job. "Me too,” Wackner says, grabbing a Copy Coop apron. He’s an employee of ten years.

I don’t think this lands as well as it’s meant to. I think the point is supposed to be that Wackner’s just some guy—not a billionaire, not an academic, not a judge, not a lawyer—with an idea. But it’s a little too neat. And it doesn’t explain how Wackner financed his court initially, nor does it explain why he has basically unlimited access to Copy Coop space and resources. I’d buy it if he were the OWNER of Copy Coop, but I have so many questions about him being an employee.

Diane tells Liz she’s actually going on vacation this time, and they laugh about how Kurt bonded with STRL.

“I want you and Allegra to be name partners. I’ll be an equity partner,” Diane says. “Why?” Liz asks. “Five years ago, when I hit rock bottom, this firm took me in. So I don’t like the idea of splitting this firm in two. And I can’t lead if no one will follow.” “And your clients?” “We’ll manage them together.” YES! I love this. I don’t love it because I necessarily think it had to go this way, but because it’s so refreshing to see Diane say that she actually is willing to take a step back because she cares about the firm and the people there more than she cares about being a name partner. This isn’t something we usually see. When we hear “this firm took x in” it’s usually being said incredulously against someone who’s decided to leave and steal clients (cough, Hitting the Fan, cough).

It’s been pretty clear for most of this arc that Diane and Liz like working together and they like their firm, but that no one (other than Diane, I guess) is willing to let RL lose its status as a black firm, and that the employees and equity partners weren’t going to be satisfied until Diane stepped down. Diane really had three options: Stay and piss everyone off and claim the whole firm for herself, quit and go somewhere else and totally abandon the good working dynamic she had, or step down and put her money where her mouth is.

Also yeah the clients were never actually going to be an issue! They were only an issue because Diane intentionally went about informing them she was stepping down in a way she knew would make them worry!

“I think I need to prove myself,” Diane says. I’m not sure that’s the key issue or that she can ever prove herself fully, but we’ll worry about that next year.

“I missed you,” Liz says. “I’m here,” Diane replies. “I know. Thank you,” Liz says.

Diane decides she’s going to move downstairs so Allegra can have her office. I think there’s another office on this floor, since she, Adrian and Liz all had offices. This feels a little bit like Diane’s in love with the idea of making things difficult for herself and maybe hasn’t fully grasped the point, but, you know, I’ll take it.

Diane tells Kurt her decision and he asks if it was the right thing to do. She says she doesn’t know—but she says it with a smile. Kurt notes he’s going hunting next month with the STRL folks and will put in a good word for her. Ah, yes, because STRL still controls all of this and all of this is moot! Thanks for the reminder Kurt! Diane says she wants in on the hunting trip. Of course.

And the elevator doors close. Remember how closing elevator doors was a motif earlier this season??? It’s back!

Then we get a little coda with Wackner Rules airing a new episode that’s just violence and destruction. This sequence seems to straddle the line between being there for thematic reasons for the viewers and there to show what happened in the show’s universe, but I think it’s main purpose is theme, so I will not go on a full rant questioning why Del would want to air this.

A white blonde lady in an apron watches the destruction of Wackner Rules. She looks concerned. “That was violet,” she says with dismay. And then we see she’s holding a guy in a jail cell in her kitchen.

And then we see other courts, as America the Beautiful plays. One’s in a garage debating kicking someone out of the neighborhood; another is across the street about the same case. There’s one in Oregon about secession. There’s one among Tiki Torch Nazis deciding only white people can own property. There’s (inexplicably) one about pronouns. There’s one with arm wrestling, one that happens while sky diving, and a bunch of others. It’s pretty ridiculous, and not necessarily in a good way. It feels at once like the natural extension of the Wackner Rules show and like an over the top parody you’d see on another show. Tiki Torch Nazis screaming “only white people can own property!” is the opposite of subtle writing. Tonally, this sequence feels more like the zany humor of Desperate Housewives or the insanity of BrainDead than anything TGF has done before (and TGF’s been plenty surreal), and it doesn’t quite work for me. It feels like it is trying to prove a point in the corniest, most on the nose way possible. It almost feels like it’s parodying its own plotlines.

On my first watch, this ending for Wackner left me stumped. I knew the writers were making an argument against individualism (Wackner’s speech + the repeated references to The Apprentice) and cults of personality. But I couldn’t figure out a real life analogue to Wackner’s court, and since this ending was so obviously trying to be About Something, that bugged me. Sure, that last sequence could be an argument against people making community courts, but WERE people making community courts? I didn’t see the urgency.

And then I talked to @mimeparadox. And as soon as he said that it was about factions and people playing by their own sets of rules beyond the justice system, it clicked. I’d been looking for Wackner’s plot to be a commentary on the legal system. It is much broader than that. It’s a commentary on the weakening of democratic systems (the Big Lie, etc.), more broadly, and Wackner and his common-sense approach are just a way to get liberal viewers to go along for the ride.

Now that I understand the point, or what I think is the point, I like this conclusion. Circumventing the system leads to chaos; that’s why we have institutions and bureaucracy, and I think the show is arguing that these institutions should still be respected despite their flaws. The many theses of this episode all come together to make this point (though the reality TV stuff is a little more tenuous and I'm a little shocked we got through all of this without any commentary on social media?): If we stop having a shared belief in institutions and instead follow individual leaders (whom we may learn about through reality TV), the rules will stop mattering and we’ll end up with a fractured country and widespread violence.

But, and maybe this is just about me being upset I missed both the obvious 1/6 parallels AND the point of the arc the first time through this episode (my defensive side feels the need to also note I first watched this episode at like 5 am when I was barely awake), I don’t know that I actually think this episode does a great job of driving its point home. There are SO many moving pieces to the Wackner plot and SO many references. There are so many threads we never return to from earlier in the season, and there’s so much that strains credulity (like Wackner taking Dr. Goat seriously for more than a split second). It’s pretty clear what the themes are—even though I’m saying I missed the point my first time through, I've hit on all these themes separately in past recaps and posts—but, I dunno, something about this episode just feels scattered. Maybe it’s all the moving pieces, maybe it’s all the moments where it sounds like the characters are voicing related ideas that don’t quite snap together to form one coherent picture, or maybe it’s that Wackner’s plot gets two endings (the actual ending + the coda) and it’s up to the viewer to put together how they relate.

I really don’t know. At the end of the day, I think there was a little too much going on with Wackner and that the writers needed to use the episodes between the private prison reveal and the finale to narrow—not broaden—the scope of what they were trying to do with Wackner. But I also think that what they were doing with Wackner was really, really smart and original. I don’t think I can overstate how impressed I am that the writers took an idea that sounded, frankly, awful when I first heard about it and turned it into something captivating and insightful that I was happy to spend nine weeks watching.

Overall, a few bad episodes aside, I thought season five was the strongest season of TGF yet. I haven’t seen this show be so focused in... well, maybe ever. Having two overarching plots that received consistent development and felt like they were happening in the same universe at the same time REALLY helps make season five feel like a coherent whole, and I can’t wait to rewatch it.

#tgf thoughts #the good fight

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goddessdoeswitchery · 3 years

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Hellenic Polytheism 101: Hymns, Epithets, and Prayers A Transcript

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Hellenic Polytheism 101, where we will be discussing hymns, prayers, and epithets. I’ve found that a lot of Hellenic polytheists tend to struggle with prayers, with hymns, and with understanding epithets. It’s incredibly common to go into any forum dealing with an introduction to Hellenic Polytheism and see example prayers, templates for prayers, or see a button saying something along the lines of “prayer requests here”. This button is not often used in the way you traditionally think of prayer requests, as way to request prayer for someone in support of something going on; instead, it’s used to request that the writer write a particular prayer to use in every day practice. An example would be, “Can I get a prayer to Apollo for good luck in my band try-out?” Prayers can be hard. We always wind up feeling like we’re being judged, like it’s not good enough, like it should be better. So, here’s a guideline on that, on how I started writing my own prayers, to try to combat that feeling.

I want to start out with epithets, mainly because they are an important part of writing prayers and hymns. An epithet is a title, meant to indicate exactly what domain of what deity you are calling to. Again, I’m going use Hermes as an example because if there’s one deity that you want to be clear with, it’s definitely the god of trickery. Hermes has a bunch of epithets, Keeper of Flocks, of the marketplace, of crafts, or wiles, of games, interpreter, Slayer of argos, son of maia, messenger, trickster, leader of thieves, giver of joy, luck bringer, giver of good things. Hermes is all of those things, at once. However, if you’re wanting luck and decent sales at the farmer’s market, you probably don’t want the leader of thieves to be by your side. Epithets help with prayers because they can help narrow the focus of the prayer. Every deity in Hellenic polytheism has more than one side and more than one domain. Sometimes, those domains can be conflicting, in a way, like with Hermes being god of the marketplace and god of thieves.

Epithets also help with the signing of the praises and the worship of the deity in question. Remember how I said one of Hermes’ epithets was “Slayer of Argos?” That calls back to the time when Hermes, using his wiles, slayed Argos as Argos watched over Io for Hera, to keep Io away from Zeus. When I pray to honey tongued Hermes, Son of Maia, Slayer of Argos, luck bringer, for help in reaching my marketing goals for the month for at work, each epithet has a purpose. Son of Maia and slayer of Argos is how I say “I know who you are, I respect you, I know what you’ve done, I know your greatness and I’m showing you the deference and respect you deserve because of these things which you are”. Every deity has epithets which are less about their domain and more about their greatness as a deity. Foam born, golden Aphrodite. Chaste Artemis, daughter of Leto. By using those epithets, you’re calling to their greatness.

Now, you’ll notice that in that little example I gave with Hermes, I used the epithet “honey tongued”. This isn’t, to my knowledge, an epithet that was used by Homer or any of the cults of Hermes. That’s because another fun thing about epithets is that you can make your own. I’ve seen some fun ones, like Aphrodite of the perfectly shaped buttocks, or Hestia of the perfectly cooked dinner. They can be fun, amusing, small things that you credit the Theoi with. They can also be more serious things. Artemis of the well placed shot. Demeter of a mother’s grief. It’s not only acceptable, but encouraged to come up with your own epithets.

Once you’ve settled on, or created, the epithets you want to use, it can help to look at hymns. Pretty much every Hellenic polytheist knows of Homeric hymns. Now, these hymns may have been created by Homer, of the Odyssey and Iliad, but they’re called Homeric Hymns because they’re written in the same meter as the Iliad and Odyssey. There are also the Orphic hymns, if you’re looking for hymns with historical use. And there are many, many hymns written by modern worshippers. Now, a lot of people have asked “What’s the difference between a hymn and a prayer?” Hymns like the Homeric hymns were often sung out in public. There’s a reason so many of them start with “I sing of” or “I tell of” or “I speak of”. They were performance pieces. They were used in competitions and in rituals and in public places. A lot of the modernly created hymns serve the same purpose. They’re used for public worship (in a way) and often serve to sing of the praises of our deities. When we put them out there for others to see, it’s saying “Hey, look at how amazing Apollo is!” When we use them in private worship, its saying to the Theoi “Look at how incredible Apollo is! Hear all the wonderful things he’s done! I just love him so much!”

But a prayer is more…..focused. Yes, prayers can be used to worship. They can also be used to request something, or thank the Theoi. They’re a little bit more flexible. Sometimes a prayer is to one specific Theoi. Sometimes, it’s to many of them. I’ve never seen one to all of them by name, probably because no one has that kind of time, but I have seen prayers addressed to “The Theoi” in general. About 4 years ago, when I still worked on overnights, I wrote the following prayer:

Artemis, great huntress, protector of women and children alike, thank you for your protection over me and mine during this night.

Apollo, musician, without your gifts of music, I would be lost all night. Thank you for the songs and playlists, and the strength and inspiration they give me.

Hephaestus, inventor, without your mind and your creations, my life would be much harder. Thank you for the many things I take for granted.

Hera, queen of the heavens, shining goddess, thank you for the strength you bring me and the peace you bring my relationships.

Zeus, bringer of justice, King of all, thank you for the opportunities you bring me to enact what justice I can on those around me.

Athena, of wisdom, glorious goddess whose mind never fails, thank you for helping me keep my mind and helping me find creative ways to do better. Without you, I would be lost.

Demeter, goddess of the harvest, I cannot sing your praises enough, nor can I thank you enough for the food that graces my family and feeds us all. Thank you, for always ensuring we are well fed.

Hestia, who protects and guides the home and those in it, praise be to you. I have a home and loved ones inside. I am blessed by you, glorious goddess, compassionate one.

Poseidon, ruler of the seas, shaker of the earth, father of horses, thank you for your protection over your realm which allows us to travel on it and get the supplies we need. Glory be, ruler of the ocean.

Ares, warrior and raging god, whose wrath is feared and well known, thank you for guiding me in my rage to use it to the best advantage.

Dionysus, who knows a good time and who knows the value of being free to be yourself, thank you for your guidance and the freedom you give me to be me.

Aphrodite, passionate one, lovely goddess who shines above all, revered beauty, goddess of love, thank you for the love you bring me every day. Thank you for the one I love who loves me in return. Thank you for guiding us to each other, bringing us happiness and joy.

Hermes, trickster, great messenger, merchant and traveler, who watches over all who appear at my job and who keeps my family and loved ones safe from harm, endless thanks to you. Talkative one, who keeps me entertained, and who brings my prayer to the heavens for all the Theoi to hear, I praise you.

Praise be to Theoi, who do so much to guide, protect, inspire, and care for humanity and those I love every day

Notice, I didn’t use any specific, historical epithets. This was a prayer specifically for the Olympians. Not every prayer has to be, but in this case, I wanted it to be. It was one I said, every morning, for about 2 years, when I got home and lit incense after work, before bed. If I were to write it today, I would obviously adjust it. I would adjust the bits about my job because it has changed. I’m not the person I was before. And that’s okay! Prayers can change. I’ve heard from a lot of people who have used that prayer as a template for their own. Every worshipper is different and so your prayers will be unique to you and your experiences.

They also don’t have to be that long. A lot of mine are not that long. “Fleet footed Hermes, guide, luck bringer, help me get to work on time, please and thank you!” is a prayer that is said with some regularity in my car, my fingers clutching the prayer beds hanging on my gear shift, because I once again got out of the house a little later than I should have. At meal times, my prayer goes “ Thank you, Great mother Demeter, whose bountiful harvests provided me with this food.” “Hades, bringer of wealth, careful planner, help this check stretch as far as it needs to” is one I’ve said more than once. “Lovely Aphrodite, glorious goddess of love, swift footed Hermes, messenger, traveler of great distances, help us find the time to meet” is a prayer I’ve used to ask for more time to spend with my girlfriend, as we both have busy schedules and live like an hour and half away from each other.

I know it can feel hard sometimes, to come up with a prayer that can meet the scrutiny of a deity who has been around forever. It can be harder to come up with one that meets the scrutiny of the internet. When you’re writing down a prayer in a devotional journal, its hard to find one that feels like it’s up to the challenge of being in there, forever. But we shouldn’t be afraid to pray, to sing out a hymn, to use a unique epithet we created. I’ve been a Hellenic polytheist for over a decade. There are a lot of prayers and hymns and epithets that I’ve looked back on and went “eesh” and stepped far away from, never to use them again. But it’s never stopped me from trying. And that’s really the lesson I want to leave you with today. Start trying, and don’t stop. Your prayers do not have to be perfect to be prayers.

So thank you for listening to today’s episode of Hellenic polytheism 101. Once again, if you want to find a transcript of today’s podcast, go to goddessdoeswitchery.com and check out the tags transcript or transcripts (plural). Along with the transcript, you’ll find a link to the sources I used today, which are the epithets section of Theoi.com pages for Aphrodite, Hermes, and Artemis. Otherwise, it’s all just general knowledge I picked up who knows how long ago from books and blog posts whose titles I’ve long forgotten. The last episode of this year will be on December 27th and will be focused on how to create your own calendar for worship, including religious holidays like Noumenia. I look forward to seeing you all then.

#hellenic polytheism #hellenic polytheism 101 #transcript #transcripts #hymns prayers and epithets #hymns #prayers #epithets

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goblin-gardens · 3 years

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This week I answered the phone and talked to two library patrons who I will be thinking about for a long time.

The first was a mother of nine who has been homeschooling her children according to her religious beliefs for twenty years, and this year her husband is no longer in the picture, so the legal paperwork has fallen to her for the first time. She is a brilliant farmer and parent, she trained her oldest daughter who is now the best midwife in the county, and she is both dyslexic and religiously opposed to a lot of technology. She was in way over her head, and as of 72 hours ago I knew nothing about this part of homeschooling, but she reached out to us for help, and I have my job because I’m good at research

So my boss OKed me setting aside a morning for her, and I found the necessary templates and info on the internet, she supplied the specific information, and after less than an hour of (distanced) conversation while I typed as fast as I could, she went home with all forms complete, extra blank ones to copy later, and all the phone numbers I could google up for single parent, home school, food, and legal support in our area. Tbh, this was way outside my usual responsibilities, and when she called, we were both overwhelmed by the task ahead of her, but with time and focus, we were able to not only solve the immediate problem but prepare for the future-- her for the next time she submits these forms, and me for the next time someone asks for help. Did she clearly have to take a moment to take in my partially buzzed haircut, my favorite blazer/buttonup combo and blue eyeliner? Did I have to keep my eyes firmly on my laptop screen when she took a moment to pray and have to ask her more than once to clarify some of her handwritten notes? Yes and yes. We also made it through with mutual respect and appreciation for each others’ roles in our community.

The other was an older lady who I think moved up to our small town from NYC, maybe for the pandemic, maybe for her retirement. She sounded well-educated and knew exactly which book she wanted to borrow. I told her I could order the print version from one of our neighbor libraries since our copy was checked out, or I could have the book on CD version ready for a contactless pickup in five minutes. “Oh,” she scoffed. “I’ve always thought audio books are for people who never learned to read.” I responded with some sort of platitude about wanting people to engage with stories and learn new information no matter what form it takes, but I was livid.

This woman lives so within her own bubble that she throws out comments like that to a(n almost fully accredited) public librarian in a rural town. Our budget of time and money goes to maintaining our book collection, sure, but most of it is towards kids story time and tech literacy and English classes and job search help. We reopened after our April 2020 shutdown as fast as possible not because we need to make money or even lend out our copies of Infinite Jest. We needed to be a food distribution hub, get people tax forms and filing for unemployment on our public computers, get books-- any books-- moving to families struggling more than ever with education. Frankly, of all the facets of our community, snobs like this lady are a group I’m least interested in catering to. I’d replace every print book on our shelves with audio books in a heartbeat if it meant reaching the people who need our services most. We are lucky to live in an are with a high literacy rate but that’s not achieved by shaming anyone! And audio books are a huge accessibility tool for dozens of groups. There’s a billion reasons, including plain old preference, why audio books are necessary and should be far more common that they are!

These two women are linked in my mind not just because I talked to one on Wednesday and one on Thursday, but because of how much I would rather deal with twenty emergencies like the homeschool mom’s than one snob like the no-audio book lady. One of these women understands what the library is really for. One of them respects what I do, and the people I do it for.

#personal #library life #AuDiObOoKs ArE FoR dUmMiEs OK ASSHOLE

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zhuilingyizhen · 4 years

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Have you ever considered a time travel au? Like sizhui (+ the other juniors?) going back to when wangxian's generation was their age,, or wwx and lwj ending up in their younger bodies or smth

Ooh!!!

I have one idea, but it’s.... kinda dark? Jin Ling gets erased out of existence?

Hmmm I said no sad, but it’s like crack-sad so I think it’s okay.

So, this whole idea started when I thought “what if jingyi & zizhen, the ultimate matchmaking team, went back in time and unknowingly got yzy and madame jin together?”

Then I realized, “what if that made a big oopsie?”

Anyways, this is the “oh shit, i screwed up” kinda time travel AU. Be warned.

Jingyi and Zizhen are in the Cloud Recesses library, reading through some random books, when they stumble upon one that looks older than Lan Qiren. One of them is a journal, documenting a time traveler.

They read it, and it’s super cool! Fun! Woah!

Jingyi, thinking it probably won’t work anyway but hey, why not try? tries the tailsman with Zizhen.

Suddenly, they’re back in time.

But they don’t know that & thought they failed.

Just then, an uNknOwN Lan disciple walks in and demands to know wtf they’re doing there at this time of night!!

Jingyi is confused, bc who is this strangely familiar disciple? A new transfer?

He voices his ?? and is met with “I am Lan Qiren. Why are you imposters in here? Where did you get that ribbon?”

He’s droning on in true Lan Qiren fashion, and Jingyi and Zizhen kinda look at each other because hOLY SHIT THAT ACTUALLY WORKED!!!

They immediately get tf outta there (guess it’s their turn with the brain cell) and start checking out all the differences. Zizhen deduces that they should be forty or fifty or so years in the past, since LQR be old.

They’re wandering around for a couple days (future tailsman in Zizhen’s pocket) and have fun exploring all the different stuff.

And then, Jingyi realizes that the Wens are kinda alive. And he has a moment, where he realizes they could bring Sizhui back here!! Surely Sizhui would want to learn about his past, right?? This would be the perfect opportunity!

He may or may not have bought a Wen(tm) jewelry for his very platonic best friend, but we don’t talk about that.

And then, they meet a rando young woman practicing her sword fighting. Zizhen thinks that she feels familiar, but has no idea why.

The juniors approach her, and ask what’s up, because she be really murdering those dummies.

She introduces herself hesitantly (she’s a little sus of them), as Yu Ziyuan.

Zizhen & Jingyi definitely failed their history tests, because they don’t know who she is, only that she’s very gay for her friend.

And Jingyi and Zizhen hatch a plan to help this rando stranger who certainly isn’t important to the plot or anything get with the girl!

And bOI DO THEY TRY

They help Ziyuan out by suggesting flowers, sweets, even give her a template for an undying love confession!

She’s kinda cold towards them at first, but Ljy and oyzz shan’t be hindered! They persist, and she eventually asks her friend to elope with her and escape their arranged marriages.

Jingyi gives Zizhen a side eye like “whoops” but also cheer as they ride off into the sunset!! Woohoo!

Then they go back in time, and... oh boy. Shit happened. Time rippled. The universe was changed.

Because Jingyi & Zizhen may or may not have erased Jin Ling from existence by getting his grandmothers together.

Because then those two ditch and jc & jyl are kinda not alive, though wwx still gets taken in (and maybe they pretend he’s jfm’s child so jfm can make him sect heir??)

And ljy & oyzz are shook.

And then they freak out and go to the only sane, responsible person they know: Lan Sizhui

bEcaUse sUreLy hE wOulDn’T bE diFferEnt

Actually, they search the whole Cloud Recesses, but he’s not. there. And Jingyi asks the now-old Lan Qiren, who has no clue who Sizhui is.

Then Zizhen has a brain cell moment and remembers, oh wait, wasn’t Sizhui a Wen??

They look at each other and bolt towards the Nightless City, which is not dead bc plot convience and. Maybe yzy and madame jin started their own sect and they saw through the Wen’s bs? They’re still alive tho

And Sizhui is an innocent bb farm boi in the middle of nowhere 🥺

COUNTRY BOII I LOVE YOUUUUUU

Jingyi literally tackles him into a hug and Sizhui freezes bc who da FUCC is this

But even in this timeline, he is :)) so he just kinda asks, v. politely, “who are you”

But then he sees Zizhen and lights up

“A zhen! What are you doing here?”

tHEN

Sizhui smiles shyly and kisses Zizhen on the cheek and ljy & oyzz both have whiplash

bc this is time for my zhuizhen agenda and they be dating

they have to somehow convince Sizhui that they’re from a completely different timeline

And it’s really confusing until Jingyi just starts listing off everything he knows about Sizhui, bc he is not giving up his status as Sizhui’s best friend just bc they’re in different timelines.

& the stuff Jingyi know is... a lot.

“Your favorite color is white, you hate herbal tea, you think that putting your hair down is a hassle, and when you were twelve you thought you were cursed bc two of your rabbits died in a week and placed stone tablets near every door in the dorms—”

Sizhui is kinda shook so he goes with them, though he doesn’t believe them at first. And he ain’t letting his bf (oyzz) leave immediately :/

Sizhui helps them with the ritual, and lets them leave. Then, he goes home to his peaceful farmer boi life, confused.

They have better luck next time they go back and don’t help anyone. They don’t do anything extreme, and they don’t do anything! Right?

Yeah no, cause zizhen sees this little, dirty child out in the streets and goes uwu and gives the child some money (and maybe a motivational speech?? life changing??).

That child grows up to be Jiggy, bc ofc ofc, and he and his mom manage to use to money to leave (I mean, sect heir oyzz has to have a decent sum, and it was worth more back then). Jgy becomes a respected vendor, hating his dad like every other child of jgs but still living da peaceful life.

So he never helps them with the Wens. And the Wens may or may not win. (honestly I don't remember the plot of mdzs, so this is probably inaccurate. I gotta reread it; my memory’s trash lol)

A lot of people get dead. Zizhen is horrified.

This time though, WQ and WN stole baby WY and left. The Wens,, didn’t really care (maybe they noticed wq left, but they have other, not as competent, healers).

They seek refuge, but the Cloud Recesses is kinda burnt and the Jiangs ain’t looking so hot either (plus that ain’t a good idea, jc is probably not ok with that)

They don’t bother to check up on anyone this time.

Zizhen and Jingyi go back to the past, stare at each other in true mamma mia, here we go again fashion.

But this time, they dig a hole in the ground and hide there for a couple minutes, before finally, finally, finally going back to the future

And it’s fine, except they screwed up and ended up a little too far into the future.

Like, as in they accidentally time travel to Jin Ling and Sizhui’s marriage fast-forward.

Revelations are made, and this has somehow worn even Jingyi to the point of exhaustion (also, is there any world where he gets to be with a Yuan??)

So they go back several years, energy depleted, and end up right where they started.

Zizhen and Jingyi look at each other, and have a mini-celebration because they did it! They got back and everything seems normal so they’re gonna assume it’s their timeline.

On their way to burn the magical time travel book, they bump into Wei Wuxian.

Zizhen asks how his husband is doing, and they find out that WangXian hasn’t gotten together in this timeline yet.

Jingyi screams, and Zizhen goes to cry in a hole. They’ll be okay. Eventually.

Wow, this ended up really Zizhen/Jingyi-centric...

#lan jingyi #ouyang zizhen #lan sizhui #jin ling #mo dao zu shi #the untamed #yu ziyuan #mdzs juniors #mdzs #mdzs hcs #cql #gaystarjay #ask #addy answers asks #madame jin #mamma mia #wei wuxian #lan wangji #wangxian

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geopolicraticus · 4 years

Text

The Role of Science in Enlightenment Universalism

A Commentary on Susanne K. Langer on Scientific Civilization

When I wrote about Jacob Bronowski on scientific civilization I noted that the book in which Bronowski mentioned scientific civilization was about the history of science, not about civilization, but Susanne K. Langer’s 1961 essay “Scientific Civilization and Cultural Crisis” is a discussion of civilization that takes up the idea of scientific civilization in an explicit way:

“Science is the source and the pacemaker of this modern civilization which is sweeping away a whole world of cultural values. It is with good reason that we are meeting here to discuss the role of science in civilization; I would like to carry the issue a little further, and talk about the effect of this scientific civilization on human culture throughout the contemporary world. For it is not only in countries on which it has impinged suddenly and dramatically, but also in the countries of its origin—in Europe and America—that the technological revolution, with its entirely new mental and material standards, has deeply disturbed local and even national cultures.”

I have previously mentioned this essay by Langer in David Hume and Scientific Civilization, but at that time my ideas about scientific civilization were ill-formed and not yet clear. Now I am much better prepared to appreciate Langer’s essay. Many of the observations that Langer made in 1961 were to become commonplace decades later, so the essay is quite prescient, and there is quite a bit of it I can endorse, but there is also quite a bit that was equally prescient but with which I differ.

While Langer does not reference Oswald Spengler, there are Spenglerian aspects of the distinction she makes between culture and civilization. For Spengler, culture is the expression of a people in their youth, and it is only when culture becomes decadent that culture passes over into civilization, which is by definition the decadent phase of culture. Thus Spengler wrote:

“In this work, for the first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or less ethical, distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic succession. The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable of solution.” (The Decline of the West, p. 31)

For Spengler, then, sequence culture–civilization is an invariant coupling of two periodizations that are found whenever a culture survives for a period of time sufficient to become a civilization. Langer does not go quite this far, but she does distinguish culture and civilization, and notes that, “Like every process of fruition, civilization strains and drains the life which engenders and supports it…” and, “Finally, civilization as a whole descends like an iron grid to crush the heritage of feeling and faith and the beauty of life. Civilization… is like an outline tracing of the culture that begot it. As long as an outline lies on the painting from which it is made it takes special attention to abstract it; but moved away it appears as a stark and empty form, and imposed on another painting it makes for confusion.”

As in Spengler, cultures precede civilizations, and civilization represents a kind of falling away from the heights of culture. This characterization of civilization as a kind of template that is imposed upon circumstances not necessarily fully in agreement with the model occurs in the context of a discussion of the possibility of transplanting civilizations, which Langer presents as simple matter-of-fact.

I emphatically agree with Langer that civilizations can be transplanted, and with the Age of Discovery we saw Iberian civilization transplanted into Mesoamerica and South America, while northern European civilization was transplanted into North America. But the transplanting of civilization involves the uprooting of the transplanted civilization, and when an uprooted civilization is transplanted into foreign soil, and tended by those who did not initially build it, it becomes something else over time. Langer implicitly recognizes this in saying that civilization appears as a stark and empty form when imposed on an unfamiliar context. Eventually that stark and empty form is filled in, but it is filled with different details than those that filled it in its native clime.

Extending the organic metaphor as applied to social institutions further than most have taken it, Nikolay Danilevsky made a distinction between transplanting civilization and grafting civilization in his Russia and Europe: The Slavic World’s Political and Cultural Relations with the Germanic-Roman West (“Danilevsky” is also transliterated as “Danilevskii”; I previously discussed Danilevsky in newsletter 54). Danilevsky was a Slavophile and a Pan-Slavist who was concerned with the distinctness of the Slavic peoples, and their place in history. Danilevsky’s account of transplanted and grafted civilizations is quietly savage in his implied view of colonialism, and he anticipated Langer’s characterization of civilization as a template. Of the transplantation of civilization by means of colonies he wrote:

“If there ever were to be a universal civilization, then for its sake we would have to hope it used this means of dissemination everywhere, so that there would no longer be any other peoples besides those who produced this universal civilization, just as, for example, for the sake of agriculture it would be highly desirable for there to no longer be any weeds. And just as if for the farmer, if you will, all means of destroying weeds are permitted, so the disseminators of the one universal civilization would be permitted to destroy other peoples, which are only more or less hindrance to it. Since the ones who produced this universal civilization in its purest form could both preserve and spread it across the face of the earth, that would be the simplest, most direct and certain method of making progress. This method has been used successfully more than once in America and other places. But if this seems too radical, it would at least make sense to strip the peoples and states outside the universal cultural type of the power to oppose it, that is, their political independence (whether by means of cannons or opium—as they say, by hook or by crook), and over time to make them servants of the highest goals, an ethnographic element soft as wax or clay, without resistance taking any form seen fit to impose upon it.” (Russia and Europe, chapter 5, p. 82)

While aspects of Danilevsky’s views on colonialism sound contemporary, his recognition of the role of cultural-historical types (at the beginning of Chapter 5) in the constitution of civilization, which are essentially ethnic groups and their traditions, is decidedly unmodern—or perhaps I should say that it is an unspoken undercurrent, which remains largely unspoken because a careful and explicit consideration of the underlying presuppositions would raise uncomfortable questions in light of our modern presuppositions. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

While for Danilevsky, Europe has arrogated to itself to the role of universal civilization, in Langer’s essay we find an explicit recognition of a nascent scientific civilization as a universal civilization, though scientific civilization grew out of European civilization. Langer views science as the first truly cosmopolitan human enterprise, taking science to fully exemplify Enlightenment universalism, and moreover to exemplify this universalism while trafficking exclusively in empirically verifiable knowledge. Langer makes this point of view fully explicit, but elsewhere this is a widely held view that is entertained implicitly more often than it is explicitly stated. One must go quite far afield to find anyone who maintains the contrary and states their views explicitly, and one of the rare examples of this is to be found in Danilevsky.

I have visited a related controversy previously in Perverse Rationality, in which I asked, “If western civilization were to fail, and humanity’s only fully scientific and technological civilizations were to be found in Japan and China, would these civilizations be able to carry on the vision of science and technology to be found in the western imagination in its modern aspirations? Would science and technology, cut off from the root that brought them to maturity, be able to continue to develop? And if they did continue to develop, would they develop in distinctively Japanese or Chinese ways?” Danilevsky would have asserted without hesitation that Japanese or Chinese science would be distinctively Japanese and Chinese, just as he argued that Slavic science is a distinctive scientific tradition, so that very different futures would follow depending on whether Slavic science or European science were to be the leading power in a scientific civilization. In other words, for Danilevsky, scientific civilization is not universal and cosmopolitan, but rather a scientific civilization would be a product of the cultural-historical type from which it grew.

Recall that the Slavophiles rejected the kind of modernization pursued by Peter the Great, who looked to western European models of the Enlightenment, science, and rationalism as a model for Russia—one might even say, a template to be imposed upon the Russian people. Danilevsky would have none of this. He wrote: “…not only does the universally human not exist in reality, but to wish for it means to be satisfied with the generic level, colorless unoriginality, or simply a nonexistent, incomplete form.” (Russia and Europe, pp. 101-102) For Danilevsky, the Slavic peoples and the European peoples (whom he called Germanic-Roman) were distinct cultural-historical types, and, according to his third law of cultural-historical types: “The principles of civilization for one cultural-historical type are not transferable to the peoples of another type.” (Russia and Europe, p. 76)

To what extent is the development of science predicated upon Enlightenment universalism, and to what extent is Enlightenment universalism itself not universal at all, but a distinctive feature of the European cultural-historical type? For quite some time I have been taking notes toward writing something about the distinction that needs to be made between science and the Enlightenment (what follows, then, will have to appear in lieu of a more ambitious exposition); the two are often conflated, but they are conflated for good reason: the great men of the Enlightenment saw themselves not as formulating a new ideology, but as severing themselves from the past and using the resources of science to guide themselves into the future. Both science as a social institution and the Enlightenment as a cultural movement have their own presuppositions, and while many of these presuppositions coincide, and some of them overlap, there is also a remnant that is disjoint, and it is one of the fundamental confusions of Enlightenment thought to believe itself to be a spokesman and advocate of science, whereas in fact the Enlightenment is selective about the science it chooses to advance. This was equally true in traditional civilizations, which were highly selective in the forms and institutions of knowledge cultivated under their authority; the difference is that, after the scientific revolution, science became a much more powerful force, and hence a force that could not be neglected, nor passed over in silence.

There is a similar confusion between science and the Enlightenment on the part of scientists. The institutional expression of science today in western nation-states is primarily that of the culture of universities, where much pure scientific research is undertaken. Scientists today, in so far as they are part of the milieu of the contemporary university, are part of the culture of universities, which shape the growth of knowledge. In the same way that the culture of the university dictates what kind of scientific research is pursued and what kind of research is nipped in the bud (or never even proposed, because the potential researchers fully understand the fruitlessness of proposing research that contradicts the public ideological position of the university), the culture of geographical regions and of the nation-states that dominate cultural regions (as India dominates south Asia and China dominates east Asia) dictates what kind of science will be pursued in local educational institutions.

Scientists largely see themselves engaged in the kind of universal project of knowledge described by Langer, and not as representatives of a cultural-historical type, as described by Danilevsky—except that the milieu of the world-class research university has become its own cultural-historical type, and the cultural-historical type of the university is largely based upon Enlightenment presuppositions. The ongoing vigor of the Enlightenment project is evident through the many forms and permutations that the Enlightenment has exhibited since its appearance, and it is far from being played out at present. The dialectic of the Enlightenment will continue to animate western political institutions, and as the Enlightenment comes to be better understood and more clearly defined, the counter-Enlightenment, already present early in the Enlightenment in figures like Comte de Maistre (himself part of the western tradition, unlike Danilevsky), will be more clearly defined, and will grow in stature as a rival to the Enlightenment. The better the Enlightenment is known, the better its alternatives will be known, and it will not be until the Enlightenment engages with the counter-Enlightenment critique that the dialectic of western history can move forward.

It is a different position to maintain that history moves forward only on the basis of an exclusive embrace of the Enlightenment project, so that no engagement with the counter-Enlightenment is necessary, or even desirable. Indeed, if one fully adopts the Enlightenment perspective, one sees the sacrifices necessary to achieve the historical goals of the Enlightenment as no sacrifice at all, but a joyous liberation from an oppressive past. We find this, but less directly connected to science, in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, where the Enlightenment development of civilization has liberation from oppressive tradition as its telos.

Langer does not go this far. She is not insensitive to the losses entailed by scientific universalism; her essay on scientific civilization begins by recounting these losses and allowing them their full measure. In looking forward to a future scientific civilization, she acknowledges the feelings of emptiness and anomie that are often the result of the loss of tradition:

“Our technological civilization… seems to overtake and overwhelm us as though it were something foreign coming in upon us; it makes all our traditional institutions seem inadequate, so we tend to abandon them. State religion, marriage, paternal authority, deference to the aged, piety toward the dead, holiness and rank and royalty—all these ancient values have lost their inviolable status and need to be defended against the iconolastic ‘modern spirit.’ Sometimes, for all the defenses that the older generation can put up for them, a younger generation sweeps them away as relics of a superstitious, slavish, uncivilized past. But with them it sweeps away its own social symbols and the materials of its own world orientation; then personal life suddenly feels empty, and the civilization that shatters its spiritual comforts in the name of practical improvements seems to have come upon it like a superimposed power from outside.”

Presumably, the losses, while lamented, will ultimately be justified by the gains when a truly scientific civilization takes shape. And Langer does see a scientific civilization taking place. She unambiguously positions science as a universal force that is transforming the world along universalist lines, and she forecasts a world culture that will eventually emerge from science itself to create a scientific civilization:

“This is, I think, an inevitable transition which really marks one of the great crises in human history—the final emergence of world society from the long ages of self-sufficient cultural groups. For science, which is certainly the keynote of our era, is international. It is a human achievement, not a national one. The civilization which is sweeping the whole world, though it is expressed mainly in commerce and new kinds of industry, is a product of science. We are in a socially anomolous state between a world populated by societies with tribal religions and interests, and a world of global industrial organization, populated by a society with global interests but no symbols to express them, no religion to support the individual in this vast new theatre of life.”

The tribalism that Langer sees being displaced by universal science is exactly what Danilevsky called cultural-historical types, and which he viewed as the basis of civilization. While Langer’s vision of a universal science that is the possession of all will sound very familiar, perhaps even comforting, to those to whom the Enlightenment project comes naturally, and for whom likely remains unquestioned, Danilevsky’s denial of the universality of science will sound strange, perhaps incoherent. Here is Langer’s take on the universality of science:

“…scientific thinking is the only one of our great and prevailing activities which is universal in fact as well as in principle. We already claim the universality of art, and gradually come to appreciate other people's art, but it still starts by being exotic and often remains so even if we know and love it, Science is not native or exotic; it belongs to humanity and is the same wherever it is found.”

Most of us will recognize these ideas. Most of us (those of us who are westerners) will not so easily recognize Danilevsky’s contrary view. Danilevsky cites three arguments for the universality of science (p. 108), 1. Science is singular, i.e., there is one and only one science, 2. Science is cumulative, and can be taken up and put aside by different peoples as they please, but the cumulative results are indifferent to this process, and to who develops what parts of science, and 3. Science can be formulated in any language, and therefore presumes no particular audience. He grants the strength of these arguments, but disputes all of them.

Danilevsky’s argument is subtle and detailed, taking up the whole of Chapter 6 of Russia and Europe, so there is much more to it than I can summarize here. He considers all the special sciences in their turn and makes his case for each of them. His remarks on Linnaeus and Enlightenment science are particularly telling, and I hope to return to this exposition in another context. To the three arguments he cites for the universality of science, Danilevsky opposes three arguments for the national character of science:

“1) the preference shown by different peoples for different branches of knowledge; 2) the natural one-sidedness of each people’s distinctive abilities and worldview that cause it to see reality from a unique point of view; 3) a certain admixture of objective truth with individual, subjective peculiarities that (like all other moral qualities and traits) are not randomly distributed among all peoples, but grouped by nationality and, taken collectively, constitute what we call the national character.” (p. 112)

Danilevsky develops each of these points in detail, and does not hesitate to apply this view even to mathematics. We think of mathematics (and, to a lesser extent, logic) as the purest exemplification of pure science, completely devoid of the subjective admixture of which Danilevsky writes, but it is in mathematics more than in any other discipline that the infinite development of science is most obvious, and it is in the infinite extrapolation of science that Danilevsky’s argument unfolds most powerfully:

“…a one-sided perspective, or an admixture of falsehood, is inherent in everything human, and constitutes precisely the realm of the national within science… It is true that in the course of time, from the variety of national perspectives (and more importantly, through that variety) these admixtures are refined and eliminated, leaving the pure noble metal of truth. However the role of nationality (that is, of certain individual peculiarities, grouped by nationalities) in science is not reduced or weakened by this, since science opens newer and newer horizons which require the same work, it cannot produce anything except by means of admixing the individual, and thus also national, traits to the reflections of reality in the mirror of our consciousness.” (p. 110)

If science always opens new horizons of knowledge, where the purity of knowledge without admixture is not yet possible, then science—especially the most advanced science, pushing the furthest edge of knowledge into the unknown—must always reflect the peculiarities of the individuals and the ethnic community in which that science unfolds.

Science is, in principle, infinitistic, and Danilevsky implicitly recognizes the infinitistic nature of science in his argument for the continued admixture of pure and impure knowledge at the point of scientific advancement. The infinite possibilities of science means that science could be independently practiced by two distinct populations and have very little overlap, although in practice the scientific knowledge most useful and most interesting to human beings will be that science which is directly relevant to human concerns, but these human concerns will also vary with cultural-historical types. To employ the method of isolation in order to make this point clearly, we can posit the existence of two scientific civilizations, each of which takes a different branch of science to emphasize according to its own peculiar perspective, while deemphasizing precisely the branch of science that the other emphasizes according to its peculiar perspective. These two scientific civilizations could develop in parallel and yet look little like each other.

I think it is clear that Langer would have categorically rejected this conclusion, but how is the argument against Danilevsky to be made? In western thought, the preferred way to dismiss these difficulties about science (which are also difficulties for scientific civilization) has been to make a distinction between genuine science and ideological corruptions that masquerade as science, or to make a distinction between science acceptable within a given ideological framework, and other science that lies outside this ideological framework, but which, as science, is perfectly sound, but which is beyond the pale because it is ideologically unpalatable. Science outside the Overton window is still science, however much we would like to pretend that it is not, though we can at least preen ourselves on our virtue for having forsaken ideologically unpalatable science.

Since the ideological framework concerned in this connection is, of course, the ideology of the Enlightenment, how are we to know—other than through the intensity of our faith in the Enlightenment—that counter-Enlightenment science is an ideological corruption of science, rather than Enlightenment ideology itself being the ideological corruption of science? Is there any objective measure, that is to say, is there any scientific measure, by which we can determine the more corrupt ideology? If we maintain the is/ought distinction, there is, and there can be no, scientific measure of corruption. We can make a moral judgment regarding the ideology we prefer, and we can defend this judgment with moral reasoning, but science must remain silent on this point.

Churchill would not have warned us of “…a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science” if he had not seen that science, while in principle universal, is not universal in practice. Science in practice is informed by the culture that practices the science in question. The science of a new dark age might consist of all of the experiments that we cannot do, or do not do, for ethical reasons. Take, for example, the utilitarian thought experiment of a doctor with five patients in need of organs, and one healthy patient in his waiting room: is he morally justified in harvesting the organs of the one healthy patient in order to save the lives of the other five, who would die without the organs? (This is a variation on the theme of the trolley problem.) Even familiar moral theories like utilitarianism can have monstrous implications, from which we distance ourselves by the virtuous expedients of inconsistency, dishonesty, and hypocrisy.

We could posit a scientific civilization that was the mirror image of Enlightenment scientific civilization, revaluing and overturning all the moral judgments of the Enlightenment and replacing them with their opposite numbers, so that science forbidden within the Enlightenment project was affirmed by this mirror image of the Enlightenment, while science celebrated by the Enlightenment project was rejected by this mirror image. I am not suggesting that this would be an adequate basis for a scientific civilization, but we cannot exclude this possibility, even if we reject it on moral grounds.

There are, then, ways of arguing Langer’s Enlightenment universalism with respect to scientific civilization—by way of distinguishing the theoretical and practical reality of science, or by distinguishing morally acceptable and morally unacceptable science—but is this the best way to apply Langer’s insights on the problems of civilization, and upon the problems of scientific civilization in particular?

Langer was particularly known for her philosophical treatment of feeling (cf. her books Philosophy in a New Key:A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art and Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key), and she leads her essay on scientific civilization with a sketch of her views on feeling:

“…every human life has an undercurrent of feeling that is peculiar to it. Each individual expresses this continuous pattern of feeling in what we call his ‘personality’, reflected in behavior, speech, voice, and even physical bearing (stance and walk) as his individual style. On a larger scale, every human society has its undercurrent of feeling which is not individual, but general. Every person shares in it to some degree, and develops his own life of feeling within the frame of the style prevailing in his country and his time.”

This is something Danilevsky might have written, had he lived in the twentieth century instead of the nineteenth century. This undercurrent of feeling, whether individual or social, is not universal, but is roughly shared within what Danilevsky called cultural-historical types. If we challenge Langer’s commitment to Enlightenment universalism, and to a model of science based on Enlightenment universalism, I think we find a far better fit of her thought with Danilevsky’s cultural-historical types and with his observations of science being practiced within a particular cultural-historical milieu, which gives to the science in question a distinctive cast.

If there are multiple permutations of science, as its develops within the traditions of terrestrial civilization, and therefore multiple permutations of nascent scientific civilizations, we may have to sacrifice some of the presuppositions of the Enlightenment in order to acknowledge this, but it also means that we need not necessarily surrender utterly to the annihilation of all traditional cultures in the face of the scientific juggernaut that will eventually result in scientific civilization.

And if we allow ourselves a moment of optimism, in which human beings enter upon a grand future of exploration and expansion into the cosmos, this exploration and expansion would grow outward in every direction—like a big bang of the human spirit. In such a thrilling scenario, far from seeing traditional cultures swept away by modernity and science, we would see distinct scientific civilizations moving outward, each in a distinctive direction and in a distinctive way. Because the science human beings would be pursuing is infinitistic, each distinctive scientific tradition could grow without limit, and since it is at the point at which new knowledge is generated is the point at which knowledge is most distinctive to a given cultural-historical type, the further this expansion is perpetuated, the more we will affirm our human, all-too-human traditions.

#Susanne K. Langer #civilization #scientific civilization #science #Enlightenment #nikolay danilevsky #Oswald Spengler

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tomasorban · 5 years

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ORMUS : Is It The Philosopher's Stone? - with Barry Carter by Celeste Adams

Since ancient Egyptian times, alchemists have worked in secret, searching to produce something called the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life. Barry Carter and other researchers believe that ORMUS is related to this search. Since 1995, Barry Carter has been conducting experiments with water modified by ORMUS. He has written numerous articles on the subject and leads workshops around the country where he demonstrates three methods of producing ORMUS water. ORMUS comes from the acronym Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements, or ORMEs.[†] It was discovered in the late 1970s by David Hudson, an Arizona farmer who noticed some very strange materials on his land as he was mining for gold. During the next decade, Hudson spent several million dollars trying to understand how to create this substance and work with it. ORMUS, which is made from water and other substances, has also been called monoatomic gold, white gold, white powder gold, m-state, AuM, microclusters, and manna. Adams: There's a quote by D. H. Lawrence that says, "Water is hydrogen two parts, oxygen one part, and something else, though we don't know what it is." What did Lawrence mean by that? Carter: There are many unusual properties of water that aren't explainable by the known properties of hydrogen and oxygen or by any concept of how a compound of those two elements should behave.

There are perhaps thirty-two anomalous properties of water that are unexpected. We believe that those properties are due to the presence of ORMUS in most water molecules. Generally, it is believed that the water molecule is dodecahedral or icosohedral. In other words, the molecule is the shape of a geodesic dome, and this shape allows for a lot of space inside the molecule. Some of us believe that the ORMUS elements hide out in that inner space, inside the dome. From that space, the ORMUS can change the configuration of the water molecule so that it tightens or expands. This is the way we think that these elements may modify the structure of water. It's very clear that there's something else other than H2O — two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen — in ordinary water. One person that I've worked with said that triple distilled water, weighs eight pounds per gallon, but water that's made by burning hydrogen in oxygen weighs seven pounds per gallon. The difference between seven versus eight pounds per gallon indicates that there's a pound of something else in the water. Adams: What exactly is ORMUS? Carter: We think it's a new form of matter that appears to have properties of Spirit. It seems to be a transition between physical reality and spiritual reality. We believe that it can be used as a communication tool between spirit and matter. It is, literally, precious metal elements in a new form, a new state of matter. In this state they don't assay or analyze as the precious metal elements. They look like a white powder instead of like a metal. They can even show up as an oil. Because these materials look like other things, they have not been recognized by science. We've extracted the ORMUS element from the air, from rocks, and from water, including the water of the body. We believe that, perhaps as part of the water molecule, they are the carrier of the information that restructures water. Any system for structuring water depends on the ORMUS elements. Adams: What elements can be found in ORMUS? Carter: The ORMUS or m-state materials are thought to be the precious metal elements in a different atomic state. Cobalt 27, Nickel 28, Copper 29, Ruthenium 44, Rhodium 45, Palladium 46, Silver 47, Osmium 76, Iridium 77, Platinum 78, Gold 79, and Mercury 80 have been identified in this different state of matter and, with the exception of mercury, are listed in Hudson's patents. Adams: How was ORMUS first discovered? Carter: These elements appear to have been known in ancient times. The ancient Egyptians were clearly working with the ORMUS materials in their alchemical processes, and the ancient alchemists also were working with the ORMUS elements. You hear in alchemy about "oil of gold" — which is something we've made using the various ORMUS processes. David Hudson also spoke of the oil of the elements, or the oil of metals. Some people actually claim that they remember past lives in which they were working with these materials. Hudson discovered ORMUS when he was working with a gold-mining process. He was the first to make it known, but it's ancient knowledge that has been rediscovered. Now we are applying the tools of modern science to this ancient knowledge. The ancient Egyptians talked about the "white powder of gold." They have pictures on their bas reliefs of little cones called "shewbread." They say these little cones are white bread, and they also say they're gold. How could something be white bread and gold at the same time? Well, now we know. We've got the technology to make the white powder of gold and form it into a cone-shaped bread if we want to. Several of the procedures for extracting or making ORMUS have been adapted from ancient alchemical texts. We believe that the Philosopher's Stone and the Biblical manna are both variations on this state of matter. Some recommended alchemical texts related to the Philosopher's Stone are Sacred Science by R.A. Schwaller De Lubicz, Le Mystere des Cathedrales by Fulcanelli, and Occult Chemistry by Leadbeater and Besant. The premier treatise on the subject may be The Secret Book by Artephius. Adams: Why do you think this information has become available now? Carter: I think it's because all of the areas of science are dealing with the question of how Spirit and matter are connected, and ORMUS helps explain this. All the areas of science are bumping up against this question. We see people in physics saying there's a non-physical realm. David Bohm called it the Implicate Order. According to Bohm, the Explicate Order — physical reality as we know it — is a projection or a manifestation of this non-physical template. The ORMUS elements clearly connect the realms of the spiritual and the physical. We like to compare ORMUS to the use of cellphones. It used to be we always had to use hard-wired phones, now we've got cellphones and we can walk around and talk and communicate with anybody else. So imagine that every cell in the body has a cellphone, and that they communicate with one another until the cellphone batteries go dead or the antennae are damaged. In this analogy, we think the ORMUS elements go in and recharge the batteries on the cellphones and rebuild the antennas. Instead of just being able to talk to the cell next door, the cell in your hand now can talk to the cell in your big toe. In other words, all of the cells are instantly and continuously in communication. Physicists and biologists call this phenomenon of instant communication "quantum coherence." Everything is coherent and in total communication, instantaneously, all at once. Each water molecule gets into resonance with every other water molecule in the body. As the water molecules change their shape and structure, the water is patterned, and changes happen in the body. Information is imparted to the cell and to the immune system, as well as to the other systems of the body. These changes allow the body to heal more rapidly because the communication is perfect.

Adams: Do you have evidence to prove that ORMUS has healing capabilities? Carter: We have photos of a woman's tooth. The tooth had been broken in a stair-step manner, and it literally filled in just from drinking ORMUS water. Hundreds of people have reported benefits that include pain reduction, and improvement or recovery from serious diseases like cancer, AIDS, diabetes, and so on. You can find some of these stories on our Subtle Energies website. Several people have noticed that the ingestion of ORMUS seems to stimulate the kundalini energy flow in the body. A couple of people have said that it's like vacuuming the restricted areas of the kundalini, so that it opens the chakras that are tight or closed. Some people who have a tight heart chakra feel as though they're having a heart attack when they drink ORMUS water. The ORMUS is actually opening the heart chakra. A couple of people with heart problems have gone to the doctor and were told that their hearts had become totally healthy. Different ORMUS elements seem to stimulate the different chakras in a beneficial way. We're not really clear about which ones go with which chakra but there's some speculation about that. One of these days we'll get it nailed down, I'm sure. Adams: What kind of benefits have you experienced yourself from ingesting ORMUS? Carter: I don't hurt anymore. In my mid-forties I noticed that I had carpal tunnel in my wrist, my back ached, and I had general joint pain. When I stood up I would ache a bit. I've been taking ORMUS materials for six years and I don't hurt anymore. Now I jump up from my chair — I don't feel like I have to stand up carefully. I'm fifty-three and I feel great. I feel better than I felt when I was seventeen. I've also been taking one of the other ORMUS elements called ORMUS copper, and my beard is clearly getting dark again. So I've had some very great benefits. I feel as though the clock is rolling back for me.

#ormus #orme #monatomic gold #monoatomic gold #alchemy #genetics #consciousness

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fresh2definitely · 5 years

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tagged by the boy yami @y4mmyb0y (made this a read more just because I ended up making it so long)

nickname - e, big e, ellie, i lie, eliphant, fresh

zodiac - taurus dummy

height - 6'2" (?)

hogwarts house - fuck everything - yamz

last thing I googled - template little fighter 2

favorite musicians - Lorn, END, OPN, Crooks uk, Napoleon, Save Us From The Archon, Counterparts, Knocked Loose, Frank Ocean, Boy Harsher, Fleet Foxes, Arca, Clark, corbin, Sufjan Stevens, HEALTH, Lone, Mad Zach, Glacci, Little Ugly Fella, Yung Clean, Young Thug, Black Kray, Randomer, glocque, idk... probably more thats all i can think of off top and also help from youtube history also whoever made the maplestory soundtrack

song stuck in my head - yung lean - kyoto.............................

following - 467

followers - 1,956

amount of sleep I get - right now im staying up to fix my sleep schedule for the 300th time this year, i really should keep track of how many times i do this, and back to back even. wish me luck i am fading ALREADY. I either don't sleep or i sleep for 16 hours lucky number(s) - 22 dream job - I have no idea anymore, farm hand, actually if it's a dream job I guess just Farmer then, maybe freelance composer, pay me to make assey music, photographer, I would love to make clothes, uhh rock band... voice actor.. I don't have one big dream job solidified in my head anymore... BRO okay league of legends pro player 😌 wearing - seb's limited release white sworn in death card pullover hoodie and burgundy looking pants instruments - Fruity Loop baby, bass, guitar, piano but i do not play piano at all or any regularly, seb's been teaching me some Drums : ) random fact - i have a scar on my eyebrow from where i used to have a piercing that got ripped out and it makes it so hair doesn't grow there so i have a little bald patch on my eyebrow Aesthetic - scene, cyber anything, DRAIN, tech, 2k/90s/80s/70s art(L), horror movie indoor pool scenes, dark, nature, isolation, night, Soda, Antireal, Monster Energy, cozy, house decorations, october, farms, flash photos of lan parties, rave flyers, mephis rap album covers, dos games, Cats, cute things, Busy Town, bubbly, 3D cgi, liquid, low poly water, eurodance album art, garfield, whatever HEALTH got going on, pictures of the sky, buffy, old school free mmo era imagery, four point stars, buddies having a good time, whatever graphic designers been up to fuck dude i dont even really know... this is all bound too shift as i hyperfixate on the next thing I tag uhuhhuhhh @w3k @merriweatherpostpaviliontshirt @lydiadotnet @fuckersupreme @virtualuxx @hellbabyfromhell @frankocean @god- @staff anyone who wants to do it

#long post #all mutuals do this now or die #jk #IM JK #just. kidding.#unless....?

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rossialessia80 · 5 years

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best spot to seriously level up your sneake

best spot to seriously level up your sneaker game Hubble's multicolored picture reveals with unprecedented clarity that the shell of matter is a network of filaments and dense knots, all enshrouded in a thin "skin" of gas [seen in blue]. With the weather getting cooler, Middleton has mostly attended events in cozy outerwear, concealing Cheap Fake Yeezys any budding baby bump.. Would another company have been just as effective even if it was not as professionally done? Potentially. Ended up only needing two of them so I sent the rest back." Whitney, The Bachelor season 21, Bachelor in Paradise seasons 4 and 5. Some of that comes through private donations like the ones fans made at the game through a special text line. And as it did this, it took our expectations with it. "I'm like the cheapest contestant to ever go on The Bachelor. Your first deal willlikely not go that well. There are lots of reasons to hate holidays: traffic, awkward family reunions, expensive gifts that would wring a tear from anyone wallet. He's unfair, unreasonable and often unbalanced but in a good way. With Karnataka's farmers issuing various threats in defiance of the court's order, Krishna declared that he would walk from Bangalore to Mandya, near Mysore, southwest of Bangalore, a distance of 98km. To build a sustainable food business takes a lot of time, therefore this partnership was appealing to us. When the ancient Polynesians invented surfing, they often used a paddle to help them navigate. "My expectations of Hector were a little slim. Williams saved one with an ace, but yet another deep return, this one a bomb of a forehand, ended the match. And I reported for hours on live television in the middle of the Sherman Park unrest.. But we do and we suffer the consequences with the first hints of varicose, bunions, corns and oddly shaped toes that seem to form a heart. And Caleres will debut Veronica Beard shoes via a partnership with the rising New York ready to wear brand.WILL ADIDAS' WINNING STREAK CONTINUE?The company has been showing strong increases quarter after quarter. Should ban plastic straws whileanswering a question about curbing the country reliance on single use plastics. Emerging from the courthouse, he thanked the federal agents who arrested him for being courteous and professional.. However, Daswani believes all hope is not lost. The BlackBerry Classic hit the market in December 2014, offering customers a 3.5 inch (88.9 millimeter) screen, which was 60 percent larger than the previous BlackBerry Bold 9900, longer battery life and a standard keyboard and touch screen.BlackBerry has faced calls to stop making cellphones in favor of focusing on its burgeoning software business, but CEO John Chen recently reaffirmed his commitment to stay in the hardware market.In its most recent quarter of its 2017 financial year, the company sold roughly 500,000 smartphones, about 100,000 smartphones fewer than the previous quarter.However, Chen has said he believes a new venture to license BlackBerry's mobile software to other companies can help turn its mobile business segment profitable this fiscal year, which ends in February.BlackBerry is expected to release two new mid range, Android powered smartphones before the end of February. But he plans to start incorporating more of his own material into the weekend shows. Sorry. The letter from Office of Management and Budget Acting Director Russell Vought sought funding for a "steel barrier on the Southwest border.". Through 40 minutes, goals were hard to come by with the Senators and cheap yeezy shoes Habs tied 1 1 going to the third period. 'And of course when employed correctly, storytelling can make things incredibly memorable, especially for brands' (Hegarty, 2011, p.96). Chalkbot's mission at the Tour de France was to send messages of hope, support and perseverance to the athletes in the race, and to inspire them to keep moving forward. This template solves the problem, with a festive birthday cake and sprinkles cover that includes sample text over which you can type the birthday boy or girl's name and approaching age.. But there's just something classy about wearing a watch. After hearing of the company bankruptcy filing announcement, consumers like Kyle Wyler are loading up on their favorite Hostess treat. "Creating new opportunities while cracking down is the way to go. Nike doesn't have exact Zumba shoes, but they have a dance collection which is suitable for Zumba. Sells them for money at the pawn store and then leaves the facility," said Everett Police Det. The most outraged reaction came, perhaps predictably, from Trump himself. Whether this has anything to do with price is unclear. For me, the initial pull of the shoes was simple (simplistic?) nostalgia. The women were in the parking lot when two men with guns approached them. Officials concluded the attackers had been aiming the plane toward Washington.. They usually have the same sized image sensors as the DSLR, as well as interchangeable lenses. By the way, 1997 runner up Moya has not won a match at the Australian Open since 2003, losing five straight first round matches.. The third tip is to make it stable and fast, an app is only effective when it works quickly, it makes sense that a slow app would not be a desirable one. Travolta, and everyone else, right to the cooling celery and bleu cheese dressing. On one side, you have a golf course. He cited Tweets by the latest councillor responsible for waste collections, Cllr John O'Shea (Acocks Green, Lab.), who quoted the Labour leadership tackling inequality in 2012 which 'may mean reduction in flow of gravy to leafy Sutton Coldfield'.And in 2013 Cllr O'Shea joked if he ran the council as saying 'I'll put Sutton Coldfield up for sale for starters'.Cllr Mackey believes the town has been starved of Birmingham City Council services and said: "Sutton Coldfield wards having some of the worst refuse collection rates will come as no surprise to the long suffering residents of the town who have been left scratching their heads as to how the refuse collection service could have deteriorated since the strike has come to an end."A glance at the twitter account of Cllr John O'Shea who became the latest cabinet member to take responsibility for the collection of our refuse and the cutting of verges may give some indication as to why Sutton Coldfield has suddenly seen such a deterioration in service from his portfolio."In two separate tweets Cllr O'Shea can be seen describing the receipt of council services by Sutton Coldfield as a flow of gravy and having them cut off as a way of somehow tackling equality and in another describes how if he was leader one of his first acts would be to put Sutton Coldfield up for sale.Missed bin collections cause hazard near Sutton Coldfield primary school"I appreciate these tweets were a few years ago, before Cllr O'Shea rose up the Labour ranks but behind the thinly veiled attempt at humour there is an abhorrence for Royal Sutton Coldfield and its residents that is pervasive throughout out the Labour Group."Sutton Coldfield residents pay their council tax and we are entitled to the full list of services Birmingham City Council has to offer."Here we have a cabinet member who clearly believes that council services should be focused on wards held by himself and his Labour colleagues as born out in the latest council figures."This explains an awful lot and while this just confirms what we have suspected all along it is totally wrong and if he had any fake yeezys for kids decency he should come to Sutton Coldfield apologise to its residents and see the sorry state of affairs for himself."Read MoreRubbish and flytippingCllr John O'Shea, Cabinet Member for Street Scene and Parks, said: "I've made it clear since taking on this portfolio that the level of service across the city isn't where it should be if we are to deliver on the top priority for citizens clean streets."Individual depots do have specific issues that need to be worked out.

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thatboomerkid · 5 years

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Twist of Deadly Wishes

Twist of Deadly Wishes -- Pathfinder Feat

... Glancing away, the mage visibly struggled with his emotions. “Any wish, then. Is mine.”

“Yes.”

“Mine to make as I see fit.”

The demon smiled. “Oh, indeed. Most certainly and truly, master.”

“Any ... any wish at all?”

Shadibriri shrugged. “Within ... ah, limited guidelines. Barring a wish for more wishes, there is little of which I am not capable. As I have said before, to other men in other places: I can call forth any spell, I can resurrect the dead, I can rewrite time and space. I can create from nothing, and make you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams; I can open doors to other worlds, and cast you across the infinite pleasures of the planes as you desire. I can turn lead to gold, pig-farmers to pigs, and day to night. With but a word, I can unmake mountains, reshape flesh and topple kings ...”

“Very well.”

The demon smirked. “I was not done, master, and am still bound to speak the truth. The whole truth. I can also rewire your brain so that you think you’re a hummingbird, or set your bones on fire, or turn you into a pillar of salt and throw you into the ocean to dissolve, as a certain nameless sorceress once discovered. My abilities are not much limited; you drink from the very waterfall of creation’s torrent when you unleash my gifts. Be careful, I suppose they say, what you wish for.”

“It is to you, then, to interpret the meaning of my wish?”

The demon shrugged again. “My powers are great, and call on majesties older that your species can fathom; even I do not truly comprehend the full scope of what I do, any more than you understand the mysteries of digesting a glass of warm milk and turning it into blood and flesh, nor how it is that you fall to sleep, and dream, and then wake again. I would be careful, were I you, to know exactly what you want, and to make it clear to me what you want, and to phrase what you want as precisely as possible. Barring that, you should also hope that I’m in a good mood, and that my values coincide rather perfectly with your own.”

The mage swallowed, hard. He then allowed himself a thin smile, but it was wry, and without much humor. “Heh. Yes.”

-- from Twisting Amongst Mages

You command the very waterfall of creation’s torrent.

Brought to you absolutely free to enjoy, to test & to share – as always – by the fine folks of my Patreon.

original image from here

Prerequisite: Ability to use spells, spell-like abilities or supernatural abilities of any kind; non-good alignment; see Special, below

Benefit: When you gain this feat, roll three ten-sided dice and arrange them in order from highest to lowest; you will generate a three-digit or four-digit number from your result (somewhere between 111 and 1099). If your highest score is a ten, it represents 1,000; otherwise, tens always represent zero.

For Example: Mike rolls a 3, a 9 and a 10. His final result is 1093. Amber rolls two 3s and a 7. Her final result is 733. Kelsey rolls two 10s and a 1. Her final result is 1,001.

This is the total Twist Score you much reach to Cash-Out your wish. Each time you Cash-Out, you re-roll this 1d100 and once again begin the long climb to your new target score.

If any magical attack you make – or supernatural ability you use – would ever kill a living intelligent creature outright, you may choose to reduce your damage by any amount and thus leave the creature alive; if you choose to do so, you may demand that your victim make a wish.

If your target hears and understands you, and freely chooses to make this wish, you gain the ability to grant this wish (caster level 21st), much like an efreeti or glabrezu.

A wish made in this way must be a statement that can be uttered, in full, in six seconds or less.

Demanding that your target make a wish in this way ends your turn. On your opponent’s next turn, she may speak her wish as a free action. On your next turn, you may then grant this wish as a full-round action.

You may not grant more than three wishes per day. If you are a PC, you may not grant the wish of a fellow PC. Whether you are a PC or NPC, you may not grant a wish to an ally of any kind; if you attempt to do so, your attack’s damage is not reduced in any way and your ally is instead slain.

You may always freely choose to fulfill a wish of this type in a destructive or even deadly manner, although you must TECHNICALLY fulfill a mortal’s stated desires by use of this magic: if a target states that she wishes she could see in black-&-white, rather than in color, you could not, for example, just summon a horde of baboons to beat her to death and then say “your wish is granted.”

If your target says “I wish for limitless riches,” however, you are 100% percent within your rights to crush them beneath a tide of gold coins Plutokinesis-style or banish them to a section of the Elemental Plane of Earth composed entirely of diamonds ... but without a breathable atmosphere.

Your GM is the final arbiter of what are and are not legal responses to the granting of a wish; strong, open and above-all honest communication with your GM is not simply encouraged for this feat but is instead required.

If your GM cannot decide what a specific character would wish for, she may choose to roll 3d6 on the chart below (ignoring any result and rounding down if that option has already been used too many times) to determine the character’s wish; possible responses from you are also listed after each choice:

I wish I wasn’t here! / I wish I was somewhere else! [You may plane shift your target to the Abyss, to the City of Brass or to another location of your choice]

I wish I could escape / I wish there was something I could do to get away safely! [You may baleful polymorph your target into a rabbit or a frog]

I wish you weren’t here! / I wish you would just go away! [You may use greater teleport, moving to any location that is outside of your target’s immediate visual field]

I wish I was home! / back home! / at home! [You may teleport your target back to their home, bringing along yourself and your party or other combatants if you desire]

I wish this hadn’t happened! [Your target is teleported, unharmed and healed of all conditions & wounds, back to where they last awoke or to wherever they were 12 hours ago, whichever is greater]

I wish you would just let me go! [You and your target are both teleported 100 feet into the air, with you grappling your target. At the end of your action, you are teleported back to your previous location]

I wish you were on fire! [You gain the benefits of fire shield]

I wish you would leave me alone! [Your target is subject to a maze effect]

I wish I could kill you! [Your target is given one round to kill you. All other creatures in the area benefit from a sanctuary spell. If you are not dead at the end of the round, your target dies]

I wish you couldn’t see me! [Your target gains permanent natural invisibility, as per an invisible stalker. She also gains a permanent overwhelming scent of rot, death and the grave (or some other scent, as you choose); all opponents within 30 feet may freely detect her purely by sense of smell. If she is upwind, the range increases to 60 feet; if downwind, it drops to 15 feet. Her exact location is not revealed, only her presence within range and the general direction toward her. When she is within 5 feet of any creature with a sense of smell, that creature automatically pinpoints her location even if otherwise blinded to her. She may also be tracked by her smell: any creature may attempt to follow from where she has been by making a Wisdom (or Survival) check to trace her movements and current whereabouts, even if she possesses the trackless step ability. The typical DC for smelling her out is 10; this DC increases by 2 for each hour since she departed the area. This otherwise follows the rules for the Survival skill.

I wish I was immortal! / I wish I was undefeatable! [Your target gains the benefits of the Immortal Creature template and is subject to a baleful polymorph effect]

I wish I was invincible! [Your target is transformed to adamantine, as per a special flesh to stone spell]

I wish your magic would fail! [You may gain the benefits of transformation]

I wish there was another way we could settle this! [You and your target are both teleported to another location, as per a maze spell. You may challenge your opponent to any test of skill -- that is NOT combat! -- that you desire; if you opponent fails against you, she dies]

I wish you would face me alone! [You and your target are both teleported to a location of your choice]

I wish you were dead! [You instantly split yourself into a pair of creatures: your spectral true self and your corporeal false self. Your true self becomes both invisible and incorporeal, and must remain directly adjacent to your false self until this effect ends. You may take no actions while you are so disjointed, nor interact with your environment in any way except to observe. Your false self dies for one hour per character level you possess or until you choose to end the effect. At any time while this effect is active, you may choose to end the effect as a free action: thereby collapsing yourself back into a single creature under your full control. All reversible effects related to your death are undone instantly at this time, just as though you had not died; this includes any damage and/or all secondary effects that would have been avoided if your false self had not died. You are the beneficiary of a true resurrection effect.

I wish ... I wish ... uh ... (stuttering) [your target is forced to answer the following round]

I refuse! [you may not force the creature to make a wish]

You are not required to grant a wish made of you in this way. For example, if a victim says “I wish your bones were all broken,” you could offer to your GM the option “Very well ... I gain all the benefits of an elemental body (or fluid form) spell, and all of my ‘bones’ are ‘broken’”; if your GM doesn’t like that, however, you are within your rights to simply say “I will not grant such a wish.”

If you choose not to grant a wish, you lose one Twist Point from your current Twist Score. This does not count against the total number of wishes you can grant each day.

Each time that you grant a wish by use of this feat, you add a number of Twist Points to your Twist Score equal to your target’s Hit Dice. Once you have reached your goal, you may Cash-Out all of your Twist Points as a full-round action and immediately gain the benefits of a wish spell.

Special: This feat assumes that your GM will establish additional specific, in-universe backgrounds and requirements for gaining this ability; the prerequisites (above) for this feat are thus left intentionally vague, entirely up to the storyteller. In a traditional fantasy game, this power might be limited only to elves or to other creatures with ties to the First World, only to demons and their mortal kin, only to wishcrafters or witches with specific Patrons, only to members of a certain lineage or arcane tradition, only to mad chaos-gods and their spawn, to the seventh son of a seventh son, or to certain “chosen ones” who are born to fulfill a dark destiny.

—

NOTE:

This website uses trademarks and/or copyrights owned by Paizo Inc., which are used under Paizo’s Community Use Policy. We are expressly prohibited from charging you to use or access this content. This website is not published, endorsed, or specifically approved by Paizo Inc. For more information about Paizo’s Community Use Policy, please visit paizo.com/communityuse. For more information about Paizo Inc. and Paizo products, please visit paizo.com.

#pathfinder #spellcaster #demon #effreet #wishcrafter #wishtwister #villain #feat

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paleorecipecookbook · 5 years

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Meal Prep: Your Best Tool for Healthy Eating

One of the main reasons why people are unable to stick with Paleo is that they feel overwhelmed; the grocery shopping and cooking involved can certainly be a major adjustment if you’re not used to preparing your own meals. Fortunately, there is a simple way around this potential roadblock and to make your diet changes stick—start meal prepping!

In this article, I’ll cover the art and science of meal prepping, as well as provide you with valuable tips and tricks for making the Paleo lifestyle affordable and time-saving, even if you’re on a strict budget and tight schedule.

Want to skip ahead? Use these links to jump to a new section:

Why meal prepping makes sense

Five steps to successful meal prepping

The best foods to use

Other ideas to help you meal prep

Why It Makes Sense to Meal Prep

Why should you start meal prepping? Simply put, meal prepping saves you time and money and, by ensuring that you have good-quality meals to eat on a daily basis, helps you stick to your diet!

If you want to start meal prepping but you’re not sure where to begin, this article is for you. Get time- and money-saving tips and learn how to plan and prep your Paleo meals successfully. #nutrition #wellness #chriskresser

You Save Time

The thought of having to cook 21 separate meals every week (breakfast, lunch, and dinner times seven) can seem daunting to Paleo newcomers. Because it’s simple to batch cook foods ahead of time, rather than making complete meals from scratch every day, meal prepping saves you valuable time in the kitchen.

You Save Money

The costs associated with regularly buying takeout or eating at restaurants really add up (and such food, unless you pay a premium, is typically lower in quality). Meal prepping, on the other hand, saves money because it involves cooking at home with ingredients that you can easily buy affordably in bulk. (Keep reading to learn more strategies for eating Paleo on a budget.)

You Prevent “Decision Fatigue”

For many of us, our action-packed days are a series of decision-making sessions that leave us exhausted and deplete our willpower—leading to “decision fatigue.” Decision fatigue can make us more likely to lounge on the couch and order takeout after work than hit the gym and cook a wholesome meal. By deciding on all your meals in advance, meal prepping reduces decision fatigue and frees up some of your willpower, helping you stay on track with your diet and your other health-related goals.

Five Steps to Successful Meal Prepping

While meal prepping pays off, it does require some planning on your part. In this section, I've provided you with handy guides, tips, and tricks to make each of these steps as painless and straightforward as possible.

Step 1: Clean Out Your Kitchen

The first step towards successful meal prep is to get rid of foods in your fridge, freezer, and pantry that aren’t serving your health. Toss or give away items like processed foods, industrial seed oils, and refined sugar. Get rid of items that have already been opened and donate unopened items to a food pantry. And before you panic that your shelves will be bare, remember that you’ll be replacing these foods with healthy staples!

Prepping for the Thirty-Day Reset Diet

If you’re brand new to the Paleo lifestyle and are unsure about the types of foods you can tolerate, I recommend trying a Thirty-Day Reset, as outlined in my book The Paleo Cure.

To start, you eliminate unhealthy foods and potentially problematic foods for 30 days. Then you systematically reintroduce those possibly problematic foods to determine which ones you can tolerate. This diet is specifically designed to reduce inflammation, identify food sensitivities, and reduce allergic reactions—in addition to improving your overall health.

If you’re beginning a Thirty-Day Reset, eliminate these foods (at least temporarily):

Alcohol

Coffee

Dairy products like butter, cheese, yogurt, milk, and cream

Grains, including rice, wheat, oats, quinoa, barley, and couscous

Beans, legumes, and related products like peanut butter and soy sauce

Chocolate

Processed “health foods” like whey protein and energy bars

All sweeteners, whether they’re real or artificial

What to Do If You’re on a Paleo Template

Not everyone needs to follow a Thirty-Day Reset. If you already have a good idea of which foods you can and can’t handle, a Paleo template might be a better fit for you.

Under a Paleo template, your main focus should be on getting rid of packaged, processed food. Eliminate foods made with industrial seeds oils and goods that include hidden sweeteners or food additives. While there are some healthy packaged foods out there (and you should check the ingredient label if you’re unsure), a good general rule is if it comes in a bag or a box, throw it out.

Here are some common items to toss:

Sugary beverages like juice, soda, energy drinks, and sweet teas

Seed oils, like vegetable, peanut, or canola

Margarine and Crisco

Packaged meals like pizza, french fries, and frozen dinners

Imitation meat or seafood

Boxed pastries and other packaged baked goods

Canned soups, unless they’re free from preservatives, processed ingredients, and other additives

Breakfast cereals and snack bars

Dips, dressings, seasoning mixes, marinades, and gravies

Chips and crackers

Candy, cookies, cakes, pudding, and other desserts

Syrups, including processed pancake syrups, sorghum syrups, etc. (Note: real maple syrup is okay)

Processed honey (Note: raw, local, and organic honey is fine)

Step 2: Restock with Healthy Staples

Once you’ve eliminated those foods from your kitchen, it’s time to restock with healthy staples.

Non-Starchy Vegetables

Non-starchy vegetables are a nutritious and affordable staple in the Paleo lifestyle. Stock your fridge and freezer with fresh or frozen broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, green onions, bell peppers, and leafy greens.

Whole Fruits

Whole fruits such as berries, apples, pears, bananas, mango, pineapple, and citrus fruits are excellent sources of vitamin C and phytonutrients. They make a great snack on their own or can be added to smoothies. However, avoid fruit juice because its lack of fiber allows fruit sugars to be absorbed more rapidly, resulting in spikes in blood glucose levels. In fact, diets heavy in fruit juice are linked to an increased risk of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, whereas whole fruit consumption does the very opposite, reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes. (1)

Starches

Starchy plants such as sweet potatoes, white potatoes, plantains, winter squash, taro, cassava, beets, turnips, and rutabaga are affordable, nutrient-dense, satiating foods to include in your diet. Stock up on these vegetables when they’re available seasonally; many of the tubers and root veggies will keep for quite a while when properly stored in the refrigerator. If you have trouble finding some of the more exotic tubers at your grocery store, consider checking out Asian markets, which frequently stock taro and cassava.

Protein

High-quality protein is a staple of the Paleo diet and can be prepped ahead of time. Purchase grass-fed and organic beef, bison, chicken, turkey, and eggs from your grocery store or farmers market or directly from local farms. Check out EatWild to find farms near you offering grass-fed and organic meats. I also recommend eating wild seafood several times a week as a source of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, selenium, and many other micronutrients. Thrive Market and Vital Choice both offer excellent selections of wild, sustainable seafood.

Healthy Fats

As you may know by now, Paleo encourages the consumption of plenty of healthy fats such as olive oil, coconut oil, red palm oil, avocado oil, pastured tallow and lard, and duck fat. Select a few of these fats and keep them on hand for sautéing, roasting, baking, and dressing salads.

Nuts

Nuts and nut butter make for a great Paleo snack. If possible, buy soaked and sprouted nuts because these processes remove much of the anti-nutrients from nuts, making their nutrients more bioavailable. You can also soak and sprout raw nuts yourself at home. Avoid buying roasted nuts covered in vegetable oils, as the roasting process causes the fats to go rancid.

Spices

Spices can quickly add interest to any Paleo dish. Invest in a spice rack and stock it with staples such as oregano, thyme, rosemary, cinnamon, and turmeric.

Baking Ingredients

If you’re planning to do any Paleo baking, then you’ll want to stock your pantry with a few Paleo flours and sweeteners. Try cassava, almond, coconut, and tigernut flours for baking Paleo cookies, brownies, or cake. Coconut flakes are a nice addition to homemade Paleo granola. Keep cans of full-fat coconut milk (preferably a BPA-free version such as Native Forest Simple Organic Unsweetened Coconut Milk) on hand along with Paleo-friendly sweeteners such as raw honey, maple syrup, stevia, coconut sugar, molasses, and monk fruit sweetener.

Other Paleo Template-Friendly Foods

Depending on your personal Paleo Template, you can also stock up on things like white rice, buckwheat, full-fat dairy products, legumes, and chocolate. Just look for organic products that aren’t processed or refined.

Step 3: Plan Your Meals

Now that you’ve eliminated unhealthy foods and restocked your kitchen with healthy staples, it’s time to start planning your meals! This part of the meal-prepping process is fun, will save you time in the kitchen, and will even tempt you to try new tastes and flavors.

Start by planning your meals on a weekly schedule. You can do this in one of two ways.

Old-School Style

Take a pen and paper and figure out how many breakfasts, lunches, and dinners you will need for the upcoming week. Factor in things like date nights, meals with clients, and travel. Once you know how many meals you’ll need for the week, decide what to eat for those meals. See the sections “What makes a good meal?” and “Which foods work best for meal prepping?” below for ideas. Make a grocery list based on your notes.

Use a Meal-Prepping App

There are many useful apps that will help you with meal prep—and some are even tailored specifically for Paleo. These apps provide you with recipes, chart out your meal schedule for the coming week, and automatically generate a grocery shopping list based on your meal plan. (Check out Step 4 below for an overview of my favorites.)

Once you’ve laid out your meal plan for the week, display it in a place where everyone in your household can see it. This way, you can get input from them and ultimately create weekly meal plans that will make everyone well fed and happy.

After the first few weeks of planning meals regularly, I realize it can be easy to fall into a rut, using the same few recipes repeatedly. But dietary diversity is crucial for meeting our nutrient needs and for feeding our gut microbes, so I recommend introducing new foods and recipes regularly. Start by adding one new vegetable per week and work your way up from there.

What Makes a Good Meal?

What exactly should the meals on your meal plan look like? First and foremost, choose nutrient-dense, whole foods. To learn more about how to select nutrient-dense foods, read my article “What Is Nutrient Density and Why Is It Important?”

Secondly, try to create meals that contain a balance of carbohydrates, fat, and protein. Eating well-balanced meals promotes satiety, modulates your body’s blood sugar response, and even enhances nutrient uptake from food. For example, eating protein with carbohydrates moderates the spike in insulin caused by dietary glucose, and consuming fat with vegetables enhances the absorption of fat-soluble nutrients such as carotenoids. (2, 3)

While I typically don’t advise people to count calories or obsess over macronutrient ratios, some people need to do so for health reasons. If you are one of those people, I highly recommend using a meal planning app to make the process easier.

Step 4. Use an App

The amount of planning involved with meal planning is significant, but fortunately, there is a way to make it infinitely easier—meal planning software and apps. I’ve taken the guesswork out of selecting the best ones for Paleo meal planning by creating this list.

AnyList App

AnyList collects and organizes recipes and adds them to a meal plan calendar. It then generates a grocery shopping list that you can easily edit and share with friends and family.

Cook Smarts

In addition to creating weekly meal plans, Cook Smarts also offers helpful cooking guides, infographics, and online cooking sessions.

eMeals

eMeals lets you choose from a variety of different meal plans (including a Paleo plan, of course). Each meal plan includes recipes with main and side dishes, a shopping list, and step-by-step instructions.

Mealime

Mealime produces weekly meal plans with over 200 personalization options.

Keto Diet Tracker

The Keto Diet Tracker app is helpful for tracking net carbs and storing recipes for those following a keto diet.

Nom Nom Paleo App

The Nom Nom Paleo app has nearly 150 recipes, 2,000 step-by-step photos, and a Whole30-friendly monthlong meal plan and generates customizable shopping lists, all for a low cost.

Paleo Leap Meal Planner

This app includes only Paleo-friendly recipes—every single one is free of gluten, grains, legumes, sugar, soy, and corn. The app offers over 1,500 recipes, generates grocery lists, and lets you set your own food preferences and restrictions; for example, you can indicate if you’d like low-FODMAP, egg-free, or autoimmune protocol-friendly recipes.

Paleo.io

The Paleo.io app answers a simple question: Is it Paleo? It helps users determine whether a given food is Paleo or not using a database of over 3,000 foods. It also includes hundreds of Paleo-approved recipes. This app is particularly helpful for those who are new to Paleo.

Paprika

The Paprika app helps you organize recipes, make meal plans, and create grocery lists. Paprika’s built-in browser allows you to save recipes from anywhere on the internet so you can create your ideal meal plan.

Plan to Eat

Plan to Eat allows you to add your own recipes from anywhere on the internet into a recipe book. You can then drag and drop recipes into a calendar to plan out your meals for the week. The app also generates a grocery list for you based on your planned recipes.

RealPlans

RealPlans creates and organizes recipes, develops a weekly menu, and generates grocery lists so that you can get healthy, delicious food on the table. If you need to track your macros, Real Plans has you covered. A subscription will give you access to all the app’s meal plans (Classic, Dairy-Free, Gluten-Free, Paleo, Keto, autoimmune protocol, and more) and over 1,500 recipes. You can add on recipes from well-known food bloggers for an additional fee.

Yummly Recipes and Recipe Box

Yummly takes a cue from Instagram, allowing you to browse through a photo gallery of recipes and save them to your own digital cookbook. Yummly also uses a proprietary program called Food Genome and a patent-pending technology called Food Intelligence to recommend recipes to users based on their allergies, tastes, and more.

Step 5: Cook Your Meals

You’ve cleaned out your kitchen, restocked it with healthy foods, and created a meal plan—now it’s time to start cooking! Here are a few simple strategies that will make it easier for you to follow through on your commitment to stick with Paleo.

Set Aside Time for Grocery Shopping and Meal Prepping

For many people, Sundays work best. You may also want to consider doing your shopping and main meal prep session on a Sunday and a second, smaller meal prep session mid-week to keep your fridge stocked with fresh options. Use a list when grocery shopping and check off items as you add them to your cart.

Organize Your Recipes

Organizing the recipes you intend to use in meal prepping will save you time in the kitchen. The meal prep apps I mentioned above make organizing your recipes easy, but you may also want to keep a few cookbooks in your house and print out recipes from blogs and websites and collect them in a binder. Find 15 to 20 recipes that you really enjoy and rotate them throughout the weeks (and check out some of my favorite Paleo-friendly recipes).

Keep Things Simple

You don’t need to cook an elaborate meal to satisfy your nutritional needs and appetite! Uncomplicated meals should be a staple in your weekly meal plans. For example, a high-quality protein source; steamed or roasted veggies with salt, pepper, and some healthy fat; and a sweet potato can make for a wholly satisfying and effortless meal.

Incorporate Leftovers into Your Weekly Meal Plan

Don’t be afraid of leftovers! Eating leftovers is an easy way to cut down on meal prep and prevents food waste. Label and date leftovers so you keep track of what’s in your fridge and freezer. And speaking of the freezer, use it! When you batch cook (see next item), you’ll have extras that you can stash away for later.

Batch Cook

Batch cooking, including doubling and tripling your favorite recipes, is a critical component of food prepping and can be applied toward many types of foods. For instance, bake several batches of egg muffins at a time to have around for breakfasts or roast a bunch of sweet potatoes to use as sides throughout the week.

Which Foods Work Best for Meal Prepping?

Some foods are more suitable for meal prepping than others; for example, roasted sweet potatoes hold up well to reheating, whereas pre-dressed salads quickly wilt in the refrigerator. In this section, I’ve outlined some of the best foods to include in your meal prepping process.

Meat

Cook chicken, turkey, beef, bison, or game meat in a slow-cooker. Shred the meat and set aside to use in stir-fries, in Paleo tacos, on top of salads, or in soup.

Sauté ground turkey, chicken, or beef in a pan with garlic, onion, and sea salt. Use the ground meat in Paleo “taco” salads, on top of spiralized vegetables, or in hearty stews.

Bake chicken breasts, wild salmon fillets, burgers, or meatballs in batches. Use them throughout the week with roasted or sautéed veggies, salad, and starchy vegetables as sides.

Eggs

Hard-boil a dozen eggs. Hard-boiled eggs are ideal for a quick and easy breakfast and are also an excellent portable snack.

Vegetables

Roast sweet potatoes, white potatoes, winter squash, and root vegetables in batches. These vegetables hold up well to reheating and are nutrient-dense sources of carbohydrates.

If you tolerate white rice, make large quantities in a rice cooker or Instant Pot.

Cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts, also hold up well to reheating throughout the week.

Sauces

Make several sauces to use throughout the week. Salsa, guacamole, gremolata, and chimichurri are just a few examples of Paleo-friendly sauces that can be made ahead of time and quickly spice up any meal.

Four Meal Prepping Tips and Tricks

Now that you know the basics of meal prepping, you’re well on your way towards saving time in the kitchen and eating well.

To build on your new skills and help you stay on track with Paleo eating, here are more ideas you can use, including strategies for how to shop Paleo on a budget, where to buy healthy staples and fresh ingredients, how to shop seasonally, and—when home-cooking isn’t on the menu—recommendations for Paleo meal delivery services.

1. Stick to a Budget

Shopping Paleo can be expensive if you don’t know how to grocery shop to your advantage. With the tips I’ve outlined here, you can successfully shop Paleo on a budget while still filling your cart with high-quality, nutrient-dense foods.

Buy conventional instead of organic (for some produce). Organic produce is ideal because it reduces our exposure to harmful pesticides and herbicides. However, costs can really add up when buying nothing but organic foods. If this is a problem for you, check out the Environmental Working Group’s Clean 15 and Dirty Dozen lists to determine which conventionally grown fruits and vegetables are lowest in pesticides and thus safe to buy conventional rather than organic.

Whether you buy organic or conventional produce, thoroughly wash your produce before eating. Almost no food is completely free of pesticides. The most effective way to remove pesticides from produce is by washing produce in a baking soda bath. (4) To wash vegetables, fill a large bowl with water and add a teaspoon of baking soda. Add the veggies and soak for 10 to 15 minutes. Scrub with a scrub brush and then rinse under clean water. For leafy greens, soak in a baking soda bath for a minute, thoroughly rinse, and then spin dry in a salad spinner. Wash smooth-skinned fruits (like apples and nectarines) in a baking soda bath like you would for veggies.

Here are some more money-saving tips:

Buy frozen produce. Buying frozen produce saves money while still providing you with nutrient-dense food; most fruits and vegetables are flash-frozen immediately after picking, thus preserving the nutrients they contain.

Buy in-season produce. Out-of-season produce is typically shipped from distant locations, including other continents, increasing costs. It’s also generally picked before it’s allowed to ripen (so that it can be transported without bruising or other damage), and that can impact its nutrient content if it’s improperly stored or subjected to temperature extremes.

Start a garden. Growing your own produce takes some work, but it ultimately is a really low-cost way to obtain organic fruits and vegetables.

Buy lower-quality cuts of meat. You don’t need to buy expensive cuts of meat to eat Paleo. For example, ground beef and brisket are cheaper than filet mignon but have the same nutritional value. In fact, some of the so-called “less desirable” cuts of meat may actually have higher nutritional value than pure muscle meat; for instance, nutritious gelatin-rich cuts of meat such as chuck roast and beef shank are often cheaper than cuts such as sirloin.

Choose more affordable species of wild fish, such as wild sardines instead of wild salmon.

Make eggs a staple in your diet. Eggs are a very economical protein source, including high-quality, farm-fresh eggs from a local source.

Buy in bulk. Many bulk grocery stores now offer many healthy options, including organic produce, wild seafood, and pastured meats, at lower prices than regular grocery stores. Consider buying a quarter, half, or or whole animal for meat directly from a rancher or farmer instead of single cuts from the grocery store; while you’ll need to invest in a chest freezer, this strategy can significantly reduce the cost of meat.

2. Shop Around for Healthy Food

Contrary to popular belief, Whole Foods is not the only place you can buy healthy food! All the stores listed here have excellent selections of healthy, Paleo-friendly foods. Even your local grocery store is likely to have some options.

Trader Joe’s

Natural Grocers

Sprouts Farmers Market

Super Target

Wegmans

Harris Teeter

Hannaford

Albertsons

Food Lion

Publix

Pathmark

Kroger

Aldi

Lidl

Costco

Sam’s Club

Farmers Markets

Don’t forget about your local farmers market! Farmers markets offer fresh produce, meat, and (depending on where you live) seafood at lower prices than most grocery stores. You might also want to investigate a CSA—community supported agriculture—in your area from which you can purchase a subscription to locally raised foods including produce and meat, delivered weekly or monthly.

Online

Healthy grocery shopping can now be done online as well as in person. The following online grocery stores offer organic, healthy options and deliver right to your door:

Thrive Market

Vitacost

AmazonFresh

Shop Seasonally

Shopping seasonally is a great way to tune in with your local food system and save money. Check out the Seasonal Food Guide to find out what produce is in season near you.

3. Use Real Food Delivery Services

If you are really tight on time but still committed to eating healthy meals, you may want to consider a Paleo “real food” meal delivery service. There are countless options out there, but I’ve curated the very best in this list.

Beetnik Foods

Beetnik Foods meals are certified Paleo friendly, delivered nationwide, and also available in select health food and grocery stores.

ButcherBox

ButcherBox delivers 100 percent grass-fed and grass-finished beef, heritage breed pork, and free-range, organic chicken. That can help if you’re short on time or if you’re struggling to find a local provider of grass-fed meat.

Caveman Chefs

Caveman Chefs offers both meal delivery services and catering. It is based in Colorado but ships nationwide. Choose from meals that are Whole30 approved, autoimmune protocol, low FODMAP, and ketogenic.

Factor 75

Factor 75 meals are premade, 100 percent organic, and free of hormones, GMOs, and antibiotics. Choose from bundles of four, six, eight, 12, or 18 meals.

Green Chef

Green Chef provides you with prepped ingredients to cook three two-person Paleo dinners (or two four-person dinners on the family plan) each week. All recipes are organic and gluten-free, feature protein and fresh veggies, and contain zero grains or dairy.

Kettlebell Kitchen

Kettlebell Kitchen meals are free of artificial ingredients, preservatives, gluten, dairy, soy, corn, industrial vegetable oils, and refined sugar. Some of the meals contain non-Paleo ingredients that are tolerated by many people, including white rice, lentils, and gluten-free oats.

Paleo On The Go

Paleo On The Go operates out of a completely gluten-free kitchen and specializes in Paleo and autoimmune protocol-friendly frozen premade meals that can be delivered nationwide. You can purchase meals individually or in bundles.

Paleo Power Meals

Paleo Power Meals offers premade meals with generous portions that pack a large amount of protein.

Pete’s Paleo

Pete’s Paleo offers seasonally inspired, farm-fresh prepared Paleo meals. Order bundles of five, 10, 14, or 20 meals in vacuum-sealed packages from anywhere in the United States.

Sunbasket

Sunbasket allows you to select three two- or four-person meal kits per week without gluten, grains, soy, corn, added sugar, or dairy. The ingredients and recipes are delivered fresh so you can cook great meals without any planning or shopping.

The Good Kitchen

The Good Kitchen sources organic produce almost exclusively from local farms in North Carolina (where its operation is based) and delivers its refrigerated and frozen meals nationwide.

Trifecta Nutrition

Trifecta Nutrition provides ready-to-eat dinners and lunches that are non-GMO, 100 percent organic, and free of sugar, grains, gluten, dairy, and soy. You can also upgrade to add breakfasts and additional entrées or choose build-your-own meals.

TrueFare

TrueFare uses the highest-quality ingredients in their meals, including organic produce, grass-fed beef, heritage pork, and organic or free-range poultry. They offer Paleo-, keto-, autoimmune protocol-, and Whole30-friendly meal plans.

4. Stock Your Kitchen with the Essentials

To successfully meal prep, you’ll need to stock your kitchen with some essential tools. This includes basic tools that everyone should have in their kitchen, Paleo-specific items, cookware and bakeware, and maybe some “nice to have” extras for when you decide to get creative with cooking.

Kitchen Basics

Measuring cups

Measuring spoons

Potholders

Kitchen towels

Vegetable peeler

Spice rack

Cutting boards

Chef’s knife

Slotted spoons

Spatula

Ladle

Utensil holder

Mixing bowls

Glass storage container

Wooden spoons

Paleo Kitchen Essentials

Meat cleaver

Paring knife

Whisk

Grater

Probe meat thermometer

Hand-held lemon squeezer or citrus reamer

Mason jars

Salad spinner

Cheesecloth or cotton/linen fine mesh towel

Potato masher

Tongs

Food processor

Blender

Immersion blender

Cookware and Bakeware

Sauté pan

Saucepan

Skillets

Baking dishes

Stockpot

Soup pot

Dutch oven

“Nice to Have” Items

Kitchen shears

Pepper mill

Mandoline

Muffin tin and muffin liners

Ramekins

Spoon rest

Meat grinder

Hand mixer

Mortar and pestle

Slow cooker

Sous vide

Dehydrator

Spiralizer

Fermentation pot

Juicer

Spice grinder machine

Garlic press

Tool for making your own meat jerky (such as LEM Products 468 Jerky Cannon)

Food processor

Instant Pot

Countertop toaster oven or convection oven

Water Filter

For drinking and cooking water, I recommend investing in a high-quality water filter. Berkey water filtration systems sit conveniently on your countertop and remove viruses, pathogenic bacteria, cysts, and parasites to undetectable levels. They also reduce heavy metals without eliminating beneficial minerals. Additional white filters can be added to remove fluoride. If you want to filter your home’s entire water supply, you may want to consider a reverse osmosis filter instead.

Food Storage

Once you’ve prepped your meals, you’ll need containers for storing everything. Since plastic containers contain chemicals that are known endocrine disruptors, I prefer people use glass storage dishes with BPA-free lids.

For wrapping up foods, use unbleached parchment paper or beeswax-coated reusable food wrap (such as Bee’s Wrap) instead of conventional plastic wrap, which may leach endocrine disrupting chemicals into your food. (5) Finally, try reusable silicone storage bags (such as Stasher bags) instead of plastic freezer/storage bags, which may also contain endocrine-disrupting plasticizers.

Now I’d like to hear from you. Do you practice food prepping? If not, do you think you’ll try the food-prepping strategies I’ve outlined in this article? Let me know in the comments below.

The post Meal Prep: Your Best Tool for Healthy Eating appeared first on Chris Kresser.

Source: http://chriskresser.com February 12, 2019 at 06:10PM

#paleo #recipe #food #delicious #healthy #yum #diet

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