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omegatheunknown · 3 years

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AEW ALL OUT 2021

In which, not to get ahead of myself here, AEW puts on one of the best major wrestling shows in several years*, following the simple yet effective principle of giving the people what they want and sending everyone home happy and hungry for more.

- The incredibly 'Nitro' ending of the go-home Dynamite, which ran a little long on the 'heels beat everyone up and strut around like assholes almost too in desperate need of comeuppance' bit, short of garbage raining into the ring, did actually increase the heat for both promoted matches. Again, not rocket science, but executed perfectly. Catharsis was on the card, and catharsis went over several times Sunday. - Again, it's time to move on from the Casino theme, shuffling the deck and drawing suits really only detracted from the Battle Royale and seemingly always throws the production crew a curve. If they haven't hammered it by now, it's not going to happen. - Bit unhappy about the PAC/Andrade situation, but still over the moon with Andrade's promo style and Chavito being unhelpful at best.

*Pre-Card

Best Friends and Jurassic Express v The Hardy Family Office and The Hybrid 2 (**) - Not usually much to say about a loaded-up multiteam boondoggle, particularly when the show has yet to begin, but there were some moments worth sitting up to take notice -- there's a lot of talent in the ring, even if Jack Evans/Angelico aren't going to be more than mid-level mooks, little matchups with guys like Luchasaurus and Chuck Taylor are opportunities for innovative/weird spots. - Really this match exists to show-off Jungle Boy, play his theme song twice, and work him in to the aforementioned spots. I don't rightly know what Jungle Jack's ceiling is, but it sort of feels like he's plateauing, at least this version of himself. - Dan Lambert thing is interesting in that it doesn't seem to easily lead to something obvious... I mean who are Scorp and Ethan Page feuding with by proxy here, the concept of contemporary professional wrestling? Orange Cassidy and Kenny Omega?

*Main Card

Miro (C) v Eddie Kingston for the TNT Championship (***1/2) - 'Redeem Deez Nuts' T-shirts now available -- and made immediately redundant now that Miro has graciously redeemed Eddie's nuts. - Imagine looking at Miro, listening to Miro talk, and not really being able to figure out this guy is money. Also imagine panicking when he took a little while to find his groove in AEW. 'The Redeemer' is both entertaining and terrifying, and this match delivered heavily on the promise of two big fellas smacking together repeatedly. - Not only does Eddie's arsenal of power moves target Miro's neck, he may also be quite difficult to put in the full reclined camel clutch. Or he'd quite literally snap in half. It didn't come to that. - Weird heel turn by Bryce's attention span and the overall weirdness of the finish is all that kept this from being an excellent match, otherwise this was a tremendous curtain jerker and started off a dangerously fun run of pure adrenaline.

Jon Moxley v Satoshi Kojima (****) - The stakes were nebulous, the build was abrupt, yet this was a fantastic match and tremendous showcase for an underappreciated great who has been more or less just toiling for a bunch of years as a NJPW Dad. Same deal for Nagata, and I assume Tenzan is the same, Taka Michinoku even -- let's see it. - I have to assume the Cozy Lariat might have put Mox down, but Kojima otherwise played the hits (Koji Cutter, Piledriver, Brainbustaaaa) in a big way and Moxley once again proved he's become a very well-rounded wrestler who can match the intensity of just about any former IWGP champion. - More to the point-- KAZE NI NARE -- out of nowhere, too. Or out of nowhere to those not paying attention to the whereabouts of Minoru Suzuki (Right, he's just over here to fight Daniel Garcia and not Mox?), which I guess is to my own peril. Wow, though. Surprise Number 1- a complete surprise, and a welcome one. Let's have it.

Dr Britt Baker, DMD (C) v Kris Statlander for the AEW Women's Championship (****) - I love Kris and her best friends but she didn't have a prayer of dethroning Britt. She got one promo, several weeks ago, and though she did make a meal of Hayter and Rebel, the chase has been abrupt and not given much discussion, other than Mark Henry and whomever else acknowledging what is extremely evident -- Statlander is stronger than she looks, and she looks really strong. They've got her doing Cesaro-level 'modify your grip while holding your opponent's entire weight' nonsense, and it's amazing and scary. - Even with the reign of the good doctor not being credibly threatened, this was an excellent match that demonstrated the continued growth of the competitors in the women's division, even as it underlined that their storylines remain undercooked and perfunctory: Orange Cassidy whipping off his shades to urge Stat to get up was a beautiful moment. Britt's Panama Sunrise, also, too sweet. Statlander eating shit on her 451 and her pendulum moonsault was properly brutal, as were Britt's curb stomps. Really great match between these two. - Again, if they had bothered to write anything into this story, such as Kris' alien physiology making her immune to the lockjaw or something... actually, maybe that's a terrible idea. it's an idea. Undefeated challenger is defeated, on to the next for Dr Britt. Statlander and OC should tag against some of the boys.

The Young Bucks (C) v The Lucha Bros for the AEW World Tag Team Championship(*****+) - Can't not mention the insane entrance lined up for Fenix and Penta. It was bewildering, it was enchanting, it was aggressive, it was hype. It also reminded everybody how very badly we all wanted the Lucha Bros to win. The crowd has been setting new peaks with their volume since Punk showed up, but things were absolutely thunderous and ecstatic at the end of this match. Absolutely valid response. I yelled on the couch. - Nick's facial hair was a bigger tell that it was time for the Bucks to lose than anything else about this build. There's literally nowhere to go from there -- they've done the hair, the bandanas, the kicks, the animal print, the dangly earrings -- peak visual heel for this time and place. - Sincerely thought this was going to be too much of a full sprint spot-fest (the PWG-esque circle of trading blows is not really 'my thing') but even so they kept finding gears, and ramping and ramping and adding blood and brutality along the way. Even a bit of levity, with the tacked up sneaker, followed by the sincerity of Penta throwing himself in harm's way to protect his brother. Immense match, I think you'd have to go back to the Bucks vs the Addiction and MCMGs Ladder War to find a more thrilling tag team gimmick match. - If there's a single flaw to be found it's in the production not really settling on wide angles for simultaneous action at the start of the match. They figured it out. - Rey Fenix is the best luchador in the world.

Women's Casino Battle Royale (**1/2) - If nothing else, this really shows off that they now have a surplus of women's wrestlers who deserve time to hang in the ring. Unsurprisingly, the match picked right up when Thunder Rosa and then Jamie Hayter got to the ring, with additional props to Tay Conti and Jade Cargill, who was dumped rather unceremoniously given her general booking... - Okay, there was something else. Welcome to the rechristened Ruby Soho, who I've not seen a lot of outside of her extremely limited showcase in WWE, but she has so many friends in the back and in the industry and that's never for nothing, not in wrestling, anyway. Intrigued to see where she fits, and if the women ever get more than a match per show. - Touched on this in the preamble but this was the roughest part of the night for the home viewer, just weird decisions on cutting away from various entrances to show... nothing in particular happening. Also while the commitment to not-kayfabing the countdown clock is... admirable? It makes the pacing hinky. - Almost everyone who got new gear for tonight was looking like the white ranger -- Nyla, Swole, Bunny, someone I'm missing. Except Anna Jay, whose stars and glitter gear looked great.

MJF v Chris Jericho for the fate of Jericho's in-ring career (***) - MJF's unauthorized homage to Y2J's entrance: good. Fozzy's guitarist going off tempo with the instrumental Judas: weak, and would've been sad if this were the end for Jericho. Especially as the build has felt... muted, somehow. - Props to the commentary for continuing to feed the red herring of 'in AEW,' as a caveat to stipulation, it did feel like... a remote possibility that MJF would win. - Credit to Aubrey for calling this one down the middle and not putting the fix in for her friend Jericho, and I guess the Dusty finish will give MJF plenty to gripe about. - MJF wrestles with a pure heel style, holds, chops, blocks, and Jericho is fifty years old, so the level of wrestling on exhibition in these matches is well beside the point. It was solid to good, and I was fighting burn out from the first half of the card's level of excitement.

CM Punk v Darby Allin (***1/2) - There are a couple benefits of Darby as a dance partner, and it's certainly better than having to watch Punk return against like, QT Marshall or Shawn Spears. Darby does make everyone look slow, but he can also be tossed around, and this raises his profile even in defeat, obviously. That said, the stakes here are... meta, at best, in that we want to see the man look good and justify the hype. It's a weird thing to root for. He certainly does look good. (Tights? Tights!) - It's fun to theorize about actually booking an angle where Punk is rusty and needs to regain his prowess, and maybe he'll stumble, but maybe the most we get out of that angle is hitting the GTS a little close to the ropes so Darby falls right out of the ring, in what was, for me, the spot that justified this whole match. - Sting's proud step-dad aura is still a hell of a thing, I really liked the end of the match kudos all around. - Match was good, hard to hang my emotions on. I wasn't watching WWE when Punk was in WWE. Definitely feeding off the excitement of others a bit here, and he sure can talk. I'd like to see him cultivate a stable, certainly.

Paul Wight v QT Marshall (n/r) - ...popcorn match? QT Marshall is like the anti-Daniel Garcia in that while his prominence and presence is just as inexplicable, I don't want it to continue, and he doesn't justify it in the process. - Match was two minutes longer than it needed to be.

Kenny Omega (c) v Christian Cage for the AEW World Championship (****1/2) - Crowd was both burnt out and more or less waiting for the post-match angle. Which I get. it's hard to cruise to the main event and having seen all the different things we've already seen on this card, even a singular performer like Kenny Omega and a legend with whom he (surprisingly? fittingly?) has superb chemistry with in Christian Cage were up against it to deliver something memorable. - Context dependent, I can definitely see rating this below their Rampage match, especially since... I mean Christian isn't winning the AEW title off Kenny at this or probably any other event. - But! It was really good! It was very good! They really do match-up well, and Kenny's v-trigger has rarely looked more devastating than when it knocks Christian flat. Christian got cut open in a novel and initially worrying way, and Kenny followed up a botched moonsault with a harder version of the same move off a rail, but it was a really great match and it deserved more energy than was available.

Post-Show - Calling back and inverting the end of Dynamite, The Elite strut about the ring, slightly less stoked than they were on Wednesday, but with the Bucks smiling through the pain, and Jungle Boy once again subjected to violence for his misguided heroism, Kenny 'not much a promo' Omega lays down a killer line about nobody being fit to challenge him who isn't unavailable, already tired or dead. - The Undertaker ADAM COLE, BAY BAY as Surprise #3 was a minor stroke of brilliance, and a fun swerve because while it's exciting to see him, his appearance at this point in the narrative does nothing to solve the problem of The Elite beating up Christian and Jungle Boy. Unless he's still sore about his unsolved murder, which he isn't. Storytime with Adam Cole is back and it's beautiful. Also Jungle Boy died for this. - Okay. But. Just. Okay. CM Punk and Bryan Danielson are All Elite. They will hopefully tag together. Bryan will head to NJPW, almost definitely. Minoru Suzuki just walked in and started slugging on Mox. The Forbidden Door is wide open. Will Kenny Omega one day return to Wrestle Kingdom? There are so many possibilities and they are all very exciting. This was a phenomenal show and it didn't have Hangman Page, Cody Rhodes, FTR, Santana and Ortiz, PAC, Andrade, Sammy Guevara, Team Taz, and the rest.

- Wrestling is good, actually. Imagine watching like five hours of wrestling and loving wrestling at the end of it.

*What competes- WK11, Dominion 2018, 2019, DoN 2019, 2021.. All-In, probably. Wrestlemania 30. A few Takeovers. Kris Wolf's retirement show...

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darkblueboxs · 4 years

Note

If you're taking requests, maybe the foxes reacting to soft andreil? I love seeing their relationship through outside perspectives

Sorry for the delay! I ended up with two very different ideas for this and wrote both of them. I’ll be posting the other one in the next week or so! [EDIT: Here it is!]This was great fun to write. Thank you for the request.

In the Eye of the Beholder

Read here or on AO3

#1 Dan

Dan raps her knuckles against the door to the monster’s flat and waits. Nicky greets her with an impressive mop of bedhair and a baffled expression which smooths over only when Neil darts past, citing brunch with Dan as his excuse for being awake at such a thoroughly reasonable hour on a Sunday morning. He’s in high spirits, from what Dan can tell, rolling on the balls of his feet as they wait for the elevator to arrive. Dan is ready to put it down to excitement over their plans – she has a stack of potential recruits under her arm thicker than Les Misérables for them to discuss, hopefully with a stack of pancakes of equal height on the side. Then she spots the light bruise peeking over the hem of Neil’s collar, and draws a very different conclusion about the source of Neil’s good mood.

She smiles as they step into the elevator, but keeps the observation to herself. While some members of the team love to badger Neil for the slightest insight into his relationship, Dan is willing to push her curiosity aside for the sake of Neil’s privacy. He has plenty other teammates to pester him without her jumping on the bandwagon.

Just before the doors slide shut, an arm bursts through the gap, forcing them open. Andrew is as stoic and terrifying as ever (not that Dan would ever admit it) even while wearing Neil’s foxprint-patterned pyjama bottoms. The quickened rise and fall of his chest is the only hint that he ran to get here.

Neil raises an eyebrow at the sudden appearance of his underdressed partner.

Andrew lobs something at Neil which bounces off his chest and lands on the floor between his feet. Neil stoops to scoop it up, and Dan sees that it’s his wallet.

“Thanks.”

“Idiot,” Andrew huffs. He retracts his arm, and the doors slide shut on the sight of him stalking back to their dorm.

Neil taps the wallet against his hand a couple times before sliding it into the wallet.

“You’re both idiots if you think I’m letting you pay for brunch,” Dan says wryly.

Neil shakes his head. “I said I was going to pick up some stuff at the store afterwards. But thanks. Brunch is on me, though.”

“We’ll see,” Dan says, which means no. “Okay, I’ll admit it. That was sweet of him.”

The corner of Neil’s mouth twitches. “Nah. He’s just making sure I come back with the junk food I promised him.”

“Sure.” And, oh, Dan had been trying to be good, but she really can’t help herself any longer. “So, did you guys mean to give each other matching hickeys, or was that just a fun little accident?”

Neil slaps his hand to his neck and groans.

All in all, it’s a great morning.

#2 Kevin

Aaron’s trial is coming up. Kevin wouldn’t care (well, he would, but for different reasons) except that it’s making the cousins snippy and fractious. More so than usual. Andrew isn’t sleeping properly, although he would deny that it had any relation to the trial. Unfortunately, his insomnia is contagious, which ends with Neil losing focus at their night practice, having spent the best part of a week running on fumes and gatorade.

Kevin has been patient – patient by his standards, anyway – but the third fumbled catch in a row snaps his temper like brittle bone.

“Get the fuck off my court, Josten.” Kevin says, smacking the base of his racquet against the floor.

“Fuck you,” Neil answers reflexively. He stops to push his lengthening bangs back from his face.

“I’m not joking. You’re in no state to play. Get the fuck out.” Kevin wishes Neil would take it as the blessing it is, a night to re-focus and re-calibrate, but instead he’s glaring Kevin down like he just asked him to eat sewage.

Neil turns away from him to send another ball barrelling towards the goal. It misses by an entire foot.

“Neil,” Kevin says sharply, readying for a fight that neither of them have the energy nor patience for.

Before he can begin, the doors to the court bang open. Andrew stands in the entrance, arms crossed. It’s the expression that ends an argument before it’s had time to start; Kevin knows it far, far too well.

Andrew leads Neil away to the showers while Kevin continues his drills.

When he’s finished washing up, he finds the pair in the team lounge, collapsed on the wider of the couches. Neil is asleep, slumped into Andrew’s side. Andrew looks up as Kevin enters, but he doesn’t move his hand from its resting place in Neil’s hair. Although Neil was the only one of the pair training that night, Andrew’s hair is plastered against his head as though he, too, is fresh out of the shower. Kevin tries not to consider the implications.

They wait in silence for a few minutes, watching as Neil sleeps, properly sleeps, for the first time in far too long. Neither are willing to disturb him, but the night is late and Kevin has a whole host of classes waiting for him in the morning.

“I’ll walk back,” says Kevin. Andrew meets his gaze for a long moment before nodding briefly. The bags under his eyes betray him.

Kevin darts back into the lockers to pick up Neil’s abandoned kit bag. When he passes them again, Andrew has slouched onto his side, having manoeuvred Neil in front of him so they can both lie comfortably. His arm is slung protectively around Neil’s waist like Andrew is prepared to beat off the world to keep him there.

Kevin knows they spend more nights in each other’s bunks than out of them in the dorm, but somehow they’re always up and away before anyone else is awake enough to give them any hassle over it. Kevin doesn’t care, but Nicky can be overbearing at the best of times, and Aaron is… well, Aaron. But here, in the privacy of an empty stadium, it looks like Neil has finally found enough security to drop off at last, and Andrew looks ready to follow. Kevin shuts the door behind him, not quite smiling, but close. It was strange to some, the idea of Neil and Andrew, but anyone who saw them curled up together would see it plain as day. They just fitted.

The next day, Neil is closer to being himself again, and no more is said on the matter.

#4 Matt

Matt has to admit that press duty with Neil is never boring. The interviewers seem to share his opinion, visibly perking up when Neil follows Matt into the room. They lost to the Bearcats, but it was close enough that Matt doesn’t have to lie when he says that he’s proud of the team’s performance today.

“Some are saying that the failure of the defence line in later stages was due to Minyard’s performance in goal in the second half. How would you respond to that?

Matt doesn’t know why he bothers opening his mouth; the question may be directed to him, but he knows damn well that a boulder in the shape of Neil’s fury is already barrelling in this hapless reporter’s direction. “Well-”

“Last time I checked, this was a team sport,” Neil says loudly. “Was I hallucinating that, or has there been a few rule changes since yesterday?”

Matt isn’t sure whether to laugh or groan. Coach had told Matt to keep an eye on their resident fire-starter as though anyone was at all capable of controlling Neil when there was a mic in front of him. Matt feels sorry for the poor sucker that will one day be assigned to the role of Neil’s publicist, because he’s sure that Neil will drive them into an early grave alongside Matt’s.

“You have to admit that the number of goals that he let in-”

“I��m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that his entire defence line had already played two full quarters before he even stepped foot on court. People get tired the longer a game goes on, of course defence is going to suffer in the second half. But sure, keep pinning it on the goalie you clearly have it in for.”

Matt claps a hand on Neil’s back. “What he said,” he agrees, staring down the reporter.

They take no further questions.

Matt doesn’t mean to eavesdrop, but when he leaves the showers to see Andrew and Neil alone in the locker room he ducks back out of sight. He walks into at least one dramatic confrontation amongst his teammates per week, and sometimes the best way to deal with the daily bouts of fox drama is to hide and wait for the storm to pass.

“Point me to where I asked you to lead my own personal crusade.” Andrew’s flat tones echo off the tiled floor. Matt regrets leaving his Ipod in his bag. The conversation doesn’t seem too personal to overhear, but Andrew and Neil have never been the easiest reads.

“I’m tired of them talking shit about you just because they have a vendetta against anyone with your…” Neil trails off. Matt imagines him to be making several expressive hand gestures; it’s hard to condense all of Andrew’s history and circumstances into one word. “…everything,” Neil settles on.

“Your principles should not intersect with my business.”

“Even if it could affect your future career?” Neil’s words are met, unsurprisingly, with silence. “Besides, yours do.”

“Explain.”

“When I first came here, you told Nicky to back off. Not out of concern for me. Because of your principles.”

This time, the silence stretches so long that Matt doesn’t think Andrew is going to answer.

“Point,” Andrew concedes.

“Besides, is it so bad that I’m standing up for you?”

“Only when it’s making new enemies for you. How many does one man need?”

“I’ve got room for a few more,” Neil says. There’s a rustle of movement, and, oh, are they kissing? Matt strongly suspects that they are kissing. It’s more than his life is worth to look. He takes a few steps back, rattles his kit loudly and makes as much noise as possible before entering the locker room. The pair are a safe distance apart by the time he enters, and Matt gives them a probably-not-convincingly-casual nod before busying himself with his change of clothes.

The pair spend the journey home holed up together at the back of the bus, and if he suspects that they’re doing a little more than talking, Matt keeps it to himself.

They’ve earned a little privacy, after all.

#5 Aaron

“Well, maybe if you stopped and took the time to, I don’t know, explain literally anything that you do, we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess.”

“Aaron,” says Bee, a gentle reprimand. He isn’t in the mood to hear it. His attention remains on his brother, who’s features remain the same stony, impassive blank that they have in almost every joint session to date. It’s an expression that makes Aaron want to tear his hair out, or kick his brother’s face in, or both.

“What would you like me to explain?” says Andrew, more of a challenge than an offer. Aaron snorts, because, where to fucking begin?

“How about we start with your little fuck-buddy, seeing as you’re so keen to start on mine.” Earlier that week, Andrew had returned early from a class to find Aaron and Katelyn together in their dorm room. The result, while not outright violent, had been deeply unpleasant for all involved. And of course, Andrew was being an ass about it.

“Aaron. We’ve talked about this. How can you expect Andrew to talk about Katelyn respectfully if you won’t offer the same respect to his own partner?”

Aaron scoffs. “It’s not the same.”

Andrew’s eyebrow… it doesn’t quirk, but it twitches. “Oh?”

Aaron gestures vaguely. “You know what I mean.”

“I can assure you that I don’t.”

“Me and Katelyn. You and Neil. It isn’t the same.”

“How so?” Andrew’s tone isn’t in the danger zone yet, but it’s edging towards it.

“I’m not talking about the gay thing. I’m talking about…” The hand Aaron was waving clenches into a fist as he drops it into his lap. “Don’t make me say it.”

Andrew and Bee share a look over his head.

“Aaron,” says Bee.

“I just, fucking…” Aaron grapples with words, struggling to find a combination that won’t rip them apart any worse than they already have been. “How the fuck can you expect me to believe that you and him… that you’re real. That you’re normal, that you’re like us, after everything those fuckers did to you. What makes him so different?”

Andrew watches him. Just when Aaron resigns himself to the fact that no answer is coming, Andrew speaks. “If I ask him to stop, he stops.”

Aaron bites down on the inside of his cheek so hard that he thinks he might have drawn blood. “It can’t be that simple.”

Andrew shrugs.

“How?”

Andrew’s eyes flicker upwards, like he would rather be anywhere else, having any other conversation in the world than this one. “We have a system. We don’t touch each other without asking first. We listen to each other. We talk. What more do you need me to say?”

Aaron falls silent. He doesn’t know what he needs from his brother, still, but it’s something.

“I have a question in return,” Andrew’s eyes flick to Bee. He isn’t looking for permission, but she nods in encouragement nonetheless. “Katelyn. What makes her so different?” Andrew meets his gaze dead-on as he turns Aaron’s own words back on him. “How can you trust her, after everything that bitch Tilda did to you?”

And finally, it all clicks into place.

Aaron forces himself to look his brother in the eyes. So much like his, yet at the same time so different. “Okay,” he concedes at last. “I see.”

Because, at last, he does.

#7 Allison

Neil appears at Allison’s door with a black eye, a bust lip, and the words “don’t freak out,” spilling from his mouth before she can get so much as a word in.

“Great start,” she says, pulling him in. “Who do I need to kill?”

“My shoelace came undone and I ate shit while I was on my run. I just need enough makeup that I can get through class without looking like I’ve been in a fight again. Do you know how many of my lecturers have taken me aside to give me the domestic abuse hotline?”

“You should know how to do this yourself by now.” Allison rolls her eyes as she leads Neil through to the table.

“You’re better at it,” he admits grudgingly, and oh, doesn’t that just warm her heart to hear.

“Nice try. You’re still taking me out for coffee after this.”

Neil pulls a face, and Allison laughs. It doesn’t take long – Allison has treated him in far, far worse shape, as much as she’d rather not think about it – and soon there’s only the faintest smudge around Neil’s eye.

“Can I tempt you to some mascara? Glitter?” Allison asks, waggling her eyebrows as she spreads the contents of her makeup bag out for his inspection.

“Maybe next time,” says Neil, “When I’m not going to a calculus lecture.”

“But that’s the best place for it.” Allison dabs the tip of his nose with her brush, and Neil’s face scrunches up as he tries to hold back a sneeze. His hair flops back down over his forehead as he moves, falling into his eyes.

“Don’t move just yet,” Allison says, yanking a drawer open and fumbling for the kitchen scissors. “I’ve been meaning to deal with that mop for weeks, and right now I have you trapped.”

“Oh, no,” Neil says flatly, but still he surrenders herself to her demands. Wise move.

“Perfect,” says Allison a few minutes later, ruffling Neil’s hair to shake away the last loose strands. “Ready for the red carpet now. I hope there aren’t any cute guys in your maths class, or Andrew is going to go mad with jealousy.”

Neil snorts. “He’s not really the type.”

“Mhmm,” says Allison, because in her experience, everyone is the type.

Speaking of the psychotic little devil himself, Andrew bursts through the door just as Allison is brushing up the last of the trimmings.

“Hey,” Neil says, apparently impervious to Andrew’s thunderous entrance. Andrew ignores the greeting, taking hold of Neil’s chin to turn his face from side to side.

“Kevin said you fell,” he says, relinquishing the grip. Allison half-turns away, pretending to busy herself tidying but really listening, because the monster’s overbearing-boyfriend performances are rarely seen in public yet endlessly entertaining.

“Shoelaces. Who could have seen it coming?”

“I did. And warned you. Twice.”

Neil winces. “My bad.”

Andrew mutters something under his breath that seems to involve the words kill you. The day Allison understands their relationship is the day that she gives up on any and all gossip for the rest of her life.

Then, Andrew pauses, distracted. “Did you trip and fall onto a pair of sheers?”

“Allison gave me a haircut. How does it look?”

Andrew holds his hand in front of Neil’s face. When Neil nods, Andrew runs it quickly through his hair, gently tugging at the roots as he goes. “Awful.”

“Hey,” Allison interrupts, outraged. They both start, and Andrew’s hand drops away, like they had forgotten she was there. Which was the point, really. She holds the scissors in Andrew’s direction. “You’re next, scraggy.”

“When I’m dead,” Andrew replies flatly. It’s clear he isn’t joking. Neil shakes his head at them both.

“Come on, then,” Allison says. “Neil’s taking me for coffee. Give us a ride and I’ll buy you the sugariest, most expensive drink on the menu. I’m hoping the diabetes will finish you off if lung cancer falls through.”

Andrew glances between them. “Fine.”

Sugar and Neil; the keys to Andrew’s stony little heart.

#8 Nicky

Nicky is fully capable of responding to his cousin’s newfound domestic happiness with maturity and decorum.

He just chooses not to.

This has nearly ended in violence no less than eight times. But really, how can he be expected to let it lie when his cousin, who came to him an unruly, violent teen to whom any conversation was like pulling teeth with plastic tweezers, is, for the first time, experiencing the gay teen college romance Nicky could only have dreamed of?

With his fiancée a million miles away, Nicky has to live vicariously when it comes to matters of the heart. There is no better subject for this than his violent baby cousin, who, it seems, isn’t such a baby anymore.

Nicky is beyond late for his class already when he realises that his laptop is dead. He had been skyping with Eric until ass-o-clock in the morning, forgot to plug it in before passing out in his bunk and is paying for it three-fold. He has two options; pencil and paper (what is he, a toddler?) or steal someone’s laptop. The answer is both clear and obvious.

Andrew’s is the first to hand. He most likely won’t surface until noon, by which time Nicky will have returned from class, leaving him none the wiser. The perfect crime.

Or it is the perfect crime until Nicky opens the laptop in the middle of his seminar to a webpage that is filled with very, very unsafe-for-classroom content.

Nicky slams the laptop shut. It wasn’t a video, none of the sites Nicky knew from his own fits of late-night loneliness. Large blocks of text, diagrams that were more analytical than downright pornographic. Nicky slides the laptop open again, just enough for the screen to light up once more, and tabs up. No, not porn. Informative. Educational.

The girl beside him, although unable to see his screen, is giving Nicky some very strange looks. Nicky glances back to the laptop before sliding it shut once more. Pencil and paper will have to do.

The class is drier than dirt, leaving Nicky’s mind with far too much space to think. A dangerous pastime in Nicky’s case, Eric would say teasingly. Nicky had assumed – well, not that he had thought about it, much, but Andrew always seemed so set and sure of himself that it was hard to imagine him googling how-to guides like an acne-riddled teen the night before prom. His apparent innocence is weirdly adorable. Not a word Nicky uses out-loud in his cousin’s presence, but true all the same.

Nicky remembers his first time. Awkward, uncomfortable, and involving entirely the wrong set of genitals. He can only hope Andrew and Neil’s is better.

He shouldn’t get involved. He really, really, shouldn’t.

Nicky slips the laptop back into place mere moments before Andrew slouches into the living space. Nicky watches him as the coffee-maker gurgles away, thinking.

“Andrew.”

Andrew glances up. Nicky isn’t sure what he reads in his face, but it must be setting off alarm bells, because his hands move almost unconsciously to his sleeves. Nicky holds his hands up.

“Hey!”

“What?”

“I just…” Oh, this is a lot more awkward than Nicky anticipated. “You know, I’m always here for you. If there’s anything you want to talk about.” He clears his throat. “If you have any questions…”

Andrew’s eyes narrow. They flick in the direction of his desk. Nicky remembers, far too late, Andrew’s impossibly perfect memory. He would remember the exact position he left his laptop in. Nicky is busted.

“Don’t borrow my laptop,” Andrew snarls. The coffee brewer clicks, and it may be the only thing that saves Nicky’s life.

“I’m sorry! I was in a rush!” Nicky says weekly. “If it’s any consolation, the guy who sits behind me now thinks I’m a grade-A pervert.”

Andrew slams a mug down on the counter so hard he almost cracks it. “One more word. One more.”

“I won’t. I won’t, I promise, I’ve been there, okay?”

Andrew takes his coffee and his laptop and leaves without another word. Nicky counts it as a blessing.

The next day, he’s working his way through the mother of all essays when Andrew enters the room, pulling the door shut behind him. Nicky keeps working until Andrew pulls a chair over to Nicky’s desk and sits in it. He stops typing mid-sentence, fingers hovering over the keys.

“Everything okay, Andrew?”

“I want you to take a moment and remember how many knives I have on me right now.”

“A lot, I assume.”

“A lot,” Andrew confirms. “If I had any other choice in the world, I would take it. But I have you. So, I’m going to ask you something, and you are going to be calm and level and mature and everything that you usually are not when you answer.”

“Of course,” Nicky says in a heartbeat. He can’t think of a single time Andrew has ever come to him for help, not even when he was wrapped up in bed and coughing his lungs out the day before his AP Calc exam. Nicky has never been more determined to get something right in his life.

“How,” Andrew says, stops, starts again. Today is full of firsts; Andrew is usually so careful and measured with his words. “How do I do it without hurting him?”

Nicky’s heart is ready to melt or break or explode, maybe all at once. “Oh, Andrew.”

“The knives, Nicky. Remember the knives.”

“Okay,” says Nicky, and he tells Andrew everything he can. He wants, more than anything, for Andrew to be safe and happy, and if it involves going into details that even Nicky is squeamish about discussing with family, then that’s what he’ll do.

He offers to write out a list of reliable books and websites for Andrew to check out, ones he used himself and others Eric recommended to him. Andrew shakes his head.

“Just tell me. I’ll remember them.”

When they’re done, Nicky almost claps Andrew on the shoulder. He thinks better of it, hand hovering mid-air before he withdraws it. “Andrew.”

Andrew is half-way out the door, but he stops, which is more than Nicky expected.

“You’ll be fine.”

Andrew huffs, and abruptly disappears. Nicky smiles to himself as he turns back to his essay.

It took him a long time to piece it all together, but the truth is that Andrew really can be quite sweet, in his own terrifying way.

Nicky wonders how long it will be before he has to give Neil the sex talk too. Maybe he should offer.

Best not to; he has some self-preservation instincts, after all.

#9 Renee

Renne likes to think that she has improved at reading Andrew over the years. Some of his quirks are more obvious than others, however; it doesn’t take a student of human character to notice that when Andrew wants to spar, it’s usually because he has something on his mind.

Renee is hardly in a position to judge, not when she finds the cut and blow of a vicious fistfight as cathartic as he does. There’s still a piece of Natalie Shields underneath all of Renee’s growth like the pit at the heart of a peach. Sometimes the best way of holding her down is by letting her out in controlled increments. Give her the inch so she won’t take the mile.

As usual, it is only when they have beaten each other to exhaustion and back that Andrew is ready to talk. They sit cross-legged in the centre of the room, slurping down apple-juice cartons like kids in the playground, and finally, Andrew speaks.

“I want you to train Neil.”

Renee sets her carton down. “I thought Matt was teaching him to box.”

“He’s a shit boxer.”

“Neil or Matt?”

“Both.”

Renee shakes her head. She reaches back to pull out her hair tie, letting her bangs tumble back into their usual place. “Is there a reason Neil hasn’t asked me himself?”

Andrew is silent. There it is; the heart of the matter.

Renee sighs. “I’m not going to force Neil to train with me if he doesn’t want to.”

“I don’t force Neil to do anything,” Andrew says sharply. Renee winces; it was a poor choice of words on her part.

“Why do you think he needs it?”

“Matt is teaching him how to box. It’s not the same as real fighting.”

Renee hums. “Can’t he do something for fun?”

“That’s not the point. Besides,” Andrew pauses. “Matt only knows how to fight like the fuck-off giant that he is.”

Renee can’t argue with that; Matt never had to learn the same style of combat that she and Andrew did. He may teach Neil how to throw a good punch, but there’s a big difference in stance and strategy when your opponent is a foot taller than you. Renee and Andrew learned that the hard way.

“And who is it that you think Neil is going to be fighting?”

Andrew waves one arm in an all-encompassing gesture. “Have you met him?”

“Andrew.”

“Renee,” he shoots back, imitating her tone and inflection.

“What did he say when you suggested that I teach him?”

Andrew scrunches up his features in an imitation of Neil’s ugh face. “He said that he gets enough bruises as it is.”

“He’s not wrong.”

Andrew doesn’t roll his eyes, but his eyebrows twitch as though he’s considering it. “He also said he doesn’t need to get any better. Because he…” Andrew grimaces. Sharing is still tough for him, even after years of therapy and trust. “He has me to protect him.”

“As I said,” Renee says, smiling. “He’s not wrong.”

“He’s an idiot.”

“He has his moments.”

They finish their juice boxes in silence.

“Well,” says Renee, getting back to her feet. Her legs may be going stiff, but there’s still some fight left in her. There always is. “I may not be able to train Neil, but at least I can train his bodyguard to the best of my ability.” She holds her hand out to Andrew. After a moment of careful consideration, he takes it, using the pull to swing himself to his feet. “One more round?”

Andrew nods, determination setting in his eyes like concrete. “One more round.”

Renee likes to think that she has improved at reading Andrew over the years. This time, as they trade hits and kicks, it isn’t anger or frustration powering Andrew’s movements; it’s something far more powerful.

She thinks – hopes – prays – that the worst of Neil’s fights are behind them. All the same, she sleeps a little easier knowing that, should the day come, Andrew will be at his back with a knife in each hand.

That’s love, after all.

Thank you for reading - please let me know what you thought

Still open to requests!

#aftg #andreil #tfc #neil josten #andrew minyard #my fic #asks #anon

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xsecretblastsx · 4 years

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1x18 Much I do about nothing

So, here it is the final recap for S1. Once again this one took way too long, but long story short I have limited access to a laptop I’m basically only able to do this on mobile, which is not the best.

I normally do the recaps in one sitting, which takes me quite a while and it’s hard for me to find the time to do it. So going forward I’m going to try to do it a bit differently and watch the epsiode in parts, I’m hoping that will help to have the recaps out there faster.

Anyway, here’s the recap.

Thoughts I had while watching the episode

Serena calling after Dan all night... he isnt’t worthy of that but she loves him so there’s that

Rufus and Lily finally got their sexy time. Too bad is the morning of Lily’s wedding. Talk about akward.

This is one of my fave scenes of Chuck and Blair, there’s cuteness, there’s flirty banter and feisty Blair, what’s not to love.

I still want to know the story about him not removing that scarf. Just for entertaining purposes.

Nate and his dad running is a nice little call back to the early episodes of S1, which feels like ages ago.

And here we are with Dan and Georgina and Serena finally exposing her as a manipulative evil mastermind

Thanks Serena for reminding that Lily & Rufus can’t coexist with Dan and Serena 😪

That scene between Bart and Lily is actually good, he’s obviously making a point and letting her know she must make a choice, the good old days when Bart was actually a character and not a cartoon villian.

I remember thinking on my first watch while Dan and Blair are scheming, the show should make them snarky friends that would be fun. 😪

Seriously Dan and ‘Sarah’ have known each other for how long and they already have “their spot” guys are the worst

“Humphrey you’re a born liar” you don’t even know the half of it Blair

As much as I love Blair and this iconic line “haven’t you heard, I’m the crazy bitch around here” I still can’t believe that aftet plotting the whole night with Chuck their plan was just ratting her out to her parents.

Sorry Jenny but that dress Vanessa is wearing is awful. Actually I’m not a fan of Blair’s dress either. Anyway everything is a tad better with ‘Time to pretend’ playing in the background, overplayed as it was I still love it.

Also Blair and Chuck again with the flirty bantering, reminiscing a bit about that first time and Chuck getting kicked. Quality content all around.

I don’t know about Serena but luckily for Blair twenty years in the future she won’t be on her fourth husband

I always hated that “I didn’t sleep with Georgina, but I may as well have” like first of all what does that even mean. Second it’s so frustating because it feels like the show went through great lengths to keep Dan as the “good guy” on this particular situation, and that wasn’t fair to Serena.

Even though I know this is only the end of S1 and there’s more to come I’ll forever be bitter about Rufus and Lily not being together. I do like the bittersweet note of this particular moment though.

Rufly aside I have such a soft spot for the Van der Basses. Sure it was far from perfect but still.

That earlier bit between Nate and Chuck with the captain pointing out that whoever the girl they’re fighting about ain’t worth it and Chuck agreeing and Nate saying that’s the problem may seem like another of Chuck douchbag smarmy moments, but I actually like how it sort of makes sense later in the episode, because is only when Chuck admits the truth to Nate about how he felt about Blair, that Nate not only finally listens to him about the captain, but is also willing to have his friend back.

Poor Nate, always being let down by his father, at least he got to make his point, even if he had to punch his dad (again) to do it.

Even though Blair is on full bitch mode towards Vanessa, she ain’t actually wrong about Nate: endless family drama and never getting over Serena.

Nate and Chuck’s friendship isn’t as larger than life as Blair and Serenas, but is one I still love, and finally is back on. Also Nate’s amused and surprised smile about Chuck’s feelings for Blair is priceless. Chuck’s reaction too, how con someone be smug and shy at the same time?

Dan makes me want to scream like what bullshit is thid “i got seduced by a girl who was pretending to someone else and you knew” so somehow that’s Serenad fault? “I am the most understanding person in the world” Excuse me!!! In what universe, like honestly Dan just shut up.

The fact that this show actually has Serena saying “we are exactly we were at the Bass brunch when we started dating I wasn’t the person you thought I was and you can’t forgive that” and then Dan just sidetracks and claims a lot has happen... and we’re only on season one

Beside the fact that I love the scene of Chuck’s speech while he’s looking at Blair, this line is so spot on “in the face of true love you don’t give up, even if the object of your affection is begging you to” the whole speech is basically the abreviated version of the Chuck and Blair story.

Serena’s is in her own cloud of missery and yet she still makes a face when she sees Chuck and Blair are kissing 😂

Chuck Bass is a romantic, and that’s all that matters 😉.

As much as I’m not sad about Dan and Serena breaking up, it is kind of sad watching them have a last dance with ‘the ice’s getting thinner” playing in the background (such a good song btw)

I had honestly forgot about Jenny for a bit here.

I feel so robbed because they just skip a week and we didn’t got to see any of it, like Chuck being a complete gentlemen? C’mon! Anyway Blair’s traveling outfit is almos customy, nevermind I still love it, it also helps how fears about helicopters aside, she’s excited she’s about the Tuscany trip,

I remember the first time I was like so that’s the end of Nate and Vanessa? How swift. Not that I mind because that scene between Nate and Serena was so promising about summer and the Hamptons... but that’s a rant for S2

The way Bart can’t help but messing up Chuck’s head, even if he doesn’t try to, though whith Bart one never knows. Fun fact: the first time I watched this episode when Chuck goes after Amelia I literally screamed to the screen: “NO!!!’ You idiot”.

So that’s a wrap on Season 1! It was such a fun ride and I’m going to miss it. This last episode was really packed, it also felt quite long for some reason. It also ends with every major ship on the outs, which sucks a bit but it’s also a great set up for season 2.

First there’s Dan and Serena, who call it quits because for the last few episodes their relationship has been a constance struggle of secret and lies. One could make the point that their relationship was always dishonest by Dan’s secret identity as gossip girl, god knows I’ve been ranting about that the whole season particularly the last episode, because in principle is very hypocrital of Dan to be so mad about Serena’s lies when he’s keeping the biggest secret of all. But since she doesn’t know this the whole discussion is centered about her mistakes... Serena makes the very valid (and true) point that Dan can’t forgive her for not being who he thought she was, and this is something that’s going to keep being an issue for them the whole show, but for this particular break up the other big issue is lack of trust

Trust is the key point in a relationship and how can Dan trust Serena if she lies and hides stuff, they can’t have a relationship that way, even if she has come clean about her past who’s not to say if they come across another issue Serena will be honest this time and not hide and try to handle it on her own, truth is she most likely will, (she does act this way in future seasons) but what I would like to point out is that as much as Dan can’t trust her now, Serena actually never trusted him, not in the sense that he would spill her secrets but rather that she didn’t trust him not to judge her and she also didn’t trust that he would still love her if he knew everything about her. And in her mind he proves her right that’s why she points out they’re having the same argument they had at the Bass brunch and even so (sadly) Serena still wants to work through this and Dan is the one that says no, let’s break up. I don’t disagree with him is better for them to be separated but I ‘m petty and so I kind of hate he’s the one in his high horse breaking up with her, when he almost cheated on her with Georgina and even has the nerve to be like “i only did that because you cheated on me and you’re a liar and you let me get involved with a psycho” and it’s just hell no Dan! First of all no one force you to do anything, and also how long did he knew this girl Sarah and they already have “their spot” like that’s on you, and I’m not even mentioning how this argument of the psycho pretty much destroys itself when one remember he’s gossip girl so... who’s the most twisted manipulative one there. I would have issues with Dan and Serena even if he wasn’t Gossip Gilr, but the fact that he is... seriously he’s one devious guy.

Also not a fan of the show going out of their way to keep Dan’s nice guy image, they keep teasing his night with Georgina and then they decide to be light, well he didn’t actually slept with her, the intention was there, but he didn’t because he’s good Dan and sex is meaningful for him, so it’s a big deal for him, but still he was nice and faithful. Sorry but no, have him cheat, everyone else in this show makes questionable decisions and surely the UES changes Dan, so I would like for the show to embrace, they eventualy show it, but they had the space to start to show it much earlier, also just for the record sex with Dan was meaningful for Serena, it wasn’t something she had really experienced before, and it was pointed out earlier in the season, so sex it’s not only meaningful for Dan.

Other two relationships have a quick death this episode: Rufly & Nate and Vanessa. The later gets set aside almost like and afterthought which was dissapointing because it was like why bother then in the first place? Also I actually like their interactions and Vanessa while still judgemental makes and effort for Nate to be more understanding and in turn allows her to show different sides of her character and that’s nice. Then we have that scene between Nate and serena and it’s iluminatinhg, because at list at this point it looke like the show wanted to set something up there and it’s like finally! let’s unravel this (and then...😪 but that’s a rant for the next recap). Rufly on the other hand I like how it went, it felt natural and yet sad because basically they don’t take their chance because they feel that boat sailed a long time ago, it’s been 20 years, and they could have stolen moments, but more than that is just not possible, doesn’t seem like it could work at this stage of their lifes, and while it’s exciting to take the plunge I totally get why they didn’t here.

Finally there’s Chuck and Blair, and me screaming into infinity. Don’t get me wrong I love this episode and even when I still was like No Chuck you idiot! In some ways it needed to happen. Or at least some version of it, but I’m getting ahead of myself. What I love about this episode is all their flirty banter, their chemistry shines through every single scene they have, and they truly make me think of much ado about nothing, i like the back and forth and the obvious subtext of how much they truly like each other, and one can also tell how this is exciting for them, these thing between it’s a first for both of them for him it’s the first time he wanted more from a girl, he yearns for her in a way he never has feel before, he feels, he’s in love, and to her is quite a heady experience to be so openly wanted by someone, she doesn’t even have to try, to force it like she did Nate whose eyes were always following her best friend, Chuck’s eyes follow her and no else. For a minute there they take the plunge, armed with having his best friend back and getting a family Chuck’s goes for it via a best man speech and an apology. He’s a romantic at heart and he wants her to know, and she can’t resist it and goes for it to.

We’re robbed from that week they’re together after that night and is such a shame because while I feel internally each of them have acknowledged they’re in love with each other, there’s a difference between falling in love with someone and actually loving someone, and I feel this is the time that while they obviously don’t speak about it, I don’t even think they fully realized then but they truly fell for each other to the point where it was never the same again. It’s a scary thought, and it’s Bart who brings those fears to the front of Chuck’s mind, the guy is scared to death, is not only because the change of going from womanizing playboy to boyfriend seems monumental for a guy like him but more importantly Chuck’s someone who believes the worst of himself, and it wasn’t a big deal for him, because to eyes of the person whose opinion matters the most to him he’s alreayd a failure and that’s not got to change, but Blair is his second thoughest critic, what she thinks matters and unlike Bart she actually believes he has it in him, to be whatever he wants to and Bart’s words make him think of the expectations Blair may have of him now, and the thought of proving her wrong, he doesn’t want her to see that, and sure he’s going to fail and she’ll hate him for it... and that would be it. So better to end it now, on his terms while he’s the one in control of the situation and put a stop to it.

Bottom line he ain’t ready for it at all, he actually won’t be for a long time, and because of this is going to take Blair a lot of time too to be ready for it. Is what I like about Chuck’s best man speech at first glance is his way to tell Blair he feels something for her and he wants her to give him, them the chance to be something. It’s a plight at heart. It also works perfectly as a summary of what their relationship will be for a while. That no matter what, they love each other, theirs is true love and even if it’s hard almost impossible at times, they can’t give up, and that when one of them wants to throw the towel there’s the other one to remind them of why is worth it in the end.

The game between them is really about to start, here we go S2.

Random bits I’ve noticed:

Chuck lightly squeezing his dad’s arm when Lily’s almost at the end of the altar warmed my heart.

#gossip girl rewatch #gossip girl recap #gossip girl #1x18 #much i do about nothing

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not-a-perfect-metaphor · 5 years

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Heavy tinhat content ahead! Please keep scrolling if that’s not for you!

J2: parenthood, the children, and all that jazz!

*****

Okay, so I LOVE talking about the kids and doing J2-Daddies posts, 🥰 but I don’t think I’ve really shared many of my in-depth thoughts on what I personally believe is involved in the care of those children/the dynamic(s)/what is known when and by whom/various routines/etc., and it’s a very very important thing to talk about!

I’ll start with some of the basics, one of those basics being the fact that Jared and Jensen both very much wanted to have children, and I have no doubt that future children and parenthood plans were huge parts of their initial contracts with Gen and Dan.

I think that some of those contract specifics may have been overstepped since then...like the number of children at least in Jensen’s case, something he’s hinted at a few times by sharing the fact that he originally only ever planned on/wanted a single child, two at the most. He even used the word “contract” at one point (Pitt-17) while discussing the topic publicly with Jared (they both did actually). Jensen mentioned very briefly that the contract had been too loose and hadn’t held enough water, and his comment was in response to Jared having said that he (Jensen) needed to be more specific in these kinds of verbal contracts with Danneel, like for example “two total, not two more.”

*want a link to my post about the “contract” slips? Message me!*

Regardless of that, however, both Jared and Jensen clearly love being parents, and they are wonderful parents!

I’m SO glad that their dream of one day being daddies-

(on goals/hopes, things not yet accomplished, the below GIF)

-has now been so thoroughly actualized!

The next logical thing to talk about I suppose would be my thoughts on whose children are whose and how all of that works.

I do think that the Js technically live in their own houses, separately and with their respective children and ‘wives’ (fauxmance partners/co-parents), but we know that they’re together as much as they possibly can be, which is a lot even as far as the public is aware and much more than that in reality for sure, and I think that, depending on what’s going on/circumstances/etc., they spend stretches of time varying in length and frequency together in one house.

Take, for example, this comment by Jensen when asked if he and Danneel share household chores (nola-17)-

“It is split up. When we’re not there, she handles it. When we come home, she’s like ‘here’s the keys to everything.’”

The ‘we’ there was in reference to himself and Jared, and the implication seemed to be that he and Jared are together in one house at least some of the time and moreover that they’re given some time and space for just the two of them (and the kids) when they’re home.

I believe that Jensen and Jared each fathered their own three children, yes, but it’s also VERY evident that they love and care for all the kids as their own and that they very much take on the role of a parent not just with their three but with all six.

Let’s look at some dimension-lending examples that support this theory, although it’s really not needed since the Js have pretty much verbally confirmed the one-family-love to be true.

Just for fun, though-

*****

Tom: “Hi, Dad!”

Jared & Jensen simultaneously: “Hi Tom!” (Vancon-14)

Jared: “We didn’t get to see our family last week. But that being said, our kids get to see their parents doing something that they love.” (Houscon-17)

*****

Jensen: “The hits just keep coming with six kids!”

*****

^ almost correct! But actually he was just being a dad with his kids, not babysitting 😊.

*****

Jensen: [Jared] wasn’t there, so I was watching the kids.”

^ See what I mean? A separate occasion, by the way.

*****

Jared: “[Shep] and Jensen had a special bond from day one.” (PHXcon-16)

*Jensen pats his heart during a conversation about Shep*

Jared: “They’re kindred spirits.”

Jared (about JJ, m&g): “I love how her face lights up when I pick her up from school. She’s wrapped around my finger.”

Jared (about Arrow’s beautiful long eyelashes): “She’s like a Disney princess!”

Jared (about JJ): “She plays [Jensen] like a fiddle!”

Jared: “Tom said a word in music class that started with an ‘f’ and ended with an ‘uck.’”

Jensen: “Wonder where he heard that? *pauses for a second* Me. ”

Jensen (to Jared): “Don’t worry about getting too old. We are raising the next generation of hunters.”

Jared: “The boys have started to ask where babies come from. I try to distract them. I’m like ‘look a raccoon!’”

Jensen: “No you don’t! You send them to me!” (NJcon-18)

Jensen: “I’ve already had the talk with Shep.”

Jensen: “I get a text message from [Jared]. And he’s like ‘hey, I need you to send Tom a video.’ So I sit down and make a little video to Tom and send it to him.”

•••••••••

As far as what Jared’s kids call Jensen and vice versa, ‘uncle’ seems to be what was chosen right from the start, which makes sense.

Some ‘Uncle Jared & Uncle Jensen’ examples:

Jared (about his boys): “They call Jensen ‘Uncle Jensen.’”

Continued in the first following image-

*****

Jensen: “Instead of saying ‘stop,’ she says ‘go away.’ (...) She got it from Uncle Jared.”

Jared: “Aww, I miss JJ.” (Asylum-16)

Jensen: “Uncle Jensen is trying to get some work done out here.” (Chicon-12)

Tom: “Uncle Jensen.”

Jensen: “I hear you, big guy! I hear you!”

Jared (mimicking Tom when he was missing Jensen): “Uncle Jensen-Uncle Jensen-Uncle Jensen-Uncle Jensen!” (Jib-14)

Tom: “I love you Unca’ Jensen!”

•••••••••

We can only vaguely speculate about what the kids will know and when concerning their parents’ arrangement, if that even is part of the future plan which it very well might not be.

But my guess is that when they reach a certain age, each child will be told at a minimum that Jared and Jensen share a beyond-platonic intimacy (even if it’s kept very vague), because the alternative for the Js is never being able to exist openly with each other even privately with just their family.

And surely as time passes, the kids will pick up on more and more about the full truth, plus they’ll likely be given additional information as they get older (that’s IF they’re not told outright at some point).

And of course we don’t know if there’s any intention of coming out publicly some day or if there’s the hope of coming out publicly some day should circumstances allow for it, but that’s an entirely different matter and would probably involve the decision to have Gen and Dan deny any prior knowledge of the Js relationship (in fact the non-platonic aspect of the Js relationship would likely be presented as something that had unfolded between Jared and Jensen not long before telling the public about it).

Just a side note that popped into my head-

In a collection of written interviews I found from the late 90’s that were conducted with anonymous closeted celebrities, a fairly common answer to one of the questions (about coming out) was that if it were to happen, it would happen after retirement from the industry.

It was heartbreaking to read, however, that the majority of the interviewees felt they would never have the option, realistically speaking, of coming out, at least not while still being able to protect their livelihoods.

I’m getting off topic here.

Although I do want to get into the above a lot more thoroughly in another post.

But for now...back to the kids!

Let’s touch on some more parenting details.

To expand a bit on what I said about Jared and Jensen being the fathers of each of their three respective kids but at the same time caring for all six with a parent’s love and dedication (and AS parent figures in the eyes of all six), I think the same basic principle applies to Gen and Dan.

I don’t think they are as involved in the daily lives of each other’s children as much as Jared and Jensen are (meaning Gen with Jen+Dan’s kids and Dan with Jar+Gen’s kids), but certainly they are to at least a somewhat-regular degree due to Jared and Jensen and therefore the inherent interconnectedness of both families.

And regardless of how I feel about either Gen or Dan personally, regardless of how you feel, they are two of the four parents of six beautiful children, and whatever happens between the Js, whatever happens between Jen and Dan or Jared and Gen, just whatever happens...these four human beings will always be connected through their children at the very least, and that is why there is nothing but good will toward all of them in my heart.

I say that with complete and genuine honesty. I really do.

Alright...

I am too sleepy to carry on. The rest will have to wait for a part two.

But I will conclude things by adding these precious, wonderful photos for you to ‘cute’ over! 😊💕

#j2 #j2 tinhat #daddies #my thoughts #wives content #children content

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://www.wired.com/story/john-ratcliffe-dni-trump-nominee-danger/

What could go wrong with a DNI who misleads about his own resume?

. @Wired "The idea that a person prone to wild conspiracy theories might soon occupy the role legally designated to be the final voice in the president’s ear on intelligence matters should terrify Americans—as well as both our allies and adversaries the world over." https://t.co/hsqdaD1ISK

THE DANGER OF JOHN RATCLIFFE

By GARRETT M. GRAFF | Published July 30, 2019 6:30 PM ET | Wired | Posted July 31, 2019 11:01 AM ET |

THE PRESIDENT’S INTENT to nominate Robert Mueller’s chief Capitol Hill inquisitor to head the nation’s intelligence community might just be the Trump administration’s most alarming personnel decision yet—even in an administration whose list of departed, disgraced, and indicted former top officials reads like a casualty list from Game of Thrones.

The news Sunday that Trump planned to tap representative John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) as director of national intelligence, replacing former senator Dan Coats, left many even on Capitol Hill scratching their heads: Who? “I don’t know John. I’ve met him a couple times, seen him on TV,” Senate Homeland Security Committee chair Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) toldPolitico, among other choice quotes it gathered.

Indeed, very few Americans had ever heard of the congressman from Texas’s fourth district until last Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing, when Ratcliffe lambasted former special counsel Robert Mueller about “not exonerating” Donald Trump. Watching the hearing on TV with a group of journalists, I turned to my colleagues and said, “He’s auditioning to be DNI.”

Days later, Axios scooped the news of Ratcliffe’s impending nomination, saying Trump was “thrilled” by the congressman’s performance at the Mueller hearing.

That the administration is so predictable in its terrible choices should not make those terrible choices any less troubling.

The men who have occupied the relatively new role of DNI so far are among the most experienced intelligence leaders and diplomats in the country. After the job was created as part of the post-9/11 reshuffling of the US national security apparatus, George W. Bush tapped an experienced hand to fill it: John Negroponte had served as an ambassador in four countries, including Iraq; been UN ambassador; and worked at the National Security Council. His successor, Mike McConnell, was a vice admiral in the Navy and a former director of the National Security Agency. Barack Obama’s first DNI was another admiral, Dennis Blair, who had led Pacific Command and served as associate director of the CIA.

James Clapper, Obama’s second pick as DNI, was arguably the most experienced intelligence officer in the entire country—a career Air Force intelligence officer who had served for four decades, risen to the rank of lieutenant general, and personally headed two of the nation’s most critical intelligence agencies, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Clapper had also served as undersecretary of defense for intelligence, where he oversaw all three of the Pentagon’s intel agencies: DIA, NGA, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the nation’s spy satellites.

And even though Coats, the outgoing DNI who Ratcliffe may replace, had no field intelligence background, he served in the Army during the Vietnam War, spent nearly 30 years in Congress—in both the House and the Senate, including stints on the intelligence committee—and had served as ambassador to one of America’s top allies, Germany.

Ratcliffe’s experience pales in comparison to any of his would-be predecessors. He served as the mayor of Heath, Texas—population 8,000—for a decade, and while he did a brief stint as a politically appointed US attorney in Texas in the final months of George W. Bush’s administration, his r��sumé on national security matters is practically nonexistent.

He had previously claimed to be involved in a single terrorism-related case, against the Holy Land Foundation, but appears to have far overstated his role. As ABC News’ James Gordon Meek reportedTuesday, “The fact is that @RepRatcliffe did not convict anyone in the Holy Land Foundation trial. His staff now admits he simply reviewed the first mistrial and issued no report to [attorney general Mike] Mukasey, which is why no one we contacted remembers him at all.”

Similarly confounding, he asserts on his House website that he once “arrested 300 illegal aliens in a single day,” which would have been quite a feat, since US attorneys don’t have arrest authority.

That lack of experience is almost certain to make Ratcliffe an ineffective DNI, a position that has little direct power and whose few levers and moral suasion only Clapper—the longest-serving DNI yet—managed to handle effectively.

But while Ratcliffe will likely have trouble herding the cats that make up the nation’s 17 sprawling intelligence agencies, ranging from the Justice Department to the State Department to the Pentagon to even the Energy Department, that’s not what seems primed to make him a dangerous DNI.

The biggest danger Ratcliffe poses is to the integrity of the job of director of national intelligence in the first place; the core principle of the intelligence professional is to speak truth to power.

The US spends $60 billion a year on the nation’s intelligence apparatus, a workforce of tens of thousands ranging from CIA officers and FBI agents to NSA cryptologists and hackers, NGA analysts, interpretation experts at the NRO, financial wizards at the Treasury Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and much more.

All of that money and all of those workers share a simple uniting goal: To ensure that the president of the United States is, in every conversation and decision, the most informed, knowledgeable, best-prepared person in the room. They enable the president and his advisers to anticipate problems and opportunities; understand the mind, decisionmaking, and internal pressures of foreign leaders far and wide; know from satellites overhead, cables underground, and agents in the field what’s happening the world over—and why.

The career analysts, agents, officers, and leaders of the intelligence community work every day to ensure that the information flowing up to the Oval Office is the most thorough, accurate, and best-analyzed it can be. That mission requires that the information presented to the president be presented in a fair, objective, nonpartisan, and apolitical manner. (The rare instances where the CIA or other agencies have skewed their intelligence toward political ends, as with the run-up to the Iraq War, only underscore the devastating consequences of anything less than fair-eyed analysis.)

It’s here that the DNI plays his most important role. By statute, the DNI is the president’s lead intelligence adviser. That’s supposed to mean that the DNI leads the effort to provide the President’s Daily Brief—the world’s most elite newspaper—filled with daily intelligence and big-picture analysis of global, geopolitical trends affecting the US, its allies, and its adversaries. That role of chief intelligence adviser is one that Coats, Trump’s outgoing DNI, never quite grew into. Mike Pompeo arrived first in the administration as CIA director, before Coats was confirmed, big-footed the PDB, and hit it off with Trump before Coats could really establish a bond with the commander-in-chief.

Yet Coats did try to speak truth to power. He spoke up when it mattered, was honest about Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, and was willing to contradict Trump publicly on the future of North Korea’s nuclear program. One of Coats’ final acts as DNI actually was to appoint the nation’s first election security czar. That honesty appears to be a not insignificant part of why Coats was shoved aside, and ultimately out the door.

With a president so divorced from daily reality as Trump, it’s all the more important to fill the role of DNI with someone whose first duty is to puncture the Fox News fever swamp bubble that surrounds the White House, provide real facts and grounded analysis, and ensure—to whatever extent possible—that the information that flows into the Oval Office and the decisions that flow out of it are informed and strategic.

There’s little evidence that Ratcliffe is the man for the job. Beyond his antics cross-examining Mueller last week, he’s long been on the leading edge of criticizing the Russia investigation writ large. He was even the congressman who started the completely false rumor that the FBI—one of the intel agencies he is set to oversee—had an anti-Trump “secret society.”

Ratcliffe seems to appeal to Trump for the same reason most of the sycophants around him do: Loyalty first and foremost to No. 1. But the DNI is not supposed to walk through the door of the Oval Office attempting to please the president—he is supposed to tell the president whatever he needs to hear, consequences be damned.

Trump wants nothing of the kind. Instead, as he told reporters Tuesday afternoon, “We need somebody strong that can really rein it in. Because as I think you've all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok. They've run amok.”

The fact that Trump, who has skirmished with the intelligencecommunity ever since the campaign, still sees the truth-telling tradition of the intelligence world as making them his adversaries rather than his allies underscores how little Donald Trump has risen to the role of the commander-in-chief. As The New Yorker’s David Rohde wrote this week, the message Trump sends with Ratcliffe's appointment is clear: Be loyal or leave.

That’s a recipe for the type of geopolitical mistake that gets Americans killed.

The idea that a person prone to wild conspiracy theories might soon occupy the role legally designated to be the final voice in the president’s ear on intelligence matters should terrify Americans—as well as both its allies and adversaries the world over. The fact that Senate GOP members have so far been relatively muted in their support for Ratcliffe encourages hope that maybe this disaster-in-waiting might be averted.

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xsecretblastsx · 4 years

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1x12 - School lies

I’m back! It wasn’t my intention to take so long between the last recap and this one, but long story short, I was sans computer for a few days, and doing these on my phone is no fun.

So anyway here we go. Recap after the break.

Thoughts I had while watching the episode:

That looks like the most unpractical key ever

Nothing gives more the idea that this a party of super rich kids than the fact that they’re drinking in martini glasses, and not red plastic cups

Refreshing to see Nate being the one chasing after Blair, and I know she’s not avoiding him of her own volition, but he deserves it anyway.

Not that it wasn’t obvious but it suprised me that Chuck actually admits to Blair that the sight of her and Nate make his stomach turns.

I love Serena’s bathing suit

Someone should have told Dan that is annoying he keeps taking Vanessa to all these parties she isn’t actually invited to. 🙄

Gotta give it to the headmistress if she actually thought she could expell 2/3 of the Junior class

Blair’s rant with the headmistress is hilarious, it also sounds like the plot of a coming episode, about being innocent and then doing the stupind thing someone and the doing the stupid thing with someone else and pretend she have never do the stupid thing before

Nate and his heartfelt letter to Blair, aww. Poor Chuck, still plotting, still getting nowhere, and I can´t help but feel a bit bad for him every time Nate makes an insinuation about his night with Blair, he ain’t pulling that indiferent face very well.

Sorry Rufus, but I kind of agree with Lilly on this one, he did send her mixed messages.

Seriously Dan stop taking Vanessa everywhere.

You can always count with Chuck to tell it like it is, though I do feel for Dan here, mostly because I can relate a bit, private school ain’t easy when you’re not part of the rich kids group.

Dan is so frustrating because even when I agree with him on principle he the way he says things to Serena, always trying to make her feel bad for being from “that wordl” annoys the hell out of me

For all Vanessa’s morals that was invasion of privacy, no but really how easier everyone’s lives would have been if Serena hadn’t met Dan Humphrey.. or more exactly if he hadn’t met her.

Vanessa telling Chuck that he’s sick, and yet she still takes the money. The sad fact of life that we can all have our morals, and yet money is still money.

Dan and Serena really did have a variation of this conversation time and time again, it’s so tiring. Like the particulars may change but at the crux of the argument there’s always the same thing. 😪

Blair calling what Nate did the most romantic thing someone has ever done for her... I don’t even know what to say.

I feel really bad for Serena, because I just can’t help thinking how crappy every guy in her life must have been to really believe that Dan Humphrey is the best thing that ever happened to her, and a bit worrisome that she believes he’s the most important thing in her life.

For all her faults Lily does loves her children.

Nice Vanessa, you still preached and acted all morally superior, but that was nice.

I’ve always loved the scene between Blair and Vanessa in the cafe, it’s one of those moments I actually like Vanessa, and I love Blair reluctantly doing nice things for others. Also that was a good joke on Chuck

Yes Serena! he’s making it and upstairs downstairs thing, he always does, he always will.

And so the first death of Rufly in favor of Derena on this show.

Nair is back on again... for now.

So, I actually ended up liking this episode more than I thought I would. It’s one of those episodes that I looked back as filler episodes, with a typical high shcool drama plot, and yet there are some interesting bits here. On this rewatch I realized that this is a very Serena episode. Sure it’s focused mainly on her relationship with Dan, and I’m not a fan of the show making it like a big part of the reason Serena leave behind her wild ways was because of Dan, while in reality that was something she had decided to do for her self and she deserves recognition for that.

That being said is true that Dan was a big influence on her, and sometimes that’s good and sometimes not so much, it’s good to have someone that inspire us, that encourages us to be the better version of ouserlves, and Serena sees Dan that way, and it’s positive for the most part, the sad part is that he laces it with a dosis of judgment and he always frames it as if she should be ashamed of having a privileged life, among other things. This episode is very telling in this dynamic and also the importance Serena has gave to the presecen of Dan in her life, and seeing her talking to her mom about it is such an emotional moment for many reasons. It lowkey let us know how damaged Serena really is, and how love has been really lacking in her life.

She clings to Dan because all of her life she had been gettin attention, being loved and adored, for all the wrong reasons, for very superficial reasons, and for her Dan is the person that really sees her, he wants to be with her because he likes her, the Serena that’s an actual person, the Serena that can be this amazing person, the better version of Serena. She was starving for that kind of understanding, so much that she gives him the center place of her life, and she wants it to last forever, because with Dan she feels her life is better, she’s better. There’s of course a lot of red sings on this way of thinking, she stil hasn’t learned how difficutl it really is to live to the expectations of Dan and the pedestal he puts her. But this makes it easier to understand why despite everything that happened later, she still sees Dan this way, and the way she feels here is why she sees this period with rosed tinted glasses later all.

Going back to her scene with Lily, I’ve always seen people calling her selfish for this, for telling her mom to pick Bart over Rufus, and yes it’s inherently selfish, but also again very telling of how her mother’s love life and how incosistent it made their lives really affected her, and Lily understands this, and that’s why she agrees to marry Bart, because she realizes how much she hurt her children, how Serena seems to be finally happy and in a positive way no less, and she owes it to them, and that’s why she sets her own happiness aside, because she had put it above her children for so long, and I’m glad she did, and it also was a moment of personal growth for her, and most likely I don’t think Rufly would have made it very far here, they weren’t ready yet it was too soon, and on a more selfish level the union of Bart and Lilly was the birth of another relationship I love a lot on this show. So thanks Serena.

And last bot not least this episode brings Nair back, the triangle between Nate - Blair - Chuck gets all set up for the next week episode, so I really won’t get into it now, just felt like mentioning that it was actuall nice seeing Nate put the effort for once, he’s a simply guy, a very typical guy in fact the kind that likes the girl when she doesn’t like him back, yet I felt for Blair getting the love, attention and romantic gestures she always wanted from Nate, and I’m glad she got it, it was after all the dream she had for them growing up. Their relationship is doomed obviously, even if Nate never find out about Blair’s affair with Chuck, the fact was they were getting back together for reasons that weren’t sustainable on the long run: she out of nostalgia and childhood dreams, him because he saw her as a novelty, a new Blair. Once a mistmatch, always a mismatch.

Random bits I noticed:

That shot of Lily on the restaurant watching everything around her really reminded me of that scene in Titanic where Rose is having lunch with her mother and some other ladies and she sees this little girl learning about manners and suddendly it’s clear as day how much of a never ending cycle of appareances that life is, how exhausting and how much of a prison that life is.

That classic car Rufu’s drive off was lovely, where can I get one?

#gossip girl #gossip girl recap #gossip girl rewatch #1x12 #school lies

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dailyaudiobible · 5 years

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02/21/2019 DAB Transcript

Leviticus 11:1-12:8, Mark 5:21-43, Psalms 38:1-22, Proverbs 10:8-9

Today is the 21st day of February. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I'm Brian. It is great to be here with you. It's great to be here with you today. Feeling a little little little tiny tiny bit stronger and that's kinda how it comes on. That's how the jet lag works. We did have a adrenaline filled day yesterday just because we're seeing all of this stuff for the first time and experiencing the wilderness and we'll talk about that in a little while but first we need to take the next step forward as we continue reading through the Scriptures. And today we’ll be able to read the Scriptures here from the southernmost part of Israel city Eilat on the shores of the Red Sea. We’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week. Today Leviticus 11 and 12.

Commentary:

Alright. So, in the book of Leviticus today and again, you know, the law and the customs and the rituals are being given and so we can consider this to be a portion of Scripture that's kind of like dry reading not particularly riveting reading. It's because of the kind of literature it is, right? So, we read the book of Genesis and we’re reading like a narrative, we’re reading in story form what happens next. And, so, this is how we understand things, right. So, even when we get together and catch up on each other's lives we’re gonna say this is what happened between the time that we last met and catch each other up and tell it in order. Whereas the law, these are statutes and regulations and rules. We can read this kind of literature and in our modern era by getting online or going to the library and getting a law book, but you never really see those on the bestseller list because they aren't the most riveting reading. So, we can go through reading like today in the book of Leviticus and just kinda, you know, zone out or glaze over because we’re talking about clean and unclean animals and, you know, the rights of purification after childbirth. And we can see the logic in kind of outlining what can and can’t be eaten, you know, like what's edible and what has no nutritional value to a human. But that’s when, you know, we might wonder why it's in the Bible. But if we go a little closer and we remember when we started this particular portion of the Bible there are practical reasons for why things were to be done the way that they were, practical in just community perspective, but everything had a spiritual underpinning. What’s being installed into this culture is that they couldn't do almost anything at all without it leading back to a reminder of who they were, who God is, and where they're going. So, if we look a little closer we might each have differing opinions about what kind of animals should or shouldn't be eaten depending on where we are on the planet, might be able to order a Big Mac in the United States but you probably won't be able to order that in India and we could definitely get lost in the weeds on trying to determine why somethings clean or unclean in terms of the food supply. But that would be missing the point. Clean and unclean things still do exist in this world and the principal that God’s weaving into the culture of the children of Israel, the principle of clean and unclean, is no less applicable today because it was always intended to be an outward representation of what was happening inside of someone. So, there are for sure, for sure things that we know are not clean and there are things that we know are and whether it's a behavior or a compulsion or an activity or something that you're thinking about, the fact that our reading in Leviticus represents an ancient custom has no bearing on the reality that there is still clean and unclean and we should not participate in what is unclean. So maybe we don't have to be ritually pure anymore but that does not mean we’re not supposed to be pure. And, as we’re out here in the wilderness and we've experienced one day in the wilderness and we’ll be experiencing most of today in the wilderness as well it doesn't take hardly any time to look around and realize, there is no way to survive out here without God. I mean, it would be so…it would be…even now in modern times with modern logistics, if we took a million people, even a half a million people out into this wilderness and tried to sustain them as they moved around without roads, like, I mean it would…it would be virtually impossible now…absolutely impossible then. So, we see that God leading His people into the wilderness where they have no way out and are having to learn and be reframed and reformed into a new people how important this was and how important this is to our own lives. There is clean. There is unclean. If we’re going to consume what is unclean, whether in spirit or body we are going to become defiled. Maybe we’re not going to become ritually impure, but the effects on our body and spirit are going to be the same. We’re separating ourselves from our intended state, holiness and purity. And there is clean. And inside of us we know when we are wandering into unclean territory and we know when we are walking pure and holy and are living clean lives. And as we can see from the book of Leviticus, it matters.

Prayer:

Father, we invite You into that. Yes, we are in the starkness of the wilderness. And yes, this certainly does put us right in the story that we’re reading. And even from the book of Mark when we’re reading Jesus of You casting demons into the swine, we think ahead because we’re gonna go there too. And, so, we can see that You have a lot to say to us as we journey whether here physically in the land of the Bible or whether as a community experience as we day by day just journey through the Scriptures. There’s a lot for You to speak to us as we’re here and we invite You fully. Nothing is off limits to You. Show us the areas that are unclean, the areas that we need to walk away from, the areas that are doing us no good whatsoever. Come, Holy Spirit we pray, in Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, its where you find out what's going on around here.

And obviously, we’re in the land of the Bible right now, just kinda getting going on our pilgrimage where we will experience so, so much. We have already been as far west as you can go in the land. That was yesterday in Ashdod on the Mediterranean Sea. It won’t be the last time we’re on the Mediterranean coast, but that's as far west as you can go. And we’re leaving out from Eilat today. We traveled south all day yesterday through the wilderness and truly got to experience what we’re talking about when we're talking about the wilderness, right? When we talk about the desert and the story of the children of Israel and their formation, we are here, and it is stark and it is barren and it is desolate and there's so much that gets brought up in our hearts because of that. And, so, we’re kind of just sitting with it. We were able to visit Beersheba yesterday. Beersheba is the southernmost city within the borders of ancient Israel, right? So, the borders of ancient Israel were known from Dan to Beersheba. So, from Dan in the north to Beersheba in the South. Of course we traveled a lot further south of Beersheba, but visiting there, starting there, looking at how people had to live and how they had to get water in an arid transition zone, understanding that your standing in the book of Genesis, pretty big deal, pretty good place to start. And then we just kind of began to move into the deep desert and we were able to find an outlook and overlook the wilderness of Zin. We haven't got to this story yet in the Old Testament, but these children of Israel who are getting their laws and customs and being formed right now, they will eventually be preparing to go into the Promise Land and before they do that they will send spies into the land and that will happen from the wilderness of Zin. And, so, we took some time to explore that story and its implications to our own lives before grabbing some lunch. And we had some lunch with the Bedouin folk who live in the desert and travel around in the desert. And even though their culture is modernized to a degree, the desert dwelling people dates back thousands and thousands of years. So, even though desert dwellers may have new newer technologies than they had thousands of years ago they still live very simply and very nomadically, and we were able to have a taste of that, literally and figuratively, as we had lunch together out in the desert. And then we continued our journey south toward the Red Sea, which was our destination. We got some ice cream, got a favorite spot down in the desert where there's dairy farmers and fresh ice cream. Got to enjoy that before making our way to Eilat and the shores of the Red Sea. And boy, when you’re standing on the shores of the Red Sea after traveling through the wilderness all day long and you're able to kinda stand there and see into the country of Egypt and see into the country of Saudi Arabia and see into the country of Jordan while standing in the country of Israel, realizing that as you’re looking into the land of Egypt you're looking into the continent of Africa. Like all of a sudden you realize I am a long way from Kansas, like I am a long way from Spring Hill Tennessee or all of the different places that we've come from and it kinda hits us. It hits me every year almost always at the same spot, like…we are…this is really happening…we are really here and yes, I am a long way from home. So, that's kinda what our day looked like. Today we will be spending most of the day in the desert, but a lot to do. And we’ll be coming out of the desert and we'll talk about all of that tomorrow. So, thank you for…thank you for your prayers…your continued prayers over safety, stamina, health, logistics just the whole thing, it's quite a dance to do what we’re doing and keep everything moving in the same direction and on the same page. Thank you for your prayers.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link on the homepage of dailyaudiobible.com. Didn’t I already say that? I don’t know. I’m still jetlagged. Anyway, there's a link on the homepage. If you're using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hello Daily Audio Bible family, this is Kay from West South Georgia. This is my second time calling since I found out about this ministry last year. I am with a heavy heart calling in to ask for prayer for my dear friend Elaine. She is in her 70s, one of the most vivacious, healthiest, godliest women I’ve ever known and out of nowhere she got sick with a virus that went to her heart and she is in ICU right now and it’s just…it’s scary for all of us. We know where she’s going if the Lord decides to take her but I’m real selfish right now and so is her family and I just pray that you would pray God’s will that He will heal her from this myocarditis. And before this happened, she went to her family practitioner and she’s never taken medications in her life and they put her on steroids and antibiotics shot and antibiotics orally and inhalers and it just completely flipped a switch in her brain and then she…she tried to hurt herself…tried to end her life then this happened. And now she’s in ICU with her heart at another hospital. So, again, if you would just lift Elaine in prayer that God’s will will be done and give the family and friends peace, that He will hear her this side of heaven. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Hello Daily Audio Bible listeners, this is Candace from Oregon and I want to stop and encourage all the musicians among us and pray for all of us including myself. Being a musician for the Lord is a huge, glorious experience and it’s just…it’s usually such a joy, it’s so good. It’s also really, really terrible at times. And all of you, if you’ve spent enough years as one of God’s musicians, you know what I’m talking about, you could give examples of what I’m talking about. But I think if you look across the years…the blessings…if you look across at the details of your experience as God’s musician, the blessings have far outweighed the struggle. So, I would encourage you to do that. Lord, I lift up before you now, along with all the listeners and prayer warriors who are hearing these words now, we lift up the musicians among us Lord and we ask You to bind the enemy from them, to free them into Your service in every way that You desire Lord. Fill their hearts with peace and joy. Encourage them and help them to be disciplined in their efforts and to listen to You Lord and keep their eyes on You. We pray in particular for Lynn __ husband and thank you that she has been there to intercede on his behalf and that her love for him is an undying love that only You can provide. Thank you, Jesus.

Holy Spirit flowing free please fall down afresh on me inside outside all through me take my life Lord let it be change is all I’m begging please keep me free from all disease free my heart from the sin it sees flesh condemned but spirit frees when I’m week Lord make me strong stay with me and carry long Lord I feel your presence strong lead me Lord where I belong

[email protected]. Like to give a shout out to Terry the truck driver. Hope you’re still healing up and everything’s going good and Lee from New Jersey like to give you a shout out too. Anyway, thank you once again Brian and the Hardin family for this wonderful podcast for God’s Holy Spirit to flow. Keep it flowin’ y’all. All right. Bye-bye.

Hi everyone, it’s Christy from Kentucky. I wanted to call tonight and reach out to some of our sisters in Christ. First of all, Hurting, in North Carolina, you called about your brother and I’m glad that your brother is getting the help that he needs but I can still hear your concern and I’m just praying for you. You just love your little brother so much that’s so evident and you both have been on such a hard journey and I’m just praying that the Lord will touch and heal both of your hearts and to restore joy back into your lives and to let you walk out the rest of this journey together being healed and happy and knowing that you both have a hope and a future. Also wanted to pray for my sister Kathy in Kentucky and let you know that I’m praying for your brother and your family member that is dealing with addiction. And also Janet, sister Janet, we are praying for your son Jared and we are asking the Lord just to minister to his heart and to give you peace about the decision that you have made to place him in this program. And I’m just asking for the Lord to give you guidance and direction and what you should do regarding Jared’s request to come out of the program. You know, pray about it and when you find peace in your heart you will know the answer. We love you Janet and we’re praying for both you and Jared. I also wanted to speak to our sister Alyssa. You called in and you were just in such hysterics, it just broke my heart to hear your tears and I want you to know dear sister that we are here for you. Everyone, there is a DAB Friends page and if you ever need immediate prayer, if you go on that Facebook page, the DAB Friends you will have immediate responses from people all over the world who will pray for you right away. And Alyssa you are never alone. God promises He’s always with us.

Hi, it’s Gerda from Germany. I want to say thank you to Brian for __ I listened to the Daily Audio Bible today to Jill’s words and it’s really truly an amazing task what Brian has to do every day, no holidays, nothing without thinking about how to get it set on the Internet. I want to say thank you Brian, thank your family, thank you for supporting Brian, and thank you for having a part of it every day. Thank you for…and God bless you, God keep you safe, God give you and all your team a wonderful, amazed, blessed time. Thank you for everybody who does it in different languages. Thank you for all the tasks you have to do, and God bless you and God keep you safe and God support you in everything and God give you everything to be safe. Thank you for doing it. You’re an awesome community. I listen daily since many years. Thank you for being a part of it. God bless you all and keep you safe. I love you. Bye. Gerda.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT DATA

A few days ago I finally figured it out. Notes PR has at least one person willing and able to focus on first, we wouldn't have the concept of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the wealth they generate. You can't replace those. Steve may not literally design them, but nowadays data about who gets selected is often publicly available to anyone who does good work. Windows, because the mafia too are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. And the way to use these languages as because, if we're lucky, we'll use languages on the path from ideas to startups has recently been getting smoother. In Airbnb's case, these consisted of going door to door in New York. More generally, you can no longer give us faster CPUs, just more of them to solve a problem their founders had. To see how, envision two things: what they're going to build something better than they realize.

As the art itself gets more random, the effort that would have required object-oriented programming at the moment, there is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is a peloton of younger startups behind them. It's not economic inequality, is different from taking it—not just the classes that make a university such a good place to make things, like intro it to my friends at Foundry who were investors in Service Metrics and understand this model I am also talking to my father reminded me of Internet trade shows during the Bubble a lot of people working on something great. Who knew there was something wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age. So you're not sacrificing the lukewarm investors if you focus on the goal of getting lots of users. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Rich Draves, Dan Giffin, and Lisa Randall for reading drafts of this essay didn't work.1 It's not that people think of property as having a single thing. You have to decide. Or business users. Many a founder would be happy to trade places with them.2

In fact, they're lucky by comparison. I don't mean to suggest we should never do this. Whatever the outcome, the conflict was military. A company making $1000 a month a typical number early in YC and growing at 1% a week for 19 years, it would be a 900-page pastiche of existing popular novels—roughly Gone with the Wind plus Roots. But a very able person in a big company in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by committee, and the enforcement of quality. Different plans match different investors. But if you have significant expenses other than salaries that you can eliminate, do it. My parents were pretty good about admitting when they didn't know things, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

And not just in the last 40. Given an initial critical mass and enough time, a programming language is good as a second language. There you're not concerned with truth.3 VCs get paid a good salary right away. Standards are higher; people are more sympathetic to Newton. We did that at Viaweb. For example, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. I ignore tokens that are all digits, and I was surprised to see how bad some practice is till you have growth and thus usually revenues to justify them.4 So I don't even want to do a deal; so there must be a lot.5 Fortran, and it would be extraordinary if all eight succeeded. What difference does it make how many others there are? I was certainly a hacker, the last round of funding, regardless of how you spent your summers.

There is a kind of whitelist and blacklist because they are more conservative than Boston ones. Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: give it away and make money from it. With a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? 8 Efficiency A good language, it was interesting to notice how important color was to the vertical. Beware of research. Oh my God, they know it, you'll miss out on most of the rest. And he pointed out that because you can release it as soon as he got a job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter to learn how to program computers, or what advantage, if any of your data be trapped on some computer sitting on a sofa watching TV, I'd have noticed very quickly. Deals fall through. It's probably closer to machine language than Python.6 There was no reason you couldn't have done this.

The strategy described at the end. Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something major is missing. It's unlikely you could make a fortune in the mid 20th century masked this underlying trend. You have to consciously resist it. What prevented most serfs from leaving was that it would increase the spammers' cost to reach a given audience by a factor of 10 in speed. They can lead to distractions even more dangerous than the valuation. Hence what I call the Hail Mary strategy.

The Power of the Marginal June 2006 This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007. The company that did was RCA, and Farnsworth's reward for his efforts was a decade of patent litigation. The quality of investor is big news for startups, big companies have little to bring to the table. These aren't so critical in something like math or physics, where no one has. Imagine walking around for years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly having them removed. Running a business is to make source code smaller. There was a good deal of resistance at first. They just had us tuned out.

Do you, er, want a printout of yesterday's news? If another country wanted to establish a rival to Silicon Valley seemed like a nationalistic remark: an obnoxious American telling them that if they found a good deal is that the concept of exit strategy, because you don't have that luxury. _____ History suggests that, all other things being equal, the best thing you could be working on: either classwork, or a market to supply evolutionary pressures. So they claim it's because they seem safer. And even in those fields they depend heavily on startups for components and ideas.7 But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them.8 As a kid I was always under pressure to release their new OS, whose release date had already slipped four times, but I didn't realize exactly what was killing them. But I think the cost of starting a startup. Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which have remained more or less a subset of the language is.

Notes

Applying for a reason. To solve are random, they may end up. Or worse still, has one booked for them. Though if you are unimportant.

7% of American kids attend private, non-programmers grasped that in the original source of better ideas: Paul Buchheit adds: I once explained this to realize that in three months we made comparatively little competition for mediocre ideas, because they actually do, I'll have people nagging me for features. Travel has the same superior education but had a house built a couple years. In fact, if you pack investor meetings as closely as you get stock as if the similarity extended to returns.

There is of course it was the season Dallas premiered. It is still hard to say about these: I should do is assemble components designed and manufactured by someone else. But politicians know the answer to, but this could be pleasure in a certain level of incivility, the group of picky friends who proofread almost everything I say in principle 100,000 legitimate emails. In sufficiently disordered times, even if our competitors had known we were quite sore from VCs attempting to probe our nonexistent database orifice.

Some people still get rich by buying their startups. Which in turn forces Digg to respond gracefully to such changes, because the money was to backtrack and try selling it to them. When that happens. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously.

And so this one is now very slow, but which didn't taste very good. Sites that habitually linkjack get banned.

Why Startups Condense in America consider acting white.

Founders at Work.

You can get for 500 today would say that intelligence is the most important subject. Don't ask investors who say no for introductions to other knowledge. Cit. Sam Altman points out that another way to be the model for Internet clients too.

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allenmendezsr · 4 years

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Warfit Combat Conditioning System

New Post has been published on https://autotraffixpro.app/allenmendezsr/warfit-combat-conditioning-system/

Warfit Combat Conditioning System

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Attention Martial Artist, Combat Athlete, Military Personnel, or LEO…

The Step-By-Step Program for Winning Through Superior Conditioning!

Dear Friend,

If you want to build superhuman levels of conditioning, be able to continuously access your highest level of skill even while fatigued, and move with the confidence that comes from knowing you’re the best, then this will be the most important letter you read all year!

Here’s Why…

Hi, my name is Jon Haas – Certified Underground Strength Coach-Level 2, 9th dan Black belt, Certified Personal Trainer, and creator of the Warrior Fitness Training System. I have spent over 30 years – a lifetime – training, studying and working with the best in the areas of martial arts and strength and conditioning to figure out how to reverse engineer the ultimate in human performance.

Back in 2008 I wrote the book, Warrior Fitness: Conditioning for Martial Arts. Since then I have been working harder than ever to refine my understanding, improve my system, and clarify my communication to bring you the best Program I can design!

Why is conditioning so important?

Frank Gotch, the first American professional wrestler to win the world heavyweight free-style championship, and credited for popularizing professional wrestling in the United States once said, “Conditioning is the greatest hold” – And he was right!

You know that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you feel like you’re on the verge of gassing out in a sparring match, a game, or in the ring? You want to avoid that feeling at all costs!

Possessing a highly conditioned body is the key to unlock ALL the other attributes and skills you’ve trained so hard for!

Without conditioning a fighter has no access to his techniques…

Without conditioning an athlete has no access to his strength..

Without conditioning a warrior has no access to his skills…

All the techniques, tactics, and strategies you’ve worked so hard to learn and develop as a martial artist or athlete are far less effective when fatigued UNLESS you’ve trained to preserve power and strength in that fatigued state!

In my training and research I discovered these 3 critical combat conditioning mistakes that that separate the top performers from the ordinary…

Conditioning Mistake #1: Focusing on Aerobic Fitness

Combat, like life, does not happen at one constant rate of speed. It is multi-faceted in nature. There will be periods of brutally intense activity followed by lulls in the action, again followed by another flurry of activity. Being able to use those lulls in action to recover is a critical ability for the warrior.

Steady state cardio, Long Slow Distance (LSD) training simply will not cut it. Running on a treadmill may be appropriate for a hamster in a cage, but human beings require more. Long distance running can be beneficial for mental toughness and/or active recovery, but it should not be the primary focus of a warrior’s endurance training.

Conditioning Mistake #2: WOD Envy

The current rage in conditioning training, especially when talking about combat conditioning, is to completely change up the workout for each and every session.

This has the advantage of keeping the training fresh and throwing the body into chaos each time so it never knows what hit it. The hardcore advocates of this type of conditioning stress that this environment will create a very broad and general fitness that prepares the trainee for almost every physical contingency, both known and unknowable. This enables one to prepare for the chaos and uncertainty of combat by training in an uncertain and chaotic environment.

Seems to make a lot of sense on the surface, right?

However, one of the problems resident with this type of training is that random training yields random results. It’s difficult to measure progress when the parameters are constantly shifting.

In order for the body to produce an adaptation for improved performance in life, sport, or martial art, we must apply specific stimulus as per the SAID Principle (Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand). This basically means that the body adapts with a specific type of fitness to any demand which is imposed on it. When the same exercise is performed for too long, the body adapts to the stresses of each set and the adaptations or returns get smaller and smaller. Once it has adapted to the stress, then it’s time to change or increase the stress or else we fall into that trap of diminishing returns.

Conditioning Mistake #3: All High Intensity ALL the Time

Training harder demands training smarter.

We all know people who think they can continue to grow and continue to make gains indefinitely by simply pushing harder and harder in their training day in and day out. But what always happens to them? Injury, burn out, sickness, stagnation. Then what? Well, once they get back on their feet they start the same cycle all over again. Why? Because maybe, just maybe they weren’t pushing hard enough or using enough brute force last time to succeed and this time will be different. Riiigghhht…

How about this instead?

Train Smarter AND Harder.

Bring the intensity every workout, yes. Push the limits, hell yes. Keep moving forward, always. But not always in a straight line. What do I mean? Training smarter involves the usage of planned back-off workouts and deload weeks which, in effect, allow the body to take a step back in order to spring forward again with greater energy and intensity.

Additionally, it is of paramount importance to have a properly structured strategy in place for recovery and restoration. Continued progression and development demands it. Without a recovery strategy, the gains in fitness slow, plateaus are hit and NOT overcome, injuries occur, and as we said earlier, progress sputters to a screeching halt.

Here are just some of the incredible benefits you’ll discover in the WarFit Combat Conditioning System…

An 8-Week Combat Conditioning Program That Will Forge A Warrior’s Whole-Body Strength, Endurance, and Toughness!

Learn How to Utilize the Revolutionary NEW Concept of Programmable Chaos to Power Your Workouts

Highly Effective Workouts Focused on Functional, Real-World Strength and Muscle Building!

Step-By-Step Workout Guide AND Video Instructions Showing You Exactly How to Build STRONG, Functional Muscle While Burning Fat at the Same Time!

Peak Performance Improvement for ALL Martial Arts!

Dynamic Mobility and Resistance Band Warm-up and Prehab to Significantly Decrease Risk of Injury and Build a Safety Valve into ALL Movement!

Warrior Flexibility Cool Down Routine to Remove Residual Tension and Reduce Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness!

And, More…

Don’t just take my word for it though, read what some of my students have to say…

“I started following Jon a little while ago and put into practice some of his ideas and principles from his blogs into my workouts and when Jon offered a few people to beta test his new WarFit program, I had to try it out. Each training day was a welcomed challenge, there were some techniques I have never performed before and the tutorial videos Jon shared helped shorten my learning curve to maximize the results. The combinations for each of the training days left me with a feeling of a balanced full body workout and performing the joint mobility with the band exercises before training and on the off days kept the muscles from feeling tight or sore compared to my normal routine. After the first couple of days there was an extra sense of well-being both physically and mentally. It’s hard to put into words how I felt after the two weeks were done. I would sell this program short if I just said “I felt great.” … there were definitely some internal changes happening that even my coworkers noticed and commented “There is something different about you. What have you been doing?” If this is happening after two weeks, imagine after the full program. I for one, am looking forward to starting from the beginning and to share my results. Jon, great Job on this program and thank you for the opportunity to participate.”

-Jaymes Rexroth, Bujinkan Martial Arts Student

“What can I say, this program is awesome and I have tried a few however this one gives me the just what I was looking for.

Jon Haas well done!”

-Michael Pitt, Taishinrei Bujinkan Dojo

“I tried Jon Haas’ Warfit program and was impressed! This is the first fitness program I have tried in recent years. The Warfit program is laid out in a very easy to use format with schedules and routines setup. There were many exercises I never heard of before but Jon also included video links for the routines and exercises which made it easy to understand also. I found the work out to be very challenging yet inspiring. Jon obviously has a wealth of knowledge in the martial arts and fitness realm. As a martial artist (and someone that needs to get fit!), I would highly recommend the Warfit program for anyone that wants to be serious about taking fitness to another level!!”

-Jamie Yugawa, Martial Arts Student

“In my opinion WarFit is a great program! Jon has provided great detail in this program and it is very easy to use. It is presented to you with great explanations and step by step instruction. it’s all laid out in front of you all you have to do is DO IT! Warfit will give you muscle hypertrophy, muscular endurance, cardiovascular endurance, Mobility and functional and tactical strength. I really enjoy the set rep schemes that Jon uses along with the different protocols and the way he combines them. This program has the feel of old school bodybuilding, calisthenic resistance training along with modern tactical functional training. I like that each day has a different focus. Again, it is a very well-thought-out program and I know it will give you great results – I know it kicked my butt!”

-Rick Ray, CEO and Head Instructor of Rick Ray’s Warrior Arts Academy

If you are still reading this then by now you are probably thinking, OK Jon this sounds like an amazing program that is perfect for me to take my training to the next level (and you;d be absolutely right!)…

BUT, what’s the investment?

Well, hang on a sec…

My students (I hate the word “client” – I’m a coach not a hair dresser!) pay me upwards of $350 to design a customized, comprehensive program like this for them.

But since I want to make this critical conditioning information extremely affordable for everyone who wants to become the strongest, most capable, bad-ass version of themselves, I am NOT going to charge you anywhere near the hundreds of dollars the information in this program is worth!!

What about hiring a personal trainer to create a program like this for you instead?

Sure. You could… But 99% of the personal trainers out there in your local gym are just out of school. They took some classes and a few multiple choice tests. Their amount of real world experience and training is very limited. Not to mention that you will not pay them a small, one time fee, but depending on where you live, you could end up paying them over $500 to $1,000 for just one month of training with little or nothing to show for it! Why waste your time like that when I have done all the leg work for you already?

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If you are not completely satisfied with the WarFit Program for any reason, simply return it and I will refund 100% of you investment.

Click the Button Below to Buy WarFit NOW for Only $49 $37!

Jon Haas, “The Warrior Coach” has been training in Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu for more than 25 years and is currently ranked as a Kudan (9th degree black belt) under Jack Hoban Shidoshi. He has also trained in Okinawan Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Russian Systema, BJJ, Krav Maga, as well as Internal Martial Arts of Yiquan and Aiki.

He is also a certified Underground Strength Coach -Level 2, an ACE and FMS certified Personal Trainer and the founder of Warrior Fitness Training Systems. In 2008, Jon wrote the book, Warrior Fitness: Conditioning for Martial Arts, and since then has created numerous other online training and coaching programs helping people around the world become the strongest, most capable versions of themselves!

ClickBank is the retailer of products on this site. CLICKBANK® is a registered trademark of Click Sales, Inc., a Delaware corporation located at 917 S. Lusk Street, Suite 200, Boise Idaho, 83706, USA and used by permission. ClickBank's role as retailer does not constitute an endorsement, approval or review of these products or any claim, statement or opinion used in promotion of these products.

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simonconsultancypage · 4 years

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If Top Exec Has Covid-19, Does the Company Have to Disclose It?

As the coronavirus outbreak has spread, the COVID-19 disease has struck millions across the globe. The demographics and geographic distribution of the disease will make for interesting study when the current outbreak has ended, but clearly the disease has struck both the mighty and modest. The high-profile victims include the Prince of Wales and the U.K. Prime Minister. Other victims have included (and likely will continue to include) senior corporate executives. When key execs contract the disease, their companies face the question whether the executives’ illness must be disclosed. As discussed in Judy Greenwald’s April 21, 2020 Business Insurance article (here), there are no bright line answers to this question.

Examples of Company Disclosures

There certainly have been a number of corporate executives hit with the COVID-19 disease. For example, on April 9, 2020, Morgan Stanley disclosed that its CEO, James Gorman, had recovered from the disease. On March 20, 2020, Altria Group announced that it CEO Howard Willard had contracted the coronavirus illness and would be taking a leave of absence. On March 31, 2020, real estate company Vereit announced that its CEO Glenn Rufrano had tested positive for the coronavirus and was being treated at home. On March 26, NBC Universal announced that its CEO had tested positive for the coronavirus. On March 13, 2020, BT plc announced that its CEO had contracted the illness and had chosen to self-isolate.

In each of these examples, and in numerous other cases that have come to light, the companies involved elected to disclose their CEOs illness. But does the company have an obligation to make a disclosure to the investing public if its CEO or other key official contracts the disease?

Considerations Concerning Companies’ Disclosure Obligations

On the one hand, in an April 8, 2020 joint statement about COVID-19 disclosures from SEC Chair Jay Clayton and SEC Division of Corporate Finance Director William Hinman (here), the two SEC officials said “We urge companies to provide as much information as is practicable regarding their current financial and operating status, as well as their future operational and financial planning,” and specifically called on reporting companies to provide investors with information on “material risks” to their business operations and results resulting from the coronavirus “to the fullest extent possible.”

On the other hand, company’s specific disclosure obligations with respect to an executive’s illness are unclear. According to D&O maven Dan Bailey, who is quoted in the Business Insurance article to which I linked above, there is “no black and white answer” to this question. As Boris Feldman of the Wilson Sonsini firm is quoted as saying in the same article, “the formal answer is, there’s a great deal of latitude.”

This question about obligations to make disclosures concerning executives’ health brings a lot of competing considerations into play.

First, there is the general principle for reporting companies under U.S. securities laws that companies do not have a an obligation to reveal material non-public information absent a specific obligation to do so, as noted by Tom Gorman of the Dorsey & Whitney law firm in the Business Insurance article. While many companies (such as those identified above) may elect to disclose their executives’ illness, there are no specific requirements that the company disclosure the illness of a corporate executive, particularly where the CEO is still performing his or her duties.

Other countervailing consideration that clearly can come in to play are the privacy rights of the affected individual.

Many readers will undoubtedly recall the controversy that surrounding what turned out to be the final illness of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. In January 2011, the company did disclose that Jobs would be taking his third health-related absence from the company, but questions swirled about the nature of Jobs’s illness his ability to recover, and his continuing involvement in company affairs. There was a great deal of controversy at the time about the right of the investing public to know more about Jobs’s illness versus the rights of Jobs for the details of his medical condition to be kept private. These issues were never fully resolved.

Where an affirmative obligation to disclose may arise is when the CEO or other key official is no longer able to perform their duties, particularly if business operations are disrupted as a result. A key examples of this is Century Cobalt Company’s March 16, 2020 disclosure that it was unable to files it annual report on Form 10-K because its CEO was is isolation after having contracting the coronavirus. Similarly, as discussed in a March 25, 2020 Compliance Week article (here), a CEO’s or other key official’s inability to participate in a conference call may well trigger a disclosure.

Another consideration that may affect a company’s disclose an executive’s condition has to do with insider trading. If company insiders were to sell their shares in company securities while aware of non-public information concerning a key executives health, subsequent claimants or even the SEC might contend that the trading represents prohibited insider trading. The disclosure of information concerning the executive’s health would remove this concern (and also permit other insiders to trade their securities).

If a Company Makes a Disclosure, What Must be Disclosed?

Even if the company chooses to disclose, there are the questions about what must be disclosed. Principles of full disclosure and transparency may argue in favor or more fulsome disclosure but that could (as noted above with respect to Apple and Steve Jobs) conflict with the individual’s privacy interests. One commentator quoted in the Compliance Week article to which I linked above suggests that at a minimum the disclosure must identify the person affected, the extent of their ability or inability to perform their functions, and the anticipated impact on company operations.

A key consideration here is that later, after events unfold, prospective claimants will have the benefit of hindsight in scrutinizing the adequacy of prior disclosure. For that reason, it may be critical for the board and other senior officials to memorialize the reasons for their disclosure decisions.

There are other related disclosure issues. For example, what if the issue is not that a senior executive has the illness, but rather that the workforce has been affected? Although there would be seem to be even less compulsion for companies to disclose the illness of company employees below the C-Suite level, some companies have disclosed employee illnesses. For example, on March 18, 2020, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company did disclose that an employee had received a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 and was hospitalized. A key consideration about workforce illnesses is the extent to which the illness affects the company’s operations. A more serious outbreak that interfered with company’s ability to continue business operations clearly is more material and could warrant in interim disclosure.

Is There a Duty to Update?

Another related disclosure issue that arises if a company chooses to disclose is whether the company has a duty to update. Here the question is going to be whether subsequent events render the prior disclosure potentially misleading. The example of U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is instructive here. 10 Downing Street initially disclosed that Johnson had tested positive for the illness and was recovering at home. If that initial statement had not been updated when Johnson subsequently was hospitalized and placed in the Intensive Care Unit, the initial statement clearly would have become misleading.

From a company perspective, when considering whether prior disclosures must be updated, it is critical to keep in mind that prospective claimants will have the benefit of hindsight in making allegations that prior disclosures should have been updated. These kinds of considerations militate in favor up subsequent updates (particularly if subsequent developments are negative).

****

An Example from History: In thinking about these issues, and in particular in reflecting on the circumstances surrounding Boris Johnson’s illness, I reflected on the example from American History of the U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson, as described in University of Wisconsin history professor John Milton Cooper, Jr’s excellent one-volume biography of Woodrow Wilson.

In October 1919, while traveling the country to try to drum up public support for The League of Nations, Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke. Just a few days later, while recuperating at the White House, he suffered a dangerous prostate infection that according to Cooper left Wilson “near death.” Though he emerged from these twin ordeals, Wilson was left weakened, and arguably incapacitated.

Notwithstanding the seriousness of Wilson’s condition, the information disclosed publicly about his condition was carefully measured and consistently “vague” and “upbeat.” Over the ensuing weeks and months, Wilson would struggle to recover, but he never considered resigning. His Vice President, Thomas R. Marshall, fearful of appearing as if he were plotting some kind of a coup, resolutely stayed in the background.

Cooper’s biography overall presents a balanced but unquestionably favorable impression of Wilson. However, with respect to Wilson’s condition in the wake of the medical crises, Cooper’s assessment is harsh.

He noted that “the psychological effects of the stroke were … striking” as Wilson’s “emotions were unbalanced and his judgment was warped.” Though in the past Wilson had been able to “offset his driving determination, combativeness and overweening self-confidence with detachment, reflection and self-criticism,” those compensating behaviors were now “largely gone.” Worse, Cooper noted, “his denial of his illness and limitations was starting to border on delusion.”

The most disturbing thing about Wilson’s condition, however, is that the American people were largely kept in the dark, as was most of official Washington. With the benefit of hindsight and the passage of a century’s time, it seems unbelievable how little of Wilson’s incapacity was disclosed.

There are some important lessons from this example.

The first is how harsh the judgment of history is on the decision to withhold information from the American people about Wilson’s condition. Cooper, an unquestionably favorable biographer, can barely restrain his outrage over the insufficiency of the disclosure about Wilson’s condition. Admittedly, part of Cooper’s outrage is due to the fact that the mistaken picture given of Wilson’s health allowed his wife Edith to exercise a complete gatekeeper role over the President, and practically speaking to determine Presidential policy and action. But even allowing for this historically astonishing aspect of Wilson’s situation, the fact remains that the history’s judgment surrounding the disclosure questions are unforgiving.

The second is that the decisions and disclosures surrounding Wilson’s health unquestionably undermined Wilson’s legacy. Cooper’s biography makes a persuasive case that, until his illness, Wilson was an effective President. Cooper also seems to suggest that without the troublesome months after Wilson’s illness, Wilson could well be remembered as a great President. Instead, the turmoil and conflict that followed his illness cast a cloud over Wilson’s entire Presidency. Had he accepted his incapacity and stepped aside when he was no longer able to govern, Wilson’s legacy might have been preserved. But that would have required him to acknowledge – to himself, and more importantly, to the American people – that he was no longer fit for office.

Clause 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution (ratified by a sufficient number of U.S. states in 1967), provides, among other things, that, “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

This clause has never been invoked, and one can only imagine what a traumatic event it would if it ever were to be invoked. However, the example from the events surrounding Woodrow Wilson underscores the fact that in order for this momentous step to even be considered, the Vice President, cabinet officials, and Congress would have to be fully informed about the President’s health condition.

While the questions relating to the health of a U.S. President are far different than those relating to a corporate CEO, consideration of all of the issues in both situations argues in favor of full disclosure.

If Top Exec Has Covid-19, Does the Company Have to Disclose It? published first on http://simonconsultancypage.tumblr.com/

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warninggraphiccontent · 5 years

Text

3 May 2019

A second Bite

Isn't it nice when things just work, to quote the old Honda 'cog' advert?

We've definitely found an event format that does. Our second Data Bites event this week was, like the first, great fun as well as informative. The presentations were on a wide range of topics - building a digital service, the government Data Ethics Framework, personal data and citizen science - but the common thread this time round seemed to be a focus on users. Mainly citizens - though citizens featured as data collectors and curators as well - but also, importantly, those running government and public services. (There'll be more from me on how to help civil servants navigate issues of data and future technology later today...) You can watch this week's event here, the previous one here, and put Tuesday 4 June in your diary for the next one.

Literally seconds before we went on stage, Gavin Williamson was sacked from the Cabinet. (Good job I had our resignation chart - including the stitched version - in the slide deck.) Delighted to see ITV's Peston use a version that evening, too - I think that's at least four IfG charts which have now made it on.

I had hoped to publish a couple of things on dataviz this week - one framed around sport (there's a clue about which sport, there), the other on the radar charts from last week's InCiSE Index - but time got the better of me. Instead, I'll leave you with Anna Powell-Smith's important new Missing Numbers initiative, identifying gaps in government data. We've got a few suggestions here (and here).

Today's links:

Graphic content

Elections

Local elections 2019: live results for English councils (The Guardian)

Local elections: Results in maps and charts (BBC News)

Local elections 2019 (IfG)

Did someone say by-election? (Me for IfG)

Spain, election result on the local level (El Pais via Europe Elects)

Spain’s Socialists win the election, but need to find allies* (The Economist)

Europe

Leavers v remainers: how Britain’s tribes compare (The Guardian, via Lee)

European Parliament elections: 7 things you need to know (Constitution Unit - see also the IfG explainer, and bonus chart)

The shifting centre of the EU* (The Economist)

Everything else

Sackings and resignations (Lee for IfG - we have spreadsheets on resignations since 1900 and since 1979, do comment if we've missed anything)

In Pennsylvania, Joe Biden Finds Support Where He Most Needs It* (New York Times)

220 world metro systems (r/MapPorn)

Sitting days (Hansard Society)

Charts that lie (Alberto Cairo)

Freedom of Information (Institute for Government)

PoliticsHome coverage

Britain is rejecting an ever greater share of freedom-of-information requests* (The Economist)

Thriving Places Index (via Dan)

Social mobility in Great Britain - state of the nation 2018 to 2019 (Social Mobility Commission)

BEST OF THE VISUALISATION WEB… FEBRUARY 2019 (Visualising Data)

Meta data

The only way is

The ethics of smart cities (RTE)

The five principles key to any ethical framework for AI (NSTech)

How Big Tech is struggling with the ethics of AI* (FT)

Tech

The story of London's tech scene, as told by those who built it (Wired)

Regulating Facebook will be one of the greatest challenges in human history (Siva Vaidhyanathan for The Guardian)

Facebook is sharing data to figure out how it messes with democracy(Vox)

Diversity

Mind the Gender Gap: The Hidden Data Gap in Transport (Reconnections, via Lee)

Computer says no (Ellen Broad for Inside Story)

Openness

UK fracking commissioner admits to deleting correspondence with industry (Unearthed)

What is open data? (Rebecca Williams)

Exploring Freedom of Information in local government (mySociety)

Opportunities

JOB: Assistant Data Integration Engineer (Parliamentary Digital Service)

JOBS: OPEN POSITIONS – JOIN THE TEAM! (MyData)

Everything else

Data Bites #2: Getting things done with data in government (Institute for Government)

Introducing Missing Numbers: a blog on the data the government should collect, but doesn't (Missing Numbers)

A Widely Cited Statistic That Supposedly Proved Student Debt Was a Rich Person Problem Was the Result of a Coding Error (Slate)

Data Harvesting (Polly Curtis)

NHS data is a public asset. Why does Matt Hancock want to give it away?(openDemocracy)

Digital progress through a data-for-all law: Position paper of the party leaders of the Social Democratic Party Germany (SPD, via Google Translate, via Peter Wells)

An algorithm wipes clean the criminal pasts of thousands (BBC News)

New institutions are needed for the digital age* (Jeni Tennison for FT)

#northernlands

An Oxford philosopher who’s inspired Elon Musk thinks mass surveillance might be the only way to save humanity from doom (Business Insider)

29 Thoughts on the Future of Digital Healthcare (Jessica Morley)

Consequence Scanning (Doteveryone)

Finding ctrl (Nesta, via Tess)

Government as a Platform, the hard problems: part 3 – shared components, APIs and the machinery of government (Richard Pope)

And finally...

Who will win “Game of Thrones”?* (The Economist)

Hey @washingtonpost this is not how bar graphs work (Andy Pressman, via Tim)

Correction (Chiqui Esteban)

THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO AGILE (Mark O'Neill)

How would you get on against Eliud Kipchoge? #LondonMarathon (BBC Sport)

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aqais81 · 5 years

Text

The Simple Secret That Increases Productivity by 57%

—

This article contains excerpts from Kyle’s best-selling book Escalate: The Practical Guide to Get Yourself Unstuck and Build Lifelong Momentum

In 2005, psychologist Dan Ariely found one of the simplest ways to increase productivity. You might be wondering why you’re just now hearing about it. Unless you’ve read Ariely’s book or some drab psychology studies, you likely haven’t come across it.

In the study, Ariely paid students to build Lego models (Kamenica, Ariely, & Prelec, 2005 Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case of Legos. PsycEXTRA Dataset. Doi: 10.1037/e640112011-016). Each model was composed of forty pieces and accompanied by instructions. In one group, each completed model was placed on the desk in front of the students. Then the students would receive another box and start assembling the next model.

In another group, the students received two boxes. Every time they completed a model, it was immediately dismantled and placed back in the box, so the students could start assembling the second box, and over and over.

In both groups, all of the models were identical. However, the first group outperformed the second group eleven to seven. The difference? The first group could see their progress. The mere fact that their progress was visible inspired them to work harder and faster. As a result, they continued to build enthusiastically, despite being paid less for each later model.

These numbers may not seem remarkable but take on new meaning when you realize that the group whose progress was visible outperformed their counterparts whose progress was not, by over 57% (despite being paid less for each consecutive model completed). How many organizations and individuals do you know who would pay phenomenal amounts to gain 57% more productivity? What could you accomplish if you could get 57% more productivity out of yourself?

This principle not only affects productivity but also HOW you do your work. To illustrate this, let’s look at an all-too-familiar example of mowing the lawn. You’re rarely excited or inspired to mow the lawn. As you grab your mowing shoes, you remind yourself of this and again as you grudgingly get behind the machine.

However, as you start cutting, almost immediately, there is a satisfaction that takes control of you as you see the mess that you call a lawn go into the mower, and clean leveled grass come out. Even more, when you make turn 4 or 5, you start to take pride in seeing multiple rows of clean-cut grass.

What happens next? Well, instead of trudging behind the push mower, you quicken your step. Instead of degrading the chore and yourself, you’re filled with satisfaction. “Look how good that looks!” you tell yourself.

When you make progress visible, it spurs you forward. It encourages you to keep going and makes even the most demanding of tasks more enjoyable.

The biggest barrier to this though, is a failure to celebrate small wins.

Take the example of Carrie, a well-educated and experienced client of mine, who was tasked with helping her growing organization in food production, implement a leadership development program. Not long into the engagement, Carrie expressed frustration about not making any progress.

“What would make you feel better about the situation?” I asked.

“Having the program in place and running,” she replied.

We then walked through all the progress she had made.

“Carrie, you began this project about six months ago,” I told her. “When you started, how much did you know about leadership development?”

“Nothing,” she replied.

“What do you have in place right now that you didn’t have in place six months ago?” I asked.

“Nothing! That’s the problem.”, Carrie said dejectedly.

“You really believe you don’t have anything new in place?” I responded. Followed by, “What would you need in place right now to feel like you’ve made progress?”

“We would be offering training quarterly, have leadership development built into our performance management process, and have a suite of tools and resources for the organization to use.” She replied.

I considered her reply for a moment, “I see. Well I know for sure you have done some things. Forget what you believe you should have in place and tell me what you do have in place.”

“Well, we have three ongoing lecture series,” she said. “And we’re starting to include leadership suggestions in our newsletter and have revised some job descriptions.”

Carrie paused before reeling off several other initiatives that were also in action. I questioned her about all the steps she had taken to accomplish each achievement. There were many, including diligent efforts to find good presenters for the lecture series.

“And who did all of that?” I asked.

“I did,” she replied.

“How do you feel about your progress now, considering none of it existed just six months ago?”

I questioned.

She was humbled, but also excited. “You’re right,” she agreed. “We have made progress. Imagine how much progress we’ll make in the next six months!”

With this fresh perspective, she recognized that the organization had made tremendous advances in the six months she had worked with them. Seeing her progress began by recognizing her small efforts for what they were, small wins.

As I did with Carrie, you can recognize and reward your own progress by unpacking what you’ve done into the tasks it took to do it. When you focus on creating an entire leadership development program, researching presenters may not seem like a small win, but it certainly is.

It has to be done, and once it is, you are one step closer to your desired results. Identify and then celebrate these things as the wins they are. Reward yourself!

“Remember, the journey of a thousand steps starts with one, but it only continues if that first step is seen as a victory.”

Too often you stop yourself from taking action because you know you won’t achieve your long-term goal right away. You fail to recognize that the culminating effects of small steps are what lead to extraordinary achievement.

One of the most significant issues I have run into in my work is that individuals have a tough time recognizing small wins. They focus so much on the goal, on a few large milestones, that they fail to acknowledge the progress they are making in simple ways every day.

When you fail to recognize these wins, you miss out on a huge opportunity to gain desire and accelerate your progress.

It is one thing to tell yourself that you’ve worked hard at the end of the day; it is another to identify what you actually did. For action and progress to be visible and inspiring, you must engage in honest observation and reflection. If you think about and track your efforts in ambiguous terms, it will not do much for you and won’t help to increase your desire. Many people work hard every day of their lives, and yet they still lose desire.

If you want your actions to increase your desire, you need to remove the ambiguity and get specific about what you did and how it led to (or will lead to) your desired results. It is more inspiring to reflect on each of your efforts and observe how they are moving you forward than to tell yourself that you worked hard.

How do you find the power to take action, and gain desire from the effort you’ve taken? Spend time reflecting on your efforts, make your progress visible, and reward yourself for that progress.

—

What’s your take on what you just read? Comment below or write a response and submit to us your own point of view or reaction here at the red box, below, which links to our submissions portal.

◊♦◊

—

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

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oldguardaudio · 6 years

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PowerLine -> Today in Sexual Harassment + Al Franken: The movie

Powerline image at HoaxAndChange

Help Hillary lost and can’t shut up at HoaxAndChange.com

Daily Digest

Today in Sexual Harassment

Loose Ends (31)

Tweet of the Day

Springtime for Marx and Germany

Al Franken: The movie

Today in Sexual Harassment

Posted: 21 Nov 2017 03:23 PM PST

(Steven Hayward)I didn’t think the morning news that Melissa Gilbert has accused Oliver Stone of sexual harassment way back in 1991 (I’d kinda forgotten who Melissa Gilbert is, and Oliver Stone is best forgotten on general principle), but then I saw the news that came out later that Pixar’s major creative force, John Lasseter, is “taking a leave” from the animation powerhouse because of the usual problem:

John Lasseter, the head of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios and one of the most powerful figures in the entertainment industry, acknowledged Tuesday that he had crossed the line with employees. He is taking a six-month leave of absence.

Lasseter sent a memo to staff apologizing for making employees feel disrespected or uncomfortable, Variety has confirmed. . . His name has continued to be mentioned privately, with a number of former Pixar employees telling Variety that he has behaved inappropriately and describing a culture at the company as “toxic” and “sexist” for women. . . Since the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke in October, however, some female employees have begun to discuss how Lasseter’s behavior has crossed boundaries, describing it as creepy.

Lasseter isn’t quite the Hollywood presence that Weinstein was, but I have long held to the axiom that only Pixar should be allowed to make children’s movies, as their offerings were so far superior to the formulaic Shrek fare of Dreamworks, IMHO. The Dreamworks stable of kids movies always try too hard to make subtle nods to the parents and almost invariably have an annoying baby boomer music soundtrack. Pixar movies are consistently more original. This just isn’t debatable.

A reminder of how the next Oscar night is shaping up:

And here, a special schadenfreudetastic moment—Kevin Spacey defending Bill Clinton on . . . Charlie Rose. It really doesn’t get better than this:

Loose Ends (31)

Posted: 21 Nov 2017 09:45 AM PST

(Steven Hayward)• The Financial Times has an interesting article on Chinese universities, and especially how the authoritarian regime would like to exert better control over foreign-funded universities and branch campuses. The government is going to place trusted Communist Party members on the board of trustees on all these joint-venture universities, and make them vice-chancellors as well.

This passage, in particular, stands out:

“This changes the nature of the game and has ominous potential [consequences] for academic freedom,” one of the people said. “The first line of control is self censorship. The next line is [more] overt.”

In other words, the Chinese are modeling themselves after American universities!

• Germany sub-alles? Angela Merkel is unable to form a government, and may call for new elections. The sticking points between her and her potential coalition partners sound familiar: immigration, and energy policy. Her potential right of center partners wants to restrict immigration and back away from green energy nonsense, while her potential left of center partners demand open immigration and a pledge to abandon coal-fired power as well as Germany’s remaining nuclear power. Good luck with that. Apparently, a coalition with the new Alternative for Germany Party, which went from zero to 95 seats in the Bundestag in the last election, is not even being remotely considered. Merkel’s survival as chancellor is in doubt, like Theresa May in Britain. (Though ironically Merkel’s sudden weakness may help bail out May, as May’s government can now demand a better Brexit deal. Merkel was clearly intent on punishing Britain for its temerity in rejecting the EU.)

Great. Just what we need. Parliamentary instability in Germany in a time of populism. Maybe the supposedly “gridlocked” American system isn’t so bad after all. At least we get an administration that can function.

• Finally, about the brewing Capitol Hill sexual harassment scandal, in which millions of dollars have been quietly paid out to settle harassment claims. Anyone care to make book on whether Joe Biden was one of the figures involved? Rumors are starting to circulate. . .

I’ve been thinking about coming up with a 1 to 10 Weinstein Grossness Scale to calibrate the problem of male predation. Here’s a first draft:

Flirtatious emails/texts.

Lame pick up lines at a bar.

Wolf whistle on the street. (Hard-hat optional.)

The Joe Biden (uninvited hugs and general grabbiness).

The George H.W. Bush (pinching/patting derriere).

The Full Franken (uninvited kiss).

The Roy Moore (stalking teenagers).

The Ted Kennedy-Charlie Rose maneuver (turning up without pants).

The Louis C.K. (ick).

The Clinton-Weinstein maneuver (aka rape).

Tweet of the Day

Posted: 21 Nov 2017 08:47 AM PST

(John Hinderaker)The tweet of the day (it was yesterday, actually) comes from Dan McLaughlin. So many have been swept up in the tide of sexual assault and harassment accusations that it is hard to keep track of them all, but arguably the second most consequential figure implicated so far (second only to Bill Clinton) is John Conyers:

John Conyers settled charges of sexually harassing staffers during the time his wife was in prison for taking bribes on the Detroit City Council.

The perfect Democrat power couple.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) November 21, 2017

Via InstaPundit.

Springtime for Marx and Germany

Posted: 21 Nov 2017 07:24 AM PST

(Paul Mirengoff)I suppose it was inevitable, given the left’s re-enchantment with Communism, but I still found news of the 2017 film “The Young Karl Marx” jarring. The American Film Institute will be showing the movie as part of its “European Union Film Showcase” next month in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Here is how the AFI describes this German/French/Belgian co-production:

Following his documentary I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, Raoul Peck takes on the story of the formative friendship of Karl Marx (August Diehl) and Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske). From Germany to France to England, the young thinkers pursue justice for the working class, who toiled under obscenely exploitative conditions to enrich their employers (including Engels’ father, a mill owner) during the peak of the Industrial Revolution.

Peck crafts an accessible biopic about these two larger-than-life thinkers, taking them down from their historicized pedestals and allowing viewers to relate to them as young strivers disrupting an inequitable status quo through the power of persuasion and organization.

Official selection, 2017 Berlin International Film Festival. DIR/SCR/PROD Raoul Peck; SCR Pascal Bonitzer; PROD Nicolas Blanc, Rémi Grellety, Robert Guédiguian. Germany/France/Belgium, 2017, color, 118 min. In German, English and French with English subtitles. NOT RATED

I had thought Marx was “taken down from his historicized pedestal” 25 years ago. The left is striving to restore him to that platform. This film strikes me as part of that effort via “an accessible biopic.”

It’s a fine strategy. Students can now claim close familiarity with the founder of Communism without undertaking the laborious — and if we’re talking about Das Kapital, nigh impossible — task of reading him.

Young Marx will be portrayed by August Diehl, a 42-year-old German actor best known in America for playing SS-Sturmbannführer Dieter Hellstrom in Inglourious Basterds. Diehl may not be as good looking Gael García Bernal, who portrayed Che Guevera in “The Motorcycle Diaries,” but he’s a damn sight better looking than Karl Marx.

Che is chic. Maybe now Karl Marx will be too. T-shirts of him are already being sold.

Al Franken: The movie

Posted: 21 Nov 2017 05:40 AM PST

(Scott Johnson)I have written a lot about Al Franken on Power Line over the years. I posted this review of the Doob/Hegedus documentary on Al Franken in September 2006. The movie was a complete and utter commercial bomb (domestic gross: $102,990). Just about no one saw it. As Franken rides out the scandal deriving from recent disclosures of his past behavior, I thought back to the film. A.O. Scott reviewed it for the New York Times. Stanley Kaufmann reviewed it for the New Republic, writing: “This film by Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus forces us to make some decisions about him. For myself, I find him generally gross, in person and in manner.” I thought some readers might find this of interest, however slight, in the context of the recent disclosures. Before the Scott and Kaufmann reviews appeared, this is what I wrote (slightly edited):

Last week I received a DVD screener of Al Franken: God Spoke on the condition that I post a review on our site between September 6 and September 13. The film is scheduled to open in theaters on September 13.

I watched the film over the weekend and again last night. It’s hard for me to believe how bad it is. Directed by Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus, the makers of The War Room, their new film might more aptly have been titled The Bore Room. Although Franken made his name as a comedy writer for Saturday Night Live, the film provides additional evidence to support my view that Franken hasn’t been funny since the expiration of the Al Franken Decade in 1990.

I have been a fan of Franken for a long time. In June 2005 I was given a press pass to attend the Democratic fundraiser in Minneapolis where Franken was the featured speaker. The fundraiser was held on the west bank campus of the University of Minnesota within shouting distance of where I had first seen Franken perform with his former comedy partner, Tom Davis. The film shows Franken in 1977 performing the same skit on Saturday Night Live with his parents that I saw Franken try out in Minneapolis in the summer of 1976 at the Dudley Riggs Workshop.

What kind of a documentary is God Spoke? It feels like a 90-minute vanity production cum campaign video, geared to promote Franken’s apparent candidacy for the Senate seat currently held by Norm Coleman. In that respect, however, the film closes on an extremely sour note. Franken is at the wheel of his car driving from the airport in Minneapolis and musing on some advice given to him by Minneapolis attorney Tom Borman. In an early scene in the film, Franken is seen telling his favorite joke (from Buddy Hackett) before a Minneapolis audience. The final scene shows Franken reflecting on Borman’s statement that his parents (wisely) thought Franken should stop telling that joke at political appearances. Franken is incredulous and unhappy about the advice.

Whereas The War Room portrayed the inside of a successful presidential campaign, God Spoke appears to be a study in failure, though no one knows it. The film opens with Franken promoting Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them before an appreciative audience. Thereafter it’s mostly downhill with Air America. God Spoke portrays Franken’s involvement with the debut of the liberal radio network, Franken’s coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican conventions in 2004, Franken’s campaigning for John Kerry, Franken’s disappointment on election day, Franken’s announcement that he’s thinking about running against Norm Coleman and Franken’s related move from New York back to Minneapolis.

At what appears to be an Air America planning session for a meeting with investors, Franken is asked what Air America is to be. “It’s about answering the fuckheads,” Franken says. On his first Air America show in March 2004, Michael Moore is Franken’s in-studio guest; together Franken and Moore interview Al Gore by telephone. The film shows Franken exulting that his ratings for the first month of the show beat those of Rush Limbaugh in New York.

The network’s financial difficulties are intimated by reference to a missed payroll, but the abject failure of the network’s lineup to generate an audience remains a deep secret of the film. The film portrays Franken hinting darkly of network difficulties deriving from the “active intimidation” of advertisers and leaves it at that. “Less is more” seems to be the spirit with which Doob and Hegedus approach the story of Air America’s difficulties and disappointments.

The film includes a kind of “Man from Hope” element, showing Franken returning to the house he grew up in for a look around and reminiscing about his father. It also shows him on one of his USO tours impersonating Saddam Hussein to entertain the troops in Iraq. It is an unfunny sequence that appears to have been edited to show the troops laughing uproariously over Franken’s routine.

Doob and Hegedus work hard to portray Franken in a flattering light, but ninety minutes with Franken is about eighty minutes too many. Franken does not wear well; he comes across as a boor and a profoundly ugly man. Doob and Hegedus have blundered into the truth, though I can’t for the life of me imagine why they think an audience would want to pay to see it.

PowerLine -> Today in Sexual Harassment + Al Franken: The movie PowerLine -> Today in Sexual Harassment + Al Franken: The movie Daily Digest Today in Sexual Harassment…

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years

Text

WHEN THEY DEMO IT, ONE OF THE TOP HANDFUL IN THE WORLD

But I don't know any technology companies that have done it. 14758544 valuable 0. The conclusion being, say, the hundredth. In fact, the more dangerous false positives become, because when the filters are really good, users will be more likely to make the headers look innocent, but my guess is that it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. That may not have mattered quite so much as he expected. How much does it matter what message a city sends without living there. Think twice before you try to beat them. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. There are two bad smelling words, color spammers love colored fonts and California which occurs in testimonials and also in menus in forms, but they vanished on meeting the guys.1

We regularly have startups go from seed funding direct to acquisition, however, prefer to fund startups within an hour's drive. All along the spectrum, if you don't have startups, pretty soon you won't have any adults. You don't know yet.2 In the old economy, the high cost of presenting information to people meant they had only a narrow range of options to choose from. But different things matter to different people, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it. And once we picked them, unless they did something really egregious, they were treated like a racing stable: prized, but not so wrong about the specific companies, but not identical. Young people don't want to live in a great city. I could think of an idea like that, remember: ideas like that are all around you.

VCs get deals almost exclusively through personal introductions. Tell yourself you can be as nice as you want, so long as the new model spread rapidly.3 So if you want to do something great. Her immense data set and x-ray vision are the perfect storm in that respect the cheeseburger of essay forms. So they tend to grow into a big one. No one wants to be the early and middle ones of your career. I suspect VCs accept business plans over the transom more as a way to make the headers look innocent, but my guess is that it doesn't matter—that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it.

By living really cheaply they think they can make the remaining money last five months. There is another reason: Jessica hates attention. The angel now owns 200/1200 shares, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from? Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it. For example, in the long term because it gives you all the advantages other people forgo by trying to encourage startups. Most people would rather a 100% chance of $1 million. Log everything. What is an incubator? There's no thread of reasoning you have to say actually is a list of n things is random access.

One of the VC firms says they want to. Together these mean that in many fields the rule will be: Build it, and expand your ambitions when and if you raise more money. Reddit had different goals from Hacker News. At a minimum, we'd have to accept lower rates of technological growth.4 In fact, I'd say what separates the great investors from the mediocre ones is the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a flaw. As well as being smarter, they tend to; and vice versa. I was at Yahoo, I couldn't help thinking, how will this sound to investors?

I want is for the company to have a huge effect. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do that for surprisingly little. Having one is the best insurance against needing one. Our startup begins when a group of people. Like a contrarian investment fund, someone following this strategy will almost always be doing things that don't, and only gradually learn to distinguish between words that occasionally do occur in legitimate email and words that almost never do. And, confusingly, the names of users with the highest average comment scores in orange. Jessica and I decided one night to start it, and savor the time you have. There's a whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure. The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just that if you cut investors' appetite for risk doesn't merely kill off larval startups, but taxed away all other surplus wealth?

A large, clean corpus is the key to making Bayesian filtering work well. Dilution is a hard problem. Palo Alto is suburbia, but then it was a charming college town—a new way to focus one's energy, for example, allow founders to cash out. Now that conventional ideas have caught up with it, it seems to have been a rejection.5 Most people who did great things were clumped together in a place where you can find peers and encouragement. Maybe the solution is to let people do the best work they can, and then they're gone. In the old economy, the high cost of presenting information to people meant they had only a narrow range of options to choose from.

It was a place people went in search of angel investors. Rejection is a question, not an answer. But it also discovered that per and FL and ff0000 are good indicators of spam. The same thing happened during the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles. Its fifteen most interesting words in this spam, with their probabilities, are: madam 0. It's the partners who decide, and they said no. And you could do more; you should try harder. Some I only learned in the past century. But schools change slower than scholarship. The due diligence discloses no ticking bombs, and six weeks later they go ahead with the deal.6 VCs who led the round, but Tim is a smart and influential guy and it's good to have a lot of what's good in an article often survives; indeed, the closer the paraphrase is to plagiarism, the more easily you'll notice new ones.

Notes

San Jose. In the early adopters you evolve the idea that investors don't yet have any of the flock, or b get your employer to renounce, in both cases you catch mail that's near spam, for example, would be unfortunate. There are simply the embodiment of some logical reason e. 5% a week for 4 years.

In-Q-Tel that is a major cause of accidents. VCs aren't tech guys, the users' need has to be careful. The situation we face here, I would be taught that masturbation was perfectly normal and not to.

This is one of the optimism Europeans consider distinctly American is simply that it offers a better source of food. It's not a complete list of the editor in Lisp, Wiley, 1985, p. Good news: users don't care about. If you're expected to, so we should be working on Y Combinator.

You're not one of the most part and you make something popular but from which a few people plot their own company. It is the most promising opportunities, it is very hard and not fixing them fast enough, it is to get frozen yogurt. We don't call it ambient thought.

Though you should be easy to get a lot of people, but they start to get the bugs out of about 4,000. Founders weren't celebrated in the middle of the rest of the twentieth century, Europeans looked back on the web.

Siegel, Jeremy J.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Max Roser, Joshua Reeves, Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Robert Morris, Joe Hewitt, Dan Giffin, and several anonymous CS professors for sparking my interest in this topic.

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nancyedimick · 7 years

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More on the First Amendment and @RealDonaldTrump

(Matt Rourke/Associated Press)

Last week, I blogged about whether the First Amendment restricts President Trump’s ability to block users from his @RealDonaldTrump Twitter account. The Knight First Amendment Institute said “yes.” I said “probably not,” because I thought Trump’s actions with regard to @RealDonaldTrump — an account that (unlike @POTUS) precedes the Trump presidency and that conveys Trump’s individual voice — would likely be viewed as not “government action” but rather his own individual decisions and thus not bound by the First Amendment. I said (and still think) that it’s a close call, but I noted that some cases had suggested that even speech on government matters by high government officials may be seen as their own speech, rather than the government’s, and I thought this was so here.

Jameel Jaffer from the Knight Institute was kind enough to respond. I’ll quote his entire response and then offer a few thoughts of my own. (Amanda Shanor (Take Care) and Robert Loeb (Lawfare) have posted analyses that are similar to the Knight Institute’s, though more detailed and worth reading.)

First, Jaffer’s thought:

Does the First Amendment Restrict Trump on Twitter?

The First Amendment binds President Trump when he acts in his official capacity. How do we know, though, when he’s acting in his official capacity, rather than his personal one?

Earlier this week, the Knight Institute sent President Trump a letter on behalf of people whom President Trump had “blocked” from his most-followed Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump. We argued that the account constitutes a “designated public forum” under the First Amendment and that consequently President Trump is barred from blocking people from it simply because they ridiculed or disagreed with him. But why does the First Amendment apply at all, one might ask, to @realDonaldTrump, an account that Trump opened long before he became president and that could be understood as the “personal” counterpart to @POTUS, the “official” presidential account?

Professor Volokh argues (tentatively) that @realDonaldTrump is the megaphone of “Trump-the-man,” not “Trump–the-president.” Government officials, he points out, can operate in two different capacities — “on behalf of the government” and “expressing their own views.” He writes that Trump opened @realDonaldTrump before he became president, that the account is “understood as expressing [Trump’s] own views — apparently in his own words and with his own typos,” and that the account does not express “the institutional position[s] of the executive branch.” He distinguishes @realDonaldTrump from @POTUS, which has a handle “more focused on the president’s governmental role.” He states that the question falls “near a borderline that hasn’t been mapped in detail,” but he concludes (again, tentatively) that @realDonaldTrump is not a public forum.

It’s of course true that public officials sometimes act in their personal capacities. A president probably has less latitude to act in a personal capacity than, say, a city councilor does, but even a president’s statements will sometimes be attributable to the president-as-citizen rather than the president-as-president. If President Trump established a private Facebook page to communicate with business acquaintances about golf, no one would contend that the First Amendment barred him from excluding people from the group based on their views.

But wherever the line between personal accounts and officials ones, @realDonaldTrump must be on the “official” side of it. Here are the facts, as I understand them:

The account is operated by President Trump.

In the account’s “bio” line, Trump identifies himself as the “45th President of the United States of America.” The location line says “Washington D.C.” The background image is a photograph of Air Force One.

The president uses the account almost exclusively to communicate about government affairs, including international affairs, economic policy, and appointments to senior government positions. This is not an account focused on, say, literature or film or real estate.

The president uses this account to make major official announcements. For example, the president announced at 4:44 on Wednesday morning that he intended to nominate Chris Wray for the position of FBI director. The president announced this through @realDonaldTrump before he (or anyone else) announced it through any other channel. @POTUS did not tweet it at all.

The president uses the account to engage foreign leaders, to frame world events, to conduct diplomacy, and to state foreign policy goals.

The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, has said that the administration considers the president’s tweets to be “official statements” of the White House.

The White House social media director, Dan Scavino, promotes @realDonaldTrump, @POTUS and @WhiteHouse equally as channels through which “President Donald J. Trump … communicat[es] directly with you, the American people! #USA”

The courts have given weight to the president’s tweets in assessing the motivations behind government policy. (See, e.g., the Fourth Circuit’s travel ban decision.)

Some of the president’s aides are reported to have written some of the tweets.

The president hasn’t limited access to the account, e.g. to family members, friends, or business colleagues. To the contrary, the account is open to everyone — everyone, that is, except those who are blocked because of their viewpoints.

If these are the facts, as I think they are, I don’t think @realDonaldTrump can fairly be characterized as a project of Trump-the-man, even if it began as his project. Whatever the account once was, it’s now an important channel through which Trump-the-president communicates with Americans about his presidency. It’s not a personal account; it’s an official one — and consequently it’s an account to which the First Amendment applies.

Here’s my thinking:

1. That Trump is talking about government-related matters to the public, including what he is doing and what he will do, doesn’t make it government speech. As I mentioned in my earlier post, when an incumbent running for reelection gives a campaign speech, he is not acting on behalf of the government. Likewise, even Supreme Court justices who believe that the government may not endorse religion think that it’s fine for government officials to express religious views in their speeches — here, for instance, is the view of Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Van Orden v. Perry:

Our leaders, when delivering public addresses, often express their blessings simultaneously in the service of God and their constituents. Thus, when public officials deliver public speeches, we recognize that their words are not exclusively a transmission from the government because those oratories have embedded within them the inherently personal views of the speaker as an individual member of the polity.

When I put up posts, or moderate comments, I’m not acting on behalf of the state of California (even though blogging is part of my job, for which I get some modest credit in my job evaluations, much as professors who write op-eds are given some credit for such “service” to the public); likewise for Trump. To be sure, my powers stemming from my government job are small, and Trump’s powers are vast. But the principle strikes me as quite similar.

For whatever it’s worth, the only case that has closely dealt with this, Davison v. Plowman, took the view that a government official may be speaking as a citizen and not as the government, even when he is “mak[ing] public statements though social media” to constituents — though I should acknowledge that this is just a federal trial court case and not a binding precedent.

2. Sean Spicer’s statement that @RealDonaldTrump tweets are “official statements” doesn’t count for much here, I think — I don’t think that a press secretary can bind the president, the executive branch or the judiciary on a legal question such as this.

3. That courts have given the president’s tweets weight in determining his motivations is not, I think, relevant: Indeed, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit’s decision, cited by the Knight Institute, cited a tweet from when Trump was a candidate — that certainly couldn’t have been government speech. The theory behind the 4th Circuit’s use of the tweet is that Trump’s motivations were relevant to whether he had a discriminatory intent at the time he created the policy, and for that the 4th Circuit didn’t care whether the tweet was an official statement or just his views in 2015 as a private citizen.

4. To the extent that the president’s aides regularly write tweets in his name (not certain, and the cited source is from the time when the president was just a candidate), the matter might be different, though that is not entirely clear.

* * *

While I’m talking about this, let me briefly note one other post about this, from Noah Feldman (Bloomberg). Feldman focuses on the fact that Twitter is a privately owned platform and concludes that “it’s highly likely that there is no state action when blocking the followers takes place” on such a private platform.

I don’t think that’s quite the right inquiry, though: If, for instance, a government agency rents space in a privately owned building to hold a public meeting and then lets citizens speak during a public comment portion of the meeting, it has created a limited public forum in which it can’t discriminate based on viewpoint.

The same is true if a government agency (and not just a single politician) runs a Facebook page and allows citizens to comment there — that would indeed be a “limited public forum,” because it’s government-run even if it uses private property. (See the Davison cases cited in my original post.) Likewise with Twitter, the question is whether Trump is acting as Trump-the-man and not Trump-the-government-official in running the Twitter feed, not whether Twitter is a state actor.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/06/14/more-on-the-first-amendment-and-realdonaldtrump/

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