#BLUE TEXAS IS AN ACTUAL POSSIBILITY FOR THE FIRST TIME IN DECADES!! EVEN IF IT DOESNT GO BLUE THATS A CRAZY ACCOMPLISHMENT!!

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

16-Year-Old Cosmic Mystery Solved, Revealing Stellar Missing Link The Blue Ring Nebula, which perplexed scientists for over a decade, appears to be the youngest known example of two stars merged into one. In 2004, scientists with NASA's space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spotted an object unlike any they'd seen before in our Milky Way galaxy: a large, faint blob of gas with a star at its center. In the GALEX images, the blob appeared blue - though it doesn't actually emit light visible to the human eye - and subsequent observations revealed a thick ring structure within it. So the team nicknamed it the Blue Ring Nebula. Over the next 16 years, they studied it with multiple Earth- and space-based telescopes, but the more they learned, the more mysterious it seemed. A new study published online on Nov. 18 in the journal Nature may have cracked the case. By applying cutting-edge theoretical models to the slew of data that has been collected on this object, the authors posit the nebula - a cloud of gas in space - is likely composed of debris from two stars that collided and merged into a single star. While merged star systems are thought to be fairly common, they are nearly impossible to study immediately after they form because they're obscured by debris the collision kicks up. Once the debris has cleared - at least hundreds of thousands of years later - they're challenging to identify because they resemble non-merged stars. The Blue Ring Nebula appears to be the missing link: Astronomers are seeing the star system only a few thousand years after the merger, when evidence of the union is still plentiful. It appears to be the first known example of a merged star system at this stage. Operated between 2003 and 2013 and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, GALEX was designed to help study the history of star formation throughout most of the universe by taking a census of young star populations in other galaxies. To do this, the mission observed both near-UV light (wavelengths slightly shorter than visible light) and far-UV. Most objects seen by GALEX radiated both near-UV (represented as yellow in GALEX images) and far-UV (represented as blue), but the Blue Ring Nebula stood out because it emitted only far-UV light. The object's size was similar to that of a supernova remnant, which forms when a massive star runs out of fuel and explodes, or a planetary nebula, the puffed-up remains of a star the size of our Sun. But the Blue Ring Nebula had a living star at its center. What's more, supernova remnants and planetary nebulas radiate in multiple light wavelengths outside the UV range, while further research showed that the Blue Ring Nebula did not. Phantom Planet In 2006, the GALEX team looked at the nebula with the 200-inch (5.1-meter) Hale telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, and then with the even more powerful 10-meter (33-foot) telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. They found evidence of a shockwave in the nebula, suggesting the gas composing the Blue Ring Nebula had indeed been expelled by some kind of violent event around the central star. Keck data also suggested the star was pulling a large amount of material onto its surface. But where was the material coming from? "For quite a long time we thought that maybe there was a planet several times the mass of Jupiter being torn apart by the star, and that was throwing all that gas out of the system," said Mark Seibert, an astrophysicist with the Carnegie Institution for Science and a member of the GALEX team at Caltech, which manages JPL. But the team wanted more data. In 2012, using the first full-sky survey from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope that studied the sky in infrared light, the GALEX team identified a disk of dust orbiting closely around the star. (WISE was reactivated in 2013 as the asteroid-hunting NEOWISE mission.) Archival data from three other infrared observatories, including NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, also spotted the disk. The finding didn't rule out the possibility that a planet was also orbiting the star, but eventually the team would show that the disk and the material expelled into space came from something larger than even a giant planet. Then in 2017, the Habitable Zone Planet Finder on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas confirmed there was no compact object orbiting the star. More than a decade after discovering the Blue Ring Nebula, the team had gathered data on the system from four space telescopes, four ground-based telescopes, historical observations of the star going back to 1895 (in order to look for changes in its brightness over time), and with the help of citizen scientists through the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). But an explanation for what had created the nebula still eluded them. Stellar Sleuthing By the time Keri Hoadley began working with the GALEX science team in 2017, "the group had kind of hit a wall" with the Blue Ring Nebula, she said. But Hoadley, an astrophysicist at Caltech, was fascinated by the object and its bizarre features, so she accepted the challenge of trying to solve the mystery. It seemed likely that the solution would not come from more observations of the system, but from cutting-edge theories that could make sense of the existing data. So Chris Martin, principal investigator for GALEX at Caltech, reached out to Brian Metzger of Columbia University for help. As a theoretical astrophysicist, Metzger makes mathematical and computational models of cosmic phenomena, which can be used to predict how those phenomena will look and behave. He specializes in cosmic mergers - collisions between a variety of objects, whether they be planets and stars or two black holes. With Metzger on board and Hoadley shepherding the work, things progressed quickly. "It wasn't just that Brian could explain the data we were seeing; he was essentially predicting what we had observed before he saw it," said Hoadley. "He'd say, 'If this is a stellar merger, then you should see X,' and it was like, 'Yes! We see that!'" The team concluded that the nebula was the product of a relatively fresh stellar merger that likely occurred between a star similar to our Sun and another star only about one-tenth that size (or about 100 times the mass of Jupiter). Nearing the end of its life, the Sun-like star began to swell, creeping closer to its companion. Eventually, the smaller star fell into a downward spiral toward its larger companion. Along the way, the larger star tore the smaller star apart, wrapping itself in a ring of debris before swallowing the smaller star entirely. This was the violent event that led to the formation of the Blue Ring Nebula. The merger launched a cloud of hot debris into space that was sliced in two by the gas disk. This created two cone-shaped debris clouds, their bases moving away from the star in opposite directions and getting wider as they travel outward. The base of one cone is coming almost directly toward Earth and the other almost directly away. They are too faint to see alone, but the area where the cones overlap (as seen from Earth) forms the central blue ring GALEX observed. Millennia passed. The expanding debris cloud cooled and formed molecules and dust, including hydrogen molecules that collided with the interstellar medium, the sparse collection of atoms and energetic particles that fill the space between stars. The collisions excited the hydrogen molecules, causing them to radiate in a specific wavelength of far-UV light. Over time, the glow became just bright enough for GALEX to see. Stellar mergers may occur as often as once every 10 years in our Milky Way galaxy, meaning it's possible that a sizeable population of the stars we see in the sky were once two. "We see plenty of two-star systems that might merge some day, and we think we've identified stars that merged maybe millions of years ago. But we have almost no data on what happens in between," said Metzger. "We think there are probably plenty of young remnants of stellar mergers in our galaxy, and the Blue Ring Nebula might show us what they look like so we can identify more of them." Though this is likely the conclusion of a 16-year-old mystery, it may also be the beginning of a new chapter in the study of stellar mergers. "It's amazing that GALEX was able to find this really faint object that we weren't looking for but that turns out to be something really interesting to astronomers," said Seibert. "It just reiterates that when you look at the universe in a new wavelength or in a new way, you find things you never imagined you would." JPL, a division of Caltech, managed the GALEX mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The mission was developed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, under the Explorers Program. JPL also managed the Spitzer and WISE missions, and manages the NEOWISE mission. TOP IMAGE....The Blue Ring Nebula consists of two expanding cones of gas ejected into space by a stellar merger. As the gas cools, it forms hydrogen molecules that collide with particles in interstellar space, causing them to radiate far-ultraviolet light. Invisible to the human eye, it is shown here as blue. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Seibert (Carnegie Institution for Science)/K. Hoadley (Caltech)/GALEX Team LOWER IMAGE....The Blue Ring Nebula consists of two hollow, cone-shaped clouds of debris moving in opposite directions away from the central star. The base of one cone is traveling almost directly toward Earth. As a result, astronomers looking at the nebula see two circles that partially overlap. Credit: Mark Seibert

#space #science #Astronomy #physics #news #nasa

[idreamofplaid]

Moonlight Whiskey

Square Filled: Whiskey for @walker-bingo & Established Relationship for @girl-next-door-writes Make Me Feel Bingo

Summary: Cordell plans a romantic night for the reader that brings back memories from decades ago.

Rating: Explicit

Characters: Cordell x Reader; Emily mentioned

Word Count: 4040

Created for @walker-bingo & @girl-next-door-writes Make Me Feel Bingo

“We’re almost there.” Cordell’s voice held a hint of excitement. Whatever this was he had planned for you, he was happy with himself about it; and that made you happy. It was past time Cordell let himself feel happy again.

You lifted your fingers to the bandana covering your eyes. It had slipped a little, and you pushed it back into place. If it fell much lower, you might be tempted to peek, and you didn’t want to ruin Cordell’s surprise. He knew your inclinations, and when he saw what you were doing; he issued you a playful warning. “Keep the blindfold on.”

This entire night already had you feeling good, and you played along. “Is this something kinky, Cord?”

You felt his hand settle on your thigh. “Not that I don’t want to get kinky with you, baby, but not tonight.”

You put your hand over his and moved your fingers lightly over his long, thick ones.  That was part of the beauty of Cordell. His hands were strong. You’d seen those fingers wrapped around a rope while he rode a bull. His hands were strong enough to keep him on the back of that massive animal. 

They were also gentle. When he touched you, he made you feel like something precious, and his gentle touch could set you on fire. You shifted slightly in your seat at the thought.

The truck came to a stop, and Cordell cut the engine. “Sit tight, baby. I’ll be right around to get you.”

It was only a few seconds before your door opened, and Cordell’s hand was on your arm to help you out of the truck. “Watch your step, darlin’.”

The ground was a little uneven beneath your feet. It made you wonder where you were. After a few steps, Cordell stopped you and put his hands on your shoulders, turning you to face the direction he wanted.

You could feel him untying the bandana at the back of your head, and it slipped from your eyes. When you saw the landscape in front of you, your mouth fell open; and you put your hand over it. “Cord, you didn’t.”

His smile was so big it brought his dimples out to play. “Happy Anniversary, baby.” His arms circled around your waist, and he pushed your hair to the side so he could kiss the back of your neck. 

You closed your eyes, enjoying the feel of his soft lips on your skin. “Cordell, that’s really romantic, but it isn’t our anniversary. He opened his mouth a little to suck on your neck.

“Yes, it is. It’s the anniversary of when we almost had sex on prom night. Right here.” You opened your eyes to take a good look at the lake. This was the exact spot he’d brought you after the prom when you had just turned sixteen and he was the dashing older boy who was way too cute and adorable. You hadn’t had a chance and had fallen for him hard.

You smiled at his attempt to be sentimental. He never had been good with dates. “Cord, this isn’t the right day.”

He turned you in his arms and pulled you up against him. “Well, it was April,” he said, “and you looked beautiful that night.” He smiled when he said it, and it made him more handsome and more charming than any man had a right to be.

You laughed. This man had always had the talent to make you happy, even when he was a boy. “Yes, it was April.”

He kissed you slowly with a touch of tease, promising something more to come. Cordell lifted his lips from yours, and he smiled at you again. “I thought we could have a do over. Maybe I’ll be luckier tonight than I was then.” He grinned at you with a particular gleam in his eye.

You licked your lips. “As I recall, you were the one who put the brakes on that night.”

He chuckled. “I did, but I had a very good reason for that.”

You slid your hand down to grip his ass. “And what reason was that?”

He lowered his head, and you could have sworn you saw him blush behind the beard. “I had no idea what I was doin’ because... I was a virgin.”

You’d never known that. Girls were all over Cordell in high school. You’d just assumed.

He nodded toward the bed of his truck. “Would you let me try to make things a little better for you than they were that night?”

For a second you forgot to respond because the moonlight was shining in his gray blue eyes. “You left me aching for you, Cord.” You said it with a touch of lightheartedness, but it was the absolute truth.

His smile was hypnotizing, his eyes serious.“You weren’t the only one who was aching.”

You put your hand on his cheek. “Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen tonight.”

He nuzzled that sweet spot beneath your ear. “I’m not going to leave you wantin’ for anything tonight, babygirl.”

Then Cordell took your hand and led you over to the back of the truck. He lowered the tailgate and climbed inside. There was a rolled up sleeping bag that he unfurled and laid out across the bed. Then he reached for your hand and helped you up.

He sat down, leaned his back against the cab, stretched his legs out in front of him and extended his hand in invitation to you. You took his offered hand in yours and sat down next to him, tucking your legs beneath you.

Cordell put his arm around you, pulling you close, and you put your head on his shoulder. It seemed that all the stars were out tonight, and it was even more romantic than that night all those years ago had been. If that was even possible, because you had been head over heels in your first love then.

That first love had never left you. He’d moved on, and you had tried. You’d even moved away from Austin for a while. It had just been too painful to see him with Emily, but moving to another state or anything else you’d tried had never erased him from your memory. No other man had ever measured up to him.

You let yourself just feel this moment. Cordell’s arm was around you. He was choosing you, and you wouldn’t ponder too much on if his decision would be the same if Emily were still alive. He was with you now.

You buried your nose into his neck and inhaled his scent, wanting nothing more than to lose yourself in him. He kissed the top of your head and asked, “Hey, you okay.”

His instincts were good. What else could you expect from a Texas Ranger? “I’m fine, Cord. I was just thinking.”

He combed his fingers through your hair. “What ARE you thinking?”

You turned your head to kiss his neck. It wasn’t possible to say it out loud. You couldn’t tell him how much he actually meant to you, how you really felt about him. In your mind, you were still second choice to Emily. If she were still alive, you wouldn’t even be here. That knowledge didn’t encourage a complete reveal of your feelings for him.

Instead, you told him “I was just thinking about that night.” 

Cordell laced his fingers through yours. “Will you tell me what you were thinking?”

You chewed on your bottom lip for a minute, contemplating how much you should share with him at this point in your relationship. Part of you knew how he felt about you, even if he hadn’t said it. Another part of you knew he was focused on his kids right now, and you supported him in that. They had lost their mother, and Cordell was doing his best to help them through that. You loved him even more BECAUSE he was a good father.

It was that third part of you that was causing you so much trouble. Emily might be gone, but the specter of her loomed large in your mind. You’d been Cordell’s girlfriend first, sort of, but then Emily had come sweeping into his life and just like a spring storm that was fast and furious; she popped up out of nowhere. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. It was bound to happen; some girl was going to capture his heart, and in so doing she had destroyed all your dreams of a future with him.

That wasn’t really fair. She hadn’t meant you any harm. Chances were she barely even knew of your existence. Cordell had followed her around like a puppy. It was clear he was enamored with her, and the friendship you had with him that might have blossomed into something else was all but forgotten. He was busy with someone else, and that still stung. You were a grown woman, and it still hurt. There was a young girl inside you who had never stopped loving him, and she was a part of the woman you had become.

You’re being ridiculous, Y/N. He’s here with you now. Are you going to let your teenage broken heart get in the way of that?

It was time to expose yourself to him a little more, let him know what you had felt for him, maybe even what you were feeling now, trust him. You squeezed his hand to reassure yourself he truly was there. This wasn’t a dream you would wake up from and feel the other side of the bed, only to discover it was empty. 

You took a breath and told him one of the secrets you had been holding inside. “That was one of the best nights of my life. I had a huge crush on you.” Crush. That word would do for now, until your relationship was in a place that you could reveal the entire truth.

He shifted to look at you. The grin on his face was adorable and oblivious. “A crush? Really?”

“Yes, Cord. I thought you were the cutest boy I’d ever seen, and that night you were so handsome. A tux is a good look on you.” You put your head down on his shoulder because what you’d told him made you feel a little vulnerable and because you could. After so long, you could be close with him like this again.

“I thought you were so pretty. I couldn’t believe you were with me.” Hearing him say that made you get all soft inside. “I meant what I said about a do over. I wish I’d done things differently that night.”

Butterflies started to flutter in your stomach just like you were sixteen again. “What would you have done differently?”

He tilted your chin up with fingers. His eyes, that always kept you guessing about what color they would be, had turned the deepest of grays without a trace of blue. “Why don’t I show you?” 

He dipped his head down to touch his mouth to yours. His lips parted slightly, and you opened yours in response. Cordell’s tongue glided around yours, and you felt yourself falling even more deeply into him. 

When he pulled away from you, the expression on his face was as soft as the warm April breeze caressing your skin. You looked at each other for several long seconds before he turned and lifted the blanket that was piled in the corner of the truck bed to reveal a picnic basket. He lifted the top and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. 

He held it up so you could read the label. “Remember this?” he asked. 

You smiled and shook your head, but not because you didn’t remember. Every detail of that night was etched in your mind. You were amazed he remembered so much. The shaking of your head turned into a nod. “I do remember. That was the first time I ever tasted whiskey. It felt like my throat was on fire.” You laughed softly at yourself and the memory.

Cordell reached into the basket to retrieve something else. He’d brought glasses. It was the same kind of whiskey, but he’d upped his game. That night you passed the bottle back and forth, drinking straight out of it. He opened the bottle, poured some into a glass and handed it to you. Then he poured a glass for himself. 

He held up his glass before taking a drink. “To second chances.”

You clinked your glass against his and took a sip. “What do you remember about that night, Cord?”

He took a big drink from his glass and got a faraway look in his eyes. “I remember how nervous I was. I thought we were gonna...you know.”

Your voice dropped to a whisper. “Why didn’t we? I would have. Why did you stop?”

Cordell’s eyes searched yours, like maybe he was weighing how much he should tell you too. “Because I...uh...I was afraid of hurting you, in more ways than one.” He dropped his eyes. “I had a condom in my wallet, and it just felt too calculated. Prom night. This place, a lake and the stars overhead. It was like I set you up. I didn’t want to take advantage of you.”

You put your hand over his where it was resting on his thigh. “Cordell, just because you were prepared doesn’t mean you were taking advantage of me; you were taking care of me. Neither one of us was ready for a baby then.” 

He raised his eyes to meet yours again. You wanted to ask him why it had never happened, not even after that night, but you didn’t. You knew. Emily. She was the one who’d had his babies. It was barely a month after that night that she’d entered his life.

Cordell’s voice snatched you out of your troubling thoughts, back to the here and now. “It wasn’t because I didn’t want you, Y/N. I did. I went home and...took care of the raging hard on I had while I thought about you.” You saw him swallow hard. 

You ran your fingertip around the rim of your glass, suddenly feeling bold. “Tell me, Cord, exactly what did you think about?”

He finished his whiskey in a gulp, put his glass down, and settled his hands on your hips. “I thought about you, your mouth, how it felt kissing you, and... what else you could do with your mouth.”

You dipped your finger into your glass, then dragged it across Cordell’s lips, leaving them wet. He tasted of bourbon when you kissed him and whispered against his mouth “Tell me more.”

Cordell’s breathing was noticeably heavier. “I imagined what it would feel like to be inside you, how warm and tight you’d be, and I pretended it was your hand on me.”

You tossed your glass and the remainder of its contents past Cordell’s shoulder and over the side of the truck. It hit the ground with a thud. With both of your hands now free, you unzipped Cordell’s fly and reached inside to cradle his cock in your hand.

He hissed in a breath as you worked his cock out of his boxers and through the opening in his jeans. When it was free, you stuck three of your fingers into your mouth to get them wet. Then you wrapped them around his dick that was beginning to harden and started to stroke. “Is this what you imagined?”

Cordell dropped his head back. “Fuck, baby. This is so...much...better.”

His cock grew hard under the soft velvety smoothness of his skin. “You feel so damn good, babygirl.”

Your strokes got slower. “It can feel even better. Why don’t you do what you wanted to do that night?”

Cordell opened his eyes. He held your cheek in his hand then brushed your hair from your face. “You’ve even more beautiful now than you were then, Y/N.”

You’d been dating Cordell for months now. This certainly wasn’t the first time you’d been together, but in many ways it felt like it. Maybe it was the place; maybe it was the way he was looking at you, like you were the only woman for him. You believed that. He’d made you believe it during this time you’d reconnected, with moments and gestures just like the one he was making tonight.

He lifted your shirt off over your head, and you felt a chill run through you; but it wasn’t because it was cold. It was because you were filled with excitement and anticipation, as though the clock truly had turned back. 

You’d bought a matching bra and panty set for tonight, and you were glad of it. When Cordell saw your blue satin and lace bra, he inhaled sharply. You had never forgotten it was his favorite color. He ran his thumb along the top edge of your bra cup, then lowered his head to kiss the swell of your breast rising over the top of the bra.

“You are so soft, baby.” He raised his head to nuzzle that spot below your ear while he reached around to unhook your bra. “You smell good too.”

He slipped the bra straps from your shoulders, and your breasts spilled free. Cordell cupped them in his hands, kneading them in his calloused fingers. You moaned when he flicked his thumbs over your nipples. “God, Cordell.” Your moan got deeper when he sucked one into your mouth. 

His warm mouth closed over your nub, and the way his tongue was circling over it, caused you to clench. Your walls were fluttering around the emptiness, and you were close to begging him. 

Cordell’s mouth left your breast, and you felt the loss, but you were distracted by watching him take off his shirt. His body had changed since he was younger, and was it ever breathtaking. His shoulders were even more broad, his waist still trim. The muscles in his arms, shoulders, chest, and stomach were more defined. Your mouth literally watered looking at him.

His cock was fully hard now, protruding through the opening in his jeans and underwear. It was magnificent. No matter how many times you saw it, you would never get used to just how big it was, and you couldn’t see it without thinking about the way it felt inside you when it was stretching you open. 

You wanted him out of the rest of his clothes so you could see that cock, standing hard and thick against his stomach. Once you’d gotten his clothes down around his hips, Cordell took them the rest of the way off, including his boots and socks.

His naked body drew you to it like a magnet. The hair on his chest was soft on your breasts, and your fingers tangled in his hair while he kissed you passionately, further stoking the fire in your core. You shimmied out of your jeans and panties, wanting all of his bare skin next to yours.

Cordell’s hands traveled down your back while his mouth continued to claim yours. You dropped your mouth from his to kiss his neck. “Cord, are we going to get caught doing this?”

There was a smile on his lips as he guided your mouth to his again. “Are you afraid you’ll get arrested? I’ve got some handcuffs if you want to practice.”

He’d made you laugh again and put you completely at ease. “I thought you said no kinky stuff tonight.”

He nibbled at your neck where it met your shoulder. “Right. Later then.” 

Cordell guided you down to the sleeping bag. You were on your back, and his eyes were traveling up and down the length of your body. “You are so fucking gorgeous naked in the moonlight like this.”

You bit your bottom lip like the shy schoolgirl you used to be. “So are you.”

Cordell lowered himself over you and whispered in your ear. “Tell me how you want it.”

You played with the curls at the nape of his neck. “Slow at first, but I want everything you have, Cord. Don’t hold anything back from me.”

At first, all you felt was the blunt head of his cock at your entrance. Then he pushed into you slowly, just like you’d asked. He kissed your neck and your ear, told you how much he wanted you, and looked into your eyes while he moved inside you. 

When his thrusts speeded up, you felt your orgasm getting closer, and you closed your eyes. You felt him raise your hand over your head and thread his fingers through yours. “Open your eyes, baby. Look at me. I want to see you when you come around me.”

You slowly lifted your eyelids. Your breath was escaping your mouth in small little gasps.  Cord’s eyes had changed to the color of a honey kissed chocolate. He was so gorgeous, perfect in so many ways, and everything you had ever wanted. 

His eyes were locked on yours, and they held a soft intensity in them that you knew you would remember and see when you closed your own eyes. The sound of his voice nearly sent you over the edge. “I’m so close, baby. I want you to come with me. Will you be a good girl and do that?”

“Yes, Cord.” You held onto him tightly. His next thrust scraped across your g-spot, and your body began to spasm and squeeze his dick buried so deep inside you. Cordell released his hot come into you with a grunt followed by a deep groan.

He collapsed onto his forearms, keeping his full weight off you. You could feel the light sheen of sweat on his back, and it was satisfying knowing you had put it there. Cordell nuzzled his nose on your cheek. “You okay, darlin’?”

“Mmmmm. Hmmmmm.” You wanted to stay here like this with him forever, just the two of you under the stars. 

When he rolled off you, you followed and settled your head on his chest. Cordell reached for the blanket and covered you both with it. You kissed his chest and whispered, “That was perfect.”

He was running his fingers lightly up and down your back. “Yeah. It was.”

You lay that way for a few minutes, enjoying the feel of his touch on your skin. He was unusually quiet. Finally you asked, “Cord, what is it?”

He shifted and propped himself up on his side. You sat up a little so you could see him better. Cordell reached for you and traced his fingertip down the edge of your cheek. “Y/N, I…” You waited, your breathing speeding up again. “I...love you.”

Before this moment the concept of forgetting to breathe had seemed like an exaggeration to you, but now you understood it. He put his fingers over your lips. “You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted you to know.”

You leaned in to kiss him, not trusting yourself to say anything just yet. For twenty years, you had waited to hear him say just that. Now that he had, it was overwhelming. It was like a dream. What followed was the sweetest and most meaningful kiss of your life so far. Cordell loved you. You were being kissed by a man who loved you, the man you had always wanted to love you.

While you were kissing, he lay you back down. When you opened your eyes, you were facing each other, heads on the pillows he had brought. He played with the hair at the side of your face, twisting it around his finger. “I wanted to be your first, Y/N. I wish I had been.”

“I wish you had been too, Cord.” You sighed, still trying to believe what had just happened. What did it mean? But you refused to let your head intrude on this moment. This one was for your heart, the heart that had been longing for him since you were a girl. Now, he was yours. That was enough. You’d figure out the rest later. 

Everything: @gambitwinchester @princessmisery666 @onethirstyunicorn @peridottea91 @logical-princey @emilyshurley @beenlovingromansincedayoneish @fangirlxwritesx67 @waywardbaby @atc74 @shaniquacynthia @mariekoukie6661 @tumbler-tidbits @67-chevy-baby @fandom-princess-forevermore @terrarium-jpeg @emoryhemsworth @crashdevlin @jules-1999 @cosicas-cuquis @sammyimpala-67 @queenoftheunderdark @dean-winchesters-bacon @timelordy-fangirl2 @sweetness47 @hobby27 @awesomesusiebstuff @kickingitwithkirk @becs-bunker @sandlee44 @supernaturalgrandma @dawnie1988 @volleyballer519 @kdfrqqg @lizette50 @daisymoder72 @sorenmarie87 @lovealways-j @mrswhozeewhatsis @spnbaby-67 @wayward-and-worn @asthesunwentdown @vulgar-library​ @petitgateau911​ @thinkinghardhardlythinking​ 

Walker: @spnwoman​ @sammysnaughtygirl​ @putowtin​

Sam/Jared: @girl-next-door-writes​ @stunudo​ @feelmyroarrrr​ @idabbleincrazy​ @evansrogerskitten​ @focusonspn​ @autumninavonlea​ @durinsbride​ @deansyahtzee​ @wendibird​ @waywardnerd67​ @fullmooner​ @julesthequirky​ @sams-sass​ @beskaradberoya​ @fromsamwtocordellw​

#walkerbingo #make me feel bingo #walker smut #walker fluff #walker x reader #cordell x reader

[ifuckinglovestvincent]

St Vincent: “Pour a Drink, Smoke a Joint... That’s the Vibe”

Ding dong! Daddy's Home

By Johnny Davis

19/03/2021

Annie Clark, known professionally as St Vincent, picked up a guitar aged 12 after being inspired by Jimi Hendrix. During her teens she worked as a roadie and later tour manager for her aunt and uncle, the jazz duo Tuck & Patti. Originally from Oklahoma, she moved to Dallas, Texas when she was seven and later attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts for three years, before dropping out.

Clark worked as a touring musician with the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens, before releasing Marry Me, her first album as St Vincent, in 2007. By her fifth album, 2017’s Masseduction, she had become one of the most celebrated artists in music, the first solo female artist to win a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album in 20 years.

She became unlikely Daily Mail-fodder around the same time, thanks to an 18-month relationship with Cara Delevingne, and later Kristen Stewart. Her ever-changing music, dressing up-box image and head-spinning well of ideas have seen her compared to David Bowie, Kate Bush and Prince. To complete the notion of her being the "artist's artist", in 2012 she collaborated with David Byrne on the album Love This Giant.

Indeed, she is surely one of few performers today who could stand in for Kurt Cobain with what’s-left-of-Nirvana, performing “Lithium” at their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, as well as cover “Controversy” at a Prince tribute concert in 2020, with such guitar-playing fireworks its author would surely have approved.

Following the glam-influenced pop of Masseduction, St Vincent has performed another stylistic handbrake turn. Complete with a new image – part-Warhol Superstar, part-Cassavetes heroine – she has mined the textures of the music she loved most as a kid: the virtuoso rock of Steely Dan, the clipped funk of Stevie Wonder and blue-eyed soul of mid-Seventies' David Bowie, on her upcoming album, Daddy’s Home.

The title refers to Clark's own father, locked up in Texas for 12 years in 2010, for money laundering in a stock manipulation scheme, one in which he and his co-conspirators cheated 17,000 investors out of £35m. It is also, in typical Clark style, a bit of saucy slang.

Back on the promotional trail, Clark Zoomed in from Los Angeles one morning recently – fully caffeinated and raring to go. “My vices?” she pondered. “Too much coffee, man…”

What question are you already bored of being asked?

There’s not one that’s popping out. There’s no question where I’m like “Oh God, if I ever hear that again, I’ll jump off a building.” I’m chill.

I mention it because prior to releasing your last record you put out a pre-recorded “press conference”, seemingly to pre-empt every inane question the media would throw at you.

It’s so funny. It didn’t really occur like that. Originally that was supposed to be a legit green screen conference. Like, “I’ll just answer these questions ‘cos when they need to have me on ‘The Morning Show’ in Belarus they can have this and put their own graphics behind it”. But then when my friend Carrie Brownstein [collaborator and Sleater-Kinney vocalist-guitarist] and I started writing it and it became very snarky. For some reason it didn’t occur to me that “Oh, that might be off-putting or intimidating to journalists” I just thought "This is silly”. So anyway… I understand.

We're curious about your dad and the American legal system.

I have had a lot of questions about that. For some reason it didn’t occur to me how much I would be answering questions about… my hilarious father!

How do you view his time in prison?

Just that life is long and people are complicated. And that, luckily, there’s a chance for redemption or reconciliation, even after a really crazy traumatic time. And also anybody that has any experience with the American justice system will know this... nobody comes out unscathed.

You recently presented an online MasterClass: "St. Vincent Teaches Creativity & Songwriting". One of the takeaways: “All you need are ears and ideas, and you can make anything happen”. Who’s had the best ideas in music?

Well, you’ve got to give credit to people who were genuinely creating a new style – like if you think of Charlie Parker, arguably he created a new style. This hard bop that was just absolutely impossible to play. It was, like, “Check me out – try to copy me!” So, that’s interesting. I think Brian Eno, for sure, has some great ideas about music – and obviously has made some of the best music. Joni Mitchell – completely singular. I mean: think about that. There are some people who are actually inimitable – like, you couldn’t possibly even try to imitate them.

It’s a brave soul who covers a Joni Mitchell song. Although, apologies if you actually have.

No, I have not. And there’s a reason why not. Come on – Bowie. Bowie never repeated himself. David Byrne also didn’t repeat himself. He took all of his influences of classic songs and the disco that was happening at the time, and the potpourri of downtown New York music from the mid- to late Seventies… and synthesised it into this completely new, other thing. I mean, that’s impressive. Those are the ones we remember.

How hard is it not to repeat yourself?

It’s whether people have the Narcissus thing or not. Like, it’s always got to be a balance where you’re, like, “Well, I need to believe in myself to make something and be liberated. But I can’t look at that pond of my previous work and go ‘Oh you! You’re gorgeous!’” So I don’t go back and listen to things I’ve done. I finished Daddy’s Home in the fall and it was, like, “This is done” and it felt great. I loved the record and it was so fun to make. But what I did immediately afterwards was to write something completely different. But then I don’t know, ‘cos there are people who do the thing that they do just great. And you just want to hear more songs, in the style of the thing that they do great.

Right. No one wants an experimental Ramones album.

Exactly. Or, like, or a Tom Petty record. I don’t want a tone poem from Tom Petty! I want a perfectly constructed, perfectly written completely singalongable three-chord song.

The new album has a very “live” Seventies feel. I’d read that some of the tracks are first takes. Can that be right? It all sounds very complicated.

That’s not right. I should say [rock voice] "Yeah, that’s right, we just jammed…" But, you know, I’ll be honest. There are some vocal takes in there that are first takes. But it really is just the sound of people playing. We get good drum takes. And good bass takes. And I play a bunch of guitar and sitar-guitar. And it’s the sound of a moment in time, certainly. And way more about looseness and groove and feel and vibe than anything else [I’ve done before].

Amazing live albums, virtuoso playing, jamming – those were staples of Seventies music. Have we lost some of that?

I mean, I can wax poetic on that idea for a minute. In the Seventies you had this tremendous sophistication in popular music. Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan and funk and soul and jazz and rock…. and all of the things rolled into one. That was tremendously sophisticated. It just was. There was harmony, there were chord progressions.

What else from that decade appealed to you for Daddy’s Home?

It reminds me of where we are now, I think. So, 1971-1976 in downtown New York, you’ve got the Summer of Love thing and flower children and all the hippy stuff and it’s, like, “Oh yeah, that didn’t work out that well. We’re still in Vietnam. There’s a crazy economic crisis, all kinds of social unrest”. People stood in the proverbial burned-out building. And it reminds me a lot of where we are today, in terms of social unrest, economic uncertainty. A groundswell wanting change... but where that’s headed is yet to be seen. We haven’t fully figured that out. We’re all picking up pieces of the rubble and going “Okay, what do we do with this one? Where do we go with that one?” Being a student of history, that was one of the reasons why I was drawn to that period in history.

Also: that’s the music I’ve listened to more than anything in my entire life. I mean, I was probably the youngest Steely Dan fan. It didn’t make me that popular at sleepovers. People were, like, “I want to listen to C+C Music Factory” and I was, like, “Yeah, but have you heard this solo on [Steely Dan’s] ‘Kid Charlemagne’”? That music is so in me. It’s so in my ears and I feel like I never really went there [making music before]. And I didn’t want to be a tourist about it. It’s just that particular style had a whole lot to teach me. So I wanted to just dig in and find out. Just play with it.

Is there a style of music you don’t like?

That I don’t like?

You're a jazz fan...

I love jazz. Are you kidding me? I was that annoying 14-year-old who was, like, “Yeah, but have you listened to Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth?”

I love jazz. Are you kidding me? I was that annoying 14-year-old who was, like, “Yeah, but have you listened to Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth?”

That does sound quite precocious for a 14-year-old.

It’s annoying. Just insufferable. [Thinking aloud] What music don’t I like….? Here’s what can happen. And I feel like it’s similar to when an actor has some lines in a script and they’re not very good – not very well-written – so they overcompensate by making it very dramatic and really overplaying it. I would say that is a style of music that I don’t really like. Where somebody has to really oversell it and it all feels… athletic. Instead of musical or touching.

Did you put your lockdown time to constructive use?

If you need any mediocre home renovations done, I’m your girl. It was fun. I did – let’s see now – plumbing, electrical, painting. Luckily there’s YouTube, so you can more or less figure it all out. I did a lot of that stuff and I have to say it was such a nice contrast to working on music all day. Because when you’re working on music you have to create the construct of everything. You’re, like, “I need to make this song. But what is this song?” Everything is this kind of elusive castle in the sky thing. But then, if you go and sand a deck, you’ve done something. It feels really good. And it’s not, like, “What is a deck? And who am I?” You’re just, like, “This is a task and I get to do it and I can see how the mechanism works I understand it it’s not esoteric – it’s simply mechanical". I can do something mechanical. I loved it.

Which bit of DIY are you most pleased with?

Painting the kitchen cabinets. That’s a real job. We’re talking sanding. We’re talking taking things off hinges. We’re talking multiple coats. The whole lacquer-y thing at the end. That. I’m, like, “That looks pretty pro”.

What colour did you go for?

Oh, you know, it’s just a sort of… teal. But classy teal.

Of course.

Yeah. The wallpapering wasn’t as successful. But, you know, that’s fine. So that was really fun. And then I also went down a history rabbit hole. I realised I had some gaps in my knowledge about the Russian Revolution and life under the Iron Curtain and the gulags and Stalin and Lenin. So, I went down that hole. And then I was like “Oh I forgot – I haven’t read any Dostoevsky”. So I have been working on his short stories – which are great. And then Solzhenitsyn I really liked – I mean liked is a strange word to use for The Gulag Archipelago. I read Cancer Ward… All of them. I recommend all of it. And then, before that, it was a big Stasi kick. I can’t remember the last time I had time to brush up on the Russian Revolution.

There’s a lyric on “The Laughing Man”, “If life’s a joke… then I’m dying laughing”. It’s also on your new merchandise. What do you think happens when we die?

Nothing.

This is it?

Yeah. I mean, I understand that it would be comforting to think otherwise. That there might be a special place. It would be nice! The thought’s never really been able to stick for me. I would say that we are made of carbon and then we get subsumed back into the Earth and then eventually we become life again – in the carbon part of our makeup.

Well, that sounds better than an endless void.

I don’t think it would be an endless void.

In what ways are you like your mum and dad?

Let’s see. Well, my mother is a precious angel who has unwavering optimism. She is incredibly intelligent and also very nonjudgmental and able and happy to explore all kinds of possibilities. Saying that, though… it’s sounding not like me at all. I’m like my father in that I think we have very similar tastes in books, films, music and a very similar sense of humour. My mother’s so kind that it’s hard for me to… Her level of kindness and decency is aspirational to me.

How famous are you, on a scale of one to 10?

God, I mean, like, “TikTok Famous” probably a one, right? I’m gonna say – I don’t know about the number system – but I’m going to say I-occasionally-get-a-free-appetiser-sent-over famous. Which is a great place to be.

What do you look for in a date?

It’s been so long since I’ve been on a date. You know, I once read something, it might have been something cheesy on a card, but [it was]: if you don’t like someone, then the way they hold their fork will bother you. But, if you like someone – or love someone – they could spill an entire plate of spaghetti on your lap and you wouldn’t mind.

You play a zillion instruments. What’s the hardest instrument to play?

Well, I can’t play horns or anything like that. The French horn is supposed to be really hard. I don’t like to blag… but I’m an incredible whistler. Like, I can whistle Bach.

Is Bach a particularly tough whistle?

I think… yeah. It’s fast. And noodly.

What’s the first thing you’re going to do when we're out of lockdown?

I’m gonna get a manicure and a pedicure and a massage. Massage from a stranger. Any stranger.

What about a night on the tiles?

I will probably attend a dinner party.

That sounds quite restrained.

It sounds hella boring. Sorry.

Clubbing?

No, I don’t really go to clubs. I think in order to go to clubs you have to be a person who likes to publicly dance. And I don’t publicly dance. I mean I would feel too shy to dance at a wedding. But for some reason I will dance on stage in front of 10,000 people.

That’s why alcohol was invented.

Exactly! But I swear I would reach the point of alcohol sickness before I would be drunk enough to dance.

The effects of drugs on creativity: discuss.

Unreliable. Really unreliable. Sometimes after a day’s work in the studio you’re like, "I’m gonna have shot of tequila and then sing this a few more times, and then play". It’s okay but you peak sort-of quickly. You can’t sustain the level without getting tired. And then I would say that weed just makes me paranoid and useless. Every once in a while some combo of psychedelics can get you someplace. But, for the most part, you either come back to [the work] the next day and you’re, like, “This is garbage” or you get sleepy or hungry or distracted and you’re not really doing anything. I’ve never had opiates. Or coke or whatever. So I don’t know. I can’t speak to that. But with the slightly more G-Rated [American movie classification: All Ages Permitted] thing, it doesn’t really help.

What do you have too many of in your wardrobe?

I’m not a hoarder. I tend to have one thing that I get really obsessed with and then I wear it every day. Some people, having a whole lot of things gives them a sense of safety and security. It gives me anxiety. I can’t think if there’s too much visual noise. If there was a uniform that I could wear every day I would absolutely do that. And at certain times I have.

Like Steve Jobs?

Or, oh God, what’s her name? The Theranos lady… Elizabeth Holmes!

The blood-test-scam lady?

Well, I guess it was unclear how much of it was self-delusion and how much of it was, you know, actual fraud.

Another black turtleneck fan.

And – again, this is unconfirmed – she also adopted a very low voice like this in order to be taken seriously as a CEO.

Like Margaret Thatcher.

Did she have a low voice?

She made hers “less shrill”.

Oh yes. Yes!

What movie makes you cry?

The Lives of Others

That’s a good one.

Right. I rewatched that during my Stasi kick.

I’ll be honest, your lockdown sounds even less fun than everyone else’s.

I mean… Look, I had to educate myself. I went to a music college [Berklee College of Music] where I tried to take the philosophy class and the way that they would talk about it… it was taught by this professor who was from one of the neighbouring colleges in Boston. And it was very clear that he really disliked having to talk Kierkegaard to a bunch of music school kids. He was just so bummed by it. I’m trying to learn, “What’s the deal with Kant?” and he felt he had to explain everything only in musical terms [because he assumed it would be the only thing music students could relate to]. Like, “Well, you know, it’s like when Bob Marley…" I’m, like, “No, no, no! I don’t want that!” So I had to educate myself. This is where its led me.

Where should we ideally listen to Daddy’s Home?

Put it on a turntable. Pour yourself a glass of tequila or bourbon – whatever your favourite hooch is – and smoke a joint and listen to it. I think that’s the vibe.

Daddy’s Home is released on May 14

#have u covered Joni mitchell? Annie clarkson: ​‘I have not’ #OKAY MA’AM WHATEVER U SaY MA’am #st vincent #annie clark #interviews #marfa was a dream #Apparently #and that one time she posted her singing jm in the car #also that time at Newport folk festival with doveman #‘maybe that’s her shtick this time around’ #’to be full of shit?’ #’yah’ #that’s hot

[solitaria-fantasma]

Um for the Super Ghost AU I am just imagining that The Question managed to figure out basically everything about Gawain and the Mystery Skulls, but instead of it being his paranoia getting to him it's because he accidentally learned Gawain was a ghost, wanted to learn why he's a ghost and then he was going down the rabbit hole and by the time he climbed out of it he's just wondering what is Gawain's life, unlife, whatever and the life of his brother. Just, this came to me and refused to leave.

((*cracks knuckles*))

Question hadn't seen sunlight for nearly six days, and it had finally paid off.

He leaned over his hands on the edge of the desk, staring at the pin board before him. It was crisscrossed with color coded strands of yarn, and little push pins that held up photographs, newspaper and magazine clippings, and printed Internet screenshots. It wasn't the most complicated web he'd ever built, but it tied up neatly, and that was enough. Not every mystery had a a million twists to unwind.

The trail started in London, England, and stretched all the way across the Atlantic to a tiny town in Texas, USA, barely large enough to be a speck on a map. He had birth records, school enrollment records, science fair awards, promotions, Visa applications, mortgages, home appliance purchases, swing dance trophies, company picnic photos, a missing person's report, and an obituary, all leading to a giant question mark scribbled over a photo of a young blond man, with the word 'whereabouts?' written beneath it.

This photo connected to the next item in the chain with a quick arrow of blue, and another long, arching arrow connected a birth record from earlier in this leg to the same thing - a newspaper article from that small Texas town, talking about the mysterious case of a young boy with amnesia being found on the steps of a local restaurant. There was an article about the boy's adoption just a few months later, and then another article congratulating three local kids and their dog for solving a small time mystery.

The chain ran through several articles like this one, and the kids grew older as their mysteries evolved from misplaced mail and lost pets to package theft, poltergeist activity, and cryptid sightings. More and more, the articles talked about ghosts, creatures of urban legend, and even sightings of demons and occult activity. Around 2008, the newspaper articles became printed blog posts, and seemed to be written by the kids themselves.

Question laughed quietly to himself. Kids after his own paranoid heart, all three.

The articles came to an abrupt halt in 2014, with a missing persons report for the amnesiac boy (now an adult), and a series of articles about a groundbreaking prosthetic limb, developed by a genius young man who tested his prototype on himself after tragically loosing his own arm. There were a few more articles about the prosthetic, and a few photos to go along with them that showed the blond man from previous articles, and then there were a few clippings of local tabloids from a truck driver who swore he'd been carjacked by 'a flaming skeleton with great fashion sense'.

There was silence for a month or two, and then concurrent newspaper articles and blog posts about the miraculous return of one Lewis Pepper, thought to be dead from the same tragic caving accident that cost his best friend his arm. The blog posts about the supernatural returned, and the prosthesis research seemed to slow down. Coincidentally, a young man named 'Merlin Knight' with an eerily familiar face was hired at the local auto shop.

Question wondered if the entire town was playing dumb, or just stupid. The only real change was the clothing, and that long blond hair being braided.

This employment record connected all the way back to the obituary from the first leg of the chain, and proceeded on to connect with screenshots from a social media account of a robotic body, and the building of what would be, within a few month's time, the town's own local hero.

Question breathed out through his nose. A local hero who would go on to help save the world, and found the Justice League itself. Had that been part of the plan?

The web wrapped itself up quickly from there. Supernatural skills and abilities not possible by modern science, knowledge of other realms and creatures only known to mythology, and the tiny little clues he'd been hoarding and observing for a full year all pointed to the same conclusion. It wasn't as fantastical as it sounded, in all honesty, though Green Arrow had looked at him stranger than usual when he'd first said his conclusion out loud.

There were legitimate aliens, sorcerers, and demons in this reality - why not ghosts, too?

There was one final piece missing from the web, however, and he was out of clues to tie in. There was a near twenty year gap between the last known sighting of Gawain Kingsmen, and the appearance of 'Merlin Knight'. What had the man been doing for all that time? There had been no sightings of anyone even remotely matching the appearance of Gawain or 'Merlin' anywhere in that time, and without even the slightest whisper of a rumor on an Internet forum or library archive, there wasn't much more he could do to find out.

Question straightened up from the desk, and rolled his shoulders to try and stretch them out. There was no way around it.

He was going to have to get more...direct from here on out.

.......

"What does a dead man do for twenty years?" Gawain froze with a potato wedge half-raised to his shoulder at the question, and Bran - unwilling to wait for her snack - leaned her head down to snatch it up anyway. Gawain turned his yellow LED eyes over to Question, who had planted himself in the chair across the table without so much of a 'hello', and tilted his head.

"...I'm sorry," He apologized. "But I'm not sure I know what you mean."

"I know you do." Question leaned one elbow on the table. Bran nudged Gawain's still-raised hand, hoping for more potatoes, and the hero absently picked up another wedge to feed to her. "I know most people believe the 'advanced AI' cover story, but I'm not most people. I know you're a ghost possessing an armored suit like that old anime." The potato wedge vanished, and Question wondered if the little ghost was actually eating it, or just storing it for later.

That was a mystery for another time, regardless.

Gawain had turned to face him fully, now, and his two other ghostly companions were now peeking out of hiding from behind his shoulders. They weren't hostile, but their stares were, nonetheless, intense, and Question smiled behind his mask. He knew he had their full attention, now.

"How did you find out?" Gawain asked, keeping his voice low.

"I saw you from the ground in that fight with Mr. Sorcerer Superior, Magnus Creed." Question replied. "You ran into that warding slip like a bird into a clean window. A robot wouldn't have been stopped by mere paper and superstition." Gawain tilted his head slightly to one side.

"Some superstitions hurt." He argued, just the slightest bit defensive. "...what was your question, again?"

"What does a dead man do for twenty years?" Question asked. "There's a two decade gap between your presumed death and your reappearance. You could stand to work on that secret identity, by the way." He advised. "Someone's going to notice your resemblance to a dead guy from twenty years ago, if you ever let down your hair." Gawain's LED eyes narrowed, and one of the spirits - Chopper, the one with the upright spines - hissed in response.

Vixen walked by with John Stewart at her side, and both Chopper and Gawain made a visible effort to drop any outward signs of irritation. Question remained where he was. People were used to seeing him tense and suspicious, by now. It wouldn't raise a single eyebrow.

"...I was lost." Gawain spoke up quietly once Vixen and John had passed out of earshot. "I woke up in the middle of an unfamiliar forest, and I just couldn't get out. Not for a while."

"You were lost in a forest for twenty years?" Even Question sounded skeptical. "I've seen what you're capable of. You should have been able to handle a little thing like being lost."

"It was ten years," Gawain retorted sharply. Bran raided his plate for the remaining potato wedges. "And I wasn't just...born being able to do that stuff. I had to grow into it. I had to learn." A strange gust of air blew past the table, scattering someone's forgotten paper plate and napkin to the floor, before Gawain unclenched his fists, and visibly calmed down. Question still didn't move.

"Death...does things to you." Gawain lowered his voice again. "To your mind. You can't think straight for...a long time - and that's if you're lucky." He lowered his hands to the table, and Bran automatically wound herself around one arm with a pleased sound. "I found my way out of the forest after ten yes, and then I went...home. To Tempo."

"Your parents had moved away by then." Question knew. He knew how the story of the living family had played out, from there. "Your brother was living with your uncle, and your friends were off at college." Gawain's shoulders drooped, and the third spirit - Griflet, if he remembered right - patted at the side of his helmet sympathetically. Chopper was still glaring at him.

"They had." Gawain made no effort to hide the disappointment in his voice. "I guess I couldn't fault them for not wanting to stay in town after all they went through, but back then, I didn't know it had been ten years. It only felt like a few days, to me."

"That must have been difficult." Question said, and he meant it. Sympathy wasn't really his thing, but Gawain was being cooperative, so it was the least he could do. "And the other ten?"

"I was hiding." Gawain laughed humorlessly. "I somehow convinced myself that my family-...that my brother, and my uncle, would be afraid of me, if they saw me like that, and I just...never came forward." He shrugged. "I just sort of watched, and listened, and followed them for another ten years, and I thought that was pretty good, you know?

"I couldn't interact with them, sure, but at least I could still see them. It was...better than nothing." The hero fell silent, for a few moments, and then looked Question in the eye. Or...as close as he could get. The featureless mask tended to throw off people's frame of reference for facial features. "What are you going to do now?"

"Absolutely nothing." Question casually leaned back in his own chair. "I've already put the pieces together. This was just the last piece I needed to finish the story." He stood up, and pushed the chair in under the table. "This time, I just wanted to satisfy my own curiosity." Gawain seemed surprised, and remained sitting as Question walked out of the cafeteria.

He could feel four pairs of eyes burning into his back, but for once, being watched didn't bother him. Curiosity killed the cat, they said, but satisfaction brought it back, and Question was very much satisfied with this answer.

Now, he could focus on more important matters...like the long-ignored connection between Girl Scout cookie sales and the appearance of crop circles in Midwest America.

#mun's writings #ask #Anon #Gawain #Reptilitones #AU: Super Ghost #((I haven't written with Question before so pls forgive me if he's a little out of character)) #((thank you for the prompt!!)) #((I know your original prompt involved the Skulls a lot more but this was getting long)) #((I'll see if I can do a part 2))

[random-thought-depository]

@multiheaded1793, continuing from my response to this, I wrote up some alternate history scenarios for the 2020 election to illustrate to you how I think this sort of discourse would be happening in multiple very different scenarios. I think there’s only one scenario that centrist liberals wouldn’t interpret as vindication of their beliefs, and that’s a huge Dem win with a leftist like Sanders at the top of the ticket (a resounding democratic leftist victory is the one experience that’s incompatible with their beliefs about politics!).

It would have been more elegant to just tag you about this, but for some reason I can’t.

These aren’t “proper” alternate history scenarios, e.g. the Sanders victory scenario is “worked backward” to give a final result that’s basically just like OTL, cause the “joke” of the scenario is that the result is basically exactly the same but it’s interpreted differently because it’s Sanders at the top of the ticket instead of Biden. I think “realistically” a Sanders victory scenario would be more different. Or maybe not; one possible interpretation of the 2020 election is elections are very deterministic and it basically doesn’t matter who the candidates are, in which case if we could see a Sanders victory world we might indeed be shocked by how similar their election results maps are to ours.

I hope I didn’t make any silly mistakes. It’s hard to remember and keep track of the twists and turns of this election and the complexities of the United States’s kludgey spaghetti-coded election system! This is why I prefer writing science fiction: there’s less of a chance of getting something wrong!

Anyway, I hope you’ll find these entertaining if nothing else. Warning, this is kind of long.

Resounding Biden victory world:

The point of divergence that leads to this world is obscure. Perhaps it happened decades or centuries or even millennia ago. Whatever the differences are, for a long time they remained hidden in the vast but subtle sociological forces that do more to shape history than all the politicians, generals, philosophers, and prophets. It was only on November 3rd 2020 that these differences produced a manifestation on the flashy surface of politics, as a volcanic eruption might alert humanity to vast slow movements happening in the hot darkness deep within the Earth. On November 3rd 2020 the Democrats get the resounding victory and resounding repudiation of Donald Trump that they were hoping for.

The differences become obvious on election night. As in our world, there is a “red mirage” created by in-person voters favoring Republicans while mail voters favored Democrats, and this briefly creates the impression that the Republicans are doing surprisingly well, but with a much more lopsided vote this “red mirage” lifts much more quickly than in our world. Wisconsin and Michigan flip blue relatively early on election night, while swing state after swing state goes into the Biden-lead column: Arizona, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania ... Texas. Not long into election night Texas flips blue for the first time in two generations; when the news goes out on the TV a hundred million liberals cheer and a hundred million conservatives groan as it becomes obvious that the Republican Party is headed not merely toward defeat but toward a historic once-in-a-generation disempowerment and humiliation. Trump reacts predictably, going on TV to make baseless allegations that he is only losing because of massive voter fraud, but against the background of such a monumental defeat it seems more comical and pathetic than anything else. By the time the sun rises over the CONUS Atlantic coast on November 4th the election is basically all over except for the formalities.

In this world Joe Biden wins all the states he won in our world, and he also wins North Carolina, Florida, and Texas. He also wins one of Nebraska’s electoral votes (as in our world), and wins all four of Maine’s electoral votes (in our world he only won three of Maine’s four electoral votes). Trump still wins Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri, but they’re thin squeaker victories, instead of the comfortable margins of victory he enjoyed in those states in our world. The final electoral college count is Biden 389, Trump 149 (in our world it’s Biden 306, Trump 232). In the popular vote the election is a spectacular landslide blow-out, with over 85 million people voting for Biden while only a little over 50 million people voted for Trump (as of the count on 11/25/2020); Biden’s huge popular vote margin of victory doesn’t make any difference legally but it’s a nice solid symbolic repudiation of Trump.

The picture elsewhere is somewhat less spectacularly rosy for Democrats, the big story of this election being more repulsion toward Trump than repulsion toward Republicans in general. Still, the overall picture is very good for Democrats.

Doug Jones loses his seat in Alabama as he did in our world, but in this world Democrats pick up Senate seats in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, and Maine (in our world only Arizona and Colorado flipped to the Democrats). This gives the Democrats a net gain of four seats and a 51 seat majority, with a strong possibility of picking up the other Georgia Senate seat in the run-off election in January 2021. It’s a very thin majority, leaving them vulnerable to conservadem defections, but it’s probably about as good as could realistically be expected under the circumstances. In the House of Representatives the Democrats increase their majority to 243 seats (it was 235 seats after the 2018 “blue wave”); it wasn’t needed, but it’s nice to have. Democrat governors are elected in Vermont and New Hampshire (unlike in our world, where Republicans won those races). Perhaps best of all, the Democrats do well in the state legislature races, and that means they will control much of the next round of redistricting; the consequences of that may profoundly shape the political landscape in the future.

The most obvious discourse implication of this result is an apparent vindication of the Biden strategy of inoffensiveness and reaching out to affluent suburban centrist swing voters. The “Bernie can’t win, we need an electable moderate to take down Trump” people are feeling totally vindicated and credibly claiming credit for this huge victory and drawing lessons for the future that basically amount to “the strategy we advocated was clearly the correct one and we should keep doing it”; they think that if it had been Sanders at the top of the ticket the Democratic victory would have been much narrower or not happened at all. The 2020 election result map also suggests a new geography for the Democratic Party. While the blue wall held this time, in the context of this resounding Democrat victory it looks kind of Trumpy: Trump still won Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa (barely), the Democrat candidate lost the Senate race in Iowa, and Biden’s margins of victory in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania aren’t overwhelming. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has made huge inroads into the south on the strength of southern blacks, Latino/as, and highly educated affluent suburban white swing voters. Political analysts observe that Biden could have lost the Blue Wall and Texas and still narrowly won (with 304 electoral votes). The “recipe” for the huge Biden win was to get lots of non-white votes while peeling off suburban moderates. This strategy is likely to get more effective in the future as the non-white population grows and the country becomes increasingly educated. Put together, this suggests that the Democrat faction in the ascendance will the the moderate “identity politics” faction that wants the Democratic Party to be an economically centrist and institutionally moderate-reformist minority advocate party (think: the sort of people who unironically see “more black lesbian CEOs” as a significant metric of social improvement). On the uglier fringes, this shades into the idea that the Democratic Party doesn’t need those Trumpy culturally conservative poor white people and should just leave them to vote for Republican politicians and rot.

On the left flank, response is divided. Some think that Trump was so bad a potted plant with a smiley face could have won a huge victory against him so the actually existing huge Democratic victory means very little; they think a more leftist party with somebody like Sanders at the top of the ticket would have done even better (a favorite argument of theirs is to paint the mere 51 seat Democrat Senate majority as pathetic). Others think the moderates are probably right about their strategy being the most effective one; it’s hard to argue with spectacular tangible success.

On the Republican side of the aisle, Trump and his hard-core supporters are digging in their heels and claiming with no evidence that the Democrats only won because they cheated. In the other parts of the Republican party, there’s a lot of soul-searching and distancing themselves from Trump and rats fleeing the sinking ship. A decisive repudiation of Trump-style politics within the Republican Party seems likely.

The version of me that exists in this world really enjoyed election night. He bought a nice dinner for himself to celebrate and sat back and enjoyed watching the Republicans get what was coming to them. He has a fond memory of joyously yelling “HE’S BODIED! HE’S FIRED!” as Texas flipped blue. He was in a good mood for days after the election. He feels kind of conflicted about the wider implications of this election though. It sure will be nice to have Trump gone, and the decisive repudiation of Trumpism sure is nice, but... Joe Biden will have most of what he needs to be the next F.D.R., but will he want to be that? Probably not. He still wistfully thinks it would have been better if Sanders or Warren was up there: they might really do something with a once-in-a-century opportunity like this! He expects Biden and his centrist faction to more-or-less squander it. And he’s very much aware of what factions within the Democratic Party will reap a huge PR win from this victory, and he doesn’t enjoy thinking about it. He’s not looking forward to watching Kamala Harris’s inauguration speech in 2024. Still, this will be an opportunity for the left to build. Maybe if A.O.C. can primary Harris in 2024... And if it was Sanders or Warren at the top of the ticket they might have lost, so maybe this is the best that could realistically be hoped for. He’s decided that for now he’s just going to enjoy the beautiful knowledge that Donald Trump’s Presidency will end on January 20th 2021; the future can be worried about when it comes.

Narrow Sanders victory world:

The primaries:

Perhaps this world too was subtly different from ours long before the differences effected the flashy surface of politics, but the obvious point of divergence between this world and ours is Joe Biden unknowingly accidentally eating some contaminated food on February 23rd 2020 (the day after the Nevada caucuses). On the evening of February 23rd he becomes violently ill and is taken to a hospital, where he is diagnosed with a very serious case of food poisoning. His symptoms are severe and there is a tense period when his doctors are not sure he’ll survive. There’s a miscommunication somewhere along the line, and on the night of February 23rd a member of Biden’s staff tells a reporter he’s ready to leak a huge scoop: Joe Biden is dying. By the morning of February 24th the story has hit the presses.

Reports of Joe Biden’s imminent demise prove greatly exaggerated. Though Biden’s illness is severe, it passes quickly: by late morning on February 25th Biden has more-or-less recovered and is out of the hospital and being driven to an airplane that will take him to South Carolina, where he will hit the campaign trail, trying for that win he needs to save his floundering campaign. Still, the incident raises concerns about his health and age at the worst possible time. On February 29th Joe Biden gets the big win he needs in the South Carolina primary, but it’s not quite as big as in our world; the delegate count from South Carolina is this world is Biden 37, Sanders 17 (in our world it was Biden 39, Sanders 15). It is a portent of things to come. With the food poisoning incident raising concerns about Biden’s age and health, different political calculations are made, and Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar don’t sacrifice their Presidency ambitions to give Biden a clear shot at the nomination.

With Buttigieg and Klobuchar still in the race super-Tuesday is a bit of a muddle, instead of the clear Biden victory it was in our world. Sanders wins the west, manages a narrow plurality win in Texas, and manages a strong second or third place in many other states. The super-Tuesday map is rich with southern states where Biden’s conservative reputation and connections with the black community serve him well, and Biden does well. If Democratic primaries were winner-take-all Biden would have managed the sort of resounding victory he had in our world, but they are proportional, so Buttigieg and Klobuchar cut deep into his delegate share and he’s unable to top Sanders the way he did in our world. Amy Klobuchar gets a plurality win in her home state of Minnesota, and Klobuchar and Buttigieg do well in the northeastern states, allowing Sanders to claim plurality wins in all of them. After throwing an obscene mountain of money at the primaries, Michael Bloomberg performs disappointingly. Elizabeth Warren also performs disappointingly. Political analysts in this world see the big winners of super-Tuesday as Sanders and Biden. Biden has gone from floundering to being the clear front-runner among the moderates. Sanders doesn’t really perform all that much better than in our world, but with the moderate vote split he comes out of super-Tuesday the biggest winner, with a solid delegate lead and a good enough performance to look like a strong candidate.

A few days after super-Tuesday Michael Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren drop out of the race and Elizabeth Warren endorses Bernie Sanders. Sanders is the biggest winner from this, as the left flank of the Democratic Party now fully consolidates around him while the moderates remain divided.

The next round of primaries is March 10th. It’s again a muddle, which ultimately favors Sanders. Joe Biden wins big in Mississippi, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg do fairly well, and Sanders wins in Washington and manages a solid second or third place in most other places, which given the proportional nature of Democratic primaries means he continues to build a plurality delegate lead.

The Democrat machine politicians can see where this is going and don’t like it. They well remember what happened to their Republican counterparts in 2016, when a divided field helped their insufficiently house-trained disruptive outsider candidate win the nomination and ultimately the Presidency. They have no intention of letting the same story play out on the opposite side of the aisle in 2020. Having proved himself with his good performance on super-Tuesday, Joe Biden has re-established himself as the Democrat establishment’s favored candidate, and pressure is brought on Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg to drop out. In mid-March Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg suspend their campaigns and endorse Joe Biden.

Sanders and Biden head into their first one-on-one round on March 17. Biden wins big in Florida, while Sanders gets a modest majority of the vote in Illinois and consolidates his dominance of the west by winning in Arizona.

Meanwhile, COVID19 has been spreading as in our world. By mid-March cities all over the country are under shelter-in-place orders and the Democrats are scrambling to try to figure out how to manage a still very competitive primary election in the middle of a once-in-a-century plague year. Then, in late May, the next punch comes; George Floyd dies as he did in our world, and as in our world his death catalyzes a huge eruption of protest and civil unrest.

The whole thing feels queasily mystical. It is as if someone Upstairs thought the Donald Trump Presidency wasn’t as exciting as they’d hoped it would be and tweaked the parameters of the simulation to make 2020 an Interesting Times speed run. Donald Trump seems to only become more vicious and delusional as he presides over a country increasingly riven with civil unrest and fully under the power of the coronavirus. The streets are eerily quiet, like tombs, when they are not increasingly filled with protest and rage and violence. Bernie Sanders is claiming dominion over the Democratic Party and seems poised to do for the left what Donald Trump did for the right. Opinions are divided about exactly how that last thing feels queasily mystical. Is it the light rising to challenge the growing darkness? Or is the horseman of socialism riding with the horseman of plague and the horseman of civil strife? Whatever value judgments one makes about what’s happening, it seems that the old order is being pummeled from many directions simultaneously and is being driven to its knees. Or perhaps it is dying in the way an AIDS patient might die; killed by half a dozen secondary infections that are all fundamentally consequences of the same disease.

With Klobuchar and Buttigieg out of the race Biden surges. In the later one-on-one primaries against Sanders, Biden usually either wins or comes in a strong second. Biden is particularly strong in the south; he wins big in almost every southern state. Many are surprised by the strength of Biden, who many had previously dismissed as an uncharismatic doddering old man who seemed to struggle to string together coherent sentences. However, unlike in our world, in this world Sanders looks like a winner, so many fence-sitters who voted for Biden in our world vote for Sanders in this world, so Biden is unable to dominate the later primaries the way he did in our world.

The final Democratic primary debate in April looks much like it did in our world: two old men in a mostly empty room; an elbow-bump instead of a handshake because they don’t want to risk coronavirus infection by getting close to each other. It’s a test of how well the notoriously gaffe-prone Biden will do in a one-on-one debate, and he passes that test fairly well, allaying fears that he may have some sort of age-related cognitive decline. Biden’s promise to choose a woman as his Vice President is a clever bit of political maneuvering; Sanders is clearly unprepared for it and struggles to respond gracefully. The only big difference is the mostly unstated background knowledge of who is winning and who is losing. In this world Sanders comes into the April debate fresh from an unspectacular but fairly solid win in the Wisconsin primary.

With neither candidate able to dominate the race the Democratic primary remains competitive into June in this world. Biden gains on Sanders, but is unable to overtake him. Political pundits speculate that Sanders has an unfair advantage: he has an ally in the coronavirus: Biden’s vulnerable older supporters stay home in fear of the coronavirus, while Sanders’s younger and less vulnerable supporters go to the polls without fear.

In early June, Joe Biden and Democrat machine politicians face a choice. Biden can stay in the race to the bitter end. Maybe he can overtake Sanders, reach the magic 1,991 delegates, and go into the Democratic convention the unquestionably fair-and-square winner with a clear majority. Or if he can’t do that, he can still try to win on the conventional floor. Klobuchar’s and Buttigieg’s state-level delegates will be proportionately redistributed between him and Sanders, but their district delegates will be in free play and, with the blessings of Klobuchar and Buttigieg, will almost certainly back Biden. Biden can likewise probably expect the superdelegates to side with him. If it comes to convention floor politics Biden will probably easily crush Sanders. It will all be perfectly legally correct. It can even be credibly argued to be the will of the people; everyone knows Sanders is only winning because the moderate vote was split. But does the Democrat establishment dare alienate Sanders’s supporters this way, when they are going into one of the greatest political fights of the twenty-first century against Donald Trump? A long, bruising primary that drags into July may harm the party in the general election. And they know that inside Sanders’s clothing there is more than a man: there is the human mascot and spear-tip of a movement. Biden gaining the nomination through convention floor political maneuvers may be perfectly legally correct, but it takes no great political genius to see Sanders’s supporters will not see it that way; they will see it as their hero being undemocratically cheated out of his victory by a dirty trick. There is a great fear that if this course of action is taken Joe Biden’s 2020 nomination will go down in history as the twenty-first century equivalent of Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 nomination. And there’s also a real fear that a Sanders defeat by convention floor political maneuvers might trigger an eruption of violence as Sanders’s fanatical supporters respond by violently rioting in the streets. The fact that Sanders is so popular with the young, relevantly with fighting age men, starts to assume an ominous dimension in these speculations.

The last competitive primary happens on June 9th. Biden wins big in Georgia, while Sanders gets a surprisingly big win in West Virginia. The day after that, Joe Biden and top-level Democrat machine politicians make a decision. It is perhaps the most important decision of Joe Biden’s life. They will make a sacrifice for party unity in the face of Donald Trump. On June 11th 2020, Joe Biden goes on TV, announces that he is suspending his campaign, endorses Bernie Sanders, and urges party unity in the face of Trump. Immediately afterward, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Bloomberg also endorse Bernie Sanders.

The general election:

In August, it is announced that Elizabeth Warren has been chosen to be Sanders’s Vice President if he wins. There is speculation that there was a deal made to get her to drop out and endorse Sanders in March and this was the reward she was promised, though she is a logical choice in important ways. She has name recognition, has similar politics to Sanders while being somewhat younger than him (unusually important in this election because Sanders is so old and is an “outsider” candidate; he will need somebody who can pick up the torch from him if he dies in office, or in 2024 when he’ll be in his 80s), has a cooler and more analytical intelligence that compliments Sanders’s charisma, and may be attractive to some voters who are less enthusiastic about Sanders.

On August 17-20 the Democratic National Convention formally nominates Bernie Sanders as the Democratic Presidential candidate for 2020.

The mood among liberals going into the general election is tenser and less confident than in our world. Sanders has a lead over Trump in most polls, but the polls don’t look as good for the Democrats as they did in our world. And Sanders, a man who openly calls himself a socialist, a man who said something nice about something Fidel Castro did and dug in his heels when called in it, is a candidate who naturally inspires electability worries. Many liberals are convinced the Democratic Party has collectively made a terrible mistake, and hope they are wrong.

The first Sanders-Trump debate is on September 29th, and it’s the same kind of spectacle the first Biden-Trump debate was in our world. The highlight (or perhaps lowlight) is Trump making a “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by” statement which many interpret as a call to stand ready to act as brownshirts on his behalf. Some moderates have a vague idea that a Biden-Trump debate might have been somehow more dignified and Presidential, some leftists chuckle about how if it was Biden up there he’d probably have soiled his pants in the middle of the debate or something, the general sentiment among everyone to the left of Mitt Romney is simply that Trump lived down to their worst expectations.

The Vice Presidential debate between Mike Pence and Elizabeth Warren on October 7th is a note of normality: they actually sound like normal politicians instead of like two old men having a Thanksgiving table argument about politics while the rest of the family wishes they’d quiet down. There’s a 2020 touch when a fly rests on Mike Pence’s head for a few minutes.

In the final Sanders-Trump debate they put in a mute button to stop Trump from interrupting so much, and it’s actually a huge favor to Trump, disciplining him into actually being an actually not bad debater.

Election night and after:

The mood among liberals going into election night is tenser and less optimistic than in our world. There’s no confident expectation of a big blue wave and a resounding repudiation of Trumpism, and there’s a lot of fear that Sanders is simply unelectable and he will drag down the down-ballot with him.

Election night seems to confirm the worst. Swing state after swing state goes into the Trump-lead column, and aside from a couple of wins in the west the Senate race picture looks bleak for the Democrats. It looks like Trump will win Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania. Sanders’s margins of victory in crucial swing states are mostly tighter, so it takes longer for the “red mirage” to lift. One of the few bright spots for the Democrats is Arizona, which is a sour note for Donald Trump; at this point he’s mostly confident of victory, but losing Arizona is a humiliation, and Donald Trump hates being humiliated. Late in election night, Donald Trump goes on TV and makes a confident victory speech. He has some worries about the red mirage though, so in typical Trump fashion he follows his confident declaration of victory by claiming that the Democrats are committing voter fraud on a massive scale and trying to steal the election, and he says that the vote counts should stop. A defiant Sanders goes on TV and reassures his supporters that there are many voters yet to be counted, and then goes on the attack, saying Trump is blatantly trying to steal the election. He also says something that some interpret as a call for his supporters to riot if his victory is stolen from him, giving the left its own version of Trump’s “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by” scandal.

There’s a lot of tension in a lot of mixed-generation liberal households on election night, as older, more cautious and moderate liberals quietly or not so quietly blame the youngsters for the disaster they believe is unfolding in front of them. “This wouldn’t have happened with Biden or Mayor Pete or Klobuchar,” they think, “How did you expect middle America to react to a guy who calls himself a socialist and defends Fidel Castro? We told you this would happen!” The election picture most liberals go to bed with that night is bleak.

In the last dark pre-dawn hours of November 4th the red mirage finally begins to lift. Wisconsin flips to Sanders-lead. By late morning on November 4th Michigan has also flips to Sanders-lead. Millions of older liberals who went to bed blaming the Berniebros for four more years of Donald Trump check the news and breathe a sigh of surprised relief: it’s not much but maybe Bernie did have what it takes after all; he managed something he needed to do, something Hillary Clinton failed to do: he held the blue wall! All eyes now turn to Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania actually flips somewhat earlier than in our world, to the absolute jubilant delight of young liberal “Berniebros,” the cautious relief of their liberal elders, and the disappointment or outrage or terror of a hundred million conservatives. Not long afterward, a surprise: Georgia flips to Sanders-lead too. It’s a real squeaker, even tighter than Biden’s Georgia win in our world, and Sanders would have won without it, but it’s a pleasant surprise for liberals.

With the election basically all over but the formalities Sanders makes his formal victory speech, with raucous cheers from enthusiastic supporters. In contrast to the almost therapeutic victory speech Biden gave in our world, Sanders’s victory speech is darker, angrier. The speech has its hopeful and conciliatory notes, but the general thrust of its message is that Sanders intends to fight for the ordinary American and his fight has just begun.

Sanders’s victory is greeted with an outpouring of joy and celebration by his often young supporters. Most liberals are happy just to get rid of Trump. Many moderate liberals aren’t really looking forward to what they see as another four years of an obnoxious angry extremist in the White House, but at least Sanders isn’t evil. On the right the mood ranges from grumpy disappointment to ... dark. There’s a significant number of people who are under the sincere impression that Sanders is basically Lenin and the relationship between him and Antifa is similar to the relationship between Hitler and the Blackshirts.

So far the much-feared Trumpist brownshirts seem to be a paper tiger; there have been some rowdy protests but no serious violence. Lots of people are very fervently hoping things stay that way.

Somewhere there’s an immigrant from China who’s old enough to remember the Cultural Revolution and is very, very frightened. She doesn’t follow politics much but she’s heard that Bernie Sanders is a communist and she’s got just the right mix of garbled information about him filtered through her Fox News watching neighbors to be very alarmed. It’s starting here too! It’s all starting again! She’s trying to give her family a crash-course in how to survive in a communist dictatorship, but they’ve never known anything but freedom and don’t seem to be taking her very seriously, which is frustrating and heartbreaking to her; “they don’t realize these things will soon be matters of life and death!”

Comparing the election results in our world and in this world, most people would be struck by how similar they look, how little difference the top of the ticket made.

Compared to Biden, Sanders did better in the west but worse in the south. He did worse with affluent moderates and center-rightists and better with liberals and poor people. He did worse with blacks but better with Latino/as. He actually has a bigger popular vote win than Biden, mostly because he creates greater enthusiasm in liberal areas such as California, but his margins of victory in swing states are mostly tighter. Sanders didn’t poll as well as Biden in the lead-up to the election, but he also did not underperform expectations in the same way; Sanders supporters tend to be the sort of people who don’t answer polls much. Compared to Biden, Sanders’s success relied less on peeling off swing voters and more on bringing in politically disengaged people; the sort of people who don’t answer polls much, don’t trust or like the talking heads on TV, usually don’t vote, and are usually poorer and less formally educated than the conventional electorate. In short, the “dark horse” Sanders voter looks a lot like the “dark horse” Trump voter.

In short, compared to Biden, Sanders has a rather Trumpy profile, and his winning strategy looks kind of like a sort of left-wing mirror of Trump’s 2016 winning strategy: super-charge the base, draw in some politically disengaged people, rely on partisan tribalism to fill in the gaps, with this build the sort of narrow winning coalition that can just manage to defy conventional political wisdom and propel an “extreme, outsider” normally “unelectable” candidate into office.

Sanders won the same states Biden won in our world. His margins of victory are bigger in Arizona and Pennsylvania but smaller in Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia. Sanders didn’t win that one electoral college vote in Nebraska, which in this world went solidly to Trump, so his electoral college total is slightly smaller than Biden’s.

In the Senate, the picture is broadly similar to our world, though with some differences. Warren and Sanders were both Senators from states with Republican governors who would have the responsibility of appointing their replacements if Sanders became President. The governor of Vermont agrees to appoint a Democrat-aligned independent to replace Sanders if he wins (much as he did in our world), but the governor of Massachusetts intends to appoint a Republican to replace Warren. However, the Democrats did get one stroke of luck in this world that they didn’t get in ours: the Democrat Senate candidate won in Iowa; this saves Warren from going down in history as having cost the Democrats a Senate majority by accepting the Vice Presidency post. Other than this the Senate picture looks basically just like in our world. This puts the Democrats in a somewhat better position than in our world, as there will be a special election for Warren’s Senate seat in 2021 that is likely to elect a Democrat, but the Senate majority is going to come down to two run-off races in Georgia, just like in our world. The House races went a little worse for the Democrats than in our world: as of 11/25/2020 the Cook Political Report calls the House as 220 Democrats, 213 Republicans, and 2 uncalled races (in our world it’s 222 Democrats, 210 Republicans, and 3 uncalled races). Likewise, the governor’s races went the same way they went in our world, except that the Republican also won the governor’s race in North Carolina (in our world, the Democrat won that race). And the state legislature races are the same depressing picture as in our world, so Republicans will control much of the next round of redistricting.

The post-election discourse:

Of course, people in this world cannot compare their election results with ours and see how similar they are. They can only speculate about what our world might look like, just as I can only speculate about what their world might look like. And speculate they do.

Many centrist, moderate, and “pragmatist” Democrats think they know exactly who’s to blame for the Democrat’s disappointing performance: Sanders, and by extension the primary voters who put him at the top of the ticket. How could a President be as bad as Trump was, get 250,000 U.S. citizens killed through incompetence, and then come so close to winning? How could so many people vote for such a person and for the politicians who did nothing to stop him and aided him? Well, maybe if the opposition party did something incredibly, mind-bogglingly stupid, like putting at the top of the ticket a guy who openly calls himself a socialist and who defends Fidel Castro... They are convinced that the election results look the way they do because Sanders turned off huge numbers of persuadable voters. They think the Berniebros took the perfect storm of conditions for a once-in-a-century huge Democrat victory that was 2020 and used it to get an ordinarily unelectable extremist into the White House, at an enormous opportunity cost to the rest of the party (and a little less luck and they’d have blown their own goal too and gotten everyone four more years of Trump!). They are convinced that if it were Biden or Klobuchar or Buttigieg at the top of the ticket the party would not be in this mess. Many of them are sure that the Democratic Party would have surged magnificently to crushing dominance of the Presidency and both branches of Congress, if only the Berniebros hadn’t insisted on burdening the party with a toxic albatross.

The predictable tweets and thinkpieces blaming the disappointing election results on Sanders have been written. The disappointing results in the south are blamed on Sanders’s inability to reach out to black people and persuadable white moderates. Somebody looks at exit polls, notices Trump seems to have improved his performance with everyone except white men (a pattern that exists in our world too), and multiple high-profile articles and blog posts are written blaming this on Sanders’s “class reductionism” and supposed insensitivity to the problems of everyone who isn’t a working class white man. The election map represents the Democratic Party turning away from its vibrant diverse future and doubling down on its decaying past as the party of “white working class” Midwesterners. The fact that non-white people still overwhelmingly voted Democrat and Sanders has many female and minority supporters is, of course, quietly soft-peddled in such analysis. The disappointing election results are blamed on the Democratic Party’s embrace of socialism, of Medicare For All, of “defund the police,” of BLM. Criticism that paints Sanders as “class reductionist” and insufficiently sensitive to the needs of women and minorities coexists happily with criticism that castigates the Democratic Party for embracing anything that makes affluent culturally conservative suburban white people uncomfortable.

Many leftists are, of course, convinced that the moderates have it all backwards and the Democrats would have gone down in epic humiliating defeat under Klobuchar or Buttigieg or, God, can you imagine; Biden. The closeness of the election just shows how badly the Democrats needed a leader like Sanders who could inspire people and had something real to offer; without him the Republicans would have wiped the floor with them; he saved the party from total defeat and ingratitude and backstabbing is his predictable reward, because liberals would rather lose to fascists than win with leftists. It just shows electoral politics is a waste of time anyway, watch 2024 when Warren gets primaried by Mayo Pete who then loses to Tom Cotton.

The version of me that exists in this world had a tense election night, breathed a cautious sigh of relief when he opened his computer and saw Wisconsin had flipped blue in the morning, breathed a bigger sigh of relief when Michigan followed it, and spent a week feeling good when Pennsylvania finally flipped for Sanders. It’s a far from ideal election result, of course, with Sanders’s power likely to be sharply constrained, but still, there’s a President who might really do some good! If nothing else, he thinks Sanders will be good at using the soft power of the Presidency to shift the Overton Window. He’s very excited that Sanders will be going to the White House.

#politics #election 2020 #alternate history

[tigereyes45]

It was Ridiculous

This is my secret santa gift for @vonlipvig for the @redvsbluesecretsanta event. They asked for Epsilon angst and possibly Yorkalina with Lina remembering York. So I combined the too with just some general angsty feels from Carolina about anything. Sorry, it was a couple days late. I ran into some unexpected posting complications over break.

________________________________________________________________

Ghosts don’t exist. So the thought of an AI, assuming he’s a ghost that could interact with the physical realm was sort of hilarious. A mind that was so incapable of accepting any other possibility that it’s almost impossible to connect it back to her father. Then Carolina remembers how impossible it was for him to accept her mother’s death. All the sudden Church’s sudden disappearing when even slightly inconvenienced makes perfect sense.

Carolina watches the old Blood Gulch Canyon clips with a bitter sense of melancholy and a twisted kind of joy. Epsilon wasn’t like her father, but he had never been so dimwitted either. It’s strange seeing the memory possess more common sense than the Alpha. She wonders if it was because he was so broken that it was a struggle to hold on to as much as he could.

“York? What about Lina?” She could feel her eyes grow as her heart beats faster. She wasn’t even aware that Alpha had remembered her. It was strange hearing her the twisted voice of her father genuinely ask after her health. The fact that it was his first instinct after hearing York’s name struck a different kind of chord.

“She was already dead.”

Alpha doesn’t even bother to ask, how or why. He doesn’t question the death of just another freelancer. It doesn’t even register in his program that it’s something to collect his interest. Not the way it leaves her with so many questions. She continues watching, now having a closer timeline of when York was killed. Learning who was with him in his last moments. Once upon a time, she would have assumed it was Tex who had killed him. The ghost of her mother who had taken everything away. Her father’s attention, the reason for all the work, why she joined the military, the reason why she left it.

The one who got York killed.

Tex doesn’t bother to explain any further either. Neither care for the freelancer they barely knew they were so connected to. Texas probably still hated her, as much as Carolina now just feels apathy and regret.  That thing had never been her mother, but it was her last connection to her parents. As much as she hates to admit it.

She pauses the video and takes off her helmet. Somehow the air had only gotten colder in the valley, despite the days steadily getting warmer. Looking up the stars look so scattered from here. Back on Earth, they were so close together. Little clusters of galaxies miles away that humans had only ever hoped to reach one day. It was so easy to forget that they were living during those “one day”s now. Able to go anywhere in the matter of hours, days, and months. Travel anywhere, and she was spending her days here. On a planet nowhere, with a bunch of idiots that somehow managed to get her further than her team ever had. They had actually managed to help her relax. Carolina leans back on the roof of their bases. Kimball had spared no expense to give them a great place to settle down.

York had wanted to settle down with her once upon a time. He was a smooth talker from the first moment they met. She wonders if he had ever lost that annoyingly sweet side of his personality before the end. Who was the last person to hear him talk? Was it Tex? Did she ever mention it? So far the videos show nothing, but it’s possible that at some point someone was told off-camera. She could ask, but it probably wouldn’t matter.

“Hey there.”

Carolina tenses and grabs her helmet close. She was ready to throw it until she saw the half apologetic smile on Wash’s familiar face. He holds his empty hands up. “Sorry I should know better than to sneak up on you.”

“You should.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah just thinking.”

“I uh, sorry, but I was looking for you and I heard the video playing.”

Carolina laughs and slowly sets her helmet back down. “That’s my fault for playing it out loud. I should have kept it to the helmet. I just wanted to hear their voices out loud. I know how weird that sounds, but -”

“No, it’s okay. You uh, you had more of a history with them then I did.”

“Epsilon was in your head first.”

“Yeah well the Alpha was kind of like, well a copy of your dad wasn’t he?”

“Yes.” She leans back on her arms and kicks her legs lazily over the side of the roof.

“You weren’t really thinking about them were you?”

“I was for a little bit.”

“Oh.”

A one-sided awkward silence settles down as Wash practically falls on his ass next to her. For the first time, she realizes he had been drinking. From the looks of him, it had been more than enough to get him drunk. He looked like he was ready to pass out at any moment now.

“So your mom. Was she as much of a bitch as Texas was?”

“Wow Wash. Your poker game with the reds and blues must’ve gone well, because you have even less tact than usual.”

“Sorry.” He leans over the edge of the roof. His body slacks and for the first time in what felt like decades Wash smiles. This reaction to being reprimand was new. So many times Wash would immediately cave when being lectured. Other moments, her favorites, he would snark back with a sly smile before getting it smacked off his face. He had a few good jokes back then. His humor had only gotten better with the years, and changes.

“Don’t be. From what I remember she could be, though not as bad.”

“What about York?”

“What about him?”

“Was he always a dick?”

Carolina grabs Wash’s shoulder as he leans further over the roof. He slowly pulls his helmet off. As soon as his mouth was uncovered the coughing starts. Carolina’s back straightens up as she moves to hold Wash with both arms. As soon as he was steady the vomiting started. It was a mess of brown, green, and noodles. As his hacking slows, she glances over to see it had painted the side of the building. None of it made it to the ground.

As she looks back to Wash the slimy dribble slowly begins to cover her armor. At least it wasn’t much. A quick clean up and some wax there shouldn’t be any sign or smell of the best. The smell of beer and Tucker’s mystery stew was a sure-fire way to ruin any clear night. Carolina pulls Wash up along with her. Somehow he was still mostly able to stand, even if walking was a far more difficult endeavor.

“Sorry Lina.”

“Don’t be Wash. I needed something to pull me from my thoughts.”

“Epsilon was also always sad. Whenever he got started he couldn’t be stopped. He, he had nightmares.”

“It’s okay Wash. We don’t have to talk about it.”

They walk in mostly quiet as she guides him back to his room. The white halls were eerily quiet despite the fact the others were partying just next door. Any quiet now was enough to bring back memories. After Chorus it was easier to not think about her old team and her parents. Easier didn’t mean impossible though. The bright lights were harrowing for her they must’ve been agonizing for Wash right now, but the panel for the hall lights is all the way on the first floor. So re-acquainting himself with suffering will just be his lot in life for the next few minutes.

Wash groans as Carolina finally manages to drag him into his dark room. She drops him onto the bed and tears his helmet off. His head goes flying back as a broken whine escapes him. He sounded like a lost puppy that was kicked into a ditched. It almost hurts her to hear it. She wonders if she should take his armor off, but realizes that if he has any other kinds of problems it would be better to leave it on. She pulls the shades on the window open. One more lesson wouldn’t hurt him too much. After all, she did keep him from throwing himself off the top of the roof with his dinner.

“Lina,”

His voice was so soft it barely stopped her at the door. She turns around on her feet to see the soldier laying half off the bed. His leg and arm clung to the sheets to keep him up like a sloth on a spindly branch.

“Yeah Wash?”

“I’m sorry about York. About Leonard too.”

“Don’t be Wash.” She flips him back over onto the bed. With a few poor attempts to untangle the sheets, Carolina gives up and leaves them twisted around his arms and legs. Somehow a knot formed in the sheets along his stomach. “I was the one that got them killed.” She had been the person to hand her father the literal gun.

His armored hand rubs up and down her arm. It barely moves, but there’s an air of familiarity around it that she hadn’t felt in years. If neither of them had the armor on it probably would be soft. When was the last time she felt another person’s skin on hers? Or something just as simple as a hug?

“It wasn’t your fault Lina. Not really.”

“If you say so Wash. Now how about you go to sleep?”

“Yeah. Sleep sounds nice. Donut showed a home video he and Doc made. It was supposed, supp-ta, to be about his farm back on Earth. It was oddly se-”

“I’m sure it was Wash. The video is over now. It’s time to rest.”

“Fiiiine.”

“Good.” Carolina stretches before hanging in the doorway. It was weird being this friendly with people again. Let alone with Washington. She never even expected to know his name let alone care about his health. Yet here they were. Stuck in a galaxy far far away, as the last members of a special unit no one will even remember once they’re dead. She looks out the window to see the stars glittering off the lake. The bright white lights were all that made the planet outside visible right now, and they were dim from the reflection of the hall lights.

The project was destroyed and finally, Washington could relax. She could settle down just like she should have done with York all those years ago

#rvb #rvb angst #rvb fanfic #fanfiction #fanfic #red vs blue #carolina #epsilon #yorkalina #carwash siblings #washington #church #rvb church #rvb washington #rvb carolina #project freelancer

[fromtheringapron]

WCW Starrcade 1990

Date: December 16, 1990.

Location: Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, MO.

Attendance: 7,200.

Commentary: Jim Ross and Paul Heyman.

Results:

1. Bobby Eaton defeated The Z Man.

2. Pat O’Connor Memorial Tag Team Tournament, Round 1: The Steiner Brothers (Rick and Scott) (USA) defeated Col. DeKlerk and Sgt. Krueger (South Africa).

3. Pat O’Connor Memorial Tag Team Tournament, Round 1: Konan and Rey Misterio (Mexico) defeated Chris Adams and Norman Smiley (United Kingdom). 

4. Pat O’Connor Memorial Tag Team Tournament, Round 1: Mr. Saito and The Great Muta (Japan) defeated Rip Morgan and Jacko Victory (New Zealand). 

5. Pat O’Connor Memorial Tag Team Tournament, Round 1: Salman Hashimikov and Victor Zangiev (Russia) defeated Danny Johnson and Troy Montour (Canada). 

6. Michael Wallstreet (with Alexandra Yorke) defeated Terry Taylor. 

7. The Skyscrapers (Sid Vicious and Danny Spivey) defeated The Big Cat and The Motor City Maniac. 

8. Tommy Rich and Ricky Morton (with Robert Gibson) defeated The Fabulous Freebirds (Michael PS Hayes and Jimmy Garvin) (with Little Richard Marley). 

9. Pat O’Connor Memorial Tag Team Tournament, Semi-Final: The Steiner Brothers (Rick and Scott) (USA) defeated Konan and Rey Misterio (Mexico).

10. Pat O’Connor Memorial Tag Team Tournament, Semi-Final: Mr. Saito and The Great Muta (Japan) defeated Salman Hashimikov and Victor Zangiev (Russia).

11. Texas Lariat Match for the NWA United States Heavyweight Championship: Lex Luger defeated Stan Hansen (champion) to win the title. 

12. Street Fight for the NWA World Tag Team Championship: Doom (Ron Simmons and Butch Reed) (champions) (with Theodore Long) fought Arn Anderson and Barry Windham to a no-contest. 

13. Pat O’Connor Memorial Tag Team Tournament, Final: The Steiner Brothers (Rick and Scott) (USA) defeated Mr. Saito and The Great Muta (Japan). 

14. Steel Cage Match for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship Match: Sting (champion) defeated The Black Scorpion. 

My Review

The 1990 edition of Starrcade is an outright bad show. Amusingly bad, yes, but it’s still a pretty resounding failure. The cherry on the shit sundae, of course, is The Black Scorpion, one of WCW’s most infamous creative blunders. The storyline leading up to Starrcade was a lot of pulpy early ‘90s hokum⏤a mystery man, who may also be some sort of wizard, haunts world champion Sting for months with a groggy voice provided none other than Ole Anderson. It was completely ridiculous and demanded an equally ridiculous payoff.

What makes it suck so bad, however, is that not only is the reveal underwhelming, but it’s also boring. The Scorpion, first and foremost, is dressed like a masked jobber on an episode of WWF Superstars. Then it’s revealed the Scorpion is Ric Flair, the same man who Sting had already faced off with a billion times in the past two years. It’s admittedly interesting watching Flair try to completely abandon his style to play a new character, but the match itself is a by-the-numbers chore. Oh, and Dick the Bruiser is here as a terrible special guest ref who adds completely nothing. At least the Scorpion has the decency to enter the Kiel Auditorium through a spaceship that looks like your grandmother’s antique lamp.

But that’s not all, folks! We’re also treated to the Pat O’Connor Memorial Tag Team Tournament, featuring teams from all over the world. A noble ideal, but the talent pool is, um, underwhelming to say the least. For example, we get wrestlers billed from “South Africa” who clearly aren’t from that country. Not that it winds up mattering anyway, because the whole point is for the Americans to beat them all. The matches are also hindered by some blown finishes that really kill the mood. It’s just a series of missed opportunities that could’ve been much a cooler concept if they’d thought more outside the box than “Welp, America wins LOL!”

It should be noted this is the second out of four consecutive tournaments WCW would book for their biggest show of the year. This is firmly ensconced in the era where the booking for Starrcade started to get a little wonky, anyway. I’m not sure how much of it had to do with them trying to distance themselves from the NWA name as much as possible or what, but it took away from Starrcade’s standing as a marquee show. It says a lot about this time period for WCW⏤constantly throwing one gimmick out there after another in hopes something would eventually stick.

It’s kinda sad, because it’s clear they didn’t need to go so far out of their way to establish their own identity. So many pieces of the puzzle are present in this show, from the production to the roster. It’s when they work overtime in competing with the WWF that things falls apart, a mistake they’d go on to repeat several times over. Collision Course is a fitting tagline for Starrcade ’90, and I’m not talking about the tag tournament. The show is a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas and, like any collision, the result is a mess.

My Random Notes

Apologies for the blurry quality of the poster above. It’s practically the best version I can find right now. Cut a queen some slack in the midst of pandemic, eh? 

A few production notes: 1.) Why is the WCW logo on the entrance way always crooked? 2.) I love the blue and yellow ring apron, but the red and yellow ropes are a weird fit. 3.) We’re treated throughout the broadcast with Starrcade Stats, a cheeseball yet time-period appropriate concept giving us trading card details on each of the night’s competitors. For example, the Z-Man does a missile dropkick “if possible.”

Spot of the night goes to Col. DeKlerk who damns it all and hits one of most ill-conceived front flips of all time, which causes Rick Steiner to visibly corpse on camera.

Laugh at Team Russia all you want, but they absolutely would be at a singlet party in Provincetown during Bear Week if it were 2020.

I’m pretty supportive of having filler matches on pay-per-views, but what the hell was even the point of that Skyscrapers squash? Did they forget to book it on WCW Saturday Night and need to make up the minutes?

We get our first taste of the highly acclaimed commentary duo of JR/Paul Heyman. It’s a slightly awkward first outing. Heyman isn’t really the Heyman we’d come to know yet so he sometimes comes off as a second-rate Bobby Heenan. He tries making a joke that the Midnight Express broke up due to Yoko Ono, which is every bit as painful as it sounds.

You mean to tell me the best Canadian wrestlers they could find were Troy Montour and Danny Johnson, whom I’m not even sure are actual wrestlers?

This should go without saying, but the Fabulous Freebirds and their fetishization of the Confederate flag is, um, a huge amount of yikes in a 2020 context. I don’t know a whole lot about about the point of them having Little Richard Marley as their sidekick, but I don’t think I want to know.

As with the dawn of any new decade, the ‘80s were still alive in 1990 and you need to look no further than the Dynasty extras they put on this show as the flag-bearers, with hair almost as tall as those big ass stars on the entrance way.

This, amazingly, marks the first time I’ve seen Rey Misterio Sr. (or Rey Misteric, as he’s referred to in the Starrcade graphics). I’ve honestly never even Googled his name to see what he looks like. It does seem like his nephew has a much better handle on the high-flying maneuvers. He inexplicably launches himself over the top rope after his Round 1 match is over. I’m sure it made Col. DeKlerk proud.

#wwe network #wrestling #wcw #sting #ric flair #90s wrestling

[evilelitest2]

I've seen this floated around but how exactly is Texas going blue? And if it is how long will it take and will it be long term maybe even permanent?

Well there are quite a few factors in that direction.  Firstly, as a consequence of being the second largest state in the country, Texas has a large population, which naturally allows leftism to thrive.  Huston, Austin, and even Dallas are these little blue islands in the larger state.  Also as a large state, it has quite a few colleges and college towns, which also serve as these little blue islands.  And the suburbs are steadily turning blue across the whole nation and texas has a lot of those.  

And that is just the white population.  Texas has one of the largest latino populations in the nation, as well as a very large African American population, and a sizable Asian population.  The Black Texas are almost universally democrat, while the Latino and Asian populations trend in that direction.  The state is 52% white, 32% Latino, 12% Black, and a little under 4% Asian.  So despite how conservative texas is, it is actually moving in the direction of the left by the day.  And since Texas is one of the fastest growing states in the nation, most of its new residents are coming from blue states looking for more affordable living, as well as a lot of Mexican immigrants who steadily become citizens.  

In fact, Texas should be a blue state already, if it wasn’t for the fact that it has the MOST oppressive voter laws in the entire country, in fact protecting Texas was the main reason why Republicans got into voter suppression in the first place.  So if the democrats can pass a national right to vote act and allow actual democracy in that state, you likely will have a blue Texas and effectively secure democratic control over the presidency for decades, thanks to the Electoral College (which should be abolished).  The problem for democrats is that Texas is Huge, and therefore investing in the state infrastructure is really nightmarish, and for the democrats its always a question of “Do we put a ton of money in Texas or do we put that money in more easy to win states, like Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado”.  So once Texas turns blue, it is likely to stay that way, but the process of turning it blue takes more and takes more money.

This is why i”m really annoyed at Beto for running for president rather than Senate this time around.  Because his 2018 primary might have lost, he did a great job building up the democratic party in texas, and managed to win a lot of local and state races.  If he had built on his success in 2020, he likely would have lost the Senate race, but he could have done a lot to build up more and more infrastructure, and possibly helped us win in 2022 and 2024.    Still, Texas turning blue seems inevitable.  

#ask EvilElitest #Texas #Democratic Party #American Politics

[distant-rose]

Oreos at One-Thirty

Notes: Today is the two-year anniversary of the Little Pirates series. That’s right. On August 16th, 2017, I published the first installment of the series By the Hook. It’s insane to me to think I’ve been writing for this series so long and I couldn’t have done it without the amazing support of all my readers. While the first installment focused on Killian and Beth, I decided to celebrate the series by writing about Emma and Wes today. Thank you for everything and a special thank you to @optomisticgirl for constantly letting me spam her about this dumb ass universe. She’s a trooper. Summary: It’s the middle of the night and one of Emma Swan’s kids is out of bed. She’s not going to stand for this. Word Count: 2,500+ Rating: T

It was 1:30 in the morning when the stairs gave a small whine. It was a faint noise, one that most people wouldn’t notice.

But Emma Swan wasn’t most people.

She had never been the most peaceful of sleepers. The slightest of sounds had the tendency of waking her up, one of the many leftovers from living on the streets and staying in stolen hotel rooms. While a few of her habits from that time had faded, her light-sleeping habits seemed only be more honed with the birth of her children.

She laid there in her bed, ears straining for more movement and her hand automatically reaching for her nightstand where she hid her pistol. She would like to think that no one in Storybrooke would have the balls to attack her family in their home in the middle of the night, but with the number of villains and curses she had dealt with over the past couple of decades, she wasn’t willing to chance it. She glanced over at her husband, debating whether or not she should wake him. He was snoring away, completely unaware of the stirrings in their house, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to rob him of his sleep after some many late-night shifts at the station.

Her decision was made for her when there was another creak from the stairway, one that was only made when someone was putting their weight on the bottom step. She scowled in the dark.

There was no intruder in her house.

Someone was out of bed.

Muttering curses under her breath, she crawled out of the warmth of her own bed. Killian mumbled something in his sleep before shifting in the warm spot she had left behind and grasping at her pillow. If she wasn’t so annoyed with their kids, she would have smiled at the sight.

As she headed down the stairs, blue and white light danced across the walls followed by the faint chiming music of an advertisement for Old Spice. As she got halfway down, the identity of her little miscreant was revealed.

Her twelve-year old son was on her couch, watching television and stuffing not one, not two, not three but four Oreos into his mouth all at once.

“You got to be kidding me!”

Wes jumped at the sound of her voice, tipping over the large glass of milk he had been cradling in his elbow and sending the packet of cookies flying into the air. Emma’s mood only soured as she watched the mess spread across her leather couch and drip onto her brand new and very expensive carpet that she and Killian had bought two days ago.

“Uhhhhh…hi Mom…fancy seeing you here…” He scrambled a bit, looking around frantically for something before grabbing a half-eaten Oreo off the floor and holding it out to her. “Cookie?”

She gave him an unimpressed look, arching an eyebrow and crossing her arms in front of her chest as she regarded him. His blue eyes darted between her and the Oreo in his outstretched hand.

“What? Don’t believe in the five-second rule?”

“Westley.”

“I can get you a new cookie. It’s no big deal.”

“Westley Graham.”

“But it would be a total waste of a cookie and you know what Grandma Snow always says — waste not, want not.”

“Kid, it’s two in the morning.”

“Actually, it’s one thirty-two, so you’re—”

“Your bedtime is eight-thirty,” she cut him off, rubbing at her temples as her irritation with him rose.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Really? You do? So, you’re not actually here? You’re upstairs like you were supposed to be for the last six hours and I’m just hallucinating right now? I’m not actually witnessing you out of bed and destroying my furniture?”

“No, I’m here. I did actually go to bed at eight-thirty like you wanted…I just woke up and got bored. It’s not like we have a mandatory wake-up time.”

“You’re supposed stay in bed until six-thirty…” Emma replied through gritted teeth. Wes raised his eyebrows at her, looking disturbingly like Killian whenever he was feeling particularly obstinate.

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

“When?”

Emma pinched the bridge of her nose and mentally counted to ten to keep from screaming. When she looked back at her son, he was watching her with an expression that was caught between wary and amused. She was going to kill him.

“I’m saying it right now. Seriously. Kid, if you don't pick up that mess you’ve made of my living room and get your ass back in bed, so help me, I will tan your hide!"

“I’m pretty sure the law frowns upon child abuse.”

“Oh kid, you’re forgetting one teeny tiny detail, I am the law. Get some paper towels. Now.”

Catching her thunderous expression, Wes scrambled off the couch and headed into the kitchen. She was mildly impressed with how fast he was able to move on those skinny toothpick legs of his.

Emma let out a sigh, trying not to think about the ruined rug. Everything in her house was in a state of disrepair. The coffee table had watermarks on it. The couch had been broken more times than she could count. Even the television had small dents and scratches on the screen from the time Beth and Neddy had a lightsaber match that had gotten out of hand. What difference did it make that the brand new rug now had stains on it?

While waiting for her son to come back with paper towels, she went to work picking up the leftover Oreo crumbles on the couch. She deposited them in the empty side of the plastic container before sitting down on the dry side of the couch and turning her attention to the television. Her interest piqued as Dataline crossed the screen, detailing the disappearance of a young woman from Texas.

“They think her boyfriend did it,” Wes commented as he returned.

“What?”

“Christina Morris,” he replied, nodding his head towards the television. “They think her boyfriend kidnapped her. They’re not sure if he killed her or if he took her in Mexico or something.”

“Grim,” Emma remarked absently, picking up the last Oreo and biting it.

“Totally.”

“What the hell are you doing watching this in the middle of the night? You’re going to get nightmares from this stuff.”

“As if I don’t already have nightmares anyway,” he replied, not looking at her as he went about cleaning up the spilled milk.

Her anger and irritation melted away at his words, giving away to concern. She patted the place beside her. Wes hesitated, looking conflicted as he placed the soiled paper towels on the coffee table.

“Come here.”

He climbed onto the couch, placing some space between them. Emma was having none of it, pulling him by the shoulders and guiding his head into her lap like she often did when he was a much smaller boy and afraid of the dark. She brushed her fingers through his thick blond hair, frowning as she looked down at him.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“What’s got you so shaken up?”

“It’s just…” He trailed off, averting his eyes and swallowing his words.

“Wes…It’s better to talk about it.”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“I’m your mom, kid. I wiped your bottom when you were baby. Nothing gets more embarrassing than that.”

“Mom, c’mon,” he whined, turning on his side and pressing his face into her stomach. She didn’t press him any further. Even when he was a baby, he had never responded well to being pushed into things. He had inherited both her and Killian’s stubbornness in tenfold. Getting him to do anything when he was a toddler had been absolute nightmare and he had only gotten slightly better in age, replacing tantrums with a defiant look and firmly stated “no.”

So, she did what she felt was best in these type of situations. She waited for him to open up to her, continuing to run stroke his hair and watched what was left of the Dataline episode on her TV screen.  They were showing interviews with Christina’s suspect boyfriend before Wes mumbled something against her clothed belly, his breath warming the fabric.

“What was that?” she asked, pausing her ministrations.

“Clowns.”

“Clown?”

“Clowns,” he repeated. “You know like killer clowns. Like in that movie, you know, It?”

Emma shuddered. She remembered the Stephen King novel vividly. She had read it back in when she was in prison and had nothing but time on her hands. It had given her nightmares as well.  She was aware it had been turned into a movie a couple of times, but horror movies had never been her thing and she had little desire to actually watch it. She had found the story to be disturbing at eighteen, she couldn’t imagine how terrifying it was to a twelve-year old. He shouldn't be watching or reading things like that.

“Wait a minute,” she frowned, coming to a realization. “How do you know about It?”

“Henry!” Wes replied a little too quickly.

“You, Westley Graham Jones, are a liar and a terrible one at that,” Emma said pointedly, giving him a tired glare. “One, Henry hates horror movies... and possibly killer clowns more than you do. Two, he would never in a million years let you watch something like that. So, tell me the truth this time.”

“Okay, okay, okay. Just promise me you won’t get mad?”

“I’m making no such promises. Seriously, Wes. The truth.”

He let out a heavy dramatic sigh. He was becoming more and more moody as he had gotten older. He was going to be a nightmare teenager. Emma was sure of it.

“Gideon and I snuck into a showing of it during Halloween. He said if I didn’t it would be because I’m scared, and I’m not scared of anything—”

“Except clowns,” Emma cut him off. “Wes, that’s an R rated movie. Gideon is fourteen and even he’s not old enough to watch those kinds of movies. You certainly aren’t. There are ratings on things for a reason.”

“It’s just a movie,” he scowled at her.

“Yeah. A movie that scared you badly enough that you’re having nightmares and are up at all hours of the night feasting on Oreos,” she replied, looking at the demolished empty container. “Your father is going to kill you. His sweet tooth is almost as bad as yours.”

“So? You can just buy more.”

“You think money grows on trees, don’t you?” she asked, unimpressed with his answer.

“Well, money is made from paper and paper comes trees so there’s that.”

“Smart ass kid.”

“Better than being a dumb ass.”

“God, you’re so my kid it hurts sometimes,” she muttered under her breath, rolling her eyes.

He was staring up at her with that impish little grin that seemed to have permanent residence on his face since the time he could walk. He was a good kid though, even if he did sometimes eat all the Oreos and wake her up at all hours of the night. Out of her five children, Wes was the most like her; a little rough around the edges and sometimes a little too smart with his mouth, but he was never malicious. He was just a little too defensive and wanting to prove to be people he was tough. She had been the same at his age.

She wanted to soften those edges. Hers had been bore out of a need to survive; they had been necessary to endure group homes, bullies, being homeless, being in prison and then later as the Savior. Wes didn’t need them. Nothing was going to happen to him, not while she was still breathing.

“You know it’s okay to be scared right?” she asked after a moment.

“What?”

“Being scared of things. It’s normal.”

He scoffed at her words. “You’re not scared of anything.”

“That’s not true,” she sighed. “Want to know a little secret?”

He nodded wordlessly in response.

“I get scared a lot,” she admitted. “I get scared all the time of things – villains, bills, that I’m not being a good mom—”

“But you’re the best!” Wes protested, cutting her off.

“Thank you for the vote of confidence, let me finish,” she responded gently. “The point is sometimes I get scared, but the important thing is to not let it control you. Sometimes fear is a healthy thing, but it shouldn’t paralyze you and stop you from doing things…Do you understand me?”

“Yeah…I guess…” He looked unsure.

“Do you know what makes me feel better when I’m scared…Knowing that I have your dad…and Henry…and your grandparents…and even Regina...I just know that having them in my life makes me stronger and that I’m not alone…and you know what, kid? You’re not alone either…you have all of us and even your brothers and sister.”

“I’m not trusting Neddy to fight off bad guys. He’s barely toilet trained.”

“Oh, stop, he’s fine. A little accident here and there isn’t bad. Give him a break.”

“He peed on my bed, Mom.”

“Like I said accidents happen. He’s not gonna be little forever. He might be even bigger than you and Har someday.”

“Yeah right,” he scoffed.

“All kidding aside, it’s okay to get scared but you can’t let it control you and your sleep schedule…”

“I know, I just…I’m not ready to go back to sleep yet.”

“And that’s okay…We can stay down here for a little bit and watch some TV but not all night, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, batting his forehead against her hand. She chuckled quietly to herself as she resumed stroking his hair. He reminded her a bit of the stray dog she used to feed back when she was in Boston, starved for food and attention.

A new episode of Dateline started, and Emma watched it half-heartedly. Her attention was more focused on the droopy-eyed boy in her lap. His eyelids were getting heavier and heavier as the minutes passed. He was asleep a good few minutes into the episode. She debated quietly whether or not she should wake him so he could sleep properly in his bed but loathed the idea of waking him up again.

She placed a brief kiss on his forehead before gingerly removing his head from her lap and placing a decorative pillow underneath it. She picked up one of the various throw blankets that were strewn carelessly across the floor and tucked him in. She left the television on, wanting to give him some source of light just in case Pennywise the Clown haunted his dreams again and woke him up. It was one of the few things she craved when she awoke from nightmares, being able to see her surroundings and make sure she was safe. She could only imagine that he might desire the same thing.

As she slipped back into bed, Killian wrapped an arm around her waist. He pulled her close and nuzzled his nose against her neck.

“You’re back,” he mumbled sleepily.

“Yeah. I’m surprised you’re awake.”

“You really think I was going to sleep without you in our bed, love?”

“Well…with the way you were snoring…”

“Hey now,” he muttered in mock offense, nudging her foot with his. “Wes back in bed?”

“You know it was him?”

“Educated guess really. He’s our biggest night owl.”

“He had a nightmare. He and Gideon have been sneaking into R rated movies.”

“We’re going to have to watch him. If anyone is going to be throwing secret keggers, it’s going to be him,” Killian commented.

“Probably, but let’s worry about that when he’s a teenager and not at two in the morning. Right now, I just want to go sleep.”

“Alright, love,” he chuckled before placing a kiss behind her ear. “Pleasant dreams.”

“Yeah, no clowns hopefully."

#captain swan #cs ff #cs fic #cs fanfic #little pirates #little pirates fic #oreos at 1:30 #wes jones #my fic #my shit

[arcticdementor]

In the fall of 2015, a rash of posters appeared around Copenhagen. One, in pink letters laid over an image of chicken eggs, asked, “Have you counted your eggs today?” A second — a blue-tinted close-up of human sperm — inquired, “Do they swim too slow?”

The posters, part of a campaign funded by the city to remind young Danes of the quiet ticking of their biological clocks, were not universally appreciated. They drew criticism for equating women with breeding farm animals. The timing, too, was clumsy: For some, encouraging Danes to make more babies while television news programs showed Syrian refugees trudging through Europe carried an inadvertent whiff of ugly nativism.

Dr. Soren Ziebe, former chairman of the Danish Fertility Society and one of the brains behind the campaign, believes the criticism was worth weathering. As the head of Denmark’s largest public fertility clinic, Dr. Ziebe thinks these kinds of messages, fraught as they are, are sorely needed. Denmark’s fertility rate has been below replacement level — that is, the level needed to maintain a stable population — for decades. And as Dr. Ziebe points out, the decline is not solely the result of more people deliberately choosing childlessness: Many of his patients are older couples and single women who want a family, but may have waited until too late.

…

If any country should be stocked with babies, it is Denmark. The country is one of the wealthiest in Europe. New parents enjoy 12 months’ paid family leave and highly subsidized day care. Women under 40 can get state-funded in vitro fertilization. But Denmark’s fertility rate, at 1.7 births per woman, is roughly on par with that of the United States. A reproductive malaise has settled over this otherwise happy land.

It’s not just Danes. Fertility rates have been dropping precipitously around the world for decades — in middle-income countries, in some low-income countries, but perhaps most markedly, in rich ones.

…

Decades of survey data show that people’s stated preferences have shifted toward smaller families. But they also show that in country after country, actual fertility has fallen faster than notions of ideal family size. In the United States, the gap between how many children people want and how many they have has widened to a 40-year high. In a report covering 28 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, women reported an average desired family size of 2.3 children in 2016, and men wished for 2.2. But few hit their target. Something is stopping us from creating the families we claim to want. But what?

…

To worry about falling birthrates because they threaten social security systems or future work force strength is to miss the point; they are a symptom of something much more pervasive.

…

DANES DON’T FACE the horrors of American student debt, our debilitating medical bills or our lack of paid family leave. College is free. Income inequality is low. In short, many of the factors that cause young Americans to delay having families simply aren’t present.

Even so, many Danes find themselves contending with the spiritual maladies that accompany late capitalism even in wealthy, egalitarian countries. With their basic needs met and an abundance of opportunities at their fingertips, Danes instead must grapple with the promise and pressure of seemingly limitless freedom, which can combine to make children an afterthought, or an unwelcome intrusion on a life that offers rewards and satisfactions of a different kind — an engaging career, esoteric hobbies, exotic holidays.

…

There are, to be sure, many people for whom not having children is a choice, and growing societal acceptance of voluntary childlessness is undoubtedly a step forward, especially for women. But the rising use of assisted reproductive technologies in Denmark and elsewhere (in Finland, for example, the share of children born via assisted reproduction has nearly doubled in a little more than a decade; in Denmark, it accounts for an estimated one in 10 births) suggests that the same people who see children as a hindrance often come to want them.

…

Trent MacNamara, an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, has been pondering human attitudes toward fertility and family for over a decade. Economic conditions, he notes, are only part of the picture. What may matter more are “the little moral signals we send each other,” he writes in a forthcoming essay, signals that are “based on big ideas about dignity, identity, transcendence and meaning.” Today, we have found different ways to make meaning, form identities and relate to transcendence.

In this context, he said, having children may appear to be no more than a “quixotic lifestyle choice” absent other social cues reinforcing the idea that parenting connects people “to something uniquely dignified, worthwhile and transcendent.” Those cues are increasingly difficult to notice or promote in a secular world in which a capitalist ethos — extract, optimize, earn, achieve, grow — prevails. Where alternative value systems exist, however, babies can be plentiful. In the United States, for example, communities of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, Mormons and Mennonites have birthrates higher than the national average.

Lyman Stone, an economist who studies population, points to two features of modern life that correlate with low fertility: rising “workism” — a term popularized by the Atlantic writer Derek Thompson — and declining religiosity. “There is a desire for meaning-making in humans,” Mr. Stone told me. Without religion, one way people seek external validation is through work, which, when it becomes a dominant cultural value, is “inherently fertility reducing.”

…

The crisis in reproduction lurks in the shadows, but is visible if you look for it. It shows up each year that birthrates plumb a new low. It’s in the persistent flow of studies linking infertility and poor birth outcomes to nearly every feature of modern life — fast-food wrappers, air pollution, pesticides. It is the yearning in your friends’ voices as they gaze at their first child, playing in their too-small apartment, and say, “We’d love to have another, but …” It is the pain that comes from lunging toward transcendence and finding it out of reach.

Seen from this perspective, the conversation around reproduction can and should take on some of the urgency of the climate change debate. We are recognizing nature’s majesty too late, appreciating its uniqueness and irreplaceability only as we watch it burn.

…

Reproduction is the ultimate nod to interdependence. We depend on at least two people to make us possible. We gestate inside another human, and emerge with the help of doctors or doulas or kin. We grow up in environments and communities that shape our health, safety and values. We must find concrete ways to recognize this interdependence and resolve to strengthen it.

#new york times #anna louie sussman #low birth rates #denmark #china

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Former Vice President Joe Biden’s team is talking a big game about an expanded electoral map with Arizona, Georgia and Texas in play, even though those states haven’t voted for a Democratic presidential nominee in two decades.

So let’s talk about just how feasible this strategy is. How competitive are those three states at this point? And what’s more, how does this strategy complement — or counteract — Democratic efforts to pick up Midwestern battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, or perennial swing states like Florida?

First up, Arizona. What do we think? Does Biden have a shot there?

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): Of the three states we’re looking at, I think it’s pretty clear that Arizona is the most in play — and that Biden may even have the lead there, based on the limited polling we have.

President Trump won Arizona by 3.5 points in 2016 while losing the national popular vote by 2 points. So it stands to reason that if Biden is up 6 points or so nationally, Arizona is a toss-up, and that’s before we consider other things that may have shifted between 2016 and now.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): I agree, although I have been surprised at the degree to which Arizona seems to have moved to the left since 2016.

sarah: What other evidence do we have that Arizona has moved to the left since 2016?

geoffrey.skelley: Well, unlike in Georgia and Texas, Democrats actually won major statewide contests in Arizona in 2018 — including the state’s marquee Senate race — and election turnout was nearly as high as the 2016 presidential contest, meaning that performance may reflect a broader shift toward the Democrats rather than just a side effect of the midterms’ blue wave.

nrakich: G. Elliott Morris of The Economist had an interesting newsletter item recently that showed how much various states have moved left or right since 2016, based on the 2020 polls so far. Arizona had the starkest movement.

And Geoffrey’s right that, if Arizona were still 6 points redder than the nation and Biden led by 6 points nationally, we’d expect polls of Arizona to show a tied race. But Biden has consistently led in Arizona polls so far.

Biden has the edge in Arizona polling so far

Presidential general election polls of Arizona conducted since March 1

Dates Pollster Biden Trump Margin May 18-22 HighGround 47% 45% D+2 May 10-14 Redfield & Wilton 45 41 D+4 May 9-11 OH Predictive Insights 50 43 D+8 April 7-8 OH Predictive Insights 52 43 D+9 March 10-15 Marist 47 46 D+1 March 11-14 Monmouth 46 43 D+3 March 6-11 Latino Decisions 50 42 D+8 March 3-4 OH Predictive Insights 49 43 D+6 March 2-3 Public Policy Polling 48 47 D+1

Source: Polls

On the other hand, I’m still somewhat skeptical of the idea Arizona has moved that much to the left. Some of the higher-quality polls, like from Marist and Monmouth, do have the race closer to a tie, whereas the polls suggesting Arizona has gotten significantly more Democratic (e.g., by showing Biden up by 8 points) are not coming from gold-standard pollsters.

sarah: One other thing about Arizona that makes me think it might be fertile ground for Democrats in 2020 is that Democratic Senate challenger Mark Kelly seems to have the upper hand against Sen. Martha McSally, and if that race ends up close — or flips blue — that bodes well for Democrats in the long run, as it’s more evidence that Arizona might be becoming more of a blue state.

nrakich: Yeah, Kelly has been a monster fundraiser. He’s taken in more than $31 million since the beginning of last year.

Although I don’t think a down-ballot race is likely to drive turnout for the presidential. If anything, Kelly might run ahead of Biden because of his money and great bio.

geoffrey.skelley: That’s fair, but it’s worth remembering that every Senate seat that was up in 2016 went for the party that carried the state at the presidential level, so the fact a Democrat is polling that well in the Senate contest is probably a decent sign for the party’s chances as a whole.

sarah: For sure. It’s less that a down-ballot race would affect the top of the ticket, but more that Arizona really might go blue in 2020.

It sounds like we agree with the Biden campaign’s assessment that Arizona is in play, so does it make sense for them to campaign there?

Or is there an argument to be made that they should keep an eye on it, but maybe not commit fully?

nrakich: I mean … both?

It’s a spectrum.

I definitely think Biden should spend more time and money in Arizona than in Georgia and Texas. But I still think Arizona is unlikely to be the tipping-point state, and Biden should spend even more time and money in must-win states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

geoffrey.skelley: Oh, they should definitely fully commit. Arizona gives them another possible path to 270 in the Electoral College. Arizona’s worth 11 electoral votes, so it could sub in for, say, Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) if Trump were to narrowly carry the Badger State.

nrakich: Now you have me questioning myself, Geoffrey! *whips out calculator*

Hmmm, Florida and Wisconsin were 3 points to the right of the nation in 2016. Arizona, as discussed, was 6. That’s not a big gap at all; maybe they do converge this year?

geoffrey.skelley: Another thing to keep in mind is that Democrats have been making inroads in the suburbs and dominating urban areas. Maricopa County (Phoenix and its environs) was the most populous county in the country to vote for Trump in 2016, but Trump only won it narrowly by about 3 points, and in 2018, Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema carried it by 4 points. So Democrats may be hoping for a repeat in 2020. Win Maricopa, win Arizona.

sarah: OK, it sounds like focusing on Arizona is smart for the Biden campaign, but maybe we’re a bit more skeptical of Georgia and Texas, the other two states the campaign has included in its “expanded” electoral map?

nrakich: Yeah. Georgia was 7 points to the right of the nation in 2016, and Texas was 11 points to the right. Given long-term trends, they have both probably moved a little to the left, but they have further to go than Arizona.

That said, Biden may well win those states — take a look at the polling there:

Georgia polls are extremely close

Presidential general election polls of Georgia conducted since March 1

Dates Pollster Biden Trump Margin May 16-18 Civiqs 48% 47% D+1 May 11-13 BK Strategies 46 48 R+2 May 4-7 Public Opinion Strategies 47 46 D+1 April 25-27 Cygnal 44 45 R+1 March 31-April 1 Battleground Connect 46 48 R+2

Source: Polls

Can Biden shock Trump in Texas?

Presidential general election polls of Texas conducted since March 1

Dates Pollster Biden Trump Margin May 8-10 Emerson College 48% 52% R+3 April 27-28 Public Policy Polling 47 46 D+1 April 18-27 University of Texas at Tyler 43 43 EVEN April 10-19 YouGov 44 49 R+5

Source: Polls

But if he does, he will probably already have clinched the Electoral College in the Midwest, Arizona or Florida.

geoffrey.skelley: Georgia is interesting. On the one hand, Biden could target the increasingly Democratic suburbs of Atlanta. On the other hand, it’s one of the most inelastic states in the country — meaning voters there are among the most likely to stick with their usual party regardless of which way the rest of the country swings — in part because its white voters remain predominantly Republican and its large black population is heavily Democratic, and there just isn’t a ton of movement there.

Additionally, if Democrats couldn’t carry Georgia in 2018 when the electoral environment was very pro-Democratic, that makes me skeptical they can win it in a presidential year, when partisan conditions could be more balanced. That said, if Biden is winning by 6 or 7 points nationally, that might be enough to put Georgia in his column, as Trump only carried it by 5 points in 2016. But as Nathaniel was saying earlier, that’s not a situation where Georgia is an integral part of Biden winning 270 electoral votes. It’s gravy at that point, though maybe it helps Democrats in the two Senate contests there.

nrakich: Yeah, Georgia is definitely inelastic. But on the other hand, Georgia has inched leftward (relative to the nation as a whole) in the last three presidential elections. And I think there is room for more suburban whites to move toward Democrats, not only in Georgia but also in Texas and Arizona.

sarah: That’s a good point, and I think a real question determining whether Georgia and Texas will be competitive is just how much the trends of 2018 — namely, suburban white voters moving to the Democratic Party — hold true.

This is an extreme hypothetical, but earlier this year, Nathaniel looked at what would happen if a state’s presidential vote was based strictly on how rural or urban the state is, and he found that Georgia would remain in the R column, but both Arizona and Texas would swing blue:

What if the urban-rural divide dictated the 2020 election?

The results of a hypothetical presidential election if a state’s urbanization were the only factor, based on the relationship between FiveThirtyEight’s urbanization index and 2016 presidential election results

State Result State Result Alabama R+16.0 Montana R+30.8 Alaska R+27.3 Nebraska R+8.2 Arizona D+6.1 Nevada D+12.3 Arkansas R+20.5 New Hampshire R+11.9 California D+17.7 New Jersey D+18.3 Colorado D+4.2 New Mexico R+12.2 Connecticut D+7.6 New York D+22.5 Delaware D+2.3 North Carolina R+6.6 Florida D+8.3 North Dakota R+23.2 Georgia R+3.6 Ohio D+0.6 Hawaii D+3.3 Oklahoma R+11.6 Idaho R+16.1 Oregon R+1.5 Illinois D+10.3 Pennsylvania D+4.1 Indiana R+5.5 Rhode Island D+11.6 Iowa R+16.1 South Carolina R+9.4 Kansas R+9.3 South Dakota R+27.4 Kentucky R+13.6 Tennessee R+8.3 Louisiana R+8.6 Texas D+4.5 Maine R+23.4 Utah D+1.7 Maryland D+11.5 Vermont R+25.9 Massachusetts D+13.2 Virginia D+1.0 Michigan R+0.3 Washington D+3.8 Minnesota R+4.9 West Virginia R+22.4 Mississippi R+25.1 Wisconsin R+8.3 Missouri R+8.2 Wyoming R+33.6

Source: American Community Survey

What do we make of this? Might Texas actually turn blue before Georgia?

nrakich: We have a tendency to think about elections through the lens of the decisive voters in the previous election, which for 2018 was suburbanites. But as I showed in that urbanization article, Georgia does have a lot of rural voters too, and there is still room for them to move even more toward Trump. So, actually, maybe those two trends will cancel each other out.

geoffrey.skelley: OK, but Georgia was still notably closer to going for Clinton than Texas — Trump won Georgia by 5 points and Texas by 9 points, which is a fairly sizable difference. And while Georgia may be more inelastic than Texas, Texas is not that elastic. Our 2018 elasticity score for Texas was 1.03 — not that far above the baseline of 1 — while Georgia’s was 0.90.

Texas is changing, but Barack Obama lost it by 12 points in 2008, which was a really good environment overall for Democrats.

nrakich: Yeah, there’s just too far for it to go.

geoffrey.skelley: As is often the case with questions about when Texas could go blue, it depends on how fast the political environment changes, but it still probably won’t happen until sometime after 2020, given what we know currently.

sarah: People seem to agree that the Biden campaign shouldn’t invest too much in Georgia and Texas if it comes at the expense of other battleground states in the Midwest or Florida. Is that fair?

nrakich: I think there’s a case for keeping your options open in Georgia. But the Biden campaign would be foolish to invest significantly in Texas. If Texas votes Democratic, Biden will already have won virtually every other swing state and, therefore, the election. It’s simply not a part of his path to 270 electoral votes — more like a part of his path to 400.

Also, Texas is an extremely expensive state in which to campaign, so it just wouldn’t be an efficient use of his money.

geoffrey.skelley: If Trump really is doing a lot worse among older voters than in 2016, it would be foolish for Biden to abandon Florida, which has one of the oldest populations in the country.

I could see reasons for Democrats to worry about Florida being a mirage after they failed to win the gubernatorial and Senate races there in 2018, but it’s just been too close in recent presidential elections to actually give up on it. Trump only won it by 1 point in 2016!

nrakich: Oh, I have strong feelings about Florida.

sarah:

nrakich: Florida is definitely still a swing state; it’s not as inelastic as the 2018 results implied. The Democratic nominees for governor and senator, Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson, still outperformed Hillary Clinton in most counties; they just underperformed Clinton in a few key areas, especially Miami-Dade County. (This article by Florida Democratic consultant Matthew Isbell does a great job showing that.)

The reason for this is probably that their Republican opponents, Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott, did a lot better among Hispanic voters than Trump did. According to exit polls, Trump got 35 percent of the Latino vote in Florida in 2016, while DeSantis got 44 percent and Scott got 45 percent. In 2020, I don’t think Trump will be able to match DeSantis’s and Scott’s numbers.

So if Biden can pair Clinton’s performance among Hispanic Floridians with Nelson’s and Gillum’s among other voters, he can absolutely win Florida.

geoffrey.skelley: We’ve talked a lot about how Biden might be able to expand his electoral map, but he can’t afford to give up on Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In 2016, they were collectively decided by 78,000 votes, and who wins them in 2020 will likely be consequential as well.

The bigger questions in the Midwest and Rust Belt are probably whether to invest in Iowa and Ohio, which Trump carried by about 9 and 8 points, respectively. Those two states might be harder for Democrats to win back considering how they swung hard toward the GOP in 2016 after backing Obama in 2012.

That said, Iowa does have some history of being pretty swingy. It’s also cheaper to advertise in Iowa than Ohio, and if we’re talking down-ballot races, there is more at stake there, too. Potentially four competitive House races and a Senate seat in Iowa, whereas Ohio has no Senate race and is likely to have only one or two close House races.

nrakich: Yeah, if Biden wants to be an effective president, he’ll need a Democratic Senate. IMO, that means he should give extra credit to Georgia and Iowa when deciding where to allocate his resources.

sarah: The balancing act that the Biden campaign will inevitably have to engage in isn’t entirely clear to me yet. How much will they actually invest in states like Arizona, Georgia and Texas versus doubling down on states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin?

Much of this will inevitably boil down to what the tipping-point state is in 2020, but one thing that’s hard to figure out is how much of the map already realigned in 2016. Put another way, does Biden have his eyes on states like Arizona because winning states like Wisconsin back will be difficult?

nrakich: But I think that’s the needle we need to thread: Arizona might be moving in one direction and Wisconsin in the other, but even in the “realigned” (really more “recalibrated”) 2016 map, Arizona was redder than Wisconsin.

geoffrey.skelley: It’s curious because some of this comes down to the national environment. Maybe Wisconsin is a point or two redder than it was in 2016, but if Biden wins by 4 or 5 points nationally, maybe that’s enough to carry it even if Wisconsin is continuing to move toward the GOP.

But how exactly that plays out in each state is hard to say.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Sarah Frostenson #Nathaniel Rakich and Geoffrey Sk

[watusichris]

A Bob Dylan Story, or Two

WARNING: The following may contain spoilers. Yes, spoilers.

In Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, which takes in Dylan’s youth and the first five years of his recording and touring career, the late Izzy Young, the founder of Greenwich Village’s Folklore Center, picks through an early Dylan bio. He notes some of the singer’s more outrageous accounts about his early travels, and his claims of learning songs from blind Chicago street singer Arvella Gray and Texas songster Mance Lipscomb.

“I should have figured out right away he was bullshitting me,” Young says.

From the very first, bullshitting was an important, even preeminent part of Dylan’s self-manifestation, and some of the recent acts of archival curation on the musician’s behalf have also involved no small amount of manure spreading. (cf. my piece on the gospel set Trouble No More, here: https://watusichris.tumblr.com/post/167349872212/a-dylan-a-day-annex-narrow-is-the-way).

Scorsese’s new film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, which premieres on Netflix June 12, is being described in some quarters as a “documentary,” but it is animated in no small measure by large servings of highly entertaining mendacity. Its subject gives a bit of the game away in its early minutes: Dylan takes a stab at explaining what the subject of the film might be, then halts abruptly and says, “Ah, bullshit.”

The movie, which is being accompanied by a 14-CD boxed set of music (my Variety review: https://variety.com/2019/music/news/bob-dylan-rolling-thunder-revue-live-box-set-review-1203235093/), is a major reclamation project. The copious documentary footage of Dylan’s titular tour of 1975 was shot for his maiden project as a film director, the excruciating, nearly four-hour Renaldo & Clara. I had a hand in launching that self-indulgent disaster in 1978, and to say the grosses were nightmarish is an understatement -- it flopped on arrival. It’s still a chore to view this addled junior-high stab at Children of Paradise. Watching it today at its full length on YouTube, I wanted to remove my brain from my skull with my own hands.

Dreadful as Dylan’s movie was, some astounding performances by Dylan and his many Rolling Thunder co-stars and cohorts could be found amid its stupor-inducing dramatic improvisations by Dylan and his cast of non-professionals (who included his wife Sara, whom he was trying to woo back into his good graces, and his former paramour and singing partner Joan Baez).

Wisely pretending that Renaldo & Clara never existed, Scorsese organizes the blazing footage of Dylan, his immense and febrile RTR band, and his co-stars into a chronological account, augmented by new testimony, of what the late poet and tour fellow traveler Allen Ginsberg calls “a con man carny medicine show” in a vintage interview.

Since Renaldo & Clara has been officially buried in the vaults for four decades and never officially released on home video, and the concert material that hasn’t been scrubbed from the Internet is not of the highest quality, the vibrant, newly cleaned-up footage in Scorsese’s feature will most assuredly blow minds.

Part of the Rolling Thunder Revue’s allure derives from the starry trek’s short run of remote ’75 dates in New England and Canada, and the movie delivers the goods in spades, offering up those obscure shows in all their forceful glory. The visually pristine sequences of Dylan and company hurling themselves through then brand-new numbers like “One More Cup of Coffee,” “Isis,” “Romance in Durango,” and “Hurricane” and high-watt rearrangements of oldies like “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” shook the theater at the screening I attended.

Dylan himself is especially intense onscreen in his whiteface and plumed, flower-bedecked, wide-brimmed hat, dashing around the stage and locking eyes with his band mates and duet partners Baez and Roger McGuinn. Customarily a non-presence in front of a camera (even in his own movie), he is ferociously alive behind the RTR mic.

No less exciting is material captured by the side of the road, like a version of Peter LaFarge’s  “Ballad of Ira Hayes,” about the Native American hero of Iwo Jima, played at a Tuscarora Indian reservation, or an impromptu run-through by Joni Mitchell of her new song “Coyote” (reputedly inspired by an affair with tour mate Sam Shepard) with Dylan and McGuinn in Gordon Lightfoot’s living room.

Despite its seemingly conventional contours, Scorsese’s look at the short, lively life of the Rolling Thunder Revue should not be confused with his relatively straightforward docs like No Direction Home, The Last Waltz (which also features Dylan), or his films about George Harrison and the Rolling Stones.

“Life is about creating yourself,” Dylan says, and Scorsese acts as an accomplice in the present endeavor. The results are enjoyably perverse.

The sleight-of-hand approach announces itself in the film’s first minute. It begins with a clip from an 1896 short by Georges Meliés, the subject of Scorsese’s 2011 homage Hugo, in which the French filmmaking magician makes a woman disappear. (Just as the director renders Sara Dylan invisible in the proceedings, it should be noted.) A title card immediately appears: “Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Revue.” The word “conjuring” suggests that some of what the audience will be seeing is at once something more than and somewhat less than the truth. (A lyric comes to mind: “All the people we used to know, they’re an illusion to me now.”)

Keener-witted viewers of Rolling Thunder Revue may have already started to wonder about the veracity of some of what they’ve been watching by the time they reach a segment, late in the film, in which former Michigan congressman Jack Tanner talks about a trip to a Rolling Thunder show in Niagara Falls that was facilitated by President Jimmy Carter.

After you realize that “Tanner” is the actor Michael Murphy, reprising his role in Robert Altman’s political mockumentary Tanner ’88, you may start to understand that some of what you’ve already seen is the purest fiction. You then find yourself second-guessing some of the talking heads who offer their recollections.

So was that “European film director” actually a part of the crew shooting the tour? Or is he possibly a former performance artist? How is it that one of the purported tour promoters shares the name of the current chairman of a major Hollywood studio? Nah, couldn’t be. Should we believe an assertion by Ronnie Hawkins, who played “Bob Dylan” in Renaldo & Clara, that Scarlet Rivera, the exotic violinist on the tour, was a major freak who invited him to her hotel room to watch her have sex? (“She had a sword,” both Hawkins and Dylan report, darkly.) Was Rivera’s boyfriend really Gene Simmons of KISS, whose makeup supposedly inspired Dylan’s whiteface? (That one’s a real hoot!) Should we trust Sharon Stone, the star of Scorsese’s Casino, when she describes joining the tour as a 17-year-old?

Not content to toy with his own reality, Dylan has obviously given license to Scorsese to toy with everyone else’s, too. Note the picture’s subtitle again: “a Bob Dylan story.” In this case, a good synonym for “story” is “yarn,” and a decent yarn it is.

I suppose it’s appropriate that Allen Ginsberg, making a poignant posthumous return to Dylan’s stage, is the beating heart of Rolling Thunder Revue. After all, he was a man who appeared in Jack Kerouac’s novels as fictional characters – Carlo Marx, Alvah Goldbook, Irwin Garden, Adam Moorad. Dylan calls him “the Oracle of Delphi” here, and he brings the picaresque rigor of the Beats to the film, as he declaims his hardcore elegy “Kaddish” to an audience of little old ladies at a mahjongg tournament, reads Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues at the novelist’s Massachusetts grave site, and dances ecstatically in a hotel ballroom.

The poet is granted the film’s final moments, in which he instructs the audience to  “pick up on some redemption of your own consciousness, and make it for your own eternity.” That line seems almost like a description of Dylan’s and Scorsese’s playbook for this unusual movie.

[mst3kproject]

Night Fright (1967)

 I found this movie by accident while I was looking for Night of the Bloody Apes.  The goofy cover art got my attention, so I pulled the box out for a better look and there at the bottom was the name of the star: John Agar!  There’s also Bill Thurman from Attack of the The Eye Creatures, a movie I will be referencing a lot in this review. Furthermore, Night Fright was directed by James A. Sullivan, who according to IMDB edited Manos: the Hands of Fate (yeah, apparently Manos was edited… who knew?).  Clearly the Bloody Apes were going to have to wait for another time.

That woman on the cover?  Not in the movie.  I’m not sure she’s in the same decade as this movie.

We open on a couple making out in a car, and then watch as they get killed by a POV shot while a radio news announcer tells us that a mysterious object recently fell from space.  With that union-mandated scene out of the way, Sheriff Clint Crawford gets to work investigating the rash of mysterious murders that have beset Hollis County in Texas.  Weird three-toed tracks make it look like the Paulasaurus from Track of the Moon Beast might be to blame… and that’s actually almost it.  The object that landed in the nearby woods is a NASA rocket, and six months in space has mutated every living thing on board into hideous monsters!

I think ‘James A. Sullivan’ may be a pseudonym for Larry Buchanan, because this movie feels an awful lot like Attack of the The Eye Creatures.  I mean, there’s Bill Thurman, and both John Agar and Carol Gilley were in another Buchanan film, Zontar, the Thing from Venus (a remake of It Conquered the World).  The dingy and washed-out film stock makes the day scenes look exactly like Buchanan’s night scenes, while the actual night scenes are tinged blue, so dark it’s almost impossible to tell what’s going on, and still obviously shot in the daytime!  We see several full-body shots of the monster that are just black, with no features visible.  I’d be tempted to say this was an attempt to create suspense if we ever did get a good look at the thing, but we didn’t, so I guess the lighting was just that bad.

What little we do see of the monster is gloriously cheap.  It’s half-Paulasaurus, half-Bigfoot, a shambling fun-fur joke that moves very slowly because the poor actor in the costume can’t see where he’s going.  I think the reason shit-cheap movie monsters attack teenagers making out in convertibles is mostly because they’re not fast enough to catch anybody else.

A number of online summaries claim that the creature is a mutated alligator, but I’m going to disagree on several grounds. First, although we don’t see the monster very well we can tell it’s a primate… and it’s got fur, for crying out loud.  Second, the same summaries also say that the radiation from the rocket mutated an alligator that was already living in the swamp, which is not at all what the movie says happened.  And third, who sends an alligator into space?  A dog, sure.  A monkey, of course!  An alligator?  What poor bastard had to stuff it into the capsule?

Badness continues.  The characters are blandly-dressed and big-haired.  John Agar looks like he’s about fifty in this movie (he was, in fact, forty-six) while his love interest is implied to be in her twenties (I could’t find out how old Carol Gilley was).  The dialogue is breathtakingly bad – the way to kill the monster comes up in one of those ‘wait, say that again, no, the other part’ conversations.  The character of college student Chris is established as a philosophical type by having him say something like, “I keep thinking about the things we don’t know about, like the earth and the sky and the wind and even this leaf.”  What?  The movie’s scientist, Dr. Clayton, always has a pipe in his mouth and seems to be an expert on everything from rocketry to biology.  And god, I hate having to say this, but John Agar is actually the best actor in the movie.

The music is very strange.  ‘Suspenseful’ scenes are set to what sounds like a very, very sleepy woodpecker who occasionally wakes up and does some proper hammering before drifting off again. There’s a very annoying piece that consists of the same four notes on a flute, over and over – when we’re meant to feel more urgency, it’s reduced to three.  The ‘hip song’ the beach kids dance is a repetitive instrumental, which to judge by what the radio announcer says, is apparently the hottest thing around here.

And again like Attack of the The Eye Creatures, very little actually happens.  For much of its length, Night Fright just kind of lies there, trying to convince us there’s suspense and action when there isn’t any. Everything goes on way too long: there’s an early scene with a couple of young lovers who do far too much dull frolicking before finally finding a corpse, interminable scenes of men in cowboy hats searching the woods, a Manly Beach Dance that would show us lots of wiggling asses if it were only bright enough to see them, and many more.  There’s some kind of subplot among the sorority girls, having to do with who used to date who and who has a crush on who else, but this ultimately doesn’t do much in the plot and I’m not sure why they made such a point of it.

There is one kind of fun thing in the movie, though, and that’s how they defeat the monster.  Sheriff Crawford likens it to duck hunting – they set up a mannequin in the middle of the woods and all sit around watching it, with guns.  The monster doesn’t fall for it, though, perhaps because the thing doesn’t smell like a human.  Instead, it chases after Chris and his girlfriend Judy, who run towards the mannequin, and then it blows up when the creature touches it.  I was definitely not expecting that, and it made me smile, so I guess I can award a couple of points for that.

Really, though, there’s very little entertainment or amusement of any sort to be derived from Night Fright.  There’s just nothing interesting in it, and it completely denies us the two things we want most out of it.  The first of these is a decent look at the monster.  We can see just enough of it to tell that it’s probably hilarious rather than horrifying, but the details that would make the difference remain frustratingly just out of reach.  If you make a monster movie and the monster is not somehow memorable, then you’re screwed.

The second thing we want to see is the massacre of the teens at the lake, which seems to build up but then, as in Nightbeast, somebody tells them to leave and they actually do.  The only ones who hang around to get munched are annoying wannabe-tough-guy Rex and his whiny girlfriend Darlene, but Rex has already had his comeuppance when sensitive nerd Chris beats him up, so… why bother?  At the end of the film, the credits roll leaving us feeling fundamentally unsatisfied.  Why the heck did we watch that movie?  Why did anybody bother to make this movie?

As usual, I’ve managed to tease an answer out of the mess, and I think it may actually be an intentional one.  This movie is about government secrecy doing far more harm than good.

At the beginning, the rocket come to earth and the Area 51 types, with Dr. Clayton in tow, immediately show up to claim it (the movie can’t afford to show us this, of course, or the army of State Troopers brought in to help hunt the creature).  Nobody is allowed in, even local law enforcement, and so it’s only the coincidence that Clayton and Sheriff Crawford are old friends that allows anyone to make the connection between the downed rocket and the bodies.  Later, the Sheriff brings a plaster cast of the creature’s footprint for Clayton to look at, and Clayton recognizes it at once but has to seek permission from his superiors before he can say what it is.  I don’t know if I can say he would have saved lives by speaking up, since this movie has a body count of four, but the possibility exists.

Local law enforcement, in the form of Crawford and his deputy Pat, resent this, but also participate in it.  In the tradition of authorities in monster movies, they decide to keep what’s going on a secret in order to avoid a panic (the plot here really is just a bunch of tropes strung together).  They forbid the newspaper editor to print the story until they have more information, and then ask Chris and Judy not to talk about what they’ve seen at the site of the first murder.  Chris remembers this later when he urges his friends to abandon their beach party, and so Rex and Darlene dismiss his warning.  Everybody in this movie keeps secrets, and nobody gains anything by them.

In running this blog I’ve reviewed a few movies I highly recommend entirely because they suck.  There’s the amazing Lou Ferrigno Hercules, for example, or The Giant Claw, films that are absolutely no good at all and yet are funny or charming enough to be truly so bad, they’re good.  This is not one of those movies. There’s no reason to bother watching it unless you’re some sort of masochistic John Agar completionist, which… uh… well, at least I have a name for my problem now.

Damn it, I could have been watching Night of the Bloody Apes.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #night fright #oh shit it's john agar #manly beach dance #60s

[fapangel]

SO what do you what will happen now with the whole fake Bomer guy supposedly be a trump supporter? Do you think the blue wave will restart or is it too little to late?

The most significantrevelation of the mail-bomber incident was that the Republicanmainstream – not the usual fringe kooks, but the levelheaded,respected commentators – immediately suspected it to be amanufactured “October Surprise.”

Some of those knee-jerktweets have since been deleted, likelyfor the same reason that I was more alarmed that I could entertain a“false flag” theory in the first place than I was by the possible“false flag” itself. Embracing asinine conspiracy theoriesis, to me, a hallmark of left-wing agitprop, an indelible impressionfrom my formative Bush-era youth when ~Halliburton~ and~Bush’s cabinet of puppeteers who have Jewish last names~was unceasingly invoked in anypolitical argument. And yet, despite knowing theoverwhelming odds of a lone lunatic being the perp (as indeed theywere) and my own decades-old biases against conspiracy theories, Istill found myselfmuttering dubiously.

Iwasn’t alone in that impression – the NewYork Times picked up on it too, and as is their wont managed todisclose their unique myopia as well. In their effort to equate allright-wing media to Alex “Lizardman Chemtrails” Jones’s usualconspiracytainment bullshit, theydrop this revealing paragraph:

Mr.Jones has been largely pushed tothe fringes of the internet — kicked off Twitter, Facebook and adozen other services — and his cries for attention now seem mostlypitiful. (This week, he was filmed yellingat a pile of manure outsidea rally for President Trump in Texas.) Buthis spirit lives on in the larger universe of pro-Trump media, whichhas fused the conspiratorial grandeur of Infowars with an unshakablefaith in Mr. Trump’s righteousness.

Theyautomatically equate media exposure of an idea with how manyviewers believe the idea. The thesis of the article lies inthese two sentences; Alex Jones has been silenced, but the moremainstream right-wing media has picked up his ideas, and that’s whythey’re still alive.

Thisalone speaks volumes about the media’s worldview, but to reallydrive it home see thisarticle wherein the reporter blames Trump’s attacks on themedia for their plummeting popularity, as if the Great PresidentialPumpkin can sway millions of Americans into hating themainstream media via his eldritch mind-control rays. This is why theyspeak of “an unshakable faith in Mr. Trump’s righteousness-”leftists view the world in terms of stupid mobs and the influentialdemagogues that sway and lead them. They simply cannot comprehendthat their own actions have shattered the public’s trust in them,despite the problem long predating Trump (one of my Journalism 101professors cited trust polling that consistently put Journalistsbelow used car salesmen back in 2007!) They find it easier tobelieve that their vast media empires’ combined megaphone is beingdrowned out by RumpleTrumpskien pied piping on his magical racistdogwhistle than to admit that people might think for themselves longenough to call them out on their egregious lies.

Thisdovetails nicely with recent revelations thatthe FBI leaked information to the press, then cited said “reporting”to the Justice Dept. as justification for further investigations,including FISA wiretapping warrants. Whilethe media’s lunacy is frequently amusing – reporters leaningdramatically into nonexistent wind, CNN’sfit over a panel truck blocking their stalker peephole in the hedge,or going bugfuck insane because Trumphad dinner without informing the media – nobody’s laughinganymore. And it’s precisely because of the growing understandingamong the populace of how the media has wantonly abused its power toaid the abuse of Federal power to nullify the results of a democraticelection.As Ian Miles Cheong said; “if the media can lie about somethingas insignificant as a koipond feeding ceremony, what else are they lying about?”

Well,now we know – and the people don’t seem amused.

I’vecovered the media’s worldview and demonstrable myopia before; Iaddress it in this instance to show thatthe media simply cannot adapt their message. Indeed,the NYT article on fringe-to-mainstream cites the mocking/pol/ “suspicious devices” meme without apparentunderstanding of how it undermines their implicit assumptions mereparagraphs prior of deplatforming speakers equalingthe silencing of their ideas. Theleft-wing “mobs and demagogues” is more than theory to them; it’show they organize – which is why John Oliver’s sick Friday nightburns are being repeated ad nauseam on Facebook by early Saturdaymorning. Theleft truly cannotmeme;it’s simply how they function. So when RumpleTrumpskien needles themedia into talking All About Themselves instead of the issues at handyetagain, iteffectively makes the mediathe issue at hand – and given that pollingconsistently shows that many Democrats are coming to distrust themedia of late, that’s not a strong issue for the DNC.Conversely, right-wingers will be shitposting the latest dank memeswith or without Alex Jones’s Twitterfeed, comehellor Maxine Waters.

Thusly,I conclude the mail bomber incident won’t have a significant impacton the electoral map – notjust because of widespread cynicism engendered by constant mediafalsehoods, but also because the structural problems that producedsuch alsocripple the media’s ability to exploit such incidents. In fact, themedia’s incredible blindness makes them likely to harmthe left-wing’s cause by doubling down on narratives that wereasinine the first time around. There is no bad news for the DNC thatthe media’s mental illness cannot make worse. Takethe latest example of thesynagogue shooter thatturnedout to be a Trump-hater who thought POTUSwas controlled Jews. Theusual hate-mongeringWaPo crowd actuallydug up the “star-shapedbackground graphic in a campaign ad” gem that was laughablelunacy beforeTrumpmoved the US embassy to Jerusalem and made defending Israel in the UNa cornerstone of US foreign policy. Thisis placed at the topofthe article, as if it’s a powerful and convincing lead-in to thelong-winded paranoid rambling of “troll armies” motivated by theusual mystic ~coded signals~ mentioned later on. Eventhe more sober-sounding takes likethis NYT hit-piece must open by blaming Trump for the crimes ofTrump-supporters andTrump-haters,which obliges the author to afascinating attempt in pissing up a rope without getting wet.

Itnaturally follows, then, that breathless media polling reports citing85% and upwards chances of a “blue wave” retaking the House areabout as trustworthy as similar polling in 2016. Even Nate Silver’smuch-vaunted “538” polling agency has come under prettypointed criticism for the number of times they’ve shrugged offsimilar “80%” predictions that haven’t come to pass – froma Harvard professor, no less. Furthermore,midterm elections are different in many ways – local issues oftenhave people more fired up (read, pissed off,) especially regardinggubernatorial elections. Since midterms are traditionally very lowturnout, a popular gubernatorial candidate can have a huge impact on“down-ballot” races – i.e. people show up to vote for thegovernor, and vote straight party ticket for alltheother candidates, US House included. In short, the polls mean jackdiddly squat, soeveryone’s simply reporting what they want (if you don’t believeme, look no further than Fox News’s reportinga nail-biting dead heat currently, then thisSeptember 22ndarticle on how dismissing “blue wave” rhetoric as the bullshit itis could suppress the Republican vote via overconfidence.A “dead heat” narrative is the safest way to turn out votes; norisk of overconfidence or hopelessness keeping people away from thepolls.) Soto evaluate the potentials, we must turn to the murkiest of allpolitical-forecastingcrystal balls - “energy levels.”

There’sbeen multiple media-exacerbated own-goals for the left in thatregard, most notably the mind-blowingly vicious smear campaignagainstJustice Kavanaugh that only managed to rile the right wing via sheeroutrage even more than the left. I could roll this one around fora while – talking about the surprising pluralities (note therelatively high numbers of Democrats and low numbers of Republicans“Very Angry” over Kavanaugh’s suffering; a surprisinglycenter-right plurality,) or how big the Republican benefit really was(Republicans being moderately more outraged than Democrats amounts toa low gain if Democrats enteredthe fray with high outrage already; but it’s likely that manyRepublicans who didn’t care at all before are outraged now).Butthere’s a larger factor to contend with – the historical realitythat the party controlling the Executive usually loses seats in theHouse in midterm elections. It happens with regularity for the samereason PoliSci101 shows you a “standardized plot” of Presidential approvalratings over time – human nature. Whoever’s in charge gets blamedfor everything bad, simply enough – so even popular Presidents willshed a few seats in the mid-terms. Combine this with the importanceof turnout in midterm elections and the oft-lamented anti-Trumpobsession on the left, and everything seems to point to Democratsbeing more motivated.

However,I’m not so sure they are.

Youtuber“Aydin Paladin,” an advanced psych student who usually talksabout psychology in a political context, did a video 11 months agotitled “LeftistLethargy and Low Energy,” specifically addressing how aconstant state of horror and outrage at every single damn Trump tweethas the inevitable consequence of emotional burnout. One cannot stayoutraged forever. At some point, you simply stop caring. Onecould debate Ayadin’s point that the left was demonstrablyhittingthis point a year ago, or posit that they’ve had time to recover –but I personally believe the lethargy lingers. Myevidence? A quick jaunt through the New York Times’ editorial page:

*A Halloween op-ed about Trump literally being worse than the fuckingbogeyman (“WhenNightmares Are Real” by Jennifer Finney Boylan,)

*An article begging Democrats not to take a usually-safe votingdemographic for granted, Native Americans

*An article on “how to turn people into voters,” featuring a modelspecific to “black Southerners,” who are a safe Democraticdemographic – but only when they actually turn up to vote,

*Andmost tellingly, an article titled“You’redisillusioned. That’sfine. Vote anyway.”

Blindand narcissistic they may be, but I trust the media to know their owntribe – and theiroutlookon the base’s revolutionary fervor looks rather dim. Once again themedia’s endless talent for own-goals is apparent. The continuingdemonizingof Trump as theworst nightmare ever onlyensures that a choir that tired of the preaching a year ago willremain so. The struggle to get black voters to actually turn out isan old and ongoing one, but pissed-off Native Americans isn’t justElizabethWarren’s fault – it was mostly the media that accepted her DNAtest showing some squillionth of a percent of native DNA asvindication,andthen gallopedover to Trump to triumphantly flaunt it at him, giving him a goldenopportunity to mock it on national TV – on their own live networkbroadcasts, even.

You’llnote that the point regarding the media’s self-sabotage of theleft-wing movement was made many paragraphs ago, but it continues torear its awful head as a salient factor in almost every exampleillustrating any otherpoint in this article – this is how pervasive it is.

There’smore to Democratic lethargy than the media pissing off key left-wingDemographics in western states with important House races, however –there’s also the overall lack of a message. Instead of coalescingon a single one, Democrats appear to be taking a local-issuesapproach, which is rather awkward given they – and the media –have spent the last two years making absolutelyeverything aboutTrump. They’re stillmaking everything about Trump (e.g.synagogue shooter) even now,inthe eleventh hour. Thenthere’s the notable and growing strain between old-schoolblue-collar union Democrats and the “progressive wing” (viz.privileged wealthy white socialists) whichdivides their messaging on the economy – especially tellingconsidering the record-low unemployment and rapidlyrising wages. (It’s hard to tell people they’re living inObama’s economy whenyou were telling them it was Trump’s climate a few months ago.)

Andof course, the cherry on this shitstorm sundae is the latest greatestmigrant caravan advancing through Mexico – seven thousandstrong, originally – which took Trump’s single greatest electionissue and slam-dunked it in the middle of the debate again. Thecaravan is significant because it tangiblyprovesTrump’s long-standing point regarding immigration problems, and isexactly the kind of thing a big wall would hinder – awall Trump can’t build if he can’t get a funding bill through theHouse.

Insum, the left still lacks a coherent message, is still desensitizingtheir electorate with constant panicked screeching, is frequentlypissing off their own key constituencies with their ham-handedagitprop, and are helping to suppress their own vote by portraying anelection that’s all but won. Meanwhile the Republicans have aPresident who’s actually delivered on many of his promises, has agreat recent event to showcase how delivering on the rest rides onthis next election, and, in general, have optimism.Somethingabout Kanye West’s recent visit to the White House stood out to me– he saidhe had nothing against Hillary’s campaign slogan, but when he puton a MAGA hat, he “felt like Superman.”

“Feltlike Superman.” That’s a sentiment of empowerment.Obamaunderstood the power of positive messaging – it’show “Hope and Change” swept him into office in his first term.Democratsthis year simply don’t.

Ican’t call it either way. But I cantell you that anyone who thinks this election is all over but for thecounting isnuts. The battle lines of 2016 have only been dug deeper, and thesimple truths of human nature make for an uphill fight – but by thesame token, Democrats have badly misplayed the hands they have, arecompletely incapable of real self-reflection on any significantscale, and Trump’s been President for two years with realsuccesses, with the much-ballyhooed Trumpocolypse yet to descend.

Insofaras I can call anything, I’d say this election is going to be close.I’d tell you to go out and vote, especiallyif you don’t want to see the party encouraging mob intimidation andstoking racial hatred controlling the House – which they’ll useto launch endless sham investigations of Trump long after Mueller’scharade finally gives up the ghost, in addition to impeaching himjust for the hell of it. If Trump loses the House he- and his agenda- will be a lame-duck for the next two years, because any seriousbill needs to be passed by both House and Senate.

Onceagain, everything is on the line.

I’mnot sick of winning yet.