#Publicly Perform Denouncement Of The Thing Any Time You Mention Liking It

[sunfoxfic]

Okay I'm not done thinking about the anon who approached me the other day who I only spoke to indirectly, never publishing their asks. I'm still thinking about how out of line they were to send me those asks.

So, if you didn't see, I'll give the story of what happened that was public knowledge for anyone: I received an ask. It was on a topic I only posted a couple times, demanding me to acknowledge something in a very performative way.

Now, something else about that ask: The topic was not ML related. I feel like that's something I need to say, because I need to make it clear that I very very rarely post non-ML things. Even my rambles and crossover posts/reblogs ultimately tie back to Miraculous.

It should be noted that I am a Miraculous blog because I care about Miraculous in a way I don't care about other shows. (Not to say I don't love and appreciate them. I do. But there is no other fandom that I've written several hundred thousands words of fanfic for, especially because a big chunk of that comes from this year alone.)

So I posted about this topic two or three, maybe four times. (Depends how you count reblogs, but even then, I couldn't tell you exactly.)

This anon came in and said, "I don't appreciate a specific problematic part of this topic." It was not within the topic itself, but rather tangentially related. Now, if I had written several hundred thousand words of fanfiction about this topic, I would appreciate knowing this information. Assuming it's true (which, given, I did not fact check) then it's terribly problematic and something built into the foundation of the topic.

But I mentioned this topic offhandedly, a few times.

If I knew every problematic thing about everything I come into contact with, I would never interact with anything.

But more so than that, this anon did so many things:

1) They put potentially triggering content in my inbox. I am not an activist. I am not someone who has agreed to have conversations about potentially triggering things. I have not released hardly any personal information on this blog; it runs under a pseudonym, I haven't publicly stated my age or my identity. When I do say something specific about myself, it's almost always in my tags. The most public information you'll find about me that actually pertains to my real life is that my pronouns are she/her.

This world should not be "assume triggerless until proven otherwise."

You don't know me. Don't know who I am or what I've been through. You don't get to to assume that I can take anything. Especially because I know my boundaries, and I know that having anon on won't hurt me, but there are plenty -- plenty -- of people who could potentially be hurt by having anon on -- or their askbox at all! -- and deserve to be thought of.

2) They demanded I publicly answer information that is much more likely to trigger other people. And I would have put trigger warnings -- I try really hard to tag my stuff well, and on AO3 at least, I do a better job than most people. (Tumblr, less so, but I think Tumblr is in general less controllable than AO3 and that's part of the deal.)

3) They demanded I publicly denounce something problematic. And for what?

I try really hard to be a good person. I don't always get there, and I know that, but I do try to care and educate myself on stuff that matters. At the end of the day? This doesn't matter. In the time it would take me to look up the facts of the matter, read first-hand accounts of how it's harmful and why it's problematic, and form my own "public response" (public to the 15 people who will see it on their dash, a fraction of which will care about because again, I am not a blog dedicated to this topic) I could do so much more for the people that this problematic statement supposedly hurt.

I try to be a good person. I try to listen and participate when it's right for me to do so. And I know that I don't need to constantly show this to random people following me online. I am a teenager with more than enough on my plate. Saving the world is not high on my list of priorities, surprisingly. Especially through a single performative action that will not make any lasting change, if it's any change at all.

Come off anon. Maybe I'd agree to talk then. But for now, it really seems like you're demanding I publicly denounce something, even if I can do more good for it in private, when you're too cowardly to show your face.

I am not an influencer. Nor an activist. I am not trying to save the world. I'm trying to get through school, I'm procrastinating my homework, I'm watching children's shows for fun -- I'm educating myself, too. I'm trying to listen to voices that have not been heard in the past, and internalize good messages. But I'm not doing that for clout on a blog that has 200 followers.

#for the record i once had an instagram that had over 11k followers #if i wanted clout from strangers on the internet i wouldn't have privated and abandoned that account #anyway #don't rb #hopefully that anon has blocked me

[psychosistr]

Green-Eyed Monsters- Chapter 4

Summary: Dominic tries to keep his distance from his partner and their target to avoid compromising the mission, but some information from Maravilla reveals that there’s more to the heiress than meets the eye. Can he intervene and save Steelbeak before it’s too late?

Notes: There are some trigger-warnings for the chapter including manipulative behavior, mentions of murder and potential cannibalism, and drugging. Each instance is brief, but please proceed with caution if those things bother you!

-First Chapter-

Eight times.

Dominic had been leaning against the same spot on the wall long enough to watch his partner place a hand on a woman who was essentially a complete stranger eight times. Five of the aforementioned incidents had involved Steelbeak placing a hand on Emelia Malton’s back. The other three had involved a hand on one of the billionaire’s long legs. (Not that he’d been counting, though. No, of course not- he was just observing to make sure his partner wasn’t in any danger. That’s all.) Nearly all of them were immediately followed by the woman in question laughing at something that was said while one of her own hands found somewhere new to touch him- his hand, his shoulder, his chest, his forearm, his thigh, his upper arm, the tip of his beak, and his cheek, in that exact order.

Watching them made the loon’s skin crawl and set off warning bells that hadn’t stopped the entire time he’d been watching them converse while downing two drinks each. Something about the way that woman was so eager to touch the fowl seemed wrong- like she was feeling up a prime cut of meat. What upset the red-eyed bird even more was how the other man seemed completely oblivious to it, apparently either too intoxicated or too enamored to notice…and at this point Dominic wasn’t sure which reason would set him off more…

“Looks like the green-eyed monster has set her sights on another one.” Oh, great- the voice of the one other person in the room that he did NOT want to hear right now.

Red eyes tore themselves away from the pair seated at the bar across the room to begrudgingly acknowledge the jaybird’s presence. “I don’t know what you’re trying to imply, but I’m not-”

To his surprise, though, Maravilla’s eyes were looking in the exact same direction his own had been for the longest time. “I’m surprised she’s taking so long with him…then again, there are a lot of people here…” She took a sip of the wine she’d brought with her before shrugging. “Oh well…it won’t be too much longer: The green-eyed monster hates going hungry, after all.”

Red eyes narrowed suspiciously, their owner thoroughly confused by the double-agent’s words. “What exactly are you talking about…?”

“Emelia, of course.” The lady in red responded as if the answer should have been obvious. “I have to admit, I wasn’t certain which one of us she’d go for, but I think I’ll let this one slide given her..history.” Another sip from her now half-emptied glass. “Still, Steelbeak’s putting on quite the performance- it’s almost as if he doesn’t know how much danger he’s in right now.”

Okay, now Dominic’s confusion (and other feelings) were being pushed aside by a far more powerful one: Protective fury. “What danger?” His tone and the look in his eyes were both equally serious- demanding answers and promising punishment if this demand was not heeded properly.

“Hm?” Maravilla blinked and looked away from the lighter couple at the bar to stare at the man beside her with a baffled expression. “Wait…you two didn’t know?” A purple fingertip came up to tap the base of her beak in a thoughtful gesture. “Ohhh, no wonder he took the first two drinks…I just thought he had a way to neutralize it or something…”

The loon’s glare did not subside one bit; quite the opposite, in fact. “I am in NO mood for games right now. Tell me what you know, or FOWL and SHUSH are going to be down one agent.” The way his hand rested over his concealed weaponry made it clear that his threat was far from empty.

Unfortunately, this only seemed to excite the double agent in an unsettling way. “Ooh, don’t tempt me~” At a warning scowl, she let out a quiet giggle and held her free hand out in a pacifying gesture to, hopefully, still the loon’s hand. “Okay, okay, I’ll talk, no need to be so forceful~” The playful demeanor soon fell away as the femme fatale finally gave the sharp shooter his desired information. “It seems that SHUSH had better intel than FOWL this time. It’s been rumored for quite some time now that Emelia Malton has been abducting people from the events that she attends or hosts. At least one person has vanished without a trace from every event she’s attended for the past ten years. Apparently, she approaches people at these events after seeing them with someone else- a date, a spouse, or even a complete stranger- no matter what their relationship is to the missing person, they all reported that Emelia only talked to the other one after they’d shown some significant form of interaction together such as a dance or a long conversation. It’s almost as if she’s jealous of someone else receiving the attention that should be hers. Some say that jealousy even went towards her own family and she staged their deaths so she could have all of the wealth and social-spotlight to herself. This has earned her a fitting nickname within the upper-crust who spread these rumors: ‘The green-eyed monster’.”

“If so many people know about this, then why hasn’t she been caught yet?” Dominic asked skeptically.

Maravilla’s response was simple and straightforward: “She’s rich.”

“That’s it?” His skepticism had not been quelled.

Slender shoulders gave an impartial shrug. “That’s all it takes nowadays- if you’re rich and famous enough, you can get away with just about anything. Having a bank account with well-over fifteen digits is practically a ‘get out of jail free’ card.” As much as he wanted to argue against that, the loon knew that, sadly, that was pretty true given some of FOWL’s contacts within the business world. “The only way to take down someone with that kind of power is with indisputable, bullet-proof evidence of what she’s done.” Her hand briefly inclined her glass back towards the bar where her fellow SHUSH agent was still keeping a watchful eye on the pair. “That’s why we’re here: To get our hands on her private files and footage from her security system so she can be publicly exposed for what she’s done. Once her business partners, bourgeoisie affiliates, and politically inclined ‘friends’ are forced to distance themselves from and denounce her to save their own skins, arresting her will be much easier.”

That was certainly a lot of information to take in. “It’s still hard to believe a woman with her level of social-notoriety wouldn’t have been outed by now. There’d have to be police investigations to deal with, witnesses to take care of, bodies to get rid of- even with a vast fortune and a military-grade security detail, that’s A LOT to hide.” The loon stated skeptically, glancing back at the woman in question as she, once again, placed a hand on the rooster’s arm while speaking to him and leaning in FAR too close for propriety’s sake.

Maravilla followed his gaze, taking note of the way the two had steadily grown closer in proximity since she’d last looked. “Police can be bribed. Witnesses can be discredited when someone ‘more reputable’ vouches for someone’s whereabouts. As for the bodies..well…we have no SOLID proof for this, but…” The wine glass was brought back to her beak, the calmness of her tone and the way she sipped from it providing a shocking contrast to her next words. “We think she’s been eating them.”

Red eyes widened as the aquatic avian did a double take to stare at the purplish jay in disbelief. “She’s WHAT?!” A shushing gesture from the double agent and a few inquisitive glances from nearby party-goers was enough to make Dominic lower his voice back to a more reasonable level, but nowhere near enough to cool the protective-fury driven fire that had been lit within him. “You knew she was a murderous man-eater, and you didn’t bother WARNING him?” Oh, if looks could kill, then the feminine fowl would be dead where she stood several times over.

Unfortunately, Maravilla seemed immune to the loon’s attempts at mentally murdering her. Though she certainly wasn’t unaware of it, judging by the amused look in her eyes as she “tried” to look surprised and “innocent”. “I just assumed you two already knew. After all, why else would you leave your ‘partner’ all on his own with a woman who can’t keep her hands to herself?”

Dominic made a mental promise to shoot the infuriating woman the first chance he got, barely restraining himself from doing so for the sake of not blowing his cover. “He’s just trying to get her alone so he can take her earrings. He can handle it on his own.”

“Normally, I’d agree with you, but I think the ‘Green-eyed Monster’ is tired of waiting for her dinner.” A purple hand gestured with the nearly empty glass towards the bar- more specifically, to the bartender making the next round of drinks.

Keen red eyes watched the bartender’s hands carefully as the man finished mixing everything together for a margarita. Everything seemed normal…until Dominic noticed the blister-pack of pills being slid back into the bartender’s pocket and the worrying amount of powder that was quickly mixed into the drink while the unsuspecting recipient was distracted by whatever conversation he’d been having with the lovely lady now only a few centimeters short of sitting in his lap. Panic struck the aquatic avian like a freezing knife to the heart at the sight of just how many pills were missing from the pack and the thought of how little attention he’d paid to the lighter fowl’s previous cocktails; he had no idea how much Steelbeak had already ingested of the unnamed medicine or what its effects on him would be.

Black webbed feet moved as quickly as they could across the tiled floor without running. He couldn’t risk blowing their cover or alerting the guards at this point, though Dominic was extremely close to doing so and throwing caution to the wind when he saw his partner pick up the laced beverage and bring it to his beak. Darn it all, why did he have to be such a heavy drinker?! The fool had already downed half of the malicious mixed drink by the time the loon had reached the bar.

“We need to leave.” Were the first words to leave his mouth as soon as he got there, giving his partner a serious look that he hoped would get through to him how urgent their situation was.

Steelbeak looked at him while leaning heavily against the bar and the foxy woman beside him. “Wha..?” The shorter bird silently cursed himself and his carelessness when he noticed the truly intoxicated look in the taller one’s eyes. The look only further cemented his worry- Steelbeak was NOT a lightweight, a few simple drinks shouldn’t have been anywhere near enough to get him this inebriated. “Leave? Wha’re ya talkin’ ‘bout, red eyes? Party jus’ got FUN.” He was even slurring his words together. Just how strong WAS that stuff?

Dominic tried once again to give his intoxicated partner the best stern look he could muster without tipping off the heiress that he was onto her schemes. “We have that ‘meeting’ in the morning, remember? If we don’t leave now, we’ll be in big trouble later.” He hoped that some small part of his partner’s mind was still awake enough to pick up on his tone of voice and take a hint.

Apparently, he hoped for too much.

“Whaaaaa..? Meetin’…what the heck’re ya talkin’ ‘bout, Dee?” An off-white feathered hand tried waving the loon away as if he were a fly buzzing too close to him. “Go if ya wanna, I’mma hang ‘round for a while an’ have some FUN for a change~”

Emelia smiled, the look in her sparkling green eyes far too self-satisfied for the red-eyed fowl’s liking. “If fun’s what you’re looking for, then I know a place we could go for some…private entertainment~”

Steelbeak looked back at the fox with an overly excited grin that made Dominic’s guts twist with more than just anger. “Sounds good t’ me, sweetheart~” He followed the vulpine vixen’s lead when she stood up and took his hand in an attempt to lead him away from the bar (and his partner).

With a stern frown on his dark beak and a tone of voice that made many a man twice his size cower and obey, Dominic grabbed onto the end of a dark sleeve on the rooster’s other wrist and held on firmly. “Steelbeak, we really need to go. Now.”

It seemed for a single, fleeting moment that the loon’s words were cutting through whatever fog had surrounded the larger fowl’s mind…until that infuriating man-eater decided to open her mouth again.

“I just want to have a little fun, is all- and you clearly do, too.” The white fox all but draped herself along the confused man’s side, one finger trailing along the buttons of his suit tantalizingly. “I’m sure you can tag along….after all, he’s not the boss of you, right?”

“Yeah..” Steelbeak’s expression soured slightly and he repeated himself more firmly. “Yeah! You ain’t the boss of me!” He snatched his arm back out of his stunned partner’s grip, using his newly freed hand to point at the loon’s chest while still remaining at least an inch or two away to avoid bumping into him as the taller fowl swayed slightly on his feet. “You’re always tellin’ me what t’ do! Well, I don’t care what YOU wanna do, I’M gonna go enjoy myself! Go walk home for all I care, partner!” The last word he said before turning away and letting himself be led towards his doom was so…so cold…as if that word was a source of uncontested hatred and bitterness for him…

Once the shock and sting of his partner’s rejection faded away, Dominic was left with nothing but a cold, hollow feeling in his chest. That feeling soon gave way to frustration and bitterness.

Fine, he thought, if that’s how Steelbeak really felt, then Dominic had half a mind to just let him-

Movement.

Eyes trained from years of sharpshooting picked up the faint trace of movement from his retreating partner’s back: His free hand (the one that Dominic had been holding back earlier) was curled behind his back, the angle it was at hiding the movement from anyone on his other side by utilizing his large tail feathers as cover. The hand was closed in a partial fist, with only his first two fingers sticking out so the pair of digits could do a quick hooking motion towards himself.

Red eyes blinked in surprise at the universally recognizable gesture. Perhaps his partner wasn’t as foolish as he thought…

_____________________________________________________________

Across the room, a certain purplish jay returned to her taller companion after witnessing the altercation between the two FOWL agents. They wouldn’t get a better opportunity than this- they had to act fast. “I’m going after them.”

Xaviera looked at the shorter woman with a frown that tried to be stern, but simply came off as worried. “Mari, be-”

“Careful. I know.” Maravilla smiled up at the statuesque avian reassuringly. “Don’t worry, mi cielo, I’ll be just fine. After all,” A purple hand took back the hair-comb she’d left in the vulture's care earlier, fingers lingering a little longer than necessary on the other’s palm before gathering up her wavy tresses and securing them properly into their original style. Once she was satisfied with her appearance, she gave the lighter fowl a playful wink. “I’ve got you by my side~”

The easily flustered woman tried (unsuccessfully) to fight back the crimson flush that covered her face and spread half-way down her neck as she stood up. “W-What’s-” Quickly clearing her throat to try regaining her composure (and try to hide the embarrassing chirp that found its way into her voice), she looked down at her comrade with a more serious expression. “What’s the plan?”

“Steelbeak’s partner is following him and Emelia back to her room. If our intel’s right, the security will get the signal to clear the hallways leading there for exactly five minutes to avoid rousing her ‘victim’s’ suspicions. I’ll follow along and help him incapacitate Emelia, ensuring their trust so I can look through her files freely while they collect the diamonds they’re after. With any luck, I’ll be able to get everything downloaded before the guards return. If not, well..” The corners of her mouth lifted in a smile that was clearly restrained, but full of excitement. “I’ll have you waiting by the window to help me escape if things get…dangerous~”

“Please don’t jump out of a closed window, Mari- I don’t want to spend the night pulling glass out of your arm…again…” The poor vulture only had so much patience to give, but somehow the jaybird always seemed to drag a little more out of her despite her own protests.

“Fine, no closed windows.” The devious dame’s tone did not go unnoticed, but, before her cohort had a chance to call her out on it, she was already speed-walking towards the room’s exit with impressive ease for someone wearing such high heels. “See you outside, mi cielo! And don’t forget about our dance~!”

“Mari…” Xaviera was left to sigh and shake her head, black-feathered fingers coming up to twist and fidget with a lock of her long hair anxiously. “You’re going to give me a heart attack one of these days…I’m just not sure if it’ll be a good or bad one yet...” When she felt the light but sharp feeling of her roots trying to remain in place, the tall avian quickly released her hair before it was unintentionally plucked from her already sparsely-covered head- she knew from experience that if she didn’t, she’d be the one getting a loving-lecture about taking care of herself.

With a firmer shake of her head, the lady in green walked briskly towards the door leading outside- they had work to do and bad guys to stop, after all.

<--Previous Chapter Next Chapter-->

End Notes: For the record- Maravilla is a pathological liar and master manipulator, so whether her story about Emelia eating people is true or not is completely up to your own interpretation >x3

#darkwing duck #dwd #steelbeak #Dominic Domino #steeldomino #xaviera #double agent maravilla #darkwing duck oc #dwd oc #not my oc #and #my OC #trigger warning #emotional manipulation #mental manipulation #cannibal tw #non-consensual drug use #green-eyed monsters

[walker-journal]

Pyrrhic Transfiguration (Adam Solo)

Participants: Adam Walker (Hunter) Danica Vassliev (NPC Spellcaster) 

Context: Adam’s strength is fading fast as cult infiltration, wounds from Bloody Mary, and Apoleia Dynamis bring him close to bodily and metal collapse. Calling in favor with one of Penelope’s covenmates leads to more questions than Adam can answer about his relationship and malady. 

Follows: Into the Fold Part 1, Deep Sea Blues

Content Warnings: Body Horror (Medical Transmutation), Chronic Disease (Apoleia Dynamis),  Mention of Drug Use (Elixir), Animal Sacrifice, Allusions to Physical Abuse

Sorry its long

“How long has it been since your last drink Adam?”

“Why,” Adam asked from where he lay in the exact center of a ring of river clay, the Hunter so maimed from the tender mercies of Ma’al’s cult that he could barely stir from where Danica’s assistant had set him down. One half of the circle’s interior was covered in lush grass while the other half was dead burnt ash. 

“I don’t want to transmute your blood into red sugar syrup by calculating the toxicity incorrectly,” Danica pointed out as her basilisk fang stylus scratched more runic equations into the soft clay circle. 

“Three months.”

Danica looked up from where she had been drawing sigils on Adam’s right wrist with Lampade blood ink. “You? Adam...you’re shitting me.” 

“Nope,” the fraternity captain confided, hoarse voice a wane attempt at being cheerful, “been straight edge lately. Don’t tell anyone, I’ll lose all dudebro cred and have to go into soyboy exile.” 

The sorceress took one of Adam’s bare legs in the business-like fashion of a medical professional who was too familiar with wounds and physiology to be made bashful by her patient’s state of undress. “Tragic,” she affirmed, “any other stimulants, tobacco, or…”

Adam watched as Danica painted diagrams on his calf and thigh in Fae blood, eldritch mathematics evidently meant to guide magic through his body like silicon traces channel electrical currents through a circuit board. “Well I had to pop some Elixir during those hauntings a while back..”

Danica made a guttural sound of disgust and frustration in her throat. “That’s poison Adam! It’ll rot you from the inside!  Jak mogłeś! Próbuję cię utrzymać przy życiu, durniu!” Danica continued to heap imprecations on Adam in Polish for his stubbornness and general dumbassery as she smoothed some calculations on the clay circle with an iron spade. She began scribing new sigils to account for any necrophage elements that still lingered in Adam’s tissues. 

“Why not ask Penelope to perform regeneration rites,” Danica asked later as she took skin, hair, and saliva samples in order to account for the specific concentration of enzymes and other proteins in Adam’s body. “I can sense her power all over you, and the connection between you both would make this easier.” 

“Uh her ...what...all over me?” 

Danica helped raise Adam up to a sitting position, gingerly trying to avoid the lacerations and bruises that covered the athlete’s body like livid craters. “Relax Casanova,” she teased, stylus tracing a geometric web of interconnected eye-like runes up the length of Adam's spine while trying not to wince at jagged slashes, claw marks, and yellowed contusions that lined his back. “She’s used sanguimancy to put you back together a couple times now right,” she posited, earning a nod of confirmation from Adam. “Magic like that is all about bonds, an exchange of essence that catalyzes a change in reality. It’s in your marrow now Adam.” 

The Hunter thought back to that night of that cursed full moon when Nell had performed what she thought would be her last full moon. She’d used both their blood to enkindle new flowers to bloom and that evening had left Adam with an inkling of the grand unity of life her arts entailed. “Yeah, that makes sense I guess.” 

“There's another connection too,” Danica began, “emotion is a higher…”  

Adam’s snort of jocular derision turned to a hacking cough as his broken ribs sent shuddering spasms of pain up his chest. “Sorry, I’m shit at talking about that stuff,” he admitted. 

“Well you might need to start,” Danica snapped. She pressed Adam’s head down to start on a greater symbol of cerebral warding on the nape of his neck, the closed eye surrounded by a Solomonic temple and pentacle serving as a sort of occult circuit breaker that’d stop the spell’s energy from liquifying Adam’s grey matter. “Look Adam I’m not trying to slut shame you here,” she began more gently. “But Nell’s exile now, the support structure we grew up in is closed to her. We’re forbidden from even speaking with her...” 

Adam met Danica’s grey eyes and comprehended that he was the sorceress' only point of contact with the woman she had to publicly denounce as an apostate. “Nell’s more than just a good time to me,” he rasped quietly, breathing shallow. “I know I’m a piece of shit when it comes to girls but I wouldn’t lie...not about that.” 

Danica’s soft exhalation of relief might’ve been a bit insulting, but Adam had never been shy about explicitly stating what he wanted and what he had no interest in. “I know Esther raised all you Walkers to survive the zombie apocalypse or whatever,” Danica sighed as she began tracing the veins and muscles of Adam’s battered left arm in symbols. “But maybe drop those defenses a little for Nell? She needs more than a soldier.”

Adam bit his split bottom lip, watching Danica’s expression with bloodshot eyes. “You’re really worried about her aren’t you,” he noted, choosing not to take offense at this butting into his personal life. 

Danica brushed dark tresses of hair away from her face, bracelets inscribed with aspects of the many-faced goddess letting out a metallic click on her wrists. “Necromancy, exile, hooking up with a Hunter, and getting into ...this…” Danica held up Adam’s arm to his own face, giving him a clear view of livid lesions and fingers snapped by blunt force trauma. “Yes I’m worried!”    

“I’ll make sure she makes out, no matter what,” Adam assured, before raising both lacerated eyebrows at Danica’s fervent curse in Polish that he was probably luckily not understanding. 

“That's exactly what I’m afraid of,” Danica sighed as she wrote equations in alchemical script across the Hunter’s forehead and temples. “Look I’m about to rip your body apart and put it together again.” The witch nodded to the human corpse and stone slabs with struggling animals tied to them that formed a sacrificial perimeter around the clay circle, raw fleshly materials for the spell. “Even with all this? There's a good chance you won’t make it Adam.”   

“I know.” 

Danica met those dark bloodshot eyes, so eerily devoid of fear or hesitation. “Fuck Hunters,” she exclaimed under her breath while placing a ward on Adam’s right pectoral that’d hopefully keep his heart from suffering a corner spasm during the impending ritual’s trauma. “Whatever took your powers? It’s a wound in your psyche, your soul even, and I don’t mean that figuratively.”

“That’s a thing?”

The healer nodded as she drew an intricate branching tree of overlapping runic circle’s down Adam’s sternum, with its roots twinning around his abdominal muscles. “Whatever you and Nell are doing is making it worse...like alot worse,” she emphasized. “There’s nothing I can do for that, the soul can’t be transmuted,” the medical alchemist admitted. “The best thing you could possibly do right now is stop whatever this mission is before …”

“I need to do this,” Adam said with quiet firmness, unmoved even after realizing the cults’ attempts to break his and Nells’ will to resist were hitting deeper than he’d even thought possible. “I just need to last long enough to see it though.” 

“Does that still take priority over everything,” Danica prodded, as if holding out hope that Adam would fight harder for the people closest to him rather than the abstract of humanity.  “Even with your powers gone?” 

Adam’s silence and thousand yard stare at the sanctum’s cold stone walls was answer enough. He didn’t stir at the shrill screams of rabbits having their throats slit by Danica’s sanctified athame. The high squeal of slaughtered swine joined the last braying of a goat rasping into silence. 

Blood slid down long slanted groves in the stone floor, flowing into the alchemical equations that Danica had scribed into the circle of river clay.  A hiss was followed by an eruption of viscous scarlet vapor, as if the blood had become a silken cloud. The clay began to writhe and shift of its own accord. Animal bodies and a human corpse wriggled down through groves in a grotesque parody of animation, melding into the roiling clay in a sickening crunch of bones and sloshing meat. 

“Last chance Walker,” Danica said, almost pleadingly. 

Adam looked at the roiling ring of earth, blood, and flesh that’d become a single promethean substance. Nausea filled his gut at the thought of whatever the hell this was getting inside of him. But Adam hadn’t been raised to flinch from duty’s cost. 

“Whatever it takes,” he answered. 

Bowing her head, Danica spoke the concluding sequence of the grand equation written through the room and Adam’s very flesh. 

Adam watched in sweat-soaked shock as his own arm ripped open, the slick strands of nerves, veins, and tendons uncoiling like unspooled thread from his bones. Adam’s world went white as ocular nerves and muscle were torn from his skull. The ring of flesh clay rushed inward, smothering Adam’s flayed body in a glissading mass. Everything became pain, sickening warmth, and the bodily alienation of things slithering around inside of him. 

Danica’s chanting rose as ambient power thrummed through air, incantation harmonizing with Adam’s agonizing screams till all was one. 

#solo

[deniscollins]

These CEOs broke the rules at a secretive summit to expose a billionaire’s crude sexual comments

What would you do if you attended a financial industry summit which has a privacy policy that confines the information shared by industry leaders to only those who pay $25,000 to attend, and a keynote speaker makes  crude, inappropriate remarks, including comparing his wealth management strategy to picking up women for sex: (1) Share the comments on Internet to expose them, (2) maintain the policy and say nothing because a financial person’s credibility is wholly dependent on their ability to be discreet and keep information private, (3) something else, if so what? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

On the second day of one of the nation’s most elite conferences for wealth management CEOs, self-proclaimed “self-made multibillionaire” Ken Fisher shared his industry philosophy during a fireside chat at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco.

Fisher, 68, had been previously honored at the Tiburon CEO Summit and has written 11 books, regularly writes newspaper columns on finance and has a net worth of $3.7 billion. His conversation on the main stage with Chip Roame, managing partner at Tiburon Strategic Advisors, was a keynote event open to all 220 participants. There were no competing panels.

But almost as soon as his session began, attendees said online and in interviews with The Washington Post, Fisher used the spotlight to make crude, inappropriate remarks, including comparing his wealth management strategy to picking up women for sex.

Roame, who moderated the discussion, did not intervene or ask Fisher to stop.

In the audience, attendees quietly and privately discussed their shared dismay about what they characterized as a pattern of behavior. The backlash did not go public, though, until hours later — in large part because of a summit-wide privacy policy meant to confine the information shared by industry leaders to only those who pay the $25,000 to attend.

At least three attendees refused to stay quiet, willfully violating the summit’s code of conduct to expose Fisher’s behavior with the hope of bringing reform to the wealth management world — which eventually forced Roame to address the matter publicly and Fisher to apologize.

Violating the summit’s media policy was risky, attendees said, particularly in the field of wealth management. A person’s credibility is wholly dependent on their ability to be discreet and keep information private. But those who spoke out said this circumstance warranted an exception.

“I chose to speak out because maintaining a culture of silence around harassment and assault protects those who abuse their power, which then further marginalizes underrepresented groups,” Sonya Dreizler, a speaker and consultant to financial services firms, told The Post.

Dreizler, who specializes in investing that delivers both financial and environmental or social justice returns, came forward after her friend and fellow summit attendee Alex Chalekian shared a video of himself recapping Fisher’s behavior, which he called a “true debacle.”

Chalekian, founder and CEO of Lake Avenue Financial in Pasadena, Calif., said Fisher talked about dropping acid and his belief that charities are immoral. According to Chalekian and other attendees, Fisher also made crude comments about genitalia and mentioned financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was indicted on federal sex-trafficking charges earlier this year before dying by suicide in prison.

“Things that were said by Ken Fisher were just absolutely horrifying,” Chalekian said in the video.

Rachel Robasciotti, founder and CEO of wealth management firm Robasciotti and Philipson in San Francisco, also publicly condemned Fisher’s words “at great personal risk to my career,” she told The Post in an interview.

“If we want things to be different, we have to be different,” Robasciotti said. “And that means not condoning that kind of behavior."

In the days since the summit, Roame has denounced Fisher’s remarks in a lengthy statement and vowed that the powerful billionaire will never again be invited back to the Tiburon CEO Summit.

“These comments lacked the dignity & respect that should be expected by any Tiburon CEO Summit speaker or attendee,” Roame said. “These were unacceptable words at Tiburon, in the wealth & investments industry, and in society generally.”

Roame also said he “commended” Chalekian for “having the strength to go public.”

Fisher has been forced to respond, too, both apologizing for and defending his words.

In an email to his employees at Fisher Investments that was obtained by Forbes, Fisher was dismissive of criticism from attendees and wrote that Chalekian’s video “mischaracterizes” what he said at the summit.

“It attributes views to me that I neither expressed nor endorsed,” Fisher wrote. “… Many of you are likely familiar with my sometimes colorful means of expressing myself. I like to say whatever is on my mind. I want to you to know I am sincerely sorry if anything I’ve said in your presence offended you. That certainly was never my intention.”

Fisher was more defiant in an interview Wednesday with Bloomberg News.

“I have given a lot of talks, a lot of times, in a lot of places and said stuff like this and never gotten that type of response,” Fisher told Bloomberg. “Mostly the audience understands what I am saying."

On social media, other financial advisers and wealth managers came forward claiming they had heard Fisher make equally crass comments while speaking at previous industry summits.

At one conference in Dana Point, Calif., last year, Fisher said it was “stupid” to brag about financial performance in a direct mailer, according to video of the summit obtained by Bloomberg. Fisher compared that move, according to Bloomberg, to “walking into a bar and you are a single guy and want to get laid and walking up to some girl and saying: ‘Hey you want to have sex?’ You just turn yourself into a jerk.”

When asked what he would have done differently in life, Fisher said he would have “had more sex,” according to the video.

Fisher told Bloomberg he is an “easy guy to dislike” because he manages so much wealth, adding that he regretted taking the speech invitation because it ended up being a “pain in the neck.”

“I wonder if anybody will be candid at one of these Tiburon events again,” he told Bloomberg.

On Thursday, Fisher expressed contrition.

“Some of the words and phrases I used during a recent conference to make certain points were clearly wrong and I shouldn’t have made them. I realize this kind of language has no place in our company or industry,” he said. “I sincerely apologize.”

Robasciotti said her critique of Fisher’s behavior has nothing to do with being candid.

“I don’t need political correctness; I need responsibility from the leaders,” she said. “No other CEO is going to do a deal with me if they’re thinking about me as a sexual object.”

Robasciotti identifies as a queer black woman in an industry overwhelmingly occupied by white men. Fisher’s words, she said, and the message they reinforce are what make it more difficult for people like her to succeed.

“If there aren’t women and people of color in the industry,” she said, “it’s because they don’t feel welcome.”

She is trying to change the work environment from the inside by hiring LGBTQ people, people of color and women and co-founding a social justice investing platform called RISE (Return on Investment and Social Equity), which has partnered with consumer activism and workplace equity groups to tackle the issue of workplace sexual harassment.

The initiative, called Force the Issue, is what she spoke about at the summit — just minutes after Fisher’s keynote address ended. The irony, Robasciotti said, was not lost on her.

“This exact issue was parallel,” she said.

#Ken Fisher #Sexism

[sm4selfdefense]

Donald Trump might not be sitting in the White House today. At first glance, that might sound odd. The six-term Republican senator, who passed away Saturday, has been hailed as an outspoken opponent of the president, while Trump himself despised McCain and famously claimed the former prisoner of the Vietcong was “not a war hero.” McCain has also been held up, by both right and left alike, as an exemplar of political civility, integrity, and decency; a nonracist Republican; the anti-Trump. Bernie Sanders called him “a man of decency and honor;” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praised him as an “unparalleled example of human decency.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Even if you discount the fact that McCain once publicly dismissed his wife as a “cunt.” Or that he referred to two of his fellow Republican senators as a “fucking jerk” and an “asshole.” Or that he mocked Chelsea Clinton, then a teenager, as “ugly.” Or that he refused to apologize for calling his Vietnamese captors “gooks.” Or that he slammed anti-war protesters as “low-life scum.” Ignore all of that and you’re still left with his hate-mongering, race-baiting, Trump-precursing 2008 presidential campaign — against the first black Democratic nominee for the White House. How have the vitriol and smears of a decade ago been so easily forgotten by his eulogizers? So casually consigned to the media memory hole? Remember: McCain introduced the loathsome Palin to the world in August 2008, when he plucked her from Alaskan obscurity and made her his running mate. In doing so, he granted prestige, influence, and credibility to a know-nothing demagogue and conspiracy theorist; a woman who thrived on racial and cultural resentment and would later become a leading figure in both the tea party and the “birther” movement. Sound familiar? Palin, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote in 2016, was “politically, the Mother of Trump.” As even Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC host and former adviser to McCain, conceded during the 2016 campaign: “Mr. Trump is riding the wave of anxiety that Ms. Palin first gave voice to as Senator John McCain’s running mate. Mr. Trump has now usurped and vastly expanded upon Ms. Palin’s constituency, but the connection between the two movements is undeniable.” Is it any wonder then that the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin, in an otherwise fawning piece on the late Arizona senator in May, observed how “many in Mr. McCain’s own party believe that, by selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, he bears at least a small measure of blame for unleashing the forces of grievance politics and nativism within the Republican Party”? Remember also: McCain has never apologized for picking Palin. As Martin reported in his piece, McCain did express regret that he hadn’t selected his friend and fellow Sen. Joe Lieberman as his 2008 running mate, but “he continues to defend Ms. Palin’s performance.” Yes, her racist and conspiratorial performance. That performance. It’s easy, though, to blame all of the Trumpish campaign of 2008 on the former governor of Alaska. It was McCain, however, who unleashed and empowered her — and failed to restrain or rebuke her as she incited angry crowds against Obama. “The growing furor in the Republican Party was something that we, as a campaign, failed to address,” admitted Wallace. And, while it was Palin who shamelessly accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists” and dog-whistled to rally-goers that the black Democrat wasn’t “a man who sees America the way you and I see America,” it was McCain who spent much of the days and weeks before the election trying to tie Obama to his former acquaintance, Bill Ayers, the co-founder of a Vietnam War-era militant group. It was McCain who authorized his campaign spokesperson to remind reporters of “Barack Obama’s long association with a domestic terrorist.” The spokesperson added, “The American people know radical when they hear it, and John McCain is not the candidate in this election they should be concerned about.” You think shouting “lock her up” and “CNN sucks” at Trump rallies is bad? McCain-Palin rallies in 2008 featured Republican supporters in the audience shouting “Traitor!”, “Terrorist!”, “Off with his head!”, and “Kill him!” at the mere mention of Obama’s name. “Watch the tape of the guy screaming, ‘He’s a terrorist!’ McCain seems to shudder at that, he rolls his eyes … and I thought for a moment he’d admonish the man. But he didn’t,” wrote Joe Klein in Time magazine on October 9, 2008. “True enough: he no longer has his honor. But we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn’t done the right thing all year.” On October 11, 2008, Democratic congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis lambasted both McCain and Palin for “sowing the seeds of hatred and division” and even compared their dangerous campaign rhetoric to that of arch-segregationist George Wallace. Some conservatives expressed outrage with McCain, too. David Frum accused him of “whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November.” Andrew Sullivan urged the Arizona senator to desist from dangerous and inflammatory attacks on a young, black Democrat: “For God’s sake, McCain, stop it. For once in this campaign, put your country first.” Republican activist and former McCain ally Frank Schaeffer denounced the GOP presidential candidate for “playing with fire,” unleashing a “monster of American hate and prejudice,” and holding rallies that “are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.” Yet, astonishingly, all of this has been whitewashed from McCain’s political record. None of it makes an appearance in the raft of unctuous obituaries that have been published since Saturday. Instead, a single moment from that campaign — in which a woman at a town hall accused Obama of being “an Arab” and McCain replied by saying, “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man” — has become the only thing anyone seems to remember from it. Over the past couple of days, the clip of that exchange has gone viral on Twitter, with everyone from former Bush administration official Fran Townsend to liberal author Stephen King, citing it as proof of the late senator’s “character and integrity” and his “finest moment.” Sorry, what? I have never understood how this was a badge of honor for McCain — nor do many Arab-Americans, for that matter. Actor Ben Affleck summed up the problem on “Real Time with Bill Maher” a few days after the incident. “What if someone said, ‘I heard he’s a Jew.’ ‘No, no, he’s not a Jew, he’s alright … he’s a decent guy’?” Affleck asked the audience. “‘Arab’ and ‘good person’ are not antithetical to one another. … We’ve allowed this idea where denying … that Obama is not an Arab, nor is he a Muslim, we’ve allowed that denial to turn into the acceptance of both of those things as a legitimate slur.” In 2008, McCain could have pushed back against this idea, expressed by the increasingly Trumpish GOP rank and file, that there was something wrong with being Arab or Muslim; after all, his fellow Republican and Vietnam veteran Colin Powell did so rather eloquently on television around the same time. But, no, McCain, whether wittingly or unwittingly, allowed a distinction to be drawn between being an Arab and being a decent family man. Some suggest he should be given the benefit of the doubt on that remark because it was a spur-of-the-moment, off-the-cuff response to a rambling and racist questioner; his intent, they say, was noble. Maybe. But context matters. How do you explain the rest of his shoddy election campaign? Shamefully, he ran for president while repeatedly claiming his black opponent was a friend of terrorists. Embarrassingly, he chose to give the nativist Palin a national platform she didn’t deserve. Disgracefully, he stayed silent as his own supporters called for the killing and beheading of Obama. So the reality is this: if you were drawing up a list of Americans who share blame for the rise of Donald Trump, John McCain’s name would have to be somewhere near the top of it. With the noxious Palin at his side, the Arizona senator ran a nasty, bigoted, and desperate presidential campaign in 2008 that paved the way for Trump and Trumpism in 2016. And you don’t have to take my word for it. It’s been reported that McCain requested for Obama to speak at his funeral. Perhaps the former president can start his eulogy by repeating aloud what he told New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait in October 2016: “I see a straight line from the announcement of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential nominee to what we see today in Donald Trump … and the shift in the center of gravity for the Republican Party.” Thanks, John McCain. Thanks a lot. https://theintercept.com/2018/08/27/hold-the-plaudits-john-mccains-2008-campaign-paved-the-way-for-donald-trump/

#mccain #palin #trump

[investmart007]

WASHINGTON | A life of courage, politics came down to 1 vote for McCain

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/PPj6xz

WASHINGTON | A life of courage, politics came down to 1 vote for McCain

WASHINGTON — For John McCain, a lifetime of courage, contradictions and contrarianism came down to one vote, in the middle of the night, in the twilight of his career.

The fate of President Donald Trump’s long effort to repeal Barack Obama’s health care law hung in the balance as a Senate roll call dragged on past 1 a.m. on a July night in 2017.

Then came McCain — 80 years old, recently diagnosed with brain cancer, his face still scarred from surgery, striding with purpose toward the well of the Senate.

The Arizona Republican raised his right arm, paused for dramatic effect and flashed a determined thumbs-down, drawing gasps from both sides of the aisle.

Trump’s health care bill was dead. McCain’s lifelong reputation as free thinker, never to be intimidated, was very much alive.

It was the capstone of a political career that had taken McCain from the House to the Senate to the Republican presidential nomination, but never to his ultimate goal, the White House.

McCain, who faced down his captors in a Vietnamese prison of war camp and later turned his trademark defiance into a political asset, died Saturday. He was 81.

With his irascible grin and fighter-pilot moxie, McCain won election to the House from Arizona twice and the Senate six times. But twice he was thwarted in his quest for the presidency. His upstart bid for president in 2000 took flight in New Hampshire only to be quickly flattened in South Carolina.

Eight years later, he fought back from the brink of defeat to win the GOP nomination, only to be overpowered by Democrat Obama in the general election. McCain had chosen a little-known Alaska governor as his running mate for that race, and in the process helped turn Sarah Palin into a political celebrity.

After losing to Obama in an electoral landslide, McCain returned to the Senate determined not to be defined by a failed presidential campaign in which his reputation as a maverick had faded. In the politics of the moment and in national political debate over the decades, McCain energetically advanced his ideas and punched back hard at critics — Trump not least among them.

Scion of a decorated military family, McCain embraced his role as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, pushing for aggressive U.S. military intervention overseas and eager to contribute to “defeating the forces of radical Islam that want to destroy America.”

Asked how he wanted to be remembered, McCain said simply: “That I made a major contribution to the defense of the nation.”

Taking a long look back in his valedictory memoir, “The Restless Wave,” McCain wrote of the world he inhabited: “I hate to leave it. But I don’t have a complaint. Not one. It’s been quite a ride. I’ve known great passions, seen amazing wonders, fought in a war, and helped make a peace. … I made a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my times.”

Throughout his decades in Congress, McCain played his role with trademark verve, at one hearing dismissing a protester by calling out, “Get out of here, you low-life scum.”

McCain stuck by the party’s 2016 presidential nominee, Trump, at times seemingly through gritted teeth — until the release a month before the election of a lewd audio in which Trump said he could kiss and grab women. Declaring that the breaking point, McCain withdrew his support and said he would write in “some good conservative Republican who’s qualified to be president.”

He had largely held his tongue earlier in the campaign when Trump questioned McCain’s status as a war hero by saying: “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

McCain, with unusual restraint, said that was offensive to veterans, but “the best thing to do is put it behind us and move forward.”

But by the time McCain cast his vote against the GOP health bill, six months into Trump’s presidency, the two men were openly at odds.

Trump railed against McCain publicly over the vote, and McCain remarked that he no longer listened to what Trump had to say because “there’s no point in it.”

Unafraid of contradictions, McCain himself had campaigned against Obama’s health care law, but voted against its repeal because Republicans had flouted what he called the “old way of legislating,” with full-fledged debate, amendments and committee hearings on the final bill.

In his final months, McCain did not go quietly, frequently jabbing at Trump and his policies from the remove of his Hidden Valley family retreat in Arizona. He opposed the president’s nominee for CIA director because of her past role in overseeing torture, scolded Trump for alienating U.S. allies at an international summit, labeled the administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy “an affront to the decency of the American people” and denounced the Trump-Vladimir Putin summit in Helsinki as a “tragic mistake” in which Trump put on “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”

On Aug. 13, Trump signed into law a $716 billion defense policy bill named in honor of the senator. Trump signed the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act in a ceremony at a military base in New York — without one mention of McCain.

Over a 31-year career in the Senate, McCain became a standard-bearer for reforming campaign donations. He railed against pork-barrel spending for legislators’ pet projects and cultivated a reputation as a deficit hawk and an independent voice. He even attacked senators’ own perks of office, such as free, up-close parking spots at Washington airports.

But faced with a tough GOP challenge for his Senate seat in 2010, McCain disowned chapters in his past and turned to the right on a number of hot-button issues, including gays in the military, immigration and climate change.

When the Supreme Court in 2010 overturned the campaign finance restrictions that he had worked so hard to enact, McCain said he was disappointed, but he seemed resigned to their demise. “I don’t think there’s much that can be done, to tell you the truth,” he said. “It is what it is.”

After surviving the 2010 election, McCain wasn’t about to roll over on any number of other issues. During a long and heated 2011 debate in Congress over the federal debt, McCain dismissed conservatives’ arguments against raising the government’s borrowing limit as “bizarro” and foolish. In a 2014 hearing, he lit into Secretary of State John Kerry for “talking strongly and carrying a very small stick — in fact, a twig” on foreign policy.

Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, offered his own summation for a senator whom he described as “quixotic.”

“I think John’s legacy is that he never quits,” Biden said in a 2015 interview.

Over a lifetime in politics, McCain’s anti-authoritarian streak was both his greatest asset and Achilles’ heel.

Often disinclined to follow the herd, McCain achieved his biggest legislative successes when making alliances with Democrats. He also piled up a full repertoire of over-the-top wisecracks, and had enough flare-ups with colleagues to cement a reputation as a hothead. Some questioned whether he had the right temperament to be president. McCain’s challenge always was to strike the right balance, offering himself both as a rabble-rouser and a reliable Republican standard-bearer.

John Sidney McCain III’s history as a Vietnam POW for 5½ years after being shot out of the sky at age 31 was a powerful part of his back story as the son and grandson of four-star admirals.

When his Vietnamese captors offered him early release as a propaganda ploy, McCain refused to play along.

“Now it will be very bad for you, Mac Kane,” they told him, and they were true to their word.

McCain returned home from his years as a POW on crutches and unable to lift his arms. Never again could he raise them above his head.

He once said he’d “never known a prisoner of war who felt he could fully explain the experience to anyone who had not shared it.” Indeed, he seemed more at ease joking about his incarceration than analyzing it.

More than once he quipped after a distasteful experience: “That’s the most fun I’ve had since my last interrogation.”

In his darkest hour in Vietnam, McCain’s will was broken and he signed a confession that said, “I am a black criminal and I have performed deeds of an air pirate.”

For all of that, though, McCain defied his guards. To his captors, just as to his superiors back at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, he was exasperating.

“He had to carry a different burden than most of us and he handled it beautifully,” Orson Swindle, a former POW cellmate, once said.

“He didn’t need any coping mechanism; that’s just built into him.”

Even in prison, McCain played to the bleachers, shouting obscenities at his captors loudly enough to bolster the spirits of fellow captives. Appointed by the POWs to act as camp “entertainment officer,” a “room chaplain” and a “communications officer,” McCain imparted comic relief, literary tutorials, news of the day, even religious sustenance.

Bud Day, a former cellmate and Medal of Honor recipient, said McCain’s POW experience “took some great iron and turned him into steel.”

McCain once said that Vietnam “wasn’t a turning point in me as to what type of person I am, but it was a bit of a turning point in me appreciating the value of serving a cause greater than your self-interest.”

It taught him, he said, “that if you put your country first, that everything will be OK.”

Still, a predilection for what McCain described as “quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country’s uniform” was encoded in the family DNA.

His father and grandfather, the Navy’s first father-and-son set of four-star admirals, had set such a low standard for behavior at the Naval Academy that John Sidney McCain III’s self-described “four-year course of insubordination and rebellion” got little more than a yawn from his family.

Speaking of his father, McCain once pronounced himself “little short of astonished by the old man’s reckless disregard for the rules.” And yet for all the raucous tales of misconduct, the midshipmen of the McCain family abided by the school’s honor code not to lie, cheat or steal.

McCain’s Vietnam experience gave him new confidence in himself and his judgment. But it did not tame his wild side, and his first marriage was a casualty. McCain blamed the failure of the marriage on “my own selfishness and immaturity” and has called it “my greatest moral failing.”

One month after divorcing his first wife, Carol, McCain married Cindy Hensley, 17 years his junior.

McCain’s war story made him a celebrity in Washington. When he became the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, he quickly established friendships with some of the younger senators, who would stop by his office, put their feet up, and chew over the events of the day. The experience opened McCain’s eyes to the impact that politicians could have, and to the notion that he could be one of them.

His marriage to Cindy, the daughter of a wealthy beer distributor in Arizona, helped clear the path forward. In one day, McCain signed his Navy discharge papers and flew west with his new wife to his new life. By 1982, he’d been elected to the House and four years later to an open Senate seat. He and Cindy had four children, to add to the three from his first marriage. Their youngest child was adopted from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh.

McCain set about establishing a conservative voting record and a reputation as a tightwad with taxpayer dollars. But just months into his Senate career, he made what he called “the worst mistake of his life.” He participated in two meetings with banking regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, a friend, campaign contributor, constituent and savings and loan financier who was later convicted of securities fraud.

The S&L situation simmered for a few years, but eventually boiled over, and McCain got burned.

As the industry collapsed, McCain was tagged as one of the Keating Five — five senators who, to varying degrees, were accused of trying to get regulators to ease up on Keating. McCain was cited for lesser involvement than the others by the Senate ethics committee, which faulted his “poor judgment.”

But to have his honor questioned, he said, was in some ways worse than the torture he endured in Vietnam. He spent years trying to live down the taint.

Another move McCain would eventually say he regretted came earlier in his career as a lawmaker when in 1983 he voted against establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday. In doing so he followed the political tradition of Arizona, which was the last state to recognize the holiday for the slain civil rights leader.

In the 1990s, McCain shouldered another wrenching issue, the long effort to account for American soldiers still missing from the war and to normalize relations with Vietnam.

“People don’t remember how ugly the POW-MIA issue was,” former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey, a fellow Vietnam veteran, later recalled, crediting McCain for standing up to significant opposition. “I heard people scream in his face, holding him responsible for the deaths of POWs.”

Few politicians matched McCain’s success as an author. His 1999 release “Faith Of My Fathers” was a million-seller that was highly praised and helped launch his run for president in 2000. His most recent best-seller and planned farewell, “The Restless Wave,” came out in May 2018.

By NANCY BENAC, Associated Press

#Alaska Governor #contrarianism #dramatic effect #electoral landslide #John McCain #lifelong reputation #political asset #politics #TodayNews #trademark defiance

[orlandohands-blog]

Twenty years of failure: Many groups missed chances to stop Larry Nassar

It's important to read through this article. As Larissa Boyce watched the past week unfold the growing number of news trucks parked outside the courthouse, the surging public interest in disgraced gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar and his sex abuse victims, and the calls from lawmakers for resignations and investigations - one word repeated through her mind, encapsulating both relief and frustration. "Finally," Boyce said Thursday. "Finally, somebody is listening to our cries for help." Boyce, a 37-year-old mother of four, is one of the 156 women and girls whose testimony over the course of seven days, coupled with a review of documents produced in litigation, offered the most complete picture to date of how a man a prosecutor called "possibly the most prolific serial child sex abuser in history" avoided the inside of a jail cell for so long. Between 1995 and 2015, according to testimony and court filings, 13 girls and women claim they raised complaints about Nassar, who continued to treat and assault his patients until the 14th went to law enforcement, and then to the Indianapolis Star, in August 2016. It's a timeline of people and organizations accused of failure to aggressively respond to suspicions of abuse that includes institutions under fire this week: Michigan State University, USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic Committee, but also the FBI, a local police force, a local gymnastics center, and the parents of several victims, along with others they say they consulted before deciding not to contact law enforcement. "I think it was the perfect storm of sorts, of ineptitude, inaction, and willful neglect," said John Manly, a California attorney representing more than 100 victims. For victims such as Boyce, however, the timeline extends past the fall of 2016 when Nassar was arrested and runs right up until the past week, when the first few days of tearful testimony triggered the national outpouring, and furor from Congress, that she and others expected a year earlier. "We've felt like we've been fighting this battle for the last 14 or 15 months, just to try to get somebody to listen to us," she said. "Why did it have to take that long for people to understand what happened here?" A review of the timeline of accusations doesn't answer that question, but does show the many people and organizations who may have had a chance to stop Nassar earlier, and didn't. 1995: Donna Markham claims her 10-year-old daughter, Chelsea, told her, after visiting Nassar for treatment for back pain, that "he put his fingers in me, and they weren't gloved." Markham was ready "to drive across the median" to turn around and confront Nassar, she said in court last week, but her daughter begged her not tell anyone, out of fear it would negatively impact her gymnastics career. She said she mentioned the incident to a gymnastics coach who expressed doubt it had happened. Chelsea Markham committed suicide in 2009, at the age of 23. 1997: Boyce, then a 16-year-old in a Michigan State youth gymnastics program, claims she told Kathie Klages, the university's longtime gymnastics coach, that Nassar digitally penetrated her during medical treatment. Klages expressed doubt and called in other young gymnasts, Boyce said, asking if anyone else had experienced similar conduct by Nassar. The coach also brought in collegiate gymnasts, Boyce said, who suggested she was misinterpreting a procedure Nassar performed on nerve endings in the pelvic area. One other girl, who was 14 at the time and wishes to remain anonymous, also came forward that night with concerns about Nassar's treatment, according to Boyce and her attorney, who also represents the other accuser. At one point, Boyce said, Klages waved a piece of paper in the air she believes it was some type of complaint form and discouraged them from filing a report. "Instead of being protected, I was humiliated," Boyce said. "I was brainwashed into believing that I was the problem." The other girl that day testified in court last week as Victim 55. Nassar nodded in recognition when she addressed him. "I never questioned why he always asked the nurses and residents to leave the room, even though he was a teaching doctor" she said. "We grew up watching MSU promote and glorify a pedophile." In court filings, Michigan State's attorney has said the school has been unable to either prove or disprove these claims. 1998: The anonymous mother of a young gymnast at Twistars, a Lansing, Michigan-area gym run by 2012 Olympic gymnastics coach John Geddert, claims she was told by her daughter that Nassar had touched her in the vaginal area. The mother informed Geddert, she said, that she would no longer permit Nassar to treat her child. The same year, a 12-year-old girl identified in a lawsuit against Twistars as Jane A71 Doe alleges she complained vaguely to an unnamed coach that Nassar was doing "inappropriate things." In court filings, Twistars has denied these claims, and Geddert has denied any knowledge of Nassar's abuse. This week, USA Gymnastics announced it had suspended Geddert's membership, pending a disciplinary investigation. A day later, Geddert announced through a letter to gym members he was retiring, while denouncing USA Gymnastics' decision. 1999: Lindsey Schuett said she was 16 when she sought treatment from Nassar and she "knew immediately that it was abuse." She told her mother, she said, and a school counselor, but Nassar convinced them she misunderstood a legitimate treatment. Her mother sent her back to Nassar for more treatment. "I felt like I was trapped in some hellish situation that only a movie could dream up," said Schuett, now 34, in her videotaped impact statement, which she sent from South Korea, where she now lives. "I told myself to forget," Schuett said. "I told myself that I had to be the only one." The same year, former Michigan State cross-country runner Christie Achenbach claims she complained about Nassar's treatment to her track coach, and to her parents. They concluded she must have misinterpreted valid treatment, Achenbach said in a phone interview Thursday. Achenbach's former coach sent her a Facebook message recently, she said, apologizing but stating she did not recall this conversation. Over the years, Achenbach, now a 40-year-old dietitian in North Carolina, has periodically typed Nassar's name into internet search engines, along with terms such as "accusations of harassment" to see if anything came up. Until late 2016, nothing did. 2000: Tiffany Thomas-Lopez, a Michigan State softball player, claims she complained about Nassar digitally penetrating her to two trainers, one of whom discouraged her from filing a formal report. "I imagined hitting you if I ever got the chance to see you again," Thomas-Lopez told Nassar in court last week. In court filings, Michigan State's attorney has said the trainers have denied these allegations and that the school can neither prove nor disprove Thomas-Lopez's claims. Sometime between 2000 and 2002: Michigan State volleyball player Jennifer Rood-Bedford said she made a vague complaint to a trainer about Nassar, and ultimately decided not to file an official complaint. Nassar's unusual treatments were apparently well-known to her teammates, however, as Rood-Bedford said they jokingly referred to him as "the crotch doc." "I remember laying there wondering, 'Is this okay? This doesn't seem right,'" she said in court of her treatment by Nassar. "Everyone trusted him. I told myself I needed to trust him, too." Of the discussion with the trainer, Rood-Bedford said, "She treated the situation with both seriousness and sober-mindedness." Rood-Bedford decided not to file a complaint, she said, a choice she has long regretted. "I constantly ask myself, 'Did I have the power to stop him?'" she said. 2004: Kyle Stephens, a 12-year-old family friend of Nassar, told her parents about abuse he had been subjecting her to since she was 6. Nassar denied the girl's allegations, and Stephens's parents believed him. Stephens's father committed suicide in 2016, an act she believes was partly due to the realization she had been telling the truth. "Parents need to learn the warning signs," Stephens said in an interview outside the courtroom last week. "And they need to believe their kids." Stephens's parents consulted a retired Michigan State professor and psychologist, Gary Stollak, about their daughter's allegation before they decided to believe Nassar, Stephens has said. In a court hearing last year, Stollak testified he had a stroke in 2010, and doesn't recall any of this. The same year, 17-year-old Brianne Randall told her mother and police in Meridian Township, near Lansing, that Nassar sexually assaulted her. "The police questioned you and you had the audacity to tell them I misunderstood the treatment because I was not comfortable with my body," Randall said, addressing Nassar during her impact statement. That Meridian police missed an opportunity to stop Nassar has been reported publicly since September 2016, but Randall didn't publicly identify herself until the sentencing hearing. When she saw the first Star article about Nassar in September 2016, Randall said, she immediately called her mother and said, "He's abused other people, I knew this was going to happen." Meridian Township paid for Randall's flight from Seattle, where she now lives, to Michigan to confront Nassar. Frank Walsh, the township manager, said they have a news conference planned for next week to discuss the case. 2014: Recent Michigan State graduate Amanda Thomashow filed complaints with both university police and the school's Title IX office after, she claimed, Nassar cupped her buttocks, massaged her breast and vaginal area during treatment, and was visibly aroused. Michigan State's Title IX office concluded she had misinterpreted medical treatment. The police investigation did not result in a criminal charge. After the Title IX investigation concluded, Nassar and his boss - William Strampel, then the dean of Michigan State's college of osteopathic medicine - agreed to conditions to prevent another "misinterpretation." Nassar was never to perform this type of treatment again without a chaperone in the room, and would modify it, he agreed, to minimize skin to skin contact. After Nassar's arrest, Michigan State police and the FBI jointly interviewed several of Nassar's supervisors and colleagues. According to the police report, released late last year, Strampel conceded he never intended to ensure Nassar was following these conditions, because the Title IX inquiry cleared him and these were "common sense" measures. Michigan State sports physician Douglas Dietzel told police that, in 2016, after Nassar was fired, Strampel told several doctors that "'Larry didn't follow the guidelines' that were put in place after the 2014 investigation," the report states. Dietzel said when he heard that he thought, "How do we enforce those things when we didn't even know about them?" 2015: In June, former Team USA gymnast Maggie Nichols contacted USA Gymnastics leadership about Nassar, who assaulted Nichols, she alleges, at the Karolyi Ranch. USA Gymnastics conducted its own investigation for five weeks, and decided to report Nassar to the Indianapolis office of the FBI in July. An agent told the organization's CEO, Steve Penny, not to do anything that would interfere with the investigation, USA Gymnastics has said, which Penny interpreted as a directive not to inform anyone else. While USA Gymnastics quietly parted ways with Nassar, and informed the USOC of the allegations, no one contacted Michigan State. 2016: In April, Penny and then USA Gymnastics board chair Paul Parilla, concerned about an apparent lack of progress by the FBI investigation out of Indianapolis, met with an agent in the bureau's Los Angeles office. In July, Nichols received her first call from an FBI agent, based in Los Angeles. A spokeswoman for the FBI's Indianapolis office deferred questions to the FBI's national press office, which declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles office confirmed that office opened an investigation in the spring of 2016. "The L.A. investigation was opened when allegations came directly to the L.A. office," spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said. "These other questions really need to be directed elsewhere." In August, Rachael Denhollander, a Louisville, Kentucky woman assaulted by Nassar in 2000 as a 15-year-old gymnast from Kalamazoo, Michigan, contacted the Indianapolis Star and filed a report with Michigan State police. Days before, Nassar treated Emma Ann Miller, now 15, who believes she is his last known victim. In September, the Indianapolis Star published its first story on the allegations against Nassar, and Michigan State fired him. On Sept. 20, Michigan State police executed a search warrant at Nassar's home, and discovered an external hard drive containing 37,000 images of child pornography in the trash can at the curb. One enduring question to Manly, the victim's attorney, is why no one from any of the FBI field offices investigating Nassar bothered to execute a search warrant earlier. "The first thing you do in a child molestation investigation is you try to get access to his computers, because there's usually child pornography there," he said. In December, Nassar was indicted on child pornography charges. Thomas-Lopez went public in a lawsuit with allegations her complaints were ignored in 2000. The Lansing State Journal reported that a university Title IX investigation of Nassar in 2014 cleared him. 2017: In February, Michigan State announced the hiring of attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, a former federal prosecutor, to conduct an internal review related to Nassar. Victims soon began calling for a public release of Fitzgerald's report. In March, Penny resigned from USA Gymnastics. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on sex abuse in Olympic sports, called by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. USOC executive Rick Adams, under questioning from Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said someone at USA Gymnastics likely knew or should have known about Nassar's abuse, given the number of accusers. In Michigan, Boyce publicly alleged she tried to complain about Nassar in 1997. In May, the Senate Commerce Committee held its own hearing, called by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., discussing sex abuse in Olympic sports. In June, USA Gymnastics released a report by a former federal prosecutor that recommended policy improvements, but avoided addressing potential failures to stop Nassar earlier. Manly called the report "a public relations facade," and began calling for independent investigations of USA Gymnastics and the USOC. In July, Nassar pleaded guilty to federal child porn crimes. In November, Nassar pleaded guilty to 10 sexual assault counts in two counties in Michigan. In December, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette acceded to victim's demands, and asked Michigan State to make its internal report public. The attorney Fitzgerald stated there was no report; he had been conducting fact-finding in preparation for defending the school in lawsuits, and found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Victims renewed calls for an independent investigation of Michigan State's role in Nassar's crimes. A federal judge sentenced Nassar to serve 60 years for his child porn crimes. 2018: On Jan. 16, Nassar's sentencing hearing began. Last Friday, in the middle of the fourth day of victim's statements, Michigan State's board acquiesced to demands for an independent investigation, and asked the state attorney general's office to conduct it. On Wednesday, minutes after a judge sentenced Nassar to 40 to 175 years in prison, USOC chief executive Scott Blackmun announced plans for an independent investigation of USA Gymnastics and the USOC's role in Nassar's crimes. Hours later, Michigan State president Lou Anna Simon resigned. Late Wednesday and Thursday, multiple members of Congress, for the first time, issued calls for independent investigations of Michigan State, USA Gymnastics, and the USOC. Sen. Feinstein released statements that said a meeting she had with eight Nassar victims last February was "one of the most disturbing, emotional meetings I've held in 25 years in the Senate," and she demanded an investigation of Michigan State. Sen. Blumenthal tweeted that he, too, was calling for independent investigations of the USOC, USA Gymnastics and Michigan State. "The women who bravely exposed Larry Nassar's criminal conduct deserve nothing less," he wrote. Sally Jenkins: USA Gymnastics allowed Larry Nassar to prey upon innocent victims. Congress must investigate. In apology, USOC CEO calls for resignation of entire USA Gymnastics board of directors 'We have the power now': The statements from the women who confronted Larry Nassar http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/orlandosentinel/~3/gXKpnoS8KN4/ct-missed-chances-to-stop-larry-nassar-20180126-story.html

[her-culture]

Color and Casting

Colorism (According to Oxford’s Online Dictionary): prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group.

The “Brown Paper Bag” Test:

Black individuals with skin lighter than a brown paper bag would typically gain more privileges than those who had a darker complexion compared to the color of a brown paper bag. This test was mostly used in the 1900s to determine if a black person looked white enough to gain acceptance or admittance into the upper class part of society.

Color has been something that has separated many things - crayons, laundry, and especially people. While discrimination against people of color is often talked about and brought up on various platforms, it does not seem like there is enough being said about colorism within non-white communities, like the black community. As a dark skinned African-American woman in a colorful family, I’ve grown up hearing many sides of how black people tend to receive different treatment based on the shade of brown they are. For those on the outside looking in at this issue, I am going to explain the effects of colorism in two contemporary films.

Hollywood in general often receives a lot of controversy when it comes to who they choose for roles, especially in films that are supposed to receive a lot of attention when they hit theaters. One of the many reasons for why a movie’s casting can be controversial is when a role based on an actual person, a well known fictitious figure, or even an individual who ideally is supposed to be of a certain ethnic background- is portrayed by an actor who does not accurately fit the description. Whitewashing has been a big hot button topic lately, as there is a belief that movies will sell better if there is a well known white actor involved. There are far too many examples to highlight, but a few that caused major discussion were Emma Stone’s portrayal of an Asian woman in Aloha (2015), the three principle actors in The Last Airbender (2010), Ben Affleck portraying a Mexican-American man in Argo (2012), Tilda Swinton as a Buddist monk in Doctor Strange (2016), and Scarlett Johansson playing a character from Japanese anime in Ghost in a Shell (2017).

To many, these examples are clear indicators of of casting done incorrectly, but there are also examples with films featuring stories of people of color where the ethnic background is accurate but not the right skin color. Why is this so important? Well to start, many of the key issues and conflicts within these plots tend to stem from not just the background, but the appearance of the character. This is too crucial of a detail to get wrong, especially in films that wish to showcase a portrait of someone’s black experience. Skin color is a character in itself. This can not be overlooked, otherwise the story will lose some important value in its message. No matter how well an actor can transform themselves for a role, acting the part is really half of the battle.

NINA (2016)

Director Cynthia Mort, best known for writing for the sitcom Roseanne , released this film as her directorial debut. This biopic of the late, great singer and artist Nina Simone was already eleven years in the making, and many critics had voiced that it should never been released, as not enough research and care was taken with handling the story of an individual who was more than just a black woman with the blues. Mort had spent a day with Ms. Simone in the early 90s and didn’t know herself that it would one day be the inspiration for her first film as a director. She was no doubt in awe of the singer and wanted to do something to honor her memory. It is evident that Mort did her best to research many aspects of Simone’s life, but I believe that the biggest plight of her life was lost in translation, simply because Mort could not relate to the story. As a white woman, she did not consult nearly enough black women, or even those who knew Nina well in general to be able to authentically capture what really brought out the emotion behind Simone’s voice.

In 2012, it was announced that Zoe Saldana, a well-known black but light skinned actress, would take on the role of Nina Simone in Mort’s film.

This is where any potential for the film finding positive acclaim had diminished. Nina Simone’s daughter, Simone Kelly, had even mentioned publicly that Saldana was not the best choice to portray her mother. Because Nina Simone grew up in a time where she was told “her nose was too wide, her skin was too dark,” casting a woman who couldn’t naturally relate with that struggle took away a great deal of what made Ms. Simone so unique and powerful. Simone’s family and estate denounced any ties to the film and were very vocal about their outrage towards it. A white director sticking to the decision to use a light skinned woman (who in the picture above had to paint her face in order to appear to have ‘dark’ skin) is indirectly a display of anti-black racism and further proof that the closer a black individual is to whiteness, the more desirable they are. Nina Simone’s life and legacy completely defied this notion, yet this is how she is being represented and shown to audiences.

I do not doubt that Mort’s heart was in the right place, but I cannot forgive the fact that her mind was not. Those close to Ms. Simone and those who know well of her personality would agree that even Nina herself would be insulted by this if she were alive and knew that this is how she was being shown in a film.

The trailer of the film Nina:

 I personally cannot bring myself to watch the actual film based on what I’ve seen in this trailer alone. As a dark skinned woman, I know that I would certainly be offended if I knew a light skinned woman would be portraying me, since a huge part of my identity is based around how I learned to love the skin I’ve been given.

MARSHALL (2017)

Chadwick Boseman, a prominent black actor and dark skinned man, portrays Thurgood Marshall on screen. Boseman has actually got a great track record with representing the black community well. His filmography includes other starring roles in biopics such as 42 (2013), where he played the hall of famer baseball player Jackie Robinson and Get On Up (2015), where he portrayed the wild and complicatedly brilliant singer and musician James Brown, not to mention The Black Panther coming out this year in February, where we will see him and a mostly black cast portray heroic individuals who are also African royalty.

This makes me wonder why Boseman wanted to take on this influential figure when, unlike for his roles of Robinson and Brown, he does not carry a believable resemblance at all to the subject.

Hudlin is known for making many cult classics for the black community such House Party (1990), Boomerang , (1992), The Great White Hype (1996), The

Ladies Man (2000), etc but this will be is first time debuting a cinematic biopic. His motivation behind creating the film is pretty clear, but one might question what exactly made him decide on Boseman for the lead role. Boseman is clearly great at portraying black icons, but that doesn’t mean he needs to do it even when he has little to no likeness to the person at all. I guess I do appreciate that unlike the Nina film, Boseman did not have to wear makeup to make his skin appear lighter in order to portray Thurgood Marshall. That would have been another case of insult to injury.

Some would say this is a very minor setback, as it is predicted that Boseman will deliver another amazing performance in this role, but that is not what I’m doubting here. I’m more so worry about Thurgood’s story.

I’m sure that the plot of this film will be very engaging and the story within will have very moving and poignant aspects, but the actual Thurgood Marshall could not do a lot of what he did at that time if he was as dark as Boseman is. It feels weird for me to celebrate the release of Marshall like I did with Selma (2014) and other works that put revolutionary black leaders on the big screen, when I know already that a big part of what made his life what it was, is the fact that he had light skinned privilege. Marshall would definitely pass the brown paper bag test.

My first reaction when I first heard that this film was in the works was confusion rather than outrage. Surely there are great light skinned black men who could have taken on this role, just like there were deserving darker skinned women who could have accurately depicted Nina Simone.

Part of me understands that we’ve seen so much brilliance from Boseman that maybe it’s just assumed that he can play nearly anyone - but that is a very slippery slope and I would hope that Boseman doesn’t repeat something like this in the future. He is a great talent who doesn’t always need to be the lead, especially in a film based on a light skinned black man who used his advantage to help him get ahead in the rankings of the justice system.

I take biopics very seriously. The actor chosen to play the role, as well as the story and the key elements in the plot need to be on point, otherwise I find myself very disappointed. You are essentially showing the life and legacy of someone to people who may or may not know of that person, but feel as though they will learn more about them through watching the film. Some of the best biopics I’ve seen that beautifully capture their subject’s character and adversities are Selena (1997), Ray (2004), and Frida (2002). Not only was the casting nearly spot on, but the performance of the actors along with the story of these individual's lives comes off as authentic without me having to think too hard about how accurate the details are while watching it. I’m not claiming that these are perfect depictions, as it’s very difficult to have a completely truthful biopic and there is always some point of bias being shown, but I have always thought those those three did an incredible job of focusing more on the person rather than their politics.

I do actually plan on seeing the movie Marshall. Even though I am not satisfied with the casting since it will already make the story partially inaccurate, it still presents some type of empowerment for black people.

The trailer for Marshall: 

 The Nina film is unnecessarily dramatized to make Ms. Simone a lost soul, who needed the saving of a kind man to stay by her side even as she grew bitter. Maybe that display of Mort’s version of Nina Simone wouldn’t be that terrible to see if it was an actual dark skinned woman, who was communicating this struggle to overcome oppression along with her personal demons. Having a light skinned woman try to explore that while wearing brown paint is unfathomable. It continues the history of darker black women being treated as jokes, not even worthy enough to play women that were naturally dark like themselves on screen. Though this may appear as a double standard, having a dark skinned individual take the place as a light skinned one does not come off as damaging. It seems that black audiences are still getting used to seeing themselves in mainstream films in a positive light. Rarely do we conquer and outsmart our oppressive white counterparts, or the system which oppresses us in general without facing some fatal retaliation or lesson that will carry on to cause further pain among our our people. Marshall is triumphant. A celebration of the black mind and I will look forward to that more than it revealing a new perspective into the life of Thurgood Marshall.

As an upcoming filmmaker myself, works like these make me more cautious in how I will chose to represent people in the stories I create, whether they are based on real individuals or not. The skin color of a person does not just impact how they will be viewed by others around the world, but within their own communities - and of course, themselves. A message will be sent to the audience merely by the person chosen to lead the story. This alone is a key factor in making a work of film either feel relatable or out of touch with reality.

People should be judged by their content, not by their color; but characters on screen need to at least be the right color in order for us to judge the content of the film or how that person’s life is being visually shown to us. 

Head image sourced from http://everydayfeminism.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/dark_girls_caro_page-bg_29012.jpg

#race #colorism

[investmart007]

WASHINGTON | For McCain, a life of courage, politics came down to 1 vote

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/ooPhiQ

WASHINGTON | For McCain, a life of courage, politics came down to 1 vote

WASHINGTON — For John McCain, a lifetime of courage, contradictions and contrarianism came down to one vote, in the middle of the night, in the twilight of his career.

The fate of President Donald Trump‘s long effort to repeal Barack Obama’s health care law hung in the balance as a Senate roll call dragged on past 1 a.m. on a July night in 2017.

Then came McCain — 80 years old, recently diagnosed with brain cancer, his face still scarred from surgery, striding with purpose toward the well of the Senate.

The Arizona Republican raised his right arm, paused for dramatic effect and flashed a determined thumbs-down, drawing gasps from both sides of the aisle.

Trump’s health care bill was dead. McCain’s lifelong reputation as free thinker, never to be intimidated, was very much alive.

It was the capstone of a political career that had taken McCain from the House to the Senate to the Republican presidential nomination, but never to his ultimate goal, the White House.

McCain, who faced down his captors in a Vietnamese prison of war camp and later turned his trademark defiance into a political asset, died Saturday. He was 81.

With his irascible grin and fighter-pilot moxie, McCain won election to the House from Arizona twice and the Senate six times. But twice he was thwarted in his quest for the presidency. His upstart bid for president in 2000 took flight in New Hampshire only to be quickly flattened in South Carolina.

Eight years later, he fought back from the brink of defeat to win the GOP nomination, only to be overpowered by Democrat Obama in the general election. McCain had chosen a little-known Alaska governor as his running mate for that race, and in the process helped turn Sarah Palin into a political celebrity.

After losing to Obama in an electoral landslide, McCain returned to the Senate determined not to be defined by a failed presidential campaign in which his reputation as a maverick had faded. In the politics of the moment and in national political debate over the decades, McCain energetically advanced his ideas and punched back hard at critics — Trump not least among them.

Scion of a decorated military family, McCain embraced his role as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, pushing for aggressive U.S. military intervention overseas and eager to contribute to “defeating the forces of radical Islam that want to destroy America.”

Asked how he wanted to be remembered, McCain said simply: “That I made a major contribution to the defense of the nation.”

Taking a long look back in his valedictory memoir, “The Restless Wave,” McCain wrote of the world he inhabited: “I hate to leave it. But I don’t have a complaint. Not one. It’s been quite a ride. I’ve known great passions, seen amazing wonders, fought in a war, and helped make a peace. … I made a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my times.”

Throughout his decades in Congress, McCain played his role with trademark verve, at one hearing dismissing a protester by calling out, “Get out of here, you low-life scum.”

McCain stuck by the party’s 2016 presidential nominee, Trump, at times seemingly through gritted teeth — until the release a month before the election of a lewd audio in which Trump said he could kiss and grab women. Declaring that the breaking point, McCain withdrew his support and said he would write in “some good conservative Republican who’s qualified to be president.”

He had largely held his tongue earlier in the campaign when Trump questioned McCain’s status as a war hero by saying: “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

McCain, with unusual restraint, said that was offensive to veterans, but “the best thing to do is put it behind us and move forward.”

But by the time McCain cast his vote against the GOP health bill, six months into Trump’s presidency, the two men were openly at odds. Trump railed against McCain publicly over the vote, and McCain remarked that he no longer listened to what Trump had to say because “there’s no point in it.”

Unafraid of contradictions, McCain himself had campaigned against Obama’s health care law, but voted against its repeal because Republicans had flouted what he called the “old way of legislating,” with full-fledged debate, amendments and committee hearings on the final bill.

In his final months, McCain did not go quietly, frequently jabbing at Trump and his policies from the remove of his Hidden Valley family retreat in Arizona. He opposed the president’s nominee for CIA director because of her past role in overseeing torture, scolded Trump for alienating U.S. allies at an international summit, labeled the administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy “an affront to the decency of the American people” and denounced the Trump-Vladimir Putin summit in Helsinki as a “tragic mistake” in which Trump put on “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”

On Aug. 13, Trump signed into law a $716 billion defense policy bill named in honor of the senator. Trump signed the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act in a ceremony at a military base in New York — without one mention of McCain.

Over a 31-year career in the Senate, McCain became a standard-bearer for reforming campaign donations. He railed against pork-barrel spending for legislators’ pet projects and cultivated a reputation as a deficit hawk and an independent voice. He even attacked senators’ own perks of office, such as free, up-close parking spots at Washington airports.

But faced with a tough GOP challenge for his Senate seat in 2010, McCain disowned chapters in his past and turned to the right on a number of hot-button issues, including gays in the military, immigration and climate change.

When the Supreme Court in 2010 overturned the campaign finance restrictions that he had worked so hard to enact, McCain said he was disappointed, but he seemed resigned to their demise.

“I don’t think there’s much that can be done, to tell you the truth,” he said. “It is what it is.”

After surviving the 2010 election, McCain wasn’t about to roll over on any number of other issues. During a long and heated 2011 debate in Congress over the federal debt, McCain dismissed conservatives’ arguments against raising the government’s borrowing limit as “bizarro” and foolish. In a 2014 hearing, he lit into Secretary of State John Kerry for “talking strongly and carrying a very small stick — in fact, a twig” on foreign policy.

Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, offered his own summation for a senator whom he described as “quixotic.”

“I think John’s legacy is that he never quits,” Biden said in a 2015 interview.

Over a lifetime in politics, McCain’s anti-authoritarian streak was both his greatest asset and Achilles’ heel.

Often disinclined to follow the herd, McCain achieved his biggest legislative successes when making alliances with Democrats. He also piled up a full repertoire of over-the-top wisecracks, and had enough flare-ups with colleagues to cement a reputation as a hothead. Some questioned whether he had the right temperament to be president.

McCain’s challenge always was to strike the right balance, offering himself both as a rabble-rouser and a reliable Republican standard-bearer.

John Sidney McCain III’s history as a Vietnam POW for 5½ years after being shot out of the sky at age 31 was a powerful part of his back story as the son and grandson of four-star admirals.

When his Vietnamese captors offered him early release as a propaganda ploy, McCain refused to play along.

“Now it will be very bad for you, Mac Kane,” they told him, and they were true to their word.

McCain returned home from his years as a POW on crutches and unable to lift his arms. Never again could he raise them above his head.

He once said he’d “never known a prisoner of war who felt he could fully explain the experience to anyone who had not shared it.” Indeed, he seemed more at ease joking about his incarceration than analyzing it.

More than once he quipped after a distasteful experience: “That’s the most fun I’ve had since my last interrogation.”

In his darkest hour in Vietnam, McCain’s will was broken and he signed a confession that said, “I am a black criminal and I have performed deeds of an air pirate.”

For all of that, though, McCain defied his guards. To his captors, just as to his superiors back at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, he was exasperating.

“He had to carry a different burden than most of us and he handled it beautifully,” Orson Swindle, a former POW cellmate, once said. “He didn’t need any coping mechanism; that’s just built into him.”

Even in prison, McCain played to the bleachers, shouting obscenities at his captors loudly enough to bolster the spirits of fellow captives. Appointed by the POWs to act as camp “entertainment officer,” a “room chaplain” and a “communications officer,” McCain imparted comic relief, literary tutorials, news of the day, even religious sustenance.

Bud Day, a former cellmate and Medal of Honor winner, said McCain’s POW experience “took some great iron and turned him into steel.”

McCain once said that Vietnam “wasn’t a turning point in me as to what type of person I am, but it was a bit of a turning point in me appreciating the value of serving a cause greater than your self-interest.”

It taught him, he said, “that if you put your country first, that everything will be OK.”

Still, a predilection for what McCain described as “quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country’s uniform” was encoded in the family DNA.

His father and grandfather, the Navy’s first father-and-son set of four-star admirals, had set such a low standard for behavior at the Naval Academy that John Sidney McCain III’s self-described “four-year course of insubordination and rebellion” got little more than a yawn from his family.

Speaking of his father, McCain once pronounced himself “little short of astonished by the old man’s reckless disregard for the rules.” And yet for all the raucous tales of misconduct, the midshipmen of the McCain family abided by the school’s honor code not to lie, cheat or steal.

McCain’s Vietnam experience gave him new confidence in himself and his judgment. But it did not tame his wild side, and his first marriage was a casualty. McCain blamed the failure of the marriage on “my own selfishness and immaturity” and has called it “my greatest moral failing.”

One month after divorcing his first wife, Carol, McCain married Cindy Hensley, 17 years his junior.

McCain’s war story made him a celebrity in Washington. When he became the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, he quickly established friendships with some of the younger senators, who would stop by his office, put their feet up, and chew over the events of the day. The experience opened McCain’s eyes to the impact that politicians could have, and to the notion that he could be one of them.

His 1981 marriage to Cindy, the daughter of a wealthy beer distributor in Arizona, helped clear the path forward. In one day, McCain signed his Navy discharge papers and flew west with his new wife to his new life. By 1982, he’d been elected to the House and four years later to an open Senate seat. He and Cindy had four children, to add to the three from his first marriage. Their youngest child was adopted from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh.

McCain set about establishing a conservative voting record and a reputation as a tightwad with taxpayer dollars. But just months into his Senate career, he made what he called “the worst mistake of his life.” He participated in two meetings with banking regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, a friend, campaign contributor, constituent and savings and loan financier who was later convicted of securities fraud.

The S&L situation simmered for a few years, but eventually boiled over, and McCain got burned.

As the industry collapsed, McCain was tagged as one of the Keating Five — five senators who, to varying degrees, were accused of trying to get regulators to ease up on Keating. McCain was cited for lesser involvement than the others by the Senate ethics committee, which faulted his “poor judgment.”

But to have his honor questioned, he said, was in some ways worse than the torture he endured in Vietnam. He spent years trying to live down the taint.

In the 1990s, McCain shouldered another wrenching issue, the long effort to account for American soldiers still missing from the war and to normalize relations with Vietnam.

“People don’t remember how ugly the POW-MIA issue was,” former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey, a fellow Vietnam veteran, later recalled, crediting McCain for standing up to significant opposition. “I heard people scream in his face, holding him responsible for the deaths of POWs.”

By NANCY BENAC ,  Associated Press

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