#it's possible Elizabeth had become a liability in some way

[everythingisouroboros]

I don't want to hijack this post, so I won't put this in their notes, but its so wild to see just a totally different take on Elizabeth's role in the tribunal. I had always assumed that she was there because she chose to be there. Surely there's no reason for Krenel to target her specifically. Even if she'd been caught outside, I feel like she could have slipped off. But Elizabeth doesn't. She's in front right next to Titus, already trying to talk the Krenel mercenaries down when Harry and Kim show up. She doesn't even have a weapon but she doesn't back down through that whole stand-off.

I don't believe the Claires would have wanted her anywhere near the line of fire. Not necessarily out of the goodness of their hearts: they paid for her education as a lawyer, which seems like too much of an investment, both in money and maybe more importantly, time, to throw away. To me, it seemed like Everat considered the Hardie boys to be the disposable ones.

#anyway it's cool to see a differing take on why Elizabeth might be there at the tribunal #i hadn't really questioned why she was sent to babysit the Hardie boys when the Claires knew the mercenaries would be after them #it's possible Elizabeth had become a liability in some way #she's smart and was asking too many questions ig #and turning her into a martyr was a convenient way to kill two birds with one stone #possibilities... #disco elysium #Elizabeth Beaufort

[jennamoran]

The Art of Glitch (Part 6)

Glitch 0th edition is available here.

Hi! We’re talking about Glitch art direction.

So previously,

we talked about the art in the pre-release;

and then a bit about the general set up for the 1st edition art!

and then covered some ways that example characters can die.

and then a bit about gender/ethnic balancing, plus details on a few pieces in particular!

and then about the first assignment to Elizabeth Sherry.

Let’s move on!

        So!

Like I mentioned yesterday, one of the first things I did when gathering artists for Glitch was reach out to a few of the CMWGE artists whose style I thought might bend to fit the book.

The second of these would be Beatrice Pelagatti!

           Beatrice Pelagatti

https://www.artstation.com/beatrice_pelagatti/albums/all

Beatrice was a lock for the book for a couple of reasons, one of them a little dumb and one of them pretty good.

The reason that’s a little dumb is that in an early Chuubo’s piece, she gave me a Jasper Irinka with natural hair. Forever after, accurately or otherwise, I’ve had her in the back of my mind as “good at respectful handling of minority characters” and “bad at anime” and assigned pieces accordingly.

The less dumb reason is that in Glass-Maker’s Dragon, she had the opportunity to turn in some really remarkable pieces, often with hints of the art nouveau aesthetic that was, if not really endemic in the 2nd edition of Nobilis that I was trying to emulate, at least, you know, definitely Nobilis-y.

So here I was, with a book where anime style would be a liability and where I needed people I could trust to do remarkable, Nobilis-y stuff and handle people from all over the world respectfully:

Of course she was high on my list!

           The Process of Assignment

Beatrice specifically listed her availability as “a couple pieces a month,” so I wanted to start her out with two pieces.

I didn’t really have a place for her more art nouveau/deco pieces, except possibly the frontispiece—which I was still fretting over, a bit—

So instead I tried to pick out something that suited what I considered her other strength, which was drawing realistic people. Not photorealistic. Not unrealistically attractive. Not going the other way into the deliberately unattractive or grotesque:

Just, you know, people-like people.

People who seemed real and not stylized.

In particular, I wanted a piece opposite “the Sound of Larks” chapter opening that was just, like, a person. A Strategist, you know, working a job, a job with people, and not being all eerie otherworldly majesty or, alternatively, gloomy back-of-the-hand-to-the-forehead “I can’t be a part of this world!”

A Strategist who had managed to get at least some of the way towards, you know, being human?

        Picking from my Chart of Genders &c.

For this character, I opted to grab “fat white woman” from my list.

Part of this was on the theory that Beatrice’s style would lend itself well to drawing a person who was fat but not distorted by fatphobia.

Part of it was, well ...

... like, right, I really didn’t want to start things off by grabbing from the handful of “(no additional tag) white (gender)” entries from my list. I particularly didn’t want to do that when just grabbing someone whose flagship trait was “being basically human.”

But, at the same time, if the core canonical image of “Strategist who has seen past the war and joined humanity” was, e.g., black ...

Like, there were multiple ways that could be read badly!

Really, just the usual ways to read non-white Chancery Strategists badly (”X kind of people want to destroy the world!” and “X kind of people are supportive enough to be the ones to stop trying to destroy the world and become the world’s magical guiding friends instead!”), just the usual problems that I was trying to avoid by having a really diverse book but also still having it be whiter than it probably “should” be ...

But, like, in this piece, all of those problems came back to the fore.

Similarly, it worked poorly to have this character queer.

... but I couldn’t see an interaction between the various unfortunate implications and fatphobia, so that might be OK?

Disability stuff would also have worked, I thought? And I was kind of tempted to have her be in a wheelchair instead or something?

... but I was having trouble framing the image itself there.

Like, it would have been viable, but the wheelchair itself wouldn’t have been visible in a lot of the concepts I was having or practical in the rest.

So a fat character was what I thought I could do here.

            Origins of the Image

In terms of the set of images that I’d planned out earlier, this was going to be the “Ability 4” image, the “showing Expertise by just fitting in with humans at work” image, and so originally the plan was to have the character working at a bakery or a gas station.

Ironically, both of those ... did raise potential issues:

The fat baker is a vaguely positive stereotype, at least in my head thanks to Studio Ghibli, but is also unquestionably a stereotype.

And gas stations have lower-class connotations that ... would be saying something, I’m not sure what, exactly, or if it would necessarily be a problem, for a fat character.

Maybe it would have been fine, but I wanted to be careful.

(It’s kind of a pity, because I think “job at a gas station” is up there with “job at a bookstore” for “classic first jobs for a Strategist coming back into the world,” but, well: there we are.)

Anyway, because of that, my best thought was to deliberately upcode the character towards a culturally higher-status job that was still in the field of, like, jobs, of exploited interchangeable employees working for people who don’t really care about them, but, you know, better-off ones; and for me, that meant either software type stuff or those higher-status office jobs you see on TV where they do I don’t actually know what but it looks like super white-collar and business and important, like, maybe they are the ones who decide what color plastic is going to be or how many cans of playdoh per year is safe for a child to eat.

(Remember that “safe” is a subjective judgment handed down, ultimately, by whoever is willing to pay for the privilege of doing so. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were the people as a whole?

But the people as a whole don’t actually fit in that office!

... probably, I digress.)

Ultimately, for software, it helped that I have lived in Silicon Valley and in fact done a sort of softwarey job and stood around in the offices of people who did even more softwarey jobs while they softwared softwarily around me, and that gave me a much stronger sense of what that would actually look like, which would be, like, super-important if we were to assume that Beatrice Pelagatti is in fact an extremely powerful telepath able to read my mind without even being in Portland.

So that’s what I went with!

Thus, a first-take assignment of:

       Page 70  

Piece Style: realistic/dark fantasy

Strategist: Caucasian, fat, she/her

Bane: inobvious

                 Description: this is a heavily “ordinary life” piece, and one of the more hopeful pieces in the book. She is working at an office, either programming or chatting with coworkers or giving a presentation or something like that—medium-status work—surrounded by humanity. She uses sunglasses to hide the Excrucian eyes.

The key point of the piece is just “here’s someone who has sort of adapted to fit in, and it is almost working?”

It doesn’t work completely, but this piece doesn’t have to show that. It can, but it doesn’t have to, and maybe it shouldn’t, for the reason below.

I’m personally envisioning this as in Mountain View, California, with decent windows on the office and a relatively scenic sidewalk outside, but whatever, it can be anywhere.

          Note: please avoid unfortunate stereotypes. Heck, please avoid stereotypes at all. Americans, at least, are primed to dismiss, disdain, and ignore fat people, and I don’t want to see that here. Thus:

Please assume that she is dying of something completely unconnected to her weight, like, birds. Or group theory.

And please assume that she eats perfectly healthily, in part because of how people look at her whenever she doesn’t, and exercises normally despite how people look at her when she does, but it doesn’t help.

Please make her fat enough that it is not ambiguous, but do not make her fat enough to compromise mobility.

In short, please recognize that she is fat because I want to be inclusive, not for the purposes of comedy or tragedy.

And please assume she is awesome.

         OK

Apparently i was actually coding programming as “medium-status” work in March, which is more accurate than “higher-status” really but makes me embarrassed about my lead-up to the description. But the truth is, all of this stuff is extremely squishy and if there’s someone out there who actually knows the difference between a medium and a high thing they should probably be out there designing women’s clothing or something and not nitpicking my patreon posts!

              Also

The character, it turns out, didn’t really come out very fat in, like, the final piece, making much of the thought that led up to the assignment somewhat, uh ... unnecessary? I guess?

I have mixed feelings about this.

Like ...

There is a strong argument that I should have been aggressive about making sure that, like ... every bit of representation came across fully. That every nonbinary character should have looked nonbinary. That every fat character should have been definitively so, rather than just “definitely not skinny.” That every time I specified an ethnicity it should have been super-obvious.

There’s a strong argument that I undermined my carefully-engineered intentions by not doing that.

I shied heavily away from that, though, and it wasn’t just out of being unwilling to hector the artists or impose my artistic judgment, although that was part of it.

See:

The thing is, I worry that letting the fat characters ... maybe, not be? ... undermines the fat representation in the book, but I also don’t think it’s my place to be going, “no, no, fatter.”

Or, like, similarly? For another kind of case that came up?

I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to be going, “This person is hard to definitively identify as Indian or Chinese or whatever because they don’t have incredibly pronounced ethnic markers as defined relative to white Americans, fix that.”

I mean, ew.

That would be, like, a super-gross thing to say.

    So, Ultimately,

Ultimately I guess my feeling is, it’s a gorgeous piece, and the character is not RPG-art skinny or even real-world skinny, which are all wins, but she’s also not really the representation that I wanted to have in there, and that’s a serious art direction failure on my part.

Probably the solution is to double or triple the number of pieces I req’ as fat next time around; probably the solution is to say, “Yeah, OK, my art notes actually had the right level of diversity this time around, but if I’m actually going to get that level of diversity in the final book, I may have to go further.”

(Though ... like ... I don’t know if I have enough pieces to do that?)

Anyway, the point is, to keep the artists from thinking I wanted caricatures, I avoided, like, overemphasizing stuff like fatness or heritage, and that may have effectively underemphasized it a bit.

I dunno.

I haven’t art directed anywhere near as much as I’ve written; I hope to get a lot better at all of this stuff---

And I do want to clarify that Beatrice did amazing work; I think this flaw is on me.

                    So, anyway

Anyway.

Here’s a neat thing that some of my artists do!

(Elizabeth actually does it too, and I probably should have showed you that yesterday. ^_^)

         A Neat Thing

A neat thing some of my artists do is respond to a request like this with a handful of options like:

And let me choose which way to go forward from there!

This is amazing, and I love it, and secretly I get annoyed at the artists who don’t do this although I try not to because it’s not strictly in the contract that they have to, but also:

Historically, I’ve usually stared at this kind of thing and gone, “uhhhh” or “aaaa!”

I’ve flailed my hands!

I’ve run around in confusion!

Because, like, I like at least two of these five pics a lot, right? And I’m not even sure that the two I like are the actual best!

     For Glithc, though,

For Glitch, though, I had this incredible advantage of a completely laid-out book with spaces for the art in it. I could just, like ... clip out the little pictures and put them in the book and see which one would look best.

This technique was not actually a perfect one.

Like, some of the pieces got shuffled around later, so “this rough definitely looks best opposite this text” was a fallible measure.

Sometimes, too, I’d approve a rough that just ... y’know ... felt different than the final wound up doing?

And then I’d have to figure out whether to tell the artist to change the final, or whether the new final was better, or whether the new final was similar or a bit worse-feeling but not to the extent that I could ask the artist for more, or whether it was worse but that could be fixed by placing it somewhere else or moving it to the opposite page?

     In This Case, Anyway

In this case, it turned out that the version of the piece that worked best was the one on the lower left.

That was kind of disappointing to me, in that it didn’t have other people in it. I’d honestly have really liked the middle top one better conceptually?

           But ...

Bu, ift you put the lower left piece by a big splashy chapter title “The Sound of Larks”—

Or, as it wound up becoming, for reasons I may tell at a later time, “A Sound of Larks”?

If you do that?

... it gets just the right feel of being called out from yourself, being pulled away into the world.

It gets the right feel of going through the world, in the gloom, lost in thinking everything is awful, and getting called out of it by, like, the sight of cattails in the wind.

By the singing of larks.

That ... wasn’t exactly what I was expecting from the image, but it was better than what I was expecting, so I went with it!

A visual representation of this process follows:

As you can see, the lower left option is so good it doesn’t even have a puzzled Jenna icon obscuring part of it!

That’s quality!

         Birds

P.S.!

Beatrice also provided me a set of roughly the same pieces that also showed the birds this character was arguably potentially dying of. You know, hanging around?

This was a little sad, because by the time I got that rough—she’d had another project to finish before she could start work on Glitch, IIRC—

By the time I got that rough, I’d assigned out a piece of a character that was specifically and definitely dying of birds, so I had to turn that kind intention down.

                    In fairness to Elizabeth, since I didn’t include that section last time

Also P.S.!

In fairness to Elizabeth, I will show you the sheets of options Elizabeth sent me for the rider traveling through Ninuan:

Cool, right?

And there would, as you can see, have been the option to see the character’s face, but ... like ...

Similarly, plugging this into the book---

At that time, opposite page 218?

    Plugging these into the book, it was just obvious that C/F would be the better choice.

         Anyway! Back to Beatrice!

I also wanted to assign Beatrice a second piece. And, since I wanted to give each artist one of these when possible, this would be one of the generic “Strategist, dying of the thing” pieces.

For this, basically, I just picked something rather far away in the book—page 266, which would be about as far away as you could possibly get from page 70 if you glued the back cover to the front cover so that the book became round, which seemed like the reasonable measure—and looked at my fairly non-binding guess at what that piece would be of from before.

It turned out---

I’d done some loose drafting out of the art of the book while sorting out exactly where the Ability-based pieces would go and stuff---

That that meant a character dying of Time.

I skimmed the character “looks” in the ethnicity/gender table until I found one that wasn’t innately problematic with any of the suggested deaths, which I honestly didn’t think through that carefully. I mean, I don’t actually remember if I did that immediately before the assignment or back during the initial setup, but either way: it was pretty casual.

Looking at it today, I can see very loose reasons not to pick a white, black, fat, old, or disabled character here---Time feels intrinsically Important, so giving it to a white character risks letting myself get into a pattern there; there’s a thing about overdue bills that might play into weird poverty stereotypes for black characters; and I might be uncomfortable showing a disabled, old, or fat character being chased by Old Man Time with a scythe ...

But honestly, none of that actually leapt out at me, I think. I just picked “Hispanic guy” and moved on:

              Page 266

“Gradegais Lauen, who is dying of Time”

           Piece Style: a “Strategist” dying of the thing […]

On the Name Plate: [...] [mention of some death description options, which I’m leaving because I like them:] “who Time seeks to kill,” “whom Time will devour,” “who dies to bleak Time,” “who the Hours will kill,” “who Time will destroy,” “ever-murdered by Time,” and “ever-dying of Time” all work too […]

          Strategist: Hispanic, he/him

Bane: Your choice, or “Time.”

Examples:

wandering through a spiritual clock realm;

walking slowly (with a cane? Walker?), unnaturally? aged;

hunched over with hands over his face or ears in agony because he just can’t deal with the bonging sound of a clock on the wall behind him, presumably represented by either sound effects or <<< >>> vibrations or something;

coming face to face with velociraptors in the kitchen, or, a college library;

pulling “June 16” off a daily wall calendar to reveal “June 16” behind it, with a few more “June 16” scattered around the room;

being chased by Old Man Time with a scythe;

sinking into an hourglass in classic supervillain trap fashion;

haggardly looking at a large stack of bills stamped “OVERDUE” and “IMMEDIATE ACTION NEEDED,”

being shot with a tranq dart by a copy of himself.

       Note: please avoid unfortunate stereotypes. Unless you’re a Hispanic man or clear it with a male Hispanic sensitivity consultant:

he is not a gangbanger;

he is not oversexed;

he is not a drug user;

he is not a buffoon. 

P.S. because stuff happens and pieces can potentially be reassigned, I am including this bit even when I know the artist I am sending this to is or isn’t a Hispanic man.

       A Lot of Options!

... because, honestly ... a lot of the death options were either not very good or kind of hard to draw.

Still, I’m still kind of proud of the variety!

The truth is, though, Beatrice drew a bunch of them and sent them back to me and it was like obvious that most of my ideas here were not actually visually good ideas.

But!

One of them was, and so, all was well.

          Next Time: Kirsten Moody!

Catch you tomorrow!

#patreon-supported posts #glitchrpg #the art of glitch #beatrice pelagatti

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: You sound like a remarkable woman out of her time. Your posts suggest you are modern and feminine yet your cultured intelligence and cleverness seems from an earlier lost time. Would you prefer to be living in 18th Century Georgian England? One imagines you would fit right in as a heroine in Jane Austen’s Regency world of aristocratic manners and clever barbs over tea in the drawing room.

I had to smile to myself a little because the last thing I ever saw myself was a Jane Austen character. I certainly don’t see myself as heroine of Austen’s world. After all don’t most if not all of Austen’s literary heroines spend their time pathetically pining away for the socially aloof and yet heroically vulnerable gentlemen they profess to love, men who are usually too dense to know that these whining women have childish schoolgirl crushes on them? I know I’m going to angry mails now from pouting Austen fans but I have to speak my mind.

Like most people I do profess to liking a nice, cosy Jane Austen adaptation on television. The fabulous frocks, fans, feathers and finery soothe us with images of a gentler, well-mannered time when gentlemen in cravats and breeches wooed perfumed ladies across ballrooms and well-manicured lawns.

However the reality was not quite so lovely. It’s not that women - like Austen’s literary women - were caught up in the social constraints of their time but also I would get restless just sitting down all day to tea and gossip. I would sooner catch the first ship bound for India and have adventures in the Orient along the way. Tea with Mr Darcy in well stuffed breeches might not be enough for me but then again a well stocked library as most landed gentry homes had would make me reconsider.

I’m fortunate that within my family we have a wealth of diaries, correspondence, private papers, and other family heirlooms that go back a few centuries which we have scrupulously stored to hopefully pass onto future generations.

So when I can decipher some letters of my ancestors it gives me some insight into what life was like for them as men and women of their time. It’s not always easy to read as they loved to scribble in ink (now faded) in the margins on nearly every page of the books they read. And so the penmanship is stylish but minuscule and therefore sometimes hard to make out. The letters are somewhat more legible but it requires patience and perseverance to make sense of what they were writing about. It’s a wonderful way to flesh out the genealogical tree with titbits of personal anecdotes that could be perfunctory, mundane, scandalous, salacious, romantic, and even political.

I’ve read Jane Austen like every other girl at boarding school I imagine. I like her writings but I wouldn’t say my heart is in it to actually live through that time.

Life for Georgian women, even of high birth, was harsh enough in a time when men still held all the power and husbands could beat and even rape their wives. Noblewomen caught diseases passed on from their husband's prostitutes and were still subjected to confinement and the barbaric medical practice of bleeding when pregnant. Even their fashions and frippery provided cold comfort when their make-up poisoned them, unwashed dresses and undergarments stank and their fancy foods made their teeth rot and fall out.

The fact that women did survive and even thrive is a testament to their strength and fortitude which I find admirable. 

I’m used to mud and sweat and even living rough because as ex-army officer I was trained to suck it up but it’s also in my nature because I love going rough when I hike or climb mountains or trek to other places off the beaten track. So I’m not squeamish so long as at the end of the day I can bathe or shower my aches away and I can put on a fresh change of clothing. However even I recoil in some horror when I consider that despite their elegant appearance, Georgian women carried a world of stench. While hands and faces would be washed daily, immersive bathing was considered bad for the health and was only indulged in occasionally.

The heavy gowns of the period would have caused the wearer to sweat profusely, with only perfumes such as rose water and orange blossom to mask the smell. The clothes themselves would also be pungent. Due to the huge amount of work involved in laundering, most households would have a maximum of one wash-day a month. Linen undergarments were changed as often as possible, but their "clean" smell would still be unappealing to us. Linen was often bleached in chamber lye, a kind of soap made from ashes and urine.

As if bodily odour was not bad enough, there was also the whiff of rotting teeth. A sugar-rich diet led to frequent tooth-decay in the upper classes. Cleansing tooth-powders had started to emerge but most of these featured "spirit of vitriol", known to us as sulphuric acid, and stripped teeth of their enamel. Often the best remedy for smelling teeth and bad breath was to chew herbs such as parsley. Where a tooth was past hope of redemption, it would be pulled with pliers or a tooth key, a claw that would fix to the teeth so it could be loosened in the jaw. To avoid a gummy smile, ladies of fashion sought false teeth made from ivory or porcelain but, where possible, they preferred to have "live" teeth in their dentures. Poor people were encouraged to sell healthy teeth for this purpose. While such a practice was unethical, it was better than the other method of sourcing human teeth: pillaging them battlefields and graveyards.

Georgian women were renowned for their snowy faces and dark eyebrows but achieving the fashionable skin tone could be extremely dangerous. White face powders were lead-based and some also featured vinegar and horse manure. Years of coating the entire face, shoulders and neck with such a mixture could lead to catastrophic consequences. Society beauty Maria Gunning died at the age of just 27, having spent her life addicted to cosmetics. Lead-poisoning could cause hair loss and tooth decay but ingeniously, these problems were elegantly adapted into the fashion and it became desirable to have a high forehead and pencil-thin eyebrows. If your own eyebrows failed you completely, you could always trap a mouse in the kitchen and use its fur to make a new artificial pair.

I usually wear my hair straight or tied up in a bun so I don’t fuss too much over my hair. This would certainly be out of place if I lived in Georgian times. Georgian ladies were the mistresses of big hair. They piled their frizzed and curled locks over pads or wires to create show pieces for the drawing room. Often their own hair was not sufficient and had to be supplemented by horse hair and false pieces. Styles from the 1760s were domed or egg-shaped, elongating into the pouf in the 1780s. But Georgiana, the infamous Duchess of Devonshire, had to take things a step further. She introduced the three-foot hair tower, ornamented with stuffed birds, waxed fruit and model ships. Following her example, women competed with one another to make the tallest headdress. Since these styles were costly and took hours to arrange, they were worn for several weeks. Ladies had to sleep sitting up and travel on the carriage floor to avoid spoiling their creations. With no combing possible, lice were inevitable so a special scratching rod was invented for irritated ladies to poke into their piled up hair.

It wasn’t any real fun being a woman and I often think Jane Austen is selling a false bill of goods in her books. You never see women in her novels deal with their menstrual problems. No one has proved for certain what they did, if anything, for sanitary hygiene. With no knickers to hold in strips of linen or rag, they were left to Mother Nature’s mercy. I can imagine that being a conversation stopper in the drawing room over tea with the vicar and his prissy wife. Their toilet habits were a little more civilised. When ladies at the royal court were caught short, they resorted to porcelain jugs much like a modern-day gravy boat. This contraption, called a bourdaloue, was stuffed up beneath the skirts and clenched beneath the thighs. Apparently it was quite normal for a lady to continue her conversation while urinating into the device! I think Jane Austen missed a trick by not having at least one scene with Elizabeth Bennet urinating under her skirts whilst trading clever barbs with Mr Darcy.

Speaking of which marriage was not a box of chocolates in the early 18th Century or indeed later in Austen’s day. Upon marriage, a lady and all her worldly goods would become property of her husband. It was therefore essential to guard a well-to-do bride’s interests with a legal marriage settlement before the ceremony took place. I read somewhere that Henrietta Hobart, later mistress to George II, had reason to be thankful for the settlement drawn up before her marriage to Charles Howard in 1706. It stipulated that two thirds of her dowry should be invested, with the interest at her sole disposal. Should Henrietta die, the funds were to pass to her children. This arrangement was to prove life-saving when her husband became an abusive gambling-addict and alcoholic.

Lower class women were known to take extreme measures to protect their future husbands from their own debts. "Smock weddings" were intended to show that the bride brought no clothes or property to the union, thus exempting each spouse from the other’s financial liabilities. The woman would be married wearing only her undergarment or smock – or sometimes nothing at all. Of course no marriage settlement, however generous, could save a woman from a violent husband and it remained legal for a man to rape or kidnap his wife. While excessive beating was frowned upon, whipping was considered a reasonable measure to discipline a wife.  Even so, it would appear many men pushed their rights beyond the limit, for laws were later amended to say a man could only beat his wife with a stick "no thicker than his thumb".

Escaping an abusive marriage then was well-nigh impossible. Divorces were so expensive that they remained the privilege of the very rich. Even if a lady did have the money to appeal for divorce, she was by no means certain of success. She would have to prove both adultery and "life-threatening cruelty". And if she won her freedom, it would come with more than just a social cost - any children from the marriage would remain property of the husband. Certainly in my family - on my father’s English side of the family - they had their fair share of scandalous behaviour that didn’t reflect well to our 21st Century minds.

Certainly the Georgians were not sexless and they enjoyed their carnal pleasures but of course being aristocratic they never did things that would publicly expose them to scandal. I was reading one such letter of an ancestor who was writing to her older sister about how hard it was for her to conceive her first child - a son naturally - that her rakish husband first took to prostitutes in an era when such things were common and the risk of infection from sexually transmitted diseases was rife. And then later settled on one mistress whom he seriously gave thought to impregnate her. However the mistress was an actress and thus such a union was frowned upon in landed gentry circles and so he was shamed back to his high born wife and to ‘try harder by God’s Providence’. The duty of any aristocratic wife was to produce a healthy son and heir but if nature did not take its course, they could seek help and so these ancestors of mine did.

Like many other aristocratic couples with trouble conceiving children they sought out quacks who made promises to cure infertility. One such person was a Dr James Graham who had invented what he called ‘The Celestial Bed’ that guaranteed conception and unearthly sexual pleasure. The bed itself was electrified and stood on insulating glass legs. The mattress was stuffed with stallion hair to increase potency. Mirrored floors and music from a glass harmonica heightened the experience, while the air swirled with exotic perfumes. Having made love on this bizarre contraption, the couple were encouraged to take ice baths and have a firm massage. The lady would also be advised to douse her genitals with champagne.

It must have worked because the family line did not die out but flourished. It proves to me that champagne is the answer to almost every question in life. A woman’s travails were not over just because she was successfully pregnant. More hazards lay in her path. Despite advances in medicine, a shocking number of medieval practices remained in the Georgian birthing chamber. The long period of rest or "confinement" leading up to the birth was still enforced for wealthy women. The rooms would be kept dark and sweltering with the expectant mother wrapped up in fustian waistcoats and petticoats. As soon as she had given birth, the room was made even hotter, with the curtains round the bed pinned and even the keyhole in the door stopped to prevent a draft. When I lived in China I discovered this is what Chinese mothers did and still do to this day. So I wasn’t so surprised when I read such a practice happened in other cultures like my own.

Those more fortunate might find themselves in a birthing chair. This had a sloped back and a semi-circle cut from the seat, designed to let gravity aid nature. It was certainly a better option than staining expensive bedding and linen. With only female relatives and an unofficially trained midwife to help, many women and their babies died in childbed, as it was known. Even when male surgeons became involved in obstetrics toward the end of the century, treatments were woefully inadequate. I read in the correspondence of one of my female ancestors that she was frequently ‘bled’ during her pregnancy. Somehow she survived any risk of post-partum haemorrhage.

Even when a birth was successful without complication the wife/mother was not out of the woods just yet. In keeping with custom in landed gentry circles of the times, the new mother would not suckle their own babies. In keeping its custom this taks was given over to a wet nurse. In the case of one of my ancestors whose correspondence I read she got a village girl from the family estates to breast feed the baby. The reason for doing so was brutally simple. Firstly, it was to ensure that the lady could conceive again as soon as possible. And secondly, Wealthier women often had difficulty breastfeeding due to their tight corsets or stays. It was also believed that a child would grow up stronger and hardier with a country-woman’s milk.

But even when the baby sprog was weaned, it was common practice for it to be handed to foster-parents until it was old enough to run about and talk. Interestingly enough Jane Austen and her siblings were fostered by a cottager in Deane village, two miles from their family home.

So overall I’m no so sure I would be thrilled to be living in the Georgian and Regency era even if it meant challenging that scoundrel Mr Wickham to a sword duel (and kicking his arse), match making with Emma, or even missing out on the pleasure of taking tea with Mr Darcy.

Sorry Mr Darcy.

Of course I’m fascinated with history and one sometimes wonder what it might be like to live in a particular time. However it’s just a flight of the imagination because to paraphrase Sir Roger Scruton I prefer to live in “the pastness of the present” rather than the past itself. This is the difference between being an historically illiterate reactionary and being a true conservative.

Thanks for your question

#question #ask #regency #georgian england #living #women #femme #personal #family

[kiss-my-freckle]

N-13, Rakitin, Sikorsky, and Scubi Global

I don’t think Red was kidding when he told Liz that he has billions of assets. If I’m right, her 41 million won’t even begin to cover it. I think she’s trying to kill someone who’s been in an alliance for 30 years, and has something far more valuable... a well of powerful secrets, and people willing to kill to keep them. 

Red: Most things will take care of themselves. But there are a lot of assets. Billions of assets. Of which, to a great degree, you’ll be in control.

Liz: You’re sick, you’re old. You’re an easy target. Red: Yes, I have my liabilities. But then, of course, I have so many assets.

Intro

The woman from Paris had two things on her side. Liz foolishly trusting in her as Liz so often trusts in the wrong people, and a codename she can use to search for the real Katarina Rostova while claiming to be Liz’s mother.

Woman: What do you know about N-13? Liz: N-13? I don’t know what that is. Woman: Not a what. A who. N-13 is an operative. The “N” stands for “neopoznanny,” the Russian word for “unidentified.” 13 represents the 13 packets of intel he stole from Lubyanka Square in 1990. Liz: You’re talking about a KGB mole? Woman: One whose identity remains unknown. A turncoat who was never proven to exist. 30 years of hunting, and still no one knows. Liz: N-13 is still active? Woman: Depending on who you ask. The CIA, MSS, MI5, the Mossad - all believe he continues to cypher some of their most damaging intel. Liz: From other governments? Why? To what end? Woman: To build a compromising file. Liz: The Sikorsky Archive. You said it’s a blackmail file. Woman: One that started with 13 intel packets over 30 years ago and has been evolving ever since. Liz: That’s why there was a bounty on your head. Woman: Yes. Because Dom set me up. He leaked to the KGB that I was N-13, that the dossier Ilya asked me to deliver that night was the elusive Archive.

The Sikorsky Archive was initially stolen by the real N-13 from Lubyanka Square in 1990. We can be sure it wasn’t stolen by the woman from Paris because she said she was framed with it on the night her husband died in the car bombing. By that time, imposter Raymond already existed because Dom and Ilya both discussed him in the car in flashback. For the past 30 years, the real N-13 has been adding intel to this Sikorsky Archive. This intel was gathered from at least four agencies... all listed in the above conversation. CIA (US), MSS (China), MI5 (UK), and the Mossad (Israel). That’s not even including what Russian intel was gathered and added to the Archive. This could be how Red knew all about Samar’s brother. 

I believe these folders on the thumb drive are the “packets” of intel the woman was referring to. Originally 13, now a constant scroll. 

Raymond Reddington is Katarina Rostova aka N-13.

As far as I’m concerned, the writers already confirmed the woman from Paris was an imposter and Red is Katarina through their N-13 confirmations alone.

The real Katarina Rostova was N-13. Confirmed by William Heidegger. 

Heidegger: Assuming, for the sake of discussion, you are who you claim to be. What proof could you possibly have? Woman: I have the identity of N-13. Heidegger: You're N-13.

Heidegger’s initial statement compared to Liz’s. Because the woman from Paris was lying to Liz. She’s not her mother. She was looking for her mother. 

Heidegger: Assuming, for the sake of discussion, you are who you claim to be. 

Liz: N-13 has the Archive, doesn't he? Assuming it is a "he." 

That's why Red was forced to kill William Heidegger. He couldn’t very well have the woman from Paris telling Heidegger what she learned from Ilya’s memory extraction - that the real Raymond Reddington died at the fire and Rostova became Reddington. Because Red was forced to stop the woman from Paris, his presence alone confirmed he’s the real Katarina Rostova. After all, if it were a lie, he had no reason to be there. Definitely had no reason to kill his way in. 

Rakitin and Sikorsky both know Red is Katarina aka N-13.

The three of them want Red’s identity to remain secret because all three have something to lose. 

Sikorsky: We know about Keen. What she's saying. That you're N-13. Red: An allegation no one believes. Sikorsky: A fact no one knows is true. We must do whatever we can to keep it that way.

Refer to Dom's statement in 5x13.

Dom: I never heard from Katarina after she left for America. What really happened to her - I think there are some people who want to keep ­that information a secret. And I think [they] will do whatever is necessary even now to keep it that way.

"They" would be Rakitin, Sikorsky, and Red. That's what Dom meant when he said both Raymond and Katarina have the Archive. They're both N-13 because they're one and the same person. Rakitin and Sikorsky want to keep secret the fact they’ve been working with Katarina Rostova while she's been living under Reddington's identity for the past 30 years.

Rakitin makes things worse because he knows Red is Rostova. 

Dembe: And it gets worse. Red: Worse than Moscow at this time of year - at any time of year? Red: Ah, well. Looks like the second front has officially engaged.

This shows in his conversation with Red. 

Red: I’m not an errand boy. I won’t be ordered about. Rakitin: Our friend has concerns about Keen. Red: Elizabeth Keen is not to be touched. I accept our friend’s concern, nothing more.

Rakitin knew about Red’s scheduled meeting with Sikorsky, and I believe he has concerns about Liz just as Sikorsky does. This would give Red reason to tell both men that Liz is not to be touched. 

Red: I flew 15 hours so I could look you in the eye and tell you what I told Rakitin - Elizabeth Keen is off limits.

   Scuti Global

Red has nothing to do with Scuti Global, but his friends in his alliance do. That’s why he treats this matter the way he does. You can see it in their conversations.

That’s why Rakitin asked if he’s familiar with it. 

Rakitin: You’re familiar with Scuti Global? Red: Of course. Scuti Global - It’s become quite the profit center.

And why he doesn’t give a damn that they’re pleased with his work. 

Sikorsky: Our friends at Scuti Global are quite pleased. Red: I couldn’t be less interested.

He works for neither men, and makes that pretty clear. 

Red: I’m not an errand boy. I won’t be ordered about.

Red: What interests me is why after nearly 30 years you suddenly act as if I work for you. I don’t.

I believe this is because he’s working WITH them. It’s an alliance with serious back-scratching. Red basically did a favor for someone he’s in alliance with even though he has nothing to do with this specific project he’s fixing. Which tells me Rafikin offers Red and/or Sikorsky something valuable to even be part of their alliance.

Red: Ah, well. Looks like the second front has officially engaged.

In just looking at the spoilers and this specific dialogue, I believe it'll be Rakitin rather than Sikorsky who will end up breaking his alliance. Because the files on the thumb drive are his. I think those files will break open Scuti Global after Red just took care of the issue. I wouldn't even be surprised if Rakitin sides with Neville Townsend for the sake of protection. He's young, unlike Red and Sikorsky. Like half their age young. 

And I don't think I can make it any more clear. Every time Liz wins against Red, she's actually losing. That's why I'm TeamRed. Freeing The Freelancer, if he does kill Red... that's a loss for Liz. Stealing the thumb drive, if Cooper does open it... that's a loss for Liz. The more she pushes, the more she loses. Because NOW is the time she should actually give a damn about his identity. 

Because he’s her mother, and he’s in a serious alliance. 

#Rederina

[floosies]

Trouble Chpt. 8

paring: mob!bucky/mob!frank x reader

summary: Elizabeth’s brother Frank, was man who looked for trouble and Bucky was just that. As much as he tried to make sure she didn’t get involved trouble, he knew it wouldn’t stop her from getting involved with it.

warnings: smut, violence, and blood (actual smut in this chapter)

Series Masterlist

After the odd interaction, James suggested that Elizabeth head to his suite and wait there. The look on his face was serious enough that she didn’t question or argue. Why would she? He knew something that she didn’t and it was most likely to keep her alive. Taking no chances, he walked her to his room. The space he resigned in was warm looking with an vintage big leather arm chair placed pressingly close to one of the walls, his suitcase placed on top of some coffee table, and the shoes he’d wear for more festive occasions discarded to a corner by the bed. 

Curiosity caused her to ask a question she didn’t think she’d be asking for a long time, “am I spending the night here...With you?” A silence lingered, in all honesty it was most likely the case that she would be. There was this gleam in her eyes, he couldn’t tell what it was but it was there, “I think so doll. I’ll let you know though. Don’t open the door for anyone okay. There’s a mini fridge, get what ya want from there. I’ll be back soon,” she nodded and promised to not open the door for anyone but him.

Closing the door, he sighed. Thankful that she was safe in his room, and then headed to Frank’s shared suite. He was expecting at most to see Karen possibly cuddling up to the man. He didn’t expect to see them having full on sex on couch. His disgusted scream stopped them, “don’t you know to knock first!” Karen screamed horrified and angered. Guarding his view with his hand to his eyes, he answered her, “well I wouldn’t have to if you two kept this to your room. Also the door was unlocked, so it’s more partially your fault.” 

They finished putting their clothes back on, “where’s my sister Barnes?” Frank spoke gruffly as he buckled his belt. He looked at Karen for a moment of privacy, “fine i’ll leave. Next time knock first. Frank i’m going to shower.” She left to the bathroom while glaring Barnes. With a sigh and a head shake Bucky continued, “I actually came to talk to you about that. Teller, he knows who she is...sorta.” Then he explained the whole scenario that happened only an hour ago. The look of fear and anger that filled Bucky earlier was now on Frank. Without thinking twice Frank had an idea, “lemme blow the bastards brains out, we’ll hide the body somewhere on here.” 

Fucking Frank, always so violent. It did make James smile though, the idea of watching Teller bleed out and become a corpse, “as much as that would be a great plan. We can’t make that kind of commotion here Castle. There’s too much liability.” The two set up a meeting with the other four. It came about quickly, Karen went to sleep after shower, which was a godsend to Frank.

Parker suggested a less evasive way to get Teller, “boss what if we invite him to a dinner, offer him a special glass of wine and get him then. If Ms.Castle will be there he won’t be suspicious.” The kid was reckless most of the time but this was a bright idea, “what do you guys think? I personally like the idea but does anyone else disagree.” Peggy spoke first, “who would be attending the dinner? Let’s not give the impression that it isn’t more than just you and Elizabeth that are here. He’ll suspect an ambush.” The rest nodded know that was true. Frank then added, “my sister doesn’t know who he is. I’d like to keep it that way. Perhaps I should be waiting in the hall after the drug kicks in. Take him out back, and you walk her to the room.” 

So it was agreed, after the drugged Teller was taken out he’d be on a boat to Brooklyn with everyone but Frank, Karen, Betty, and Bucky. They’d take the boat out the next morning. They’d be back in New York, in Brooklyn by two days tops. May be less, but hopefully soon. The meeting ended soon after. James promised Frank that Betty was safe and would be safe regardless of the plan. 

While all this was going on, Elizabeth found herself getting bored. She’d found some books on a shelf where the television of the room was placed. An hour or so passed and she figured she would be staying the night after all. Looking around, she saw a burgundy t-shirt that Bucky probably had worn to bed and just left it lying around. It was soft and long enough to be a dress on her. It was a no-brainer for her to get comfortable.

It was frustrating that somehow that hick got to Betty. There was so much on Bucky’s mind right now. He was thinking what he would say to her, how he would get her to stay the night. Instead he walked into a sight, her hair was down and the only light was coming from a lamp. She was on that old chair reading some book, wearing his shirt. She wore it so much better than he ever could. He was going to disrupt this beautiful scene, how selfish of him, “did ya miss me doll?” Her eyes fell onto his gaze. Standing up, she walked to him. Taking in the scent of his cologne, she held him. He felt warm and gentle, the same way his lips did moments after.

There’s no recollection of how they ended on the bed but he wasted no time making the most of it. The shirt she’d worn so beautifully was on the floor. Her body on full display for him. Her smaller hands on his chest trying to get his clothes off. His swollen mouth was every where, indulging on the noises she was making. Somehow she’d gotten his shirt off, her nails scraping his back. 

His hands wandered to her most sensitive spots. Slipping gentle caresses to her core, feeling the slick cover his middle and ring finger as he thrusted them languidly. The pleasure was too great, she hadn’t felt this way in so long, it was almost foreign, deep sighs of content came from her parted lips, “doll, the things you do to me.” He whispered, his voice jagged from the way in which her hands were fondling him.

Nearing the edge of her climax, she held onto him by his shoulder. Shallow breathes and her voice soft yet weary, “please, please fuck me. C’mon bucky...fuck...me..” she pleaded as she came for the first time. His lips catching her moans. His girl, she wanted him. Hastily he went from the condom in his jeans, the light from the lamp shone on his glistening skin. She waited for him in the same position he’d left her. From where he stood, he could see purple spots forming, a reminder of what had just happened. 

Carefully again he placed himself on top of her small frame, her breath fanning his chest, his right hand toying her bundle of nerves. Making whimpers leave her needing body, she began to grind against the palm of his hand looking for more friction. He took at his signal, slowly he began to enter her. She had only once done this, there was pain, he could tell, “I promise doll, you’re gonna feel so good right now. I’m gonna be so gentle right now.” His words were soothing enough for the moment. The burn that was there when they started was now beginning to blend with the sensation of pleasure.

Whimpers and slight grunts filled the room, as her legs wrapped around his waist, her voice was ragged, “so fuckin good.” He rolled them over so that she was on top now, her body practically covered in sweat, lips pouting as she rode him. He was in a trance, she felt so impossibly good. Her legs were giving out, she laid her head on his chest as he began to thrust into her. She could feel how deep he was in her, it only heightened the sensation. He could feel her squeezing him, it was euphoric, this was something they’d both been deprived of for so long. 

Who said it first, it was probably Betty. He couldn’t stop moaning her name out, she was a whimpering mess and then suddenly as her climax came she said, chanting it like a mantra, “fuck i love you, i love you so much.” In turn this made him go into a feral mode, not giving her time to ride out from her high. His lips again were everywhere on her. He was trying to prove something, “love you so fuckin much Betty, always gonna take care of my doll. Mine.” He kept raggedly saying the word. She was his, who else would she want? No one but him. 

There were a couple more times that night. By the morning, the room smelled of sex. Neither was complaining though. Barnes thought he woke up first. The sunshine was coming in from the small window in the room. Her body was bare and displaying last nights endeavors well. She however had been awake, but afraid that maybe she’d said the wrong thing at the wrong time. That was proven wrong when his arms engulfed her. She was met to the loving gaze of his sleepy blue eyes looking at her like some sort miracle, “morning doll, I love you.” His voice was so raspy and low. She smiled though, “I love you too Buck,” He smiled at her whispered words. They were only meant for his ears to hear. They stayed laid out for a few more minutes. 

#mob!au #mob!bucky #mob!steve #frank castle #Bucky Barnes #Steve Rogers #mcuedit #mcu #chris evans #sebastian stan #jon bernthal

[revcntulet]

❝ The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing. ❞  SCORPIUS MALFOY looks a lot like that muggle, FROY GUTIERREZ, right? Only 20 years old, that SLYTHERIN alumnus works as a HEALING APPRENTICE and is sided with the ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. HE identifies as a CIS MAN and is a PUREBLOOD.

CHARACTER PARALLELS: Amy Santiago (B99), Claire Temple (Daredevil), Chidi Anagonye (The Good Place), Giles (Buffy TVS), Michelle Jones (Spiderman: Homecoming), Elizabeth Swan (PoTC), Spock (Star Trek), Clarke Griffin (The 100), Harley Keener (MCU), Gregory House (House) suggested honorable mention Gizmo (Gremlins)

Full Name: Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy Gender/Pronouns: Cis man | he/him Age: Twenty Birthdate: January 20th Parents: Draco Malfoy & Astoria Malfoy (née Greengrass) Siblings: N/A. Birth place: St. Mungo’s Hospital, England Height: 5’11” Weight: 56 kg Sexual/Romantic Orientation: Demiromantic Bisexual Nationality: British Body Alterations/Marks: A ragged diamond shape scar at the base of his throat.

Blood Status: Pureblood Hogwarts House: Slytherin Wand Arm: Right Pet: A crested toad named Jarvis. Patronus: Arctic Fox Wand: 11 2/3 inches, Willow, Supple, Dragon Heartstring.

Willow is an uncommon wand wood with healing power, and I have noted that the ideal owner for a willow wand often has some (usually unwarranted) insecurity, however well they may try and hide it. While many confident customers insist on trying a willow wand (attracted by their handsome appearance and well-founded reputation for enabling advanced, non-verbal magic) my willow wands have consistently selected those of greatest potential, rather than those who feel they have little to learn. It has always been a proverb in my family that he who has furthest to travel will go fastest with willow.

Personality Traits: Brilliance, innovation, empathetic, individuality, openness, social consciousness, inventiveness, logical, practical skill and self assertion; lack of attachment to people and the “real world,” over-intellectualizing of the emotions, dismissiveness, anxious, crotchety tempered, facetiousness, rigidity, prone to self-isolation, intellectual arrogance, and stubbornness. Zodiac Sign: Aquarius/Capricorn Cusp Moral Alignment: Neutral Good Core values: Loyalty, Knowledge, Hope Four temperaments: Melancholic  

HOGWARTS HOUSE BREAKDOWN

Slytherin Primary and a Burned Ravenclaw Secondary.

Slytherin Primaries prioritize their own selves and loved ones first. Slytherins don’t feel guilty or selfish about this– they feel righteous and moral. The most important thing is to look after your own. Abandoning or hurting one of your own is the worst thing you can do.

A Burned Ravenclaw Secondary might want to be skilled, curious, and prepared, but they feel like they are (or like people think they are) limited, clumsy, or inconstant. Gathering knowledge, hobbies, skills, or tools is the right way to achieve their goals, but Burned Ravenclaws know that’s not going to work within their capabilities. So they take other paths and use other tools– maybe a Gryffindor’s bluntness, a Slytherin’s flexibility, or a Hufflepuff’s slow and steady dedication.

You may have a Hufflepuff Secondary Model.

Hufflepuff is the House of grit, reliability, and determination, and Hufflepuffs use those values to help live, act, and succeed. If you model Hufflepuff Secondary, you also value these things and like to live by them. You like to be hardworking, dedicated, and consistent– but you wouldn’t feel guilty for abandoning those values in the service of other, higher priorities. If there’s another, easier way to get what you want– you’d take it. You think hard work provides valuable rewards– and those rewards are why you work. The work doesn’t have persuasive value in itself.

9. The Expositor will have to destroy the one who they love. There is no other way. It cannot be avoided. Their fate – possibly even the entire world’s fate – depends on it.

39. You are in the Order, and as a spell inventor, you played a key role in helping the Knights mutate the Patronus Charm to create daemons. Because of this, you have a daemon of your own, and you have been experimenting with the limitations of the magic, trying to figure out if there are any ways to improve them.

Code Name Revontulet, which literally translates to “fox fire.” Legend says that an arctic fox dashed across the tundra swiping snow up into the sky, while others claim his bushy tail caused sparks when brushing the peaks of tall mountains to create the Aurora Borealis.

Despite his very best resistance he’s always been pretty empathetic in nature, he tries to rule his emotions as well as he can but fails more often than not. He was always one of those toddlers that if another kid started crying he’d be right along with them, not because he wanted attention but because he just couldn’t not. A bit of a crybaby, honestly, has researched how to magically seal up his tear ducts. Obviously managed to keep the family’s flair for the dramatic there as well.

Just managed to scrape through his schooling with nearly all top grades, this isn’t due to him being an excellent student. He has always accrued information with a voracious appetite. Any knowledge he could find, even if most people would consider it entirely useless. His mind clicks into that place? You can’t keep him away. However, when there is not an immediate stir of interest on his approach to a topic he has to fight with himself tooth and nail to carry on. Predictably found exam season highly stressful, was never open about it but was quietly competitive and silently smug over his good grades. Could comprehend well above his reading level from an early age and would often look into experimental research and complicated magic but found himself lost in OWL level History of Magic when chapter upon chapter lay ahead of him about something that didn’t catch his interest.

Tends toward introversion and finds himself tired sometimes quite easily by a large amount of social interaction. Witty and big-mouthed when he feels comfortable or is in the presence of those that embolden him and very likely to get flustered and snap at people when things are becoming a bit too much. Especially if he feels however unjustly that someone is blocking his escape. Has matured slightly in this since leaving school but it happens still, he’s just anxious. Quite fickle and can at the drop of a hat decide that he’s done with you for the day once his Give Me Attention Meter is maxed. Could be an absolute bloody brat when he felt like it but feels he has grown out of it, which he mostly has.

Always been very, very aware of many people’s distrust of him and his family, he used to sneer and play it up if anyone tried to bring up his dad and go on the offensive but was genuinely affected quite deeply by it all. In his early school years, despite his weakness to the cold, he constantly had his sleeves rolled up to the elbow so that his blank forearm was bared as a statement to just about everyone. I am not marked, I never will be. Now he’s older he has more of a handle on things and can be diplomatic in situations where people are clearly discomforted by his presence and his family history.

Scorpius was in his seventh and final year when the Knights were first created and he spent a lot of his time patching people up and teaching simple healing here and there, wherever he could. It was a natural transition to become part of The Order once he graduated, he still kept in contact with members of the Knights but while he had no way to access the grounds at all it seemed ridiculous that he be privy to everything, especially as sharing such information could have been intercepted by the opposing side. He was absolutely horrified by Harry’s resurrection and his stomach rolls every time he even thinks about it.

Never produced much of a talent for offensive magic and wouldn’t resort to those methods unless he had literally no other choice, not a front line fighter by any means. His talents with strategy, healing and his perseverance with defensive magic meant that he was an ideal candidate, in his head, to have the singular daemon amongst the Order and to test all of their hard work. Then the prophecy was slowly unravelled, silver spool of damning words in a pile at his feet.

Is in a strange place in that he can’t simply stop loving people he’s always loved whilst working simultaneously to strangle any potential for more people to be added to the list as frantically as he can. Tends to just try and put the prophecy out of his mind otherwise he stares at Cleo for too long and his hands start to shake.

Very nearly lost his apprenticeship due to his intensity over developing and refining the magic of the patronus charm. It was an all-consuming obsession, he went so far into the zone that he was a bit of a liability for a while there. He would turn up at any hour to other Order members for their opinions on an obscure theory, an element of the magic, the importance of ritual and their thoughts on his experiments with dementors. Alot of people were like you’re a bit young to be doing this aren’t you love? And he was like I’m not going to tell you to fuck off, just explain that I will not let this go and if you exclude me I will continue working on it alone.

[ DEATH TW ] Although this can be said for anyone possessing a daemon, he is protective of Cleo to the point of neurosis, the magic was experimental at the time of her manifestation and he felt every single layer of his soul flayed away and the creation of atoms from a matter that he still doesn’t quite understand. Only that it came from him. They have managed to limit the bitter, burnt iron taste that lingered at the back of his sinuses for two weeks, the numbness of his fingers and toes and the burst blood vessels in his eyes on other subjects. Oh and the part where he stopped breathing for nearly an entire minute. By the time he performed it successfully he wasn’t sure he wanted anyone else to ever experience it, the spell basically consumed his life for several years and when the research was finally over he was stood there blinking owlishly with no real concept of where the last couple of years had gone.

Always had somewhat fragile health tending toward sickly. Hands are never warm. Bruises like a peach and scars so easily.

Views quidditch as a good fly spoiled.  

Is a very skilled pianist.

Has a fabric sling that he wears across his torso that Cleo is often curled up in. Looks like a single dad at Order meetings, toad on his shoulder.

While very eloquent and well spoken, he is markedly less posh than when he first arrived at Hogwarts.

When he isn’t prone to bouts of insomnia he can take a nap pretty much anywhere. He was once found in a tree after several frantic hours search.

the stillness of the world the moment you take the first step into fresh snow, cashmere and fine wool, the pearlescence of dreamless sleep draught, the scratch of a quill on parchment, faintly tremoring fingers, a shiver up your spine in a warm room, the exhilaration of a problem solved, a thunderous grey overcast sky, the bite of a stitching charm, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, petrichor, the burn in your eyes before a well of tears.

#ok can we not talk about the series of failed graphics tryna look like dragon age tarot cards? cool sweet #rev intros #blood tw #death tw

[yobaba30]

This.Is.Fucking>Brilliant.

On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had tweeted that “the public has a right to know” who is attending a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, Helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me ‘Sir,’ ” wrote the 45th president of the United States.

It was a classic Trumpian ragetweet: aggrieved over a minor slight, possibly prompted by a Fox News segment, unverifiable — he has a long history of questionable tales involving someone calling him “Sir” — and nostalgic for his primetime-TV heyday. (By Thursday he was lashing Ms. Messing again, as Hurricane Dorian was lashing the Carolinas.)

This sort of outburst, almost three years into his presidency, has kept people puzzling over who the “real” Mr. Trump is and how he actually thinks. Should we take him, to quote the famous precept of Trumpology, literally or seriously? Are his attacks impulsive tantrums or strategic distractions from his other woes? Is he playing 3-D chess or Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots?

This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.

I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)

But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.

He was born in 1946, at the same time that American broadcast TV was being born. He grew up with it. His father, Fred, had one of the first color TV sets in Jamaica Estates. In “The Art of the Deal” Donald Trump recalls his mother, Mary Anne, spending a day in front of the tube, enraptured by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. (“For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he remembers his father saying, “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.”)

TV was his soul mate. It was like him. It was packed with the razzle-dazzle and action and violence that captivated him. He dreamed of going to Hollywood, then he shelved those dreams in favor of his father’s business and vowed, according to the book “TrumpNation” by Timothy O’Brien, to “put show business into real estate.”

As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.

He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain.

Even when he adopted social media, he used it like TV. First, he used it like a celebrity, to broadcast himself, his first tweet in 2009 promoting a “Late Show With David Letterman” appearance. Then he used it like an instigator, tweeting his birther conspiracies before he would talk about them on Fox News, road-testing his call for a border wall during the cable-news fueled Ebola and border panics of the 2014 midterms.

When he was a candidate, and especially when he was president, his tweets programmed TV and were amplified by it. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onscreen as soon as the words left his thumbs. He would watch Fox News, or Lou Dobbs, or CNN or “Morning Joe” or “Saturday Night Live” (“I don’t watch”), and get mad, and tweet. Then the tweets would become TV, and he would watch it, and tweet again.

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”

The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”

Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder.

Reality TV, writ broadly, goes back to Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera,” the PBS documentary “An American Family,” and MTV’s “The Real World.” But the first mass-market reality TV star was Richard Hatch, the winner of the first season of “Survivor” — produced by Mark Burnett, the eventual impresario of “The Apprentice”— in the summer of 2000.

Mr. Hatch won that first season in much the way that Mr. Trump would run his 2016 campaign. He realized that the only rules were that there were no rules. He lied and backstabbed and took advantage of loopholes, and he argued — with a telegenic brashness — that this made him smart. This was a crooked game in a crooked world, he argued to a final jury of players he’d betrayed and deceived. But, hey: At least he was open about it!

While shooting that first season, the show’s crew was rooting for Rudy Boesch, a 72-year-old former Navy SEAL and model of hard work and fair play. “The only outcome nobody wanted was Richard Hatch winning,” the host, Jeff Probst, would say later. It “would be a disaster.” After all, decades of TV cop shows had taught executives the iron rule that the viewers needed the good guy to win.

But they didn’t. “Survivor” was addictively entertaining, and audiences loved-to-hate the wryly devious Richard the way they did Tony Soprano and, before him, J.R. Ewing. More than 50 million people watched the first-season finale, and “Survivor” has been on the air nearly two decades.

From Richard Hatch, we got a steady stream of Real Housewives, Kardashians, nasty judges, dating-show contestants who “didn’t come here to make friends” and, of course, Donald Trump.

Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.

In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.

Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.

Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons.

Maybe the best definition of being real came from the former “Apprentice” contestant and White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman in her memoir, “Unhinged.” Mr. Trump, she said, encouraged people in his entourage to “exaggerate the unique part of themselves.” When you’re being real, there is no difference between impulse and strategy, because the “strategy” is to do what feels good.

This is why it misses a key point to ask, as Vanity Fair recently did after Mr. Trump’s assault on Representative Elijah E. Cummings and the city of Baltimore in July, “Is the president a racist, or does he just play one on TV?” In reality TV, if you are a racist — and reality TV has had many racists, like Katie Hopkins, the far-right British “Apprentice” star the president frequently retweets — then you are a racist and you play one on TV.

So if you actually want a glimpse into the mind of Donald J. Trump, don’t look for a White House tell-all or some secret childhood heartbreak. Go to the streaming service Tubi, where his 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” recently became accessible to the public.

You can fast-forward past the team challenges and the stagey visits to Trump-branded properties. They’re useful in their own way, as a picture of how Mr. Burnett buttressed the future president’s Potemkin-zillionaire image. But the unadulterated, 200-proof Donald Trump is found in the boardroom segments, at the end of each episode, in which he “fires” one contestant.

In theory, the boardroom is where the best performers in the week’s challenges are rewarded and the screw-ups punished. In reality, the boardroom is a new game, the real game, a free-for-all in which contestants compete to throw one another under the bus and beg Mr. Trump for mercy.

There is no morality in the boardroom. There is no fair and unfair in the boardroom. There is only the individual, trying to impress Mr. Trump, to flatter Mr. Trump, to commune with his mind and anticipate his whims and fits of pique. Candidates are fired for giving up advantages (stupid), for being too nice to their adversaries (weak), for giving credit to their teammates, for interrupting him. The host’s decisions were often so mercurial, producers have said, that they would have to go back and edit the episodes to impose some appearance of logic on them.

What saves you in the boardroom? Fighting. Boardroom Trump loves to see people fight each other. He perks up at it like a cat hearing a can opener. He loves to watch people scrap for his favor (as they eventually would in his White House). He loves asking contestants to rat out their teammates and watching them squirm with conflict. The unity of the team gives way to disunity, which in the Trumpian worldview is the most productive state of being.

And America loved boardroom Trump — for a while. He delivered his catchphrase in TV cameos and slapped it on a reissue of his 1980s Monopoly knockoff Trump: The Game. (“I’m back and you’re fired!”) But after the first season, the ratings dropped; by season four they were nearly half what they were in season one.

He reacted to his declining numbers by ratcheting up what worked before: becoming a louder, more extreme, more abrasive version of himself. He gets more insulting in the boardroom — “You hang out with losers and you become a loser”— and executes double and quadruple firings.

It’s a pattern that we see as he advances toward his re-election campaign, with an eye not on the Nielsen ratings but on the polls: The only solution for any given problem was a Trumpier Trump.

Did it work for “The Apprentice”? Yes and no. His show hung on to a loyal base through 14 seasons, including the increasingly farcical celebrity version. But it never dominated its competition again, losing out, despite his denials, to the likes of the sitcom “Mike & Molly.”

Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” boardroom closed for business on Feb. 16, 2015, precisely four months before he announced his successful campaign for president. And also, it never closed. It expanded. It broke the fourth wall. We live inside it now.

Now, Mr. Trump re-creates the boardroom’s helter-skelter atmosphere every time he opens his mouth or his Twitter app. In place of the essentially dead White House press briefing, he walks out to the lawn in the morning and reporters gaggle around him like “Apprentice” contestants awaiting the day’s task. He rails and complains and establishes the plot points for that day’s episode: Greenland! Jews! “I am the chosen one!”

Then cable news spends morning to midnight happily masticating the fresh batch of outrages before memory-wiping itself to prepare for tomorrow’s episode. Maybe this sounds like a TV critic’s overextended metaphor, but it’s also the president’s: As The Times has reported, before taking office, he told aides to think of every day as “an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

His character shorthand is “Donald Trump, Fighter Guy Who Wins.” Plop him in front of a camera with an infant orphaned in a mass murder, and he does not have it in his performer’s tool kit to do anything other than smile unnervingly and give a fat thumbs-up.

This is what was lost on commentators who kept hoping wanly that this State of the Union or that tragedy would be the moment he finally became “presidential.” It was lost on journalists who felt obligated to act as though every modulated speech from a teleprompter might, this time, be sincere.

The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.

This conveniently echoes the mantra he learned from his early mentor, Roy Cohn: Always attack and never apologize. He serves up one “most shocking episode ever” after another, mining uglier pieces of his core each time: progressing from profanity about Haiti and Africa in private to publicly telling four minority American congresswomen, only one of whom was born outside the United States, to “go back” to the countries they came from.

The taunting. The insults. The dog whistles. The dog bullhorns. The “Lock her up” and “Send her back.” All of it follows reality-TV rules. Every season has to top the last. Every fight is necessary, be it against Ilhan Omar or Debra Messing. Every twist must be more shocking, every conflict more vicious, lest the red light grow bored and wink off. The only difference: Now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos, only press secretaries, pundits and Mike Pence.

To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.

And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.

#the apprentice (tv program)

[bountyofbeads]

The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/opinion/sunday/trump-reality-tv.html

Great analysis by James Poniewozik🤔 To understand the wacky, outrageous, demented mind of Trump is to know that Trump is nothing more than a self-grandized TV character (D-rated).

"To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy."

"And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch."

The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV

Understand that, and you’ll understand what he’s doing in the White House.

By James Poniewozik | Published September 6, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 8, 2019 9:00 AM ET |

Mr. Poniewozik is the chief television critic of The Times and the author of “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television and the Fracturing of America.”

On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had tweeted that “the public has a right to know” who is attending a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, Helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me ‘Sir,’ ” wrote the 45th president of the United States.

It was a classic Trumpian ragetweet: aggrieved over a minor slight, possibly prompted by a Fox News segment, unverifiable — he has a long history of questionable tales involving someone calling him “Sir” — and nostalgic for his primetime-TV heyday. (By Thursday he was lashing Ms. Messing again, as Hurricane Dorian was lashing the Carolinas.)

This sort of outburst, almost three years into his presidency, has kept people puzzling over who the “real” Mr. Trump is and how he actually thinks. Should we take him, to quote the famous precept of Trumpology, literally or seriously? Are his attacks impulsive tantrums or strategic distractions from his other woes? Is he playing 3-D chess or Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots?

This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.

I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)

But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.

He was born in 1946, at the same time that American broadcast TV was being born. He grew up with it. His father, Fred, had one of the first color TV sets in Jamaica Estates. In “The Art of the Deal” Donald Trump recalls his mother, Mary Anne, spending a day in front of the tube, enraptured by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. (“For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he remembers his father saying, “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.”)

TV was his soul mate. It was like him. It was packed with the razzle-dazzle and action and violence that captivated him. He dreamed of going to Hollywood, then he shelved those dreams in favor of his father’s business and vowed, according to the book “TrumpNation” by Timothy O’Brien, to “put show business into real estate.”

As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.

He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain.

Even when he adopted social media, he used it like TV. First, he used it like a celebrity, to broadcast himself, his first tweet in 2009 promoting a “Late Show With David Letterman” appearance. Then he used it like an instigator, tweeting his birther conspiracies before he would talk about them on Fox News, road-testing his call for a border wall during the cable-news fueled Ebola and border panics of the 2014 midterms.

When he was a candidate, and especially when he was president, his tweets programmed TV and were amplified by it. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onscreen as soon as the words left his thumbs. He would watch Fox News, or Lou Dobbs, or CNN or “Morning Joe” or “Saturday Night Live” (“I don’t watch”), and get mad, and tweet. Then the tweets would become TV, and he would watch it, and tweet again.

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”

The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”

Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder.

Reality TV, writ broadly, goes back to Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera,” the PBS documentary “An American Family,” and MTV’s “The Real World.” But the first mass-market reality TV star was Richard Hatch, the winner of the first season of “Survivor” — produced by Mark Burnett, the eventual impresario of “The Apprentice”— in the summer of 2000.

Mr. Hatch won that first season in much the way that Mr. Trump would run his 2016 campaign. He realized that the only rules were that there were no rules. He lied and backstabbed and took advantage of loopholes, and he argued — with a telegenic brashness — that this made him smart. This was a crooked game in a crooked world, he argued to a final jury of players he’d betrayed and deceived. But, hey: At least he was open about it!

While shooting that first season, the show’s crew was rooting for Rudy Boesch, a 72-year-old former Navy SEAL and model of hard work and fair play. “The only outcome nobody wanted was Richard Hatch winning,” the host, Jeff Probst, would say later. It “would be a disaster.” After all, decades of TV cop shows had taught executives the iron rule that the viewers needed the good guy to win.

But they didn’t. “Survivor” was addictively entertaining, and audiences loved-to-hate the wryly devious Richard the way they did Tony Soprano and, before him, J.R. Ewing. More than 50 million people watched the first-season finale, and “Survivor” has been on the air nearly two decades.

From Richard Hatch, we got a steady stream of Real Housewives, Kardashians, nasty judges, dating-show contestants who “didn’t come here to make friends” and, of course, Donald Trump.

Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.

In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.

Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.

Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons.

Maybe the best definition of being real came from the former “Apprentice” contestant and White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman in her memoir, “Unhinged.” Mr. Trump, she said, encouraged people in his entourage to “exaggerate the unique part of themselves.” When you’re being real, there is no difference between impulse and strategy, because the “strategy” is to do what feels good.

This is why it misses a key point to ask, as Vanity Fair recently did after Mr. Trump’s assault on Representative Elijah E. Cummings and the city of Baltimore in July, “Is the president a racist, or does he just play one on TV?” In reality TV, if you are a racist — and reality TV has had many racists, like Katie Hopkins, the far-right British “Apprentice” star the president frequently retweets — then you are a racist and you play one on TV.

So if you actually want a glimpse into the mind of Donald J. Trump, don’t look for a White House tell-all or some secret childhood heartbreak. Go to the streaming service Tubi, where his 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” recently became accessible to the public.

You can fast-forward past the team challenges and the stagey visits to Trump-branded properties. They’re useful in their own way, as a picture of how Mr. Burnett buttressed the future president’s Potemkin-zillionaire image. But the unadulterated, 200-proof Donald Trump is found in the boardroom segments, at the end of each episode, in which he “fires” one contestant.

In theory, the boardroom is where the best performers in the week’s challenges are rewarded and the screw-ups punished. In reality, the boardroom is a new game, the real game, a free-for-all in which contestants compete to throw one another under the bus and beg Mr. Trump for mercy.

There is no morality in the boardroom. There is no fair and unfair in the boardroom. There is only the individual, trying to impress Mr. Trump, to flatter Mr. Trump, to commune with his mind and anticipate his whims and fits of pique. Candidates are fired for giving up advantages (stupid), for being too nice to their adversaries (weak), for giving credit to their teammates, for interrupting him. The host’s decisions were often so mercurial, producers have said, that they would have to go back and edit the episodes to impose some appearance of logic on them.

What saves you in the boardroom? Fighting. Boardroom Trump loves to see people fight each other. He perks up at it like a cat hearing a can opener. He loves to watch people scrap for his favor (as they eventually would in his White House). He loves asking contestants to rat out their teammates and watching them squirm with conflict. The unity of the team gives way to disunity, which in the Trumpian worldview is the most productive state of being.

And America loved boardroom Trump — for a while. He delivered his catchphrase in TV cameos and slapped it on a reissue of his 1980s Monopoly knockoff Trump: The Game. (“I’m back and you’re fired!”) But after the first season, the ratings dropped; by season four they were nearly half what they were in season one.

He reacted to his declining numbers by ratcheting up what worked before: becoming a louder, more extreme, more abrasive version of himself. He gets more insulting in the boardroom — “You hang out with losers and you become a loser”— and executes double and quadruple firings.

It’s a pattern that we see as he advances toward his re-election campaign, with an eye not on the Nielsen ratings but on the polls: The only solution for any given problem was a Trumpier Trump.

Did it work for “The Apprentice”? Yes and no. His show hung on to a loyal base through 14 seasons, including the increasingly farcical celebrity version. But it never dominated its competition again, losing out, despite his denials, to the likes of the sitcom “Mike & Molly.”

Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” boardroom closed for business on Feb. 16, 2015, precisely four months before he announced his successful campaign for president. And also, it never closed. It expanded. It broke the fourth wall. We live inside it now.

Now, Mr. Trump re-creates the boardroom’s helter-skelter atmosphere every time he opens his mouth or his Twitter app. In place of the essentially dead White House press briefing, he walks out to the lawn in the morning and reporters gaggle around him like “Apprentice” contestants awaiting the day’s task. He rails and complains and establishes the plot points for that day’s episode: Greenland! Jews! “I am the chosen one!”

Then cable news spends morning to midnight happily masticating the fresh batch of outrages before memory-wiping itself to prepare for tomorrow’s episode. Maybe this sounds like a TV critic’s overextended metaphor, but it’s also the president’s: As The Times has reported, before taking office, he told aides to think of every day as “an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

His character shorthand is “Donald Trump, Fighter Guy Who Wins.” Plop him in front of a camera with an infant orphaned in a mass murder, and he does not have it in his performer’s tool kit to do anything other than smile unnervingly and give a fat thumbs-up.

This is what was lost on commentators who kept hoping wanly that this State of the Union or that tragedy would be the moment he finally became “presidential.” It was lost on journalists who felt obligated to act as though every modulated speech from a teleprompter might, this time, be sincere.

The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: Never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.

This conveniently echoes the mantra he learned from his early mentor, Roy Cohn: Always attack and never apologize. He serves up one “most shocking episode ever” after another, mining uglier pieces of his core each time: progressing from profanity about Haiti and Africa in private to publicly telling four minority American congresswomen, only one of whom was born outside the United States, to “go back” to the countries they came from.

The taunting. The insults. The dog whistles. The dog bullhorns. The “Lock her up” and “Send her back.” All of it follows reality-TV rules. Every season has to top the last. Every fight is necessary, be it against Ilhan Omar or Debra Messing. Every twist must be more shocking, every conflict more vicious, lest the red light grow bored and wink off. The only difference: Now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos, only press secretaries, pundits and Mike Pence.

To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.

And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.

#trump #trump administration #president donald trump #trumpism #maga #donald trump jr #donald trump #u.s. news #u.s. presidential elections #us politics #politics #politics and government #u.s. politics #republican politics

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

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

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): A powerful moment on the second night of the Democratic debates came when Sen. Kamala Harris confronted former Vice President Joe Biden for his remarks about working with segregationist senators, as well as his opposition to school integration via busing in the 1970s. Biden has stood by his original comments, arguing that he meant them as an example of his ability to work across the aisle, and in the debate he invoked his record of supporting civil rights.

Other candidates, notably Sen. Cory Booker, have also criticized Biden on issues of race. Nevertheless, at least going into last week’s debates, Biden was the most popular Democratic candidate among Democratic voters. But did Thursday night’s exchange show that Biden is out of touch with the modern Democratic Party? Is there a generational divide at play here? And how are the other candidates positioned—or not positioned—to talk about issues of race?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): I think there are actually two things at stake here. First, there is the question of whether there is a divide. I don’t think the Democratic Party has a racially conservative wing anymore, but I do think there’s a split over how so-called identity issues are approached by the party.

And the second issue is about the candidates themselves, particularly how this impacts Biden’s core arguments for why he should be the nominee.

julian.wamble: (Julian Wamble, a political science professor at Stony Brook University): The Democratic Party has certainly changed on how it discusses race, and I think this is particularly true among white Democrats. But I think what we’re seeing here is both a generational divide and a change in the racial landscape of American politics.

Biden is from a generation where his past choices concerning race are coming back to haunt him in ways that he may not have expected, and that’s because issues surrounding race are at the forefront of the political conversation.

And generally speaking, white candidates have only had to contend with not being overtly racist, but now the Harris-Biden moment shows how that may have changed.

meredithconroy: (Meredith Conroy, political science professor at California State University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): I agree that the Democratic Party doesn’t have a racially conservative wing anymore. That could be because these voters have left the party. However, a recent study after the 2016 election found that white Democrats are changing their views about race to align with their partisanship.

Now whether that means someone like Biden is disqualified for previous positions like opposing school integration via busing in the 1970s isn’t clear.

julia_azari: Why, in 2019, anything can still surprise me is an open question for perhaps another chat, but I was legitimately surprised to see people relitigating the busing debate of the 1970s on Twitter on Saturday.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Do we all agree this was bad for Biden?

On net, I think this was a bad week for Biden, but at the same time, I think there is a group of Democrats who aren’t that liberal on racial issues and basically agree with him.

A study from the Pew Research Center found, for example, that about 22 percent of Democrats thought people were “seeing discrimation where it does not exist.”

meredithconroy: It was bad for Biden because he looked ill-prepared. His record is long — and to be clear, all the candidates have a past they’ll have to defend at some point — but his defense was particularly weak.

perry: We should note that Morning Consult found that he lost 5 points since the debate (nearly 8 points among voters in our Morning Consult survey), with Harris going up by six. A CNN poll found that Biden’s support had fallen to 22 percent, down from 32 percent this time last month. Harris was in second at 17 percent, compared to 8 percent a month ago. So it seems clear this debate and the fallout from it hurt Biden and helped Harris. That said, I think Biden is still the frontrunner.

julian.wamble: I actually don’t think black voters are going to be so quick to withdraw their support from Biden given the perception that he is best situated to beat Trump. However, it is possible that discussions of his past missteps regarding race and racial policies could hurt her with black voters in the future, especially if another candidate seems poised to be able to defeat Trump.

perry: I agree. I also think that these racial controversies are as much of a problem for Biden (and Pete Buttigieg) with white liberal voters, who care a lot about racial issues, as with black people.

sarahf: So in that chart Perry shared, a majority of Democrats (78 percent) were likely to say that it’s a big problem that Americans don’t see discrimination where it exists.

This means that for these Democrats, Harris’s exchange with Biden should have been a powerful moment, right?

perry: The overwhelming majority of Democrats are liberal on racial issues. But Biden has proof that he is, too. He loves to mention that he was Barack Obama’s vice president, but more than that, I think Biden is actually in the mainstream of the Democratic Party on many racial issues.

sarahf: Do others agree? What is the evidence we have for Biden being in the mainstream on racial issues vs. Biden being out of touch?

julia_azari: As a parties scholar, I think what’s meant by “the mainstream” is malleable. That is, people are going to be responsive to elite cues about how race fits into other issues, or what kinds of problems should be prioritized (race vs. class), and how to frame both the causes of racial injustice and the solutions to it.

perry: And the elite cues are confusing right now. The post-debate media coverage for Biden has been largely negative. But influential black Democrats like Jim Clyburn and John Lewis generally defended him on comments he made before the debate. So I don’t think the message that “Biden is bad on racial issues” or “black people don’t like Biden” is clear to voters. I also think that will be a hard message to have resonate — Biden spent eight years defending Barack Obama.

julian.wamble: I think what we’re seeing is a crisis of what it means to be white in America, and white liberals are bearing the brunt of it. This means the need to create distance from the “bad moments” is heightened which I think the response to Biden is a manifestation of, and could foster the belief that Biden is out of touch with the Democratic Party.

sarahf: Is it fair to say that this is the next fracture point in terms of cultural issues in the primary? Or where do you see the next divide? It does seem to be an area where Biden is particularly vulnerable.

perry: I tend to think that Biden supporters are older, more moderate and generally not going to break with him en-masse over these kinds of issues on race or gender. (The CNN poll showed Biden with a 12-point advantage over the next-closest Democrat (Harris) among Democrats over 45, but trailing Harris, Sanders and Warren among Democrats over 45.)

Which means that the better case for Harris and others to make is not that Biden has bad racial views, but that his debate performance suggests Biden is a weak candidate and can’t beat Trump, which cuts against what I think is one of his biggest strengths — Democratic voters care a lot about electablity and generally see Biden as the most electable candidate.

julian.wamble: Yes, what Biden has going for him is the perception that he can beat Trump and that some of his “authenticity” will make him appealing to certain voters.

meredithconroy: But on the electability question, at least one poll after the debates found that voters thought Elizabeth Warren and Harris were more electable than before (although Biden was still said to be the most electable).

julia_azari: So the Democratic Party has traditionally been divided on race — the last 40 years are a break away from that. But if issues like reparations or other race-conscious policy initiatives become part of the national agenda, we might see more of a split in the party.

You can already see this happening on the question of criminal justice.

perry: Right. If reparations or really aggressive school integration programs become big issues, I think we might see that even some white liberals aren’t totally on board, because these policies will be perceived as giving black people things at the expense of non-black people. And if there is a racial divide on those issues, I think more moderate whites will be more drawn to candidates like Biden.

meredithconroy: Well, the elevation of those issues don’t benefit Biden or Harris, right?

perry: No, but they might help Warren.

julia_azari: But as Meredith pointed out, this is an area of vulnerability for Harris too.

At this stage, there really isn’t a candidate who is an obvious pick for serious racial justice activists. Nearly all the major candidates have liabilities — even Julian Castro, given his background as the Housing and Urban Development secretary). But Biden, Harris, and Buttigieg in particular have serious liabilities.

So it’s really unclear which candidate (if any) this would benefit.

meredithconroy: Very unclear!!!

perry: Sanders came out in support of allowing people currently incarcerated to vote, while most Democratic candidates favor voting rights only for people after they have left prison. Warren was one of the first to embrace a study on whether there should be reparations for black Americans, and Castro has called to change the law to make illegally entering the country a civil offense, instead of a criminal one.

So I think some candidates will push forward fairly strong stances on racial issues in a way I’m not sure Biden, Harris or say Cory Booker, do.

The question I’m most curious about is whether this was good for Harris or not.

I tend to think it was mostly good for Harris. (And the polls suggest it was.) She got more media attention and I think it’s fair to say she appealed to white liberals, who say they are progressive on racial issues. But this doesn’t mean she necessarily cut into Biden’s advantage with black voters.

julian.wamble: I’m not sure it was as good for her as some think it was. I think it was effective to show that Biden has some problems when it comes to race, but not that she is a better choice to represent voters with those interests.

meredithconroy: Right. I think in terms of positioning her as a strong candidate, who can confront opponents, it helps her. But it also opens up her Attorney General record and her time spent as a prosecutor in California to greater scrutiny.

sarahf: Biden seemed to try to push on that in the debates by pointing out his background as a public defender, but that didn’t really seem to go anywhere.

Do we think that it will come up in other debates?

julian.wamble: Harris’s prosecutorial background, particularly the truancy laws, which have been shown to disproportionately affect communities of color, will definitely come up in future debates. I think especially now, given this new CNN poll which shows she is making strong gains among Democratic voters. If she is viewed as the candidate to beat, then I think her time as prosecutor will definitely gain higher levels of scrutiny.

meredithconroy: Yeah, strategically speaking, Biden probably should have leaned into that attack more. But I’ve also been critical of those questioning Harris’s record as Attorney General, given that women often have to have more experience than their male counterparts in order to gain political influence and power.

perry: I tend to think the backlash to Harris’s background asg a prosecutor is largely contained to a small number of very progressive voters, and is not a real barrier among the vast majority of Democratic primary voters.

When I ask voters about Harris, I hear way more often their concern that she is not electable than anything about her criminal justice record. (I also think it will be hard for Biden to campaign on the idea that a black female candidate wants to send lots of black people to jail in the same way that it will be it will be hard for Harris to prove Obama’s VP doesn’t support allowing black kids to attend integrated schools.)

julia_azari: I sort of disagree, Perry. If say, the Bernie left came out against Harris that could get ugly fast.

perry: But she was never going to win those people.

She is a fairly establishment-friendly candidate.

julia_azari: You’re right that she was never going to win those voters. But the question is whether their messaging does other damage. I’m not sure I would have previously considered this a possibility, but after 2016 I do.

perry: When I watched that moment, what I thought was it was bad for Harris because it could become framed by her critics as an electability issue. I think Obama did well in 2008 and 2012 because he rarely spoke about race in a way that might alienate white moderate general-election voters. But Harris went over that line.

And now New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has blasted Harris for “making white Americans feel racially on trial.” Granted, Stephens is an anti-Trump conservative, so not exactly representative of the Democratic primary electorate, but I still think of it as evidence that Harris may have provoked white people who don’t want to be criticized on racial issues unless they do something over-the-top like Trump.

And I think it has the potential for a lot of backlash.

julian.wamble: Obama definitely had his own challenges with electability, particularly in 2008, but that was a question of whether the United States was ready for a black president. The 2020 election is different insofar that Democrats are looking for a candidate who can beat Trump. And the notion of ‘electability’ is different this time around, especially for the female candidates who are seen, by some, as not being ‘strong’ or ‘tough’ enough to take on Trump. So I saw Harris calling out Biden as a signal that she wasn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with a man.

julia_azari: Also, I think that Harris’s approach spoke to white Democrats who want to congratulate themselves for supporting her, which I saw as part of Obama’s calculus, as well. I know it sounds reductive, but I think voters feeling good about themselves often drives political decisions. (See Lilliana Mason’s work on identity politics.)

meredithconroy: Yeah, especially among Democrats who are concerned that electability arguments exclude women and people of color.

sarahf: Were there other candidates who were hurt or helped by this exchange? Or phrased another way, is a stronger Harris bad for Booker?

meredithconroy: I thought Booker opened the door for Harris’s attacks, after he went after Biden for his segregationist comments. And it seemed to elevate his candidacy (at least in terms of media coverage), so I’m not sure its bad for Booker, necessarily.

perry: A stronger Harris is probably bad for Booker. A Harris who disqualifies Biden (by showing him as an inept) but also raises questions about herself (can she be cast as too left and unelectable in the general) is good for Booker.

A weaker Biden is good for everyone.

meredithconroy: Yeah, I think Perry is right.

julian.wamble: A strong Harris isn’t great for Booker in the long run, but considering he’s also getting media attention and talking about race as a result, it’s not bad for him yet.

Which I think is to Perry’s point — a weaker Biden is good for everyone else.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

[tatianareddington]

Original Redarina theory

3-16-18

This is not edited properly, nor have I adequately noted specific episodes, scenes, dialogue to substantiate each. You may immediately know which one is referenced. I have way more ideas that I haven’t started writing about, ideas to substantiate or explain inconsistencies in the Redarina theory.

I’ve been thinking about this theory a lot. Well actually, I think obsessing is a more accurate word. I’ve actually figured out a reasonable way to explain Carla, Harold, Dom and several others although I have no answers for  Red’s roommate nor can I adequately explain the fingerprints matching to his FBI records. (We could assume that either his prints were switched in evidence, more than plausible, or that in some way the prints were transferred to Redarina - I say this only because Red cut off the thumbs of the frozen man to get into the bank box, so that is an episode which shows how someone could use someone else’s body as identifiers - oh, also the episode in which Kaplan removes a man’s eye for retinal identification so that her hire can get into archived FBI files to get Red’s immunity agreement)

And it doesn’t explain the full extent of Red’s burns on his shoulder and back. However we only see Katarina’s injuries from the fire through Kaplan’s memories. I believe Kate says to Katarina, “You’re hurt” so it’s very possible the injuries were much worse than what we saw in Kaplan’s memories. Keep in mind that we have frequently heard that memories are evasive, fuzzy, incomplete (what was Red;s quote from last week’s episode?) And regarding Liz’s memories of the fire, at one point he dismisses them as the memories of a small child. So we know at face value that Kaplan says to Katarina, you are hurt and we know her sweater is torn, so it��s possible that in reality it was much worse.

Gender reassignment/Hiding in plain sight

I. Red’s relationship with Dom

Red acquiesces to Dom, who is grouchy and overbearing

Very close, knew each other from long ago, intimate

“Sorry I didn’t turn out to be the person you wanted me to be”

Intense anger on Dom’s part towards Red, why? ‘Selfish prick’

I think if we look at the Djinn we can see a sort of reverse parallel to Dom/Red. In the Djinn, the father forces the child/son to, I don’t remember exactly how Red said it, but something like mutilate his body against his will and forced to live that way. The father believes he is doing the right thing for his child. The child/son/daughter is beyond rageful that his own father would do such a thing.

I couldn’t figure out Dom’s deep anger at Red because although we see him treating Red as though he was a close relative, he’s very bitter toward Red.  I think it’s a reverse of the Djinn: it is the parent who is ‘rageful’ against the child/son/daughter for ‘mutilating’ her body and becoming a completely different person, not the person, probably spy, Dom wanted Katarina to be, a woman.

We know Dom is Oleander so we can assume that Katarina worked with him and that would mean he knew she was a honey pot and, we assume, he was fine with that. What kind of father would be proud of this or want this for his daughter? 

Red talks about being young and arrogant, to Dom, and how he royally screwed things up as a result.  Reddington kidnapped the girl and bright her to the states, to a townhome. Katarina and some group of people (kgb, double agents? Dom?) Came to the house with a plan, probably a plan to get the girl, get the fulcrum, and somehow do away with Reddington. In their argument that night the man says to her (about the fulcrum) it’s the only thing keeping me alive. Those are the exact words Red/Redarina uses in Luther Braxton when he and Liz are in the boiler room trying to survive, he tells Liz of the fulcrum, it was the only thing that kept me alive (what he said to Katarina on fire night).

So Katarina is the most amazing spy around so much so that she’s considered to be a myth, not actually real, then she had some pretty big.expectations of her abilities. Her weakness? Reddington, and the child they conceived. Red tells Liz when Katarina became pregnant she thought about aborting it, but chose not to. Instead, the instant the baby was born she felt nothing less than that her child was a blessing.

Reddington was her assignment but she became ‘weak’ and fell in love with him. Well, maybe not love, she said to Kaplan it was frivolous. Still, it was not strictly an assignment. And she became pregnant with his child, a vulnerability. She thought about aborting it, that would be the ‘logical thing’ to do. But she was weak because of her feelings for him.

So when Reddington took Masha/Elizabeth, this was her weakest point. She had tried to break it off with him. His taking the child to the states meant she might be outed.  

So she set up a plan and got her people gathered. She went after Reddington like she would have gone after anyone who crossed her in her work. Her plan was arrogant, she succeeded at everything. But this plan went wrong.  Terribly wrong. And that was her shame. She had to sacrifice the woman to save the child. She had to kill herself because she was death to the child. She killed herself to become Reddington. It was a Hobson choice. “In a choice between ethics and life I always chose life” Red told Cooper.

Dom became bitterly disappointed in Katarina because of her failure. He ended up dragging himself to this place in the woods, alone, isolated, ‘you call this living?!”  The comment Red makes about missing the C minor on the piano is about Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor. Most Americans recognize this concerto because Eric Carmen made it into a pop song in 1975 called “All by Myself”. Completely summarizes what Dom feels.

Since Katarina has determined she is death to her child, and she is highly resourceful, she decides to kill herself by changing her identity so she can live in plain sight. But it’s a Hobson’s choice, she must die to her self in order to save the child, thereby completely severing her relationship with her own daughter and denying her motherhood.

Red makes a remark (in recent episodes I think) about making a choice between ethics and life. Red immediately responds he would chose life each time. In this way, it supports further that Katarina would chose to suicide by changing her identity so that she can still life.

II. Red’s relationship with Carla

Red cares deeply about Carla

Carla is initially very bitter/angry at Red

Jennifer is her daughter

Carla: it’s more complicated, but I suspect that after Reddington died either at the fire or sometime during the following year up to December 1990. Carla probably knew about Katarina and Elizabeth. Raymond was away for long stretches so if Raymond did die in the fire, there was reason to believe he was away on a job. The FBI likely knew Reddington died in that fire, or he was severely injured. He was a liability either way because of the fulcrum and the FBI would have manipulated the story to their advantage. Why the 10 months? Maybe he was in a coma and hadn’t actually died but Katarina thought he had.

Here is where the episode, “The Harem” helps substantiate a theory that in the 10-12 months following the fire I believe Katarina was able to befriend Carla or earn her trust through the sisterhood of women to let her know what happened and how to keep her safe. Elizabeth was already safe with Sam.

In those 10 months the FBI came after Carla and tried to implicate her in the theft of the fulcrum, they froze her assets, they pursued her, it was awful. Until the FBI decided they needed to make a story as to why Reddington disappeared (so maybe they didn’t know he was dead) and within less than 24 hours, Carla and her daughter were places in WITSEC in Philly.

I believe Katarina approached Carla, told her of her plan, told her of Raymond’s death, promised to keep her safe. Carla agreed to keep silent about the relationship and silent about Elizabeth.

The harem, a sisterhood, a corollary for Carla and redarina interaction

Lord Baltimore - of Carla Red says to Frank, she’s more like a ??? Distanced? Sister to me….makes even more sense if it’s actually Katarina, are they actually sisters? That would be really weird, but I think it’s more like sisters of the sisterhood of women.

Red has an uncanny way of understanding women. Only a woman would understand women

KATARINA Russian nesting dolls,  in time capsule, apartment, elsewhere.

Russian nesting dolls, like a mother giving birth to her daughter from a woman to a woman. And so in changing her identity she was able to break the cycle so that her daughter would not have to live like her, severed from love and true intimacy. Having a ‘normal’ life.

She wanted her daughter to be safe from being coerced into a life like hers using sex to achieve a goal rather than live.

Explains why Kate says, I loved you to Katarina,  Dearie, to Red. I don’t think they were lovers, but I do believe Kate loved Katarina and maybe was ‘in love’ with her.

Explains 30 years employment, when you put her in my arms as a baby.

Quiet time between Christmas 1989 to Christmas 1990 Carla says they kept questioning her, froze her assets. She had a house,  a dog.

Red has particular compassion for children and women, particularly those who are abused. These are typically female attributes. He has an uncanny sensitivity and awareness not usually attributed to men.Was she abused? Did Dom and other men hin her life abuse her? Push her into using her body for work?

Episode, Berlin corrolary of Liz’s relationship to Red as his child

Zoe rejects wants to get away from her father permanently and even when she is able to be reunited with him, she refiuses.

Prints, tatoos, it’s him, 1994 papers

Graduatied by 24

Floriana campos says “there is no work more meaningful than being a mother”

Red - “how does the devil in you contend with the angel? I would kicked her out years ago.” A man would have said, “I would have kicked him out years ago”

VANESSA CRUZ - prototype of Fire Night

A trip to Cruz’ mother’s house lays out the reasoning behind it all: Vanessa was married to a man named Fernando who was accused of insider trading and then jumped off the George Washington Bridge. But Vanessa always maintained his innocence, and the Post Office team figures out that Cruz is going after people who were involved in the insider trading that Fernando was accused of. When they go back to talk to Mr. Conway in prison, he reveals that there was a group of people who arranged the insider trade, and they all agreed to pin it on Fernando, and when Fernando figured out that they were framing him, he was killed. Everyone who had a part in framing Fernando has been taken care of by Vanessa except one…

Knowing that her jig is up, Vanessa is sitting in an airport, likely on her way to a life of no longer murdering people in bathtubs, when a dashing Mr. Kaplan sits down across from her. He tells Vanessa that her employer is a longtime admirer of her handiwork; she can either run and hide from her newly discovered trail of crimes, or she can accept help. These two seem like a dangerous combination.

“[Reddington] has a moral code. I don’t like it, but at least I know what it is, and it does not include lying to me.” Lizzie, what are you talking about?!

Theories on why Mr. Reddington, criminal mastermind, needs Ms. Cruz, a master framer of criminals, on his team?

Vanessa Cruz fakes her death then sets out to seek revenge for her husband’s death.

She couldn’t kill the woman she was having an affair with because she discovered she actually had feelings for her.

Vanessa Cruz’s sexuality is ‘fluid’. She clearly loved her husband and was committed to her heterosexual lifestyle. But when we see her, years after her beloved husband took his own life, she has developed a sexual relationship with a woman which is based on love. It isn’t her sexuality or her lesbian relationship which troubles her, it is her difficulty with emotional commitment, clearly a result of the pain of loss of her husband.

FORGIVENESS

Velov: Dear, I cannot help you. I would if I could, believe me. I, too, have daughter. The life I led, the things I had to do, she won’t talk to me. I try to explain, but there are some– some things which can never be forgiven.

Cooper: If it were up to me, I’d burn it. I’ve learned the hard way that some secrets are best kept in the dark.

Red: Mine certainly is.

Red: Harold, forgive Charlene. A friend told me recently that forgiveness won’t change the past but could very well change the future. Apparently, nothing is unforgivable.

Liz: My mother’s alive. You lied to me.

Red: Velov is the one who lied to you, Lizzy, not me. Katarina Rostova committed suicide in 1990.

Liz: Velov was the agent assigned to find her. He was getting close, she knew it. That’s why she allegedly walked into the ocean. She wanted the world to believe she drowned.

Red: But Velov knows differently.

Liz: He tracked her to a hotel in Prague. She had just left. But in such a hurry, she missed this… A photo of her little girl. Me.

Red: That could easily have been planted.

Liz: You said the name Masha Rostova had been lost to history until the manhunt. Now it’s out there, and someone’s looking for me. It’s my mother. Who else would care? Who? [ Sighs ] You were right. Some things can’t be forgiven.

The Djinn

3x16 the caretaker

Liz: Forgiveness can’t change the past, but I believe it can change the future.

Red: That’s a charming sentiment. But as far as I’m concerned, some things are unforgivable.

Nasim: Allah teaches us forgiveness, but some things– they’re unforgivable.

RED Bertolt Brecht uses the alienation effect to create emotional distance from the audience.

a pipe-smoking cream puff of a German named Gerta.

Bahram Bakhash (the djinn’s father): I did what I had to to keep you alive.

Red: I believe I will always do whatever I feel I have to do to keep you alive. (The Pilot)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I0dpBGoUmjh-O67CwDFvjcHDjjtga6fSbv4d3a4yOcM/edit?usp=sharing

#theblacklist

[covid19updater]

COVID19 Updates: 09/08/2021

RUMINT (US):  A friend of mine posted tonight on social media about a friend of hers who had died. The woman was very young, and no cause of death was listed, so my first thought was that it was some sort of tragic accident. I went to the Go Fund Me that was linked, and it turned out she died of Covid. The woman was young (under 30, I think), wore masks, and was fully vaxxed. She left behind two young kids. She was a fit, healthy-looking young woman. I don't know anything about whether there were underlying conditions or not, but her family and friends all seemed quite shocked by her passing. The Go Fund Me was to provide something for her children. Every time I listen to someone like Chris Martenson, or others like him, who say that Delta is actually not as bad as the media makes it sound, I almost become convinced ... until I hear something like this, and it reminds me that this variant is infecting and sometimes killing young, cautious, vaxxed people.

World:  Study: Mu variant is more vaccine evading "Mu variant is highly resistant to sera from..[Pfizer]-vaccinated individuals. Direct comparison of different spike proteins revealed that Mu spike is more resistant ..than all other currently recognized variants LINK

World: Op/Ed:  Remember: the desensitization to death and suffering that the 1918 flu brought paved the way for fascism in the 1920s and 1930s.

Europe:  Notices of Liability for COVID-19 Vaccine Harms and Deaths Served on All Members of the European Parliament LINK

India:  New "Pandemic Potential" Brain-Destroying-Virus With 75% Death Rate Spreading In India LINK

US:  U.S. COVID update: Many states reporting holiday weekend backlogs - New cases: 303,843 - Average: 154,645 (+19,837) - In hospital: 100,700 (+434) - In ICU: 26,094 (+84) - New deaths: 2,265

Australia:  #Australia's 1,721 new #Covid19 cases is the second worst ever total, almost 500 up on last Weds. 1,480 infections in #NSW, 221 in #Victoria while #ACT has the other 20. Today was also 2nd highest daily death toll for 364 days as another 10 fall victim to #Coronavirus

World:  Some people have 'superhuman' ability to fight off COVID-19, study finds LINK

Germany:  TOP GERMAN PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICIAL SAYS  IF WE DO NOT VACCINATE MORE PEOPLE, THE FOURTH WAVE OF THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC COULD HAVE A MASSIVE MOMENTUM THIS FALL

Japan:  THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT IS SOLIDIFYING ITS PLANS TO PROLONG THE STATE OF EMERGENCY IN MOST PLACES UNTIL THE END OF SEPTEMBER - NHK

Czech Republic:  The Czech Republic on Wednesday recorded 588 new cases of COVID-19, the highest daily tally since May 25, as government officials predict a continued rise in cases;

Europe:  EMA: ASTRAZENECA COVID-19 VACCINE PRODUCT INFORMATION WILL BE UPDATED WITH GUILLAIN-BARRÉ SYNDROME (GBS) AS A SIDE EFFECT

Germany:  The head of Germany’s CDC, Lothar Wieler, warned of a drastic 4th coronavirus wave this fall as the number of Covid ICU patients, many of them younger, has nearly doubled in the past two weeks. Wieler, who leads the Robert Koch-Institute, urged Germans to get vaccinated.

Ukraine:  Ukraine could tighten lockdown restrictions as COVID-19 picture worsens LINK

Idaho:  Idaho hospitals begin rationing health care amid COVID-19 surge LINK

Missouri:  St. Louis children's hospitals near capacity, and not just from COVID LINK

South Korea:  S.Korea planning to live 'more normally' with COVID-19 after October LINK

California:  California’s Central Valley overwhelmed by COVID-19 Delta surge LINK

US:  Just Say It: The Health Care System Has Collapsed LINK

World:  Bad news on #MuVariant—Japanese scientists: "Mu variant is highly resistant to sera from convalescent & [Pfizer]-vaccinated people. Direct comparison of different spike proteins revealed that Mu spike is more resistant…than all other current variants”

Canada:  Alberta nurses say government is scaling back its pay cut proposal amid fourth wave of COVID-19 LINK

Kansas:  Kansas data doesn’t reflect reality as COVID-19 rips through schools LINK

Vermont:  FBI opens criminal probe into 3 troopers over fake Covid-19 vaccination cards LINK

Texas:  Texas Hospital Reports 50 Mu COVID Cases As Delta's Dominance Continues LINK

Indiana:  Union Hospital emergency rooms are filling up with patients LINK

Mississippi:  Nurse walkouts possible statewide as COVID-19 takes a toll on healthcare professionals LINK

US:  From Alaska To Idaho And Beyond, Covid Surges Stress Hospital Systems LINK

Hawaii:  DOH, HAH COVID efforts give hospitals a couple weeks before reaching “crisis point” DOH Director Elizabeth Char, MD, and HAH President and CEO Hilton Raethel shared a joint presentation to the Committee, noting that Hawaii exceeded its ICU bed capacity as of Friday. LINK

US:  COVID Now Leading Cause of Death Among Law Enforcement LINK

Wisconsin:  Wisconsin reports more than 1,000 COVID-19 hospital patients for the first time since January LINK

Colorado:  Nursing homes face staffing shortages, financial problems as they serve growing need LINK

West Virginia:  No ICU beds available: PCH at capacity with COVID-19 patients LINK

Florida:  At West Boca Medical Center, 32 Kids Admitted Over Seven Days For COVID LINK

US:  252,000 children test positive for COVID-19 in past week as classes resume LINK

Washington:  A Washington county has approved an emergency declaration to bring in a refrigeration trailer for the bodies of COVID-19 victims that have overwhelmed the morgue LINK

World:  Why are we seeing more COVID cases in fully vaccinated people? LINK

World:  Is Covid here to stay? A survey of more than 100 scientists found a vast majority expect the coronavirus will become endemic LINK

Jamaica:  GRIEF, HORROR AND DEATH “They say we are low on oxygen, I am telling you, we are running out of medication too. What we have to be doing is writing prescriptions and giving it to the family to fill because there is this great demand for these products” LINK

RUMINT (US):  OK. So now a first for me. TBH, previously I've known no one directly who has died either of the covid19 or the trial vaccination. Now that has changed. 26 year old mum, has child of 9 months, died three days after trial vaccination. Foremost it's a tradgedy for her & close ones.

World:  COVID-19 created lots of supply chain problems — and they're nowhere close to being solved LINK

US:  Supply chain issues impacting ports in Pacific Northwest LINK

World: Op/Ed:  The only thing I seem to recall re. Mu, is all the same people playing that down played Delta down for quite a while too. Perhaps Mu won't succeed. But, it seems very sensible to have the attitude, one will soon.

US:  NEW: White House signals new COVID-19 measures coming for unvaccinated Americans LINK

Canada:  814 new cases of #COVID19 announced in B.C., as the rolling average rises slightly as we continue to be in this bumpy short-term plateau. Active cases rise to 5,550, hospitalizations rise to 261, but no new deaths.

Iowa:  Iowa DPH confirms 18 cases of COVID-19 mu variant LINK

Macedonia:  15 people have reportedly been killed and more than 20 others injured in a fire at a Covid hospital in North Macedonia - #Covid #hospital #Fire

UK:   More than 50 cases of the Mu variant have been detected in the UK LINK

World: Ivermectin causes sterilization in 85 percent of men, study finds LINK

[aion-rsa]

WandaVision Episode 5 Theories Explained

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This article contains WandaVision spoilers.

It’s very weird and more than a little thrilling to see some of the fan theories that we’ve previously collected actually play out on WandaVision, but of course there are still four episodes of Marvel’s rollercoaster spinoff series left to go, and this week we’re bringing you all the most compelling theories gaining traction online to help pass the time until the sixth episode drops.

At this point, many of the theories surrounding WandaVision’s bigger story are less outlandish. Every week a little more of the puzzle is revealed, and every week we get a little more background on what our central characters have been up to since the climax of Avengers: Endgame, which in turn brings us a lot closer to them.

Not only does this feel fairly organic, it’s also testament to how much we’re genuinely rooting for Wanda’s happiness now. We all want this to turn out well for her, and for her to be allowed to process her grief properly, even as things start to fall apart and the Westview cracks start to show.

Here are some of the biggest theories doing the rounds since episode 5 needle-dropped its MCU-breaking reveal…

Stark Warning

It didn’t take long for Marvel fans to uncover the origin of the ’80s drone tech Monica Rambeau managed to grab so that SWORD could penetrate The Hex in their attempt to reason with Wanda.

After being disabled and dragged outside the mystical forcefield, the drone was exposed as the product of Stark Industries – and if you recall Wanda’s emotional story of how she and Pietro were trapped waiting for a Stark bomb to go off when they were children (as recounted in Avengers: Age of Ultron), it’s no wonder she was so pissed to see a weaponized Stark drone appear in Westview.

It’s not massively surprising that Howard Stark and his team were working on that kinda drone tech in the ’80s, but how was Monica able to get hold of it so quickly? The answer appears clear – SWORD managed to keep a bunch of easily-accessible clout that has either been inherited through SHIELD or lifted from Tony’s warehoused tech.

What else do they have access to, and do they also have a new resource on hand inside SWORD – or at Stark Industries – who could end up being essential to the MCU?

well i think that's worth a look 👀👀#WandaVision pic.twitter.com/pbAvQEfMBF

— Phase Zero (@PhaseZeroCB) February 6, 2021

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 8

Engage Ultron

Is it possible that when Wanda snatched Vision’s body from SWORD and brought him back to life that she accidentally set in motion (or interrupted) a chain of events that would bring back Ultron?

There are a LOT of questions lingering about exactly what SWORD was doing with Vision’s body before Wanda hit the scene and disturbed their work. Were they really about to put him in storage as per his wishes, or were they lowkey doing some pretty dangerous experiments with the original Ultron tech Tony Stark built him with?

This theory is a work in progress for fans who aren’t really sure how Ultron could return without access to the Mind Stone. Still, there’s a solid reason that so many people are checking out James Spader’s IMDb page every week…

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 7

Quicksilvered

You can’t throw a stone online without hitting a theory about how notorious Marvel villain Mephisto will ultimately be unveiled as the real brains behind Westview’s manifestations, and many fans are deeply suspicious of Evan Peters’ arrival as Wanda’s twin brother “Pietro.”

Peters, who played ‘Peter’ Maximoff in the X-Men franchise, has seemingly been cast in WandaVision instead of the MCU’s original Quicksilver, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, but does this really mean that realities are colliding and mutants are now here to stay?

Though it’s exciting to think that’s exactly what’s going down here, Pietro’s appearance in Westview feels hastily designed to derail both Wanda and Vision, and who might have a more vested interest in keeping this charade going other than Mephisto? He does absolutely love pretending to be dead people to manipulate Marvel superheroes and villains alike, and his Wrong Quicksilver guise might well keep us off the trail.

#WandaVision Basically the end of episode 5 pic.twitter.com/lND9tUN4yp

— where the stimmy reside. where the stimmy reside. (@Smilinjai) February 7, 2021

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 5

For the Children

Vision wants to know why Billy and Tommy are the only children in Westview, but if you’ve watched trailers that show us glimpses of WandaVision‘s upcoming Halloween episode – where Wanda and Vision finally get to wear their comics-accurate costumes – you may have noticed that Vision is surrounded by children trick-or-treating through the town.

It appears the “no children” situation is about to be fixed posthaste, but there are still indications that children are very much a liability inside The Hex. During episode 5, Agnes says that children can’t be controlled, and Wanda appears perplexed and a little infuriated that her own kids are immune to the effects of her powers.

Putting that aside, where have the children of Westview gone? And why have they been removed from the equation? Are they being held captive because they would see straight through Wanda’s perfect white picket fence life and be utterly terrified that their parents are acting weird as hell?

Some fans are wondering if there’s an even more nefarious reason for their disappearance – perhaps someone or something is using their lifeforce to grow powerful inside the womb of The Hex. A certain red-faced demon? Mmmaybe not, but there is some worrying Age of Ultron foreshadowing for Billy and Tommy’s sudden existence…

Scene that stuck out to me in AoU considering where we are at in WandaVision. from WANDAVISION

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 5

Recap Rewind

Are the “previously on WandaVision” recaps actually all part of the illusion? This meta theory began in earnest after episode 5’s recap when we saw a new version of Wanda explaining to Vision why Monica Rambeau had vanished.

When this scene played out at the end of episode 4, Wanda expelled Monica from The Hex and told her special red popsicle that ‘Geraldine’ was simply no longer around because “she had to rush home”, but in episode 5’s opening recap Wanda’s words had changed to “she doesn’t belong here.”

It’s worth noting that the show’s recaps are always introduced in Elizabeth Olsen’s voice, and this particular alteration is certainly very curious.

The way that Wanda says "Previously on Wandavision" gets a little more sober per episode.#Wandavision pic.twitter.com/CZIOSjWRs9

— Elizabeth Olsen Access (@LizzieContent) February 7, 2021

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 5

Hail Hayward

As soon as we clapped eyes on new SWORD director Tyler Hayward, we instinctively knew he was going to turn out to be a wrongun, and our fears were justified when he immediately hijacked Monica’s plan to reason with Wanda using an old Stark drone.

Yes, that git really strapped a missile to it and ordered his men to take the shot. He must have been snacking on the wrong local mushrooms when he came up with that plan – sir, Wanda Maximoff almost took down Thanos, are you for real?

So, is Hayward just a misguided military man with absolutely no concept of how powerful Wanda is or how quick her reflexes are, or was he deliberately trying to make her mad to destabilize the situation? Is he just another in a long line of confident, strong-jawed men who have risen to the top of government oversight organizations in the Marvel Cinematic Universe who later turn out to be working for HYDRA?

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 4

Get Stoned

The theory that all of this comes back to the Mind Stone has been around since the very first episode of WandaVision started streaming, but it’s only grown in popularity every time Vision has done something extraordinary in the show. It’s hard to argue with the notion that Vision’s head bling isn’t just for decoration here – he’s able to use the powers of the Mind Stone in Westview to expose the town’s secrets when Wanda isn’t around, ergo the stone itself might be a very real presence.

But if the infinity stone is here, how has it returned? As revealed in Avengers: Endgame, Thanos reduced his version of it down to the atomic level far away from Earth, and Cap took the stolen Scepter containing the Mind Stone to its rightful place in 2012, presumably to deliver it back into the hands of HYDRA, who would go on to perform experiments with it that enhanced Wanda and Pietro Maximoff before it was used to create Ultron and Vision. But did all go as planned or did the Mind Stone fall into the grasp of someone else, creating a branch reality that Wanda (or someone else) was able to exploit?

Another theory also posits that since destroying it at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, Wanda has become the living embodiment of the Mind Stone, which is why her powers seem to have increased exponentially. Hmm.

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 2

Watch Next

The first time an episode of WandaVision finished and Disney+ suggested we watch Avengers: Age of Ultron, no one paid it too much attention. After the second, third, fourth, and fifth time it happened, it became an amusing meme on social media. But what if there’s a very good reason that Marvel is so keen for us to re-watch the film again 5+ years after its release?

Tons of people caught up in the intriguing events of the spinoff series are now choosing to go back and mine the Marvel blockbuster for clues, wondering if everything we really need to know about the truth of the story is right there for the taking.

We re-watched Age of Ultron ourselves, once in preparation for WandaVision and again halfway through to see if it changed the way we viewed the events of the movie. It definitely seems to have taken on a new depth, and the Avengers’ chatter about humanity’s doomed future rings clearer.

Thor’s random vision quest, where he skipped out on the plot to go take an underwater peek into the future, also feels more essential. Okay, yes, there’s Heimdall’s assertion that Thor would lead them all “into Hell” – another possible hint that Mephisto is on the horizon – but there’s also that dire warning from Thor upon his return.

He says he saw “a whirlpool that sucks in all hope of life, and at its center, the Mind Stone.” Was this really a reflection of Ultron’s plans for it, or was it setting the stage for WandaVision‘s finale?

Watching the avengers age of ultron again, so my sister can understand #WandaVision. pic.twitter.com/l9HsgTKnu3

— shoot (@AgirlnamedShoot) February 7, 2021

Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 1

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Have you heard any juicy new theories about WandaVision after last week’s episode? Let us know in the comments.

The post WandaVision Episode 5 Theories Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

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There is no credit fairy that might come visit you one night and whisper magical spells into your ear on how to fix your score. However, this article has advice you can employ for simple steps towards a better rating. Read on for some tips and tricks that might just be the miracles you were hoping for.

If you have a lot of debts or liabilities in your name, those don't go away when you pass away. Your family will still be responsible, which is why you need to invest in life insurance to protect them. A life insurance policy will pay out enough money for them to cover your expenses at the time of your death.

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It may be very difficult to comprehend the idea of a home business. That said, it can be easy to do if you know what you're doing. You just have to continue to learn more about your business niche and find out what is necessary to operate your business smoothly.

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Have you always wanted to understand more about investing? All the fancy financial terms and phrases may make investment seem daunting. However, it is not as hard to understand as you think. This article will simplify some of the basic investment concepts that will help you become a smart investor.

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How Bernie Sanders’ Passionate Base Revitalized His Campaign

When Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders suffered a heart attack in October, what upset his long-time supporter Craig Althof the most was the way it was covered by the media.

In the opinion of 65-year-old Althof, who had a similar procedure to Sanders to prop open an artery, journalists were too quick to write Sanders’ political obituary, speculating that the 78-year-old’s second White House run was likely over.

“I’m a two-stent guy, just like Bernie,” said the substitute teacher in Newton, Iowa. “It opened people’s eyes that they’re out to get him.”

Four months later, the progressive firebrand’s turnaround — a virtual tie for first place with Pete Buttigieg in last week’s Iowa caucuses and another strong showing likely in New Hampshire on Tuesday – is at least partly thanks to the passion of supporters like Althof, who says the way the U.S. Senator was written off reminds him of the 2016 nominating race – which Sanders ultimately lost to Hillary Clinton – all over again.

Those fans were determined that the outcome would be different this time.

In the week following the heart attack, staff and volunteers held nearly 300 events in Iowa alone, from house parties to canvassing outings, and made 800,000 calls in four days to early voting states including Iowa and New Hampshire, campaign officials told Reuters at the time.

Days later, Sanders won the most sought-after progressive endorsement from first-term Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the first of a string of endorsements.

More than any of the other 10 Democrats vying for the right to take on Republican President Donald Trump in November, Sanders leans heavily on this fervent core of supporters for donations and for canvassing voters, an approach summed up by his slogan “Not me, us.”

Sipping a beer at Sanders’ post-caucus party in Des Moines last week, Michael Tunney, 34, said he traveled from Los Angeles to knock doors for Sanders, and was planning to do the same in Nevada ahead of the caucuses there.

“It’s easy to do because you don’t feel like you’re selling something,” he said. “When you knock on doors you have nothing to be ashamed of, it’s not like your a used car salesman, because you know you’re right on all the issues.”

Sanders raised $96 million in 2019, more than any other Democratic contender. In January alone, Sanders raised $25 million, according to the campaign, some of which would be put into the 14 states that vote on March 3, known as Super Tuesday.

These are all strong signs Sanders may be building a progressive version of the populist wave that swept Trump into office in 2016, observers say.

But the analogy to Trump is exactly what makes many skeptics uncomfortable.

Sanders’ fiercest supporters can be unwilling to countenance criticism of their candidate and seem ready to back him almost no matter what he does.

Sanders himself has shown no interest in reaching out to the Democratic Party’s moderate wing, which rivals believe would become a major liability if he became its nominee.

Instead, the self-described Democratic Socialist has continued to push the message in recent weeks that he is taking on establishment Democrats.

“We are their worst nightmare,” he said in a Sioux City rally on Jan. 26, referring to the party hierarchy as well as Trump and business interests that he said were “nervous” at the idea of him in the White House.

‘STAUNCH ON HIS VALUES’

That unapologetic stance may have helped him with many liberals who had been weighing him versus fellow liberal U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was building momentum with a similar policy platform before Sanders’ heart attack. Both support Medicare for All – a single, government payer system that would all but eliminate private healthcare.

Warren’s separate proposals since then – that she would finance Medicare for All without any tax increases on the middle class, and that she would seek a gradual transition into the system – have sparked criticism from all sides.

Moderates accused her of lying to taxpayers. And more than a dozen Sanders supporters who had been considering Warren told Reuters in recent weeks they saw the idea of a transition as a sign she was moving to the center.

Sanders won 26.1% of state-delegate equivalents in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, just behind Buttigieg’s 26.2% but well ahead of Warren, who finished third with 18%, and former vice president Joe Biden, who had 15.8%.

“I feel like Warren is becoming less progressive to kind of cater to Republicans. That’s what Hillary did in 2016 and it obviously didn’t work,” said Marisa Rude, 19, a freshman at the University of Iowa, who switched from Warren to Sanders in the past month and was volunteering for his campaign in January.

“So that’s why I’m for Bernie. I think he’s staunch on his values.”

TWO DOORS A SECOND

Sanders held on to some key staff in Iowa from his 2016 campaign and had built up a formidable organization by October, with 112 staff working out of 16 offices.

His campaign spent nearly $6 million to air television ads 20,272 times in Iowa, according to data published last week by Wesleyan Media Project. Only billionaire Tom Steyer and Buttigieg outspent Sanders on TV in the state.

In Iowa, the campaign said it knocked on 500,000 doors in January. At one point staffers and volunteers knocked on two doors every second over a five-hour period, said Misty Rebik, Sanders’ Iowa state director.

In the days before the caucuses, Sanders’ campaign was looking strong – enough to prompt moderates to try to stop his surge, airing television ads arguing that a socialist cannot win in many of the states beyond Iowa.

Supporters like Rod Sanders, 53, dismissed those concerns.

“I’d rather have the guy over here who’s trying to get me the best deal possible, instead of conceding from the start,” he said. “And maybe America needs scaring a little bit.”

(Reporting by Simon Lewis; Editing by Soyoung Kim and Sonya Hepinstall)

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