#over 60 episodes tracing this thread!!!

[seriousbusinessforhumans]

Feb 2018

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted over 100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called "alt-right" — a movement that continues to access the mainstream and reach young recruits.

On December 7, 2017, a 21-year-old white male posing as a student entered Aztec High School in rural New Mexico and began firing a handgun, killing two students before taking his own life. At the time, the news of the shooting went largely ignored, but the online activity of the alleged killer, William Edward Atchison, bore all the hallmarks of the “alt-right”—the now infamous subculture and political movement consisting of vicious trolls, racist activists, and bitter misogynists.

But Atchison wasn’t the first to fit the profile of alt-right killer—that morbid milestone belongs to Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in 2014 killed seven in Isla Vista, California, after uploading a sprawling manifesto filled with hatred of young women and interracial couples (Atchison went by “Elliot Rodger” in one of his many online personas and lauded the “supreme gentleman,” a title Rodger gave himself and has since become a meme on the alt-right).

Including Rodger’s murderous rampage there have been at least 13 alt-right related fatal episodes, leaving 43 dead and more than 60 injured (see list). Nine of the 12 incidents counted here occurred in 2017 alone, making last year the most violent year for the movement.

Like Atchison and Rodger, these perpetrators were all male and, with the exception of three men, all under the age of 30 at the time they are alleged to have killed. The average age of the alt-right killers is 26. The youngest was 17. One, Alexandre Bissonnette, is Canadian, but the rest are American. 

The “alternative right” was coined in part by white nationalist leader Richard Bertrand Spencer in 2008, but the movement as it’s known today can largely be traced back to 2012 and 2013 when two major events occurred: the killing of the black teenager Trayvon Martin and the so-called Gamergate controversy where female game developers and journalists were systematically threatened with rape and death. Both were formative moments for a young generation of far-right activists raised on the internet and who found community on chaotic forums like 4chan and Reddit where the classic tenets of white nationalism — most notably the belief that white identity is under attack by multiculturalism and political correctness — flourish under dizzying layers of toxic irony.

The Killings Started in California

The timeline for alt-right killers began on May 23, 2014.

On that day, college sophomore Elliot Rodger stabbed his three roommates to death before driving to a sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and shooting several women. He then killed or injured several pedestrians with both gunfire and his vehicle before exchanging fire with police and eventually taking his own life. He ultimately killed seven and wounded 14.

Rodger left behind a sprawling 107,000-word manifesto titled, “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” which contained passages lamenting his inability to find a girlfriend, expressing extreme misogyny and various racist positions including disgust for interracial couples (despite the fact that he was multi-racial himself (half-Chinese)).

“How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself,” Rodger wrote. “I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves.”

Rodger frequented PUAhate, a deeply misogynistic forum populated by failed “pick up artists” dedicated to revealing, “the scams, deception, and misleading marketing techniques used by dating gurus and the seduction community to deceive men and profit from them.” Discussions about women on the forum are at best objectifying and at worst, violent.

The term, “white sharia,” allegedly coined by Sacco Vandal of the popular alt-right site Vandal Void, is a radical response to Patrick Buchanan’s argument in Death of the West: that the increase in immigration and decline of white birthrates is leading to the end of Western civilization. Rodger’s celebration at the 504um, one of the premier alt-right forums, is the rule rather than the exception, and locates misogyny at the core of the alt-right.

Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer’s founder and chief propagandist, has his own troubling history of vicious misogyny, tracking all the way back to high school.

In the aftermath of Rodger’s killing spree, a user at 4chan/b/ posted a photo from Rodger’s Facebook page with the note, “Elliot Rodger, the supreme gentleman, was part of /b/. Discuss.” This sentiment was echoed by other /b/ users who found similarities between his lexicon and that of the noxious board, including the term “beta,” used by men online to describe themselves as lacking the physicality, charisma and confidence associated with alpha males.... The term resurfaced on 4chan/r9k/ in the wake of a shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, by Chris Harper-Mercer, who killed nine and wounded at least seven others at the college on October 1, 2015. “This is only the beginning. The Beta Rebellion has begun,” one anonymous user wrote. “Soon, more of our brothers will take up arms to become martyrs to this revolution.”

Although never proven, it is widely speculated that Harper-Mercer was a user on the board as warnings against attending school the following day that circulated on the eve of the shooting. Authorities believe Harper-Mercer, who like Rodger was multi-racial, was also motivated by white supremacist ideas. The Government Accountability Office categorized the Roseburg killings as “white supremacist” in an April 2017 report.

2017: A Year of Alt-Right Violence

The first killing in 2017 that can be tied to the alt-right occurred on January 29 in Canada. A 27-year-old university student named Alexandre Bissonnette allegedly brought a semiautomatic rifle into the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City and shot and killed six worshippers while injuring 19—two critically.

On May 20, 2017, Sean Urbanski, a 22-year-old University of Maryland student, allegedly stabbed and killed newly commissioned Lt. Richard Collins, III. Authorities described the attack as “totally unprovoked.” Urbanski approached Collins, who was black, and two friends at 3 a.m., seemingly intoxicated, and said, “Step left, step left if you know what’s best for you.” When Collins refused, Urbanski stabbed him. Urbanski, however, was a member of a Facebook group called “Alt Reich: Nation”.

Less than a week later, Jeremy Christian, a 35-year-old Portland resident, allegedly stabbed and killed two people and severely wounded another passenger on a train while they were defending two young women from his anti-Muslim and racist remarks. Christian, who identified as a white nationalist and had a history of violence and mental illness, had a Facebook page filled with racist and bizarre political content. Witnesses at an alt-right free speech rally in the month preceding the stabbing saw Christian wearing an American flag cape, yelling racial slurs and making Nazi salutes. 

Two months later, on July 14, 2017, Lane Maurice Davis, 33, allegedly stabbed his father, Charles Davis, to death at the family home in Skagit County, Washington, after accusing his father of pedophilia. Davis, a conspiracy theory obsessive who went by the name ‘Seattle4Truth’ online and accused his father, not based on his own experience, but instead on his belief that liberals around the world are participating in secret pedophilia rings. Davis was reportedly a researcher for Milo Yiannopoulos and claimed to have ghost written pieces on Breitbart News for the former tech editor. 

In the months leading up to Unite the Right, members of the alt-right colonized and organized themselves on the gaming chat platform Discord. This includes Auernheimer who was a frequent participant in the Daily Stormer’s server, “Thunderdome,” where he regularly interacted with site readers and put out calls for action.

Young, White, Angry, Male

According to Dr. Eric Madfis, author of a 2014 paper on the intersectional identities of American Mass Murderers, young, white, middle class, heterosexual males commit mass murder at a disproportionately high rate relative to their population size in the United States.

The rate of mass murders spiked in the 1970s and 1990s. Between 1966 and 1999, there were 95 cases of mass public shootings. Between 1976 and 2008, mass murders occurred roughly twice per month, claiming an average of 125 deaths each month. A more recent study published by Mother Jones identifies 95 mass shootings in the United States since 1982. Of those, 55 (59%) were committed by white men.

FBI crime data suggests that ages 16 to 24 are peak time for violent crime. According to Dr. Pete Simi, Director of the Earl Babbie Research Center at Chapman University, "This is a period of substantial transition in an individual's life, when they're less likely to have significant attachments in their life that deter them from criminal violence."

Madfis’s 2014 paper from the University of Washington investigates the role of intersectional identities in mass murder incidents and argues that young, white males' unique downward social mobility, relative to his expectations, accounts for their overrepresentation as perpetrators of mass murder.

Only one in five mass murderers are “likely psychotic or delusional,” however, according to Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University.

A 2001 study conducted by Meloy examining 34 adolescent perpetrators of mass murder found that 59% were the direct result of a triggering event. That rate jumped to 90% among adult mass murders. 

Dr. Elliott Leyton, an expert on serial homicide, argues that contemporary mass murderers often target the perceived source of lost financial stability or class prestige. The alt-right, which couches its mission in terms of surviving literal extinction, routinely laments so-called reverse racism and affirmative action as well as immigration in all its forms.

The grievances collected by those motivated by the white nationalist ideology at the heart of the alt-right often do not begin with racist propaganda, but rather in the toxic communities of the men's rights movement... The age-old racist argument - that black men are 'taking our women' — is made regularly. Racist slurs are chucked around casually. There seems to be a significant overlap with organised white supremacy." 

Andrew Anglin once wrote “[o]ur target audience [for the neo-nazi website Daily Stormer] is white males between the ages of 10 and 30.”

Wiring Young Neurons

“Our target audience is white males between the ages of 10 and 30,” Anglin wrote in his “PSA: When the Alt-Right Hits the Street, You Wanna be Ready.” “I include children as young a ten, because an element of this is that we want to look like superheroes. We want to be something that boys fantasize about being a part of. That is a core element to this. I don’t include men over the age of 30, because after that point, you are largely fixed in your thinking. We will certainly reach some older men, but they should not be a focus.”

[Richard] Spencer told Mother Jones in December of 2016 before a contentious speaking engagement at Texas A&M University. “I think you do need to get them while they are young. I think rewiring the neurons of someone over 50 is effectively impossible.”

Undeniably, their efforts have had success. Mainstay racist conferences, like the annual gatherings of American Renaissance and the National Policy Institute, are attracting larger audiences, no longer dominated by their once singular demographic of middle-aged white men.

On a panel at Harvard University in October, Derek Black, son of longtime white supremacist Don Black, who once represented the future of the movement until he renounced racism during college, described his surprise at seeing so many young participants in Charlottesville:

I can say for sure my entire life in white nationalism I went to conferences many times a year. I spoke at them. I tried to organize them. I organized online through my dad's site [Stormfront] through organizations whether Jared [Taylor]'s AmRen or David [Duke]'s EURO or Council of Conservative Citizens … Everybody at these things is gray-haired. Me and two other people would be under 40. That was it. Which is partly why I took this impression that this is not gonna last. And a lot of that is because young people have a lot to lose … Young people who show up to a rally like that are going to get their identities exposed online and then it's gonna be hard for them to get jobs … I cannot actually explain what changed. The one striking thing about Charlottesville…was there's a ton of young kids like college-age or actual college students who got on buses and went to this who I don't think had been to an event like that before. 

Alt-right groups such as Identity Evropa and Vanguard America are marketing themselves exclusively to college and high school-aged individuals.

Then, on October 19, barely two months after the chaos of Charlottesville, the University of Florida was forced to host a Spencer speaking engagement under threat of a lawsuit........................ Hours later, three of his supporters were arrested for attempted murder after an alleged confrontation with protestors in which Spencer’s supporters threw stiff-armed salutes and one fired a shot at the urging of his accomplices. 

Not Even 21

James Alex Fields was only 20 years-old when he drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of attendees and protestors during August’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, injuring 19 and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Fields stood with members of Vanguard America during the rally and carried a shield with the militaristic, alt-right group’s insignia on it.

According to police records, Fields also had a troubling history of childhood domestic violence — which experts see in about 1 in 6 mass killers. In 2010, Field’s mother called 911 after he attacked her for telling him to stop playing a video game. Other records reveal that he brandished a 12-inch knife at her on a separate occasion. His disabled mother uses a wheelchair.

Just three months prior to Unite the Right, another young, white man with a history in the alt-right, 18-year-old Devon Arthurs, allegedly killed two of his roommates... in Florida. Arthurs, who was taken into custody by authorities after holding employees of a tobacco shop hostage, had converted to Salafism, an ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam, and begun defending ISIS online a year prior. He was previously a leader of a National Socialist group known as the Atomwaffen (“Atomic Weapon”) Division which formed on the fascist forum Iron March. 

In the year leading up to the shooting, Arthurs appeared to be blending his alt-right beliefs with his newfound adherence to extremist forms of Islam. His username changed from Weissewolfe to Kekman Al-Amriki, a combination of the trollish god of “meme magic” common to 4chan and the name of an American member of al-Shabab, an Islamic militant organization. According to VICE, Arthurs also spoke of “white sharia,” a concept exemplifying the brutal, misogynistic core attitudes of the alt-right and those it has inspired to violence.

Leaderless Resistance

In 2014, after longtime Klansman Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. killed three at a Jewish community center and a retirement home in Overland Park, Kansas, Brad Griffin of Occidental Dissent published an article on the topic of “self detonating lone wolf vanguardists.” According to Griffin, “a ‘self detonating lone wolf vanguardist’ is someone who is radically alienated from society and who has given up on persuasion, a fanatacist who is inclined toward violent methods of bringing about eschatological political change, who usually acts alone or with an accomplice in the name of a movement without the support of assistance of any group, and who typically explodes, lashes out, or ‘self detonates’ without warning in rampage shootings, murder-suicides, and bombing campaigns.”

In its just over four years of operation, the Daily Stormer’s audience included at least three readers who were either convicted or indicted for murder. 

"An Age of Ultraviolence"

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Storm Roof killed nine African-American worshipers and wounded one while attending a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof, then 21, told his victims, including Reverend and State Senator Clementa Pickney, that, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

In a manifesto posted to his website, lastrhodesian.com, Roof cited the Trayvon Martin case as his inspiration for searching on Google for “black on White crime.” According to Roof, “I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief.”

On March 22, 2017, another Daily Stormer reader, James Harris Jackson, was arrested after stabbing 66-year-old black man Timothy Caughman with a sword in Manhattan. Jackson, an army veteran, was 28 at the time of the alleged stabbing. He travelled to New York from Baltimore, Maryland, to conduct a “practice run” for what was intended to deter white women from race-mixing. He told a media source after his arrest that, “the white race is being eroded.” 

On Friday, December 27, a 17-year-old white male, reported to be Nicholas Giampa, allegedly shot and killed the parents of his ex-girlfriend in Reston, Virginia, before turning the gun on himself. According to reports, the parents had facilitated the break-up after learning that Giampa held neo-Nazi beliefs.

Giampa’s account also attempted to engage with those of alt-right leaders and organizations like Mike Peinovich, VDARE, the Traditionalist Worker Party, Identity Evropa, as well as Vanguard America, the neo-Nazi group that James Fields was photographed with in Charlottesville. One of Giampa’s main obsessions, however, was the hardcore neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen.

2018 is already off to a disturbing start. On January 2, Blaze Bernstein, a college student who was gay and Jewish went missing and was later found murdered. Friends of the accused murderer, Samuel Woodward, told ProPublica that Woodward was a committed neo-Nazi and member of Atomwaffen which may have as chapters in as many as eight states.

This former Atomwaffen member also said that the events in Charlottesville had a major impact on the group. Its membership doubled.  

(selected sections of article)

#southern poverty law center #far right #alt right #american extremists #Elliot Rodger #Andrew Anglin #Richard Spencer #Dylan Roof #2010s #2017 #Derek Black #crime and violence data #killers #mass shooting #mass murder #domestic terrorism #white supremacists #men's rights #incels #misogynist terrorism

[lapis-lazuliie]

you’re my favourite thing : a fanmix for my fic, pandoras box

1. the weight of us - sanders bohlke // 2. last train - dawn golden // 3. a quiet darkness - houses // 4. let it be (ft veela) - blackmill // 5. fade away - best coast // 6. upset - the hoosiers // 7. man - the bird and the bee // 8. wolf - first aid kit // 9. ghosts that we knew - mumford and sons // 10. who said anything (about falling in love) - the hoosiers // 11. i’m the only one - melissa etheridge // 12. yeah yeah yeah - jack conte // 13. hands down - the greeting committee // 14. cleopatra - the lumineers // 15. better - onerepublic // 16. the writing’s on the wall - ok go // 17. troublemaker - grizfolk // 18. dreams - youngblood // 19. wow - beck // 20. sentiment - verte // 21. season 2 episode 3 - glass animals // 22. trees - the oh hellos // 23. separate ways (worlds apart) - journey // 24. makes me wonder - maroon 5 // 25. can’t catch tomorrow (good shoes won’t save you this time) - lostprophets // 26. between two lungs - florence and the machine // 27. better place - rachel platten // 28. tired of talking - leon // 29. honey - trace // 30. wait a minute! - willow // 31. the night - honne // 32. r u mine? - arctic monkeys // 33. i don’t mind - defeater // 34. in the night - the weeknd // 35. single - the neighbourhood // 36. ghosts - pvris // 37. wanderlust - frank turner // 38. saint claude - christine and the queens // 39. see the sun - the kooks // 40. too much - magic man // 41. could have been me - the struts // 42. waiting… - city and colour // 43. move your body - sia // 44. belong to the city - partynextdoor // 45. butch - saint motel // 46. back to the ordinary - kid ashtray // 47. a well respected man - the kinks // 48. so nice so smart - kimya dawson // 49. i am yours - the makemakes // 50. one week - barenaked ladies // 51. i feel it coming - the weeknd // 52. i feel free - cream // 53. touch - shura // 54. lithium and a lover - sirenia // 55. handclap - fitz and the tantrums // 56  love - lana del rey // 57. falyakon - mashrou’ leila // 58. moving to neptune - cruisr // 59. summer love - trevor something // 60. fade away - trevor something // 61. telepathic - starset // 62. why try to change me now - fiona apple // 63. it ain’t me (ft selena gomez) - kygo // 64. second change - shinedown // 65. ruby - kaiser chiefs // 66. in the shadows (radio edit) - the rasmus // 67. two of us - the beatles // 68. landed - ben folds // 69. pretty face - soley // 70. open season - high highs // 71. if i be wrong - wolf larsen // 72. lazuli - beach house // 73. cloudbusting - just us // 74. phase me out - verite // 75. love like this - kodaline // 76. gimme twice - the royal concept // 76. champagne supernova - oasis // 78. heart’s on fire - passenger // 79. sheep in wolves clothes - little hurricane // 80. let it all go - birdy & rhodes // 81. everybody but me - lykke li // 82. handsome - the vaccines // 83. naive - the kooks // 84. let go - frou frou // 85. pin - grimes // 86. tell me it’s okay - gnash // 87. royal - waterparks // 88. come a little closer - cage the elephant // 89. wish list - neon trees // 90. i’ll stay with you - new order // 91. notion - tash sultana // 92. done - camp cope // 93. high tide - bec sandridge // 94. there’s a honey - pale waves // 95. twice - little dragon // 96. peace and quiet - waxahatchee // 97. rhythm of the night - debarge // 98. so high - ghost loft // 99. walkway blues - m83 & jordan lawlor // 100. swoon - imogen heap // 101. ever fallen in love - pete yorn // 102. instant crush - daft punk // 103. dakota - stereophonics // 104. city - ciaran mcmeeken // 105. in the air - maala // 106. one headlight - the wallflowers // 107. you’ll be mine - havana brown // 108. glitter and gold - rebecca ferguson // 109. shimmer - tiesto & christian burns // 110. missing you - john waite // 111. lights - embrz & pennybirdrabbit // 112. neon rainbow (ft anna yvette) - rameses b // 113. landmines - pierce fulton & j hart // 114. used to this (ft moonzz) - autolaser & pls&ty // 115. ghost - chelsea lankes // 116. heartlines - broods // 117. sunset lover - petit biscuits // 118. find a way (ft rudy) - dirty south // 119. aquaman - walk the moon // 120. beggin for thread (gryffin & hotel garuda remix) - banks // 121. loving someone - the 1975 // 122. golden - parade of lights // 123. greek tragedy - the wombats // 124. 16 years - the griswolds // 125. killer whales - smallpools // 126. elevate - st lucia // 127. 101 - walla // 128. sun models (instrumental) - odesza // 129. coming over (filous remix) - james hersey // 130. standing still in time - neuropa // 131. who is in your heart now? - studio killers // 132. missing (todd terry remix) - everything but the girl // 133. shapeshifting - great good fine ok // 134. we’re on our way - radical face // 135. crash - the primitives // 136. one last time - jaymes young // 137. gold rays - vinyl pumps // 138. lost - scavenger pump // 139. 1,000 ships - rachel platten // 140. absolute beginners - david bowie // 141. just you - amy stroup // 142. us - anna of the north

[ listen here x ]

#mordeson #my playlists #really ik no one reads the fic anymore so you might as just take this as 'new music to listen to' lmao

[amandajoyce118]

Black Panther Easter Eggs And References

Instead of doing a Six Sentence Sunday this week, I thought I’d finally get around to writing up and sharing some Easter eggs and references from Black Panther. I’ve now seen the movie twice, so I think I’ve got a fair amount, but I’m also sure there are going to be things I missed.

If you haven’t yet seen this movie, there are spoilers in my list! So. Many. Spoilers. You have been warned.

I’m not going to give you everyone’s comic book history and what’s been changed for each character for the movie, but what I will say is that I think this is one of the few MCU movies where every single named character exists in the comics, which is pretty fantastic.

The Marvel Comic flip.

Before the Marvel characters and logo appear on screen, the studio still uses the flipping comic book pages to give you a little nod to their history. Usually, the images are the same for the MCU with the Avengers you see across Phase 1. This time, if you blink you might miss it, there’s a Black Panther symbol in those pages.

The history of Wakanda.

The movie’s opening has a father telling his son (you might have that it was T’Challa getting the story when the movie first opened, but that’s definitely Erik being told the story by his father) the story of vibranium landing in the middle of Africa, tribes separating, and Wakanda being built around the vibranium mound. He also details the lineage of Black Panthers. All that is almost exactly out of the comics. The MCU often changes bits and pieces of the story, like it does for T’Challa’s father dying when he’s an adult instead of a boy, but this stunning set up is almost exactly the same.

Oakland, 1992.

Oakland happened to be where director Ryan Coogler grew up and it’s also where the Black Panther political movement was born in the 60s - shortly after the comic book character made his debut. I’m not sure if 1992 is a significant year for him because it’s not for Black Panther. The previous comic book series ended in 1991 and another volume wasn’t published until 1998. It was considered a particular “bloody” year by local papers though. There were 167 known murders that occurred in Oakland that year, which apparently was a record at the time. Since that’s particularly dark, let’s also note that the Oakland Athletics (that’s baseball, folks), finished first in the American League West that year. (When the movie returns to Oakland at the end, that’s also a nod to Coogler’s real life dream: to be able to give back to the community that raised him. T’Challa puts a Wakandan Outreach program in place. Coogler spoke in some of his very first interviews about wanting to bring his movies to Oakland, to film there, to generate revenue for the city, to work with kids that live there in arts programs.)

Public Enemy.

One of the posters on the wall of the Oakland apartment is for Public Enemy, which seems appropriate for a guy in 90s Oakland who wants to bring power back to his people.

The MCU timeline.

The movie references it being a week since the UN conference and T’Chaka’s death, so it’s set right after the events of Captain America: Civil War, putting it right before Spider-Man: Homecoming and Doctor Strange, but also possible happening during the last few episodes of Agents of SHIELD’s third season. So, don’t expect a crossover there.

Killmonger’s mask.

In addition to being inspired by real life ceremonial masks worn by the Igbo, the mask also draws on comic book inspiration. Killmonger wears a mask very similar to the one in the movie during his first confrontation with T’Challa in the comics.

Killmonger’s girlfriend.

So, this might not have been intentional, and this might not even really be an Easter egg, but one relationship long time comic book readers will remember is that of Killmonger and Madam Slay. Madam Slay had trained leopards (and we do see leopard-like spots in Killmonger’s costume later), and she was his right hand for a few issues when Black Panther stories were being told as part of Jungle Action comics. She had a thing for knives and wanted to help Killmonger kill T’Challa. Of course, she was also Wakandan, so maybe the woman seen in the movie isn’t her.

Klaue’s arm.

The cannon in Klaue’s arm is inspired by the comic book design. He has a “sonic cannon” in his arm in the comics, which gets something of a shoutout when he says it’s sonic mining equipment that was used to give him the arm in the movie.

Shuri’s buns.

When T’Challa meets his family off the plane, Shuri’s hair is in a couple of buns. That’s your Star Wars reference as it was meant as an homage to another princess in a galaxy far, far, away. Letitia Wright confirmed the nod in an interview.

“What are thoooose?”

I hear this is a nod to a famous vine. LOL Okay, I have to admit that I was never into vine, but everyone in the theater under 30 found this hilarious. I found it more adorable that Shuri bases her shoe design on Back to the Future. But hey, we all find different things funny.

Mount Bashenga.

Shuri’s lab is inside a mountain named for the first known king of Wakanda that becomes Black Panther. He’s even named in the opening sequence of a bed time story.

M’Baku makes a move toward Shuri.

During the challenge, as M’Baku talks about the things he disagrees with in Wakanda, one of them is “a child” being in charge of the technology. In the comics, M’Baku specifically wants to get rid of all of the futuristic tech in Wakanda. He also, at one point, kidnaps Shuri. So, that brief moment struck me as a nod to that.

So, I’ll also note here that M’Baku is a big departure from the comics, but a lot of things were kept to provide a nod to the source material. Like Nakia calling him the “Great Gorilla” when she meets him because the villain name Man-Ape is pretty racist, no? Her term is more a sign of respect. The skin he wears over his shoulders? A nod to him killing a White Gorilla in the comics in a ritual that gives him the strength and stamina of the animal.

(Also, side note: the movie cut, but set design kept, the Jabari tribe loving the wood from a sacred tree in the mountains and using that to build their homes with. It’s in direct contrast with the high tech Vibranium. Winston Duke also worked with a dialect coach so his rhythms would be closer to different Nigerian dialects instead of South African dialects to differentiate himself from the rest of the main cast, setting the Jabari apart from the rest of Wakanda. It was also his idea to do the barking/grunting sounds as a nod to the comic book source material, but to give the Jabari a way to make an entrance and shut people up.

Okoye complains about that wig.

Honestly, this only struck me because Danai Gurira has to wear a massive wig for her role as Michonne on The Walking Dead. I know she’s spoken at length about loving that role, but I immediately thought her character’s hatred for wigs was a nod to the fact that she spends so much of the year in one.

The Pan African flag.

The stripes of the Pan African flag are green, black, and red, so when Nakia, T’Challa, and Okoye walk into the underground gambling ring in Korea and stand at the guardrail, you’re seeing that flag brought to life. (And for those who think that’s reaching for symbolism, Ryan Coogler confirmed in an interview that was the intention of the costuming decisions in that scene.)

Stan Lee’s cameo.

We all recognize Stan Lee by now, but in case you missed him, he’s one of the gamblers. He talks to Agent Ross and takes T’Challa’s winnings when he leaves them behind.

“Every breath you take is mercy from me.”

T’Challa says this line to Klaue in the movie, but in the comics, he said it to someone else. He said it to Namor following the arrival of Thanos in Wakanda. T’Challa and Namor have a complicated frenemy-ship, we’ll say. I kind of hope Namor (since the rights are back with Marvel) gets to make his debut in a Black Panther movie.

Vibranium from Sokovia.

When Agent Ross and T’Challa chat in the casino, Ross mentions the guy he’s dealing with also having been traced to the events in Sokovia. So, just in case you needed another big flashing sign for an MCU connection, there you go.

The story of El Dorado.

Klaue tells the story of a Golden City, and how people searched for it in South America. In addition to trying the movie to the legend of El Dorado, it’s also a nod to the capital city of Wakanda in the comics, called the Golden City. It’s where the royal family lives and where most of the activity takes place in the comics.

Another broken white boy.

When Shuri makes the comment that there’s another broken white boy for them to fix (after the CIA agent is brought in to have his spine repaired), I actually didn’t think about the fact that Bucky Barnes was cryogenically frozen in Wakanda for safe keeping, though I’m sure plenty others did, but of Hunter, T’Challa and Shuri’s adopted brother. T’Chaka saved the boy after his parents died in a plane crash over Wakanda and raised them with his children. Hunter grew to be jealous of T’Challa and the leader of the War Dogs. He was a sometimes enemy of his adopted brother. Of course, the post-credit scene makes it clear that Bucky is standing in for Hunter since the kids even call him by Hunter’s comic book name, “White Wolf,” even if the timeline doesn’t quite add up.

The influence of African cultures.

Yes, Black Panther is a comic book movie, but Black Panther also takes a whole lot of inspiration from different African cultures. For example, the Dora Milaje are inspired by the Dahomey Amazons, an all female military group that essentially died out after the mid twentieth century. The costuming, the body modification, the language, and even the hairstyles in the movie are all rooted in different African cultures. This twitter thread does an amazing job at explaining so much of what you see in the movie.

It’s also worth noting that you won’t see a Wakandan character in the movie with relaxed hair. Why? The country was never colonized. I believe it was Lupita Nyong'o who explained in interviews that the idea of relaxing kinky hair was brought about by colonizers shaming Africans for their looks. Because Wakanda has never been colonized, the residents have pride in something as simple as natural hair.

War Dog assignments.

The “War Dogs” are referenced several times, but outside of Nakia being called a spy, there’s not a whole of information about them. So, the term War Dog is actually in reference to the Hatut Zeraze, which are the “secret police” in Wakanda in the comics. T’Challa actually disbands them when he becomes King because he doesn’t like the idea of sending out people to assassinate others around the world, which is one of their jobs. The movie appears to have made them literal spies instead of assassins.

Shuri’s gauntlets.

I’m sure a lot of people noticed that she built her gauntlets to resemble the heads of panthers. While that’s obviously a nod to the Black Panther being Wakanda’s hero, it’s likely also a nod to Shuri becoming the Black Panther in the comics. She takes her brother’s place when he’s gravely ill and she also becomes the Queen her country needs.

Over the waterfall.

The moment where Killmonger tosses T’Challa over the edge of the cliff? Taken exactly from the comics. T’Challa survives that fall as well, though he doesn’t get help from M’Baku in the comics since they were enemies as well there.

War Dog cities.

When Killmonger and W’Kabi discuss which War Dogs have responded to his plans to take over the world, they are in very specific cities. New York, London, and Hong Kong are mentioned. Those also happen to be the cities that house Sanctum Santorums in the Doctor Strange movie, which means they’re hot spots for magic, lines between realms, etc. (Though this could be a coincidence as they’re also well known and well populated cities that world wide audiences would recognize.)

Killmonger’s Black Panther suit.

I already mentions that he gets leopard-like spots on it, which could serve as a nod to Madam Slay’s leopards, but there’s more. Black Leopard was the name used for Black Panther briefly in the comics to distance the character from any politics. Killmonger also had a sidekick in the form of a leopard he called Preyy. The gold tones in his costume - and particularly the look of the necklace - are a direct callback to what the actual Black Panther suit most often looks like in the comics as well.

T’Challa wrestles a rhino.

The scene where Black Panther takes down a rhino? Pretty much exactly out of the comics. In his very first comic book run in Jungle Action comics - the run is actually called Marvel’s first graphic novel - he had to wrestle a rhino to the ground in the same way.

Alex R. Hibbert.

The young actor, famous now for his role in Moonlight, gets a cameo at the end of the movie as the little boy who chats with T’Challa about his ship. Ryan Coogler is a big fan of Moonlight and has said that the director actual gave him a lot of support in his career. Hibbert gets the last official line in the movie, though there is a mid credits scene and a post credits scene.

#black panther #black panther easter eggs #marvel comics #mcu #marvel easter eggs

[eggnogdoubt38-blog]

Reading Recap: August 2018

At the end of every month, I take a look back at my reading journal and share the books and my thoughts on them here. The comments below are excerpts from my full reviews on Goodreads; you can always keep up with my reading in real-time over there.

My Goodreads goal for the year was 71 books, and I hit it this month! So I’ve increased my goal to 91 books—this is the most I’ve ever read in my life, and I’m loving it. After being a guest on the What Should I Read Next? Podcast, I decided to start treating my love of reading as a hobby. Prior to that—for reasons I can’t articulate—I just didn’t see reading that way. It was something I did around the edges of the day, but it wasn’t a primary activity.

Since we moved to Prague, that’s changed. I watch only 1 hour of TV each day—and don’t read that in a snooty voice! I pass no judgment on TV-watching; I love TV-watching. I just like reading more. By the by, we usually work our way through a series, one episode per day until we’re done. Just finished season two of Riverdale, and I love it so much OMG. So campy and over-the-top. LOVE! I cannot wait for season three. Give me more Cheryl!

Anyway… back to reading. I deleted Twitter and my RSS reader from my phone so I don’t get sucked into the vortex. I always have my Kindle in my purse so I can take advantage of unexpected bench-sitting time or a long line. I listen to audiobooks and literary podcasts on my daily walks. And I read every night before bed, sometimes at lunch, and sometimes for 30-60 minutes in the morning, if I wake up before 6:00 a.m.

I am thoroughly enjoying this book nerdiness.

Pachinko byMin Jin Lee | 3 1/2 stars I really wanted to love this book, but for me, it was good, not great—which makes me feel kinda dumb because it received so many prestigious accolades. I respect it, but it didn’t touch my heart. To be fair, I’m beginning to think that sprawling family dramas are not for me. I prefer to be really connected to a smaller cast of characters in an atmospheric setting. There were so many people in this book and the way I thought of them was “the one that owns the pachinko parlor,” “the one that wants to be a scholar”… they never moved past 1-liners into real people for me. (My Goodreads review provides more detail, but also spoilers; proceed with caution.)

This book’s biggest strength—and it’s significant—is the way it brings an unknown-to-me part of history to light. I was only vaguely aware of the events leading up the U.S. Korean War, and it was fascinating—and sobering—to learn about the tensions and discrimination between the Korean and Japanese people.

Favorite highlight: “People are rotten everywhere you go. They’re no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter  by Theodora Goss | 4 stars Just as Pachinko helped me realize multigenerational family sagas aren’t really for me, this book reinforced how much I love stories about found families. Set in Victorian England, this romping adventure includes not one, but FIVE plucky heroines, and I am here for it. If you enjoy the Veronica Speedwell series—A Curious Beginning, A Perilous Undertaking, A Treacherous Curse—then you will probably enjoy this one, too.

I don’t want to give too much away because the surprises are fun, but this story includes Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the danger of poisoning, literary references, a traveling circus, an insane asylum, potentially evil nuns, and family secrets. What’s not to love?! (I also treated myself to the sequel European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman because it’s described as a “madcap romp” and the action takes place in Paris, Vienna, and Budapest.)

Favorite highlight: “No wonder men did not want women to wear bloomers. What could women accomplish if they did not have to continually mind their skirts, keep them from dragging in the mud or getting trampled on the steps of an omnibus? If they had pockets! With pockets, women could conquer the world!”

I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life by Anne Bogel | 5 stars It’s no secret that I adore Anne Bogel’s podcast What Should I Read Next? so I had high expectations for this collection of essays. On her podcast, Anne is just the kind of person with whom you’d want to discuss books: opinionated but not pushy, insightful, relatable, and quick to laugh—all of that warmth and intelligence and sheer book love comes across in these essays. I read it over the course of a month or so, dipping into the essays between the other novels I was reading to cleanse my palate and to revel in the book nerdiness of reading.

I sometimes have a difficult time talking about my favorite books, or even really sharing how much reading means to me as a human—it feels too personal, makes me vulnerable in a way I’m not really ready for. But reading this book made me realize that there are legions of us out there: People who find friendship, solace, adventure, challenge, grief, joy—the whole gamut of human emotions—in the books that we read. And sometimes, they’re just damn fun.

I’d Rather Be Reading is just like that: lots of feels and damn fun.

Favorite highlight: “Old books, like old friends, are good for the soul. But they’re not just comfort reads. No, a good book is exciting to return to, because even though I’ve been there before, the landscape is always changing.”

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel | 4 stars Food, love, magic, and passion color this luscious family saga set in a Mexican border town around 1019, so the intimate story of the family is played out against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution. The tale reads like a family legend that’s been passed down through generations, and it centers on the forbidden love of Tita and Pedro. As the youngest daugher, it’s Tita’s fate to forsake love and to care for her dominerring mother Mama Elena until her mother’s death. But Tita and Pedro fall madly in love: When Tita felt Pedro’s gaze on her “she understood exactly how raw dough must feel when it comes into contact with boiling oil.” To be close to Tita, Pedro marries her older sister, and no one’s life remains untouched by this flawed decision.

Tita’s life is spent in the kitchen—both a gift and a curse to her—and her cooking is infused with deep emotion and magic. To Tita, food is life, and each chapter represents a month of the year, opening with a recipe that intertwines with the characters’ lives. Tita’s tears wept into wedding cake batter induce a devastating sense of longing in the guests who take a bite, and a delicate sauce made of rose petals inspires dangerous passions around the dinner table.

As the plot traces Tita and Pedro’s lifelong love, we see its impact on the rest of the family and the village: Tita’s sisters, a kindly doctor, bouncing babies, and Mexican revolutionaries. It’s a delightful—and sad—story of family obligation, the things that feed us, and a passion that could not be extinguished.

Favorite highlight: “When the talk turns to eating, a subject of the greatest importance, only fools and sick men don’t give it the attention it deserves.”

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier | 3 stars I went into this novel expecting a dark gothic adventure—thanks to previously reading Rebecca https://amzn.to/2BVakpp—and that’s exactly what I got—for better and for worse. Our heroine is definitely a damsel in distress, all muddle and forbidden love and quivering fear. I think I would have loved this book if Mary had some spunk, but instead, she kind of just bounces her way through the story. I found I enjoyed giving daily updates to my husband about what was happening a lot more than I actually enjoyed reading it. But for pure camp, it’s great: creepy isolated house, desolate moors, shady characters, an is-he-or-isn’t-he love interest, locked doors, a big character reveal, and plenty of stormy nights.

Favorite highlight: “The driver, muffled in a greatcoat to his ears, bent almost double in his seat in a faint endeavor to gain shelter from his own shoulders…”

Prague Spring by Simon Mawer | 4 1/2 stars Yay for British release dates: I got to read this book in time for the anniversary of Prague Spring on August 21—it’s available for pre-order now in the U.S.

This books examines what people are willing to risk for freedom and love. And if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to accidentally get caught up in a potentially dangerous spy mission, this is the book for you.

It’s the summer of 1968—the summer of love—even, for a while, in communist Czechoslovakia. As tensions rise between Moscow and Prague in the background, this story follow the misadventures—romantic and otherwise—of two groups of people: an on-again-off-again British couple who cross the Iron Curtain on a lark as they listlessly backpack through Europe, and a group of Czech youths—eager to test the limits of the Czechoslovak “socialism with a human face”—who find themselves in an unexpected friendship with a British diplomat.

There are also world-famous musicians, bugged rooms, larks into the countryside, and secret meetings. The various threads of this sort-of spy story come together in a satisfying, heartbreaking way. There’s plenty of intrigue, interpersonal sparks, romance, adventure, and irresistible descriptions of Prague, as well as a cast of characters you won’t soon forget. (I also LOVED another book by Simon Mawer: The Glass Room.) http://meljoulwan.com/2018/07/23/reading-recap-june-2018/

Favorite highlight: “You haven’t lived here long enough,” Zdenek said. “No one can live in this place for long and still believe in reality.”

FIND ALL THESE BOOKS AND MORE IN MY AMAZON STORE!

Source: https://meljoulwan.com/2018/09/03/reading-recap-august-2018/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

[tech-battery]

MSI GE66 Raider Review: Good-Looking 300 Hz Powerhouse

If you’ve ever wondered, “Why aren’t gaming laptops flashier?” the MSI GE66 Raider is for you. With an RGB light bar and keyboard, aluminum build and trim design, it’s as beautiful as its price suggests -- $1,899 to start, $2,999 as tested.

Packing an RTX 2080 Super Max-Q graphics card and 10th Gen Intel Core i9 CPU, The GE66 Raider proved it’s ready to make ample use of its mind-blowing 300 Hz display, too.

MSI GE66 Raider Specs

CPU

Intel Core i9-10980HK

Graphics

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q (8GB GDDR6)

RAM

32GB DDR4-3200

Storage

1TB PCIe NVMe SSD

Display

15.6 inches, 1920 x 1080 resolution @ 300 Hz, 3ms

Networking

Killer Ethernet E3100 LAN, Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 (2*2ax), Bluetooth 5.1

Ports

2x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C (DisplayPort 1.4), HDMI 2.0, Mini DisplayPort 1.4, SD card reader, 3.5mm headphone/mic jack

Camera

1080p

Battery

99WHr

Power Adapter

280W

Operating System

Windows 10 Home

Dimensions(WxDxH)

14.1 x 10.5 x 0.9 inches (358.1 x 266.7 x 22.9mm)

Weight

5.3 pounds (2.4kg)

Price (as configured)

$2,999

Design of MSI GE66 Raider

How does a laptop manage to look more mature and more wild than your typical gaming clamshell? A cool and classy chassis underscored (quite literally) by a stunning RGB bar, that’s how. The GE66 Raider isn’t the only laptop to incorporate colorful LEDs on its deck. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 G732 has a light bar on three sides. However, I’d argue that the GE66 Raider does it best. The boldness of the light bar and its beveled glass encasement make for a crystalline vibe that goes galactic with the right color scheme. The default settings (a combination of fuchsia, blue and green) is enough of a show to cross the Aurora Borealis off my bucket list. (Okay, not quite). But with those same default settings on the keyboard, it’s one prismatic phenomenon that’s probably as showy as RGB can be without inducing nausea.

Speaking of the keyboard, this one is from SteelSeries and offers per-key programming via SteelSeries’ Engine 3 software, as is the RGB light bar. But only the default setting was cosmic enough for me to warrant this level of RGB spectacle.

The aluminum lid is a royal shade of gray, fitting for the dragon shield that tops it. The logo’s raised silver outlining is the sort of attention to detail that makes company logos more forgivable. Plus, a dragon emblem is way cooler than someone's last name in a circle (for example). Sadly, silver only lives on the lid; the rest of the laptop is black, which, perhaps, helps the RGB pop.

On the left side of the GE66 Raider’s black deck is a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C port (20 Gbps), a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A (10 Gbps) port, plus a 3.5mm headphone/mic jack. The right side has a pair of  USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports (5 Gbps) and, surprisingly, an SD card reader. There are more ports on the laptop's spine, namely HDMI 2.0, Mini DisplayPort 1.4, and RJ45 Ethernet port and a port for MSI’s proprietary charger. MSI really has all the bases covered here.

The underside of the laptop has what MSI calls “Dragon armor carving,” which is really a bunch of stretched out hexagons. Overall, this feels like a solid machine with only a small amount of flex in its thin, 15.6-inch screen. MSI says it increased the torque on the hinge by 14% over the last generation (the MSI GE65 Raider) and widened it 9%.

The sleek black deck is smooth with a very subtle hint of shimmer. Combined with the 5mm thin bezel around the display, 82% screen-to-body ratio and, again, the mesmerizing effect of the RGB keyboard and light bar, you’ve got a machine that seems premium where needed and fun where wanted.

The GE66 Raider stacks up averagely when it comes to 15-inch gaming clamshells. The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550, for example, is 14.1 x 10.6 x 0.8 inches and 5.3 pounds, while our MSI review unit is 14.1 x 10.5 x 0.9 inches and the same weight. You can get sleeker though. The MSI GS66 Stealth, as its name subtly suggests, is slightly lighter at 4.6 pounds and trimmer at 14.2 x 9.7 x 0.7 inches.

MSI GE66 Raider Gaming Performance

With an RTX 2080 Super Max-Q graphics card, our review unit of the GE66 Raider easily hit 60 frames per second (fps) in most games. I enjoyed Battlefield V at ultra settings typically in the 80-90 frames per second (fps) range. During intense battles, it’d drop to roughly 73-76 fps, and when I crawled through some grass it climbed as high as 130 fps. After I added ray tracing into the mix, framerates stayed around the 70-80 fps range, hitting 99 fps during calm moments and the low 70s in heavy battle.

When it came to running the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark (1920 x 1080, highest settings), the GE66 Raider averaged 75 fps. That’s 6 more fps than the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 and greater than the MSI GS66 Stealth’s 66 fps average. Both laptops use the same GPU as our review unit. Meanwhile, the Alienware m17 R3 with a Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 Super came close to matching the GE66 Raider at 74 fps.

Our review unit outperformed its sibling MSI machine and the ROG Zephyrus Duo when it came to Grand the Grand Theft Auto V benchmark (1920 x 1080, very high) as well. However, the Alienware bested the MSI by 7 fps.

The Far Cry New Dawn (1920 x 1080, ultra) benchmark ran at 99 fps on our GE66 Raider. That’s 10 more fps than the Asus and Alienware and 14 more fps than the GS66 Stealth averaged.

The GE66 Raider also comes out on top when looking at Red Dead Redemption 2 (1920 x 1080, medium). Our configuration ran the benchmark at 58 fps, which is slightly faster than both the Zephyrus Duo and m17 R3 and 9 fps quicker than the other MSI machine here.

To stress test our review unit, we ran the Metro Exodus 1080p RTX benchmark on a loop 15 times to simulate 30 minutes of gaming. During this time, the game ran at an average framerate of 51.9 fps. The RTX 2080 Super Max-Q ran at an average clock speed of 1,360.4 MHz and temperature of 64 degrees Celsius (147.2 degrees Fahrenheit). The CPU, meanwhile, was running at 4.4 GHz average clock speed and 76.5 degrees Celsius Average (169.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

MSI GE66 Raider Productivity Performance

The configuration of the GE66 we tested has an Intel Core i9-10980HK with eight CPU cores and 16 threads, working with 32GB (2x 16GB) of DDR4-3200 RAM and a 1TB PCIe NVMe SSD. That’s a lot of power, and the laptop proved more than sufficient for running 22 Google Chrome tabs, including one playing Netflix, as well as Slack. I was able to track through an episode on Netflix with a 1-3 second delay. And there were no obvious delays when navigating or scrolling through my numerous browser tabs.

On Geekbench 5.1, an overall productivity performance benchmark, our configuration of the GE66 Raider proved more effective than the other machines here. Its score of 8,347 on all cores outshined the ROG Zephyrus Duo. The Asus scored 8,134 with the same specs as our review unit but with two 1TB SSDs in RAID0. The Alienware also has the same CPU and RAM as our GE66 Raider and a 1TB drive in RAID0. It fell behind our review unit by 720 points. The GE66 Stealth got 6,261, with a lesser Intel Core i7-10750H CPU, 32GB of DDR-2666 RAM and a 512GB SSD.

It took our review laptop 36 seconds to copy 25GB of files, which equates to 745.8 MBps. That’s much slower than the ROG Zephyrus Duo’s 1,413 MBps and the Alienware’s 1,220.4 MBps. The GE66 Stealth, however, was at a comparative crawl.

The GE66 Raider shined in Handbrake. It took the laptop 6 minutes and 59 seconds to transcode a video from 4K resolution to 1080p. That’s quicker than all the other laptops here, especially the GS66 Stealth, which needed 2:56 longer.

MSI GE66 Raider Display

The screen on the GE66 Raider packs a wildly fast refresh rate of 300 Hz, coupled with a 3ms response time. This is part of a growing trend of gaming laptops sporting insanely high refresh rates, including the 300 Hz Razer Blade Pro 17 (2020) and Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 G732.

Even the best gaming monitors are still stuck at 240 Hz max (360 Hz desktop monitors are en route). But while the screen may update with new information 300 times a second, your graphics card may not be so fast, depending on the game you’re running. AAA titles are out of the question when it comes to hitting 300 fps. Instead, you’ll have to play an esports game, like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, FIFA, Rocket League or CS:GO to get past the 240 fps mark.

Overwatch is another contender for high framerates, so I dropped settings to the lowest on the GE66 Raider. I surpassed 240 fps quite frequently. Framerates were as high as 301 during a low-intensity training session, and during actual gameplay it usually was in the 250-260s, sometimes dropping as low as 194 fps and reaching as high as 281 fps.

In terms of image quality, the GE66 Raider’s screen packs a healthy amount of color for both gaming and movies. Overwatch looked as pleasant as ever on the laptop, with tanks featuring their gold tones instead of looking like a pale yellow. I could also see the nuanced shades of gray in Reinhart’s weapon, which can look more washed out and flat on other screens.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout also looked as colorful as I expected after watching it numerous times on a large TV. Green poplars in a garden stood out, as did the subtly olive tone of Ilsa’s jacket. The purple-pinkish haze that subtly covers a scene at an airport at dusk and is often lost on other displays was also visible.

The panel is IPS style, and side angle viewing lives up to expectations. When watching Mission: Impossible from a 90-degree angle there were reflections on the further half of the screen, but it was still watchable, especially for a movie this good. At a 45-degree angle, there were virtually no issues.

Our testing showed that this speedy panel averages a solid 300 nits max brightness. However, every other laptop here has a brighter screen, including the smaller second screen on the Zephyrus Duo. The other MSI and the ROG Zephyrus Duo offer a similar amount of coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut as the GE66 Raider. However, the Alienware is incredibly colorful.

MSI GE66 Raider Keyboard and Touchpad

I love a trim gaming laptop, but in the GE66 Raider’s case, that comes at the price of a spacious keyboard. MSI said it enlarged the keycaps, especially the left Ctrl key, compared to the GE65 Raider. But there are also some (but not all) navigational keys squeezed into the right column, and the arrow keys that aren’t offset enough to be easily locatable. At the end of the day, you’re left with keys that are pretty close together and very flat, making it easy for the fingers to slide across to other keys accidentally. There are also some weird choices, like the abomination of the left FN and Ctrl keys crammed into one space.

When gaming, this resulted in mispressed keys and me having to look down more often than usual to reorient myself. The larger Ctrl key helped, but I still found it hard to find other keys when holding down Ctrl, like when I was trying to slide in Apex Legends. And when trying to input combos, I had to look down to figure out where I was in a sea of flat keys.

On the 10fastfigners.com typing I test I averaged 113.7 words per minute with a 96.6% accuracy rate. That’s pretty typical for me and only slightly below my 98% average accuracy, likely due to how snappy the keys are. But my fingers felt a little worn out afterward.

On the other hand, the keyboard’s quite functional. As mentioned, you get some navigational keys, like Home and Page Up. You can also use the function row to toggle the webcam off (handy for privacy), activate crosshairs for training, enter Game Mode, quickly turn the fans to max speed and toggle through the keyboard and light bar’s premade RGB effects simultaneously or control RGB brightness.

The GE66 Raider is also rocking a 4.1 x 2.5-inch touchpad, which I found to be a good size. It isn’t very slippery, instead offering a healthy amount of friction for control. I had no problem navigating Windows 10 with touchpad gestures.

MSI GE66 Raider Audio

The MSI GE66 Raider’s two 2W speakers live on either side of the deck, a more logical location than speakers that are under the laptop, which can result in muffled sound. They’re Dynaudio brand (if you forget, a logo on the deck will remind you), and MSI says they support up to a 192 KHz sampling rate and 24-bit Hi-res audio and go up to 122 dB.

In Overwatch, the overall sound was a little tinny. But I’ve heard worse, especially on other gaming laptops and thin ultraportables. The battlegrounds sounded like there were people banging on different types of metal trash cans as opposed to firing off different weapons. The audio didn’t sound as layered as usual, and even Reinherart’s voice was more metallic. When I switched to external speakers, I could hear more bass and a greater variance in weapon noises. The speakers’ volume, on the other hand, was ample, even with all my windows and balcony door open on a rainy day.

Music also sounded different than usual. When I played “Like Glue,” Sean Paul sounded like he was singing far away down a tunnel and higher pitched. Moving to speakers resulted in a warmer voice with more bass. The instruments in The Strokes’ “What Ever Happened?” didn’t sound as detailed on the GE66 Raider either.

MSI GE66 Raider Upgradeability

Once you remove 11 Philips head screws and apply some elbow grease, you can pry off the GE66 Raider’s cover for upgrading. You can replace the RAM to reach up to 64GB (mine had two 16GB sticks), and my unit also had an empty spot for adding another M.2 SSD by removing an additional Philips head screw. You can also unscrew the Wi-Fi card.

MSI GE66 Raider Battery Life

Like the GS66 Stealth, MSI gave the GE66 Raider a 99WHr battery, the largest size it’s legally allowed to implement into a laptop, a company rep told me. But while the GE66 Raider may offer a lot of performance in a more portable package, you’ll still want to bring the charger if you plan on using it all day.

The GE66 Raider lasted 4 hours and 57 minutes on our battery test, which surfs the web, streams video and runs browser-based OpenGL tests while connected to Wi-Fi and with the screen at 150 nits brightness. This isn’t bad for a gaming laptop, but the GS66 Stealth lasted 1:39 longer. You can also get over an 1:15 more playing time with the ROG Zephyrus Duo if you’re willing to turn its second screen off. Still, the GE66 Raider’s battery life seems like a lifetime compared to how long the Alienware m17 R3 lasted.

MSI GE66 Raider Heat

As with many gaming laptops, the GE66 Raider can get pretty warm. It was common for me to notice the keyboard heating up, even during light productivity tasks and with fans set to max performance. Despite its thin stature, the GE66 Raider’s fans can get as loud as your typical gaming laptop when blazing at max speed.

In my experience, the GE66 Raider got too hot to use on my lap for long periods, and the keyboard was usually noticeably warm with the space above it being shockingly hot at times, even when just surfing the web.

After 15 minutes of playing YouTube videos, the Raider’s touchpad was 84.5 degrees Fahrenheit (29.2 degrees Celsius), and the spot between the G and H keys was 107.5 degrees Fahrenheit (41.9 degrees Celsius). But that hottest point was on the underside in the center, where the temperature hit 125 degrees Fahrenheit (51.7 degrees Celsius).

MSI rejigged the cooling system compared to the GE66 Raider’s predecessor that helped keep it 0.9 inches thick compared to the GE65 raider’s 1.1 inches. The company’s Cooler Boost 5 cooling system here uses two fans with 53 blades, besting the latter’s 37 blades. Each blade is 0.25mm thick, which is 38% thinner than before and supposed to help drive more airflow. The six copper heatpipes are also supposed to be wider than that of the GE65 Raider.

MSI GE66 Raider Webcam

The webcam on the GE66 Raider is, thankfully, 1080p (at 30 frames per second), rather than the 720p that’s not uncommon in today’s laptop webcams. With video calls becoming a bigger part of the work day, the sharper resolution is more important than ever. And given Asus ditched the webcam altogether on many of its recent gaming laptops, we’re happy to see MSI step things up this way.

The webcam here proved decent. It was slightly, but not very noticeably, sharper than a 720p laptop webcam in a side-by-side comparison, with less fuzz and graininess. But my skin was still slightly grainy, and the color was slightly too cool.

MSI GE66 Raider Software and Warranty

Our MSI GE66 Raider came with several MSI-branded apps.

MSI Dragon Center primarily provides an overview of your PC’s components, namely CPU, GPU, disk, memory and SSD. You can get info like fan speeds, temperatures and amount of space remaining. This is also where you can toggle between Extreme Performance, Silent, Battery and more to control fan intensity. And if you have components or peripherals that support MSI’s Mystic Light RGB, you can sync effects.

MSI True Color offers different picture modes, like gamer, anti-blue and sRGB, with some offering sliders for further adjustments. It also includes a small number of tools, the most helpful of which is the crosshair. And MSI App Player would be handy if I had an Android phone and wanted to sync games between the two PCs.

You also get Killer Control Center, which is useful for focusing bandwidth on a particular app, such as when downloading a new game or streaming. MSI also threw in Nahimic Sound Sharing, which lets you tweak audio on connected speakers or headphones and play with the built-in mic.

Of course, you also get your typical Windows 10 bloatware, like Xbox Game Bar.

MSI backs the GE66 Raider with a 1-year warranty.

MSI GE66 Raider Configurations and Availability

At $2,999, our configuration of the GE66 Raider is as powerful as it gets. It comes with an Intel Core i9-10980HK CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q (8GB GDDR6) graphics, 32GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and a 1TB NVMe PCIe SSD. You can find it by the SKU number GE66 Raider 10SGS-057.

The cheapest version, the GE66 Raider 10SF-285, is $1,899. For that price, you get an i7-10875H, RTX 2070 graphics, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. The display also drops to a ‘mere’ 240 Hz, which is, of course, still plenty for most serious gamers. Alternatively, you can pay the same price for a 144 Hz screen; the benefits there are a bump to a 1TB SSD, but you also get a  i7-10750H CPU instead, which is a hexa-core processor compared to the i7-10875H’s octa-core chip.

There are three available SKUs in between. The GE66 Raider 10SGS-288 for $2,799 (i7-10875H / RTX 2080 Super Max-Q / 32GB / 1TB) is the only configuration besides our review unit that also offers a 300 Hz screen.

Bottom Line

The MSI GE66 Raider is a powerhouse of a gaming laptop with looks to match. With its high-end but slim shell, powerful GPU, 10th Gen Intel Core i9 CPU and a lot of storage, you won’t be left wanting or bogged down with bulk.

Our pricey configuration usually topped our comparison group more when it came togaming performance. And its 300 Hz screen won’t go to waste if you’re an esports player. We surpassed 240 fps regularly on Overwatch and even climbed past 300 fps during more idle gameplay time. Productivity performance was also comparable to rivals, and I had no issues multi-tasking.

However, if you want a very colorful or bright screen, the Alienware m17 is a much better choice. The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 is also better in that regard, plus may be as lavish as the GE66 Raider, thanks to its second screen.

But if you can afford to make this investment in performance and prettiness, the GE66 Raider is pure premium gaming luxury.

[ladystylestores]

China-India Tensions, Beijing Outbreak, Protest Art: Your Friday Briefing

(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up.)

Good morning.

We’re covering a surge in anti-Chinese anger in India, a backlash against salmon in Beijing and an email slip-up in Britain that helped us land a story.

An anti-China backlash in India

Anger is surging in India over the loss of 20 soldiers in a brutal, hand-to-hand border clash with Chinese troops fought with clubs and rods studded with nails. There have been angry calls to shut down Chinese restaurants and tear up contracts with Chinese companies. Crowds have smashed Chinese-made televisions in the street.

Generals from the two countries met again on Thursday to discuss de-escalation in the Himalayan border zone where the brawl erupted, but satellite images indicated that Chinese troops had yet to pull back.

Some Indian Army officers want to change the rules of engagement and abandon the border code that does not allow the use of guns during confrontations.

Spillover in trade: The Indian Express newspaper reported that the government was preparing to cancel a huge railway contract with a Chinese company.

Protests have broken out across India to boycott Chinese goods, a move that would not be easy. The phones in most Indians’ hands are made in China, as are countless other products. India-China trade has grown to more than $95 billion in 2018 from $3 billion in 2000. As of last year, India’s trade deficit with China reached nearly $60 billion.

China outbreak claims unlikely victim: salmon

When reports from Beijing said traces of the coronavirus had been found on cutting boards used for imported salmon at a vast produce market, the backlash was swift.

By the time Chinese officials acknowledged that imported salmon was not responsible for the city’s new outbreak, business at Japanese restaurants in Beijing had dropped sharply, and salmon suppliers in Norway and the Faroe Islands had seen Chinese orders evaporate. A vendor at Jingshen market, which processes much of the city’s seafood, said he had seen sales of all seafood drop by 80 percent since last Friday.

Context: With Chinese nationalism on the rise, imported salmon proved an easy target. The Chinese authorities have for months waged a propaganda campaign to highlight their successes in taming the virus and to deflect blame for the pandemic to outsiders.

Outbreak details: More than 130 people in Beijing have tested positive. Officials have closed workplaces, restaurants and hotels in parts of the city. The cluster has been traced to the Xinfadi market in the city’s south, but the precise source remains a mystery.

Here are our latest updates and maps tracking the outbreak.

In other developments:

The Times is providing free access to much of our coronavirus coverage, and our Coronavirus Briefing newsletter — like all of our newsletters — is free. Please consider supporting our journalism with a subscription.

Mixed messages from the U.S. on Uighur camps

China lashed out at the U.S. on Thursday, a day after President Trump signed into law a bill that allows for sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the detention of Uighurs in camps in Xinjiang.

But accusations by John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, have muddied the issue. In his new book, Mr. Bolton said Mr. Trump had questioned why the U.S. would impose sanctions on the Chinese officials involved.

In a private meeting with President Xi Jinping last year, Mr. Bolton wrote, the president even accepted the Chinese rationale for the creation of a vast system of camps and surveillance in Xinjiang. The report dismayed Uighur activists.

Context: Fury at China is a pillar of Mr. Trump’s re-election strategy — and that of many Republican lawmakers. The administration has intensified its criticism of China on a variety of fronts, including for its aggressive move to limit Hong Kong’s autonomy and handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

China response: After a meeting in Hawaii on Thursday between China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, China’s Foreign Ministry said the U.S. should support what it described as a successful antiterrorism campaign in Xinjiang.

If you have 7 minutes, this is worth it

The U.S. sports comeback isn’t going well

Football is back in Europe, baseball in Asia and rugby in New Zealand. But in the United States, which has the world’s largest coronavirus outbreak, the return of sports is not going particularly well.

Several major leagues have announced comeback plans, but there are no regular-season games on public schedules and no clue as to when teams might play again in home arenas and stadiums. There are no firm plans for bringing back fans. One of our sports reporters look at the disarray.

Here’s what else is happening

U.S. immigration: The Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration cannot immediately end a program protecting about 700,000 young immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation.

Hungary rights: Hungary’s restrictions on the financing of civil-society organizations are unlawful, the European Court of Justice ruled in a resounding rebuke to Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Climate and childbirth: New research examining more than 32 million U.S. births shows that pregnant women exposed to high temperatures or air pollution are more likely to have children who are premature, underweight or stillborn, with African-Americans accruing the deepest harms.

In memoriam: Dr. Tomisaku Kawasaki, 95. In 1967, he first identified a disease in children that remains mysterious and that has recently been in the news in relation to Covid-19.

Snapshot: Above, students and artists working on a huge street mural reading “Power to the People,” which will be unveiled today in Detroit. Protest art has been flourishing in the U.S., capturing the movement for racial justice.

What we’re reading: This article on Xi Jinping in Nikkei Asian Review. The Chinese president turned 67 this week, an age that usually signals the final year in party office. Here’s a look at the battle for influence shaping up in China’s corridors of power.

Now, a break from the news

Cook: This savory loaf packed with cheese and olives can be served with slices of tomato and onions, or eaten plain for a snack.

Watch: Our critics revisit “Nine to Five,” a comedy about three secretaries — played by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton — who stage a revolt against their chauvinistic, handsy boss. It was released in 1980, way before the #MeToo movement.

Read: Fifty years after the first Pride March, the authors Jericho Brown, Carmen Maria Machado and Thomas Page McBee reflect on a complicated moment for the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

Do: Here are some tips on what you can do to attract birds to your garden.

At Home has our full collection of ideas on what to read, cook, watch and do while staying safe at home.

And now for the Back Story on …

A British email slip-up

Jane Bradley, an investigative reporter based in London, got quite a surprise as she and her colleague Ben Mueller worked on an article The Times published this week: “England’s ‘World Beating’ System to Track the Virus Is Anything But.” Here’s the story.

I had just powered up my laptop to make the final edits to an article about the British government’s chaotic contact tracing system, expecting to see a typically bureaucratic response from officials to our latest questions.

A message from my co-reporter, Ben Mueller, pinged: Had I seen last night’s email from a senior press officer at the Department of Health and Social Care?

I darted to the thread, curiosity turning to astonishment.

Ben and I had interviewed more than a dozen contact tracers, public health officials and local government leaders to get a picture of how much wasn’t working. We’d looked at screenshots from a private Facebook group on which tracers were complaining that they were still waiting for login details two weeks after the program’s start. And we’d discovered that the secretive contract for the tracing effort with Serco, an outsourcing giant, cost the British government 108 million pounds, or about $136 million.

But when we asked officials a basic question — why they had halted contact tracing in March, before reversing course, the official line was that tracing had never stopped and to claim otherwise would be entirely wrong.

This email said otherwise.

It began mundanely: The press officer said she was handing over my questions to colleagues. But a little deeper in, she accidentally included internal discussions about my query about the halt to contact tracing in March. “The answer to this,” wrote an official, “is we basically didn’t have the testing capacity.”

It was a rare and candid glimpse behind the curtains of Westminster and its usual political spin that the government, of course, did not want us to publish. The email was a “brief internal discussion” which was inadvertently sent and was not for quoting, their press officer said after I invited comment before publication.

But my editors disagreed. When a senior government press officer inadvertently reveals information in the public interest as part of an official response to newsworthy questions, journalists have a duty to report that — especially the parts that usually stay behind closed doors (or email).

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.

— Carole

Thank you To Melissa Clark for the recipe, and to Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the rest of the break from the news. You can reach the team at [email protected].

P.S. • We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is about Joe Biden’s search for a running mate. • Here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: Black-and-white cookie (4 letters). You can find all our puzzles here. • Today, The New York Times is commemorating Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States.

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[bountyofbeads]

Roy Cohn Is How We Got Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/opinion/roy-cohn-trump.html

To understand the anatomy of Donald Trump, you have to understand Roy Cohn and the prominence he played in the 50s and 60s in New York and Trump's early years.

Roy Cohn Is How We Got Trump

From McCarthyism to the mob to Trump, Cohn enabled evil. Why did elites embrace him?

By MICHELLE GOLDBERG, Opinion Columnist | Published Sept. 20, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 20, 2019 8:50 AM ET |

Near the beginning of “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” the new documentary about the lawyer and power broker who mentored Donald Trump, an interviewee says, “Roy Cohn’s contempt for people, his contempt for the law, was so evident on his face that if you were in his presence, you knew you were in the presence of evil.” He wasn’t being hyperbolic.

The film, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, will likely be of wide interest because of how Cohn helps explain Trump. In the attorney’s life, you can see the strange ease with which a sybaritic con man fit in with crusading social reactionaries. You see the glee Cohn derived from being an exception to the rules he enforced on weaker people. From him, Trump learned how, when he was in trouble, to change the subject by acting outrageously, to never apologize and always stay on the offense. When the Justice Department claimed that apartment buildings owned by the Trump family were discriminating against black renters, it was Cohn’s idea to countersue the Justice Department for $100 million.

In the 1950s, as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Cohn wasn’t just a key player in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the time. He also persecuted men in the State Department who were suspected of being gay, despite being a closeted gay man himself. Later, he became a consigliere to New York’s mafia families, some of whom also had ties to Trump, even as he ranted about law and order.

The film’s title comes from something Trump said when he was frustrated with then Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Cohn was Trump’s template for what a lawyer is supposed to be. (In Attorney General Bill Barr, he seems to have found someone who satisfies him.) “Roy was somebody that had no boundaries,” a lawyer in his firm says in the film. “And if you were on the right side of him, it was great. And if you were on the wrong side of him, it was terrible.”

But what I found most striking about “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” wasn’t its insights into the thuggish president, whose particularly brand of malevolence has been theorized to death. It was its reminders of just how decadent, in every sense, New York society used to be. Cohn was manifestly despicable, but he was embraced, rather than shunned, by New York elites. For a time, he had a sham engagement to Barbara Walters. He hung out with the famed artist Andy Warhol and was a regular at the oft-mythologized nightclub Studio 54.

Warhol is only briefly mentioned in the film, but his diaries mention Cohn’s parties repeatedly. “And when you go to these Roy Cohn things all everybody says is, ‘It’s so amusing, it’s so interesting, because you never know who you’ll find at these things,’” Warhol wrote in 1982. In 1985, he described Cohn’s birthday party at the New York nightclub The Palladium. TV monitors showed Cohn’s anti-Communist speeches from the 1950s. “And that was exciting, it was the best thing,” wrote Warhol.

To understand the milieu Cohn moved in is, I think, to understand at least some of the generation gap among elites over what’s sometimes called “cancel culture” or “call-out culture” or even just “political correctness.” If you are under 35 or 40, it’s probably hard to grasp just how much depravity used to be tolerated in fancy circles, and, further, how tolerating it was itself taken as a sign of sophistication

During Warhol’s heyday, the amoral celebration of fame was considered glamorous and edgy, and genuine outrage was deeply uncool. Similar values still predominated when I moved to New York almost 20 years ago, when figures like Harvey Weinstein seemed to rule the city.

It wasn’t until the intertwined ascents of social media and millennial progressives that the zeitgeist really turned, and jaded acceptance of the status quo fell from fashion. Younger people, scarred by the wreckage of the financial crisis, looked at the world they’d inherited and felt wide-ranging moral indignation. Unlike their elders, they hadn’t watched the radical promise of the late ’60s curdle into violence and farce, and so weren’t disillusioned with the left.

Today, wealth and power can still buy horrible people a degree of social acceptance. Sean Spicer lied to the American people for a living and is now on “Dancing With the Stars.” Ivanka Trump is still reportedly invited to celebrity weddings. But the left has far more cultural power than in the past, and some on the left have used that power to re-moralize the public square. Sometimes that means ostracizing people, or, as they say on the internet, canceling them. A more decent society would have done that to Cohn.

Still, it’s easy see why the way the left deploys its influence feels, to some, inquisitorial. The religious right, of course, hates the new cultural mores because it wanted to re-moralize America on its terms. But plenty of liberals are nostalgic for a less sanctimonious era, where, at least in certain cosmopolitan precincts, being amusing and interesting were more important than being upright. Sometimes I feel this nostalgia myself; if you came of age in a culture that celebrated transgression, norms that demand sensitivity can feel restrictive.

But to see the way Cohn was accepted among artists, socialites and the demimonde of New York night life is to be reminded how warped the city’s values used to be. That’s why, for so long, Trump was able to thrive here.

In the end, the social world in which Cohn could be at once a right-wing dirty trickster and a celebrity bon vivant did have rules, and he ran afoul of them. In 1986, after a lifetime of skirting consequences for his corruption, Cohn was disbarred for cheating his clients. (At one point Cohn allegedly dressed up like a male nurse to get a dying multimillionaire client to sign a document making him a trustee of his estate.)

Unable to practice law, his power evanesced. In “Where’s My Roy Cohn,” an old friend explains how, every year, Cohn held a private dinner for his intimates. After the disbarment, the friend arrived at one such dinner. “When I get there, this long table was set, and nobody came,” he said. At the same time, Cohn was dying of AIDS, though he refused to admit it. Trump, his protégé, cut him off. New York wasn’t more forgiving back then. It was just more forgiving of certain people.

Where’s My Roy Cohn?’ Review: A Fixer’s Progress

A documentary traces the life and times of a notorious lawyer whose career stretched from Joseph McCarthy to Donald J. Trump.

By A.O. Scott | Published Sept. 19, 2019 Updated Sept. 20, 2019, 12:00 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted September 20, 2019 8:50 AM ET |

In a television interview near the end of his life, Roy Cohn predicted that his obituaries would lead with Senator Joseph McCarthy. He wasn’t wrong. Thanks partly to the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, Cohn’s role as the Wisconsin senator’s youthful counsel was imprinted on the public memory and seemed, when Cohn died of AIDS in 1986, to be the most significant episode in a contentious public career.

Lately, the emphasis has shifted, in part thanks to Cohn’s association, in the ’70s and ’80s, with the New York real estate developer who is now the president of the United States. Matt Tyrnauer’s  compact and informative new documentary, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” quotes President Trump in its title. The film’s answer to the question suggests that Cohn is among the threads that link the politics of the Red Scare with whatever it is we’re living through now. He’s still around.

As one of the principal characters in Tony Kushner’s great play “Angels in America” — an embodiment of hubris and shame, not without a tragic dimension — Cohn has been posthumously played by a handful of first-rate actors, including Al Pacino, Nathan Lane and F. Murray Abraham. The man himself, reanimated by Tyrnauer (a former writer for Vanity Fair) in newsreels and video clips, evidences a certain slippery charm, a relish for verbal combat, and what can only be called a passionate disdain for the truth.

Cohn’s personality and career are fleshed out by the testimony of accomplices and witnesses, lawyers and journalists (including Sam Roberts of The New York Times). The story they tell zigzags a bit on its way from an unhappy, privileged childhood through precocious success to disbarment and death. It’s the chronicle of a closeted gay man’s fate in a hostile environment and also, contrapuntally, of an unscrupulous fixer’s progress.

The people who reveal the worst about Cohn are the ones who knew him best — friends, family members, a former lover and a handful of colleagues. Some are well known, like Roger Stone, Cohn’s protégé in the dark arts of political manipulation. Others, like two of Cohn’s younger cousins, are private citizens who give an intimate account of their relative’s public corruption.

Nearly all of their reminiscences are tinged with the kind of astonishment that can start to sound like admiration. The chutzpah! The ambition! The nerve!

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” offers a critical account of its subject’s ethically dubious behavior, early and late. As part of the team prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, he made ex parte phone calls to the judge urging that the couple be sentenced to death. Later, he defended organized crime bosses and cooked his own books.

Through it all, he was a fixture of New York society and a welcome guest in Washington power circles. He counted Ronald and Nancy Reagan among his friends, and friendship was a crucial tool in his arsenal. He was good at knowing when favors needed to be done and when they needed to be called in. He made a great show of loyalty, and received it in return.

Television interviewers, even when they made a show of asking Cohn tough questions, tended to fawn over his intelligence and connections. There is no doubt that he was a fascinating and important character, but “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” is most interesting for the questions it doesn’t explicitly ask.

Those have to do with not with Cohn’s blatant amorality, but with the moral compromises of the elite who tolerated his company and found uses for his talents. It’s not that any of the high-minded, good-doing, often professedly liberal people who invited him to parties and accepted his favors necessarily approved of him, any more than they approved of, say, Harvey Weinstein or Trump himself. But they kept him around, out of some combination of cynicism, self-interest and curiosity that remains an underexamined and toxic force in the history of our time.

#currently reading #us politics #trump administration #trump news #trumpism #president donald trump #trump scandals #donald trump jr #trumptrain #news today trump #trump crime family #trump crime syndicate #republican politics #u.s. politics #politics and government #politics #u.s. news #maga #corruption

[ghaw2007]

9 Fennel Benefits

9 Fennel Benefits

1. Bone Health

Due to the calcium content, fennel can help maintain bone strength and health. Fennel contains about 115mg of calcium or approximately 10% of the RDA which can help increase calcium in your diet, especially for those who do not consume enough from other sources.

But, calcium isn’t the only bone-strengthening nutrient found in the bulb, fennel also contains magnesium, phosphorus, and vitamin K, which all play a role in maintaining bone strength.(2)

2. Improves Skin Health

Fennel is high in vitamin C, providing almost half of the RDA in just one bulb.  Vitamin C is a potent antioxidant that may help reduce free radical damage that can lead to premature aging.

Vitamin C is also necessary for the formation of collagen and a powerful tool in protecting skin’s appearance, making it a good choice to naturally slow aging. A deficiency in vitamin C is called scurvy, which manifests in the inability to properly form collagen, leading to bleeding gums and bleeding below the skin. (3)

Due to these functions, adequate intakes of vitamin C are critical for reducing the appearance of wrinkles and maintaining healthy skin. The RDA is 60 mg/day, but more vitamin C from whole food sources will help keep skin healthy from the inside-out.

3. Lowers Blood Pressure

Fennel can help lower blood pressure and inflammation due to its high potassium content and low sodium content. Potassium works against sodium, helping to fight high blood pressure in the body.

A diet high in potassium can reduce systolic blood pressure by 5.5 points when compared to a high sodium diet. But, don’t expect lower blood pressure overnight, it takes about four weeks of consuming a high potassium diet to see a drop in blood pressure. (4, 5)

4. Aids Digestion

Fennel is included in the GAPS Diet, as well as on my Healing Food Shopping List, because of its ability to ease digestion. Since fennel contains 7 grams of dietary fiber, it can help maintain a healthy digestive system.  The muscles in the digestive system need dietary fiber to provide bulk for the gastrointestinal muscles to push against and increase motility or movement. Because digestive problems like constipation and IBS are so common in adults, fennel makes a great addition to any diet, which is one reason why I include it on my list of foods recommended for a healing diet.

Additionally, fiber acts like a small brush as it moves through the digestive system, clearing the colon of toxins that could potentially cause colon cancer. Fennel itself can act like a laxative, helping with elimination of toxins.

It is also common in certain cultures to chew fennel seeds after meals to help digestion and eliminate bad breath. Some of the oils found in fennel do help stimulate the secretion of digestive juices.(6)

Fennel may also be beneficial for people with acid reflux.  Adding fennel to your diet can help balance the pH level within your body, especially within your stomach, and can reduce reflux after meals. (7)

5. Increases Satiety

Fiber contains no calories, but provides bulk, increasing satiety. Humans do not have the enzymes required to break down fiber, therefore it cannot be absorbed as calories. Fennel provides 7g of calorie-free, filling fiber.

Studies show that diets high in fiber can help people to effectively lose weight. A 2001 study, found that participants who added 14 grams per day of fiber to their diets, without changing anything else, ate approximately 10% fewer calories per day and lost about 4 pounds over a period of 4 months. Increasing fiber intake, by adding fennel and other high fiber foods to the diet may be a simple way to effortlessly feel more satisfied and to experience weight loss. (8)

6. Improves Colic

Infant colic, although it is a relatively benign medical condition, it can have a significant impact on new parents. Most parents of a colicky infant would probably try almost anything to soothe their crying child.

The current medication used for colic, called Dicyclomine hydrochloride, can have some serious side effects and may not be consistently effective.  But, researchers have found that fennel seed oil has been shown to reduce pain and increase motility in the small intestine, making it can excellent natural remedy for colic.

In a 2003 study, researchers compared fennel seed oil with a placebo in 125 infants. The group treated with fennel seed oil was reported to have 65% less colic, measured by crying episodes, than those in the control group, with no side effects.

Although this research may be promising and many desperate parents may want to run out and get some fennel oil, there is not an established safe dose for infants at this time. The safest way to use it to treat infant colic is for a breastfeeding mother to drink fennel tea. (9, 10)

7. Helps Prevent Cancer

Fennel has been used for centuries in Chinese medicine to help treat inflammatory conditions such as insect bites or sore throat. Fennel’s ability to decrease inflammation led researchers to investigate if fennel’s properties could be applied to other inflammatory diseases such as various forms of cancers.

Fennel contains oil called anethole that has been shown in some clinical studies to be act as a natural cancer remedy, helping to reducing the growth of breast cancer cells. It is believed that anethole reduces inflammation that may lead to the development of cancer, although further research is needed to determine how it can be used exactly. (11)

Other anti-inflammatory nutrients are also found in fennel, specifically selenium, a trace mineral that may help decrease cancer mortality rates.  A large study of over 8,000 participants found that selenium did reduce mortality and decrease future incidences of cancer. (12)

8. Decreases Risk of Heart Disease 

Foods high in fiber, especially soluble fiber, as is found in fennel, have been shown to help reduce balance cholesterol levels in the blood stream. A diet high in fiber can help reduce overall risk of heart attacks and stroke by helping lower blood cholesterol to a normal level.

The high fiber and the potassium content make fennel a double whammy in reducing risk of cardiovascular disease by lowering both cholesterol and blood pressure. Fennel is also high in other potentially cardio-protective vitamins such as folate and vitamin C.

9. Eye Health

Macular degeneration is the leading cause of age-related vision loss. Although the exact cause is unknown, antioxidants that help reduce inflammation such as certain flavonoids, vitamin C, and zinc may help improve vision or slow the progress of the disease.

Fennel contains many of these vision-saving nutrients. Due to its high flavonoid, vitamin C, and mineral content it can help reduce oxidative damage and inflammation, and may help prevent macular degeneration.

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