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the-scooby-gang · 4 years

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The school body of Coolsville High valorised their lives. That’s why any thought they had on the Heathers was said outside the school grounds. Far away from The Red Heathers ears and listeners . Not that helps any. They somehow still know of your slight agains them, there being one or not.

One of the topics whispered between the walls of the malt shop was a highly debated one: The Red Heathers didn't deserve a friend like Norville Heather Rogers

Fiercely loyal and surprisingly friendly, seen who his best friends were, Norville “Like, call me Shaggy” Rogers didn't have any of the characteristics of someone everyone assumed would mingle with Fred and Daphne. In fact, when he had first arrived on the school, freshly transferred from some place in California, with a historic of anxiety and panic attacks, many pitied him.

“Poor Kid” they said “The Heathers will ate him alive”

“How long do you think it will take for him to cry?”

“I give him a week”

“You are being optimistic. By lunch time, one of the traps will traumatise him beyond words. I give two days before he asks for a new transference”

But it never came to be.

No one is quite sure what Fred Jones saw in the new kid, but the attack on the easy target never came. Instead, both Daphne and Fred sat down with him at lunch. Made conversation, asked to show him around. Becoming... friends.

For many weeks, everyone held their breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the lanky kid to appear glued to the flagpole, without his pants, in tears.

But the days passed and no nefarious deeds were committed against one Shaggy Rogers.

Many were confused.

Why?

The Heathers never made, what Daphne use to call, ‘Bad investments’ in regards of who they hang around with. What, exactly, tall, lanky Shaggy Rogers could offer to them, outside having the middle name Heather?

Some theorised it was because his family was loaded, they sell engagement rings after all.

Some said that they wanted to capitalise on the fact that, anxiety aside, he was the lead in the track team and was one one the best gymnast of Coolsville (with was a terrifying notion: someone with such physical prowess under Daphne and Fred’s command would have no problem climbing walls and roofs and planting god knows what kind of trap in there. Out of sight, out of reach)

Some thought it was because of the Giant Great Dane that followed the boy around. A service dog, Scooby Doo was as fiercely loyal as Shaggy himself and when, rarely, he wasn't with his owner, you could see the dog casually trotting side by side with the King or the Queen.

Having a dog the size of a small pony just added to their image of “Don't fuck with us.”

But the truth appeared one month later.

Already stablished as “A Heather”, Shaggy had developed a new found confidence. With his posture straight and a new fondness for yellow.

(”Like, Daph, you and Freddie have, like, your color. And since green is already taken I was thinking, I don't know, yellow?? What do you think?”

“That’s a marvellous idea, Shaggy! You know what? We should go shopping after class, so I can help you”

“Thanks, Daph”

“Don't sweat over it, sweetie. That’s is what friends are for”)

Shaggy Rogers and Scooby were just walking down the hallway. Radiating friendliness as per usual. Until they weren't.

No one remember their names. The only thing everyone remembers about them was that they were both new transfer students. A tall blond cheerleader wannabe and a small jock.

They were new, poor things. They didn't know about the status quo. They didn't know to bend the knee to the King and Queen. For any new arrivals, the way how the school worked was shoved down their throats by the ever looming presence of the Heathers power, but during Shaggy “initiation” as one of them they had been quiet. Non-threatening. Normal teens even.

With had put the school in a state of unease.

But the fools, unimaginably tremendous fools, didn't see it. The warning on the faces of their fellow students that something was not right. They were new, and as such didn't know the rule they were about to break.

They insulted Daphne.

A comment on her blazer. The way she made her hair. How all the red mixed with her hair makes her look like a giant tomato. How that shade of lipstick made she look like a slut....

The Red Heathers had not yet arrived, but the students on the hearing radium on the conversation freeze. They may not be here, but they will know.

They always know.

The foolish idiots keep on laughing, not noticing that the entire hallway is now deadly quiet. Picturing their coffins most likely. No one notices Shaggy smile disappear or see the boy approach the laughing duo.

Shaggy’s first against the locker, barely missing the jock, wreaked that spell.

“You will watch that dirty. whore. mouth of yours when talking about my friend, or I will personally sew it shut”

He had barely whispered, but on the silence corridor it sound like a shout. They did a double take. Some gave a triple take just to be sure. The Shaggy they have come to know barely swore, much less threaten someone.

But this was not Shaggy. The man in yellow is now unrecognisable from Shaggy and his cheerful eyes.

His eyes were now cold and piercing. He stood tall, smirking gleefully when noticing that his 6,7f frame loomed over his targets. Even the energy around him seemed to change. Friendliness stepped aside to be replaced by Fear.

This was also a common topic in the relative safety of the malt shop: How reality seemed slightly distorted depending how Shaggy was felling that day. Some kids went as far as say that maybe that's was why Fred and Daphne became his friends. His reality bending powers must have made it so, they say, thats why when he is being friendly, we feel joyful in his presence, they say. That when he is mad, you are bombarded by fear.

The cheerleader was paralysed. She was plastered against her locker, trying to look as small and as unthreatening as possible. Her jock friend, however, in a moment of panic maybe, tried to punch his way out of the situation. Just for Shaggy to dodge the first like it was nothing. In a fraction of a second he grabbed the wrist of his smaller target and twisted his arm behind his back, shoving him face first against the locker.

“When I talk to you, I want a verbal answer. Or are you too stupid to figure that out?” Shaggy now demanded, his voice level, but not less frigid. “Now, where was I... Oh, yes. You and Misses failed abortion face here were laughing about my friend, wasn't it?” he asked, turning his face to look at the cowering girl, who was doing her damnedest to fuse herself with the metal, but still keeping her friend pined against the lockers like a misbehaving portrait.

“You,” Shaggy said, glaring at the girl so intensely they expected her to die by its force alone “Daphne warned me about people like you.” He turned his face back to the jock with a look of disgust before effortlessly throwing him over her lake a sad sack of potatoes “She told me about the slander. About the jokes behind her and Fred’s back. How pathetic little sacks like you two have your life mission to make them miserable” with each word Rogers was getting more frigid, if that's was even possible, while everyone else looked in disbelieve when the pieces of the plan laid right in front of them, finally clear.

“You. absolute. pieces. of. jealous. shit can't see someone that seems slightly better than you that you want to drag them all over the mud isn't it?” he was shaking right now. Scoob, that had been by his side the entire ordeal, got closer to his owner. A silent support. “Just because they are rich, you think their life is a barrel of rainbows, that they don't suffer at all. That you can say your mean words all you want that Perfect and Rich Daphne and Fred will be unaffected”

His voice was breaking, he was clearly on the verge of tears. But if you looked at his face alone, you would think it was made of stone. Scooby at that point, cleaver boy that he was, accessed the situation and started to growl at the two dumbfound pair on the ground, clearly deducing that they were the cause of his friends distress. Both pressed themselves harder against the wall, now with a pissed Great Dane looming over them

“So guess what? They may be more forgiving than any of you disgusting toads deserve, but while I'm still fucking breathing no one, AND I MEAN NO ONE IS GOING TO SPEAK ANY SORT OF BULLSHIT ABOUT MY FRIENDS! IS. THAT. CLEAR?”

“What is happening here?”

The sea of spectators of the passionate declaration of loyalty parted to show Daphne, her hands on her hips, with Fred right behind.

Her face, however, didn't have her normal mythic bitchness, but a look of, what appeared to be, concern.

That was when Coolsville High remembered a crucial fact about the Heathers, one they should have not so easily forgot: They were liars. Really.Good. LIARS.

Shaggy’s posture immediately relaxed and he went in long strides in her direction, engulfing her in a hug.

“I’m sorry I doubted you.” he was now crying on her shoulder, his sobs heart breaking “I'm so sorry. I... I thought that they count possibly be so... so cruel to you guys without... without motive” He looked up from his place in Daphne shoulder to look at Fred, them let go of her and went in his direction, now taking him in his embrace. While Fred soothed Shaggy with one hand in his hair, pressing his crying friends face to his red ascot, blocking his view from his surroundings, Daphne put her hand on his back and started slow circular motions.

What, in any other circumstance, would have being quite a sweet moment between friends was broken by the fact that, the moment Shaggy’s face was out of sight, Daphne and Fred’s concerned looks melted away to looks of devilish delight, and the student body now felt a new dread in their souls.

“Don’t worry, Shag.” Fred’s voice was way too soft for the look on his face “We are used to it. It hurts... yes, yes it does, but me and Daph are strong. We can deal with it”

“But you shouldn't have to” Shaggy removed his tear stained face, once again hardened to stone, from Fred’s neck “Sorry for the ascot” he looked miserably to the tear spots on the fabric. Fred’s face once again melted away in a new expressions never seen in his face: A soft smile the recked of compassion.

“It is just an ascot, Shaggy”

That was the confirmation that it was all a very elaborate lie. It was not just an ascot. It was a symbol. The unofficial crown of the King of Coolsville High, together with Daphne’s Red Scrunchie.

Shaggy remove himself from the embrace with Fred and side glanced at the forgotten targets, silently trying to scape since the focus was no longer on them. Shaggy squinted his eyes. That won't do.

Shaggy gave a sharp whistle. Scooby, who had calmed down when the Heathers arrived, decide to lie down, close his eyes and relax a little from his exertion but keep his ears ready for any commotion, was up again in a second. Looking at his owner once again distressed face, Scooby was confused. Didn’t the Red ones arrived already? Looking in question to their faces, once again, in seconds, Daphne and Fred’s faces melted away to new expressions. This ones there were fairly used to. After all they saw it every day in their victims faces: despair.

His humans were in despair. Looking around for the reason, he saw the two threats from before moving away. With a growl of anger, Scooby advanced after them.

It was fascinating, seeing the large dog run, jump and pin down two grow teenagers with relative ease. It was terrifying seeing said teenagers being dragged by their ankles in on only, painful looking, bite. They were throwed like rag-dolls at the Heathers feet, all three of them now truly looking like a complete set. The yellow just seemed to fit in in middle of the red.

“Like, you think I'm done with you? No. You idiots are my example. SO THIS IS FOR EVERYONE TO KNOW. DON’T. FUCKING. MESS. WITH. MY FRIENDS” He glared at the crowd, like he suspected that all of them were guilty of the crime of bulling “poor Fred and Daphne”. Knowing Daphne, that was probably what she told him. With that remark, he grabbed the duo by their bloody ankles, making them both let out a whimper that was immediately silenced by one glare. And he dragged them like they weighted nothing thru the corridor, with the crowd opening up once again, going without stop to the back doors.

The Red Heathers simply smiled like Cheshire cats, and, arm in arm, followed their loyal yellow friend.

They were never seen again, that duo. Some think that they were killed. Buried in unmarked graves just outside of town. Others think that the so much theorised cryptid abilities must have scared them into a new country.

Never the less, the message was clear. Even if Shaggy had gone back to exude joy by his presence alone, with Scooby being a cute pup right beside him. There was always going to be there, just under the surface, that fear. The knowledge that Shaggy was fiercely protective to the point of ruthlessness. That the joy in his eyes could so easily turn into ice.

So Coolsville High learned to fear once again.

Now they feared Daphne’s crocodile tears. Fred’s well crafted defeated looks.

For Daphne and Fred had seen in Shaggy what others didn't. In he’s first day, many have seen an easy target. Someone easy to break.

The King and Queen, however, had seen a Knight and his Dog. Stronger than what first appearances told. Honour bound and loyal. And so, so easy to train.

#scooby gang #scooby doo #scooby!heathersAU #fred jones #daphne blake #shaggy rogers #yellow lantern shaggy #wizard shaggy #a little bit of both #mixed together #Shaggy is always friend shape no matter with universe we are talking about #and that can be exploited #Daphne and Fred are turning into royal bastards the more I write this au #now I will stop tipping because my wrist is starting to hurt

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longwindedbore · 4 years

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Before we rush into another war because a POTUS *says* they have a double secret intelligence report more accurate than everyone else- like the one in 2004 on Saddam’s WMDs. Or like...

Part 2 of “More Generals Died at Baghdad Airport Last Week than at the Pentagon on 9/11/01”

Once we “Remember 9/11” like we “Remember the Maine” or “Remember the Alamo”, we as a a National Culture are conditioned to rally ‘round the flag and Ask-No-Questions. Questions like..

Why did the terrorist pilot of Plane #3 deliberately chose the least damaging way to strike the Pentagon? The method guaranteed to kill the least number of victims? Unless he had been instructed to do so?

It’s difficult to conceive that any terrorist or mastermind with more than five minutes explosive experience would have chosen to hit an outside wall of the Pentagon.

As would be predictable, plane #3 exploded dissipating most of its energy * away * from the building. As evidenced by the engine and other parts strewn on the lawn outside the building. As graphically depicted below.

Had the pilot instead flown over the roof hitting any inside wall of the Courtyard the resulting explosion away from the point of impact would have reverberated against all the walls. At the least sending window glass flying through offices. Bigwigs have window offices. Spewing fuel and starting fires.

Further, why not choose a side of the building that is a target rich environment when such digrams are readily available?

Beyond Plane #3 having had the statistically ridiculous bad *luck* of targeting exactly the one section of the Pentagon that was devoid of military personnel.

Plus *inadvertently* targeting and wiping out the one group the terrorists should have preferred to have been helping - those pesky civilian accountants investigating $2.7 Trillion in fraud by Major Weapons Suppliers. Some of those Weapons Manufacturers might have been closed down; the Predatory CEOs imprisoned. Too bad the evidence was all incinerated.

Plus plus the incredible almost unbelievable bad luck that those accountants had only just been moved into the largely empty outer ring section that took a basically imbecilic hit.

Sort of the same amazing coincidences as at the Twin Towers. Beginning with “Why the Twin Towers?”

Most of us in 2001, indeed most of the World, had never heard of ‘the World Trade Center’. Certainly would not equate it with important USA cultural institutions. The towers were considered eyesores by New Yorkers.

Much like striking the outside wall of the Pentagon, hitting the Twin Towers had * zero* affect on the US to do business or wage war. Dropping a plane on the Federal Reserve or the Stock Exchange would have been economically crippling.

To accomplish a hit on the Fed or WallStreet the plane would only have to come in low and slower like Plane #3 had to do to hit low on the outside wall.

Instead plane #1 hits just under Cantor Fitzgerald stock brokerage trapping all its employees. Hitting unnecessarily low as it turns out because plane #2 hits higher up. Coincidentally plane #2 wiping out the commercial banking floors.

The double secret intelligence (alleged but never produced) report that Bush (?) or Cheney (?) * depended * on indicated Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan were responsible.

Because of that never produced report we invaded Afghanistan. Despite in 2001 neither Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban acknowledging they were responsible.

Odd since Bin Laden and Al Qaeda acknowledged immediately the bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the US Cole. But is silent on 9/11?

Since no entity had come forward to claim responsibility, had Bush not declared Afghanistan the culprit, the Bush Administration would have been * forced * to investigate suspicious stock trading before 9/11/01. Since none of those trading had any connection to Bin Laden, Al Qaeda or Afghanistan, the investigation was cut short.

Amazing, simply amazing, * coincidence * of the sudden massive shorting of stock options for the airlines and firms with offices in the Twin Towers. The destruction of the financial records in both Towers while killing potential witnesses.

Or the coincidence of massive surge in stocks for weapons manufacturers just before 9/11. Even more curious after Bush had earlier in 2001declared that the US was cutting armed forces particularly overseas.

Sort of like the Bush/Cheney Administration taking the * curious * step of deputizing as “special agents” anyone and everyone in US Financial institutions who might have any knowledge of these pre-9/11 trades. Alas, as “special agents” whether they wanted to be or not, they can never divulge one word of what they might know. To speak would result in Federal Prosecution like they were Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange.

Sort of like the Bush (?) Cheney (?) decision to redact the FBI’s 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission report that indicted Saudi Arabiaasthe recruiter and helper of the terrorists.

Saudi Arabia. Homeland of most of the Terrorists. Close Friends to the Bush family, to Cheney. Enemies of Bin Laden. Now friends with the Trump family. N

We the People have been led into almost every war by false flag incidents, exaggerations, to deal with puppet that cut its strings, or a re-election. Always for land, natural resources, war profiteering, oil.

Just maybe it’s time to stop?

=====================

1755 - land, false flag attack

1801 - war profiteering, exaggeration Slogan: “ Millions for War, not one penny for tribute” (while the US budget was 25% for tribute)

1812 - war profiteering and land

1836 - protect property (slaves) Slogan: “remember the Alamo”

1848 - land, false flag attack

1852 - access to markets & oil (whale), exaggeration (settles without loss of life;

1861 - protect property (slaves), false flag attack (fire on fort whose guns can only be aimed out to sea) Slogan: “Remember Fort Sumter”.

1898 - property, either false flag attack or exaggeration Slogan: “Remember the Maine”

1917 - war profiteering, exaggeration (Zimmerman Telegram). Slogan “Remember the Lusitania” (forget that it blew up 2 years earlier)

1919 - war profiteering (aborted)

Sept. 1941 - false flag (failed)

Dec. 1941 - war profiteering, oil & land grab - USA reinforces Pacific Fleet by moving home fleet to Pearl Harbor mid-pacific refueling station. Threatens to cut off oil to Japan if the Japanese doesn’t stop trying to seize China and instead joins the Axis to attack anti-capitalist Russia. Continue to sell military supplies to Japan for Russian invasion. While EVERY other country is at war, USA intended to use its reinforced Pacific fleet based in the Philippines to at least economically dominate if not seize rubber rich IndoChina and oil rich Indonesia. (like we also took the Virgin Islands Greenland and Iceland before the war) . However, Japan elects to not go to war with USSR. Decides to sink US Pacific Fleet and home Fleets. Elects to seize the IndoChina rubber and Indonesian oil fields. Japan wins battle of Java sea against alliance including US ships. US Ships which had left the Phillipines immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Leaving US forces at Bataan stranded without an escape by sea.

1963- (1919 part 2). US places nuclear ballistic missles in Turkey able to launch surprise knockout into USSR stategic resources.m. After which USSR places nuclear ballistic missles in Cuba able to hit surprise knockout into Miami and future Disneyworld swamp land. Two nuclear powers plot global “warming”. Slogan “90 miles from our coast!” (A thousand from any target)

1964- war profiteering, false flag attack, seize IndoChina part 2 (or 3). Slogan: “Domino principal”

1984 - re-election Slogan: “Grenada?”

1989 - puppet cut its strings Slogan: “Noriega is collecting Hitler memorabilia!”

1990 - puppet cuts its strings. Oil. Slogan: “Saddam is collecting Hitler memorabilia!”

2001 - war profiteering, (as yet unproven) false flag attack. Slogan: “Remember 9/11”.

2004 - war profiteering, oil, exaggeration. Slogan “Remember 9/11!”

2019 - oil. false flag attacks on oil tankers in gulf by the Kaiser, no...SPECTRE...no wait...Iran.

2020 - re-election, oil. Is it a false flag if we provoke violent retaliation for the assasination of master terrorist general no one in US ever heard of but was responsible for killing US troops in massacres we did not know happened?

#was 9/11 a false flag?#secret reports and other lies

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mrsrcbinscn · 4 years

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Franny Robinson HC Infodump #4: Country and Bluegrass Music

hi, I’ll finally do a writeup on her work in jazz next but I’m in a country mood and was INSPIRED so oops country first

Word count: 2486

Dara & Danny

In 1991, Daniel Maitland (fc: Martin Sensmeier), an Indigenous Alaskan kid, moved from Alaska to Payne Lake, Georgia, with his parents and older and younger sisters after his father got a job opportunity in Atlanta, a reasonable commute away. Daniel spent two years being musical rivals with Franny Framagucci before he proposed they just combine their talents and perform together at talent shows and the county fair. The two were inseparable, musically, until Franny went to college at NYU and Daniel went to East Tennessee State.

They remained friends throughout college and reunited during winter and summer breaks to play together locally. Daniel was in Franny’s wedding party. He’s Wilbur’s godfather and is ‘Uncle Dan’, they’ve always remained close. They would write songs together usually through an internet connection except for when they could travel to write in person.

In 2009, Daniel once again was the one who suggested they officially collaborate. That’s when the bluegrass-country-traditional southern/Appalachian folk duo was born. They have released 9 albums together since they started releasing music under Dara & Danny.

One album, titled Molly’s Church, is almost entirely songs from the hymnal of the Church of the Nazarene in their hometown in Georgia, which was the church their friend Molly attended before her death. It was a “fuck you” response to them having received backlash from certain gatekeepers for a video of them singing Hank Williams’ I Saw The Light going viral. They were pissed two non-Christians were getting praise for performing the song. (Franny is a Buddhist and Daniel is an Indigenous Alaskan with traditional spiritual beliefs).

To the backlash, Franny said, and announced the dropping of this album on an Instagram Live Q & A, “It’s funny. Like. Christmas is such a part of mainstream American culture. I celebrate Christmas, my non-religious Maori husband celebrates Christmas, are y’all mad about that too? Christianity is so deeply woven into American culture and the history of American music, like I just -- its wild y’all are so mad. And because I like to poke an angry bear, our new album, Molly’s Church [...] and what really gets me is like - just because I ain’t Christian, don’t mean I’m ignorant about it either. I’m from the Bible Belt, y’all. I did go to church with my little friends some Sunday mornin’s as a child if I had a sleepover at their house. [...] One of my best friends, the lovely, talented, beautiful, late Molly Vaughn, who we named the album after, was a devout Christian. When I would cry, she’d always sing It Is Well With My Soul to me and play with my hair. You can’t tell me that because I’m not a Christian, that song ain’t special to me. I think of that song whenever I’m going through a hard time and my heart is at peace because at its core it's a song about looking at your situation and making peace with it, and finding the strength to move on to hopefully better days. At her husband’s request, I sang Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing at her funeral, okay? Like- [pause for annoyed exhaling] to suggest we have nothing but respect for these beautiful hymns is insulting. [...] Insulting not just to us, but to the hymns. They’re so beautiful that they have made an emotional impact on two non-Christian musicians. I think that’s wonderful and speaks to how lucky we are to live in a time where all sorts of sorts are able to learn from and share with each other. But that’s just us, I guess.

Every song on Molly’s Church has a special memory attached to it for either myself or Daniel, or in the case of Be Thou My Vision, it was Molly’s favorite hymn ever. We couldn’t name an album of hymns after her and not put that on it.”

The track list is as follows: [Spotify playlist]

I couldn’t find a folksy or bluegrassy version of Be Thou My Vision, which. I’m ANGRY about. Because when I was a practicing Nazarene Christian it was my favorite hymn, and I still find it beautiful but.

Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing

How Great Thou Art

Dwelling In Beulah Land

Be Thou My Vision

It Is Well With My Soul

I Saw The Light

Victory In Jesus

Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory

Holy, Holy, Holy

Another album, titled Something’s Rotten in The Sticks is purposely very dark. It’s largely covers of murder ballads and sad traditional folk songs from the American South and Appalachian Mountains, featuring original songs and covers of songs that explore the darker sides of more modern rural life like the opioid crisis, unemployment, poor education, poverty with no social safety nets, and more.

Franny openly admits that she wrote the original songs from a place of immense privilege. In an Instagram Live Q&A about the album she said, “These aren’t my exact lived experiences. But I feel like I have some right to talk about these stories because these are the things happening to my people, the good people of the town that took my mother in when she was a twenty-something year old refugee, and then helped raise me. I buried my first friend thanks to the Sacklers (the family whose pharma company produces oxycontin, who purposely spread misinformation about how its a safe drug and who pret-ty much engineered the opioid epidemic) in 1998. I just last month buried one of my best friends since elementary school after three narcan shots couldn’t save them.

Rural Southern folks and the problems they face are dear to my heart. [...] I know how lucky I am to have grown up in the rural south and ended up where I am today, in the privileged position I am in. [...] And I see the way people in the cities talk to and about these people and it’s fucking gross. You know nothing about these people and what their lives are like, and what they care about and worry about. I have always been proud to be Southern, just as I’m proud to be Cambodian. [...] Rural poor folks are the kindest, most loving, most resilient people, and I am not ashamed that I came from that.

This album… so our last album, Prodigal Children of Clayton County, Georgia, was a love letter to and about our hometown and the people of the rural south. This album is more of a ‘we see you.’ And it's also, I hope, an accessible way to start explaining the problems our people face to city elites that look down their noses at them. Like, I hope people can say in response to “I just don’t understand these people”, “hey, go listen to I Grabbed A Banjo (And You, The Pills), then talk to me.”

Daniel said in that same Q & A, “I was born in Alaska, I met Franny when I moved to her hometown in Georgia, in middle school, and we began playing music together in high school. I live in the Appalachian Mountains now, I studied Bluegrass and Old Time music at East Tennessee State University, in Johnson City. Now, I’m -- I’ve been lucky enough to make a living out of the music I love, but you know- like I said. I live in the Appalachian mountains, in Kentucky, in a rural area. I never left the rural south, since I came here, this has been my home. We’re privileged now, but had a few stars aligned differently, our high school friends’ lives would have been ours. We love the people of this region. Like Franny said, we both have two groups of people we are passionate about amplifying and equipped to amplify. Mine are our struggling rural folks, and Indigenous voices, and Franny don’t ever shut up about Cambodian or the rural south.”

“I really fucking don’t.” Franny quipped.

The track list is as follows: [Spotify link, the first 8 tracks are the songs they covered on the album and the rest are songs that fit the vibe of the original songs to give y’all a picture]

Knoxville Girl

I Grabbed A Banjo (And You, The Pills), an original song about the opioid epidemic that’s killed many of Franny and Daniel’s high school friends

Troubles, traditional folk song as popularized by Kilby Snow and Anna & Elizabeth

Red Dirt Girl (Emmylou Harris cover)

But I Ain't A Milton Boy/Girl , an original song about how in Milton (a bougie rich people part of Georgia) kids go to college and become doctors and lawyers while people from the song narrators’ town don’t bother learning to solve for X because all that waits for them is army recruiters, the power company, or the unemployment line [the male narrator, Daniel], and the female narrator [Franny] sings about how she was a smart girl who held her first baby when she was a baby herself, married two bad men she thought were good, and now she sells her ADHD pills to college kids to buy groceries, and how their high school aspirations crumbled easily, and the chorus is literally just narrators fantasizing about a decent standard of living and having decent opportunities and then going, “But I ain’t a Milton boy/girl, and that’s why I’m cryin’ today”

Deportee (Woody Guthrie song as covered by Dolly Parton)

Savannah, a song Franny wrote about the time her brother drove her down to Savannah when she got pregnant in high school so she could have an abortion three hours from home, where nobody local to them would be out front shouting at people needing abortions

Poor Folks Town (Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton cover, instrumentation is modified to be a little melancholy to fit the rest of the album, but it is still a markedly happier song than the rest of the album except for Rich Kid Clothes)

Don’t Put Whiskey In My Water, an original song about a man nine years sober almost falling off the wagon when he’s laid off ahead of his teenage daughter’s high school graduation, including the line ‘don’t worry about Ole Miss, we’ll figure it out, somehow we always do, smart little girl like you can’t die in this town’

Don’t Take Your Guns To Town (Johnny Cash cover)

Pretty Polly

Down In The Willow Garden

Rich Kid Clothes, original song about a brother and sister super jazzed about their “new” clothes, hand-me-downs from the rich kids of the house their mama cleans, happiest song on the album

Health Insurance, an original song from the perspective of three different people, on in each verse, either dying or seriously suffering from solvable medical issues but because healthcare in America is trash they either can’t get help, or are going bankrupt trying to, that’s incredibly sarcastic including lyrics like ‘and I know I deserve to die for not having had a rich great-grandaddy, and who wants to see their daughter graduate college anyway’ , one of those sad songs with joyful instrumentation

Another album! Is titled The Rise And Fall of Jenny and Jamie, and is a concept album meant to be listened from start to finish that tells the story of a couple that falls in love, gets married, has a very dysfunctional marriage, and ultimately divorces. Think the energy of Alpha Desperation March by The Mountain Goats, and the entire Tallahasee album but especially No Children. The Dara & Danny album is a little less dark because the last few songs, about divorce, are like...happy.

Daniel, who had been divorced twice by the time they wrote the songs for that album, said “There is nothing sad about ending a marriage you’re miserable in or don’t want anymore. The two songs about the divorce, they’re happy because our characters are happy to be done with each other. It isn’t Tammy Wynette spelling D-I-V-O-R-C-E and lamenting the end of her marriage, instead, Jenny and Jamie realize their marriage is toxic not just for the other person, but for themself, and they’re relieved to not be married anymore.

Notable Dara & Danny performances and accomplishments:

They cover Whiskey Lullaby at many shows they do. A video from a 2016 show went semi-viral, and fans of the duo will show it as an example of “Peak Dara & Danny”

Nominated for the 2019 Grammy Award for Best American Roots Song, as the duo Dara & Danny, but ultimately Brandi Carlile won for ‘The Joke’

Franny was absolutely thrilled for her. She STANS Brandi Carlile and has written songs with her before.

In the post-Grammys interview, the interview asked Franny if she was disappointed and she was like “I would pay Brandi Carlile to punch me in the face, so no.”

The clip of Franny saying that went viral and embarrassed poor Wilbur

“To be honest, when I saw The Joke was nominated, I didn’t even bother writing a speech. Daniel and I were both just thrilled to be considered to be like, at her level.”

Nominated for the 2019 Grammy Award for Best American Roots Performance, as Dara & Danny, and again lost to “The Joke��, but again, did not care at all

Won the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album as Dara & Danny, their fifth nomination in the category and second win

Nominated as Dara & Danny in the category Vocal Duo of The Year at the 2019 CMA awards.

Nominated for IBMA Album of the Year in 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018

Won the 2019 IBMA for Album of the Year

Won the 2019 IBMA for Song of the Year

Franny is the first person of Cambodian descent to win a Grammy, an ASCAP award, an IBMA, or be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame

Daniel is the first Alaskan Native to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame

Solo work

Franny’s used bluegrass-folk style music to write songs about the experiences of her mother and other relatives under the Khmer Rouge and in the civil conflict that preceded it. It leans a little away from #pure bluegrass but it includes mandolin, banjo, and even some traditional Cambodian instruments. It’s this blend of bluegrass instrumentation and traditional Cambodian instruments that on paper sounds like “Franny you’re crazy” but in practice its fuckin’ lit, y’all.

It’s as genius as The Hu, that Mongolian band that was like “what is we play metal music with guitars and a drum set and TRADITIONAL MONGOLIAN INSTRUMENTS?” Lit.

She did an entire album, Franny Sor Robinson Covers Kitty Wells [playlist] and that album gained Franny a ton of street cred in the country/bluegrass industry. She got a lot of respect for her Kitty Wells covers.

She’s released three solo albums of folksy-bluegrass-country style music that is original music she wrote the lyrics and music for.

Three solo albums, the Kitty Wells cover album, and nine Dara & Danny albums makes twelve country-bluegrass albums total Franny’s released, not counting featured artist appearances on other albums.

Notable Franny Sor Robinson awards, performances, and accomplishments in the country music sphere:

Franny sang ‘Born To Fly’ with Sara Evans once

Franny loves that song, it came out in 2000, when she was in college at NYU, and it was a staple song of hers to perform at any gigs she did in college

The day the United States legalized same-sex marriage, Franny was a supporting solo act for a friend of hers and she was like “I don’t know a better way to celebrate than by taking one of my favorite country love songs and making it better. And by that I mean gay.” By this point she’d been out as bisexual for years. So she sang Brad Paisley’s She’s Everything

Franny’s always kept the pronouns the same in songs she covers, so if it was a man’s song about a woman she’s always kept it about a “she.” Her cover of She Thinks I Still Care by George Jones was an instant hit when it was released on one of her solo albums

At an event honoring Randy Travis, Franny performed his hit Deeper Than The Holler for him

She also got to sing I Told You So with him once at another occasion and she damn near died

At the final show of George Strait’s final tour, Franny sang Carried Away with him and almost cried he is one of her!!! Idols!!! and during his encore, she joined him and all of the other special guests of the final concert to sing All My Exes Live In Texas

She’s been awarded and recognized by various organizations for the furthering of Asian-Americans in the arts in general, in music, and empowerment for both her work in jazz and country umbrella music

She’s performed at and been nominated for CMA awrds, ACM awards, and Americana Music Honors & Awards

She’s won Americana Music Awards

When challenged to prove she could yodel she fuckin got right up and sang Hank Williams’ Long Gone Lonesome Blues and nailed all the very technical yodeling, and its a thing she’s like, Known for doing, so she will perform it live pretty often

#&&...hc

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nebris · 5 years

Text

The Harm Done for White Men

The new attacks on Roe v. Wade are about protecting men, not women

Part of President Trump’s new immigration proposal is something called “patriotic assimilation.” It’s a euphemism for an immigrant entry exam that evokes the Jim Crow literacy tests used to disenfranchise black voters. One administration official told the Washington Post that green-card applicants would be required to pass an exam based on such everyday American household dinner topics as Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.

That is a perplexing choice for the administration, given the timing. That letter, dated January 1, 1802, is the foundation of many understandings of the First Amendment when it comes to the separation of church and state. That is anything but what we saw this week, as their Republican allies in statehouses throughout the Midwest and South pushed through unconstitutional, misogynist and pseudoscientific restrictions on abortion.

In my native Ohio, a child who is raped might not even know she is pregnant before she runs out of time to abort her rapist’s fetus. Missouri sent its eight-week restriction to its eager Republican governor for signature on Friday. And Alabama’s law, arguably the most barbaric of them all, criminalizes the procedure from the moment of conception and carries a prison sentence for doctors of up to 99 years. That is a much longer bid than the maximum any rapist in the state could get, all while his victim is forced to bear his child. Each law, in its own way, subjugates women and girls — and since white women statistically have greater access to the procedure, signals a specific attack on women of color. This is a particular issue in Georgia, where noted vote suppressor Brian Kemp is governor. Under the law scheduled to go into effect on January 1st, women who self-terminate their pregnancies can be imprisoned for life or executed, thereby accomplishing two goals: subduing them for their gender, and taking away their ballot. (Men who impregnated them, per the law, suffer no consequence.)

It has been plain for a while now that the anti-abortion cause has nothing to do with actual deities or morality. If it did, it wouldn’t put the lives of doctors, patients and clinic employees in jeopardy to make its argument. States would be more concerned with their terrible infant mortality rates than they would about saving fetuses. Ending reproductive rights in America has never been about anything holy. Anti-abortionists like to remind us of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s statements about eugenics or claim they’re trying to stop a “black genocide,” but their movement was born to keep white patriarchy alive. And it is white men who are the primary beneficiaries of such policies.

As Politico Magazine detailed in 2014, the forced-birth movement, as I term it, got its primary motivation from a ruling three years before Roe v. Wade. A 1970 D.C. District Court decision denied tax-exempt status to “segregation academies” formed to escape the consequences of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education precedent. These academies were connected to churches, and soon the IRS wanted to know whether their institutions too discriminated upon the basis of race. Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich and evangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., over the course of the 1970s, seized upon the opportunity to mobilize a powerful voting bloc out of the disgruntled religious conservatives thwarted in their efforts to discriminate. But even back then, it was impolitic to promote themselves as “the racist caucus,” so they went hunting for an issue. Abortion was it — a political bogeyman ginned up out of a mix of opportunism, misogyny, and a rising religious unease with a spike in abortions after legalization. No scientific expertise in women’s physiology was required. White supremacy had all it needed, its natural symbiote: patriarchy.

The Republican movement behind forced-birth bills is truly ignorance allied with power, as James Baldwin once warned us about. The rhetoric may be more vociferous and reckless now than it was when the religious right was first revving up, but it is no less cynical. Even if it escapes the lips or is written or signed into law by women like Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama, the primary goal of that revanchist talk has always been to take America back to a time when the word of white men went all but unquestioned.

This is a particularly intoxicating prospect for men like Trump, who have grown up with this palatial reality all of their lives. What he sold in all those books and buildings and casinos and steaks was not just wealth, but his brand of white manhood. It is one reason why, despite the fact that his brash trade wars with China and Canada have made life harder for farmers and other American low-wage workers, some of them insist that they won’t leave his side.

Not wealthy enough to benefit the most from GOP tax cuts? Your local hospital going under? Your kids stuck in endless wars? It’s OK: hang with the GOP for the potential benefits of increased race-based stratification. Even if Trump’s policies are making your farm go under or depriving you of the steel you need, the benefits of whiteness await you. Because if something bad happens to you, it’s someone else’s fault. And that someone else is probably black. Or perhaps an immigrant from Mexico.

This is the investment that the Republicans have made in the intoxication of whiteness. It applies to these abhorrent attempts to end abortion as well. Legislation like these bills in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri isn’t merely about trying to get the Supreme Court’s conservatives to overturn Roe. These states, and the (mostly) men behind the bills, are making a point about where women stand in relation to men, and moreover, where white men stand in relation to everyone else. This isn’t about who voted for what, or who signed what bill. It is about what message is sent, and who benefits.

When women are told that their bodies belong to the state at a time when access to health care remains drastically unequal by race and class, it means that rich white men win when abortion restrictions become law. They will all be challenged in court, wasting a lot of taxpayer money that could have been better used improving those health care systems or even educating the children that Republicans claim to care so much about. Then it will come time for those five Justices to decide the future for anyone who will ever possibly carry a fetus to term, or choose not to do so.

It is a mistake to get lost in religious debate around this. Remember, always, that Jesus was the hustle used to get us here. The fight to keep women from getting abortions is really about reinforcing a belief that white men should maintain dominion over this country and the people in it. The only God that matters most to these guys is themselves.

Jamil Smith is a Senior Writer at Rolling Stone, where he covers national affairs and culture. Throughout his career as a journalist and Emmy Award-winning television producer, he has explored the intersection of politics and identity. Follow him on Twitter @JamilSmith.

Originally published at www.rollingstone.com on May 17, 2019.

#The Sisterhood

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cosleia · 6 years

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snoke: death by choking on something and everyone just looking, not helping him in any way. like, chew your food Snoke

1579 words. Content warnings: choking to death, white male entitlement.

Supreme Leader Snoke liked to throw feasts. This was not something Kylo had been aware of when he’d left---when he’d arrived, when he’d joined Supreme Leader, and at first it was somewhat surprising. It was hard to get used to the idea of indulgence after a lifetime of being told he couldn’t have what he wanted.

Of course, Kylo could not indulge the way Supreme Leader did. He hadn’t earned it. Supreme Leader often told him he would have everything he dreamed of if he worked hard enough, but until then he had to focus on his destiny. On seeing Supreme Leader’s plans through. On obeying Supreme Leader, flawlessly and unquestioningly.

It had been years now, and Kylo had done everything Supreme Leader had asked. He’d killed thousands with his own hands. He’d endured trials he never could have imagined in his former life. He’d grown powerful. Yet still his wishes were denied him. Still he lived an austere existence, with few personal effects and no access to the rich, exotic foods Supreme Leader enjoyed. Snoke would say, before Kylo had even mustered the courage to ask, “You’ve come very far, but you still have far to go.”

It was getting harder and harder to accept it.

Kylo was a prince, a descendant of the fallen Jedi who had changed the galaxy. He was the rightful ruler, heir to a fateful legacy. If he had desires, it was his right to sate them. If he saw something he wanted, he should be able to take it.

In the beginning, what he had wanted was to serve Supreme Leader. He should still want that. Yet here he stood at Snoke’s feast, standing with the praetorian guard and his knights, watching, serving as a sentry when by all rights he should have a seat at the table. Even that simpering fool General Hux had been invited.

Kylo knew Supreme Leader could sense his simmering rage, knew that it pleased him, and that made it worse. Should he be happy that his unhappiness served his leader? Should he be unhappy that unhappiness was apparently required? Would Leader Snoke be pleased if Kylo wasn’t fuming?

Anger made Kylo strong, but it was also a trap that turned him into a tool. He knew this, he’d always known this, but somehow it seemed to matter more now than it once did.

The scavenger had grown strong without Snoke. She was untrained, but she could tap into her power without giving herself over to another.

Kylo shouldn’t need---

Sudden commotion at the table caught his attention. No one had moved, but all of Snoke’s dinner guests were looking at him. The leader of the First Order let out a thick, hacking sound and beat a fist on the table. He was choking.

From his position behind Snoke’s seat, Kylo stared. Supreme Leader thrashed in his chair, gesturing wildly toward his throat. Kylo should move. He should help. He knew how to save a person from choking; it was simple first aid.

Kylo didn’t move. No one did. Kylo didn’t let them.

The abortive wheezing sounds, wordless, stifled cries, and full-body jerking took more time to end than Kylo had expected. But finally they did, and Supreme Leader Snoke fell face-first into his trifle.

Snoke was dead. Kylo was free.

Low murmuring broke out here and there among Snoke’s dinner guests. All the members of High Command were here, as were representatives from Kuat-Entralla Engineering and various New Republic dignitaries whose influence helped funnel resources to the Order. These people would need a leader. Kylo stepped forward.

“It would seem a leadership change is at hand,” General Hux said, not quite succeeding in keeping a note of levity out of his voice as he rose to his feet. “As head of High Command I hereby accept the duty of leading the First Order.”

Kylo ignited his lightsaber. “As Leader Snoke’s acolyte, as the strongest Force user in the galaxy, it is my destiny to rule.”

A new voice spoke up from the doorway. “Supreme Leader could not choose between you,” said a woman with white-streaked black hair. “Surely this means you both should rule?”

“Grand Admiral Sloane,” Hux stammered, looking gratifyingly shocked. His pale skin had gone even whiter.

“Just Sloane,” the woman said. Kylo knew of her; she had fled execution years ago, exiled herself from the First Order.

“How is it you have returned here, traitor?” he demanded.

“Traitor!” Sloane laughed. “Snoke was the traitor. He has turned the First Order away from what it was meant to be, used it for his own ends. I’ve watched this happen, powerless, for years. Only now am I able to finally act. I only hope it’s not too late.”

General Hux rounded the table and moved to stand beside her. “Gr--Sloane,” he said.

“Armitage,” said Sloane. “You’ve done well for yourself.” Hux flushed, his face rapidly shifting from ghostly pale to blotchy pink. “I’m sure you can see the larger picture here.”

“Of course,” Hux said. “I agree. Sup--Snoke had lost sight of the First Order’s true mission. I had hoped to course-correct, but it proved difficult. Now, as you say, is the first real opportunity.”

The murmuring broke out at the table again.

“The true mission of the First Order is to reestablish the Empire,” Kylo said loudly, swinging the crackling blade of his lightsaber down in a swift arc.

“So it is,” Hux said.

“The Empire was more than military might. It was a government.”

“Which is why,” Sloane said, “the two of you should rule together.” Hux gaped at her, having apparently forgotten that part of her dramatic entrance. “Armitage knows strategy, tactics, planning, logistics. He will win the war, and after that he will maintain order. But you, Kylo Ren---while you are a weapon, you have the power of persuasion. You have talents that are invaluable to any diplomat. There are certain victories that cannot be won on the battlefield. You are also a symbol, a direct line to the Empire of old. You are the grandson of the last, and arguably the greatest, Dark Lord of the Sith. Your presence at the head of the new Empire will give it legitimacy and strength.”

Kylo gazed at Rae Sloane. She was right about him; everything she said was true and demonstrated clearly why he should lead the First Order. And she was also right that Armitage Hux was good at handling messy details. The general might be useful, though Kylo would prefer him serve as an advisor.

He deactivated his lightsaber. “Your words are wise,” he said. “I am willing to entertain the notion. For now,” he addressed the table, “you may consider both of us in charge, and any intelligence, information, questions, or anything else should be brought to both of our attention.”

“We will issue the formal decision at a later time,” General Hux agreed. “High Command will reconvene in the coming days, and we will be in communication with the rest of you shortly thereafter.”

“You have served witness to a momentous event in the history of the new Empire,” Kylo said. “Tell no one of what you have seen until you hear from us.”

“We shall end this feast here,” Hux said, and Kylo sensed that he was laboring not to look at Snoke’s body. “Thank you all for attending.”

“You see?” said Rae Sloane after the last wide-eyed guest had departed. “You two work well together.”

“I suppose,” Hux said grudgingly. Kylo began to move off to issue instructions to the praetorian guard and the Knights of Ren that they were to protect Hux as well as himself, for now. But then Hux said, “Why are you doing this to me?” Kylo kept walking to give the impression that he couldn’t hear their conversation, but he used the Force to amplify his hearing.

Sloane gave a small, low chuckle. “Because I truly believe it is the wisest choice. Snoke pitted you two against each other for a reason. He knew how powerful you’d be if you joined forces.” Hux let out a noncommittal sound. “And besides,” Sloane said, so softly Kylo never would have heard it without the Force, “I know how you feel about him.”

Kylo whirled on the spot to see General Hux blushing violently, fists clenched at his sides. Hux looked up, eyes widening in horror as he spotted Kylo staring at him. For a long moment, Kylo held his gaze, face blank. Then he cocked his head to one side and raised an eyebrow, letting the corner of his mouth twitch upward.

It didn’t seem possible, but Hux turned even redder and cast his eyes to the floor. Sloane chuckled.

Well. This was unexpected. But not, Kylo mused, entirely unwelcome.

He’d denied himself many things at Snoke’s behest. But as emperor---co-emperor?---he could take whatever he wanted.

Convenient that one of those things was offering himself up already.

“I’ll leave you two to talk,” Sloane said. “Armitage, I’ve sent my contact information to your datapad.”

Hux watched helplessly as Sloane left the banquet hall. Then it was just Kylo, Hux, the guards, the knights, and Snoke’s body.

Heedless of all of these, Kylo backed Hux up against the nearest wall. He caught Hux by the wrists and pinned them up on either side of his head.

Hux swallowed, licked his lips, and gazed at him with wide, darkening green eyes. And Kylo grinned.

#star wars #kylux #fanfic #my writing #heather kills snoke 2k17 #rae sloane #praetorian guards #the knights of ren #choking #death #sitharmitage

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pamphletstoinspire · 5 years

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Part 3: On Catholic Social Teaching: The Common Good, Part 2

Last time, in this space, we mentioned that, while the Church condemns atheistic communism for, among other things, denial of the right of private property, it is also leery of the dangers of capitalism. Why? As G.K. Chesterton put it, because it produces too few capitalists and, instead of concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the state, tends to concentrate it in the hands of a tiny oligarchy. Original sin affects capitalists as well as communists.

Here’s the deal: The Church — so far from wanting private property abolished like the communist or concentrated in the hands of the 1% like the laissez-faire capitalist — wants everybody to own private property. This, yet again, is rooted in the biblical tradition — specifically, the Seventh Commandment: “You shall not steal.” If there were no such thing as private property, there could be no such thing as theft. So the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

“Private property is an essential element of an authentically social and democratic economic policy, and it is the guarantee of a correct social order. The Church’s social doctrine requires that ownership of goods be equally accessible to all, so that all may become, at least in some measure, owners.”

Whatever else that is, it’s not Marxism and is, indeed, 180 degrees the opposite of the state owning everything.

Indeed, so insistent is the Church that ownership of the goods of creation is necessary to our survival and proper to our dignity as creatures made in God’s image that she says the right to private property is “innate in individual persons, in every person, and has priority with regard to any human intervention concerning goods, to any legal system concerning the same, to any economic or social system or method.”

Some libertarian-minded Catholics badly misread this quote by applying it only to themselves or to the corporation, as though the rest of the human race is not also made in the image of God. Erring thus, they take the Church to mean that the right to personal property is the absolute be-all and end-all and that, should an individual or corporation legally acquire ownership of vastly more property than is necessary for normal functioning or control access to something that is vital to the common good, there is no obligation before God or man to consider anybody else. Such a theory, in addition to being blind to the deadly sin of greed, simply twists the Compendium’s obvious meaning.

For the Compendium goes on to declare that the Church is, in fact, referring to the universal destination of goods and the right of each person to own property and have access to the goods of the earth necessary to human life: “All other rights, whatever they are, including property rights and the right of free trade, must be subordinated to this norm [the universal destination of goods]; they must not hinder it, but must, rather, expedite its application. It must be considered a serious and urgent social obligation to refer these rights to their original purpose.”

In short, the law (including the laws of economics) was made for man, not man for the law. Just as the state does not have the right to destroy the access of persons to the common good, neither does the corporation or the greedy individual.

The shocking (to Americans) upshot of this is that private property, while certainly a good, is not an absolute right. It must give way to other considerations sometimes. This, again, is a thoroughly biblical idea. John the Baptist tells his followers, “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise” (Luke 3:11). Why? Because my neighbor’s right to life (and therefore to not freeze to death) supersedes my right to my second coat. Notice that, just as with abortion, the Church places the right to life ahead of the right to property.

Again, take water, the most basic element of human existence. The Compendium says:

“‘The principle of the universal destination of goods also applies naturally to water, considered in the sacred Scriptures as a symbol of purification (Psalm 51:4; John 13:8) and of life (John 3:5; Galatians 3:27). As a gift from God, water is a vital element essential to survival; thus, everyone has a right to it [1009].’ Satisfying the needs of all, especially of those who live in poverty, must guide the use of water and the services connected with it. Inadequate access to safe drinking water affects the well-being of a huge number of people and is often the cause of disease, suffering, conflicts, poverty and even death. For a suitable solution to this problem, it ‘must be set in context in order to establish moral criteria based precisely on the value of life and the respect for the rights and dignity of all human beings.’

“By its very nature water cannot be treated as just another commodity among many, and it must be used rationally and in solidarity with others. The distribution of water is traditionally among the responsibilities that fall to public agencies, since water is considered a public good. If water distribution is entrusted to the private sector, it should still be considered a public good. The right to water, as all human rights, finds its basis in human dignity and not in any kind of merely quantitative assessment that considers water as a merely economic good. Without water, life is threatened. Therefore, the right to safe drinking water is a universal and inalienable right.”

The guiding principle here is simple:

“Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute and untouchable: ‘On the contrary, it has always understood this right within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation: The right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.’”

Systems that make water available at a profit are fine, just as long as those who cannot pay for this elementary and fundamental right are not cut off. In such cases, some other way of covering the cost must be found.

Does the Church, then, teach that a perpetual welfare state of parasites should be established? Of course not. The principle way the poor are to have a share in the common good is, as we have already seen, through work at a living wage. And what is a living wage?

A living wage fulfills four criteria:

1. Families in general seem to be living at a standard of decency appropriate to their society;

2. They do so without working undue hours;

3. They do so without wives being forced to work outside the home or children forced to work inappropriate hours or under inappropriate conditions (if they choose to do so, that’s another story);

4. They do so without undue reliance on government support or consumer credit.

That is the goal. But in this fallen world, the goal is often not met. Therefore, the community must help those who cannot find the means to access necessary goods such as food, shelter and water.

Someone may ask, “What about Paul’s command that those who will not work shall not eat?” To begin with, Paul is speaking not about the obligations of the state, but of Christians in the Church at Thessalonica who were ignoring their obligations to the community on the theory that Jesus’ return was imminent. He is speaking to those within the household of faith and telling them to get off their duffs — ironically, so they can provide for themselves and the common good. He is not writing the First Epistle to the Americans on Congressional Welfare Reform.

Meanwhile, Jesus gives us our marching orders as Christians moving in the world outside the household of faith, and they are shocking and radical: “Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you” (Matthew 5:42). Note that there are absolutely no qualifications put on this command. Indeed, his counsel on generosity is so countercultural and counterintuitive that, so far from talking about giving to “the deserving poor” who will thriftily earn a percentage on our largesse and give it back with interest, he instead commands: “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:12-14).

“For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:46-48). The Gospel, as Dorothy Day says, “takes away forever our right to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor.” Because in God’s eyes, we are none of us deserving, and we are all of us poor.

And so, just like the Church, Paul urges not the abolition of property, but its generous sharing modeled after that of Jesus, who, “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). And the Tradition of the Church on this is unbroken from antiquity to the present:

St. Ambrose: “You are not making a gift of your possessions to poor persons. You are handing over to them what is theirs. For what has been given in common for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself. The world is given to all and not only to the rich.”

St. John Chrysostom: “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs.”

St. Gregory the Great: “When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.”

St. Basil: “Are not thou then a robber, for counting as thine own what thou hast receivest to distribute? It is the bread of the famished which thou receivest, the garment of the naked which thou hoardest in thy chest, the shoe of the barefooted which rots in thy possessions, the money of the pennyless which thou hast buried in the earth. Wherefore then dost thou injure so many to whom thou mightest be a benefactor.”

St. Bede: “He then who wishes to be rich toward God will not lay up treasures for himself, but distribute his possessions to the poor.”

Leo XII: “Every person has by nature the right to possess property as his or her own. … But if the question be asked: How must one’s possessions be used? the Church replies without hesitation in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas: ‘One should not consider one’s material possessions as one’s own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when other are in need. … .’ True, no one is commanded to distribute to others that which is required for one’s own needs and those of one’s household; nor even to give away what is reasonably required to keep up becomingly one’s condition in life. … But when what necessity demands has been supplied and one’s standing fairly provided for, it becomes a duty to give to the needy out of what remains over.”

Pius XI: “The right to own private property has been given to the human by nature, or rather by the Creator himself. … At the same time a person’s superfluous income is not left entirely to one’s own discretion. … On the contrary, the grave obligations of charity, beneficence and liberality, which rest upon the wealthy, are constantly insisted upon in telling words by holy Scripture and the Fathers of the Church. However, the investment of superfluous income in securing favorable opportunities for employment … is to be considered … an act of real liberality, particularly appropriate to the needs of our time.”

Gaudium et Spes: “God has intended the earth and all that it contains for the use of all people and all peoples. Hence justice, accompanied by charity, must so regulate the distribution of created goods that they are actually available to all in an equitable measure. . . . Therefore, in using them, everyone should consider legitimate possessions not only as their own, but also as common property, in the sense that they should be able to profit not only themselves but other people as well. Moreover, all have the right to possess a share of earthly goods sufficient for themselves and their families. This is what the Fathers and Doctors of the Church had in mind when teaching that people are obliged to come to the aid of the poor, and to do so not merely out of their superfluous goods.”

Paul VI: “Private property does not constitute for anyone an absolute and unconditional right. No one is justified in keeping for one’s exclusive use what one does not need, when others lack necessities.”

St. John Paul II: “It will be necessary above all to abandon a mentality in which the poor — as individuals and as people — are considered a burden, as irksome intruders trying to consume what others have produced.”

In short, the Church desires that wherever possible people have the dignity of work at a living wage so they can both have their own property and enough resources to raise a family and share with the community. But where this is not yet possible, the Church calls us to exercise a “preferential option for the poor” in the keen awareness that our gifts belong to them and their prayers for us may well spell the difference between salvation and damnation.

As Jesus says, “Make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails, they may receive you into the eternal habitations” (Luke 16:9).

BY: MARK SHEA

From: https://www.pamphletstoinspire.com/

#catholic social doctrine

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radioleary-blog · 5 years

Text

Burning Flags and Hosing Native Americans

11/30/16

"Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag," Trump wrote this week, after a college student in New Hampshire burned a flag to protest the election, "if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!"

This from the guy who called for registering Muslims and imprisoning his political opponents. “If these people don’t like things the way they are, they shouldn’t burn the flag, they should do what I did, and burn the Constitution!” Trump said, “You think I could get away with all the crazy shit I have planned for this country if I just burned a flag? No way, I’d be in a prison cell right next to Hillary. So the Constitution had to go. You say flag burning is protected by the First Amendment? Let’s get rid of it. Shoot the First Amendment with a gun from the Second Amendment. A Bill of Rights? They sold you a bill of goods! It’s a Bill of Wrongs, folks, that’s all it was. A Bill of Wrongs.”

Trump released his statement through what has become the official White House press briefing source: Twitter. Oh, he loves his Twitter. Probably because 140 characters is just about the upper limit of his attention span. And 140 characters is the perfect length for saying something stupid, and saying it loud. With a lot of exclamation points!!! Trump loves Twitter because he knows he never has to provide details or logically support his arguments in 140 characters. Of course, he couldn’t support most of his bullshit with logic if he spent ten years writing them into a Russian novel. Hmm, I wonder, what would the title be of a Russian novel written by Donald J. Trump? “The Gulag Mara Lago” ? “One Day in the Life of Ivanka Denisovich” ? “Abortion: Crime and Punishment” ? “War and Pussy” ? Actually, Napoleon plays a prominent role in “War and Peace”, and Trump reminds me a lot like Napoleon. Except Napoleon’s hand is always thrust into his shirt, whereas Trump’s hand is usually thrust into a woman’s pants.

And Trump’s other hand is always on Twitter. And since he’s limited to 140 characters, the Donald doesn’t even have to demonstrate he understands the issues he’s tweeting about. Trump somehow manages to always tweet with the same grandiose level of outrage, bluster and threatening huffy-ness on absolutely any topic, especially when he has no clue what the fuck he’s talking about. Just try him, on any topic:

@surrealDonaldTrump: “Quantum Theory? It’s a hoax invented by the Australians! Scott Bakula is a great actor!! Why no Oscar, academy? Shame!!

@surrealDonaldTrump: “Picasso and Cubism? There must be penalties for (so-called) artists who support Fidel Castro’s ideas! Cubism!! And only 90 miles from our shores!

@surrealDonaldTrump: “Handel’s Messiah at the Met? No gingerbread house! No scene where Handel and Gretel get cooked in the witch’s oven? The Met got it wrong!! Boring - cut funding!!

Of course, what he’d really like to do is get the whole Constitution down to 140 characters or less:

@surrealDonaldTrump: “We/ people -perfect union, just perfect!! More guns- 2 Corinthians. lower corporate tax rate!! No illegal alienable rights- a selfie evidently: life, liberty, etc.”

Trump is the first Twitter President, but he’s also the first internet troll President, and that’s what’s scary; that a man who is always so angry and eager to get into a Twitter war is now able to get us all into a very real war just as fast, and just as furious. The fast and the furious, or maybe the fascist and the furious. What keeps me up until 3 AM? Worrying about what the hell Donald Trump is up to at 3 AM! He gets up at 3 AM not because he thought of something brilliant to say that couldn’t wait till morning, but because he has to pee twenty times a night. He’s not having a “Eureka!” moment, he’s having a “urea” moment. Because no matter how rich and powerful he is, he’s still an old man, with an old man’s prostate and bladder that are just about as worn-out and unworkable as his economic policies. And both his bladder and his economic plan rely entirely too much on a “trickle down” theory that never, ever provides any relief.

So he wakes up every night in the middle of the night, mad at the world and fully capable of any act of irrationality on Twitter. And now, on the world stage. I’m afraid I’m going to wake up one morning and find out we’ve been at war with China for five hours already. I can see the Joint Chiefs of Staff pleading with him, urging him not to go to war, “Mr. President, we can’t risk a nuclear confrontation, it’s madness! The stakes are too high!” To which Trump replies, “Wrong, General, my steaks are very reasonably priced! Believe me. Very high quality steaks.”

Then our military leaders would be begging him to stop the war. “Please Mr. President, there are 1.2 billion Chinese with a standing army of 200 million men! Our troops are being decimated! We told you hours ago to give the order to retreat! If we are to survive as a nation, you must give the order to retreat!” To which Trump replies, “Wait, you said ‘retreat’? My bad. I thought you said ‘retweet’!”

“But seriously, General, we should retweet. We can still win this on social media.”

Hosing Native Americans

I’m deeply disturbed by what’s going on with the DAPL. To us that stands for Dakota Access PipeLine, but to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, it stands for Damn Americans Plundering Land.

Now I’m a big fan of oil, a really big fan. Fossil fuels? Love them so damn much. They keep me from freezing to death every winter, when New York state turns into the planet Hoth from ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ for five months. More like ‘The Empire State’s Back: A No Hope.’ And even those giant Imperial Walker “AT-ATs” moved a hell of a lot faster than Northway traffic in winter.

So I love oil. I loved dinosaurs as a kid, and now that they’re fossil fuel, I love ‘em even more when they’re driving my ass around in my car. So I understand why we usually look the other way while the robber barons take the land to take the oil, and play the villain in this never-ending Western horse-opera that keeps our lights on. We usually don’t really care that there’s never a Lone Ranger to ride to the rescue and shoot the gun out the villains hand, we’re willing to let the good guys lose if it keeps our cell phones charged. And hey, how the hell did the Lone Ranger always manage to have a non-violent resolution to every conflict...by using guns? I don’t think he ever killed anybody, but he was always shooting and waving those guns around like a guy with flashlights on a runway waving in a 747. It probably was less of a moral stance than the fact that silver bullets were ridiculously expensive. But this really painted an unrealistic expectation for an entire generation of TV-watching kids; that hostile confrontations are more likely to be resolved peacefully once you break out the guns. Everything will be just fine! What could possibly go wrong with teaching kids that random gunfire solves most problems?

And The A-Team? They were an even worse example, they fired guns all day long and nobody ever got hurt. Every episode, the A-Team ended up in a ten minute shoot-out with machine guns at close range, and they still never managed to successfully shoot somebody. These guys were supposed to be ex-military? What branch, the Kiss Army? They must have fired ten million rounds of ammunition over five seasons, but they never managed to kill a single goddam bad guy. Not even accidentally. You’d think someone would at least get hurt tripping over the mountains of spent cartridges. No one ever got seriously wounded or maimed, either. Never a realistic depiction of the awful consequences of close-quarter machine gun fire on the human body. Never a bad guy laying there screaming at the end of the episode, writhing in a spreading pool of blood, desperately trying to cram his intestines back into his body as the A-Team smoke cigars and high-five each other in a freeze-frame over the closing credits. No, when the show was cancelled the body count was still zero. No wonder these guys were kicked out of the military, they were just wasting valuable ammo and helicopter fuel! I guess B.A. stood for Bad Aim. Was it poor eyesight? I think maybe they called them The A-Team because that was the only letter they could read at the top of the eye chart.

But I digress. Back to the pipeline. So the oil companies dig and bulldoze, raze and deforest, drill, lay pipe and pump. That’s where the oil comes from, and we write it all off as Progress. Although, in all fairness, “drill”, “lay pipe”, and “pump” is also where orgasms come from, so let’s not rush to judgement.

The DAPL is a 1,172-mile, $3.8-billion pipeline, which would transport up to 570,000 barrels of oil a day. It’s nearly finished except for a section scheduled to go under the Missouri River. Native Americans of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe are protesting the pipeline, saying any oil spill will contaminate water sources that serve over 17 million Americans. So last week, authorities attacked the tribe with water cannons in sub-freezing temperatures, which put 17 protesters in the hospital. You think we’ve really advanced as a society? In 400 hundred years of Native American relations, we’ve only gone from intentionally giving them smallpox, to intentionally giving them pneumonia. Slightly less life-threatening, I guess, but not a big improvement. Who knows, maybe in another hundred years we’ll only intentionally give them a head cold. Not a bad one, but one that may cause them to call in sick to work and lay in bed all day catching up on TV.

Authorities defended their use of the water cannons. “We warned them repeatedly,” Morton County Sheriff ‘Buffalo Bill’ said at a press conference, “It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again!” Sheriff Buffalo Bill then tucked his penis between his legs and tweaked his nipples for the remainder of the press briefing.

And do we truly appreciate the sheer fucked-up-edness of using water cannons on people who are protesting to protect water? What Federal Agency was behind this? Did they call in the Bureau of Irony Enforcement? What was the plan, was this psychological warfare, to hose the Native Americans until they say, “You know what? Fuck water. I’m going back to the casino. We have towels there, and our odds of winning are better.”

This is like, say, if there was a protest by PETA, and the police came to break it up by throwing cats at them. “This is a legal order to disperse!” Raawr! “You must leave the area immediately!” Mrowwl! “Sir, the protesters are deploying countermeasures, they have balls of yarn!” “Hmm...get me that big tomcat named Pepper, we’ll see how they like it when he sprays!”

This whole situation shows that we as a people can no longer effectively stop large, powerful corporations like the oil industry from doing whatever the hell they want to us and our land. They determine public policy, and they have lawmakers and law-enforcement to back them up. They aren’t even afraid of lawsuits and litigation from this tribe, and this tribe is called the Sue! Sure, they spell it ‘Sioux’, not ‘Sue’, but everybody knows the Sioux were the most litigious of all the tribes. The Apache were the most renowned warriors, but the Sioux were legendary litigators. Man, they were a formidable legal opponent. Their raiding party would ride silently into settlements under cover of the night, and as the settlers awoke, they would hit them all at once...with subpoenas.They were ruthless; issuing restraining orders, ‘cease and desist’ orders, and injunctions (I think that’s actually where the offensive slur injun comes from; injunction).

Then they would tie them up. In court. For years. Led by the great Sioux warrior, Red Tape. They still talk about the greatest Sioux leader, Chief Council, and his partner in the firm, Running Billable Hours. The Sioux were the tribe that successfully negotiated a class-action settlement against the Iroquois League over faulty tomahawks, and they are the tribe that got the zoning variance for the Grand Canyon. They were also, by most accounts, the nation’s first litigators to use peyote to consult a Spirit Guide during jury selection, but Alan Dershowitz later perfected the technique. It’s sad how little of this you learn in school these days.

But take heart! As I write this, an estimated 2,100 U.S. military veterans were bound for the frozen Standing Rock reservation to aid and support the Sioux and their allies battling the oil baron villains. Maybe I was wrong, it looks like there are a whole hell of a lot of Lone Rangers riding to the rescue. Of course, Tonto was really running the show.

If anyone was offended by any of this, please don’t Sioux me.

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