VIDEO: Wasted Space Release John Wick-Themed Video for ‘The First Time We Met’ – Broadway World

New York-natives Wasted Space has released their hard-hitting, new video "The First Time We Met." The chaotic, post-hardcore track is pulled from the group's recently released EP Never Odd Or Even, which dropped earlier this spring. The band is also currently on tour to support the 4-track EP. Despite the heavy topics that the track addresses, the video for "The First Time We Met" brings out a more lighthearted side of the three-piece.

The three-piece group shares of the track, "The song is about the haunting feeling of depression and anxiety, the music video is a spoof on John Wick where 'Bones' has come to kill us all for some unexplained reason. A little funny backstory is Bones is our lead singer's 'roommate' who he makes fun little skits for TikTok and Instagram with. Often these skits include some kind of mischief on Matt's part to the detriment of Bones so anyone following the band knows that there is a dispute between the two."

While the track is heavily marked by vocalist Matthew Lupkin's intricate, doom-filled delivery, "The First Time We Met" video brings a comical narrative to the forefront of the visual with a John Wick-inspired theme. Displaying their hilarious attitudes and DIY roots, the band is met with inevitable ruin and destruction as Lupkin comes face to face in a shoot-out with Bones. Despite taking on a more humorous tone, "The First Time We Met" effortlessly delivers a swift punch to the gut through groovy guitar riffs and echoing drums.

Based out of Buffalo, NY, Wasted Space brings groovy riffs, solid rhythms, and thought-provoking lyrics to the forefront of their releases.

Wasted Space is the group's interpretation of humanity and its steady decline, as they reflect the overwhelming sense of nihilism and cynicism that is imposed on society by the direction of the world and the people who inhabit it. The only way forward is to throw your hands up and embrace the chaos, hopefully with a smile.

Their latest release, Never Odd Or Even, and their new video for "The First Time We Met" are both currently available.

Watch the new music video here:

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VIDEO: Wasted Space Release John Wick-Themed Video for 'The First Time We Met' - Broadway World

America’s heart of darkness: Making sense of the nonsensical allure of MAGA – Salon

The Republican-MAGA movement's reactionary agenda is clear enough. But the deeper motivations of many Trump supporters, at least beneath their absurd and offensive stated beliefs, is much less so.

What we might call the Great Demolition plot includes establishing a corporate oligarchy, a neo-feudalist regime based on long-term minoritarian rule and a malevolent pseudo-Christian theocracy undergirded by state thuggery and social authoritarianism, all of it infused with an incoherent ideological blend of anarchic libertarianism (on guns and most forms of regulation) and fascistic nightmare (white supremacy, antisemitism and numerous grades of conspiracy theory).

Millions of Americans support this regressive and oppressive agenda, but their views are not identical or monolithic: There are the probably well-meaning but horribly misguided Joe and Jane Average, the bloodthirsty fascists, the apoplectic culture warriors, the scheming plutocrats, the uniformed sadists, the gun-radical civilians, the Christian nationalists and "Dominionists," the QAnon believers, the con artists and grifters, the conformists, the deeply traumatized and the profoundly misinformed. All understand themselves to be "patriots," of course.

Clearly, there is a wide spectrum of motivations, beliefs, personalities, interests and objectives, intensity of conviction and degree of lunacy among these mistaken millions. But how can one account for this herd-like descent into paranoia, cultish-nihilistic rage against reality, and proliferation of sociopathic behaviors? A general answer is that extreme beliefs bear little if any connection with the object they purport to discuss. They stem from complex and often subterranean interplay between biological forces (such as neural-hormonal wiring or gender), constructed biographies (whether individual or collective), economic interests, one's sense of belonging and social networks, and "belief formation," meaning the cognitive, affective and behavioral dynamics of decision-making.

What is behind crazy beliefs? Craziness, in one form or another. Crazy beliefs result from dysfunctions and toxicity that, in many individuals, generate unbearable anguish. A more specific answer, then, is that fear plays a central role in individual devolution and mass indoctrination. As Corey Robin points out, fear has a social history. It is a political feeling, the raison d'tre and oldest manipulation tactic of repressive groups and regimes. Many Americans suffer from fear, derived from multiple poisoned sources. Desperate and despondent, they lash out through nihilism, tribalism and rhetorical or actual violence.

Fear has been part of the human experience since time immemorial. From Howard Sackler's screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's 1953 film "Fear and Desire":

There is a war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist unless we call them into being. This forest then, and all that happens now is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time but have no other country but the mind.

Britain and the United States, to cite the obvious examples, were able to develop generally successful and more or less democratic governments over time because powerful potential enemies were far away, while internal dissenters often emigrated or were crushed. Historically, this included Roman Catholics in the U.K. and anarchists, socialists, Black radicals and other political dissidents in the U.S. In America's case, two vast oceans allowed for safety from external invasion and also for considerable social, individual and ideological diversity. Yet after the traumas of 9/11, the war on terror, the Great Recession, the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan and the COVID pandemic, Americans reacted as many other peoples have done before them, sliding downward into mass intolerance and violence.

That included the wholesale and largely unquestioned surrender of supposedly cherished freedoms through emergency laws and mass surveillance; extrajudicial kidnapping, torture and imprisonment; new forms of unconventional warfare (i.e., drones) waged against civilians and militants alike; and an enormous consolidation of power in the presidency and the executive branch. All of this went along with military adventurism, political radicalization and polarization, and an upsurge of magical beliefs and both mental and physical health crises, including opioid addictions, obesity and suicide.

After 20 years of mismanaged war in the Middle East, the U.S. finds itself in a situation disturbingly similar to Weimar Germany: disaffected veterans, militarized police, and right-wing radicalism converging with "mainstream" conservatism.

Fear is also inflamed through the national obsession with world domination, military power, militarized culture and gun idolatry. Historian Kathleen Belew, author of "Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,"argues that each modern U.S. war was followed by a significant increase in domestic radicalism, white supremacy activism and paramilitary agitation. After 20 years of brutally mismanaged war in the greater Middle East, the U.S. finds itself in a situation disturbingly similar to Weimar Germany in 1919: With a relatively large and often disaffected veteran population (think of Timothy McVeigh), growing fascist penetration of the police and the military, increasingly militarized police forces, and armed militias (akin to the Freikorps in Germany) assaulting the legal-constitutional order. Right-wing radicalism has begun to converge with "mainstream" conservatism, fueled by a proliferation of entrepreneurs of chaos and the widespread cult of guns.

Fear also comes from the economy: Since the 1980s, economic survival has continued to demand more expensive degrees, longer working hours and greater productivity. Increasing financial pressure on individuals, families and communities has weakened the middle class by raising the costs of education, health care and real estate, and undermining wages, job security and organized labor. Americans fear exploitation and intimidation in the workplace, and also fear loss of status, health coverage and retirement pension. What's more, they fear each other, and not entirely without reason a factor that helps explain the proliferation of guns. (This is nearly identical to the classic "security dilemma" of international relations theory.)

Global economic forces subject Americans to the rule of the unaccountable one percent, the whims of the FIRE corporations (finance, insurance and real estate) and the condescension and pandering of their lackeys in both political parties. Workers tough it out while the masters of the new Gilded Age buy politicians, lawmakers, judges, think tanks, media outlets and experts; corrupt and exploit the skewed tax system; flout the law and the public interest (no major executive was incarcerated for the 2008 Great Recession); and corrupt the public spirit. To say that the system is rigged, as critics on both the left and right proclaim, is nowhere near adequate.

Abandoned by corporate Democrats, in 2016 the (white) working and middle classes turned in desperation toward an arsonist leading a gang of saboteurs. Their rage resulted from their dysfunctional context; their radicalization was a reaction against structural injustice. Their radical politics may be understood, in part, as a desperate reaction against despair. As Hannah Arendt wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" about 1930s fascism, "the masses' escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they're forced to live.... It's a protest against the real conditions of existence."

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Male anxiety and overcompensation have further befouled this witches' brew. Dominant models of American personhood, and especially manhood, are rooted in stereotypes of heroism, self-reliance, stoicism, greed, athleticism and competitive vigor, not to mention heterosexuality. Reality appears somewhat different, as the hard right is characterized by panic, emotional incontinence, unhinged rage and homicidal schadenfreude. (Of course I mean Donald Trump, but consider also Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Ingraham, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, etc.)

Archetypes of manliness are grotesquely distorted by far-right online "communities" of gamers, "incels" and white supremacists, and entirely too many women who embrace a cartoonish vision of masculinity and denigrate feminism. Anguished "conservatives" and "patriots" are incensed by women's progress, the evolution of gender mores and increasing acceptance of a wide range of LGBTQ+ identities. They are simultaneously insecure and arrogant, fragile and bellicose. Their aggressive bombast and misogyny only serves to reveal the compensatory role played by performative toxic masculinity in lessening their inner turmoil and re-establishing a vague semblance of psychic safety.

There is a continuum that encompasses run-of-the mill misogynists, "pick-up artists," men's rights activists, the online manosphere (e.g., MGTOW), extreme gamers, incels, incels who murder women, the alt-right, and activists and politicians who want to strip women of their rights. Male supremacy also feeds white supremacy, as white sexual anguish stokes racial anguish over Black men's virility and fuels the spread of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory.

This shared hostility toward women and minorities springs from recognizable sociopathic traits: entitlement, grievance, raging righteousness, cruelty, and social domination. Many are looking for father figures, authoritarian or even punitive fathers, for unapologetically dominant alpha males (John Wayne, Rambo, Trump, "Top Gun," John Wick) and models on how to be a real man (Jordan Peterson). In April of this year, Tucker Carlson infamously pushed an apocalyptic-messianic "documentary" called "The End of Men" that advocated "testicle tanning," or exposing male genitalia to red light, supposedly to boost testosterone levels, as a form of "bromeopathy."

In his 1897 classic of sociology, "Suicide," mile Durkheim argued that suicide was not a purely individual phenomenon, but was influenced by collective forces. A society that nurtures functional "little platoons" ( la Edmund Burke) and the sound social integration and regulation of individuals helps them cope with the rigors of life. When that kind of integration fails, the result may be what Durkheim called "selfish suicide" (individuals who feel disconnected), while deficient regulation may facilitate "anomic suicide" (when an individual lacks a sense of rules and meaning). On the other hand, too much integration, as in the military or cult movements, can facilitate "altruistic suicide" (self-sacrifice for the group), while excessive regulation may facilitate "fatalistic suicides" (in which someone breaks under the weight of rigid social norms). In other words, unbalanced forms of social cohesion produce specific pathologies. It's not much of a leap to conceive that American society, with its social isolation, incessant consumerism, endless commercial spectacle and social Darwinism, could produce all sorts of alarming compensatory strategies, such as the manic, cultish, bellicose energy of the MAGA faithful.

Indeed, the fear of death whether biological and social is the fear that underpins countless others. As anthropologist Ernest Becker showed in "The Denial of Death," individuals will do almost anything to lessen or forget this primal terror. Trumpers repudiate their loved ones, vilify reason and science, internalize outlandish lies and embrace servitude and mob rule. Cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and amnesia are the ticket into the warm embrace of the tribe, which is both an extension of one's precious ego and a framework for security the basis of Abraham Maslow's pyramid of fundamental human needs.

Furthermore, terror management and grief processing are closely connected. Elizabeth Kbler-Ross famously identified five stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance. Millions of Trumpers grapple with loss and remain stuck at the initial, pain-filled levels of the grieving process: "The COVID virus is a myth, I am in control" (denial); "Mask mandate is Nazism and/or communism" (anger); "Dr. Fauci stole my life" (anger and depression); "If I take vitamin D, I won't be affected" (bargaining). They take longer to move toward acceptance, if that ever happens: "I will wash my hands and keep a safe distance." David Kessler, a foremost expert on grief and close collaborator of Kbler-Ross, added a sixth stage: seeking meaning. But actual meaning can only come after an acceptance of reality. Delusional sense-seeking is what happens when individuals and groups short-circuit the process, skip healthy grieving and rush into compensatory worlds.

The fear of economic exploitation, violence, political sclerosis, loneliness and death is easy enough to understand. Yet another fear torments Americans: fear of freedom.

The fear of economic exploitation, violence and war, institutional or political sclerosis, solipsism and death is easy to understand. Yet another fear secretly torments many Americans: fear of freedom, or rather fear of the charges and duties that responsible freedom entails. Erich Fromm, in his study of Nazism "Escape From Freedom," explains that the rigors of freedom create considerable anxiety in many individuals, who seek to lessen stress through three mechanisms: destructiveness, conformity with (and submission to) the group, and seeking refuge in an authoritarian movement that seems to offers direction and meaning. Today, the mainstream, conventional American sense of self is self-centered, entitled and inauthentic; and therefore also insecure and hyper-vigilant, aggrieved and bellicose. An epidemic of narcissism and unmoored subjectivity that cuts across generations, races, genders, sexual orientations, classes and political affiliations has fed the current crisis. Irritable individual sovereignty, freed from any sense of responsibility, helps many Trumpers indulge their narcissism, intellectual laziness and conformity.

Indeed, willful ignorance is key here. In 1546, John Heywood, perhaps inspired by Jeremiah 5:21, wrote: "There are none so blind as those who will not see." Self-indulgence mixes with the old populist mystique of practical knowledge and vocational skills to feed the fear and hatred of analytical culture and critical thinking and the particularly demanding form of freedom it offers.

As Richard Hofstadter remarked some 60 years ago, anti-intellectualism and paranoia are American traditions embedded in the national experience. In his 1963 classic "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," heargues that intellectuals and experts are viewed as "pretentious, conceited, effeminate, and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive" and un-American. Historically, the American glorification of the "common man" tends to feed demagoguery, favors the lowest common denominator and fuels self-absorption, religious fundamentalism and suspicion of the experts and other Others. It is Jacksonian democracy run amok. Mangled English and a smug ignorance (of science, history, the world, legitimate sources of knowledge) become evidence of one's authenticity (Trump, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush) and good character. Hostility toward critical knowledge is also a form of revolt against the Enlightenment, against an ideal of truth that demands questioning one's ego, one's limits, one's safety and one's world. This ontological insecurity feeds paranoia, which Hofstadter defined as "the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy" that characterizes "more or less normal people" throughout American history.

Paranoia is found across historical time and space. Its American avatar harks back to medieval Christian millenarianism and end-time fantasies of destruction and salvation, which Norman Cohn describes as

the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies, systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.

This portrait of medieval lunatics can be applied verbatim to contemporary QAnon believers, Christian nationalists and other "patriots." Trumpism is a charismatic, cultish and nihilistic mass movement that calls for destruction "for them" and salvation "for us." This helps explain why sadism, cruelty and sheer frenzy run deep in the MAGA circus: they bind the mob together toward mass cruelty and some apocalyptic showdown. Charisma replaces common sense. As Bret Stephens writes about the decay of moderate conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic: "Where there is sense, there is not much charisma; when there is charisma, there is almost no sense."

Trumpist zealots converge on style and substance, while their goals and deeper motivations remain diverse. Many Trumpers are not fearful at all, but arrogant, domineering and coldly conniving. Others the sour, surly, and surreal specimens whom Jordan Klepper interviews regularly demonstrate the truth of the adage that "there are limits to human intelligence but no limits to human stupidity." Others, like the morally flexible evangelicals, use the "Cyrus the Great" rationalization (Isaiah 41:2-4, 45:1-3) to proclaim that Trump, though imperfect, was anointed by God because he delivered their most cherished goals. Millions of others spurred by anguish are riding along in the bacchanal, serving as the useful idiots and shock troops for the Pied Pipers, princes and principalities (Ephesians 6:12) of Trumpistan.

Read more

on why millions of Americans still love #45

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America's heart of darkness: Making sense of the nonsensical allure of MAGA - Salon

The MFA Novel and the Mystery Box – Patheos

If youve picked up a volume of literary fiction in the past decade or sopreferably one that drew favorable coverage in the New York Review of Books or snuck its way onto the Man Booker longlistyoure probably already familiar with the phenomenon of the MFA novel. Strictly speaking, of course, one does not need to have the degree to write such a book. It is a matter of style and tone rather than a rigid descriptor, reflecting the distinctive mode of writing selected for by both elite educational institutions and an increasingly insular publishing ecosystem.

The MFA novel is typically brief rather than epic, loath to channel the experiences of anyone beyond the author herself. Its plot is wispy and ill-defined, with its meandering storylines periodically punctuated by episodes of bad sex, substance abuse, reflections on the allure of suicide, gazes into the abyss of social media, and ruminations on impending climate apocalypse. One thinks of Sally Rooney, Lauren Oyler, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jenny Offill, and countless othersall very talented writers, to be clear, but all engaged in very similar projects. The dominant sensibility of the MFA novel is what Elif Batuman described in 2010 as an impulse to make literature into an unhappiness contest, or an unhappiness-entitlement contest.

The influence of the MFA novelor, more precisely, the style of storytelling it exemplifieshas spread far beyond bookstore shelves and culture websites. Perhaps most notably, its a sensibility that shows up across the various streaming video series usually classed as prestige TV. How else to classify the moody, shoegazy character studies that constitute HBOs I May Destroy You, or Amazon Primes Fleabag, or Hulus The Bear?

Batuman and plenty of other writers have criticized this turn in storytelling for its self-doubt, its chic nihilism, and its parochialism. But perhaps theres a deeper issue in play here.

In a kind of enantiodromia, the ubiquity of the MFA novel and its mixed-media progeny may have produced and cemented the dominance of an opposite form of storytelling: the mystery-box narrative. Despite its near-omnipresence throughout popular culture, this kind of story is only rarely recognized as such. Or, perhaps, that is precisely why it remains so invisible.

Famously associated with film director J.J. Abrams, the mystery-box narrative launches the reader or viewer into the story in medias res, with the protagonists context and circumstances left deliberately unclear. As the story unfolds, the hero or heroine learns more about his or her own background, and about the rules and internal logic of the universe around them.

Abramss own work, of course, is suffused with this approach. Tasked with crafting the seventh Star Wars film, Abrams opens that movie by declining to explain precisely how the galaxy tipped from its post-Return of the Jedi equilibrium back into open warfare. He leaves his heroines parentage ambiguous, shuffles the beloved Luke Skywalker almost entirely offscreen, and makes his archvillain a smoke-shrouded figure of unclear significance. Whereas in 1977, George Lucas felt the need to spell out backstory in a lengthy title crawl, here the opening crawl serves primarily to obfuscate.

All of this, of course, is calculated to generate that most elusive of reactions: solid word-of-mouth and fan engagement. For popular movies and shows, vast fan communities now stretch across the internet, generating massive Reddit threads and page after page of dedicated messageboards devoted to speculating about plot points. Creators now know that split-second allusions to obscure elements of lorethe enormous corpus of backstory generated by decades-old franchiseswill be obsessed over for years by super-fans. A prime example of this is the TV show Westworld, which has derived most of its punch from its heavy reliance on asynchronous timelines as a source of mystery, and that regularly sparks feverish online debate.

The mystique of the mystery box has come to dominate pop culture. Just consider the near-maniacal fear of spoilers that overtakes the internet upon release of a much-anticipated genre film. This concern is historically novel: years ago, film trailers would lay out the movies entire plot, including the endinga choice that didnt deter audiences from showing up. The element of surprise, in other words, wasnt the only element that mattered.

And what happens when the other elements start to drop out? In the work of fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson, mystery-box storytelling reaches its apex. The Stormlight Archive, Sandersons as-yet-unfinished magnum opus, painstakingly unspools its story across a series of colossal, thousand-page volumesvolumes that would be virtually unreadable, if Sanderson didnt artificially generate plot momentum by withholding crucial background information from the reader.

As the Archive develops, its two lead characters slowly drift through the events of a fantastical world, picking up scraps of knowledge about the cataclysm that rocked their cosmos long ago and repristinating elements of pre-cataclysm wisdom. Protagonists spend page after page brooding over their own uncertainty, as they puzzle out the mysteries around themmysteries that readers know will eventually be disclosed, when the author finally deems it convenient. But properly speaking, the internal logic of the narrative doesnt demand this drip-feed of backstory, leaving the mystery increasingly feeling like an excuse for bad pacing. Indeed, if the rules and backstory of Sandersons fictional universe were laid out in a couple of pages, the justification for the series sheer bulk would collapse: Sandersons prose and character development, considered apart from the mystery-box milieu, arent especially strong. (Contrast this approach with J.R.R. Tolkien, who had no qualms about spelling out the logic of his legendarium from the outset, or Patrick Rothfuss, whose novels have a reverse-whodunit structure focused on how a foregone outcome will be achieved.)

The strange reality of contemporary American fiction, irrespective of medium, is that the MFA novel and the mystery-box narrative exist as a kind of cultural yin and yangone ubiquitous in high culture and the other in popular entertainment, with each serving as a foil to the other. In the MFA novel, plot is nothing, a dclass distraction from the virtuosity of the style and the nuances of the characters (or politics) on display. In the mystery-box narrative, plot is everything; stories become an interlocking mass of Chekhovs guns and internal cross-references, where the greatest imaginable sin is a plot hole or a failure to stick the landing.

Despite their differences, though, these two currents share a common root. The singular virtue that both modes of storytelling select for is a kind of technical competencefor the MFA novel, the proficiency of a well-chosen phrase or memorable personality, and for the mystery-box narrative, the skill of revealing just enough information to keep the consumer hooked. Altogether out of view is whether a story corresponds to any kind of essential truth or universal experience. Rather, for the MFA novel, what matters is that a story captures someones truth; for the mystery-box narrative, truth is merely internal coherence.

In the end, both tendencies reflect a loss of faitha loss of faith in storytelling as a means of access to anything beyond bare contingency. And yet it seems to me that the stories that linger are those penned by authors confident in their ability to say something true. Those creators might be wrong, but at least they are audacious enough to trust that their vision of the world can speak for itself.

Without that faith, a far gloomier, more forgettable media landscape awaits.

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The MFA Novel and the Mystery Box - Patheos

The Nihilism of the Left – VDHs Blade of Perseus

Victor Davis HansonAmerican Greatness

The last 14 months have offered one of the rare occasions in recent American history when the hard Left has operated all the levers of federal government. The presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the permanent bureaucratic state are all in progressive hands. And the result is a disaster that is uniting Americans in their revulsion of elitists whose crazy ideas are tearing apart the fabric of the country.

For understandable reasons, socialists and leftists are usually kept out of the inner circles of the Democratic Party, and especially kept away from control of the country. A now resuscitated Bernie Sanders for most of his political career was an inert outlier. The brief flirtations with old-style hardcore liberals such as George McGovern in 1972 and Mike Dukakis in 1988 imploded the Democratic Party. Their crash-and-burn campaigns were followed by corrective nominees who actually won the presidency: Southern governors Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Such was the nations innate distrust of the Left, and in particular the East Coast elite liberal. For nearly half a century between the elections of John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, it was assumed that no Democratic presidential candidate could win the popular vote unless he had a reassuring Southern accent.

How did the extreme Left manage its rare takeover of the country between 2018 and 2020? Certainly, Obamas election helped accelerate the woke movement and energized identity politics. One could also argue over the political opportunities in 2020 following the devastation of COVID-19.

In the long term, the medicine of lockdowns and quarantines probably proved more calamitous than the disease, and this crisis mode made doable what had once been unimaginable. State governors such as Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and Andrew Cuomo did not let the pandemic crisis go to waste. It was a rare occasion to leverage agendas that otherwise had no public support in ordinary times.

In the chaos of 2020, both laws and customs were altered or scrappedchanging the very way we vote. Over 102 million ballots were either mailed in or cast during so-called early votingstrangely resulting in far lower rejection rates in most states than in past normal years of predominantly in-person voting on Election Day. Indeed, in just one year, Election Day went from an American institution to an afterthought.

The hatred of Donald Trump prompted an influx of hundreds of millions of dark dollars from Silicon Valley to supplant the responsibilities of registrars in key precincts with armies of paid activists. A non compos mentis, basement-bound Joe Biden was cynically given an Ol Joe from Scranton moderate veneer to pursue a calibrated hard-Left agenda.

So Americans ended up with a neo-socialist government. It is proving as disastrous as it is bitterly instructivereminding this generation of Americans what the Left does when it grasps power. As all restraints came off, the hard and now unbridled Left went to work to turn America into something like a looney, one-party California. A wide-open border followed. We may see 3 million illegal aliens cross at the southern border during the first 18 months of the Biden Administration. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been allotted to reward those illegally entering America, who can expect free legal support from the U.S. government to ensure they are not subject to the laws of the United States.

In a sane world, Biden would have been impeached for deliberately destroying the very federal laws he swore to uphold. On the prompt of his hard Left controllers, he was eager to alter the electoral demography of the nation rather than ensure immigrants came in reasonable numbers, legally, with audit and background checks, and safely in a time of a pandemic. The former illegal arrivals were seen as needed constituents, the latter legal immigrants too politically unpredictable.

The Left in about a year has negated American gas and oil independence. Biden, who promised to end Americas use of fossil fuels on his watch, cast adrift millions of his fellow citizens to choose between driving and eating. Much of what the Left had traditionally demonized and wanted gone from American lifefrom gasoline to beefsteak to new pickup trucksbecame so inflated in price as to be nearly unattainable.

The electrician now pays five times more for his wire, the carpenter eight times more for his plywood, the plumber six times more for his pipeas all three have to pay off-the-books cash for rare workers who prefer to get checks from the Biden Administration. The Biden printing press has destroyed both the idea that all citizens will work if there are just good-paying jobs, and that affordable necessities for lifefood, fuel, and shelterform the basis for a middle-class life.

If the Left did all that in 14 months, imagine what it can still do before losing the Congress in 2022.

The Biden Administrations profligate multitrillion-dollar budget, inflation of the currency, de facto zero interest rates, destructive subsidies that undermined labor participation, and incompetence at addressing the supply-chain and clogged port crises will all by midyear likely achieve a 10 percent annualized inflation rate. Carter-era stagflation is on the near horizon.

When an American president predicts a food shortage in what used to be the breadbasket of the world, then we see the wages of socialism in all their unapologetic cruelty. When the Left can scarcely hide its glee that diesel fuel hit $7 a gallon in California, the public is finally seeing that the Bidens, Newsoms, and AOCs of the world care nothing for the real-life consequences of their elite utopian green fantasies. How did America ever stoop to begging communist Venezuela, theocratic Iran, and dictatorial Russia to pump oil for us that we have in abundance but will not produce? Which insane person thought up the idea of using Vladimir Putins Russia as our mediator to restart the Iran Deal?

The now unfettered woke revolution seeks to Trotskyize American history and its heroes. A disastrous foreign policy of appeasement has ended U.S. deterrence. After the worst military humiliation in 50 years in Afghanistan, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all seek to capitalize on a rare American Phaethon moment. The worlds superpower has turned over the reins of its deterrence chariot to a ninny and his gurus. And before crashing the country, they aimlessly rebound from one self-created crisis to the next self-induced disaster.

Aside from the dismal left-wing political record, the public has also witnessed an unapologetically leftwing federal bureaucracy now completely unbound. Our top echelon of the administrative state is defiant in its weaponized assumption of legislative, executive, and judicial powers.

We are learning that the likes of Anthony Fauci have all but destroyed the reputation of once time-honored federal health agencies. In their contradictions, about-faces, and deceit, they focused mostly on controlling their multibillion-dollar public fiefdoms, hounding critics, rewarding sycophants, politicizing science, hiding culpability about routing money to lunatic gain-of-function research in China, and marginalizing outspoken voices of audit.

The military apparat after Afghanistandefined as woke Pentagon functionaries, revolving door and politically weaponized corporate generals, and outspoken politicosmanaged the impossible: a once revered military now cannot even win a 50 percent vote of confidence from the American public.

The intelligence agencies are worse. Former kingpins such as John Brennan and James Clapper, both pundits for hire on leftwing cable networks, lied under oath before Congress without consequences. When 50 retired intelligence officials during the Biden 2020 campaign claimed publicly that Hunters laptop was likely a Russian plot, what then is left of any semblance of nonpartisan professionalism and integrity?

James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Christopher Wray have all eroded the reputation of the FBI by fueling the Russian collusion hoax, the Alfa Bank hoax, and the Hunter laptop disinformation hoax. Since when does the FBI go after journalists in their underwear or moms and dads at school board meetings, as if it is now an extension of the teacher union or DNC?

Along with Robert Muellerwho claimed no knowledge of either the Steele dossier or Fusion GPSthe Washington FBI hierarchy did to the agency what Lois Lerner infamously did to the IRS. Just as Lerner became an extension of the Obama 2012 reelection effort and corrupted tax law, so the FBI descended into becoming the wayward Biden familys retrieval serviceeager to keep quiet Hunters incriminating laptop and to rescue Ashley Bidens lurid diary.

When the evidence becomes overwhelming that the collusionary media lied about the laptop or the origins of COVID-19, there is never a retraction, only a Soviet-style silence about past untruth. And then it is on to the next false narrative.

Add in the conduct of FBI luminaries such as the forger Kevin Clinesmith, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, who preferred to investigate conservatives rather than enemies of the nation. What characterizes, then, our once revered intelligence agencies is not just institutionalized mediocracy. Rather it is a dangerous zeal to enact by fiat politicized agendas that cannototherwise be ratified by a legislative voteall with the expectation that these sanctified agents of political change are above the law and will be rewarded accordingly.

Americans had tuned out many of our major institutions that are now openly hostile to American exceptionalism. In their nihilism, leftists seek to destroy the very organizations they absorbed.

Professional sports? Multimillionaire basketball players are more likely to refuse to salute their own flag than to say a word of dissent to their autocratic and often ethnocentric Chinese paymasters.

Higher education? A Yale law school dean contextualizes the loud disruption of free speech by leftist law students at a conference. Only that way can she ensure that rules about open expression remain theoretical, and not real for the woke.

Entertainment? Hiring, promotions, and awards are now based as much on race, gender, and sexual identity as on merit.

Forty years ago, face slapper Will Smith would likely have been removed from the Oscar ceremonies for rudely shouting and interrupting the worldwide show. Twenty years ago, he might still have been rebuked for profanity and yelling the F-word in a live televised event. Now he is neither arrested nor even removed for physically assaulting comedian Chris Rock. His belated contrition is belied by his refusal to leave the ceremony and to go dancing and partying into the post-assault wee hours. Will there be open brawling on stage next year?

The Left got what it wanted and now controls academia, the media, the internet, K-12 education, corporate boardrooms, the Pentagon, Wall Street, and Hollywood. And they more or less have turned each of these into versions of Pravda. The sermons, arrogance, and narcissism of these woke cultural imperialists now explain why they are disliked as much abroad as they are at home.

In sum, we are watching a rare laboratory experiment in which the traditional American fringe is now in control of the government. In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it. The result is an unmitigated disaster that not only has tarred the Democratic Party, corrupted once-revered agencies, and alienated half the country from our cultural institutions, but now endangers the very health and security of the United States.

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The Nihilism of the Left - VDHs Blade of Perseus

Understanding what drives addiction – The Shillong Times

Editor

I watched a little bit of your YouTube presentation on the drug menace in Meghalaya. Your persistent question on what actually causes addiction was great. But the answers, I thought, were typically modern too scientific and external, more about brain and body in short, covering everything but the soul of the addict especially his loss of inwardness and faith in his powers of self-control. If science alone could explain addiction, then addiction would have been endemic to human nature and visible in all generations. But that is not the case, right? We are not our bodies, and certainly not our brains alone. Consciousness and the soul cannot be explained in terms of the brain alone.So what makes an individual transition from mere desire, to addiction? I have a different explanation. I think it is the terrible nihilism of our times and its chief consequences which are, loss of inwardness, lack of meaning in life, loss of faith in our powers of self-control, etc. Succumbing to the appetites, without boundaries imposed by self-control, leads to a devastating loss of self a self-prone to self-destructiveness.We all have desires. But we do not become addicts. Many young people have a lot of pain in their hearts. Loss of faith and genuine belief in a higher being, makes them deal with pain through addictive forms of self-destruction. Human nature, unless redeemed by self-control, is self-destructive.So maybe we need more than just sympathy. Here in Northwest Indiana I see this regime of sympathy (nothing else) as really devastating to the recovery process. Recovering addicts, I am sure, have more faith in therapy than in themselves. This is a tragedy of modernity unruly passions leading to addiction, whether to substances or to therapy.As you can see, I feel strongly about this topic. Although untrained in therapy, I wish I were there in person, to speak directly to young addicts. Medication helps, but only to some extent. It cannot tame the passions or bring about dispassion. It cannot give self-control. At best, it controls the physical effects of the devastating mental state of the addict.Thank you for doing this important work,

Yours etc.,

Deepa Majumdar

Via email

Editor,

The daily load shedding of two hours by Meghalaya Energy Corporation Limited (MeECL) is pushing us to the dark ages. When there is a power failure, mobile internet gets halted. It brings a lot of inconvenience to people, particularly the ones who are working from home for private companies. When there is darkness, one can buy candles or even have a solar light. However, when there is no connectivity, the only solution will be to get an inverter that not all can afford. We hope that the Power Department will empathise with what the citizens are going through and resolve the issue at the earliest.

Yours etc.,

Genia Dohling,

Shillong 3

Editor,

It is with great distaste and disgust that I am writing this letter, to let the public know of the prevailing covid scare in NEHU, Shillong. We are all aware of the VC testing Covid positive post Yoga Day events after which many students from the same Yoga Day celebrations have developed symptoms and have been asked to get tested. My niece too had been feeling unwell and we, hailing from Silchar, Assam have been at our wits end on how to offer our support given the recent deluge in the Barak Valley. Her parents, my brother, in particular has not even been told of the prevailing situation in NEHU due to his hypertension. What compels me to write this letter is, how can a university in the 21st century and with the reputation of being North Easts highest seat of learning have a leader with utmost disregard for Covid protocols and social distancing? If he was symptomatic and had been feeling unwell, with what state of mind did he attend the Yoga Day observance by putting at risk the lives of hundreds of students and indirectly making their families suffer too during the already tense times of flooding and property losses? It appears that a photo-ops is more important for the VC instead of making sure that his students who have no access to humongous reimbursements and hospital care which Central Government officials are used to, are not exposed to the risk of Covid.This is a total administrative failure on the part of NEHU to deal with the pandemic which is far from over. When students are asked to return negative RT-PCR results when returning to hostels, why cant the Vice-Chancellor not be asked for the same given his country-trotting escapades as reported in different media? I think the entire system of Covid handling, especially of NEHU and the State Government needs a relook given this disastrously cataclysmic approach of a VIP Centric Covid culture.

Yours etc.,

A Deka

Silchar, Assam.

Read more:

Understanding what drives addiction - The Shillong Times

Lupe Fiasco’s "DRILL MUSIC IN ZION" is a discourse on capitalism and nihilism – EARMILK – EARMILK

After gifting us the thought-provoking and playful "AUTOBOTO" featuring singer Nayirah, Lupe Fiasco continues the salvo with yet another mind-blowing single titled "DRILL MUSIC IN ZION". The title track from his forthcoming album, however, doesn't share the same soundscape as the genre included in the title. Instead, it's made up of cinematic jazz textures provided by his in-house producer Soundtrakk. Atop airy, somber horns, moody strings, and punchy boombap-style drums, Lupe weaves intricate rhyme patterns threaded by his bird's eye view account of how rotten the modern world is. The first verse deals directly with consumerism and the lack of principle over profit in this day and age where money is worshipped. This can also be summarized by the following lines

"Somebody's daughter is contemplating the conventBut a man with a dollar is slobbering for her haunches"

The second verse follows the story of a wrongful execution while the real killer goes scot-free basking in the euphoria of a failed justice system. Lupe again watches from afar like the eponymous Watcher (from the Marvel universe), contemplating and hoping that justice gets served. He closes the song with the third verse which is just 4 bars long where he reminds us that we are mere mortals whose choices have domino effects.

"DRILL MUSIC IN ZION" is the title track from Lupe's next album, also titledDRILL MUSIC IN ZION. The product of a burst of thoughtful spontaneity,Lupecreated the new album over a short period, diving into a folder of beats sent bySoundtrakkand emerging with a fully-realized album in just three days

Buy/Stream "DRILL MUSIC IN ZION"

Pre-orderDRILL MUSIC IN ZION

Check out full details about "LFT" at Henka.io

Connect with Lupe Fiasco:Twitter|Instagram|Facebook|Spotify

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Lupe Fiasco's "DRILL MUSIC IN ZION" is a discourse on capitalism and nihilism - EARMILK - EARMILK

Why are these summer books indebted to an Austrian author of nihilistic rants? – Los Angeles Times

On the Shelf

Hot Thomas Bernhard Summer

If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

The name Thomas Bernhard appears in the jacket copy and pre-publication reviews of three novels out this summer, and its not a coincidence. Within the Bernhardian universe, one jacket opines; narrated by the love child of Thomas Bernhard and Lydia Davis, reads another. An early review of the third calls it a straight-up approximation of the style associated with the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard.

Its an odd selling point, only more so in our attention-deficit era. Bernhard was a monologist fueled by energetic misanthropy, disgust and vitriol. Sentences go on for pages. The narrators of his novels usually describe the plight of a close friend who, after laboring on an artistic endeavor for years, has recently ended it all. Bernhard, who was disgusted by his native countrys hypocrisy and its complicity in the Holocaust, died in 1989 at age 58; his will forbade stagings of his plays or publication of his work in Austria.

Despite his difficulty in text and in life, we find ourselves in the summer of Bernhard. Jordan Castros debut novel, The Novelist, published two weeks ago, not only mentions Bernhard on its jacket but also references one of his books in the text. Mark Habers second novel, Saint Sebastians Abyss, out last month, is the closest to a straightforward homage. Emily Halls debut, The Longcut, also published in May, follows an artist who wonders what my work was on a meandering walk to visit a gallerist.

Each of the three books could be described as a Bernhardian rant, or in some cases a diatribe, centered on the creation and purpose of art. Marked by lengthy monologues, emphatic hatefulness and a disgust with modern life, they pay implicit tribute to a writer whose influence seems only to grow with the decades.

Bernhard himself would have hated an investigation into his effect on contemporary fiction. Thanks to several Twitter accounts that post Bernhard quotations daily, I am reminded that he wrote: I hated literary theories more than anything in my life, but most of all I hated so-called theories about the novel.

His closest modern-day adherents share some of that aversion to the bland and condescending formulas taught in many writing graduate programs. I had come out of an MFA program, and it felt very much like this is what you have to do, Hall told me from her home in Queens, New York.

So Hall cast about for other ideas. I was bored out of my mind, she recalls. I was in Three Lives bookstore in New York, and I picked Bernhards Concrete off a table. Right, I thought, the guy with no paragraph breaks. But when I read it, I realized all the things I thought were my flaws the digressing, the self-contradiction in Bernhard that was the writing. I got very excited.

The Bernhard vogue likely traces back to the early 2000s, when Viking reissued a number of his books, sparking interest among Anglophone readers especially in his later novel The Loser. Though all 13 of his novels have now been released in English, there is still plenty of untranslated material among his countless plays, novellas, stories and memoirs. In October, Seagull Press will publish The Rest Is Slander, a collection of five previously untranslated stories.

Years later, Hall is so inspired by his work that she has been trying to learn German. I wonder what is lost in translation, she said.

Her admiration has drawn her into a cohort of like-minded writers. Hall has spoken about the influence of Jen Craig, who is frequently compared to Bernhard. Reached by video in Australia, Craig said that following Bernhard means learning to break the rules.

He gives you the plot on the first page, Craig said. Once thats out of the way, you can write everything else, everything that cant be described by plot. Craig is the author of Since the Accident and Panthers and the Museum of Fire. Since the Accident is out of print, and Panthers was published by a small press, so Craigs work is shamefully under the radar. I discovered Panthers at my local bookstore on the shelf of staff recommendations. The little note under the book read, for fans of Thomas Bernhard.

At first, I was a bit self-conscious at there being a link between me and this obscure, possibly misogynist, excessive writer, Craig said, of the frequent comparisons to Bernhard. But now I dont care. Im glad. For me, Bernhard is all about realism. I dont think many think of him as a realist, but coming out of graduate school, so much of the idea of writing was about theme and plot and content. That stuff is so bogus. The ranting ... thats reality to me.

Because Bernhards style is so uniquely his, I wondered whether being associated with him was anxiety-inducing to these writers.

One of the things Im interested in is dispelling the myth of spontaneous creation, Castro said. We learn through imitation, and we have this myth of the self-made artist. Im always wearing my influences on the proverbial sleeve. Theres a part in my book when the narrator says you learn guitar by playing other peoples songs.

Castros book is about a novelist who sits down to write and does anything but. Finally, veering off into a rant about a frenemy propels him to write: I suddenly felt an exhilarating burst of energy ... I could write a novel where I just talked s about Eric; I could write my own version of [Bernhards] Woodcutters.

Castros novel is the only one of this summers Bernhardian books that mentions the author explicitly, but all bear his stamp even as they vary widely in subject and tone. Habers Saint Sebastians Abyss, is narrated by a man on his way to visit friend and colleague Schmidt on his deathbed; the two have made their careers obsessing over a single work by a fictional Syphilitic painter, Count Hugo Beckenbauer.

The style, the myopic sentences: I realized I could use those to tell the stories I wanted to tell, said Haber, speaking from Houstons Brazos Bookstore, where he is the operations manager. His ghost is ever present, but I dont think Ill ever get to the quality of his sentences. I like to think that my books are sillier; I dont think Bernhard would write a holy donkey.

Many other writers have been compared to Bernhard or spoken about his influence on their work, including Mauro Javier Crdenas, Claudia Pieiro and the late Rafael Chirbes. But Bernhards influence, though wide-ranging, is still a bit of a secret. For fun, I entered Bernhards The Loser into the generator website, What Should I Read Next? The answer was more Bernhard.

Perhaps its a good thing we havent yet made too much of the Bernhard boom. The prospect of his style being too widely (and inevitably poorly) imitated is grotesque. How far and how bad does this go? Hall asked. Does Bernhards style become an MFA staple?

This summers writers have learned from Bernhards ruthless approach to plot and to what the novel can be without losing their own voices in the process; thats a much better legacy than a flotilla of junky imitators. Influences are a series of permissions, Craig said.

I felt relief when I realized Bernhard was always writing about the same thing, Hall said. Theres always this idea that you have to do something different with each book, reinvent the wheel. Craig said something analogous: Popular novels now are more about something: a historical period or figure: Today, as a novelist you have to become an expert rather than a writer.

All four writers were thrilled to get a chance to talk not only about their work but also Bernhards; our conversations felt like the tail end of an Irish wake. Haber and I reveled in the abundant contradictions within even a single Bernhard sentence. His novel pays tribute to this in the letter Schmidt sends to his friend, reading all nine pages of his relatively terse email.

Castro and I laughed over the episode of Schopenhauers dog in Concrete, a passage so funny we had to interrupt our partners bedtime routines to read it to them. Theres such a glee there, Castro said. Its not being straightforwardly pessimistic.

This appears to be the key to understanding Bernhard: Not his depressiveness but his joy. He wrote, Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death, Hall said. If you start there, everything is funny. The warmth in annihilation isnt lost on Haber, either. To write, you have to have some sense of hope, otherwise why would you write? There are dark ideas in Bernhard, but his writing is energetic and life-affirming. It comes from a place of deep affection.

Above all, this distinctive crop of summer reads is Bernhardian in its focus on the struggle to create art, which is for the artist an existential question. I thought I would choke on the error of believing that literature was my hope, Bernhard writes in My Prizes: An Accounting. That choking is prolific. But the heart of that statement is what makes his work, for all its nihilism, continually galvanizing in itself and in its acolytes.

Ferris most recent book is Silent Cities: New York.

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Why are these summer books indebted to an Austrian author of nihilistic rants? - Los Angeles Times

Crashing Confidence: The Dallas Fed Reveals All – The Epoch Times

News analysis

July Fourth is always a bittersweet holiday, a time to reflect on the grand ideals of the founding of American independence. But this year it will once again be impossible to believe that those ideals are still with us as a governing principle, at least not consistently, not even predominantly, certainly not right now.

To summarize the current problem, the nation decided to turn against those ideas of freedom and rights in the name of virus control (a model mysteriously copied from the praxis of the Chinese Communist Party) and thereby unleashed at home the very tyrannies that our ancestors fought so hard to establish as a permanent feature of American life.

And we are paying the price in the worst way now. They shut down nearly the whole of the American economyas if that would be possible without causing egregious damageand closed churches and schools. They tried to make up the difference by spending and then printing trillions of dollars, believing somehow that this would not create an eventual calamity.

That calamity is here now, and it is showing up not only in raging inflation but also worker demoralization, cultural nihilism, radical political discontent, and economic dislocation. The most pressing problem right now is satisfying American energy needs but the Biden administration offers no more than wind and airliterally recommending those two means of powering our lives rather than tapping abundant fossil fuel resources.

The incompetence on display daily is truly mind-boggling. As a result, not even our usual July Fourth celebrations can be observed without pressing reminders of how prosperity is being drained away. The typical celebratory parties this year, according to Wells Fargo, are up fully 11 percent over last year. Thats also the real-time rate at which food and beverages are going up in price.

Farm Bureau, according to The Epoch Times, fully expects a 17 percent increase:

The authors of the study assessed many of Americans favorite cookout foods. They found that the price for two pounds of ground beef surged 36 percent to $11.12, two pounds of boneless and skinless chicken breasts jumped 33 percent to $8.99, three pounds of center cut pork chops climbed 31 percent to $15.26, and 32 ounces of pork and beans rose 33 percent to $2.53.

Such a level of inflation has been unknown in the United States for forty years, and it is worse this time because of its longevity. There is no one at the Fed right now with the courage to do what needs to be done, and no one in any policy position within the reigning party will push economic growth over control, enterprise over diktat, or freedom over compliance. For these people in office, command and control is all they know.

We will soon be watching those firecrackers in the sky to celebrate freedom as a principle but it was little over a year ago when many ruling-class voices were dismissing the whole idea and even calling it freedumb. That was surely a turning point in American cultural life, when the people who imagined living out this countrys main ideals were put down as enemies and suspected as possible insurrectionists.

Regardless, the resistance to this unrelenting attack on American ideals is growing and appearing in highly unusual places. One that struck me most recently was the printing of actual truth on the pages of a site run by the Federal Reserve itself.

Some background.

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 with branch banks around the country to give it the appearance of decentralization even though its not true. Those branches survived to this day. Each specializes in a few tasks to give them some reason for existence. Each one has a different character. The Dallas Fed has always had a more conservative bent, leaning more toward tighter money and freer markets.

The Dallas Feds latest survey of manufacturing output sentiment has done the world a service by actually printing comments from businesspeople who answered the survey. Here are some of the choice answers. Its remarkable to me that such sentiments have been printed in this venue.

These comments are not only obviously true. That they appear on a Fed site is stunning and indicative of real revolt happening at all levels of society.

Lets return briefly to the problem listed above, namely that none of this can be fixed anytime soon. We are in for two-and-a-half years of continuing hell. It seems incredible to contemplate. And remember we are talking about responses from Texas, a state that opened earlier than others and has a lower tax burden than most states. Its a state to which people have moved in order to escape the despotism. And yet even here, there is no escape.

After years of this, what will be left of American industry, culture, the labor pool, and optimism generally is hard to know. The tragedy of it all is that the Biden administration really did have a chance to do some good, to bring calm and normalcy to American life. They instead chose some kind of mythical revolutionary path inspired by untested woke ideology hatched in university settings that has nothing to do with real-world longings for liberty and a happy life.

Its best not to let this July Fourth pass without deep reflection on the meaning of the holiday. The ideals of this holiday are not just for the 18th century. They are for the 21st century too. The sooner we see this and act on it, the sooner America can get back to being a light unto the world.

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Crashing Confidence: The Dallas Fed Reveals All - The Epoch Times

‘Roe v. Wade’ is still overturned, and other news too! – The Pillar

Hey everybody,

Roe v. Wade is still overturned, and this is the Tuesday Pillar Post.

Many of you have heard for your entire lives that Roe v. Wade would be eventually overturned. If youre anything like me, you didnt believe it there were too many things that seemed to work against a monumental shift in the American approach to the deeply contentious issue of abortion.

Even in the weeks after a draft decision was leaked, the prospect that Roe would really be struck down seemed just incredible. The odds were too great.

And yet, here we are.

The decision is a long-awaited milestone for the pro-life movement, after decades of effort to legally prohibit the barbarism of abortion.

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Its no overstatement: Dobbs v. Jackson has begun a new chapter in American political life.

What comes next, politically and culturally? I dont know. Neither do you. Dobbs does not make abortion illegal across the United States; it localizes the issue to state legislatures and eventually, to state judiciaries.

Twenty states are unlikely to prohibit or strictly regulate abortion, and almost as many with strict bans set to go in place. That leaves a handful of states where there will be fierce fights over the issue. And, eventually, state laws on abortion - for or against - will face challenges in state courts, with advocates looking to see how judges might interpret state constitutions.

Meanwhile, abortion advocates are becoming less reserved about being just that not pro-choice, but calling themselves explicitly pro-abortion.

At the same time, the political coalitions that brought the U.S. most of the way to this moment have seemed already to be in their last gasps, and there is really no clear picture of what will emerge from a lot of disagreement as the future of American political conservatism, or how that will impact state-by-state pro-life lawmaking.

And, of course, there is a tension in America between the phenomenons of polarized partisanship, on the one hand, and widespread institutional disaffiliation, one the other. And our runaway inflation heightens awareness of economic disparities in America, to say nothing of the vexing problem of access to affordable healthcare, etc etc etc.

It also seems likely that in the next few weeks - as churches and crisis pregnancy centers have already been burned since the Dobbs decision - some incident in some city will become a flashpoint for ugly conflict over abortion.

In the long term, it will be fascinating to watch as state supreme courts take up state laws prohibiting abortion SCOTUS didnt only send abortion to state legislatures, it implicitly sent state laws to the review of state courts, such that we could be gearing up for state-constitution based Roe v. Wade cases in many of the states prohibiting or restricting abortion with all the politicking that goes into planning the judicial review of highly contentions issues. The lawyers will have their work cut out for them.

The Church has a role to play in all of that. Catholics will no doubt disagree among ourselves about our role in public and political life going forward. There is a lot to watch, and discuss, and analyze, going forward.

But with all of that said, it seems to me that for the moment, it suffices - and is just - for Catholic Americans to take a moment to offer to the Lord the Te deum, a hymn of praise and thanksgiving.

Last weeks decision will save the actual lives of human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, our creator. Thats worth praising God for, even as the next few weeks and months in America portend real difficulty.

You are God: we praise you;You are God: we acclaim you;You are the eternal Father:All creation worships you.To you all angels, all the powers of heaven,Cherubim and Seraphim, sing in endless praise:Holy, holy, holy, Lord, God of power and might,Heaven and earth are full of your glory.

And if youre going to sing the Te deum, it really ought to be Mozarts composition. Its delightful.

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Most of the news weve published in the past few days has been about the Supreme Courts decision, of course, and here it is:

On Friday, soon after Dobbs v. Jackson was released, we published an interview with Notre Dame law professor Carter Snead about what the decision means, and what it doesnt. If you havent read it yet, start here - Snead has a lot to say worth thinking about.

There was concern as the decision was released that it might lead to acts of vandalism or desecration of Catholic churches and other pro-life spaces across the country. In fact, not much of that has happened. But there have been some: A historic church in West Virginia burned to the ground under apparent arson, there was an attempted arson at a parish in Virginia, a crisis pregnancy center in Colorado went up in flames, another in Virginia was vandalized.

Still - when Dobbs was issued, parishes and churches wanted to be prepared for what might be coming.

We talked with diocesan officials and cathedral rectors in several cities about the kinds of security precautions they put in place as Roe v. Wade was overturned.

And if you want a round-up of what your bishop, and others, had to say about the historic decision, you can find our selection of episcopal statements and reactions right here.

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Heres a report I dont want you to miss:

When the Supreme Court on Friday overturned 50 years of federal abortion protections, demonstrators for and against chanted and waved signs in the streets outside the Court building.

When Dobbs v. Jackson was announced, some people took to prayer, perhaps. Others had more prosaic responses: Talking heads on cable news began pontificating almost immediately, while pro and anti abortion lobbying groups blasted fundraising emails to their supporters

But more than 1,600 miles from Washington, D.C., on a dead-end street in north Denver, Clifton Powell and Floyd Jenkins stood patient and quiet, at the end of a driveway leading into the Planned Parenthood Park Hill Health Center, one of the largest abortion clinics in America.

Its where Floyd and Clifton always stand on Friday mornings.

Floyd and Clifton are sidewalk counselors, who stand outside Planned Parenthood, sometimes in prayer, holding a sign that urges women to change their minds about prospective abortions and, miraculously, they say women often change their minds.

They live in a state with the most permissive set of abortion laws in the country abortion is legal in Colorado, where I live, up until the moment of birth. So Clifton and Floyd said they still be at the clinic five days a week, Dobbs or no Dobbs.

I talked with them, and with pro-life activists, about the significance of sidewalk counselors like them to the pro-life movement.

Give it a read.

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You might have read in recent months about ongoing persecution of Catholics in Nicaragua, where the regime of President Daniel Ortega has no love for the Catholic Church.

One of the countrys most prominent bishops has a uniquely Catholic response to the persecution hes fasting.

The bishop emphasizes that hes not on a hunger strike for political purposes, but on a fast, for spiritual ones.

Edgar Beltrn, a correspondent for The Pillar in Latin America, reports on the Churchs spiritual response to serious persecution in Nicaragua.

Give it a read.

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We told you last week that adding journalist Luke Coppen to The Pillars roster would mean some excellent journalistic coverage of the life of the Church in the United Kingdom and Europe.

Luke started Monday, and has jumped out of the gate with some excellent coverage.

Read here about the English Catholic paradox how it happened that a county with 4 million baptized Catholics has three cardinals three times as many as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where around 35 million Catholics live.

Luke talked with a lot of interesting English Catholics, to ask whether English Catholicism is enjoying a moment of revival, or whether the preponderance of red-hatted Englishmen are just a quirk of history and personalities.

Guys, read this.

Meanwhile, the German bishops conference announced this week that nearly 400,000 Germans formally disaffiliated themselves from Catholicism in 2021 a huge increase from roughly 220,000 who did the same in 2020.

At the same time, the number of Mass-goers in Germany dropped below 1 million, for the first time in as long as anyone can remember.

With an assist on crunching the numbers from Brendan Hodge, Luke took a very interesting look at the declining numbers, their context, and what they might portend for Germanys ongoing Synodal Path.

Take a look.

Also, you might have missed it on Friday what with other big news happening but we were very proud and very excited to announce that longtime British Catholic journalist Luke Coppen has joined The Pillars team as our senior correspondent.

Weve tasked Luke with providing serious, insightful, and important deep-dive coverage into the life of the Church in Europe with some attention to how the European Church impacts things in Rome, and things on the U.S. side of the Atlantic.

Hell also have some other cool projects in the works.

Very few people do the kind of careful, serious, engaging journalism Luke does if you read his initial filings with us, Im sure youll agree.

But we also explained on Friday that hiring Luke is a wager for us.

Growth, we mention a lot, is fueled by subscriptions. And weve had subscription growth in recent weeks - but this year has been slower than last year, and were a few hundred paying subscriptions below where we projected wed be at this time of the year.

Still - weve heard from a lot of you that youd like to see serious, smart, Pillar-style coverage of the UK, of Germany, of Eastern Europe, and beyond. Luke ticks those boxes.

So when he became available, we decided to bring him on board, in faith that the Lord would provide through you.

If youre one of those people urging The Pillar to grow our team well, now were urging you to help us pay for it. Subscribe.

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(Ill stop bugging you about this for a while, I promise.)

Finally, 50 migrants were found dead yesterday in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas. The dead were migrants, being transported to the U.S. in a smuggling operation. There were also fewer than 20 survivors found in the truck, surrounded by the bodies of people who died in the trucks extreme heat - some of the survivors were teenagers.

Pray for the survivors, for the dead, for their families, and for justice.

Heres Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller of San Antonio:

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I went last night to the Bans off our Bodies pro-abortion rally at Colorados state capitol Im calling it pro-abortion because speakers emphasized repeatedly that their movement should own that moniker, and move away from the euphemism of choice.

I live-tweeted my time there, and you can view the entire tweet thread here if you want to:

Heres some impressions

First, Colorado is only one state, and one where abortion is emphatically enshrined in state law, so I dont know how that might impact turnout. The crowd, which seemed to me to be a few thousand, was certainly smaller than the annual state March for Life, held in the same location each January.

There were, of course, some inane remarks I couldnt quite fathom like the speaker who told the crowd that Ours is a life-affirming movement.

And there was the speaker who said that the pro-abortion movement is not going away: We will survive like the viruses that wont quit. We are going to become the dominant variant, she said to cheers from the crowd, without any apparent sense of irony about comparing her movement to a pandemic.

There were also some deeply sad moments, most especially the midwife who told the crowd that she had conducted the pharmaceutical abortion of her own child, and taught other midwives who usually bring life into the world how to facilitate abortions.

Most striking, at least at first, was this installation piece:

Yes, youre seeing that right. Those are, in effigy, the heads of five Supreme Court justices on pikes, on the lawn of Colorados state capitol.

Gruesome? Yes. Foreboding? Maybe. But I must admit, the intended effect of the piece was dampened for me when people posed for selfies with the styrofoam heads, and when the artist urged me to tag her instagram handle if I posted pictures online.

The whole display seemed a bit more like juvenile cosplay than like some serious attempt at intimidation or threat-making.

Justice Neil Gorsuch is the center head, with a poster below him listing an address in Boulder, Colorado where Gorsuch is said to live. The sign even helpfully offers an approximate drive time for those inspired by the head-on-a-pike, and keen to trek up to Boulder.

The only problem? Well, it didnt take very much googling to learn that Gorsuch sold that house in 2017. Pity the person who lives there now.

Of course, the problem with juvenile cosplay about the decapitation of political leaders is that some nut will be inspired to act upon it and there were, milling about, the sort of nuts who seemed like possible candidates.

So this is the kind of unserious thing that must be taken seriously.

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Heres the takeaway from what I saw:

Sure, the protest featured the skewered heads and goofy things like the woman in alb and stole, carrying a sign with a detailed drawing of female anatomy and walking a small dog.

But while I was there, I tried to listen for some kind of common ground with these demonstrators. They care enough about abortion to go to a protest, I figured, and Ive been to many abortion-related protests, so I should at least listen.

I was struck by the crowds distrust for institutions, parties, and the political process. I heard countless people insist they were progressive, but not Democrats, just as I often hear young conservatives say increasingly theyre conservative, but not committed to the Republican party.

Ive also heard many pro-life young people make it a point to insist theyre pro-life, but not Republicans in recent years all hallmarks of the institutional disaffiliation that defines their generation.

On Monday night, few speakers urged the crowd to vote most expressed nihilism, or ambivalence, about the prospects of the political process. When a speaker called democracy a preposterous delusion I thought of the post-liberal energies running now in some Catholic intellectual circles.

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More broadly, the speakers, and the crowd, emphasized their sense of isolation and atomization of lacking cohesive or meaningful human communities.

It frequently seemed to me that speakers were mourning the loss of culture itself lamenting American communities with no cohesive sense of identity, no customs, no continuity, and - as Matthew Crawford would put it - no cultural jigs, by which contours of meaningful and satisfying life are easily understood or attained.

See the article here:

'Roe v. Wade' is still overturned, and other news too! - The Pillar

Todd Haynes on The Velvet Underground: Warhols Factory offered equal opportunity objectification – The Independent

Todd Haynes was still a toddler when John Cale met Lou Reed in New York in 1964. He was six when The Velvet Underground & Nico was released that slow-detonating explosion that caused a mutation in the genetic code of rocknroll. As a precocious seven-year-old visiting San Francisco for the first time in 1968, the future director of Far from Heaven and Carol took home a poster of Franco Zeffirellis wildly romantic Romeo and Juliet and put it up above his bed at home in suburban Los Angeles.

Haynes would not discover The Velvet Underground until he was at college years later. Yet his early career, especially his breakthrough film, Poison (1991) a defining work of that decades New Queer Cinema movement owed so much, he says, to a kind of ferocity and defiance that The Velvet Underground opened up. And, at 60, with his first documentary, Haynes has made a film, The Velvet Underground, out today on Apple+ and in selected cinemas, that captures something truly beautiful about the band and the time and place in which they came into being: a beauty that has facets of degradation, brutality, nihilism, narcissism and danger.

In fact, the black-clothed New York f*** you art cool that Haynes captures so perfectly is how I come to be talking to him in a London hotel room about his childhood in Sixties California. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley, where the reverberations of hippy flower power would be gently washing for the next decade; the sonic shockwave of The Velvet Undergrounds detuned guitars and sadomasochistic death urge were from a darker place. The bands drummer Mo Tucker puts the collision between the opposing world views of East and West Coast succinctly in the film. This love peace crap, she says, we hated that. Get real.

Haynes, who in moving to New York after university realised this is who I wanna be, applied a similar antipathy to the world view of Ronald Reagans America during the AIDS era. Films such as Poison and Tom Kalins Swoon, he says, were responding to the crisis around AIDS and a panic around gay people by challenging conventional notions of liberation as strategies towards representation and trying to make the minority culture more palatable to the mainstream it was standing up for the transgression.

Theres still something of the young radical about Haynes, and of the even younger artistic prodigy he once was: the rapidity of his speech, the ideas that pour from him; his indie charm. Theres a boyishness to his look, too hair that still curls between preppy-short and stoner-long; red plaid shirt over black tee that name-checks one of his heroes, the late German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Transgression, of course, was one of the elements that Reed embodied in The Velvet Underground, with his lyrics about trans women, fellatio, sex whippings and buying and injecting heroin, which ensured that radio stations wouldnt play the bands records. In the film, a college friend talks about how Reeds early poetry was very heavy on very dark gay themes, with the singer telling him, if its not degrading, its not hot, its not sex.

Does Haynes think Reed was the first out rock star? The word out doesnt belong to this time in The Velvet Underground, in the Sixties, he says. But as early as 1972, when he joined David Bowie for his second solo endeavour, Transformer it was a complete and total embrace of the gay liberation vernacular: Were coming out/ Out of our closets/ Out on the streets, he sings the lyrics. These are the words of Lou Reed. He realised that he had inaugurated something. And it was being manifest by this next close generation of music makers And he jumped right on it.

Hes referring to the glam rock era, when artists such as Bowie and even Gary Glitter necessarily queer looking, many of them straight male artists [were] mincing up and down the stages of rocknroll arenas. Was it disappointing to him then that Reed, rather like Bowie, seemed to backtrack on an expression of his queerness later?

I was certainly disappointed I was probably more closely tracking Bowies renunciations of his bisexual self by the Eighties than I was Lou Reeds at that time, and they were disappointing, and I think a lot of us took that somewhat personally.

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But I think one can understand it and see it with more complexity when you look at a whole career. And you understand that these are just people and they are subject to the cultural and political forces [of the time]. Theyre not determining them themselves, and they shouldnt have to have that responsibility theyre artists. And both Lou Reed and David Bowie had great desires for commercial success that always sort of wrestled with their experimental instincts and exploratory instincts .

Filmmaker Todd Haynes at the New York Film Festival in October

(Josh Lamparski/Getty Images)

Reed found the perfect foil for those instincts in Cale, a classical musician with an intensity that had taken him all the way from the Welsh valleys, via Goldsmiths College in London, to the heart of the New York avant-garde of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew and La Monte Young. Cale was embedded in the Downtown art scene, part of The Dream Syndicate with Young, playing amplified drone music tuned to the refrigerator in his Lower East Side apartment for an hour and a half every day. Then he met Reed, a house songwriter for Pickwick Records, in Long Island City. There was a lot of eyeballing going on, he reports in Hayness film.

Open hostility would come later but it could wait. Soon they were sharing the same apartment, and Cale was driving them towards an uncompromising sound to match Reeds uncompromising lyrics one very different from the acoustic singer-songwriter format in which they arrived. The addition of Sterling Morrison on guitar and Mo Tucker on drums completed the classic Velvets line-up (and this John Doran piece in The Quietus is brilliant on the importance of Tucker to their sound). Haynes carefully delineates the priming of this musical IED without recourse to a parade of stars assessing its impact: There are countless people who are so interesting and so talented could tell us what The Velvet Underground meant, why they were great and how they influenced them, he says. And I just didnt want a movie that told you all those things, I wanted you to maybe be able to find that yourself. And hear that yourself. And it was gonna be too much talk. So it was really simple to just say, OK, just people who were there. Thats it.

Its this decision that allows the film to take flight. Haynes and his partner of almost 20 years, Bryan OKeefe, have deep-dived into experimental film of the time, scouring 600 hours of footage to create a kaleidoscope of visual riches, in which the conjunction of The Velvet Underground with Andy Warhol and the artists, film-makers and superstars, such as Nico, who surrounded him feels somehow inevitable. Its unmistakeable in these images that almost everyone looks cool, everyone looks beautiful. Film critic Amy Taubin appears alongside her Warhol screen test, and makes the point that the scene around The Factory was not good for women because of Warhols fascination with some ideal of female beauty, and if you didnt measure up and who ever could measure up? that was very damaging. Haynes cuts her voice saying it to an image of Nico looking luminous. I wonder what the director, who looks again and again in his films at women in situations that are not good for them, made of Taubins view. I was so interested in what Amy had to say she was there interestingly, though, I think people will have a range of opinions about that very fact, in that were still talking about a very homosocial culture in The Factory, and everybody was objectified, because they were all being looked at, for their beauty and their photographability, and who was going to be in the next movie that they were going to shoot that afternoon, and which hot boy was going to take his shirt off, and which beautiful girl was going to pose It was sort of equal opportunity objectification.

And of course, people were flirting and going into the backroom and having sex, but more often it was men with men. [Warhol superstar] Mary Woronov describes a culture that just wasnt that goal oriented in terms of sex, that there was a lot of posing and flirting and, you know, kind of provocation going on? But there was also a kind of impotence, which sometimes is a side effect of the kind of drugs that they were using.

Moe Tucker, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed in concert

(Apple TV+)

Haynes turns away from a glossy, gossipy portrait for example, unlike most films that depict The Factory, theres little direct reference to one of its most endlessly discussed personalities, which it turns out was deliberate. I talked to John Cale about things Id read about him having an affair with Edie Sedgwick in the first month of him going to The Factory, exactly at the moment when Lou Reed was having an affair with Nico, he shared all that. But then he also was like, Yeah, but, you know, were all in our early twenties. And people were having sex a lot in those years.

Haynes wanted to focus on the artistic origins of the music and the people, he says, rather than their personal lives, or sex lives or even their drug practices. When I talked to everybody and asked them about their sex and their drug lives, they were always a little dismissive of it. And I was like, OK, I get it they werent there for the drugs. The drugs were there for the art.

In the best examples of melodrama as a genre, the beauty is part of the cage in which all these people live

Todd Haynes

Sex, likewise. Theres a great fascination but lets be real: most people that age, no matter what they look like, are trying to have sex with each other. And usually it doesnt really last and it doesnt really distinguish those people from other people, [or] gay people from straight people. And I dont think Nico was gonna have sex with anybody that she didnt want to have sex with. That said, the competition within The Factory must have been intense. And the feeling of whos being looked at more and I must be not as good looking and the way that gets carried out into your everyday life as a woman, its a whole different discussion.

Doesnt Haynes himself often make people, women especially, look very beautiful in his films? Is an ideal of beauty something he shares with Warhol?

Its funny, because whats so interesting to me about the melodrama as a genre, in its best examples, is that the beauty is part of the cage in which all these people live. The enamel beauty of the [Douglas] Sirk-ian set and home and lighting and objects and clothes and women is part of the claustrophobia and of the sort of killing aspects of middle-class life. So the beauty is rarely ever felt as transcendent.

But, of course, I love to make the image incredibly rich and specific to the time and place and absolutely in Velvet Goldmine (1998), it was about a physical beauty that was inherent, and a kind of cosmetic beauty that men adopted in the glam era, and androgyny and all of those things, but also kinds of beauty that questioned prior models of how men can be beautiful or, you know, whats the divide between male beauty, female beauty, gay desire, straight desire, all those things were blurring. So that was part of the visual language. So Im completely guilty of wanting the films to be He pauses. When I think of a film idea, I usually close my eyes and its like some rich He pauses again, inside this vision now, like I wanted Far from Heaven to be heartbreakingly beautiful and full of sadness. So the beauty didnt make anybody feel good.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Todd Hayness Velvet Goldmine'

(Peter Mountain/Zenith/Killer/Kobal/Shutterstock)

It will be fascinating to see what Haynes does with Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in his upcoming May December; its about a Hollywood actress visiting the real-life woman she is about to play in a film about the tabloid scandal that engulfed her 20 years earlier. He is also making a biopic of the singer Peggy Lee (which, it has been reported, may have Billie Eilish among its executive producers) named after her signature song, Fever. Having already made Velvet Goldmine (loosely based on the coming together of David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop in the 1970s) and Im Not There (about Bob Dylan) and his cult college film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, has Haynes learnt anything specific from making a music documentary that will influence his approach?

I dont think in any direct way. I always start with, in any film but particularly a film about a musical artist the question is always how to find a visual style, a language, through the lens, that gets, in a visual parallel, close to what they were doing in their music but I want Michelle Williams [playing Lee] to perform the music live, so there will be an element of something live and in the room, which is quite different from anything Ive done, and yet its quite different from this movie because there doesnt exist anything of them in the room from the years that they were putting out records.

It is a mark of the triumph of Hayness The Velvet Underground that its possible to come away from the film without ever being aware of that absence.

The Velvet Underground is out today on Apple TV+ and in selected cinemas

Continued here:

Todd Haynes on The Velvet Underground: Warhols Factory offered equal opportunity objectification - The Independent

Dinosaurs Might Have Actually Looked More Cuddly Than We Think – Nerdist

We all have ideas of what dinosaurs looked like in our minds eye. Mostly sourced from Jurassic Park, of course. But science has evolved and paleontologists now believe that many if not most dinosaurs had some kind of plumage. In a new video, the science education YouTube channel Kurzgesagt In a Nutshelltakes a look at what dinosaurs may have looked like with that theory in mind. And while the illustrations are cartoonish, its easy to imagine real dinosaurs in a whole new light.

Kurzgesagtwhich literally translates to in a nutshell from Germanrecently posted the above video to YouTube. For those unfamiliar with the educational channel, Kurzgesagt is a small team of creators that like to make videos explaining things with optimistic nihilism and beauty. Previously, for example, the channels looked at what would happen if Earth turned into solid gold. Or if we nuked the Moon.

Kurzgesagt

In this deep dive into the past, Kurzgesagt gives a general sense of what many scientists think dinosaurs probably looked like. The channel notes that paleontologists have discovered more than 1,000 dinosaur species over the last 200 years; the evidence allows them to model dinosaur aesthetics in an accurate way. Or at least more accurate than the bony minimalist way that pervades the current dino zeitgeist.

Kurzgesagt

As for what the dinosaurs actually looked like? Apparently we should be picturing a lot more soft tissues. More fat bellies and chests. And lots of soft parts like skin flaps, lips, gums, and just more pronounced features that would make [dinosaurs] seem like much more pleasant animals than one would think. The channel notes, for example, that T. rex were possibly giant cuddly animals with feathers with an inclination for relaxing and playing, a la modern day lions.

Kurzgesagt

Obviously its impossible to say for sure what dinosaurs looked like. And who doesnt want to own a cuddly T. rex pet once scientists bring them back from extinction?

Read more:

Dinosaurs Might Have Actually Looked More Cuddly Than We Think - Nerdist

What Makes John Carpenter’s The Thing So Effing Scary? – tor.com

Some masterpieces of cinema are simply doomed at the box office and destined to be savaged by critics. Very often the culprit is bad timing, or a weak marketing effort, or internal disputes at the studio. All three of those played a role in the brutal reception that greeted John Carpenters The Thing (1982), which is today recognized as one of the most effective, shocking, and suspenseful horror movies of all time.

I saw this movie at far too young an age (thanks, Mom and Dad!), and I was puzzled to find that the TV Guide description gave it a measly two out of four stars. In the ensuing years, I learned that the failure of this film left the brilliant Carpenter almost completely disillusioned with Hollywood, which drastically altered his career trajectory. Both the snooty film critics and the major horror magazines of the time decried The Things nihilism and barf bag special effects. The sci-fi magazine Cinefantastique posed the question, Is this the most hated movie of all time? Christian Nyby, the director of the 1951 version, bashed Carpenters remake. Even the beautiful minimalist score by Ennio Morricone was nominated for a Razzie.

I realize that everyone had their stated reasons for not liking the film at first, but here is my grand unified theory to explain their massive error in judgment: the film was just too effing scary. It hit all of the major pressure points of fear, tweaking the amygdala and triggering a response so palpable that many viewers could only look back with disgust. And if that were not enough, The Things meditation on despair was simply too much for audiences and critics. Its bleak, uncertain ending, a harbinger of death on a scale both small and large, was too much to handle. I cant think of another mainstream blockbuster that even attempted such a thing, before or since.

It took a long time, a lot of introspection, and a lot of grassroots enthusiasm to rehabilitate the films reputation. Now that weve all had a chance to gather ourselves and process whats happened, here are some of the key elements of horror that work a little too well in The Thing. Spoilers are ahead, obviously, but 2022 marks the fortieth anniversary of the film, so its well past time to knock this one off your list.

Fear of the Unknown and the Incomprehensible

The Thing opens with an absurd image, with no explanation or context. A helicopter flies over a wintry landscape, chasing a husky as it sprints across the snow. A man leans out of the side of the chopper, firing at the dog with a rifle. He desperately shouts in Norwegian to the pilot, imploring him to keep following. Panting, the husky arrives at an American research outpost, where the scientists and the support staff are baffled by the commotion. The weirdness escalates when the chopper lands, and the rifleman continues to chase the dog, firing wildly and screaming in what sounds to the Americans like gibberish. He tries to toss a hand grenade, but his errant throw destroys the helicopter, killing the pilot. Seconds later, a security officer shoots and kills the Norwegian, and the inhabitants of the camp gather round the body, confounded by what theyve witnessed. In the background, the husky behaves like a normal dog.

Right from the beginning, we are trapped in a state of bewilderment alongside the characters. Rather than pursuing a mystery after a crime takes place, the mystery is thrust upon us. And from there, the unknown mutates into the incomprehensible. Later that night, we see the dog in its true form: a shape-shifting creature from the worst nightmares of cosmic horror. Gelatinous, gooey, tentacled, pulsing, and asymmetrical. A completely alien organism that can mimic other living things that it touches.

When we see the alien parasite moving from dog to human, a new kind of terror emerges. The half-formed imitations have an uncanny valley quality to them, forcing us to stop and try to grasp what were looking at. In one of many scenes cut from network TV airings of the film, the character Windows (Thomas G. Waites) enters a room to find Bennings (Peter Maloney) half-naked, covered in a viscous fluid, and wrapped in squirming tentacles. Whether this is an emerging clone or a person being digested is left to the viewers imagination. Later, the crew catches up with the Benning-thing. He unfolds his arms to reveal two pulpy stalks, while emitting an eerie howling noise. Horrified, the men burn the creature alive.

Oh, but it gets even worse. We discover that the cloned bodies can adapt when threatened. A mans chest bursts open to reveal a gaping, fanged mouth. Another mans head splits apart, forming a pincer-like weapon. Granted, there are a few shots in which the otherwise brilliant effects by Rob Bottin look fakeyet even those images still trigger our revulsion. They remind me of a similar scene in Aliens (1986), when the facehuggers try to latch onto Ripley and Newt. One of the spider-like creatures is tossed aside, only to flip right-side up again. It looks like a toybut it works! Its a broken toy from hell that keeps juddering about even after the batteries have been pulled!

Many fans of The Thing blame its box office failure on Steven Spielbergs E.T., which dominated 1982. The friendly alien in that movie resembled a child, with its big eyes and dopey grin. In contrast, The Thing toyed with the incomprehensible. To this day, I wonder: how many people ended up watching it simply because E.T. was sold out? Those viewers must have been the most appalled.

Fear of the Other

Im writing in 2021, which requires me to compare our current real-world predicament with The Things depiction of infection, quarantine, and paranoia. The critic Gene Siskelwho defended the movie against his colleague Roger Ebertnoted the Cold War mentality of the script, with its fears of infiltration and assimilation. Both are on display in a scene in which the head scientist Blair (Wilford Brimley) runs a computer simulation showing how quickly the alien could mimic the entire crew, which places a ticking clock on the action.

Yet as grim as this movie gets, the humans do not outright betray one another. Nor does anyone go Full Brockman, conceding defeat to curry favor with the enemy. Ironically, the people who go too far to fight the Thing are Blair, the smartest guy in the room, and MacReady (Kurt Russell), the films protagonist by default. In some ways, MacReadys actions are similar to the drastic unilateral decisions that Ben has to make in Night of the Living Dead (1968). In his desperation to survive, MacReady assumes control by threatening to destroy the entire camp with dynamite. From there, he establishes a mini-dictatorship, with round-the-clock surveillance of the crewmembers, along with a blood test to prove who is infected and who is safe. When the gentle Clark (Richard Masur) tries to resist, MacReady shoots him dead, only to discover later that the man he killed was still human. By then, MacReady is so focused on the task at hand that he moves on, shoving poor Clark out of his mind, his own dehumanization complete. And despite that effort, MacReadys plan goes sideways when the test succeeds in revealing the Thing. Now exposed, the creature reverts to its transitional form, killing a member of the crew. After all of that sacrifice, all that setting aside of morality and trust, they achieve nothing.

Suspense: a sidenote

While many of the scares come as a shock, the aforementioned blood test builds the tension slowly in a scene that is a masterwork in suspense. While cornered, desperate, and fighting off hypothermia, MacReady uses a flamethrower to keep the others at bay. He forces them to cut themselves with scalpels and drain some of their blood into petri dishes. One by one, he applies a hot needle to each dish. His theory is that the blood of the Thing will react when threatened, thus revealing the host. The red-hot needle touches the first dish, and the blood squelches the heat. As MacReady works his way through each of the samples, we grow accustomed to the squeaking sound it makes each time, accompanied by the howling wind outside.

As we allow ourselves to hope that we might make it through the scene without any further mayhem, Carpenter misdirects our attention by having Garry (Donald Moffat)the outposts security officerstart an argument with MacReady. This is pure nonsense, Garry says. Doesnt prove a thing. With the needle in one hand, and a petri dish in the other, MacReady reminds Garry of why hes the most suspicious person in the group. Well do you last, MacReady says. Which makes us anticipate the moment when we can finally prove that Garry is the Thing.

And then the needle touches the sample, belonging to an eccentric but relatively quiet man named Palmer (David Clennon). And all hell breaks loose. The blood instantly turns into a bloody tentacle, squealing in agony as it tries to escape the heat. Palmer mutates into what could be described as a giant walking mouth, its teeth snapping like a bear trap, while MacReady and Windows scramble to burn him with their flamethrower. But its too late. By the time they dispatch him with fire and explosives, another person is dead, another wing of the outpost is destroyed, and the paranoia intensifies.

Fear of Isolation

Heres another reason why watching The Thing in 2021 may be tough. The characters are stuck together in close quarters and cut off from the rest of the world. Even before the mayhem begins, we catch glimpses of how the routine is slowly becoming unbearable. MacReady destroys a computer chess game when he loses, claiming that the computer somehow cheated. Many of the characters self-medicate, with J&B Whiskey as the painkiller of choice. Others have been watching VHS tapes of the same TV shows over and over, apparently for months on end. It helps that Carpenter prefers to shoot in a widescreen format, which allows him to cram more people into the frame, making some of the interior shots downright claustrophobic.

The walls close in tighter once the danger becomes real. Blair, who realizes early on that they are all doomed, destroys the communication equipment and sabotages the vehicles. No one can leave, and no one can call for help. The remaining crew is on their own, holed up in a building that will be their tomb. With no Netflix!

In a strange bit of dark humor, we see Blair again after his meltdown, and after the crew has locked him a separate building. Im all right, he insists. Im much better and I wont harm anybody. While he rambles, a hangmans noose dangles behind him. No one comments on it. Its just there to remind us that Blair the rational scientist has carefully weighed his options while isolated in this meat locker.

Fear of Nature

Even if it had no alien in it, The Thing reminds us of how powerless we are in the face of nature. A major plot point involves a storm pummeling the outpost. Despite the weather, the characters insist on taking their chances indoors. I can easily imagine them many months earlier, sitting through some tedious orientation for their jobs, in which a trainer explains to them all the ghastly ways that hypothermia and frostbite can shut down their bodies and scramble their minds.

There are other ways in which the film invokes our fears of the natural world. On several occasions, the Thing mimics the animals that have terrorized our species. The petri dish monster strikes outward like a viper. A severed head sprouts legs and crawls about like a spider. Near the climax of the film, the Thing takes on a shape that resembles a snake or a lizard. The original script and storyboards included an even more elaborate final boss, which would incorporate several icky animals. Part squid, part insect, part rabid dog. The films budget would not allow it. But by then, it makes no difference. A mere glimpse of the monster is enough to conjure more frightening shapes lodged in our imagination.

And Finally, Fear (and Acceptance) of Certain Doom

The Thing is the first of Carpenters Apocalypse Trilogy, which continues with Prince of Darkness (1987) and concludes with In the Mouth of Madness (1994). All three films combine Lovecraftian cosmic horror with late twentieth-century concerns about societal breakdown and World War III. Together, these themes and images explore the erosion of order and identity, leading to the end of all things. The Thing can be said to represent the unstoppable forces of the universe that have no concern for human well-being. As many critics have noted, it is never made clear what exactly the Thing wants. It may in fact be such a mindless, viral organism that it doesnt even know its an alien once the imitation is complete. No one can bargain or plead with such an entity, in the same way we cannot reason with the forces that may lead to our extinction.

At the end of the film, the hopelessness of it all leaves the lone survivors, MacReady and Childs (Keith David), sharing the bleakest drink in the history of cinema. Though the monster has seemingly been defeated, the entire camp is left burning, and neither man knows if the other is infected. As they both acknowledge, they are in no condition to fight anymore. Their best bet is to doze off as the fires burn out and never wake up again. Why dont we just wait here for a little while, see what happens? MacReady suggests. What else can they do?

As they take their last sips of J&B, Morricones score begins again, with a piece titled Humanity, Part II. The thudding sound resembles a heart beating. Is this a defiant assertion of humanity, or the final pumps of blood? Or are we hearing an imitation, mimicked by an incomprehensible force that has no regard for human life?

A Legacy of Fear

Nostalgia for 1980s popular culture has certainly helped to renew interest in films like The Thing. Still, theres something special about this particular movie, something that helped it rise from the ashes of its initial failure. While a film like The Day After (1983) was scary enough to change our defense policy, its specificity to the nuclear arms race makes it more of an artifact of that era. In contrast, the fears invoked by The Thing are figurative, visceral, and universal, and can be applied more easily to any point in history, from the Cold War to the pandemic and political strife of the 2020s. In another generation, I expect people to rediscover it once more, applying it to whatever keeps them up at night. And they will continue the debates about which characters were infected when, whether the infected characters even know that theyre the Thing, and whether the alien is truly dead or merely hiding in that final scene. In the end, the film leaves its paranoia with us. Were infected, and the safe world weve tried to build for ourselves will never look the same.

Robert Repino (@Repino1) grew up in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. After serving in the Peace Corps in Grenada, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College. He works as an editor for Oxford University Press, and occasionally teaches for the Gotham Writers Workshop. Repino is the author of the middle grade novel Spark and the League of Ursus (Quirk Books), as well as the War With No Name series (Soho Press), which includes Mort(e), Culdesac, DArc, and Malefactor.

See the original post here:

What Makes John Carpenter's The Thing So Effing Scary? - tor.com

Revisit Day of the Dead for a Reminder That Sometimes Zombies Deserve to Win – Gizmodo Australia

Today marks the debut of Day of the Dead, a new Syfy TV series that takes inspiration from George A. Romeros 1985 zombie classic of the same name. At this years San Diego Comic-Con, the shows creators explained that the series set during the first 24 hours of a zombie apocalypse will pay homage to the film but will mostly strive to tell its own story. Those are agreeable enough terms because theres no such thing as too much horror on TV. But using the name Day of the Dead while not really resembling Day of the Dead in story or tone feels a bit duplicitous. On the other hand, Day of the Dead really needs no improvement or update.

Though its traditionally been the least-vaunted entry in Romeros trilogy that also includes Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead still holds up as an excellently tense, extremely gory (Tom Savinis genius strikes again, with an assist from Greg Nicotero among others) example of how nihilism and, in a weird way, hope can somehow coexist in a single story. Shifting from the Pittsburgh environs of Romeros first two zombie films, Day of the Dead takes place in Florida evidenced by the opening scenes helicopter fly-over of a beachy town populated by zombified tourists and at least one giant alligator. But there are no tropical dreams for protagonist Sarah (Lori Cardille), only persistent nightmares, since the horror of being alive during an undead takeover is only slightly greater than the circumstances of her survival. As part of a team of scientists trying to figure out how to cure or eradicate the zombie problem, Sarahs the sole woman living in an underground missile silo amid a few colleagues and a group of military men led by the macho Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato). The soldiers were originally tasked with protecting the researchers but have gotten more foul-mouthed, racist, controlling, leering, and trigger-happy as the weeks pass.

Even more than Romeros first two Dead films, Day of the Dead explores the existential dread that comes with wondering if you and the (mostly awful) people youre surrounded with are all that remains of your species. The initial panic of losing supremacy on the food chain has long since subsided; now, everyone just is teetering on the edge of exhaustion. Sarah is the most practical member of the group, insisting on rules and procedures the military guys dont bother to follow half the time which is worrisome, because many of them pertain to the zombies they keep corralled for use in experiments, as well as the wild mob of undead that hungrily paws at their perimeter fence.

Sarahs also the most level-headed among the science team, which is led by the increasingly unhinged Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty). Hes earned the nickname Frankenstein with good reason again, all praise to Savini and his creatively disgusting ways with dripping entrails, exposed brains, and severed heads but his quest to figure out why zombies become zombies gets sidetracked when he realises one of the undead in his care, dubbed Bub (Sherman Howard), is more self-aware than the rest. A scrap of civility and normalcy comes in the form of helicopter pilot John (Terry Alexander) and radio operator Bill (Jarlath Conroy), who mostly keep to themselves Johns point of view is that maybe humans arent supposed to understand whats happening, except that it might have to do with punishment from an angry god but become Sarahs allies when all-out chaos descends on their makeshift community.

As Day of the Dead progresses, it becomes clear that the clashing points of view (kill the zombies; study, cure, and/or train the zombies; flee to an island and escape the zombies) are whats going to tear the group apart at least, until the zombies themselves get a chance to handle that in a more literal sense. Sarah tries to reason with everybody Maybe if we tried working together we could ease some of the tensions! but the only creatures in Day of the Dead who are truly working together are the ones trying to devour human flesh. Its no new revelation that the movie is about humans losing their humanity as zombies discover theirs; civil behaviour is what distinguishes us from the lower forms is one of the last lucid things that Dr. Logan says.

Theres no doubt what Romeros meaning is and his movie remains potent not just because of the loving attention it gives to special effects involving throats being ripped out and heads being ripped off, but because of the question at its core: is humanity even worth saving? Should it step aside for these new apex predators, who are obviously thriving? Though Sarah, John, and Bill make it difficult to declare that total extinction is the right answer, the rest of the characters suggest that maybe the zombies are doing us a favour. It seems unlikely that the Day of the Dead TV show, which appears to be a bit lighter in tone (though its worth noting it doesnt look like it skimps on the gore), will follow that same path. But considering the state of the real world in 2021, maybe itll stay true to Day of the Deads not-so-subtle implication that humankind is getting precisely what it deserves.

Day of the Deadwill air on SBS in Australia.

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Revisit Day of the Dead for a Reminder That Sometimes Zombies Deserve to Win - Gizmodo Australia

‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Has Nudity and Drugs NowBut No Hook – The Daily Beast

Ill say this for Amazons soft reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer: it wastes no time letting viewers know what kind of show theyre in for. Perched atop a cliff with a pensive but disaffected look on her face, lead actress Madison Iseman speaks in perfect, self-serious monotone: Im sure youre sitting there right now thinking you know who you are, who your friends are, she says. I thought I knew. I was wrong.

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson set the bar for a generation of meta-horror imitators to come with his Scream screenplay, but his nautical 1997 follow-up cast its net in a more conventional pond. A loose adaptation of Lois Duncans 1973 novel, the predictable teen slasher generally left critics cold, but it understood what its audience wanted and delivered without overthinking. With its creatively-staged kills and impeccable cast of young, tri-nonymous idolsSarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr.I Know What You Did Last Summer sank its hook deep into the 90s mall rat demographic.

This new teen drama, on the other hand, is committing the cardinal sin for young people in any era: Its trying way too hard.

The basic premise of this I Know What You Did Last Summer remains largely the same: A carful of rowdy teens, vehicular manslaughter, and a cover-up that backfires when the group begins receiving ominous messages from an unknown witness to their crime who begins killing them one by one. The killer could be their not-so-dead victim, a stranger, or perhaps evengasp!one of them.

In a twist on the original formula, however this series revolves around a pair of twin sistersAllison and Lennon. The two share a complicated relationship: Their mother died by suicide when they were young, and while Lennon moved on quickly (on the surface, at least), Allison remains depressed and misanthropic.

Isemanwho, coincidentally, might just be this generations closest Sarah Michelle Gellar doppelgngerplays her characters with impressive distinction. The actresss face almost seems to change shape from one character to the next, molded by expressions that belong either to one twin or the other. Unfortunately, her accomplishment is not enough to save this dour slog, which takes itself way too seriously.

Like the 1997 film, this I Know What You Did Last Summer is a loose adaptation of its source materialbut unlike the film, which at least grounded itself in the likability of its megawatt leads, the series gives us pretty much nothing to root for. There is no unassuming Jennifer Love Hewitt in stacked necklaces here, no spiky-haired Freddy Prinze Jr. fisherman with a heart of gold. In this version everyone is equally rotten and deluded, from the Insta-addicted Margot (Brianne Tju) to the mopey, moralistic fuckboy Dylan (Ezekiel Goodman).

As the series progresses, it diverges further and further from the 1997 films premise. The four episodes made available to critics for review, all of which debut on Friday, introduce a mystery that will likely dominate the shows plot for the remainder of the season. So far, however, this project feels like a shallow echo of things that have come before, conspicuously dropping slang like sus and merc to prove its Teen bona fides. Its Riverdale without the camp, bedazzled in Euphoria makeup.

In this version everyone is equally rotten and deluded, from the Insta-addicted Margot (Brianne Tju) to the mopey, moralistic fuckboy Dylan (Ezekiel Goodman).

Truthfully, Sam Levinsons drugged-out HBO show appears to have inspired more than just I Know What You Did Last Summers makeup. Drug use is equally central here, albeit Special K instead of heroin, and nudityboth male and femaleis equally pervasive, as is a certain nihilism were meant to believe is generational. Theres a sex scene with full-frontal nudity, and the shows premiere includes a penis in profile. All of these choices feel designed to capture both the viral success and the pearl-clutching controversy Euphoria has engendered.

As far as TV reboots of popular franchises go, I Know What You Did Last Summer is far from egregious. It wisely avoids merely rehashing its predecessor and includes some delightfully bizarre twistslike a certain parents relationship with a certain public servant, which I wont spoil hereand even manages a few creative kills, although none so far that feel as memorable as those in Williamsons film. Still it feels hollowits plot in search of purpose, its characters starved for even an ounce of depth. Maybe this really is what Teens These Days wantbut if theres one thing adolescents have always been pretty good at, its knowing when theyre being pandered to.

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'I Know What You Did Last Summer' Has Nudity and Drugs NowBut No Hook - The Daily Beast

Literary manga ‘The Man Without Talent’ speaks volumes in hermetic angst – The Japan Times

A crane framed by a moonlit windowsill. A family hike, and the arguments and nihilism that ensue. A poet dissolving into the mist.

These are some of the moments that make up The Man Without Talent, a compelling work from one of Japans masters of literary manga, Yoshiharu Tsuge. With the release of The Swamp last year, and The Man Without Talent in January (both translated by Ryan Holmberg), Tsuge is finally coming alive for English readers.

The Man Without Talent, by Yoshiharu TsugeTranslated by Ryan Holmberg240 pagesNEW YORK REVIEW COMICS

The Man Without Talent explores the daily life, meditations and human interactions of Tsuges cartoon stand-in, Sukezo Sukegawa, as he attempts to support his family through selling stones, fixing up broken cameras and any other endeavor that seems destined to fail.

The real merit of the work comes from its breadth: While the focus remains trained on Sukezo, images, stories and mythologies float in and out of the background: the wonder of beautiful stones, bird-whisperers in the forest. It is a thoughtful work enveloped in the authenticity and crudeness of its self-centered protagonist, broken down by the cruelty of modern life and the inability of Sukezo, or rather Tsuge, to connect with others.

Tsuge is nothing short of one of Japans most important manga artists. His unequivocal influence on manga begins with his use of mature themes in a comic format and his integration of autobiographical material, and extends to his blend of the fantastic and surreal with meditations on traditional Japanese culture and customs. He has had a pronounced impact on generations of artists and writers, from seasoned horror master Hideshi Hino to contemporary author Hiromi Kawakami.

The amount of writing about Tsuge is probably second only to (Astro Boy creator) Osamu Tezuka, says Holmberg. I think Tsuges mastery and influence will naturally dawn on English-language manga readers.

While Tsuges early work from the mid-1960s was compiled in The Swamp, The Man Without Talent was published during the late 1980s. It became immensely popular and was even adapted into a film in 1991.

Today, the book serves as a prime example of the I-novel a Japanese literary genre that is characterized by an autobiographical narrative done in manga form. Author Osamu Dazai is another champion of the I-novel, and in some ways, The Man Without Talent is reminiscent of Dazais novel, No Longer Human. Both works draw out the self-pity, misery and narcissism of a philosophical deadbeat a man both pathetic and admirable, as easy to loathe as he is easy to empathize with.

If youre puzzled about how a deadbeat like Sukezo could be considered a sage, consider the times, writes Holmberg in the foreword. By the time The Man Without Talent was turned into a movie, fissures in Japans real estate and stock market bubbles were the stuff of daily headlines. Being mun (talentless) became seen as not helpless and shameful, but an affirmative way of life based on using your skills in ways other than what society deems proper.

Sukezos incompetence is astonishing. He insists on selling stones despite never getting even a single customer. He neglects his child. But this man without talent escapes drowning in self-pity. Sukezo encounters the world around him with a philosophical flair, so his idleness (and perceptiveness) points the readers attention to the mangas arguably more compelling vignettes and moments.

Another obvious highlight of the book is Tsuges art. He uses cinematic angles and composed frames, cloaking characters in light and shadow. He depicts sunlight, wind, dirt and rain with sensitivity and alertness. The last chapter of the manga explores the life of a poet named Seigetsu Inoue and features some truly beautiful and creative pages.

According to Holmberg, Tsuges comics and his accompanying real life habit of shutting himself off from the world represented an ideal of masculine hermitude to many critics in the 1970s and 80s. Separating himself from family concerns and the burdens of a capitalist society was seen as a noble pursuit. But the small nuclear family, regardless of its internal aggravations, is ultimately a ballast and refuge for Tsuge, says Holmberg. Sukezo is flawed but real, and thats precisely why the angst makes for a compelling story.

Tsuge has received buzz in Japan and internationally in the past few years. Last February, Tsuge received an honorary award at the Angouleme International Comics Festival in France, the biggest manga festival in Europe. A few months later, major publishing firm Kodansha released a complete collection of his works in Japanese. After years of attempting to license Tsuges work in English, overseas publishers have only recently succeeded.

Tsuge is now 83 years old and long-retired, but his work has a cache unlike others. As a Kodansha comics official told the Asahi Shimbun last year: Tsuges way of life and his very existence are considered legendary.

While the self-pitying nature of the I-novel genre can feel off-putting at times, Tsuges thoughtfulness and attention to detail makes The Man Without Talent a captivating read. It also speaks to a wider world of literary manga that remains underappreciated in English and that we will hopefully see continue to be opened up in the coming years.

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Literary manga 'The Man Without Talent' speaks volumes in hermetic angst - The Japan Times

The unaccommodated man: Review of Manoranjan Byaparis The Runaway Boy – The Hindu

Manoranjan Byapari is unique among Indian writers because he comes from the working class. In that, he represents a huge swathe of our population that is born in anonymity, toils without honour, is exploited ruthlessly, and dies without redress. These people go unnoticed in the India of Mercs and condos because they cannot make themselves heard at best, they can depend on a middle-class author to lend them voice and presence. Byapari is exceptional because he is one of them, but with the decisive ability to write his experience, which he brings out raw and bleeding in his books. As he said in an interview, I write because I cant kill. His rage is directed at Brahmins, landowners, police, the state, and also at us the genteel, privileged reader for whom deprivation is an idea. Byapari can make us feel ashamed.

Im a Chandal

This self-taught writer pulls off a near-impossible literary feat in his works he closes the gap between life and art so seamlessly that one can almost stand for the other. (It helps, of course, that he writes in his mother tongue Bengali. The contribution of translators like V. Ramaswamy or Arunava Sinha in rendering Byaparis writings into English while keeping his cadence intact cannot be gainsaid.) In The Runaway Boy, the first part of his semi-autobiographical Chandal Jibon trilogy, we are introduced to Jibon, born unfortunate though not unwanted, who, true to his name, is indomitable. He is Shakespeares poor, bare unaccommodated man who walks and keeps on walking, no matter how much the world tries to crush him. The story of The Runaway Boy is unadorned, unrelenting, sometimes rambling, but always true to the life the author has led. As the boy screams out at his assailants at one point, My names Jibon, Im a Chandal. What more do you want to know?

It takes a child born into a low-caste, disenfranchised, utterly disadvantaged family to ask the simplest but toughest question of them all, the question Job had put to God: what has he done to deserve it? He runs away from his starving family in hope of a better life but hunger dogs him everywhere. The alternative to enduring starvation is to suffer the gratuitous cruelty of his employers, who beat him, cheat him, sexually abuse him, and treat him as untouchable. Battered relentlessly, Jibon gets an insight into the injustice inherent in social order: Someone or the other had once told Jibon that the wages for minor work were low. The more important the work, the higher the wage. Jibon could not figure out why the work of men who ploughed the land under sun and rain and provided the country food... of the workers in farms and factories who worked their hammers and tools and made the country wealthy, was considered small, and why were their wages so low? And how was it that the tonsured Brahmins muttering om-bom and ringing bells before stone images in temples, the babu sitting on a chair in his office and sipping tea were considered big?... Who made this classification of work?

Wings of light

Abjection gives Jibon a nihilistic view of life and society. Yet his is not the intellectual nihilism of the decadent bourgeois. If Jibon loses his belief in religion, in politics of the Left or Right, in ideas of social welfare, even in humanity, it is because he simply cannot afford to trust. In the instances when he does, he is inevitably betrayed. The incident in Gauhati Mail where a man treats him kindly only to con him is gut-wrenching, all the more because we feel our hopes rising along with Jibons. The fall, when it comes, hits hard.

But no experience, however painful, can snuff out Jibons will to live. Byapari creates moments of levity such as when Jibon has a solemn conversation with his spectral friend, Maran (Death), or when, at playtime, Jibon assumes the role of the great archer Ramachandra, his pants torn at the backside that flit on wings of light against the darkness. His descriptions of cities like Calcutta controlled by the privileged few who laughed, walked and talked like machines can recall images of urban superficiality in the works of great modernists like Eliot. But Byaparis subject position gives his account a robust, hard-won authenticity.

The Runaway Boy will make the reader look at life through Jibons eyes and the view isnt flattering, to put it mildly. Get ready to confront some bitter truths: In this country, the son of a Baniya used to go on a fast from time to time, for two or ten days every month or two. He had become a leader by doing that. Later, he became the father of the nation. But the names of Jibon and many more like him who began fasting from the time they were in their mothers wombs and ended it only when they finally died found no place in history. No one spoke about them Could there be anything more incredible than that!

The Runaway Boy; Manoranjan Byapari, trs V. Ramaswamy, Eka, 599

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Trump’s impunity is another sign of the degradation of the US Senate 02/03/2021 Lcia Guimares KSU | The Sentinel Newspaper – KSU | The Sentinel…

The institutions are functioning. This phrase has been repeated, with or without a question mark, in the United States for over four years and, since the end of the military dictatorship, it has not been used as much in Brazil.

Its hard to believe the institutions are working when we wake up to news that a rogue QAnon spokesperson manages to hold the Republican leadership hostage in the House in Washington, and that a distraught extremist has won the leadership of the powerful Constitution and Justice Commission in Brasilia.

The functioning of the institutions does not depend solely on the independence of the three powers. In the American case, more than two centuries of unbroken constitutional rule have been crucial in stemming the lawless wickedness of Donald Trump. He had neither the time nor the competence to undermine the entire institutional apparatus of the federal government. But he has tried and achieved successes that will mark the legislature and the bench, in addition to Joe Bidens tenure.

The funeral ceremony at the Capitol Roundabout on Wednesday (3), when MPs and Senators paid tribute to policeman Brian Sicknick, murdered during Trumps invasion of the House, spoke of the contrast to the violence and chaos that reigned supreme in the same room. , January 6th. A sign that the institutions are functioning?

The presence of Republican leader Mitch McConnell at the roundabout does not eclipse the fact that he has spent the past two weeks maneuvering to obstruct the Senate committee scrutiny that Democrats have rightfully won at the polls. The nihilism of the party is still personified by the leadership of McConnell, who, despite hating Trump, decided the former president was a useful idiot.

The tenuous Democratic control of the Senate 50 seats plus Vice President Kamala Harris tie-breaker vote at a time when the Republican Party does not decide whether it wants to be the bunch of lunatics and renegades that instigated the Capitol breach , makes it more urgent. question: does the Senate work?

In the mythology of American exceptionalism, a clich coined in the 19th century describes the Senate as the greatest deliberative body in the world. No one demoralized this pride more than McConnell himself by declaring in 2010 that his only mission was to make Barack Obama president for one term.

The composition of the Senate is often criticized as a guarantee of minority power, a modern Republican electoral project since the years of Richard Nixon. Since every state, regardless of its population, has the same right to send two senators to Washington, the 50 Democratic senators today represent 41 million more Americans than the 50 Republican senators.

Tuesday (9) we will have another opportunity to ask ourselves whether the Senate serves American democracy or the power projects of its members. Unfortunately, there is no suspense in sight. It will be impossible to rally Republican voices to condemn Donald Trump in the second and unprecedented impeachment trial.

If in the first trial a year ago hypocrisy was barely disguised as absolving the presidents criminality, this time the senators who insisted Biden stole the election are more difficult.

How can a large deliberative body go unpunished for a president who launched the terrorist invasion, which barely claimed the lives of its members?

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Trump's impunity is another sign of the degradation of the US Senate 02/03/2021 Lcia Guimares KSU | The Sentinel Newspaper - KSU | The Sentinel...

All the Horror You Need to Stream in February 2021 – Film School Rejects

Welcome to Horrorscope, a monthly column keeping horror nerds and initiates up to date on all the genre content coming to and leaving from your favorite streaming services. Heres a guide to all the essential horror streaming in February 2021.

Smell that? Love is in the air. A loveof horror, that is!

Valentines Day may fall in February, but dont let the cheap chocolates and the gradually increasing daylight fool you: this months as spooky as the rest of em! After all, what could be more romantic than pledging your undying love for horror films? Passive entertainment remains a challenge as the world continues to burn (thanks, ongoing global pandemic!). So, if you can, give yourself and the genre a little love this month.

Speaking of which: February comes bearing blood-soaked gifts, from hotly anticipated new releases to old bangers waiting to be re-discovered. Weve got a body-swapping sophomore flick from Brandon Cronenberg, a nihilistic family haunting, an underrated British counterculture gem, and the best Dracula dance film ever made.

Be sure to peruse the complete list below, calendar in hand, for a full picture of what horror flicks are coming and going from your favorite streaming services this February.

Synopsis: Theres losing yourself in your work, and then theres this. Tasya Vos is an elite assassin; a corporate mercenary who commandeers the minds and bodies of unsuspecting victims to fulfill her deadly contracts. But when her latest assignment gets the better of her, Vos finds herself trapped in the mind of a hostile target that would see her destroyed.

Possessor makes good on the often unfulfilled promise of its peers. For a change, the gore actually lives up to the hype! The films two nightmares are devilishly compatible: an intrusive sense of dissociation coupled with a corpulent knockdown of chipped teeth and mangled flesh. While ultimately Possessor amounts to more of a concept than a narrative, its visceral gait is more than enough to get under your skin. The loss of bodily autonomy, a simultaneous crunch of bone and self, is more compelling than half of the lesser fare in Possessors elevated weight class.

Brandon Cronenbergs second film deftly quells any residual handwaving leftover from his wanting debut. There can be no doubt: he is a tremendous talent well worth watching. As Vos, Andrea Riseborough is as fantastic as weve come to expect; a cool killer who finds herself in the throes of an identity crisis at work and at home. Christopher Abbott has been fantastic for a long time (especially in 2018s Piercing), and I hope more directors follow Cronenbergs lead and give the man more starring roles. All told: Possessor is not above being genuinely queasy and disgusting. And I respect that.

Arrives on Hulu on February 1st.

Synopsis: In an otherwise peaceful English village, spoiled brat Tom Latham chooses to raise hell with his occult motorcycle gang. Sure enough, the goth apple doesnt fall far from the tree. Toms black-magic dabbling mother just so happens to know the secret to immortality. So, how do you cheat death? Frog magic and just plain deciding not to die, of course! Thrilled at the prospect of being an eternal public nuisance, Tom giddily sails off a bridge, only to burst out of his grave with a vengeance. Soon enough the gangs name, The Living Dead, takes on a more literal meaning.

Released as The Death Wheelers in the US, the 1973 film Psychomania is a bonkers example of a larger aesthetic shift in early 1970s British horror from the gothic chills to modern thrills. Of the bunch, Psychomania is perhaps the weirdest example of an attempt to cash in on the youth market. The kids love nothing more than pagan frog cults, zombies, and motorcycle culture. Right?

Psychomania was directed by Australian-born Hammer Films veteran Don Sharp (The Kiss of the Vampire), and he brings much of the black humor and efficient pacing that defined his marvelous work throughout the 1960s. Ted Moore, who shot seven of the James Bond films, contributes his professional touch. And the legendary John Camerons pre-synth score is as haunting as it is underrated.

Beryl Reid (Dr. Phibes Rises Again) and George Sanders (Village of the Damned) co-star as Toms Satan-worshiping mother and her spooky butler, respectively. All this amounts to a wonderfully offbeat gem with eccentricities to spare. There is no better film about a frog-worshiping, motorcycle death cult.

Arrives on Shudder on February 22nd.

Synopsis: In the late 19th century, a mysterious foreigner, Count Dracula, arrives in London. The unsuspecting socialite Lucy invites the stranger into her home. Her mistake proves fatal, and Dracula bites Lucy, who succumbs to the Counts curse. Her fianc entrusts her care to Dr. Van Helsing, who confidently diagnoses the vampiric source of her affliction. When Lucy dies under mysterious circumstances, Van Helsing and literatures preeminent himbo, Jonathon Harker, are on the case!

Look, Im Canadian. And there is nothing more Canadian than the government producing a silent-era-styled performance of the Royal Winnipeg Ballets adaption of Bram Stokers Dracula directed by our nations greatest weirdo, Guy Maddin. If this isnt already a Heritage Minute, it should be.

Dracula: Pages From a Virgins Diary is, as The New York Times astutely remarks, simultaneously beautiful and goofy. A fine line to walk, no doubt, but one which Maddin frequently, and graciously, skips across with ease. Here, Maddins reputation for stylish anachronism is on full display, with Dracula mimicking many of the aesthetic traditions and special visual effects of the era.

Amidst its delirious stylish flares, the film is impressively loyal to Stokers text, making it one of Maddins most accessible films. And yet, Maddins pointedly postmodern touch is undeniable. Notably, in casting Chinese-Canadian Zhang Wei-Qiang as the titular Count, Maddins Dracula underlines the xenophobic themes of Stokers text in ways past and future films have yet to match.

Think youre well-versed with the Dracula corpus? I implore you: this wildly sexy Canadian silent-era pastiche dance film is the Dracula film.

Arriving on The Criterion Channel on February 28th.

Synopsis: Drawn to their rural childhood home, a sister and brother visit their dying, bed-ridden father. Isolated on their secluded goat farm, the siblings grow increasingly paranoid and suspicious that something evil is targetting their family. After a horrific tragedy confirms their unease, the siblings are forced to confront their grief and lack of faith as the increasingly hostile presence strengthens its chokehold on their lives.

The Dark and the Wicked is a rare 2020 release in that it is a film that was released in 2020. What a concept. For a decidedly dark year, the film is, well, fittingly dark. There are enough jump scares to satisfy the contingent of genre ghouls who get off on a good jolt. But The Dark and the Wicked hits hardest when it leans into ambiguity and its admirably unrelentingly bleak atmosphere.

The film sits comfortably on the same shelf as other modern psychological family affairs like The Babadook and Mama. Though, if you take issue with the increasingly popular trauma-as-horror trend, your mileage may vary. But if youre a fan of nihilism (like our own Rob Hunter, who christened the film as one of the years best horror offerings), The Dark and the Wicked may just be worth a peek.

Arrives on Shudder on February 25th.

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All the Horror You Need to Stream in February 2021 - Film School Rejects

The Boys season finale: Victoria Neuman head exploder twist reveals the limits of the show’s nihilism. – Slate

Now you AOC see her Amazon Prime

This article contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of The Boys.

Watchers of The Boys got a real jolt of a reveal at the end of the shows second-season finale. Victoria Neuman, the truth-speaking young congresswoman played by Claudia Doumit, who had worked with the vigilante Boys in their efforts to bring down the evil Vought Enterprises, turns out to be a secret superhero. She also seems to be pretty evilshes the one responsible for all the disgusting random head explosions that have made the show so hard to watch this season. In fact, the terrible scene we were subjected to in Episode 7a Congressional hearing Neuman calls in order to bring Vought Industries to justice ends in a huge mess as the star witness and multiple attendees get their gourds squished by an invisible forcewas all Neumans doing.

Why did this surprise retain the power to jar and upset me, since Im generally a huge fan of what Slates Matthew Dessem has described as the shows deep and abiding misanthropy? Because Neuman is clearly an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez analog. The comic-book series the shows drawn from had a character named Victor Neuman, but he was a dim-witted Vought exec turned politician, apparently inspired by George W. Bush. This Victoria Neuman is totally different. Shes a young woman of color (Doumit is Lebanese, Italian, and Australian). Shes plain-spoken, sharp, and brimming with charismaand just like AOC, Neuman knows her way around a statement lipstick.

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The show even gestures to the similarity explicitly in Episode 5, when Neuman convenes a rally outside Vought after the once-hidden fact that the company has been manufacturing a superhero serum goes public. Homelander (Antony Starr), the evilest superhero, drops in on the rally, paying Neuman a series of smarmy compliments. Didnt you love that little Walk Like an Egyptian dance she did online? he asks the crowd, a seeming reference to that time a video of AOC dancing adorably to Phoenixs Lisztomania on a rooftop in college went viral. So fun! I loved it! Homelander, an old-school sociopath deeply uncomfortable with the workings of online celebrity, did not in fact love itbut the crowd, full of people hoisting signs that say We love you, Victoria!, clearly did.

Not everyone is sold on Neuman, even before the big reveal. The Boys meet with Neuman at a mutual allys house to prepare for those hearings that end in blood. Their leader, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), doesnt want to collaborate; he is, to put it politely, not a believer in electoral politics. Weve never had Congress on our side before, says the ally (Grace Mallory, ex-CIA, played by Laila Robbins), asking Butcher to play along. To which Butcher spits, in his classic brutal form: Congress? Please! What a bunch of corrupt fucking cunts they are! Neuman replies, casually: Youre not the first to call me a cunt, Mr. Butcher; Im starting to think its like a badge of honor. Rep. Ted Yoho called Ocasio-Cortez a fucking bitch on the Capitol steps in July of this year, so this cant have been an explicit connection since this season of the show was already in the can, but Ocasio-Cortez certainly gets enough abuse online to make the connection resonate.

Looking back at the times Neuman appeared this season, Im not sure why I didnt call this turn ahead of time. This particular show is not about to put its faith in a politician, no matter how apparently virtuous. The reveal that Victoria Neuman is a head-squishing supe works within the universe of The Boys, because nobody but the Boys (and maybe the good superhero, Starlight, and Grace Mallory) are allowed to have pure hearts. But this twist of the story makes me look twice at the shows nihilism, and wonder whether I want to be along for this particular ride.

When we find out shes a supe secretly working against the Boys, Victoria Neumans force of personalitythe leadership qualities that draw people to attend the rallies she convenes, toting signs that say Victoria Neuman, Political Badassbecomes instantly suspicious. Its just too reminiscent of online right-wingers making up fables about AOCs secret nature (Snopes.com has debunked conspiracy theories from AOC is an actress playing a congresswoman to AOC wants to ban motorcycles.) Clearly jealous of her youth and beauty, these real-life conspiracists insist shes too good to be true. I wish this show hadnt done the same.

Neumans nature isnt known to the Boys yet (just to the shows viewers), and the finale ends with Hughie (Jack Quaid), the most idealistic of all the vigilantes, joining up with Neumans campaign. Season 3 is supposed to start filming in early 2021, COVID willing. I suppose theres some room for a turnaroundmaybe well find out the congresswoman had reasons for busting the heads she busted. But Im not holding out much hope.

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The Boys season finale: Victoria Neuman head exploder twist reveals the limits of the show's nihilism. - Slate

The Second Season of The Boys Was Fueled by the Nihilism of Reality – The Ringer

The penultimate episode of The Boys second season begins in unnerving fashion, even by the shows standards. A lonely young white man who lives at home with his mother is slowly enveloped, and radicalized, by the dangerous rhetoric spewed by the Vought Corporation superhero and newest member of the Seven, Stormfront. Over time, and with Stormfronts warnings of super-terrorists invading America from beyond our borders constantly booming from his phone and computer screens, the loner begins to suspect that his local bodega owner is one of these threats in hiding. (The owner is, of course, a person of color.) The tragic sequence culminates with the man shooting the innocent owner in the face.

While The Boys is a pessimistic thought exercise exploring what would happen if super-powered beings actually existed among usspoiler: yes, superheroes would absolutely abuse their powersthis particular moment, unfortunately, feels very much rooted in our current reality. As other on-screen superhero stories have confronted historical examples of fascismHYDRA, originally an experimental scientific branch of the Nazi Party, is a recurring antagonist in the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe Boys portrays more contemporary racist ideologies. Modern fascism comes by way of social media, memes, and conspiracy theories.

Stormfront, a being who the second season reveals was originally created by Heinrich Himmler (a side effect of her powers is that she doesnt really age), is the evolution of the white supremacist rebrand in practice. Once a literal Nazi from Nazi Germany, she shaves part of her head, is undeniably crafty with her faux-feminist/anti-corporate messaging, and succinctly underlines her philosophy for recruiting people like the aforementioned loner. You cant win the whole country anymore, so stop trying, Stormfront tells Homelander, the shows sociopathic Superman/Captain America stand-in. You dont need 50 million people to love you, you need 5 million people fucking pissed. Anger sells. You have fans; I have soldiers.

That The Boys season finale, What I Know, premiered the day after the FBI uncovered a terrorist plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is further proof that, existence of superpowered humans wearing dorky costumes aside, the series has a firm grasp on how actual cults of personality are formed. Reality these days can be just as strange, and depraved, as fiction. (If the second season wasnt put together in 2019, Stormfront may well have given a shoutout to the same white supremacist group that the president told to stand by just two weeks ago; The Boys is rarely subtle.)

Viewers expecting a crass, irreverent take on superhero culturethe tone of Deadpool in the form of a TV seriescertainly wont be disappointed by The Boys, but Season 2 sure goes down with an un-Deadpool-like bitterness. Amazon Studios originally sent critics the entire second season in advance over the summer, so my enjoyment of the show was distilled in a few afternoons. But The Boys actual release modelafter the first three episodes premiered on September 4, Amazon went with a weekly rollouthas its pros and cons.

On the one hand, the series reaped the rewards of sustaining interest for weeks on end; its popularity is such that not only was The Boys renewed for a third season, but a spin-off about superpowered kids in college is also on the way. (Suggestion: Cast Nicholas Braun for all the Sky High heads out there.) On the other hand, stretching out this particular season into weekly morsels is asking fans to become gluttons for punishment. Even though her name was an obvious reference, Stormfront doesnt reveal her true nature until the end of the third episodeat which point, the show takes its time laying out the full extent of her awfulness (an ageless Nazi who, in a previous superhero iteration under the name Liberty, viciously murdered a young Black man). Its compelling, up to a point: Eventually, you just want to see Stormfront, like Ramsay Bolton on Game of Thrones, get her comeuppance.

To the credit of The Boys, What I Know does deliver a satisfying rebuke to, as many characters end up dubbing her, the Nazi bitch. After A-Train discovers the real reason why Stormfront doesnt want him back in the Sevenbecause hes Blackhe goes about stealing buried, classified documents of her Nazi past. With Hughie and Starlights help, Stormfronts real identity is leaked to the press, giving Vought another PR nightmare to deal with. (One of the many effects of the revelations of Stormfronts Nazi ties is that A-Train is let back into the Seven so the company can try and save face.) As for Stormfront, who confronts the Boys in the finale, she pivots very quickly from decrying the information as a deepfake to acknowledging that people like what she has to saythey just dont like the word Nazi.

And then, thankfully, she gets walloped. Queen Maeve, whos spent much of the series wallowing in self-pity, leads a Stormfront beatdown, joined by Starlight and Kimiko. The sequence is immensely cathartic and scored to the on-the-nose tune of Peaches Boys Want to Be Her. The Boys loves to take jabs at Marvelwhether intentional or not, three female heroes beating the crap out of a Nazi feels like the shows answer to Avengers: Endgames cringey and entirely unearned girl power moment. Stormfront eventually does her best Anakin Skywalker getting roasted on Mustafar impressioncourtesy of Homelanders superpowered son Ryan nailing her with his laser visionto cap off her arc. With all due respect to Aya Cash, who delivered an incredible performance, Id be fine if that was the last we ever see of her.

Season 2 was a transitional period for The Boys. After all, What I Know saves its biggest mic drop for last: Victoria Neuman, the representative reminiscent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whos been trying to hold Vought accountable for its actions, has powers herself. And not only that, shes the character responsible for the series of head-exploding assassinations this season. (Her final kill of the season was the leader of the shows equivalent of the Church of Scientology.)

While Neumans motivations arent entirely clear, it appears that Vought is covering all bases: Since the company cant stop the government from interfering in its nefarious plans, they might as well have a mole in charge of the newly established Office of Supe Affairs. If a Nazi becoming the most popular and social-media-savvy member of the Seven was The Boys appetizer, the shows main course looks like it will be Voughta conglomerate with shades of Disney and Lockheed Martin that turns a blind eye to fascists and murderers in its ranksvying for complete global domination.

Having a young representative in the mold of AOC secretly being a ruthless assassin who can explode heads with her mind is, uh, definitely in line with The Boys provocative sensibilities. But the finales Neuman twist also reaffirms what the show has hammered home from the very beginning: Whether its superheroes, celebrities, or politicians, you should always have a healthy dose of skepticism for authority figures and the institutions that put them on a pedestal. And if you ever find yourself confronted by a Nazi, punch them square in the face.

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The Second Season of The Boys Was Fueled by the Nihilism of Reality - The Ringer