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Former BigLaw partner is convicted of money laundering in cryptocurrency scheme – ABA Journal

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

Criminal Justice

By Debra Cassens Weiss

November 22, 2019, 2:02 pm CST

Image from Shutterstock.com.

A former Locke Lord partner accused of leaving BigLaw to launder money in a cryptocurrency scam was convicted Thursday.

Lawyer Mark S. Scott, 51, of Coral Gables, Florida, was convicted of conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to commit bank fraud, according to a press release from the Manhattan U.S. attorney.

Law360, the New York Law Journal, BBC News and the Cape Cod Times have coverage; Bloomberg Law covered opening statements.

Scott showed little emotion as the verdict was read but comforted a weeping family member, according to Law360.

Scott was accused of setting up fake investment funds to launder $400 million in an international pyramid scheme based on the worthless cryptocurrency OneCoin. Prosecutors said Scott earned more than $50 million in the scheme, which he used to buy luxury watches, a Ferrari, several Porsches, a yacht, and three multimillion-dollar seaside homes in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

According to federal prosecutors, OneCoin operates as a marketing network in which members receive commissions for recruiting others to buy cryptocurrency packages. The value of OneCoin is determined internally and is not based on market supply and demand, prosecutors say. They are not mined using computer resources, according to prosecutors.

OneCoin continues to operate and denies wrongdoing.

Scotts lawyer, Arlo Devlin-Brown, had argued that he didnt know that OneCoin was based on a worthless electronic currency, and his client was duped by OneCoin co-founder Ruja Ignatova, who disappeared in 2017. Ignatovas brother was a prosecution witness.

Devlin-Brown said Scott would appeal to clear his name.

Locke Lord has said it was unaware of Scotts misconduct, which happened after he left the firm.

Former BigLaw partner is convicted of money laundering in cryptocurrency scheme - ABA Journal

Cons of Cryptocurrency: the Other Side of Digital Coins – CryptoNewsZ

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

Cryptocurrencies are slowly setting a foot in the finance market and have started gaining traction around the world, to the extent that, a few Asian countries which used to hold a negative stance regarding cryptocurrencies, have started to consider the same with a bit optimistic approach. In this case, the credit goes to the benefits which these digital currencies bring on the table. However, what we are discussing today is the less talked about aspect of cryptos: the cons of cryptos.

While every coin has two sides, a large part of the crypto-community has focussed on the positive side of this newly arrived technology most of the time. It is crucial to know what disadvantages cryptocurrencies hold, how they can be tackled and what benefits they can bring in. Major drawbacks of the digital currencies include:

The constantly fluctuating prices of cryptos have infused the instability in the market and therefore, making it a risky affair. Such volatile nature of the market keeps the investors in angst and worried regarding his returns. This level of volatility, which is largely due to a lack of inherent value, paints the existence of cryptocurrencies as a bubble.

Despite the rapid spread of digital currencies in daily use, there is a significant amount of hesitation regarding its use as a payment mode. The risk that the method of crypto payment poses has played its role along with the lack of awareness here. Also, the escalating numbers of fraud and theft incidents have caused people to look at cryptos with a bit of skepticism.

Cryptocurrencies being decentralized, appear difficult to regulate. Due to that, several criminal activities find their way easily to disrupt the ethos within crypto space. The anonymity factor in crypto-space seems to be a major reason behind it. However, anonymity, at times comes across as a protection layer against hacking.

Moreover, the way the crypto market depends upon Bitcoin whales also emerges as a threat to the rest of the investors, as this whales can turn the tide at any point in time for the market.

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Cons of Cryptocurrency: the Other Side of Digital Coins - CryptoNewsZ

Zeitgeist – men’s streetwear made in Cape Town – CapeTown ETC

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

Zeitgeist translates as Spirit of Time and the Zeitgeist brand philosophy is to absorb the essence of interconnectedness that the Zeit Geist movement portrays and through that reflect the dominant global influences of streetwear, catwalk, culture, music and art of our time.

Based in Cape Town South Africa, the Zeitgeist brand was launched by design innovator Maxine Ginsberg and her dedicated team to take streetwear for men to the cutting edge and beyond. Maxine is the founder and owner of the company and her family has been involved in the South African Fashion Industry since 1905.

Original design and constant innovation is very important and capsule collections are done and updated all the time using the best in internationally sourced fabrics and trims. Production runs are limited to maintain exclusivity and to allow new stock to be introduced continuously so that the collection refreshes several times within a season. Zeitgeist regularly takes part in fashion showcase like South African Menswear Week.

The brand has through its strong online presence created a dedicated following of fans including celebrities, models and musicians. Zeitgeist is primarily aimed at men but due to high demand the collection has unisex pieces that also cater for women and a ladieswear range is being launched in the near future. The Zeitgeist customer is not a fashion follower but rather a first adopter and as such a free thinker that knows exactly what he wants and definitely not part of the pack.

Zeitgeist manufactures all garments within a 75km radius of their headquarters in Cape Town South Africa. This enables factory workers to stay employed and retain skill sets in an industry that has lost over 85 000 jobs to imports in the last 10 years. In many instances the workers are sole breadwinners and come from dire socioeconomic backgrounds where gangsterism, drugs, violent crime and abuse are the norm. It also allows for a much greener footprint as fabric and garment transport is kept to a minimum.

Find Zeitgeist on Facebook under https://www.facebook.com/ZeitGeistZA/ and on Instagram under https://www.instagram.com/zeitgeist.mw/ for the most up to date looks.

Contact: 082 567 9454

Address: 259 Long St, Cape Town City Centre, Cape Town, 8001

Website: https://zeitgeistmw.com

Pictures: Supplied

The wives of the Internet don’t approve – Salon

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

If you live in the Anglophone world and use the internet, you may already be familiar with /r/funny. With 27.3 million subscribers, /r/funny pronounced R slash funny when spoken aloud ranks as the most popular subreddit, the neologism to refer to topical forums on the eponymous link aggregation site. Like nearly all subreddits, /r/funny operates on the principle of social Darwinism: people post things that they believe are funny and which adhere to the lengthy and somewhat contradictory list of moderator rules that run along the side of the site and account-bearing users then vote on what they like. Those posts then rise to the top of the subreddit.

Hence, one scrolling to the /r/funny homepage this morning would see a webcomic by Little Porpoise about an anthropomorphic human heart wielding a knife; a visual pun on the word telekinesis; and a prank video filmed by a man tricking his mother into sitting on an air horn. All of these were, per Reddit's userbase, voted to be the most funny posts of the moment.

Because of the Darwinian nature of Reddit and the vast size of /r/funnys subscriber base, statistically speaking, the funniest videos should populate the homepage. But of course, humor is relative. There is a gulf between what you find funny and what a specific subset of internet users do. Thus, /r/funny is less of a repository of laughs, and more of an anthropological study on contemporary humor, and the popularidea of what "funny" means. It is a window into the zeitgeist.

Like much of Reddits ever-critical userbase, I am often perplexed at the kinds of things that are upvoted on /r/funny. Still, I find myself coming back frequently over the years sometimes to laugh, other times to cringe at the bizarre, frequently offensive, occasionally propagandistic images and videos that rise to the top.

Observing it over the years, you start to notice trends, certain topics or rhetorical constructions that recur among popular posts. One such trend, oft-seen but woefully unwritten about, is something I like to call the "Wife Didn't Approve" post. Usually, these posts consist of a picture of something that an adult man is doing, or is about to do, or wishes to do; the object is frequently puerile, and often involves something phallic, childish, or both.

The captions to the "Wife Didn't Approve" posts are performative. Here is something that is fun that I am doing, the men say. Yet my wife, who is not fun, does not approve. Isn't that relatable?

These kinds of posts are not, of course, confined to Reddit. Internet memes are ephemeral; they leak between the huge content aggregators and social media sites, and hence, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, 9gag, and other similar sites have thousands of variations on "Wife Didn't Approve."

A pattern like this always hints at something deeper happening socially and culturally. Why, then, are "Wife Didn't Approve" posts so popular? While we cannot easily gauge whether the people liking these posts are men or women, the rhetorical construction of it suggests that it is playing on a familiar sexist stereotype: the humorless, fun-killing protagonist's better half. Beyond that, theres the notion of marriage as some kind of entrapment, an end to the fun life of a bachelor. The men in these kinds of posts are implied to be immature, and celebrating their immaturity. Their partner, evidently, saps their youthfulness from them. They are rebelling against her regulatory whims, or so the posts seem to imply.

The Wife Didnt Approve guys are an interesting juxtaposition to the nascent internet phenomenon of the Wife Guy. The Wife Guy is a social media archetype whose personality is defined by his partner and his devotion for her. The phrase starting making rounds after a now-infamous Instagram post from Robbie Tripp, whose self-congratulatory writing about his wifes body became a viral, much-mocked meme. As the New York Times Amanda Hess wrote, the Wife Guy is worthy of suspicion because he appears to be using his devotion to his wife for personal gain. And Tripp was the consummate Wife Guy, inasmuch as hehelped normalize the neologism Wife Guy, as his life, vis-a-vis Instagram at least, revolved around depicting himself as a hero for loving his curvy partner. Capitalizing on that virality, Tripp later made a music video celebrating zaftig women like his wife.

In contrast to Wife Guys like Tripp, the "Wife Didn't Approve" guy or Anti-Wife Guy, as I call them defines his identity as counterposed to his wife. His existence is set against her rules, wishes or goals. Anti-Wife Guy is, thus, an anti-hero, a perpetual child whose baser impulses have to be curbed by his wife, who behaves more like a mom. Anti-Wife Guy basks in puerile humor and childish hobbies. He is who the man-cave was invented for. But his ability to engage in such hedonism is foreshortened by his wifes domineering disapproval. Or, so say the memes.

It is probable, given the huge amount of Anti-Wife Guy content, that many Anti-Wife Guys are exaggerating their wives' point of view. Perhaps in many cases, said posters either dont have wives, or their wives actually do approve, or they dont care. But the employment of the "Wife Didn't Approve" phrase allows one to play on recognizable archetypes both of the fun-hating harpy wife and of the manchild husband that many in the Anglophone internet world identify with.Infusing memes and jokes with wife didnt like this or wife disapproved adds a new element the idea of opposition, and of the poster and reader taking part in a collective subculture with all the other Anti-Wife Guys.As an omnipresent meme that plays on sexist stereotypes, the Anti-Wife Guy is not that dissimilar from Anti-Vax Mom.

One of my favorite Anti-Wife Guys, and perhaps the most self-aware example I have ever seen, appears on the X-Men subreddit in a post from about a year ago. In this post, an Anti-Wife Guy posts a picture of a Deadpool action figure that he stuffed in the family shopping cart without his wife's approval.

Had it in the basket already but the Wife didn't approve [of] me getting this for myself, he writes. She said we're doing Christmas shopping for the kids [not] for me. I says Im a big ass kid.

Why does every persons marriage on reddit sound awful? someone asks in the comments. The Deadpool-loving Anti-Wife Guy contemplatively replies:

Haha because our [wives] don't let us be ourselves at times haha. My wife [has] had [it] with the stacks of comic books I have in my living room. I also just recently started collecting Figurines an[d] she was like[,] ["You] don't get full its never enough for [you]. Lol. [...] I see it as we are some big ass kids and our wives are like our moms. No don't get that or no can go there and that bad for your health [...] I guess that's why we love them. My marriage is [great] can't complain.

There is something tragicomic about the Anti-Wife Guys and those who love them. Why get married if your partner disapproves of everything you do? Younger generations have taken to mocking the tendency of Boomer cartoonists to celebrate hatred of ones life partner as if marriage were something we must endure because monogamy and partnership are more important than happiness.

Those irrational Boomer beliefs about love and commitment abound in media: Al Bundy and his family on Married With Children perhaps best exemplify this nascent male Boomer attitude towards matrimony. The two sentiments are related, but not quite the same, I think: Anti-Wife Guy isn't a Boomer meme specifically, as the Anti-Wife Guy's modus operandi is to depict his partner as shrill, nagging, and mom-esque; whereas the Boomer wife-hater merely detests his partner.

One of the defining traits of a patriarchal society is that its men have more freedom to do what they please, whereas women are socialized to be more bound to a specific subset of duties that serve mens needs. Hence, men are taught that they have the ultimate freedom to pursue their passions and pleasure, and hence, dont have to grow up. In many cases, men aspire not to. Women are acculturated to take on more housework and childcare labor, and therefore responsibility. Despite the successes of the modern feminist movement, there is still a vast housework labor gap, and a concomitant childcare labor gap. As with many stereotypes, Anti-Wife Guys stereotyped partner springs on the sad reality of this social situation. I suspect I would be miffed by my partner, too, knowing that I lived in a society where my partner was expected to embrace behaving like a child, and I was expected to embrace household labor.

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The wives of the Internet don't approve - Salon

Joan Didions Early Novels of American Womanhood – The New Yorker

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

As the lovely New York spring of 1977 turned into the worst kind of New York summer, I did two things over and over again: I watched Robert Altmans mid-career masterpiece 3 Women, at a theatre in midtown, and I read Joan Didions astounding third novel, A Book of Common Prayer. Released within weeks of each other that year, when I was sixteen, these two revelatory pieces of art shared a strong aesthetic atmosphere, an incisive view of uneasy friendships between women, a deadpan horror of consumerism, and an understanding of how the uncanny can manifest in the everyday. Reading and watchingit wasnt long before Altmans and Didions projects merged in my mind, where they constituted a kind of mini-Zeitgeist, one that troubled, undid, and then remade my ideas about how feminism might inform popular art.

After falling under the sway of A Book of Common Prayer, I turned to Didions first two novels, Run River (1963) and Play It as It Lays (1970). (All three novels were reissued in November, as part of a handsome volume from the Library of America, Joan Didion: The 1960s and 70s.) Run River, published when Didion was not yet thirty, was conventional in a way that reflected not the fascinating slant of her intractably practical mind but, rather, her formidable ambition: writers wrote novels, so she wrote one. Still, the book, which is set in Didions home town of Sacramento, is not just a reflexive or academic exercise. Its protagonist, Lily Knight McClellan, is a kind of ruined Eve living in relative wealth in an Eden that the next generation will want no part of. Lily cries, drinks, cheats on her rancher husband, Everett, and aborts a child, because she cannot forgo the comfortable loving fictionsthe story of being a wife and thus socially acceptable, according to the rules of her tribe. What no Didion heroine can entirely reconcile herself to is the split between what she wants and what a woman is supposed to do: marry, have children, and keep her marriage together, despite the inevitable philandering, despite her other hopes and dreams. Didions women have an image in mind of what life should look liketheyve seen it in the fashion magazinesand they expect reality to follow suit. But it almost never does. In Didions fiction, the standard narratives of womens lives are mangled, altered, and rewritten all the time.

Play It as It Lays also centers on a woman failing to live up to social expectations, and it comes as close as any book has come to representing what repression does to the soul. In this slim novel, where sometimes a few words constitute a chapter, Didion gives shape to ghosts, the ghastly, and the ephemeral. Maria Wyeth, a sometime B actress, suffers a number of misfortunes, including the birth of a disabled child, but what makes her still the best known of Didions early heroines is how she queers the image of American womanhood even as she presumably lives it, in her nice house in Los Angeles, a city where failure, illness, fear... were seen as infectious, contagious blights on glossy plants. Maria feels an existential gnawing in her bones, a dread she can never quite shake, but instead of clinging tighter to the rules she has presumably been taughtpolish the furniture, make an apple pie, prepare her husbands Martini as he rolls up the drivewayshe makes a list of the things she will never do: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to,... carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.

Play It as It Lays was published not long after the Stonewall riots, in New York, at a time when there were few stories about gay male life out there, representing. The book, which features a significant gay male character, could be read both as a metaphor for queernessthe girl who doesnt fit inand as an early, un-camp depiction of the fag hag, a woman who questions convention by avoiding it and finds safety in the company of gay men. I admired Play It as It Laysthere isnt a closeted gay adolescent on the planet who wouldnt identify with its nihilism played out in the glare of glamorous privilegebut it didnt thrill me like A Book of Common Prayer, which has a full-bodied pathos and yearning that Didions other early fiction lacks or suppresses.

When A Book of Common Prayer came out, the country was still drunk on Bicentennial patriotism; 1976 had given us a big dose of pomp and ceremony. Over the receding jingoistic din, Didions voice told another story, about womens inner lives formed in a nation that was, as Elizabeth Hardwick put it, in a 1996 essay about Didion, blurred by a creeping inexactitude about many things, among them bureaucratic and official language, the jargon of the press, the incoherence of politics, the disastrous surprises in the mother, father, child tableau. The first three items listed have to do with language generally and rhetoric specificallyhow we fashion the truth, and why. In Didions noveland in most of her fiction, including her 1984 masterpiece, Democracybelieving that empirical truth exists is like believing that the water in a mirage will satisfy your thirst. What interests her is why people still want to drink it. Certainly Charlotte Douglas does. Charlotte is the person whom the books narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, is referring to when she says, at the start of the novel, I will be her witness. When I first read those words, that long-ago summer, I was struck, as I am now, by the feminist ethos behind them: I will remember her, and therefore I, too, will exist.

I had grown up with the art and politics of such early heroes as Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Ntozake Shange, but Altmans potent film and A Book of Common Prayer were the first works I encountered that embodied the second-wave white feminism that mattered to me as well. Not that Didiona graduate of Berkeley and a staffer at Vogue during the age of Eisenhower, who was already writing pieces steeped in originalitywas part of the feminist movement. In her 1972 essay The Womens Movement, she objected to several of the movements tendencies, including its invention of women as a class and its wish to replace the ambiguities of fiction with ideology. It was clear from Didions writing that not only was she allergic to ideology, which she avoided like a virus in most of her work, but her ways of thinking and of expressing herself were unlike anyone elses. In a 2005 essay in The New York Review of Books, John Leonard recalled how startled he was, in the sixties, by Didions syntax and tone: Ive been trying for four decades to figure out why her sentences are better than mine or yours... something about cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, icepick laser beams, or waves. Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than could be expected, as if to square a sandbox for the Sphinx. Still, in A Book of Common Prayer, Didion tried to close the gap between herself and others, to write about the responsibility inherent in connecting.

To me, A Book of Common Prayer was feminist in the way that Toni Morrisons Sula, published four years earlier, was feministwithout having to declare itself as such. But, whereas the two friends in Sula live inside their relationship, Didion wrote about a woman trying to enter into a friendship and a kind of love with another woman who is ultimately unknowable. A sixty-year-old American expatriate living in the fictional Central American city of Boca Grande, Grace inhabits an atmosphere of opaque equatorial light. Boca Grande, a sort of ersatz movie set, has no real history; its airport is a way station between more desirable destinations. A stomping ground for arms dealers and rich people with offshore accounts, Boca Grande is as good a place as any for Grace, who has cancer, to live and die. Not once during the course of the novel does she ask who will remember her when shes gone. Grace, who shares some of her creators moral rigidityIn order to maintain a semblance of purposeful behavior on this earth you have to believe that things are right or wrong, Didion told an intervieweris always looking out, rarely looking in. In a way, by moving to Boca Grande, Grace sought to escape life, or, at least, the life she was supposed to have as an American woman. And yet it followed her across the sea, in the real and ghostly presence of Charlotte, who died before Grace began telling this story.

Born in Denver, Grace was orphaned at a young age: My mother died of influenza one morning when I was eight. My father died of gunshot wounds, not self-inflicted, one afternoon when I was ten. Until she was sixteen, she lived alone in her parents former suite at the Brown Palace Hotel. Then she made her way to California, where she studied at Berkeley with the cultural anthropologist A.L.Kroeber, before being tapped to work with Claude Lvi-Strauss, in So Paulo. But make no mistake: her pursuit of anthropology was not the result of an intellectual passion, or any kind of passion. I did not know why I did or did not do anything at all, she says. After marrying a tree planter in Boca Grande, Grace retired (quotation marks hers) from anthropology. She gave birth to a son, and was eventually widowed and left, she says, with putative control of fifty-nine-point-eight percent of the arable land and about the same percentage of the decision-making process. Graces inheritance makes her the head of the household, but money isnt everythingit isnt even a start, when your real interest lies in something other than profit and waste. The flesh and the spirit are on Graces mind; her terminal illness no doubt contributes to our sense that, for her, the day is a long night filled with questions about being, questions she attaches to her memories of Charlotte.

Referred to by the locals as la norte-americana, Charlotte, during the brief time that Grace knows her, is a perfect denizen of Boca Grande. Pretty, ginger-haired, she seems to have no past, though she has an intense interest in the past, which spills over to the present and infects the future. She believes in institutions and conventionality, but they dont believe in her. She has a daughter, Marinmodelled on Patricia Hearstwho has disappeared after participating in a plane hijacking. Charlotte fills that absence with invention: she makes up a version of Marin who is forever a child. Charlottes husband, Leonard, isnt around much, either. When asked about him at one of many cocktail parties, Charlotte says carelessly, He runs guns. I wish they had caviar. That Charlotte is a mystery to Grace is part of the story: what sense can be made of a woman who spends half her time at the airport, watching planes take off for other places? Grace tries to shape these fragments and images of Charlotte into a coherent whole because she loves her, though she has no real language to express that love and Charlotte isnt around to receive it.

A Book of Common Prayer is an act of journalistic reconstruction disguised as fiction: a Graham Greene story within a V.S.Naipaul novel, but told from a womans perspective, or two womens perspectives, if you believe Charlotte, which you shouldnt. In a review of The Executioners Song, Norman Mailers 1979 book about the Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, Didion writes, of life in the West, Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on. Women pass down stories. This is true of life in Boca Grande, too. Grace wants to pass down what she knows about Charlotte and, thereby, what she might know about herself. And yet some of the drama rests, of course, in what she cant know. After marrying, Grace says, she pursued biochemistry on an amateur level. The field appeals to her because demonstrable answers are commonplace and personality absent. She adds:

I am interested for example in learning that such a personality trait as fear of the dark exists irrelative to patterns of child-rearing in the Mato Grosso or in Denver, Colorado.... Fear of the dark is an arrangement of fifteen amino acids. Fear of the dark is a protein. I once diagrammed this protein for Charlotte. I dont quite see why calling it a protein makes it any different, Charlotte said, her eyes flickering covertly back to a battered Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalogue she had received in the mail that morning in May.... I mean I dont quite see your point.

I explained my point.

Ive never been afraid of the dark, Charlotte said after a while, and then, tearing out a photograph of a small child in a crocheted dress: This would be pretty on Marin.

Since Marin was the child Charlotte had lost to history and was at the time of her disappearance eighteen years old, I could only conclude that Charlotte did not care to pursue my point.

Also, for the record, Charlotte was afraid of the dark.

Facts dont necessarily reveal who we are, but our contradictions almost always do: its the warring selfthe self thats capable of both caring for others and intense self-interestthat makes a story. And if Grace is drawn to anything its a story; narrativeinvestigating it, creating itgives her something to live for. Part of what so captivates me about A Book of Common Prayer is that, on some level, its a book about writing, which captures Didions love of cerebral thriller-romances, such as Joseph Conrads 1915 tale Victory or Carol Reeds 1949 film version of Graham Greenes The Third Man, in which a man tries to piece together the story of his friends life. But the dominant ethos of the novel is one that Didion discovered as a teen-ager, while reading Ernest Hemingway. Writing about Hemingway in this magazine in 1998, Didion noted:

The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source.

Charlottes failure is that she attaches. She cant move through in the way that Grace can, or believes she can. Charlotte has her own stories to tell, but how can you give force or form to a piece of writing when youre immune to veracity? You can only write fantasy, tell the world not who you are but who you want to be. Charlottes fantasy includes the conviction that her strange and troubling family is a family. In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind, Didion noted in her wonderful 1976 essay Why I Write. Theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion. Charlotte composes several Letters from Central America, with a view to having The New Yorker publish her reportorially soft, inaccurate work, but the editors decline. Charlottes ineptitude doesnt keep us from rooting for her, though, because, despite it all, she doesnt complain and never loses heart, and how many of us could do the same, if, like Charlotte, we loved a child who couldnt love us, or married a man who was indifferent to our pain? Graces sometimes smug responses to Charlottes high-heeled strolls into political and emotional quicksand are more upsetting than Charlottes mistakes, because Grace believes she knows better, when, in fact, no one does. What Charlotte teaches Grace, directly and indirectly, is that, no matter how much you want to tell the truthor, at least, your truththe world will twist and distort your story. Didion closes her most lovelorn and visceral novel with Grace saying, with sad finality, I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

I dont think its necessary to read chronologically through the Library of America volumewhich, in addition to the novels, includes Didions seminal essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). Almost any page of this invaluable book will take you somewhere emotionally and offer a paramount lesson in the power of Didions voice. Some readers came to Didion later in her careerthrough her National Book Award-winning memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), about the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, for instance, or Blue Nights (2011), about the death of her daughterand its interesting to go back and explore the origins of the impulse that drives those memoirs. Indeed, in The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion confesses a Grace-like tendency to try to distance herself from the unfathomable through writing and research: writing, for her, can be a means of controlling the uncontrollable, including grief and loss.

A story thats as interesting as the ones Didion tells in important works like A Book of Common Prayer is how she found and developed that authoritative literary voice. In her review of The Executioners Song, this daughter of California wrote:

The authentic Western voice... is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down. The very subject of The Executioners Song is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fadeout, trail off, like skywriting. Beneath what Mailer calls The immense blue of the strong sky of the American West... not too much makes a difference.

So whats out there in the blue? What words can we try to grab and shape as theyre fading away? How can we describe intimacy, or the failure of intimacy, without getting too close to it? Part of Didions genius was to make language out of the landscape she knewthe punishing terrain of Californias Central Valley, with its glaring hot summers and winter floods, its stark flatness, its river snakes, taciturn ranchers, and lurking danger. Those extremes affect the way you deal with the world, she said in a 1977 interview. It so happens that if youre a writer the extremes show up. They dont if you sell insurance.

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Joan Didions Early Novels of American Womanhood - The New Yorker

Is this the end of Mashiach ben Yosef? – israelrising.com

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

The ruling elites, the sacred establishers of Israels bureaucracy are coming with their knives sharpened closing in on Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. After all it is their state their establishment and not his. This was made clear to Menachem Begin, the man who Bibis father served as secretary, when David Ben Gurion ordered Yitzhak Rabin to fire on the Atalena destroying it, the ammunition in it, and killing many passengers most of whom were Holocaust survivors. The real target had been Begin who made it out alive.

Israel Eldad had warned Begin not to trust the Mapai, the forerunner of the Labor. Menachem, do you really think they will just let you walk in with enough weapons to take control? It is their state not yours and they rather destroy it than hand it over to you.

Eldad was right of course. The destruction of the Altalena led to the fall of Jerusalem since the ammunition and weapons Begin was bringing in would have led to its capture.

When Avichai Mandebilt declared his intention to indict the Prime Minister, he essentially paved the way for the leftist super-structure, Israels Deep State to begin the process of finally wresting control of the country from the street it lost it to when Begin surprised the parochial classes and Laborites in 1977.

True, there have been right wing leaders before, but each eventually bent to the will of the courts and the media, but not Netanyahu he has always been smarter than the left. The street, the disadvantaged, the religious, the settler, the sefardi, they have all sensed Netanyahu was different.

True, Netanyahu has not always acted the way any one group would want, but changed the face of Israel, steering it away from failed policies and turned it into a powerhouse a true global leader. The Prime Minister has been a thorn in the side of the Left, because he mainstreamed positions that were at one time unthinkable, steering a shaky ship after Olmert went down and turned the State around in the face of tremendous systemic opposition .

At the End of Days, a leader will arise that will be a forerunner to Mashiach ben David. This forerunner is dubbed Mashiach ben Yosef, whose whole aim is to safeguard the Jewish people in the Land of Israel in a material sense. His power and ability is to utilize the physical vessels available and harness them for the good of the Nation of Israel while protecting the nation from harm.

The Mashiach be Yosef is also a concept or a movement, represented by thousands of redeemers since the birth of the Zionist movement. This movement has been encapsulated by the State the one which has been uplifted by the current Prime Minister in a way never previously imagined.

Along with Mashiach ben Yosef, there is the Erev Rav named for the mixed multitudes that left Egypt with the Nation of Israel. At the End of Days, it is said that these mixed multitudes will be control of the Land of Israel and ultimately destroy the Mashiach ben Yosef, which is both the leader himself and the physical restoration of the Nation of Israel in the Land of Israel.

Sometimes we think Redemption and we feel the End of Days is sometime in the future, but it seems now we are at that point.

And I will pour out upon the house of David and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplications. And they shall look to me because of those who have been thrust through [with swords], and they shall mourn over it as one mourns over an only son and shall be in bitterness, therefore, as one is embittered over a firstbornson.Onthat day there shall be great mourning in Jerusalem, like the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the Valley of Megiddon.Zechariah 12:10-11

The first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Palestine Rav Kook wrote the following in 1904 as a eulogy on the occasion of Theodor Herzls death:

The characteristics of nationalism was prominent in Ahab, who had great love for Israel. He followed in the footsteps of his father, Omri, who founded a city in the land of Israel. Scriptural commentators said: Everyone receives a portion in the world to come. Gilead is mine refers to Ahab, who fell in Gilead. At the height of battle, despite being shot through with arrows, Ahab hid his injury so as not to alarm his soldiers. Such courageous spirit is derived from tremendous, abundant love. He also honoured the Torah, for he outwardly preserved the nations dignity in the eyes of Ben-Haddad. Nonetheless, he did not recognise the value of the Torah and of Gods unique holiness, in which Israels entire advantage lies. Therefore, he followed the ways of Jezebel and the despicable customs of other nations to the degree that they then prevailed over the Zeitgeist.

In contrast, Josiah elevated the spiritual aspect as no king before or after him. As the text testifies, And before him there was no king like him, who returned to the Lord with all his heart and soul and might, in accordance with the entire Torah of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him. To that end, he wanted Israel to have no relationship with the nations of the world. He therefore did not heed the words of Jeremiah, who advised him in Gods name to allow the Egyptians to pass through Israels territory.

Thus, Ahab and Josiah combine the two aspects of Joseph and Judah, the power of the Messiahs of the House of Joseph and the House of Judah. When the people are ready, the distortion of each separate dynasty will be removed, for in the times of the Messiah the two kingdoms will join together and come to fully realise the full potential of their power as a chosen nation. At that time, with this reunification, the mourning [in Jerusalem] will also reach a climax, for what was lost and the distance from true fulfilment will finally be recognised, and the mourning for both Ahab and Josiah will combine and grow exponentially. [This great mourning] will serve as a moral that [both kingdoms] must combine their powers in order to create the balance that will lead to the greatest general good.

What we are witnessing now is the tearing apart of an approach to make way for something far bigger. After all, Bibi and those within the Revisionist Zionist movement tried to balance between a redemptive vision of the state and an out of date nationalism that relied on secular concepts rather than the Torah and Jewish faith. In this case, the Erev Rav were never done away with because in order to destroy them, the Revisionists would have to rely on a force beyond their cognitive abilities. This force is the light of the Mashiach ben David, which is above time and space.

At the End of Days Mashiach ben Yosef falls, which leads to the next stage of the Redemptive process. Of course this comes with chaos and fear, because all of us no matter what camp we have been in, understand that what has been in existence cannot truly continue as is. Netanyahus fall is the fall of the State as we know it.

How the road to the final Redemption will play out now is anyones guess, but one thing is certain it will be a surprise.

How MAC Cosmetics Plans to Get Back on Top – The Business of Fashion

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

NEW YORK, United States Drew Elliott has, by his own admission, engineered some of the most important pop culture images of the past decade.

Its not an idle brag: it was his decision, as chief creative officer of Paper Magazine, to put Kim Kardashians naked, glistening derriere on the cover of the publications infamous #BreakTheInternet issue in 2014. The images came close to meeting that hashtags promise, bringing in upwards of 50 million page views for Papers website, a coup for a niche fashion publication in a time when print had lost much of its lustre.

Now, Elliott, 38, is once again helping an ageing institution beset by online competitors to recapture the cultural zeitgeist. Only this time, its on a far bigger stage. As the newly appointed senior vice president and global creative director of MAC Cosmetics, hes tasked with reviving the fortunes of the worlds biggest prestige makeup brand.

I'm going to give them blockbusters, Elliott told BoF at MACs offices in Soho, in his first interview since starting in his new role three weeks ago. Some 300 employees are spread across four floors, connected by a massive red Ruby Woo staircase named for the brand's longtime bestselling lipstick (it was recently dethroned by Devoted to Chili.). The 86,000-square-foot space exists as a hip offshoot to the stuffier Midtown offices of The Este Lauder Companies, MACs parent.

Among Elliotts first orders of business: attract Gen Z customers with a revamp of the labels imagery, messaging and voice on social media. He said he will help MAC communicate through a lens of pop culture, although hes mum on specifics. He also wants to rethink the brands approach to its signature collaborations, green-lighting fewer new products but expanding the notion of these partnerships to include campaigns and other concepts that dont involve putting more items on shelves.

Elliotts arrival marks the completion of a total makeover of MACs upper ranks, a changing of the guard the likes of which havent been seen since Este Lauder acquired the brand from founders Frank Toskan and Frank Angelo in 1998.

Creative Director James Gager and Global Brand President Karen Buglisi Weiler, who built MAC from a fledgling Canadian label into a multi-billion-dollar cosmetics empire, exited in March 2017 and February 2018, respectively. Buglisi Weiler's replacement was Philippe Pinatel, the former head of operations at Birchbox, who joined last year as MACs senior vice president and global general manager. He will have help from Ukonwa Ojo, who starts next month in the newly created role of senior vice president of global marketing.

We were not in the channels of distribution where young people were shopping.

The decision to pluck executives from a digital-first beauty subscription service and a print magazine was an unusual one for the company, which almost never looks outside the Este Lauder universe when filling leadership roles.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. MAC was able to scale because its expansive selection provided something for everyone and it was primarily sold at department stores, once the leading sales channel for prestige beauty. Plus, there were less makeup brands, which gave fewer options to consumers now bombarded with new launches on a daily basis. MAC was a pioneer to the inclusivity movement labels are rushing to be a part of, from challenging gender norms to offering the requisite 40 to 50 shades of foundation decades before the rest of the industry.

But the brand has seen US sales falter in recent years, where digitally native labels like Glossier have invented a new way of selling makeup centred on building community among consumers under the age of 25. Glossier operates out of the same Soho building as MAC.

Though MAC has been the largest prestige makeup brand in the US for over a decade, sales dipped 10 percent in the first half of 2019. The picture looks better globally, with strong demand from emerging markets expected to drive global sales for fiscal year 2020. Global business is growing by high, strong single percentages, and MACs now the second biggest prestige makeup brand in China. Singles Day sales totalled $38 million and included 1.2 million lipsticks, a 67 percent lift from last year. MAC is the second largest label in the Lauder portfolio, after theEste Lauder brand, with annual net sales that top $2 billion.

A lip wall in Mac cosmetics' Shangahi store | Source: Courtesy

We took our success a little for granted and didnt fundamentally understand the fragmentation and profound disruption of what social media and content brought to the marketplace and the conversation, particularly with Gen Z, said John Demsey, executive group president at Este Lauder. We were not in the channels of distribution where young people were shopping.

MAC needs to change its sales pitch. In the past, the label played such a central role in the cultural conversation about beauty that it could dictatea single trend across all markets(when Strobe Cream came out in 2000 there was only one shade that the brand talked about using in one way as a highlighter on cheekbone). A different approach is necessary today, where trends vary by region and consumers might get their makeup tips from micro-influencers instead of television and magazine ads. People want options and dont want to be told what brand to buy.

We used to have a very strong, fashion-centric point of view where we would say, This is a trend, this is what is hot and MAC was delivering it, Pinatel said. The brand is also developing new products to appeal to the regional market, a departure from MACs previous one-size-fits-all strategy.

We are innovating from New York, but for the [different] regions and countries and for the consumer, he said.

MAC recently launched a mascara in Latin America for consumers who had trouble curling their eyelashes, and cushion compact foundations that are only sold in Asia. Both have become bestsellers in their respective markets. A store in Eaton Centre in Toronto, which has a large proportion of Chinese shoppers, sells products from Asia-specific lines. Customers at Nordstroms new Manhattan flagship can check out looks from New York Fashion Week.

Mac Cosmetics' display inside the new Nordstrom New York store | Source: Courtesy

MACs problems arent limited to messaging, however. Pinatels focus initially is on revamping the companys distribution strategy, which sees the brands makeup sold via 4,650 locations worldwide. They include about 680 freestanding doors, including 162 in the US and 50 in Canada.

Until 2017, points of sale did not include US specialty retailers, which have stolen a large share of makeup sales once made by department stores, historically a MAC stronghold. Two years ago, the brand entered Ulta Beauty, and is now sold in 350 of the chains roughly 1,200 stores. MAC is sold in Sephora in nine markets internationally, including China, South Korea, Brazil and Canada.

Demsey said MAC opted for Ulta because the chain, which operates hair and nail salons, allowed the brand to hire its own in-store makeup artists. The company employs 19,000 makeup artists worldwide, but is incorporating more digital elements and a stronger self-service component into stores for customers who prefer to explore on their own.

Pinatel is confident the revamped store format, which will roll out to all doors within three years, will help the North American business. Sales are up 10 percent in about 80 percent of the US and Canadian stores that have already incorporated the updated design.

He talks a lot about re-tapping into culture, pointing to makeup collaborations with mainstream icons like the Disney movie Aladdin and the singer Mary J Blige, as well as more niche cultural touchstones such as Commes des Garon. The brand was an exhibitor at video game convention TwitchCon this year as an effort to reach gamers, and has been working to build a presence on Tiktok to connect with the apps young user base.

For every VSCO girl, theres a Euphoria boy or girl that goes against it.

Makeup trends are diverging, with labels like Lady Gagas Haus Labs embodying a makeup for everyone ethos to Gucci Westmans Westman Atelier and Victoria Beckham Beauty taking a clean approach to colour cosmetics. Glossier appeals to teens and twentysomethings with an affinity for no-makeup makeup and Huda Beauty attracts the exact opposite. MACs role in this world is to service everybody, Pinatel said.

We have seen, in the past, a swing between a lot of makeup, less makeup, then a lot of makeup, said Pinatel. The new story is that theres this young customer with authority saying, Im not wearing a lot of makeup, and thats a clear choice that they are speaking very loudly about.

Or as Demsey put it: For every VSCO girl, theres a Euphoria boy or girl that goes against it.

MAC has one advantage over other beauty brands: it was the first label to challenge mainstream societys ideas and values around gender norms, sexuality and alternative lifestyle, most notably through early collaborations with RuPaul, who starred in the first Viva Glam campaign in 1994. The MAC Aids Fund, founded at the same time, has raised over $500 million to date.

The brand has struggled to communicate this in a way that resonates with American teens, and despite strong growth abroad, MAC fell out of favour with a younger demographic.

MAC Cosmetics' collaboration with Comme des Garcons | Source: Courtesy

The Gen Z consumer mindset is so completely different than ours, said Shireen Jiwan, founder of Sleuth Brand Consulting, of todays youth who categorises gender, sexual preference and ones physical sex as three separate entities. For older generations, your pronoun and your gender and your sex are all one thing.

Digitally native newcomers like ColourPop, Lime Crime and Morphe have become the go-to for this group, despite MACs deep history and roots in the arts and theatre communities that have typically been the ones most elastic in their thinking about whats now referred to as gender fluidity.

They [MAC] ushered it in, they were the pioneers and then everybody else rushed into this space and all of that noise drowned them out, said Jiwan. Its going to be about taking these issues around gender and sexuality out of the realm of niche and shoving them firmly in the faces of the mass mall consumer. We havent seen that yet.

Its a tall order for Elliott, who underscored the importance of maintaining MACs rightful place inside pop culture. For him, its less about product and more what the brand will put out from an image perspective, taking cues from Instagram, TikTok or anyone with an influential voice or following.

My job is to prioritise those things and to articulate them through our brand filter so it's 100 percent clear, Elliott said.

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Continued here:

How MAC Cosmetics Plans to Get Back on Top - The Business of Fashion

Tokyo, Lisbon, Leeds: the indoor food halls sweeping the world – The Guardian

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

In a riverside venue in Durham with sensational views of the citys castle and cathedral, John Theobald is getting to grips with a fancy new digital oven. LED lights flash on and off apparently randomly, but soon enough a plate of handmade peri-peri pork sausages, champ mash and buttered spinach is on the counter.

The Durham Sausage Company is one of seven independent food businesses under one roof at the Food Pit, which officially opened on Friday. Its plates of sausages and mash had previously been available at a local pop-up, but Durhams new food venue was a chance for Theobald and his business partner to go a step further without the investment and risks of opening a restaurant. Anyway, I dont think theres demand for a restaurant dedicated to sausages, said Theobald. This is a bit like a food cart, but on a bigger scale.

In another booth, Richie Parker of Spread From The Med offering chicken gyros, souvlaki and halloumi fries had spent the summer touring festivals in a converted horse box. Were still doing the van, but this is a toe in the water to see if theres scope to become a bigger company.

From Durham to Brighton, Preston to Cheltenham, in Liverpool, Leeds and London, food markets and halls are bringing street food indoors. The largest, Market Halls West End, opened nine days ago in a redundant BHS store at Oxford Circus, London, offering more than 900 covers a day in a 35,000 sq ft venue. One of the smallest, the Street Food Market in Preston, will open on Wednesday after local businessman Irfan Asghar borrowed money from family and friends for the venture and spread the word on social media.

The food market movement is a runaway train, according to Big Hospitality, a website that reports on the industry. The new wave of food halls with multiple restaurants in one venue is sweeping the UK at an alarming rate, it says.

Food courts are a common feature of Asian cities, but there they can be chaotic and brash experiences, with noisy hawkers, formica tables and bright fluorescent lighting. The concept has spread across the world and moved upmarket: last week, the 50,000 sq ft Time Out Market Chicago opened following similar ventures this year in Miami, New York, Boston and Montreal, five years after the first Time Out Market opened almost 4,000 miles away in Lisbon. In Chicago, customers can choose from 19 outlets and three beautiful bars.

In most UK food markets, a developer will operate the venue, choose the independent food businesses for the hall, pay business rates, utilities and insurance, provide cutlery and crockery, hire uniformed staff to clear tables and clean toilets, and critically the developers run the lucrative bar. The independent food outlets either pay a fixed rent or a share of their turnover.

These markets are blurring the lines between street food and restaurants, said food writer Hugh Thomas. They are more democratic and less formal places to eat, and the food is more affordable. You dont have to go for a full-on meal, you can spend a tenner for great food along with a drink. For customers, the biggest advantage is choice. Those socialising in groups can eat different food, depending on taste or dietary restrictions. Everyone pays for what they eat; no tortuous dividing up of bills at the end of the meal.

These markets are blurring the lines between street food and restaurants

For families, food markets have the informality of fast-food venues but are more relaxed, pleasant places and some provide games, play areas and activities. Solo diners are common, with a choice between communal tables or eating alone.

Mark Laurie, director of the Nationwide Caterers Association which supports street-food traders, said the rapid growth of food markets was partly due to the slow death of retail. There are more spaces available on high streets and in town centres. People who would have invested in restaurants are now investing in market halls.

In Durham, Nick Berry of Clearbell Capital, the developer behind the Food Pit, said there was an experiential trend in retail and eating out. Customers were looking for something unusual, with a local feel and good value. And small food businesses dont want to sign up to long-term liabilities if they cant be sure they will be successful. Were trying to remove those barriers.

Colin and Mandy, who had eaten their lunch at the Food Pit, were delighted. Spot on, said Colin. I like the fact that theres all different variations of food in one place. And its very relaxed. Dawn, who was among a group of women taking a break from their workplaces, said they had tried pretty much all the restaurants around here in the past 10 years and were grateful for something new and different. Its good to have a choice, especially when you have a fussy eater with you, she said, indicating one of her co-diners.

Two hundred and seventy miles away in London, Market Halls West End is the firms third food hall in the capital, with two more planned to open by the end of 2020. Were bringing young, independent, chef-driven businesses that wouldnt normally have a chance of trading in these sites, to the West End, said Simon Anderson, the companys chief creative officer.

The venue offers 11 kitchens, including Malaysian Tamil cuisine, Japanese sushi bowls, Chinese savoury crepes, tacos from Tijuana and vegan and gluten-free wok dishes. There is a rooftop bar and a demonstration kitchen.

On Friday, the lunchtime clientele included office workers, tourists, construction workers in hi-vis jackets, students and families. It has a busy vibe. You can come on your own or in a big group and be part of something, said Anderson. It breaks down a lot of barriers.

But Laurie warned of a battle for the soul of street food. There was a risk of the street-food movement being taken over and exploited by big corporations, he said.

Food halls done right are a great addition to the UK food scene. They fit the experiential zeitgeist and suit the British weather. But they need to maintain the authenticity that made street food so popular, and they need to continue to facilitate micro-businesses and start-ups.

Street food has disrupted the traditional food and beverage sector, and it is now disrupting the entertainment sector and night time economy.

The passion, skill, innovation, and theatre of street food is what makes it special. Hopefully as the market hall sector grows, this will continue to flourish otherwise punters will head back to the streets or elsewhere.

Read the rest here:

Tokyo, Lisbon, Leeds: the indoor food halls sweeping the world - The Guardian

The 30 Best Drake Memes of the 2010s – XXLMAG.COM

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

These days, memes are a way of life. No rapper knows thatbetter than Drake.

Drizzys debut album,Thank Me Later, was released six months prior to the launch of Instagram in October 2010, and since then, the rappers every move has served as fodder for the viral phenomenon known as internet memes.

Drake is the right mix of popular, polarizing and ever-present in the cultural zeitgeist that all eyes are constantly on him. That amounts to Aubrey pretty much not being able to do anything without the potential of it becoming the internets next meme craze. Every album cover, every awkward face made while sitting courtside at a Toronto Raptors game, every screenshot from a music video or snippet of footage from tour has the potential to be the days most entertaining tidbit. The rap superstar isnt even safe checking his phone in the club these days.

In 2016, he acknowledged the fact that he is every meme makers top priority during an interview with Instagram.

"I have become the most memed person aside from the Michael Jordan crying face," Drake said. "I love that Im the guy that doesn't take himself too seriously. I like laughing even if it's at my expense. It doesnt feel like it's necessarily malicious or hurtful stuff. Im conscious of it."

He added, "I really enjoy it more than watching television. It brings joy to my life. I hope it brings joy to other peoples lives too."

The same year, he appeared on Saturday Night Live and jokingly sprinkled his opening monologue with a song called More Than a Meme about constantly being the butt of internet jokes.

Earlier this year, he fed into the meme mania, urging people to meme his post-game rant following the Toronto Raptors winning the NBA Finals, to which he was obliged.

Aubrey is definitely ingrained in the meme culture. With the decade coming to a close, XXL compiles a list of the best Drake memes of the past 10 years.

Drakes Degrassi character Jimmy Brooks got shot on the show andbecame wheelchair-bound. When Drizzy broke out to stardom around 2010, it didnt take long for the memes about his former gig to surface.

Drake made his way inside the University of Kentucky locker room and found himself under the arm of friend and then freshman center Demarcus Cousins while the hooper was giving his post-game interview following a NCAA tournament win over Wake Forest. The glowing look in Drakes eyes instantly became a meme mainstay.

Drake (especially when he first dropped) was considered by some to be softer than satin because of his rap ballads and tender slow jams. The perceived lack of toughness birthed an abundance of Drake the type of nigga posts on social media that still continue on today.

Memeufactures made easy work of out Drakes laggard Take Care track Marvins Room, specifically the part where Drizzy stands in front of a mirror and repeats, I hope no one heard that.

A photographer captured photos with Drake displaying polar opposite moods on his face, and the internet caught the alley-oop and slammed it home.

A screenshot of Drake rocking Timb boots, a throwback DaDa Supreme fit and turned at an awkward angle was all the internet needed tofreeze in time one of the most memorable meme moments of the year.

When the Miami Heat won the NBA Finals in 2013, Drake was front and center with the Big Three and crew popping bottles in the club. Some called foul on Drakes seemingly bandwagon behavior.

Drakes profile photo backdropped by a blue sky for his Nothing Was the Same album quickly started getting replicated after it was revealed, with many people putting their own head in the clouds.

The University of Kentuckys loss to UConnin the 2014 NCAA Tournament left Drake looking sad in the stands. Leave it up to the Internet to revel in Aubreys sorrow.

Drake has been spotted at many Serena Williams matches over the years. When she went head to head with Andrea Petkovic in 2015, Drakes spirited claps of support were caught by the camera and flipped into Internet entertainment.

Madonna laid a big wet one on Drake right in front of the crowd during her set at 2015 Coachella. The scene left people stunned including Drizzy whose immediate reaction to the pop stars tongue being shoved in his mouth gassed up meme content for days.

The Hotline Bling video may hold the record for most memes generated from a single work. Drakes dance moves, facial expressions and hand gestures have been the meme gift that keeps on giving.

Drakes rudimentary If Youre Reading This Its Too Late mixtape cover quickly turned into something people were making on their own. Fans came up with some entertaining alternates.

When the beef is on, the memes come out. When Drake and Meek Mill were mortal enemies in 2015, the internet played a large part in adding entertainment to the friction with memes that helped push the narrative.

The release of Drake and Futures joint effort, What a Time to Be Alive, had the internet teetering on the verge of maximum overload. Once fans started taking in the project, the memes started rolling in.

Drake and Futures alliance on WATTBA proved they were a dynamic duo and two of the hottest rappers in the game. But when someone unearthed their high school photos, the internet had fun with speculating about their pre-fame lives.

Drakes Views album cover depicts the rapper sitting atop Torontos massive CN Tower. It didnt take long for hilarious recreations to pop up.

On-again, off-again, probably never-again couple, Drake and RiRi partied the night away at E11even Miami in the summer of 2016. When the paparazzi captured a shot of Bad Gal whispering something in Aubreys ear, speculation of what was said started running rampant in meme form.

It was a simple check of the phone at the club but, because the Internet, it turned into a whole damn wave of memes with empathetic commentary.

Drake scribbling words down into a notebook gave people open season to come up with what the rapper must have been scribing.

When Drake invited fans to caption a blurry concert photo in 2017, the hilarious captions and memes started piling up.

Drakes Gods Plan video got touching at moments, especially the part where Aubrey shares a warm embrace with a couple he just hooked up with some cash.The teary-eyed moment became the motivation for another meme movement.

Drake let his soul glow in Migos throwback Walk It, Talk It video, with the internet having a good ol time coming up with jokes about the rappers curly wig selection.

Drakes mind was blown when magician Julius Dein turned a regular lollipop into a bust of Batman right before his eyes. The 6ix Gods look of surprise will forever be jotted down in meme history.

When cameras caught Drake pouring up a beverage while sitting courtside at a Toronto Raptors game last season, he jokingly slid the drink to the side, reminding people of similar situations theyve been in.

Drakes fake smile during the 2019 NBA Playoffs was accompanied by some of the best memes of the year.

Drake was on one after the Toronto Raptors won Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals and predicted his home team to win it all in a fiery post-game interview. Drakes intense demeanor was hilariously logged into the meme catalogs.

When Kevin Durant injured himself during the NBA Finals, Drake was upset. Orwas he? The internet had a field day deciding if the show of frustration was real via meme.

People had no chill after seeing Chris Brown and Drakes extended No Guidance video. Drakes Ooo. Wow line has been the subject matter for several funny memes.

The unthinkable happened when Drake performed at Tyler, The Creators Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival: Drizzy got booed offstage. It happens to the best of them, but since it happened to Drake, we got a bunch of memes poking fun at the moment.

Continue reading here:

The 30 Best Drake Memes of the 2010s - XXLMAG.COM

Growing up with, and outgrowing, Elvis Costello – tonemadison.com

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

By no means am I out to delegitimize Costello as a musician or human being. The man has released records with musicians as genre-spanning as Burt Bacharach and The Roots, for Gods sake. So accomplished and admirable. What a marvel.

Yet, my Elvis Costello vibe is this: Have you ever had someone you know and feel safe with do something bizarre or creepy? I have. My whole feeling about them changes. They dont feel safe anymore. I might want to like them, but the memory of the way I felt in that instance cant be erased. Now, Ive listened to and sung along with Alison for years, but over the last few, particularly while rewatching New Girl, the song hit me in a different way. So, while I respect Costello and his impressive and expansive oeuvre, he lightly creeps me out. And for that reason, I will not be seeing him play at the Orpheum on Nov. 24. I wont settle for less than the choicest vibes. Im sure its no skin off his back.

On the same note, Im actively ridding my record collection of what I refer to as creepy old man music, like recent castoff Rolling Stones Some Girls. (The title track is atrocious.) There were scant options not to identify with angry young man music at that precious point in my life. (Nod to the Riot Grrrl movement for throwing me a life preserver.) And in identifying with an overtly masculine zeitgeist at a tender age, I felt I also had, in some way, to excuse the depiction of women as inferior humans, glorified or reviled through the male gaze. Granted, my origins are far from feminist, so I cant pin this solely on creepy old man music. But many people particularly women ("girls," in the nomenclature) dont get a peek outside of this limiting and oppressive perspective. For that, I cant bring myself to participate in the misogynistic, problematic charade any longer. Not for all the catchy nostalgia in the world.

Scott: I think what's also really hairy here is that if you get into Costello in your teens or early 20s, his work often feels like an escape from, or at least a counterpoint to, the machismo you expect from male rock musicians like the Stones. It's nerdy, it's sardonic, its anger feels like the anger of the underdog, at least until you scratch the surface. Of course, we know it isn't that simple, that a man doesn't stop playing his role in broader societal imbalances just because he strikes a goony pigeon-toed posture or credits his guitar playing to "the little hands of concrete." We're hardly the first to ask what role misogyny plays in Costello's music, and he has written that he finds that line of critique "bewildering."

It's interesting that you mention "This Year's Girl," because that song by itself has been pretty central to the debate over how Costello's music portrays women. He addressed this in his memoir, even, asserting as you do that the song targets not the woman but the man's way of looking at her. He also claims in the same passage that maybe some critics and listeners were just projecting their own misogyny onto him. Which, I mean, come on, we know he can look inward a little harder than that. It's a bit of a dodge. The question here isn't necessarily whether Costello is a particularly odious misogynist, but whether he can grapple with the assumptions and worldviews and blind spots he carries into his work. I think it'll still be a great show and I've had four very good experiences seeing him live, but I can understand feeling icky enough to stay away.

Holly: Good point on the machismo front, Scott. Elvis Costellos a cool rock guy, right? Not some hair metal schmuck or like stereotype. Similar to Rivers Cuomowho probably picked up some style, if not lyrical, tips from Costello. Nerdy Cuomo wrote No One Else and Across The Sea in the mid 90s. The formers about wanting a girl who lives her life essentially for his enjoyment. The latter? A sweet tale of yearning to put the moves on an 18-year-old Japanese schoolgirl who sent him fan mail, admitting it would be wrong, yet creeping out all the while.

It comes down to context. Cuomo was a non-macho rock guy for his day, as was Costello. At the time, the kind of sentiments in Alison and the aforementioned Weezer songs were accepted as sweet, relatively emotionally mature alternatives to songs that blatantly objectified women. Look, these nerd rock songs say, I have a mind and a heart. And thats great. Rock music needed that. Yet toxic masculinity has come across as progressive on many fronts.

Its much easier to sweep this subject under the rug and bask in nostalgia. So thank you for having this discussion. In analyzing these instances of misogyny and heteronormativity, we can focus on untangling problematic ideas, rather than vilifying the artists who expressed them 20-40 years agoregardless of whether the artists have changed their minds. Freedom of expression is a right and fuck ups are inevitable. Learning from the past is whats important. If more young people and musicians are exposed to ideas about how these kinds of songs oppress others, theyll be better equipped to write more empoweringand sexy!songs about relationships. Music by women expressing themselves with little concern for the male gaze definitely had a lasting impact on me, and for that Im eternally grateful.

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Growing up with, and outgrowing, Elvis Costello - tonemadison.com

Defining a Decade in Arts and Culture – The Saint

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

Music- Annabel Steele

When it comes to music, the 2010s are split down the middle. Firstly, its been the age of electronic music. Of course, we had the synth-heavy 80s and the disco-loving naughties, but the past decade has put DJs and producers at the forefront of the music scene, creating and championing an unprecedented style of electronic music. And because of this, its all about collaborating; you dont just look out for the new Calvin Harris release, but you also want to know whos featured. The intricacies of production have become much more appreciated because of this: producers are no longer behind the scenes, but musicians in their own right. Artists like Flume, Skrillex and Martin Garrix have proved that you can create chart-topping electronic songs where production is the main focus: lyrics arent necessary anymore. This idea, which before 2010 only really existed in the minds of classical composers, is changing the way we think about music for the better, I think.

But theres also a new genre which puts lyrics above anything else: grime. The main criticism of grime music is that every beat and every backing track sounds the same; but thats sort of the point. The lyrics, and the way theyre delivered, take the place of instruments. You dont look for melody in a grime track, you look for rhythm. The better the writer, the better the artist. Wordplay is the priority: playing with the relationship between the vocals and the beat, and treating the instrumental as an accessory to the lyrics. Grime artists have cultivated an entire culture out of their music, and collaboration is important here, too. Different artists have established their own style of writing and delivery, but collaboration in grime is the process of figuring out whose styles would complement each other.

All in all, its been a decade to remember and, more importantly, one which I think will play a huge role in defining the trajectory of music from here.

Fashion- Annabel Steele

The past decade in fashion has been the most diverse ever. The difference between high end and high street is more noticeable than ever, and more recent concerns over the sustainability of the fashion industry have shaken up attitudes towards how we should dress. But there are a few ideas and trends which I think will come to define what weve been putting on our backs for the past 10 years.

First of all: fashion trainers. If youd told my 2010 self that Id be sporting Nikes on a night out in 10 years, I would have laughed in your face. But now, I find myself double-taking at someones footwear if it isnt something that could technically be worn to the gym. I was so against this trend when it first made an appearance, but the moment I realised it was here to stay was also the first moment that fashion became a genuinely important part of my life: the first time I watched the Chanel Haute Couture SS14 show. After watching Cara Delevingne skip down a rotating staircase to Sbastien Tellier accompanied by a live orchestra, in a tweed mini dress, glittered eyes and a pair of stunning white Chanel trainers well, I was hardly going to be against the shoes after that religious experience.

Next up: colour! If Ive said it once, Ive said it a thousand times: thank you, young Donna Sheridan. Funky patterned trousers, animal print shirts, bright knit jumpers: festival wear, but all year round. To Anna Wintours smug delight, were not afraid of colour anymore. But we dont just owe it to Donna. The progress weve made towards LGBTQ+ equality, and the integral part fashion has to play in that movement, has also brought colour back into our lives. Pride is called Pride for a reason, and the movement isnt just about who you fancy its about having the freedom to cultivate your own identity, and fashion is central to that process.

And on a similar note, I also hope the 2010s will be defined by a genuine encouragement to wear whatever you want. Androgyny, drag, body positivity we are moving, slowly but surely, towards a more inclusive and accepting society, and that has been reflected in fashion choices across the board.

Food- Sophia Rink

Culinary journalisms upward trend over the past decade owes its widespread cultural foothold in large part to the adjacent rise and eventual stabilization of social media and its associated practices. While foodie culture in general has certainly seen its fair share of new gastronomic trends craft beer, deconstructed plating techniques, everything rainbow, and ridiculous dessert portion sizes to name a few the solidification of social media as a form of personal journalism has played an understated but incredibly important role in the way that food is reported in the media, discussed, and even consumed. Presentation is no longer solely about showcasing food to one who has ordered it but about how Instagrammable it is. Food is used as a marker of digital social status and culture. Trendy eateries have always been salivated over by the masses, but with how second-nature photo sharing has become over the last decade, its now become an ingrained reflex to photograph a meal to prove its worth the sight of the consumable is nearly as important as the act of consumption. By situating the photograph and the sharing of the visual experience as the first order of business, eating is made into a secondary motivation for purchasing food. Sites like Pinterest and homespun culinary blogs have furthered this push towards visual consumption while they have made food and culinary experimentation more accessible and more desirable, they absolutely impart a sense of aesthetic ambition. For example, meal prepping does make ones life easier on busy days, but do the instructions which suggest arranging brightly-coloured vegetables to form a rainbow in the Tupperware mean that modern cooking is successful only if it is visually appealing? The answer is no, but with social media in mind its worth thinking about what you eat and why youre eating it.

Film- Milo Farragher-Hanks

For me, the moment that best surmises the past decade in cinema is Ethan Hawkes tormented Reverend protesting Well, somebody has to do something in Paul Schraders First Reformed. Its a sentiment perfect for an era that has sometimes felt like a crisis point for the medium, a time in which all has been in flux much has been done for good and ill. Once accepted wisdom about what kind of films people see, where and how they see them, and even what cinema is has been called into doubt. In some welcome, overdue ways, it has been a time of broadening. Movements like #OscarsSoWhite and #TimesUp have given voice to long-silenced accounts of systemic inequality in the industry, and helped to challenge conceptions of whose story is worth telling. All this has been significant and valuable. Yet in other, broader ways it has felt like a period of narrowing. Slowly but surely, a complex confluence of factors have concentrated the attention of the entertainment press and audiences near-exclusively on a single type of film: CGI-heavy, mega-budget spectacles based on existing properties. The films that dominate the popular imagination are budgeted such that they must appeal to all possible tastes, often making the world of cinema feel utterly bereft of risk and surprise. Of course, that is not the case. This is the decade that gave us We Need To Talk About Kevin, Moonrise Kingdom, Inside Llewyn Davis, Under The Skin, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Handmaiden, Moonlight, Phantom Thread, Leave No Trace and so many more aesthetically and narratively bold, stirring films. But the continual existence of the conditions that allow such films to be made and find an audience does not feel like a guarantee. As a medium stands on the precipice between widening and closing, only one thing is sure somebody has to do something.

Podcasts- Euan Notley

Perhaps the most surprising development of the 2010s has been the rise of the podcast. The golden age of radio as longform entertainment came to an end in the 1950s with the mass marketing of the television. Now suddenly, the podcast has resurrected the audio format. While television still reigns supreme, the rate with which podcasts have entered our popular culture is astounding.

The rise of the podcast can be summed up by the story of the biggest podcast of all. Journalistic radio show This American Life had been having success releasing their episodes as podcasts and decided to create something specifically tailored to the medium. The result was Serial, a real-life murder mystery told over twelve episodes. By the time the first season was wrapping up it was the most popular podcast of all time and the first to get people binge-listening. Ten years ago, podcasts were either a hobby for amateurs or somewhere for traditional radio shows to put their back catalogue. Now theyre big business.

Today it feels like everyone has a podcast. They provide an easy way for the up-and-coming broadcaster to produce their own content or existing stars to try something more laid back. True crime still looms large; the BBCs recent hit The Missing Cryptoqueen about a cryptocurrency scam was straight out of the Serial mould. Interviews are also a major trend, with people like David Tennant and Alec Baldwin sitting down with celebrity friends for freeform conversations.

Roosevelts fireside chats recognised that the power of radio was it brought you into peoples homes. The podcast brings you right into the listeners ears. It is the perfect form for the age of the smartphone and solitary consumption of media. The podcast shows no sign of dying off in the 2020s, but the 2010s shall be remembered as its coming-of-age.

Books- Alice Hobbs

Trends that have defined the last 10 years in books can only begin with the Twilight Saga, the trilogy which premiered across 2008-10. The ramifications of this trilogy panned out for years after as seen in the obsessive relationship genre which was transformed in E.L James Fifty Shades of Grey (2011). This narrative of Twilight/ Fifty Shades of Grey was commodified in the many spin off novels seen in both adult and young-adult literature. This trend was replaced by the girl trend which was seen in 2012 with Gillian Flynns Gone Girl which also took the publishing world by storm. These consumer fads have therefore largely defined the last 10 years in books. However, more important trends have also taken hold. Novels in the last decade have also challenged the white hegemony of the literary world with writers such as Marlon James winning the Man Booker Prize in 2015 with A Brief History of Seven Killings. This diversity was further seen in the success of Colson Whiteheads The Underground Railroad and Zadie Smiths Swing Time in 2016 which both gained critical acclaim, Whitehead won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for his novel. Standout books in 2017-2018 were defined by quirky protagonists, and largely female authors. This was seen in the huge success of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. Unlike the other trend-setters Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey and Gone Girl Eleanor Oliphant has not been replicated for sales and instead its quirky and unique aesthetic has remained stand-alone. Sally Rooneys Normal People which won Waterstones Book of the Year was also a triumph and featured this quirky dynamic. 2019 has so far been defined by the publication of new novels by big names such as Margaret Atwoods The Testaments and David Nichols Sweet Sorrow. The last decade in books has been an unusual one. Fads have dominated the market but within these chart-toppers we have been some genuinely beautiful books which will by all means become classics of the future.

TV- Marianna Panteli

We are still in the new Golden Age of TV. TVs return to the top podium may have begun in the Noughties but it has persevered throughout this decade too. This is despite the major shift in how we are watching it. A medium that was once set to a public schedule and watched as a family, now provides us so much more choice in where and when we watch and who we watch with. Streaming platforms such as Netflix are redefining what TV is for better or for worse.In the midst of all these technological advances the TV programs that these many platforms have given us continue to surprise, shock and delight.

Dark and moody dramas lured us in with their sinister charm. True Detective, Hannibal and Fargo raised the expectations of what we expect. Not only were the narratives of these dramas captivating but the cinematography rivalled anything that you could find at Cannes. TV, to my outrage, has always been seen as Films slightly low rent cousin. However, the dramas of the past decade have put this assumption to shame and showed the potential of TV as a true art.

We have also seen shows struggle under the weight of their own popularity. When Black Mirror first aired in 2011 it quickly gained a cult following. In the years to follow it became a global phenomenon. With people protesting Trumps election and Brexit waving placards bearing the scribe I dont like this episode of Black Mirror. But inevitably it has begun to lose its grip on the zeitgeist as new shows enter the arena. We entered the decade anxious about all this new technology about. We leave the decade with a tangible sense of fear about the climate crisis. The TV we are drawn to is reflective of this.

As with other arts industries the TV industry has had reckonings about past abuse and continuing inequalities. The ramifications of which are too vast to do justice here. However, as we enter a new decade it is not just the content on our screens that is changing, but the way the industries themselves operate.

Photography- Noa Lee

A decade fraught in human turmoil has demonstratively captured the very essence of photography, connection. We all can recall the photo of a little Syrian boy Omran Daqneesh whose bloodied, dusty face became a symbol of civilian suffering during the siege of Aleppo. As the photograph flooded the media, many hearts reached out to a distant place in a genuine moment of human connection. It is not a good camera that makes the shot, but the human story behind it.

Another defining moment is the Crying Girl on the Border. Photographer John Moore snapshotted Honduran toddler Yanela Sanchez crying as she and her mother are taken into custody by US border officials in McAllen, Texas on the 12thof June. Capturing the journey of immigrant families whom rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico to seek asylum but then detained by US authorities, this single photo instigated public outcry on the Trump Administrations zero tolerance policy at the border under which immigrants caught entering the US could be criminally prosecuted. The fear of separation between a mother and daughter caught worldwide attention as it was published, and the policy was reversed on the 20th of June. Not too technical, nor artful, photography of the decade seems to echo a deeper intuitive kinship with the audience.

Iconic and intense, White House photographer Pete Souza captures the former President Barack Obama and members of his national security team monitoring the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. The photograph luminates the anxiety-filled air. Not particularly visually grandiose, the single shot is a significant moment in American history as it encapsulates the end of a chapter of terror for many anguished families. In a sentence, photos of the decades are ingrained in human stories of tragedy, love, anxiety, fear and hope.

Theatre- Marianna Panteli

As one of the oldest art forms in existence it might seem strange to ask how theatre has changed over the last decade. How can you define this decade of theatre? For it is a mere blink of the eye in the lifespan of theatre. However, theatre has continued to roll and adapt with the times.

A big innovation in theatre came at the end of the Noughties and continued to grow in success throughout this decade. NT Live is broadening the reach of British theatre across the world by bringing it to our cinema screens. As we say goodbye to this decade, NT Live celebrates its 10thanniversary and is now broadcasting to 2,500 venues across 65 territories, with 700 in the UK alone. Nothing can quite capture the feeling of being in the theatre itself, however NT Lives initiative is making theatre more accessible to more people. As a medium that can sometimes seem out of reach, with most major productions being in the major cities, NT Live goes some way in democratising the medium. This is technology and theatre working hand in hand in an outstanding way.

Lin-Manuel Mirandas Hamilton: An American Musical took the stage and then the world and then possibly the universe by storm. This 2015 sung-and-rapped musical looks at the life of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. I dont think I need to say much more we know so much about Hamilton.However, what is remarkable about this musical is how it has sunk into our everyday lives. It is now being parodied at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and also thoughtfully and hilariously picked apart for its gender politics in Katharine Ryans Glitter Room. This the mark of a show that has embedded itself in our culture and then started to change it.

To round up my piece, I could not help but mention Fleabag. In 2013, it started its humble beginnings at the Edinburgh Fringe where Waller-Bridge received a three-star review in the Guardian for her one-woman monologue. In the following years, it has had an Off-Broadway run, become a cultural phenomenon, and finally found itself as the star of the West End as the decade draws to a close.

Fine Art- Olivia Hendren

The art world has changed significantly in the past decade. Protest art has become more prominent in the world of fine art, and street art is finally being praised for its significance. Banksys recent shredding canvas surprised buyers at the anticipated Christies auction, raising questions about how we assign value to an artists work. Fine art also used to be seen as its own category and style, however in recent years, the definition of what makes a work fine art has shifted.

The rise of Instagram and other social media platforms has made selling art easier for individual artists, and smaller buyers. CJ Hendry, an artist with a well-known Instagram following, has built her career though the platform. CJ started her art career by selling hyper realistic pen drawings from her parents garage in Sydney Australia but has since moved to New York City and has sold her paintings to many celebrities and collectors including Kanye West.

This past decade has blended the arts with politics, conservationism, and activism. Challenging the norms and exclusive nature of the art world will allow artists to start conversations that might have been previously ignored. Artists now truly question the very nature of who is and is not included in the art world.

The Triumph of Preposterousness – Fair Observer

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

As impeachment proceedings move forward in the House of Representatives, Politico reports that US President Donald Trump has proposed to mobilize his network of backers to help fund the campaigns of several Republican senators facing serious reelection challenges in 2020. Each of them has signed onto a Republican-backed resolution condemning the inquiry as unprecedented and undemocratic, Alex Isenstadt writes. For those Americans who still ignore the meaning of quid pro quo, this could provide a new illustration to help them at vocabulary building.

If, as expected, the House votes to impeach Trump, the Senate will become the jury of his impeachment trial.In a tweet with a link to the Politico article, the former head of the US Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, said: The accused is helping jurors raise money. Does it get any more preposterous than that?

Here is todays 3D definition:

Preposterous:

In the realm of the now-dominant political system of plutocratic hyperreality, a synonym for normal and worthy of admiration

The Online Etymology Dictionary provides the following account of the meaning of the word: 1540s, from Latin praeposterus absurd, contrary to nature, inverted, perverted, in reverse order, literally before-behind (compare topsy-turvy, cart before the horse), from prae before + posterus subsequent.

When a system demonstrates consistentprinciples of behavior, a disciplined observer will assume there is abehavioral rule, or scientific law, at work. The strong correlation betweenmoney acquired or spent and what is applauded as merited success in the currentculture of the US and most of the Western world points toward a new behavioralnorm that has turned older ethical instincts on their head. The value of anyitem, deliberate act or even personal reputation has become synonymous with themonetary price one places on it.

When on The Daily Show this past week host Trevor Noah, interviewing former Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer, announced Balmers net worth of $51.7 billion, the presumably leftist, anti-plutocratic, Democratic audience erupted into spontaneous, admiring applause even before Noah could finish his sentence. Balmer invented nothing and became rich partly by chance, through his association with Bill Gates, and partly through his preposterous, over-the-top commercial style focused on money and success.

As an attorney specializing in government ethics who served under three presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump Schaub may represent one of the last of a dwindling minority in the public sector who accept that there are laws governing behavior in society that supersede the force of cash. On the strength of his belief in the existence of something called ethics, he judges Trumps attempt to provide funding for his future jurors perverse, contrary to ordinary values, the opposite of normal and quite literally preposterous.

And yet the rest of the nation, including its media, appears to excuse Trumps actions as simply self-interested and, therefore, normal. For most Americans relishing the fact that they live in a free country, because Trump has the ability to mobilize wealth his own or the wealth of others he should not only be allowed but even expected to do so.

This doesnt mean that the notion of ethics no longer exists. Many people will see Trumps gambit as unfair. But such behavior no longer seems preposterous to anyone whose profession doesnt involve theorizing formal ethics. Instead, certain forms of preposterous behavior have become an implicit model commanding admiration. The easiest and surest way of achieving success is to break the ethical and moral rules, defy the conventions and, as quickly as possible, display ones achievement measured by the money or power acquired. Trumps election in 2016, weeks after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, validated that thesis.

Brazen lying, provocative actions, antisocial behavior in the form of sheer egoism, selfishness and narcissism, and successful bullying are acts the public now sees as either acceptable or inevitable attributes of those who succeed through their assertiveness. If coupled with monetary success, these traits are elevated to the status of a behavioral model. Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas and energy secretary, has just explained why he thinks Trump is the chosen one, comparing him to the Old Testament kings David, Solomon and Saul. It is part of Gods plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government.

Trump is not alone. There is no end of telling examples among those who rule and judge in todays political, industrial and media culture: Kanye West, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, the late Jeffrey Epstein, Dick Cheney, Bernie Madoff, Harvey Weinstein, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Mark Zuckerberg, O.J. Simpson, practically any televangelist and the list goes on.

Some of them bully; some of them steal; several of them murder and rape; some move fast and break things. Most have learned or invented special ways of conning large numbers of people. All of them not only brazenly lie but insist on the veracity of their lies. Some of them, subsequent to their success and celebrity, have been caught in a legal trap simply because, besides ensuring their own fame, they tend to make enemies, often among those as brazen as they are.

In other words, preposterous no longer simply means in radical violation of the norm. Preposterousness has become a new norm, though reserved for the talented, wealthy few. It isnt without risk. But it tends to be one of the quickest paths to success and wealth in a world in which wealth itself has become the strongest insurance against the legal, ethical and political challenges that society may still put forward to thwart preposterous behavior.

Because being successful with preposterous behavior requires a special talent, history has consistently produced a number of exceptionally talented individuals with the means of achieving fame, though not always fortune, through their preposterous acts. Unsuccessful and unconvincing preposterous behavior has usually tended to be classified as antisocial if not criminal.

Among the ancients, the Greek general Alcibiades, the cynic Diogenes, Nero and Caligula cultivated different styles of preposterousness that made them famous and, in some cases, dangerous. From Genghis Khan, Napoleon and on to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, conquerors and would-be conquerors while concentrating on the material aspects of conquest have at least played at being preposterous in the name of acquiring and consolidating power. So while it is not a new phenomenon, until recently preposterous behavior focused not on financial success or prowess, but exclusively on the power of the preposterous personality.

All that has changed in contemporary culture, thanks to an evolution in ethical norms due to the recently established role of monetary value as the supreme measure of worth. Wealth and the inexorable influence of money have taken a central place in our culture, complementing and, to some degree, even displacing personality and talent. Personalities such as Trump, Epstein and Madoff wouldnt have had so much influence over so many people without the attraction of wealth. Those who have acquired wealth, often more by chance than talent, find that they now have a license to develop, display and even promote their preposterousness because of that wealth. Elon Musk and Kanye West illustrate that trend.

This past week, Musk offered an unintended demonstration of the power of preposterousness when he organized the unveiling of his Tesla electric pickup truck and watched as his proud claim of shatterproof windows was literally shattered in front of a live audience. In the aftermath of what for non-preposterous people would be a shameful and costly humiliation, Musk announced that he had received 187,000 orders for the truck. He left the fatal impression that he either lied about or worse misunderstood the technical characteristics of the technology he is admired for producing.

The fact that this failure in no way either dampened the publics enthusiasm for his products nor stained his personal reputation proves that preposterousness associated with financial success works. He did, however (provisionally), sacrifice $770 million of his net worth as Teslas shares took a dive.

In presenting the Conservative Party election manifesto this past weekend, three weeks before Decembers general election, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised investment in infrastructure, health care and other services, accompanied by no increase in taxes. More generally, he painted a picture of five years of British utopia, all of that thanks to his proclaimed ability and determination to push through Brexit.

Voters have good reason to doubt nearly all of Johnsons promises and every reason to believe that this isnt the first time he has lied to the nation. And yet he is projected to achieve a commanding majority in Parliament. In contrast, the very sincere Theresa May lost her majority in Parliament in 2017 and, while battling for two and a half years to fulfill what she believed to be her mission, could accomplish nothing. Preposterousness definitely pays.

Some may see as a degradation of democracy the fact that bombastic liars and corrupt manipulators are applauded and rewarded for their transparently disingenuous or utterly mistaken maneuvers simply because they dared to do it. Both Johnson and Musk to say nothing of Trump have created an image of a personality that dares to say or do preposterous things and, when they fail, to earn immediate forgiveness for their errors.

This has become a sign of leadership in a civilization governed by the values of celebrity culture. Those rare voices who invoke the notion of ethics and call such actions preposterous will not only never be publicly cheered, but their critique of preposterousness will at best be acknowledged as a quaint relic of a no longer relevant past in which people cared about integrity and moral values.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devils Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observers editorial policy.

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The Triumph of Preposterousness - Fair Observer

Bitcoin Prices Fall To Their Lowest Since May – Forbes

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

Bitcoin declined to nearly $6,600 tonight, falling to its lowest point since May.

Bitcoin prices declined over the last 24 hours, hitting their lowest price in more than six months.

The digital currency reached $6,616.24 shortly before 8:45 p.m. EST, CoinDesk data shows.

At this point, the cryptocurrency had fallen more than 35% from its recent high of more than $10,000 in October and over 50% from its 2019 high of nearly $14,000 reached in June, additional CoinDesk figures reveal.

Bitcoins price remains under pressure, especially as the China-hype-driven speculative surge unraveled, said Joe DiPasquale, CEO of cryptocurrency hedge fund managerBitBull Capital.

Moreover, the recent China-Binance FUD also dampened market sentiments considerably, he added.

[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]

Michael Conn, founder and managing partner of financial services firm Quail Creek Ventures, also weighed in.

Though there are still rumours in the market about a Chinese crackdown on Binances offices in Shanghai, I think the majority of the pressure is from bears, with little support to the upside right now, he stated.

Going forward, the digital currency may be in for additional downside, according to technical analysis provided by Jon Pearlstone, publisher of the newsletterCryptoPatterns.

While there are a few key technical indicators that continue to show potential for upside, for now bears have the edge, he stated.

The next targets would be a test of support at $6500 then $5000, added Pearlstone.

Disclosure: I own some bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, ether and EOS.

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Bitcoin Prices Fall To Their Lowest Since May - Forbes

Bitcoin Isnt Down Because of China, Its Down Because You Dont Need It – Forbes

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

BEIJING, Nov. 7, 2019 -- A visitor tours a display center of the National Big Data Comprehensive ... [+] Pilot Area in southwest China's Guizhou Province, May 22, 2019. (Photo by Ou Dongqu/Xinhua via Getty) (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu via Getty Images)

Crypto markets are not reeling this week because China is cracking down on Blockchain. Tokens have been getting slammed since the summer because most of them are unnecessary, and because the need for coins that may offer some utility is not as imminent as buyers thought it would be. This is most obvious with King Crypto, bitcoin, whose purported use-case as a store of value is not looking very compelling.

The risk-reward in bitcoin has always been an extreme one, which is why its biggest proponents/salespeople assigned astronomic price targets to it. Widespread adoption is an extremely low-probability event with an enormous payoff if the stars align. And lets be clear: the things that need to happen for the world to turn to bitcoin complete central bank impotence, widespread currency debasement, falling equity markets and the abandonment of traditional gold means betting on bitcoin is essentially betting against the house. Hence the short bankers, long bitcoin meme. To say bitcoin will offer a 100x return yet also say its a highly probabilistic event is inherently contradictory and hugely dishonest.

The market is now realizing this. As the global economic slowdown of the last nine months shows signs of stabilization and the Federal Reserve sees no need for more interest-rate cuts, the case for bitcoin is taking body blows. None of the stories about adoption are turning out, big tech giants from Facebook to Google are doing everything possible to dominate electronic pay and finance, and projects designed to make bitcoin a means of exchange are either slow, fruitless, or both.

In short, the house does not look like its in a losing position just yet. And so bitcoin is getting killed. Sure, the U.S. and China could have a major fallout, get into a currency war, and Chinese citizens could rush to crypto as a way to get money out of the system. Thats why bitcoin will never be worthless, and why every investor should watch its price action, but that scenario is looking way, way further away from reality than the cryptoknights had so many believe.

Bitcoins violent moves are a factor of the speculative nature described above. Because its probability of success is low, it is closer to a roulette wheel than any traditional asset class. Average people were lured into the bitcoin sales pitch in 2017 when the economy was tearing hot, cash flow was heavy, stocks were churning out huge gains, and people could afford to take a gamble. Why not roll the dice?

Now those buyers are losing faith in their chances of winning, and are using this years rally to get out. As the fundamental reason for owning bitcoin as a store of value also loses luster amid a stabilizing economic situation, the true believers may start bailing out too. If it continues, it should be a warning sign to more traditional investors who made a similar bet in gold, and maybe even those who ran to Treasury bonds as a hedge against chaos, too.

Originally posted here:

Bitcoin Isnt Down Because of China, Its Down Because You Dont Need It - Forbes

Bitcoin Is Cratering Again, Some People Believe For The Last Time, Again – Dealbreaker

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

Fidelity Investments evolution from mutual fund giant donating money to white nationalists to cryptocurrency player with correspondingly less money to donate to white nationalists took another step forward last week. The New York State Department of Financial Services, presumably in between howls of laughter, awarded Fido a crypto license. Obviously, fake money immediately took another nosedive, with bitcoin falling to its lowest level in six months as the Chinese once again took a large needle to the bubble and others recognized the Fidelity news as the contraindicator it is, once again putting John McAfees penis in mortal danger.

Throughout the long boom and (more common) bust cycle of bitcoin, swoons such as these have prompted the inevitable question, is now the time to buy bitcoin? In spite of the obvious answer to that question, we regret to inform you it has been posed again (and not by John McAfee, who certainly hopes so).

Wall Street veteran Peter Brandt, who made a name for himself by predicting bitcoin's devastating 2018 bear market, has called bitcoin's low for July 2020two months after bitcoin's closely-watched halving event. As well as the May bitcoin halving, which will see the number of bitcoin rewarded to miners cut by half from 12.5 bitcoin to 6.25 bitcoin, bitcoin investors are hopeful next year will bring an increase in the number of bitcoin retail investors and people using bitcoin and cryptocurrencies for payments. Bakkt's bitcoin futures daily volume hit a new all-time high, according to data from Intercontinental Exchange, with some $20.3 million across 2,700 futures contracts on Friday.

Bitcoin Has Crashed AgainBut Is This When To Buy Bitcoin? [Forbes]Bitcoin Matches Record Losing Run in Fall to Six-Month Low [Bloomberg]Bitcoin Drops Below $7,000 as China Euphoria Fades [WSJ]Fidelitys crypto company secures New York state license [Reuters]

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Bitcoin Is Cratering Again, Some People Believe For The Last Time, Again - Dealbreaker

As Bitcoin Plummets Below $8,000, Crypto Heavyweights See The Price Going Sharply HigherHeres Why – Forbes

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

Bitcoin and crypto markets have been on a downward trend since bitcoin hit a year-to-date high of over $13,000 per bitcoin set in late June.

The bitcoin price, which has this morning dipped below $8,000, has bounced wildly over recent months as crypto traders and investors search for direction, try to guess the mood of regulators, and struggle with "dismal" bitcoin trading volumes.

However, bitcoin's biggest bulls have come out in force to reassure investors bitcoin is far from dead (though that could change)and all point to different reasons for why they see bitcoin going higher.

Draper Associates founder Tim Draper thinks adoption of bitcoin's lightning network will eventually ... [+] push the bitcoin price sharply higher.

Bitcoin investor and venture capitalist Tim Draper, who has previously called a bitcoin price prediction of $250,000 per bitcoin "conservative," has predicted that the likes of the bitcoin Lightning Network, designed to make smaller bitcoin transactions quicker and cheaper, will be the catalyst for the next bitcoin bull run.

"I think bitcoin payment processors are really going to open the floodgates," Draper said, speaking during a Q&A session at theMalta AI & Blockchain Summit earlier this month and reiterating he expects the bitcoin price will reach a quarter of million dollars by 2022 or 2023.

"Its because of Lightning Network and OpenNode and maybe others that are allowing us to spend bitcoin very freely and quickly, so that its not just a store of value but it can be used for micro-payments; it can be used for retail, it can be used all over."

Bitcoin's Lightning Network has long been touted by some as a potential game changer for bitcoin and crypto payments, though adoption has not come as quickly as some had hoped.

Elsewhere, Changpeng Zhao, the chief executive of the world's largest bitcoin and crypto exchange by volume Binance, said he expects the bitcoin price to rise simply as the bitcoin industry grows.

"If you look at the fundamental technology and a longer term view, across a five year or ten year horizon, we're very confident the industry will get bigger and when the industry gets bigger the prices will go higher," Changpeng Zhao, who's often known simply as CZ, told Bloomberg, a financial newswire.

"If you look at the short term view, bitcoin and cryptocurrency is a smaller market cap instrument so there will be higher volatility," CZ added, attempting to explain away bitcoin's recent downward trend.

The bitcoin price, after a strong start to the year, has fallen steadily over the last few months.

Meanwhile, bitcoin and cryptocurrency analyst Tom Lee has said bitcoin will need to pass $150,000 per bitcoin, a rise of over 1,600% from current prices, before a long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) could work.

Lee, who founded strategy research boutique Fundstrat Global Advisors, thinks that though "demand for an ETF is monstrous," the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) "needs to punt the ETF until crypto becomes bigger."

According to Lee, a significant increase in the bitcoin price will increase investor confidence in bitcoin and cryptobut proper regulation and oversight will be needed.

"Institutions aren't going to touch crypto if they think the SEC isn't doing a good job," Lee reportedly said, speaking at the Blockshow conference in Singapore last week.

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As Bitcoin Plummets Below $8,000, Crypto Heavyweights See The Price Going Sharply HigherHeres Why - Forbes

As Bitcoin slowly recovers, XRP price slides further down – Yahoo Finance

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market saw some positive gains today, with almost every major coin in a better place than where they stood yesterdaybut not Ripples XRP.

XRP is down nearly 4 percent on the day, according to data from Messari, currently trading for around $0.22 token. Meanwhile, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin have all improved by anywhere between two and four percent today after tanking over the weekend.

Ripples XRP is now trading for less than the low it experienced in late Septemberthe last time that the crypto market crashed this hard. At the time, Ripple was trading for between $0.23 and $0.24 per coin. The crash affected the crypto market broadly and saw Bitcoin, for example, fall from around $9,500 per coin to about $8,100, losing roughly $1,400 in just a matter of days.

At the moment, Bitcoin is currently trading for approximately $7,100 per coin, losing $2,000 in value in just the last two weeksa drop that might make XRP holders feel a bit better about their own losses.

The price of XRP, however, doesnt reflect much of the positive news as of late regarding the network. Ripple transactions, for example, are at an all-time high, surpassing both Bitcoin and Ethereumthe two largest cryptocurrencies by market capover the weekend.

In addition, Coinbase has added XRP spending capabilities to its latest crypto debit card offering, and the network experienced an 80 percent expansion earlier this month.

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As Bitcoin slowly recovers, XRP price slides further down - Yahoo Finance

As Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripples XRP, And Litecoin Lose Billions, This One Small Coin Has More Than Doubled – Forbes

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

The bitcoin and cryptocurrency market has lost a combined $170 billion since its year-to-date high set in June, with major tokens ethereum, Ripple's XRP, and litecoin all falling steeply.

The bitcoin price has almost halved, dropping from almost $14,000 to trade at around $7,600 today (though some heavyweight crypto investors remain upbeat).

However, one relatively minor cryptocurrency, chainlink, has more than doubled since June, jumping from around $1 to $2.55 after the company behind the token revealed a raft of partnerships and deals to use its technology.

After rallying hard earlier this year, the bitcoin price has been stuck on a downward trend for the ... [+] last few months, dragging the likes of ethereum, Ripple's XRP, and litecoin with it.

The chainlink token, which trades under the name link, began the year at $0.25, climbing to highs of around $4 per link token, before falling back along with the wider bitcoin and cryptocurrency market.

Chainlink is currently the 14th most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap data, which counts bitcoin, ethereum, Ripple's XRP, bitcoin cash, and litecoin as the respective top five (excluding so-called stablecoin tether).

Chainlink, an ethereum token that powers the Chainlink decentralized oracle network allowing smart contracts on ethereum to connect to external data sources, APIs, and payment systems, has managed to stage a strong recovery since the late summer sell-off, breaking away from the wider bitcoin and crypto market, which has been falling steadily.

Some of chainlink's recent gains could be due to its efforts to expand into China just as China's president Xi Jinping has revealed the country will work to widely incorporate blockchain technology over coming years.

In April, the Chainlink organization hired a Chinese community manager.

Last month, Chainlink teamed up with Binance, the world's largest bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange by volume, to develop blockchain and smart contract-based so-called decentralized finance products, including lending, derivatives, and decentralized exchanges.

Back in June, the Chainlink organization began working with search giant Google and enterprise software company Oracle to help bridge their legacy payment systems and databases using blockchain technology.

Elsewhere, OpenLaw, which is developing decentralized peer-to-peer legal agreements, started working with the Chainlink organization in April on its smart legal contracts.

The chainlink price is up almost 700% over the last 12 months, compared to bitcoin's 75% rise over ... [+] the same period.

Some analysts have, meanwhile, been talking up chainlink's prospects.

"Id be lying if I said I havent been watching chainlink incredibly closely," Eric Thies, a popular bitcoin and cryptocurrency analyst on Twitter, told crypto news outlet CCN.

"I noticed a similar structure to ethereums price behavior in 2016 or, dare I say, bitcoin between 2011 and 2012. I wouldnt be surprised to see link hovering around $10 and making it to the top 10 cryptocurrencies in CoinMarketCap by mid-2020."

Other crypto watchers have though warned chainlink investors that the token's bull run could be coming to an end.

"Anything can happen, [chainlink] often defies gravity," bitcoin and crypto trader Scott Melker said via Twitter alongside technical charts and analysis of the chainlink price. "But never bad to take profit if you have the chance."

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As Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripples XRP, And Litecoin Lose Billions, This One Small Coin Has More Than Doubled - Forbes

Bitcoin breaks above $7,000 but it might not last – Yahoo Finance

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

For the last month, the price of bitcoin (BTC) has been on a major downtrend, having fallen from a peak of almost $10,000 in late October, down to its current value of $7,192. Earlier today, bitcoin touched as low as $6,630its lowest value since May 2019, but promptly recovered back to over $7,000 as trading volume picked up.

Despite losing almost 30% of its value in the past three months, and having fallen from a 2019-high of over $13,500 back in June, bitcoin has seen its trade volume grow considerably in the past several months. As of today, bitcoin is racking up approximately $50 billion in daily trade volumeits highest value in over a month and up more than 250% since August.

In commentary provided to Decrypt, eToro analyst Simon Peters claimed bitcoins recent crash to $6,600 was triggered by $100 million in liquidations on futures exchanges that occurred overnight. When the market dips, it can cause futures trades to be automatically sold, causing the price to fall futher down.

Peters suggested that this may have been in response to a familiar charting pattern: the death cross. This is when bitcoin's 50-day moving average (EMA) crosses below the 200-day EMA

Now while it was reported that the death cross happened last month, that was using one type of measurement. Instead, looking at exponential moving averages, which Peters said tends "to be preferred in technical analysis as they give more weighting or importance to recent price data," the death cross actually happened in the last few days.

But, it could spell disaster for the price of bitcoin. Peters pointed out that, the past two times this has happened, bitcoin's price dropped by more than 60%. Will it break the norm or follow the same old pattern?

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Bitcoin breaks above $7,000 but it might not last - Yahoo Finance

Bitcoin price: why the digital coin is suffering its biggest fall in six months – The Week UK

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Danzig

Bitcoin and rivals Ethereum and Ripple have suffered their biggest declines in six months, wiping billions off the cryptocurrency market.

After surpassing the $13,000 (10,100) mark in June, bitcoin quickly ran out of steam and entered a state of decline, according to data on ranking site CoinMarketCap.

Prices briefly rose at the end of October, leaping from $7,500 (5,830) to $9,900 (7,700) in a matter of hours, but then began falling once again.

In the past week, bitcoin has sunk from a high of $8,680 (6,750) to around $7,130 (5,550) as of midday on Friday.

Bitcoins rivals have also suffered big declines in recent days.Ethereumsank from a high of $187 (145) on Sunday to todays price of $146 (113) per coin, while banking-focused coin Ripplehas slipped to $0.23 (0.18) from Sundays high of $0.27 (0.21).

A total of around $170bn (132bn) has been wiped from the market since June, following mass sell-offs across the three digital currencies, reportsForbes.

A fresh crackdown on illegal cryptocurrency exchanges in China may have triggered this weeks price drops.

Earlier this month, Chinese state-run newspaper Xinhua ran a front-page article hailing bitcoin as a success, after President Xi Jinping described plans to launch Chinas own digital currency as an important breakthrough, The Independent reports.

The superpower has taken a hard line towards cryptocurrencies and banned bitcoin in September 2017.

But Beijings change of tone seemed to fuel an increase in trading activity on illicit platforms, resulting in a fresh crackdown on illegal exchanges, says the news site.

The Peoples Bank of China (PBOC) has warned that it will take decisive action against any illegal activity around virtual currency trading, while cautioning investors not to confuse bitcoin with blockchain - the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies.

Jamie Farquhar, a portfolio manager at London-based crypto investment firm NKB Group, told Reutersthat the PBOCs crackdown on illicit digital currency trading suggests that Chinas acceptance of the technology is unlikely to include bitcoin.

Its the realisation that the positivity over Xis blockchain announcement was exaggerated, he told the news site. It may not include bitcoin at this point.

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Bitcoin price: why the digital coin is suffering its biggest fall in six months - The Week UK

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