The speaker made a last-minute reversal to avert a government shutdown. It could cost him his job.
Anna Moneymaker / Getty
Updated at 9:02 p.m. ET on September 30, 2023
For weeks, Speaker Kevin McCarthy seemed to face an impossible choice as he haggled over spending bills with his party’s most hard-line members: He could keep the government open, or he could keep his job. At every turn, McCarthy’s behavior suggested that he favored the latter option. He continued accepting the demands of far-right Republicans to deepen spending cuts and dig in against the Democrats, making a shutdown at tonight’s midnight deadline all but a certainty.
With just hours to go, however, the speaker abruptly changed course, defying his conservative tormentors and partnering with Democrats to avert a shutdown. The House this afternoon overwhelmingly approved a temporary extension of federal funding. The Senate passed the bill in the evening, putting off a shutdown for at least 45 days and buying both parties more time to negotiate spending for the next fiscal year.
The question now is whether McCarthy’s pivot will end his nine-month tenure as speaker. By folding—for now—on the shutdown fight, he is effectively daring Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and other hard-line Republicans to make good on their threats to depose him. “If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy told reporters before the vote. “But I think this country is too important.”
The stopgap bill includes disaster-relief money sought by both parties, but McCarthy refused to add $6 billion in Ukraine aid that the Biden administration and a bipartisan majority of senators wanted. The Senate had been on the verge of passing its own extension that included the Ukraine money, but after the House vote it was expected to accept McCarthy’s proposal instead. Whether House Republicans agree to include Ukraine assistance in the next major spending bill is unclear, but Democrats and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are likely to make an aggressive push for it.
McCarthy’s surprising about-face set off a wild few hours in the Capitol. Democrats were caught off guard and stalled for time to read the new bill, unsure if Republicans were trying to sneak conservative policy priorities into the legislation without anyone noticing. (In the end, only a single Democrat voted against it.) Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a second-term Democrat, caused the evacuation of an entire House office building when he pulled a fire alarm just before the vote, in what Republicans said was a deliberate—and possibly criminal—effort to delay the proceedings. (Bowman’s chief of staff said that the representative “did not realize he would trigger a building alarm as he was rushing to make an urgent vote. The Congressman regrets any confusion.”)
On the right, the criticism of McCarthy was predictable and immediate. “Should he remain Speaker of the House?” one of his Republican opponents, Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, tweeted after the vote, seemingly rhetorically. Yet to more moderate Republicans, the speaker’s decision was a long time coming. McCarthy’s months-long kowtowing to the right had frustrated more pragmatic and politically vulnerable House Republicans, a few of whom threatened to join Democratic efforts to avert, or end, a shutdown. But many Republicans are even more furious at Gaetz and his allies. “Why live in fear of these guys? If they want to have the fight, have the fight,” former Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a moderate who served in the House with McCarthy for 12 years, told me. “I don’t understand why you would appease people who are doing nothing but trying to hurt and humiliate you.”
This morning, the speaker finally came to the same conclusion. His move to relent on a shutdown only kicks the stalemate over federal spending to another day. Now it’s up to House Republicans to decide if McCarthy gets to stick around to resolve it.
Shortly after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had struck a deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling, Republican leaders began circulating a fact sheet to their members listing the victories McCarthy had secured. The first bullet point captured what was supposedly the whole point of the negotiations for the GOP: The newly christened Fiscal Responsibility Act would cut spending.
An item further down the list, however, revealed far more about the agreement—and about how committed modern-day Republicans really are to their party’s small-government principles. That bullet point noted that the bill would “ensure full funding for critical veterans programs and national defense priorities, while preserving Social Security and Medicare.” At the end of a weeks-long negotiation, Republicans were bragging that they had exempted as much as half of the federal budget from the spending cuts they had fought so hard to enact. What they didn’t say was that for all of their rhetoric about reducing spending, they didn’t actually want to cut that much of it.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which the House approved tonight on a vote of 314-117, will avert what would have been a first-ever national default, lift the debt ceiling through the next presidential election, and save Congress from a crisis of its own making. The bill, which is expected to clear the Senate in the next several days, is hardly what Democrats would have passed had they retained their House majority last fall. But in terms of “fiscal responsibility,” the proposal does vanishingly little. “It does nothing to change the unsustainability of the federal budget,” Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal-watchdog organization, told me. “It’s taken off the table everything that would have an effect.”
It’s not that Republicans lost the budgetary battle because of Biden’s tough negotiating. They didn’t even try for major spending cuts in this round of talks. McCarthy followed former President Donald Trump in abandoning the party’s long-standing push to tackle the biggest drivers of the national debt: Social Security and Medicare. Biden and the Democrats were willing to cut the Pentagon’s budget, which accounts for nearly half of all federal spending outside of entitlement programs. But the speaker nixed that idea too. “Spending cuts are very popular in the abstract, much less so in the specific,” Bixby said.
By the time McCarthy and Biden began negotiating in earnest, there wasn’t much left to cut. “You just can’t get major savings from the rest of what’s left,” Bixby told me. McCarthy was ultimately able to trim a few billion dollars from last year’s budget. That’s enough for him to claim that the Fiscal Responsibility Act cuts year-over-year spending for the first time in a decade, but in the context of the nearly $6 trillion that the federal government spent in 2022, it’s a pittance.
McCarthy succeeded in getting much of what he said he wanted, but that’s only because he didn’t ask for much. Congress will take back $28 billion in unspent COVID-relief funds, and Republicans chopped off as much as one-quarter of the $80 billion Democrats earmarked for the IRS as part of their Inflation Reduction Act last year. But the reduction in IRS funding could actually increase the deficit in the long term, because the purpose of the money was to secure higher revenue for the government by cracking down on tax fraud. The toughest provision for progressives to swallow is additional work requirements for childless adults ages 50 to 54 who receive food stamps and cash welfare. Other changes, however, will expand the food-stamp program to veterans and homeless people, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office yesterday estimated that the government will end up spending more money on food stamps, not less, as a result.
The CBO projected that the bill would save $1.5 trillion over the next decade. But its estimate assumes that Congress will stick to lower spending levels for far longer than the two years that the legislation requires. The speaker has touted other reforms in the bill, such as a requirement that the administration find cuts to offset expensive new rules or regulations, and a provision that calls for an across-the-board 1 percent cut in spending if Congress fails to pass the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government each year. But neither of these is guaranteed.
The best that fiscal hawks could say for the agreement was that it temporarily halted spending growth. Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told me that the most significant part of the deal was the “change in behavior” it represented. In recent years, she said, “lawmakers have only added to the deficit. They haven’t had any bipartisan deals that have brought the deficit down in a decade.”
McCarthy and his allies have argued that he extracted as many concessions as he could, considering that Democrats control the White House and the Senate whereas Republicans barely have a majority in the House. As speaker, McCarthy must protect the members most vulnerable to defeat next year, and he evidently determined that demanding cuts to some of the government’s most popular programs—Social Security, Medicare, the military, and veterans—could threaten the GOP majority.
House conservatives were quick to denounce the agreement. To them, the cuts McCarthy secured were a woefully insufficient price for suspending the U.S. borrowing limit for the next year and a half. “Trillions of dollars of debt for crumbs,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chair of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, told reporters yesterday. “This deal fails, fails completely.” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado noted that by only freezing rather than cutting spending, the legislation would “normalize” the growth of the federal government that happened during the coronavirus pandemic, even after most of the COVID-specific spending wound down.
A few conservatives accused McCarthy of betraying the commitments he made to the party when he narrowly won the speakership in January. But even the Freedom Caucus spared the Pentagon and the biggest safety-net programs in its own proposals.
Republicans have flinched on cutting spending before. Although the House GOP passed a debt-ceiling bill last month stuffed with conservative priorities, the party did not adopt a spending blueprint that would have detailed how it planned to balance the budget without raising taxes. And last week, Republicans abruptly postponed committee votes on four traditionally noncontroversial appropriations bills that contained spending cuts. GOP leaders cited the ongoing debt-limit talks as a reason, but congressional observers suspected that the party lacked the votes to advance the bills to the House floor.
The GOP’s supposed zeal for smaller government has long been inconsistent. Most Republican lawmakers were happy to support spending sprees led by Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Trump. Only when Democrats have occupied the White House has the GOP demonstrated any interest in spending restraint.
But that may be changing. In the 2011 debt-ceiling talks, Republicans forced Barack Obama to bargain over entitlement programs and accept deep cuts that applied equally to the military and domestic programs. Now the GOP is poised to hand Joe Biden a debt-ceiling increase of roughly the same duration in exchange for hardly any spending cuts at all.
The party’s hardliners fought the deal but could not stop it. They appear unlikely to try to oust McCarthy over the agreement, and Republicans might not get another opportunity to force their agenda through for the rest of Biden’s term. That they chose to fight over so little represents a huge concession of its own, an acknowledgment that despite all their denunciations of out-of-control spending, Republican leaders recognize that what the federal government funds is more popular than they like to claim.
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Before we move forward, some quick background on this ongoing feud. The Reedy Creek Improvement District was established in Southern Florida in 1967. It was created because Walt Disney wanted more control of the area surrounding his then-soon-to-be-opened Walt Disney World resort. He had plans for a private city, and even after that never happened, the special district remained. Since then, Disney World hasn’t had to follow certain Florida laws, essentially giving the company its own mini-government. But after a 2022 spat between DeSantis and Disney over the company’s (tepid) support for LGBTQ rights, DeSantis used Florida House Bill 9B to restructure the district.
As part of this, he appointed a new board of directors to oversee the district. But upon showing up for its first meeting, the new board learned that, in its final hours, Disney’s outgoing board had legally given nearly all control over the district back to Disney. This greatly upset DeSantis who called the deal a “collusive and self-dealing” arrangement that “undercut Florida’s legislative process.” He also asked Florida’s authorities to investigate the situation. He was, in other words, big mad about fucking around and finding out with Disney’s lawyers.
DeSantis plans to escalate his war against Disney
However, DeSantis isn’t done being mad or finished with his fight against Disney. As reported by Deadline, the Florida Commander in Chief visited Hillsdale College in Michigan on Thursday and spoke about the ongoing Disney battle, claiming that in the end he and the state would win.
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“What Disney has tried to do is they have tried to say that they should be able to operate outside the context of our constitutional system in Florida,” DeSantis said. “Now, we took this action prior to the election. We won overwhelmingly. They are not superior to the people of Florida. And so come hell or high water, we’re going to make sure that that policy of Florida carries the day, and so they can keep trying to do things, but ultimately, we’re going to win on every single issue involving Disney. I can tell you that.”
Deadline further reports that DeSantis seemed upset about media reports that Mickey Mouse’s company had “pulled one over on the state” which makes sense. When you get made a fool, you tend to not enjoy that experience. But DeSantis also suggested that legislation would “void anything” Disney’s board did before leaving. And also hinted at further punishments to levy against the company.
“Now that Disney has reopened this issue, we’re not just going to void the development agreement they tried to do, we’re going to look at things like taxes on hotels, we’re going to look at things like tolls on the roads, we’re going to look at things like developing some of the property that the district owns.”
Why DeSantis is fighting Disney and stripping it of its special district
Image: Giorgio Viera / Arturo Holmes / Kotaku (Getty Images)
And let’s be clear: DeSantis isn’t going after Disney because he suddenly became an anti-capitalist who wants to destroy the company and make it pay its fair share in taxes. No, instead, as he explained during his Michigan visit, all of this was because Disney dared to speak up mildly against his horrible, fascist laws and policies against LGTBQ and trans people, including pushing schools to out students to their parents. State leader didn’t like that one bit, adding that he didn’t want Florida to be “subsidizing woke activism.”
“We just had to look at this and say, ‘OK, do they have a quote, First Amendment right to be advocating for gender ideology in Kindergarten? Yeah, I guess. Is that honestly faithful to their fiduciary duty to their shareholders? I don’t think so. But that’s not really in my wheelhouse as governor, but what I can tell you as governor is that under no circumstances should the state of Florida be subsidizing woke activism by allowing them to have their own government. So we took it away,” DeSantis said at the time.
It’s clear that Disney and DeSantis aren’t done yet and while I hate rooting for a giant corporation like Disney, I don’t mind seeing an asshole like DeSantis keep losing over and over again. And really, the only winners in all of this are (as usual) lawyers who bill by the hour.
The pandemic initiated a slew of transformations, and though many have not stuck, one indisputably has: Telehealth is booming in America. This golden age of electronic engagement has one massive benefit—doctors are more accessible than ever. Unfortunately, this virtue is also proving to be telehealth’s biggest problem. For patients, being able to reach their doctors by video visit, phone call, or email is incredibly convenient, but physicians have been overwhelmed by the constant communication. This cost is now being shifted back to the patients, and almost every interaction with a doctor, no matter how casual, counts as some form of “visit” now.
At the start of the pandemic, telehealth was lauded as the beginningofarevolutioninmedicine. Patients quickly became adept at using online portals to reach their doctors, frequently writing to them with quick questions or concerns in between visits. But when in-person visits largely resumed, this higher volume of online messaging did not go away. In fact, it did not even seem to decrease. And though a video appointment and office visit might be interchangeable in a doctor’s daily schedule, busy physicians found themselves with little time to respond to those smaller communications.
To stay above water, some doctors and health systems have started charging for many of their responses. These in-between interactions, once considered a standard part of care, are being reframed as separate services, many of which warrant additional charges. Having an informal relationship with your doctor is now just fiction: You get the care that you pay for.
When Jed Jacobsohn got COVID for the first time in May, he began gathering information. How long should he quarantine for? How could his two young children stay healthy? He decided to give his doctor a quick call, and after five minutes, he hung up satisfied, he told me. Next thing he knew, he had a $180 bill. His satisfaction evaporated.
For a patient, five minutes is fleeting; for a doctor, five minutes on the phone generates a chunk of associated work, including reviewing the patient’s chart, updating notes, and putting in orders for medications, tests, or referrals. Most doctors work for health systems that use “relative value units” to calculate how they get compensated. “You can think of them like productivity points,” A Jay Holmgren, an assistant professor at UC San Francisco who researches asynchronous messaging, told me. In order to get paid, doctors must get a certain amount of work done. Since March 2020, billing for both synchronous telehealth (that is, video visits) and asynchronous telehealth (emails and other online messages) has been allowed for the majority of providers, Holmgren told me. One explanation for billing for messages is that health systems were recognizing the time spent responding as work and ensuring that physicians could answer queries without working outside of their hours, reducing their patient load, or taking a pay cut. For those who work in private practice, billing for messaging can function as self-accountability. When Reed Wilson, a doctor in internal medicine and cardiology, used to run a private practice, he rarely had time left by the end of his long workdays to answer or respond to calls or online messages. He worried that they would get pushed aside. “That’s why I had the administrative fee,” Wilson told me. “I was providing a service.” Of course, both health systems and private practices are also businesses, which benefit from new revenue streams
Being billed painfully large amounts of money for seemingly small increments of health care is nothing new. So why does the idea of a $180 bill for a phone call hit so hard? Part of the resistance can be attributed to the distinction between cost and value, Jeremy Greene, a doctor and researcher at Johns Hopkins who also wrote a book on telemedicine, told me. Jacobsohn, for instance, had really only phoned his physician to be responsible and avoid using Twitter or Google as his only source of information. Telehealth can certainly be a good substitute for an in-person visit, but if a quick phone call with a doctor simply affirms what a patient already knows, paying the bill might feel like a waste of money—especially if the patients themselves are coughing up the cash.
Although Jacobsohn paid a particularly high amount because of his insurance plan, even if an insurance company is footing the bill, being charged might still rankle. Calling your doctor or emailing them has long been part of standard care; paying for it is new. The disconnect between patients’ past expectations and new reality comes down to the hidden costs of care. At the same time, though a five-minute phone call is more work for a doctor than many patients realize, it can also feel less fulfilling than another type of visit. For some, feeling truly seen by their doctor requires actually seeing their doctor (whether that’s in person or on a video call).
Patients do value different types of interactions with doctors differently. Burt Rosen, a patient advocate who is dealing with two different types of cancer, puts it this way: “If I were scaling this emotionally, I would say in-person visits should be the most expensive, video should be below it, and then calls should be below that.” If each of these services takes the same amount of time, by a certain logic, they should have the same charge; but for most people it doesn’t quite measure out that way. “If a televisit is not good enough but then costs as much as an in-person visit, then we’re effectively creating a substandard mode of care,” Greene said. This doesn’t mean that telehealth itself is subpar, but rather that paying for an unsatisfying telehealth visit might register more strongly than paying for a disappointing in-person one. Even the purported convenience of telehealth might not be quite the panacea it once seemed: Zoe Steinberg, a medical illustrator who is disabled and deals with many doctor appointments as a result, told me that she generally appreciates telehealth, but finds it frustrating to have to make what counts as an entire doctor appointment for a quick query that any health-care provider—not just a doctor—could answer. “I’ve definitely had days where I was just pulling my hair out because of little issues with telehealth that I’m having,” she said.
Ultimately, these bills for all encounters with a doctor are a more honest representation of how medicine works now than one in which a friendly doctor can field questions as a complimentary service. The field has long been shifting toward corporatization, and away from the more genteel norms once associated with care. This latest trend is edging out one of the remaining areas that had not been made fully transactional. Yes, being a doctor means cultivating meaningful, intimate relationships with patients. But, like so many other jobs, being a doctor is becoming more and more standardized.
The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us show and both games.
Inevitably, someone will read everything I write here and chalk it up to “being mad about the show doing something different from the games,” but reader, I implore you to consider that just because something is different, that doesn’t mean it is inherently good or above critique. I’ve got beef with the version of Ellie in HBO’s The Last of Us show. The show has constantly been oscillating between big swings and faithful recreations, and some of its departures from the game have certainly been for the better. But certain scenes, dialogue, and even behind-the-scenes discussions surrounding the character of Ellie are leaning into a narrative that I think already does her journey through violent grief a huge disservice and we haven’t even seen it through, yet.
To get it out of the way, none of this is on Bella Ramsey, who portrays the young girl in the adaptation. She’s doing an excellent job with the material she’s been given, and it’s been a truly refreshing experience in even the most faithfully recreated scenes to see Ellie played by a teenager. Ashley Johnson’s performance in the game still captured the character’s youth, but it had the polish of an adult playing a child character. No, my beef is with showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, who are leaning harder toward a narrative suggested by The Last of Us’ marketing, rather than the one that plays out in the games themselves. I’m specifically referring to how the show frames Ellie’s relationship with violence, and how it portrays her not as a child who had to learn how to fight to protect herself and the ones she cares about, but as the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a kid who kills animals in their backyard for fun.
The showrunners say Ellie is “activated” by and likes violence in the show
Initially, I didn’t pick up what Mazin and Druckmann were putting down when I first watched the series’ premiere episode. In the final scene of the episode, Ellie witnesses a brutal murder of a FEDRA soldier at the hands of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal. She watches in what I initially read as shock, but as Mazin describes it in the Inside the Episode video for the pilot (skip to about the 4:30 mark), this isn’t a stunned silence. It’s her being “activated.” She “likes” watching the violence unfold. She likes the idea of being defended to brutal ends, and the idea of this dude getting “punished” for the indiscretion of holding them at gunpoint.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
Perhaps, at the time, I read her silence as shock because of my familiarity with the game, where she repeatedly expresses shock and discomfort early on at the lengths Joel must go to to keep them alive. But the framing of Ellie as a person who actively likes violence rather than one who turns to it out of necessity has become much more apparent throughout the season’s run. Episode three, which is otherwise a beautiful story about how violence is sometimes the end result of loving and protecting someone in the post-apocalypse, has a scene where Ellie finds an infected pinned down by a bunch of rubble. Rather than dealing with it efficiently and getting back to business, Ellie takes her time to hover over the poor bastard and look him over like he’s a dying animal. She slices open his head with her switchblade and sees what’s under the skin of an infected. When she finally stabs him in the head and kills him, she pulls back with a satisfied expression that’s unnerving. Again, Ramsey is putting in the work here.
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Joel never sees this scene unfold, because it’s important that he views her as an innocent kid and not a weird, violence-loving pervert, but, horrifyingly enough, the character who does see this side of her is David, the predatory, cannibalistic cult leader she meets in the series’ eighth episode. When he’s got her caged up in his cannibal kitchen, he says he can’t let her out because she would take her switchblade and gut him. Which, like, you’re a cannibal who kidnapped her, so spare us the judgment when she naturally wants to kill someone who abducted her. But he goes on to say she has a “violent heart.” Which, unfortunately, I guess is true in this version of the character.
The reason this doesn’t sit well with me is because it’s not only fundamentally at odds with Ellie’s story in the game, but because it feels like it’s rooted in a simplistic and reductive view of her story in the source material, a view that was largely perpetuated by Naughty Dog in its own marketing campaign for The Last of Us Part II.
What is Ellie’s relationship with violence in the games?
Let’s rewind to the beginning of Ellie’s story in the game. When she and Joel first meet, she’s not had a ton of exposure to violence. At least, not the kind of human brutality Joel would expose her to throughout the first game. When Joel kills the FEDRA forces there, Ellie is taken aback, having thought they would just hold them up as they made their escape. Eventually, Ellie comes to accept the necessity of this violence as they make their cross-country journey, leading to her first kill in order to save Joel from a raider. She’s sick about it, and it results in tension between her and Joel because she picked up a gun despite his deliberately never giving her one. The two then bond over him teaching her how to use a rifle and then giving her a pistol. It’s a point of newfound trust, and it illustrates that Ellie takes on violence for necessity’s sake.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
The equivalent scene in the show is a painfully drawn-out sequence where Ellie shoots a raider in the leg and while he pleads for his life, Joel tells her to get to safety while he handles it. Then the two jump right into talking about the effects killing can have on your soul. In an abstract way, this feels like it’s setting up Part II’s themes in a more overt way, which has been a running theme throughout the season. We can see the show pretty deliberately leading into the events of the sequel for season two with a number of things, including references to characters like Dina and framing Joel’s actions in a sympathetic way. Part II sees Ellie going down a dark, violent path, so perhaps the thinking here is that by asserting Ellie is a violent person, the things she does later will seem more consistent with our understanding of her character. But the foundation of Ellie’s relationship with violence is fundamentally different, and I don’t think it’s for the better when, in the games, the contrast between who Ellie was and who she became is so fundamental to her story.
Part of what makes The Last of Us Part II effective is that it feels like a transformative story for Ellie. She’s gone from a child who was horrified by Joel’s violence to a young adult who travels to Seattle in the grip of righteous fury. She goes on this crusade to find a group who killed Joel and at least kill Abby, the one who dealt the killing blow. She goes under the pretense that this is what she wants to do, but as she goes on her revenge tour, each subsequent kill wears on her.
The death of Nora, which is a loaded scene for a lot of reasons, is where this starts to become clear. Ellie commits one of her most heinous acts of violence in the game during an interrogation, and in the next scene, she’s overwhelmed with guilt at the lengths she had to go to. She has to be comforted by Dina, afraid her partner will see a monster where she once saw a future. Next, in an attempt to extort information about Abby’s whereabouts from her friends Mel and Owen, she tries to use Joel’s signature interrogation technique of asking one party for information and confirming with the second. If the information matches up, she knows it’s accurate. If not, well, that’s up to her discretion. But despite her attempts, the confrontation goes off the rails and ends with Ellie killing both of them in a messy scrap. She then realizes Mel was pregnant, and is immediately overcome with anxiety at having killed an innocent party. Throuhgout her spiral into violence, Ellie is repeatedly confronted with the possibility that she’s not cut out for what she signed on for.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
Eventually, she leaves Seattle without killing Abby. The fact that she killed everyone other than the person she views as most responsible for Joel’s death wears on her, but Dina is growing sick from her own pregnancy, and everyone around her is telling her this is the best course of action. They argue that Abby losing those close to her is an equivalent punishment for taking the life of Joel. She reluctantly goes along with the plan, up until Abby shows up at their hideout and forces her to go along with the plan by way of a beatdown and a threat.
After this, Ellie tries to live a normal life in the post-apocalypse by living on a farm with Dina and their son JJ. But she’s still dealing with PTSD surrounding the death of Joel, and ultimately leaves her family behind to pursue Abby once more. Once she tracks her down to Santa Barbara, California, the two come to blows one more time. Ellie gets the upper hand and nearly drowns her on the California beach. But in a moment of clarity, she lets Abby go, realizing this was never going to bring her the peace she wanted.
What does violence actually mean in The Last of Us?
Whether driven by survival or grief, The Last of Us has never framed violence as something characters take an overt pleasure in. Sure, when Ellie kills Jordan—who was a snarky piece of shit—in Part II, it’s satisfying to fuck him up. But it has an underlying meaning beyond Ellie liking acts of carnage. The fact that she has gone through a fair bit of the series uncomfortable or traumatized by violence makes her giving into it a moment of noticeable change, and her repeated struggle to persevere in her quest illustrates that despite her compulsion, this isn’t who she is.
HBO Max
Meanwhile, the showrunners are over here telling us that this is absolutely who Ellie is. It’s alluding to a version of this story that feels more in line with Naughty Dog’s marketing of The Last of Us Part II than it does the story it actually told. As a person who found Ellie (and Joel and Abby, for that matter) profoundly sympathetic by the end of the sequel, it’s worrisome to me that HBO’s version of her is leaning into a perverse vision of what violence means in The Last of Us.
Unfortunately, Part II’s marketing campaign lost the thread of grief and love-driven violence that’s at the core of the game and swaths of the internet think The Last of Us is about how violence is bad, and players should feel bad for doing it. How did this interpretation become so prominent? Naughty Dog itself said this is what the game is about. In an interview with Launcher, series director Neil Druckmann described the dueling protagonist structure as having been at least partially inspired by his witnessing of an Israeli soldier’s lynching (there’s an argument to be made that centrist Israeli politics run through the game’s veins), and a desire he felt to hurt those responsible. This was followed by immense guilt and a desire to explore that idea in Part II’s structure. The idea is that you would play through Ellie’s segments killing Abby’s friends, then find out at the end that Abby killed Joel in her own grief.
I don’t think it’s wrong to be judgemental of Joel, Ellie, or Abby’s actions. The game itself is pretty overtly critical of them throughout. Ellie’s killing of Abby’s friends is always treated as something that comes with a cost, as nearly every kill she commits is framed as mentally taxing on her. Abby, meanwhile, spends her entire half of the game trying to make up for the way she tortured and killed Joel because she’s trying to “lighten the load.” But nevertheless, we have to act out the play until it reaches its natural conclusion, which leads to the same dissonance we can feel in the first game’s final segment where Joel kills several innocent people to save Ellie.
For characters like Joel and Ellie, violence is a language spoken in a world where they’ve learned and been taught that it’s the only way they can communicate. It’s all the things that the characters feel, that they navigate, that they express through violence (or, in key moments, the choice not to use violence) that really matters. The desire to protect. The desire to avenge. The decision to forgive. But despite Part II delving into themes of grief and forgiveness through violence, the narrative that this series is about violence permeates through how we talk about it. That’s on Naughty Dog because that was the message the studio put out. But I find everything the company said about the game in marketing materials and interviews, such as the assertion that the game was “about hate” when it was first revealed, suspect after it became clear the studio had been deliberately obfuscating what Part II actually was. I understand this was done in an effort to keep the shocking event that sets the game in motion hidden ahead of launch, but the second Joel died instead of showing up in scenes the trailers showed, I approached the game with no further preconceptions.
Image: Naughty Dog
The sanding down of The Last of Us’ thematic makeup is Naughty Dog’s own doing, but that framing was what people had to work with. Much of the criticism surrounding Part IIfocuses on its relationship to violence, concluding that it’s meant to be a heavy-handed lesson in the cost of giving in to some base urge to harm one another. In post-release interviews, Druckmann has gone on record saying that the company’s messaging around Part II wasn’t reflective of what the game was actually about. But that’s the video game industry. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put these games in front of people, and 20+ hour experiences must be reduced to bullet points you can put on marketing copy. It ultimately didn’t affect the prestige of the franchise, as Part II went on to sell 10 million copies and earn countless Game of the Year awards. However, HBO’s television adaptation feels cognizant of the series’ decade of discourse in a lot of ways, and in this case, not for the better.
In some ways, this has worked out in the show’s favor, because stories like Bill and Frank’s get to take on new life as a sign that love is worth living for instead of being a cautionary tale about how caring about people is bad for your self-preservation. But this particular change feels like it’s an odd turn toward a marketing campaign that has ultimately soured a lot of the discussion around The Last of Us and the character at its center. That marketing and the ideas it helped to cement hang over the series to this day. It can be hard to see past those notions when you’re actually playing through a game that, if it is viewed as being about how violence is bad and you should feel bad for doing it, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It does hold up, however, when viewed primarily as a story of grief and, ultimately, acceptance. After watching Ellie go through so much inner turmoil as she fought her way through her demons while playing Part II, I don’t understand why the show seems to want us to view violence as something that excites her rather than as something she’ll one day reluctantly resort to as her own pain manifests. Yeah, some people will read this and minimize it to some kind of adaptation purity nonsense. I just hope the core of what The Last of Us is isn’t squandered under what a marketing team said it was to fit all its nuances on the back of a box.
Episode five of HBO’s The Last of Us marks the midpoint of our nine-episode journey. That’s right, we’re halfway there, and Ellie and Joel are definitely living on a prayer. Look, I’m sorry for the bad Bon Jovi reference but man, this episode is The Last of Us at its most relentlessly bleak. I needed to do something to lighten the mood for myself, and unlike Ellie, I don’t have a book of awful jokes handy. At least this episode also features what I consider the most effective subtle nod to the game in the entire season. We’ll get to that in a bit.
At the end of episode four, Joel and Ellie were being held at gunpoint by two characters who players of the game likely immediately recognized as Henry and Sam. (If you need to catch up, you can find my recap of that episode here.) As episode five begins, we flash back a little while to meet these new characters and learn about what’s driven them into such desperate circumstances.
The Fall of Kansas City FEDRA
At first glance, this episode’s beginning seems like one of pure jubilation. Chants of “freedom!” are heard rising from a crowd that’s celebrating in the streets. But almost immediately, we’re shown the grim side of this happy occasion, with FEDRA officers being executed at point-blank or publicly hoisted into the air by the neck as they twitch with their final struggles for life. An armored vehicle the people have reclaimed roams the streets blasting the message, “Collaborators, surrender now and you will receive a fair trial.” Hmm, yes, somehow I don’t believe you. Maybe it’s the fact that you’re dragging a body behind you that’s stuffed with so many blades it looks like a pincushion, I’m not sure.
As the armored vehicle passes, we see Henry and Sam lurking in the shadows. Henry (Lamar Johnson, The Hate U Give) uses ASL to communicate with his brother, cluing us in to a significant change from the game: Here, Sam is deaf. (Sam is wonderfully played here by young actor Keivonn Woodard, who is also deaf.) In this brief exchange, you can already sense Henry trying to put on a brave face for his much younger brother. The two sneak away unseen by the patrolling resistance which, as we learned in last week’s episode, is hell-bent on finding them.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
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In fact, even as the celebration rages on, Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), the resistance’s leader, is working, interrogating a group of “collaborators”—civilians who worked with FEDRA before it fell—about Henry’s whereabouts. Lynskey remains chilling in the role, coating her comments in a tone that, on the surface, sounds reasonable and kind, but is so transparently cold and ruthless underneath. “Lucky for you, I’m not FEDRA,” she tells them, saying that if they cooperate, they’ll be put on trial, be found guilty of course, and then have to do some time, “easy.” She’s got her commando assistant Perry (Jeffrey Pierce, who voices Joel’s brother Tommy in the games) by her side, his silent presence lending her words an added threat of danger. Finally someone cracks and tells her that Henry and Sam are with Edelstein, the doctor we saw Kathleen interrogate in last week’s episode.
A moment later, she orders her men to go door-to-door until her prey is found. When Perry shows some hesitation and advises against this plan, we see that she can turn her condescending ruthlessness on him, too. “He’s not my seventh priority, Perry,” she says. “Is that what he is to you?” I’m starting to feel like the way she prioritizes finding Henry above all other concerns may backfire on her in some way. Remember last week, when Perry showed her the ominous, quivering sinkhole in the building, and rather than dealing with it in any real way, she told him to just seal the building off and remain focused on finding Henry? Yeah, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
Perry asks if they’re really putting the arrested collaborators on trial. Of course they’re not. “When you’re done, burn the bodies. It’s faster,” she says, the way you might ask someone to pick up some milk from the grocery store on the way home.
Henry and Sam stay with Edelstein
Henry and Sam meet up with Edelstein, who takes them into the same cramped attic space we saw Kathleen investigate in last week’s episode. Here, it’s not yet covered with Sam’s drawings, as Henry and the doctor discuss their very limited food supply and total lack of ammunition for their guns. Everything that transpires here has an undercurrent of dread for us, since we already know that Edelstein soon gets captured and executed by Kathleen.
Sam, who can’t hear what they’re saying, sits in the corner, drawing on his little magnetic sketch pad. Edelstein seems like a kind and thoughtful man, showing genuine concern for Sam’s well-being. “He’s scared because you’re scared,” he advises Henry.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
Henry goes to comfort his little brother, who has drawn a masked superhero on his pad. “Super Sam,” Henry signs. Sam is understandably afraid, and Henry tries to reassure him that they’re safe here. “There is one problem, though,” he says. “This place? Is ugly.” He then breaks out the big bag of art supplies that Sam uses to decorate the space. It’s an endearing moment, with Henry creating for his younger brother an alternate reality in which the only real problem facing them is the drabness of their surroundings, and not the army hunting them right outside.
The birth of Super Sam
We skip ahead ten days, to find the attic filled with images of Super Sam blasting evil FEDRA officers and flying protectively over the city. But now, a real problem is bearing down on them: they’re almost out of food, and Sam is hungry. Edelstein’s been gone a whole day, and their hopes rest on him returning with some. We already know he’s not coming back. And yet right out the window, Henry can see resistance officers scouring the city, making leaving a dangerous proposition. They’re in a tight spot.
Finally, Henry has to face the fact that Edelstein isn’t returning. He tells Sam that he’s studied the patterns of the resistance patrols and can guide them to safety. When Sam asks if they killed Edelstein, Henry is honest and says they probably did. Sam clings to Henry for a long time after that. He’s a child growing up in a world in which nothing is ever safe or assured. He must be terrified.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
As he holds his brother and looks at the art decorating the walls, Henry has a flash of inspiration. He tells Sam to close his eyes, and paints a red mask on his face, just like the one Sam’s alter ego sports in all the drawings. Seeing it reflected in his brother’s knife, Sam nods with satisfaction. He’s ready to face the world.
They don’t get far, though. Just as they’re about to leave the building, a gunfight breaks out outside. It’s Joel and Ellie’s unceremonious arrival in Kansas City, and Henry observes as Joel kills the hunters attacking him. We see the wheels in his head turning. “New plan,” he tells his brother.
Meeting Joel and Ellie
Now we come back to the moment that concluded episode four, when the paths of these two duos intersect. Henry’s obviously been keeping an eye on Joel since earlier in the day, and he’s tracked him and Ellie to the apartment building where they’ve crashed for the night.
Joel isn’t exactly thrilled about waking up to the reality of being held at gunpoint, but soon they agree to a tentative truce, and Henry introduces himself as “the most wanted man in Kansas City.”
Over a quiet meal, Ellie asks Sam how old he is, and with Henry acting as an interpreter between them, he responds that he’s eight. (In the game, Sam is closer to Ellie’s age of 14, but him being younger here makes me even more sympathetic to how overwhelming and terrifying his experience of the world must be.) Joel, being Joel, says dryly that they successfully ate together and didn’t kill each other, so they should call it a win and move on. But Henry has a card up his sleeve. “I’m betting that y’all came up here to get a view of the city and plan a way out,” he says. “And when the sun’s up, I’ll show you one.”
“Welcome to Killa City”
The next morning, Henry provides Joel (and us) with some additional context for what went down in Kansas City. Looking out at the city, Joel is struck by the lack of FEDRA, especially since he’d always heard that KC FEDRA ruled with an iron fist. Henry confirms the rumors. “Raped and tortured and murdered people for 20 years,” he says. So if Henry wasn’t part of this monstrous FEDRA, Joel wonders, what, then, was he? When Henry replies that he was something even worse, “a collaborator,” Joel protests and says he doesn’t work with rats. Henry insists that today, he doesn’t have much choice, “‘cause I live here and you don’t.” They need each other, Henry argues. Only he knows where to go, and only Joel has the capacity for violence to get them out alive.
This is all quite different from the game, in which Henry and Sam weren’t native to Pittsburgh (where the game’s version of this storyline takes place), but had just come there from Hartford, Connecticut in search of supplies. They had no connection to the resistance that had risen up in Pittsburgh, but just happened to be people who could help Joel and Ellie get out of the city. In both stories, though, Sam lets us see new sides of Ellie by giving her a fellow kid to geek out with and play with, and having another duo traveling with them for a while illuminates Joel’s growing attachment to Ellie and his sense of himself as her protector, no longer just out of obligation but increasingly out of genuine care and concern.
As the two talk, the sound of kids laughing can be heard nearby. Ellie is showing Sam her tattered book of jokes, and a genuine smile stretches across Henry’s face. “Haven’t heard that in a long time,” he says, mirroring a moment from the game in which Ellie and Sam playfully eat blueberries together and Henry says it’s been a long time since he saw Sam crack a smile.
Perhaps counterintuitively, I find these moments of fleeting happiness among the most devastating in both the game and the show, because I know how things end for Henry and Sam. Their fate is so awful, so bleak, that it makes me think back to Ellie’s question to Joel in episode four: “If you don’t think there’s hope for the world, why bother going on?” I’m once again glad that the TV series at least offered us the reprieve of Bill and Frank, giving us one vision of lives lived well and with meaning, to temper how relentlessly hopeless it all gets for a while.
Henry’s plan
Henry sketches a map of the area showing how Kathleen’s forces have the area on lock. Still, there is a way out, he insists. Sam sits nearby sketching, but Henry doesn’t want him left out of the conversation. “How do we get across?” he signs at his brother. Sam writes intently on his pad for a moment, then holds it up. “TUNNELS.” It’s a great plan, but there’s a huge catch. Kansas City may seem strangely lacking in Infected, but there’s a reason for that. “FEDRA drove them underground 15 years ago,” Henry says. He insists, though, that FEDRA cleaned out the tunnels three years ago. Just what that means or how exactly they did that remains ominously unspoken, almost as if the show’s writers want to plant a seed in our minds about it. Nah, I’m sure it won’t come up again. Henry admits that the plan is “dicey-as-fuck,” but it’s also the only plan they’ve got.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
As they head down into the tunnels, Joel tells Ellie to get her gun out, and it looks like Ellie has to suppress a smile as he’s finally fully shifted from relentlessly denying her a gun to asking her to be ready to use one. However, the tunnels do indeed appear empty, vastly, surprisingly empty, stretching hollowly before them as far as the eye can see. Joel stays on guard but nothing is stirring in these subterranean passageways, and at last they come to a place that looks quite different, where the walls are decorated with the kinds of colorful drawings you might see at a preschool. Passing through a door, they find an abandoned place where people—adults and children—clearly once lived. Amidst all the details—the toys, the posted signs laying out rules, all the other signs of life—one thing stands out: a child’s drawing of two smiling men in body armor, with rifles, labeled “our protectors,” Danny and Ish. And here’s where we come to the episode’s great little nod to the game.
Who is Ish?
First, a little background. In the game, Joel and Ellie’s journey with Henry and Sam briefly takes them along a beach where you can enter a battered old boat and find a note. (Considering that this is near Pittsburgh, that probably makes about as much sense as the beginning of episode two being set “10 miles west of Boston.”) The note is signed by someone named Ish (perhaps a reference to Moby Dick’s sea-faring narrator Ishmael) and details how, after spending some time at sea to hide from the outbreak, he eventually found himself running low on supplies and his boat in disrepair, and returned to shore to take his chances with humanity again.
Ish’s boat on the beach near Pittsburgh, which, yeah, probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
From there, you head into nearby sewers, where you can find a small area where Ish lived alone for some time after coming ashore. A note of his you can find there mentions that he met some people who had kids with them and who did not want to shoot him on sight. “Shocking I know,” he comments. The encounter puts the idea in his head that maybe it’s better for him to try trusting other people than it is to continue living alone. “What’s the point of surviving if you don’t have someone to laugh at your corny jokes?” his note reads, a question that cuts to the heart of The Last of Us’ themes. “Tomorrow, I’m going in search of them.”
Soon, you come to a place that’s very much like the one the party finds in the TV series, where Ish lived with other adults and children. In fact, the very same drawing of Ish and another adult named Danny that we see in the show is seen here in the game. Unfortunately, environmental clues also tell us that at some point, infected did get into the settlement, and the results were tragic, with another adult named Kyle and a few children getting trapped in a room by infected, and Kyle killing the children himself to spare them an even worse fate. Another note that you can find in the suburbs upon leaving the sewers reveals that he and a woman named Susan got out, but it’s excruciating to read. “She lost her children,” it says, “and I have no clue what to say to her.”
It concludes with Ish writing that every part of his being wants to give up, but he just can’t. “I’ve seen that we’re still capable of good. We can make it. I have to stay strong… for her.” What happened to him after that remains unknown.
Very often, I feel that Easter eggs are kind of exclusionary. They wink and nod to those people who are in the know, letting those viewers perhaps feel smug about picking up on cool details that fly over the rest of the audience’s heads. This drawing on the wall, though, works either way, I think. If you haven’t played the game, it offers some insight into what life was like here in this underground settlement at one time, and if you do know it from the game, it opens up a whole other narrative to you. A tragedy nested within a tragedy. Right about now, The Last of Us just feels like tragedies all the way down.
Savage Starlight
Sam finds a copy of a Savage Starlight comic, which in the game serves as a collectible Joel can find throughout and give to Ellie. Ellie is immediately stoked at Sam’s find, and the two of them bond over their shared enthusiasm for the series, trading details about which issues they each have. One particularly sweet moment sees Ellie quoting the hero’s catchphrase of “Endure and survive” and Sam teaching it to her in ASL. God, I want these kids to make it. (Around this same stretch of the game, Ellie will occasionally say “Endure and survive” after Joel has finished taking out a group of enemies and it seems like the two are safe for the time being.)
Ellie and Sam play soccer in the game in a moment referenced in the show.Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
Other moments here are direct nods to the game, like one when Ellie and Sam play soccer using a makeshift goal painted on the wall. However, a conversation between Joel and Henry that sheds further light on his connection to Kathleen is totally new. Joel apologizes for having called Henry a rat before, saying that if Henry did what he did for Sam’s sake, he understands. Henry finally tells Joel exactly what it is he did do, and why. He paints a picture of a great man, one who “was never afraid, never selfish, and he was always forgiving.” He’s clearly talking about Kathleen’s brother, who he wanted to follow, and would have followed, if only.
“But Sam, he got sick. Leukemia.” And wouldn’t you know it, FEDRA had control of the very limited supply of the only drug that could treat him. So he made a deal, and gave FEDRA what they wanted. He’s still wracked with guilt about it, but the world presented him with an impossible choice that he never should have had to make in the first place. Rather than offer any words of comfort or understanding, though, Joel just says “We’ve waited long enough.” It’s time to move on.
Kathleen and Michael
We find Kathleen standing in her childhood bedroom, in a clearly abandoned house. And as she tells Perry about her brother—who we learn here was named Michael—and how he’d always comfort her during thunderstorms when they were kids, all I could think was, “Oh my god, shut up.” She’s the type of person who’s so convinced that her pain and suffering matter so much more than everyone else’s, that hunting down Henry is good and righteous because he took her brother from her, even though he only did it because it was the only way to save his own brother. Of course her pain and grief are real, but the extremes she’s going to in her pursuit of Henry make me lose all sympathy for her. She’s an egomaniac.
In fact, even her own brother’s wishes don’t matter to her, much as she might pretend to be honoring his life or his memory in this act. “He was so beautiful,” she says about Michael. “I’m not. I never was.” She knows Michael would want her to forgive Henry. He outright told her that when FEDRA had him locked up right before they killed him. But her pain is just too important to her for her to do that. And Perry is happy to validate her worst impulses. “Your brother was a great man. We all loved him,” he says. “But he didn’t change anything. You did. We’re with you.” Thanks, Perry. Big help. I’m sure that won’t encourage Kathleen to do something even more selfish and reckless than all the things she’s already done.
Sniper on the street
Joel and the gang emerge outside of Kathleen’s territory in a suburban neighborhood that seems safe at first glance, and the mood is relatively light as Ellie begins does her best Joel impression and encourages Henry and Sam to come with them to Wyoming. (In the game, Henry and Sam are already planning to track down the Fireflies, but here, they just want to get out of Kansas City for starters.) The calm is broken, however, when a sniper bullet strikes the ground near them and they dash behind a wrecked car for cover, plunging us into a sequence that owes a lot to the game.
The Pittsburgh suburbs section leading up to the sniper encounter is perhaps the game at its most ruinously beautiful.Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
Sniper bullets continue to rain down on them, and just as in the game, Joel opts to sneak around and try to come at the sniper from behind. In the game, though, what you find in the sniper’s perch is a young man with a knife, prompting a grisly button-mashing sequence in which you ultimately turn the blade on the man and stab him with it repeatedly. Here, Joel finds an older man, one of Kathleen’s faithful, who refuses Joel’s plea to just drop the gun, instead cementing his own death by turning the gun on Joel. Just then, Kathleen’s voice crackles over a radio. “Hold them where they are,” she says. “We’re almost there.”
“It ends the way it ends”
In the game, the one repurposed Humvee the Pittsburgh resistance claimed from FEDRA soon arrives, but here, Kathleen’s forces are much more well-equipped, and a number of vehicles are soon barreling down on Ellie, Henry, and Sam. Just as in the game, Joel provides cover with the sniper rifle, and here he takes out the driver of the truck leading the charge, sending it careening into a nearby house where it promptly explodes.
Still, Kathleen’s forces close in. Perry sends men after Joel, and Kathleen begins to address Henry, revealing that her hypocrisy and self-importance know no bounds. “I know why you did what you did,” she says, “but did you ever stop to think that maybe [Sam] was supposed to die?” When Henry protests that Sam is just a kid, she replies that kids die “all the time.” That may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that by her moral calculus, Sam’s life should have been totally disregarded, while Michael’s life should have been prioritized above all. In one truly staggering moment of cognitive dissonance, she says “You think the whole world revolves around him?” as if she isn’t acting like the whole world revolves around her quest for vengeance.
Finally, Henry emerges. “It ends the way it ends,” Kathleen says as she raises her gun to kill him. This calls for a deus ex machina, baby!
Something wicked this way bloats
Just then, the truck nearby teeters and falls as the earth beneath it yawns open, and an absolute tidal wave of speedy infected rise up out of it, a kind of cosmic retribution for Kathleen’s hubris. (A mob of infected also bear down on the group during this sequence in the game, but it’s nothing like this.) Huh, I guess FEDRA didn’t really deal with the infected problem after all, they just tried to brush it aside. Showrunner Craig Mazin knows a thing or two about writing stories where institutions do that, I guess, having worked on Chernobyl as well.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
Suddenly Kathleen’s considerable show of force feels quite impotent, as the assault rifles have little effect in stemming the tide of death. Joel does the best he can to cover his allies amidst the chaos, but Ellie gets separated from Henry and Sam and climbs into an old SUV. Just then, a guttural growl unlike any sound we’ve heard an infected make thus far is heard, and a very different beast emerges from the sinkhole, a formidable, fungus-encrusted chonker of an infected called a bloater, a boss-type enemy from the game. Kathleen’s forces don’t have any of the molotov cocktails or nail bombs I usually use to take these bad boys down, so I think they’re pretty much fucked.
Perry peppers the thing with bullets but they clearly have little effect aside from making it mad. As it bears down on him, he urges Kathleen to get to cover, then turns to face his fate, which is having his head ripped clean off in a death consistent with one of the game’s most horrifying death animations.
Meanwhile, Ellie has a guest in her little SUV sanctuary: a creepy infected who was also a teenage girl before getting turned. Ellie heads out onto the street where she sees Henry and Sam pinned down by infected under a nearby car. With Joel’s help and a few stabs of her trusty switchblade—her signature weapon in the game—she gets them out and they make a run for it. Kathleen stops them yet again, but her success is short-lived, as a young infected—who I think but I’m not certain is the same one that chased Ellie out of the vehicle a moment before—leaps on her and absolutely shreds her to bits. It ends the way it ends.
As Joel leads them away from the chaos, we see the mob of infected, including the bloater, lurching its way back toward Kansas City. Nice going, Kathleen. Great job.
“I’m scared of ending up alone”
Joel and the gang have found shelter in an old motel for the night. In the game, there’s a nice moment here where Henry presses Joel for details about the time Joel and his brother Tommy rode Harley-Davidsons on a cross-country trip. That detail’s been omitted from the show, but the general arc of how things play out here is pretty similar.
“You think they’ll be okay?” Henry asks about the kids as they read Savage Starlight together in the next room, and Joel, in his own taciturn way, offers a kind of comfort to Henry, as a fellow protector of a young charge. It’s easier when you’re a kid, he says. “You don’t have anybody else relying on you. That’s the hard part.” Then comes a bit of playful meta-dialogue as Joel says, “What’s that comic book say? ‘Endure and survive’?” “Endure and survive,” Henry says. Then, after a moment: “That shit’s redundant.” “Yeah, it’s not great,” Joel agrees.
And now, as Ellie jokingly predicted earlier, Joel does indeed invite Henry and Sam to join them on the trip to Wyoming. It’s another one of those seemingly pleasant, hopeful moments that I find all the more painful because we’ll never get to see what might have come to pass if only the world they lived in were a little less dangerous and cruel. “Yeah, I think it’d be nice for Sam to have a friend,” Henry says. “New day, new start.” Okay, writers. Now you’re deliberately twisting the knife, jeeze.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
Though Henry urges Sam to get some sleep, he and Ellie stay up for a bit, Ellie doing different voices as she reads Savage Starlight aloud. But Sam is preoccupied. “Are you ever scared?” he writes on his pad, a question he effectively asks her aloud in the game. (“How is it that you’re never scared?”) Just like in the game, Ellie first jokes that she’s afraid of scorpions, before admitting that what really scares her is the possibility of ending up alone.
In the game, when Ellie asks Sam what he’s scared of, he brings up infected. “What if the people are still inside?” he asks, and it’s the first time that the game directly engages with a terrifying idea that the show brings up early on: whether the person an infected once was remains somehow present and aware, even as they lose all control over their body. The game’s Ellie dismisses the idea, saying “that person is not in there anymore.” Her counterpart in the show, however, seems a bit more troubled by the idea.
The game’s Sam keeps his bite a secret, but in the show, after asking Ellie, “If you turn into a monster, is it still you inside?” he lifts the leg of his jeans to show her the nasty wound. Ellie here does something strange and sweet and hopeless: she cuts her own hand to draw blood and press it into the bite, telling Sam, “My blood is medicine.” If only it were that simple.
What happens the next morning is so awful, I don’t even want to bring myself to write it. If you’re reading this recap, you probably know, and if you don’t, I think you can guess.
Screenshot: HBO
As they bury the bodies near the motel, Ellie sets Sam’s sketchpad atop his grave. On it, she’s written the words “I’m sorry.” She’s withdrawn and just wants to leave. You have to wonder if she isn’t starting to give up on the world herself. Meanwhile, as he looks at the message she’s written, Joel seems, if anything, more committed to Ellie than ever. Something in his face suggests that he wants to spare her an existence made up of this kind of relentless suffering. He collects his gear, picks up the sniper rifle (new weapon unlocked!), and they head west.
As I said above, I find this week’s episode excruciating, so miserable in its outcome that in retrospect, even the few bright spots make it more agonizing. I don’t know about you but good lord, after all this, I sure hope these two catch a bit of a break soon.
It seems I was too quick to judge HBO’s The Last of Us. While the first four episodes certainly kept my attention as well-written and delightfully-shot prestige television, I had been a little let down as the adaptive process of turning the game into a show has, so far, left out the recreation of specific, memorable action sequences from the game. Well, with “Endure and Survive,” the fifth episode of the first (but not the last) season of The Last of Us, the show has revealed that it’s more than capable of adapting the action of the video game, and in some cases, just might be doing a better job with it.
Adapted from the hit PlayStation 3 title of the same name, The Last of Us’ gripping, character-driven plot exists alongside tense, deadly, moment-by-moment combat encounters. The player, as Joel, must overcome both hostile humans and infected with a combination of stealth, firearms, and crudely improvised weapons. For its first four episodes, HBO’s adaptation has, mostly, prioritized the story elements, choosing in some cases not to recreate memorable action sequences or feature unique, crafted props of the kind we’ve seen in the game. It makes sense for television to focus on the actors and the story, but until now I’ve found the show to be missing that key action ingredient I’ve loved so well, not just from seeing the game, but from playing it.
There’s a reason The Last of Us appears on our list of the best action games you can play this year. With a slower cadence than what you find in something like Naughty Dog’s other recent series, Uncharted, and an emphasis on survival, The Last of Us as a game injects tight, intense, action sequences throughout the narrative, reminding you that, however much things might feel under your control during the narrative downtime, you’re never actually safe in its deadly world.. The action sequences are when the rug has been pulled out from under you and you must deal with a situation in the here and the now. Mess up, and someone’s dying.
Our action game list highlighted the sequel, Part II, as being a bit more flexible, with more options for how you approach and respond to various situations. But the sequel follows what the first game already did so well: Moments where, forgive the cliche, all hell breaks loose and you must respond. Immediately. It’s stress-inducing action for sure, but damn, is it a thrill.
While I would’ve certainly traded the first game’s “upside-down” shootout sequence in the “Bill’s Town” level for the beautiful story of Bill and Frank we got in episode three of the show, I was beginning to worry that HBO’s TV adaptation would continue to leave out other, more explosive sequences rather than attempt to translate the immediacy of the game’s action to the screen. But here we are with episode five’s suburban sniper sequence. This gripping scene not only translates the game’s action particularly well, but does so with a narrative revision that makes the carnage even more intense.
Just like in the game, Joel and Ellie have teamed up with Henry and Sam. But this time, Henry and Sam’s situation is a bit more urgent. Kathleen, the leader of a revolutionary force, obsessively wants to see Henry die for his role in her brother’s death. Like the game, Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam must travel down an abandoned suburban street, moving from car to car to avoid getting shot by a sniper overlooking the area.
The TV show does depart a touch from this scenario as it exists in the game. To start, Joel isn’t faced with additional hostile forces on his approach to the sniper’s nest. And it becomes clear once Joel deals with the sniper that this individual belongs to the revolutionaries in Kansas City (the game’s parallel version of these events takes place in Pittsburgh and doesn’t feature Kathleen or any of the revolutionaries introduced in episode four). This is one of the improvements the show makes over the original game, something its sequel also worked harder to achieve: lending faces, complicated motivations, and identities to the antagonists.
But we need to talk about the sound design in the sniper sequence first. Though the show has caught my ear before (a particularly unnerving-yet-satisfying ambient music swell as Joel, Ellie, and Tess ascend the stairs in episode two’s museum is one such example), I am unhealthily obsessed with the gunshots in this scene. The exacting and penetrating strike of the sniper rifle’s shot is chased by a split second of silence that could swallow the universe, followed up with a timeless whisper of air and sensually percussive hits on the bodies and windows of cars. Satisfying bangs funneled into powerful clangs, sharp shatters of glass…heavy metal bands will spend their entire careers trying to deliver something so sonically beautiful and destructive at the same time. This is bliss.
The sounds are loveable as special effects and creations on their own, but the effect really drew me in with an intimacy of the kind I’ve felt in video games—and in particular, the one this show is based on. The scene that mirrors this one in the video game is one example, but the latter half of The Last of Us Part II also has a similar sniper scenario. Cover-to-cover movement with the threat of violence pressing you back is successfully brought to life on screen. But we’re not done yet.
Screenshot: HBO
Like in the game, Joel eventually gets to the top of the sniper’s nest, eliminates the shooter and must then get behind the scope as hostile human forces march forward. In the show, the personality-less mob of foes is replaced by new-character Kathleen on her quest for revenge, with her forces in tow. Joel must make several needle-threading shots, one of which is recreated from the game: Hitting the driver of a hostile vehicle, with the camera going behind the scope of the rifle itself. And yes, like the game, that car crashes into a house…a house which has a surprise in store.
The TV show’s vehicle veers off and crashes to the right side. It crashes on the left in the game; this mirror image of recreated scenes seems to be a common element of the show. Joel and Sarah are flipped in their position on the couch in the opening episode; Joel’s “I am sure you will figure that out” line of dialogue to Ellie asking what the hell she’s supposed to do while he naps in the first episode sees the couch he lays on flipped to the other side of the room.
And while a cluster of infected does ultimately flood the street in the game as well, it’s quite different in the show. Here, the emergence of a horde of infected from underground serves as the payoff to some wonderful foreshadowing in the previous episode and earlier scenes in this one, where we learn that FEDRA had previously chased all the infected underground as a way to “fix” the problem. It’s clear that this is something that will resurface to cause a problem. And in this scene, once you see that truck fall into the house…you know what’s coming, and that the hubris that led Kathleen to go to such extremes will soon claim its price.
Screenshot: HBO
Shattering the calm insanity of Kathleen’s myopic quest for vengeance, the fallen truck and the chorus of screams and roars from the mob of infected it unleashes is a powerful release, snapping us out of the daze of trying to follow Kathleen’s justification for cruelty. We’re barely given time to digest the contours of her bloodlust as the infected’s long-buried rage drowns out all, the great equalizer that considers no one safe and needs no justification for its wrath and violence. At the end of this scene, I felt the instinctual urge to put down the controller and take a breath. Except there was no controller.
Episode five’s sniper scenario doesn’t just adapt a key action sequence of the game, it makes it better. The pacing is tighter, more intense. The narrative wrapping pulls you into what’s at stake in a far more satisfying way, and it earns its zombie mob scene. This is the kind of game sequence adaptation I’ve been waiting for in HBO’s show, and it did not disappoint. Until next time, I’m gonna go see if Whole Foods has crow on sale.
Lawmakers from the U.S. states of Mississippi and Missouri have introduced bills that seek to legally protect their citizens’ rights to run a Bitcoin node and to mine BTC.
Excerpt of Mississippi’s bill
Excerpt of Missouri’s Bill
Bills have been submitted to both the Houses and Senates of the respective states, with Senator Josh Harkins (R) and Representative Jody Steverson (R) leading the movement within Mississippi. Representative Phil Christofanelli (R) of Missouri submitted its respective bill to the House. Both states’ bills utilize language from the Satoshi Action Fund. Amongst the explicit rights for nodes and mining, the bills also have language prohibiting:
Political subdivisions of the state creating requirements which are not in line with other data center requirements, and changing the zoning of bitcoin miners without proper notice.
Outlawing of discriminatory energy rates directed at bitcoin miners.
Sound ordinances directed at mining facilities that are not in-line with other sound ordinances within the community.
Operating nodes or miners being considered the act of money transmitting.
Just yesterday, a New Hampshire commission recommended that the state Department of Energy investigate how bitcoin mining could be integrated into energy grids statewide. In addition to this recommendation, a report released in November 2022 directed at members of the Texas legislature recommended making bitcoin an authorized investment for the state, while giving tax incentives to local BTC miners.
“I see an opportunity for states that were left out of the tech boom to have a real shot at taking part in the Bitcoin boom,” Dennis Porter, CEO and founder of the Satoshi Action Fund commented. “Mining facilities often get built in rural parts of America. We hope that Missouri and Mississippi see this potential and begin opening up their states to Bitcoin mining businesses.”
The reports all signify growing interest from states across America on how they can benefit from adopting bitcoin and utilizing bitcoin mining within their energy networks. Continued political action from the likes of Bitcoin Policy Institute and Satoshi Action Fund greatly contribute to the education of lawmakers.
“Now that these bills have been drafted and introduced, we must continue the education process for the elected leaders of the state of Mississippi,” Porter stated.
In regards to concerns voiced by Bitcoiners about the consolidation of hash rate in North American jurisdictions, Porter said that, “Consolidation of mining is a concern, but it is much less of a concern than consolidation of nodes. The nodes and the users of the Bitcoin network are the ones in control, the Blocksize Wars proved this. However, extreme consolidation of mining could become a risk. We at Satoshi Action strongly support the growth of hash rate outside the USA and North America.”
Eric Peterson, director of policy at the Satoshi Act Fund has also been working to advise Mississippi. He explains how “Because of its unique characteristics, Bitcoin miners are looking to expand their footprint in the state. Legislators can see the opportunities these miners bring, especially in terms of creating jobs in rural areas.”
If the bills are enacted, they could contribute to mounting interest from state governments, something that Peterson is seemingly leaning in on. “The most important concept for legislators to understand is that Bitcoin is not going away anytime soon,” he said. “Even if states don’t get behind the industry they need to have a working regulatory structure for it and ensure that businesses who operate in this state can do so long term in their state.”
Federal politician Andrew Wilkie, an independent, introduced the bill into parliament yesterday. He proposes that loot box mechanics—where players use actual money to buy random in-game items—prey upon the same impulses that gambling does, and that they can serve as a pathway to get kids hooked. He suggests that any game with loot boxes (or similar systems) should not only be restricted to those over the age of 18 (the legal gambling age in Australia), but should also carry warning labels specifying the reason for the rating as well.
While Australia has a reputation for being incredibly heavy-handed with its classification of video games—mostly down to a broken old system from decades past that has since been overhauled (but which still has some drug-related kinks in the pipe)—I think this is a no-brainer?
Here’s the full outline of the bill, which in some cases wouldn’t just restrict the sale of these games, but in some situations just straight up ban them (“RC” means Refused Classification, and games without classification can’t legally be sold here):
Loot boxes are features of interactive games containing undisclosed items that can be purchased with real currency. They can take the form of a virtual box, crate, prize wheel or similar mechanism and contain a prize or item which may or may not benefit the player. For example, a loot box might contain a particular character, additional play time or access to levels and game maps. As the rewards contained within these loot boxes can offer competitive advantages within the game, they carry significant value for players and may hold resale value.
By tempting players with the potential to win game-changing items, encouraging risk-taking for possible reward, delivering random prizes on an intermittent basis, and encouraging players to keep spending money, loot boxes give rise to many of the same emotions and experiences associated with poker machines and traditional gambling activities. This is especially concerning as many games which contain these features are popular with adolescents and young adults. Despite this, loot boxes are not currently required to be considered in classification decisions nor are games required to advertise when they contain this feature.
This bill remedies this by requiring the Classification Board to consider loot boxes when classifying a game. Further, the Board must set a minimum classification of R18+ or RC for games containing this feature, which will restrict children from purchasing and playing these games.
The amendments also require a warning to be displayed when games contain loot boxes or similar features, so that they can be easily identified by parents and guardians.
It’s Black Friday, the day on which the entirety of planet Earth entirely takes leaves of its senses and spends all its money on stuff it doesn’t need for 5 percent less than it would have cost yesterday. Planet Earth this year has bought itself an entirely new moon, even though the old one’s fine, just because this one has Bluetooth. So let’s distract ourselves from all that by discovering 12 amazing new games.
As is ever the case with Indiegeddon, I am not vouching for these games, as I’ve not played any of them. Instead, I just think they look interesting, exciting, frightening, or so damned weird I couldn’t not write about them. Most of them aren’t out yet, but the most useful thing you can do for the developers is give them a wishlist on Steam: it makes a big difference.
There’s bound to be at least one game here that has you checking its release date and wishing it were sooner, unless you’re that one person in the greys who feels the need to tell the whole universe that he actually thinks they all look terrible. We feel sorry for you, that one person. Just pity, really. For everyone else, woo-hoo, let’s get going!
Stuffer Fox
Falling Frontier
Every time I see a space-based RTS that looks as cool as Falling Frontier, I think, “This will be the one! This will be the game where I conquer my fear of menus!” And then I fail. But maybe it will be this one, because damn, it looks brilliant. Four years in the making already, by only one human, this looks like it came from a team of 100 at Paradox. Just watch those spaceships asplode! It’s all about taking over a procedurally generated star system, with intel and logic as its primary factors. But then you can also design your ships, raid enemies, and do all that amazing space-strat stuff I wish I’d grown a brain for.
You, a squirrel called Bill who’s great at crafting, stumble upon an alien baby in your garden who needs your help! It’s a tale as old as time itself. The result, Bill, is a simulation game in which you must craft, farm and organize everything the baby alien needs to survive. And it’s all to explore the concepts of recycling. Which is the weirdest elevator pitch, and yet looks like it could be adorable.
Get your head around this one: A 1 to 4-player couch co-op game about attempting to maintain a spaceship in calamitous circumstances, but also in splitscreen where you see both the inside and outside of your ship at the same time. Yikes. People will be able to take on different roles on the ship, from captain to janitor, as everything goes wrong on board while trying to defend yourself from enemies. It’s all about chaos and multitasking, or as I prefer to describe it, failing as a team.
Quartet looks like an incredibly faithful classic-style JRPG, but with a new twist on its turn-based battle system. Indeed, there are eight characters in that thumbnail above, but you battle with four at a time, able to tag characters in and out as appropriate. It’s also a quartet of stories, four to choose from, played in any order you wish, and of course in an Octotraveller way, they intertwine as you play through them all. It’s an ambitious project for a five-person indie team, but it sure looks like they’re doing it.
That man has a very tiny head. That said, this is Dreambound, a visual novel that’s just had a successful Kickstarter (raising over $30,000), affording everyone the opportunity to watch handsome young men stare wistfully at one another. It’s booooy looooove. As well as that, there are also mysterious deaths, dreams that invade reality, and demons from the past to deal with, for main character Noah, in what’s already looking like a very pleasingly drawn and written adventure.
Coo, look at this! It looks like that all-too-rarely explored sweet spot between point-and-click adventure and RPG. Sky Of Tides is a sci-fi story in a civilization on the brink of war, telling the personal tale of Rin, searching for her missing father, and, you know, saving the planet Numen. (NUMEN!) It promises that your decisions will determine your character, as you explore the isometric world, and honestly, I want to be playing it already.
Elsewhere in space… Terra Invicta is another super-deep space sim, this one immediately reminding me of Stellaris, but with a far more specific focus: Earth. This is from a group of modders, best known for XCOM: Long War. The success of that mod sent them pro, and Terra Invicta is their first commercial game, a geopolitical space exploration sim, where you’re preventing (or even aiding) an alien invasion of our home planet. The game’s been out in early access for a couple of months, and is proving very popular with Steam reviewers, thanks to its complexity and scale.
An Arkanoid-like, but the blocks you hit shoot back at you! How is this not already a thing. (I think you’ll find, actually, that there was an example of this on the Amiga Rupture 3400 in Germany, in the parallel dimension of Raaaaaaa – That Guy.) The Blocks Shoot At You looks like such an obvious idea, but I’ve never seen it before: Bullet Hell Breakout. This looks like it could be my new obsession, at which I am endlessly terrible.
I love it when I can’t quite tell if it’s a video-nasty trailer or a retro FPS trailer. That’s a whole scene right now. Phobolis fits right in, its scratchy trailer at first looking like a ruined VHS video that will curse your grandchildren, then cutting to a grimy, old-school shooter. You can pick up the alpha test build of the game via Itch for a buck, or wait until the year after next when they plan to release.
Call me a sucker, but I can’t resist a game about a space cat detective who investigates a crime on an interstellar cruise ship populated by sentient carpets. As Domino, said detective cat, you explore the ship in third-person, attempting to catch a jewel thief. It’s presented so superbly down-to-earth, given the ridiculous premise, as you’ll see in that full half hour of the game in the video above.
I can’t write one of these without including a card game—there are laws. Zero Division is a cyberpunk approach, that promises to mix Magic: The Gathering with Slay The Spire. You pick three characters from a selection of nine, each of which has their own deck of 40 cards. And set deck sizes mean no deck thinning! Woo! What grabs me is the combination of cards and epic 3D monsters and robots flinging their arms and weapons around on the other side of the board. There’s a demo due in spring ‘23, and I’m definitely going to be playing it.
Always finish on an existential non-linear psychedelic platformer, that’s what my grandmother taught me. Not one to refuse sage advice, here’s Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity by Sam Atlas, creator of the 2022 IGF Nuovo nomination, Space Hole 2020. Extreme Evolution looks just so spectacularly fucked up, like if David Lynch had made The Lawnmower Man, and I think I’m going to be dreaming this brief trailer for the rest of my life. Oh god that spider virus thing.
El Salvador’s Minister of the Economy Maria Luisa Hayem Brevé submitted a digital assets issuance bill to the country’s legislative assembly, paving the way for the launch of its bitcoin-backed “volcano” bonds.
First announced one year ago today, the pioneering initiative seeks to attract capital and investors to El Salvador. It was revealed at the time the plans to issue $1 billion in bonds on the Liquid Network, a federated Bitcoin sidechain, with the proceedings of the bonds being split between a $500 million direct allocation to bitcoin and an investment of the same amount in building out energy and bitcoin mining infrastructure in the region.
A sidechain is an independent blockchain that runs parallel to another blockchain, allowing for tokens from that blockchain to be used securely in the sidechain while abiding by a different set of rules, performance requirements, and security mechanisms. Liquid is a sidechain of Bitcoin that allows bitcoin to flow between the Liquid and Bitcoin networks with a two-way peg. A representation of bitcoin used in the Liquid network is referred to as L-BTC. Its verifiably equivalent amount of BTC is managed and secured by the network’s members, called functionaries.
“Digital securities law will enable El Salvador to be the financial center of central and south America,” wrote Paolo Ardoino, CTO of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, on Twitter.
Bitfinex is set to be granted a license in order to be able to process and list the bond issuance in El Salvador.
The bonds will pay a 6.5% yield and enable fast-tracked citizenship for investors. The government will share half the additional gains with investors as a Bitcoin Dividend once the original $500 million has been monetized. These dividends will be dispersed annually using Blockstream’s asset management platform.
The act of submitting the bill, which was hinted at earlier this year, kickstarts the first major milestone before the bonds can see the light of day. The next is getting it approved, which is expected to happen before Christmas, a source close to President Nayib Bukele told Bitcoin Magazine. The bill was submitted on November 17 and presented to the country’s Congress today. It is embedded in full below.
MONROE (WKOW) — Wisconsin’s dairy farmers are calling on the U.S. Senate to pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act; it was already approved by the House of Representatives in 2021.
Proponents say this bill would streamline citizenship for migrant visa workers and lower food prices, but opponents say this is an extreme amnesty bill.
Wisconsin’s agricultural industry generates over 104 billion dollars a year. Nearly half of that, 45 billion, comes from the dairy industry and a worker shortage is threatening America’s Dairyland.
“Farmers are being forced to go out of business because they don’t have the help they need on the farm,” said Mykel Bickham, Associate Director of Government Affairs with Edge Dairy Farmer Cooperative.
So dairy farmers are calling on the Senate to pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act allowing them to hire H-2a visa workers. Proponents like Bickham said would keep dairy production consistent and lessen the pressure on consumer wallets.
“It has a huge impact on your grocery store shelves. It also has an impact on inflation,” said Bickham.
The problem is the dairy industry is excluded from the H-2a visa program and dairy farmers say this is hurting their business.
“Getting people to fill different positions, whether we’re talking milking cows or feeding animals. I think is a huge issue,” said Dan Wegmueller with Wegmueller Dairy Farm & “The Dairy” Farm Stay.”
“As input costs continue to go up and it’s tougher for farmers to get their products out onto the market and harvested. Those prices do go up on the grocery store shelves,” Bickham said.
More migrant and H-2A workers are associated with lower inflation
More denied naturalization petitions are associated with larger consumer prices and higher inflation
Opponents like Daren Bakst, an expert with the Heritage Foundation, described the Farm Workforce Modernization Act as an amnesty bill for illegal workers with short-term benefits for farmers. He said workers who get this H-2A visa will almost certainly move off the farm. In his full statement, Bakst said:
“This is an amnesty bill for agricultural workers who are illegally in the country. And the bill makes no pretense otherwise. The legislation gives a special pathway to citizenship for illegal workers, with some workers being able to get a green card in as little as four years. To stress, it isn’t giving these illegal workers a way to become a part of the H-2A guest worker program, but instead, it goes way beyond that and creates a pathway to citizenship. It allows illegal aliens to stay in the country while they are provided an easy pathway to citizenship, rewarding lawbreakers and punishing legal aliens who abide by the rules to become citizens.
For those saying it will help farmers, at best it would provide a short-term benefit to farmers who have employed illegal workers. Many of the illegal agricultural workers who get this new pathway will almost certainly move off the farm. That movement away from the farm is precisely what happened when the United States granted amnesty to more than 1 million agricultural workers in 1986.
It’s one thing for Congress to reform legal pathways, but it’s quite another to reward illegal agricultural workers and agricultural employers who have ignored the law altogether.
When considering immigration in agriculture, it isn’t a binary choice between doing nothing and creating this extreme amnesty bill. There should be a thoughtful dialogue regarding how to improve the legal immigration system without simultaneously undermining its legitimacy.”
The Farm Workforce Modernization Act is still pending in the U.S. Senate; whether or not the Senate will vote on this act remains uncertain.
This act would cap worker visas at 20,000 and dairy farmers want that cap lifted, which is one reason this act is stalled.
ARLINGTON, Va., April 4, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– The American COMPETES Act of 2022 was passed by the House of Representatives in February 2022 to cover scientific research, economic competitiveness and various other matters related to CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR MANUFACTURING, PRE-EMINENCE IN TECHNOLOGY AND ECONOMIC STRENGTH (COMPETES). After recent breakthroughs in the fusion energy industry, Kronos Fusion Energy highly encourages the support of this act.
On March 23, 2022, the US Senate voted 66-33 on a motion to proceed to consider this Bill. There is a very important Amendment for the fusion energy industry that was sponsored by three House members who are thought leaders in developing strategies to create high-paying American jobs for the fusion energy industry.
Priyanca Ford, founder of Kronos Fusion Energy Inc, urged the U.S. Senate to consider fusion energy to be a bipartisan issue, “Fusion Energy is the cleanest and most efficient energy source in the universe that will lead mankind to a new golden age. [Ford] urges the U.S. Senate to support the Fusion Energy Amendment and to pass the COMPETES Bill quickly, to help to jumpstart the American fusion energy industry’s quest to become the global leader in jobs creation for fusion energy”.
Representative Don Beyer (D-VA), the Chairman of the House Fusion Energy Caucus, Representative Lori Trahan (D-MA), the sponsor of the Fusion Amendment to the Energy Act of 2020 that created the fusion energy milestone program, and Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology sponsored the Fusion Energy Amendment that will help to foster the rapid growth of the United States fusion energy industry.
Michael Pierce Hoban, managing partner at Kronos Fusion Energy Inc, commented on why this amendment is important to the U.S. fusion energy industry, “This amendment grows the funding for the Department of Energy’s proposed milestone-based public-private partnership program for fusion energy from $325 million over five years to $800 million. It also increases authorized funding for a new materials program from $200 million to $400 million over the coming five years.”
The U.S. Senate is now considering whether to concur with the house amendment on fusion energy and whether to pass the COMPETES Bill so that a completed bill can go to President Biden for signature.
Information on Kronos Fusion Energy can be found below.
A proposed bill aimed at increasing transparency in Nevada’s online poker scene has failed to progress in the state’s legislative process. AB380 sought to establish a list of individuals with interactive gaming accounts who had been suspended or banned for cheating.
Sara Cholhagian Ralston, the bill’s primary supporter,later amended the bill, removing the term “cheating” and any reference to suspensions or bans related to cheating. Instead, the revised bill proposed creating a list of all players with an account and their status. Despite the recent failure, Ralston said the conversation surrounding poker transparency in Nevada “is too important to be abandoned, and I hope it will continue,” she commented, according to The Nevada Independent.
However, Assembly Judiciary Committee Chairwoman Brittney Miller (D-Las Vegas) announced last week that there were insufficient votes to advance AB380. Caesars Entertainment, the operator of Nevada’s only poker website based on the company-owned World Series of Poker, opposed the legislation.
The company’s lobbyist, Michael Alonso, argued that the bill would impose a burden on Caesars, which already takes “everything reasonably possible to keep bad actors off the [online poker] site.”
Sara Cholhagian Ralston
Ralston stated that if Nevada gaming regulators do not introduce more transparency to online poker, she plans to reintroduce the bill in the 2025 legislative session. “As someone who cares deeply about the poker industry, I brought this issue forward because of my moral compass and the belief that transparency is crucial to protect the integrity of the game,” she said, as reported by the above-mentioned media.
Nevada legalized online poker in 2013, but gaming companies have argued that the state is too small to support multiple sites, leaving Caesars as the sole operator.
Nevada is part of the Multi-State Internet Gaming Agreement, which was established in 2014 with Delaware to expand the player pool for two of the smallest states in terms of population. New Jersey joined in 2017, followed by Michigan in 2021.
Additionally, since 2012, six states—Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia—have legalized online casino gaming.
