#// Could be some new extremists or just a natural disaster.

[a-d-nox]

pluto in aquarius: a prediction of what's to come

this is a huge astrological event, pluto is moving into aquarius for the first time since the late 1700s. last time pluto was in aquarius america fought for independence from britain, uranus was discovered, the french revolution began, the bill of rights was ratified, etc.

so for day one, i want to create predictions of what is to come!

some house matters!!!

TWO PLUTO RETROGRADES WILL OCCUR - june 11th - jan 20th, 2024 is the first so we won't see too much wildness just yet as pluto will return into capricorn during this time and THE FINAL RETROGRADE BACK INTO CAPRICORN will be september 1st, 2024 - november 19th, 2024. then we are full steam ahead with pluto in aquarius until march 9th, 2043.

i personally am NOT a witch or anything wild, everything i am saying is purely theoretical - it is not fated to happen just because i am saying it. i am simply socially aware. i know what's up generally in the world today and what was up in world in the 1700s - "history typically repeats itself."

i live in the usa so my post likely will be slightly more focused there examples wise so i apologize in advance! feel free to comment, dm, or reblog with other examples from your country based on my prediction key phrases.

i am going to start light and get darker so mentally prepare yourself for that (tw: STI/STD outbreaks, war, 9/11, COVID-19, and other abrasive topics that may make people uncomfortable depending on where they are currently reading from) - but we are talking about pluto so... expect the unexpected?!

let's do this.

renewable energy sources

aquarius is electricity, light, inventions, electronics, telephones, televisions, etc while pluto can be change! i recently bought a new tv and the back of the remote has a solar panel instead of a battery pack. i do believe we will see more evolution with technology; perhaps we will see solar changed phones! otherwise pluto is also pollution and natural disasters - the climate is in crisis mode perhaps we will see more responsibility and thus changes in our sourcing of energy! example: recently i read that japan has a great source of geothermal energy. currently the conversion to using this source (instead of coal, gas, and nuclear energy) is being held up by a higher up in the hot spring business who claims switching to a new energy system "threatens centuries-old traditions" (bang - a capricorn term - tradition - so perhaps after the retrogrades are through we will see a major shift in energy sourcing).

general technological advancements/inventions

last time pluto was in aquarius the cotton gin was invented; which aided in quicker production of goods and higher demand for american cotton. i strongly believe this is a general indicator that AI is going to become an even bigger part of day to day life. i have seen AI already replace those who take orders in the panera drive thru, there is a higher demand for philosophy/english grads to help teach AI, etc. aquarius is also new teachers/occupations so AI could become the new teachers OR new careers could be coming in the area of interacting with AI generally so it gains more consciousness. so it could be AI or it could be something else that is only just a dream in the back of someone's mind at this moment in time.

altruistic extremists

we may see utopian dreamers rise up! they are likely to advocate for the deconstruction of pre-existing political institutions in favor of either self governance or egalitarian policies. they will likely do whatever it takes to make this statement; we may see more protests / political statements similar to wynn bruce's.

fanatical/extremist announcers radio/tv

we already have biased stations and channels (fox, abc, cnn, nbc, etc). we are likely to see a further rise in politically biased newscasters and announcers.

demonization of astrology

astrology is aquarian in nature but pluto is fanatics, evil, demonics, etc. the community has been saying about the next world war for a while now. we are moving out of conservative pluto in capricorn, so we may find that those of deep belief systems accusing us [astrologers] of conspiring with the devil if/when something militant arises (similar to how the tarot community gets told constantly by christians that they must be satanists).

something with birds

i don't have this nailed down yet specifically, but both aquarius and pluto are rulers of birds. aquarius is large birds while pluto is wading/swamp birds and/or flesh eating birds. no one freak out and start thinking that i am indicating something like the 1963 horror film the birds. if anything i can see more bird-spread illness and/or parasites. OR pluto can be archaeology! there may be a bird related discovery or something to do with the distant relative of the bird - aka the raptor (dinosaur related).

a new STI/STD discovery/outbreak

aquarius represents the distribution of bodily fluids while pluto is often representative of sexual activity. this could either be an outbreak because pluto can be death, extremes, catastrophes, and/or casualties OR pluto can be ph balance in the body (possible new discoveries for feminine sexual health), kidneys (perhaps a discovery will be linked to the diminished functionality associated with syphilis, hiv, etc and how to combat more symptomatic issues), and even purification (aka a cure perhaps to help viral carriers to no longer pass the sti/std to sexual partners).

collapse of congress / house of commons/representatives

i mean it only stands to reason that the bill of rights was created/approved last time pluto was in aquarius that either those rights will disappear (pluto also represents dictators) OR simply the people rise up and demolish the institution as it stands: "...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..."

airplane catastrophes

aquarius rules over planes and pluto can represent accomplices, catastrophes, casualties, b0mbs, and t3rr0r!sm. we may experience another event similar to 9/11 OR we may see air strikes in a potential world war 3 scenario.

societal change: crime, war, leadership, and more

world war 3 is on the horizon so say pluto in aquarius (probably in the wake of election year in the US - when the final retrograde into capricorn concludes). but this could also just be governmental restructuring - this could be seen as rebellions (similar to the French Revolution), the rise of organized crime if good become more scarce, religious shifts (pluto is the antichrist, aquarius is freewill (first amendment), and capricorn is the old church (christian schools of thought)), etc.

aquarian terms i can't think of change in but seem important to note / keep in mind: freethinkers, hamburg germany, heart weakness (biden - perhaps the early death of a president in office?), motion picture (already changing as more theaters close), photography, psychology (we are already starting to care more about everyone's mental health), science (general scientific discoveries?), social affairs (there is always something going on - the question is how big will this be?), society, sweden, syria, and xray.

plutonian terms i can't think of change in but seem important to note / keep in mind: abductions (aliens - ufo sights?), aliases, alibis (governmental riffing similar to how no plan was in place when for COVID-19), assass!nat!0n (hopefully not), betrayal, bootlegging (bootleg tiktok if america bans it?), cemeteries (removal of that method if too many are dying at any giving time - mass graves?), convicts (prison release due to overcrowding? the mega-prison of el salvador?), corruption (governmental likely?), demolitions, earthquakes (more environmental issues?), electrocution, executions (war?), fanatic, extremes, floods (environmental? emigration - society is aquarius after all?), liars, massacres (the rise of crime?), murder, nihilism (the rise of philosophy at the time of war?), ransom (war?), satire (rise of political satire?), stolen goods, and taxes (trump-esque no?).

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© a-d-nox 2023 all rights reserved

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 31, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

The Biden administration emphasized today its whole-of-government response to addressing the damage caused by Hurricane Idalia—which hit Florida yesterday before moving north into Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina—and by the wildfires in Maui, Hawaii, which broke out on August 8. Idalia, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, brought 125-mile-an-hour winds and intense flooding that have left at least three people dead. The Maui wildfires, at least one of which was apparently started by a downed electric line, have killed at least 115 people and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings.

Biden and Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas visited the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters in Washington, D.C., today, and Biden later spoke at the White House, explaining that he had spoken with the governors of all the states affected by the hurricane before the storm hit. He had approved Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s request for an early emergency declaration to free up federal funds to address the expected impacts of the storm, and federal officers surged personnel to Florida and other southeastern states to help people get to safety. 

Biden emphasized that the government was also focused on recovering and rebuilding efforts in Maui, promising to respect and honor Hawaiian traditions and the needs of the local community—a deep concern among those affected by the fires. “We’re not going to turn this into a new land grab,” he said. 

In addition to the $27 million dedicated to the removal of hazardous material and the $400 million dedicated to debris removal in Hawaii, Biden announced that the administration has dedicated $95 million of the funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act to harden the electrical grid against climate change by burying cables or installing smart meters to pinpoint where lines are down.

“I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore,” Biden said. “Just look around: historic floods—I mean historic floods; more intense droughts; extreme heat; significant wildfires have caused significant damage like we’ve never seen before. It’s not only throughout the Hawaiian Islands and the United States, but in Canada and other parts of the world.”

“When I took office,” he said, “I directed my team to raise our game in how we lead and coordinate our responses to natural disasters…to ensure we [meet] the people where they are when they need our help the most.” 

At FEMA headquarters, Biden profusely thanked the FEMA employees for their “incredible contribution” to the recovery efforts. He noted that the past few years have kept FEMA going from one emergency to the next, and he thanked them for their sacrifices and the risks emergency personnel take to help our communities when they need it. 

With extremist House Republicans threatening to defund the government unless their demands are met, Biden called on Congress to make sure it provides “the funds to be able to continue to show up and meet the needs of the American people to deal with immediate crises that we’re facing right now, as well as the long-term commitments that we have to make to finish the job in Maui and elsewhere.”

When a reporter asked if he could “assure Americans that the federal government is going to have the emergency funding that they need to get through this hurricane season,” Biden answered, “If I can’t do that, I’m going to point out why…. And so, I’m confident, even though there’s a lot of talk from some of our friends up on the Hill about the cost, we got to do it. This is the United States of America.”

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee, chaired by Republican James Comer of Kentucky, announced this week it will investigate the federal response to the Maui wildfires. Biden said yesterday he welcomes such an investigation, suggesting that House Republicans “should go out and talk to every elected official, from the mayors to the governors to the United States senators” who have praised the government’s response. 

Biden’s use of the government contrasts sharply with former president Trump’s promise to turn the government into an agent of retribution for those he perceives as his enemies. On Tuesday, right-wing radio host Glenn Beck asked him if he would use the presidency to imprison his political opponents if he were reelected. “You said in 2016, you know, ‘lock her up.’ And then when you became president, you said, ‘We don’t do that in America.’ That’s just not the right thing to do. That’s what they’re doing. Do you regret not locking her up? And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?” 

Trump replied: “[T]he answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.”

Trump’s legal troubles have sparked an outpouring of violent talk from him, but it is simply an escalation of the theme he staked out at his first campaign rally in March 2023, held in Waco, Texas, a spot that is a rallying cry for those of his base who believe the government is oppressing them. There, Trump told his supporters: "I am your warrior, I am your justice…. For those who have been wronged and betrayed…I am your retribution."

Trump promises retribution and power for those MAGA Republicans determined to impose their will on the majority of Americans, like those cheering on Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall, who claimed in a court filing on Monday that Alabama, which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, can prosecute people who help women travel out of the state to obtain an abortion as part of a “criminal conspiracy.” 

Today’s Republicans have abandoned the Reagan-era Republican plan to gut the federal government and are instead determined to capture it, replacing nonpartisan civil servants with Republican extremists who will carry out the ideals of Trump or any candidate like him who can defeat Biden in 2024. Their nearly-1,000-page plan, called “Project 2025,” calls for politicizing the Department of Justice and law enforcement officers and giving far more power to the president.    

Today, Trump waived his right to appear at his arraignment in Fulton County on racketeering charges for his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and entered a plea of not guilty.

Also today, Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas filed their annual financial disclosure report after receiving an extension from the May deadline. Thomas’s report included three gifts of transportation from megadonor Harlan Crow and two of meals and lodging from Crow when Thomas was his guest. Thomas defended his previous omission of such gifts by saying the omission was inadvertent, as he had used old guidelines that were changed only in March 2023 (in fact, ethics experts say he should have disclosed the previous gifts at the time).

Thomas also suggested he needed to travel on private planes because “the increased security risk following the Dobbs opinion leak” meant that his “security detail recommended noncommercial travel whenever possible.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[lacklusterhero747]

Building a Fabula World, Part 5

Ah, here we are. Our final stretch. The last of the necessary world building steps...

Threats To quote the text, "What terrible threats cast a shadow over your world? Environmental disasters, furious deities, power-hungry empires, or perhaps even clouds of corrupting miasma that are enveloping and consuming the land?" Each person at the table is asked to contribute a threat, preferably something that is endangering the future of entire nations to the game. Something that the Game Master can base a majority of their villains and antagonists on sculpt the future of the narrative. For our group, our threats looked like this:

Every eleven days, right at noon, Sentoki and the surrounding lands are shaken by ground tremors. Some are stronger and last longer than others, and it is unclear if this is caused by the volcano or something more sinister...

The ruling class of The Alumen Dominion seek to lock the world into an enforced elemental stasis. They hope that this move will be the catalyst by which they can gain their immortality. What unforeseen consequences will this have?

A small political faction in The Free Marches is discontent with the status quo. They wish to see the Marches unified into a true nation… with themselves at the top, of course.

An extremist splinter faction of The Folk—The First Names—is attempting to raise a resistance force that is capable of returning the world to what they believe is the true state of nature. They seem to have garnered the ability to call upon the impossible to control Primordial Names of Creation.

A mysterious sickness is spreading, affecting people who utilize the older, esoteric forms of magic. The sickness does not kill those who become infected but it does cause those who practice the older ways to become increasingly incapable of properly controlling their rituals and spells.

The expansion of The Golden Path, through the use of their Divines, is causing political tension between The Zlota Sovereignty and other political powers of the world as the militant orders of the theocracy move in to defend their new converts, seemingly expanding the nation's borders by default.

The magical currents that travel through the world occasionally come in contact with the fallen bodies of the ancient Titans. When this happens, disastrous magical storms and other ill effects follow. The Folk claim that this is because the spirit of the fallen titan is conjured back from the river of souls, and its rage and anger are the cause. One such Titan corpse is said to lay at the bottom of the Forlorn Sea, the body of water to the southwest of the continent in which The Immarian Empire is located, and is said to be responsible for the frequent, devastating storms that frequently isolate the decrepit nation of the rest of the continent.

And there we have it. The work is done and the stage is set. When it's all said and done we have a continent seemingly on the brink of war. The advancement of magical science seems like it could offer stability and a way forward, but it (and it's more sinister undertones) are being actively resisted by practitioners of the old ways. Meanwhile, a faction of religious extremists in possession of a questionable source of power seek to progress their own agendas, all while the balance of the elements and nature itself seems to be in constant flux.

I, for one, already have plenty of ideas about how to use all of this information, and a good idea of where I might like to see the story go, but at the end of the day this is a roleplaying game. These ideas, all these last 8 or so posts about building the world are just my guide posts, and as the dice are rolled and my players continue to contribute... well this is only the beginning really.

Now is the part where we truly play to find out what happens.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Monopoly so fragile

A big boat stuck in the Suez Canal, catastrophically disrupting global logistics - it wasn't just predictable, it was inevitable. For decades, the shipping industry has consolidated into just a few companies, and ships got bigger - too big to sail.

As Matthew Stoller points out, in 2000 the ten biggest shippers controlled 12% of the market, today, it's more that 82%, and even that number is misleadingly rosy because of alliances among the megashippers that effectively turn them into one company.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/what-we-can-learn-from-a-big-boat

The Suez crisis illustrates one of the less-appreciated harms of monopoly: all of us are dunderheads at least some of the time. When a single person wields a lot of unchecked power, their follies, errors and blind-spots take on global consequence.

The "efficiencies" of the new class of megaships - the Ever Given weighs 220 kilotons and is as long as the Empire State Building - were always offset by risks, such as the risk of getting stuck in a canal or harbor.

Despite this, a handful of executives were able to green-light their deployment. Either these execs didn't believe the experts, or they didn't care (maybe they thought they'd retire before the crisis) or they thought they could externalize the costs onto the rest of us.

Running a complex system is a game of risk mitigation: not just making a system that works as well as possible, but also making one that fails as well as possible. Build the Titanic if you must, but for the love of God, make sure it has enough life-boats.

Monopolies are brittle. The ideology that underpins them is fundamentally eugenic: that there exists among us superbeings, genetic sports who were born with the extraordinary insights and genius that entitle them to rule over the rest of us.

If we let nature run its course, these benevolent dictators will usher in an era of global prosperity.

This is catastrophically, idiotically, manifestly wrong. First, even people who are very smart about some things are very stupid about other things.

Charles Koch took over his father's hydrocarbon empire and correctly concluded that the industry was being held back by a focus on short-term profits. He made a series of long-term bets on new production technologies and grew the business a thousandfold.

Being patient and farsighted made Koch one of the richest people in world history - and one of the most influential. He pioneered a kind of slow, patient policy entrepreneurship, investing in a network of think-tanks that mainstreamed his extremist ideology over decades.

And yet, this man who became a billionaire and changed the character of global politics with his foresight has managed to convince himself that there is no climate emergency. That patience, foresight, and cool weighing of probabilities have gone out the window completely.

Smart people are often fools (so are regular people). History is full of them. Take William Shockley, the Nobel-winning inventor of silicon transistors who failed in industry because he became obsessed with eugenics and devoted his life to a racist sterilization campaign.

Moreover, fools sometimes succeed. Take Mark Zuckerberg, who justified his self-serving "real names" policy (which makes it easier to target ads by banning pseudonyms) by claiming that any attempt to present yourself in different ways to different people is "two-faced."

That is a genuinely idiotic thing to believe: presenting yourself differently to your lover, your parents, your toddler, your boss and your friends isn't "two-faced," it's human. To do otherwise would be monstrous.

But even when monopolists aren't idiots, they are still dangerous. The problem with Zuck isn't merely that he's uniquely unsuited to being the unaccountable czar of 2.6 billion peoples' social lives - it's that no one should have that job.

Monopolists all have their own cherished idiocies (as do the rest of us), but they share a common pathology: the ideology, popularized by Thomas Friedman and others, that "efficiency" is the highest virtue.

The whole basis for 40 years of tolerating (even encouraging) monopolies is the efficiencies of scale that come from consolidating power into a few hands, and the shared interests that arise from a brittle interdependence.

Who would go to war with the trading partner that controls the world's supply of some essential item?

This was always, predictably, a system that would work well but fail badly. Clustering the world's semiconductor production in Taiwan made chips cheap and plentiful, sure.

But then the 1999 Taiwan quake shut down all the world's computer sales. There are plenty of examples like this that Stoller lists: a single vaccine factory in England shuts down in 2004 and the US loses half of its flu vaccines.

Despite the increasing tempo of supply-chain crises that ripple out across the world, we have allowed monopolists to "take the fat out of the system at every joint," setting up a thousand crises among us and yet to come.

Bedding makers can't make mattress for want of foam. RV manufacturers can't get enough "air conditioners, fridges, furniture" to meet orders. Often, the pivotal items are obscure and utterly critical, like the $1 "flat steel form ties," without which home construction halts.

"For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost." We've understood that tightly coupled systems have cascading failures since the 13th century. "Resiliency" is inefficient - but only if you ignore what happens when brittle systems fail.

Every monopolist *necessarily* shares an ideology that elevates brittleness to a virtue. They must, because monopolies are brittle. One foolish mistake, one ship wedged in a canal, one delusive denial of climate change, and we all suffer.

Every monopolist believes in their own infallibility. They must, because to have someone as fallible as me or you in charge of the world's social media or shipping or flat steel ties is otherwise a recipe for disaster.

Of all the dangerous things monopolists are wrong about, this belief in their own inability to be wrong is the most dangerous.

Image: Copernicus Sentinel (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Container_Ship_%27Ever_Given%27_stuck_in_the_Suez_Canal,_Egypt_-_March_24th,_2021_cropped.jpg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[newstfionline]

Monday, August 2, 2021

Frustration as Biden, Congress allow eviction ban to expire (AP) Anger and frustration mounted in Congress as a nationwide eviction moratorium expired at midnight Saturday—one Democratic lawmaker even camping outside the Capitol in protest as millions of Americans faced being forced from their homes. Lawmakers said they were blindsided by President Joe Biden’s inaction as the deadline neared. More than 3.6 million Americans are at risk of eviction, some in a matter of days. The moratorium was put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of the COVID-19 crisis when jobs shifted and many workers lost income. The eviction ban was intended to prevent further virus spread by people put out on the streets and into shelters. Congress approved nearly $47 billion in federal housing aid to the states during the pandemic, but it has been slow to make it into the hands of renters and landlords owed payments.

Breakneck pace of crises keeps National Guard away from home (AP) In the searing 108-degree heat, far from his Louisiana health care business, Army Col. Scott Desormeaux and his soldiers are on a dusty base near Syria’s northern border, helping Syrian rebel forces battle Islamic State militants. It’s tough duty for the soldiers. But their deployment to the Middle East last November is just a small part of the blistering pace of missions that members of the Louisiana National Guard and America’s other citizen-soldiers have faced in the past 18 months. Beyond overseas deployments, Guard members have been called in to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters and protests against racial injustice. For many, it’s meant months away from their civilian jobs and scarce times with families. While Guard leaders say troops are upbeat, they worry about exhaustion setting in and wonder how much longer U.S. businesses can do without their long-absent workers. “This past year was an extraordinary one for the National Guard,” said Gen. Dan Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau. Does he worry about exhaustion setting in? “That’s something I’ve been very concerned with right from the start.”

Western Wildfires May Take Weeks To Months To Contain (NPR) Pockets of the American West continued to burn over the weekend, as another nine large fires were reported on Saturday in California, Idaho, Montana and Oregon. The 87 fires still active in 13 states have consumed more than 1.7 million acres. Just shy of 3 million acres have been scorched since the start of 2021, with months left in what experts predict will be a devastating fire season. In southern Oregon, the Bootleg Fire has become the largest active blaze in the country. The 413,000-acre inferno was contained at 56%, as of Saturday night. A fire line has been constructed around the entire perimeter, ranging from 100 to 150-feet wide between the burn and unburned areas.

Bacon may disappear in California as pig rules take effect (AP) Thanks to a reworked menu and long hours, Jeannie Kim managed to keep her San Francisco restaurant alive during the coronavirus pandemic. That makes it all the more frustrating that she fears her breakfast-focused diner could be ruined within months by new rules that could make one of her top menu items—bacon—hard to get in California. “Our number one seller is bacon, eggs and hash browns,” said Kim, who for 15 years has run SAMS American Eatery on the city’s busy Market Street. “It could be devastating for us.” At the beginning of next year, California will begin enforcing an animal welfare proposition approved overwhelmingly by voters in 2018 that requires more space for breeding pigs, egg-laying chickens and veal calves. National veal and egg producers are optimistic they can meet the new standards, but only 4% of hog operations now comply with the new rules. Unless the courts intervene or the state temporarily allows non-compliant meat to be sold in the state, California will lose almost all of its pork supply, much of which comes from Iowa. Animal welfare organizations for years have been pushing for more humane treatment of farm animals but the California rules could be a rare case of consumers clearly paying a price for their beliefs.

Why are so many migrants coming to one of Europe’s smallest countries? Blame Belarus, officials say. (Washington Post) Europe’s newest migration crisis is unfolding in one of its most unlikely places. Lithuania, a Baltic nation roughly the size of West Virginia with fewer than 3 million residents, hasn’t been known as a destination for undocumented immigrants: Each year, the country sees roughly 70 people unlawfully cross its border with Belarus. In July, the number skyrocketed to more than 2,600, consisting mostly of immigrants from Iraq and sub-Saharan Africa. Officials expect the numbers to grow in the coming weeks. This new flow of people did not begin organically, Lithuanian and European Union officials say. Instead, they say, it is the result of an audacious plan by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to weaponize migration in response to E.U. sanctions. In June, Lukashenko threatened to allow human traffickers and drug smugglers to stream into Europe. E.U. officials say they have evidence that his government is also encouraging immigrants to travel there: coordinating with a Belarusian travel agency to offer tourist visas, setting up flights and then transporting people from Minsk to the Lithuanian border. Lithuania, which has virtually no experience with large numbers of immigrants, has scrambled to construct a barbed wire fence along the border.

Thousands protest against COVID-19 health pass in France (Reuters) Thousands of people protested in Paris and other French cities on Saturday against a mandatory coronavirus health pass for entry to a wide array of public venues, introduced by the government as it battles a fourth wave of infections. It was the third weekend in a row that people opposed to President Emmanuel Macron’s new COVID-19 measures have taken to the streets, an unusual show of determination at a time of year when many people are focused on taking their summer break. The number of demonstrators has grown steadily since the start of the protests, echoing the “yellow vest” movement, that started in late 2018 against fuel taxes and the cost of living. An interior ministry official said 204,090 had demonstrated across France, including 14,250 in Paris alone. This is about 40,000 more than last week.

Turkey evacuates panicked tourists by boat from wildfires (AP) Panicked tourists in Turkey hurried to the seashore to wait for rescue boats Saturday after being told to evacuate some hotels in the Aegean Sea resort of Bodrum due to the dangers posed by nearby wildfires, Turkish media reported. Coast guard units led the operation and authorities asked private boats and yachts to assist in evacuation efforts from the sea as new wildfires erupted. A video showed plumes of smoke and fire enveloping a hill close to the seashore. The death toll from wildfires raging in Turkey’s Mediterranean towns rose to six Saturday after two forest workers were killed, the country’s health minister said. Fires across Turkey since Wednesday have burned down forests and some settlements, encroaching on villages and tourist destinations and forcing people to evacuate. In one video of the Bodrum fire filmed from the sea, a man helping with the evacuations was stunned at the speed of the fire, saying “this is unbelievable, just unbelievable. How did this fire come (here) this fast in 5 minutes?”

Afghans flee (NYT) A mass exodus is unfolding across Afghanistan as the Taliban press on with a military campaign and the U.S. withdraws. At least 30,000 Afghans are leaving each week and many more have been displaced. The Taliban have captured more than half the country’s 400-odd districts, according to some assessments, sparking fears of a harsh return to extremist rule or a civil war. The sudden flight is an early sign of a looming refugee crisis, aid agencies warn.

As the Taliban closes in, Afghan forces scramble to defend prisons holding thousands of militants (Washington Post) Huddled in brightly lit yards late one recent night, hundreds of inmates taunted a team of about a dozen special forces who were rounding the walls along the top of Kunduz prison. The appearance of elite soldiers was an anomaly, a sign to the prisoners that something was happening. “What’s going on?” they shouted. “Is tonight going to be our last night in here? Taliban fighters planned to storm the compound that evening, according to information gathered by local intelligence officers. Government forces hoped the show of force would spur prisoners—some in possession of smuggled cellphones used to communicate with the Taliban—to wave off the attack. Without enough fighters to hold the city’s front lines and reinforce the prison, the special forces’ move was a gamble. But it appeared to work: The night passed without incident. As Taliban militants close in on Afghanistan’s provincial capitals, they are inching closer to central prisons that house around 5,000 of their fellow fighters, leaving the government scrambling to secure the detention facilities. If just a fraction of the detainees were to escape, Afghan security officials warn, it would hand the militants a significant advantage on the battlefield, where they are already making steady gains.

Burkina Faso sees more child soldiers as jihadi attacks rise (AP) Awoken by gunshots in the middle of the night, Fatima Amadou was shocked by what she saw among the attackers: children. Guns slung over their small frames, the children chanted “Allahu akbar,” as they surrounded her home in Solhan town in Burkina Faso’s Sahel region. Some were so young they couldn’t even pronounce the words, Arabic for “God is great,” said the 43-year-old mother. “When I saw the kids, what came to my mind was that (the adults) trained these kids to be assassins, and they came to kill my children,” Amadou told The Associated Press by phone from Sebba town, where she now lives. She and her family are among the lucky ones who survived the June attack, in which about 160 people were killed—the deadliest such assault since the once-peaceful West African nation was overrun by fighters linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State about five years ago. As that violence increases, so too does the recruitment of child soldiers. The number of children recruited by armed groups in Burkina Faso rose at least five-fold so far this year, according to information seen by the AP in an unpublished report by international aid and conflict experts.

Behind the Rise of U.S. Solar Power, a Mountain of Chinese Coal (WSJ) Solar panel installations are surging in the U.S. and Europe as Western countries seek to cut their reliance on fossil fuels. But the West faces a conundrum as it installs panels on small rooftops and in sprawling desert arrays: Most of them are produced with energy from carbon-dioxide-belching, coal-burning plants in China. Concerns are mounting in the U.S. and Europe that the solar industry’s reliance on Chinese coal will create a big increase in emissions in the coming years as manufacturers rapidly scale up production of solar panels to meet demand. That would make the solar industry one of the world’s most prolific polluters, analysts say.

Americans Spend Nearly 60 Billion Hours a Year on Google (PC Magazine) Collectively, Americans spent 57.3 billion hours on Google per year. Its video equivalent, YouTube, comes in second with 29.6 billion hours, followed by Facebook with 9.7 billion hours.

[sexywookieesquadron]

Origins: Mey-Gon

Hey all, we’re finally ready to start sharing our OCs! This is the first chapter of OC Mey-Gon Niek’s backstory, created and written by Megan. We hope you enjoy and follow along as we introduce the rest squad and their wild adventures!

Word count: 724

Chapter 7/9

Summary: How does a famous, wealthy party girl end up joining forces with a controversial paramilitary group like the Resistance?

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

xxx

31 ABY, Malastare

“Head back, please,” the Bothan stylist instructed and Mey-Gon obediently tilted her face toward the ceiling of her prefab dressing room.

The Twi’lek woman doing her makeup sighed and scooted over to accommodate the change in position. Somewhere out of view, Mey-Gon could hear her manager clicking his tongue as he sat on her couch, working on his datapad.

“These shots from your trip to Pressylla yesterday look marketable,” he commented, “I mean, the city looks like hell, but the cam drones really captured your good angles.”

“Oh, that’s a relief,” she said carefully, so as not to sabotage her makeup artist, “I was trying so hard not to make a face from the smell.”

“Yeah, perfect, it looks like you’re holding back tears. Very sympathetic. Maybe even enough to overcome your liability.”

Mey-Gon frowned, then immediately snapped back to neutral when the Twi’lek hissed a frustrated breath through her nose. Now that she thought about it, her list of scripts to read had been getting smaller lately. She’d kept so busy with her side projects that it hadn’t really concerned her. Over the past several months she’d made countless publicity appearances at disaster sites with the G.I.D.E. and taken a couple more “vacations” to Canto Bight. And all of that was between her busy shooting schedule and the swoop racing pre-season. If something was jeopardizing her future gigs, she hadn’t noticed; after all, that was her manager’s job.

“What liability?” she finally asked.

“Your opinions, of course. Well, at least you’ve toned down your rants,” she could almost hear him rolling his eyes, “but you’re probably still on some kind of First Order hit list, just for publicizing their atrocities with your charity work. Perhaps you should have your people screen the aid requests more carefully? Less political attacks, more natural disasters.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Mey-Gon said, feeling a surge of righteous anger, “I’m not going to deny anyone help just because it’s bad PR for the First Order.”

“Like I said, liability,” he grumbled, “Just be extra careful. I know this is one of the best action holo crews around, but make sure you double-check everything before throwing yourself into any of these stunts. These days, you never know who you can tr-”

A loud and rather urgent knock drummed against the door, causing everyone in the dressing room to jolt in surprise. The hairstylist hurried forward to answer the door and made a shocked sound when he pulled it open to reveal a handful of uniformed New Republic security officers. They immediately focused on Mey-Gon and stepped inside toward her chair. She felt her heart drop and, for a panicked moment, indulged in the dramatic thought that she had been framed for something, before remembering that she probably did have some legitimate crimes under her belt by now.

“Mey-Gon Niek,” one officer read from his datapad, “We are placing you under arrest for the crimes of embezzlement, credit laundering, and aiding of an extremist organization.”

“Now, wait just a minute-!” she started to protest as another officer pulled her to her feet and started to cuff her wrists.

“Don’t say anything!” her manager stepped forward, “For kriff’s sake, Mey-Gon. Do not. Say. Anything.”

She looked around helplessly at her hair and makeup team, now scooted as far away as they could get with arms raised innocently and shock on their faces, then she cast one last desperate look at her manager as the officers started to lead her away, “What do I do?!”

“You keep your mouth shut,” he instructed, trailing along at a distance as she was taken toward a transport, “Let them book you until the bail is processed, then we’ll fight the rest in court.”

She nodded, pressing her lips tightly together and feeling her chin start to quiver. She tried not to think about all the cast and crew staring now at the spectacle of her humiliation. She tried not to think about the detention center she would be tossed into shortly. She tried not to think about the damage this would cause to everything she’d worked so hard to build for herself. She tried not to think about the ways she was failing Leia and the Resistance.

She burst into tears anyway.

[sneksue]

Official Post About Lifestyle Changes

The date is January 28, 2021. 

I have not had chickens for a while. It will be 2 years in August. I have been meaning to write something here about all of it, but I either have not had time, or the willpower to go through with it. I was in grieving. 

In June of 2019, I took a trip from my shared homestead in Mississippi to Colorado to do some long distance hiking. I left all of my animals in the care of my ex husband’s mother and her then boyfriend. 

I trusted them to at least do the bare minimum in my animal’s basic care. 

That didn���t happen. They failed night after night to close and lock the coop’s door. They wouldn’t change their water during the day and they did not collect eggs. 

When I had service on my phone during the hike, I checked in with them to find out that because they had not closed or locked the coop door at night, several birds were “missing”, with more missing every day. 

Instead of simply closing the door and providing a safe space for my dear, darling animals to sleep at night, they decided to buy a game camera to see what was happening to them at night. 

Their reasoning had absolutely zero logic, and I was pretty pissed.

They found that raccoons were simply just waltzing into the coops and grabbing birds. The raccoons would drag them away into the woods and feast. 

By the time our trip was almost over, all of my ducks were gone. There were only a few chickens left, and the guinea fowl were all intact due to roosting 50ft up in oak trees. My cat was also “missing”.

I was heartbroken, devastated. I had spent so much money, time, energy, and love to build this flock. I wanted to provide my “family” and myself with sustainable, renewable food in case of a natural disaster. No one seemed to value my efforts, or even care to see what my end goal was. 

On top of grieving for the loss of my feathered babies, my then husband’s younger brother decided to GO OFF on me during our drive back to Mississippi. He claimed I was selfish, psychotic, uncaring, and manipulative. He screamed at me while we were all stuck in the car. He called me a bitch, he called me a liar, he called me a leech. I was stunned in silence. I had been struggling with my mental health for years, and had contemplated suicide more times than I could count. So, it is no surprise that while we were driving 70mph on the interstate, I seriously contemplated opening the car door and leaping out into traffic. 

I turned to my husband, my partner, the love of my life, my support system, to back me up. Defend me. Tell his brother that he was wrong. My husband did nothing of the sort. He remained silent as the verbal barrage from his brother continued. 

Everything clicked for me then. My mother in law was a complete nutcase, she blamed me for all of my husband’s shortcomings. She viewed me as a failure for not being the perfect housewife. She only saw me as a burden on her son’s happiness. My husband maintained an emotional distance from me for several years. He refused to be intimate towards me. He never showed an interest in me, my thoughts, my feelings. He never stood up for me or was proud to show me off. He never commended my strengths and triumphs, he only pointed out what he viewed were my failures. My brother in law was more of a nutcase than his mother, physically abusing his dog and neglecting his cat, leeching off of his mother and getting handouts at every possible opportunity, spending his days smoking hundreds of dollars of marijuana, drinking booze, playing videogames. 

I had no social life, I wasn’t allowed to have a social life. 

I had no friends I could hang out with, all of my friends were online. 

No matter how much I did for these people and how much I excelled at everything I did, nothing was ever enough. I was never enough. 

No wonder I struggled with mental health, eh?

I came to this realization instantaneously, and demanded to be dropped off at my dad’s house in Westminster, CO. 

I had none of my personal belongings besides my hiking and camping stuff. I didn’t care, I just had to get away from these toxic monsters. 

My husband and I loosely decided that this would be a “break” for our relationship, and that he would go back to MS to work and save up to move here with me. I agreed and I began working and saving up myself. 

We both knew he was never going to come here. We were never going to be together again. 

We remained in close contact for a few months after the separation. But the contact and our conversations became fewer and less substantial. 

One night, as I was walking home from work, I called and told him that I thought we should break up. He admitted to me that he had removed his wedding ring over three weeks prior. I was understandably hurt by that, but I did understand. 

He also informed me that all of the birds were gone or dead except for a couple roosters. 

I was more devastated by the loss of my birds than the loss of my marriage. If that doesn’t tell you enough, I don’t know what does!! 

My cat never returned. 

I asked him if we could keep in contact, and he told me he did not want to talk to me or hear from me for several years. I was once again hurt by this, but with his own mental health issues, I again, understood. He did say he can see us being friends in the future, but now that its been some time, I don’t want to be friends with him. I want the best for him, but I can’t bring myself to expose my mentality to his toxicity and negativity. 

I asked again and again, over a period of months, for him to return my belongings. He kept putting it off. I told him I was going to drive down there myself and gather everything i could and dispose of the rest. 

He agreed, initially, then banned me from coming only after I requested the time off from work and had friends to accompany me on the journey, He promised he’d send all my stuff in several shipments after he sold my car. I told him he could keep the profit from the sale of my car and use it to send me my stuff. 

He ended up sending me ONE box of my stuff. And most of it wasn’t even mine. I was appalled and disgusted that he’d be so careless and inconsiderate. 

I sent him messages and requested SPECIFIC items after I received the first box. I got no reply, and no more packages to this day have been sent. 

He and his family stole my property, killed my pets, and broke my heart. 

Thieves, liars, and extremists, the lot of them. 

I grieve daily for the loss of my animals and the torture I was put through for nearly 6 years. 

All of that out of the way, let me move on to tell you what this blog will now feature. 

I have obviously had a change in lifestyle. I no longer live on homesteading land, I live in a roomy two bedroom apartment with my AMAZING fiance. 

My love of chickens, I discovered, was a love for reptiles in general. Cuz birds are reptiles and all that jazz. 

When I met my fiance, I was already blown away by his attitude, confidence, and view on life right off the bat! He inspired me, made me want to be better to myself. 

Meeting him felt weird, at first. It felt weird because I was waiting for this amazing person to... have a catch. There’s gotta be a red flag somewhere. And if there isn’t... he is probably a psychopath who will eventually turn on me and kill me. No one is that... good. 

So I thought to myself, “Welp, gotta find out. I’ll go to his house!”

He had a couple little snakes in his room which I demanded to play with. He happily got them out and I was like “THAT’S the catch? Nah, this just convinces me this guy is... my kind of guy.” 

I’ve had a love of snakes since early childhood. Not an interest of passion, but I truly loved interacting with and watching them. I’ve never had an innate fear of any insect, (exclude honeybee, because I didn’t know better at 6 years old), or animal. I love them all and everything they do to contribute. All they experience. 

I used to catch wild garter snakes and rat snakes in nets, pet them, show them to my mother occasionally to freak her out, and release them. Then watch them. 

There were a mating pair of Oteekee Corn Snakes in my HS yard. Every summer we’d see them, out and about hunting, hiding, climbing... growing. They were bright red and jet black with specks of yellow. I could tell these guys were pretty smart and maybe there was more to snakes than I really thought about ever. 

So, being sold on this amazing guy, we up and moved in together. Nice. My paycheck kept going up and up. I was saving a ton. I wanted a car and an apartment as soon as possible. 

I got bonus after bonus for working hard at my job and everyone hitting labor targets. 

We got a place. Nice. 

Both got steady jobs. Nice. 

There’s uh, a lot of room in this new place. Nice. 

Hey it’s my birthday and I can get myself a snake. I have more than enough for supplies and the animal itself. 

I browsed on morphmarket for what felt like ages.... 

I had no idea that there were.... so many complicated genetics with ball pythons. I was highly interested, because if you know me, you know I’m interested in genetics and selective breeding. 

I found there were THOUSANDS of genetic combinations, each with unique names. It was like alien code. The animals were beautiful but I had no idea what I was really looking at. 

One night while going to our local reptile store to get feeder rats, I was looking around at all the glass window babies, as I usually do. 

I made my way around the scorpions, tarantulas, cave scorpions, frogs, lizards, the store’s companion burmese python, and my eyes landed on a little... adorable puppy-eyed baby ball python. The signage stated that it was a Puma. Seemed simple enough. Easy name to remember. I looked into the glass at the lil noodle, and talked all baby talk and shit. The sweet little thing came right up to scope at me, then yawned. 

I called an employee over and said I’d like to handle this animal right here. The employee obliged and I fell in love. Sexed as male. Easy buy. 

I cried on the way home, It was amazing. I have one picture on here of him a few days after I got him. His name is Mallow, and he is bigger now, but still just as sweet. 

So yeah. It went from there. Now, including the boa and ball python that are my fiance’s, and Mallow, we have added 3 more to our family. We are done now, as these animals may live a loooooong time. And they require space and attention just like any other pet. They’re not expensive, and they’re low maintenance care is nearly brainless if you set it up right. They’re statistically and actually safer than dogs or cats, and are absolutely therapeutic and entertaining. 

This blog will from this day forward be dedicated to snake content, reptile content, and a lot more fun, actually good pictures. I will also share genetic related stuff I find relevant. 

Not having a shitty phone camera is pretty great, tbh. 

TLDR: No more homestead. Ex is evil (yeah yeah), New place new animal new me. SNAKES! SNAKES!!!! SNAAAAAAAAAKKKKKKKKEEEEESSSSS!

I know this post is just for me but whatever, if I make myself laugh. Cool. G’night. 

[jordanianroyals]

Harper’s Bazaar Arabia March 2019: Queen Rania of Jordan on 20 Years of Intelligence, Integrity and Intuition (x)

By Louise Nichol | Photographer - Alexi Lubomirski

Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan is determined to forge a bright future across the Arab world

"I'm not ready to give up on humanity,” says Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, the steel in Her Majesty’s voice belying her softly smiling eyes. It’s a position that must have been sorely tested over the 20 years that her husband King Abdullah II ibn Al Hussein has ruled Jordan, the Arab nation that shares its borders with Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel and Palestine, placing it at the heart of some of the most harrowing global conflicts of recent times. Yet amid five ongoing conflicts and two of the world’s biggest humanitarian disasters – in Syria and Yemen – Jordan remains a beacon for resilience and optimism in the Arab world; its Queen, a globally-revered symbol of modern Arabia.

Sitting in her office in the capital Amman, photographs of her four children beaming out from amid the whispered hush of the chic Middle Eastern-inspired surrounds, 48-year-old Queen Rania gestures as if to the beige environs of the city, musing, “It isn’t really about the magnitude of the crises we face, but what we choose to learn from them, and how we use those lessons to become better leaders, citizens and human beings.” Since the onset of the Syrian crisis in 2011, Jordan has taken in 1.3 million vulnerable people, bringing its current population to around 10 million, according to UN estimates. The strain on the resource-poor nation’s infrastructure has been immense, with schools forced to operate double shifts to accommodate around 150,000 Syrian students. “We couldn’t turn away innocent people fleeing war, death and despair,” Queen Rania states simply, “I think the choice Jordan, its leadership and its people made when Syrians started fleeing across the border will go down in history as an example of moral leadership and moral courage.”

Her Majesty’s role is as far away from the storybook ideal as one could imagine, despite her fairy tale princess exterior. It is Queen Rania’s integrity, intelligence and intuition that arm her to battle the giants that history has placed at her door. “If I were to be queen in a different time, I do not expect that it would be any different,” she says pragmatically, “The world will always bear witness to catastrophic events, some naturally occurring, others man-made. Giving up or even slowing down is not an option, neither for me, nor for His Majesty.”

Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, Rania Al Yassin was working in Amman when she met the then prince Abdullah at a dinner party in 1992. They married the following year but it was not until 1999, when Rania was 28, that the line of ascension was changed by King Hussein on his deathbed and her husband ascended the throne. Over the latter half of his reign, His Majesty King Abdullah has steered the country through the fallout of the global economic crisis in 2008, the Arab Spring in 2011, the rise of Islamic extremist factions across the region and the ongoing civil war in Syria.

Jordan’s open-arm position towards its neighbours pushes back against the tide of global populism that erects walls at borders and sees countries turn in on themselves, ostensibly out of fear of what lies beyond. “Fear is a powerful emotion, and, in today’s uncertain world, it has become a potent political force,” Her Majesty explains. “People are worried about the economy, social and technological disruptions, violence and terror attacks… They’re worried about their future, and the future of their families.” In times of seismic change, she explains, it is natural to seek comfort in the familiar as people can feel left behind, which creates “room for others to capitalise on their unease, and to sow divisions and hatred.”

It is all too easy to sense the tremors of isolationism that threaten to rip humanity apart as would-be leaders espouse a rhetoric of division masquerading as patriotism. “After all, one of the simplest ways to win people over is to validate their anxiety by giving them someone else to blame, like globalisation, foreigners or refugees,” Queen Rania explains, “that’s certainly easier than finding real and lasting solutions!” Yet find lasting solutions to humanity’s woes we must, she asserts. “Our world is too interconnected for any nation or group to succeed on its own. Turning inwards and trying to keep the world out is no longer a viable option. Climate change, economic downturns, the global refugee crisis… These challenges transcend borders. So instead of indulging prejudices or playing the blame game, we need to come together to seek sustainable solutions to the issues plaguing our world.”

As a Muslim, Queen Rania is acutely attuned to the divisions propagated by religious separatists. “There are over 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, yet many people continue to confound this diverse group of people with a small minority who commit heinous crimes in the name of Islam,” she says. “Our religion preaches compassion, tolerance, forgiveness and embracing people of other faiths; it condemns hatred, prejudice and bigotry.” To those who would spread dissonance, she counsels, “There can be no true understanding or trust in a world divided by walls – and not only those walls built of concrete and stone…But the walls we erect in our minds.” She urges Muslims to “speak up and reclaim our religion’s true values and principles which – not too long ago – built a thriving and diverse intellectual civilisation.” Only by Muslims and non-Muslims addressing their growing intolerance and fear of the other can they move past their divisions, she says, adding with innate optimism, “I would like to believe that extremism falsely committed in the name of Islam has reached the apex, and that if we as Muslims continue to reject the extremists’ mangling of our faith, they will eventually lose their sway on the ground.” “There can be no true understanding or trust in a world divided by walls"

In an era of fake news, Queen Rania warns that our human instinct to judge those different to ourselves has been amplified by social networks, leading to the global spread of false stereotypes and divisive discourse.“The danger here is substantial,” she says, “but is even more so when this online debate starts gaining ground offline; when negativity on Facebook or Twitter becomes fodder for negativity on the streets, schools or in conversations with friends and even strangers.” Her measured response is not to blame or ban social media itself but to reassess the way we use it. “The repercussions of misusing social media have already permeated our daily lives, and now we are a little in over our heads,” she cautions. “Our best bet is not to dial down our use of these platforms, but to become more discerning about what we are exposed to online. If destructive discourse is being brandished around us, we need to question whether it can be validated and think before we share in the conversation.”

At its most base level, social media can be an easy tool for bullying, and as an outspoken woman in the Arab world, Queen Rania is wide open to negativity and criticism, which she handles with grace and insight. “Listening to criticism is part of my job,” she smiles. “It’s important to respect all different viewpoints, and sometimes it’s the people who disagree with you who are able to point out something you may have overlooked. But criticism is constructive only when it is based on fact. Sadly, in today’s media landscape, false information can become irrefutable fact in a matter of hours.” She admits that when she first stepped into the role of royalty she was reluctant to speak out or take risks for fear of opening herself up to scrutiny or attracting censure. “With time and experience, I’ve become more comfortable in my own skin. There is nothing more important than being authentic, saying and doing what we believe in, and owning our narrative. If we don’t, others will fill in the gaps on our behalf,” she says. “I’ve learnt that the path to progress is long, hard, and often thankless – if you let fear of criticism paralyse you, you’ll never make it out the door. The difficult choices – the ones we most fear – are often those that need to be made.That fear is there to let us know that they are worth it.”

One of the most politically candid first ladies in the Middle East – if not the world – Queen Rania muses, “I never really made a conscious decision to be outspoken, I feel it’s something that I have to do because any voice raised against injustice erodes the power of that injustice.” She urges us all to follow suit. “I think it’s the most important thing in the world to be authentic, to live according to your beliefs and to speak your truth. Particularly at this time because the public discourse is dominated by hatred and intolerance and anger and fear, and so we need to provide a counter-narrative to that, particularly for people in public positions.”

Beyond those in the public sphere, Queen Rania encourages individuals to speak out, particularly women in the Arab world whose voices may have been hushed by cultural restraints. “For too long that voice has been quite muted,” she says.“When it comes to women from the Middle East you’ll find a lot of international experts ready to jump in and speak on their behalf, but you get narratives that are either inaccurate or just stereotypes. Women are usually painted with two broad brushstrokes, whether as dangerous extremists or oppressed victims; the nuance is lost in the narrative. Authentic voices from the Middle East are few and far between and it’s absolutely critical that women do speak for themselves because the stereotypes really don’t capture what women in the Middle East are all about.” Few would deny the yawning chasm between the perception of Arab women that proliferates in the West and the reality of the female experience across the Middle East.

“The women that I see and interact with are so strong, they are so determined, they are so ambitious, they are resilient. A lot of them are extremely well-educated. A lot of them are high achievers,” Queen Rania agrees, adding, “We can’t expect the rest of the world to recognise our successes and our achievements until we recognise them ourselves. We have to do a better job of celebrating Arab women, of highlighting their successes, of creating environments for them to thrive and express themselves and build on each other’s successes. Then we can start to reset global perceptions about Arab women.” Are observers in the West aware, for example, that in many Arab countries there are more females enrolled in universities than males? “In Jordan girls are much higher achievers academically than boys are, but the challenge is how do you transform those academic achievements into successful careers? All the time we see women bumping into glass ceilings and barriers in the work place. A lot of times it is because there is just a bias and a lot of times it’s because the working environment is not helpful or not conducive for women.” Such obstacles, however, can forge iron wills. “I think cultural and familial barriers really hold women back but I’m always inspired by how determined Arab women are. Because we are faced with all these challenges we try that much harder, so they’re very resourceful.”

One third of start-ups in the Arab world are headed by females, a higher percentage than in Silicon Valley. “That tells you a lot about how determined Arab women are to succeed in spite of their barriers. And how little of a victim mentality they have, contrary to what many in the western world think,” Queen Rania smiles. “So there’s a lot to be celebrated in the Arab world. But we need to amplify those successes. We need to talk about them. And we need to create linkages between these women because it’s like the reverse domino effect where one woman lifts another woman up and we all end up standing together. The greatest support that a woman can get is from another successful woman who lifts her up and tells her, ‘You can dream, you can succeed.’” We all have a role to play, she says, in encouraging, listening to and sharing a diversity of women’s voices from across the region, “so they can speak of their own story whether it’s the good, the bad, the triumphs or the trials. All of it. It’s part of the picture of who Arab women are and we’re so diverse; there isn’t one stereotype of an Arab woman. In different parts of the Arab world each woman is her own unique person. I would love to hear more voices coming up. Increasingly we’re seeing them but I think we still have a long way to go before we really leave a mark on the world stage.” "A meaningful life is a life where you have made things better for people around you"

As recent times have highlighted, it is not only in the Middle East that the female narrative is silenced, subdued or subjugated. “Women all over the world see the subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways that gender discrimination can hold us back,” Her Majesty says. For women in the Middle East, however, the stakes can seem so much higher. Surrounded by war and conflict, women face issues of displacement, barriers for movement, and the severe economic challenges that result. “And whenever those things happen, there is a disproportionate effect on women; they tend to bear the brunt of the fall-backs. We see women and their needs and their status fall down the priority list,” she explains. The battle for equal rights, for education, for gender parity is forgotten when a battle of bombs and bullets is raging outside. “If you look in a lot of the countries where there is conflict, people don’t talk about how the rights that women have worked so hard to acquire are now taken away from them,” she says.

For the daughters, sisters and mothers who are thrust into life-destroying circumstances – whether Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims forced to flee child murder and rape, or those touched by atrocities in neighbouring Syria – the effects of such butchery are unimaginable. Yet while the rest of us can switch the channel on the television or turn the page of a newspaper when faced with images too horrific to process, Her Majesty has witnessed first-hand the suffering inflicted on humanity across the Muslim world, encounters that must levy an enormous emotional toll. “Every day we’re bombarded with images of human suffering and injustice and that can turn you into a cynic,” she agrees, “but we need to remember that even in the worst of circumstances you still see incredible acts of humanity and sacrifice. Even in the darkest places – particularly in the darkest places.” By seeking out the compassion of mankind, Queen Rania refuses to let the darkness overwhelm her. “I’m not ready to give up on humanity. Against all the terrible things that we see, there’s incredible goodness in people,” she says, “and it would be good for all of us to focus on that, and also our faith, in prayer. I feel that at times of reflection you find a lot of the answers, and our religion teaches us to face these kinds of situations with patience and determination and acceptance. That’s a great source of comfort for me and it keeps my faith.”

Cocooned by the zen surroundings of the Al Husseiniya Palace compound, where elegant cypress trees line the drive and the air is softly scented, the ills of the world seem a million miles away. Bringing up four children – Crown Prince Hussein, 24, Princess Iman, 22, Princess Salma, 18, and Prince Hashem, 15 – the temptation to be protective must have been strong. “Like any mother, I want my children to be happy and fulfilled and challenged but also I really want them to be decent human beings,” Queen Rania says of her drive to instil compassion and empathy in her children. “As parents we’re always very protective over our kids and eager to take care of their needs but I think we need to teach them from a young age to balance their needs with other people’s needs. Whether it’s standing up to a bully or sharing a toy; those are qualities that you instil in your kids from a young age.”

The playing field is skewed, however, when you have the word Prince or Princess before your name. “I want them to be normal kids. Sometimes I feel like I’m swimming against the current because obviously they’re royals and people sometimes treat them that way, but I try to make sure that they have an identity outside of their title,” Queen Rania says. “I always tell them, ‘You carry your title, it doesn’t carry you’ and to think of it more as a responsibility and not a privilege.” Ultimately, she explains, honorifics are not character defining. Children’s true identity is derived not from a title but through values, morals and principles, and “making sure that they’re aware of their history and heritage and their faith.” These are the things, Queen Rania says, that create a sense of identity for a child. “Although we can’t shield our kids from all the things that life is going to throw at them, when you instil those things in your kids they become resilient. That’s what I want for my kids, to have that kind of resilience.”

Raising a future king must present its own set of challenges, ones that Queen Rania has experienced first-hand. “There’s plenty of personal sacrifice,” she says of life as a royal. “When you’re in the public eye you do get exposed to a lot of criticism, a lot of judgment. A lot of times my decisions are based on things that I can’t do rather than what I can, because there are certain restrictions or you just can’t go there because it’s not accepted, whether culturally or in any other context.” Queen Rania understands the gravity of duty. “When you are in the public eye your choices are not yours because you’re not living for yourself. But nothing that’s worthwhile is necessarily easy; you take the good and the bad, and I feel like it’s an honour and a privilege to be able to have a positive impact.”

Despite the human rights abuses she has witnessed around the world or the ongoing economic struggles of her fellow Jordanians, Queen Rania is motivated by the prospect of betterment for her country and those that surround it. “Ultimately what we all have in common is that we all want to have a meaningful life. People spend so much time trying to look for that meaning but I think it’s actually quite simple; a meaningful life is a life where you have made things better for people around you. And I think we all can do that whether you’re a public personality or a private citizen.” That’s not to say that she doesn’t allow herself some respite. “I’m more conscious now of making sure there’s a balance in my life. When I started out I didn’t understand fully the impact of emotional stress; how much that impacts your physical health, your energy, your outlook. Now I see when I am run down from too much work or too much stress that I suddenly become exhausted. So I make a much more conscious effort to create that balance. I make sure that the evenings are for my kids and for my family, watching TV. And also weekends, sometimes we’ll go to Aqaba or something like that.” With half of her children in Jordan and half studying abroad, she admits that it is hard to carve out family time. “I make sure that we somehow organise our schedules so that we’re together for a few weeks as a family over summer, and I must say that it is the most fulfilling time for me. That’s when I really fill up the tank. Just being with my kids, having that interaction every day, I love it. There’s nothing more important.”

Queen Rania was an employee of technology giant Apple when she met her future husband and today she embraces social media, where she describes herself as ‘A mum and wife with a really cool day job’ to 10.4 million Twitter followers, 16 million on Facebook, and 5.1 million on Instagram. But as her own children come of age in a newly digitised world, she is aware of the tightrope between empowerment and subversion that such connectivity brings. “When my kids started becoming old enough to be on social media and on the internet, as a mum my protective antennae shot up. But then I realised that snooping around is not going to be helpful because it will erode the trust between us and they will stop sharing things with me, so I’d rather we have an open dialogue and channels of trust that allows us to give and take,” she says. “At the end of the day it’s about moderation. It’s the same boring advice that you heard from your mum and your mum heard from her own mother: be moderate. I tell my kids to spend less of their lives on the phone and more of their lives being in the present, being in nature, picking up a book. It is hard because a lot of our lives are slowly migrating online but every now and then you just need to remind them that’s what is happening so they can be conscious of it and try to keep that balance.”

In addition to balancing time on- and off-line, the digital sphere can be a double-edged sword, Queen Rania explains. “The internet has unleashed a lot of potential for a lot of kids and sometimes when I look at YouTube channels or websites that are run by children they’re incredibly inspiring. But it is also a dangerous space where kids can be exposed to unsuitable content and negativity, to bullying, to content that makes them doubt themselves, or their self-image,” she says.“Increasingly, I try to guide my kids to look at the marvels of the internet and really steer them away from the dark corners.” The two-dimensional nature of platforms such as Instagram can be a battering ram in the face of wavering self-esteem, something that Queen Rania is also acutely aware of. “One thing that I’m very conscious of is that it’s become a very visual world and you really have to guard against your kids either becoming too superficial or unaccepting of who they are and becoming critical of themselves. Physically, emotionally; people start to think that other people’s lives are better than their own. I see that all the time, how people become incredibly insecure.” And it’s not only children who are susceptible, she warns. “Sometimes it really surprises me when I see people whose characters online are so different from their characters offline. And it makes me wonder, ‘Why do you feel you have to wear that mask? Why do you feel you have to project a certain image to the rest of the world? Why can’t you just be comfortable with who you are?’ Because ultimately your authentic self is what matters. And the closer you remain to the trueness of who you are, the happier you will be at the end of the day.” Despite what Snapchat filters would have us believe, “You don’t deceive anybody by trying to portray some kind of image on social media,” she counsels. “The number of likes that you get ultimately doesn’t matter. The validation that really matters comes from a sense of self-acceptance, achievement, doing something, developing your own skills.”

For these portraits taken for Harper’s Bazaar Arabia by photographer Alexi Lubomirski, Her Majesty was keen to stay true to her own sense of style, a style that is always secondary to substance. “I am very passionate about my work, and the clothes I wear don’t have any bearing on that. I am also very mindful that I have a duty to represent my country well. So, rather than follow the latest trends, I aim to dress in a way that reflects who I am,” she says. “I find that I’m most comfortable in modest wear – partly because of my position, but mostly because it feels right for me, as a woman.” Her Majesty just wishes that the emphasis would be on what she says, rather than what she wears. “Of course, one of the downsides of being a woman in the public eye is that there will always be comments about my outfits and appearance. Sometimes, there is a lot of exaggeration as well. I suppose it comes with the territory,” she says, “But at the end of the day, I hope it is my work that defines me, not my wardrobe.”

Chief among her work achievements is Her Majesty’s focus on education across the Arab world. Away from the images we see of starving children, displaced families and people in desperate need of medical aid, Queen Rania believes there is another less visible crisis unfolding in the Middle East, one that doesn’t make front page news. “Across the Arab world there are millions and millions of children who are receiving education that is inadequate, it’s outdated, it doesn’t prepare them for today’s job market, let alone tomorrow’s. So they really don’t stand a chance,” she says. “People don’t see it as a crisis. I see it as an emergency.” The slowly unfolding repercussions of failing to educate the region’s youth could decimate a generation. “What will become of them? Will they become vulnerable to extremist ideology, will they be a burden on society? What kind of impact will they have on our collective future?” She has seen first-hand how Jordan’s own education reform efforts have been strained by the pressure of accommodating Syrian refugee children in the country’s schools. “There isn’t anything more urgent for us in the Arab world than education because at the end of the day it’s about the individual being able to have the skills to participate in today’s economy, to feel competitive. There shouldn’t be a conflict between the sense of, ‘I’m an Arab, I’m a Muslim but I’m able to compete on the international stage’ and you can only achieve that through a quality education.” She urges a communal effort to revolutionise education across the Arab world. “If we put our hands together we can all muster up the resources that we need for our kids. Obviously some countries have more resources than others, but ultimately when it comes to the education of our kids we all have the same vested interest. If I’m in Jordan, it’s in my best interest that kids in Syria get a great education because if they don’t, that’s going to become a problem for me in the future.” While the challenge is huge, there is also great potential. Just imagine what strides a well-educated workforce could make. "The greatest support that a woman can get is from another successful woman who lifts her up and tells her, 'you can dream, you can succeed'"

“A large percentage of our population are young and therefore with the right interventions, what we see as a challenge could become an opportunity for very quick change,” she says. The digital world also makes it easier to reach students, train teachers and modernise learning. In 2014 Queen Rania launched Edraak as an Arabic online educational platform for adult learners, who were starving for engaging digital content in their native language. Since then, Edraak has reached more than 2.2 million registered users. Last September, the platform was expanded to schoolchildren too, with the Edraak K-12 platform, which will offer e-curricula in all major subjects to Arab children everywhere. “We’ve already rolled out mathematics, and there is much more to come. The platform will eventually include thousands of Arabic instructional videos, quizzes, and practice exercises covering everything our children learn in schools, all available free of charge to anyone with an internet connection,” Her Majesty says. The aim is to provide all Arab school-aged children with free access to quality education by 2020, whether they are in urban centres, refugee camps or conflict zones. “It is a tremendous undertaking, but it is one that our region cannot afford to put off,” she says. “A child denied an education is not a tragedy for just that child – it sets us all back. So we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to give them a fighting chance.”

By taking on as mammoth a responsibility as education reform in the Arab world, Queen Rania is setting herself a gargantuan task. “Sitting still is not who I am. You can ask my team, you can ask my mum,” she smiles. “The easy life is not something that I ever aspired to. And I think the easy way is never really the right way.” The education crisis can’t be solved overnight, and reform is fraught with resistance and cynicism, she says. “I could feel discouraged when those who are resisting the change have got the upper hand, but then there are days where I feel that we’ve really moved the dial, even if it’s for an inch. Where I see teachers who have just taken a course and are feeling empowered with their new skills and I see how their students are becoming inspired by this new atmosphere in the classroom.”

With the dreams and ambitions of a generation in her reach, Her Majesty Queen Rania's lasting influence over the Arab world has the potential to be prodigious. “I don’t believe in legacy; you’re not there to see your legacy,” she muses. “What I do believe is that you need to leave good deeds behind. Do whatever you can to positively impact other people’s lives.” We may not all be queens, but as Her Majesty says, the end game is the same for all. “Really we’re all here to leave a decent mark behind.”

Photography: Alexi Lubomirski Fashion director: Belen Antolin Hair: Alain Pichon Makeup: Valeria Ferreira Photography team: Diego Bendezu, Maximilian Hoell and Jeremy O’Donnell Producer: Neha Mishra

[scarefox]

Had a bad evening yesterday. Including some idiot extremists protesting in front of the most animal friendly zoo in Germany. With the biggest and most natural enclosures (besides a few exceptions, but they fix all their shitty areas over time). They went from ordinary tiny cage zoo to big natural enclosures in the last years. Where different species even live together in some areas. They even have a giant jungle as big as a stadion. A zoo who strongly supports species protection with a lot of money, supports WWF, WWF always has an info booth in there and the zoo participates in breeding endangered animals that get returned to the wilderness. So yeah, if you want to protest against horrible zoos, that’s the wrong zoo. Some other small-minded people even gave some bad google ratings because dogs aren’t allowed, and they couldn’t see many animals due to the ammount of plants in those big enclosure….. how does that sound like the zoo cares more about the audience than their animals? I bet the screamy protestants were from the peta army or left-extremists and din’t even inform themselves about the location. This is why I hate extremists, no matter what side they on.

Then my father turned out his worst narcissistic asshole behavior. The event we went to was badly organized. Way too many people and long waiting times. He just went back to the car and let us alone (after we paid the entry….). And we felt bad the whole time we were at the event. At least he waited for us in the car. But of course, afterwards he blamed my mother and me for it all. We could have known how shitty this will be (he always forgets, he could have thought about it too but didn’t), it was our stupid idea, he will never come with us to such an event ever again. As if we forced him. No, my mother asked him if he wants to come, and he agreed.

Then at my parents home my brother reminded me, with his behavior, that he becomes similar to my father and mother…. (she is focused on criticizing and correcting others). I hope he get’s better when he get’s older. But he once told me how hopeless he feels already with his 16 years. Now he got new internet friends who got him into “war history“ which is close to neo-nazi shit….

My whole family is such a disaster. And I don’t know how I could help them. They wouldn’t even believe that something could be wrong with them. They still have a hard time to believe that I am mentally ill and that it’s actualy good that I have a therapist. 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 27, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

America is in a watershed moment. Since the 1980s, the country has focused on individualism: the idea that the expansion of the federal government after the Depression in the 1930s created a form of collectivism that we must destroy by cutting taxes and slashing regulation to leave individuals free to do as they wish.

Domestically, that ideology meant dismantling government regulation, social safety networks, and public infrastructure projects. Internationally, it meant a form of “cowboy diplomacy” in which the U.S. usually acted on its own to rebuild nations in our image.

Now, President Joe Biden appears to be trying to bring back a focus on the common good.

For all that Republicans today insist that individualism is the heart of Americanism, in fact the history of federal protection of the common good began in the 1860s with their own ancestors, led by Abraham Lincoln, who wrote: “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves---in their separate, and individual capacities.”

The contrast between these two ideologies has been stark this week.

On the one hand are those who insist that the government cannot limit an individual’s rights by mandating either masks or vaccines, even in the face of the deadly Delta variant of the coronavirus that is, once again, taking more than 1000 American lives a day.

In New York, where Mayor Bill de Blasio has required teachers to be vaccinated, the city’s largest police union has said it will sue if a vaccine is mandated for its members.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott on Wednesday issued an executive order prohibiting any government office or any private entity receiving government funds from requiring vaccines.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has also forbidden mask mandates, but today Leon County Circuit Judge John C. Cooper ruled that DeSantis’s order is unconstitutional. Cooper pointed out that in 1914 and 1939, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that individual rights take a back seat to public safety: individuals can drink alcohol, for example, but not drive drunk. DeSantis was scathing of the opinion and has vowed to appeal. Meanwhile, NBC News reported this week that information about the coronavirus in Florida, as well as Georgia, is no longer easily available on government websites.

On the other hand, as predicted, the full approval of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine by the Food and Drug Administration has prompted a flood of vaccine mandates.

The investigation into the events of January 6, when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, also showcases the tension between individualism and community.

Yesterday, after months in which Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, called for the release of the identity of the officer who shot Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt, Capitol Police officer Lieutenant Michael Byrd, the 28-year veteran of the force who shot Babbitt, gave an interview to Lester Holt of NBC News.

Right-wing activists have called Babbitt a martyr murdered by the government, but Byrd explained that he was responsible for protecting 60 to 80 members of the House and their staffers. As rioters smashed the glass doors leading into the House chamber, Byrd repeatedly called for them to get back. When Ashli Babbitt climbed through the broken door, he shot her in the shoulder. She later died from her injuries. Byrd said he was doing his job to protect our government. “I know that day I saved countless lives,” Byrd told Holt. “I know members of Congress, as well as my fellow officers and staff, were in jeopardy and in serious danger. And that’s my job.”

The conflict between individualism and society also became clear today as the House select committee looking into the attack asked social media giants to turn over “all reviews, studies, reports, data, analyses, and communications” they had gathered about disinformation distributed by both foreign and domestic actors, as well as information about “domestic violent extremists” who participated in the attack.

Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) immediately responded that “Congress has no general power to inquire into private affairs and to compel disclosure….” He urged telecommunications companies and Facebook not to hand over any materials, calling their effort an “authoritarian undertaking.” Banks told Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson that Republicans should punish every lawmaker investigating the January 6 insurrection if they retake control of Congress in 2022.

Biden’s new turn is especially obvious tonight in international affairs. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a country we entered almost 20 years ago with a clear mission that became muddied almost immediately, has sparked Republican criticism for what many describe as a U.S. defeat.

Since he took office, Biden has insisted on shifting American foreign policy away from U.S. troops alone on the ground toward multilateral pressure using finances and technology.

After yesterday’s bombing in Kabul took the lives of 160 Afghans and 13 American military personnel, Biden warned ISIS-K: "We will hunt you down and make you pay.”

Tonight, a new warning from the State Department warning Americans at the gates of the Kabul airport to “leave immediately” came just before a spokesman for CENTCOM, the United States Central Command in the Defense Department overseeing the Middle East, announced: "U.S. military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner. The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan. Initial indications are that we killed the target. We know of no civilian casualties."

Biden’s strike on ISIS-K demonstrated the nation's over-the-horizon technologies that he hopes will replace troops. Even still, the administration continues to call for international cooperation. In a press conference today, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby responded to a question about U.S. control in Afghanistan by saying: “It’s not about U.S. control in the Indo-Pacific. It’s about protecting our country from threats and challenges that emanate from that part of the world. And it’s about revitalizing our network of alliances and partnerships to help our partners in the international community do the same.“

Meanwhile, this afternoon, news broke that the Taliban has asked the United States to keep a diplomatic presence in the country even after it ends its military mission. The Taliban continues to hope for international recognition, in part to claw back some of the aid that western countries—especially the U.S.—will no longer provide, as well as to try to get the country’s billions in assets unfrozen.

A continued diplomatic presence in Afghanistan would make it easier to continue to get allies and U.S. citizens out of the country, but State Department spokesman Ned Price said the idea is a nonstarter unless a future Afghan government protects the rights of its citizens, including its women, and refuses to harbor terrorists. Price also emphasized that the U.S. would not make this decision without consulting allies. “This is not just a discussion the United States will have to decide for itself.… We are coordinating with our international partners, again to share ideas, to ensure that we are sending the appropriate signals and messages to the Taliban,” he said.

Evacuations from Afghanistan continue. Since August 14, they have topped 110,000, with 12,500 people in the last 24 hours.

Perhaps the news story that best illustrates the tension today between individualism and using the government to help everyone is about a natural disaster. Hurricane Ida, which formed in the Caribbean yesterday, is barreling toward the U.S. Gulf Coast. When it hit western Cuba today, it was a Category 1 storm, but meteorologists expect it to pick up speed as it crosses the warm gulf, becoming a Category 4 storm by the time it hits the U.S. coastline. The area from Louisiana to Florida is in the storm’s path. New Orleans could see winds of up to 110 miles an hour and a storm surge of as much as 11 feet. Louisiana officials issued evacuation orders today.

The storm is expected to hit Sunday evening, exactly 16 years after Hurricane Katrina did. But this time, there is another complication: this is the very part of the country suffering terribly right now from coronavirus. Standing firm on individual rights, only about 40% of Louisiana’s population has been vaccinated, and hospitals are already stretched thin.

Today, President Biden declared an emergency in Louisiana, ordering federal assistance from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the region ahead of the storm, trying to head off a catastrophe. The federal government will also help to pay the costs of the emergency.

—-

Notes:

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/pentagon-officials-hank-taylor-john-kirby-press-briefing-transcript-august-27-afghanistan-update

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/27/weather/tropical-storm-ida-friday/index.html

https://apnews.com/article/health-louisiana-coronavirus-pandemic-1a2264b5a43033ed70fe9790c2e89437

NYPD story is from the New York Post, but a citation from them always stops the delivery of lots of letters, so I’m going to suggest people look for it themselves.

https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/EO-GA-39_prohibiting_vaccine_mandates_and_vaccine_passports_IMAGE_08-25-2021.pdf

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/08/27/president-joseph-r-biden-jr-approves-louisiana-emergency-declaration-2/

://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/27/afghanistan-kabul-taliban-live-updates/#link-KFQMWZKFSNH4DBBMK2VAJMAZF4

Meredith Lee @meredithlleeCENTCOM: "U.S. military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner. The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangahar Province of Afghanistan. Initial indications are that we killed the target. We know of no civilian casualties."

78 Retweets151 Likes

August 28th 2021

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/08/27/afghanistan-live-updates-taliban-kabul-news/5611093001/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1277715

https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-health-education-florida-coronavirus-pandemic-1908088a0b5c5b02d89fd7e007822408

Ryan Struyk @ryanstruykThe United States is now reporting 1,194 new coronavirus deaths per day, the highest seven-day average since March 19, according to data from @CNN and Johns Hopkins University.

246 Retweets677 Likes

August 27th 2021

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/officer-who-shot-ashli-babbitt-during-capitol-riot-breaks-silence-n1277736

Jim Banks @RepJimBanksRead my letter to 1/6 Chair @BennieGThompson about his norm shattering decision to spy on his colleagues. @ATT @Verizon @TMobile @Facebook @Twitter @FCC

136 Retweets311 Likes

August 27th 2021

/photo/2

https://news.yahoo.com/gop-rep-jim-banks-republicans-195845753.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/27/politics/us-military-airstrike-isis-k-planner-afghanistan/index.html

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[queer-vampire]

sooooo what are your active WIPs? 👀

ok my guy you asked for it. also i miscounted originally, i have NINE WORKS IN PROGRESS

disclaimer: ALL CHARACTERS ARE BISEXUAL UNTIL STATED OTHERWISE (no one is straight)

Invictus

this is my firstborn. my child. my love. it started out as a mcu fanfic but holy shit it’s grown so much bigger than that. it’s about Lilith, my beloved vampire child, who lives her life trying to figure out who she is. she’s got her adopted brother, Jared, who is like her second half. her adopted sister Isabela who could care less about morality. then she’s got her closest friends: Maria (trans woman!) and Abraham Van Helsing (siblings), Mordecai (love interest), Moira, and Thomas Harker, Samson (Helaku) and Shaw (Waya) Harlow. there is SO much more but i have the other 7 to talk about lmao. i have a blog for the book series and have a pinterest board for the story (characters are separate on my account)

Under the Windy City

its my version of the YA genre. but the kids are actually in their 20s cause teens should NOT be doing these dangerous tasks. again its a hefty plot so i’ll keep it simple. its set in modern day. the only change is that natural disaster is closer than we predicted. three 20 somethings end up being experimented on to save their lives from terrible accidents. as a result, they are brought into a whole new underground world of scientists and activists trying to find ways for the human race to evolve and to save earth. there will be three sides: extremists (the first trio of the experiments but it went wrong), the middle (the scientists, activist, and our new main trio), and the deniers (your billionaires, your closed-minded christians, your climate change deniers, etc etc). the clock is ticking as natural disaster is on the rise and the trio must try and save humanity. yes, i have a pinterest board for the story (characters are separate on my account)

The supernatural trilogy: Dark to Light, Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know, and Reapers

yes, its a trilogy, but none of the books are connected by characters. its connected by the fact that its based in reality and follows detectives with a supernatural twist. 

Dark to Light follows a woman who is a detective and she has many psychic abilities such as speaking with the dead, sensing death, etc. 

WWTAITIK follows two retired detectives (who are also husband and wife) dragged back into the world as an old case of theirs comes back to haunt them. her deranged sister killed his younger sister just before killing herself. the sister confessed to all the serial killings they were following. but she also told everyone that the spirit told her to do it. after laying their family members to rest, the couple retired and moved north to remove themselves from society. now they work at a lumber company to get by. they also have to raise their niece that his sister left behind. after nearly 10 years, their old friend comes back with a case that mirrors the past case down to every detail. basically they gotta figure out wtf is going on and oh shit ghosts arent real, are they?

Reapers follows another married detective couple. she dies while getting to nosy on a large case. a year later she’s resurrected by a native american woman from legends ago. there is a whole cult of women resurrected to get vengeance on their killers. our main ch finds her husband again and the rest of the story follows this group taking on the case that killed our girl. its has deeper roots than they thought and opens up many other issues to follow. this book will be a big one with two volumes. this book could be two books easily but i gotta keep it a trilogy so...

If I Should Die and What Lies Underneath

this one is my second child. ive had it for a while now. 

the plot of both follows a woman (young adult in the first book) as her niece goes missing and she goes on a suicidal mission to try and get her back. the first book ends without a happy ending. the second book takes place almost 20 years later and our girl is a detective (she now works with the detectives that worked on her case and helped her do some illegal shit). we find out who took her niece, but it isn’t a fun reveal. this is so vague but i feel like this covers it fairly well. holy shit i keep forgetting i dont have a pinterest board for this story ahhh

Blood on These Hands

a new baby. the newest. i got inspired by mudbound (2017). it follows a woman returning back from WWII after getting the highest honor and getting honorably discharged in early 1945. she served with both the soviets and the usa. instead of returning to her home state, she fulfills a promise she made to a close friend from the war. she moves down south to work for his family. she deals with sexism, racism in the eyes of a white women and how sometimes her helping actually harms, and all the psychological effects of war and childhood trauma. this pinterest board was easy to make since i knew exactly what the aesthetic would be

Untitled work

another new baby. this one was actually a dream i had. the dream came in two parts, and im unsure about the second part so idk if that will make a 10th work in progress or not. 

this one also follows a woman returning home from the iraq war. she ends up having to take care of the family cabin so she decides to just move in. the town is small so word travels fast. and since she’s had a rough past, the town still whispers about her. for work, her adopted sister and the sisters girlfriend open up a center for women, kids, mentally ill, lgbtq, victims of systematic or direct racism, and all abuse victims to come and get help and shelter. most of the townsfolk dont like it so the conflict is trying to keep the shelter alive and growing. our main ch also connects with an old childhood friend. his family cabin is across from hers, and she finds out quickly that hes not really there by choice. with trying to keep the shelter alive, she also tries to help her childhood friend get out under his fathers abusive ruling. and yes you bet your ass i have a pinterest board

and there you have it! all my active WIPs. will you be able to read any of these soon? i can say with complete honesty: no. will you ever be able to read any of these? i have no fucking clue. one thing is for certain: Invictus will get done no matter what. if it kills me, thats how i want to go. everyone needs to experience that book series otherwise i might go insane. @sweetstilesofmine (and by default my sis @p-rincesskaguya) dont hear the end of my rants about invictus. so they might lose their minds if i dont publish it either. 

anyway i hope you enjoyed this and yes PLEASE ask me specifics if you want to know more! i’ll never shut up about them so if you’re willing to give an ear, i’ll scream.

(also idk if i need to do this, but uh, don’t fucking steal these ideas or titles. this shit is MINE and let it be known that i CLAIM IT)

[dabbledrabbleprose]

Fallen Snow

Hey all, here’s the Genyatta fic that I was suddenly consumed by and had a BURNING need to write. Enjoy!

Read on AO3!

******

Peace.

In thirty-three years, never had Genji truly felt peace. He’d had moments when he was happy, sure. Content, even. But before coming to the Shambali, never had he experienced the feeling of being well and truly at peace. He’d had too much anger, too much conflict, both within his life and within himself. It had taken years of effort, along with the guidance and tutelage of one particularly patient and understanding omnic monk, but Genji had at last found peace.

And nowhere was he more at peace than when he was meditating with his Master. They sat side by side in a matching lotus within one of the deep chambers of the temple, awash within the warm glow of the Iris. The temple did well to silence the distractions of the outside world; Genji couldn’t even hear the song of the Himalayan wind from within the inner sanctum’s deep chambers. As he let his mind ascend into blissful tranquility, he let himself absorb the few sounds that rang against the profound silence. He slowly became aware of the monotone drone of Zenyatta’s processing units, steady and grounding to his left, then the gentle hum of his own cybernetics, the whir of his respiratory ventilator, and the rhythmic beating of his own heart, starkly organic amid the rest of the synthetic life he’d surrounded himself with. Occasionally, one of Zenyatta’s orbs would chime with a pure, clear note, aiding Genji in sinking deeper into his meditation.

They could remain that way for hours, finding peace in quiet introspection, and the pair had indeed planned to spend the rest of the evening that way, letting time glide around them and feeling the flow of the Iris and the universe drift by.

Dong.

One of Zenyatta’s orbs chimed, but the note was sour, the sound so discordant and jarring that it broke Genji from his meditation. He raised his head in surprise, looking over at the omnic beside him. A younger Genji would have demanded an explanation for the interruption, but he now understood the value of patience, and knew if he waited, his wise Master would offer an explanation once he’d-

Zenyatta put a hand to his forehead and made a sharp, static sound of pain.

Fuck patience.

“Master?” Genji didn’t bother to hide the worry in his voice, turning anxiously to face him. “What’s wrong?”

“Forgive me, but I must end our session early. I fear something is amiss down in the village,” Zenyatta said, orbs shifting from their meditative state to close around him. “I am picking up the frequency of the village distress beacon.”

Genji leapt fluidly to his feet.

“Then we must go to them!”

“Wait, my student,” Zenyatta’s voice was even, but held a note of urgency. “It would be unwise to rush into danger as a rabbit to a snare. We know not what awaits us.”

“Then I’ll be quiet about it,” he replied vehemently, already headed for the stairs. “But I’ll not sit by while the village is in danger!”

Genji was out the door and sprinting down the mountainside before Zenyatta could reply.

The world outside the temple was deceptively peaceful. Night had fallen and it had begun to snow, thick fluffy flakes drifting in silence around him. He could hear nothing out of the ordinary, but the village was halfway down the mountain and the snowfall could easily dampen any sounds of commotion.

He started down the mountain at a sprint. The cloud cover hid the moon, but the enhanced night vision in his visor made the mountainside appear as bright as midday. He didn’t bother with the switchbacks of the paved pathways, instead racing straight down the mountain slope, nimbly leaping across rock and snow.

Never in all his years here had he heard of a distress beacon being activated. Hell, he didn’t even know they had distress beacons. Something he’d have to ask Zen about later. There had been occasional natural disasters over the years; avalanches, rockslides, storms, but nothing the Shambali hadn’t been able to handle. That meant that whatever was happening right now was out of their league, and Genji’s overactive imagination was all too happy to provide a list of horrible possibilities for him.

Terrorists were at the top of his list. Anti-omnic and pro-omnic extremists were equally unhappy with the peace the Shambali were trying to garner between omnic and organic peoples. There were plenty of people out there who were anti-Iris as well, fearing that the Iris was a new form of God Program, ready to start a new omnic crisis.

Genji slid down a sheer cliff face and leapt to a boulder below, fast approaching the shrine that sat halfway down the mountainside, between the temple and the village. Fear twisted at his gut. What if this was his fault? What if this was someone with a grudge against him, personally? Talon? The tattered remains of the Shimada? Between the yakuza, Overwatch, Blackwatch, and his own charming personality, he’d built up a long list of enemies over the years. If his past was responsible for bringing danger to the monks here…

He swallowed that thought as he reached the Shrine. Thank the Iris that Mondatta was currently in Europe. If anything happened to him, he’d never be able to forgive himself. It took only seconds for him to dart roof to roof, sprinting across the sparse collection of buildings until he reached the cliff edge to see the village below.

It was burning.

Genji’s heart skipped a beat, then he was on the move once more, scaling down the cliff face with inhuman speed and agility. His mind and heart felt ablur, the calm of the evening’s meditation long forgotten as his thoughts spun circles around themselves in an ouroboros of guilt, fear, and anxiety.

He slowed as he grew close enough to the village to smell the smoke through his ventilator. He activated his stealth settings, disabling the green lights on his body armor, and approached silently. Thank god he was armed. His wakizashi was in his room, but his cybernetic body was automatically armed with shuriken and he never went anywhere without , the nodachi strapped to his back. He dropped over the last rocky outcropping and crouched behind a low wall, surveying the chaos before him.

Several buildings were on fire, but it wasn’t as bad as it had looked from the Shrine, and the heavy snowfall was already helping to combat the flames. Strangers stomped around the village, humans dressed in heavy cold-weather gear and night vision goggles, spread through the village and appeared to be ransacking the place. They looked as if they were searching for something. As Genji looked closer, he found the scattered, still forms of several omnic monks, motionless under a layer of fallen snow.

Fury boiled in his blood and he began to rise, reaching for the blade at his back.

“So good of you to join me, my student,” said Zenyatta from just behind him.

Genji’s heart leapt into his throat and he spun around, Ryūichi moji half out of her sheath before he calmed.

“M-Master?” he whispered frantically, crouching back down behind the wall. “But…how did you-”

Zenyatta raised a hand to silence him.

“I haven’t taught you all the secrets of the Iris,” he said, voice pitched carefully low to not draw the attention of the intruders. “Including the back passageway that connects the temple to the village.”

Genji stared at him from behind his visor, but was spared from having to come up with a coherent reply to that as his Master continued.

“I have been observing for a short while. It appears these individuals have come with the misguided notion that there is some sort of treasure to be found in the monastery.”

Genji was taken aback. That wasn’t on his list at all.

“I saw…bodies,” he whispered back. The words were hard to say aloud. He knew everyone in this village, and the thought of losing anyone was soul wrenching. “How many are hurt?”

“That, I do not know,” Zen said softly. “Several of our brothers and sisters fell at the before my arrival. I know not the state of those who have fallen, nor how…permanent their incapacitated status is.”

Genji nodded solemnly, understanding. He would hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.

“Somewhat more pressing is the fact that several more of our brethren have been confined within the village library. From what I have been able to surmise, our uninvited visitors intend to interrogate those held captive in hopes of revealing the location of the fortune they seek.”

Genji let out a low breath. “They’re going to torture them.”

“That is my fear.”

Genji moved to stand and was stopped by a metal hand on his shoulder. This pattern of Zenyatta stopping him from trying to take action was starting to become a trend, and he wasn’t sure if he liked it.

“Master, I have to help!” he hissed.

“And so we shall. But the wolf who hunts in a pack is more often successful than the Sparrow hunting alone.”

A terrible metaphor, but point taken. Genji took a deep breath and forced himself to relax with only marginal success. Trust. He needed to trust Zenyatta. Now more than ever.

“You have a plan?”

“I do.”

“Then I am listening, Master.”

“Go to the library’s southwest window and wait. I shall enter through the northeast door and keep them distracted while you rescue our captive brothers and sisters. Once everyone has been moved to safety, we shall dispatch our unwanted guests.”

“…That’s it?”

“Indeed.”

“Master, that…that is a terrible plan,” Genji said flatly. “It’s so terrible I don’t even know where to start.”

“Do try.”

Genji let out a sharp exhale of frustration. “I can think of a dozen ways how it could go wrong. We don’t even know how many hostiles there are or how many captives or how they are armed or…” he trailed off as Zenyatta held up a hand to silence him.

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy, my student. I merely thought it prudent to have a tentative plan in place before we are forced to improvise anyway,” Zenyatta said calmly, and motioned for Genji to follow him. “Regardless, I shall draw their attention while you remain at their backs. From there, we will do what must be done.”

Keeping low, they crept along the outskirts of the village, moving stealthily from cover to cover. Despite Zenyatta’s calming presence, worry still gnawed at Genji.

“I still do not like the idea of you offering yourself as a distraction,” he whispered as they approached the small, sturdy building that acted as the monastery’s library.

“I am well aware,” Zenyatta murmured. “And I appreciate your concern, but your skills are better put to use behind enemy lines. Go. I know you will be in position before I reach the door.”

Genji hesitated. “…Master…should I attempt to use…non-lethal means of subduing them?”

Zenyatta’s voice, if possible, became even more gentle. “That would be ideal, of course, but I hold no illusions that we may not be granted that luxury.” He gently rested a metal hand against Genji’s faceplate, as if to cup his cheek. “Do what must be done to protect the people of this village, Genji, and know that you will do it free from my judgement.”

“Thank you, Master,” Genji briefly brushed his synthetic fingertips against the back of Zenyatta’s hand. “…and please be careful.”

With that, he melted into the shadows. It only took seconds for him to ghost toward the stout building that held the library. It was small, only holding a few dozen books, but it also held the large databases of a much more extensive digital library, free for any to peruse. Genji climbed the side of the building as easily as a staircase, perching in the window and surveying the scene.

His heart sank. He counted seven intruders and zero hostages. Instead, there was a pile of omnic bodies thrown in a corner, unmoving, lights dark. His soul ached as he recognized the faceplates of those tossed aside like junk. Sister Dhanvi…Brother Batsal…Brother San23…all friends he had made here. Gone.

“Yer a fukkin’ moron,” One of the intruders snarled in English, breaking Genji out of his mourning and bringing him back to the task at hand. The speaker was looming over a smaller man, dressed like the others, but obviously more scrawny under the thick winter gear. The other five men were digging around the back of the large library servers, fiddling with the wiring. “Yer gizmo took out the bots, but it also knocked out the fukkin’ server, y’dumbass! How’re we supposed to get our intel now?”

Gizmo? Genji tried to see the device the smaller man was holding. It was round with a few dials and loose wires looped around what looked like a magnetic coil.

“Take it easy,” the smaller man replied calmly. His accent sounded possibly British, but Genji wasn’t the best judge at English accents. “It may have shut down all the electronics, but once your men restore the power, we can reboot the servers just fine. A small delay is a fair price for subduing the omnics, especially when we’re in no rush.”

Shut down the electronics? An EMP device! If the monks were hit by an EMP, then there was a chance they were just deactivated, not dead! If they had power restored to them and rebooted successfully, they might be okay! But if they had an active EMP device, that meant that he and Zenyatta-

“Ah, my friends. Is there something I can help you with?”

All eyes turned to Zenyatta as the monk chose that moment to enter the library through the front door, sounding for all the world like an apologetically late host.

“The thing, use the gizmo!”

“I can’t!” The small man snapped. “It needs charge time between uses!”

Genji grinned like a dragon. Perfect.

“Fuck it, then!” The large man pointed a handgun at Zenyatta’s head, but never fired the shot, suddenly distracted by the three shuriken that sank into his arm.

“Arrgh!”

The room erupted into chaos. Thugs scrambled for weapons and Genji dropped down from the window, landing hard on one of the other men, driving him to the ground and leaping off him to swing a kick at a second man while throwing a shuriken into the ankle of a third. Zenyatta smoothly floated into the room, breezily deflecting a thrown punch and redirecting the thug’s momentum to send him slamming into a wall.

Caught between two attackers, the thugs fell into confusion as Genji and Zenyatta worked together. Genji fought with a complex blend of multiple martial arts styles and the brutal street fighting he’d picked up in Blackwatch, while Zen flowed through the fight like water, using a smooth Tai Chi to manipulate the energy of the fight around him. Genji threw thugs left and right, only occasionally using his shuriken to injure, and he was even starting to think they’d get through this without any casualties on either side.

He looked over at his Master with a grin, just in time to see him glide between two thugs, tricking them into punching each other, and then felt his heart stop. The scrawny man had slipped out of the fight, lurking on the edges, waiting for an opening to strike.

“Behind you!” Genji shouted, but his warning was too late, and he watched in horror as the man swung a heavy wrench at his Master, striking him right across the exposed wiring along his back of his neck. Time seemed to slow as Zen’s back arched around the blow, sparks flying from the damaged area, and his Master let out a synthetic scream that Genji knew would haunt him in his nightmares. Zen’s lights flickered, then he dropped like a stone to the ground, orbs spilling around him, and fell still. The lights went out.

“Zenyatta!”

Genji’s blood boiled and he saw red. Emerald scales writhed beneath his flesh and cybernetics as the Dragon within him awakened, responding to his rage. Her eyes opened behind his own, focusing on their targets as their fury became one, then fell into his flesh as wrath overtook them.

“Ryūjin no ken wo kurae!”

It had been a very long time since Genji had let himself be blinded by rage, but now he let it consume him. The men he’d tried to peacefully subdue before now garnered no mercy, and he cut them down with brutal efficiency. It was over in moments, the library streaked with blood, and Genji stood panting amid the carnage, his ventilator hissing as it worked to keep up with his breath rate. He looked around and found one body missing: the scrawny man who had signed his death warrant by striking down his Master. The door to the library stood open, and Genji bolted into the snowy night.

There were more thugs still out in the village, and they met their end before they even knew death had come for them on emerald scales and a silver blade. He tore through the village, striking down any stranger who crossed his path, but still he found no sign of the scrawny man at the top of his shit list. In frustration, he climbed to the peak of the village shine, the highest point in the village, and looked around.  

His visor’s night vision was good, but his Dragon’s eyes were better, and they spotted their target fighting through the snow, running north away from the village. Genji let out a wordless battle cry and leapt from the building, sprinting after him with inhuman speed. He left the village behind, not bothering with stealth, wanting to strike fear into his target, wanting him to see the bloodied, glowing green cyborg come to claim his life.

The scrawny man struggled through the snow, then glanced behind him in time to see his death sprinting toward him, sword drawn. Genji was close enough to hear the man cry out in fear when he leapt toward him, Ryūichi moji held in both hands, ready to plunge the nodachi into his back.

The EMP blast took him completely by surprise.

There was no warning. Just a burst of electromagnetic energy and all the cybernetics in Genji’s suit went dead. His synthetic muscles went slack and Ryūichi moji fell from his hands. He hit the ground hard, sprawling face first in the snow, unable to move.

No! No, not now! Not when he was so close. If only he could just…

His beloved dragon, sister to his heart, responded to his wishes and rose up over his prone body, taking on an ethereal green form. No EMP could stop her, made of ancient spirit magic and not nanites, hard light, or other technology. She continued where her fallen master could not, and lunged forward to snap her jaws around the scrawny man. She passed through him, leaving no mark upon his body, but he collapsed nonetheless, dead before he hit the snow. Her vengeance taken and energy spent, the dragon dissipated to the winds, leaving him alone once more.

Genji lay face down in the snow, head turned to the side, suddenly aware of the silence around him. The EMP had completely killed all his cybernetics; he didn’t even have enough power for emergency readouts in his visor. Everything was just…off. He tried to move, but it was like his body couldn’t respond, couldn’t even move his head, leaving him staring at the same spot in the snow, able to see one arm sprawled in front of him.

He took a sharp, ragged breath. His heart was still pounding in his chest, having just climbed over the entire village and sprinted halfway down the mountain, but now he seemed to be struggling for breath.

Oh. Oh. It wasn’t just his prosthetic limbs that were offline. It was everything. One of his lungs was synthetic and a good portion of his circulatory system was artificial. His cybernetic body was more than just prosthetics and enhancements, it was his life support.

And it was dead.

No, no, no! No, not now…not like this. The fallen monks back in the village needed to be charged and rebooted, the fires needed to be put out, the buildings repaired, and Zenyatta, oh Zenyatta… His Master, his mentor, his friend… Genji had been so consumed with rage that he hadn’t even stopped to see the extent of Zenyatta’s injuries. He should have killed the thugs in the room, let scrawny guy run, and tended to his Master right away.

Instead, now he lay alone in the cold, far outside the village, watching the falling snow slowly cover his still body while he listened to his own labored breathing. It had been years since he’d been forced to breathe without his ventilator, and the sound was weak and wheezing, even to his own ears.

He was going to die here, alone, not even knowing if Zenyatta was alive. Mondatta was going to return from Europe and find his entire monastery dead, and it was all Genji’s fault because he couldn’t keep his damn temper in check. He could feel the cold sinking into him, what little body heat he had left escaping with the loss of his thermal support. He couldn’t even shiver, and he wasn’t able to distinguish where his offline cybernetics ended and his organic body began, all of it growing uniformly cold and numb.

His arm was now completely covered by snowfall, and the snow was starting to accumulate on his visor, effectively blinding him. Maybe no one would find him. Maybe he would be lost out here forever, his broken body claimed by the mountain. That would be alright, he thought. If he had to be buried anywhere, he would want to be here, where he became whole, in the place that he truly felt was his home. He head felt lightheaded and unfocused, finding it harder than ever to breathe.

He didn’t want to die. He had regrets, unfulfilled promises and dreams…but if he had to die today, he would at least die with his spirit at peace. He tried to make a few meditative, calming breaths and only managed a few weak gasps, but he’d become enough of a master over his own mind that he still settled his soul. He would meet the afterlife in harmony.

The image of Zenyatta collapsed on the ground sprang unbidden into his mind, and a sob broke through his gasps, shattering all the peace he’d wrapped around him. Dammit all, he couldn’t even die properly, could he? He offered a prayer to the gods or spirits or the Iris or whatever might be listening to a poor, broken cyborg, praying that Zenyatta would be safe.

With that, he let the darkness take him.

I’m sorry, Zen.

 ***

 He was warm. Warm and comfortable and safe. He’d just had a terrible dream that seemed to be just beyond the edge of recollection, and he couldn’t seem to work up the motivation to focus on it anyway, content to sleep in a little more. He reached absently for his blanket to bundle himself up tighter, frowning when he couldn’t seem to find it. He grumbled wordlessly, groping blindly for the blanket, and froze when another hand closed around his, metal fingers entwining between his own.

“Genji?”

Genji’s eyes fluttered open. It was well after sunrise and he was indeed in his room, staring blankly at the ceiling. His vision had no visual enhancements, indicating his visor had been removed, and he turned his head to find himself looking into the smooth faceplate of Zenyatta.

“…Master?”

Memory returned with the force of a freight train. The alarm, the fires, the attack, Zenyatta’s unconscious body, the massacre, the EMP. Genji bolted upright.

“Master! Are you hurt? I watched you fall!”

Zenyatta’s cool gaze met his own.

“I am fine, Genji,” he said, his voice very soft. “The blow overloaded my systems, but no permanent harm was done.”

“And the other monks? Everyone else?” Genji leaned forward anxiously.

“Most affected by the attack were able to be recharged and rebooted. Unfortunately, Brother Nikett and Sister O45TK were too damaged by the feedback to their mainframes and unable to be recovered.”

Genji’s heart sank. Nikett’s greatest passion was tending to the village birdfeeders and O45TK was an excellent weaver who loved tapestries. They would both be sorely missed. Damn it all. He wasn’t able to save everyone.

Hell. It was a miracle he’d been able to save anyone with how he’d lost control. Genji held a little tighter to Zenyatta’s hand and dropped his eyes, suddenly too ashamed to meet his gaze.

“Master, I…” his voice wavered, but he couldn’t bear the thought of not admitting his failing to his Master and his words spilled out of him in a rush. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. When I saw you lying there, lifeless on the ground and surrounded by enemies, I…I couldn’t…” Tears filled his eyes and he let them fall, admitting his failings to the one individual in the world who mattered to him more than anything. “I lost control. Everything you’ve taught me over the years, and I forgot all of it in a single moment of fear and anger. I didn’t even check to see if you were safe, I just fell into my rage and…and slaughtered them. All of them. I chased them out into the snow without mercy or pity, like a monster. Please…please, allow me a chance to earn your forgiveness. I have so much more to learn. I thought I was a better man than who I was when you found me all those years ago, but it seems I still have the same…”

He trailed off as Zenyatta slowly took both Genji’s hands in his own and gently pressed them to the Jieba on his forehead.

Omnics do not cry. Omnic hands do not tremble, their shoulders do not shake, and they have no breath to shudder, but Genji knew something was wrong by the way his Master became absolutely, perfectly motionless.

“…Master?”

“Oh, my beautiful, beloved student,” Zenyatta said, his voice so soft and gentle that Genji could barely hear. “You have come so far and grown so much. I could never be anything but proud of you. That being said, I would humbly request that you do not put yourself in such a position again.”

Genji’s shoulders slumped, but he did not pull his hands away.

“I know. I’m sorry. I should have kept my temper in check and-”

“No, Genji.”

Genji looked up sharply, so shocked by the fact that Zenyatta had interrupted him that he found himself at a loss for words.

“Moments ago, when you awoke, your first thoughts were for the safety of myself and the others in the village. Then you confessed your lapse of control and begged my forgiveness. As if I could ever hold anger toward you, my dearest student,” He slowly lowered Genji’s hands from his forehead, gently resting them down in his lap, but couldn’t seem to let Genji go. “Your selflessness and bravery are something to be lauded, and I am so proud of you for that. However…”

A glitch crackled through Zenyatta’s vocal processors that sounded alarmingly like someone choking back a sob. Genji leaned forward and held tighter to Zenyatta’s hands.

“…However, I wish you would keep at least a small portion of that concern for yourself and your well-being. When I found you half-buried in the snow, cold and still…it frightened me. I was afraid. For one terrible moment, I was certain that you had left this world to pass into the Iris.”

Genji stared at him. In all the years he’d spent with Zenyatta, he’d never seen the cool and collected omnic frightened. Distressed, maybe. Sorrowful. Irritated, even. But never afraid.

“I am eternally grateful that I was able to interface directly with your cybernetics and recharge your internal processors,” he continued softly. “Your system even allowed me brief access to your internal diagnostics, which let me see how close you came to…to…”

He trailed off, unable to continue as he was overcome with emotion. Genji broke out of his shock and threw himself forward to embrace Zenyatta. Tears burned at his eyes and he let them spill, running down his scarred cheeks to fall onto Zen’s chestplate.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Master,” he wept. “I didn’t want…I didn’t mean…”

“I know, Genji,” Zenyatta tenderly wrapped his arms around his student, steel resting against carbon fiber, and cradled the back of his head with one hand, pulling him close. “I forgive you.”

That was too much. Genji broke down into sobs of grief, regret, and relief, clinging to his Master for support. He was vaguely aware of Zenyatta’s orbs circling around the both of them, chiming harmoniously. He melted into his embrace, sinking into Zenyatta’s lap, and cried himself out. It felt like hours before he finally let out a shaky breath and felt himself relax while the monk gently wiped away his tears.

Hell. Getting emotional was exhausting.

He remained in Zenyatta’s embrace, letting his mind drift into a pleasant haze, aided by the gentle song of Zen’s orbs and the cool caress of metal fingertips. He was on the cusp of falling asleep when Zenyatta’s voice roused him.

“Genji? Are you asleep?”

His eyes fluttered open, though he made no attempt to move.

“…I am here.”

Zen’s lap was more comfortable than it had any right to be. It was genuinely surprising, the more he thought about it. Logically, Genji knew Zen’s legs were hard steel underneath those loose pants, but he was just as comfortable here as he was curled up on his bed.

“Forgive me from denying you the rest you need, but will you do me the honor of allowing me to ask the question that has been consuming me ever since you awoke?”

Genji needed a moment to navigate through the confusingly worded question.

“…Of course, Master.”

“How are you feeling?”

He couldn’t help himself; Genji broke into a startled laugh and finally pulled himself up, sitting back on his mattress on the floor.

“You ask me that question after all…” he gestured vaguely, not quite sure what even he was getting at himself. “Master, that is a very simple question with a very complicated answer.”

“The most interesting kind of question,” Zenyatta agreed.

Genji sighed, but smiled fondly as he considered how to answer.

“I think…I am not fine. But I will be.”

Zenyatta inclined his head thoughtfully.

“A wise answer, but perhaps I should rephrase my question: Do you need medical attention?”

“Oh.”

Did he? He felt fine, but that didn’t always mean anything these days. He was fairly limited on what he could feel inside himself anymore, and he did just have a near-death experience… He picked up his visor from where it had been set beside the bed and put it on, calling up his internal diagnostics with a thought. He scanned through the system report that scrolled across the visor HUD. Shit. Zen was right. He’d had one hell of a close call. Core temperature had dropped to critical levels, his SpO2 had fallen below 70%, and his heart had just started an arrhythmic pattern when Zenyatta had rebooted his cybernetics. After that, his readings all seemed to normalize and remain that way.

“No,” he finally said decisively. “It seems I was dying because my life support was disabled and when you reactivated it I…well…stopped dying.”

He bowed his head.

“Thank you, Master. It appears you have saved me once again.”

“I will confess that I prefer to be responsible for your spiritual salvation over your continued mortal existence,” Zen said. “It’s far less terrifying and employs a great deal more meditation and tea, which is more preferable to bandages and emergency hotwiring. But you are most welcome.”

Genji stopped.

Wait.

“Hotwiring?” Genji asked.

“Ah…” Zenyatta actually sounded embarrassed. “I may have perhaps exaggerated the ease of which I was to able interface your cybernetics to my mainframe. I was forced to utilize…creative methods to allow me access to your remarkably well protected systems, both hardware and software.”

“Are you saying you hotwired me like a stolen car?” Genji asked, sure he was supposed to feel violated, but instead feeling rather impressed.

“I assure you,” Zen said with that absolute calm confidence that Genji had grown to love. “that I would only steal the most luxurious of cars. Only the finest deluxe models.”

“Well, then it had better be sleek.”

“Absolutely. Very streamlined.”

“And stylish.”

“Oh, unquestionably stylish. Very sporty, too. Fit and trim.”

“Now you’re just flattering me.”

“You? I thought we were discussing automobiles and the criminal element.”

Genji laughed, his heart a little lighter already, but he could feel exhaustion rising up to meet him once again.

“Rest,” Zenyatta said, sensing Genji’s fatigue and urged him to lie back on the bed. “We can discuss more once you awaken next.”

“Thank you,” Genji said and curled up on his mattress. Zenyatta laid a thick quilt over him, the same blanket he’d been blindly searching for when he first awoke.

“You are most welcome, my dearest student. I will be here when you wake.”

On that reassuring promise, Genji let himself drift into sleep once more, calm and gentle as falling snow.

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Fire Season Comes Early To California (CNN) Fire weather is coming early to California this year. For the first time since 2014, parts of Northern California are seeing a May “red flag” fire warning due to dry and windy conditions. The warning coverage area extends from Redding in the north to Modesto in the south, and includes portions of the Central Valley and the state capital of Sacramento. The warning also extends to the eastern edges of the Bay Area. A brush fire that started Friday in Pacific Palisades flared up Saturday due to gusty winds, burning more than 1,300 acres and threatening homes in Topanga Canyon. Topanga State Park in the Santa Monica Mountains is about 20 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. The Palisades fire caused about 1,000 people to be evacuated from their homes early Sunday, with other residents on standby to leave.

Pandemic Refugees at the Border (NYT) The Biden administration continues to grapple with swelling numbers of migrants along the southwestern border. Most of them are from Central America, fleeing gang violence and natural disasters. But the past few months have also brought a much different wave of migration that the Biden administration was not prepared to address: pandemic refugees. They are people arriving in ever greater numbers from far-flung countries where the coronavirus has caused unimaginable levels of illness and death and decimated economies and livelihoods. If eking out an existence was challenging in such countries before, in many of them it has now become almost impossible. According to official data released this week, 30 percent of all families encountered along the border in April hailed from countries other than Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, compared to just 7.5 percent in April 2019, during the last border surge. The coronavirus pandemic has had far-reaching consequences for the global economy, erasing hundreds of millions of jobs. And it has disproportionately affected developing countries, where it could set back decades of progress, according to economists. About 13,000 migrants have landed in Italy, the gateway to Europe, so far this year, three times as many as in the same period last year. At the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, agents have stopped people from more than 160 countries, and the geography coincides with the path of the virus’s worst devastation.

The U.S. conversation on Israel is changing, no matter Biden’s stance (Washington Post) In Washington, support for the Palestinian plight is getting louder in Congress. On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote a widely circulated New York Times op-ed pulling the spotlight away from Hamas’s provocations to the deeper reality of life for millions of Palestinians living under blockade and occupation. He pointed to the havoc unleashed in recent weeks by rampaging mobs of Jewish extremists in Jerusalem, as well as the questionable Israeli legal attempts to forcibly evict the Palestinian residents of a neighborhood in the contested holy city. “None of this excuses the attacks by Hamas, which were an attempt to exploit the unrest in Jerusalem, or the failures of the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, which recently postponed long-overdue elections,” Sanders wrote. “But the fact of the matter is that Israel remains the one sovereign authority in the land of Israel and Palestine, and rather than preparing for peace and justice, it has been entrenching its unequal and undemocratic control.”   ��  In another era, Sanders would have cut a lonely figure among his colleagues. But he is not alone. A number of Democratic lawmakers, including solidly pro-Israel politicians, issued statements indicating their displeasure with the casualties caused by Israel’s attacks in Gaza. Others were more vocal, accusing Israel of “apartheid.” Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) tweeted: “This is happening with the support of the United States....the US vetoed the UN call for a ceasefire. If the Biden admin can’t stand up to an ally, who can it stand up to? How can they credibly claim to stand for human rights?” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a center-left pro-Israel advocacy organization that increasingly reflects the mainstream position of American liberals, said in a briefing with reporters last week that the “diplomatic blank check to the state of Israel” given out by successive U.S. administrations has meant that “Israel has no incentive to end occupation and find a solution to the conflict.”

Mexico City is sinking (Wired) When Darío Solano‐Rojas moved from his hometown of Cuernavaca to Mexico City to study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the layout of the metropolis confused him. “What surprised me was that everything was kind of twisted and tilted,” says Solano‐Rojas. “At that time, I didn't know what it was about. I just thought, ‘Oh, well, the city is so much different than my hometown.’” Different, it turned out, in a bad way. Picking up the study of geology at the university, Solano‐Rojas met geophysicist Enrique Cabral-Cano, who was actually researching the surprising reason for that infrastructural chaos: The city was sinking—big time. It’s the result of a geological phenomenon called subsidence, which usually happens when too much water is drawn from underground, and the land above begins to compact. According to new modeling by the two researchers and their colleagues, parts of the city are sinking as much as 20 inches a year. In the next century and a half, they calculate, areas could drop by as much as 65 feet. Spots just outside Mexico City proper could sink 100 feet. That twisting and tilting Solano‐Rojas noticed was just the start of a slow-motion crisis for 9.2 million people in the fastest-sinking city on Earth. And because some parts are slumping dramatically and others aren’t, the infrastructure that spans the two zones is sinking in some areas but staying at the same elevation in others. And that threatens to break roads, metro networks, and sewer systems. “Subsistence by itself may not be a terrible issue,” says Cabral-Cano. “But it's the difference in this subsistence velocity that really puts all civil structures under different stresses.”

Today’s the day: British holidaymakers return to Portugal as travel ban ends (Reuters) Sun-hungry British visitors descended on Portuguese beaches once again on Monday as a four-month long ban on travel between the two countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic ended, in a much-needed boost for the struggling tourism sector. Twenty-two flights from Britain are due to land in Portugal on Monday, with most heading to the southern Algarve region, famous for its beaches and golf courses but nearly deserted as the pandemic kept tourists away. Visitors from Britain must present evidence of a negative coronavirus test taken 72 hours before boarding their flights to Portugal and there is no need to quarantine for COVID-19 when returning home. Back at home, most British people will be free once again to hug, albeit cautiously, drink a pint in their pub, sit down to an indoor meal or visit the cinema after the ending of a series of lockdowns that imposed the strictest ever restrictions in peacetime.

Afghans who helped the US now fear being left behind (AP) He served as an interpreter alongside U.S. soldiers on hundreds of patrols and dozens of firefights in eastern Afghanistan, earning a glowing letter of recommendation from an American platoon commander and a medal of commendation. Still, Ayazudin Hilal was turned down when he applied for one of the scarce special visas that would allow him to relocate to the U.S. with his family. Now, as American and NATO forces prepare to leave the country, he and thousands of others who aided the war effort fear they will be left stranded, facing the prospect of Taliban reprisals. “We are not safe,” the 41-year-old father of six said of Afghan civilians who worked for the U.S. or NATO. “The Taliban is calling us and telling us, ‘Your stepbrother is leaving the country soon, and we will kill all of you guys.’” At least 300 interpreters have been killed in Afghanistan since 2016, and the Taliban have made it clear they will continue to be targeted, said Matt Zeller, a co-founder of No One Left Behind, an organization that advocates on their behalf. He also served in the country as an Army officer. “The Taliban considers them to be literally enemies of Islam,” said Zeller, now a fellow at the Truman National Security Project. “There’s no mercy for them.”

A Desperate India Falls Prey to Covid Scammers (NYT) Within the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak, few treasures are more coveted than an empty oxygen canister. India’s hospitals desperately need the metal cylinders to store and transport the lifesaving gas as patients across the country gasp for breath. So a local charity reacted with outrage when one supplier more than doubled the price, to nearly $200 each. The charity called the police, who discovered what could be one of the most brazen, dangerous scams in a country awash with coronavirus-related fraud and black-market profiteering. The police say the supplier—a business called Varsha Engineering, essentially a scrapyard—had been repainting fire extinguishers and selling them as oxygen canisters. The consequences could be deadly: The less-sturdy fire extinguishers might explode if filled with high-pressure oxygen. A coronavirus second wave has devastated India’s medical system. Hospitals are full. Drugs, vaccines, oxygen and other supplies are running out. Pandemic profiteers are filling the gap. In many cases, the sellers prey on the desperation and grief of families.

Full-blown boycott pushed for Beijing Olympics (AP) Groups alleging human-rights abuses against minorities in China are calling for a full-blown boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, a move likely to ratchet up pressure on the International Olympic Committee, athletes, sponsors and sports federations. A coalition representing Uyghurs, Tibetans, residents of Hong Kong and others issued a statement Monday calling for the boycott, eschewing lesser measures that had been floated like “diplomatic boycotts” and further negotiations with the IOC or China. “The time for talking with the IOC is over,” Lhadon Tethong of the Tibet Action Institute said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. “This cannot be games as usual or business as usual; not for the IOC and not for the international community.” The push for a boycott comes a day before a joint hearing in the U.S. Congress focusing on the Beijing Olympics and China’s human-rights record, and just days after the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee said boycotts are ineffective and only hurt athletes.

Grief Mounts as Efforts to Ease Israel-Hamas Fight Falter (NYT) Diplomats and international leaders were unable Sunday to mediate a cease-fire in the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed to continue the fight and the United Nations Security Council failed to agree on a joint response to the worsening bloodshed. The diplomatic wrangling occurred after the fighting, the most intense seen in Gaza and Israel for seven years, entered its deadliest phase yet. At least 42 Palestinians were killed early Sunday morning in an airstrike on several apartments in Gaza City, Palestinian officials said, the conflict’s most lethal episode so far. The number of people in killed in Gaza rose to 197 over the seven days of the conflict, according to Palestinian officials, while the number of Israeli residents killed by Palestinian militants climbed to 11, including one soldier, the Israeli government said.

Israel, Hamas trade fire in Gaza as war rages on (AP) Israel carried out a wave of airstrikes on what it said were militant targets in Gaza, leveling a six-story building, and militants fired dozens of rockets into Israel on Tuesday. Palestinians across the region observed a general strike as the war, now in its second week, showed no signs of abating. The strikes toppled a building that housed libraries and educational centers belonging to the Islamic University. Residents sifted through the rubble, searching for their belongings.

Israel’s aftermath (Foreign Policy) In Israel, the aftermath of days of violence in mixed Arab-Israeli towns has led to a one-sided reaction from state prosecutors: Of the 116 indictments served so far against those arrested last week, all have been against Arab-Israeli citizens, Haaretz reports. Meanwhile, Yair Lapid, whose centrist Yesh Atid party’s chances of forming a coalition government has crumbled since the violence broke out, placed the blame on Netanyahu. If he was in charge, Lapid said on Sunday, no one would have to question “why the fire always breaks out precisely when it’s most convenient for the prime minister.”

Long working hours can be a killer, WHO study shows (Reuters) Working long hours is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year in a worsening trend that may accelerate further due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization said on Monday. In the first global study of the loss of life associated with longer working hours, the paper in the journal Environment International showed that 745,000 people died from stroke and heart disease associated with long working hours in 2016. That was an increase of nearly 30% from 2000. “Working 55 hours or more per week is a serious health hazard,” said Maria Neira, director of the WHO’s Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health. The joint study, produced by the WHO and the International Labour Organization, showed that most victims (72%) were men and were middle-aged or older. Often, the deaths occurred much later in life, sometimes decades later, than the shifts worked. It also showed that people living in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific region were the most affected.

[lightoftruth]

where'd you hear that?you know, those camps were built in lots of places, good lord, God will not let it get all walking dead and stuff... why cause rumor? THAT's my question to you... This is how bad...

It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

The groundwork has already been laid.

Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the president and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government or objecting to a COVID-19 vaccine could get you labeled as a terrorist.

After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

For instance, the Department of Homeland Security broadly defines extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

Military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan may also be characterized as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats by the government because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

Indeed, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

According to the FBI, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories or dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s.

The government also has a growing list – shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies – of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

It’s happened before.

As history shows, the U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own purposes.

One need only go back to the 1940s, when the federal government proclaimed that Japanese-Americans, labeled potential dissidents, could be put in concentration (a.k.a. internment) camps based only upon their ethnic origin, to see the lengths the federal government will go to in order to maintain “order” in the homeland.

The U.S. Supreme Court validated the detention program in Korematsu v. US (1944), concluding that the government’s need to ensure the safety of the country trumped personal liberties.

Although that Korematsu decision was never formally overturned, Chief Justice Roberts opined in Trump v. Hawaii (2018) that “the forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority.”

Roberts’ statements provide little assurance of safety in light of the government’s tendency to sidestep the rule of law when it suits its purposes. Pointing out that such blatantly illegal detentions could happen again – with the blessing of the courts – Justice Scalia once warned, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

In fact, the creation of detention camps domestically has long been part of the government’s budget and operations, falling under the jurisdiction of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

FEMA’s murky history dates back to the 1970s, when President Carter created it by way of an executive order merging many of the government’s disaster relief agencies into one large agency.

During the 1980s, however, reports began to surface of secret military-type training exercises carried out by FEMA and the Department of Defense. Code named Rex-84, 34 federal agencies, including the CIA and the Secret Service, were trained on how to deal with domestic civil unrest.

FEMA’s role in creating top-secret American internment camps is well-documented.

But be careful who you share this information with: it turns out that voicing concerns about the existence of FEMA detention camps is among the growing list of opinions and activities which may make a federal agent or government official think you’re an extremist (a.k.a. terrorist), or sympathetic to terrorist activities, and thus qualify you for indefinite detention under the NDAA.

Also included in that list of “dangerous” viewpoints are advocating states’ rights, believing the state to be unnecessary or undesirable, “conspiracy theorizing,” concern about alleged FEMA camps, opposition to war, organizing for “economic justice,” frustration with “mainstream ideologies,” opposition to abortion, opposition to globalization, and ammunition stockpiling.

Now if you’re going to have internment camps on American soil, someone has to build them.

Thus, in 2006, it was announced that Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, had been awarded a $385 million contract to build American detention facilities. Although the government and Halliburton were not forthcoming about where or when these domestic detention centers would be built, they rationalized the need for them in case of “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs” in the event of other emergencies such as “natural disasters.”

Of course, these detention camps will have to be used for anyone viewed as a threat to the government, and that includes political dissidents.

So it’s no coincidence that the U.S. government has, since the 1980s, acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation.

As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. There are at least 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.

Fast forward to 2009, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal rights activist groups as extremists.

Incredibly, both reports use the words terrorist and extremist interchangeably.

That same year, the DHS launched Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq, Afghanistan and other far-flung places, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

These reports indicate that for the government, so-called extremism is not a partisan matter. Anyone seen as opposing the government – whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between – is a target, which brings us back, full circle, to the question of whether the government will exercise the power it claims to possess to detain anyone perceived as a threat, i.e., anyone critical of the government.

The short answer is: yes.

The longer answer is more complicated.

Despite what some may think, the Constitution is no magical incantation against government wrongdoing. Indeed, it’s only as effective as those who abide by it.

However, without courts willing to uphold the Constitution’s provisions when government officials disregard it and a citizenry knowledgeable enough to be outraged when those provisions are undermined, it provides little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions and the like.

Frankly, the courts and the police have meshed in their thinking to such an extent that anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism.

Consequently, America no longer operates under a system of justice characterized by due process, an assumption of innocence, probable cause and clear prohibitions on government overreach and police abuse. Instead, our courts of justice have been transformed into courts of order, advocating for the government’s interests, rather than championing the rights of the citizenry, as enshrined in the Constitution.

We seem to be coming full circle on many fronts.

Consider that two decades ago we were debating whether non-citizens—for example, so-called enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay and Muslim-Americans rounded up in the wake of 9/11—were entitled to protections under the Constitution, specifically as they relate to indefinite detention. Americans weren’t overly concerned about the rights of non-citizens then, and now we’re the ones in the unenviable position of being targeted for indefinite detention by our own government.

Similarly, most Americans weren’t unduly concerned when the U.S. Supreme Court gave Arizona police officers the green light to stop, search and question anyone – ostensibly those fitting a particular racial profile – they suspected might be an illegal immigrant. A decade later, the cops largely have carte blanche authority to stop any individual, citizen and non-citizen alike, they suspect might be doing something illegal (mind you, in this age of overcriminalization, that could be anything from feeding the birds to growing exotic orchids).

Likewise, you still have a sizeable portion of the population today unconcerned about the government’s practice of spying on Americans, having been brainwashed into believing that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.

It will only be a matter of time before they learn the hard way that in a police state, it doesn’t matter who you are or how righteous you claim to be, because eventually, you will be lumped in with everyone else and everything you do will be “wrong” and suspect.

Indeed, it’s happening already, with police relying on surveillance software such as ShadowDragon to watch people’s social media and other website activity, whether or not they suspected of a crime, and potentially use it against them when the need arises.

It turns out that we are Soylent Green, being cannibalized by a government greedily looking to squeeze every last drop out of us.

The 1973 film Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.

Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, Soylent Green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”

Oh, how right he was.

Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us in prisons of our own making.

Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights when power, technology and militaristic governance converge, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted, and go where we wanted without those thoughts, words and movements being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

We’re not quite there yet, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that moment of reckoning is getting closer by the minute.

SOURCE: Rutherford.org

Constitutional attorney and author John Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute.

Support LeoHohmann.com. We are committed to investigative reporting and relevant, concise analysis for a 21 century audience that is awake and in search of answers. If you appreciate our articles and commentaries, please consider a donation of any size. You may send c/o Leo Hohmann, PO Box 291, Newnan, GA 30264, or via credit card below.

[sigurdjarlson]

some ramblings on Yrel and what not. (BFA SPOILERS)

Hmmm I was doing talador questline on Gaillen today (because if I visit my garrison for one sec I get roped back into WoD) and Maarad would have been a better fit for leading a fanatical section or Draenei “we should have killed all the orcs when we arrived here.” But.. they killed him in WoD so they used Yrel instead now

iff he didn’t die...if they wanted they could have had him get lost in his desire for vengeance like Yrel worries he will. Manipulated by some light entity like Xe’ra I could see his guilt, grief and pain being twisted into something more dangerous.

but Yrel? It doesn’t fit. You get moments where she lashes out but never like Maarad does. In fact she worries that his anger will control him.

I suppose I could see MAYBE if something/someone like Xe’ra manipulated her into her overly zealous behavior. Using her sister’s death (and Maarad, Velen, etc) as a tool to make her do what the Light wants. Also Draenei are notably devoted in their worshipping is the light. If the light (a being like the naaru, a leader who represents it, etc) tells them to do something many of them will do it without question because to them the Light is the embodiment of all that is good. It wouldn’t tell them to do something wrong right? So they must be right. They’re right because the Light says so and that blind trust and worship becomes something much more dangerous when something as insidious and extremist as Xe’ra uses it to their advantage.

the lesson being that any kind of extremism (whether dark or light) can very quickly become something dangerous at best and horrific at its worst.

religion being used (both unconsciously and consciously) to justify awful things isn’t a new concept. You can see that with most extreme religious groups. I could go into more about how cults form and the psychology that fuels this kind of behavior but I won’t bore anyone with that.

Yrel coming to her senses would be my preferred outcome. The Light is her blind spot and maybe someone/something used that to their advantage. Of course she would still have full responsibility for her actions and that’s..okay. Characters fuck up. Sometimes in horrible, horrible ways. That doesn’t mean she’s lost forever and it doesn’t mean she’s a mustache twirling villain.

we know she’s insecure by nature and even though we watched her become the strong woman she is at the end of WoD..that doesn’t go away completely. Without the PC and the rest of the group to support her anymore (Khadgar, Maarad, etc) she’s left with an enormous amount of responsibility and she’s dealing with it alone. Has she even had time to mourn her loved ones? It’s not too far fetched that she might throw herself completely into her faith and sadly somehow ended up falling into the trap of extremism.

if they played this very delicately they could possibly pull it off but I’m not entirely sure if they’re going to..

I would have definitely preferred they pick someone else for this but I’m trying to make some sense out of it since this what we got.

just some thoughts. Once again I haven’t played the scenario so I don’t know shit I’m just speculating.

to be fair I think a lot of people are seeing this as a very black/white situation when it’s not and it’s what’s making people so angry. Draenei = good/victims and Orcs = Evil/Villians when..it’s not that simple. What the orcs did to the Draenei was evil but that doesn’t mean every single orc is irredeemably evil and deserves to be punished for it.

and Draenei are not all good and pure beings of light. We should know that by now..Kil’jaeden and Archi are the best examples I can think of off the top of my head. They’re individuals, with flaws, weak spots and dark sides as well as light ones.

however adding their collective blind devotion to the Light into this and there’s a recipe for disaster if someone decides to use that to their advantage to further their own ideas because “you deserve to be punished” is all and fun and dandy until they start punishing those who don’t deserve it and instead forcing their views on everyone else as well.

the Light isn’t only good. The void isn’t only bad (void elves, Alleria..). The burning legion had nuance with some characters as well. (What about demon hunters for example). What The alliance? The horde? The titans themselves? None of them are completely innocent and good and none of them are purely evil either.

I see what they’re trying to do and I definitely believe there’s more to it than what people are saying so I’m interested to play it when it comes out. (Remember how everyone thought Illidan was becoming an uwu never done anything wrong in his life hero? People are incapable of seeing nuance I swear. Also everyone thought Xe’ra was being portrayed as right when there not at all what they intended (proved by illidan fuckign killing her lmao)

still wish they would have picked someone else to lead this extremist group though. Yrel..unless they have a good story for how she got there? It doesn’t really fit. She’s flawed certainly but there has to be a reason/s she went from Yrel at the end of WoD To the Yrel in this scenario. Being manipulated by something like Xe’ra would be interesting because Xe’ra is probably far from the only type of her kind who has dubious morals (because they so steadfastly believe their cause is righteous). Contrary to popular belief /anyone/ can fall into a cult. Everyone has weaknesses and sadly some people take advantage of that.

[mr-michael-kyle]

It had been only one hour since President Biden finished an emotional defense of his withdrawal from Afghanistan, however MSNBC had found a more compelling story.

Nicolle Wallace led off her second hour with a warning concerning the Republicans.

“You can imagine the alarm we felt when we heard about this on Sunday from Congressman Madison Cawthorn,” she stated.

Two hours later, Joy Reid led her show “with the Republicans who continue to pour gasoline on the flames of January 6th.”

She used a Nazi reference in describing “junior brownshirt Madison Cawthorn,” who was “pushing the Big Lie,” issuing what would “be better described as a threat.”

And the North Carolina lawmaker is, in Reid’s view, “an embarrassing, creepy, tree-punching but sitting member of Congress.”

Next, Chris Hayes got his chance at the top of his program: “Civil War is coming, people. You know, there`s supposed to have a building crescendo for a second Civil War, a flirtation with thoughts about it among some of the right. We saw that on full display, of course, on January 6th.” And then he turned to Cawthorn.

On what planet are some heated remarks by a freshman congressman more important than the end of our 20-year war in Afghanistan, marked by the death of 13 service members and some Americans tragically left behind? Especially when the president has just given a forceful and somewhat angry speech defending his handling of the disaster?

On what planet are some heated remarks by a freshman congressman more important than the end of our 20-year war in Afghanistan?

It’s almost as if these MSNBC hosts stated whew, glad the war is over, now we can return to saving the nation from Republican extremists. Biden’s role in the chaotic end to the war was clearly not a very good story for a network catering to liberal viewers, which sees anything associated to Trump and the Capitol riot as in its sweet spot.

In fairness, these programs did cover Afghanistan later on, and other hosts — Ari Melber, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell — led with the war.

I wrote Wednesday that the political damage to Biden could be lessened if the media move on from the lost war. However I was talking about a month or so, not a couple of short hours.

Biden’s role in the chaotic end to the war was clearly not a good story for a network catering to liberal viewers.

I’m not saying that the Cawthorn controversy isn’t worth covering. However as with Marjorie Taylor Greene, he’s a Washington newcomer with no power on the Hill or within the GOP. Both parties, and all of the networks, play up wild-sounding voices from the opposite ideological side. However, leading with Cawthorn hour after hour?

At a North Carolina event, the congressman — who spoke at the Trump rally on Jan. 6 — delivered a dire message from the stolen-election camp.

“The things that we’re wanting to fight for, it doesn’t matter if our votes don’t count,” he stated. “Because, you know, if our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place — and it’s bloodshed.”

Well, that’s a scary word.

The local GOP posted a video of the speech on Facebook — it’s since been taken down — and a Democratic aide pushed it out on Twitter.

The 26-year-old Cawthorn, who’s partially paralyzed from a automobile accident, additionally uttered these ominous-sounding words:

“I’ll tell you, as much as I’m willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American. And the way that we can have recourse against that is if all of us passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states.”

Cawthorn’s spokesman issued a statement saying the congressman was “in no way supporting or advocating for any form of violence.” In fact, he’s “CLEARLY advocating for violence not to happen over election integrity questions” and “fears others would erroneously choose that route.”

You can decide whether or not he was sending not-so-subtle warnings or not. By the way, Cawthorn has additionally called for Biden’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, saying: “I’ll remove Joe Biden from office, and then, when Kamala Harris inevitably screws up, we’ll take them down, one at a time.”

He naturally didn’t imply anything illegal by “take them down,” his PR person insists.

Other media outlets, including The Washington Post, have jumped on this as well. CNN’s Chris Cillizza says Cawthorn “hasn’t grasped that angry and inflammatory rhetoric in the service of political expedience has real-world consequences.” Liz Cheney says Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans ought to “condemn” Cawthorn’s remarks and explain why they’re “dangerous.”

However on another level, that is all talk by somebody who wields no real clout. Cawthorn has clearly learned the way to use the media — one might say the same about AOC, in a totally different context — to amplify his message.

That doesn’t imply the press has to play along, even if MSNBC offers it top-story treatment.