#'now i know you may not think the increase in violent crime is a direct result of a food shortage but - '

[yepthatsacowalright]

While some Hozier fans have been inspired by Unreal Unearth to read Dante's Inferno, my nerd ass is over here working my way through an Irish history podcast, called Irish History Podcast, while muttering things like, "Eat the rich." and "Ah, just like what happened in 2020." to myself.

[weasleydream]

dreams are my reality - part 3

it’s finally here! This part is what happened during that fateful night and only that. Also i messed with the timeline but nothing too bad. 

This may be a bit violent, mention of death and blood.

As usual, feel free to like, comment, reblog and enjoy!

Masterlist

~ i’ll see how the real thing can be and it’s not pretty ~

The muggle village - August 1983

“I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have left us, just that a good friend wouldn’t have cleared out just because McGonagall was walking in the same corridor.”

“Sirius, would you shut up?” I hissed, ready to break his neck if he added one word that wasn’t a yes. 

“Of course I’ll shut up, as soon as you admit that quitting on us was a bad thing to do.”

I didn’t need to look at him to know he was smiling goofily, seemingly unaware of the fact that we were walking in an empty alley just because we were looking for a dangerous death eater. 

“First of all, you could have run away too if your arse wasn’t glued to the floor. And McGonagall wasn’t just walking in the same corridor, she was coming for us! And Sirius, we were in first year and James and you had dragged me there against my will. Remember?”

And it was true; the memory of Sirius claiming I would be the coolest girl of the school was still fresh in my mind, and with the terror brought by the sound of McGonagall’s steps, I knew it would stay engraved in my brain for a very long time. 

“Dragged you?” Sirius made a clicking noise with his tongue. “I’m not even sure one of us grabbed your hand.”

“Oh, not only my hand you idiot, my bag and my wand too!”

“And? You’re clearly not traumatized so-”

Sirius’ voice had died in his throat as soon as the explosion had echoed, yet my blood froze in my veins at the thought that maybe he had gotten us spotted. With the discretion of a cat with soft paws, he crossed the short distance that was separating us and placed himself ahead of me. A glance in my direction - Are you ready? - and a firm nod later, we were running silently toward the place of the village, hoping with all our heart that no one was hurt. 

Obviously, the death eater had already left the crime scene. Sirius and I were the last of our group to get there. Remus and James were turning all around the place like caged lions, probably looking for any clue of where the responsible had disappeared. Lily and Peter were struggling in front of the burning church, trying to get the fire to stop and to get the survivors out of this hell. A woman ran into me and my arms wrapped instinctively around her; hers were trembling and her covered in soot hands were slipping on my skin. She was mumbling incoherent sentences in which I didn’t understand anything, and I was sure she was speaking another language. However, her frantic gestures toward the fire lighted something in me, an urge to get in the furnace without even knowing why. I looked up a second to see Lily fussing over a wounded man and Sirius and Peter still trying to control the fire. No one could help me with the poor woman. 

She cried out something, a word I didn’t understand. 

“Nena! Nena!” 

“I don’t know what it means!” I screamed, cursing myself for not being able to understand a single word. 

She pointed the finger at her belly, at her heart and finally at the fire. Slowly - way too slowly - I understood what it meant. A baby was in there. I nodded frantically and the woman fell on her knees. I didn’t have the time to check on her; instead, I went to Sirius and tried to get him to help me. He was totally freaking out, and his panic only increased when he realized what I was telling him. 

“With me!” he yelled, and we joined forces to try and extinguish the fire once and for all. 

Finally, the last flames died, the last proof of its presence being the ashes flying in the air. The woman rushed between the smoldering ruins and I was ready to follow her, but Sirius grabbed my wrist. A split second later, a terrible cry echoed, and Sirius shook his head. 

At the very same moment, something exploded a few streets away. 

“James!” 

It was Lily, and she lost no time in running toward the root cause of the noise. We followed her and found a half fallen house in front of James and Remus, the both of them looking infuriated. 

“The bastard!” 

Through gritted teeth, Remus told us how they were sure someone had led them there before making the batiment explode and James added the death eater - because it was obviously him - had been careful to stay well hidden. 

“So that means we’re running blindly behind him?” asked Peter, his voice still hoarse from the smoke of the fire. 

“Running blindly and doing whatever he wants us to.” I added darkly. 

Even James and Sirius knew it had been a bad idea to accept this mission, now. Both of them had their eyes wild and were glancing frequently at each other. 

“So? What do we do now that he’s disappeared and we don’t know where to look?” muttered Lily before hiding her face in James’ neck, probably having a bout of nausea after everything we had already gone through. To be honest, I was still feeling sick thinking about that poor woman and her baby. 

I was observing a stone on the ground and wishing it could tell us what we needed to know when Peter stiffened. 

“Guys,” he whispered. “Act natural, but I think we didn’t have all the information.”

“What makes you think that?” 

If Remus was sarcastic and obviously didn’t understand where Peter was going with this, something caught my eyes and the realization hit me. 

“An animagus?” I questioned quietly, and Peter nodded. 

I almost missed the black feathers, but I still caught the bird flying from a rooftop to another. Then the bird dropped to the floor, and it happened so fast that none of us had sketched a movement when it turned into a massive black silhouette half hidden in the shadows. 

“You could have gotten out of here alive if you had just ignored me.” The voice was raspy, the tone aggressive. “Too bad you didn’t.”

This last affirmation sounded like a signal; as soon as the sound of his voice had died, the death eater drew his wand and we did the same, Sirius and Remus taking a step forward. I hadn’t seen his face, yet I was picturing myself the man with a crooked rictus and with the eyes so dark that you knew just by looking at him that his soul was rotten to the core. For some unknown reason, he didn’t attack; instead, I was feeling the weight of his eyes on us. I could imagine him looking at Sirius and Remus first because they were just in front of him, measuring the trembling of their arms - not caused by fear but by fury, which he probably was aware of; then his eyes passing from them to James and Lily, just close enough for him to guess the nature of their relationship, to Peter with his wand as high as ours and finally to me. Did he know I was looking intensely in his direction? That we were all looking right at him, our muscles tensed to make sure we would react quickly enough when the attack would come? 

If he did, he didn’t care the least. It was with something that could be qualified as nonchalance that he muttered the first spell. The green light illuminated for a second his face, and his eyes were fixed on us. The curse almost hit James, and that’s when the riposte began. 

The first counterattack spell came from Remus and missed the death eater by a hair. At the same time, Sirius rushed to the enemy, followed closely by James. Lily helped Remus to get up; he had dived to the floor to dodge a curse. Peter and I were making a detour to reach the death eater’s back, counting on James and Sirius to occupy him enough. It seemed like a mess, yet it was a manoeuvre well established because of years of service in the Order. It had always worked, more or less depending on the case, but it had never failed us. Never until then, at least.

I realized things were going to get even more dangerous when the man turned his gaze to me, plunging his eyes in mine and with his lips slowly twisting in a sickening rictus whereas he was being assaulted by James. A move of the wrist had sent James flying a few meters away, hitting Sirius and bringing him to the ground in the process. He lifted his hand, and as the terror was invading me, the only thing my brain was capable of was wondering if the movement was really as slow as it seemed to be. I drew my wand but like in dreams, it felt like something was stopping my arm. A glare was burning in his eyes, it was so intense that I felt it in the depths of my body. If the thought that he was doing some wandless and wordless magic on me crossed my mind, I found myself unable to express it. 

His wand was now pointed on me, his eyes fixing me to the ground and his power keeping me defenseless. Second by second, I saw his lips moving, forming a word I didn’t recognize, his arm got more stiff, his rictus wider. And behind my back, second by second, Sirius was getting closer to me. 

The collision caught me by surprise, not so much because it was unexpected but because of the violence of it. Sirius’ shoulder hit my lower back which sent my hips forward, and my head followed one second late. Our bodies hit the hard ground, and the scream of the death eater covered our grunts of pain. He didn’t give us a moment to recover and I heard his steps before I saw him taking great strides. Sirius was already getting up, his wand firmly held high to protect the both of us, but he didn’t need it to counter the first attack. The arm of the death eater was trembling with what I thought was rage, and he missed Sirius. Instead of its initial target, the curse flew to me and scratched my skin just underneath my neck. The shock stopped me dead in my tracks. A few centimeters higher and it was over for me; the realization erased everything else in my mind, even the painful burning sensation where my blood was now flowing. 

This time, the death eater didn’t mutter the curse. He yelled it, angrier than before, and the sound of his voice masked the noise provoked by Remus, who I saw approaching in his back. A green halo surrounded the death eater and disappeared in a heartbeat, barely illuminating the scene enough for the lifeless body of our enemy to be seen falling. However, I saw perfectly well his last curse making his way straight to Sirius’ torso. 

Sirius’ facial expressions changed from relief to shock and then to pain, to agony. His hands reached to his shirt, and when he removed them, they appeared red, bloody. His fall began with the buckling of his knees. They hit the floor, and his body, drained of all its strength, tilted forward. His arms had gone limp and his face crashed to the ground. 

It had all happened in less than a second. 

I was unable to move.

Somewhere at my right, several grunts escaped Peter’s mouth as Lily and James were helping him. I didn’t process his bloody leg, nor did I realize Lily was using only her right hand. Remus was already at Sirius’ side, and it’s only when he looked up to me with wet eyes that something clicked. 

“Sirius!”

To be continued...

[warsmith-38]

How I would do RWBY pt.6

Season Six.

RWBY and JNR (and Ozpin, Qrow, and Ilia) on route to Atlas.

SSSN and CFVY have responsibilities in Mistral so they stay back. IE: Ozpin now doubts their loyalty due to their headmaster being compromised.

RWBY and co. get stopped at SDC border checkpoint.

Almost get detained for questioning.

Blake remembers the last time a friend of hers was ‘detained for questioning’.

Winter intervenes, using the authority of the military. Allows RWBY and co. into Atlas.

As soon as they get a moment away from the grunts Winter embraces her sister and admonishes her for not even leaving a note when she left.

She understands why she left, but still.

Blake ribs her a little.

Yang points out to everyone that she’s the only one who’s never ran off without telling anyone.

Winter takes them all to Ironwood.

Ironwood explains that the Atlas military has been doing everything they can to keep the peace short of using scorched earth tactics.

The SDC and the White Fang have armed patrols going through the streets, are having regular firefights in the streets, harassing civilians, and blowing shit up, but almost always peace out when the military shows up.

Jacques is incommunicado and Sienna hasn’t been publicly seen in Atlas for over a decade.

The Atlas government is a bunch of corrupt fuckwits taking bribes from both sides (and Salem too).

Ironwood is doing all he can, but he’s being forced to do it with his hands tied behind his back.

Ruby wants to know if anyone’s seen Cinder.

Ironwood tells her that they’ve been busy with more pressing matters.

Winter says that she has encountered and even fought CEMN.

She lost half of her unit and CEMN got away.

No sign since then and no agents to spare to chase them anyway.

Ruby’s disappointment is curbed by being reunited with rebuilt Penny.

Aren’t data backups a beautiful thing?

She lucked out that her memory core wasn’t destroyed with the rest of her old body.

Her new body, to make room for newer and better features, had to do away with the data backup thing.

If she dies now, she’s dead for good. She only had the one extra life.

Both are beyond overjoyed to see each other again.

Both thought the other was dead until Penny saw Ruby on a news broadcast from Mistral.

Ruby cries while saying that she never thought she’d be able to hold Penny in a hug ever again.

Ciel is there too, not that anyone in or out of universe really cares. (…I care)

She is Penny’s supervisor as well as both Ironwood’s and Winter’s aide.

If she was old enough, she’d take up every vice there is due to how crappy her jobs are.

Everyone notices that Ironwood’s forces are almost equal parts human and faunus.

They cite that they’re sick of the SDC’s many abuses, the White Fang’s lies and broken promises, and the self-righteous indignation of the both of them.

Both sides suck and they have chosen option three.

Option three being telling both sides to go fuck themselves.

Ilia starts to think about things.

Weiss and Winter go to try to talk to Jacques to get whatever intel they can and/or stop the fighting.

Blake and Ilia try the same with Sienna, following whatever dead drop signs they can.

SDC secretary tries to wave Weiss and Winter off.

Jacques hears that his daughters are here and drops everything to talk to them.

W+W try and get Jacques to de-escalate.

He says he’s stuck in a stalemate and can’t even if he wanted to.

If he de-escalates then the White Fang will go wild at the sign of weakness.

He also admits that he’s ready to do the same should the White Fang try to de-escalate.

W+W tell him there’s a good chance that most of the more recent problems are Cinder and co. operating as accelerationists.

Willow enters the picture and sides with her daughters.

Eventually browbeat him into agreeing to a negotiation with Sienna if she also agrees.

Weiss has moment with her mother, finally addressing family problems.

Willow tells her that Jacques was contacted long ago by someone willing to give him an extra monetary and military edge in the fight.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that that someone was Salem.

Weiss is considerably less optimistic about the peace talks now.

Blake and Ilia manage to track down Sienna.

They get sneers and threatening looks from the White Fang members at her hideout.

Blake gets a ‘I’m sorry you had to kill your ex-boyfriend’ hug from aunty Sienna.

Blake accepts the hug in the name of diplomacy.

Doesn’t mention that a good chunk of Adam’s problems were made worse by Sienna’s actions and prompting or were just straight up her fault.

Blake and Ilia try to get Sienna to de-escalate.

Yeah, talking, that’s how you stop violent terrorists, totally. That’s a thing that works.

Sienna tells them that she will only de-escalate if Jacques does so first.

Until she gets a token gesture, it’s business as usual.

Blake tells Sienna about Cinder and that she’s probably causing most of the recent issues for Salem.

Ilia corroborates.

Sienna says she already knows and doesn’t care as long as it might give her an edge.

Damn the ever increasing body count.

Besides, Salem herself has been bankrolling a good chunk of the White Fang’s efforts for a while now.

Blake leaves in a huff and Ilia goes with her, both now entirely disillusioned with Sienna’s leadership as well as Sienna herself.

Ruby, Penny, and Ciel are hunting for signs of Cinder.

Get minimal results but it’s a nice opportunity for them to reconnect.

Penny is more than a little worried at how starved for vengeance Ruby is.

Ciel is skeptical as to if it’s a good idea to leave Penny alone with Ruby.

Yang is with Ironwood, trying to help however she can. Mostly kicking the ass of anyone who slacks off.

Yang is a pretty damn good XO.

She may not have the head for direct leadership, but is good at making troops do their best.

She has gained experience in such things since working with RWB.

Jaune is strategizing circles around Ironwood’s upper echelon.

Hasn’t acted this smug since wargaming night.

Ren and Nora are helping the boots on the ground, even managing to catch a good amount of both SDC militia and White Fang members.

Easier to legally prosecute people if you can catch them. Looks better in the papers and such.

Ozpin is conspiring with his inner circle as to what Salem might be planning in Atlas.

Interfering with the WF-SDC conflict to this degree isn’t Salem’s style.

She didn’t start this one, but it is her style to start a war and bankroll one or both sides.

However, she would leave it at that and let the two sides kill each other as they naturally would.

Come to the conclusion that Cinder is operating as a rogue element from Salem. That makes her less predictable and, as such, all the more dangerous.

That still leaves them in the dark as to what Salem is planning in Atlas or if she even has an active plan in Atlas for that matter.

Ruby meets Penny’s ‘father,’ a weird mad scientist who has a lot of projects ranging in levels of insanity.

Projects include but aren’t limited to: Super lasers, ICBMs, logging the genealogy of most of the planet (this one is important), Penny, making good tasting fruits taste like cat fur, pineapple on pizza, and so many more horrifying crimes against decency.

Atlas higher ups would get rid of him for being insane, but he has tenure.

Some of his projects are rather useful, too.

Ruby makes her excuses and leaves with Penny as the scientist tries to reveal certain revelations.

Yang discovers a little criminal element in the city.

That little criminal is Neo.

Yang learned her lesson from last time, takes her time to take Neo down.

Neo, surprised at how badly she’s losing, escapes with a tracker that Yang plants on her.

Weiss and Blake meet up to touch base on whatever progress they’ve made in peace talks.

Frustratingly little.

They’re both about to return to their contacts and relay plans when Sienna herself shows up with a sizable entourage.

Says that Weiss is coming with her as a bargaining chip against Jacques and asks Blake to stay out of it.

She ain’t gonna.

Ilia takes care of Sienna’s entourage.

WB vs Sienna.

Fight is cut off when SDC forces come to detain as much of RWBY as they can ‘for their own good’.

Goes about as well as expected.

Willow shows up to kick the crap out of them while Blake and Weiss cheese it.

Weiss and Winter had to get it from somewhere and they sure as shit didn’t get it from Jacques.

RWBY reconvenes.

Peace talk plan failed because both sides are led by lying douchebags more concerned about winning than the actual reasons why the fighting started.

Both sides are also being prompted to keep fighting by the same ancient witch-bitch and are too ignorantly angry to even consider the idea.

Fighting ain’t stopping but they can at least see if they can nab the people making things worse.

Ruby is eager to see if she can find and murder Cinder.

Weiss calls for an intervention on Ruby’s vengeance fetish.

Tries to tell her that this is ridiculously unhealthy and taking Cinder alive could infinitely be more useful.

Ruby lashes back at her, citing that Cinder killed Penny in front of all of them.

Penny then comes in to say salutations to everyone.

Ruby then cites that Cinder killed Ozpin.

Ozpin tells them that he’s been ‘killed’ plenty of times, Cinder ain’t special.

Ruby then cites that Cinder killed Pyrrha.

JNR point out that Ruby said less than a dozen words directly to Pyrrha during their time at Beacon and are very offended that Ruby would try and use Pyrrha’s death as a justification for her vendetta.

Ruby refuses to not go after Cinder but does reluctantly agree to try and calm down about it.

Weiss gives her a hug and says that she’s an idiot but she’s still her best friend.

Penny befriends JNR because she’s Penny.

RWBY sets off right as newest round of street skirmishes happens.

Both sides have tanks, explosives, and things that you’d need a really damn good lawyer to justify usage for ‘security’ purposes.

The latest delivery of bribes has arrived so the Atlas government orders that the military stands down and stays out of the conflict entirely.

Ironwood (with Ozpin’s prompting and despite Qrow’s objections) decides fuck that noise.

Orders that any and all SDC or White Fang combatants are to be met with extreme prejudice (the shooting kind of prejudice, not the racism kind).

What’s the government going to do, he’s the one with all the guns.

The monkey with the biggest stick makes the rules.

Peace through power! Peace through power! Peace through power!

JN(P)R work to help maintain order and minimize collateral damage in the warfare.

The P now stands for Penny.

RWBY maneuver through a warzone to where the tracker leads them.

Tracker is leading them to SDC headquarters.

CEMN are planting a big stupid bomb with a big stupid White Fang symbol on it.

CEMN season/arc final boss fight.

The plan was B fights C, Y fights N, R fights M, and Y fights E.

But we all know that was never actually going to happen.

W+Y fight E+M.

B-level 2v2 rival match. Go!

Countdown ‘til boom-boom starts.

Blake gets to work on the bomb. (She’s already had her decisive rival fight)

CEMN did their homework. It’s the exact kind of bomb that the White Fang would have used.

That also means she knows exactly how to disarm it.

Ruby chases Cinder and Neo further up the building.

Corners them and prepares for a fight.

Cinder points out that it took an insane rage state for Ruby to stand a chance and now not only does she not have that, it’s two on one.

Neo then cheap shots Cinder.

Neo reveals that she doesn’t even hate Ruby.

Ruby vs Roman was just business. Live by the sword, die by the sword. No hard feelings.

Her involvement with CEMN was just a ploy to fuck over Cinder, whom she blames for Roman’s death.

Cinder roped him into this crap, not to mention she was the one that set off the bomb that killed him.

Neo’s been subtly fucking up Cinder’s plans as much as possible without being noticeable.

If not for her, Atlas would have exploded while RWBY was chilling in Haven.

Neo’s plan was that Ruby would go berserk again and tear Cinder to pieces with Neo providing the extra edge to Ruby so that another draw doesn’t occur.

All she needed was the three of them alone together.

Is a little disappointed at Ruby’s level headedness, but is fine with helping non-berserk Ruby beat the ever-loving shit out of Cinder.

And yes, she manages to communicate all of this without speaking a word.

Cinder goes all out but so do Ruby and Neo.

Fire vs White fire with illusion bullshit.

Cinder’s grimm arm is an even greater liability than the last fight due to Ruby’s growing skill with the white fire.

Still a very dangerous opponent.

Neo gets her shit kicked in, but due to her help, Cinder is weakened.

Ruby gains a close victory.

Now comes the moment of truth.

Cinder cowers away as Ruby approaches with the scythe raised.

Neo is enjoying what she’s seeing.

Ruby cuts off the grimm arm, burning it afterwards, and cauterizes Cinder’s stump.

Neo feels gypped but shuts up (ha) when Ruby glares at her.

Says that the both of them are under arrest, but she’ll say something nice about Neo helping.

Neo is both annoyed and not willing to argue with the girl who can shoot white fire out of her eyes.

Emerald uses Willow as hostage, seemingly kills her (hallucination).

Weiss awakens her second semblance. Summoning. Summons the knight from the white trailer.

Kicks the ever-loving crap out of Emerald who then reveals that it was just her semblance and Willow is just unconscious.

Weiss still punches her and knocks her out.

Speaking of punches, Yang overpowers Mercury and knocks him out too.

Team CEMN is down like Frazier.

The bomb’s defused too.

Everyone’s proud of Ruby for resisting the urge to do brutal murder. ‘Cept Neo, that is.

Oh wait, the war is still happening.

Oh wait, no it isn’t.

SDC and White Fang stand down.

Willow and Ilia assumed command of their respective organizations, exposing all the accelerationist false-flags, and the fact that both sides were being led by members of the same Cabal.

Both sides de-escalated, stopped fighting, and detained their respective leaders to make them sit down to peace talks.

Ciel even manages to convince Ironwood to not have all of both sides lined up against a wall and shot.

Blake and Weiss give speech about togetherness and neighborliness and sunshine and you get the idea.

Jacques and Sienna both agree that ‘yeah, we could have handled all of this better, huh?’ and accept jail time while people try to fix relations that they came very close to permanently ruining.

They would have both gone to jail anyway but it sounds better to say that they ‘accepted’ the penalties.

CEMN is now also in custody. (This is seen by a motherfucker that looks like a black armored Myrmidon).

Ironwood officially crosses the Rubicon (RWBYcon, A-hey~) and deposes the corrupt fuckwits in the Atlas government and puts himself in charge as military governor.

Makes a point to emphasize to Ozpin that his position is very much temporary.

He’ll set up a new government after they’ve made Salem calm down for a century.

Ozpin ignores him and reminds everyone that this whole thing had shockingly little to do with Salem’s current masterplan.

They still have work to do.

But they did just finish taking out every meaningful member of The Cabal.

So for now they’ve earned a little party to blow off some steam.

Season six done.

World Travel arc done.

[intelligencebites]

The Fight Against Domestic SELF-Radicalization in the U.S.

“Self-radicalization refers to the phenomenon wherein individuals radicalize by consuming extremist literature but have few, if any, formal ties to any terrorist organization.” (Lawfare 2016) 

In the past when America has dealt with active shootings, violent hate crimes, and lone wolf terrorist attacks that were domestic in nature; we typically saw individuals who were mentally disturbed, or had previous violent tendencies and encounters that were well documented (despite the lack of attention to them), or a hate group which were on the fringes of society. We cannot and should not diminish or lower the horrific nature of some of the attacks perpetrated by some of those people and groups, but fortunately or unfortunately they were events that law enforcement, the legal establishment and American society as a whole felt able too, penalize and rationalize why it likely happened.  However, what we see currently in our society now, is an uptick of primarily ONLY violent crimes, an increase of hostile and unbelieving perceptions of mainstream establishments by everyday people, and the downright autocratic slant of some political parties in recent years, has created a TIPPING Point in our American society that we have to drastically fight our way back from before we are reshaped into something much worse than what we saw after the civil war.  

To be quite frank the fact that 74 Million or more people voted for the losing President and supported the majority of his rhetoric is more telling than ANYTHING that has happened before or after the most recent election. I’m not a political person, I’ve always worked for “a-political” organizations such as the U.S. Military, the U.S. Capitol Police, the Central Intelligence Agency, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security; and although each of us who work in those organizations have our own personal and private beliefs, most of us believe that what we do in those organizations is BIGGER than all of us and that the Service that we provide is what keeps AMERICA safe and free.  However, with that said I am not blind to the reality that people generally gravitate to the interests and people which they most feel comfortable with overall. Security-wise we are facing a threat from forces that previously were forced underground after the civil rights changes and updates of the 60′s through early 80′s. Something has changed to make over half of the majority demographic in this country feel less safe and less entitled to the freedoms they were born into. Maybe it’s a social behavioral problem at its root, but for the purposes of this “Intelligence Bite” (blog) and the profession I have carved out for over the last 26 years, it is the THREAT of violence that seems inevitable and what we have to prepare for and fight against.  

Below are a few ACTIONABLE STEPS we recommend people do to pull ourselves off the radicalization wagon. 

1. Be aware that when you use social media there is an entire opposition force within  adversary countries such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, who have the capacity, motive and intent to covertly influence your perceptions of another group of people of whom you may or may not agree. 

This is dangerous because say a person doesn’t quite understand BLACK LIVES MATTER (BLM), they grew up in the early to late 90′s thus they did see the civil rights struggle firsthand; they believe that the fact we had a Black President is indicative that the civil rights struggle is pretty much over, and that overall those Black Americans who protest inequality missed the memo on the 44th President. Those factors about a person can easily be seen and understood by the groups that users join, the threads users read, and the posts that users make. So then that Foreign Troll throws gas on the fire and digs into a RED line psychological area that you (the user) care most about.. such as “Post: BLM was founded by Marxist and they hate America”; thus the easy assumption is All people who fly under the BLM banner MUST hate America. 

Looking at this critically, even if you are a “Marxist” it doesn’t automatically mean you Hate America; also BLM to most Black Americans has nothing to do with Marxist philosophy or ideology, and I’d wager that the majority that support and believe in the movement know nothing about the political roots of its founder real or unreal. The POINT is, that what may have been a guy or a girl on the fence and minding their business about BLM, suddenly they are emotionally and politically involved. Thus, one by one, this causes damaging rifts between everyday people, damaging rifts between political parties, and damaging rifts within the fabric of our Democracy. 

2. Research the people and institutions that mean so much to you. 

This is a fairly direct and simple one, before we pledge ourselves to a way of thinking that makes us feel most comfortable. Please learn where the information came from, and if possible learn about the person(s) and groups/organizations that you support. A lot of the time people react off of emotion, which may lead to them following a group or person that is often many times less than scrupulous and not really the kind of person an average American would want to be affiliated with overall. Thinking and living critically and with purpose is the key to seeing the truth, for whatever it may be. There is no ONE source of information that has all the answers, go through at least TEN sources and then see how many out of SIX of those sources seem to say the same thing and then consider what the opposing sources say and if they make sense in the larger scheme of things. Once that’s the done, then get the opinion of someone you trust. Then make a decision about what you read.

What we ask above in our actionable steps is easy but it is not normal and thus likely very difficult. However we at S3 GSG feel it is part of the solution to keep Americans from SELF-radicalization and future catastrophe.  S3 Global Security Group CEO - Bobby L. Sheppard  Mr. Sheppard has spent over 25 years serving in the National Security Community beginning in law enforcement and then over 15 years with the intelligence community. Mr. Sheppard is the CEO of S3 Global Security Group LLC and the Physical Security-As-A-Service start up Malwork.com. 

[tlbodine]

The History & Evolution of Home Invasion Horror

Here’s my prediction: In the next couple of years, we’re going to be seeing a sudden surge of home invasion movies hit the market. For many of us, 2020 has been a year of extreme stress compounded by social isolation; venturing outside means being exposed to a deadly plague, after all. 

And while many people have already predicted that we’ll see an influx of pandemic and virus horrors (see my post on those: https://ko-fi.com/post/Pandemic-and-Pandemonium-Sickness-in-Horror-T6T21I201), I actually think a lot of us are going to be processing a different type of fear -- anxiety about what happens when your home, which is supposed to be a literal safe space, gets invaded. Because if you’re not safe in your own house...you’re not safe anywhere. 

Home invasion movies have been around a long time -- arguably as long as film, with 1909′s The Lonely Villa setting down the formula -- and they share many of the same roots as slasher films in the 1970s. But somewhere along the way, they separated off and became their own distinct subgenre with specific tropes, and it’s that separation and the stories that followed it that I want to focus on. 

The Origins of the Home Invasion Movie 

In order to really qualify as a home invasion movie, a film has to meet a few requirements:

The action must be contained entirely (or almost entirely) to a single location, usually a private residence (ie, the home) 

The perpetrator(s) must be humans, not supernatural entities (no ghosts, zombies, or vampires -- that’s a different set of tropes!) 

In most cases, the horror builds during a long siege between the invader and the home-dweller, including scenes of torture, capture, escape, traps, and so forth. 

To an extent, home invasion movies are truth in television. Although home invasions are relatively rare, and most break-ins occur when a family is away (the usual goal being to steal things, not torture and kill people), criminals do sometimes break into people’s homes, and homeowners are sometimes killed by them. 

In the 1960s and 70s, this certainly would have been at the forefront of people’s minds. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood detailed one such crime in lavish detail, and the account was soon turned into a film. Serial killers like the Boston Strangler, BTK Killer and the “Vampire of Sacramento” Richard Chase also made headlines for their murders, which often occurred inside the victim’s home. (Chase, famously, considered unlocked doors to be an invitation, which is one great reason to lock your doors). 

By the 1960s and 70s, too, people were more and more often beginning to live in cities and larger neighborhoods where they did not know their neighbors. Anxieties about being surrounded by strangers (and, let’s face it, racial anxieties rooted in newly-mixed, de-segregated neighborhoods) undoubtedly fueled fears about home invasion. 

Early Roots of the Home Invasion Genre

Home invasion plays a part in several crime thrillers and horror films in the 1950s and 60s, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder in 1954, but it’s more of a plot point than a genre. In these films, home invasion is a means to an end rather than a goal unto itself. 

We see some early hints of the home invasion formula show up in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left in 1972. The film depicts a group of murderous thugs who, after torturing and killing two girls, seek refuge in the victim’s home and plot the deaths of the rest of the family. In 1974, the formula is refined with Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, which shows the one-by-one murder of members of a sorority house and chilling phone calls that come from inside the home. 

Even closer still is I Spit on Your Grave, directed by Meir Zarchi in 1978. Although it’s generally (and rightly) classified as a rape-revenge film, the first half of the movie -- where an author goes to a remote cabin and is targeted and brutally assaulted by a group of men -- hits all the same story beats as the modern home invasion story: isolation, mundane evil, acts of random violence, and protracted torture. 

Slumber Party Massacre, directed by Amy Holden Jones in 1982, also hits on both home invasion and slasher tropes. Although it is primarily a straightforward slasher featuring an escaped killer systematically killing teenagers (with a decidedly phallic weapon), the film also shows its victims teaming up and fighting back -- weaponizing their home against the killer. This becomes an important part of the genre in later years! 

In 1997, Funny Games, directed by Michael Haneke, provides a brutal but self-aware look at the genre. Created primarily as a condemnation of violent media, the film nevertheless succeeds as an unironic addition to the home invasion canon -- from its vulnerable, suffering family to the excruciating tension of its plot to the nihilistic, motive-free criminality of its villains, it may actually be the purest example of the home invasion movie. 

Home Invasions Gone Wrong 

Where things start to get interesting for the home invasion genre is 1991′s The People Under the Stairs, another Wes Craven film. Here the script is flipped: The hero is the would-be robber, breaking and entering into the home of some greedy rich landlords. But this plan swiftly goes sideways when the homeowners turn out to be even worse people than they’d first let on. 

This is, as far as I can tell, the origin of the home-invasion-gone-wrong subgenre, which has gained immense popularity recently -- due, perhaps, to a growing awareness of systemic issues, a differing view of poverty, and a viewership sympathetic to the plight of down-on-their-luck criminals discovering that rich homeowners are, indeed, very bad people. 

Home Invasion Film Explosion of the 2000s 

The home invasion genre really hit the ground running in the 2000s, due perhaps to post-911 anxieties about being attacked on our home turf (and increasing economic uneasiness in a recession-afflicted economy and a growing awareness of the Occupy movement and wealth inequality). We see a whole slew of these films crop up, each bringing a slightly different twist to the formula.

*  It’s also worth noting that the 2000s saw remakes of many well-known films in the genre, including Funny Games and Last House on the Left.  

In 2008, Bryan Bertino directed The Strangers, a straightforward home invasion involving one traumatized couple and three masked villains. By this point, we’re wholly removed from the early crime movie roots; these are not people breaking in for financial gain. Like the killers in Funny Games, the masked strangers lack motive and even identity; they are simply a force of evil, chaotic and senseless. 

The themes of “violence as a senseless, awful thing” are driven further home by Martyrs, another 2008 release, this one from French director Pascal Laugier. A revenge story turned into a home-invasion-gone-wrong, the film is noteworthy for its brutality and blunt nihilism. 

2009′s The Collector, directed by Marcus Dunstan, is another home-invasion-gone-wrong movie. Like Martyrs, it dovetails with the torture porn genre (another popular staple of the 2000s), but it has a lot more fun with it. The film follows a down-on-his-luck thief who breaks into a house only to encounter another home invader set on murdering the family that lives there. The cat-and-mouse games between the two -- which involve numerous traps and convoluted schemes -- are fun to watch (if you like blood and guts). 

In a similar vein, we see You’re Next in 2013, which starts off as a standard home invasion movie but takes a sharp twist when it’s revealed that one of the victims isn’t nearly as helpless as she appears. Director Adam Wingard helps to redefine the concept of “final girl” in this move in a way that has carried forward right into the next decade with no sign of stopping. 

2013 of course also introduced us to The Purge, a horror franchise created by James DeMonaco. If there was ever any doubt as to the economic anxieties at the root of the genre, they should be alleviated now -- The Purge is such a well-known franchise at this point that the term has entered our pop culture lexicon as a shorthand for revolution. 

Don’t Breathe, directed be Fede Alvarez in 2016, is one of the creepiest modern entries into the “failed home invasion” category, and one that (ha ha) breathed some new life into the genre. Much like The People Under the Stairs, it tells the story of some down-on-their-luck criminals getting in over their heads when they target the wrong man. However, there is not the same overt criticism of wealth inequality in this film; it’s a movie more interested in examining and inverting genre tropes than treading new thematic ground. The same is true of Hush that same year. Directed by Mike Flanagan, the film is most noteworthy for its deaf protagonist. 

But lest you start to think the home invasion genre had lost its thematic relevance, 2019 arrived with two hard-hitting, thoughtful films that dip their toes in these tropes: Jordan Peele’s Us and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which both tackle themes of privilege in light of home invasion (albeit a nontraditional structure in Parasite -- its inclusion here is admittedly a bit of a stretch, but I think it falls so closely in the tradition of The People Under the Stairs that it deserves a spot on this list). 

What Does the Future Hold? 

I’m no oracle, so I can’t say for certain where the future of the home invasion genre might lead. But I do think we’re going to start seeing more of them in the next few years as a bunch of creative folks start working through our collective trauma. 

Income inequality, racial inequality, political unrest and systemic issues are all at the forefront of our minds (not to mention a deadly virus), and those themes are ripe for the picking in horror. 

I know that Paul Tremblay’s novel The Cabin at the End of the World has been optioned for film, so we might be seeing that soon -- and if so, it might just usher in a fresh wave of apocalypse-flavored home invasion stories. 

Like my content? You can support more of it by dropping me some money in my tip jar: https://www.ko-fi.com/post/Home-Invasion-Stories-A-History-R6R72RV7Y

[mykravlife]

What’s your safety colour?

Develop your situational awareness using the cooper colour code

A Lesson In Situational Awareness

She stood in front of the class going through the traumatic details…

“I was walking to my car” she started.

“That’s when he grabbed me from behind and tried to drag me into the trees. I was so scared.”

She was referring to an incident that I had read about a few weeks ago in the paper and now she was in my class.

The news article said that she was coming out of the arena and as she approached her car was grabbed by an unknown assailant, who tried to carry her into the woods.

“What were you doing when he grabbed you?” I asked

“Oh. I was texting a friend.”

In our Krav Maga classes we refer to this as condition white. Fortunately she put up a fight and was able to escape unharmed.

She was lucky…

…because just as easily the situation could have turned out different.

And more importantly, just a little bit of situational awareness could have prevented it from happening in the first place.

I often talk to my classes about the importance of situational awareness, which we define simply as knowing what’s going on around you.

It’s obvious that she was distracted by her cell phone and wasn’t paying attention to her environment.

It’s easy for us to point at her and say that she shouldn’t have been on her phone.

But the reality is that in our normal everyday lives things like that don’t happen to us. They also rarely happen to people we know!

Situational awareness however is more than just looking out for bad guys. In her situation, it could have just as easily of been a car that hit her.

That’s why I place a heavy emphasis on teaching situational awareness in every Women’s Self Defence Seminar and Krav Maga class that I conduct.

The Cooper Colour Code

“If violent crime is to be curbed, it is only the intended victim who can do it. The felon does not fear the police, and he fears neither judge nor jury. Therefore what he must be taught to fear is his victim” — Jeff Cooper

I want to start off by saying that you don’t have good situational awareness or bad situational awareness. I believe that your situational awareness is either trained or untrained.

The tool that I use to teach situational awareness to my students is called the Cooper Colour Code.

Retired Marine Lt. Col. Jeff Cooper stated that the most important tool you can have to help you survive an attack isn’t a weapon or your martial arts skills, but what he called your combat mindset.

To help develop this mindset, in the 1970’s he introduced the Colour Code which describes the different psychological conditions, or states of mind, that a person has in any given situation.

The Cooper Colour Code is made up of 4 awareness levels, each represented by a different colour.

Condition White is the first condition and is best described as generally being unaware of what’s going on around you. Basically you’re not paying attention.

Condition Yellow, the second condition, you now sense that there could be potential danger around. You begin to actively scan your environment to try and identify any potential threats.

Condition Orange is the third condition and during this level of awareness you have locked on to a potential threat. You are now formulating an action plan to put in place if needed.

Condition Red is the last level. When your awareness level has elevated to red you are now actively engaged with the threat. You are also executing the plans you formulated in Condition Orange.

There’s also another condition level that has since been adopted by the Marines that was not part of the original Colour Code. Condition Black.

Condition Black is used to describe someone who has become immobilised by panic or overwhelmed by fear.

Before I go into the specifics of the Colours and how to use them, we need to define two concepts that we’re going to be using.

The first concept is physiological response. This refers to what’s happening to your body as a threat presents itself.

Essentially it’s the activation of the fight or flight response, also known as the acute stress response.

The acute stress response is activated by the sudden release of hormones into the body in preparation to fight for our lives or to run away.

This response is characterised by physical changes such as increased heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing.

The second concept that we need to be aware of is what’s called our psychological response.

This is what happens to us mentally. As the stress of the situation we are in climbs different things happen to us mentally.

Now, let’s look at each of the conditions individually.

Condition White

“The difference between being a victim and a survivor is often a low level of situational awareness.” — Barry Eisler

When you’re in condition white you’re in a state where you’re unprepared and not ready, physically or mentally, for an event.

That event could be an attack from an assailant or it could be getting run into by a guy on a bike.

The point is that you’re unprepared. If you live in Condition White while your out and about in public then you’re more likely to become a victim.

Bad guys generally choose people who are not paying attention. This makes it easier for them to victimise you because you’re less likely to react and they’re more likely to get away with it.

When you’re in condition white you have low psychological awareness, meaning that you’re not focused on what’s going on around you.

You also will have low physiological arousal levels, which means that your fight or flight response hasn’t been activated. You’re petty relaxed.

Now, we need to spend time in condition white. Having a constantly elevated alertness level is taxing on us mentally and can lead to mental fatigue.

So when do we go into condition white?

Generally when you’re at home. Anywhere else and you should be in the next condition.

Condition Yellow

“I think it’s always important to be vigilant of what you’re doing and aware of your surroundings.” — Leona Lewis

Condition yellow is simply being in a state of awareness of what’s around us. We need to be actively searching and scanning the environment for possible threats.

We should be in condition yellow whenever we’re out, at work, at school, or at church, etc.

So what am I looking for when I’m scanning…

Basically anything that can become a potential threat. Things like people acting aggressively or suspiciously, speeding cars, off leash dogs, etc.

When you’re in condition yellow you will have a moderate psychological awareness level and moderate physiological arousal level.

Condition Orange

“Your mind-set is your primary weapon.” — Jeff Cooper

Once you have identified or locked onto a potential threat you have now moved into condition orange.

For example imagine that you’re out for a nice walk.

Whenever you go out, you should automatically be in condition yellow.

In condition yellow you’ll be casually scanning your environment. You’re looking for things that are out of the ordinary, making sure to take note of anything that could become a potential threat.

Ahead you see a dog that’s off leash and running in your direction. At this point you should move yourself into condition orange.

You have identified and locked in on the threat. Now to do the important work that characterises this condition.

You formulate a safety plan.

When confronted with a threat you essentially have one of three choices to make.

Run. Hide. Fight.

This is the time to make the decision and the plan on how to execute it. You don’t want to be doing that once the attack is under way.

You may decide that if the dog gets to a certain point in front of you, you’ll run away, or maybe you identified some shelter that you can safely hide in, or maybe you mentally prepare to fight the canine.

It doesn’t matter what the decision is, as long as one has been made.

When you’re in condition orange understand your heart rate will become slightly elevated as you’ll be in a higher state of physiological arousal.

But more important to realise is that because you’re focused on the dog, you won’t be focused on other things. You’ll have a lower state of psychological awareness than you did than when you were in condition yellow.

Condition Red

“The only acceptable response to the threat of lethal violence is immediate and savage counterattack. If you resist, you just may get killed. If you don’t resist you almost certainly will get killed. It is a tough choice, but there is only one right answer.” — Jeff Cooper

My hope is that you never have to go into condition red. That your situational awareness and instincts are developed enough that you avoided the danger long before it ever had a chance to become a threat to you.

Going into red means that you’re now in the fight. You’re at the point where you have no choice but to execute one of the plans you made back in condition orange.

You have a very high degree of physiological arousal as hormones race through your body.

Your awareness level sink even lower as you become solely focused on the threat. You no longer know what’s going on around you.

You’re now fighting for your life.

Hopefully, everything goes according to plan and you get out of there safely. It will take a good while for the adrenaline to leave your system and you may become jittery. But at least your safe.

As you can see, the Cooper Colour Code can be a useful tool to keep yourself safe. At the very least remember to be in Condition Yellow every time you leave the house and decide what you will do in different situations before they happen.

[the-hobgoblins]

✸ one short day [in the emerald city] ✸

Who: Ozymandias Pryce

Where: Ministry of Magic, London

When: 22 May 2020

When Oz came to, he was in a dark and unfamiliar room, blinking drearily into the sinister greenish haze. His head was throbbing and his wrists felt sore—which upon further investigation might’ve had something to do with the fact that he was sitting upright in a stiff wooden chair with his hands restrained behind his back by faintly buzzing cuffs of magic, which heated up and zapped when he pulled on them too hard. “Ow, fuck me sideways…” he groaned, trying to remember how he’d gotten here.

The trouble must have started that morning, when Oz ran out of rolling tobacco. 

Wait, no—that’s not quite right, is it? Let’s back up a bit…

Actually, the real trouble started when a daunting envelope stamped with an M arrived on the doorstep of Borgin and Burkes. A census questionnaire from the Magicky Government in England, and it sent everyone into a real tizzy—especially Piper.

They’d all just agreed to not send it back; after all, what were they gonna do, really? “The feds are always trying to stir up shit in Knockturn Alley…” Maeko had said, tossing the papers into a rubbish bin definitively. “…but any of ‘em who know anything won’t be stupid enough to get near this building.”

And that was true enough—the house wards and general reputation did prevent anyone wearing government robes from approaching the building. Staking it out from down the alley, though? That only got worse as time passed and the census documents from 13B remained unreturned, until the household were practically self-imposed hostages in their own home, apparating straight to and from the property interior, the windows and shutters and blinds all firmly closed.

And then Oz had run out of rolling tobacco. 

The sun was just starting to come up (not that you could ever tell very well in the perpetual shadowy gloom of Knockturn), but it was definitely too early still to really be considered morning. Oz groaned irritably, restless, and high, and hungover. He peeked out from behind the closed curtained window in his room down the empty alleyway. Five minutes, he’d be gone, tops. No life-or-death crises ever happened in five minutes, at five in the morning. 

Out and back, no problem.

Except, of course, for the increased patrols that had been ordered all along the alley for the past two weeks—which none of the Borgin and Burkes crew knew about, not having physically walked up or down Knockturn Alley in roughly a month. Oz emerged from the smoke shop to the sight of a literal kid—must have been affiliated with one of the local gangs that struggled for underground dominance in the area—pointing at Oz, and then two big robed thugs pulled out wands and started toward him with threatening intent.

And that’s when Oz bolted down the alley in the direction of Borgin and Burkes, all the way at the end. He didn’t get far before a spell hit him in the back and he fell, and when his head hit the cobblestone he was out like a light. 

And that, ladies and gents, brings us up to speed on the knee-slapping nonstop jokefest that brought Oz to this current moment—detained inside the infamous Ministry of Magic. 

They must have had some way to detect when he woke up, because not a minute after he’d opened his eyes, a heavy metal door opened and in strolled the two beefy brutes who’d shot him down in the street like a…pheasant, or something? Whatever, Oz didn’t know a lick about hunting for sport, and was that a bad thing? The English were barbaric creatures, honestly. 

After the men came a woman with coiffed grey hair that didn’t match the age of the rest of her, wearing a wide-belted trench coat and a cravat and a very outlandish hat. Her thin matte red lips were absolutely predatory. 

Under other circumstances, Oz thought he would have liked her. 

“Well, good morning to both of you very capable stalkers! And my gentle lady…” Oz said amiably, shifting as much as was possible into a lounging position given the way he was being restrained. “…or should I say afternoon? Evening? Gute Nacht?” He had no clue how much time had passed since he’d stupidly left Borgin and Burkes that morning, how long he’d been in here. He looked between the men, who just stood in front of the closed door with muscly arms folded in surly silence, while the woman pulled out a chair and sat down in it; it gave a screech as the legs scratched the floor, the kind that made your skin crawl, and her red lips got even thinner as she smirked. Not very forthcoming, then, it seemed. Lovely. 

Oz, not thrown in the least by the silent treatment, said, “So what can I do ya for?”

The woman pulled some papers out of a briefcase, straightened them by tapping the bottom edge on the table, examined them a moment. Then: “Ozymandias Pryce, is it?”

“In the flesh, as they say…” Oz replied, all cheek and ease. 

“I thought so…” the woman said, and her smugness was sinister. She lit a cigarette at the end of a long, old-fashioned cigarette holder and leaned back in her chair. The smell of smoke immediately made Oz itch with craving. The woman smoked for a moment, her eyes never leaving Oz. Then she added, “…I must say, Mister Pryce, that your reputation precedes you…”

“Does it?” said Oz. “Well I’m tickled pink to hear it, truly. In fact, if you undid these very, ah—zappy cuffs, here, I’d be more than happy to—”

“—I think not,” she cut him off, smirk widening, flipping a page. “You’re the Squib brother of Maeko Burke, is that correct?”

Oz laughed. “Is that what my file there says? I suppose the Very Official Documents always know best…”

“And are you aware, Mister Pryce, that performing magic with a wand that has not been licensed to you is a fineable—sometimes even punishable offense?”

Here Oz really cackled. “Are you lot cracked? You think poor little un-magical me was so desperate to be a Manly Wizard Man that I stole someone’s little Spelly-Stick to wave around when your suits refused to license me one?” His tone was thick with mocking.

“I’m not alleging that…” the woman said, shifting, unfazed. “…I’m merely pointing out the fact that it’s considered unusual—highly unusual, for someone with your handicap—”

“My what?”

“—to take up residence in a strictly magical area of commerce. And that one, in particular. Makes one wonder…”

“So you’re saying it’s a crime to live with my sister? My only relative who isn’t currently servin’ a life’s sentence—and oh wait, whose fault is that again?”

“And you’re saying we don’t have just cause to be suspicious of the children of known felons, living amongst the highest density of criminal activity in the entire country—”

“My sister an’ I aren’t fuckin’ criminals, you intolerant twot—” Oz spat back, straining against the restraints despite the stinging buzz the dissenting effort shot up his arms. 

The woman leaned across the table like a cat taunting its prey, breathing smoke into Oz’s face. She grinned, as if riling him up were some kind of victory. “Not yet, maybe. But keep it up, mister—you and Miss Burke will be joining your beloved parents in the company of Dementors in no time.”

Oz shrank back into his seat, admittedly just a little bit shaken in the face of an actual, overt threat. After a moment, deflated, he said, “Whadda you want, then, reely? I’m not fuckin’ touched, I know I’m not shit to you ’n yours…let’s just get this bit over ’n done with, shall we? So we can all go home?”

“I’m happy to hear you’re willing to be so cooperative…” the woman said, pleased as punch. “…for starters, the 13B Knockturn Alley residence has failed to return the mandatory census questionnaire, and has exhibited suspicious behavior—not just in the past month, but for years that we’ve sent patrols to maintain peace in the area. If you confess what you’re hiding to me, now, I’d be willing to consider advocating for leniency for you…”

“And Maeko?” asked Oz warily. This wasn’t just about Piper, then—that was just the tip of the iceberg. 

“Miss Burke’s case would be separately considered, in relation to the severity of her crimes—if she has nothing to hide, then she should have nothing to worry about…”

Oz narrowed his eyes and kept quiet, not taking the bait. After a minute, the woman prompted, “One more question, Mister Pryce—what can you tell me about your involvement with the underground insurgency group who’ve been spreading violent, anti-regulatory propaganda under the guise of rock music?”

This question did, genuinely, confuse Oz. “The—the who?”

“I believe they refer to themselves as ‘The Band Cthulhu?’”

And then Oz burst into loud, hysterical laughter. He rocked in his chair with the force of it and then spat—literally—at the woman across the table. He propped up his dirty sneakers, his legging-clad legs, and grinned. “Up yours, ya loony bitch. Your lot’ve got fuck all on me.”

He was still laughing when the woman stormed out of the interrogation room, enraged, wiping her spat-upon face with her cravat. And even when her muscle came and roughed him up a little for his insolence, Oz kept laughing.

And several hours later, when Maeko and a portly gentlemen claiming to be Oz’s legal council showed up and facilitated his release, Oz walked out of the Ministry of Magic laughing.

[elizabethemerald]

After the Museum Date

I had an anon that requested:  I wish you would write a fic where Julia and Carmen are able to interact without Chase and V.I.L.E. interrupting them

Tumblr won’t let me add read more’s to asks so rather than torture all my lovely readers I’m going to post it here. Thanks for the request!

This is the direct sequel to the previous Jule Thief piece. (Museum Date), (Coffee Date)

Julia stood at the balcony door of her hotel room. The view of the Eiffel Tower was breathtaking. Privately this was one of the best parts about working for ACME. Interpol never paid for the best rooms, but now she had an uninterrupted view of Paris. She turned away from the view, glancing at the clock as she walked into her room. Two in the morning. She was exhausted but couldn't sleep.

Julia had spent the past couple of days working tirelessly in preparation for the Louvre Gala, then the ACME agents and the Interpol officers had their work cut out for them, arresting would be thieves and filling out paperwork.

The Chief was annoyed that Julia had Carmen Sandiego literally in her arms but didn't capture her. Julia was able to get Chief off her back by saying that Carmen Sandiego had hinted at other VILE operatives also being there.

ACME was now investigating the blonde Carmen had called Tigress, and the Frenchman who had danced with Julia. Hopefully eventually they would realize Carmen wasn't working with VILE. But she wasn't going to hold her breath.

Julia walked into the bathroom, maybe a shower would help her fall asleep. As she showered she couldn't help but feel a tingle on her lips. Carmen Sandiego had kissed her. She almost felt like she was in a daze.

The note Carmen had given her sat on her bedside table. Julia had read it again and again. "Thanks for the dance!" It read, signed Carmen. It had been folded into an origami heart. And sealed with a kiss in her red lipstick.

Julia toweled off and wrapped herself in the plush bathrobe. She was glad Carmen had worn a different lipstick to the dance, there was no trace of the kiss they shared while the lights were off, other than her burning ears. And she had managed to pass that off as embarrassment at letting Ms. Sandiego get away.

She emerged from the bathroom, a cloud of stream following her out. She was wearing the bathrobe, her damp hair swept back from her face. She felt a slight chill and hurried to close the balcony door. Curious. She was sure the door had been closed when she entered the shower. Unless…Julia turned around and there sitting on one of the chairs was Carmen Sandiego. She was back in her trademark hat and jacket.

"I've already swept the room for bugs. We can speak freely." Carmen said softly.

"Are you making house calls now Ms. Sandiego?" Julia asked.

"I just wanted to talk, and apologize."

Julia sat down on the bed. She spent a few silent seconds organizing her thoughts. Yes she loved Carmen, but she was also an officer of the law. She needed to be sure of a few things.

"If you want me to trust you, you need to answer some of my questions." Julia finally said. Carmen sat forward resting her arms on her knees, she nodded for her to continue. "You said you were no longer with VILE, but you were at one point?"

"I was raised by the faculty of the VILE crime academy. We had a...falling out, after I left." Carmen seemed to curl in on herself, she avoided eye contact, but she could see the glisten of tears in her eyes. Julia had never seen her looking this vulnerable. She decided against pursuing that line of questioning further.

"What were you doing at the gala tonight?" Julia asked instead.

"Every thief worth their salt knows the one time the Louvre collection is vulnerable is the yearly Gala. There's too many guest for security to keep an eye on everything. From my own reconnaissance I knew there was only going to be one moment where anyone could steal something and hope to get away with it. And worse of all the infamy of the theft and press coverage would increase the value of anything sold."

Carmen sighed and rubbed her face. Julia couldn't help but notice how tired the woman in red looked. "Tigress needed to knock out the power during that precise moment and she could get away with whatever she wanted. The only thing I could do was stall her. So I did. The signal blocker worked for a little while. Then I danced with you. Got everyone's attention, so the other thieves wouldn't be able to take advantage. I knew Tigress would get jealous when she wasn't the center of attention."

"Were you two...close?" Julia asked.

"We never dated if that's what you're asking. She was the closest rival I had at the academy. She's been the angriest since my departure, the most aggressive when we meet in the field."

Julia didn't say anything. She was glad she didn't have to compete with the gorgeous blonde. After a second of silence Carmen continued.

"We fought during the dance. You saw the aftermath of that." She gently rubbed her chest and Julia could tell she was going to have a bruise under her eye. "She was able to cut the wires of my signal blocker. But I picked her pocket and got the trigger for the EMP. I set it off before she could get in position or take it back."

Carmen leaned back a satisfied smile. "It took months of work to figure out their plan. Weeks of sleepless nights to make sure VILE had no other options while maintaining the smoke screen that they had found something no one had thought of. And it all came down to a single pocket picked during a dance.”

This was more the Carmen, Julia knew. Confident and self-assured. She couldn’t help but smile at her.

“You said you wanted to apologize, what for?” The smile slipped from Carmen’s face. Julia almost regretted asking the question.

“I may have painted a bit of a target on your back now. VILE will soon learn that I danced with you. They may send someone after you like they did with Chase. I’m so sorry.”

That actually wasn’t that surprising. Chase had already been targeted, Julia felt it was only a matter of time before they came for her as well.

“I may be able to talk to my superiours about increasing my security.” Julia said slowly.

“It might also help if you can describe a credible threat. For instance famed villain Carmen Sandiego tossing your hotel room?” Carmen suggested.

“And have you labeled forever as a violent criminal?” Julia sat up aghast.

“I may not be violent, but I am a criminal.” She said with laugh, then she grew serious again. “It would be worth it to make sure you stay safe.”

“Then how would you come to see me again?” Julia asked. Carmen’s smile grew sad.

“Do you actually want to see me again?” She asked in response. At Julia’s ernest nod, her smile brightened again. “I’m the greatest thief in the world. I’ve stolen from an organization of master criminals, and it seems I’ve stolen your heart as well. If I want to be close to you I’ll find a way! But for now I think it’s time for me to leave. I’ll be back in the morning to make it look like we had a fight.”

Julia smiled at her again. Carmen smiled back, then stood and walked to the balcony door.

“Carmen! Wait!” The woman in red turned. “Stay with me. At least till morning!”

Carmen turned, taking off her hat and jacket as she did so, draping them on the arm of the chair. She kicked off her boots and crawled into the bed beside Julia. They leaned against each other, hands intwined. Julia laughed to herself. The infamous thief Carmen Sandiego was in her bed! She wasn’t sure she had ever dared to dream that something like this would happen.

It only took a few minutes for Carmen to fall asleep completely. Julia kissed her cheek gently, then allowed herself to doze off, Ms. Sandiego sleeping against her.

Julia awoke in the early morning. Carmen was still sleeping against her. She gently carded her fingers through her red locks. Carmen made a small noise then turned and put her arm across Julia. She could tell that she was awake by the change in her breathing.

“Good morning beautiful.” Julia whispered.

“Mmm. Good Morning. Are you ready for me to toss your room?” Carmen said, her voice still heavy with sleep.

“I think I’ll go down for breakfast in a little while. That should give you plenty of time to make it look convincing.” Julia murmored. “But right now I just want to stay with you.”

“So are we officially dating?”

“I think so.” Julia smiled and kissed the top of Carmen’s head.

Hopefully this one lets me put in the read more. I’ve trouble with asks in the past.

[scripttorture]

So I know it’s been mentioned that victims do not change beliefs or are brainwashed when undergoing torture but is it completely impossible for a character to undergo so much abuse that they stop fighting, are resigned, or become more submissive. And I know that this might be a bit out of the torture theme but , would a person undergoing abuse/torture and then being comforted by the villain make them more compliant or the likes. Aka how easily does it take for Stockholm syndrome to show up. Thx

Iknow next to nothing about Stockholm syndrome and questions aboutthat in particular are better directed towards @scriptshrink (who hasanswered questions on it in the past I believe). I don’tthink (based on Scriptshrink’s definition) what you’re describingis Stockholm syndrome.

Torturegenerally makes people much more strongly opposed to the torturer(and often anything related to them) then they were prior to torture.

Thatdoesn’t always mean violent resistance because violence is neverthe only way to resist.

Ithink how possible this is depends on what you mean by ‘submissive’and how long term you’re imagining that state being. Because rightnow this looks to me like it could be edging into… ‘torturesurvivors are broken’ territory.

Alot of torture victims dostopphysically fighting while they’re still captive. There are a lot ofvery good reasons for doing that; for starters a lot of commontortures make victims less physically capable of fighting back. Sleepdeprivation, dehydration and starvation all decrease reaction times,lower strength and increase the chances of someone fainting becausethey moved too quickly.

Andbluntly, trauma doesn’t make people stupid.

Torturevictims are perfectly capable of judging how much danger they’re inand what’s likely to increase that immediate danger. Violentresistance, fighting, usually puts victims in immediate danger. Ifviolent resistance fails at any point, if it’s anything short of acompletely successful breakout and escape, then it means reprisalsand possible execution.

Sometimeseven if it doesresult in a completely successful breakout and escape victims couldstill expect reprisals, aimed against their families, friends or hometown. That’s a fairly common feature of a lot of regimes. It’shappening now with the Uighurs in China; people with relatives abroadseem to be especially targeted. It happened in Syria, with wholefamilies ‘arrested’ when male members were suspected ofsupporting an opposing side. It also happened in Nazi-occupiedEurope.

Forthe vast majority of torture victims violence isn’t going to getthem anywhere. The chances of success are vanishingly slim and thechances of more pain are incredibly high.

Thesituations we’re talking about generally are modern high techprisons. Thevast majority of people do not think they’ll be able to fight theirway out a place like this with their fists.

Inthat context choosingnot to fight can be a smart survival decision. Conversely choosing tofight can be a sign of suicidal feelings.

Nowvictims can and do organise.Organised groups of victims canoccasionally fight successfully. But when you’re talking abouttorture specifically, you’re talking about a group of injured,unarmed, malnourished people successfully taking on a group of wellfed, well rested, heavily armed people who are trainedto fight.

Thereis one undisputed successful slave revolt in history: Haiti. And Ithink that number illustrates just how difficult it is for victims‘fighting’ to be successful.*

You’retalking about people without proper clothing going up against peoplewith guns and Kevlar. When those are the odds fighting is usually notthe best option for any individual victim.

Butequating a lack of fighting with a lack of resistance is a veryblinkered view. I think equating a degree of compliancewith a lack of resistance is also a mistake.

Alotof victims pretend to give in and comply over some things as aconscious strategy. It can give them better opportunities to escape,better chances of survival in the short term and better opportunitiesto sabotage the torturers’ operation.

Peoplewho ‘gave in’ under torture have been some of the most successfulspies and saboteurs in history. This is not violence. It is, in theircontext, a more effective way of resisting.

They’vealso been key witnesses in virtually every trial for crimes againsthumanity I can think of.

Cantorture make people seem‘compliant’? Yes. But this is a sham.It’s short term. It’s unreliable.

Victimscan manifest symptomsthat make it more difficult for them to resist in a material way.Depression to the point of catatonia, coupled with forced labour andstarvation does stoppeople taking up arms.

Butit doesn’t stop them refusing to work. It doesn’t stop thembreaking equipment. It doesn’t stop them purposefully doing as poora job as possible. It doesn’t stop them from committing masssuicide.

Thoseare all strategies that people in forced labour situations have used.

Andthere is absolutely no wayfor a torturer to control what symptoms any victim manifests. It ischance. It can’t bepredicted. Hence they can not control whether or not a victim ends inthis state.

Thenthere are the more inventive things people have come up with. There’sthe Chinese man who hid letters in the decorations he was forced tomake. There’sthe American, HenryBox Brown, who posted himselfin a box to the free north.

Thisis not ‘submission’.

Weare resilient, resourceful creatures with an immense capacity forsurvival and recovery.

Barbarismdoes not make people obedient. It canmake people comply over the short term. It can make people wait forthe moment when their personal chance of success is highest. It canmake people go along with things that don’t contradict their moststrongly held beliefs.

Butit fundamentally can’tchange hearts and minds.

Therewill always be things people would rather die then do. Mostpeople would not rather die then put on a uniform, or engage in asimple repetitive task like cutting stone. But the more complex thetasks victims are forced to engage in the more opportunities forresistance they get and the higher the chance of their oppressorsjust failing.

Ifyour story is entirely based around the idea of a character beingtortured and hencebecoming entirely subservient to the torturer- then what you arewriting is unrealistic andit is torture apologia.

Iknow that my two posts on torture survivors aren’t particularlypopular compared to most of my Masterposts, but there’s a reasonthey’re up there. It’s to showcase exactly how different thereality is to this myth. This myth that favours the lies of torturersabove the lived experience of victims and is used to justify andcondone atrocities.

FelaKuti was beaten so many times over the course of his life that it’sthe likely cause of his death. The military government he clashedwith so may times attacked his family, his friends and his home. Theymurdered his mother. They raped and mutilated his friends.

Felawrote songs about it.He marched his mother’s funeral procession up to the biggestmilitary barracks he could find in one of the most populous cities inhis country and left her coffin on the steps.

RonaldSearle drew his experiences as a POW in Japanese camps. He drew thedeaths of his friends. He drew the torture of other prisoners. Hedrew his own emaciated, sick, starved, over worked body.

Hedid this knowing thathe could be killed for these drawings.

Helldid you hear what Bobi Wine had to say a few days after beingtortured? He’d been flown out to America for specialist medicaltreatment. He couldhave stayed put. He couldhave stayed silent. He could have done the safe ‘submissive’thing.

He’sback in Uganda now.

Bywhat measure does this look ‘submissive’?

Becausefrom everything I’ve read this is the normnot the exception. This quiet opposition.

Yesvictims can ‘comply’ in some short term sense; Searle didn’trefuse to work when ordered. He knew that if he did he’d be killedand he saw his duty as bearing witness.

Yesvictims can despair; that is a symptom. But treating that as the onlyemotion survivors can experience is a gross misunderstanding ofmental illness. It is treating survivors as if they are incapable oflife and growth, as if they are already dead.

Asthings stand what you’re suggesting is a fantasy. And it’s onethat’s usually used to demean survivors.

Thinkabout whether your story needstorture. Think about what it’s adding to your story beyond theseunfortunate implications.

Thinkabout why this story,this pattern appeals to you. What draws you to this story? What’sinteresting about it?

Becausethe chances are that the bit you feel is the core, the interestingbit, can be achieved in a different way. Itmay take a little more inventiveness to find that but it’spossible.

*Recentevents make me feel as though I should stress that this dependsheavily on your definition of ‘success’. The enslaved people ofBrazil did not drive their colonial oppressors out of the country asHaiti did. But the establishment of Palmares and the dozens, hundredsof other towns and cities as separate states within states stands asits own form of success.

Disclaimer

[uomo-accattivante]

(Photo by BACKGRID)

SCREENPLAY REVIEW - TRIPLE FRONTIER

Below is a review I recently came across. (I’m not sure if this version is the updated one which includes input by JC Chandor.) 

Pope - Oscar Isaac

Redfly - Ben Affleck

Ben - Garrett Hedlund

Ironhead - Charlie Hunnam

Catfish - Pedro Pascal

Be forewarned - the following review contains SPOILERS:

***

Screenplay Review - Triple Frontier

Genre: Crime/Action

Premise: A group of ex-special forces come together to steal 90 million dollars from a drug lord in the most criminally potent area of the world, the Triple Frontier.

About: Triple Frontier is one of those projects that’s been impossible to get made. It’s had more starts and stops than my neighbor’s 1999 Volkswagon Jetta. But no matter how much talent has come and gone, the project has always been able to replace them with either equal or better talent. That’s typically the sign of great material. That’s because when you have bad material and A-listers drop out, you never get any A-listers back. Your project is doomed to second-tier status. Well, all that waiting has paid off as the film is now in post-production. It stars Charlie Hunman, Oscar Isaac, and Ben Affleck. J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, A Most Violent Year) directed. Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) wrote the script.

Writer: Mark Boal

Details: 136 pages

The heist is one of the most bankable structures in storytelling. Get a group of contrasting characters together (Act 1), give them something they want to steal (Act 3), then slowly build a plan for achieving their goal (Act 2). It’s almost full-proof. And yet, we don’t get a lot of good heist films. In fact, I can’t remember the last one I saw.

That’s because the heist film is one of the most difficult genres to come up with something fresh for. Most of the heist scripts I read involve stealing money from a bank. There just aren’t that many ways to make that premise original. So I was thrilled when I picked up Triple Frontier, which promised to be a new take on the heist genre. Let’s see if it succeeded.

Ex-Special Forces operator Pope has gotten tired of missions to remote parts of the world where he guides local police to take down giant drug dealers. It’s more death, more destruction, and he thought he left all that behind with the special forces. The problem is, a man needs to make a living. And these missions are the only thing Pope knows how to do that pay good money.

Then one day, a Brazilian drug runner discloses to Pope the location of one of the biggest drug runners in the world, Lorea. Lorea has a home in Paraguay right off the criminally infamous Triple Frontier (the nexus of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina), where he’s holding 90 million dollars. With Pope’s unique skillset, he believes he can break in the house and get that money. But he’s going to need some help.

Enter his ex special forces buddies: the all-American Redfly, the bipolar Ben, the wily old vet, Ironhead, and the cool-as-a-cucumber Catfish. Some of the men are reluctant and others reared up and ready to go. But in the end, because there wouldn’t be a movie unless they all signed up, they all sign up.

Once in the Triple Frontier, the group begins doing surveillance and planning. And when I say planning, I mean planning. Pope gets his hands on the blueprints for Lorea’s house and builds an EXACT REPLICA in the jungle so that they can practice the heist. But that’s only the beginning of this mission impossible, as they have to figure out shit like how five men can carry away 4500 pounds of money on foot, and how they can escape through a backyard that rings an alarm if anything over 20 pounds steps on it.

After extensively perfecting their plan, they wait out an unexpected rainstorm and sneak in. Everything goes according to plan until they arrive in the money room and… it’s gone. Not a single bill. Just as everyone starts freaking out, Pope notices that the ceiling is leaking. They moved the money during the storm so it wouldn’t get wet! But that means going through every room one by one to find it.

As you’d expect, this leads to them being spotted, and within seconds there are three dozen guards converging on them. The soldiers go into fuck-all mode and start shooting everyone. They know the gig is up. They know they should leave. But they’ve put so much effort into this that they must have that money. So after the money they go. Will they get it? I’m thinking they’ll find a way. But the real test may be what happens AFTER they get the money.

Uhhhh…

This. Was. Good.

Wow.

I’m talking really really good.

Where do I begin? Let’s start with the heist itself. What’s the number rule for writing a good heist film? It’s not what goes right, it’s what goes wrong. Your job, as a writer of a heist flick, is to have your criminals cover all the bases, make sure they’ve found contingencies for every situation, and then when they show up, something goes wrong. And that thing that goes wrong leads to several other things that go wrong. And quickly, the whole damn heist falls apart.

I LOVED when they arrived in the money room and the money wasn’t there. Even when my cynical screenwriting analyst brain kicked in and said, “Of course they were duped. That’s what always happens!” But then Pope looked up and saw the leaking and realized the money had been moved and I said, “oooooooh, that’s good.”

I loved how the script evolved from there. Because what I was expecting to happen is what always happened in these mid-point heist films (a script where the heist happens at the mid point instead of the third act): They get the money home but then the bad guys come and hunt them down.

Triple Frontier instead focuses on the complexity of getting this money out of the country. The special forces guys rent a helicopter, only to find out that the money (which has increased from 90 million to 600 million at this point) will be too heavy. But they decide to risk it anyway, and fly their copter through the endless South American mountain forest. When the mountains start getting too high, they have to make the unthinkable choice of dropping the money and living or keeping the money and likely spiraling into the most hostile terrain in the world.

That was one of the best scenes I’ve read this year, besting even the Mission Impossible Fallout helicopter chase. And I’ll tell you why. It wasn’t just a simple helicopter chase. Difficult choices needed to be made. They MIGHT have been able to make it through the mountains if they kept the money. But they likely wouldn’t have. How do you make that decision? The decision to throw away 600 million dollars?

But the script isn’t just the heist. Boal made the bold choice of using the entire first act to get the band back together. This is a controversial screenwriting choice because modern screenwriting outlets will tell you to move this section along as quickly as possible. A short burst of scenes that has the band back together and ready to go by page 10, page 15 at the latest. They’re afraid that if you include an entire opening act of characters reuniting and talking and establishing their jobs and lives, that the average audience member will get bored.

But the great thing that happens when you extend your character intros out that far is that we get to know the characters better. I mean, it’s simple math. The more time you spend with someone, fictional or real, the more you’re going to care about them. Therefore, when these guys flew off to the Triple Frontier, I felt like I knew each of them. The extra time really paid off.

Now there’s a caveat to this. You have to be good with character to pull it off. You have to know how to set up a flaw. You have to know how to make your characters unique. You have to give each character a defining personality that’s easy for the audience to understand so they can label him properly (Chris Kyle was the introspective sniper). Each character’s dialogue has to be unique and interesting. If character isn’t your strong suit, don’t spend an entire act getting the band back together.

The fact that this script has been sitting on the shelf for so long is insane. I’m guessing it’s because Ben Affleck has a million projects to do and he’s in rehab half the year and they had to wait for him. I’m just glad the wait is over. Cause this movie is going to be damn good.

[ ] What the hell did I just read? [ ] wasn’t for me [ ] worth the read [x] impressive [ ] genius

What I learned: Find a unique place in the world that isn’t well known and build a story around it. What makes Triple Frontier so good is that we’d never heard of the Triple Frontier before. It hasn’t been in any movie. It creates the all important “strange attractor” we can exploit for one hell of a heist film.

###

[betterthedevilyouknowuk]

Never Let Your Activism Be Artless: An Interview With Lucien Greaves of The Satanic Temple

Haute Macabre interview June 28, 2017

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing The Satanic Temple‘s Lucien Greaves about art, activism, and what religion means as a framework rather than a faith. “Recently” isn’t quite right — these questions were written back in February, as you might notice by the news reference in one of them, but we hope you’ll forgive us the wait. I’ve been following TST’s work for a while and am wholeheartedly a supporter of their mission, but whether you know their tenets by heart or are just tuning in, you’re sure to find something of interest below.

So, just to get it out of the way, could you describe the difference between The Satanic Temple and The Church of Satan for any readers who may not know?

Well, first off, organizationally, there isn’t any similarity. That is to say, we have an organization, we have active chapters internationally, we have a physical headquarters, and we have active campaigns to advance our goals in the real world. The Church of Satan has none of these things.

One thing that I don’t think is clear to a lot of people is that all of the organized Satanic activity you’ve seen in the national and international press in the past years — from the Satanic monument, to the religious reproductive rights lawsuits, to the After School Satan Clubs — it’s all come from The Satanic Temple. The Church of Satan writes these humorous tirades in opposition to each of our activities, but they always get their facts wrong. For instance, they’ll claim that they would never seek to erect a monument on public grounds because, according to them, they support secularism.

In fact, we very often work with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, and other established defenders of secularism nationwide. Our monuments are made in defence of secularism, and we are very clear about that. We only seek to place our Baphomet monument on public grounds where there is a pre-existing 10 Commandments monument to ensure that the government remains neutral regarding religious expression in public forums. Government has no place in Religion, Religion has no place in Government. If a public forum allows privately donated religious monuments, the Government can’t pick and choose between religious viewpoints. That’s secularism. You can’t let the theocrats take over the Public Square and claim it as their own exclusively.

Of course there are those who complain that a true expression of secularism would be the absence of any religious monuments on public grounds. Well, yes, but when there’s already a 10 Commandments monument on public grounds, it doesn’t do much good to simply say you wish it weren’t there. There isn’t much point to organizing a membership structure and hierarchy when there are no activities associated with those roles. When we’re proposing our monument, the government then has to make a choice — will they accept a Satanic monument, or will they engage in religious discrimination and all but ensure that the 10 Commandments monument will come down as well?

Similarly, The Church of Satan objects to our After School Satan Clubs on the grounds that they feel proselytizing to children is abhorrent. If they learned about our after school program before commenting, they’d find that we, too, find proselytizing to children abhorrent. In fact, the very reason we started the After School Satan Clubs was to offer an alternative to coercive religious proselytizing inflicted on children through evangelical after-school clubs, and we only offer our club in schools where the evangelical presence already exists. Our curriculums don’t contain any items of religious opinion and focus entirely on critical thinking and reasoning skills. To say, then, that we shouldn’t call it the After School Satan Club misses the point. We’re The Satanic Temple, and we’re Satanists, and we’re not going to hide that fact. The schools have to understand, if they allow evangelical clubs, they can’t turn away the Satanists. For children to be aware that there are self-identified Satanists, and that they are friendly, approachable people — it has a counter-indoctrination effect.

So, the incessant criticisms we receive from the Church of Satan are either wildly misinformed, or completely dishonest.

Philosophically speaking, The Church of Satan is a fundamentalist LaVeyan organization, which makes a certain sense from a business perspective because they base their authenticity on the fact that they inherited Anton LaVey’s organization and claim his achievements as their own. They hold to a remarkably similar philosophy as you find espoused by radical Tea Party Christians on the theocratic Right: Ayn Rand-inspired Social Darwinist authoritarian-fetishizing libertarianism, but with a bit of occultic ritual magic thrown in. The Satanic Temple espouses a non-supernatural anti-authoritarian philosophy that views the metaphorical literary construct of Satan as a liberator from oppression of the mind and body. Our canon embodies the Romantic Satanism of Milton, Blake, Shelley, to, particularly, Anatole France, whose Revolt of the Angels is a primary text in TST. From its inception, modern Satanism, as it came to be defined in the Revolutionary era of Romantics, was very much a non-theistic movement aligned with Liberty, Equality and Rationalism. With that in mind, I think we’re rather closely aligned with early Modern Satanism, rather than some type of wildly aberrant, unique and unrecognizable contemporary off-shoot.

Since the religious construct of Satanism doesn’t believe in the supernatural, you say you “turn to literature and art as icons for deeply held beliefs.” Can you talk more about the importance of art and literature, especially during times of conflict?

This, I think, cuts to the very heart of what it means to be a non-theistic, non-supernaturalist religion. As I’ve described elsewhere, non-theistic Satanic religious affiliation has a cultural framework that is deeply significant and far from arbitrary— that is to say, we couldn’t simply re-label it for the sake of diplomacy, nor would doing so be true to our principles.

The narrative of the ultimate rebel against tyranny, the use of blasphemy as a tool for liberation against imposed, frivolous, sanctified superstitions; the cultivation of the individual will and rationalism unencumbered by “faith” or blind subjugation; the willingness to stand as an outsider with a sense of justice that is independent of laws and institutions; all are embodied by the literary Satan.

Those of us who were burdened from childhood by archaic tradition-based dogmas, especially in the era of the Satanic Panic, were instilled with an irrational aversion and fear toward the “other”, the Satanic. Breaking that barrier, defying such deeply-entrenched cultural programming, embracing the symbols, narrative, and outside status of the Adversary, can be a supremely liberating personal experience, not merely incidentally divorced from superstition, but emblematic of, and vital to, the break with superstition. Whether we interpret them literally or not, the mythological backdrop by which we each contextualize our existential grounding is profoundly important in our lives. I feel that theists are subjugated by their myths, while we are empowered by ours. The literary Satanists of the Revolutionary Era understood this, and their power to change the world by way of altering the cultural mythological structure was certainly not lost on them. One can read some artful exposition on this point in Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry. In explaining this, I can only hope to make some people understand that, despite common perceptions, Satanism is (or can be) deeply personally enriching, and isn’t merely an attention-seeking shock tactic directed at observers. When the cameras aren’t rolling, when the journalists have all left the spectacle, we are, in fact, Satanists still. I know this doesn’t quite exactly directly answer the question of how literature and art serve as icons for deeply held beliefs; But the power of metaphor, the vital necessity of narrative to cultivate and define one’s sense of self and purpose, the atavistic desire for art are all self-evident to me. I have a difficult time understanding the bizarre, yet apparently prevalent notion, that religious identity, practice, and ethics should be dependent upon intellectually crippling superstitions. I can’t grasp why it became the norm to believe that mentally-stunted fundamentalists have a more authentic claim to deeply-held beliefs.

Any advice you would give those who are operating at the intersection of art and activism?

Never separate art and activism. Never let your activism be artless, and never allow your art to be orthodox.

In a VICE interview a few years ago, you said, “LaVey is an excellent jumping-off point, but his work was a product of its time, and it’s appropriate to recontexualize it to today’s reality. LaVey was active during a time in which, for decades, the United States was on a dysfunctional spiral of increasing violence.” 2017 also seems to be a spiral of increasing violence; do you see TST adapting to that in any particular way?

I don’t agree that there is a spiral of increasing violence. In fact, violence is at historic lows. Since 2008, in the United States, violent crime has been lower than at any point in over 40 years. There was a rise in crime in 2015, but there’s no reason to believe it’s a trend, and there’s no reason to believe it harkens the end of an overall decline in violence. Broader historical overviews indicate an overall decrease in violence from the beginning of recorded history till now. So why are we being sold this bullshit apocalyptic narrative of increasing criminality and violence? I think the reasons should be clear to anybody paying attention to American politics. There needs to be an emergency in order to declare Emergency Powers. Fear-mongering inures the public to unilateral executive actions that defy the checks and balances of open deliberation. “Othering” strengthens tribal bonds as they unify themselves against a common enemy, and the creation of unease and general panic can be used by leaders to manipulate their followers who offer them the latitude to protect them by whatever means.

In the case of LaVey, he actually was living in a time in which violence in the United States was trending upward and was a cause for alarm. During the 1960s, crime steadily and dramatically rose till about 1995 when it began to plummet, eventually, to where we happily are now. LaVey seems to have looked at what was unique in the culture around him at the time to determine what may have precipitated the rise in crime, and to determine what might need to change to make things better. He looked critically at the Rights Revolution and he despised the Hippy culture. He imagined a stratified and tribally divided, non-democratic world. He advocated police state politics.

Turns out, he was wrong.

Secular democratic states are less likely to engage in war against each other and less likely to engage in terrorism or political violence than autocratic states. The rise in democratic states and the concurrent diminution in autocracies correlates to the global trend in reduced violence. Intermingling cultures — free to “appropriate” from each other — fare better than insular ethnic/religious/nationalist cults. And crime has, as stated, drastically plummeted in the United States without any massive reductions in Civil Liberties. In fact, the Rights Revolution has continued to move forward, slowly — but with great resistance, particularly from the Christian Right — and inexorably. I highly recommend a book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which explores this topic in great detail.

Troublingly, I feel that the greatest threat to our social stability now comes from those who claim we must do something to stop the imagined increase in violence. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We already see an increased tribalistic zeal, and we see pre-emptive violence in the name of anti-fascism, which will then be used as justification for increased police action. That’s the real downward spiral.

However, an increase in crime now can’t change what we know. It won’t make a stratified, autocratic Social Darwinist system any more correct. That said, one might wonder why I feel LaVey could be described as an “excellent jumping-off point” at all, if he is so entirely incorrect on this important point? LaVey was a bold voice in opposition to faith-driven mindlessness. He was instrumental in establishing recognition of Modern Satanism, even if he did hang on to other forms of magical thinking. If he were alive today, I like to think that he would be able to see the evidence and adjust his thinking accordingly. Being able to live without delusion and adjust one’s thinking to incorporate the best empirical evidence is, I think, a great overriding principle of Satanism.

In certain areas, LaVey was quite progressive, and I’ve gotten to know some of his old friends (who don’t associate with the Church of Satan), and they’ve all said that they suspect he himself would very much appreciate what The Satanic Temple is now doing.

Is there a reason TST’s Baphomet doesn’t have breasts?

The short answer as to why our Baphomet monument has no breasts is because we fight to win in all of our battles. The Baphomet was originally offered as a private donation to Oklahoma’s State Capitol grounds where, in 2012, their government allowed for the placement of a 10 Commandments monument. The Oklahoma Legislature — led on this issue by a Southern Baptist Deacon State House representative — claimed that the 10 Commandments monument wasn’t, in fact, a religious monument, but a secular, historical monument paying tribute to the early foundations of Constitutional Law. In further attempting to build an argument that the 10 Commandments on Capitol Grounds didn’t constitute a government endorsement of religion, Oklahoma made clear that no public funds went into the construction of the monument, thus opening the Capitol Grounds as a First Amendment protected public forum for private donations. Clearly, they didn’t expect anybody to call their bluff. It was the end of 2013 when we sent off a letter to the State of Oklahoma expressing to them that we should like to offer a monument to be displayed on the Capitol Grounds and requesting the documentation required to move our monument request forward. Having obtained that, we then began to design a monument within the parameters of their “limited open forum” requirements. After sketching out various proposals, it became clear that Baphomet was the best, artistically and symbolically. Symbolically, the binary elements of Baphomet aligned perfectly with our effort to counterbalance the 10 Commandments. We meticulously contrived a legal argument for the inclusion of the Baphomet on the Oklahoma Capitol grounds that artfully paralleled the 10 Commandments’ Bill in every way. The Baphomet was to stand as an homage to the unjustly accused, the heretics and the scapegoats: those burned, hung, stoned, and tortured during witch-hunts and crowd panics. An homage to them, we explained, is an homage to the moral underpinnings of our secular Judiciary which works from a presumption of innocence, places the burden of proof upon the accuser, and refuses to recognize claims of divine authority or anti-blasphemy legislation. We constructed an ironclad argument. We knew, however, that exposed breasts would lead to an opportunity for Oklahoma to claim that our monument defied so-called decency standards, and they would be entirely relieved to evade the Establishment Clause issue in favor of a puritanical claim related to community standards. Initially, I worked with the artist to devise some type of covering for the breasts, but they all looked out-of-place and distracting. Artistically, the breastless bare chest looked best. We still occasionally hear from people who insist that they, as purists, would have included the breasts, decency complaints be damned. I just have to shrug and let them know that this is exactly why they’ll most likely never get anything done.

As a hybrid religion/activism group that embraces humor, TST bears some similarity to 60s activist group W.I.T.C.H., which has recently announced a modern reincarnation. I’m also reminded of Discordianism, which was my first introduction to the use of religion as a satirical framework as a teenager. Do you think humor is an integral part of activism?

I think humor is integral to being a well-adjusted human. There is a difference, however, between creating a satirical religion and using satire, as a religious organization, to advance a point.

Our identification as Satanists isn’t “satirical,” however, we’re not adverse to using humor and satire to highlight various hypocrisies and absurdities we run up against. This point is entirely lost on some people who seem to believe that everything is mutually exclusive, and one organization can’t be more than one thing at a time.

We’re often asked if we’re political, religious, an art movement, etc. Why would we have to choose between any one of those things? Why can we not be entirely sincere while also having a sense of humor? For that matter, why is it we seldom see the skepticism that is directed toward us directed toward the Evangelical Right? Is the Evangelical Right a sincere religious movement, or is it merely political? Is there anything in scripture that even distantly implies that a corporation like Hobby Lobby shalt not pay for insurance benefits that include contraceptive coverage? Is their belief that they should not pay those benefits more deeply-held than our belief in bodily autonomy merely because they claim to lack the intellectual nuance to not read their Bible as a literal historical text?

I would like to see that The Satanic Temple never loses its sense of humor, even as there persists this bizarre notion that humor and authenticity are irreconcilable.

According to Breitbart, you reached out to clarify that TST had nothing to do with the counter-Milo protests in California, citing your support of free speech. How do you reconcile having “freedom to offend” with the danger Milo causes to individuals by targeting specific trans or undocumented students at his speeches?

I’m not sure what danger he’s caused to anybody. I’ve never read his material. I’ve never listened to him speak. Even still, after having defended his right to speak, I still don’t give a shit about what he’s saying. I defend the principle of Free Speech, and when you defend a principle, you don’t only defend it selectively. If you can’t support it when it incidentally doesn’t benefit you, you’re not supporting it at all. You can’t claim that you believe in Free Speech, only insofar as you agree with what’s being said. If Milo has posed a legitimate danger to individuals through inciting violence in a very direct and tangible way, if he’s defamed people, or invaded their privacy — this seems like a matter for the civil courts, and the aggrieved parties should consult legal representation. If the “danger” is that he has hurt people’s feelings, then I should be quite clear that I am not sympathetic. For my part, I can’t wrap my head around the cognitive dissonance that has self-proclaimed defenders of Liberal Democracy calling for limitations on Free Speech in the name of “anti-fascism.” The irony is overwhelming. Of course, it seems, nobody quite wants to admit that they renounce Free Speech, so it’s quite popular to try and categorize anything one disagrees with as Hate Speech worthy of censorship. But offensive and even hateful speech is, and should remain, protected under the First Amendment. Threats and incitement are treated differently, and there could be legal claims related to those, if in fact that’s what Milo’s done.

Many are the times in which The Satanic Temple has been wrongly denigrated as engaging in “hate speech” by offended Christian groups who imagine that any and all of our activities are acts of persecution against them. They would argue that while we’re not make direct threats or inciting specific actions against them, our very identification as Satanists nonetheless threatens Christians and incites acrimony against them. Their feelings are hurt. They’re offended. We would support a broadened definition of Hate Speech or accept a less discriminating interpretation of what constitutes a threat or incitement at our own peril.

My impression of Milo is that he rode a wave of celebrity that was largely created by the ignorant little assholes who ran amok lighting fires, smashing property, and macing bystanders in the face wherever he was scheduled to speak. When you take a third-rate comedian who’s saying offensive things and demand his censorship, you suddenly give him the First Amendment high ground. You turn him into a defender of Civil Liberties. You make him a Free Speech martyr, and in the internet age his message is certainly no less accessible, you’ve only given him free publicity.

Incidentally, it appears that Milo’s career as a sweetheart of the alt-right is all but entirely finished, and it wasn’t destroyed because some screaming mob of mindless fascistic “anti-fascists” managed to impose a general censorship of his words, but because he was allowed to speak freely and express things that even his followers couldn’t support or defend.  

Related, does TST have an official stance on punching Nazis?

Personally, I think it’s a bad idea to go out looking to punch anybody. I especially think it’s a bad idea to go out looking to punch thick-skulled miscreants who themselves are looking for a pretext for a fight. I also think Nazis are a bit too easy a target to place all of our post-election angst upon. I’m not particularly concerned that the Nazi Party is going to gain prominence in the United States any time in the near or projected future. Even our most oppressive elements on the right probably honestly believe themselves to be entirely unrelated to Nazis. The self-identified Nazis I know of are angry, uneducated, aggressive yokels who run no risk of organizing a national coup. I just don’t run into Nazis in my daily life or when I’m out socializing. I’m not sure where people are living that they can decide to whimsically travel out and go punch a Nazi at will. Rather, I think the anti-Nazi rhetoric is simply a safe and inoffensive exhibition of discontent. It’s something people can rant about and issue threats of violence toward without any real fear of actual confrontation. I think it would be far more poignant and meaningful if people were to confront Evangelical Nationalism and rail against the Theocratic Right. I get sick of hearing people say, “let’s call them what they really are: Nazis.” No. Why don’t you call them what they really are? They are the Theocratic Right. They are Evangelical Nationalists. They are taking over the public offices and overturning Liberal Democracy. When you call people who have no attachment to Nazi-ism Nazis, they don’t know you’re talking about them, and it’s not clear that you know who you’re talking about either.

You recently opened an international headquarters in Salem. Can you tell us about this?

Our organization has grown so rapidly in the past few years. It made sense to have a dedicated headquarters where we can keep our offices and centralize our operations. The lower floor is open to the public as an art gallery where we regularly have exhibitions. The current exhibition features the work of Vincent Castiglia, a remarkable artist who paints enormous and meticulously detailed works of art in his own blood. We have some amazing sculpture-work by Chris Andres, who also designed our veterans’ memorial in Minnesota. We also have a segment of the gallery dedicated to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s, and which still persists to a greater or lesser degree today. We also have a lecture room where we show films and host guest speakers.

The gallery is always going to be a work in progress and we’re adding to it all the time. By now, given my explanation of non-theistic religion and the importance and power of art, it shouldn’t seem strange in the least that our headquarters should double as an art gallery. In fact, nothing could be more natural to us. Art is integral to our religion.

People often ask how we’re received by the local community. There haven’t been any problems at all. We get along with the neighbors, the local officials haven’t given us any problems, and we really couldn’t have picked a better place to put our headquarters. When people recognize me on the street, it’s always been a positive and polite interaction. We’ve had many people visit from out-of-state just to visit our headquarters, and it hasn’t been uncommon for them to considering moving to Salem afterward. I have a feeling that Salem will become home to the largest population of self-identified Satanists in the world in the foreseeable future.

You support non-believers having access to religion as a framework. Can you elaborate on what that means? What is the difference between religion and faith?

“Faith” is belief without evidence. Theists ennoble faith as integral to religion: blind belief in intellectually insulting superstitions that offer the benefit of solace in “knowing” that we’ll go to a paradisiacal after-world, so long as we live a life of servitude toward an unseen master. Faced with disconfirming evidence, the theist often withdraws into arguments that attack a lack of moral clarity in science. The superstitious religionist feels that their ethics, community, and sense of cultural identity are founded upon old superstitions that they must strive to believe and struggle to uphold, despite the persistent injuries constantly dealt to those beliefs by critical scrutiny and empirical knowledge.

In the United States we afford certain protections to deeply-held beliefs to respect freedom of conscience. Thomas Jefferson, in his Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom stated, “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.” Elaborating on this bill (which was important enough to him that it was named among three lifetime achievements upon his grave), Jefferson wrote in his memoirs that in this statute “protection of opinion was meant to be universal”, and the document included “within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

Religious opinion was meant to be equally protected alongside faith. The non-believer’s right to express non-belief and not be besieged by a state-sanctioned religious viewpoint is equally protected alongside the right of the superstitious to assemble in houses of worship and implore the good will of a petty and jealous deity to take pity on their pathetic and groveling souls. This is the only tenable interpretation of what “religious liberty” can mean in a democratic pluralistic society. Religious Liberty doesn’t support a “right” to impose a religious viewpoint upon anybody else, or a “right” to limit another’s civic capacities. Religious Liberty gives every one of the us the opportunity to object to impositions of the state that run contrary to our deeply-held beliefs and challenge our freedom of conscience. Superstition does not produce superior ethics or identities, nor does faith provide beliefs that are more deeply-held than the personal moral foundations of any well-adjusted atheist. It would be deplorable to give superstition preferential treatment to rational thinking.

Of course, any time that equal protection for the religious opinion of non-believers is contextualized as part of a fight for Religious Liberty, there’s always some smug asshole, self-identifying as an atheist, who witlessly parrots the witticism, “atheism is a religion in the same way that bald is a haircut,” or, “…in the same way that off is a television station,” or any number of less-than-clever unoriginal variations. Nothing could be more helpful to the Fundamentalists than non-believers who insist that religion is dependent upon superstition, thus defining themselves outside of a protected class. I feel that atheist organizations, as organizations based upon a well-defined religious opinion, or opinion regarding religion, should have no hesitation in arguing for religious privilege and exemption including religious tax-exemption.

I think that the more people come to recognize the legitimacy of non-theistic religions — and there are already a significant population of atheist Jews, Buddhists, and others — the more we will see atheistic Christians making themselves known; individuals who still venerate the Christian myth and its customs, who identify with the Christian community, but simply can’t claim to believe ludicrous Biblical stories — at least not literally.

When superstitious delusion becomes isolated from the real-world benefits of religious affiliation, superstition becomes all the more impossible to maintain and defend. The sooner the atheist movement recognizes that their fight is with superstition, not religion, the sooner we’ll get there.

What are you working on right now? How can people get involved?

Recently, we were approved to place a veterans’ memorial monument in a park in Belle Plaine, Minnesota where a Christian veterans’ monument provoked controversy leading the local officials to open the public grounds as a limited open forum. We’re crowd-funding to offset the cost of that effort.

We have two lawsuits, State and Federal, currently active in Missouri, where we’re fighting against prohibitive abortion restrictions on the grounds that these restrictions violate our religious liberty.

We’re putting a volunteer manual together for our After School Satan Club, so that people who aren’t a part of a local TST chapter can nonetheless apply to present our After School Satan Club (ASSC) curriculum in schools where Evangelical indoctrination clubs are present. We’re going to release our volunteer manual at around the same time we file our first ASSC-related lawsuit.

We’re currently researching the prospect of opening our own religiously-protected abortion clinic.

I’m putting together a syllabus now for ordination coursework through The Satanic Temple, and it’s going to be rigorous and intensive, but it will ensure that our ministry are entirely capable of speaking on behalf of our beliefs.

We’re putting together an online platform so that we can video stream our activities at the headquarters to our membership and better connect with our international community.

In fact, we have a massive number of projects currently in the works that keeping track of it all has become the largest difficulty we face. Expect big things in the near future.

People who want to get involved can check to see if they have a local chapter near them, or reach out to us if there is sufficient local interest in starting one. Keep up with our current campaigns on our website and check up on our daily news on Facebook. Check out our merchandise on ShopSatan.com and keep in mind that your purchases help fund our campaigns.

Anything you want to add?

Please check out GreyFaction.org. Grey Faction is a sub-organization of The Satanic Temple dedicated to combating irrational conspiracy theory-based moral panics, modern witch-hunts, and the discredited therapeutic practices that still haunt us from beyond the formally recognized Satanic Panic era. We are keeping track of professionals in the mental health field that continue to use Recovered Memory Therapies to reveal and propagate delusional narratives of Satanic Ritual Abuse. We have issued petitions against therapists who openly endorse bizarre conspiracy theories related to imaginary Satanic cults to the mentally vulnerable. Our research revealed the connection between one such therapist and the murder of an 8-year old boy not many years ago. Our work with Grey Faction is supremely important, but has received relatively little press coverage.

[patriotsnet]

Are There Republicans Running For President

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/are-there-republicans-running-for-president/

Are There Republicans Running For President

What Is A Voter

Trump says there is ‘tremendous support’ for him to run for president again

The Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act, which took effect January 1, 2011, created voter-nominated offices. The Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act does not apply to candidates running for U.S. President, county central committees, or local offices.

Most of the offices that were previously known as partisan are now known as voter-nominated offices. Voter-nominated offices are state constitutional offices, state legislative offices, and U.S. congressional offices. The only partisan offices now are the offices of U.S. President and county central committee.

List Of Republicans Who Opposed The Donald Trump 2020 Presidential Campaign

This article is part of a series about

This is a list of Republicans and conservatives who opposed the re-election of incumbent Donald Trump, the 2020 Republican Party nominee for President of the United States. Among them are former Republicans who left the party in 2016 or later due to their opposition to Trump, those who held office as a Republican, Republicans who endorsed a different candidate, and Republican presidential primary election candidates that announced opposition to Trump as the presumptive nominee. Over 70 former senior Republican national security officials and 61 additional senior officials have also signed onto a statement declaring, “We are profoundly concerned about our nation’s security and standing in the world under the leadership of Donald Trump. The President has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term.”

A group of former senior U.S. government officials and conservativesincluding from the Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43, and Trump administrations have formed The Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform to, “focus on a return to principles-based governing in the post-Trump era.”

A third group of Republicans, Republican Voters Against Trump was launched in May 2020 has collected over 500 testimonials opposing Donald Trump.

‘i Made A Decision To Live My Life In Service’

Brock Pierce is a former child actor who appeared in the Mighty Ducks franchise and starred as the president’s son in the 1996 comedy First Kid. But thanks to his second career as a tech entrepreneur, he’s also probably a crypto currency billionaire.

Why is he running for president? Partly because he is deeply concerned by the state of the country.

“I think that we lack a real vision for the future – I mean, what kind of world do we want to live in, in the year 2030? What is the plan? Where are we trying to get to, you know? You have to aim for something. And I see mostly just a lot of mud being thrown around, not a lot of people putting forth game-changing ideas. It’s getting scary. And I have a view of what to do.”

For the last four years, Mr Pierce has focused on philanthropic work in Puerto Rico, where his foundation recently raised a million dollars for PPE to give to first responders.

Asked what America’s priorities should be for the next four years, he suggests the country stops pursuing “growth for growth’s sake”, and measures its success by how well life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are upheld.

“I have many liberal tendencies, just like I have conservative tendencies,” Mr Pierce says. “And I think it’s time we take a collective breath and a brave step into the future, because all of these ideologies have something to teach us.”

‘We don’t like either candidate’

And if he doesn’t pull it off? Mr Pierce says he has offers.

Former Colorado Gov John Hickenlooper

Hickenlooper joined the field in early March, seeking to parlay his success in growing Colorado’s economy while passing environmental regulations and gun control laws into a successful presidential campaign. In a launch video, he spoke further of healing the nation’s political divisions.

“One thing I’ve shown I can do, again and again, is create teams of amazingly talented people and really address these issues that are the critical issues facing this country,” he said on “Good Morning America.”

He also announced he was suspending his campaign with a video.

“While this campaign didn’t have the outcome we were hoping for, every moment has been worthwhile and I’m thankful to everyone who supported this campaign and our entire team,” he said in the video posted to .

Who Wants To Run For Governor As A Republican In 2022

Pennsylvania Republicans have been battling with Gov. Tom Wolf since he unseated incumbent Tom Corbett in 2014. Many of them are eager to take Wolfs place, but there is no clear frontrunner this early in the race. Several Republicans have already announced their bid, and a few others have hinted or shown interest in joining what is expected to be a crowded primary. Thus far, its hard to find a Republican candidate without some sort of ties to former President Donald Trump. 

With a heated race to fill U.S. Sen. Pat Toomeys seat next year, the GOP will have to be strategic about what candidates it wants to back for the Senate and for governor. Potential candidates will also have to weigh their options and decide where they fit best and can compete.

There are plenty of names that could be added to this list in the coming months, but here is our second iteration of potential Republican candidates for 2022. A couple of candidates have been added since the last edition.

Running

Former U.S. Rep Lou Barletta

Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Gale

Gale was the first Republican to formally announce his candidacy for governor back in February. An avid Trump supporter, he has criticized the Pennsylvania GOP and pledged to be a conservative populist. Hes also caught attention for and saying Trumps presidency was sabotaged. 

Former Corry Mayor Jason Monn

Pittsburgh attorney Jason Richey

John Ventre

With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibitionthe Run For President

Return to Rise to National Prominence List Previous Section: The New Lincoln | 

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was the least known of all of the contenders for the Republican Partyâs nomination for president. Heading the list was former New York Governor William H. Seward, with the politically awkward Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio a distant second. Conservative Edward Bates of Missouri was considered too old, and many Republicans seemed uncomfortable with the popular but unpredictable Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune.

To overcome his disadvantage, Lincoln adopted an unobtrusive publicity campaign. The timely release of his published debates with Stephen A. Douglas and brief autobiographies and a carefully orchestrated speaking campaign in New York and parts of New England all worked to Lincolnâs advantage. The nomination and the subsequent campaign were left largely to trusted handlers, but even after his election was secure, Lincoln maintained a dogged silence on national issues prior to his inauguration.

Allegations Of Inciting Violence

Research suggests Trump’s rhetoric caused an increased incidence of hate crimes. During his 2016 campaign, he urged or praised physical attacks against protesters or reporters. Since then, some defendants prosecuted for hate crimes or violent acts cited Trump’s rhetoric in arguing that they were not culpable or should receive a lighter sentence. In May 2020, a nationwide review by ABC News identified at least 54 criminal cases from August 2015 to April 2020 in which Trump was invoked in direct connection with violence or threats of violence by mostly white men against mostly members of minority groups. On January 13, 2021, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for incitement of insurrection for his actions prior to the storming of the U.S. Capitol by a violent mob of his supporters who acted in his name.

: James K Polk Vs Henry Clay Vs James Birney

The election of 1844 introduced expansion and slavery as important political issues and contributed to westward and southern growth and sectionalism. Southerners of both parties sought to annex Texas and expand slavery. Martin Van Buren angered southern Democrats by opposing annexation for that reason, and the Democratic convention cast aside the ex-president and front-runner for the first dark horse, Tennessees James K. Polk. After almost silently breaking with Van Buren over Texas, Pennsylvanias George M. Dallas was nominated for vice president to appease Van Burenites, and the party backed annexation and settling the Oregon boundary dispute with England. The abolitionist Liberty Party nominated Michigans James G. Birney. Trying to avoid controversy, the Whigs nominated anti-annexationist Henry Clay of Kentucky and Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey. But, pressured by southerners, Clay endorsed annexation even though he was concerned it might cause war with Mexico and disunion, thereby losing support among antislavery Whigs.

Enough New Yorkers voted for Birney to throw 36 electoral votes and the election to Polk, who won the Electoral College 170-105 and a slim popular victory. John Tyler signed a joint congressional resolution admitting Texas, but Polk pursued Oregon and then northern Mexico in the Mexican-American War, aggravating tension over slavery and sectional balance and leading to the Compromise of 1850.

How Donald Trump Could Steal The Election

Ted Cruz First GOP Candidate Set to Run in 2016 Presidential Race

The president cant simply cancel the fall balloting, but his state-level allies could still deliver him a second term.

About the author: Jeffrey Davis is a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of Seeking Human Rights Justice in Latin America, and the forthcoming book Constitutional Tyranny.

Even under a normal president, the coronavirus pandemic would present real challenges to the 2020 American election. Everything about in-person voting could be dangerous. Waiting in line, touching a voting machine, and working in polling stations all run afoul of social-distancing mandates. Already, Maryland, Kentucky, Georgia, and Louisiana have postponed their presidential primaries, while Wyoming, New York, and Ohio have altered their voting procedures. Of course, other democracies face similar problems; the United Kingdom has postponed local elections for one year.

But under President Donald Trump, the possibilities for how the coronavirus could wreak havoc on the election are all the more concerning. This is not a president who cares about the sanctity of the electoral process. After all, he has never seemed particularly concerned about Russias efforts to manipulate the 2016 outcome , and he was impeached for demanding Ukrainian help in his reelection efforts.

New 2020 Voter Data: How Biden Won How Trump Kept The Race Close And What It Tells Us About The Future

As we saw in 2016 and again in 2020, traditional survey research is finding it harder than it once was to assess presidential elections accurately. Pre-election polls systemically misjudge who is likely to vote, and exit polls conducted as voters leave the voting booths get it wrong as well.

Now, using a massive sample of validated voters whose participation has been independently verified, the Pew Research Center has . It helps us understand how Joe Biden was able to accomplish what Hillary Clinton did notand why President Trump came closer to getting reelected than the pre-election surveys had predicted.

How Joe Biden won

Five main factors account for Bidens success.

The Biden campaign reunited the Democratic Party. Compared to 2016, he raised the share of moderate and conservative Democrats who voted for the Democratic nominee by 6 points, from 85 to 91%, while increasing the Democratic share of liberal Democrats from 94 to 98%. And he received the support of 85% of Democrats who had defected to 3rd party and independent candidates in 2016.

How Trump kept it close

Despite non-stop controversy about his policies and personal conduct, President Trump managed to raise his share of the popular vote from 46% in 2016 to 47% in 2020. His core coalition held together, and he made a few new friends.

Longer-term prospects

Statehood And Indian Removal

Republic of East FloridaSeminole WarsAdamsOnís TreatyFlorida TerritoryAdmission to the UnionList of U.S. states by date of admission to the UnionCracker

Defense of Florida’s northern border with the United States was minor during the second Spanish period. The region became a haven for escaped slaves and a base for Indian attacks against U.S. territories, and the U.S. pressed Spain for reform.

Americans of and began moving into northern Florida from the backwoods of and . Though technically not allowed by the Spanish authorities and the Floridan government, they were never able to effectively police the border region and the backwoods settlers from the United States would continue to immigrate into Florida unchecked. These migrants, mixing with the already present British settlers who had remained in Florida since the British period, would be the progenitors of the population known as .

These American settlers established a permanent foothold in the area and ignored Spanish authorities. The British settlers who had remained also resented Spanish rule, leading to a rebellion in 1810 and the establishment for ninety days of the so-called Free and Independent Republic of on September 23. After meetings beginning in June, rebels overcame the garrison at , and unfurled the flag of the new republic: a single white star on a blue field. This flag would later become known as the “”.

What Is A Typical Presidential Election Cycle

The presidential election process follows a typical cycle:

Spring of the year before an election Candidates announce their intentions to run.

Summer of the year before an election through spring of the election year Primary and caucus Caucus: a statewide meeting held by members of a political party to choose a presidential candidate to support. debates take place.

January to June of election year States and parties hold primaries Primary: an election held to determine which of a party’s candidates will receive that party’s nomination and be their sole candidate later in the general election.and caucuses.

July to early September Parties hold nominating conventions to choose their candidates.

September and October Candidates participate in presidential debates.

Early November Election Day

December Electors Elector: a person who is certified to represent their state’s vote in the Electoral College. cast their votes in the Electoral College.

Early January of the next calendar year Congress counts the electoral votes.

January 20 Inauguration Day

For an in-depth look at the federal election process in the U.S., check out USA In Brief: ELECTIONS.

Contribution Limits For 2021

Additional national party committee accounts Donor $109,500* per account, per year Candidate committee $45,000 per account, per year PAC: nonmulticandidate $109,500* per account, per year Party committee: state/district/local Unlimited transfers

*Indexed for inflation in odd-numbered years.

PAC here refers to a committee that makes contributions to other federal political committees. Independent-expenditure-only political committees may accept unlimited contributions, including from corporations and labor organizations.

The limits in this column apply to a national party committees accounts for: the presidential nominating convention; election recounts and contests and other legal proceedings; and national party headquarters buildings. A partys national committee, Senate campaign committee and House campaign committee are each considered separate national party committees with separate limits. Only a national party committee, not the parties national congressional campaign committees, may have an account for the presidential nominating convention.

**Additionally, a national party committee and its Senatorial campaign committee may contribute up to $51,200 combined per campaign to each Senate candidate.

Nj Primary Elections 2020: The Five Republicans Who Want To Take Over As Us Senator

Colleen ODea, Senior Writer and Projects EditorNJ Decides 2020Politics

Five Republicans are vying for the chance to try to do something no one else has been able to do in almost a half-century: Convince New Jersey voters to elect a Republican to serve in the U.S. Senate, where Democrat Cory Booker now sits.

It has been 48 years since New Jersey voters have sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate, and registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly a million. In 2018, Republican and former pharmaceuticals executive Bob Hugin spent more than $39 million, including $36 million of his own money, and lost by 11 percentage points to incumbent Bob Menendez, who had been considered vulnerable after his trial on political corruption charges ended in a hung jury.

Statewide races are the toughest ones of all for a GOP outnumbered by a million more registered Democrats in the state, said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. But even before party registrations were so lopsided, Republican Senate candidates have fared more poorly here than almost anywhere else in the nation. Since New Jersey last sent a Republican to the Senate in 1972, the GOP has lost a staggering 15 Senate races in a row, he said.

Withdrew Before The Primaries

The following individuals participated in at least one authorized presidential debate but withdrew from the race before the Iowa caucuses on February 1, 2016. They are listed in order of exit, starting with the most recent.

Name

The following notable individuals filed as candidates with FEC by November 2015.

Name

Additionally, Peter Messina was on the ballot in Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Idaho.Tim Cook was on the ballot in Louisiana, New Hampshire and Arizona. Walter Iwachiw was on the ballot in Florida and New Hampshire.

Jerry Moran: Senator Kansas

Senator Jerry Moran arrives for a meeting about the Republican healthcare bill on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., July 19, 2017.

Trumps second endorsement of the 2022 campaign season is Jerry Moran, the Republican incumbent senator from Kansas. He was the first member of Congress to receive an endorsement from the former president.

Moran voted with most Republican senators to acquit Trump of his impeachment charge of inciting the pro-Trump storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Ron Johnson: Senator Wisconsin

Former GOP Rep. Joe Walsh: ‘I’m going to run for president’

WASHINGTON, DC FEBRUARY 25: Senator Ron Johnson speaks during a U.S. Senate Budget Committee hearing regarding wages at large corporations on Capitol Hill, February 25, 2021 in Washington, DC. The committee is looking at why many low-wage workers in America qualify for public benefits even though thousands of them are employees of large corporations.

Trump announced his endorsement for Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson before he has even announced a re-election bid. Johnson, 66, has represented Wisconsin in the Senate since 2011.

Even though he has not yet announced that he is running, and I certainly hope he does, I am giving my Complete and Total Endorsement to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.  He is brave, he is bold, he loves our Country, our Military, and our Vets, Trump wrote in a statement. He will protect our Second Amendment, and everything else we stand for.  It is the kind of courage we need in the U.S. Senate.  He has no idea how popular he is.  Run, Ron, Run!

This list will be updated as Trump announces new endorsements.

: Benjamin Harrison Vs Grover Cleveland

In 1888 the Democratic Party nominated President Grover Cleveland and chose Allen G. Thurman of Ohio as his running mate, replacing Vice President Thomas Hendricks who had died in office.

After eight ballots, the Republican Party chose Benjamin Harrison, former senator from Indiana and the grandson of President William Henry Harrison. Levi P. Morton of New York was the vice-presidential nominee.

In the popular vote for president, Cleveland won with 5,540,050 votes to Harrisons 5,444,337. But Harrison received more votes in the Electoral College, 233 to Clevelands 168, and was therefore elected. The Republicans carried New York, President Clevelands political base.

The campaign of 1888 helped establish the Republicans as the party of high tariffs, which most Democrats, heavily supported by southern farmers, opposed. But memories of the Civil War also figured heavily in the election.

Northern veterans, organized in the Grand Army of the Republic, had been angered by Clevelands veto of pension legislation and his decision to return Confederate battle flags..

Sen Mitt Romney Of Utah

A Gallup poll last March found Romney, 74, has a higher approval rating among Democrats than Republicans, so you might figure he doesnt have a prayer in taking his partys nomination again. A February Morning Consult poll, though, had Romney polling ahead of Republicans like Pompeo, Cotton and Hawley. So, youre telling me theres a chance? Yes, a one-in-a-million chance.

The 2012 GOP presidential nominee and his wife, Ann, have five sons. He graduated from Brigham Young University and Harvard Law. Romney is a former Massachusetts governor, and the first person to be a governor and senator from two different states since Sam Houston, who was governor of Tennessee and a senator from Texas. Romney is this years JFK Profile in Courage Award recipient.

Former Vice President Mike Pence

If youre curious how the former vice president might handle the fact that many of Trumps supporters think hes disloyal for certifying the 2020 election, his speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on June 24 laid out his argument.

Pence opened the speech with one of his favorite lines, in which he calls himself a Christian, conservative and Republican, in that order and then proceeded to spend the next 20 or so minutes praising Trump and the work of the Trump-Pence administration. We made America great again in just four years, he boasted. Then he finally touched on the attack. Jan. 6 was a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol, he said.

Pence said he would always be proud that elected officials reconvened to finish certifying the election after the riot, and he said he understood why many were disappointed in his tickets loss last year: I can relate, I was on the ballot. He also positioned his view on the election as one informed by Republican patriotism and love of the Constitution.

The Republican Party will always keep our oath to the Constitution, even when it would be politically expedient to do otherwise, he said. Theres almost no idea more un-American that any one person can choose the American president. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone.

: Andrew Jackson Vs Henry Clay Vs William Wirt

Democratic-Republican Andrew Jackson was reelected in 1832 with 688,242 popular votes to 473,462 for National-Republican Henry Clay and 101,051 for Anti-Masonic candidate William Wirt. Jackson easily carried the Electoral College with 219 votes. Clay received only 49, and Wirt won the seven votes of Vermont. Martin Van Buren won the vice presidency with 189 votes against 97 for various other candidates.

The spoils system of political patronage, the tariff, and federal funding of internal improvements were major issues, but the most important was Jacksons veto of the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. National-Republicans attacked the veto, arguing that the Bank was needed to maintain a stable currency and economy. King Andrews veto, they asserted, was an abuse of executive power. In defense of Jacksons veto, Democratic-Republicans labeled the Bank an aristocratic institutiona monster. Suspicious of banking and of paper money, Jacksonians opposed the Bank for giving special privileges to private investors at government expense and charged that it fostered British control of the American economy.

The Anti-Masons convened the first national presidential nominating convention in Baltimore on September 26, 1831. The other parties soon followed suit, and the convention replaced the discredited caucus system of nomination.

Sen Josh Hawley Of Missouri

Though controversial, Hawley, 41, is a fundraising machine and hes quickly made a name for himself. The blowback Hawley faced for objecting to Bidens Electoral College win included a lost book deal and calls for him to resign from students at the law school where he previously taught. His mentor, former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri, said that supporting Hawley was the biggest mistake Ive ever made in my life.

Still, he brought in more than $1.5 million between Jan. 1 and March 5, according to Axios, and fundraising appeals in his name from the National Republican Senatorial Committee brought in more cash than any other Republican except NRSC Chair Sen. Rick Scott of Florida. Just because youre toxic in Washington doesnt mean you cant build a meaningful base of support nationally.

One Republican strategist compared the possibility of Hawley 2024 to Cruz in 2016. Hes not especially well-liked by his colleagues , but hes built a national profile for himself and become a leading Republican voice opposed to big technology companies.

Hawley and his wife, Erin, have three children. He got his start in politics as Missouri attorney general before being elected to the Senate in 2018. Hawley graduated from Stanford and Yale Law.

[journeysintowebcomics]

Worm Liveblog #63

UPDATE 63: Just Like Them

Last time Jack Slash had encountered the person he wanted to recruit. It went badly for the potential recruit – Oni Lee. Theo will pursue Jack Slash and try to kill him with a time limit of two years. Meanwhile, Labyrinth was visited by Burnscar, who didn’t try to recruit. It didn’t go well either. Who is next in the Slaughterhouse Nine’s potential recruits? Let’s find out!

It takes me a moment to realize the significance of this candidate. It’s Colin, or as he used to be known when he was a hero: Armsmaster. Well this has the potential to be quite the interesting situation! Because despite everything, I don’t think Armsmaster would join the Slaughterhouse Nine unless he’s really upset about the consequences of his actions during the Leviathan attack. It doesn’t seem to me like he’s delusional, thinking it wasn’t his fault or anything like that. In my opinion, he’s of sound mind and has relatively stable moral opinions. He should be okay.

What worries me is which one of the Slaughterhouse Nine will visit him, though, because it’s very likely they’ll cause havoc no matter who it is. The question is how destructive they’ll be.

So! Armsmaster is at his house because where else would he be during his house arrest, when he hears a noise like tinkling glass. Shatterbird, perhaps? Better step away from anything made of any kind of glass, just in case. Armsmaster does precisely the opposite to that, contacting Dragon, who is currently busy examining a boring code. Hah! An AI is getting bored of code! This is great. Through the microphones, Dragon tries to listen and find out where the tinkling noise is coming from. This is good, I think. If anything happens to Armsmaster, Dragon will know immediately what it was.

There’s nothing to be seen outside through the window, which of course doesn’t mean he’s safe. The noise is coming from the vent, and I think it’s clear for anyone that anything that has to come from the ventilation can’t be benign. To defend himself, Armsmaster takes a small knife that seems to have disintegration based on nanotechnology, and considers going for his helmet.

The vent exploded from the wall with enough force to fly across the room and embed in the opposite wall. It was hard to make out in the cloud of plaster dust, but Colin saw a hand, all white, each joint segmented, fingers splayed, palm facing the room.

The hand tipped forward, and then dropped to the floor alongside the attached forearm, a length of chain stretching from the vent to the ‘elbow’.

…I remember in the crime scenes the Wards had fought the Travelers at one of the bodies looked like this – joints attached with chains and stuff separated. This has to be the person who made it. I can’t avoid wondering how exactly this parahuman can survive with such mutilation, from the description I’m reading here it should be an impossibility. This person must be a tremendously skillful tinker, because I suppose it relies on technology to work.

Do you know how creepy the idea of seeing exposed organs at work is? How do surgeons endure such thing? Golly!

He knew this one from the briefings.  Mannequin.

Well the name is very fitting. From the physical description alone I’d say this one is the most memorable of all the Slaughterhouse Nine so far. There’s something extremely unsettling about him that goes beyond the fact he’s a shambling mess of a person walking and moving. Has someone drawn Mannequin? I’m certain there is. If you know some pretty good Mannequin art please show it to me! Call it morbid curiosity, because I’m sure I’ll kind of regret it once I see it, haha

Armsmaster reacts immediately, lunging forward with his weapon ready to hit while Mannequin is still lying on the floor unmoving, but of course it doesn’t work. What kind of Slaughterhouse Nine member would get killed like a chump? A large blade emerges from the hand, and Armsmaster dodges because he got lucky. Will Mannequin approve this? I think he will, it’s not like he expected a warm welcome, right?

The head is the last thing that gets to the body, and it truly is like a mannequin’s head. It doesn’t even have facial features, so I suppose that means Mannequin’s brain is the only thing inside? I’m imagining that’s what’s going on with him. Goodness, my imagination is flying about how biologically possible it could be. Mannequin seriously is such a weird character.

Dragon noticed what’s going on and help is already on its way. Will she use her speedy suit to come all the way from wherever she is, like she did with the Undersiders’ attack to the Protectorate? Maybe not because this isn’t a somewhat average villain from the city, this is a member of a worldwide threat. Launching yourself carelessly against Mannequin can’t end well...for Armsmaster because he’s the one who is vulnerable here.

Mannequin does what can only be intimidation tactics such as showing Armsmaster his spinning fingers and trying to ward him away with them, as if threatening to slice his face off with them. Instead, the blades touch the leg, and it bounces around in what may or may not have been a calculated move because of this:

All at once, it ricocheted, shearing through the computer, bouncing violently off of Mannequin’s head, then his leg again, the desk, then his arm.

It hit the computer. Maybe Mannequin heard Dragon talking, even if she was careful not to be too loud. I don’t think they’d be so careless as to make the computer what allows Dragon to listen, but Mannequin may not know that, to them any voice he heard may just be someone Armsmaster was talking with.

The blades stopped, Mannequin still isn’t saying anything. Just like I suppose, the destruction of the computer doesn’t stop the connection with Dragon, she’s able to give some useful information about Mannequin. It’s of interest to me too!

“Mannequin. Original name Alan Gramme. Tinker, originally went by the name Sphere.  Specialty is in biomes, terraforming and ecosystems… or it was.”

Well this is the most information I know of any Slaughterhouse Nine member yet. Of course he’s a tinker, no surprise there, although now I can’t avoid wondering how exactly he turned himself into his current state. It doesn’t say he was a former hero, maybe he was like Canary, a rogue? His specialty is biomes and ecosystems. His, uh, his being right now may be related to that, if he can make a self-sustaining environment for what little remains of him. Who knows what kind of stuff is inside that mannequin. All in all, useful information.

“He became newsworthy when he took on a project to build self sustaining biospheres on the moon.  He had ideas on solving world hunger, and building aquatic cities near cities plagued by overcrowding.  And he was putting it all into effect.  Until-”

“The Simurgh,” Colin finished.

So he was a genius, a veritable world-saving genius. Self-sustaining biospheres and aquatic cities are concepts that seem so science fiction it’s amazing to hear he was putting it all into effect, but the Simurgh...something happened with the Simurgh. That sounds familiar. Wasn’t the Simurgh one of the Endbringers? Behemoth, Leviathan and the Simurgh, if I recall correctly. The city he was in must have been obliterated, and he changed then.

“His wife and children were killed in the attack, years of work ruined.  Everything fell apart.  He went mad.  He cut himself off from the rest of the world.  Literally sealed himself away.”

Literally sealed himself away, no doubt. It’s a real pity such a promising mind went insane and is now one of the Slaughterhouse Nine. I can understand why he joined, though, or at the very least I can imagine why he’d be willing to take part of this group.

In what must be the world’s least surprising fact ever, Dragon says Mannequin has a body count. What’s important is what kind of person he prefers killing, though.

Like other serial killers, Mannequin favored certain types of people as victims.  His prey of choice included rogues, those individuals seeking to make a profit from their abilities, especially those looking to better the world… and tinkers.

Pretty meaningful targets, if you ask me. I can’t say I know what’s going through Mannequin’s head, but I suspect he’s killing them out of rancor or envy, like they deserve getting killed for being altruistic or because he envies they’re actually being able to help the world without things going badly for them. Maybe this is also why Mannequin is here to try to recruit Armsmaster. He was trying to do what he thought was the right thing to do for the sake of the world – and his own reputation, but that’s beside the point – yet got punished for it, dishonored and thrown aside. His fall from glory was nowhere as dramatic or painful as Mannequin’s, but it’s close enough.

Being killed isn’t something Armsmaster is afraid of, he even welcomes it because he has nothing left in his life. That’s when Dragon reveals to him what the Slaughterhouse Nine may be doing in Brockton Bay. He didn’t see it coming, he’s not happy to hear he’s under consideration to join one of the global menaces. Yes! Just like I hoped he’s not interested. I hope my judgment of him isn’t wrong!

Mannequin doesn’t seem capable of talking. I suppose vocal functions are one of those functions that aren’t important, or at leIast I doubt he left his vocal chords intact. Instead of talking, he takes some of the keys from the keyboard to try to communicate. Somehow this isn’t the kind of communication I expected with a known murderer...communicating through keyboard keys. Somehow that doesn’t really increase the scare factor.

Mannequin swiveled his upper body to face the other direction and reached for the shattered monitor.  He picked out a piece of glass and a piece of glossy black plastic.  Pressing them together, he raised it to the right side of his face, looking down at Colin.  Slowly, Mannequin changed the angle of the shard of glass with the black backing.

It took two long seconds before the villain’s intent became clear.  Colin tensed, and Mannequin froze, fixing the angle of the shard.

With the black backing, the glass reflected an image.  With the angle Mannequin had carefully found, the image reflected was half of Colin’s own face, overlapping with Mannequin’s head.

It took me a while to realize what Mannequin was trying to communicate. What can I say, I’m not very good with charades. After a moment I realize he’s trying to indicate he thinks Armsmaster and he are similar. Looks like I was correct! This is why he went to find Armsmaster and invite him to join! And unlike me, Armsmaster isn’t pleased. He refuses to think they’re anything alike.

“I didn’t date, I didn’t have kids, because I wanted to be out there, helping!  I knew that any attachments could be used against me, so I went without!  I was fucking smart enough to do that!”

Given how their deaths is part of what pushed Sphere over the edge, mentioning this seems like a ticket straight to getting your head bashed in. Mannequin doesn’t even do that, he’s silent even when Armsmaster demands a reply. He’s so upset Mannequin insinuated they were similar he’s throwing all caution to the wind, even with Dragon begging him to shut up. It’s because he’s certain he’s going to die, so may as well die telling the madman what’s what.

“You want to compare us, freak?  Maybe we both had bad days.  Days where nothing went right, days where we were too slow, too stupid, too weak, unprepared or tired.  Days we’ll look back on for the rest of our fucking miserable lives, wondering what we would have done different, what we could have done better, how things could have played out.  The difference between us is that I actually did something with my life, and I’m still trying to do more while I serve my sentence!”  He stopped and took a breath.  “You started your big projects, got every fucking person in the world to get their hopes up, and then you failed to finish anything because you couldn’t hack it when your fucking family got killed!  You insult their fucking memories every motherfucking second you exist like this!”

I won’t lie, I’m kinda impressed. It can’t have been easy to say all that to a serial killer’s face, knowingly pressing all the buttons and aiming to enrage him as much as possible. I’m also pleased to know he’s trying to do something productive even while he’s trapped in his own home. Maybe there’s hope for this man. I’m not going to expect much because he did something rather extreme that cost a few villains’ lives and that’s not forgiven easily, but I’m glad he’s not sinking into hate for heroes or anything like that. He’s the first hero Taylor had contact with, and as such I’m sure Mr. Wildbow has plans about how to use Armsmaster’s character. Will he die here in this intermission? I doubt it, given how much potential he has.

As expected, Mannequin isn’t happy at all. He slams Armsmaster against the wall and stabs him three times, and slashes him across the face. Not only now he has lost one arm during Worm, he also is minus one eye now. Nothing that can’t be fixed with tinker technology, I’d say.

None of it hurt as much as it felt like it should have.  More serious wounds didn’t tend to, odd as it was.

It’s the adrenaline, I suppose. He’s not letting the attacks stop him, he’s going to stab Mannequin with the knife. Praying it works so nobody else is killed by this monster, Armsmaster tries to stab and...well, he fails. Figures. He’s not giving up, though, he tries to drive the knife into Mannequin’s chest cavity – since it’s nanotechnology like the one his halberd had that means it should be able to cut through the materials of Mannequin’s body, right? Even if he doesn’t apply lots of force.

How many blades does Mannequin’s weird body have, geez!

Still resisting, Armsmaster makes the knife inch closer, Mannequin positions his face less than an inch from the edge of the blade. It’s so close the material of the casing is being affected, but...it’d be quite anticlimactic for the most interesting Slaughterhouse Nine member so far to get killed because he was sticking his face near a dangerous weapon as if he was a kid with a fork wondering what an electrical socket is for.

He was toying with me.

That he was. I’m glad Armsmaster did such an effort to try to win, even if he didn’t really have a chance.

Armsmaster is too weak to continue moving, he has to let the knife fall and collapses onto the floor, chance Mannequin takes to use the knife to cut the wall apart to make a daring escape. All Armsmaster can hear before falling unconscious is Dragon begging him to stay away. She even says ‘I need you!’. Huh!

She’s there to greet him – well, there’s a laptop. That’s good enough. Better this than waking up and finding a large armor right beside your bed.

Looking around, he saw a laptop propped up beside him, and a get well card from Miss Militia.  She must have put the laptop there when she left the card.

For some reason I’m very amused by Miss Militia leaving a get well card, as if Armsmaster is just resting after an appendix surgery or something. Is there a ‘Get better soon!’ balloon tied to the bed, and a vase of flowers on the nightstand? Heh, but yeah, at least she was here. Nice.

“Your heart stopped nine times on the operating table,” Dragon said, “A lesser man wouldn’t have made it.”

Okay, that’s a feat of endurance. Most of the reason why he survived is because of the artificial parts Dragon invented that are now holding Armsmaster’s face and body together. I can’t avoid making a connection to Mannequin and the fact he also has artificial parts to keep him alive.

There’s still many surgeries Armsmaster has to go into, but he’s fine with it. With Dragon’s help he knows he can survive, and he’s not so far gone into his regrets he’s just going to stop caring about what’s being done to him now that he’s not staring at death to its plastic weird face. Props to Dragon for inventing stuff to save Armsmaster, too.

“You’re a fucking idiot, Colin.  That was the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”

List this sentence under stuff I never thought I’d read Dragon say. She always seemed so proper and composed, this is not composed at all. Must be because Armsmaster was the one to get hurt, all because he wanted to hurt Mannequin where it hurts.

“Wanted to provoke him.  See if I couldn’t find an opening.”

“I repeat: Stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Was going to kill me anyways.”

“Was he? He could have killed you there. He didn’t.”

“He tried.”

...I hadn’t realized it before, but Dragon is bringing up a good point, now that I think about it. Mannequin Is a serial killer. He’s not going to fail just like that. He must have known what he was doing. Dragon’s suspicious is that Mannequin deduced Armsmaster was talking to her. He also left a photo that says ‘BRB’. Is he going to visit Armsmaster while he still is in the hospital? For everyone’s sake I hope not.

Trying to make the situation a bit less tense, Armsmaster brings up what Dragon had said right before he passed out, that she needed him. It doesn’t go well, there’s such a long silence even Armsmaster knew he had said something he shouldn’t have.

The silence stretched on for so long that he knew he’d made some faux pas.  He just wasn’t sure what.  Stupid.  This was the kind of thing that had cost him his position, started the dominoes falling in such a way that they’d led him to being prisoner in that room, led to him being an easy target for Mannequin, to him being here, in this bed.  Never knowing what to say, or how to say it, or who to say it to.

He really is starting to change, the first step to achieve that is acknowledging your flaws, and here he’s doing it. I almost can’t believe I’m actually seeing it happen! For once I have a purely positive opinion of this man.

There we go! Anyway!

He was about to apologize when Dragon said, “Those prosthetics I gave you?  They were part of a bigger project.  Something I’d intended to use for myself.”

Ah...perhaps she’s planning to make a body for herself? One that isn’t a battle armor. Interesting plans, hm...well, giving Armsmaster some of these prosthetics doesn’t mean she has to delay her plans, surely she has schematics and specifications, she can make more for herself. It should be matter of time before she finally has a body. Armsmaster thinks this is because she’s a cripple, he doesn’t suspect anything. The logic for these thoughts makes sense, it’s just that they’re incorrect, that’s it.

The intermission ends with a line that makes me wish this chapter had kept going:

“No, it’s not that,” she paused.  “There’s something you need to know about me.”

Looks like she’s going to tell him the real nature of her existence. I really wish the chapter had continued, I’d have liked to see how she worded it, what his reactions were, what their thoughts were. I hope it goes well, I like Dragon and it’d be awful if this went badly for her. Mr. Wildbow will mention how it went later, I suppose. This is too interesting of a plotline to just toss aside.

That marks the end of the fourth interlude, I’ll check the next one right now.

The fifth interlude is...heh, call me impatience, but I’m immediately going to search for a name.

Hookwolf walked between the groups of his sparring recruits.

...I can’t decide if he would join or not. Back to the start of the interlude! One paragraph above. There seems to be a fight going on right now – it’s sparring, to be more precise. Looks like Hookwolf is currently supervising the training of his recruits, for his racist organization. Needless to mention, highly trained soldiers can hold their own against parahumans and special forces if they have the right moves and weapons. Bullets and knives are quite good equalizers in many cases, as seen before. What Hookwolf is doing, all this training, is a certifiable threat. This man is serious. Although...it makes me wonder what Purity’s group is doing? She’s not trying to use brute force, that much I know, but I’m not sure what she and the others in her faction have been doing.

Hookwolf isn’t the only one looking closely at the recruits’ movements, Menja, Cricket and Stormtiger are here too, watching and waiting to see which recruits are the best ones. They all have specific people already selected. After giving some positive encouragement to the troops, a person named Bradley is called forward to fight Menja. She’s not going to crush him into pieces in a one-sided fight as she’d do if she was using her full power. Bradley is already in disadvantage, being a common human who is tired from sparring, while Menja is fresh and using her powers a little. How well is Bradley going to do? That’s what everyone is waiting to see.

At first Menja easily gets the advantage, by virtue of having powers and all, but Bradley adapts quickly to the situation and manages to get a grip. True, he’s still at disadvantage for a variety of reasons, but Hookwolf judges he has seen enough once Bradley shows to not give up and endures Menja’s kicks.

“Enough,” Hookwolf said.

It wouldn’t do to let the man defeat Menja, and it was looking increasingly possible that he might.  It would hurt her pride and weaken the position of his powered lieutenants in comparison to the unpowered ones.

Yeah, he might, if you give him like two hours. He wasn’t exactly kicking ass and taking names a second ago. Hookwolf judges him capable enough, though, and congratulates him. Welcome to the elites, Bradley! Who is next? Some gal named Leah. It’s her turn, and Menja wants her to give a try to fighting Cricket. It’s all about speed, you see.

Cricket stood from her seat in the corner and limped forward.  She’d refused the same help that Othala had granted Stormtiger, both for the injury to her leg and the damage she’d taken to her vocal chords when she’d had her throat slashed, in a time before he’d met her.  It would have taken a few days at most to restore her to peak condition, but she valued her battle scars too highly.

It’s kind of hard to think of Cricket as a hardened warrior when everything she has done onscreen is get hurt. I know she fought the Undersiders, but it didn’t end that well for her. The other big injury she had from what I remember didn’t even show her fighting. This is her chance to show she be in a fight without getting injured!

Of course. Of course she didn’t get the chance. Why would she have the chance. Not that I’m complaining, I’m not particularly fond of Cricket and these developments are of extreme importance:

The windows shattered with an explosive force, knocking the majority of the people in the room to the ground.  Hookwolf was one of the few to remain standing, though he bent over as shards of glass tore through the layer of skin that covered his metal body.

Yeah, this is what Shatterbird does! Making glass explode! I remember someone once told me the Slaughterhouse Nine announce their presence by making all glass in a city explode like this. Does this mean they’re announcing their presence, in middle of their recruiting? True, it’s not like the heroes didn’t already know – judging by what Dragon knew – and there’s no way they’d tell the general public because there’d be widespread panic. This’d be the way to make all the civilians know.

A few of the recruits and one of the graduates are dead because glass exploded in their face. Many others are injured because they had cellphones in their pockets while sparring – who the heck does that? – and I honestly can’t feel too bad for any of them, given that, well, you know what they were hoping to do by being part of this organization. Also I bet Cricket is slumped against the wall, injured for the fifth time today. The Leah woman who was going to fight Cricket is currently bleeding out from a nicked artery. This whole thing pretty much delayed Hookwolf’s plans of having new useful recruits, it’s going to take a long while for everyone injured to recover, leaving aside the few who died.

He knows all glass exploding means the Slaughterhouse Nine are attacking, so he prepares himself for further attack through some invulnerability. I’ll take that as a sign the villain groups don’t know about the Slaughterhouse Nine trying to recruit. He also takes the time to think about his odds of winning against specific members of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Good! This should be enlightening.

He was virtually invincible in this form.  That left few that could actively hurt him.  Burnscar.  The Siberian. Crawler.  There was Hatchet Face, the bogeyman of capes.  With the exception of Hatchet Face, the group wouldn’t be able to do much harm to him unless he was forced to stay still.

Of course Burnscar could hurt him, thanks to her fire powers. The Siberian is a fearsome opponent who outclasses a lot of parahumans. Crawler...I don’t remember what Crawler does. Hatchet Face sounds of special interest. The boogeyman of capes, eh? Quite the lofty description, given it’s of capes instead of a specific subset, so it’s like he’s a problem for all capes in existence. I already have high expectations for this Hatchet Face, I hope they live up to them.

More troubling were the Nine he couldn’t put down.  The Siberian was untouchable, an immovable object, invincible in a way that even Alexandria wasn’t.  Even if he were capable of hurting Crawler, he wouldn’t want to.  Mannequin, he wasn’t sure about.  He knew the crazed tinker had encased himself in a nearly indestructible shell.

For some reason he doesn’t want to hurt Crawler, but he doesn’t say why. A personal connection, perhaps? I remember Crawler is a monstrous thing who isn’t seen very clearly in the one photo there’s of him. Mannequin does seem rather tough, but from what I saw in Armsmaster’s interlude, it’s not impossible to damage its carapace, but you’d need some specialized weapons to do that, which I doubt Hookwolf can get access to.

Who else? He wracked his brain.  Jack Slash was the brains and leader of the operation. Not a threat unto himself. Shatterbird couldn’t harm him, he was almost certain.

I wouldn’t underestimate Jack Slash, after seeing him. True, his power doesn’t sound like an intimidating concept, but who knows how cleverly he’d use them. Better be careful, anyway. Shatterbird...well I guess as long as Hookwolf doesn’t have anything with glass inside him he’ll be okay. That’s been seven killers, there’s one still yet to be mentioned.

Bonesaw. She was the wild card, the most unpredictable element in terms of what she could bring to the table.  So often the case with tinkers.

Ah, so Bonesaw is a tinker. I like her name. It’s rather ominous, I can only imagine what kind of stuff a tinker named Bonesaw does. A tinker really is like a wildcard, who knows what this Bonesaw may have with her at the time of an attack. Hm.

Outside, all the windows and stuff is broken. Inside,

Surprisingly, Cricket is intact. Good for her! The reason why she felt something was off was because the glass was ‘singing’ to which I think it means it was vibrating. Hookwolf decides to go outside, so he leaves the care of all the injured in Menja and Stormtiger’s hands while he jumps through the window and lands in the pavement.

Cricket and Hookwolf hurry, running over the many, many shards of glass on the ground. Shatterbird is making barriers in front of them with the glass, barriers Hookwolf runs through without any problems. Dozens, hundred of barriers were one strike isn’t enough to clear the way.

Through the mess of dozens of dirty and wet panes of glass, he saw her. Shatterbird.  A sand nigger, going by memory and the color of her exposed skin.

Wow. What classy narration, Hookwolf. Not slimy at all, nope, not at all, the slurs are just added charm, why’d that be bad. Then again, it’s not like it’s surprising, given who is talking right now.

To get through the barriers quicker, Hookwolf makes very big spears with his hands and punches through the barriers, shattering a couple dozen every time. He’s not moving as fast as he’d like, but he’s moving forward. Behind him I guess Cricket is following the pace. Shatterbird changes tactics once it’s clear he won’t be deterred, instead using the glass to form a big spike she makes hover in the air, and drops it down on him with strength.

Even if Hookwolf is very sturdy, a big spike of glass hitting you at full speed isn’t something you just shrug off. It hits him and he goes sprawling down while Cricket gets hit by glass shards and scraps of metal.

“Stand,” Shatterbird said.  Her voice held traces of a British accent, and her body language and the crisp enunciation made her sound imperious, upper class.    “I know you survived.”

‘Unlike the woman you brought with you. What an unfortunate demise’

Not wanting to overexert himself, Hookwolf absorbs the metal and tries to save energy, instead facing Shatterbird without any fear and preparing himself for what the Slaughterhouse Nine may plan. He doesn’t like hearing she’s here alone because it’s arrogant.

She shook her head, her helmet sparkling in the light cast by the setting sun.  “I’m the Nine’s primary recruiter.  I have an eye for people who can thrive among us, and I have brought more than five individuals on board.  I thought long and hard before settling on you.  I am not about to let you turn me down.”

...ah. The odds of Hookwolf being the one to join them just skyrocketed, by virtue of Shatterbird being the most successful recruiter. She not only has done a good job at that, judging by all the crazy killers currently in the group, she also is ready to force Hookwolf to join. I don’t know what exactly she’ll do to force Hookwolf to join...perhaps she’ll destroy his organization? I don’t think that’d be beyond her. If Hookwolf’s plans are completely obliterated, he’d have nothing to do other than join – or so some people would say, but I don’t think he would, he seems like the kind of guy that��d put his pride above everything else.

So that was why she hadn’t hit the entire city with the blast, shattering the glass and maiming or killing hundreds.  She hadn’t wanted to kill any prospective members, wanted to reserve her power for when it would be most dramatic.

Ah, so it wasn’t to the entire city, it must have been only to the place Hookwolf was at. It was dramatic, yeah, and maybe it’ll make Hookwolf realize she’s completely serious when she says she’s not going to take a no for an answer, even if there’s no reason to doubt it in the first place.

Given Shatterbird’s pushiness, I suppose that means it’s settled: Hookwolf will be the new member of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Maybe she was the one who brought Burnscar into the group, since she doesn’t seem to be there completely willingly.

“You ally with the Aryan groups.  Run one, but your motivations seem to be different.  I have guesses as to why, but I’d rather you tell me.”

Eeeeh…well I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility Hookwolf’s ideologies aren’t the only reason why Hookwolf is running his group, but I don’t doubt he really is a racist asshat. I mean, the narration established it quite well, it’d be deceitful if it turned out Hookwolf’s thoughts and all that were a lie.

When Hookwolf keeps defying her, Shatterbird seems to try to use her power, but it doesn’t work as she intended. It’s Cricket, she’s using subsonics to cancel Shatterbird’s power. Right, of course she’d be capable of that, she noticed stuff like the glass ‘singing’, she could counter that. Kind of foolish to reveal it to Shatterbird like that, though. It’s not that I think this killer didn’t know already what Cricket is capable of, but…yeah, confirming it is a bit imprudent. What was it again, Hookwolf? Pride goeth before the fall?

“And here I was thinking you’d won the lottery with powers.  Incredible range, fine control, devastating force, versatility… and all it takes is the right noise and it all falls apart?”

“Guess the men who bought my power should ask for a refund.”

O-kay! Cauldron stuff! They’re shaping up to be very relevant to the current state of affairs in the Worm world, more than I thought they would be! I’m having a hard time deciding what I’d like to see more of first, if focus on the Slaughterhouse Nine, or focus on Cauldron.

Not wanting to waste any time dealing with this whole thing, Hookwolf decides to just end this as soon as possible, and Shatterbird doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. She just takes out a gun and aims. While she did intend to take Cricket out so she’d be able to use her powers properly, she didn’t hit her with bullets, she did it with pieces of glass. Looks like she still could use them to some extent.

Okay, I was joking all this time that all Cricket does is be intimidating and then get injured, but I didn’t expect it to happen. Oh, geez. Yeah, she’s out of commission for real now. Of course Hookwolf doesn’t accept these developments, he intends to kill Shatterbird, and he’s sure he can do it by himself. He did indicate in his thoughts earlier Shatterbird wouldn’t be able to hurt him, after all. Maybe he really could do it, Shatterbird doesn’t outright deny it.

She can make herself levitate by moving the glass of her costume up! Well that’s a clever way to do that.

While she attacks, she tells Hookwolf what she thinks of him. The first thing she says isn’t unexpected, she says he’s a born warrior, and despite all of Hookwolf’s bad traits, he really is, and he knows it. What Shatterbird doesn’t know nor can understand yet is what Hookwolf is trying to do with his group. Hm. Want to enlighten me on this one, Shatterbird? Because I can’t think what he may be doing with them if he’s not completely sincere about his rhetoric.

Stormtiger turns out to be useful when he makes Shatterbird lost control of her flight and she crashes onto the ground. She even falls badly, she’s injured, and therefore an easy target for Hookwolf. I must say, this isn’t being as one-sided as I expected. I had thought Hookwolf was being too cocky when he thought he could defeat one of the Slaughterhouse Nine, but it seems he wasn’t. There he is, crushing her with a foot and burying some blades into her.

“A sword age, an axe age.  A wind age, a wolf age.  A world where none have mercy.  I can believe this is your goal, your ultimate objective.  Do you crave to reduce this city to darkness, blood and ash, so that only the strong will survive?  Do you tell your followers that it is only the pure will rise to the top in the new world order?”

...well I hadn’t considered that. Hookwolf does seem like the kind of person to want that, theoretically, but I don’t know, for some reason I can’t believe that’s what he’s aiming to do. I fully believe he subscribes to the might makes right philosophy, but not to that extent. Guess I’ll know for sure once things continue here.

The second time Shatterbird offers him to join the group he again declines, planning to kill her, and she keeps twisting the knife by aiming to hit what Hookwolf cares about.

“Then kill me.” A thin smile crossed her face, though her expression was drawn with pain.  When she spoke, it was in more short sentences. “But know that your dream is over.  Unless you come with us.  Once nominated you’ll be tested.  By others, whether willing or not.  I have left notes.  Urging them to kill your soldiers.  To raze any place you might call home.  To bestow fates worse than death.”

As if they weren’t going to do that anyway. It’s effective enough, though, because Hookwolf raises his claws off her and actually considers the situation. Joining the group will make Shatterbird rescind the orders to kill and destroy everything Hookwolf had done so far, but he doesn’t plan to be there for long, just long enough to kill them, to destroy the Slaughterhouse Nine before they leave Brockton Bay. Okay, now he is being very cocky. No way he’d be capable of killing all eight members.

He wasn’t going to accept this.  They’d insulted him, hurt his people.  They wanted to subvert his mission and twist it to their own ends?  No.

See? I think it’s likely Shatterbird is right, but maybe not to the extent she believes she is. There’s some loyalty here in Hookwolf’s behavior. There’s something deeper here than it seems at first sight, I’m sure of that.

Heck, he’s so against joining the Slaughterhouse Nine, against turning his back towards his group, he’s realizing he can’t deal with the situation alone. He’s going to need help. Is he going to ask Purity’s organization for help, perhaps? I think they’re the most likely people he’d ask for help. Maybe Purity would agree to aid him, since one of the Slaughterhouse Nine members tried to kill her daughter and Theo. How successful they’d be in fighting this worldwide threat...well that remains to be seen. I’m not going to get any high hopes; I don’t think they can do much.

That’s the end of the intermission! Who is next? I’ll see next time!

Next update: in two updates

[ritebeforeyoureyes]

Confessions

This is now officially the longest multi-chapter fic I’ve written ever! Sorry it took so long to get out! I have just started juggling two jobs and university, so my free time is limited. I promise I’ll try and upload/write whenever I can x

Masterlist – Plot: Zendaya and Nikki talk.

Confessions (Chapter Twenty Five)

“What’s with that?” Zendaya glanced between Tom and Nikki, witnessing the evident hostility between mother and son for the first time. It was the day after the premiere and the closest cast and crew had gathered for a more intimate dinner before everyone was set to go their separate ways. However, within seconds of seeing Tom and his mom interact, Zendaya could tell something was up.

“Nothing.” Tom turned his attention towards Laura, who was talking about a future project that she had lined up and Zendaya glared at him, completely dumbfounded. She wasn’t born yesterday, and deep down, she knew the reason behind Tom’s strained relationship with his mother was her fault and she couldn’t help but feel guilty. The only reason Nikki had said what she had about Zendaya was because she was looking out for her son. Zendaya understood that. She was exceptionally close to her own mom and she was certain hers would have done the exact same if the shoe was on the other foot.

“Hey, do you want a hand?” Once Zendaya was sure that Tom was completely engulfed in his conversation with their co-stars, she snuck out from beside him to help Nikki with the dishes; he hadn’t even noticed her leave.

“No, sweetie, it’s okay … you relax-“

“I insist.” Zendaya took a stack of plates from Nikki’s hands and wordlessly followed her into the kitchen so that they could speak alone. Tom was stubborn, incredibly so, and Zendaya knew she needed to help break the ice between him and his mom before the drama escalated. If Tom wouldn’t talk to her about what was going on between them, maybe Nikki would.

“Thank you, dear.”

“Mrs Holland-“ After everything that had happened, Zendaya wasn’t sure if she was comfortable calling Nikki by her first name. But, from the mocking glare that was sent in her direction, she knew Nikki wanted her to. “Sorry, Nikki, if you don’t mind me asking … is Tom off with you because of me?”

“No, don’t be silly, sweetie-“ Nikki knew Zendaya, poor girl, had suffered through enough recently and she didn’t want her to blame herself for the strained relationship between her and Tom. Zendaya may have been the route of the problem, but it wasn’t her fault. Nikki just found it hard to grasp the concept of her eldest son growing up. She still pictured him flailing and pink in her arms, a curly head of hair. She knew that letting Tom make mistakes was a part of his growth and she was wrong to have interfered in his relationship, but she also wasn’t going to sit by and watch as he ruined his future. And as a result, she wasn’t going to apologise for having his best interests at heart. Regardless of how things went down, Nikki’s interference had been in Tom’s best interest and she wanted him to understand that.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to lie to me.” Zendaya huffed dryly. “I’m sorry for having gotten in the middle-“

“Don’t apologise, Zendaya.” Nikki put her dish towel down to grasp Zendaya’s forearms in a loving manner. Her hands stroked at her skin in a motherly fashion, a genuine smile imprinted on her face. “I’m the one who should be apologising to you. I know what you’ve been going through is hard and I can’t commend you enough for staying so strong through it all!” Zendaya returned Nikki’s smile with light tears in her eyes – happy tears. Loads of people sympathised with Zendaya after the whole stalker ordeal, they pitied her, and it seemed Nikki was the first person who had acknowledged how put together and strong she still was. It was definitely nice to hear out loud. “I want to say sorry for everything that happened with you and Thomas, I just wanted to protect him-”

“Please don’t embarrass me, Nikki, you have nothing to apologise for! I broke up with him because I agreed with you. I wanted to protect him too. That was a decision I made on my own and he can’t blame you for that.”

“Tom’s just stubborn … he gets it from his father.” Nikki joked and Zendaya laughed. “I know my intervention in your relationship was probably uncalled for but when you’re a mother, you’ll understand why I did it.”

“I think I understand already, my mom would do anything for me too.” Zendaya had spent her adolescent years without her mom. It wasn’t the most ideal of situations, but Claire had parted from her only child so that she could live out her dreams of being an actress. Whilst Claire still kept her teaching job in Oakland, Kazembe moved to L.A. with Zendaya. Claire had spent many a night by herself, yearning for a cuddle from Z. She missed her beautiful face and her whimsical cheer, but her feelings didn’t matter, not in the grand scheme of things. Claire was happy to let her bird fly out of the nest – really prematurely – if it meant she could got to live her life. “Caring for your son isn’t a crime, Nikki, and I also want to thank you. The fact that he wanted to honour our relationship and stick by me through everything is partly because of your upbringing. You raised him to be a gentleman and it’s admirable-”

“Okay, now you’re going to make me cry.” Nikki felt the bring salt water trickle down her face involuntarily and she wrapped Zendaya’s tall frame into a hug. “Thank you for making my son happy. I couldn’t be prouder of his choice in companionship.” The two were hugging so tightly, they’d barely noticed Tom make his way into the kitchen. “Welcome to the family, darling.”

“What … what’s going on?” Tom stuttered the question but the smile on his face was inexcusable.

“Get over here, jerk.” Zendaya instructed sternly, Tom obliging wordlessly. “I want you two to sort out whatever it is that’s going on here,” As she walked past him to re-join her co-stars, Zendaya whispered a, “please.” Into his ear.

It was hours later when Tom returned from having spoken to his mother. Zendaya had been the push that they’d needed, and she’d seemingly helped them iron out their issues. Nikki wanted Tom to respect how much that she cared for him and Tom wanted her to respect his independence. Things were easier said than done but it was nice to know that both parties were trying to take an active role in changing their behaviour. But, in the time that Tom was gone, he’d missed Toni and Jacob’s pancake eating contest, Toni’s consequent vomit and the departure of many of his friends. In fact, he’d only made it back to Zendaya just moments before her eyes closed for bed.

“Hmm.” Tom quietly snuck out of his clothes and crawled into bed with her; he was big spoon, his body enveloping her warm frame. She snuggled back into him, her legs pulling up into her chest. “How did it go with you-“

“I love you.” Before she could finish her sentence, Tom cut her off, his lips placing gentle kisses against her exposed shoulder. This ‘I love you’ was different to his first, this time, it was loaded with a double meaning. He loved her because he did but he also loved her for actively trying to repair his relationship with his mum. Despite all the drama and the arguing, Nikki was an important part of his life and Zendaya had clearly been aware of that. If it were possible, Tom was now more in love with Zendaya than he was a few hours ago.

“I love you too.” Zendaya giggled softly, her brain nonverbally understanding the magnitude of meaning behind his words.

“Be my girlfriend again, Zendaya.” After moments of pregnant silence, Tom’s words echoed throughout the room. However, he didn’t get the answer that he was looking for when Zendaya’s loud laughter filled the space. Her body hunched forward, and she turned her head to look back at him.

“I thought this meant we were back together?” She motioned between them two of them in bed with her finger before letting her lips dictate his.

Their kiss started off slow, her trying to reassure him that the thing between them was real before the speed (and the intensity) increased.  Instantly, Tom was a goner, letting her take the lead of their kiss. He felt every inch of her mouth with his tongue, the distinctive taste, smell and sight of her enrapturing all his senses. Their hands roamed each other’s bodies as a consequence, the desperation evident in the both of them. And as their desperation increased, so did the need for air. Zendaya’s chest was heaving violently against his own and he reluctantly dragged his mouth away from hers so that they could catch their breathe.

“I want to do this properly this time - you and me.”

“Yes.” And finally, it seemed like all order was restored in the world of Tom and Zendaya once again.

If you enjoyed this piece and would like to help further me and my work, please support me whilst I try to raise money to do a ‘walk for charity.’ The money you donate will help create awareness for cancer research and will allow me to have added support throughout my journey. It is one hundred per cent a voluntary pursuit and greatly appreciated, however, your lovely comments and votes are always welcomed too. Thank you for being the greatest: https://ko-fi.com/D1D072V0

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/covid-19-news-live-updates-the-new-york-times-14/

Covid-19 News: Live Updates - The New York Times

Here’s what you need to know:

A man suspected of having contracted Covid-19 being covered with a blanket by healthcare workers in Bergamo, Italy, in March.Credit…Fabio Bucciarelli for The New York Times

In the 10 months since a mysterious pneumonia began striking residents of Wuhan, China, Covid-19 has killed more than one million people worldwide as of Monday — an agonizing toll compiled from official counts, yet one that far understates how many have really died.

The coronavirus may already have overtaken tuberculosis and hepatitis as the world’s deadliest infectious disease. And unlike all the other contenders, it is still growing fast.

Like nothing seen in more than century, the virus has infiltrated every populated patch of the globe, sowing terror and poverty, infecting millions of people in some nations and paralyzing entire economies.

But as attention focuses on the devastation caused by halting a large part of the world’s commercial, educational and social life, it is all too easy to lose sight of the most direct human cost.

More than a million people — parents, children, siblings, friends, neighbors, colleagues, teachers, classmates — all gone, suddenly, prematurely. More than 200,000 in the United States, which has the largest total number of coronavirus deaths in the world, followed by Brazil, with over 140,000.

Those who survive Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, are laid low for weeks or even months before recovering, and many have lingering ill effects of varying severity and duration.

Yet much of the suffering could have been avoided.

“This is a very serious global event, and a lot of people were going to get sick and many of them were going to die, but it did not need to be nearly this bad,” said Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

At the height of the first wave, places like China, Germany, South Korea and New Zealand showed that it was possible to slow the pandemic enough to limit infections and deaths while still reopening businesses and schools.

But that requires a combination of elements that may be beyond the reach of poorer countries — and that even ones like the United States have not been able to muster: wide-scale testing, contact tracing, quarantining, social distancing, mask wearing, providing protective gear, developing a clear and consistent strategy, and being willing to shut things down in a hurry when trouble arises.

Time and again, experts say, governments reacted too slowly, waiting until their own countries or regions were under siege, either dismissing the threat or seeing it as China’s problem, or Italy’s, or New York’s.

Thomas R. Frieden, a former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that a major failing had been in governments’ communication with the public, nowhere more so than in the United States.

“You have standard principles of risk communication: Be first, be right, be credible, be empathetic,” he said. “If you tried to violate those principles more than the Trump administration has, I don’t think you could.”

The world now knows how to bend the curve of the pandemic — not to eliminate risk, but to keep it to a manageable level — and there have been surprises along the way.

Masks turned out to be more helpful than experts initially predicted. Social distancing on an unheard-of scale has been more feasible and effective than anticipated. The difference in danger between an outdoor gathering and an indoor one is greater than expected.

And, crucially, people are most contagious when they first show symptoms or even earlier, not days or weeks later, when they are sickest — a reversal of the usual pattern with infectious diseases. That makes preventive measures like wearing masks and swift responses like isolating and testing people for possible exposure much more important. If you wait until the problem is evident, you’ve waited too long.

Officials are particularly concerned about eight neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.Credit…Mark Abramson for The New York Times

After months of promising signs in its fight against the coronavirus, New York State on Monday reported a spike in its rate of new cases, including a rise in New York City and in its northern suburbs.

The rate of positive test results in the city reached 1.93 percent, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday, an increase from the 1.5 percent rate reported by the city a week before, as officials continued to warn about dangerous behavior in several communities.

The increase in the city, the one-time center of the pandemic, and some suburbs contributed to the statewide rate of approximately 1.58 percent — a jump from results reported on Sunday and in prior weeks.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, said on Monday that the increase was primarily because of clusters in Brooklyn, as well as in Rockland and Orange Counties, in the Hudson Valley, saying there was “significant action” in those areas.

Officials are particularly concerned about eight neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, some with large Orthodox Jewish communities, that have accounted for about one-fourth of New York City’s new cases in the past two weeks, despite representing about 7 percent of the city’s population.

On Friday, city health officials began carrying out emergency inspections at private religious schools in some of those neighborhoods, and threatened to limit gatherings or force closings of businesses or schools if there was not better compliance to social distancing requirements. The communities are celebrating Jewish high holidays through mid-October, which are marked by religious and family gatherings.

A continued rise could affect a closely watched plan to reopen the city’s schools: The mayor has said that he will automatically shut down classrooms — which are all slated to be open by Thursday — if the positivity rate exceeds 3 percent over a seven-day rolling average. The mayor has also has twice delayed the start of in-person classes for most students, and on Sunday, the union representing the city’s principals called on the state to take over the reopening effort from Mr. de Blasio.

Mr. Cuomo has previously said that reaching a 2 percent positivity rate would make him “nervous,” and that surpassing a 3 percent rate would cause “the alarm bells to go off.”

On Monday, Mr. Cuomo said that he would make 200 rapid testing machines available to schools and local governments in areas where rates were rising, saying “the key with these clusters is to jump on them quickly.”

All told, the state on Monday reported 834 new cases, out of nearly 53,000 tests, the governor said, adding the spike in the positivity rate was largely confined to 20 ZIP codes, where the rate went as high as 30 percent, in contrast with the rest of the state, where the rate remained around 1 percent.

The statewide positivity rate began to creep up over the weekend, when officials reported rates just slightly above 1 percent; hospitalizations have also risen over the last several days, according to state statistics.

Mr. Cuomo stressed that “mask compliance is important,” and urged local governments to enforce mask rules and prohibitions on large gatherings, even if residents were feeling “compliance fatigue.” On Wednesday, New York City will allow indoor dining to resume at 25 percent.

Over the summer, the state began requiring travelers from states with increasing cases to quarantine for 14 days upon their arrival in New York, though the enforcement has been lax. On Monday, Mr. Cuomo said he would sign a new executive order subjecting most travelers from other countries to the 14-day quarantine.

United States › On Sept. 27 14-day change Trend New cases 37,332 +23% New deaths 267 +2%

Where cases are highest per capita

U.S. Roundup

Police investigating the scene of a shooting in Rochester earlier this month.Credit…Joshua Rashaad Mcfadden/Getty Images

The number of homicides in 27 cities across the United States was 53 percent higher this summer than in the pre-pandemic summer of 2019, according to an updated analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan research group.

The update, covering the months of June, July and August, found that aggravated assaults also increased from last year, by 14 percent, but that many other types of crime plummeted, including residential burglaries, larcenies and drug offenses. Across the country, overall crime rates remain at or near generational lows, despite striking increases in violence in some cities.

Fluctuations in crime rates are notoriously hard to explain, but 2020 has seen two factors with potentially seismic influence: the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused mass unemployment and made the most proven types of anti-violence measures far more difficult to implement, and the killing of George Floyd in police custody in late May, which sparked nationwide protests.

The new report’s authors, Richard Rosenfeld and Ernesto Lopez, wrote that “subduing the pandemic, pursuing crime control strategies of proven effectiveness, and enacting needed police reforms will be necessary to achieve durable reductions in violent crime in our cities.”

The F.B.I reported on Monday that violent crime continued its downward trend in 2019, but that preliminary figures for 2020 show a 15 percent increase in homicides, the largest single-year increase on record.

A New York Times analysis finds that despite President Trump’s attempts to blame “Democrat cities” for failing to curb violence, homicides have increased regardless of the political party of the mayor. In three cities recently called “anarchist” by the Department of Justice — Portland, Ore., New York and Seattle — the murder rate remains quite low. Those cities were not among the top 40 American cities ranked by their projected 2020 murder rate.

And murder is not the only violent crime on the rise. The Chicago Police Department said that domestic-violence-related calls increased 12 percent during a period from the start of the year through mid-April, compared with the same time period in 2019. In other cities, including Los Angeles and New York, the police have seen a drop in calls, but the authorities have said they believed that victims were in such close quarters with their abusers that they were unable to call the police.

In other U.S. news:

After a six-month closure, the Washington Monument will reopen to the public on Thursday. The monument will be open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a new set of safety and cleaning procedures. Tickets, which must be reserved at recreation.gov, will be available starting on Wednesday.

Officials in Montana reported 412 new cases on Monday, a single-day record for the state. Daily reports of new cases have more than doubled in the last two weeks to an average of 250 a day, according to a New York Times database — shattering records and raising concerns that Montana’s hospitals could become overwhelmed. Almost half the state’s total 174 deaths from Covid-19 have come in the past month, and hospitalizations are up sharply. Some of the surge can be attributed to outbreaks in prisons and nursing homes, but state experts also point tothe recent reopening of schools and universities.

Officials in Idaho reported more than 880 new cases on Monday, a single-day record, with the possibility of more cases as counties continue to report through the evening. The previous record (681 new cases) was set on Friday.

A Maryland man has been sentenced to one year in jail and fined $5,000 for throwing two large parties in violation of the state’s ban on gatherings of more than 10 people.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals, a Pennsylvania firm whose chief executive boasted to President Trump in March that it was the world’s leader in coronavirus vaccines, said on Monday that it will delay the next stage of testing for its vaccine until addressing questions from the Food and Drug Administration.

The company said the pause is not related to any serious side effects from the first phase of testing of its vaccine, which uses a DNA technology that stimulates a person’s immune system with some of the coronavirus’s genes. No DNA-based vaccine has ever made it to market for any human disease. The company is not able to start Phase ⅔ testing but its Phase 1 trial will continue, it said.

Inovio’s pitch has long been that this genetic approach would allow for faster design and manufacturing than its competitors. But it’s now far behind the pack. More than two dozen coronavirus vaccines have made it to later testing phases than Inovio’s has.

The F.D.A. had questions about the vaccine’s “Cellectra 2000 delivery device,” which uses an electrical pulse to open skin pores in order to more consistently deliver the vaccine dose. Regulatory questions about a similar device held up clinical trials for an Inovio cancer vaccine in 2016.

The company said it plans to respond to the F.D.A.’s questions in October. After that, the agency will have 30 days to decide whether to allow the trials to proceed.

Most of the coronavirus vaccine trials have not run into safety issues. The exception is AstraZeneca’s, which was recently halted when two volunteers became seriously ill after getting its experimental vaccine. That trial is still on pause in the United States.

Negotiators resumed talks on Monday over a coronavirus relief package in a final bid to revive stalled negotiations as House Democrats unveiled a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill that would provide aid to American families, businesses, schools, restaurants and airline workers.

The release of the legislation came minutes before Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, spoke on the phone Monday evening, as the pair seeks to end the impasse over another round of coronavirus. The two agreed to speak again Tuesday morning, said Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi.

The moves appeared to be the most concrete action toward another stimulus bill since negotiations stalled nearly two months ago. But the sides remain far apart on an overall price tag, and with just over a month before Election Day, lawmakers and aides in both chambers warned that the time frame for striking a deal was slim.

Absent an agreement with the administration, the House could vote as early as this week to approve the legislation, responding to growing pressure for Congress to provide additional relief and quelling the concerns of moderate lawmakers unwilling to leave Washington for a final stretch of campaigning without voting on another round of aid. But at roughly $1 trillion more than what Mr. Mnuchin has signaled the White House is willing to consider, the package is likely just a starting point, all but guaranteed to be rejected by the Republican majority in the Senate should the House pass it in its current form.

Democrats maintained a provision that would revive a lapsed $600 enhanced federal unemployment and another provision that would send a second round of $1,200 stimulus checks to Americans. And some measures were either added or expanded: $225 billion for schools and $57 billion for child care, an extension of an expiring program intended to prevent the layoffs of airline workers through March 31 and the creation of a $120 billion program to bolster ailing restaurants.

Students at Hillsborough High School in Tampa, Fla. waited in line to have their temperature checked before entering the building in August. C.D.C. data shows that the virus is more common in teenagers than younger children.Credit…Octavio Jones/Getty Images

The rate of infections with the coronavirus in adolescents aged 12 to 17 years is about twice that in children aged 5 to 11 years, according to an analysis released Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The finding is based on a review of 277,285 confirmed cases in children from March to September, when most schools in the nation offered only remote learning or were closed.

Children often have mild symptoms, if any at all, so some researchers have suggested that the low numbers of confirmed cases in children result from a lack of testing.

The number of children tested increased to over 320,000 in mid-July from 100,000 on May 31. By July, the incidence of infected children had risen to 37.9 per 100,000 from 13.8.

Along with other evidence about the incidence of coronavirus infections in those under age 19, the new figures suggest “that young persons might be playing an increasingly important role in community transmission,” the authors wrote.

The number of tests and the incidence of infections decreased after July, but may again be rising, the researchers added.

The number of children infected during the study period varied by age. The weekly incidence among adolescents was 37.4 per 100,000, compared with 19 per 100,000 among younger children.

Children who had underlying conditions were more likely to become severely ill, the analysis also found. Among school-aged children who were hospitalized, admitted to an intensive care unit, or who died, 16 percent, 27 percent and 28 percent, respectively, had at least one underlying medical condition, the researchers reported.

Deaths among children were rare, but Black and Hispanic children were more likely to be hospitalized or admitted to an I.C.U., the C.D.C. reported.

Karla Monterroso, 39, has been debilitated by Covid-19 symptoms since March. Credit…Rozette Rago for The New York Times

They caught the coronavirus months ago and survived it, but they are still stuck at home, gasping for breath. They are no longer contagious, but some still feel so ill that they can barely walk around the block, and others grow dizzy trying to cook dinner. Month after month, they rush to the hospital with new symptoms, pleading with doctors for answers.

As the coronavirus has spread through the United States over the past seven months, infecting at least seven million people, a subset of them are suffering from serious, debilitating and mysterious effects of Covid-19 that last far longer than a few days or weeks.

“Before this, I was a weight lifter, kayaker, hiker, white-water rafter,” said Karla Monterroso, 39, who was living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area when she caught the coronavirus in March. She has been sick for going on 200 days.

“I can’t do anything right now, physically, without harming myself,” she said.

Patients wrestling with alarming symptoms many months after first becoming ill — they have come to call themselves “long-haulers” — are believed to number in the thousands in the United States, including many young people who were healthy before being infected. Their symptoms can span a wide range, including piercing chest pain, deep exhaustion or a racing heart.

The New York Times asked four long-haulers to describe their experiences in their own words.

Suman Das, 13, waited with his father to load bricks this month in the North Parganas district of West Bengal, in eastern India.Credit…Atul Loke for The New York Times

In many parts of the developing world, school closures have put children on the streets. Families are desperate for money. Children are an easy source of cheap labor. While the United States and other developed countries debate the effectiveness of online schooling, hundreds of millions of children in poorer countries lack computers or the internet and have no schooling at all.

United Nations officials estimate that at least 24 million children will drop out and that millions could be sucked into work. Ten-year-olds are now mining sand in Kenya. Children the same age are chopping weeds on cocoa plantations in West Africa. In Indonesia, boys and girls as young as 8 are painted silver and pressed into service as living statues who beg for money.

In southern India, an 11-year-old boy, Rahul, would be a fine addition to any classroom. But with his school closed because of the virus, he currently finds himself part of the swarm of children who pour into the street from his housing project, bound for another day rummaging garbage dumps in search of recyclable plastic. It pays pennies an hour.

“I hate it,” said Rahul.

The surge in child labor could erode the progress achieved in recent years in school enrollment, literacy, social mobility and children’s health.

“All the gains that have been made, all this work we have been doing, will be rolled back, especially in places like India,” said Cornelius Williams, a high-ranking UNICEF official.

A restaurant owner removed chairs and tables on a terrace in Marseille on Sunday. All bars, restaurants and cafes in the city and its neighbor, Aix-en-Provence, were ordered to shut down for 15 days, sparking an outcry.Credit…Daniel Cole/Associated Press

The longstanding antagonism that pits Paris, the occasionally overbearing French capital, against Marseille, its sunnier, more rambunctious rival on the Mediterranean coast, has found a new battleground: the coronavirus.

Politicians and businesses in Marseille and its neighbor, Aix-en-Provence, are furious since the government ordered all bars, cafes and restaurants in those two cities — and nowhere else in mainland France — closed for 15 days starting on Sunday evening, to counter rising Covid-19 hospitalizations in the region.

“It’s a catastrophe, we are all anticipating permanent closures,” said Laurent Ceccarini, the owner of two restaurants, both a short walk from the Old Port in Marseille.

In the center of Marseille, a city of over 800,000 residents, French television on Monday showed some shuttered cafes and others that had briefly flouted the restrictions — until patrolling police officers calmly but sternly asked coffee-sipping customers to leave the sun-drenched terraces.

National authorities and some local health officials say the closures are a painful but necessary brake to prevent hospitals in both cities from being overwhelmed.

But some opponents of the targeted shutdown say it was imposed, with little warning, by vindictive government officials who want to punish Marseille’s rebel streak, which in recent months has coalesced around the figure of Didier Raoult, an eminent microbiologist from the city. His contrarian stance — including a claim, rejected by other scientists, that common drugs can cure Covid-19 — has endeared him to Marseille and its political class.

Officials are mounting protests and legal challenges against the new measures. One even said that the municipal police, ignoring government instructions, would not issue fines for establishments that broke the rules.

People unfold a banner written in Italian and German as protesters from ”No Mask” movements, Covid deniers movements, anti-5G movements and anti-vaccination movements gather for a protest against the government’s health policy in Rome in early September.Credit…Vincenzo Pinto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Growing numbers of Europeans are dismissing the threat of the coronavirus as media hype and sometimes embracing conspiracy theories, as the virus takes a second spin around the continent.

The sentiment echoed that of thousands of unmasked protesters who packed Trafalgar Square in the center of the city on Saturday, and a week earlier, rallying against Britain’s coronavirus restrictions. Many called the pandemic a hoax — even as the global death toll neared a million.

“Take off your mask” was freshly scrawled across an already-graffitied door alongside a strip of houses on London’s Portobello Road.

In Berlin, Brussels, Dublin and Paris, similar gatherings have gone ahead in recent weeks as coronavirus cases are again rising across much of Europe. But with health experts warning that a second wave has already arrived in some places and with many governments moving to reintroduce restrictions, the ranks of those dismissing the dangers of the virus and others calling it a government-led hoax have swelled.

Science has long shown that wearing a mask can prevent a person from spreading airborne illness, and new research suggests that it also protects the person wearing it. But protesters remain unconvinced.

In France, where infections have skyrocketed with a daily average of 12,000 new cases reported over the past week, critics have questioned the effectiveness of masks and new measures to control the spread, while others have urged people to ignore the government’s guidance entirely.

In Germany, there has been a growing and vocal number of German QAnon supporters, who contend that powerful players behind the scenes are using the virus to control the masses.

And in Slovakia, which on Friday recorded its highest number of new daily cases for a third day in a row, the country’s Ministry of Health this summer appointed a specialist to fight disinformation about the pandemic.

People who do not self-isolate in England will now face fines of up to 10,000 pounds, or almost $13,000, as the nation battles a second coronavirus wave.

As of Monday, it is illegal for those who test positive for the virus or have come into contact with a positive case to not quarantine for 14 days. The fines begin at £1,000 but could increase to £10,000 for especially egregious or repeated offenses. The government said it would begin offering a payment of £500 to lower-income residents who cannot work while isolating.

In addition, about two-thirds of the population in Wales will be under lockdown restrictions as of Monday evening. The rules largely ban nonessential movement outside of local areas.

The new rules come as Britain faces a surge in cases and what Prime Minister Boris Johnson called a “perilous turning point.” Earlier this month, Mr. Johnson announced a raft of new restrictions, including bans on most gatherings over six people and closing times of 10 p.m. for pubs and restaurants.

Britain recorded 5,692 new cases on Sunday, and the seven-day daily average is above 5,800, the highest since the pandemic began. There have been at least 434,900 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Britain, and as of Monday morning, nearly 42,000 people had died.

The government has not ruled out the possibility of a second national lockdown or one for the city of London. Britain has been using local lockdowns to try to control the spread of the virus.

“We must do all we can to avoid going down that road again,” Mr. Johnson said last week of a second national lockdown. “But if people don’t follow the rules we have set out, then we must reserve the right to go further.”

An uproar over precisely who faces restrictions has flared after The Times of London reported Monday morning that Parliament’s bars were exempt from the 10 p.m. curfew because they provide food and drink for a workplace. By late morning, that position seemed to have changed: “Alcohol will not be sold after 10 p.m. anywhere on the parliamentary estate,” a government spokesman said.

A new cloud of uncertainty hangs over the November election in Texas, as legal battles mount over how and when voters will cast their ballots because of the pandemic.

The Texas Supreme Court is weighing whether to delay the start of early voting, which had been scheduled to begin in two weeks, while it deals with questions raised by Republican lawmakers about whether voting could legally start that soon.

And a federal judge has temporarily blocked Texas from getting rid of straight-ticket voting, saying that doing so would lengthen wait times and worsen congestion at the polls. “Forcing Texas voters to stand in longer lines and increasing their exposure to a deadly virus burdens the right to vote,” wrote U.S. District Judge Marina Garcia Marmolejo of Laredo.

The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, said the state would appeal the decision.

In a state known for unusually long ballots, the century-old practice of straight-ticket or one-punch voting has been popular. It allows a voter to select a party’s entire slate with one ballot mark, instead of having to make separate marks for each race. About two-thirds of Texas voters used the straight-ticket option in the 2018 general election.

The Republican-dominated Legislature passed a law eliminating the option for this year, with proponents arguing that doing so would cause voters to become better informed and would bring Texas in line with most other states. Critics of the step, including the Democratic Party’s congressional campaign committees, sued the state, saying that eliminating the practice would have a discriminatory impact on Black and Hispanic Texans, who use it more than other voters do.

A victim of the coronavirus in New Delhi last month.Credit…Adnan Abidi/Reuters

India’s coronavirus caseload has surpassed six million, the country’s health ministry announced Monday, as infections continued to grow across the South Asian country of 1.3 billion people.

India has the world’s second-highest caseload after the United States and has recorded at least 95,540 deaths, including 1,039 deaths in the past 24 hours. The country has recorded an average of 83,000 new cases a day for the past week, down from more than 90,000 cases earlier in the month.

At least 76,000 police and paramilitary forces personnel in India have been infected by the virus, with at least 400 deaths, the local media reported on Monday.

During his monthly radio address over the weekend, Prime Minister Narendra Modi renewed his appeal for people to wear face masks when outside their homes.

Credit…Cornell Watson for The New York Times

Despite years of progress, Black people continue to be underrepresented in science and engineering.

Whereas more than 13 percent of the United States’ population identifies as Black or African-American, Black people make up less than 7 percent of students who earn bachelor’s degrees in science or engineering fields and less than 5 percent of people granted doctorates in microbiology each year, according to the National Science Foundation.

The number of Black scientists has “been largely stagnant over the past decade,” said Johnna Frierson, the assistant dean of graduate and postdoctoral diversity and inclusion at the Duke University School of Medicine. In some fields, representation has even begun to decline — a trend that has worried experts. “There’s something in the system that is not optimized in order for us to continue diversifying in the way we hope to,” Dr. Frierson said.

A former virologist, she will participate in a panel on Monday as part of Black in Microbiology Week, the latest in a series of virtual events highlighting Black scientists in a variety of disciplines.

The event will feature seven days of talks, panels and online discussions under the microbiology umbrella, including the coronavirus, and address disparities in medicine, education and career advancement.

LaNell Williams, a member of Black in Microbiology’s programming team and a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, studies physics and virology, straddling two fields in which Black women are extraordinarily scarce.

During her time at Harvard, she has dealt with colleagues who have touched her hair without permission, dismissed her admission to her graduate program as affirmative action and used racial slurs in her presence. Over the years, she said, “I’ve gotten used to people not expecting much of me when I walk into a room.”

Adm. Brett P. Giroir, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, displaying a rapid antigen test at the White House on Monday.Credit…Tom Brenner for The New York Times

President Trump announced at the White House on Monday a plan to distribute 150 million coronavirus tests — rapid antigen tests that will expand the ability to detect infection, but that also tend to be less accurate — purchased by the federal government to states, tribes and other jurisdictions in the coming months.

The tests, a product called BinaxNOW manufactured by Abbott Laboratories, do not require specialized laboratory equipment and can yield results within 15 minutes, based on a quick and relatively painless swab that shallowly samples the nostrils. Adm. Brett P. Giroir, a member of Mr. Trump’s coronavirus task force, demonstrated the administration of one of the tests from a lectern in the Rose Garden.

Governors of some states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, announced on Twitter just before Mr. Trump’s news conference that they expected to receive thousands of the tests within coming weeks, and millions by year’s end. Some 6.5 million of those tests would ship this week, Admiral Giroir said.

The tests, which were given an emergency greenlight from the Food and Drug Administration in August, are cleared only for use in people with symptoms of Covid-19, and must be administered by, or in the presence of, a trained health care professional. Such tests are intended for use, according to Abbott, within the first seven days of when a person starts to feel ill. Testing in people who don’t have symptoms is thus considered off-label use — something the company was not required to submit data for to get their test approved.

The test is designed to look for antigens, or pieces of coronavirus proteins. Such tests tend to be less accurate than laboratory tests, most of which rely on a time-intensive but very reliable technique called P.C.R. Abbott has said that its test has been able to achieve results that mirror P.C.R. testing more than 97 percent of the time in the lab. But the longer a person waits, the worse the Abbott test performs. And experts have said those numbers will likely fall if the test is used outside of its target population.

“This is, it was said by Republicans and Democrats alike earlier, this is a game changer,” said Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, a Republican, at the White House news conference, adding that the kits would allow teachers in his state to be tested more frequently.

Some have argued that frequent testing — perhaps on a weekly or even near-daily basis — could help compensate for the higher false negative rates of antigen tests. Such a feat, however, would require an even higher volume of tests than announced by the White House on Monday.

“I’m happy that they are trying to invest in technologies that would expand the number of tests that could be done in the U.S., and in particular, trying to signal demand for these rapid tests is useful,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “That said, 150 million tests is really a very small drop in the bucket considering how these tests are envisioned to be used.”

She added that “these tests haven’t been evaluated in people without symptoms. Certainly some clinicians may be inclined to use things off label. That doesn’t mean we understand how they will perform in people without symptoms.”

A number of experts have criticized the fast and frequent testing approach as logistically impractical, and worry that in certain populations where the virus is scarce, false positives could end up outnumbering true positives, compromising public trust in tests.

More than 100 million coronavirus tests of various approaches have been conducted across the United States, with nearly 850,000 conducted each day. But these numbers still fall short of the millions per day some experts say are needed to adequately assess the virus’s true prevalence in the population, and help keep outbreaks in check.

New cases have been trending steadily upward across the country, to around 43,000 daily over the last week as of Sunday, though they remain far below their peak levels from mid-summer. The Upper Midwest and Mountain West regions have struggled in recent days, with North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Utah reporting the most recent cases per capita.

About 750 deaths were being reported each day over the last week as of Sunday, more than in early summer but far fewer than in the spring. The problems in the Midwest and West have been offset somewhat by relatively few cases in the Northeast, as well as sustained progress in populous states like Florida and California that were hit hard in June and July.

Mr. Trump said the tests will be distributed first to vulnerable populations. Among these groups will be those living in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, as well as those at historically Black colleges and universities and tribal nation colleges.

Authorities in North Dakota are trying to ease concerns over hospital capacity as the state grapples with the country’s steepest current surge in coronavirus cases.

Relative to the size of its population, North Dakota has reported more new cases in the last week — 363 per 100,000 — than any other state, according to tracking by The New York Times. (Neighboring South Dakota is second, at 322 per 100,000.) So far, the state has reported 234 coronavirus-related deaths, including four on Sunday.

North Dakota state health officials met in Bismarck with the leaders of two large hospital systems over the weekend, following news reports that hospitals in the state were so crowded with Covid-19 patients that they were deferring some elective procedures and putting Covid-19 patients in emergency-room areas for lack of beds.

Following the meeting, Dr. Michael LeBeau of Sanford Health, which operates hospitals in several states including North Dakota, said in a statement that the hospital system intended to announce plans later this week to increase bed capacity in Bismarck.

The number of active coronavirus hospitalizations in the state has nearly doubled, with 105 as of Sunday, compared with 57 two weeks ago. While North Dakota’s official figures suggest that there is still ample capacity in the state as a whole, some say that the stress on hospitals is growing acute in some areas. The leaders of Essentia Health warned last week in a statement that its hospital in Fargo was “at or near capacity.”

Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, is also dealing with criticism of his reluctance to issue a statewide mask mandate and his move to rescind a quarantine order for close contacts of people who test positive for the coronavirus.

The state’s interim health officer, Dr. Paul Mariani, resigned on Friday after Governor Burgum rescinded the quarantine order. Dr. Mariani was the third person to hold the position since the start of the pandemic.

Unemployed workers wait for help to file insurance claims in Oklahoma in July.Credit…Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times

Not only are businesses shedding workers, with America’s unemployed numbering roughly 13.6 million, but employers are also cutting expenses like health coverage, and projections of rising numbers of uninsured have grown bleak.

Tens of millions of people could lose their job-based insurance by the end of the year, said Stan Dorn, the director of the National Center for Coverage Innovation at Families USA, a consumer group in Washington, D.C. “The odds are we are on track to have the largest coverage losses in our history,” he said.

While estimates vary, a recent Urban Institute analysis of census data says at least three million Americans have already lost job-based coverage, and a separate analysis from Avalere Health predicts some 12 million will lose it by the end of this year. Both studies highlight the disproportionate effect on Black and Hispanic workers.

Many businesses have tried to keep their workers insured during the pandemic. Employers relied on government aid, including the Paycheck Protection Program authorized by Congress to ease the economic fallout, to pay for premiums through the spring and summer.

Government funding appears to have “prevented the economic crisis from becoming a coverage crisis right away,” said Leemore S. Dafny, a professor at Harvard Business School and one of the authors of a report last month looking at the pandemic’s effect on small business.

Describing those employers as “the proverbial canary in the coal mine,” the researchers say there could be significant coverage losses if insurers and lawmakers fail to act in the coming months. Nearly a third of small businesses surveyed in late June said they were not sure they could keep paying premiums beyond August, according to the report.

A checkpoint along a residential block advising residents to stay at home in Yangon, Myanmar, on Saturday.Credit…Ye Aung Thu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The strict stay-at-home order issued by Myanmar last week for its largest city, Yangon, barred residents from traveling from any of its 44 townships to another. There are some exceptions, such as for police officers, emergency workers and doctors.

But one group not given special status to cross township boundaries is the news media. That includes reporters, photojournalists and the drivers of newspaper delivery trucks. The exclusion prompted protests Monday from journalists and news vendors alike.

“How can we stay at home while we need to cover the news as videojournalists?” said U Wai Yan, a correspondent with Xinhua News. “If the people do not get the true news, then there might be lots of rumors, and these are toxic for people.”

With cases of the coronavirus soaring, the government has issued stay-at-home orders for Yangon, a city of seven million people. It issued similar restrictions in Rakhine State, where the first major outbreak occurred, and most recently for three townships in Mandalay, a city of one million.

Myanmar, which was ruled for decades by the military, is one of the poorest nations in Southeast Asia, and doctors say that its underfunded medical system would be quickly overwhelmed if the virus is not contained.

The number of reported cases has skyrocketed over the past month to nearly 11,000, with 226 deaths. But the rate of testing in Myanmar is among the lowest in the world and the number of cases is likely much higher.

On Sunday, the government issued a requirement that anyone seeking an exception to the travel restrictions must register online. But it included no category for members of the media.

“I would say the government does not understand the importance of independent private media,” said U Myint Kyaw, secretary of the Myanmar Press Council.

The council, which seeks to protect the media’s interests, has appealed to the government to provide an exemption so that reporters can cover the news and newspapers can be delivered.

Critics said the restrictions on movement would make it more difficult for news organizations to cover Myanmar’s national election, which is scheduled for Nov. 8.

The main opposition party argues that holding the election in the middle of a pandemic favors the ruling party of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s civilian leader, and has called for it to be postponed. Election officials have rejected a delay.

Sonny Swe, the founder and chief executive of the influential magazine Frontier Myanmar, said journalists must have sufficient freedom of movement so they can cover the election, the health crisis and other significant events.

“I can understand the restrictions and necessary measures for the sake of public health,” he said. “But the media should be considered an essential business.”

A 61-year-old Afghan man died on Sunday in Greece, becoming the first resident of a Greek migrant reception facility to die of the virus. The man, a father of two, died in an Athens hospital. He had been living in the Malakasa camp near the city, a Greek Migration Ministry official said, adding that his two children have been tested and are isolated within the camp. Malakasa is one of nine migrant reception facilities on the mainland that are locked down because of virus outbreaks.

A cruise ship carrying more than 1,500 people was turned back from the Greek island of Milos in the Aegean Sea after 12 crew members tested positive for the virus, a Greek Shipping Ministry official said. The Mein Schiff 6, which sails under the flag of Malta, left Crete on Sunday and was off the coast of Milos early on Monday when the test results were released, the official said.

The municipal government in Beijing announced new procedures to allow medical personnel to bypass their bosses in reporting health emergencies directly to hotlines and government agencies. The rules are supposed to protect whistle-blowers’ identities and shield them from any retaliation. The goal, although not mentioned by the Beijing authorities, appears to be to prevent any repeat of the slow response last winter to the emergence of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China. The ophthalmologist who sounded the alarm there on social media, Dr. Li Wenliang, was called in by medical officials and the police and forced to sign a statement denouncing his warning; he later died of the disease.

The next Group of 20 summit meeting, which was scheduled to be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, will take place virtually on Nov. 21 and 22, the kingdom said in a statement on Monday. Saudi Arabia, which holds the group’s rotating presidency, also hosted an emergency virtual summit meeting in March in response to the pandemic.

[archonreviews]

The Archon’s Review of E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy is a first-person shooter with role-playing game elements created by Streum On Studio. It is the year 15 of the New Era (About 2395 CE), and the Federation (It’s always, always a fucking federation, isn’t it?) has total and dictatorial control over ~1,200 worlds. However, things are not going well: violent crime and piracy are not only rampant, but absolutely endemic, even expected on most Federation worlds. Strange and terrible creatures known collectively as the Metastreumonic Force have ravaged any world already desolated by human industry. Megacorporations rule pretty much everything. In the midst of this horror and chaos, a shadowy and clandestine group called the Secreta Secretorum has returned to prominence. Once, they were demon hunters and mystics, fighting against the Metastreumonic Force alongside the Federation, but now horrified by its total control over so many worlds, they have decided to rebel against them, using the chaos of looter bands and Force attacks to their advantage. However, things are not going well for the Secreta either. The group is split by factional infighting, as the Culter Dei and the Jian Shang Di groups each struggle for power and influence within the Secreta Secretorum. In this moment, the Culters have made a move to strike at “an influential Jian mentor”. You were assigned to a special task force sent to complete this mission, but you wake up in a cave, amnesiac, and must piece together your past, the plot, your loyalties, etc. As a direct result of your amnesia, people assume you’re stupid because you ask basic questions. Are you stupid? Only one way to find out.

I swear to the heavens that the above splash image is not a Space Marine.

So, another FPS, this one with the RPG mechanics that were really popular with FPS’s for a while.This is one of those games where I seem to have more bad to say about it than good, and yet I end up enjoying it anyway. See also: Shadow the Hedgehog.

So how about that visual aesthetic, eh? Basically, take Warhammer 40k, Shadowrun, Crysis, and whatever other cyberpunk/dystopic sci-fi you wanna think of, toss it all in a blender, and Divine Cybermancy is basically what you get from it. Sadly, while they were busy stealing elements wholesale from wherever they could, they decided that having interesting or multi-colored backgrounds was overrated, and that having interesting and distinct character models was more so. This actually makes it a little bit difficult to determine which enemies have which weapons and abilities. In fact, there are like, 3 character models per faction? Maybe? In addition, the lack of diverse backgrounds makes it a little bit difficult to know where you’ve been before in a level. All in all, while the aesthetic is interesting prima facie, it rather quickly becomes a mass of dull colors and confusing visuals.

Quick, semi-related note: the dialogue translations are a little bit not-the-best. I had originally thought that the game was translated from Russian, but I later read that it was translated by a Frenchman who knew no English at all. So, either this mysterious Frenchman is translating from Russian into English, or from French into English. Either way, the translations are impressive... for someone who speaks no English. Some of them do get really weird later on though, so... eh, we’ll give the translations a C+ and move on, shall we?

Speaking of men, this game is an absolute sausage fest. Like, there are literally no female characters to speak of, except for a particular female enemy type among the aforementioned Metastreumonic Force. I mean, c’mon Streum On Studio, even W40K has the Sisters of Battle, and I’m sure Crysis had a lady or two. Although... almost every character has a full helmet and body armor. So I suppose, they could be women underneath all that armor. But I know for a fact that almost all the main characters are dudes.

Speaking of dudes, the tutorial is rubbish. It’s a basic level through a cave and then a sewer system, and every time a new mechanic comes up, the game will helpfully prompt you to press the T key to bring up the list of tutorial videos. Really sloppy, actually, when you could easily build a tutorial into a game like this. Although, it controls more or less like a standard FPS, so I don’t begrudge it too much, I suppose.

Speaking of grudges, there is no functioning save system. Like, at all. The game supposedly auto-saves your progress at the start of every mission, and also at the mission’s conclusion, but missions can be really long and arduous, and even then, I have encountered at least one glitch (I imagine it’s a rare one), which deleted all my progress and booted me to just after I finished the tutorial level. Without any explanation. Or warning. It was a very trying moment for me. Manly cyberpunk tears were shed.

Speaking of other game elements to pick at, if that exposition up there made no sense to you, don’t worry. It confused they heck out of me as well, but I sorta liked it anyway. Not everyday that you see the the obligatory human Federation as the bad guys. Hell, their footsoldiers are literally the Helghast from Crysis. PEOPLE WHO MADE CRYSIS DON’T SUE THESE PEOPLE, ETC. That said, the plot your character goes through is a bit of a mess, at least, to begin with. You start in a dream, where you learn you’ve killed your mentor, and then you get dropped into the beginner cave, and everyone acts like you should know everything about this world already, but you know nothing, Jon Snow. This results in compounded confusion, especially since the historical archives your allies give you access to only detail the past millennia, not really immediate events. Regardless, I’m sure the plot pans out... somehow.

^(I’m putting thus here only to prove a point about the visual similarities between these enemies and the ones in Crysis. You guys, pleeeeaaaase don’t sue Streum. It’d make me sad.)^

Now, some of the things I’ve described are not without their qualifications. Por exemple, while the visuals are generally dull, are some genuinely impressive shots one can get if they position themselves well. The game is a bit like having a lovely view out your living room window... of a totally urban environment created by someone who subsists on cigarettes and cyber-spite.

^(A vibrant, dystopic paradise...

... the halls of power in an ancient temple...

... and choice monster ass. What more could you ask for?)^

Even all that is dressing and crust for the moment-to-moment gameplay. And that gameplay is actually quite entertaining! It facilitates a variety of gameplay styles. You wanna be a cold sniper, casually making headshots against gormless assholes? Go for it! Wanna be a psy-wizard? Do it! Tech-berserker? The world is yours! Hacker extraordinaire? Enemies are hackable; hack ‘em all! Each of those gameplay styles is not only viable, but entertaining as fuuuuuuuuck. Getting regular headshots made me feel like a Shinigami, and when I was done with that character and wanted something more hands-on; well, let’s just say the transmutation of monsters into monster corpses was made all the more enjoyable with the aid of my exploding sword.

The RPG elements work well enough, and are pretty bog-standard. You get experience points for killing enemies and completing missions, and every time you get enough, you gain a level, giving you 3 skill points to distribute among your many abilities. In addition, you can equip a number of items, each of which take up a certain amount of space in your inventory. These items and your armor determine, along with your agility stat, your movement speed.

^(My tank character’s sheet. Stats on the right, derivatives on the left.)^

You may also invest in cybernetics which increase your stats or give you special abilities, or in psionic powers which are essentially magical. Each of these cost mone -- Oh, I’m sorry, brouzoufs -- and while they seem really cool, I often found that my first brouzoufs went into research. Oh yeah, you can research things in this game. These researches can grant you the use of new items, or improve your stats, or merely unlock new research topics. Really, there’s a lot to spend your resources on, whether it’s skill points or brouzoufs.

Nəticədə, I had a hard time with this game. I loved the pizza that was the gameplay, but not as much the toppings that were the ancillary bits. I’d recommend it to very patient sci-fi/cyberpunk fans, mostly. If you’re patient with the game’s faults, the game will prove quite an enjoyable experience. I would only return to playing it if I had a lot more time on my hands, honestly.

^(Of course, the best thing about the game are these friends.)^