#A Day Late: Instrumentals for Illegal Aliens

[animalsenterprises]

RAINBOW SEASON LP & A Dark Desert Drive with No Lights

It's been a decade since I released a "full length" record. The first time up, I was just learning music production. I had never recorded anything myself before (not entirely true; I had recorded a short film score ((STILL LOVER)) on a portable multi-track), and my understanding of the process was from what I gleamed from observing my friend produce my first record, which was purely an instrumental one. While I had some production credits on that, my role was in composition, instrumentation and performing, not in tracking, or any of the studio stuff associated with recording records. Up to that point, I had been in and out of bands, mostly just playing electric guitar. But the opportunity appeared because I felt like I could do it. The thought just sprang up in my head, and like the field of dreams, it had to be done.  

It was an intense ordeal, since I had no clue, and was left to learn everything myself, from the ground up. But that process taught me an invaluable lessons; that if you want to do something way outside your competence, it can still be done. Dive head first, break shit, learn, and if you're still excited, do it again was the ethos. You have that bounce back energy with youth & there never is anything to lose. Time refines process, but process comes before quality even after refinement. You never really know quality (it's an intangible), but you always know process & that's easier to refine. 

My time in music happened in a similar way to filmmaking. It was the start of the digitalization of media. Computers and soundcards and emulation and plugins and as important, digital aggregators where making the home recording possible, and the barriers to entry affordable. All that was left was the energy, the desire and the doing.

In 2007 I released a short instrumental record, A DAY LATE: INSTRUMENTALS FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS under my project alias at the time, SHANKS AND THE DREAMERS. My friend Ray P headed the production. He had recorded a couple of DIY albums (they still hold up) for his own projects and was a super fan of Steve Albini's style and methodology. We did the tracking in a music space (Bassland Studios) in Santa Ana California headed by OC electronic music pioneer Alex X. from the project of the same name BASSLAND (location where I shot a film called "my break ups into a million pieces"). A DAY LATE had six tracks and it took nearly 2 years to complete. Scheduling the sessions, mixing, tracking, school, work, and balancing my first love, film, expanded the production cycle way past what I had anticipated.

As a son of first-generation immigrants, my life seemed completely foreign and wayward to my parents. They had no idea where I got my interest in music, as I had never played an instrument before, except after high school, while in college, picking up my first guitar while I studied at UCLA.  Though the seeds were planted much earlier, and maybe I'll write about that in a different time. In any case, all was upheaval. It's hard to transpose an understanding now, to how things were. At that time, my choices were limited, because my understanding was completely limited. So, I could only see two viable options. Go back to school, or work at a coffee shop for the rest of my life (this binary seems incredibly naive and silly, but I suppose that's how it looks for large swarms of people). There were no career aspirations in art, even though all my time was spent doing it because I was disconnected from that reality even existing. It was an impossibility. And of course, that impossibility was just an illusion. But an illusion is no different than a reality, without the tools to break through.

In any case, and to the relief & constant campaigning from my parents, I headed back to school for a graduate degree. This experience made me an advocate at dissuading most from going through the same mistake. It is part of my story, and I would not change it in any way, but when asked, I offer the truth. And that truth is that for the majority, there are much better options and routes. 

And that leads me the last full-length record I did many years ago. A month after I shot my thesis project, I recorded my first full-length record under SHANKS AND THE DREAMERS (it had turned more or less into a band at this time), "MY DARLING DIA". It took a few intense months of education, assembling the tools, learning the programs, writing the songs, and tracking.  And all of it was a giant fuck up for the most part. But it was the single greatest music production lesson I ever learned. It was a condensed, intense education, full of "Skin In the Game" and no help or resources other than my partner at the time (Art Toussi) and localized friends in the scene (bands) and of course, the web. To my giant relief, almost every question had an answer on some forum once you filtered through the arguments. And some of the tools I gathered for that project still sit in my studio (music hardware lasts much longer than the digital stuff). Here we were, a local two-piece band out of Orange County Californian, self-producing an entire record, sitting in one of the top NY Mastering Studios, where a single compressor cost more than the whole production & still completely clueless, but feeling accomplished & wild-eyed. Oddly enough, neither of was thought of ourselves as musicians really. We both had wholly different lives with trajections that had nothing to do with music.

Which leads me to this. My first full-length record under my project MIRS, RAINBOW SEASON is coming out later this year. While I've been recording EP's and singles for the last several years under MIRS, I had assumed that a full-length project was out of the scope, as each EP was thought of as my last time recording (interestingly, music had always been regulated as a side project until the last couple years when I dropped compartmentalizing everything).  But, with time and refinement usually bring in something else. Help. And ever since CANYON, MIRS has had lots of help. So what was once a solo endeavor now has the assistance to take the means of communication into another space. 

And that all changed because one thing was missing. The desire to repeat & expand the process, something that I had always wanted to do with this new project, but never allowed myself to go all the way. It was another glass ceiling. That's what they always are. 

It took a long time to get to CANYON and the merging of music & film, but not surprisingly, it's just another beginning.

[terrific-togekiss]

What if Pokémon Legends went on to other Regions?

This has been a topic of the Pokémon fandom for awhile. With the announcement of Pokémon Legends: Arceus not too long ago, many fans are anticipating and speculating the future of this ambitious side series.

Being able to not only witness, learn and partake in the legends that shape both the regions and Legendary Pokémon, leaves much room for creativity.

This is all merely speculation.

Here's my take for how any future Pokémon Legends games could play out.

Pokémon Legends: Mew

Set about roughly 20 years before the events of Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow, the elusive Mew makes an appearance in the Kanto Region.

This prompts many scientists to want to study and catch the original Pokémon, foreshadowing the creation of Mewtwo and the Ditto.

You, the player, are taken under the wing of a much younger Professor Oak, with the Gen 1 Gym Leaders also showing up to lend a hand.

As the plot focuses on you tracking down Mew before various criminals and an older Team Rocket, try to for their own nefarious purposes. Helping Professor Oak invent the Pokédex and with his research.

Gene splicing and gene testing on Pokémon grew after the War LT. Surge fought in, with an older Team Rocket using it to their advantage.

This Team Rocket being a much bigger criminal organization, before the player took them down and a smaller one appeared in Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow.

A younger Giovanni is also present, as the player gets to know the man that would go on to lead present day Team Rocket. He's a friend to the player... for now, giving some insight on who he was beforehand and show how he took over the criminal organization, setting up the events Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow.

Mew's appearance in the Kanto region, inspires him to the point of illegal gene testing on Pokémon.

As a nod to Pokémon first debuting in 1996, the game takes on a more of a late 60s to mid 70s aesthetic, so it feels like the player is shaping the legends that set up Gen 1 of Pokémon.

Plus Kanto in the Legends artstyle would be mindblowing. And take inspiration from 60s to 70s Japan.

In addition, to avoid looking too similar to Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Being more of a modern era Japan region, than a Meiji period Japan inspired region. While following in said game's footsteps, by focusing on the secondary legendary than the main one (Mewtwo).

The starters would be Chikorita (Gen 1 is about Nature vs Technology), Torchic (Peace and War aesthetic) and Popplio (60s to 70s definitely saw a rise in many famous and popular musicians).

Pokémon Legends: Celebi

Ever wonder the origins of the Legendary Beasts: Raikou, Suicine and Entei?

What they were before they were killed in Brass Tower revived by Ho-Oh? How Ho-Oh came down and choose them, saving their lives? The sea Lugia stays in the deep for? The early days of Johto? The ruins of Alpha in the past? The early days of the Kimino Girls?

Well now you, the player, do now! ...sort of. As the title of the game implies, the player meets and befriends Celebi and gets to see many of these events via time travel.

Not only would this include a huge mechanic separate from other Legends games, but it would be the most unique in how it could be approached. As Nintendo is no stranger to time travel games (e.g. Majora's Mask) that impact both the plot and gameplay.

Time travel tends to create stories that are very confusing or very heartwrenching. Or both. But I have no doubt it would be the latter.

It also leaves room for many side quests.

Starters would be Bulbasaur (Time is all about growth), Scorbunny (Bunny Rabbits are not only a common symbol in the older days of Japan, but of Spring much like Ho-Oh) and Froakie (ninjas were more prevalent during this time period, as they slowly faded out).

Pokémon Legends: Jirachi

1000 years before the events of Pokémon Emerald, (Omega) Ruby and (Alpha) Sapphire, chaos raged across the ancient Hoenn Region, between two legendary Pokémon: Groudon and Kyogre. The Draconid people hope and pray for the arrival of Rayquaza to save the Hoenn Region itself.

This is where the player steps in: in order for all this chaos to end, the wishes of the people must be heard. And the only Pokémon capable of that is Jirachi.

The player would go around helping wishes be granted, traveling and training Pokémon along the way.

An ancestor of Zinnia also makes an appearance as a friend and rival of the player.

To maintain the wishes and stars aesthetic, Deoxys also makes an appearance with its origin being explored. Being able to explore space itself, meeting Pokémon said to have an "alien" origin, like Elgyem and Beheeyem.

Latios and Latias can also be caught, flying on them just like in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire.

The meteor that would hit the future Sootopolis is what awakened Groudon and Kyogre, said Meteor containing Deoxys. Setting up the game's plot.

Since it's roughly 1000 years before the Gen 3 Pokémon games, Hoenn resembles and takes inspiration from Japan during the Heian period.

The starters would be Turtwig (Theme of continents being at stake), Chimchar (Japanese and Chinese relations) and Totodile (sea monster symbolism, which is often associated with crocodiles and related animals).

Pokémon Legends: The Dragon

Two Princes, of Galar origin, known as the "Twin Heroes" share the power of an unimaginable Legendary Dragon. Bringing Truth and Ideals to the people of Unova. They live and lead from Relic Castle.

You, the player, are a friend of the princes and over the course of the game, your alliance with them changes. Struggling to choose between Truth or Ideals. Serving as a major story mechanic.

A feud and disagreement between the Princes happen, with the player being caught in the middle and to try to quell the anger of the Dragon.

In addition to finally seeing Reshiram and Zekrom before they split, Victini is also present with the Swords of Justice Pokémon (Cobalion, Virizion, and Terrakion), the Forces of Nature (Tornadus, Thundurus, and Landorus) and even Meloetta tries to raise people's spirits.

Team Plasma's origins are alluded to, with the army of the Princes baring an odd resemblance to the future evil team.

The game has more of a wild western aesthetic since Unova is based on New York. Think late 18th century America. With horseback riding on Pokémon like Zebstrika and Rapidash, bandits and criminals that try to steal your Pokémon and being able to explore Unova in its entirety.

Or perhaps roaring 20s to 30s America. If that setting sounds more vibrant and close to the Unova of Gen 5. This is all still speculation.

You even get to ride Keldeo in a later part of the game.

The starters would be Chespin (Chesnaught is based on a Glyptodon; fossils were found in South America), Litten (Wrestling is popular in New York) and Mudkip (mudpuppies are found in Lake Michigan).

Pokémon Legends: Diancie

Set after the Kalos War, you the player are caught in the middle of it going off to fight with your Pokémon. Hoping to make a difference as the Professor (ancestor of Professor Sycamore) takes you under his wing. And hoping to help the war turned world that is Kalos.

Yveltal and Xernas have both gone into slumber, with Zygarde needing to be restored to at least 50% (player can go to 100%), so the world of Kalos can be healed from this war.

The main game focuses on Diancie: since Diancie is the Pokémon of diamonds, the war has forced soldiers and leaders to exhaust the many resources of the Kalos region. Particularly precious stones and diamonds.

The player befriends Diancie later in the game as the two work together to bring an end the greedy hearts of those involved.

The game resembles France during the 100 Years War, with the player character even having armor as part of their attire. Due to Kalos being based off of France, roughly Middle Ages or Medieval France in this game's case.

AZ also makes a few appearances in the game, racked with grief over firing the Ultimate Weapon, mostly keeping to himself over the game's plot.

As a new gameplay mechanic, the player can befriend other trainers to amass armies to overcome many challenges, like beating other armies and crossing obstacles.

Volcanion and Hoopa are also present in the game and can be caught.

The origins of Mega Evolutions are expanded on, with the player getting their hands on some Mega Stones. Due to the energy of the Ultimate Weapon.

The starters would be Snivy (said Pokémon is based on French nobility), Piplup (Empoleon is based off of Emperors and can be a nod to Napoleon) and Charmander (Charizard is based off of European Dragons).

Pokémon Legends: Marshadow

Set in the ancient Aloha region, when Tribes followed the Tapu Pokémon, you the player find yourself stranded in this intriguing region.

Ultra space wormholes begin opening across the region and its up to the player to figure out why and how to stop them. Even being able to traverse the Ultra Megalopolis in its entirety.

Necrozma is up to it and the player must learn why. With Marshadow playing a bigger role, since most of its origin is shrouded in mystery, so this would be a great opportunity to explore those origins.

Along with the origins of the Z-Crystals.

The game has more of an ancient Polynesian world, seeing as how Aloha is based of Hawaii. Being able to sail to smaller islands and even catch Pokémon while doing so.

The starters would be Grookey (drums are a popular musical instrument in the tropics), Sobble (chameleons are native to Hawaii) and Tepig (pigs have been brought to Polynesian Islands in the past).

Pokémon Legends: Zarude

3000 years, before the events of Pokémon Sword and Shield, a black storm covers the very region itself. This black storm causes Pokémon to randomly Dynamax and Gigantamax. Many live in fear of what the next day brings, as hope of a better day seems like only a naive dream.

The player joins with many Pokémon researchers (some being ancestors of familiar faces in Pokémon Sword and Shield), in order to track down the source of this chaos.

Zarude comes in as he helps providing with resources from various forests, so less Pokémon and people are harmed. Or worse.

The player believes tracking down Zarude, will lead them to stopping this madness (Eternatus).

The game looks much like 13th to 14th century Britain, in much of the fashion of characters and even dealing with the equivalent of a plague. Ironically enough.

The starters are Treecko (Forest theme and light in the dark theme in contrast to the Darkest Days), Fenniken (Magicians are a common Middle Ages motif) and Squirtle (Cannons were first invented in Europe, around this time period).

[xhaotixaesthetica]

College! Jaebum x Kinda Mad Genius! Reader

Starlink Intergalactic Navigator 

You are in: a genetic mutation of Gaia, the dwarf planet 

look at this cute ass idiot ugh my heart

so WE’RE GONNA SPICE HIS AU UP A BIT totally not because I’m already sick of the same reader inserts, just enjoy this as a story and don’t complain pls

in this au you’re an astrophysics and computer programming major, minoring in bioengineering

in other words, you’re smart af

like you’re one of those child prodigy kids

Graduated high school early and took a bunch of AP's and CLEP tests so you’re way ahead and somewhere in between a junior and a senior but since you’re so young, you just say you’re a junior

you literally have the IQ of a genius and a bunch of Ivy league schools got in a fight over you but you were like nah nah i want something fUn so you came to SEOUL WOO HOO

you get A's in everything without even trying but that's OK because it leaves more room for you to do more SCIENCE

currently in a polyamorous relationship between you, Math, and Science

you’re really fascinated by the complexity of the universe but at the same time really into physics and math so when you found out that astrophysics existed when you were like 12, you knew that was it for you

you barely have time to eat, much less be fashionable, so you wear pretty nothing but jeans, huge hoodies, Converse, and a super hero t-shirt underneath (same but just because i’m too broke to dress nice)

with good brains comes bad everything else and you’re a hot fucking mess

clumsy, notes scattered all over the place, writing astrophysics shit in the margins of all your papers and doodling constellations on them while the professor lectures, it’s bad

you’re actually kind of extroverted and hyper but you just focus all that energy into astrophysics so everyone thinks you’re a hermit

you’re not obsessed with video games and comic books specifically, you’re just obsessed with space

like Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Ender's Game, Prey, Alien, Dead Space, and even Halo, you love em all, cause fuCkinGH spACE MAN same i’m a space gay

you aLwAyS pLaYS THE FUCKIN SPACE OVERTURE ON YOUR PHONE AND WALK IN SLOW MO INTO YOUR APARTMENT AND YOUR ROOMMATE IS LIKE I HAD TO WATCH THAT WITH MY OWN TWO EYES

always writing reminders on yourself but they only help 60% of the time because you’re a hot mess

you can play the harp and the sitar?? the most random ass instruments, you literally have your harp in your bedroom and your sitar in your lab and like they were gifts from one of your cousins and you’re really protective over them

whenever you have a mental block you sit cross-legged and start playing your harp/sitar and chanting OM or the lyrics to We Will Rock You and your roommates are like omg they really are a mad scientist

you don't mind relationships but like no one wants to be with you cause they think you’re kind of fucking insane so you try not to think about it and just blow stuff up in the chem lab

like you’re really excited, you’ll gladly talk to people and you’re really bubbly and happy and friendly but all you talk about is astrophysics??? and you’re not on like level one, no you started reading college level astrophysics books when you were 14, you’re like wayyyy past PhD level so it's like you’re speaking another language

and no one wants to hang out with you like they think it's cute how passionate you are and how fucking just warm and open you are but still no one wants to be around you cause you’re like some sort of mad scientist and they're not interested in what you’re talking about

but you keep a smile on your face and keep to your astrophysics even though you start to think something's wrong with you and start getting kinda sad

aw bby :’(

and tHEN THEY WERE ROOMMATES that's when Jaebum came along

Jaebum is majoring in Ancient Studies and minoring in Greek and he’s Captain of the Football Team

pretty much every male-attracted person likes him but ain't no one going near that boy cause he is T E R R I F Y I N G

wears all black and never says anything and then when you talk to him he just has this resting bitch face on with no expression and everyone's like I’ll I’ljust go now and he just continues reading

he’s always reading with his earbuds in, you bother him it's your funeral

and it's weird cause like he has friends a precious few and ppl know he's not cold with them so why’s he ALWAYS COLD AND APATHETIC TO EVERYONE ELSE LIKE YOU GOOD MATE???

knows he's terrifying and uses it to his advantage

has no problem glaring down people who reach for the same thing at the supermarket or try cutting in front of him at starbuck’s and they near shit themselves

does not give two shits about all the people staring at him all the time as long as they don't talk to him or interrupt his reading

stays at home unless he's at class, practice, or a game

on the Dean’s List, and a massive teacher’s pet

but still, people just like to admire him for his looks and gush about how mysterious he is and that really irks him cause no one wants to actually spend the time to get to know him he’s not even that mysterious, he’s actually a bit of a crackhead so he's like i don't need y'all i have the Gupta Dynasty to keep me company

youngjae and yugyeom rolling their eyes, like HeRe HyUnG GOES AGAIN

knows more about ancient worlds than the current world?? like sometimes mark catches him staring at technology like it's an alien concept and he's like dude you've had a cell phone since you were like 12, when was the last time you had a break from reading that, chill out for a second and come back to modern times

and jb just scoffs like i don't need your modern times and buries his head in the book again but he just wants someone who's able to talk about the present AND the past with him without ignoring one cause he thinks both are really important

anyways one day you were late to an 8am class and you were rushing and dropped some papers and Jaebum came across it and he was like what in ThE HELL IS THIS cause first of all it was almost completely illegible and then when he did manage to read it, he couldn't understand it cause it was real complex math and science shit and he looked at the name and he knew who you were cause you’re the campus genius and the campus crazy

so he hunts you down until he comes across your lab later on in the day and you’re frantically looking through your BILLIONS OF PILES of looseleaf paper and jb's just thinking about how much of a fit jinyoung would have if he saw this tomfoolery

and he handed you your stuff and you were so grateful and friendly and you reminded him of a crazier version of youngjae

he couldn't help but be curious when he saw the really complicated math and science going on on your paper and he was like what's that, how does it work, what's the history

for a full fifteen seconds, you looked at him like he was god incarnate and you like i'M gLaD yOu AsKeD

and you were talking really fast but the way your eyes lit up when you talked about astrophysics and the way the sun from the window illuminated your features jfc

jb didn't believe in love in first sight he swore he didn't

unless it was you

like even if you weren’t conventionally pretty and most people wouldn't even notice you, bummie didn’t care, it was like you were the goddamn sun or something

he stops you in the middle of explaining and he's like look you're going a bit too fast, so could you repeat what you said but just a lil bit . . . slower

and for a long moment, you were stunned jungshook because like this boi . . . this devastatingly handsome boy who blows everyone off and makes them wet their pants in fear wants to hear me rant to him about astrophysics

and he actually wants you to slow it down so he can understand instead of just pretending to listen

and like you may be a genius but JB just broke your brain for a second

but then you jump back into it like yeah sure

and jae honestly finds you fucking adorable like how excited you get about astrophysics and he actually finds himself interested in it and then he starts talking about ancient cultures and greek and you already kinda know everything he's talking about and enjoy the conversation and he's all heart eyes

gets protective over you after like 2 days???

you don't care, you’re just happy there's someone who thinks you’re interesting so you don't even notice him glaring at anyone who talks to you and always hanging around you to scare other guys off

tbh bummie doesn't really comprehend why people don't like being around you cause like??? you’re so fucking pretty and cute?? you took all his uwus reader

only takes like 10 days before JB finds out you’re really affectionate and you’re hugging and cuddling all the time but he actually???likes it

and soon he's the one begging you for cuddles and you’re like ( ^_^) ofc babe lemme just finish doing these calculations right quick and JB's like asdfghjkl did they just call me what i think they just called me

but like you guys are always hanging at your lab and since JB doesn't really talk except with you and his friends and you never talk about anything but astrophysics on the off chance she gets back to the dorm in time enough to talk at all no one knows that you guys are even hanging out

it's not long after that jae asks you out and he takes you to an amusement park and you have a FiElD dAy because sooooooo much math? and pretty colors? and cotton candy? and he's made you the happiest person ever and in that moment when he sees your face he just can't help himself like pls be my s/o and you’re like ASDFGHJKL ARE YOU PLAYING WITH ME RIGHT NOW JFC OFC

and he just drops a bomb on his friends like they're all going out to dinner and he brings you and he's got his arm around your waist and he's just like guys meet my s/o and everyone's choking like S/O We ThOuGhT YoU wErE aRo oR sMtHiNG and for a minute they're so confused because no one even knew jaebum was talking to someone much less the mad scientist person when did this happen

and like they can see all throughout dinner that you’re really fucking strange but it's kind of cute and it makes bummie happy so Welcome to the Family, we have cookies

lol friends? nope, say goodbye to those, everyone is so terrified of bummie and his resting bitch face and them muscles that they refuse to come near you cause you’ve basically got Jaebum stamped on your forehead but that's ok because somehow you became really good friends with his friends and like you have this group chat that jae's not in specifically so they can share embarrassing things for you to tease him about later

but bummie highkey encourages it because if he pretends to get mad, you’ll play your harp for him and he loves that shit

jaebum will knock the living daylights out of anyone who mistreats you or makes you feel bad

like one time yall were walking back after a date and this dude grabbed your ass and was about to open his mouth to say some vulgar shit but he didn’t even get the chance before jaebum LEAPED ON HIM LIKE A FUCKING INSECT AND MOWED HIS ASS D O W N

jae had like two scratches on him meanwhile the dude on the floor probably needed a goddamn ambulance and he just took your hand and continued walking like anyways, like i was saying, no one can give me a valid reason why I shouldn’t get a cat

yall will 10/10 adopt a cat together

well it was supposed to be one but yall were weak bitches, so it turned into 3 same

at first yall rotated the cats between y’all’s apartments but then you were both like let’s just fucking move in together omfg

bam bam constantly breaks into your apartment to play with your cats

you come and cheer jae on at his football games

the first time everyone was SHOOK 

for fuck’s sake, you just learned what a touchdown was when you infiltrated a superbowl party for the food sAME, why tf were you even here

but then they saw jae beam at you and they were like omfg, they’re these people

when they win, he runs up and scoops you into his arms and spins you around, pressing a bunch of kisses all over your face and calling ou his good luck charm and you’re screaming at him for hugging you while he’s sweaty and gross even though you’re laughing and kissing him back

when he loses, you and him go to McDonalds after he showers and you just sit at a table eating while he nuzzles his head in your neck and sulks

reader, i highkey advise you to get a couple tats or a body piercing and not tell him

just have your hoodie off one day so he happens to see the tat/piercing and you’ll see his eyes darken and he’s trying to keep calm like

“i didn’t know you had tattoos/piercings”

and he’s looking down at you so intensely he’s almost glaring

“i do, wanna try and find them all?”

you did it

you activated beast mode

whenever jae sees you upset or sad, he’ll just engulf you with his whole body and you can smell his aftershave and feel his warmth while he puts on calming music and tells you greek myths in that smooth, soothing voice

and when you have your head on his chest, half asleep, he’ll just kind of stop for a second because holy fuuck, you’re so gorgeous and you’re his? how did he land you?? he’s the luckiest guy in the world?

and when you look up, wondering why he stopped talking, you see him looking at you with just this really soft, mushy look of complete adoration and before you can even say anything, he’s like i fucking love you

I WAS GONNA WRITE MORE, BUT I GOTTA END IT NOW, I’M FUCKING SOFT HNNNGGH 

Gaia, the dwarf planet 

[eldritchsurveys]

oo6.

1. Do you have any sort of “secret” goals or dreams, where you think about doing something a lot, but haven’t told anyone about it or actually made steps to achieve it? Maybe something you aren’t quite serious about, but still like to consider? >> I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Making goals isn’t a thing I’m really into. I don’t like to focus my life on one thing (moving to New Orleans is the only thing that I’m focused on, and that’s causing me enough grief because I can’t really do anything about furthering that process, it’s just a waiting game), because it has a tendency to tunnel my vision. I like to be open to as many opportunities as possible, and also... what kind of goals would a person like me have, anyway?  2. Does your town/area have a farmer’s market? Do you ever buy your vegetables there rather than grocery store? >> There are probably quite a few, but the one I know about is down the road from me. I haven’t been there when they start selling foodstuffs yet; I’m looking forward to finally buying produce from there, though. 3. Has anyone ever “ruined” anything for you (for example: your partner says, “oh, this song always reminds me of my ex” and you never want to listen to it again, or your friend is so obsessed with a movie that you start to resent the film)? >> Nah. That reminds me of Vlad, though, and how Sigma and Crystal fucking ran Repo! the Genetic Opera into the fucking ground around her to the point where Vlad refused to ever watch it or have anything to do with it. Like, damn, how obnoxious do you have to be to drive someone to that point. (Obviously if someone doesn’t find it obnoxious, then go ape-shit -- but if someone’s like “please stop singing these songs literally all the time” and you keep doing it? You’re the asshole in this situation.) 4. If you had a significant other and somehow got a chance to kiss your celebrity crush, would you still go for it? >> I don’t think my significant others would have anything against me kissing Idris Elba LMAOsdnfkglkj 5. If you still live with your parents, is it scary for you to imagine living away from them when you move out on your own? If you live on your own, how did you cope with moving away from your family for the first time? >> I didn’t really have time to acclimate to the change. I left my father’s house and drove myself straight back into the lion’s den that fucked me up the first time, because trauma does weird shit to people and in my case at that time, it made me... go back to it. And predictably, more fucked up shit happened, and I ended up back at my father’s house anyway, and then I turned 18 and got put into the hospital for suicidal ideation, and after that I was... on my own. Officially. And I had a drug-addict boyfriend, which took up all my time and energy, so I once again had no time or energy to process the fact that I was an adult out in this world that I was in no way prepared for. So, you know. I coped wonderfully!

6. Do you tend to be attracted to people that are more similar to you in interests and mannerisms or do you tend to be attracted to someone opposite/complementing to you? >> I really don’t, like... think about it. I’m just attracted to whom I’m attracted to. I trust there’s a reason for it, but I don’t make a big deal out of looking for the reason. 7. If you could choose your dream cast for a movie, name 3-4 actors you’d choose to be in it. >> Hmm. 8. Is there something that people complain about that just makes your roll your eyes because you think is not a big deal and you would gladly trade your own issues for it? >> Unfortunately, yeah, and every time I feel that way I have to talk myself out of it, because it’s uncharitable and short-sighted, not to mention dismissive of other people’s experiences and traumas. But, you know, being human, and all. It be’s like this sometimes. (It’s usually about people I don’t know, like, teenagers on tumblr complaining about... idk, their parents or something.) 9. Does it bother you when you find out that your friends have hung out without inviting you? >> This is definitely not a problem I have.

10. Have you discovered or learned anything that’s excited you, lately? If not, do you ever actually feel excitement when learning about something new? >> Sure. I mean, I don’t remember what exactly now, but that’s a familiar feeling. 11. What is a talent that a lot of other people desire or value but you really don’t care to have (e.g., singing, etc.)? >> Hmm... playing an instrument, I’d say. I like singing just fine. And I love to listen to other people play instruments, I don’t need to play one myself. 12. Do you remember the first time you consciously took a stand for your own rights (e.g., walking out of class while offended)? If you don’t remember the first time, can you explain one time when you’ve done this? >> Yeah, I really don’t remember the first time I might have done something like this. I don’t even remember any time I’ve done anything like this. I don’t think I like... take a conscious stand for things. I don’t know. 13. Is there something that you would claim as the best purchase you ever made? >> Probably not. I mean, I make decent purchases, but nothing that stands out. 14. Have you ever received an unwanted gift from someone trying to woo you? Did you accept it or reject it? >> I don’t think so. 15. Do you find that you compare yourself to others often? What sort of things do you find you compare most? >> Nah, I don’t do it all that often. Like, it happens sometimes, but it’s not a big problem I need to fix or anything. Sometimes I compare my relationship with Wednesday to other people’s relationship to [their personal incarnations of Wednesday], and that’s dumb but I know it comes from my anxieties regarding religious things in general. Christian leftovers, basically. Religious trauma is the issue I need to work on, not necessarily my knee-jerk comparing. 16. Do you ever do something in public and then worry that you might have embarrassed the people you were with? >> Sometimes, but that’s usually because substances were involved. It’s not a big problem now. 17. What was the last thing to make you really inspired to write or create art? If you don’t remember the last thing, do you ever find yourself struck by sudden inspiration? >> I do find myself struck with sudden inspiration on occasion, but I try not to depend upon that. Inspiration is fickle, and sometimes you just need to sit down and write whether it shows up or not. 18. Are you excited at all about the upcoming The Perks of Being a Wallflower movie? >> LOL 19. Would you say that you have a competitive streak when it comes to certain things? Which situations bring out the competitor in you? >> I’m really not competitive at all. In a battle of natural selection, I’d fucking lose so hard. 20. Have you ever boycotted a product or corporation? How come? >> Nah. 21. Are there any people whom you aspire to be like? Which traits do you find in those people that you wish to emulate? >> I mean, everyone I know has at least a couple of traits that I’d like to develop more in myself. Whether I do it or not is another story, lmao. 22. Are you a registered bone-marrow donor? If not, would you be interested in registering (bethematch.org) or is there something that turns you away from it? >> I’m not, but Sparrow is. The moment she said that it’s hella painful I was like “okay, donation is noble and wonderful but uh. I’m good” 23. If someone asks you to hang out, but for some reason you’re just feeling lazy/don’t want to go anywhere, do you ignore them, make up an excuse, or just tell them the honest truth? >> Listen, people who are going to be friends with me need to know that I’m gonna need days to just veg out at home and decompress and shit, or even to just be by myself for a little while, so I might as well be honest from the gate. I’ll try to make it up to them another day. 24. Do you think it should be illegal for gas stations to sell synthetic drugs (like K2 and Bath Salts) under the guise of them being “potpourri,” or do you think it’s not the gas stations’ fault for trying to make a penny, it’s the user’s fault for abusing the potpourri? >> I do think that should be illegal, because I’ve witnessed first-hand what K2 does to people. I even tried it myself, and oh my god, fuck that shit to hell. It’s... it’s disturbing. It’s so disturbing. I wish it’d go the fuck away. And while I’m all for personal accountability, I feel that’s an unnecessarily callous stance to take when it comes to substance use and abuse. There are a lot of factors that go into substance use and abuse -- mental health, socioeconomic position, the usage habits of one’s community, social alienation, desperation... like, the nuances are myriad. Saying something like “well they could just NOT use it” is an easy way to earn my distrust. 25. Have you heard of or even read the novel, “50 Shades of Grey”? If so, what’s your opinion about it? >> Heh. Yeah, I tried to read it. I didn’t get very far. I did see the movie, though! I used to feel a lot more strongly about it, but honestly, that was a waste of my fucking energy and I was just being ridiculous. It’s not that deep. 

[paranoidwino]

the bilgesnipe in the room

Where the elephant doesn’t really describe the size of the situation, and you’d rather pretend the antlers aren’t poking you in the back. I made it, @bloomsoftly ! For you! Yaaay! Because you’re having a hard time and I wanted to make you smile! :D

Special thanks to @ragwitch who checked the whole thing (and enforced work hours... and helped me with blocks) and @hollyspacey that pretended she was Sam and filled me the conversation voids. You’re awesome! Read in on AO3: here.

“There’s another one.”

Darcy groaned. Loudly. This was the fourth time this week. And yes, she kind of got it, but man this was getting ridiculous.

She opened the doors of Baker Shelter and yep, sure enough, the sounds of battle were already creeping up from the streets and people were trying to find somewhere to hide.

“What is it today?” She sighed, “Doombots? A giant hamster?” she shook her head, “no matter. Open the doors. Close the big pen and let the people in.”

Amanda nodded and rushed to the pens.

It was becoming some sort of routine for the people to come and hide in the Shelter. Darcy hadn’t planned on this, it was a Dog sanctuary not some kind of catastrophe refuge, but when she finally realized it was time they prepped for such a situation, they noticed that many people actually had nowhere to go back to. And they couldn’t turn them away, they weren’t monsters.

And so Darcy had planned accordingly, and had turned to the only person that could have helped her in such a situation: JARVIS.

Nothing about Baker Shelter had been planned. It had been a spur of the moment thing. Like, this kind of thing? Never happened to people like her. Then again, not many could say they outlived not one but two alien invasions, three if you counted New York (and it did so count!).

And so, the day she purchased a Lottery ticket from the National Lottery website while staying at  Jane’s mother’s tiny dingy apartment, she… well, she had thought ‘well, we almost died, might as well invest 2£ in this.’ She had not really expected to win the Jackpot. She had not expected to become a millionaire overnight. But Holy Shit.

She was rich now. Filthy rich. Her student debts were no more, her problems with finding a job? Forget it, she’d feed her grandkids if she had her way. And Jane. Who needed grants anymore? She could have everything.

Jane hadn’t been enthused. Or rather, Jane hadn’t really listened, or noticed, at all. And it had probably been that - the absent minded, involuntary rejection - that had stung Darcy  badly enough to decide not to tell her best friend anything.

And the ‘lie’ grew and grew, until it was impossible for Darcy to tell Jane, well, anything. So when Stark had swooped in and offered them a place (and unlimited funding, that got Jane going real fast), she’d been worried her secret was no longer going to be one.

She was wrong. Tony had been very understanding of her predicament and agreed not to say anything.

The Shelter just… kinda happened as a consequence of his contaminating her and her bleeding heart. She had the money, the means, and now a powerful ally such as Tony Stark (and Jarvis!). Opening a shelter by remaining anonymous, buying off a ton of land and pretending to be a volunteer at her own creation had been stupidly easy. She was actually surprised she’d pulled it off.

But no matter.  In the end, Baker’s Dog Sanctuary for Third Strike Dogs had evolved into Baker Shelter, and it was one of the biggest non profit compounds in the city, comprised of the actual Dog Sanctuary building and greenery, and then proper human buildings that, in reality, hosted people in a much more permanent situation than they should. Not that Darcy cared much about it. These people needed it.

She armed herself with a trashcan lid and a wooden spoon she used for the dog food, checked that no canine was nearby (she was not going to spend the afternoon looking for poor terrorized creatures during a whatchamacallit attack) and loudly banged the spoon on the lid. “This way!” She shouted.

The running crowd didn’t need to be told twice. They poured into the buildings and followed the lights into the underground panic rooms she’d insisted they install after the first attacks (if New York had more of these? Yeah, they’d solve so many problems instead of sending people down to the subway stations). They barricaded themselves in and waited for the alarms to go off at any time. The booms and screams from upstairs were deafening despite being so far away.

As soon as the sirens stopped blaring, the poor civilians tentatively poked their heads around, ready to get back to their lives.

And as per usual, the Avengers dealt with the situation within a couple of hours and that left, well, everyone else cleaning up.

No, that wasn’t fair, Tony and his very government friendly cleaning crew did a lot to remove the big stuff. But in the end, apart from paying damages, people literally had to pick up the ruins of their houses and start anew. This time,after a couple of hours of these bouncing magical watermelons (which were a thing!), 35 people had lost their homes for the foreseeable future. Okay. Okay. She had this.

“Everyone, please listen up.” She tried to look imposing, but since vertically challenged people were usually invisible from afar, she had to stand on a chair to become the centre of attention. If only it worked with superheroes or science!bros as well. “For those of you who can’t go home, there’s temporary apartments in the compound, you just need to register at the Emergency desk. Please don’t occupy rooms if you have your house in habitable conditions. We’re trying to help, help us help you!” She recited by heart with a droning voice. Sounding hardly interested and not very impressive? Check.

The crowd dispersed, and Darcy congratulated herself for another good job. Hopefully this situation would solve itself soon. They were almost out of room and she didn’t want to start turning people away.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with this city.” Mumbled Alan from behind the desk at the makeshift reception. “But seriously, this is like the sixth attack in a fortnight.”

Darcy nodded. “I just hope this is the last time.”

***

It wasn’t.

In fact, it took three more attacks on the population for the ‘real Mastermind’ to come forward and another for the Avengers to finally capture them (Darcy suspected it was a man, but it was seriously hard with the costumes and all that...so). That didn’t stop her from complaining, that day at the Tower.

“Toh-neeeey,” she wailed exaggeratedly walking into his lab, “what is wrong with this city lately? Huh? We’re filled to the brim. Filled. Us! We’re like, the biggest compound in New York! We can’t keep up like this.” No answer.

Tony was deeply focused at his workstation, the soldering iron in his hands.

“Hey, J?” she asked then.

“Yes, Miss Lewis?” JARVIS promptly answered her. J was the absolute best. She should start thinking about adoption.

“Is Tony doing something very dangerous that will explode if I distract him?”

“I don’t think so, Miss Lewis, though may I suggest waiting until Sir is done with the soldering iron?”

She nodded, “got it.” As soon as Tony put down the instrument, she put two fingers at the corners of her mouth and whistled. Loudly.

Tony yelped. “Wha-! Shortstack!” He looked around, as if checking no one was there to witness his unmanly (girlish) scream. “What’s up?”

“We’re out of space. Again.” She sighed. “I’m seriously considering digging under the Subway. Jarvis, what are the chances of me getting away with creating an underground society?”

“The chances of creating a safe and functional secret underground society are extremely small, Miss Lewis.”

Tch. “I knew it.” She deflated on top of Tony’s empty table. “We need more space, more people, this is such a mess, Tony. Like, it was meant to be a tiny dog shelter, not a fully functioning people housing, society rehab center. How did it escalate so quickly?”

“...I blame your bleeding heart.” deadpanned Tony, then held out his hand expectantly. “Give me your phone.”

Her knee jerk reaction was to take a step back and her hand flew instinctively to her phone in her purse. “No?”

He made an impatient gesture with his hand, “Come on, DoubleD, give me some credit here.”

“Yeah, no.” She argued back, “What do you want to do to him?”

“Nothing terrible, I promise. Now gimme.”

Suspiciously, she handed him her phone. He didn’t take it. They stood staring at the phone in her hand for a few seconds. “...Tony?”

“I don’t like to be handed things. Put it on the desk and come back in an hour or so.” Why you!

***

One hour later her phone was laying on the desk. She was almost afraid it would explode in her hands.

“Okay… I’m almost scared to ask, Tony.”

“You wound me, Shorty, wound me!” He exclaimed dramatically. “But no, really, it should be okay.”

She opened her phone hesitantly.

“Good Evening, Miss Lewis, I’m FRIDAY.”

Her phone had an AI. “You… you got me an AI.” She said dumbfounded.

“Well, no.” He defended, “It’s… it’s not like Jarvis, okay? It’s a tiny AI. She can help you vet people and order the stuff you need and book appointments and staff and… why are your eyes wet Shorty?! You said you needed help!”

She had no words, so she shook her head and despite the grease stains on his shirt, she still hugged him (and was she glad there was no arc reactor on his chest anymore). “Thank you, thank you.”

“Yes, yes,” he said awkwardly. “Okay, remove yourself. Now.” He wasn’t really fighting her though.

***

FRIDAY was much more than Tony had given her credit for (he’d been downplaying her abilities, the smug genius!).

First, she was as quick as JARVIS when compiling data and extrapolating from the results.

Second, once Tony taught her how to access the computers inside the facilities, she’d been the source of invaluable help and information.

She was good enough not to spy into the private homes, but she did check traffic from and to illegal sites. That was fair.

Of course, not even FRIDAY the ‘almost-AI’ could have prepared her for what happened when the houses destroyed by the Doombots were finally habitable again and they needed to empty the temporary ones.

“Darcy?” Billy, a lanky, 30 years old volunteer that was responsible for the Monday shift, started. “We have problems in relocating some of the people?”

Darcy sighed. Of course. It wasn’t the first time they happened to host the homeless, or people that couldn’t go back to their homes. “Okay, we have space for them right?”

“Uhm, yeah…” Billy didn’t sound convinced. “But this one doesn’t even have an ID… I mean, we can’t check without a name, right?”

That was slightly more unusual. How had he entered without giving reception his name? “Okay, let me check, uhm?”

Billy’s face morphed into a relieved grin. “Thanks. I owe you.”

Sweet Celestia you owe me, Billy. You owe me all the money and the favours. All of it.

Dressed in a too big jacket and a baseball cap, in one of her temporary apartments awkwardly stood the Winter Soldier.

***

Okay. Okay. This is cool. You’ve done this with scared animals and stray dogs, this is no different.

Apart from the whole… 200 pounds of murdery ex-POW with a metal arm, sure. Oh God.

Psyching herself up wasn’t working.

What would anyone with a lick of sense do in this situation?

Call Tony. The answer was literally right there. She was one phone call away to solve the problem and probably reunite History’s greatest team. Because that man was Bucky Barnes.  Even if she hadn’t been bombarded with historical pictures of the Howling Commandos since she started school (and if you didn’t know about the Howling Commandos what kind of patriot were you?), and even if you missed all of those memos and somehow forgot what James Buchanan Barnes looked like, the glinting of the metal arm was a dead giveaway.

But.

She did also remember how Bucky had not looked for Steve. In fact, how he’d been so extremely careful not to be found at all by his oldest friend, and how she’d heard Sam say that they needed to respect his need of privacy and time.

And yeah, having hosted more than a dozen scared women in her compound, Darcy had seen first hand the effects of ‘too much love’ and how quickly it devolved into ‘obsession’. If James Buchanan Barnes didn’t want to go to Steve, she had no right to force him into meeting Steve.

That didn’t really solve her problem, though.  

James Barnes hadn’t really moved throughout her inner monologue, but his eyes had narrowed and his posture had tensed minutely. She could relate. It didn’t take a genius to understand he’d been recognized, and he was probably debating if one casualty was worth his anonymity.

Props for not having killed her the first second. And bonus points because he was being very polite, what with waiting and not trying to reach for the cutlery or yeah, showing any kind of reaction that wasn’t the resigned puppy look she was on the receiving end of. Come ooon.

Three seconds into the stare, Darcy knew James Buchanan knew exactly how his handsome looks and that stare worked with the ladies, because they way he could keep it going was extremely artificial. But eh.

“I need your name, dude, if you’re staying here.” She sighed resignedly. He perked up. “And you’re not freeloading, either. I know you can work. I’m not raising the alarm, if you help around, yeah?”

“The alarm?” He asked, feigning ignorance

She nodded quickly. “Yep. You have a metal arm, dude. I mean, it’s none of my business, and I respect your space and all that, but you are a public figure, you know. There’s even a ‘wanted dead or alive’ sign somewhere, I’m sure.” She joked, and was pleased when he snorted.

“Okay, for the record?” She said when he relaxed. “I did tell you that Steve misses you very much and he’d love to have you back. Okay, my job’s done. What’s your name dude?”

He fidgeted for a while, and then tried, “...Jack?”

“Ooookay, …’Jack’” she air-quoted, “you need new clothes, but we need to repaint the nursery in the other building, so keep those for tomorrow.”

“You’re serious.” He was surprised. “You’ll host me for labour.”

She nodded. “Yep. Told you, it’s none of my business. But I did try to convince you to go back to Steve and was very disappointed when you said no, okay?”

He smiled, and it made him look at least five years younger. “Okay.”

***

Jack Robins, the people at Baker Shelter found out, was an extremely hard worker.

He didn’t mind doing the heavy lifting, which he did with ease, and didn’t care about getting dirty chasing the dogs or repainting the buildings. He wasn’t very outgoing, but he was polite and understanding.

He’d rapidly become the kids favourite, too.

If one overlooked the long sleeves and the gloved fingers, Jack was a perfectly normal, great guy with a good heart.

Darcy was pleased their arrangement was working so well.

After a few weeks, she could almost forget about the brainwashed murdery thing (notion quickly squashed the moment an entitled asshole of one of the girls had marched into the Shelter. Bucky slash Jack had excellent protective instincts and a mean right hook. Not even the police had anything to say).

After a couple of months, she could forget entirely about the whole affair. She wasn’t making much progress on the ‘Steve’ front, and while that was fine, she couldn’t not worry about the fact that ‘Bucky’ may never really be coming back.

These worries were assuaged by the fact that they were now adding another building, and there was too much to do to think about anything else.

Darcy’s days started to become very hectic. Between juggling Jane and Tony (and sometimes Bruce) and running the Shelter, and despite FRIDAY’s amazing job, she had hardly any spare time left.

And so, when FRIDAY told her that Steve and Sam were back from another unsuccessful expedition, she didn’t even register in her mind that this was the moment to worry a bit more about concealing what she was doing in her ‘spare time’.

“Hey, Darcy!” Sam was always the first to greet her, since Steve sometimes needed to cool off or just sigh and mope around a bit. Frankly, it was a relief; Darcy always felt a bit guilty whenever he talked about ‘his Buck’.

“Hey, Sam!” She waved back. It was impossible not to smile with him around, despite her tiredness. “Are you okay?” He asked, after taking a good look at her. “You look… well, I don’t know how to say it politely?”

“...Like a zombie?” She supplied and he winced. “Yeah I know, don’t worry, no offense and all that. There’s just been a lot to do. Yeah.” She yawned.

Sam frowned and looked around, and Darcy could see the wheels turning. No Jane in sight, Bruce nowhere to be seen, Tony quietly poking Dum-E in a corner… it didn’t look like the war camp she was coming from. “What-”

She waved him off. “No no, it’s not that. It’s the work at the Shelter.” She added without thinking. What. Oh God she must be more tired than she thought. She almost choked and slapped her hand on her mouth, but restrained. Okay, play it cool.

“So, uhm, I mean...”

“Miss Lewis?” FRIDAY asked from her phone.

Sam’s eyebrows raised another notch.

“There seems to be some kind of problem at the Baker Sanctuary.” Of course there was. Like, no rest for the wicked, yeah?

She sighed. She had no time to distract Sam and FRIDAY wouldn’t warn her for nothing.

“Sorry, Sam, I need to go… just…” She focused on Tony in the corner. “Ask Tony, yeah? Bye!”

She barely heard Tony’s sputtering as she trotted out of the Tower.

***

Talking to Tony Stark had reassured Sam Wilson as much as hearing the latest news about the Election rallies. Read, not at all.

He believed Stark when he said that Darcy was okay, and that if she wasn’t she had a panic button, an AI in her phone and no less than three trackers on her person (Yes Birdman, she knows about them and she’s not stupid enough to complain considering the kind of spotlight people who work with Avengers get!), but he couldn’t help but worry about the dark circles under her eyes and the disheveled appearance.

So, as soon as Tony gave him the address of this Baker Shelter she was volunteering at in her spare time, after checking that Darcy had really preceded him by at least fifteen minutes, he made his way to the Sanctuary for Third Strike Dogs.

Well, he hadn’t expected that.

When Tony had said ‘Shelter’ he had expected some kind of tiny building with some pens, they were in the middle of New York after all, not… this. A huge compound of four buildings was not in the cards, was it?

But here it was, and in front of it a group of people in green T-Shirts or tank tops proclaiming ��I support Baker, do you?’ barring access to the premises to what looked like the NYPD.

“Look, ma’am, we just-” The officer was stammering in front of a very pissed looking Darcy.

“You just nothing, agent. We didn’t do anything wrong. This place is a Safe Haven, this is legal. We have the papers!” She was almost shrieking, her hands balled into fists.

“We are not disputing the legality of this thing!” protested loudly the agent, “we just received a report of a missing woman and this was her last whereabout. Her husband is quite-”

“She’ll be pressing charges against him!” A redhead with glasses shouted from the line of volunteers and the others backed her up, tightening their ranks in front of the door.

“Look, agent,” Darcy tried with practised calm, “we understand you’re doing your job, but we cannot and will not give names of our guests. We can’t. Take it to your boss, take it to the Heads of Baker Shelter, but we volunteers are not letting you pass and violate the rights of these people!” She gestured to a lanky boy and a megaphone was thrust in her hand. “We’re not afraid of making ourselves heard, WE HAVE RIGHTS!”

A chorus of ‘We have rights’ was heard all around and Sam found himself chanting it as well, albeit with a very low voice. It was the kind of fight he could understand, the need to protect the weak and to not give in to the unjust demands. Cap would have approved too.

The police were clearly there because ordered, because they weren’t really trying to get any sort of information or to even pass across the group of people. It was a token attempt at best (one of the officers gave a thumbs up to the volunteers, Sam was sure the captain was going to overlook that as well). However, when the officers left, the volunteers almost slumped as one, clearly spent. They were massaging their foreheads and cheering each other very quietly.

“Okay, we have stuff to do, guys!” The redhead that had shouted before tried to say cheerily, and everyone left.

Sam scrambled to intercept Darcy before she entered the bowels of the giant building.

“Hey Darce!” She tensed, turned and, surprisingly, laughed nervously.

“Hi… Sam!” Her smile was tense as well, and alarms started going off in his head.

“What was that?”

“Oh!” Okay, that wasn’t the problem because she started talking a mile an hour, “That was the last attempt of entitled asshole number fifty-two, I think. They’re always trying to find ‘legal ways’ to get their ‘beloved’ back, right? Pity it doesn’t work here.” She nodded at herself, very satisfied.

He nodded back. “Thought this was a dog shelter, though.”

“It… was. And then… it wasn’t?” She winced. “Like, we started as a dog shelter but before we knew it we were taking in people running from Doombots whose houses were destroyed, and then women and men running from abusive partners, homeless people and shit. Now we’re a fully legal compound for Safe Haven and Shelter.” She seemed surprised such a thing had happened. He’d be surprised too, all things considered. It was certainly an impressive building that required a lot of people and attention...

“And that AI of yours helps you run things, yeah got it.”

She choked. “I… I’m a volunteer here, I don’t know what you’re talking about!” She whispered harshly.

“Okay, okay, got you!” He raised his hands. “I think it’s cool. Honestly.”

They spent the next few moments in silence, watching the people bustling around with tools and wallpapers.

“Can you give me a tour?”

Darcy smiled widely. “Sure!”

***

They were walking around the new building when it happened.

And okay, Darcy should have seen it coming, she’d just hoped it wouldn’t be quite this soon.

But Sam stopped dead in his tracks and, following his gaze, Darcy’s stomach sank.

Bucky slash ‘Jack’ was passing by with two humongous paint cans that couldn’t possibly be moved around by a normal human being. Fuck.

Sam’s eyes sought out hers quickly and his mouth tried to work a few times. Was he paler? Oh God, he looked paler.

“Darcy… is that…?” Oh no. Nope.

“That’s Jack,” she said with a completely straight face.

"Jack."

"Yes. Jack," she replied with finality.

"The same Jack that once tried to murder me on a bridge?" he worked out after a few seconds.

"I don't know about that Jack, but this one has a sparkly Elsa on his arm. Did your Jack have it too?" The kids had drawn that one day, and it had stuck. Darcy found it deliciously ironic.

"...I don't think so. I got a pretty good look at it when he riPPED MY STEERING WHEEL OUT OF MY CAR."

"Then yeah, it's a totally different Jack. Why don't you help me with this and we let him do his job?"

He wasn’t convinced. “Darcy, that man, he’s-”

“A guest,” she said, slowly. “Jack Robins is a guest of the Baker Shelter. He lives here, works here and is legally registered here. Do you understand, Sam?” She kept her eyes fixed on him. “I understand where you’re coming from and your concerns, they’re noted, but Jack is one of us, now. He has the same rights as everyone else. He’s a hard worker, and he’s trying very hard. He’s great with the kids and kind to the other people. This is his second chance and you have no right to force him to do anything.”

Sam’s arms shot up at the first ‘trying very hard’. “Okay, okay, woah, girl. Calm down.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve worked at the VA for a while, Darcy, I’m not the judgy douche that wants to criticize you, okay? I just… how long has… Jack, been staying with you?”

“Five months.” She replied promptly.

“And, everything okay? Like, no accidents.. nothing?”

“No,” she stressed. “Look, Sam, I get it. I know that there will be setbacks, okay? But I trust him to know when it’s too much, I trust him to trust himself. Can you do that too? Without alerting Steve, possibly?”

Sam thought about it for a while, sometimes looking at the back of Jack, who was now wrestling the paint like a pro to decorate the interior of the building.

“I… yeah of course. But I’m coming over to check on him, frequently. And I still don’t like him.”

Darcy smiled, nodding easily, “I don’t expect you to like him, but that’s okay. Thanks Sam, you’re the best.”

“...You’re welcome. I just wish I didn’t have this feeling of ‘you sold yourself to the devil’ … you know?”

She laughed uneasily. He had no idea.

***

Steve’s wingman was there again.

Looking at him.

Staring at him.

At least it wasn’t the hateful or terrified look he was expecting.

Wilson, Sam, pararescue, didn’t particularly like him. That was cool, he didn’t like him either.

And he supposed he could understand, what with the whole ‘I tried to kill you’ shtick he’d pulled last year.

He wasn’t going to chicken out of his responsibilities on that one, despite the words of his therapist. Yes, it wasn’t his ‘his’ fault, but he could understand the other man’s reservations.  

It didn’t stop making his back itch every time his stare turned towards him, though.

“Are you quite done staring, wingman?” He snarked from the kitchen sink he was fixing.

“Nnope.” Sam drawled from the opposite side of the room. Bucky had no idea how, but Darcy had managed to rope him into mounting the shelves and the suspended cabinets. She was that kind of taskmaster, the boss-lady.

“Careful with those, kids will be in this room a lot.” He remarked.

Wilson cursed from behind him “Dude, I know. Ouch.”

Bucky snickered. “Did you just hammer your finger?”

“...No. Shut up.” Bucky’s lips twitched. Kids these days. “Get back to your sink, old man.” Sam grumbled.

“You okay here, boys?” Darcy poked her head from the other room, looking at them with narrowed eyes.

“Yes, Darcy,” they droned.

“Good, good. Hey, Jack, the sink screw’s loose.”

“..Wha?” But yeah, with a hissing sound the sink decided that this was an excellent moment to spit its whole contents on him.

Wilson’s braying was heard all over the compound.

Oh yes, he disliked him too.

***

“Hey, Darce!”

The voice was so unexpected in the silence of the room that Darcy dropped her needles and yarn on the floor. Their loud clattering was ominous.

“Crap.” Bucky whispered.

“Oh. My. God.” Darcy reached for her needles, but it was too late, she’d dropped at least one stitch.

“You… you... you made me drop a stitch. Oh my God you-” She couldn’t find the right words to express the pain at the idea of restarting from scratch. Or having to re-ladder them. Oh God.

“Sorry?” He looked contrite, but you could never tell with his puppy eyes. “In my defense, I had no idea you were doing… whatever you were knitting, doll, sorry.”

“It’s… I have no chances of actually murdering you, right?” She could always die trying…

He laughed. “No. You can always try, but that’s not happening.”

“Yeah thought so. I have a taser though?”

He winced. “Yeah no, let’s not test that. What were you making?”

She tried to smooth over her project and put it away very carefully (it was delicate stuff!). “It’s a sweater. Or at least, it will be?”

He nodded and probably contemplated looking at it, but one look at her made him rethink his position. He dropped his hand and sat on the sofa beside Darcy.

“Isn’t it a bit too warm for sweaters?”

“By the time I finish this, it’ll be December,” she grumbled, peeved. He chuckled softly. She hit him on the shoulder. He just chuckled harder.

“Sorry,” he said again.

She sighed. “It’s okay. You couldn’t have known. Anyways, did you need something?”

“Mh? Oh yeah.” He stood up. “We’re done with the top floor, we need to move up to the attic.”

Whoa, that was fast! They’d started repainting it three days ago. She smiled happily and cheered “Nice, I’ll be right there. Seriously, you do as much as ten men would in the same amount of time. We’re glad to have you here.”

His face broke into a pleased smile, “I’m glad to be here, too.”

But then his face darkened a bit and she could see right through him. Steve.

“Uhm.. Buc-Jack… Do you, I mean… It’s been over five months since you’ve been here… Do you.. uhm, would you like to tell… Steeve?” She tried delicately, and tactfully. Seriously, this was not her forte

“No.” He said quickly. “I… I’m not… Not today. Maybe later...”

“Hey hey, it’s okay. No problem, dropped it. Like a hot potato,” she said quickly, “Speaking of potatoes, I’m hungry.”

She wasn’t going to push this, for today.

And she didn’t push tomorrow, and the day after. And then, it never seemed a good time.

***

Turns out, it’s ‘The American Way’ that creates ‘a good time’.

Or, for another wording, finds out the stupidest way it can to fuck with your life...

***

For a different reading: It didn’t take long for Steve to notice that Sam was hiding something, and that it was somehow related to the many afternoons he spent outside the Tower.

He’d almost believed Tony when he said it could be a girlfriend (or a lady friend), but carefully blank looks Sam was giving him every time had started to become suspicious.

Covert agent he was not, but he was certain he could find a way to follow Sam, if he wanted to.

So he wore his most nondescript jersey, a baseball cap and was ready to leave.

“Are you going somewhere, Captain Rogers?” JARVIS’s voice interrupted his train of thoughts.

“Oh. Yes, Jarvis, I’ll be back for dinner. I think.”

“So noted, Captain Rogers.”

“Thanks, Jarvis.” And then he pondered. “Say, Jarvis, do you know where Sam spends all of his time recently?”

“Certainly, sir.” The AI responded promptly. “Mr Sam Wilson spends his afternoons with Miss Lewis...” There was a girlfriend?! “...at the Baker Shelter for Third Strike animals, sir.”

Oh.

That was… nice.

He had not expected that. “Are they dating?” Not that it was any of his business, but now he was admittedly curious.

“Not to my knowledge, sir,” JARVIS said politely, “they’re fixing a new housing facility for women in need. It’s one of the activities of the Foundation, after all.” He seemed almost… proud of this. Could an AI be proud? Well, JARVIS certainly was.

“...Do you know where it is, Jarvis?”

“Certainly, sir. Take the third…”

***

This was certainly impressive.

The buildings formed a massive compound of tiny apartments and the central, big building that Steve was pretty sure was meant to be the actual Shelter.

He walked through the gates without a problem; in fact, no one seemed to care that Captain America was walking among them. He kind of liked it.

He hadn’t seen any dog yet, but it was pretty cloudy and he still had no idea where he was going. Well, not precisely, at least.

Of course all these thoughts flew out of the window when he got close to the building in construction at the far right corner of the compound.

Because laughing softly at some guy’s joke like he belonged there while hauling wooden boards, was his friend Bucky.

And it was like the air was sucked out of his lungs, and for a second he felt dizzy.

In that moment, Sam’s unwillingness to go out and search for Bucky made a lot more sense. Of course.

In the end, though, he didn't even care that Sam had hidden it from him, because Bucky was here. Bucky was right in front of him.

And by the way he’d dropped the boards he was hoisting on his shoulder, Bucky had seen him too.

Steve saw the exact moment in which Bucky contemplated running, and tensed, because there was no way they were doing that cat and mouse shtick of his in a populated area (Hydra bases were tasteless enough), but Bucky steeled himself and made his way towards him.

“Bucky.” He breathed.

“...Steve,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

That… didn’t sound like the correct question. Was there a script for this kind of situation? “I was looking for Sam, actually… Didn’t expect to find you here.”

Bucky shrugged, and Steve felt a pang of something in his chest. “Bucky, I’ve been looking for you for over a year. You- How-... How long have you been here?”

“...Six months…” Bucky didn’t really sound pleased to be interrogated.

“Six- Six months!?” Steve choked. He’d been looking for him all over God’s green Earth and he’d been living less than five minutes from the tower for six months?!

“Yes. Steve, I-”

Steve shook his head. “No, I… I’m sorry, Bucky, I should have been there for you, I should have looked for you… You’re my best pal and I left you behind, I’m so sorry.” He put his arms around his friend and hugged him, not caring of the dirty clothes. “There’s so much we need to catch up on.”

Bucky looked stricken. “Steve, that’s-”

Steve dropped his arms. “I know now things are different and-”

“Steve.” Steve stopped at the tone of Bucky’s voice. “I. I’m not coming with you.” What? Steve frowned. Bucky sighed. “I- I want to stay here. I didn’t come back to you, because I… I don’t want to fight again. You’ll always want to fight, you always did, punk. Gave me a few heart attacks back in the day. But… that’s it. I’m done fighting. I’m done with superheroes and supersoldiers and… I’m done. I… I’m just ‘Jack’ here, and it’s… I like it.”

Steve knew everything about his Bucky, upside down and front and backwards, and he was still shocked to hear that from his mouth. And then, he looked into his friend's eyes, and he realized that he was tired. And ready to start a new page. And if there was someone who deserved it, it was Bucky. "...Okay."

And he saw the relief in his friend’s eyes, and knew it had been the right thing to do.

“Hey, Jack!” A voice behind them made him turn around. It was Darcy, looking at her phone, “what’s taking you so long, you’re usually-Hiiiii Steve…” Her smiled turned forced. “Oh boy.”

***

Life went… surprisingly normal after that.

If you didn’t count the fact that Tony almost thought of a murderbot but was stopped by Bruce, the Avengers stormed a Sokovian base and found tortured kids (and Darcy appointed herself as caretaker there, because she didn’t believe any of them, except maaaybe Clint?, were able to take care of teenagers with their hero schedule), Bucky found himself a black dog he named Dodger and that ‘Captain America’ had become a fixture at the shelter (and that was great for keeping the ne'er do well far enough off), life was extremely boring.

It was almost Christmas and everyone was freezing their asses off. “What’s this?” Darcy turned to a curious Bucky, who was using his ungloved hand to poke at a fluffy package on the table.

“It’s yours. It’s the thing.” She tried to be cool about it, but she’d been debating whether or not to give it to him all day.

True to her words, it’d taken Darcy that long to finish her sweater.

It was a red, fluffy thing with a black and white dog knitted on it. “...Thanks?”

He didn’t really understand the reference, and Darcy probably got that, because, “It’s Baker.”

“...What?” Baker the shelter name?

“Uhm, long story short, Murderbot attacked us all in New Mexico and I saved that dog from wreckage, I named him Baker but I had to let him go. So.. uhm, yeah. That’s Baker.”

She smiled tentatively “It’s a … ‘one of us’ sorta thing, right? But I thought you’d appreciate something warmer than the T-Shirt…”

Oh.

Well, he’d have appreciated a gift from a pretty girl back in the day, and he’d have appreciated a gift from Darcy these days, but this had a whole different meaning.

“Thanks” He said, sincerely.

Her smile lit up the whole room.

[emedhelp]

Inside the Cell Where a Sick 16-Year-Old Boy Died in Border Patrol Care — ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez, a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant, was seriously ill when immigration agents put him in a small South Texas holding cell with another sick boy on the afternoon of May 19.

A few hours earlier, a nurse practitioner at the Border Patrol’s dangerously overcrowded processing center in McAllen had diagnosed him with the flu and measured his fever at 103 degrees. She said that he should be checked again in two hours and taken to the emergency room if his condition worsened.

None of that happened. Worried that Carlos might infect other migrants in the teeming McAllen facility, officials moved him to a cell for quarantine at a Border Patrol station in nearby Weslaco.

By the next morning, he was dead.

In a press release that day, Customs and Border Protection’s acting commissioner at the time, John Sanders, called Carlos’ death a “tragic loss.” The agency said that an agent had found Carlos “unresponsive” after checking in on him. Sanders said the Border Patrol was “committed to the health, safety and humane treatment of those in our custody.”

But the record shows that the Border Patrol fell far short of that standard with Carlos. ProPublica has obtained video that documents the 16-year-old’s last hours, and it shows that Border Patrol agents and health care workers at the Weslaco holding facility missed increasingly obvious signs that his condition was perilous.

The cellblock video shows Carlos writhing for at least 25 minutes on the floor and a concrete bench. It shows him staggering to the toilet and collapsing on the floor, where he remained in the same position for the next four and a half hours.

According to a “subject activity log” maintained by the Border Patrol throughout Carlos’ custody, an agent checked on him three times during the early morning hours in which he slipped from unconsciousness to death, but reported nothing alarming about the boy.

The video shows the only way CBP officials could have missed Carlos’ crisis is that they weren’t looking. His agony was apparent, even in grainy black and white, making clear the agent charged with monitoring him failed to perform adequate checks, if he even checked at all. The coroner who performed an autopsy on Carlos said she was told the agent occasionally looked into the cell through the window.

The video makes clear that CBP, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, inaccurately described how Carlos’ body was discovered. Contrary to the agency’s press release, it was Carlos’ cellmate who found him, not agents doing an early morning check. On the video, the cellmate can be seen waking up and groggily walking to the toilet, where Carlos was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He gestures for help at the cell door. Only then do agents enter the cell and discover that Carlos had died during the night.

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes CBP, wouldn’t say whether the scenes recorded by the camera during Carlos’ final hours were shown live on video monitors, as is the case in some Border Patrol facilities, and if they were, whether anyone had been assigned to watch the footage.

The video and other records reviewed by ProPublica document numerous missteps in the days leading up to Carlos’ final hours on the floor of Cell 199. Independent medical experts pointed in particular to the decision to send a 16-year-old suffering from the flu to a holding cell rather than a hospital as a pivotal mistake.

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“Why is a teenaged boy in a jail facility at all if he is sick with a transmissible illness? Why isn’t he at a hospital or at a home or clinic where he can get a warm bed, fluids, supervised attention and medical care? He is not a criminal,” said Dr. Judy Melinek, a San Francisco-based forensic pathologist who reviewed records of Carlos’ death at the request of ProPublica. “No one should die this way: vomiting, with a fever and without the comfort of a caregiver.”

A CBP spokesman declined to respond to a series of questions about Carlos’ death, citing an ongoing internal investigation. “While we cannot discuss specific information or details of this investigation, we can tell you that the Department of Homeland Security and this agency are looking into all aspects of this case to ensure all procedures were followed,” CBP spokesperson Matt Leas said.

CBP has refused to release the video and other records of Carlos’ death to the public or Congress, citing the ongoing internal investigation. But using Texas open records laws, ProPublica obtained material from the Weslaco Police Department, which briefly investigated his death. The records included surveillance video, detainee logs and health records turned over to police by Border Patrol.

Interviews and documents illustrate how immigration and child welfare agencies, while grappling with surging migrant numbers, were unable to meet their own guidelines for processing and caring for children. With holding tanks that were never equipped to house migrants for more than a few hours, the Border Patrol was inundated with families and children. Shelters for children, offering beds and medical care, were already packed.

The agency held Carlos for six days, though the agency is supposed to transfer children within 72 hours.

Carlos was the sixth migrant child to die after being detained while entering the U.S. in less than a year. Some died of preexisting illnesses, but at least two others died of the flu diagnosed while in Border Patrol custody. Carlos was the only one to die at a Border Patrol station; the others were taken to medical facilities after falling ill. In the previous decade, not a single migrant child had died in custody.

Carlos’ death prompted changes to require Border Patrol agents to enter the cells of ailing detainees at regular intervals to check on them and take temperatures, according to a source familiar with the fallout.

The DHS inspector general has been investigating the circumstances of Carlos’ death but has not released any findings.

Sanders, the acting head of the agency, resigned soon after the incident. He recently faulted unprepared agencies and an unresponsive Congress for a tragedy that he said was both predictable and preventable.

The deaths of Carlos and other children under his watch continue to haunt him. “I believe the U.S. government could have done more,” he said.

Carlos’ Journey

Carlos left his remote village in central Guatemala in early May. San Jose del Rodeo, home to indigenous Maya, is set in a lush landscape, and the village is a collection of tin-roofed houses and smoky outdoor cooking fires. The valleys below provide most of what little work there is, on farms growing and harvesting corn, coffee beans and sugar cane.

Carlos, the second youngest of eight children, was a standout student at the village school. He was captain of the soccer team and excelled in playing instruments the school had bought by selling raffle tickets. “He played percussion and the bombo and the lyre and the trumpet,” said Jose Morales Pereira, who was Carlos’ teacher. “He always said, ‘Professor, let’s teach everyone else.’ He was my leader.”

Bartoleme Hernandez, Carlos’ father, worked when he could planting corn or clearing land. He wore cut up tires on his feet to save his shoes for Sundays. Money was so tight that Carlos sometimes came to school with no lunch and did weekend farm work and odd jobs to help out, his teacher said.

As children, Carlos and his friends made a game of pretending to cross the border. To reach their imaginary U.S., they scaled a fence, and Carlos always played the one who made it across. The kids used guava leaves as pretend money to send to family back home, recalled a childhood friend who described the game in a Facebook post.

Two dozen or more young friends had traveled to the U.S. before Carlos. Crossing the border typically cost migrants $5,000 to $10,000 for smugglers who offer safe passage through drug cartel territory. Some migrants take out loans to fund their travel; Carlos told his teacher he might work along the way to pay his fees. He had a brother already in the U.S., and he planned to find a construction job.

Starting late last year, smugglers ran express buses up through Mexico to meet demand. A family member said Carlos and his sister traveled by bus for much of their journey. At the Rio Grande on May 13, they wore life vests and crowded onto a rubber raft with a half-dozen others.

Their parents received a video that day — later shared with the media — showing them casting off into the river. The siblings landed near Hidalgo at the southern tip of Texas, part of a group of 70 that was immediately rounded up by border agents.

In custody, Carlos was separated from his adult sister, as required under the law. He was assigned an alien identification number — A203665141 — to help agencies track him. A Border Patrol agent at the warehouselike processing center in McAllen screened Carlos for illness or injury and found none.

Migrants were supposed to be held in CBP centers for no more than three days before being deported, moved to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers or released pending a hearing. Under a 2008 anti-trafficking law, children and teenagers crossing the border illegally without parents or guardian generally must be placed with the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services within 72 hours, except in the case of heavy influx. Then they must be moved out as quickly as possible.

But Carlos had arrived at the peak of the surge, with 144,000 migrants apprehended in May alone. With the overflow crowds, nothing was working as it should have been. HHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were backlogged in transferring children out of CBP custody. In a spot check soon after Carlos died, the DHS inspector general reported that a third of the 2,800 unaccompanied minors in CBP custody in the Rio Grande Valley had been there longer than 72 hours.

Authorities at first questioned whether Carlos was a minor and whether the woman he was traveling with was his sister, according to a CBP source with knowledge of the matter. It took agents 48 hours to determine he was a few weeks shy of his 17th birthday, and the confusion delayed the search for HHS shelter space.

The McAllen facility where Carlos arrived on May 13 was barely fit for habitation. The DHS inspector general visited Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol facilities about a month later, as the number of apprehensions had begun to decline, and found holding pens packed well beyond capacity and other appalling conditions. The inspector general’s urgent alert to management warned that the overcrowding posed “an immediate risk to the health and safety” of both agents and detainees, including through the spread of infectious diseases.

Border Patrol centers were designed to temporarily hold migrants and were not set up for long-term detention, which typically includes medical staff to treat detainees who become ill. The agency had a handful of emergency medical technicians assigned to the centers. In late 2018, it had only 20 medical staffers working under contract along the 2,000-mile Mexican border to monitor the health needs of 50,000 apprehended migrants a month. CBP brought in medics from the Coast Guard and other federal agencies after two children died in custody in December and as the number of border crossers in custody began to approach 100,000 a month.

At the high point of the migrant surge in May, the Border Patrol had custody of 20,000 people a day; its definition of a crisis is 6,000 detainees.

As the surge escalated and Sanders and others pressed for help, the DHS shifted $47 million for additional medical staff to its contract provider, Loyal Source Government Services. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.)

Loyal Source increased its hiring, running a stream of job ads like one seeking EMTs for screenings at the Weslaco Border Patrol station, where Carlos died, that offered full-time, part-time, day, night and weekend shifts.

The prospect of flu outbreaks was a growing concern. The CBP had rejected a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it vaccinate migrants, saying such a program was impractical and complex. Amid the crowding, Border Patrol agents, trained in law enforcement, had reluctantly stepped into care-taking roles.

If Carlos had made it to an HHS shelter, he likely would have been vaccinated for the flu, a standard procedure in HHS shelters. But when HHS finally found a bed for him, the agency postponed his relocation because he had the flu and was not fit to travel.

Carlos had been detained in McAllen for six days when he reported feeling ill.

At 1 a.m. on May 19, he saw a nurse practitioner and complained of a headache and fever. Tests showed he had type A flu and a 103-degree fever. Nurse practitioner Irasema Gonzalez gave him ibuprofen and Tylenol and ordered Tamiflu, which is a standard treatment for flu symptoms.

Gonzalez’s treatment report also said Carlos should “return to medical office in 2 hrs or sooner” and should be taken to an emergency room if his symptoms persisted or worsened. There is no record of further medical treatment over the next 19 hours in the records obtained by ProPublica. Gonzalez didn’t respond to an inquiry from ProPublica.

Carlos was not sent to an emergency room or other outside medical facility. Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said basic monitoring of Carlos should have provided warnings that he was becoming seriously ill.

“Flu can progress rapidly, but it’s not like a heart attack. Even when fast, it worsens over a period of hours. There should have been signs that indicated he needed to go to the hospital,” Sharfstein said.

Instead, records show he was moved at midday to the smaller Weslaco station, where he could be isolated with other sick detainees.

At 8 p.m. that night, Carlos was given Tamiflu at the Weslaco station by Martha Garcia, a nurse practitioner. Her treatment report didn’t record a temperature or vital signs, leaving it unclear how thoroughly he had been examined. The report said Carlos had no medical complaints and was “in no acute distress.” Garcia didn’t respond to an inquiry from ProPublica.

The Border Patrol’s “subject activity log” from early morning on May 20 shows that Carlos was given a hot meal just after midnight. It is unclear if he was able to keep down any food. Weslaco police reports say that was the last time Border Patrol agents saw him alive.

The video of Cell 199 provided to ProPublica by Weslaco police is split into two parts, the first showing more than 33 minutes beginning about 1:13 a.m. and the second showing 1 hour and 11 minutes beginning about 5:48 a.m. Weslaco Police Chief Joel Rivera said that’s how Border Patrol provided the video to his investigators. The investigation ended after the coroner and police found no foul play in Carlos’ death.

CBP didn’t respond to questions about why the tape it provided has a four-hour gap that includes the hours when an agent reported doing welfare checks.

The time stamp on the video is inaccurate, but ProPublica was able to compare it with police and emergency medical service records to estimate that the first video begins at about 1:13 a.m., about an hour after Carlos was fed.

The beginning of the video shows Carlos on the toilet in the cell, partially obscured by a waist-high privacy wall. His cellmate, another ill boy who has not been identified, is asleep under Mylar blankets on a cement bench.

Carlos returns to the cement bench opposite his cellmate about six minutes into the video and shifts uncomfortably. He moves out of the camera’s view for a couple of minutes, apparently sitting or standing next to the cell’s large window.

At about 1:24 a.m., Carlos topples forward and lands face-first on the concrete floor. He is wearing blue jeans and a disposable surgical mask. For the next 11 minutes, he is largely still. At about 1:35 a.m., he vomits blood on the floor and then stands and staggers to the toilet.

The tape shows him sitting on the toilet for about a minute before he slides onto the ground. He struggles for several more minutes and then stops moving at approximately 1:39 a.m. Police photos taken after his death show a large pool of blood around his head.

The second part of the video opens at about 5:48 a.m. Carlos can be seen in the same position as he was four hours earlier. He is on his back, his head by the toilet, and his legs stretching out before him, toes up. The Border Patrol’s log documenting Carlos’ detention for the evening notes three welfare checks during the gap in the video, at 2:02 a.m., 4:09 a.m. and 5:05 a.m. All three log entries were attributed to Agent Oscar Garza.

Garza couldn’t be reached for comment and CBP officials wouldn’t answer questions about the extent of the welfare checks. The pathologist who performed the autopsy, Dr. Norma Jean Farley, said in an interview that she had been told the agent looked through the window but didn’t go inside Cell 199. She said it wouldn’t be unusual for a feverish child to seek comfort by laying on a cool floor.

The CBP’s policies on holding detained migrants are outlined in its National Standards on Transport, Escort, Detention and Search, known as TEDS. The standards are vague about welfare check requirements, saying agents should physically check holding cells in a “regular and frequent manner, according to each operational office’s policies and procedures. Physical inspections must be recorded in the appropriate electronic system(s) of record as soon as practicable.”

At about 6:05 a.m., the tape shows, Carlos’ cellmate awakens and discovers him on the floor. After about a minute, he walks over to the cell door and gets the attention of a Border Patrol agent, identified in police reports as Edgar Reyes.

The agent comes in, shines a flashlight on Carlos’ body and leaves. A few minutes later, a physician assistant, Alda Martinez, comes into the cell with a medic’s kit and attempts one chest compression. She quickly concluded that Carlos was dead, police reports said. Other agents walk in, stepping on silver blankets strewn around the cell. Weslaco paramedics arrive at 6:47 a.m. and declare Carlos dead.

The Border Patrol press release describing these events said “He was found un-responsive this morning during a welfare check.”

The autopsy report did not address how long Carlos had been dead before his cellmate found him. His body had already begun to stiffen when Martinez attempted to revive him. The process of rigor mortis can be accelerated by the flu.

John Sanders had seen the crisis on the border coming as early as November 2018. Then serving as the CBP’s chief operating officer, he had worked the numbers and realized that if projections about the migrant influx held true, agencies would be woefully short of shelter space for unaccompanied minors. An interagency task force monitoring the weather conditions and movements of people in Central America projected huge migrations in the coming months.

But the Trump administration agencies responsible for handling migrants, CBP and HHS, were at odds over the problem’s severity. HHS shelters were then boarding about 15,000 children, but the HHS leadership believed beds would empty out quickly thanks to a policy change reluctantly implemented by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a long battle. ICE had made it less legally risky for migrant adults to come forward to pick up children in shelters by easing mandatory fingerprinting requirement implemented in April 2018. The December 2018 policy change had increased the number of children released from HHS custody.

Still the numbers kept growing. Buses and car caravans ferried groups of 100 or more migrants at a time to the border; 111 such groups arrived in the winter and spring, compared with 13 the previous year and just two in 2017. CBP told Congress the large groups overwhelmed border security and at the same time created diversions for drug smuggling.

The Trump administration asked Congress in January for $800 million to upgrade border facilities, but it approved about $414 million, including money for a new El Paso processing center to hold children and families, renovation funds for the McAllen processing center and about $192 million for “improved medical care, transportation, and consumables” for those in CBP custody, according to the joint statement issued when the bill was finalized. It soon became clear it wasn’t enough.

Sanders was among the administration officials who appealed to Congress for additional funding. He predicted that without more funding, children would not be safe.

Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a California Democrat who chairs the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, blamed the Trump administration for conditions that led to the deaths of Carlos and other children.

“Their deaths should never, ever have happened. Tragically, DHS was irresponsible in not having an adequate mass migration plan to keep migrants safe, ensure their humane treatment and address their health care needs,” Roybal-Allard said. She also criticized HHS for failing to have “a plan to ensure it could quickly and safely take custody of unaccompanied children in CBP custody.”

In April, with the border crisis deepening daily, Sanders was named acting CBP commissioner as his boss Kevin McAleenan moved up to become acting secretary of DHS. Those would prove just interim personnel shuffles by a White House determined to harden its border policies.

The fight for money became one of Sanders’ top priorities. By May, as Carlos prepared to head north, the Trump administration made the case for $4.5 billion in emergency aid, with $2.9 billion to cover a shortfall in the program for unaccompanied minors. Democrats supported the humanitarian funding but many objected to $1.1 billion for additional immigrant detention spending.

Carlos’ death highlighted the need for relief. White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and McAleenan, making the case for the administration’s border funding request, described deteriorating conditions in a May 30 call with reporters:

“Four hundred children arrived in the last 24 hours alone. Four of those children this month have died transiting through Mexico into the United States — two drowning in a river, both a 5-year-old and 10-month-old; and two teenage boys died of infections after receiving medical treatment in federal custody,” McAleenan said. “Yesterday, a single group of 1,036 families and unaccompanied children simply walked from Juárez, Mexico, into the United States illegally as a single group — the largest group ever apprehended at the border.”

Another month would pass before a majority in Congress agreed on the humanitarian funding.

A police investigation into Carlos’ death began soon after his body was discovered, the case assigned to Det. Chris Ramirez of the Weslaco Police Department. There was no sign of foul play, and Ramirez noted that Carlos showed signs of a flulike illness. The Border Patrol turned over its surveillance video for review by police and the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy.

Dr. Norma Jean Farley served under contract with the county government. Her work on Carlos’ case included reviewing the timeline presented in the cell video and examining photos of his body from the death scene. Her autopsy report listed the cause of death as Influenza A 2009 H1N1 respiratory infection complicated by bronchopneumonia, sepsis and an immune system disorder called hemophagocytosis.

Farley said in an interview that the video showed that no one entered Carlos’ cell between 12:20 a.m., when he was fed, and around 6 a.m., when the cellmate knocked on the door to get an agent’s attention.

Farley largely defended the Border Patrol’s handling of the matter and questioned why Carlos did not do more to save himself.

“I was a little surprised that this kid, as sick as he was in the cell, never just knocked on the door as his roommate did, because as soon as the roommate did, they opened,” Farley said. “I just don’t know why he didn’t knock on the door.”

H1N1 flu has a typical incubation period of one to four days after exposure, and Carlos was in Border Patrol custody during that time. But Farley said she suspects Carlos may have had diarrhea caused by an immune disorder on his journey through Mexico, although there was no evidence of illness in his Border Patrol medical screening record.

“I’m finding what these people that tend to come there, they don’t tell them that they’re sick. And I don’t know if they’re afraid to tell them they’re sick because they’ll be quarantined. I don’t know what the issue is that they don’t. He finally did, but by the time he’s telling them that he’s sick, he’s more sick than he knows,” she said.

Questions remain about why Carlos’ grave condition was not recognized by the nurse practitioners on May 19, or before, or during his hours at Weslaco. An agency spokeswoman said investigators are looking into “all aspects of a case to ensure proper care procedures were followed.”

The Guatemalan government brought Carlos’ body home to his village to wide television news coverage, its embassy calling on the U.S. to conduct a full investigation of his death. Thousands of mourners poured in from around the country to follow behind his casket, which was borne by soccer teammates down a long dirt road to the cemetery.

Pallbearers taped his royal blue No. 9 soccer jersey to the top of his casket as they laid it to rest. “Maybe in all of his life, the 16 years that he was in this life, maybe he didn’t do many things, but he did move us,” said a speaker at his funeral. “He touched hearts.”

Carlos’ grief-stricken parents questioned how their son could have died in U.S. custody. His father, in an interview with Telemundo, wondered: “He left healthy. What happened to him?”

Carlos’ father, Bartolome Hernandez, said in a phone interview he will be glad to have answers from U.S. officials. “They need to take better care of migrants,” he said. “The U.S. isn’t a place where they should be allowing anyone to die like that.”

Pereira, Carlos’ teacher, said that he believes the boy was abandoned in his cell. He had not seen the video but said “If you have an animal that’s sick and you’ve kept it in a room, every little while you’re going to go check on it, see if it has water, whether it’s shivering. That’s with an animal. And this was a human being.”

In the months that have passed, lawyers at the Texas Civil Rights Project, a migrant advocacy group, have been in touch with Carlos’ family and asked the CBP to preserve its records. They say that so far they have received little information about the death investigation.

Meanwhile, in Washington, moderate House Democrats joined Republicans in passing a bipartisan Senate bill sending $4.6 billion aid to the border on June 27. The impasse was broken a day after a heart-rending photograph went viral showing a drowned father and daughter lying face down on the banks of the Rio Grande.

The border situation has changed dramatically since Carlos’ death. CBP now has 250 health staffers at its facilities across the Southwest, but Border Patrol cells have largely emptied out since July. The number of migrants crossing the border has declined sharply. The Trump administration has credited the decrease to more aggressive interdiction efforts by Mexico.

Adults and families crossing the border increasingly have been sent back to Mexico under the administration’s controversial Migrant Protection Protocols program, which sends them to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities while U.S. courts consider their immigration and asylum claims.

The number of unaccompanied migrant children crossing the border was 2,800 in October, a quarter of what it was when Carlos arrived in May. Still, those who work with migrants on the ground say the numbers could swell again, and HHS is building out its shelter capacity from 15,000 beds to 20,000, with emergency influx facilities that can handle thousands more.

Questions about Carlos’ death and whether agencies or individuals could have done more to prevent it have yet to be fully aired. CBP has not said when the DHS inspector general’s review will be completed. Congressional committees that voiced concern about the spate of child deaths have not had access to the Carlos cell videos, pending internal agency reviews.

The death of the 16-year-old, whose Facebook page showed a circle of teenage friends, reverberated beyond the small village of San Jose del Rodeo. Friends posted video of his funeral and a village wake on social media, with emotional tributes to him. Guatemalan immigrants outside New York City held a fundraiser to help support his family, one of the goals Carlos had in coming to the U.S.

John Sanders resigned soon after the incident, frustrated with what he characterized as unprepared agencies and an unresponsive Congress that allowed children in custody to suffer in harsh conditions.

“I really think the American government failed these people. The government failed people like Carlos,” he said. “I was part of that system at a very high level, and Carlos’ death will follow me for the rest of my life.”

Jack Gillum and Benjamin Hardy contributed to this report.

Robert Moore has been a journalist at the U.S.-Mexico border for more than 30 years and is founder of the nonprofit news organization El Paso Matters.

Susan Schmidt is an investigative reporter who formerly worked for The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. She won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting at the Post in 2006 and was part of the Post team that won for national reporting in 2002.

[newstfionline]

What Iceland Knows About Getting Teens Off Drugs

Emma Young, Mosaic, Jan 17 2017

It’s a little before three on a sunny Friday afternoon and Laugardalur Park, near central Reykjavik, Iceland, looks practically deserted. There’s an occasional adult with a pushchair, but the park’s surrounded by apartment blocks and houses, and school’s out--so where are all the kids?

Walking with me are Gudberg Jónsson, a local psychologist, and Harvey Milkman, an American psychology professor who teaches for part of the year at Reykjavik University. Twenty years ago, says Gudberg, Icelandic teens were among the heaviest-drinking youths in Europe. “You couldn’t walk the streets in downtown Reykjavik on a Friday night because it felt unsafe,” adds Milkman. “There were hordes of teenagers getting in-your-face drunk.”

We approach a large building. “And here we have the indoor skating,” says Gudberg.

A couple of minutes ago, we passed two halls dedicated to badminton and ping pong. Here in the park, there’s also an athletics track, a geothermally heated swimming pool and--at last--some kids, excitedly playing football on an artificial pitch.

Young people aren’t hanging out in the park right now, Gudberg explains, because they’re in after-school classes in these facilities, or in clubs for music, dance, or art. Or they might be on outings with their parents.

Today, Iceland tops the European table for the cleanest-living teens. The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42 percent in 1998 to 5 percent in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 percent to 7 percent. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 percent to just 3 percent.

The way the country has achieved this turnaround has been both radical and evidence-based, but it has relied a lot on what might be termed enforced common sense. “This is the most remarkably intense and profound study of stress in the lives of teenagers that I have ever seen,” says Milkman. “I’m just so impressed by how well it is working.”

If it was adopted in other countries, Milkman argues, the Icelandic model could benefit the general psychological and physical wellbeing of millions of kids, not to mention the coffers of healthcare agencies and broader society. It’s a big if.

“I was in the eye of the storm of the drug revolution,” Milkman explains over tea in his apartment in Reykjavik. In the early 1970s, when he was doing an internship at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City, “LSD was already in, and a lot of people were smoking marijuana. And there was a lot of interest in why people took certain drugs.”

Milkman’s doctoral dissertation concluded that people would choose either heroin or amphetamines depending on how they liked to deal with stress. Heroin users wanted to numb themselves; amphetamine users wanted to actively confront it. After this work was published, he was among a group of researchers drafted by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse to answer questions such as: Why do people start using drugs? Why do they continue? When do they reach a threshold to abuse? When do they stop? And when do they relapse?

“Any college kid could say: Why do they start? Well, there’s availability, they’re risk-takers, alienation, maybe some depression,” he says. “But why do they continue? So I got to the question about the threshold for abuse and the lights went on--that’s when I had my version of the ‘aha’ experience: They could be on the threshold for abuse before they even took the drug, because it was their style of coping that they were abusing.”

At Metropolitan State College of Denver, Milkman was instrumental in developing the idea that people were getting addicted to changes in brain chemistry. Kids who were “active confronters” were after a rush--they’d get it by stealing hubcaps and radios and later cars, or through stimulant drugs. Alcohol also alters brain chemistry, of course. It’s a sedative but it sedates the brain’s control first, which can remove inhibitions and, in limited doses, reduce anxiety.

“People can get addicted to drinking, cars, money, sex, calories, cocaine--whatever,” says Milkman. “The idea of behavioral addiction became our trademark.”

This idea spawned another: “Why not orchestrate a social movement around natural highs, around people getting high on their own brain chemistry--because it seems obvious to me that people want to change their consciousness--without the deleterious effects of drugs?”

By 1992, his team in Denver had won a $1.2 million government grant to form Project Self-Discovery, which offered teenagers natural-high alternatives to drugs and crime. They got referrals from teachers, school nurses and counsellors, taking in kids from the age of 14 who didn’t see themselves as needing treatment but who had problems with drugs or petty crime.

“We didn’t say to them, you’re coming in for treatment. We said, we’ll teach you anything you want to learn: music, dance, hip hop, art, martial arts,” Milkman says. The idea was that these different classes could provide a variety of alterations in the kids’ brain chemistry, and give them what they needed to cope better with life. Some might crave an experience that could help reduce anxiety, others may be after a rush.

At the same time, the recruits got life-skills training, which focused on improving their thoughts about themselves and their lives, and the way they interacted with other people. “The main principle was that drug education doesn’t work because nobody pays attention to it. What is needed are the life skills to act on that information,” Milkman says. Kids were told it was a three-month program. Some stayed five years.

In 1991, Milkman was invited to Iceland to talk about this work, his findings, and ideas. He became a consultant to the first residential drug treatment center for adolescents in Iceland, in a town called Tindar. “It was designed around the idea of giving kids better things to do,” he explains. It was here that he met Gudberg, who was then a psychology undergraduate and a volunteer at Tindar. They have been close friends ever since.

Milkman started coming regularly to Iceland and giving talks. These talks, and Tindar, attracted the attention of a young researcher at the University of Iceland named Inga Dóra Sigfúsdóttir. She wondered: What if you could use healthy alternatives to drugs and alcohol as part of a program not to treat kids with problems, but to stop kids from drinking or taking drugs in the first place?

Have you ever tried alcohol? If so, when did you last have a drink? Have you ever been drunk? Have you tried cigarettes? If so, how often do you smoke? How much time to you spend with your parents? Do you have a close relationship with your parents? What kind of activities do you take part in?

In 1992, 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds in every school in Iceland filled in a questionnaire with these kinds of questions. This process was then repeated in 1995 and 1997.

The results of these surveys were alarming. Nationally, almost 25 percent were smoking every day, more than 40 percent had been drunk in the past month. But when the team drilled right down into the data, they could identify precisely which schools had the worst problems and which had the least. Their analysis revealed clear differences between the lives of kids who took up drinking, smoking, and other drugs, and those who didn’t. A few factors emerged as strongly protective: participation in organized activities--especially sport--three or four times a week, total time spent with parents during the week, feeling cared about at school, and not being outdoors in the late evenings.

“At that time, there had been all kinds of substance prevention efforts and programs,” says Sigfúsdóttir, who was a research assistant on the surveys. “Mostly they were built on education.” Kids were being warned about the dangers of drink and drugs, but as Milkman had observed in the US, these programs were not working. “We wanted to come up with a different approach.”

The mayor of Reykjavik, too, was interested in trying something new, and many parents felt the same, adds Jón Sigfússon, Sigfúsdóttir’s colleague and brother. Jón had young daughters at the time and joined her new Icelandic Center for Social Research and Analysis when it was set up in 1999. “The situation was bad,” he says. “It was obvious something had to be done.”

Using the survey data and insights from research including Milkman’s, a new national plan was gradually introduced. It was called Youth in Iceland.

Laws were changed. It became illegal to buy tobacco under the age of 18 and alcohol under the age of 20, and tobacco and alcohol advertising was banned. Links between parents and school were strengthened through parental organizations which by law had to be established in every school, along with school councils with parent representatives. Parents were encouraged to attend talks on the importance of spending a quantity of time with their children rather than occasional “quality time,” on talking to their kids about their lives, on knowing who their kids were friends with, and on keeping their children home in the evenings.

A law was also passed prohibiting children between the ages of 13 and 16 from being outside after 10 pm in winter and midnight in summer. It’s still in effect today.

Home and School, the national umbrella body for parental organizations, introduced agreements for parents to sign. The content varies depending on the age group, and individual organizations can decide what they want to include. For kids aged 13 and up, parents can pledge to follow all the recommendations, and also, for example, not to allow their kids to have unsupervised parties, not to buy alcohol for minors, and to keep an eye on the well-being of other children.

These agreements educate parents but also help to strengthen their authority in the home, argues Hrefna Sigurjónsdóttir, director of Home and School. “Then it becomes harder to use the oldest excuse in the book: ‘But everybody else can!’”

State funding was increased for organized sport, music, art, dance, and other clubs, to give kids alternative ways to feel part of a group, and to feel good, rather than through using alcohol and drugs, and kids from low-income families received help to take part. In Reykjavik, for instance, where more than a third of the country’s population lives, a Leisure Card gives families 35,000 krona (roughly $4,000) per year per child to pay for recreational activities.

Crucially, the surveys have continued. Each year, almost every child in Iceland completes one. This means up-to-date, reliable data is always available.

Between 1997 and 2012, the percentage of kids aged 15 and 16 who reported often or almost always spending time with their parents on weekdays doubled--from 23 percent to 46 percent--and the percentage who participated in organized sports at least four times a week increased from 24 percent to 42 percent. Meanwhile, cigarette smoking, drinking and cannabis use in this age group plummeted.

“Although this cannot be shown in the form of a causal relationship--which is a good example of why primary prevention methods are sometimes hard to sell to scientists--the trend is very clear,” notes Álfgeir Kristjánsson, who worked on the data and is now at the West Virginia University School of Public Health in the US. “Protective factors have gone up, risk factors down, and substance use has gone down--and more consistently in Iceland than in any other European country.”

No other country has made changes on the scale seen in Iceland. When asked if anyone has copied the laws to keep children indoors in the evening, Sigfússon smiles. “Even Sweden laughs and calls it the child curfew!”

After our walk through Laugardalur Park, Gudberg Jónsson invites us back to his home. Outside, in the garden, his two elder sons, Jón Konrád, who’s 21, and Birgir Ísar, who’s 15, talk to me about drinking and smoking. Jón does drink alcohol, but Birgir says he doesn’t know anyone at his school who smokes or drinks. We also talk about football training: Birgir trains five or six times a week; Jón, who is in his first year of a business degree at the University of Iceland, trains five times a week. They both started regular after-school training when they were six years old.

“We have all these instruments at home,” their father told me earlier. “We tried to get them into music. We used to have a horse. My wife is really into horse riding. But it didn’t happen. In the end, soccer was their selection.”

Did it ever feel like too much? Was there pressure to train when they’d rather have been doing something else? “No, we just had fun playing football,” says Birgir. Jón adds, “We tried it and got used to it, and so we kept on doing it.”

It’s not all they do. While Jónsson and his wife Thórunn don’t consciously plan for a certain number of hours each week with their three sons, they do try to take them regularly to the movies, the theatre, restaurants, hiking, fishing and, when Iceland’s sheep are brought down from the highlands each September, even on family sheep-herding outings.

In Iceland, the relationship between people and the state has allowed an effective national program to cut the rates of teenagers smoking and drinking to excess--and, in the process, brought families closer and helped kids to become healthier in all kinds of ways. Will no other country decide that these benefits are worth the costs?

[bettydgunter90]

067: Let’s Get The Truth About Jaren Barnes

  Have you ever wondered about Jaren Barnes? What’s his story? Where does he come from? Why does he do what he does?

In this episode, I sit down with Jaren for a one-on-one conversation about his history and story. We’ll learn about how his career developed, where he gets his motivation and you might even learn a few new things he’s never shared on the podcast before.

Links and Resources

010: How Jaren Barnes Changed His Life With One Land Deal

024: An Introduction to Jaren Barnes

REtipster Terms Library

What’s the Difference Between a Realtor, Real Estate Agent, and Real Estate Broker?

Baker Book House

Cap Rate Calculator by Brian Davis

Al Williamson of LeadingLandlord.com

Lucas Hall of Landlordology.com

Coaching with Jaren

Jordan Peterson

The Millionaire Messenger by Brendon Burchard

Thou Shall Prosper by Daniel Lapin

Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl

Bethel Church in Redding, California

Share Your Thoughts

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Help out the show:

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Thanks again for joining me this week. Until next time!

Right-click here and “Save As” to download this episode to your computer.

Episode 67 Transcription

Seth: Hey everybody, how’s it going? This is Seth Williams and Jaren Barnes of the REtipster podcast. And today we’re going to do something a little bit different. I’m going to stand back and we’re going to interview Jaren for no other reason than to simply help our audience know more about Jaren. If you ever happened to catch episode 10 and I think it was episode 24, we kind of have little bits and pieces of Jaren’s backstory to kind of learn a little bit more about how he operates and what his experience has been and how he’s gotten to his current stage in life.

But we’ve never like actually dedicated a full episode just to hearing all about Jaren. We’ve got a handful of questions here we’re going to run through and just got a pretty cool story. I think you guys are going to enjoy it and I’m going to enjoy it too. So, Jared, what’s up?

Jaren: What’s up guys? This is kind of weird to be on the side of the conversation today, but it’s exciting. I’m excited too because then I think next week, we’re going to be interviewing you, right, Seth?

Seth: Yup. Actually, I don’t know which one’s going to air first, but chances are you’ve either already heard Jaren interview me or if you haven’t yet, that’s going to come next time.

Jaren: Yeah. So, I’m excited to get into your back story as well.

Seth: I guess to kick this off, let’s just answer the high-level question of how did you get into real estate, Jaren?

Jaren: Not that question. Geez. Really what happened was I got married and I needed to figure out a way to make money. My background was I started pursuing a nonprofit work, right out of high school and I dropped out of college to go work full time in a volunteer non-paid position as a superintendent over a homeless shelter in Great Bend, Kansas in the middle of nowhere. And then I helped a friend start a ministry where he was traveling and I was traveling with him. And one of the trips that we ended up going on was to the UK. And I met my wife there and I was really young. My wife is actually, I think three and a half years older than me, almost four years older than me. And I was 19 when I met her and she was 23. And I kind of just, long story short knew that she was my wife. We knew each other for two months and then I moved to the UK to spend the summer with her to get eloped with parent permission. So, I went out there and I turned 20 on July 5th and we were married on July 7th.

Seth: You needed to parent permission. You were 19 though, right?

Jaren: Yeah, I didn’t need it, but I got it because out of honor for her parents.

Seth: It’s not like illegal thing and you just didn’t want to alienate.

Jaren: I just didn’t want to be like a jerk and be like, “Hey, I got married without talking to her parents”. But here’s a really funny story. My wife’s family, they prank each other a lot. We found out after the fact, after we were married when my wife called my mother in law and asked her, “Hey, I met this guy, I really want to marry him. I feel like it’s right. Can I have your blessing?” She was like, “Yeah, yeah, sure” thinking it was a joke. And then she found out it wasn’t a joke but it’s too late. And I obviously couldn’t be a non-paid volunteer for a homeless shelter anymore because I was a husband and needed to provide for a family. So, I moved back from the UK. We were staying in Albany in Scotland and we didn’t know anything about the immigration process because we were young and dumb. And so, I was like, before you moved to America, you should go see your family one more time in Kazakhstan and then you could fly out after. And she said, yeah, that’s a good idea. So, I flew to California to stay with my mom and try to get a job and figure things out. And she went to Kazakhstan and then we found out about this thing called the immigration process. And we were separated for a year and a half and had to go through all that.

Seth: And why is that?

Jaren: Because we didn’t have an American marriage license. We had a British marriage license and neither of us were UK citizens. It looked very suspicious.

Seth: Oh, I see.

Jaren: They needed us to prove that this is a legitimate marriage and not just me getting paid off to help somebody immigrate to the United States.

Seth: Yeah, man, that immigration process is uh. I mean, I’m sure there are reasons for it, but holy cow, what a hassle. When I was working in banking, I remember working with a few people that were going with immigration and it was just like a nightmare. Funny thing is I had heard the back in the 70s or probably 70s and prior to that it was like super easy to get into the U.S. It was like, you just can say, “Well, I’m coming in now” and you’re all good. It didn’t matter if you were coming from Iraq or where. It’s just like, “Hey, just free for all”.

Jaren: Yeah, man. I don’t know why they make it so difficult. The reality is I understand why so many people do it illegally because it’s easier. It’s way easier to do it illegally than to do it the right way. It’s almost a lot of the laws and restrictions in place, they hurt people that are trying to do it the right way. Yeah, so, it’s unfortunate. I really think we need a complete overhaul of the immigration system, but that’s for another podcast.

Anyway, while I was trying to figure out how to make money, some friends started to get into business and entrepreneurship at least from an ideological standpoint. I started reading a lot of books like “Rich Dad Poor Dad” or as one of the books that were really instrumental for me was a book by a guy named Brendon Burchard called the “Millionaire Messenger” and that he literally blueprints a step by step process to make a million dollars a year. He breaks down all the numbers and stuff and it’s really good. And so, I started hanging out with those guys and then one of my friends in the group bought into a Real Estate Guru Program and wanted to start flipping houses in the San Francisco Bay Area. At this time, it was a little bit fast forward. My wife had finally joined me in the United States and we were together and I had just crushed through getting my insurance license and I had convinced a guy to hire me. Even though he wanted somebody who had college experience. I had landed this job and I was working there for about a month and a half and I was the number one salesperson there. I was making more sales for that month than anybody else. I just had to hustle.

And I realized that my friend was telling me that in one deal I could make a hundred thousand dollars. And I was like, man, if I work my entire job in insurance, I can’t make that. Even if I’m sustaining the number of sales that I’m doing now, I can’t make a hundred thousand dollars a year with where I’m at. I was making somewhere around 65-ish thousand or something like that. And I said, man if all I have to do is one sale and I can make a hundred thousand dollars in a year, it’s worth it.

So, I quit my job and then literally left my office after talking to my boss and then went directly to the real estate office in Milpitas. And I started a door-knocking that day and I started door knocking pre-foreclosures. Long story short, it was a crazy ride because again, I was really good at sales from door-knocking. I got 10 properties under contract in six months, which at the time with the climate that was really, really hard to do. It was just coming off of the 2008 recession and it’s a tough market.

I was doing really well, but the people that we were kind of partnered with weren’t the most ethical at all. I wasn’t getting paid and they were kind of kicking their feet about closing on these properties and they had a really unethical way to actually turn foreclosures into a deal or short sales into a deal. But at the time I didn’t realize. But now knowing what I know being licensed and everything, they all could have gone to prison for what they were doing and I’m glad that I stopped doing business with them. But from there I kind of got bit by the real estate bug and I was like, “All right, I really like real estate. There’s something here I want to go after it”.

I started a blog called realestatecatalyst.org and I made a post about a bunch of really awesome blogs out there, Bigger Pockets being one of them. I think REtipster was one of them too, right? And that’s how I got on Seth’s radar.

Yeah. So, from there, Biggerpockets, Josh and Brandon reached out to me like, thank you so much for the review that dah, dah, dah. Which is crazy to think. It must have been the Wild Wild West because I’m sure people write blog posts about Bigger Pockets all day long now and they don’t get reached out to by these guys. But this is back in 2013/2014. And so, long story short, they ended up wanting to come or they were going to do a presentation for Google. I was really involved in the Bigger Pockets meetups there in the Bay Area. And so, I connected Brandon and Josh to the guy that runs the Bigger Pockets meetups for the San Francisco Bay Area. And then they came and kind of did like a special meet and greet or whatever. And that’s how I got on their radar. And I noticed that Josh put out a job listing on social media saying that they needed some extra help. It was just Josh and Brandon at the time and some 1099 contractors and few VA’s. And so long story short, I reached out, I said, “Hey, I would be interested. I have blogging experience. I started my own thing and I think I would be a good fit. I’d love to work with you guys”. And he said, “Well, it has to be temporary because we want to build the team in Denver. I don’t want any more virtual employees outside of Brandon. So, would you be okay with it?” And I said, yeah, a hundred percent.

So, I worked there for I think five months and I did a lot of stuff there. I learned a ton. I edited all of the blog posts that were contributed there. There were 35 blog contributors at the time. I did forum monitoring. I wrote the show notes for the podcast. I wrote the outlines for the podcast. I got guests for the podcast. I did a lot. I did pretty much anything that they would throw at me, I would do it. And it was a really great experience. And from there I was kind of in transition for a little bit and ultimately decided to move to Indianapolis because things are cheaper there. If I wanted to afford a house and I wanted to continue to pursue real estate, that would have been much more advantageous.

So, I moved there and I was kind of feeling like I needed to pick between content marketing and real estate. And I ultimately chose real estate. I got my real estate license and then got hired by a guy named Brett Snodgrass to do content marketing. He was a real estate wholesaler. I’ve always kind of been in this bubble of content marketing and in real estate. This is kind of my whole career. And halfway through my time at Simple Wholesaling while I was building a brand for Simple Wholesaling, I switched to doing the deal side of the business. And I was the head of this position. So, it was my responsibility to make sure that the properties got sold. At the height, I was selling between 25 and 35 properties a month. We had 35 properties and those were like killer months, best months ever. But on average, the bare minimum we were hitting over 25 properties a month.

I learned a ton there and starting a podcast and continuing the branding efforts. We interviewed Seth about the land business and I was really intrigued about the land business because it was very similar to wholesaling but had just a lot more perks. Properties were cheaper, marketing was cheaper, less competition. The major difference between the wholesaling houses, if you actually take down your inventory and you don’t do assignments with land is that it takes a little bit longer to move property. My typical turnaround time in my land business is three to six months. Whereas if you’re wholesaling and you’re working with investor buyers, you can move property within a few days of having it. A lot of guys do double closes and that kind of stuff.

So, I wanted to utilize the skill sets that I had without being direct competition to my boss at Simple Wholesaling because I’m a pretty loyal guy and I thought that I was going to be there for a while, maybe in the long haul, but I wanted to still have my own ability to make wealth and generate wealth that wasn’t in direct competition to Simple Wholesaling. And so, I reached out to Seth and he said, “Hey, how about you moonlight the land course? I’ll give you access to it for free. And you just give me feedback on what your experience was like”. I was like, “Yeah, heck yeah, I’ll do that”. And so, I went through it, took action, and then kind of took off doing land in Indiana. Simple Wholesaling had some transitions and a long story short, it turned out that it wasn’t going to be the best fit for me to be there long-term.

So, I was kind of, again in transition, still working in my land business, but I was in the beginning stages. So cashflow is a real problem. And me and Seth were actually in a mastermind group together with a couple of other guys like Lucas Hall and Al Williamson. Al Williamson is leading landlord.com and then Lucas Hall is from cozy.com. He found in landlordology.com. We’ll put those in the show notes. Those guys are great. We were in a mastermind group, that we met over Zoom. We met every other week. I was complaining about my cashflow problems. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do because the land business is awesome and it’s working and we’re okay, but we’re not getting ahead. We’re just kind of treading water. And Seth said, “Well, how about you come work for REtipster?” And I was like, “That’s a great idea. That might be awesome”.

Yeah, I ended up joining the team in July of 2018 if I remember correctly. And it’s been history ever since I’ve been growing my land business. I moved from Indiana to Florida. Well, I didn’t move. I’m in Indiana still, but I moved my land operation from Indiana to Florida. And ever since I did that, things took off like a rocket and it’s been really, really good. I got to be honest, man, working at REtipster it’s my dream job. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted to do with helping people, making videos, writing articles that are tutorial base and very action-oriented and podcasting and videos and all this man.

Right now, as we’re recording this, we’re in the thick of the coronavirus nonsense mess pandemic and it’s easy to forget. But man, I can’t believe I get to do what I do every day because it’s literally everything I’ve ever wanted to do.

Seth: Yeah man, likewise. I remember that moment when you were telling me and I had that light bulb moment of “Hey, maybe Jaren could work for REtipster” and it was usually I’m too dense and slow to recognize those opportunities when they’re right in front of me. But I think God was just telling me like, “Hey stupid, here you go. Perfect opportunity right here”. And it’s true man. That’s the thing. It’s surprisingly difficult to find people out there because there’s like a lot of different things they have to be in order to excel in the role that you are in. You’ve got to have relevant experience. You have to know what you’re talking about. You have to be somebody who knows how to talk and actually explain things in a way that people can understand.

I can’t tell you how many super successful real estate investors there are out there, but they either have no interest in helping other people understand or are just terrible at it. They don’t have the mind or the heart of a teacher. And then also somebody who enjoys the video thing. I think a lot of people hate being on video. The podcasting thing and knows how to write and just convey ideas and you’re just a really good blend of everything that a person would ever need to be. So, I’m really glad we are where we at.

Jaren: Yeah, man, a hundred percent. I got to just take my hat off to you. I hope that this doesn’t turn into some like a gushy love fest or something.

Seth: Oh, I’m okay with that.

Jaren: I’m just really thankful for how much you’ve helped me hone my skills in that. Like I think I was okay. Like, I definitely could start a podcast and do some stuff. But now it’s like I really have some skills and I only have you to thank for that. I mean, I really just appreciate the opportunity man.

Seth: Yeah, absolutely.

Jaren: That’s awesome man.

Seth: I’m glad I could play any role in helping you along. That’s really cool man. Thanks for saying. So, we’ve kind of heard about from college-age until now. So when you were a kid, did you have any interest in being an entrepreneur, running businesses or making money or any of that stuff? Or did the light bulb sort of go off when you discovered real estate back in the Bay Area those years ago?

Jaren: I was not entrepreneurial at all when I was a kid. I was actually kind of like, I don’t know like I was a troubled kid I guess I would say to put it lightly. I just didn’t have much of a direction at all. Before I had my “Come to Jesus” moment when I was 15. I was really into like drugs and the party scene. I remember in my freshman year of high school because I went back and forth between my mom and my dad’s house. My mom lives in California, my dad lives in Georgia. I graduated in Georgia, but in my freshman year, I was in California. And I remember telling my teachers like, “What do you want to do when you get older?” I was like, “I want to just be like a nomad. Just kind of be a traveling nomad”. Because they beat the system. They don’t have any cares in the world. They don’t have to worry about bills or anything. They just go wherever they want to go and do whatever they want to do.

So that was where I was at, man. I was kind of like coming off of a kind of hippy-dippy, like nonsense stuff that doesn’t really work in the real world. But I had my “Come to Jesus” moment when I was 15 and that really kind of just gave me a whole new sense of direction. But the entrepreneurial bug bit me kind of out of necessity because I don’t have a college degree or a career to fall back on. I don’t have those kinds of skillsets. So, I had to figure out something and figure it out fast. Because my wife who’s older wants kids and has family obligations and I was a young kid really having to figure it out quickly, like really fast. So, real estate was the best path for me.

Seth: Yeah. That’s always weird for me to even think of you as being somebody who is a troubled kid or having no direction because you just seem so the opposite of that now. The only Jaren I’ve ever known as somebody who’s super driven and does have direction and is not a total misfit.

Jaren: Yeah. That’s my wife man. That’s all on my wife. Because my wife grew up in real poverty. She was born under the Soviet Union. So, the Soviet Union fell in 1991. She was born in 1987 and she grew up toilets in the backyard and a village kind of poor. Her story, they could write a whole book about it, but just kind of like curiously through her struggles I realized, I guess I got a little bit of that immigrant hustle from her. I realized, “Oh, wait, there’s an ungodly amount of opportunity just being in America.” I almost have a responsibility or an obligation to capitalize on that opportunity because so many people would literally kill to be like literally killed to be here and it’s a big deal. So, I can only attribute my drive and who I am today to my faith in my wife.

Seth: When I think of the people I’ve known in my life who were sort of like troublemakers or I don’t know, sort of what you were describing of yourself as a young person. I wonder if that’s the main issue at stake is that they simply have no direction or they don’t have a meaning to life. They don’t know what they’re doing or why they’re even here. And it’s almost like I don’t know if boredom is the right word, but just like when you have no a mission or you don’t understand the importance of life and what you’ve put here to do, it’s really easy to flounder and just go nowhere. And that’s probably where a lot of troubles in the world come from. It’s people who just don’t understand what they’ve been given and the opportunities that are sitting right in front of them.

Jaren: I would a hundred percent agree with that. I used to even tell people like, I don’t understand, I mean this is going to sound crazy to probably all of our audience, but when I was like 13-14 doing crazy stuff, I used to tell people like, I don’t understand the point of being sober. It’s boring. Why would you do it? I think people, everybody to thrive, they need a purpose, they need a mission and I just didn’t have one for a long time. And so, I had my “Come to Jesus” moment.

Seth: Sometimes I wonder if that purpose is born out of struggle. People have a life where they can just kind of sit in front of the TV, they can just sort of do whatever they want. They don’t have to do anything that day. It’s just whatever. I’ve known people like that in my life and the people that I know that are like super productive or really like push it really far and get far in life. I don’t know that they would be that way if they weren’t well acquainted with struggle. It’s almost like you sort of have to hurt a little bit to realize the importance of pushing for something better.

Jaren: Here I speak in my life’s ideals, man. Like my core values. Especially in recent years with things that we’ve gone through some family stuff and whatever. Like I used to be anti-suffering, adamantly anti-suffering, but I’m not so much anymore. I think that controlled suffering is the only way that you can grow. You think about working out at the gym. All you’re doing is you’re putting yourself in a position to have controlled suffering. That’s all it is. Repetitive controlled suffering is what grows muscles. It’s the same thing that grows character and it’s the same thing that teaches you how to speak a different language or learn a new skill. It’s getting through the pain and the struggle of not knowing something or fill in the blank. And that’s the only path to growth. You can’t grow without suffering.

Seth: Amen. That’s good stuff. We’ve heard your whole backstory or at least all the highlights. Is there anything else you do in terms of real estate investing outside of land? Or do you have much experience in other realms?

Jaren: I have a lot of experience because I sold a lot of “buy and hold” property and flip the property to buyers. I had to understand what they were looking for, how they run their numbers, all that stuff. I am very interested in a “buy and hold” long-term. I don’t think that two to four units are the route that I would want to go. I’ve been looking into syndications pretty heavily over the last six months and I would probably still be very interested in pursuing that. Right now, the climate’s very different than it was, but I keep coming back to it depending on who you talk to. If you talk to a syndicator, they’re small multifamily. You talk to somebody who buys residential multifamily, like two to four units, they call them big. So, it’s all relative. But anything from 5 to like 50-unit range, I feel like in the syndication world, there’s a lot of guys shy away from those because they require more hands-on management. You can’t get the good high-level property managers for those kinds of properties like you would for a 100-unit or whatever.

But being in Northwest Indiana and seeing the opportunities that are here, there’s a house literally five-minute walk from where I’m at right now. That’s a six-unit that is selling for like $550,000. There was another 10-unit, 30 minutes north of me in a really nice area called Whiting, Indiana for $500,000. It was a 10 unit.

Seth: Oh, man. Does it make good money? Are the 10 garbage units or are nice ones?

Jaren: No, I mean Whiting is kind of an Oasis in the ghetto. There’s East Chicago and then there’s Hammond is kind of up and coming. I would buy in Hammond. Purdue has a college campus there. And then there’s Gary to the East. And Gary is pretty rough. But Whiting is a really quaint little town and we would totally get renter’s there because it’s safe. It’s right by Lake Michigan. It’s literally the most Northern part of Indiana before you’re in Illinois and in Chicago. Looking at the opportunities here, if I’m going to be settled here, I don’t know, I keep circling back to that. I don’t know a hundred percent if that’s the route that I’m going to go. I’m like not committing to anything but larger “buy and hold” anywhere from 5 to doing full on syndications of like a hundred and plus units.

That’s something that’s intriguing to me, but I also like kind of the obscure creative weird stuff in real estate that’s just unusual. Like billboards have been on my radar quite a bit. I got a property that is right off of the highway in Jacksonville right now. It’s a land deal that’s vacant and it’d be perfect for a billboard and so that’s been intriguing to me. And then also all these guys that invest overseas like in Belize or in the Azores that we’ve been talking to over the last year that I like short term rentals, vacation rentals. I really like that as a strategy. I think that it sounds like it’s fun. It makes really good money, but to me, honestly, the appeal is it just sounds like it’s cool to be able to be like, “Yeah, I got a property in Hawaii, I got a property in Belize, I got property in the Azores and it makes me all this money and it’s awesome. If you ever want to go, we could always just go and book a weekend. We could go for free”.

That just seems very appealing to me. And I like the fact that there are all these obscure vacation destinations like Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, nobody really talks about that. But you can get really, really cheap property there and then you can Airbnb it in the on-season and probably make a crazy amount of money. I don’t know, that’s the stuff that’s on my radar. But currently, the only stuff that I’ve actually taken action on is I live in a house situation, I live in the side of a duplex and then I flip land. But other things are very much on my radar for the future.

Seth: And you’re really very, very familiar with the whole house wholesaling business model too. I mean, it may not have been like your money tied up in those properties, but you actually played a hand in doing many, many transactions that way. There’s a ton of stuff to learn just from that right there.

Jaren: I’ve probably had my hands involved in over 250 transactions. Confidently.

Seth: Yeah, that’s huge, man. And you were a real estate agent for a while as well, right?

Jaren: Yeah. I’m still technically licensed. I haven’t let it lapse or expire. I’m not a part of the local MLS association, the GNIAR is what it’s called for Northwest Indiana. I’m kind of just biding my time, but since I went through the headaches and the two years’ experience to get a broker’s license, like a managing broker’s license in Indiana, so I don’t have to hang in with anybody. It’s just hard for me to let go of that. I’ve just been keeping it inactive for now.

Seth: If you did let go of that, how hard is it to get it back? The managing broker’s license?

Jaren: I’d have to start from the beginning.

Seth: Man, that stinks.

Jaren: Yeah, so I’d have to have two years of active real estate experience again and do the whole thing and pass the broker’s test again.

Seth: By the way, Jaren put together a couple of really good articles about explaining the difference between a realtor, real estate agent, real estate broker and how the terms and names for those roles kind of differ from state to state. I never fully even understood it myself until I saw his writeup. I’m going to link to both of those in the show notes as well in case you’ve ever been curious about that. A lot of times people call somebody a real estate agent and they use that term interchangeably with something that isn’t necessarily that. Anyway, I just thought I mentioned that since we’re on the subject.

Jaren: Yeah, I worked hard on those. It’s funny, with some of these articles we’ve been working on recently with recent projects, it’s like one term can turn into a nightmare. Like real estate agent can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Seth: Yeah. For all the listeners out there, if you guys didn’t know this, I’ve mentioned it in a few different places, but just in case you weren’t aware, a big initiative we’ve been working on, on REtipster is creating a terms library. The idea is to just take a lot of words that are very commonly thrown around in the real estate world. Like 1031 exchange or absentee owner or real estate agent for example. Words that the typical real estate investor who’s been doing this for a while, they’re probably very familiar with it or maybe they think they know because they use the word, but they don’t actually understand all the intricate details behind it. We’ve been trying to very clearly explain these things like writing a full article about each one of them. Not just defining it but like a lot of other tidbits that people ought to know about those particular terms.

This is a new terms library on the site. I think both of us have just been blown away at how much harder this has been than we thought it would be. Part of what makes it hard is because if we want to really make ground and define a lot of these things, more than like 10 in a two- or three-month period, we have to get other writers involved, other people who understand them and can write well. That has been really hard to find good writers. And then even when we do find a good writer, it’s a ton of work to edit them and make sure all the statements were correct.

Jaren: The crosschecking on editing is a nightmare because they can legitimately show you, this article says straight up XYZ, but then you might know because you have experience in the industry. Yeah, but that’s only half the picture and that’s only under certain circumstances that that term is used for that. So, it’s really hard to figure it out.

Seth: For the ones that I’ve been writing, I’ve got legit textbooks here that I used in college. I’ve seen that same kind of thing where it explains the term in one context and it’s right in that one context. But there are also other situations where that same word is used and it means something slightly different or even very different. I’ve found plenty of other articles on like big reputable websites that have done the same thing where it’s like they are either not fully correct or they’re wrong. It’s one of those things like on the surface when you just think, “Oh yeah, let’s write a bunch of terms articles”. It seems really easy. But like, holy cow, if you want to do it right and do it well, it is insane how much work it takes. For both of us, editing is probably my least favorite thing to do. I’ve been kind of crabby every day that I have to edit articles. Jaren can attest to that. It just totally wears me out. So, it’ll be interesting to see if people get anything out of this. Like is this something we ought to spend our time on or should we do something else?

Jaren: Oh, and by the way, this is an incredible opportunity. If any of the listeners out there have real estate experience and professional editing experience, please reach out to us.

Seth: Yes, please.

Jaren: We are in a desperate situation.

Seth: Yeah, we have tapped a couple of people who have been very helpful, but a friend of mine works for a book publisher called Baker Book House and he is an editor. Like that’s what he does. He was explaining to me that every time they publish a book, it goes through four different editors. At first, I was like, man, that seems like overkill, but I’m realizing that’s actually very appropriate. There’s a lot of stuff that one editor by themselves will not catch. Because it’s not just about grammar and spelling, it’s about doing this sentence structure is right, should it be moved to a different place? Are the statements even correct? There is so much stuff involved in editing. It’s kind of mind-boggling when you think about it.

Jaren: Yeah man. Hey, can we link in the show notes my favorite terms article that I’ve read so far is been that article that Brian Davis wrote on cap rates. For whatever reason, I think that was the best writeup I’ve ever read on cap rates. He really made it super simple to not only understand but also to stick in my mind.

Seth: Yeah, Brian’s a great writer. Everything he puts together, it’s just awesome. So yeah, I’ll link to that. We have not just an amazing article on it, but also a calculator you can use on that same article. So, let’s move on here. The next question I’ve got for you, Jaren is, what is your craziest story about a real estate deal you were involved with? What’s just a bizarre experience you had for better or worse?

Jaren: One of the craziest things that have ever happened in my life is when I first started working for Simple Wholesaling, Brett had me go get trained on how to take down a boarded-up house or how to get access to a boarded-up house or to board up a house or something. He gives me this address and this is probably the most ghetto place I’ve ever been in my life. It’s like straight up from a movie kind of ghetto, like drug addicts walking around on the streets. I don’t know, it was scary. It was weird. I walk up to this house, people, all the neighbors are looking at me weird. Half of mine, it feels like I’m about to get attacked. I go up and then I see Gary, who’s this super small town, really kind of a gullible, sweet guy. And he’s like, “Hey, Jared” and la-la-la. And we were like, go in this house. He’s showing me all chirpy and nice.

Seth: And who is Gary?

Jaren: Gary was our property manager for the tenant owned properties and he also was our transaction coordinator at Simple Wholesaling.

Seth: I gotcha.

Jaren: He’s training me and we walk into this house and he is showing me around and all of a sudden, I started noticing all these Brown things everywhere. And I’m like, “Hey, do they have dogs?” He said, “Oh no man, this was a crack house and this is all human feces everywhere”. And I’m like, “What?” And like literally everywhere, there’s just spots of like just poop everywhere. And then we go upstairs and I have noticed that the bathroom, there’s no poop, there’s no anything nasty really. It’s like the nicest room in the house. And so, me and Gary were talking about it. I’m like, “What the heck? Why is it poop everywhere else except in the bathroom?”

And then while we’re putting up the boards or doing whatever we were doing, some guy approaches us and says, “Hey man, my friend was squatting here and he has my bike and my backpack in the back yard”. And obviously, this guy was the guy that was squatting there. And it was his stuff. He was fine moving on. He just wanted to get his stuff. And so, we’re like, “Yeah man, you can get your stuff. Go for it”. He said, “Aw, thanks, man. Thanks, man”. Gary actually couldn’t help himself and he asked the guy, he’s like, “Hey man, I’m just curious. You said, your friend lived here and we noticed there’s poop everywhere but there’s no poop in the bathroom. Why is there no poop in the bathroom? I’m just curious”. And the guy says, “Oh, man, that’s where we smoke our crack. We can’t poop in there. It will smell on everything”. So, they would rather poop everywhere else in the house but the bathroom. It was super weird, man. That was one of the “Welcome to real estate” moments.

Seth: Man, was that early on in your civil wholesaler career or had you been there for a while?

Jaren: I think it was like the first or second day.

Seth: Yeah man, that’s nuts. Isn’t it crazy? Maybe I and the average person listening to this is just kind of sheltered. We just have certain standards that are normal, but it is crazy how some people live. Can you imagine being that guy and being like, “This is okay? This is normal for me to live like this”.

Jaren: I mean I’ve seen so many other houses like that too. There was a house in Fountain Square Indianapolis, which Fountain Square is a really nice up and coming area and they had a back room. There was a tenant occupied and it had a backroom that was blocked off. And then I went back there and there’s just poop everywhere. And I’m like, “Hey, what’s up with this?” And they’re like, “Oh, we just let the dogs go poop and pee in that back room during the winter so that they don’t get cold”.

Seth: That’s unbelievable. Yeah, man. I mean drugs must be involved with that. I mean, can you think of a reason why a normal mentally coherent person would just do that? I mean, I don’t know.

Jaren: I think it’s when you grow up in a hoarder type situation and filth, you’re just accustomed to it. You just don’t know what cleanliness feels like.

Seth: Actually, I had a college roommate who I don’t know if his parents were hoarders necessarily, but very, very messy people. I had been to his house a few times and it was just like, “Holy cow, there’s so much junk everywhere”. But he was not like that. It’s almost like he saw the problem and he’s like, “This isn’t okay. I’m going to be clean in my life”. So, I don’t know. Who knows? Who knows? But it is kind of crazy how some people live.

Jaren: Human psychology is very, very complicated. Trying to figure out why people do what they do, it’s really, really complicated.

Seth: It’s very true. Now that we’ve heard that horror story, what was your best deal to date and what made it so good?

Jaren: Yeah, it was the one that I talked about on the previous interview. At first, we did it on YouTube and then you started the podcast and I think you used it for the podcast.

Seth: Was that episode 10? I think that was episode 10.

Jaren: I think so. Yeah. And that one was the best deal ever. It was just the stars aligned and Brett had some land property that he had acquired. And then he and I had a deal in total that we had one buyer that wanted to buy everything. And on our properties that we had gotten, I think it was like over 200 acres and the details are starting to get fuzzy now. I’m sure I said what they were in the episode. But what happened was this timber company decided to do a double close on this, like crazy huge property. So, Brett says to date that was the most he ever made in one single transaction and I made $38,000.

Seth: Yeah. And that was part of the deal, right?

Jaren: Yeah. That was just a part of the deal. Yeah. It was just insane. That changed my life and gave me seed money for really growing the business. You get deals in land that just don’t happen in other types of real estate investing strategies.

Seth: I can attest to that.

Jaren: It’s crazy. Like the home runs are really home runs in land.

Seth: Were you guys looking for land when you do the deal or did it just happen to come up as you were looking for houses?

Jaren: The property that he bought, another wholesaler brought to him and he’s like, “All right, Jared has been talking about this land thing. Let me see if I can take a crack at it”. And I had just started marketing for my property. So, I think I had done three deals before that one, something like that. Two or three deals. And at the time, again, because of my loyalty to Simple Wholesaling and all that, like I was completely fine exclusively partnering with Brett on all the deals that I brought in. And that’s what I was planning on doing. So, I think we had done about two or three deals before that one. It completely changed my life, man.

Seth: Yeah, man, that’s awesome. That’s really cool that you were able to have such a big win early on. For me, it took me like a few years to find one like that and it’s not necessarily normal, but it’s pretty awesome that you could see it right at the outset. So, what was the worst deal you’ve ever done? Did you lose money and how did that all happen?

Jaren: So probably the worst deal that I ever did was one that was also with Brett, unfortunately. We bought it. It was landlocked with easement access. I think it was like 24 acres or something. The front parcel that we had easement access on was another 6 acres. So overall it was about 30 acres or 32 acres I think total. And that was just a tough situation because we had bought it right but the easement problem, it was just hard to get over. And I didn’t know how to get good land as a specialized real estate agent at the time and I didn’t know how to move the property quickly. I was just really green to take on a project like that. And what we ended up doing was we bought the front parcel that was 6 acres for the same price that we bought the back. And so, we just had way too much money in the deal and it just took forever in a day to sell. I just walked out of the deal and gave it to Brett and let Brett recoup his losses on that as much as possible. But that was probably the toughest deal. I learned I’m pretty gun shy when it comes to landlocked properties, I think because of that. But you know what you’re doing. I think landlocked properties are the source of some of the best deals in land.

Seth:  It’s all about getting it cheap man.

Jaren: Yeah, it’s just getting it super, super cheap. And another one too. I always sell coaching clients because people ask me on discovery calls right before they become coaching clients with REtipster. They say, “What are the areas that I really have to watch out? What’s the secret sauce to making this business work?” And I say it’s two things. It’s due diligence and it’s direct mail. If you can wrap your head around doing marketing and you can wrap your head around due diligence, you’re good. That’s the 80/20 of it. Because due diligence is what has always bit me in the butt. By not understanding like, Oh, this road that’s right next to my property is a private road. So, I bought it and I can’t do anything with the property because without an easement access, I’m kind of screwed. Or I bought a property early on in Indiana that I thought was a great deal based on the comps. I bought it for $2,500 and then all of a sudden, literally the County told me you can barely have a hammock on this property. Like, there’s nothing you can do with it. That one I just had to let go to the tax foreclosure because there was nothing, I could do with it. And I tried to sell it to the neighbor and yeah, long-short, there are bumps and bruises along the way, but you got to take your losses and learn from them. But the biggest thing for me is due diligence.

Seth: Yeah. That whole thing about losing money on deals and having the ones that basically aren’t home runs or don’t pan out the way you want. On one hand, you could sort of look at it the way I always have, which I don’t necessarily think is healthy, but look at it in such a way of like, “Hey, I’m only going to go after home runs and it needs to do really well or I really screwed something up”. But on the same coin, it’s like, and I heard this a lot in the banking industry too, it’s some people will brag about, “Yeah, I’ve never done a loan that’s lost money. I’ve always had a perfect track record”. But if that’s true, that means you’ve missed a ton of opportunities. You’ve never taken a risk. You’ve never stuck your neck out and dared to be great. You look at the batting average of the best home run hitters in major league baseball. It’s like they strike out way more than they ever get on base. It’s not like having a bad deal is a sign of failure. It just means hey you’re really pushing the envelope and trying to do good deals and that’s going to happen eventually.

Jaren: Obviously if you can avoid it, avoid it. But there’s something about struggle again man, when you taste failure, there’s no better teacher.

Seth: Yeah. And I think that is one different thing about the land business. Because if we were talking about flipping houses where on every deal you got to take out, either put tons of cash down or take out a loan, then failing one time is a massive hit. That’s a huge problem. With a land deal, if you lose a few hundred bucks or a few thousand bucks, it’s like, yeah, that’s a bummer. But it’s not the end of the world.

Jaren: Yeah, again, it’s one of the major benefits to land because you’re buying it so cheap and so much undervalued. Even if the economy were to turn, you should be able to get what you bought the property for out of it, if you’re buying right.

Seth: Yeah, totally. So, I’m curious, if you did not invest in real estate, say you never discovered the real estate business at all, say you never worked for Biggerpockets or Simple Wholesaling or REtipster. Where do you think your life would have taken you? What would you be doing today?

Jaren: I don’t know man. My knee gut reaction says some kind of ministry or some kind of teacher, coach or something, a theology professor or something like that. I admire Jordan Peterson’s life and his work. And I find what he gets to do every day, at least, being from the outside looking in really exciting and really fulfilling. I really love coaching. I think the thing that I get to do at REtipster that I enjoy the most is working with people and having them become successful. When I talk to people like Sean Callahan who’s doing a crazy amount of deals and it’s like really taken off, I don’t know, that gives me a sense of fulfillment, it gives me a sense of purpose and like, “Wow, I’m actually making a difference with my life”. I think that it would be something related to teaching or coaching or pastoring or something like that.

Seth: Cool. And you’re clearly wired to work with people. I mean you’re a social person, you know how to have great conversations and help people think through problems and it’s really cool to see you being able to really put that to good use. So, what’s one of the more influential books you’ve read in your life?

Jaren: Man, there is a lot. Can I give three? Probably the first one that comes to mind is “Thou Shall Prosper” by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. That completely changed the way I look at money and the way I look at economics and the way that I relate to business because rabbi Daniel Lapin emphatically proves that business is 100% spiritual in nature. And that shift really helped me kind of reconcile this. Like, “Hey, I thought I was going to be doing ministry stuff but I’m doing business stuff. Where’s my life calling in the midst of all that?” And that was a foundational life-changing book for me.

“Can’t Hurt Me” by David Goggins. Anything from David Goggins, man. It’s just his material has just really, really given me language and a context to teach some life lessons that I have learned with personal tragedies and stuff that we’ve gone through as a family. And I really, really liked that book.

And probably another one that was really impactful was “Man’s Search For Meaning” by Viktor Frankl who is a psychologist who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp and studied because he couldn’t help himself. He essentially just observed both his experience and the experience of torture victims and actually designed a new therapy for trauma victims, I guess. And I forget the name of it, but

Seth: Interesting. essentially the premise is that anybody who’s gone through pain and trauma, if you can help them find purpose in it and a mission in it, you find meaning in the suffering, then that brings healing and that brings closure. It’s not really about being happy. People don’t really even want to be happy because happy is boring. People want to be on a mission.

Jaren: They want to have something to fight for. They want to have something to strive for and sacrifice for. So that book was really instrumental.

Seth: That is interesting. I never actually thought about that. So, I know what you mean. I feel like happiness is the thing that everybody is going after in life. But when I think about times in my life when I have been happy, I couldn’t point to hardly anything that wasn’t going right. There is something, I hate saying this, but there’s something kind of boring about that. It’s like now what? Okay, what now? I don’t know. I feel awful saying that. I feel like that’s a really spoiled snotty thing for me to say.

Jaren: But it’s true.

Seth: But yeah, I think you’re honest on that. It’s like it needs to be a greater purpose or another person or something that you’re living for. It’s not just about being happy so to speak.

Jaren: Would you rather be in a spot where you had a mansion and a pool and anything you could ever want that money could buy? Or would you rather be Gandhi or Martin Luther King? For most people, I think that they would rather have their life be a person of significance. And that can look like providing for your family. A large portion of what it looks like for me is fighting and providing for my family. But I think that mission man and being mission-oriented and figuring out why you’re here and why you’re going the way you’re doing is crucial for success.

Seth: Yes. I think anybody who’s honest and who has achieved financial success and then have been able to buy things and stuff like that, you get like a really nice car and that’s exciting for like…

Jaren: A day.

Seth: For a while. But at the end of the day, like it’s just a car. You don’t really need it. It’s not like it’s going to be your legacy or anything. It’s just a nice thing. But there’s a lot more depth to a mission and yeah, that’s interesting man.

So, we have sort of done this before on various other episodes where both Jaren and I answered the famous final three questions that we always ask people at the end of every show. But now we’re going to hit Jaren with those. So, Jaren, first question, what is your biggest fear?

Jaren: My personality is very much achievement-oriented. Fear of failure or fear of not living up to my potential. I think in times past I said the fear of death, but I’ve been reciting that. I’ve been doing a practice every morning. When I remember, it’s not perfect, but I have like a daily confession that I read out. And the first thing that it says is, “You’re going to die, so make your life count”. I’ve been getting more acclimated to death. But my biggest thing is I’m afraid that despite my effort to be the fullness of what I’m capable of being, I’m going to miss out on my potential or fail at it. Or no matter the effort that I put in, it’s not going to yield anything substantial or significant.

Seth: Yeah. I think people who meet their potential and actually live up to what they can really be is actually an incredibly rare thing. I think most people don’t get there. Do you think this is any grant type three thing?

Jaren: A hundred percent. No, a hundred percent. I’m just hardwired for achievement, man. That’s my personality. There are pros and cons to it. I could judge myself for it or I could just embrace the fact that this is how I’m wired, that I am to a fault the only way that I get any sense of personal satisfaction out of life or happiness or any of that is if I’m getting results and the things that I care about. And sometimes that’s financially, but a lot of it is personal disciplines like working out or running or like calming my mind or growing. I put a ton of pressure on myself. I think it’s my biggest strength and I think it’s my biggest weakness. I think it’s my Achilles heel, but it’s also my superpower. I am obsessed with being the best that I can be.

Seth: Yeah. That’s always a tough thing when you see somebody who has attributes, like, that everybody has them, they’re just different for each person. But when somebody has that kind of double-edged sword where it’s like there’s something that makes them great, but it’s also their downfall. Part of me wants to be like, “Hey, maybe you want to change that”. But the other part of me is like, “No, don’t change that at all. That’s what makes you amazing”. But it makes me wonder is there a point at which a good thing becomes bad. It makes me hesitant to ever look at anybody’s attribute and say that’s not a good thing because it’s sort of is a good thing at the same time. It’s just about whether it’s a healthy version of that thing.

Jaren: I hundred percent agree, man. I think that people should double down on their strengths and then set up protection against their weaknesses. But don’t reject them or judge yourself for them because that’s stupid. It’s unfruitful. It’s unproductive. I mean sure you could through a lot of effort maybe move like with my achievement thing. I could definitely do better at self-acceptance or having mercy for myself or grace for myself or whatever. But I could put all my effort and attention on trying to move the needle one step in that direction or I could just be like, “Whatever, this is who I am”. I understand that there are some drawbacks to this, but when the drawbacks come up, I can just recognize them for what they are and say, “Okay, it’s unproductive. I get it. I need to put my efforts on having me thrive based on the way that I’m wired and tick”.

I think from our education standpoint, we base our education on the college model is to kind of have you be a jack of all trades. They want you to be a well-rounded human being and expose you to several different disciplines. I don’t think that is the most productive way to educate somebody. I think that you should on the beginning of education, identify their strengths and then help them make their strengths a superpower. If somebody is really good at music or somebody is really good at math, they should double down on that and then get exceptional like world-class at it and don’t worry English. Like you got software that can help you spell correctly.

Seth: Yeah. I think that’s sort of the spirit behind like a liberal arts education. It’s sort of known for doing a lot of different stuff. A lot of stuff that you don’t necessarily need. But at the same time, it’s like how do you know what you’re going to be good at if you don’t try a bunch of stuff? It’s sort of the question of “When do you cut that off?” How much do you make somebody jump through these hoops before we just settle and be like, “Okay we’re going to pick something now”?

Jaren: And that’s where I think personality tests and the Enneagram test for whatever reason, that thing is probably the most impactful personality test I’ve ever taken.

Seth: Yeah, me too. And you can say that about anything too. Like sometimes I think about that with sports. There are so many different sports out there, tons of them, a lot of them are like obscure. You don’t even really hear about them because they’re so… Water polo or lacrosse or something like that. It’s just not as big of a mainstream thing. But there could be somebody who would be the best lacrosse player ever, but because it’s not a mainstream sport and they never had a chance to try it, we’ll never know that. They’re never going to reach their full potential. And that kind of stuff. If I think too much about that, it’ll drive me crazy because I feel like, that’s kind of what I mean when I talk about it’s a rare thing for somebody to reach their full potential. Because it’s a rare thing for somebody to get exposed to the right thing at the right time and actually latch onto that. Oh, well, that’s what we give living in an imperfect world, I guess.

Jaren: Yeah, man. A hundred percent.

Seth: Okay. So the next question. What are you most proud of?

Jaren: My son. A hundred percent. For people who might not know, we had a stillbirth for our first-born daughter. She was born at 36 weeks and she is fully developed and it’s really tragic and it was really hard for us to get pregnant after that. We had a real hard time with infertility and a crazy journey. But, my wife, man, it’s one of the most inspirational things I’ve ever been a part of. I saw her fight for my son’s life and fight and fight and fight and fight every month, negative pregnancy tests, crying and tears and pain. I saw her just straight up come to this point where she’s like, “I’m never going to stop trying. I’m going to go to this thing”. And a year and three days to the day that we lost our daughter, our son was born. And he just turned one year old and hands down, dude, the way we responded with our faith and losing our daughter and that whole journey, man, like, that’s a hundred percent without question the thing I’m most proud of.

Seth: Yeah. Yeah, man, that’s something worth being proud of. I can’t really imagine the worst thing for somebody to have to go through, honestly, then what you did.

Jaren: It was intense.

Seth: I don’t even want to know what that’s like. That’s just the thought of it is overwhelming, let alone having to go through that and then deal with it for months and months afterward. It’s a very hard thing. I commend you guys for getting through it and figuring out, finding your way after that.

Jaren: And my wife is the champ man. I can only take partial credit because it’s a whole lot easier to fight when you have a comrade or a partner who’s in the fight with you.

Seth: Yeah. Do you think the birth of your son was a good healing agent for all of that?

Jaren: A hundred percent. You know how you are named after a child in the Bible who is a replacement for someone who died? I almost wanted to name my son Seth actually.

Seth: Oh, cool.

Jaren: It was very much like what the devil stole God restored tenfold. Kind of a thing. I just look at him and I’m just in awe and wonder.

Seth: That’s an appropriate sense of on wonder for sure. I get the same thing. It’s a great part of the human experience I think for anybody who gets to go through that.

Jaren: I think it’s the closest thing we get to experiencing unconditional love as humans.

Seth: I think so, except when they throw their food all over the floor, that’s when the love it goes by the wayside.

Jaren: Even then man, it’s like, “Ah, you stinker”. I know other people are broken and maybe, I know there are parents that have really failed expectations and stuff like that, as expectations of their kids and they haven’t been there and stuff. But for me, it’s almost like my son can do no wrong. The thing I’m most worried about is that he’s going to grow up super spoiled because I just straight up tell him you’re perfect. No, no, no, no, no, no. You’re perfect.

Seth: Yeah. Actually, I heard that on a radio interview a while back. I don’t even know why I was listening to this. This was like years before I had kids, but they were interviewing this author who wrote a book about parenting. And she was saying that a lot of parents, they push their kids really, really hard to always excel, always do better. And as a result, the message always comes across like not good enough, not good enough, try harder, do better. Like the love isn’t there. It’s not that they don’t love their kids, they do, but the message is always just coming down on them. And she was saying it’s really important to at some occasion sit down and just tell your kid, “You know what? You are good enough”. Just get that message across. Even if it’s like, I know I come down on you, I yell at you, I want you to do better. Still, you’re good enough. You don’t need to be something else in order for me to love you. That’s there. And some kids never hear that and it’s kind of tragic.

Jaren: Yeah. There’s the stream of Christianity that I subscribe to, there’s this church called Bethel Church in Redding, California. And one of the pastors there wrote a book called “Loving Your Kids on Purpose”. And the whole premise of that book was really helpful. He says the most important thing that you can do as a parent is to maintain a heart to heart connection with your kids. There’s a lot of grace for making terrible mistakes as a parent, as long as your kid knows emphatically that you love them. And as long as you can sustain that, I think everything else kind of figures itself out.

Seth: Yeah. Alrighty. So, third and final question, what is the most important lesson you have ever learned?

Jaren: We touched on it earlier that we shouldn’t shy away from suffering. We should pursue suffering because when suffering is thrown on you and you’ve never experienced it before, that’s when it can break you. But if you volunteer to suffer every day and it’s like borrow from David Goggins, you commit to doing something that sucks every day, whether it’s working out or fasting on a regular basis or taking cold showers or doing something where you can fight against that part of you that cries constantly for comfort and for safety and the easy route and you can combat that thing. That is the biggest thing that will help you become unbreakable and unbeatable. That’s really the thesis of my life man, is that don’t shy away from suffering.

Seth: Do you think there’s ever a time where suffering serves no greater purpose? Like it’s just useless pain?

Jaren: Yeah. I think if you’re like tormented or rape happens or something tragic happens to you, but you can turn the suffering you don’t have control of into fuel if you know how to use it. And committing to a daily practice or a lifestyle practice of controlled suffering will help you prepare for that. Because there’s a lot of suffering and chaos and tragedy that happens to us in this world that especially here in America, we don’t really like. Like we don’t have a culture about mourning. When somebody dies, we don’t know how to process it. They take off the body and try to cover it up really quickly and move on and we don’t know how to deal with the tough, hard things in life emotionally. And I think that there’s tons of suffering that serves no purpose except the purpose that it’s there for you to overcome it.

Seth: So, it sounds like I feel like I’m hearing “yes” and “no”. There is suffering that serves no purpose, but you can turn it into fuel for something. Like, can you literally turn any suffering into good?

Jaren: I think so, yeah. But that’s not to say that sometimes you have to kind of find it in yourself to overcome it. And sometimes literally the only reason why suffering is there, it’s just so that you can beat it so that you can overcome and grow as a person. There’s a lot of evil in the world that just happens. And I’m not making a justification for evil at all. Evil is evil. Sometimes things happen that are just wrong, a hundred percent. But you can choose how to respond to that wrong. A passion project of me and my wife that is on the shelf right now is called “Live to inspire”. And the thesis, we want to write a book about it and stuff like that one day. And the whole thesis is that when faced with suffering in our tragedy, you have a choice to make. You can become a victim or you can become an inspiration. And those are really the only two choices you have. So, it is true that there’s random chaos of evil in the world, but how you respond to it determines whether it has a purpose or not.

Seth: Yeah.

Jaren: Heavy stuff, man. Why all my interviews always come out so heavy?

Seth: I don’t know, man. Maybe I’m asking the wrong questions or something.

Jaren: I should just be like, “What’s your greatest life purpose? – Work for Seth Williams and you’ll be happy”. I think part of it is this kind of heavy stuff like that’s just real life and a lot of people don’t like talking about it. It’s not comfortable. It’s not socially acceptable. And I’m not somebody who’s going to steer you away from that. If you want to talk about that stuff, I’m all here. I think it’s a sign of our healthy dialogue here. The fact that we can go there and that’s okay.

Jaren: Yeah, I guess I’m just ruined to fakery or trying to put a mask on. I value authenticity.

Seth: I feel like there’s a lot of fakery on most podcasts out there. So hopefully listener, you aren’t too depressed or anything like that from this conversation.

Jaren: No, you should be inspired, man. Like, go run a marathon.

Seth: Yeah, for sure. Alrighty, folks. Well, thanks for listening. I hope you guys enjoyed hearing more about Jaren’s story. If you guys haven’t already, in case you weren’t aware, you can text to join our email list in case you want to stay up to date on the latest podcast episodes and other happenings at retipster.com. You can join that by texting the word “FREE”. F-R-E-E to the number 33777. And that’s a wrap for today’s episode. Thanks again for joining us and we will talk to you guys next time.

Jaren: Thanks, guys.

The post 067: Let’s Get The Truth About Jaren Barnes appeared first on REtipster.

from Real Estate Tips https://retipster.com/067-jaren-barnes/

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Inside the Cell Where a Sick 16-Year-Old Boy Died in Border Patrol Care

Video obtained by ProPublica shows the Border Patrol held a sick teen in a concrete cell without proper medical attention and did not discover his body until his cellmate alerted guards. The video doesn’t match the Border Patrol's account of his death.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez, a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant, was seriously ill when immigration agents put him in a small South Texas holding cell with another sick boy on the afternoon of May 19.

A few hours earlier, a nurse practitioner at the Border Patrol’s dangerously overcrowded processing center in McAllen had diagnosed him with the flu and measured his fever at 103 degrees. She said that he should be checked again in two hours and taken to the emergency room if his condition worsened.

None of that happened. Worried that Carlos might infect other migrants in the teeming McAllen facility, officials moved him to a cell for quarantine at a Border Patrol station in nearby Weslaco.

By the next morning, he was dead.

In a press release that day, Customs and Border Protection’s acting commissioner at the time, John Sanders, called Carlos’ death a “tragic loss.” The agency said that an agent had found Carlos “unresponsive” after checking in on him. Sanders said the Border Patrol was “committed to the health, safety and humane treatment of those in our custody.”

But the record shows that the Border Patrol fell far short of that standard with Carlos. ProPublica has obtained video that documents the 16-year-old’s last hours, and it shows that Border Patrol agents and health care workers at the Weslaco holding facility missed increasingly obvious signs that his condition was perilous.

The cellblock video shows Carlos writhing for at least 25 minutes on the floor and a concrete bench. It shows him staggering to the toilet and collapsing on the floor, where he remained in the same position for the next four and a half hours.

According to a “subject activity log” maintained by the Border Patrol throughout Carlos’ custody, an agent checked on him three times during the early morning hours in which he slipped from unconsciousness to death, but reported nothing alarming about the boy.

The video shows the only way CBP officials could have missed Carlos’ crisis is that they weren’t looking. His agony was apparent, even in grainy black and white, making clear the agent charged with monitoring him failed to perform adequate checks, if he even checked at all. The coroner who performed an autopsy on Carlos said she was told the agent occasionally looked into the cell through the window.

The video makes clear that CBP, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, inaccurately described how Carlos’ body was discovered. Contrary to the agency’s press release, it was Carlos’ cellmate who found him, not agents doing an early morning check. On the video, the cellmate can be seen waking up and groggily walking to the toilet, where Carlos was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He gestures for help at the cell door. Only then do agents enter the cell and discover that Carlos had died during the night.

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes CBP, wouldn’t say whether the scenes recorded by the camera during Carlos’ final hours were shown live on video monitors, as is the case in some Border Patrol facilities, and if they were, whether anyone had been assigned to watch the footage.

The video and other records reviewed by ProPublica document numerous missteps in the days leading up to Carlos’ final hours on the floor of Cell 199. Independent medical experts pointed in particular to the decision to send a 16-year-old suffering from the flu to a holding cell rather than a hospital as a pivotal mistake.

“Why is a teenaged boy in a jail facility at all if he is sick with a transmissible illness? Why isn’t he at a hospital or at a home or clinic where he can get a warm bed, fluids, supervised attention and medical care? He is not a criminal,” said Dr. Judy Melinek, a San Francisco-based forensic pathologist who reviewed records of Carlos’ death at the request of ProPublica. “No one should die this way: vomiting, with a fever and without the comfort of a caregiver.”

A CBP spokesman declined to respond to a series of questions about Carlos’ death, citing an ongoing internal investigation. “While we cannot discuss specific information or details of this investigation, we can tell you that the Department of Homeland Security and this agency are looking into all aspects of this case to ensure all procedures were followed,” CBP spokesperson Matt Leas said.

CBP has refused to release the video and other records of Carlos’ death to the public or Congress, citing the ongoing internal investigation. But using Texas open records laws, ProPublica obtained material from the Weslaco Police Department, which briefly investigated his death. The records included surveillance video, detainee logs and health records turned over to police by Border Patrol.

Interviews and documents illustrate how immigration and child welfare agencies, while grappling with surging migrant numbers, were unable to meet their own guidelines for processing and caring for children. With holding tanks that were never equipped to house migrants for more than a few hours, the Border Patrol was inundated with families and children. Shelters for children, offering beds and medical care, were already packed.

The agency held Carlos for six days, though the agency is supposed to transfer children within 72 hours.

Carlos was the sixth migrant child to die after being detained while entering the U.S. in less than a year. Some died of preexisting illnesses, but at least two others died of the flu diagnosed while in Border Patrol custody. Carlos was the only one to die at a Border Patrol station; the others were taken to medical facilities after falling ill. In the previous decade, not a single migrant child had died in custody.

Carlos’ death prompted changes to require Border Patrol agents to enter the cells of ailing detainees at regular intervals to check on them and take temperatures, according to a source familiar with the fallout.

The DHS inspector general has been investigating the circumstances of Carlos’ death but has not released any findings.

Sanders, the acting head of the agency, resigned soon after the incident. He recently faulted unprepared agencies and an unresponsive Congress for a tragedy that he said was both predictable and preventable.

The deaths of Carlos and other children under his watch continue to haunt him. “I believe the U.S. government could have done more,” he said.

Carlos’ Journey

Carlos left his remote village in central Guatemala in early May. San Jose del Rodeo, home to indigenous Maya, is set in a lush landscape, and the village is a collection of tin-roofed houses and smoky outdoor cooking fires. The valleys below provide most of what little work there is, on farms growing and harvesting corn, coffee beans and sugar cane.

Carlos, the second youngest of eight children, was a standout student at the village school. He was captain of the soccer team and excelled in playing instruments the school had bought by selling raffle tickets. “He played percussion and the bombo and the lyre and the trumpet,” said Jose Morales Pereira, who was Carlos’ teacher. “He always said, ‘Professor, let’s teach everyone else.’ He was my leader.”

Bartoleme Hernandez, Carlos’ father, worked when he could planting corn or clearing land. He wore cut up tires on his feet to save his shoes for Sundays. Money was so tight that Carlos sometimes came to school with no lunch and did weekend farm work and odd jobs to help out, his teacher said.

As children, Carlos and his friends made a game of pretending to cross the border. To reach their imaginary U.S., they scaled a fence, and Carlos always played the one who made it across. The kids used guava leaves as pretend money to send to family back home, recalled a childhood friend who described the game in a Facebook post.

Two dozen or more young friends had traveled to the U.S. before Carlos. Crossing the border typically cost migrants $5,000 to $10,000 for smugglers who offer safe passage through drug cartel territory. Some migrants take out loans to fund their travel; Carlos told his teacher he might work along the way to pay his fees. He had a brother already in the U.S., and he planned to find a construction job.

Starting late last year, smugglers ran express buses up through Mexico to meet demand. A family member said Carlos and his sister traveled by bus for much of their journey. At the Rio Grande on May 13, they wore life vests and crowded onto a rubber raft with a half-dozen others.

Their parents received a video that day — later shared with the media — showing them casting off into the river. The siblings landed near Hidalgo at the southern tip of Texas, part of a group of 70 that was immediately rounded up by border agents.

In custody, Carlos was separated from his adult sister, as required under the law. He was assigned an alien identification number — A203665141 — to help agencies track him. A Border Patrol agent at the warehouselike processing center in McAllen screened Carlos for illness or injury and found none.

Migrants were supposed to be held in CBP centers for no more than three days before being deported, moved to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers or released pending a hearing. Under a 2008 anti-trafficking law, children and teenagers crossing the border illegally without parents or guardian generally must be placed with the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services within 72 hours, except in the case of heavy influx. Then they must be moved out as quickly as possible.

But Carlos had arrived at the peak of the surge, with 144,000 migrants apprehended in May alone. With the overflow crowds, nothing was working as it should have been. HHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were backlogged in transferring children out of CBP custody. In a spot check soon after Carlos died, the DHS inspector general reported that a third of the 2,800 unaccompanied minors in CBP custody in the Rio Grande Valley had been there longer than 72 hours.

Authorities at first questioned whether Carlos was a minor and whether the woman he was traveling with was his sister, according to a CBP source with knowledge of the matter. It took agents 48 hours to determine he was a few weeks shy of his 17th birthday, and the confusion delayed the search for HHS shelter space.

The McAllen facility where Carlos arrived on May 13 was barely fit for habitation. The DHS inspector general visited Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol facilities about a month later, as the number of apprehensions had begun to decline, and found holding pens packed well beyond capacity and other appalling conditions. The inspector general’s urgent alert to management warned that the overcrowding posed “an immediate risk to the health and safety” of both agents and detainees, including through the spread of infectious diseases.

Border Patrol centers were designed to temporarily hold migrants and were not set up for long-term detention, which typically includes medical staff to treat detainees who become ill. The agency had a handful of emergency medical technicians assigned to the centers. In late 2018, it had only 20 medical staffers working under contract along the 2,000-mile Mexican border to monitor the health needs of 50,000 apprehended migrants a month. CBP brought in medics from the Coast Guard and other federal agencies after two children died in custody in December and as the number of border crossers in custody began to approach 100,000 a month.

At the high point of the migrant surge in May, the Border Patrol had custody of 20,000 people a day; its definition of a crisis is 6,000 detainees.

As the surge escalated and Sanders and others pressed for help, the DHS shifted $47 million for additional medical staff to its contract provider, Loyal Source Government Services. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.)

Loyal Source increased its hiring, running a stream of job ads like one seeking EMTs for screenings at the Weslaco Border Patrol station, where Carlos died, that offered full-time, part-time, day, night and weekend shifts.

The prospect of flu outbreaks was a growing concern. The CBP had rejected a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it vaccinate migrants, saying such a program was impractical and complex. Amid the crowding, Border Patrol agents, trained in law enforcement, had reluctantly stepped into care-taking roles.

If Carlos had made it to an HHS shelter, he likely would have been vaccinated for the flu, a standard procedure in HHS shelters. But when HHS finally found a bed for him, the agency postponed his relocation because he had the flu and was not fit to travel.

Carlos had been detained in McAllen for six days when he reported feeling ill.

At 1 a.m. on May 19, he saw a nurse practitioner and complained of a headache and fever. Tests showed he had type A flu and a 103-degree fever. Nurse practitioner Irasema Gonzalez gave him ibuprofen and Tylenol and ordered Tamiflu, which is a standard treatment for flu symptoms.

Gonzalez’s treatment report also said Carlos should “return to medical office in 2 hrs or sooner” and should be taken to an emergency room if his symptoms persisted or worsened. There is no record of further medical treatment over the next 19 hours in the records obtained by ProPublica. Gonzalez didn’t respond to an inquiry from ProPublica.

Carlos was not sent to an emergency room or other outside medical facility. Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said basic monitoring of Carlos should have provided warnings that he was becoming seriously ill.

“Flu can progress rapidly, but it’s not like a heart attack. Even when fast, it worsens over a period of hours. There should have been signs that indicated he needed to go to the hospital,” Sharfstein said.

Instead, records show he was moved at midday to the smaller Weslaco station, where he could be isolated with other sick detainees.

At 8 p.m. that night, Carlos was given Tamiflu at the Weslaco station by Martha Garcia, a nurse practitioner. Her treatment report didn’t record a temperature or vital signs, leaving it unclear how thoroughly he had been examined. The report said Carlos had no medical complaints and was “in no acute distress.” Garcia didn’t respond to an inquiry from ProPublica.

The Border Patrol’s “subject activity log” from early morning on May 20 shows that Carlos was given a hot meal just after midnight. It is unclear if he was able to keep down any food. Weslaco police reports say that was the last time Border Patrol agents saw him alive.

The video of Cell 199 provided to ProPublica by Weslaco police is split into two parts, the first showing more than 33 minutes beginning about 1:13 a.m. and the second showing 1 hour and 11 minutes beginning about 5:48 a.m. Weslaco Police Chief Joel Rivera said that’s how Border Patrol provided the video to his investigators. The investigation ended after the coroner and police found no foul play in Carlos’ death.

CBP didn’t respond to questions about why the tape it provided has a four-hour gap that includes the hours when an agent reported doing welfare checks.

The time stamp on the video is inaccurate, but ProPublica was able to compare it with police and emergency medical service records to estimate that the first video begins at about 1:13 a.m., about an hour after Carlos was fed.

The beginning of the video shows Carlos on the toilet in the cell, partially obscured by a waist-high privacy wall. His cellmate, another ill boy who has not been identified, is asleep under Mylar blankets on a cement bench.

Carlos returns to the cement bench opposite his cellmate about six minutes into the video and shifts uncomfortably. He moves out of the camera’s view for a couple of minutes, apparently sitting or standing next to the cell’s large window.

At about 1:24 a.m., Carlos topples forward and lands face-first on the concrete floor. He is wearing blue jeans and a disposable surgical mask. For the next 11 minutes, he is largely still. At about 1:35 a.m., he vomits blood on the floor and then stands and staggers to the toilet.

The tape shows him sitting on the toilet for about a minute before he slides onto the ground. He struggles for several more minutes and then stops moving at approximately 1:39 a.m. Police photos taken after his death show a large pool of blood around his head.

The second part of the video opens at about 5:48 a.m. Carlos can be seen in the same position as he was four hours earlier. He is on his back, his head by the toilet, and his legs stretching out before him, toes up. The Border Patrol’s log documenting Carlos’ detention for the evening notes three welfare checks during the gap in the video, at 2:02 a.m., 4:09 a.m. and 5:05 a.m. All three log entries were attributed to Agent Oscar Garza.

Garza couldn’t be reached for comment and CBP officials wouldn’t answer questions about the extent of the welfare checks. The pathologist who performed the autopsy, Dr. Norma Jean Farley, said in an interview that she had been told the agent looked through the window but didn’t go inside Cell 199. She said it wouldn’t be unusual for a feverish child to seek comfort by laying on a cool floor.

The CBP’s policies on holding detained migrants are outlined in its National Standards on Transport, Escort, Detention and Search, known as TEDS. The standards are vague about welfare check requirements, saying agents should physically check holding cells in a “regular and frequent manner, according to each operational office’s policies and procedures. Physical inspections must be recorded in the appropriate electronic system(s) of record as soon as practicable.”

At about 6:05 a.m., the tape shows, Carlos’ cellmate awakens and discovers him on the floor. After about a minute, he walks over to the cell door and gets the attention of a Border Patrol agent, identified in police reports as Edgar Reyes.

The agent comes in, shines a flashlight on Carlos’ body and leaves. A few minutes later, a physician assistant, Alda Martinez, comes into the cell with a medic’s kit and attempts one chest compression. She quickly concluded that Carlos was dead, police reports said. Other agents walk in, stepping on silver blankets strewn around the cell. Weslaco paramedics arrive at 6:47 a.m. and declare Carlos dead.

The Border Patrol press release describing these events said “He was found un-responsive this morning during a welfare check.”

The autopsy report did not address how long Carlos had been dead before his cellmate found him. His body had already begun to stiffen when Martinez attempted to revive him. The process of rigor mortis can be accelerated by the flu.

John Sanders had seen the crisis on the border coming as early as November 2018. Then serving as the CBP’s chief operating officer, he had worked the numbers and realized that if projections about the migrant influx held true, agencies would be woefully short of shelter space for unaccompanied minors. An interagency task force monitoring the weather conditions and movements of people in Central America projected huge migrations in the coming months.

But the Trump administration agencies responsible for handling migrants, CBP and HHS, were at odds over the problem’s severity. HHS shelters were then boarding about 15,000 children, but the HHS leadership believed beds would empty out quickly thanks to a policy change reluctantly implemented by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a long battle. ICE had made it less legally risky for migrant adults to come forward to pick up children in shelters by easing mandatory fingerprinting requirement implemented in April 2018. The December 2018 policy change had increased the number of children released from HHS custody.

Still the numbers kept growing. Buses and car caravans ferried groups of 100 or more migrants at a time to the border; 111 such groups arrived in the winter and spring, compared with 13 the previous year and just two in 2017. CBP told Congress the large groups overwhelmed border security and at the same time created diversions for drug smuggling.

The Trump administration asked Congress in January for $800 million to upgrade border facilities, but it approved about $414 million, including money for a new El Paso processing center to hold children and families, renovation funds for the McAllen processing center and about $192 million for “improved medical care, transportation, and consumables” for those in CBP custody, according to the joint statement issued when the bill was finalized. It soon became clear it wasn’t enough.

Sanders was among the administration officials who appealed to Congress for additional funding. He predicted that without more funding, children would not be safe.

Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a California Democrat who chairs the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, blamed the Trump administration for conditions that led to the deaths of Carlos and other children.

“Their deaths should never, ever have happened. Tragically, DHS was irresponsible in not having an adequate mass migration plan to keep migrants safe, ensure their humane treatment and address their health care needs,” Roybal-Allard said. She also criticized HHS for failing to have “a plan to ensure it could quickly and safely take custody of unaccompanied children in CBP custody.”

In April, with the border crisis deepening daily, Sanders was named acting CBP commissioner as his boss Kevin McAleenan moved up to become acting secretary of DHS. Those would prove just interim personnel shuffles by a White House determined to harden its border policies.

The fight for money became one of Sanders’ top priorities. By May, as Carlos prepared to head north, the Trump administration made the case for $4.5 billion in emergency aid, with $2.9 billion to cover a shortfall in the program for unaccompanied minors. Democrats supported the humanitarian funding but many objected to $1.1 billion for additional immigrant detention spending.

Carlos’ death highlighted the need for relief. White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and McAleenan, making the case for the administration’s border funding request, described deteriorating conditions in a May 30 call with reporters:

“Four hundred children arrived in the last 24 hours alone. Four of those children this month have died transiting through Mexico into the United States — two drowning in a river, both a 5-year-old and 10-month-old; and two teenage boys died of infections after receiving medical treatment in federal custody,” McAleenan said. “Yesterday, a single group of 1,036 families and unaccompanied children simply walked from Juárez, Mexico, into the United States illegally as a single group — the largest group ever apprehended at the border.”

Another month would pass before a majority in Congress agreed on the humanitarian funding.

A police investigation into Carlos’ death began soon after his body was discovered, the case assigned to Det. Chris Ramirez of the Weslaco Police Department. There was no sign of foul play, and Ramirez noted that Carlos showed signs of a flulike illness. The Border Patrol turned over its surveillance video for review by police and the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy.

Dr. Norma Jean Farley served under contract with the county government. Her work on Carlos’ case included reviewing the timeline presented in the cell video and examining photos of his body from the death scene. Her autopsy report listed the cause of death as Influenza A 2009 H1N1 respiratory infection complicated by bronchopneumonia, sepsis and an immune system disorder called hemophagocytosis.

Farley said in an interview that the video showed that no one entered Carlos’ cell between 12:20 a.m., when he was fed, and around 6 a.m., when the cellmate knocked on the door to get an agent’s attention.

Farley largely defended the Border Patrol’s handling of the matter and questioned why Carlos did not do more to save himself.

“I was a little surprised that this kid, as sick as he was in the cell, never just knocked on the door as his roommate did, because as soon as the roommate did, they opened,” Farley said. “I just don’t know why he didn’t knock on the door.”

H1N1 flu has a typical incubation period of one to four days after exposure, and Carlos was in Border Patrol custody during that time. But Farley said she suspects Carlos may have had diarrhea caused by an immune disorder on his journey through Mexico, although there was no evidence of illness in his Border Patrol medical screening record.

“I’m finding what these people that tend to come there, they don’t tell them that they’re sick. And I don’t know if they’re afraid to tell them they’re sick because they’ll be quarantined. I don’t know what the issue is that they don’t. He finally did, but by the time he’s telling them that he’s sick, he’s more sick than he knows,” she said.

Questions remain about why Carlos’ grave condition was not recognized by the nurse practitioners on May 19, or before, or during his hours at Weslaco. An agency spokeswoman said investigators are looking into “all aspects of a case to ensure proper care procedures were followed.”

The Guatemalan government brought Carlos’ body home to his village to wide television news coverage, its embassy calling on the U.S. to conduct a full investigation of his death. Thousands of mourners poured in from around the country to follow behind his casket, which was borne by soccer teammates down a long dirt road to the cemetery.

Pallbearers taped his royal blue No. 9 soccer jersey to the top of his casket as they laid it to rest. “Maybe in all of his life, the 16 years that he was in this life, maybe he didn’t do many things, but he did move us,” said a speaker at his funeral. “He touched hearts.”

Carlos’ grief-stricken parents questioned how their son could have died in U.S. custody. His father, in an interview with Telemundo, wondered: “He left healthy. What happened to him?”

Carlos’ father, Bartolome Hernandez, said in a phone interview he will be glad to have answers from U.S. officials. “They need to take better care of migrants,” he said. “The U.S. isn’t a place where they should be allowing anyone to die like that.”

Pereira, Carlos’ teacher, said that he believes the boy was abandoned in his cell. He had not seen the video but said “If you have an animal that’s sick and you’ve kept it in a room, every little while you’re going to go check on it, see if it has water, whether it’s shivering. That’s with an animal. And this was a human being.”

In the months that have passed, lawyers at the Texas Civil Rights Project, a migrant advocacy group, have been in touch with Carlos’ family and asked the CBP to preserve its records. They say that so far they have received little information about the death investigation.

Meanwhile, in Washington, moderate House Democrats joined Republicans in passing a bipartisan Senate bill sending $4.6 billion aid to the border on June 27. The impasse was broken a day after a heart-rending photograph went viral showing a drowned father and daughter lying face down on the banks of the Rio Grande.

The border situation has changed dramatically since Carlos’ death. CBP now has 250 health staffers at its facilities across the Southwest, but Border Patrol cells have largely emptied out since July. The number of migrants crossing the border has declined sharply. The Trump administration has credited the decrease to more aggressive interdiction efforts by Mexico.

Adults and families crossing the border increasingly have been sent back to Mexico under the administration’s controversial Migrant Protection Protocols program, which sends them to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities while U.S. courts consider their immigration and asylum claims.

The number of unaccompanied migrant children crossing the border was 2,800 in October, a quarter of what it was when Carlos arrived in May. Still, those who work with migrants on the ground say the numbers could swell again, and HHS is building out its shelter capacity from 15,000 beds to 20,000, with emergency influx facilities that can handle thousands more.

Questions about Carlos’ death and whether agencies or individuals could have done more to prevent it have yet to be fully aired. CBP has not said when the DHS inspector general’s review will be completed. Congressional committees that voiced concern about the spate of child deaths have not had access to the Carlos cell videos, pending internal agency reviews.

The death of the 16-year-old, whose Facebook page showed a circle of teenage friends, reverberated beyond the small village of San Jose del Rodeo. Friends posted video of his funeral and a village wake on social media, with emotional tributes to him. Guatemalan immigrants outside New York City held a fundraiser to help support his family, one of the goals Carlos had in coming to the U.S.

John Sanders resigned soon after the incident, frustrated with what he characterized as unprepared agencies and an unresponsive Congress that allowed children in custody to suffer in harsh conditions.

“I really think the American government failed these people. The government failed people like Carlos,” he said. “I was part of that system at a very high level, and Carlos’ death will follow me for the rest of my life.”

Article Source

[wetrumpfeed]

Afternoon MAGAthread: YOUR WEEKLY PRESIDENTIAL RECAP!

HAPPY SUNDAY GUNDAY PATRIOTS!

This is u/Ivaginaryfriend here and although I'm a day late I'm back today with a weeks worth of spice and dankness for all you deplorables! For those that missed any past recaps you can check those out here!

Sunday, January 13th:

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

Democrats are saying that DACA is not worth it and don’t want to include in talks. Many Hispanics will be coming over to the Republican side, watch!

The building of the Wall on the Southern Border will bring down the crime rate throughout the entire Country!

I’m in the White House, waiting. The Democrats are everywhere but Washington as people await their pay. They are having fun and not even talking!

The damage done to our Country from a badly broken Border - Drugs, Crime and so much that is bad - is far greater than a Shutdown, which the Dems can easily fix as soon as they come back to Washington!

Thousands of illegal aliens who have committed sexual crimes against children are right now in Texas prisons. Most came through our Southern Border. We can end this easily - We need a Steel Barrier or Wall. Walls Work! John Jones, Texas Department of Public Safety. @FoxNews

Wish I could share with everyone the beauty and majesty of being in the White House and looking outside at the snow filled lawns and Rose Garden. Really is something - SPECIAL COUNTRY, SPECIAL PLACE!

Starting the long overdue pullout from Syria while hitting the little remaining ISIS territorial caliphate hard, and from many directions. Will attack again from existing nearby base if it reforms. Will devastate Turkey economically if they hit Kurds. Create 20 mile safe zone.... ... ....Likewise, do not want the Kurds to provoke Turkey. Russia, Iran and Syria have been the biggest beneficiaries of the long term U.S. policy of destroying ISIS in Syria - natural enemies. We also benefit but it is now time to bring our troops back home. Stop the ENDLESS WARS!

So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!

If Elizabeth Warren, often referred to by me as Pocahontas, did this commercial from Bighorn or Wounded Knee instead of her kitchen, with her husband dressed in full Indian garb, it would have been a smash!

Best line in the Elizabeth Warren beer catastrophe is, to her husband, “Thank you for being here. I’m glad you’re here” It’s their house, he’s supposed to be there!

The Trump portrait of an unsustainable Border Crisis is dead on. “In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with Criminal Records, including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes & 4000 violent killings.” America’s Southern.... ... ....Border is eventually going to be militarized and defended or the United States, as we have known it, is going to cease to exist...And Americans will not go gentle into that good night. Patrick Buchanan. The great people of our Country demand proper Border Security NOW!

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

Bill Maher Billboard Transformed Into NPC Meme By Conservative Street Artists

Sarah Sanders brings the fire.

To this day, one of my favorite headlines

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

Reno 911, 11 years ago.

"You can see all the stars as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard..." oops. Wrong Kinks.

No border wall...No voter ID law...hmmmm I wonder why...

Monday, January 14th:

TODAY'S ACTION:

President Trump Delivers a Statement Upon Departure

President Trump Welcomes the 2018 College Football Playoff National Champion Clemson Tigers

President Trump Delivers Remarks at the American Farm Bureau Federation's 100th Annual Convention

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

“Gas prices drop across the United States because President Trump has deregulated Energy and we are now producing a great deal more oil than ever before.” @foxandfriends But this is bad news for Russia, why would President Trump do such a thing? Thought he worked for Kremlin?

(Retweeting Ronna McDaniel) It didn't get the attention it deserved, but @realDonaldTrump recently signed a bill into law that will empower women all over the world. @IvankaTrump was instrumental in making the #WEEEAct a priority. Another huge success for the Trump admin!

(Retweeting Ronna McDaniel) Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are not negotiating in good faith with @realDonaldTrump. Instead, Congressional Democrats spent the weekend on the beach with lobbyists. It’s time for them to get back to Washington and work to secure our border and reopen the government.

(Retweeting Geraldo Rivera) Based on the record, the allegation/suggestion that the #FBI came close to investigating @realDonaldTrump as a Russian spy/asset-if true-says more about anti-Trump bias within the DOJ than it ever does about the president’s actions regarding Russia.

(Retweeting Ronna McDaniel) Economic policies that @realDonaldTrump and @IvankaTrump have championed are producing some fantastic results for America’s young women. The labor participation divide between millennial men and women is the lowest it’s ever been!

(Retweeting Ronna McDaniel) Smugglers are flooding our communities with drugs. *300 Americans die each week from heroin, 90% of it comes from south of the border. *ICE seized 2,370 lbs of fentanyl in 2017, enough to kill every American. Democrats need to work with @realDonaldTrump to secure our border.

I’ve been waiting all weekend. Democrats must get to work now. Border must be secured!

Nancy and Cryin’ Chuck can end the Shutdown in 15 minutes. At this point it has become their, and the Democrats, fault!

“Dems in Puerto Rico as Shutdown hits day 24.” @foxandfriends

The Fake News gets crazier and more dishonest every single day. Amazing to watch as certain people covering me, and the tremendous success of this administration, have truly gone MAD! Their Fake reporting creates anger and disunity. Take two weeks off and come back rested. Chill!

(Tweeting CSPAN video)

Getting ready to go on stage at the #AFBF100 in New Orleans - packed house! I will try and match the great game played yesterday by the New Orleans Saints and their incredible QB, Drew Brees. People here are very excited by the team. Going on stage now!

(Retweeting The White House) President Trump Delivers Remarks at the American Farm Bureau Federation's 100th Annual Convention

(Retweeting Donald Trump Jr.) Silence of the Moms: Media Refuse to Discuss Angel Families http://bit.ly/2FwCh79 via @BreitbartNews

(Retweeting Donald Trump Jr.) ‘Angel mom’ demands Trump’s wall, ‘we’ve become collateral damage’

Spoke w/ President Erdogan of Turkey to advise where we stand on all matters including our last two weeks of success in fighting the remnants of ISIS, and 20 mile safe zone. Also spoke about economic development between the U.S. & Turkey - great potential to substantially expand!

For decades, politicians promised to secure the border, fix our trade deals, bring back our factories, get tough on China, move the Embassy to Jerusalem, make NATO pay their fair share, and so much else - only to do NOTHING (or worse).... ... ....I am doing exactly what I pledged to do, and what I was elected to do by the citizens of our great Country. Just as I promised, I am fighting for YOU!

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

McDonald's catered a white house function. CNN is going to have a stroke.

MASSIVE REDPILL - "Toxic Masculinity is not the problem - LACK of Masculinity is"

OP ED: I’m A Senior Trump Official, And I Hope A Long Shutdown Smokes Out The Resistance

Boom: Support for Border Wall Soars Among Swing-Voters

"The Democrats’ refusal to compromise on border security and reopen the government didn’t stop President Trump from hosting national champion @ClemsonFB tonight. He personally paid for the event to be catered by some of America’s great fast food joints"

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

Jesus Christ. Every day I’m convinced I couldn’t possibly love Trump more, then he does shit like this.

Isn't it obvious what this new ad is all about? Gillette clearly hired a new spokesmaam!

So, there I was putting on my rape shoes...

Apex America. Liberals losing their collective minds. Beautiful.

1000 hamburgers

Tuesday, January 15th:

TODAY'S ACTION:

Presidential Proclamation on Religious Freedom Day, 2019

Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of Commerce

Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, and Director of National Intelligence

President Trump Welcomes the Clemson Tigers to the White House

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

The rank and file of the FBI are great people who are disgusted with what they are learning about Lyin’ James Comey and the so-called “leaders” of the FBI. Twelve have been fired or forced to leave. They got caught spying on my campaign and then called it an investigation. Bad!

Just announced that Veterans unemployment has reached an 18 year low, really good news for our Vets and their families. Will soon be an all time low! Do you think the media will report on this and all of the other great economic news?

Volkswagen will be spending 800 million dollars in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They will be making Electric Cars. Congratulations to Chattanooga and Tennessee on a job well done. A big win!

A big new Caravan is heading up to our Southern Border from Honduras. Tell Nancy and Chuck that a drone flying around will not stop them. Only a Wall will work. Only a Wall, or Steel Barrier, will keep our Country safe! Stop playing political games and end the Shutdown!

Polls are now showing that people are beginning to understand the Humanitarian Crisis and Crime at the Border. Numbers are going up fast, over 50%. Democrats will soon be known as the Party of Crime. Ridiculous that they don’t want Border Security!

(Retweeting PARISDENNARD) I trust a rancher on the Southern border more than a liberal politician from Northern California

(Retweeting Donald Trump Jr.) Worth the read. I’m A Senior Trump Official, And I Hope A Long Shutdown Smokes Out The Resistance https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/14/smoke-out-resistance/ … via @dailycaller

(Retweeting Donald Trump Jr.) Since January 1, neither CNN nor MSNBC has booked a single Angel Mom — mothers of children brutally murdered by illegal aliens — as guests on their networks, per @GOP analysis. I WONDER WHY? Silence of the Moms: Media Refuse to Discuss Angel Families

(Retweeting Mollie Hemingway) NYT Reveals FBI Retaliated Against Trump For Lawfully Firing Comey

(Retweeting Charlie Kirk) No one accused Obama of being a Russian agent after he asked for “more flexibility” until after the the election, or when Obama ignored Putin’s invasion into Crimea, or when Assad used chemical gas in Syria and Obama’s red line was crossed

(Retweeting Charlie Kirk) GREAT AGAIN: Prior to 2018, unemployment has only been below 4% 5 times since 1970 Under Donald Trump, in 2018, unemployment dipped below 4% 7 TIMES—in ONE year! What exactly are the Democrats resisting? 🤔

(Retweeting Paul Sperry) BREAKING: Inspector General Michael Horowitz still does NOT have all of Peter Strzok's and Lisa Page's texts, even though a third-party software vendor contracted to the FBI knows where all the missing data is saved

(Retweeting Paul Sperry) So...by the FBI's post-Trump standards for C.I. investigations, would this off-mike exchange between Obama & Putin's deputy (where Obama offers Putin "more flexibility" on NATO missile defense in Europe) be grounds for opening an espionage probe of Obama?

(Retweeting Tom Fitton) For the first time in a generation, we have a president who is beginning to tell the truth about the crisis on the border. @RealDonaldTrump @JudicialWatch

(Retweeting Tom Fitton) We must stand with the rule of law against the coup targeting @RealDonaldTrump. https://youtu.be/Ws679mklmIk

Why is Nancy Pelosi getting paid when people who are working are not?

Congratulations @ClemsonFB!

Great being with the National Champion Clemson Tigers last night at the White House. Because of the Shutdown I served them massive amounts of Fast Food (I paid), over 1000 hamburgers etc. Within one hour, it was all gone. Great guys and big eaters!

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

FITTON:BREAKING:Federal Court Orders Discovery on Clinton Email, Benghazi Scandal: Top Obama-Clinton Officials, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes to Respond to Judicial Watch Questions Under Oath

Democrats boycott White House border security meeting

Sarah Sanders crushes NBC News hilariously.

Reuters fucks up BIGLY! Accidentally admits the reason Dems don’t want the citizenship question on the census is because they will lose power in the House of Reps and Billions in federal funding that should go to AMERICANS!

Clemson player with the btfo

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

TD Status (2019): Memesters gonna Meme

Men Are Amazing. F*ck you, Gillette.

I haven't seen Reddit drop their McNuggets this hard since The Meltdown!

That’s How Mafia Works

I found this on r/dankmemes and thought you guys would like it

Wednesday, January 16th:

TODAY'S ACTION:

Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense

Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense

Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense

Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense

President Donald J. Trump Announces Nineteenth Wave of Judicial Nominees

Vice President Pence Delivers Remarks to the Global Chiefs of Mission Conference

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

There are now 77 major or significant Walls built around the world, with 45 countries planning or building Walls. Over 800 miles of Walls have been built in Europe since only 2015. They have all been recognized as close to 100% successful. Stop the crime at our Southern Border!

It is becoming more and more obvious that the Radical Democrats are a Party of open borders and crime. They want nothing to do with the major Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border. #2020!

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

Trump signs OPEN Government Data Act into law! Requires agencies to designate Chief Data Officer and make federal data freely and easily available. Most transparent administration in history!

Multiple Reports: Secret Service, DHS Reject Nancy Pelosi's 'Security' Excuse for Canceling State of the Union

SHUTDOWN: Why do we need so many TSA agents, Rashida?!?! Hmm?

OANN's daily Cost of Immigration Clock...

Rashida Tlaib blasts ‘right wing media’ after coverage of get-together with pro-Hezbollah activist. Declares she is a Muslim and a Palestinian. We now have a Democrat declaring she is an active foreign agent while holding elected office.

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

You may not like it, but this is what peak couple’s fashion looks like...

And then Trump says to Nancy...

My Gillette Cancellation note

MRW when I see old dried up Pelosi asking President Trump to reschedule his SOTU.

Firefighters told to not get political in backlash at Sydney fire station .

Thursday, January 17th:

TODAY'S ACTION:

Nine Nominations Sent to the Senate

President Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Appoint and Designate Individuals to Key Administration Posts

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

The Left has become totally unhinged. They no longer care what is Right for our Countrty!

So funny to watch Schumer groveling. He called for the firing of bad cop James Comey many times - UNTIL I FIRED HIM!

(Retweeting Lori Hendry) They are eaten alive by hate for our President & his voters! They care more about illegal immigrants than they do for American citizens! Look no further than CA re-directing money away from US citizens to illegal immigrants. Thank you for putting America 1st Mr. President

Thank you to Amy Kremer, Women for Trump Co-Founder, for doing such a great interview with Martha MacCallum...and by the way, women have the lowest unemployment numbers in many decades - at the highest pay ever. Proud of that!

“In 2018 alone, 20,000 illegal aliens with criminal records were apprehended trying to cross the Border, and there was a 122% increase in fentanyl being smuggled between ports of entry. Last month alone, more than 20,000 minors were smuggled into the U.S.” @seanhannity

Gregg Jarrett: “Mueller’s prosecutors knew the “Dossier” was the product of bias and deception.” It was a Fake, just like so much news coverage in our Country. Nothing but a Witch Hunt, from beginning to end!

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

President Trump’s letter to Speaker Pelosi concerning her upcoming travel

LOL! PHOTOS: Democrats Stuck on Bus After President Trump Cancels Foreign Trip

PICTURE: Pelosi’s luggage has been returned to the halls of Congress by cart

Pompeo to meet with North Korean envoy as possible second Kim-Trump summit looms, official says

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

Nancy Pelosi arrives at the airport, ready for her trip to Brussels....

The story isn't that POTUS canceled her trip .. THE STORY IS WHY THE FUCK IS THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE LEAVING TO EUROPE WHEN SHE SHOULD BE IN THE U.S. NEGOTIATING TO RE-OPEN THE GOVERNMENT. Fuck these globalist communist shitbags.

Flashback to November 19, 2016 when the r/The_Donald had only 294K subscribers

When you realize Trump waited 24 hours to respond to Pelosi because he wanted to turn her around at the airport.

Things that make you go hhhmmmm

Friday, January 18th:

TODAY'S ACTION:

Presidential Proclamation on the National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 2019

President Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate Individual to Key Administration Posts

Presidential Proclamation on National School Choice Week, 2019

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

Border rancher: “We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal.” Washington Examiner People coming across the Southern Border from many countries, some of which would be a big surprise.

Why would Nancy Pelosi leave the Country with other Democrats on a seven day excursion when 800,000 great people are not getting paid. Also, could somebody please explain to Nancy & her “big donors” in wine country that people working on farms (grapes) will have easy access in!

“It’s the Democrats keeping everything closed.” @JimInhofe So true!

Another big Caravan heading our way. Very hard to stop without a Wall!

Kevin Corke, @FoxNews “Don’t forget, Michael Cohen has already been convicted of perjury and fraud, and as recently as this week, the Wall Street Journal has suggested that he may have stolen tens of thousands of dollars....” Lying to reduce his jail time! Watch father-in-law!

Never seen the Republican Party so unified. No “Cave” on the issue of Border and National Security. A beautiful thing to see, especially when you hear the new rhetoric spewing from the mouths of the Democrats who talk Open Border, High Taxes and Crime. Stop Criminals & Drugs now!

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

AMERICA FIRST!

Thank you to our law enforcement!

Remember it was Buzzfeed that released the totally discredited “Dossier,” paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats (as opposition research), on which the entire Russian probe is based! A very sad day for journalism, but a great day for our Country!

Fake News is truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

Mueller team disputes BuzzFeed report claiming Trump told Cohen to lie | Fox News

MAGIC WAND: DOW sores AGAIN after China offers to import $1 TRILLION in US goods!

Va. State Senator Amanda Chase begins open carrying revolver to send message to potentially violent protesters after a group of immigration activistsconfronted her colleague over his bill to ban sanctuary cities.

WANT TO SEND A REMINDER TO NANCY AND CHUCK THAT WE NEED A WALL? WELL, NOW YOU CAN - DONATIONS OF $20.20 WILL SEND SCHUMER AND NANCY A FAUX BRICK

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

Hey, [The rest of Reddit]

T_D presents: great moments in aviation history

Oops... Redacted is eating itself again

Pepe The Green Dinosaur Sings His Favorite Song!

RIP Nancy & Chuck

Saturday, January 19th:

TODAY'S ACTION:

President Trump Delivers a Statement Upon Departure

President Trump Delivers Remarks on the Humanitarian Crisis on Our Southern Border

🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:

Will be leaving for Dover to be with the families of 4 very special people who lost their lives in service to our Country!

.@newtgingrich just stated that there has been no president since Abraham Lincoln who has been treated worse or more unfairly by the media than your favorite President, me! At the same time there has been no president who has accomplished more in his first two years in office!

The Economy is one of the best in our history, with unemployment at a 50 year low, and the Stock Market ready to again break a record (set by us many times) - & all you heard yesterday, based on a phony story, was Impeachment. You want to see a Stock Market Crash, Impeach Trump!

Many people are saying that the Mainstream Media will have a very hard time restoring credibility because of the way they have treated me over the past 3 years (including the election lead-up), as highlighted by the disgraceful Buzzfeed story & the even more disgraceful coverage!

Mexico is doing NOTHING to stop the Caravan which is now fully formed and heading to the United States. We stopped the last two - many are still in Mexico but can’t get through our Wall, but it takes a lot of Border Agents if there is no Wall. Not easy!

I will be live from the White House at 4:00 P.M.

SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:

McConnell: The President Stepped Up with Bold Plan to Re-Open Government, Fund Border Security | Republican Leader

HAHAHAHAHAHA Pelosi made the mistake of tweeting this 1 min before the livestream started to preemptively declare what's wrong with Trump's plan, he delayed the livestream for 10 min (likely to modify the speech), then announced he would be doing all of these. SHE SHOWED HER HAND TOO EARLY 😂

President @realDonaldTrump demonstrated courageous leadership offering a fair deal to address the security and humanitarian crisis at our border. Let’s hope Democrats care more about doing what’s right than resistance.

LMFAO!!! Redacted goes full retard and screeches “Trump’s presidency is LEGALLY OVER,” and discusses OVERTHROWING THE US GOVERNMENT; then, 5 hours later, they had to admit they fell for Fake News. Demented losers! Sad!!

Trump Is Swearing In Citizens—who did it the right way—Like A Boss

🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:

The absolute state of Democrats.

When Fake News Tries To Dunk On Trump (no dox plz)

Last night's Buzzfeed story is what finally pushed me over the edge to become a Trump supporter

A great metaphor for anyone thinking about getting their news from BuzzFeed, or pretty much any MSM source for that matter

When you pass by Pelosi’s bus after it does its 3rd loop around

WEEEEEEEEEEW!

Whata week, whata year, WHATA PRESIDENT!

Without further ado, some tunes to get you jamming through all this winning:

Promises

Bed Peace

Lost In The World

Tequilawine

Gold

MAGA ON PATRIOTS!

submitted by /u/Ivaginaryfriend [link] [comments]

[robgrayofficial]

HAPPY SUNDAY GUNDAY PATRIOTS!This is u/Ivaginaryfriend here and although I'm a day late I'm back today with a weeks worth of spice and dankness for all you deplorables! For those that missed any past recaps you can check those out here!Sunday, January 13th:🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Democrats are saying that DACA is not worth it and don’t want to include in talks. Many Hispanics will be coming over to the Republican side, watch!The building of the Wall on the Southern Border will bring down the crime rate throughout the entire Country!I’m in the White House, waiting. The Democrats are everywhere but Washington as people await their pay. They are having fun and not even talking!The damage done to our Country from a badly broken Border - Drugs, Crime and so much that is bad - is far greater than a Shutdown, which the Dems can easily fix as soon as they come back to Washington!Thousands of illegal aliens who have committed sexual crimes against children are right now in Texas prisons. Most came through our Southern Border. We can end this easily - We need a Steel Barrier or Wall. Walls Work! John Jones, Texas Department of Public Safety. @FoxNewsWish I could share with everyone the beauty and majesty of being in the White House and looking outside at the snow filled lawns and Rose Garden. Really is something - SPECIAL COUNTRY, SPECIAL PLACE!Starting the long overdue pullout from Syria while hitting the little remaining ISIS territorial caliphate hard, and from many directions. Will attack again from existing nearby base if it reforms. Will devastate Turkey economically if they hit Kurds. Create 20 mile safe zone.... ... ....Likewise, do not want the Kurds to provoke Turkey. Russia, Iran and Syria have been the biggest beneficiaries of the long term U.S. policy of destroying ISIS in Syria - natural enemies. We also benefit but it is now time to bring our troops back home. Stop the ENDLESS WARS!So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!If Elizabeth Warren, often referred to by me as Pocahontas, did this commercial from Bighorn or Wounded Knee instead of her kitchen, with her husband dressed in full Indian garb, it would have been a smash!Best line in the Elizabeth Warren beer catastrophe is, to her husband, “Thank you for being here. I’m glad you’re here” It’s their house, he’s supposed to be there!The Trump portrait of an unsustainable Border Crisis is dead on. “In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with Criminal Records, including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes & 4000 violent killings.” America’s Southern.... ... ....Border is eventually going to be militarized and defended or the United States, as we have known it, is going to cease to exist...And Americans will not go gentle into that good night. Patrick Buchanan. The great people of our Country demand proper Border Security NOW!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Bill Maher Billboard Transformed Into NPC Meme By Conservative Street ArtistsSarah Sanders brings the fire.To this day, one of my favorite headlines🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Reno 911, 11 years ago."You can see all the stars as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard..." oops. Wrong Kinks.No border wall...No voter ID law...hmmmm I wonder why...Monday, January 14th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Trump Delivers a Statement Upon DeparturePresident Trump Welcomes the 2018 College Football Playoff National Champion Clemson TigersPresident Trump Delivers Remarks at the American Farm Bureau Federation's 100th Annual Convention🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:“Gas prices drop across the United States because President Trump has deregulated Energy and we are now producing a great deal more oil than ever before.” @foxandfriends But this is bad news for Russia, why would President Trump do such a thing? Thought he worked for Kremlin?(Retweeting Ronna McDaniel) It didn't get the attention it deserved, but @realDonaldTrump recently signed a bill into law that will empower women all over the world. @IvankaTrump was instrumental in making the #WEEEAct a priority. Another huge success for the Trump admin!(Retweeting Ronna McDaniel) Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are not negotiating in good faith with @realDonaldTrump. Instead, Congressional Democrats spent the weekend on the beach with lobbyists. It’s time for them to get back to Washington and work to secure our border and reopen the government.(Retweeting Geraldo Rivera) Based on the record, the allegation/suggestion that the #FBI came close to investigating @realDonaldTrump as a Russian spy/asset-if true-says more about anti-Trump bias within the DOJ than it ever does about the president’s actions regarding Russia.(Retweeting Ronna McDaniel) Economic policies that @realDonaldTrump and @IvankaTrump have championed are producing some fantastic results for America’s young women. The labor participation divide between millennial men and women is the lowest it’s ever been!(Retweeting Ronna McDaniel) Smugglers are flooding our communities with drugs. *300 Americans die each week from heroin, 90% of it comes from south of the border. *ICE seized 2,370 lbs of fentanyl in 2017, enough to kill every American. Democrats need to work with @realDonaldTrump to secure our border.I’ve been waiting all weekend. Democrats must get to work now. Border must be secured!Nancy and Cryin’ Chuck can end the Shutdown in 15 minutes. At this point it has become their, and the Democrats, fault!“Dems in Puerto Rico as Shutdown hits day 24.” @foxandfriendsThe Fake News gets crazier and more dishonest every single day. Amazing to watch as certain people covering me, and the tremendous success of this administration, have truly gone MAD! Their Fake reporting creates anger and disunity. Take two weeks off and come back rested. Chill!(Tweeting CSPAN video)Getting ready to go on stage at the #AFBF100 in New Orleans - packed house! I will try and match the great game played yesterday by the New Orleans Saints and their incredible QB, Drew Brees. People here are very excited by the team. Going on stage now!(Retweeting The White House) President Trump Delivers Remarks at the American Farm Bureau Federation's 100th Annual Convention(Retweeting Donald Trump Jr.) Silence of the Moms: Media Refuse to Discuss Angel Families http://bit.ly/2FwCh79 via @BreitbartNews(Retweeting Donald Trump Jr.) ‘Angel mom’ demands Trump’s wall, ‘we’ve become collateral damage’Spoke w/ President Erdogan of Turkey to advise where we stand on all matters including our last two weeks of success in fighting the remnants of ISIS, and 20 mile safe zone. Also spoke about economic development between the U.S. & Turkey - great potential to substantially expand!For decades, politicians promised to secure the border, fix our trade deals, bring back our factories, get tough on China, move the Embassy to Jerusalem, make NATO pay their fair share, and so much else - only to do NOTHING (or worse).... ... ....I am doing exactly what I pledged to do, and what I was elected to do by the citizens of our great Country. Just as I promised, I am fighting for YOU!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:McDonald's catered a white house function. CNN is going to have a stroke.MASSIVE REDPILL - "Toxic Masculinity is not the problem - LACK of Masculinity is"OP ED: I’m A Senior Trump Official, And I Hope A Long Shutdown Smokes Out The ResistanceBoom: Support for Border Wall Soars Among Swing-Voters"The Democrats’ refusal to compromise on border security and reopen the government didn’t stop President Trump from hosting national champion @ClemsonFB tonight. He personally paid for the event to be catered by some of America’s great fast food joints"🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Jesus Christ. Every day I’m convinced I couldn’t possibly love Trump more, then he does shit like this.Isn't it obvious what this new ad is all about? Gillette clearly hired a new spokesmaam!So, there I was putting on my rape shoes...Apex America. Liberals losing their collective minds. Beautiful.1000 hamburgersTuesday, January 15th:TODAY'S ACTION:Presidential Proclamation on Religious Freedom Day, 2019Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of CommercePresidential Memorandum for the Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, and Director of National IntelligencePresident Trump Welcomes the Clemson Tigers to the White House🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:The rank and file of the FBI are great people who are disgusted with what they are learning about Lyin’ James Comey and the so-called “leaders” of the FBI. Twelve have been fired or forced to leave. They got caught spying on my campaign and then called it an investigation. Bad!Just announced that Veterans unemployment has reached an 18 year low, really good news for our Vets and their families. Will soon be an all time low! Do you think the media will report on this and all of the other great economic news?Volkswagen will be spending 800 million dollars in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They will be making Electric Cars. Congratulations to Chattanooga and Tennessee on a job well done. A big win!A big new Caravan is heading up to our Southern Border from Honduras. Tell Nancy and Chuck that a drone flying around will not stop them. Only a Wall will work. Only a Wall, or Steel Barrier, will keep our Country safe! Stop playing political games and end the Shutdown!Polls are now showing that people are beginning to understand the Humanitarian Crisis and Crime at the Border. Numbers are going up fast, over 50%. Democrats will soon be known as the Party of Crime. Ridiculous that they don’t want Border Security!(Retweeting PARISDENNARD) I trust a rancher on the Southern border more than a liberal politician from Northern California(Retweeting Donald Trump Jr.) Worth the read. I’m A Senior Trump Official, And I Hope A Long Shutdown Smokes Out The Resistance http://bit.ly/2AJKWQe … via @dailycaller(Retweeting Donald Trump Jr.) Since January 1, neither CNN nor MSNBC has booked a single Angel Mom — mothers of children brutally murdered by illegal aliens — as guests on their networks, per @GOP analysis. I WONDER WHY? Silence of the Moms: Media Refuse to Discuss Angel Families(Retweeting Mollie Hemingway) NYT Reveals FBI Retaliated Against Trump For Lawfully Firing Comey(Retweeting Charlie Kirk) No one accused Obama of being a Russian agent after he asked for “more flexibility” until after the the election, or when Obama ignored Putin’s invasion into Crimea, or when Assad used chemical gas in Syria and Obama’s red line was crossed(Retweeting Charlie Kirk) GREAT AGAIN: Prior to 2018, unemployment has only been below 4% 5 times since 1970 Under Donald Trump, in 2018, unemployment dipped below 4% 7 TIMES—in ONE year! What exactly are the Democrats resisting? 🤔(Retweeting Paul Sperry) BREAKING: Inspector General Michael Horowitz still does NOT have all of Peter Strzok's and Lisa Page's texts, even though a third-party software vendor contracted to the FBI knows where all the missing data is saved(Retweeting Paul Sperry) So...by the FBI's post-Trump standards for C.I. investigations, would this off-mike exchange between Obama & Putin's deputy (where Obama offers Putin "more flexibility" on NATO missile defense in Europe) be grounds for opening an espionage probe of Obama?(Retweeting Tom Fitton) For the first time in a generation, we have a president who is beginning to tell the truth about the crisis on the border. @RealDonaldTrump @JudicialWatch(Retweeting Tom Fitton) We must stand with the rule of law against the coup targeting @RealDonaldTrump. https://youtu.be/Ws679mklmIkWhy is Nancy Pelosi getting paid when people who are working are not?Congratulations @ClemsonFB!Great being with the National Champion Clemson Tigers last night at the White House. Because of the Shutdown I served them massive amounts of Fast Food (I paid), over 1000 hamburgers etc. Within one hour, it was all gone. Great guys and big eaters!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:FITTON:BREAKING:Federal Court Orders Discovery on Clinton Email, Benghazi Scandal: Top Obama-Clinton Officials, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes to Respond to Judicial Watch Questions Under OathDemocrats boycott White House border security meetingSarah Sanders crushes NBC News hilariously.Reuters fucks up BIGLY! Accidentally admits the reason Dems don’t want the citizenship question on the census is because they will lose power in the House of Reps and Billions in federal funding that should go to AMERICANS!Clemson player with the btfo🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:TD Status (2019): Memesters gonna MemeMen Are Amazing. F*ck you, Gillette.I haven't seen Reddit drop their McNuggets this hard since The Meltdown!That’s How Mafia WorksI found this on r/dankmemes and thought you guys would like itWednesday, January 16th:TODAY'S ACTION:Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of DefensePresidential Memorandum for the Secretary of DefensePresidential Memorandum for the Secretary of DefensePresidential Memorandum for the Secretary of DefensePresident Donald J. Trump Announces Nineteenth Wave of Judicial NomineesVice President Pence Delivers Remarks to the Global Chiefs of Mission Conference🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:There are now 77 major or significant Walls built around the world, with 45 countries planning or building Walls. Over 800 miles of Walls have been built in Europe since only 2015. They have all been recognized as close to 100% successful. Stop the crime at our Southern Border!It is becoming more and more obvious that the Radical Democrats are a Party of open borders and crime. They want nothing to do with the major Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border. #2020!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Trump signs OPEN Government Data Act into law! Requires agencies to designate Chief Data Officer and make federal data freely and easily available. Most transparent administration in history!Multiple Reports: Secret Service, DHS Reject Nancy Pelosi's 'Security' Excuse for Canceling State of the UnionSHUTDOWN: Why do we need so many TSA agents, Rashida?!?! Hmm?OANN's daily Cost of Immigration Clock...Rashida Tlaib blasts ‘right wing media’ after coverage of get-together with pro-Hezbollah activist. Declares she is a Muslim and a Palestinian. We now have a Democrat declaring she is an active foreign agent while holding elected office.🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:You may not like it, but this is what peak couple’s fashion looks like...And then Trump says to Nancy...My Gillette Cancellation noteMRW when I see old dried up Pelosi asking President Trump to reschedule his SOTU.Firefighters told to not get political in backlash at Sydney fire station .Thursday, January 17th:TODAY'S ACTION:Nine Nominations Sent to the SenatePresident Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Appoint and Designate Individuals to Key Administration Posts🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:The Left has become totally unhinged. They no longer care what is Right for our Countrty!So funny to watch Schumer groveling. He called for the firing of bad cop James Comey many times - UNTIL I FIRED HIM!(Retweeting Lori Hendry) They are eaten alive by hate for our President & his voters! They care more about illegal immigrants than they do for American citizens! Look no further than CA re-directing money away from US citizens to illegal immigrants. Thank you for putting America 1st Mr. PresidentThank you to Amy Kremer, Women for Trump Co-Founder, for doing such a great interview with Martha MacCallum...and by the way, women have the lowest unemployment numbers in many decades - at the highest pay ever. Proud of that!“In 2018 alone, 20,000 illegal aliens with criminal records were apprehended trying to cross the Border, and there was a 122% increase in fentanyl being smuggled between ports of entry. Last month alone, more than 20,000 minors were smuggled into the U.S.” @seanhannityGregg Jarrett: “Mueller’s prosecutors knew the “Dossier” was the product of bias and deception.” It was a Fake, just like so much news coverage in our Country. Nothing but a Witch Hunt, from beginning to end!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:President Trump’s letter to Speaker Pelosi concerning her upcoming travelLOL! PHOTOS: Democrats Stuck on Bus After President Trump Cancels Foreign TripPICTURE: Pelosi’s luggage has been returned to the halls of Congress by cartPompeo to meet with North Korean envoy as possible second Kim-Trump summit looms, official says🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Nancy Pelosi arrives at the airport, ready for her trip to Brussels....The story isn't that POTUS canceled her trip .. THE STORY IS WHY THE FUCK IS THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE LEAVING TO EUROPE WHEN SHE SHOULD BE IN THE U.S. NEGOTIATING TO RE-OPEN THE GOVERNMENT. Fuck these globalist communist shitbags.Flashback to November 19, 2016 when the r/The_Donald had only 294K subscribersWhen you realize Trump waited 24 hours to respond to Pelosi because he wanted to turn her around at the airport.Things that make you go hhhmmmmFriday, January 18th:TODAY'S ACTION:Presidential Proclamation on the National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 2019President Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate Individual to Key Administration PostsPresidential Proclamation on National School Choice Week, 2019🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Border rancher: “We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal.” Washington Examiner People coming across the Southern Border from many countries, some of which would be a big surprise.Why would Nancy Pelosi leave the Country with other Democrats on a seven day excursion when 800,000 great people are not getting paid. Also, could somebody please explain to Nancy & her “big donors” in wine country that people working on farms (grapes) will have easy access in!“It’s the Democrats keeping everything closed.” @JimInhofe So true!Another big Caravan heading our way. Very hard to stop without a Wall!Kevin Corke, @FoxNews “Don’t forget, Michael Cohen has already been convicted of perjury and fraud, and as recently as this week, the Wall Street Journal has suggested that he may have stolen tens of thousands of dollars....” Lying to reduce his jail time! Watch father-in-law!Never seen the Republican Party so unified. No “Cave” on the issue of Border and National Security. A beautiful thing to see, especially when you hear the new rhetoric spewing from the mouths of the Democrats who talk Open Border, High Taxes and Crime. Stop Criminals & Drugs now!MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!AMERICA FIRST!Thank you to our law enforcement!Remember it was Buzzfeed that released the totally discredited “Dossier,” paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats (as opposition research), on which the entire Russian probe is based! A very sad day for journalism, but a great day for our Country!Fake News is truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Mueller team disputes BuzzFeed report claiming Trump told Cohen to lie | Fox NewsMAGIC WAND: DOW sores AGAIN after China offers to import $1 TRILLION in US goods!Va. State Senator Amanda Chase begins open carrying revolver to send message to potentially violent protesters after a group of immigration activistsconfronted her colleague over his bill to ban sanctuary cities.WANT TO SEND A REMINDER TO NANCY AND CHUCK THAT WE NEED A WALL? WELL, NOW YOU CAN - DONATIONS OF $20.20 WILL SEND SCHUMER AND NANCY A FAUX BRICK🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Hey, [The rest of Reddit]T_D presents: great moments in aviation historyOops... Redacted is eating itself againPepe The Green Dinosaur Sings His Favorite Song!RIP Nancy & ChuckSaturday, January 19th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Trump Delivers a Statement Upon DeparturePresident Trump Delivers Remarks on the Humanitarian Crisis on Our Southern Border🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Will be leaving for Dover to be with the families of 4 very special people who lost their lives in service to our Country!.@newtgingrich just stated that there has been no president since Abraham Lincoln who has been treated worse or more unfairly by the media than your favorite President, me! At the same time there has been no president who has accomplished more in his first two years in office!The Economy is one of the best in our history, with unemployment at a 50 year low, and the Stock Market ready to again break a record (set by us many times) - & all you heard yesterday, based on a phony story, was Impeachment. You want to see a Stock Market Crash, Impeach Trump!Many people are saying that the Mainstream Media will have a very hard time restoring credibility because of the way they have treated me over the past 3 years (including the election lead-up), as highlighted by the disgraceful Buzzfeed story & the even more disgraceful coverage!Mexico is doing NOTHING to stop the Caravan which is now fully formed and heading to the United States. We stopped the last two - many are still in Mexico but can’t get through our Wall, but it takes a lot of Border Agents if there is no Wall. Not easy!I will be live from the White House at 4:00 P.M.SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:McConnell: The President Stepped Up with Bold Plan to Re-Open Government, Fund Border Security | Republican LeaderHAHAHAHAHAHA Pelosi made the mistake of tweeting this 1 min before the livestream started to preemptively declare what's wrong with Trump's plan, he delayed the livestream for 10 min (likely to modify the speech), then announced he would be doing all of these. SHE SHOWED HER HAND TOO EARLY 😂President @realDonaldTrump demonstrated courageous leadership offering a fair deal to address the security and humanitarian crisis at our border. Let’s hope Democrats care more about doing what’s right than resistance.LMFAO!!! Redacted goes full retard and screeches “Trump’s presidency is LEGALLY OVER,” and discusses OVERTHROWING THE US GOVERNMENT; then, 5 hours later, they had to admit they fell for Fake News. Demented losers! Sad!!Trump Is Swearing In Citizens—who did it the right way—Like A Boss🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:The absolute state of Democrats.When Fake News Tries To Dunk On Trump (no dox plz)Last night's Buzzfeed story is what finally pushed me over the edge to become a Trump supporterA great metaphor for anyone thinking about getting their news from BuzzFeed, or pretty much any MSM source for that matterWhen you pass by Pelosi’s bus after it does its 3rd loop aroundWEEEEEEEEEEW!Whata week, whata year, WHATA PRESIDENT!Without further ado, some tunes to get you jamming through all this winning:PromisesBed PeaceLost In The WorldTequilawineGoldMAGA ON PATRIOTS! #robgray

[theconservativebrief]

Even before Sessions’ mention of Scripture, the new policy prompted objections from the religious community…

(Kurtis Lee, Los Angeles Times) A day after Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited the Bible to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policies and the separation of children from their families, many faith-based leaders are forming coalitions, signing letters and issuing sharply worded statements against the policy.

[embedded content]

“I would like to cite to you the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13,” Sessions said Thursday in a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Ind. He went on to say that the Bible argues Christians must “obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”

In the past, some immigration cases were handled administratively and families weren’t broken up.

“I hate to see the separation of parents and children,” Trump told reporters Friday, refusing to acknowledge that the separations are caused by his administration’s new policy. As he has in the past, he blamed Democrats, saying they “forced that law upon our nation,” triggering the separations.

On Friday, immigration officials said that in the last two months, 1,995 children had been separated from their guardians.

** MORE ILLEGAL ALIEN CHILDREN COVERAGE at Liberty Headlines **

Even before Sessions’ mention of Scripture — which the White House defended but others called inappropriate — the new policy prompted objections from the religious community. Here’s what some religious institutions and prominent faith leaders have had to say about the policy and recent comments by the administration:

———

U.S. CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the conference and archbishop of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston in Texas, called the administration’s policy an effort to “erode the capacity of asylum to save lives.”

“Our government has the discretion in our laws to ensure that young children are not separated from their parents and exposed to irreparable harm and trauma,” DiNardo said in a statement released earlier in the week ahead of the group’s spring conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

He added, “while protecting our borders is important, we can and must do better as a government, and as a society, to find other ways to ensure that safety.”

Similar sentiments were shared in panel discussions at the conference this week.

J. Brian Bransfield, a priest in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the group’s general secretary, said Wednesday that “asylum is an instrument to preserve the right to life.”

He added, “separating babies from their mothers is not the answer and is immoral.”

———

AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH

The church’s Council of Bishops denounced the policy as “sad and sinful” on Friday and said it “shows a deep misunderstanding of the transforming truth of scripture.”

“The Bible does not justify discrimination masked as racism, sexism, economic inequality, oppression or the abuse of children,” the AME bishops said in a statement. “Jesus, who was an immigrant who had to leave the place of his birth and immigrate to Egypt because of an oppressive leader and system, admonishes all that the poor, children, the elderly, widows, and widowers should have a special place of justice and compassion in every nation.”

———

SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION

During its annual convention in Dallas this week, the group, which has a fellowship of about 46,500 Baptist churches, passed a resolution calling for compassionate immigration policies for families.

“We desire to see immigration reform include an emphasis on securing our borders and providing a pathway to legal status with appropriate restitutionary measures,” read the resolution.

The resolution went on to say that “maintaining the priority of family unity” is critical to immigration reform.

———

RELIGIOUS ACTION CENTER OF REFORM JUDAISM

The group was among the first faith-based groups to assail the Trump administration policy.

In a statement released last month, the group said “the policy of separating migrant children from their parents is unconscionable.”

“Our Jewish tradition calls on us to welcome the stranger, to treat immigrants fairly, and to empathize with the widow, the stranger, and the orphan because we ourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt,” the statement said. “The inhumane treatment of migrant children and parents is a clear indication that the U.S. government has fallen far short of this standard. We all need to do better, lest this shameful chapter in our nation’s history come to define our future.”

———

FRANKLIN GRAHAM

The influential evangelical leader was a staunch supporter of Trump during the 2016 election. At Trump’s January 2017 inauguration Graham gave a biblical reading.

Even so, he offered strong criticism of the administration’s policy.

“It’s disgraceful, and it’s terrible to see families ripped apart and I don’t support that one bit,” Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, told the Christian Broadcasting Network on Tuesday.

———

THE REVS. WILLIAM J. BARBER II AND LIZ THEOHARIS

The two are co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, a civil disobedience movement that aims to push the issue of poverty to the top of the national political agenda. The group is holding rallies nationwide this summer.

Barber, a Disciples of Christ pastor from North Carolina, and Theoharis, a Presbyterian minister from New York, said in a statement Friday that Sessions’ use of Scripture is “twisting the word of God in defense of immoral practices … a tactic used to justify keeping Black people in chattel slavery, committing genocide against Native Americans and segregating people under Jim Crow.”

They added, “His comments are anathema to any person of faith. And any politician who supports his position is an accessory to these crimes against children and humanity.”

©2018 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Original Source ->

Religious Groups & Leaders Denounce Trump’s Immigration Policy

via The Conservative Brief

[trendingnewsb]

Life As An American Punk Band in China

1970s punk rock was all about stickin’ it to the man. Rules were made to be broken, and guitars were made to be played badly. China came late to the punk game, in part because the culture puts great reverence on traditional music, and in perhaps greater part because the government does all it can to take the counter out of counterculture. But punks in China have now at last begun to rock, even if they have to tell blatant lies to the government to do it.

American punk band Shore Leave are cruise ship musicians by day, and when they’re done crooning for tourists, they don bandanas and fake names to rock out at Chinese venues, often dodging government censors in the process …

5

Every Show Is A Battle Between The Performers And The Censors

China started cracking down extra hard on concerts in 2013, and it was all Elton John’s fault.

Elton John had dedicated a recent concert to Ai Weiwei, a sculptor, architect, photographer, and strong critic of the Chinese government. Police were brought in, asking Elton to release a statement saying he was only inspired by Weiwei’s art, not his political activism. Elton refused. So officials responded by calling for new rules for foreign performers, including one that would surely silence all kinds of underdogs: No one would be allowed to perform unless they held a college degree.

Read Next

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Officially, the restriction was never put into place, but unofficially, organizers scrambled to find university certificates for their acts, and a bunch of new applications for performance licenses got turned down. And this is just one part of the infernal regulatory machine in China, where every individual music performance and even every lyric sung at concerts needs to be approved in advance by the Ministry of Culture. If the lyrics are approved, the show goes on. If they are not, either the song is pulled from rotation or the band is banned from playing completely.

“No lyrics that criticize the ruling party,” says The Captain, who does bass and vocals for Shore Leave. “No lyrics about ghosts/supernatural stuff.” One anti-capitalist rule insists artists refrain from romanticizing the luxury life — so no songs about tigers on leashes and Crystal-filled hot tubs, please.

The vague nature of these laws lets the government censor whatever they like for basically any reason, and a scary number of those reasons come down to bigotry. “You used to be able to sing pro-LGBT songs,” says The Captain, “but that’s changed,” which keeps Shore Leave from performing this album opener:

This is the case despite the fact that China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997 and removed it from the official list of mental disorders in 2001, but maybe it’s not too surprising. After all, the country still has forced electroshock conversion therapy.

Many bands dodge fallout by changing their most controversial lyrics before they submit them for review. Take Shore Leave’s not-at-all-political ode to Parks And Recreation‘s alien cult leader, Zorp. “The promoter told us the ‘revolution’ lyrics in ‘Armagedon-A-Go-Go’ might be problematic,” says The Captain. “So we wrote ‘Revolution / They gonna burn city hall’ as ‘Evolution / They’re gone, Arsenio Hall.'” Hey, nobody said the new tunes had to make any sense.

4

There’s A Secret Language That Lets You Badmouth The Government

When bands in China reference “Zhongnanhai” in a negative or mocking way, they’ll insist they’re not referring to the residential compound for China’s top leaders, but rather the popular cigarette brand.

Whether they’re hiding their anger in their lyrics or merely airing their grievances to their mail delivery person, the Chinese have implemented a sort of code that allows them to speak freely without drawing scrutiny from the powers that be. Guitarist Lt. Bugs recalls one of their first experiences with this special language: “Someone told us about a venue owner in Beijing who was ‘lost in a game of hide and seek.'” That, it turns out, is local slang for someone who died suddenly while in police custody.

Other fun examples include phrases like “the square of hopelessness.” That’s not a description of soul-crushingly dull cubicle life, but a thinly veiled reference to Tiananmen Square, which is a mostly off-limits topic in the arts.

Sometimes the code isn’t code at all. Musicians simply sing in English, as many Chinese officials do not speak or understand it. This plays to Shore Leave’s advantage. Regardless of whatever was officially submitted beforehand, they sometimes simply sing their original lyrics onstage — the odds are no one will be able to tell the difference.

3

Some Bands Are Completely Manufactured

A Chinese performance venue might mix bands to create new acts on the spot, dumping yet another challenge on artists trying to keep it real. Punk bands are subjected to this as much as anyone else is, despite that going against the very nature of everything the genre stands for. You may be thinking, “But NSYNC and the Spice Girls were manufactured. Were they not the greatest groups in the history of music?” Yes, they were. But those group members auditioned, got to know each other, practiced their craft. They became friends and co-workers before they ever set foot on stage. Manufactured bands in China are not afforded that luxury.

Lt. Bugs says these bands are often thrown together by agents at such a last minute that many of them “probably didn’t even meet before the show.” But it doesn’t matter if the band members can play their instruments with any real chemistry. Hell, it doesn’t matter if they can play their instruments at all. “Sometimes they’ll even be playing instruments to backing tracks,” says Shore Leave drummer First Mate, “making the singer essentially perform karaoke.”

The venue well may not be hiring these musicians for their creative abilities anyway. Lt. Bugs tells of the time she saw a promoter switch a band’s singer and bassist right before a show. “The bassist was a pretty-looking white girl,” she says, “and the singer was a darker-skinned Hispanic man. They wanted the pretty white girl up front.” Shore Leave has even seen fliers for their own concerts using stock photo models instead of their actual faces. That’s what happens when none of the band members are pretty enough for promoters.

By now, you might be wondering how watered-down lyrics and plastic supermodels equal punk. To put it simply, the very act of listening to anything that isn’t traditional music is an act of defiance in China. The genre of punk and the identities of the singers often boil down to “This is not Chinese.” If it’s not Chinese, it’s “Western.” If it’s Western, it’s not traditional, and it’s therefore subversive. Even the iconic punk style has received a makeover thanks to this amalgamation of all things Western. Fans will wear denim jeans and clothing with English phrases emblazoned across them as a roundabout way to show their love for the American lifestyle.

2

The Most Legit Punk Shows Go Underground

If you’re still worried these concerts sound fatally not-punk, take comfort in knowing that some shows ignore every regulation. Rather than going through the proper official channels, artists slap shows together and hope to high heaven that they don’t get caught.

Of course, advertising an illegal concert is super risky, so promoters take a very DIY approach to generating buzz. Flyers passed at shows drum up excitement for the next gig. Super secretive magazines provide info. “No names are included on zines,” says Lt. Bugs, “because, again, you have to get gov permission to distribute any sort of media. So nobody wants their name attached to an unofficial print.” The band shared an example of an underground magazine promoting local shows.

That’s all very cute and 1980s, but this is 2018, so of course online advertising is a thing. For Chinese punk acts, ads are usually images, because JPEGs are a lot harder than text for censors to read and flag. And because illegal promoters can’t advertise via normal channels, things get pretty creative. Shore Leave once got a whole audience together through Tantan, China’s Tinder. “We spent a couple weeks before our ship landed talking to girls and guys online on the app,” says The Captain. “Told them to meet us for a drink at the bar we were playing at.” 50 lonely Chinese singles showed up at the bar that night and were converted to punk fans.

Despite all the measures to avoid government attention, illegal shows still feel the wrath of censors from time to time. Usually it’s when a rival venue sees an opportunity to take out some of the competition. “That happened to an expat bar where they didn’t file for an entertainment license for an open mic comedy show,” says Lt. Bugs. “The place got raided. Some bartenders got fired for not having work visas. The bar got fined.” This put the fear of the law into them, and the place never hosted a show again.

1

Small Towns Are Hearing Punk (And Seeing Foreigners) For The First Time

Like we said, there’s a heavy focus on traditional music in China. Rebellious youth have also grown fond of rap and hip-hop, but these genres aren’t always gateways to the wider world. For starters, there are those pesky bans on seditious lyrics. And then some of China’s most popular rap songs are so damn patriotic that they go all the way to the other side and become inflammatory toward all outsiders. Take this lovely gem, which starts out with the phrases “stupid foreigners” and “fuck your mothers.”

You’d think the government would clamp down on that sort of thing, but it’s possible that Chinese censors aren’t 100 percent consistent with their standards.

Rock is new to many Chinese audiences, and so are foreigners. It’s not unusual for a punk band to perform for an audience that has literally never heard rock music before … or seen a white person up close and personal. “There’s almost a freak show element, in that some people just come to see foreigners, regardless of the music,” says The Captain. When people approach band members after shows, they often don’t talk about the music. “They just run through some conversational cues to practice their English.”

Because of this novelty, punk bands often find themselves sandwiched between bigger acts, like those aforementioned traditional Chinese performers. This means any hip youngsters looking to stick it to the man are forced to share space with chess-playing grandpas who want to hear the bamboo flute music they grew up with. “The promoter,” says The Captain, recalling one such show, “told us that the old men at the bar were complaining about the punk bands: ‘The singers can’t sing!’ The age gap between the two audiences present was obvious.”

But hiding in the sea of grumpy old men and wide-eyed punk rock virgins is a handful of rebellious youth who absolutely understand the point of the genre, even if they don’t understand the lyrics. “This one girl,” says Lt. Bugs, “who knew a little bit of English, kept buying us rounds of Tsingtao and baijiu shots and saying ‘revolution revolution’ over and over to us.” She never quite figured out the group’s actual name, so she called them the “revolution band.” And really, there was no reason to correct her.

Shore Leave appeared in a documentary on this subject alongside Bill Stevenson (Black Flag, The Descendents) and Steve Terreberry. Watch it online for free. Listen to their music and buy their album to support them here. Fight the power with Carolyn on Twitter and Instagram.

Share your own weird life experiences with Cracked here.

Support Cracked’s journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more on the crazy overseas life, check out The 4 Strangest Things Nobody Tells You About Life in China and 5 Insane Facts Of Life In Rural China.

Also, follow us on Facebook, Punk.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2502-life-as-american-punk-band-in-china.html

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[awesome-voleaksan-blog]

Documentary History Channel Aliens

An article titled "7 Colossal Misinterpretations about Outsiders" by Natalie Wolchover has showed up as of late on a few sites including Space.com; Life's Little Secrets (prime site); and the Huffington Post (shortened to only five). It's about how researchers see the presence and nature of cutting edge ET instead of the more typical impression of the colossal unwashed. The accompanying remarks are my tending to of the regular misguided judgments raised. How about we check whether I concur or can't help contradicting the decisions, and most vital, why. Gracious, obviously the "THEY" alluded to is our smart and mechanically progressed ET.

THEY Won't NOT EXIST: Oppose this idea

This is the main instance of the glorious seven with researchers supporting wagers. They "may" not exist. At that point too they "may" exist.

Approve, we have no real outsider bodies on the section in the lab, so the presence of outsiders to date is unadulterated hypothesis. With regards to life in the universe, we need to conjecture from a factual specimen of one - earthbound life. Extrapolating from a factual specimen of one is laden with peril. In any case, while doing the math, such huge numbers of stars, such a large number of planets, so much time, so much space, such an extensive amount the 'right stuff' accessible forever as-we-probably am aware it, that, not very many researchers would wager their family cultivate that earthbound life, and earthly canny life, and earthly smart existence with cutting edge innovation was the notorious IT in the universe on the loose.

Positively SETI (Scan for ExtraTerrestrial Insight) researchers, one of which highlighted noticeably in the first paper, wouldn't embrace the "we are distant from everyone else" situation. It would make a joke of their own one of a kind picked calling and professions. The conceivable presence of ET may presently simply come down to unadulterated measurements, however those insights have been crunched and twofold crunched and tripled crunched over and over and again by the best science as of now accessible to us. The decision, well SETI researchers have voted to put their chance, endeavors and vitality into, and wager on, the "we are not the only one" alternative.

At long last, on the off chance that you receive the quantum (material science) mantra, anything that isn't prohibited is necessary; anything that can happen, must happen. Life isn't illegal; life can happen - we're verification; hence life must happen over and over and once more.

THEY WON'T COME 'Face to face': Oppose this idea

By "come", the accord is that fragile living creature and-blood outsiders will strongly go through silicon and metal surrogates that are themselves built misleadingly keen (AI), in this manner sparing the organic outsiders a considerable measure of time, cost, exertion, vitality and peril. Conveying zillions of mechanical AI space tests to investigate the world while the fragile living creature and-blood outsiders remain at home however runs counter to what we people do. Of course, we put gigantic measures of assets into silicon and steel. Mechanical tests are regularly our eyes and ears from unmanned military automatons to spy-in-the-sky satellites to tests to the planets and into the profundities of the sea. In any case, there is simply something sufficiently insane about the human condition that people demand seeing and hearing for themselves, regardless of the possibility that supplemented by innovation, the marvels of, whatever.

Beyond any doubt we sent unmanned tests to the Moon - yet we took after by sending people face to face. Beyond any doubt we send unmanned tests to Mars - however people will go there face to face in the end. Beyond any doubt we investigate the sea's chasm with automated submersibles, however people still go down to look into close and individual at RMS Titanic, even unto the most profound parts of the sea trenches. Beyond any doubt we can, and do, send instrumentation into the core of huge tornadoes, however that hasn't ceased 'storm chasers' from purposely embeddings themselves into the vortex of dangerous twisters, at times as an excite, all the more regularly as not to propel the art of meteorology and determining. People always put themselves in danger despite the fact that robots improve and less expensive. That is the pith of the inquiry "Why climb Mount Everest?" The appropriate response, as usual: "In light of the fact that it's there". Presently obviously to do these sorts of things requires innovative enlargement, from warm garments (Mount Everest) to scuba outfit (investigating the Incomparable Obstruction Reef) to strengthened steel holders that keep out the outside condition (investigating RMS Titanic or setting off to the Moon). Be that as it may, the natural substance remains cased inside.

In the event that outsiders develop a high IQ and an advanced innovation, at that point they no uncertainty will want to investigate and see what's on the opposite side of the slope and climb their own particular Mount Everest. Maybe right off the bat by surrogates; yet in the event that they have one tenth the interest and drive of people, they will strongly go face to face by snare or by evildoer. Mechanical tests may illuminate ET that the third shake from a stellar body called Sol has a biosphere, yet ET will need to see with itself own eyes, sometime.

Presently I may yield that by means of cutting edge bioengineering capacities, outsiders could expand themselves with innovation to such a degree, to the point that they may be almost counterfeit developments - our manufactured hip joints and dentures and plastic heart valves taken to their intelligent decision. The Daleks of "Specialist Who" are a prime illustration. Maybe their psyche could be downloaded into something more lasting than wetware like programming a vital part of a silicon and steel PC. Yet, the key piece is that their organic substance (their brain) stays in place and strongly goes.

THEY WON'T MATE WITH US: Oppose this idea

Outsider natural chemistry wouldn't be completely indistinguishable to our organic chemistry, or deciphered, their hereditary qualities wouldn't be totally indistinguishable to our hereditary qualities. Much the same as people can't mate and imitate with petunias, however both are earthbound living things and offer DNA, people are even more averse to have the capacity to mate with ET. Anyway, for what reason do I differ with this most evident of the self-evident? Four reasons: 1) Hereditary building; 2) Folklore; 3) Present day creature mutilations and 4) UFO snatchings. Taking each thusly...

Hereditary Designing: If ET is innovatively best in class enough to get from that point (wherever that is) to here, at that point it's coherent to expect that they are mechanically exceptional in loads of territories - like hereditary building. Approve, people can not normally mate with petunias. Be that as it may, accepting they needed to; couldn't our geneticists take a human regenerative cell and the conceptive cell of a petunia, and control both to such a degree, to the point that a union between the two may be conceivable? Approve, that is quite far out, yet geneticists have effectively joined two different species qualities into one - the 'Frankenfish', licensed as the GloFish, consolidating the Zebrafish with different qualities of fluorescence proteins from different species rings a bell as only one illustration. All things considered, the field is known as creating hereditarily altered living beings (GMO's)! Much discussion seethes about GMO's as human sustenances. That aside, in principle, a human-petunia combo is conceivable. We share some hereditary qualities and DNA with the petunia.

Folklore: One would be unable to discover a culture who's folklore did exclude cases of their 'divine beings' mating with us minor mortals. Greek folklore is an easy decision given the ever randy Zeus. Scriptural folklore additionally records sex between the 'children of god' and the 'little girls of men'. Presently do researchers acknowledge the majority of the multi-a large number of gods of the world's societies as heavenly elements? - Likely not. That at that point leaves them a decision between these divinities being as 100% anecdotal as the Easter Bunny and Sherlock Holmes, or else they are outsiders. To me, likelihood manages that the more legitimate alternative of the two is ET - a hypothesis that likewise comprehends the Fermi Oddity - "where is everyone?"

The Fermi Catch 22 can be summed up basically enough just by hypothesizing the presence of no less than one other mechanically propelled extraterrestrial progress in our Smooth Way World that is more seasoned than our development by no less than a couple of a large number of years and with similar sorts of 'strongly going' drives as we people have (i.e. - plain old interest, the "what's on the opposite side of the hill?"). On the off chance that that by itself is taken as guaranteed and that's it, at that point similarly as people investigated and colonized Planet Earth in a minor division of the World's presence (likewise organisms, bugs, winged creatures, and so on.), mechanically able extraterrestrials would have investigated and colonized the Smooth Path Universe in a little part of its reality, even at say undulating out at one to 10% the speed of light. Planet Earth is a piece of that Smooth Way Cosmic system, so "where is everyone?"

On account of people concealing Earth, we don't have to ask "where is everyone?" We're all over the place. On account of ET, we do ask "where is everyone?" They ought to be here. Researchers say they're not, never have been, and in this manner they need to clarify the Fermi conundrum by different means. On the opposite side of the fence, the individuals who see confirm in those 'antiquated space explorers' and in UFOs have no Catch 22 with which to need to grapple with.

Creature Mutilations: Creature mutilations are positively very much archived, and the cause(s) are secretive no doubt. In the event that human offenders, for what reason hasn't anybody been caught, attempted and sentenced infringement of creature welfare laws, decimation of private property (if domesticated animals) and trespass? On the off chance that normal predators are to be faulted - well that ought to be grisly evident assuming genuine and no debate ought to along these lines result. On the off chance that extraterrestrials, well that clarifies a considerable measure that common predation can't care for exactness cuts and absence of blood and no foot/paw prints and no indications of a battle, however it additionally leaves uber questions unanswered. Probably, it has a comment with ET enthusiasm for earthly natural chemistry and hereditary qualities.

Documentary History Channel

[thankguard]

IN DEPTH: MELBOURNE’s bubbling lo-fi jazz scene.

Over the last 5 years, a lot of the critically-acclaimed non-rap music repped by global influencers like: The Fader, Soulection & Colors Berlin can somehow be traced back to these names: PHARRELL, MAC DEMARCO, KING KRULE, TYLER THE CREATOR, STEVE LACY, & ILLEGAL CIVILIZATION. What do all these MF’s have in common? Jazz chords.

Historically, Australian “urban” music has been made up of really white RAP and extremely poppy R&B… i’m talking Jason Derulo, Guy Sebastian, Jessica Mauboi type shit.

What about Jazz tho? It’s a vibe that goes hand-in-hand with the Aussie way of life, but up until recently there just hasn’t been enough encouragement for young, talented musicians to choose this path.

The first dude we noticed on this tip in our little scene was Sydney boi STEVÀN. At like 15, this guy was dropping heaps of really unique, catchy jazz/pop/rap tracks. Writing, recording multiple instruments, complex vocal harmonies and rapping too. He deleted all the tracks from that era. “4U” survived cos it’s on our SC.

These days, STEVÀN is killing it. His music of late has been pretty experimental, but he's obviously a prodigy and people are starting to notice.

I’m almost certain, his older spiritual bro: Brisbane’s REI SO LA FKA SUPER REI has been around at least as long (but we didn’t find him till this year). Rei gotta be one of the most underrated musicians in the country. Check him out.

It was always kinda sad, seeing musical aliens like Rei & Stevan making this sort of music without a local movement to bounce off. At some point in the last 6 months, a new-wave of fly, young MELBOURNIANS popped-up out of nowhere forming the exact movement Australia lacked.

NURU INDI, ZK KING, $AVAGE THE GIRL, PRINCE LOVE, RINI, SAISHI & BIG WORDS (to name a few) are jizzing & jazzing all over their bedroom studios as we speak. There’s something really exciting about this culturally-diverse cast of characters and the music they make.

NURU INDI, is like HOMESHAKE mixed with STEVE LACY. Suss “CHUBBY CHEEKS” or “PRETTY MF”. The dude raps too.

I don’t even know what to make of ZK KING which is a good sign. She is a purveyor of vibes.

$AVAGE THE GIRL will drop a lo-fi pop-anthem, followed by an EP of semi-ironic demos. She also incorporates UK dance influences into her music which is always dripping with personality.

PRINCE LOVE hasn’t dropped much yet, but we’ve heard some unreleased stuff from his debut EP and shit is fire.

RINI is a little more established. He dropped an album 3 months ago. His sound swings from R&B/SOUL to weirder jizz-jazz stuff. Suss “ELEVATORS” or “MONDAYS”.

SAISHI laces warped out beats with pitched vocals and hella feels.

Why Melbourne? Burn-City icons BARO & NASTY MARS have been influential af. Just seeing these dudes around town looking fresh, pulling up to shows with full jazz bands and flexing, must’ve inspired a tonne of local teens.

Also, THE OPERATVES and their whole crew… S I L E N T J A Y, BILLY DAVIS etc. Have been doing similar stuff for ages. TBH this probs isn’t jazz… but theres something that ties all these G’s together and it smells jazzy to me. These guys are all so young and their music is very raw, but they go as hard as any local rapper & the music they make has the potential to put us on the map. Don’t be sleeping.

[studentofrhetoric-blog]

Tuesday, April 11th, 2017

Domestic & International News:

--- "U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed the U.S. instrument of ratification for Montenegro's accession to NATO, the White House said in a statement. Last month the Senate overwhelmingly backed the expansion of NATO to allow Montenegro to join the alliance, hoping to send a message that the United States will push back against Russian efforts to increase its influence in Europe."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nato-montenegro-idUSKBN17D1XL?il=0

--- "An Italian research institute under scrutiny from American lawmakers, who have questioned why U.S. taxpayer money is awarded to it in grants, has strongly rejected criticism of its work and financing. In a statement sent to Reuters on Tuesday, the Italian-based Ramazzini Institute (RI), which conducts research into cancer and its causes, stressed that its procedures "adhere to the most stringent international scientific standards". "We strongly reject the attempt to inject doubts about the scientific integrity of the Ramazzini Institute," it said. The RI is under pressure from the heads of two congressional committees who wrote last month to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price asking for documents to explain the financial links between the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and Ramazzini. Their inquiry follows the launch of a similar probe late last year by members of Congress who questioned the U.S. National Institutes of Health over its grants to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), based in Lyon, France."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-health-ramazzini-idUSKBN17D272?il=0

--- "The United Nations Security Council is due to vote on Thursday to close a 13-year-long peacekeeping mission in Haiti this year and replace it with a smaller police operation, which would be drawn down over two years as the country boosts its own force. The closure of the $346 million mission, recommended by U.N. chief Antonio Guterres, comes as the United States looks to cut its funding to U.N. peacekeeping. Washington is the largest contributor, paying 28.5 percent of the total budget. "We regard the transformation of the Haiti mission, including the withdrawal of the military, as a strong example for how peacekeeping missions can and should change as a country's political situation changes," U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, told the council. There are currently 2,342 troops on the ground in Haiti, who would withdraw over the coming six months. The 15-member Security Council is due to vote on the U.S.-drafted resolution on Thursday. While Russia had some concerns about spelling out when the successor mission could use force, diplomats said those issues were likely to be overcome."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-haiti-idUSKBN17D2NN?il=0

--- "White House spokesman Sean Spicer triggered an uproar on social media on Tuesday by saying Adolf Hitler did not use chemical weapons, which critics said overlooked the fact that millions of Jews were killed in Nazi gas chambers. Spicer made the comments at a daily news briefing, during a discussion about the April 4 chemical weapons attack in Syria that killed 87 people. Washington has blamed the attack on the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. "You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons," Spicer said when asked about Russia's alliance with the Syrian government. The Nazis murdered six million Jews during World War Two. Many were killed in gas chambers in European concentration camps. When a reporter asked Spicer if he wanted to clarify his comments, he said: "I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing." Spicer's comments, made during the Jewish holiday of Passover, sparked outrage on social media and from some Holocaust memorial groups who accused him of minimizing Hitler's crimes. "Sean Spicer now lacks the integrity to serve as White House press secretary, and President Trump must fire him at once," said Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect. Spicer later emailed a statement to reporters who were asking for more explanation. "In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust. I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable," Spicer said."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-hitler-idUSKBN17D2N9?il=0

Domestic News:

--- "President Donald Trump told a group of chief executives on Tuesday that his administration was reducing regulations and revamping the Wall Street reform law known as Dodd-Frank, which might be eliminated and replaced with "something else." "We're going to reduce taxes, we're going to eliminate wasteful regulations," Trump said at a meeting attended by corporate leaders and members of his cabinet. Earlier this year, Trump ordered reviews of the major banking rules that were put in place after the 2008 financial crisis and last week he said officials were planning a "major haircut" for the regulations. "For the bankers in the room, they'll be very happy because we're really doing a major streamlining and, perhaps, elimination, and replacing it with something else," Trump said on Tuesday. "That will be the minimum. But we're doing a major elimination of the horrendous Dodd-Frank regulations, keeping some obviously, but getting rid of many." Participants in the meeting included Rich Lesser, chief executive of Boston Consulting Group; Doug McMillon, chief executive of Wal-Mart Stores; Indra Nooyi, chief executive of PepsiCo; Jim McNerney, former chief executive of Boeing; Ginni Rometty, chief executive of IBM; and Jack Welch, former chairman of General Electric."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-business-idUSKBN17D1ZD?il=0

--- "U.S. stocks ended down but well off the day's lows on Tuesday, with worries over geopolitical risks dragging down sentiment as investors readied for the start of U.S. earnings. The worries drove investors into gold and other safe-haven assets and pushed up the CBOE Volatility index .VIX, Wall Street's "fear gauge," which closed above 15 for the first time since Election Day. "Geopolitical risk is the focal point right now," said Quincy Krosby, market strategist at Prudential Financial in Newark, New Jersey. But, she said, "this is also a market trading at 18, 19 times forward earnings, and that's the higher range. The earnings season is unfolding, and that's going to be important."...The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Syrian government warplanes dropped barrel bombs on rebel-held areas of Hama province on Tuesday, a day after the United States said their use could lead to further U.S. strikes in Syria...Adding to the dour mood, North Korea state media warned of a nuclear attack on the United States if provoked as a U.S. Navy strike group moved toward the western Pacific...Shares of United Continental (UAL.N) fell 1.1 percent after a worldwide backlash erupted against the carrier over a passenger who was dragged off one of its U.S. flights. Late in the trading session, its chief executive issued an apology."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-stocks-idUSKBN17D1CU?il=0

--- "U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border on Tuesday to make his case for increased prosecutions of illegal immigrants, pressuring U.S. attorneys to prioritize cases against criminal migrants. Sessions, a long-time proponent of tougher immigration enforcement, told U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at the Port of Nogales, Arizona, that more illegal migrants should be prosecuted as criminals. It is normally the role of the Secretary of Homeland Security to meet border agents. But Sessions made the visit to highlight his focus on enforcing federal laws as dozens of U.S. cities try to shield illegal immigrants from stepped-up prosecution and deportation efforts. "Why are we doing this?" the former U.S. senator said. "Because it is what the duly enacted laws of the United States require." Sessions said that each U.S. attorney would be required to designate a point person on border security prosecutions by April 18. The person in that position, known as a border security coordinator, would be directed to coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security, according to Sessions' memo. The directive did not go beyond existing laws, but Sessions said his order "mandates the prioritizations of such enforcement" by U.S. attorneys. The Trump administration has threatened to cut off U.S. Justice Department grants to so-called sanctuary cities that fail to assist federal immigration authorities. Police in such cities have argued that targeting illegal migrants is an improper use of law enforcement resources. Sessions has said a failure to deport aliens convicted of criminal offenses puts whole communities at risk."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-sessions-idUSKBN17D283?il=0

--- "Maryland lawmakers have passed a first-in-the-nation measure that lets the state attorney general sue generic drug makers that sharply raise prices in a move aimed at fighting what legislators call "price-gouging." The bill overwhelmingly was approved by the Democratic-controlled legislature on Monday and hailed by Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh as a way to check sharply higher prices for crucial generic drugs. The Maryland measure comes as concerns about rising U.S. drug costs have been building for years. For example the 2015 decision by Turing Pharmaceuticals to increase the cost of a life-saving, anti-infection drug by 5,000 percent sparked widespread outrage. The legislation takes aim at a generic drug market that makes up 88 percent of U.S. pharmaceutical sales and totaled $75 billion in 2015, according to Frosh's office. "The market seems to bear it and so some of these manufacturers are charging as much as they possibly can," Frosh said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, has not said whether he would sign the legislation. His representatives did not respond to requests for comment. The bill allows Maryland's state authority on Medicaid, a federal healthcare program for the poor, to let the attorney general's office know when it sees patients being charged an "unconscionable increase" for essential generic drugs."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-maryland-drugs-idUSKBN17D2O6

--- "President Donald Trump said tax reform "will be better" if legislation to dismantle Obamacare is passed first by Congress because of the tax savings from the Republican health plan. "Healthcare is going to happen, at some point, but if it doesn’t happen fast enough, I’ll start the taxes. But the tax reform and the tax cuts are better if I can do the healthcare first,” Trump said in an excerpt of an interview with Fox Business Network that will air on Wednesday."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-healthcare-trump-idUSKBN17D2O3?il=0

--- "Relatives of a school teacher shot dead by her husband in a San Bernardino, California, classroom have told investigators the slaying capped a brief, turbulent marriage and breakup marked by accusations of infidelity and threats, police said on Tuesday. Police also revealed that surveillance video showed the shooter initially had tried to get into the school through a locked door, forcing him to gain entry instead by way of the front office, where he signed in and was allowed free access to the classroom by staff who recognized him. School employees, however, were apparently unaware of the marital discord believed to have led the gunman, an unemployed former pastor and maintenance worker, to fatally shoot his estranged wife, Karen Elaine Smith, and an 8-year-old student in front of their class before reloading his revolver and killing himself. The slain student and another boy hit by gunfire happened to be just behind Smith and were believed to be unintentional victims. The second child, aged 9, though badly wounded, was expected to survive. He remained hospitalized on Tuesday. The shooting at North Park Elementary, the latest of dozens of U.S. schools traumatized by armed intruders in recent years, reopened debate about what educators can do to safeguard students against mounting gun violence."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-shooting-idUSKBN17D258